Obama administration may or may not be transparent, but at least it's less pixelated

As Cheney leaves office, Google Earth map magically de-pixelates

From Gizmodo via Valleywag:

Google Maps' satellite imagery has shown us clear shots of the White House, the Capitol and even the Pentagon. But one thing it never displayed properly was Dick Cheney's house.

The Vice President's quarters, located at the Naval Observatory since 1974, have been pixelated ever since Google has given the public an easy way to check them out—coincidentally ever since Dick Cheney has lived there. This censorship wasn't by Google but those supplying Google the source images, the U.S. Geological Survey.

It always pissed me off the Cheney had the audacity to order that. He was way too secretive as it was. And, of course, a total dick.

As a sidenote, the user comments from Gizmodo's article on this were absolutely priceless... here are some theories on why the images were pixelated:

"Cheney is so dark and evil his very presence distorts light."

"Probably trying to hide his baby-raping factory."

"He doesn't want Google to catch him shooting a friend in the face."

"Cheney actually gives off a powerful electromagnetic field, sort of like Magneto from X-Men but more evil. The result is significant enough to interfere with imaging satellites and makes him unreachable by phone and thus unaccountable for anything."

Here is a link to some history on the VP's digs.

Apple at 25

Wow. From this to the iPhone in 25 years. We live in a blessed time (despite what I usually bitch about on this site!)

Story

Inauguration at 1,474 megapixels... you have to see this.

Amazing...You can manipulate the image and zoom in and out. For example, in the zoom below, Dubbya doesn't look too happy at what Barry just said:

The photographer, David Bergman explains the process:

My final photo is made up of 220 Canon G10 images and the file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes.

Play with the image at: How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address

Thanks to Bob Cesca's Blog for this awesome link.

ATTACK OF THE DRONES: Obama spills first blood of his Presidency. (Not counting John McCain, of course.)

It official, folks. The President killed his first people... hopefully they were the Al Queda kind.

Huffington Reports:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Suspected U.S. missiles killed 18 people on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border Friday, security officials said, the first attacks on the al-Qaida stronghold since President Barack Obama took office.

At least five foreign militants were among those killed in the strikes by unmanned aircraft in two parts of the frontier region, an intelligence official said without naming them. There was no information on the identities of the others.

Pakistan's leaders had expressed hope Obama might halt the strikes, but few observers expected he would end a tactic that U.S. officials say has killed several top al-Qaida operatives and is denying the terrorist network a long-held safe haven.

I don't love that this is going on, but with Pakistan being what it is (basically the mountains seems pretty lawless) and the disarray in their government, we don't have many options. I don't think the State Department is going to solve it with diplomacy. Plus, it allows the Pakistani government to officially protest these actions while secretly giving it the green light. That's my guess. This was started under the Bush administration and still seems the most logical way to go.

What, no WiFi??? Obama's crew struggles with the low-tech White House

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Cut phone lines, old software, and a jumble of other technological restrictions have taken the Obama high tech crew by surprise.

Anne E. Kornblut of the Washington Post reports:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

If I was used to a shiny new MacBook Pro and had to leave it at home so I could work on a Dell 386 running Windows ME, I don't know if I could bear it. These people must be in serious withdrawal.

Read the whole article.

GeoEye Satellite view of the Inauguration

Seems like it may have been taken an hour or so before the oath. Click for zoom.





Apparently, about 2 million made it in to see it, and there were no arrests.  That may be because out of the 2 million, 1.5 million were secret service agents!  :-)

Coutesy PopSci.com

Geekspeak: Obama's Inaugural speech in tag cloud format.

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/453163/_Obama_Inauguration_Speech

WhiteHouse.gov is up and not pulling punches.

New White House it is up. Looks as robust and new media saavy as his campaign sites. http://www.whitehouse.gov

It also has teeth. Politico notes that the Katrina section states:

Under the “agenda” portion of the site regarding Katrina, it reads: “President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

“President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina,” the statement on the site continues. “Citing the Bush Administration’s ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims.”

Between this and the statements in his speech, it's clear Obama isn't afraid of calling it like he sees it.

Parting Shots: Uncanny Valley

I finally figured out what was bugging me about her.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley

Don't worry Laura, your secret is safe with me.

17 Year-Old Kurdish Girl Stoned for Love.

On or around April 7, 2007, Du’a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Beshika, Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion. She was murdered (allegedly by her brothers and uncles) while a large group of men watched and cheered.

Aswad, a member of a minority Kurdish religious group called Yezidi, was apparently murdered because she had engaged in a relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy and had been absent from her home for one night.

Some reports suggested that she had converted to Islam, but others deny this. Initially, she was reportedly given shelter in the house of a Yezidi tribal leader in Bashika. Other reports indicate she was lured back home with news her families' anger subsided.

Most accounts agree that she was dragged from her home, stripped down to her underwear and kicked in the groin and stomach and is pelted with rocks and concrete. Police officers were present but apparently did nothing to stop the murder, and they possibly sought to encourage the crowd.

Her death by stoning lasted for around 30 minutes. We appear to have had the event recorded via the mixed blessing of cell phone technology:


This CNN clip shows a bit different footage, including what the police were doing:


More complete unedited footage can be found at Robert Lindsay's BLOG

Two of the four arrested are members of the victim's family, police in Nineveh province said last Thursday. Four others, including a cousin thought to have instigated the killing, are being sought.

IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE THAT CAN GIVE ME A VALID REASON WHY THIS BRUTALITY ISN'T WORTHY OF UNIVERSAL OUTRAGE? Cause right now I want to nuke that town and everyone in it. I hate every sweaty mad-man in that forsaken place, yabbering and whooping as if they are at a football game, waving their cell phone cameras. Wikipedia notes that to the Yazidi, the source of evil is not from Satan, but in the heart and spirit of humans themselves. INDEED.

Additional objective and subjective information can be found here:

• Amnesty International


• Kurdish Women's Rights Watch


• CNN


• Robert Lindsay


• Alternative News Sources


• Assyrian International News Agency


• Learn more about the Yezidi religon on Wikipedia

SIDENOTE: I had trouble getting this footage on YouTube. It is rumored that YouTube (now owned by Google) has been trying to remove video footage of this incident from it's servers. As brutal as this video footage is, it's serves an important function. We can't deny it exists if we have the evidence, especially for those of us far from the violence. If this editing of content is true, it's a blow to non-corporate journalism. I hope it isn't so. Here's some dude (not me) noting the issue.