A user going by the name Nick Dillinger made the first edit to Recording Industry puppet / Parkdale-High Park MP Sarmite “Sam” Bulte’s Wikipedia entry (click here to see the specific revision), shown below. The change, a single line, has been highlighted:
Could someone with a little more time than I do right now do some editing and simply state the facts? Although I agree with th that last line and also find it amusing, I believe that it breaks Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” rule.
(I posted this to The Farm and Tucows Developer — I also thought I’d post the warning on this blog as well — Joey)
“Nazis.
I hate these guys.” — Indiana Jones
The
worm is a worm that runs on the Windows platform. It began
infecting computers worldwide back in November and goes by a number of
names:
The
source code for the Sober.Z worm suggests that it
will launch another
attack on January
5th and 6th to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the
founding of the Nazi Party. On these dates, PCs infected with the virus
will be instructed to connect to numerous servers to download malicious
code that will likely send out German and English language email hate
messages.
Tucows encourages network administrators to
protect themselves by blocking domains believed to host the malicious
code, which
are:
Be
sure to tell people you know — especially if they aren’t tech-savvy —
not to open suspicious email, even if it appears
to be from a sender they know.
For more details on
the Sober.Z worm, consult these
sites:
I do so love it when I can repurpose a picture!
Yes, it’s time to unseat Sarmite “Sam” Bulte, who’s in the pocket of the entertainment industry, who think that it’s our duty to “gulp down products and crap out cash”, as Doc Searls puts it.
More on this later. In the meantime, I’ll let two different sites with pretty much diametrically-opposed politics — BoingBoing and The Western Standard’s Shotgun blog — and Michael Geist (lawyer and Canada Research Chair in Internet & E-commerce Law) do the ‘splaining.
Barely hours after we paid the immigration processing fee of CDN$975 (US$847 at today’s rates), Prime Minister Paul Martin announces that if elected, the Liberals will drop the fee. Wendy and I had better get the full-on tasting menu dinner (with wine pairings, natch) for four at Susur’s if you win, Martin!
But hey, I could throw a good party with that $975…
In the comments to the entry titled The Boxing Day Shooting, an anonymous commenter pointed me to a Globe and Mail article, Do We Need a Boston Miracle?
The article ends with a table of the murder rates for a number of North American cities. Before I show it to you, let me first explain what is meant by the term “murder rate”.
Many people misuse the term “murder rate” or “homicide rate” — they often use it when speaking of the number of people who have been murdered. The word rate implies a ratio, which is a mathematical term for a relationship between at least two numbers. For example, let’s take the recipe for one of the simplest cocktails out there: the screwdriver. Most bartender’s manuals recommend 2-to-1 ratio of orange juice to vodka, which means that for every 2 ounces of orange juice, you use 1 once of vodka. Want to use up a 10-ounce can of orange juice? Then you need 5 ounces of vodka handy. Got a pint of vodka? Then you’ll need a quart of OJ. Want a stiffer drink? Change the ratio of orange juice to vodka to 1-to-1. Want something a little less boozy? Make the ratio 3-to-1.
The murder rate is also a ratio: it’s a ratio of the number of murders in a given area to the population of that area. This number is a little more meaningful than just the number of murders in an area alone. Think about it this way: suppose a village of 500 people experiences 50 murders in a year. That’s a big chunk of the village: the ratio of murdered people to population is 1 to 10, which can also be expressed as “1:10” or “10 percent”. You could rightfully claim that the town has been decimated (the colloquial use of the term “decimated” is “killed a substantial amount”; the original meaning was “killed one-tenth”). Now imagine a city of 5 million people experiencing 50 murders in a year. That city’s ratio of people murdered to population rate is 1 to 100,000, or “1:100,000” or “one-thousandth of one percent”.
Since murder ratios (as well as other crime rates) are typically small numbers — usually some teeny fraction of one percent — they are typically expressed in terms of murders per 100,000 people; this is called the murder rate. The city of 5 million with 50 murders in a year that I mentioned in the previous paragraph has a murder rate of 1 (that is, one person for every 100,000 was murdered). The village of 500 with the same number of murders has a murder rate of 10,000!
To give you an idea of what murder rate numbers are typically like, take a look at this table of murder rates in the US spanning the years 2001 through 2004 (taken from this page). Remember, this is a chart of murder rates, meaning that the numbers here are murders per 100,000 people.
| Region | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South | 6.7 | 6.8 | 6.9 | 6.6 |
| West | 5.5 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 |
| Midwest | 5.3 | 5.1 | 4.9 | 4.7 |
| Northeast | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.2 |
| National average | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.7 | 5.8 |
A little quick mental math reveals that the average murder rate for the entire United States for this period is 5.6.
Let’s look at the murder rates for the provinces and territories of Canada for the years 2000 through 2004 (data from Statistics Canada):
| Province/Territory | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| murders per 100,000 population | |||||
| Canada | 1.78 | 1.78 | 1.86 | 1.73 | 1.95 |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 1.14 | 0.19 | 0.39 | 0.96 | 0.39 |
| Prince Edward Island | 2.20 | 1.46 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.00 |
| Nova Scotia | 1.61 | 0.97 | 0.96 | 0.85 | 1.39 |
| New Brunswick | 1.33 | 1.07 | 1.20 | 1.07 | 0.93 |
| Quebec | 2.04 | 1.89 | 1.58 | 1.32 | 1.47 |
| Ontario | 1.34 | 1.43 | 1.47 | 1.45 | 1.51 |
| Manitoba | 2.61 | 2.95 | 3.12 | 3.70 | 4.27 |
| Saskatchewan | 2.58 | 2.70 | 2.71 | 4.12 | 3.92 |
| Alberta | 1.96 | 2.29 | 2.25 | 2.03 | 2.69 |
| British Columbia | 2.10 | 2.06 | 3.06 | 2.26 | 2.67 |
| Yukon Territory | 6.57 | 3.32 | 0.00 | 3.27 | 22.43 |
| Northwest Territories | 2.47 | 9.80 | 9.64 | 9.48 | 9.34 |
| Nunavut | 10.91 | 10.67 | 6.96 | 10.29 | 13.49 |
Wow — when people said that it was cold in the Territories, I thought they were only talking about the temperature! More quick math reveals that the average murder rate across Canada for this period is 1.82.
Let’s go outside the relatively safe bubble of North America and look at the ten countries with the highest murder rates in the period spanning 1998 – 2000 (data from NationMaster.com, which got its info from the 7th United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems):
| Country | Murder Rate (Murders per 100,000 population) |
|---|---|
| Colombia | 61.8 |
| South Africa | 49.6 |
| Jamaica | 32.4 |
| Venezuela | 31.6 |
| Russia | 20.1 |
| Mexico | 13.0 |
| Estonia | 10.7 |
| Latvia | 10.4 |
| Lithuania | 10.3 |
| Belarus | 9.8 |
Here are the 2004 murder rates for various American and Canadian cities, a listed in the Globe and Mail article. I’ve highlighted Toronto in red.
| City | 2004 Murder Rate (Murders per 100,000 population) |
|---|---|
| Montreal | 1.7 |
| Toronto | 1.8 |
| Vancouver | 2.6 |
| Boston | 2.6 |
| Edmonton | 3.4 |
| Winnipeg | 4.9 |
| New York | 5 |
| Dallas | 7.3 |
| San Francisco | 7.3 |
| Washington | 7.9 |
| Houston | 8.0 |
| Los Angeles | 8.6 |
| Detroit | 10.0 |
| Baltimore | 12.5 |
| New Orleans | 25.5 |
A minute’s worth of spreadsheet work makes this data easier to visualize (click the graph below to see it at full size):
The dirtbags behind the shirt pictured on the left have borrowed the slogan “Stop Snitchin'” from the movie of the same name (note: the reviewer to whom I link is a complete idiot). “Stop Snitchin'” is part of an underground campaign led by drug dealers and members of gangs to scare anyone from reporting their activities to the police. The subtext of the message: snitches will need stitches.
Unaware of the irony, the vendors of the shirts claim that “Stop Snitchin'” is free speech, even though that free speech is being used to
silence others. Boston mayor Thomas Menino has announced a plan to have the city confiscate the shirts from stores, and the ACLU has opposed this plan, claiming that the shirts are protected speech. In my opinion. A couple of Boston vendors, after having spoken with the Mayor, have taken the shirts off their inventories.
While I do not recommend the purchase of a “Stop Snitchin'” t-shirt, I heartily recommend the Jewish remix: “Stop Kvetchin'”! They’re on sale at CafePress. 
Christiania (here’s its Wikipedia entry), the sort-of-self-governing neighbourhood located in Copenhagen, Denmark is one of those places I’d been meaning to visit (along with the rest of Copenhagen, of course). It was created in 1971 when a group of hippie-types took over an area that housed abandoned military barracks. What resulted over the following three decades was an social experiment: a citizen-run self-organizing “autonomous zone” with a large creative class, a simple set of laws and avoidance of taxes that libertarians would enjoy, and a large “creative class” of the sort of which Richard Florida speaks.
Unfortunately, Christiania’s days are numbered: the current Danish government — a centre-right one, which contrasts with the past five decades of their tending to be social democrats — is putting the squeeze on Christiania. My friend and fellow DJ from Crazy Go Nuts University, Chris “Turner” Turner, reports in today’s Globe and Mail’s Focus section in an article titled Where freedom is another word for a whole lot left to lose. The stuff that didn’t make it into the piece, as well as a number of his own photos, can be found on his blog, Planet Simpson, in this entry: Attention, Hippies!
Come Out Peacefully So We Can Smash Your Drug Mill And All Your Worldly Possessions!