Slashdot Mirror

How does it feel to go through life so completely ignorant? Probably pretty good. My favorite part is how condescending you are when so blatantly wrong:

“One of the main reasons we’ve survived is because we’ve been a used store,” says Goldmark. “CDs have been on the decline since the early 2000s. Luckily, vinyl really began to tip. Every high school and college kid has to have a turntable. At least, the alternative ones do, and they’re playing vinyl again.”

You know where that quote came from? Joe Goldmark, one of the owners of the SF store.

Or maybe it was the mentally deficient Ronald Reagan that made it happen due to "fiscal" responsibility and to fund his idiotic trickle-down fantasies:

http://www.sfweekly.com/news/t...

http://www.povertyinsights.org...

SFWeekly is calling for all Equifax employees to be executed.

Reading the article, I see that they consider this penalty to be justified because Equifax has an "overwhelmingly white and male leadership structure". The article goes on to say that,

If we care at all about the wellbeing of our fellow citizens or any form of redistributive racial justice, this point is abundantly clear: Anyone at Equifax who’s convicted of negligence and corporate malfeasance merits the death penalty, full stop.

SFWeekly is calling for all Equifax employees to be executed.

In all seriousness, the Equifax credit freeze does not work very well, and their freeze needs to work over Experian and TransUnion (and Equifax should pay for it).

Good, keep those damn bikes off the road. They are a hazard to everybody except the environment. Just because you ride a bike, doesn't mean you can ride in the road and ignore traffic lights, ignore stop signs, cut the lane in between cars and have the gull to grab onto a car and use it as a speed booster. Bikers are menaces on the road, give them their own roads and get the hell away from my car.

Be careful what you wish for.

This Is What Happened When Bicyclists Obeyed Traffic Laws Along The Wiggle Yesterday

The protest hadn't even started before the first motorist laid on the horn.

Hundreds of cyclists rode through The Wiggle yesterday evening in protest of a San Francisco police captain's calls for a crackdown on bikers coasting through stop signs. But instead of breaking the law, protesters wanted to show the city just how bad traffic would be if every bicycle approached intersections just as a car does.

Riders arrived at every stop sign in a single file, coming to a complete stop and filing through the intersection only once they were given the right-of-way. The law-abiding act of civil disobedience snarled traffic almost immediately.

...

PS - lay off the donuts, and lose those chins. Cycling would help.

This is from the more enteraining SFWeekly article that the TFA from BusinessInsider plagarizes:

Talley has become something of a den mother to Bay Area women interested in Wicca. In the backyard of her Fairfax duplex, hemmed by a rustic board fence and lush greenery, she emcees monthly moon rituals during which she and a handful of female clients chant into a cauldron, fall in and out of trances, and eat a vegetarian potluck. Men aren't welcome. "I used to invite men but they were just there to get laid," Talley tells me. "They had no interest in goddess worship, and that's very annoying when you're trying to reach the divinity.

Good thing no-one could hack or clone your toll transponder or clipper card, right?

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-0...
http://www.akit.org/2012/02/ha...

For your proposal, how to do prevent someone from photocopying the "something on a letter or package which identifies me"? For my counterproposal, I suggested (above) that you scribble something unique and take a picture of it (uploading the picture using your account credentials as identification of the package), producing a one-time code that isn't allowed to be reused.

The DOJ settled with them and made them pinky swear to follow the law for the next 5 years.

not kidding... http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/...

Yes, it is the same with pharmaceuticals and off-label marketing. If convicted of felony off-label marketing, a company is permanently barred from selling drugs to government programs, like Medicare. But of course what would happen if the manufacturer of a popular blood pressure medicine was banned from selling to Medicare? A lot of old people would die.

So instead, despite repeated, multiple, ongoing criminal fraud and multiple violated integrity agreements, and despite fines now exceeding $2 billion dollars, somehow, magically, they're never convicted of felony fraud.

Obama (and Bush) claim it is in the best interest of the people, because they can't ban those companies and lose the drugs. Too big to fail. But the solution is stupid simple:

Ban the company, revoke ALL their patents, thus allowing any other company on the planet to manufacture every one of their drugs, and be done. Off-label marketing will absolutely stop dead if J&J goes from a $100+ billion innovator to a $100 million generic drug manufacturer overnight.

I've always thought of San Francisco as the new Sodom and Gomorrah.

That's a decade or two out of date. Maybe more. Here's this weekend's list of sex and fetish events in SF. There's a nostalgia tour for tourists of SF's sex history, and a screening of porn films from a Berlin festival. Yawn.

the economy isn't interconnected at all right? ... wait for it ... "but i work in the ___ field, so i'm not affected ..."

I tend to work places that have actual income, so no, I don't worry so much about stock scams evaporating.

You want a real economic indicator? Try checking the snark frequency. This is all pretty obvious to people on the ground here: SF Techie Explains Why the World Should Revolve Around Bay Area Techies (via jwz).

OK, give me the name and address of a shop where I can legally buy pot and I'll go there.

OK, fine, start here. It's a list of marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area that's maintained by the local free weekly newspaper. These are not "drug dens," they are licensed businesses, and if you're capable of a little logic, you will put two and two together and realize that you can't get a license if there is no law governing it. Since there is a law, that makes it ... with me so far?

You will need a recommendation from a doctor, which might set you back a couple hundred bucks. That's between you and your doctor. To get one, you may be required to be a California resident. Once you have a medical marijuana card and a valid picture ID, you can legally -- yes, legally -- buy marijuana in various forms from any of these places. Thanks to the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996, you may also be able to grow a fairly generous amount of marijuana for your own personal use, depending on which city you live in. Exact laws regarding the amounts you are legally allowed to possess and grow vary by municipality. You're welcome.

Show me where Apple have crossed the ethical lines ?

How about posing as police to search someone's home?

Why all the swearing? Isn't Torvalds smart enough to express the exact same idea in a civil manner? To think that there was a big ruckus when Dujardin said "Putain".

This is what happens when you let people who don't really know video games run a video game company.

Since when did Zynga "make" games? All I ever seen Zynga make is spamware disguised as blatant and brazenly obvious ripoffs of other games in order to make money off micro-transactions.

...and lets not forget how the CEO told staff this gem:

I don't fucking want innovation, you're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.
Source

Here you go. I bing'ed it so you don't have to. And no, that's not a superfluous apostrophe. I didn't binge it.

LOL. Gnome 3.4 is as bad as any other open sores project. You losers wouldnt know how to write software if god himself came down and showed you. You losers, just give up already and leave the software coding to the adults. LOL.

If this had happened in the US, I would feel inclined to point out the recent story about the police searching homes for Apple products. http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/09/iphone_5_apple_police.php

You must not be familiar with the San Francisco Crime Lab. Or how the fallout impacted the people involved.

This was in a SF Weekly article back in 2010. http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/

San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials

So, now we can stop with the Apple FUD, right?

Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:

Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.

Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.

Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].

That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.

Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:

In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].

In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].

So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.

Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011

Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:

Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.

Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.

Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].

That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.

Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:

In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].

In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].

So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.

Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011

Maybe everyone in the US knows the backstory but i didn't so I googled it. Here is what I found:

On the 3 July 2011 a BART ( Bay Area Rapid Transport ) police officer shot dead Charles Hill ( 45 ). It appears Mr Hill was drunk but other than that stories vary wildly. No version of the story states Mr Hill had a gun, some versions say he was acting in a threatening manner with a bottle of drink. The controversy appears to be due to a police officer shooting an unarmed man when he had and should have used a taser.

Story:
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
Video ( that misses the real action ):
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php

Maybe everyone in the US knows the backstory but i didn't so I googled it. Here is what I found:

On the 3 July 2011 a BART ( Bay Area Rapid Transport ) police officer shot dead Charles Hill ( 45 ). It appears Mr Hill was drunk but other than that stories vary wildly. No version of the story states Mr Hill had a gun, some versions say he was acting in a threatening manner with a bottle of drink. The controversy appears to be due to a police officer shooting an unarmed man when he had and should have used a taser.

Story:
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
Video ( that misses the real action ):
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php

Except that no-one else on the platform, and not the CCTV that's available, backs up the story about the guy coming at the policeman threateningly with a broken glass bottle and a knife (see here). And given the record of the BART police over the past few years, I'm not sure we should give them the benefit of the doubt as to whether they're accurately describing this situation.

Building out the network is easier said than done due to NIMBY syndrome:

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_17878746?nclick_check=1
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/03/exposing_brugmanns_cell_phone.php

move to cali:

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/10/marijuana_california.php

After Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger affixed his signature on a Sen. Mark Leno-authored bill yesterday, California's marijuana policy became the nation's most progressive, pot activists tell SF Weekly.

While existing law calls for anyone busted with an ounce or less of pot to be tried for a misdemeanor and fined $100, Leno's SB 1449 changes that to an "infraction." As a result, there's no longer any need for a trial, and there will be no criminal record incurred. "You get a ticket and there's a $100 fine," Said Mike Meno, the spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. "It's almost like a parking citation." In San Francisco, it might even be cheaper.

so, relax and move to cali ;)

If it were a NON-POLITICAL DOS/bot attack, would anyone on Slashdot give a rat's ass if he went down for MORE than thirty months?

Yeah, since manslaughter doesn't get you more than two years these days.* And a hit and run might not even be something a DA wants to pursue vigorously. **

But you wanna see the system freak out? Show the people with money and clout that the system has holes, that there are people who can do things with technology that they don't understand.

OK, it's really not just a tech thing. Both our statutory punishments and our sentencing is messed up in this country. Unfortunately, it's in no small part because we're quite simply very very stupid about the issue politically: we like to vote for people who are "tough on crime," so I don't expect a lot of change.

* May not apply if you're not a police officer.
** May not apply if you're not wealthy.

Also see: http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-09-08/news/farmvillains/

Ahh yes, because now we're all experts on the case and are 100% sure the dispatcher did nothing wrong and the city is completely to blame for this wrongful termination. Let us harness our nerd rage and harass the city officials because we think we know what's best for the world.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/05/police_dispatcher_fired_for_st.php
(swiped from a post above)

Sounds to me that even if all of her comments are jokes, she is stupid for pushing the line repeatedly. Not going to agree or disagree with her dismisal, but she doesn't seem to have much common sense.

Kuchler was already on thin ice with the city, having gone through four of the five disciplinary steps required by the collective bargaining agreement with the local clerical union: a verbal warning, written warning, one-day-suspension, and three-day-suspension. When Kuchler then posted that she was an addict on her Facebook page, the city resorted to step number five: dismissal.

Look, if you don't want your job, just quit and go do something you like. Don't troll your employer into firing you, then drag lawyers into it. The only winners there are the lawyers, and that makes Baby Jesus strangle a kitten.

she had already been taken through 4 of the mandatory 5 steps to dismissal

"Kuchler was already on thin ice with the city, having gone through four of the five disciplinary steps required by the collective bargaining agreement with the local clerical union: a verbal warning, written warning, one-day-suspension, and three-day-suspension."
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/05/police_dispatcher_fired_for_st.php

so it seems that for whatever reason, her bosses didn't think much of her...

Doctors, typically non-caucasian, have frequently been caught stealing valuable jewelry in emergency rooms.

Sometimes they KILL people if the watch is a high end Rolex : murder charges on Dr Cleveland James Enmon ...

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2009/09/lawsuit_alleges_er_doctor_let.php

That doctor passively killed Jerry Keith Kubena and nurses saw him steal the watch from him. http://www.tributes.com/show/Jerry-Kubena-86051486/

Certain people with diverse ethnic backgrounds seem to not only fill prisons far more than other ethnic groups, they also have been caught stealing in the ER rooms.

Even doctors.

As to why they don't get fired, such as Cleveland James Enmon, and others, is because sometimes its hard to fire "certain kinds" of people.

I think the example is that Matt will approach the SKILL rather than the game, once he understands what the learning curve looks like (or ideally makes a model of the entire problem that's cohesive [think Tic-Tac-Toe connect four or the miriad other games that aren't worth playing because all the conditions are preset]) or maps the solution space he's bored... giving him victories based on that solution isn't really an enticement.

Paul on the other hand likes winning and achieving, he cares about points, coins, swords, paychecks, accolades etc. The products of winning and will continue to work towards them until he becomes bored.

As an example think of the game http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/mastermind.jpg/ some people will guess and enjoy winning (and feeling super smart!) others will get out a pencil and come up with the can't fail formula and stop caring.

Meet Marissa!

Actually, she was offering a better deal -- a whole CD for $1000 -- but didn't offer unlimited distribution after purchase.

I can imagine a band recording an album "on spec", actually, and I'm pretty sure it's happened already. But you'd need to have a very strong established fanbase.

scumbag == lawyer that uses broken legislation to extort money from businesses, or businesses that employ said lawyers and tactics.

A good example of this is this guy who's forced some small businesses in California to shut down completely because they can't afford to make their buildings wheelchair accessible. It's big money because CA law allows punitive and compensatory damages to be tacked on to the injunctive relief.

In my previous example, the scumbag is the guy who figures out that he can use the ADA to terminate the authors' right to be compensated for any non-universally-accessible form of their work and simultaneously extract huge damages from Amazon because they don't give free speech-enabled Kindles to anyone who clicks the "blind" box at checkout.

A group of activist hackers called The Institute for Applied Autonomy had some interesting experiences with their graffiti-writing robot: when they took it to public places and started spraying messages on the pavement, members of the public would be perfectly happy to join in and have the robot write their own messages. Of course if they'd tried the same thing without a robot, nobody would have joined in and they probably would have been arrested. Somehow the robot made their actions appear legitimate, and I think the same thing is happening with this guy. If he walked around spraying people he didn't like with a water pistol and telling them to move on, he'd probably be charged with harrassment and assault. He might even be considered mentally ill. But because he uses a robot it's a "patrol" - he seems to be on the side of authority because he's using technology more commonly used by the authorities.

A couple of years ago I read an article in which Huey Lewis was described as "Bruce Springsteen for retarded people." Apparently, he has a following among the developmentally disabled. The article is kind of sweet, actually, and Mr. Lewis comes across as a gentleman. But I'm sure the person who wrote this got a call from Lewis's manager :-)

http://www.sfweekly.com/2005-08-03/news/a-very-special-concert/

It's actually the best way to get rid of unwanted radioactive waste.

I am not sure that the people and animals living around the Golden Gate area for the next few thousand years would agree.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2001-05-09/news/fallout/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3720/is_20 0207/ai_n9128555/pg_2
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA3160/
http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/farallon/radwaste.html

As a slap in the face to environmentalists, Bush designated the nuclear waste dump as a marine sanctuary, ensuring that there was highly restrictive blanket of laws http://farallones.noaa.gov/manage/regulations.html regarding access to and use of the waters in and around the nuclear waste in order to prevent people from researching how badly all the radioactive materials are leaking and contaminating the water, sea bed and sea life in the area while at the same time pretending to do something pro-environment - the joke is on us. http://farallones.noaa.gov/manage/sac.html

Disclaimer: I'm not of any Middle-Eastern descent, and have no personal interest in the case, just in the legal aspects. (It's sad when you have to make such statements...) Also, IANAL.

Salahi posted a response below, where he defends some of the charges. And he has a point regarding the claim ("tortious business interference"), because his original email, cited as Exhibit A in the plaintiff's reply to the anti-SLAPP motion, does not reference the job at all. In fact, the e-mail was sent in regards to Quantum Media, which is the web host (and a website design company, apparently). And the sportsblogger.com website is password-protected, so I also doubt whether Kaplan was going to be hired to write for a nonexistent site.

I'm not saying Salahi is innocent. It seems like both sides try to do an end-around of the legal system. Kaplan says Salahi used fake addresses and claimed to have never been served the motion to appear (=lying in court), which would probably be illegal. (I'm just summarizing his arguments from glancing over the documents.) Though I did find Salahi explanation of the picture prank thing to be quite amusing.

For what it's worth, Kaplan probably did pose as a congressional staffer and engage in criminal activities. See this article, which was cited in Salahi's legal filing. Here's another article about Kaplan and pro-Palestinian groups from the same paper.

Disclaimer: I'm not of any Middle-Eastern descent, and have no personal interest in the case, just in the legal aspects. (It's sad when you have to make such statements...) Also, IANAL.

Salahi posted a response below, where he defends some of the charges. And he has a point regarding the claim ("tortious business interference"), because his original email, cited as Exhibit A in the plaintiff's reply to the anti-SLAPP motion, does not reference the job at all. In fact, the e-mail was sent in regards to Quantum Media, which is the web host (and a website design company, apparently). And the sportsblogger.com website is password-protected, so I also doubt whether Kaplan was going to be hired to write for a nonexistent site.

I'm not saying Salahi is innocent. It seems like both sides try to do an end-around of the legal system. Kaplan says Salahi used fake addresses and claimed to have never been served the motion to appear (=lying in court), which would probably be illegal. (I'm just summarizing his arguments from glancing over the documents.) Though I did find Salahi explanation of the picture prank thing to be quite amusing.

For what it's worth, Kaplan probably did pose as a congressional staffer and engage in criminal activities. See this article, which was cited in Salahi's legal filing. Here's another article about Kaplan and pro-Palestinian groups from the same paper.

Google has been trying to get a free municipal wireless system up in San Francisco, in partnership with Earthlink. They have largely been blocked by a county supervisor named Tom Ammiano and a few others who are clinging to a decade-old plan to put a fiber optic network in the sewer lines. It is hard for people not from San Francisco to understand how cretinous and absurd the local politics are, but this is the issue- a faction of the local gov does not want to let the mayor look good by rolling this out. Google has made a clever play whereby when the imbeciles (there is also a significant faction of anti-radio-waves people) introduce their plan it will resemble this gag and hopefully remind people of the joke. A good article on the subject is available here: http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-03-28/news/making-rad io-waves/

Two weeks ago, Wolf's pro-bono lawyers argued a motion in federal court to quash the subpoena before Judge Maria-Elena James. They claimed that Wolf is protected by California's shield law, which allows journalists to maintain confidential unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. The law lets journalists cast a wide net in reporting, even though they may end up seeing or hearing actions that are illegal. Granting the government widespread power to request unused recordings, Wolf's lawyers argued, would turn journalists into an arm of the Justice Department, creating a chilling effect among citizens, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.

They're investigating a violent protest - a policeman (apparently) had his skull cracked, for goodness sake.

Guac's kind of an acquired taste, so most places will honor your request when you say to leave it off. Though the question of your fondness leads into the next one, are you getting Mexican food from chain places, or are you going to the (slightly more risky) small hole in the wall places? Quality is a bit more sporadic in the non-chain places, but conversely, you will get places that are really damn good. The chains are pretty much universally mediocre as far as quality goes.

However, I can't help too much with the Tim Hortons thing other than to say try some of the local storefront doughnut shops. Again, sporadic quality, but there are some pretty good ones out there.

Doing some poking, though, I found this document, which seems to be a pretty decent list of good places in the SF area in general, including a food section. If I misjudged and you live somewhere other than SFO area, find whatever the free alt tabloid in the area is and try googling for the paper name "best of". All these papers have something similar; reader voted reviews of various categories. Should help you find pretty good places.

Here you go:

http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2005-11-30/news/fea ture_full.html

Although the article itself is a hostile piece that tries to sensationalize CL's impact on paper-pubs that have been impacted by CL's methods, it does confirm the investment etc.

Jealousy? I think you misspelled "outrage".

It's jealousy when you see a well-dressed man come out of a nightclub with a beautiful woman on his arm. It's outrage when the guy starts beating the crap out of her. Two very different emotions.

Your picture leaves out a few economic realities. You're looking at it simply as the flow of dollars from one place to another. But the dollars are only meaningful because they're pegged to valuable things like labor and natural resources. When someone decides to spend five million on a luxury yacht, the dollars go into the hands of other human beings, but the labor disappears and the natural resources are now firmly yachtified, and cannot be recovered for other purposes without the use of even more labor and capital.

In short, when somebody spends millions on a toy, the value needed to create that toy removes labor and resources from the world, when those resources could have been invested in something that would provide critical human needs.

Wealth isn't dollars, but is only represented by them, which is why the value of a dollar can vary. So when some person, for whatever reason, finds himself sitting on a big pile of dollars, it's symbolic of that person's ability to direct the disposition of vast quantities of labor and resources. Some wealthy people engage their money in meaningful, philanthropic ways. Others spend it on entertaining extravagances. There are some who use it to buy their way into political office (Mayor Bloomberg of New York, a long list of Rockerfellers, etc.)

I would argue that all three of these cases are corrosive to our society. In the case of the last two, my reasoning should be obvious, whether you agree with it or not. But in the case of philanthropy, it's a bit more subtle.

The most recent SF Weekly covers the philanthropic pursuits of Donald Fisher, the guy who founded The Gap (and then gave the bird to an entire generation of nostalgic hippies by putting one on the corner of Haight and Ashbury). His current focus is the educational system. He's setting up charter and private schools that seem to be doing a good job educating the students. Wonderful, right?

But the reporter has mixed feelings. As these private schools gather steam, they're quickly draining resources away from the public system, a process helped along by several pieces of legislation that Fisher supported financially.

So this raises questions. Are these private schools doing more good, or more harm? Should we be focusing our efforts on improving public education, or should we give up and privatize the whole thing?

I'm sure that there are many other questions, but the answer to all of them is, "It doesn't matter." Fisher has the money, so he's making the decision on behalf of the rest of us.

We can only hope people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are extremely wise in their philanthropic activities. But whether they see the public need clearly or simply want to do something showy to leave their marks on history, we're still faced with the situation where decisions about what constitutes the public good are increasingly being made by a handful of elites. I do not believe that these handful of billionaires are in any way worthy of the fortunes they've created, nor do I believe that they have the wisdom necessary to make such vast decisions for the rest of us.

Wrong. Come out from whatever rock your living under and look at some other points of view. Here's a quotation from an SF Weekly article:

"In order to accept prostitution, pornography, and stripping as part of mainstream sexuality, you have to not know how violent and exploitive it is, the emotional damage it does, how profoundly racist it is, how many of the acts meet the legal definition for torture," says Prostitution Research & Education's Melissa Farley. "And you have to not know that many people in it really want to get out."

I might not agree with what Farley says 100%, but for you to dismiss the dangers of pornography out of hand is naive

To my mind, it's a better read than listen. The robots are definitely cool, much better than Chuck E. Cheese - the instruments are actually being played by the robots, after all. Maybe you won't be blown away by their quality, you wouldn't see it in a sci-fi movie or Rocky III, but the man definitely has put a lot of time into it.

The stage show isn't the greatest - the songs are pretty generic rockers. Also, given the difficult task of controlling robots while running a 1-man band, it's not surprising that the between-song banter about how the robots have enslaved him and insult him ends up not being as clever as one might wish: a whole bunch of "fuck yous" are thrown around.

So I can't consider him a top example of SF wackiness - he had Extreme Elvis open for him once, and Elvis had him beat, without much of a contest.

Ah, but we know where he lives.

latest odds:
3-1 junk mail
5-1 burglary
10-1 car bomb attack
50-1 tacnuke
100-1 orbital ion cannon

any takers? ;)