Jets Intercept Plane Near White House. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Air Force fighter jets were scrambled Monday to intercept a privately owned plane that flew too close to the White House, the Secret Service said. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Looks like the "Secure and Undisclosed Location" got a workout today:

Air Force fighter jets scrambled Monday to intercept a private plane that flew too close to the White House, triggering a security scare that led Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush's chief of staff to be moved to a secure location.

Maybe a bit of an overreaction, but hey, the pilot wasn't responding on his emergency channel, so a scramble was prolly justified. But you want to know the really scary part? Check out this from CNN:

Two U.S. Air National Guard F-16s were not able to intercept a small plane that violated restricted air space around Washington until more than 10 minutes after the Cessna 182 passed near the White House, administration sources told CNN Thursday.

According to a timeline provided to CNN by a senior administration official, the fighter jets were on a 15-minute strip alert at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and did not get the order to scramble until 8:06 p.m. EDT, about the same time the plane passed its closest point to the White House -- described as within "a few miles."

For comparison:

Cessna 182:

Horsepower: 230.0000
Gross Weight: 2550 lbs

Top Speed: 143 kts
Empty Weight: 1540 lbs

Cruise Speed: 135 kts

F-16:

Speed: 1,500 mph (Mach 2 at altitude)

Thrust:F-16C/D, 27,000 pounds(12,150 kilograms)

Not really a fair fight.

5:50:54 PM     leave/read comments []

Down the Memory Hole [Das Blog]

In George Orwell's seminal novel 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, worked at the "Ministry of Truth", a place whose job it was to constantly alter historical records to fit with the government's current policies and rationale. The actual records of the past and orders to alter them were consigned to the "Memory Hole", simply a slot where items were destroyed and made forever inaccessible.

C'mon, you just know this is a Bu$h administration entry, don't you?

We've talked about this before.

5:17:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Web hijack riles Belkin router users. Belkin is trying to defuse customer complaints that its wireless routers periodically hijack users' Web connection and display an advertisement for its software. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Update on the Belkin story:

Every eight hours, a random computer that's hooked up to a local area network may receive an unsolicited advertisement for a trial version of parental control software, instead of the Web page the person had hoped to visit. The behavior can be permanently disabled, but it is turned on by default in new Belkin routers when they are shipped.

"We are crafting a statement apologizing and accepting responsibility," a Belkin representative said on Monday. The company said a firmware update, which customers would have the choice of installing, would be available in a week.

Looks like someone is paying attention. Sort of. In a better-late-than-never way.

5:02:22 PM     leave/read comments []

France, Russia sign deal for Soyuz launches from Kourou. French and Russian officials signed an agreement Friday to allow the launch of Russian-built... [spacetoday.net]

Makes sense, as the current Russian launch site is in Kazakhstan, not Russia. More international cooperation is good too. Will someone point that out to the U.S., please?

4:58:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Uganda conflict 'worse than Iraq'. The humanitarian situation in northern Uganda is worse than anywhere else in the world, says a senior UN official. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

Yet another item that points out the heartless hypocrisy of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

The humanitarian situation in northern Uganda is worse than in Iraq, or anywhere else in the world, a senior United Nations official has said.

UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland was speaking to the BBC after visiting the area affected by 18 years of civil war.

"It is a moral outrage" that the world is doing so little for the victims of the war, especially children, he said.

The rebels routinely abduct children to serve as sex slaves and fighters.

Remember, the U.S. invaded Iraq for, ahem, "humanitarian purposes."

The LRA, under shadowy leader Joseph Kony, says it wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments.

I'm sorry, maybe I was mistaken, I thought this was about Uganda, not Alabama.

4:44:46 PM     leave/read comments []

Finally.

4:39:18 PM     leave/read comments []

BLUR IN SPAAAAAACE!!!

The UK did not have a good record of supporting its space missions. For Beagle 2, the turning point was not the intervention of one man but a group - or to be precise, a band - Blur, and with them they brought the artist Damien Hirst.

Alex James, the bassist, and Dave Rowntree, Blur's drummer, joined the Beagle 2 team to help with PR in the summer of 1998. The band's unique contribution is writing the Beagle 2 signature tune, a call sign to be beamed back from Mars to announce the lander's arrival. The refrain was composed in 1999 and released on a CD along with No Distance Left To Run, the third single from Blur's album, 13.

Hirst, meanwhile, has produced one of his trademark spot paintings to act as the calibration target for Beagle 2's cameras and spectrometers. The target is fitted to a place on one of the ribs of the lander so that the instruments can focus on it to check their readings.

2:51:37 PM    

Notes from an icy idyll. Antarctic diary: Composer Craig Vear describes his journey to record the sounds of Antarctica. [Guardian Unlimited]

This is great- it's got a bunch of things that I love: the Antarctic, field recordings and tales of giant cats.

Initially, I will be following in Shackleton's footsteps around the Weddel sea and the islands of south Orkney and south Georgia, before journeying to the Antarctic peninsula and then deeper into the field.

Along the way, I will collect a unique library of recordings of Antarctic sounds: mammals, birds, machinery, the environmental and the phenomenological.

......

Got up first thing and went walking, kitted up with posh recording gear. Stanley looks like a mixture of far north Scotland and the land that time forgot. Every animal seems to have been enlarged by a factor of at least three, except for the sparrows, which are the same size as normal.

There are cats the size of dogs, birds (especially giant grey petrels) the size of pterodactyls, and sealions the size of Volvo estates.

First port of call for sounds is always the coastline, especially with a 50-knot wind blowing: there is howling rigging, crashing southern ocean waves, and seabirds squawking.

Also, check out Henry Kaiser's antarctic journal.

2:24:49 PM     leave/read comments []

The "romance" of being a war correspondent.

Source: Boing Boing Blog; 11/10/03; 12:27:59 PM

Kevin Sites' blog: How a "sojo" files a live report -- or doesn't.. Kevin Sites, blogger and NBC News correspondent in Iraq, has posted a fascinating account of the unbelievable lengths to which solo journalists must go to file live satellite transmissions from remote battlefields. Equipment breaks, unexpected technical snafus come up, but news has to get through. Sometimes, the means disassembling gear to make a temporary laptop modem out of a videophone. Sometimes, that means your dinner becomes a tripod.

"At left -- adjusting the camera. See that dirt berm? That's Syria on the other side. See that guy with a gun? That's a new Iraqi border guard. Nice pose, huh. See that guy in camo -- that's Lt. Col. Arnold (he's going to be bummed because he wanted to take off his cold weather gear before going on camera -- too late. It's an Army macho thing).

See that guy behind the camera? That's me. See that tripod? It's a piece of crap -- one of the legs fell off en route to the border and will never be found. See that box of MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat)? That's my new tripod leg. See the Colonel's helmet? That's the counterweight that keeps the camera from tipping over. It's amazing how desperation can push you to new levels of creativity in the middle of the desert."

Link (note: this round of photos shot by Joe Raedle of Getty Images)
[Boing Boing Blog]

2:24:00 PM    

Acquisition releases update!

The king of file-sharing applications has been updated yet again.

It's worth getting just for the find similar artists feature, which lets you automatically search both Gnutella and the iTunes Music Store.

1:23:24 PM     leave/read comments []