Leslie William Nielsen, OC (February 11, 1926 – November 28, 2010)[1] was a Canadian–American actor and comedian. Nielsen appeared in over one hundred films and 1,500 television programs over the span of his career, portraying over 220 characters.[2]

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Nielsen enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and worked as a disc jockey before receiving a scholarship to Neighborhood Playhouse. Beginning with a television role in 1948, he quickly expanded to over 50 television appearances two years later. Nielsen appeared in his first films in 1956 and began collecting roles in dramas, westerns, and romance films. Nielsen's lead roles in the films Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) received positive reviews as a serious actor.

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

A web attack has been launched against the Wikileaks site set up to host leaked US diplomatic cables.

The deluge of data launched against the site managed to briefly make it unreachable around 1200 GMT on 30 November.

So far no-one has come forward to claim responsibility for the so-called denial-of-service (DoS) attack.

A similar attack was launched against the main Wikileaks site prior to the public release of the first cables.

Wikileaks revealed that the separate cablegate website was suffering a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack via a message posted to its Twitter stream.

The cablegate site went live on Sunday night and soon after started to suffer occasional downtime.

A DDoS attack involves swamping a site with so many requests for access that it becomes overwhelmed.

Data gathered by net monitoring firm Netcraft showed that the cablegate site was intermittently available around Tuesday lunchtime and early afternoon because of the attack.

Prior to the launch of the site, Wikileaks had taken the precaution of hosting it on three separate IP addresses to cope with any attack.

"This does not appear to have prevented the current attack from succeeding," wrote Paul Mutton, a security analyst at Netcraft, in a blog post

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11875830

Gus: the way Wikileaks protects itself is to release the information to media organisations prior to release on its website. All Wikileaks asks is to respect an embargo until the material is published on Wikileaks — meanwhile the serious media can study the documents in confidence. This provides an insurance against cyber attacks — which one would be nuts not to believe the US (and other countries including China) is using all its might to stop this diplomatic bleeding. For us of course, who stroll day after day in our imagination in the possibilities that the official lines are often sugar-coated bullshit, we are not surprised. Lies was the name of the game...

All I wish now is for Wikileaks to place its glorious hands on the documentation (CIA, MI6 et all spy agencies) that would PROVE that Blair, Bush and Howard lied beyond beliefs. WE KNOW they did and can prove it by simple demonstration and easy deduction, but should the documentation come to light, all the sceptics out there would be knocked off. Then we could carry on with our lives and shame the bastards.

The mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says she is distressed by news that international police agency Interpol has put out an alert for her son's arrest.

Interpol has alerted member states to arrest the 39-year-old Australian on suspicion of rape on the basis of a Swedish warrant.

Christine Assange, who lives in Queensland, says she is concerned for her son's welfare and does not want him "hunted down and jailed".

WikiLeaks is under intense pressure after its mass dump of sensitive US diplomatic cables, which US officials have denounced as a "a serious crime" and an attack on the whole world.

The warrant for Assange's arrest was issued by Sweden's International Public Prosecution Office in Gothenburg on November 18.

That warrant cites "probable cause of suspected rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion".

"There is a public 'Red Notice' on behalf of Sweden," an Interpol spokeswoman confirmed today.

The spokeswoman confirmed Interpol had posted Sweden's request for assistance in tracking down Assange on its website.

Assange, who was born in Townsville and whose current location is unclear, contested the warrant in a Swedish appeals court, but his first bid to get it thrown out was rejected last week and he has lodged a second appeal.

In the meantime, he could now face arrest and extradition to Sweden from anywhere in the world where local authorities decide to act on the warrant.

Today, Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, backtracked on an offer of residency to Assange, insisting no such invitation has been extended.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/01/3081532.htm

Two Leslie Nielsen films make top three in list of movies ranked by the highest number of laughs per minute

SPOOF disaster movie Airplane! has been deemed the funniest comedy ever. Film subscription service Lovefilm asked members to vote for their top comedy films and then calculated the number of 'laughs per minute' for each one by setting up a 'laugh-o-meter' to monitor the number of times an audience chuckled.

Airplane!, which stars the late Leslie Nielsen, came out on top, with its classic one-liners such as "Surely you're not serious?... I am serious, and don't call me Shirley" and "There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you'll enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?"

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/film/48895/airplane-tops-list-top-ten-funniest-films-ever-made#ixzz25qASSWLQ

See toon at top.... Can anyone drive this democracy?....

From Clive James:

I’ve been reading The Tempest again. I suppose that if Shakespeare were writing it now, he would have to call it The Extreme Weather Event, but in those days the language was in better shape. No poetry has ever been more beautiful than Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech, which is likely to ring bells for any old man getting set to quit the world. Caliban, however, sounds so like an internet troll that he could easily be updated into a modern version.

It’s not necessarily a doomed task. Back in 1956, Forbidden Planet, one of the first big-budget sci-fi movies, drew on the characters of The Tempest to thicken the plot. I saw it several times in a row, and not just because Anne Francis as Altaira looked so fetching in the short tunic that was probably standard wear for post-pubescent females millions of miles from Earth. Only just post-pubescent myself, I didn’t realise that Altaira was based on Miranda and that her father, Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), was based on Prospero.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/20/clive-james-shakespeare-tempest-leslie-nielsen-film

See toon and comment at top...

...

Let’s be fair and say that people can harbour an irrational belief and still be rational in other respects. That’s what I would like my critics to think about me, so I strive to think the same about them; and anyway, it takes that kind of generosity to fit the historic facts. Sir Isaac Newton was rational about celestial mechanics, but quite nutty about numerology. The great poet Yeats believed in the Mystic Rose. For all I know, in order to act like Leonardo DiCaprio, you have to believe you are “fighting climate change” when you fly by private jet.

It was while receiving his Oscar that DiCaprio told the world about its duty to fight climate change. He reminded me of the radical heyday when Vanessa Redgrave used to celebrate an extra few votes for her faction in the Workers Revolutionary Party by announcing that they had “smashed capitalism”. She is still the great lyrical actress of her time, but talent can be dopey.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/12/clive-james-oscars-...

Hey, Clive, it does not cost anything to ask -- or study. Hypocrisy, including your own about dopey talent is not new. In many cases it's not hypocrisy but simple dedicated ignorance, which is less stressful than the hard yakka of learning complex stuff. Learning something scientific about climate change (say global warming) would upset the status quo of imaginative bullshit in which you are a great expert in dishing out. Flippancy is facile work when facts don't matter. And your work is the art of delivery flippancy with a literary stick pointing at a field of carrots as if it was beans. Very funny. Take a bow at the applause, but this does not mean that the global warming theory is wrong. It only means that you did not study the science though you adopted an a-priori opinion about its worth. Uncouth.