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Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
Interesting thing about peaches is that they contain cyanide. From that respect I could see why the scanner would go off...
I was going to moderate. (4) points about to expire today. But I just cannot let this example of ignorance sit at the top of a story.
Have You ever heard of CYANIDE?
Suggestion: think before you open type and demonstrate how ignorant you are.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Cyanide+peach+pits
Don't tell anyone but pressure treated wood contains arsenic.
Who will guard the guards?
Everytime you play the proprietary software game, you lose a bit of your freedom and get nearer to Orwell's world.
How can you be sure your software is not spying on you? For 1 caught Sony case, how many lesser known applications violate your privacy? Not even counting keyloggers and other obvious malware. XP phones home. How many other apps do that?
Even in the political world, proprietary software brings us closer to 1984. Seems every voting machine provider uses closed software, supposedly for "security". How can we trust these black boxes?
In the good old days of desktop computing without a network, closed source software could be trusted to keep your privacy; there was not any way to transmit the information anyway. But now, any trivial program is able to report your activities to the whole world.
Seems to me proprietary software is a dead end when privacy is involved.
If I told my great-great-great-great-grandmother that in the year 2006, most homes would have a box spying and reporting people activities, backed by the richest company in the world, she'd probably laugh. I'm not.
Pressure treated wood used to contain chromated copper arsenate (CCA).
The EPA banned it since 2004 for most anything other than industrial or agricultural use.
There are several other alternatives available. They use significantly more copper than CCA, or they use borate. Both are more expensive than CCA.
I'm pretty sure the EPA gave the lumber companies enough leeway to move their existing stocks of CCA treated wood. The majority of wood available to the avg Joe nowadays should not have CCA in it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In Delaware, they've spent a lot of time and money getting products containing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine out of the hands of teenagers who might use them to make methamphetamine.
* Most meth doesn't come from these sources.
* These sources are hard to use if they have a lot of other ingredients (like dayquil does)
* It's much easier to make things like methcathinone than methamphetamine, and methcathinone doesn't have a big market.
* Methamphetamine production requires a lot of other reagents and laboratory equipment, and these are already on DEA watchlists...
* Only an idiot would attempt to run a meth lab by grinding up Sudafed. It's way too expensive. It's better to just order a bunch of ephedrine from a chemical supply co.
They're trying to "stop a problem before it starts" or something.
* The last time a "source chemical" was regulated, meth lab chemists found an alternate, cheaper, easier-to-obtain source which produced much stronger product (I believe it was levorotatory versus dextrorotatory, and had much more recreational potential)---the DEA's actions backfired (*coughcoughPROHIBITIONNEVERWORKEDcoughcough*) before, why won't they backfire now? (Actually, it's a collection of state governors that are doing this, not the DEA, afaik.)
We don't have a needle exchange program here, despite having tons of HIV+ needle users and a huge heroin market (and a significant number of people who shoot coke). That *IS* a problem that is right in our faces and nothing seems to be happening. Of course, when it's a bunch of low-income, inner-city folk from run-down areas that are at stake, versus potential problems for "our children, our future", maybe one group gets precedence.
even 1/2-strength ricin is more lethal than many toxins.
"half -strength" may be an exceptionally optimistic yield. The patent doesn't address the efficiency of the process.
OS Wars Volume 5: Recognized as the worlds leading soporific. Warning! Side-effects include headaches and vomiting.
http://clerk.house.gov/histHigh/Congressional_His
The last President who never vetoed was James A. Garfield, elected in 1880. I'd call that non-modern history. So the article was accurate at the time of publication.
In my fact checking, I see that Bush now has 1 veto, rejecting additional funding for stem cell research, just over a week ago. The Globe article was written in April.
So the article was correct.
I'm sorry, but the peaches part of this can't possibly be realistic.
I live in South Carolina, where the state fruit is the peach. Georgia, right next door, is known as the peach state. You can't go 15 miles on rural roads in either state without seeing people selling fruit by the side of the road, and nearly all of the time, it includes peaches. Furthermore, the amount of cyanide in peach pits is minute. You'd probably have to eat a couple dozen pits before you stood even a slim chance of suffering from cyanide poisoning. And if you're going to go through that much trouble to kill yourself, there are easier ways...
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
- Drive your car
- Board a plane, train, or bus
- Enter any federal building
- Open a bank account
- Hold a job
This bill was passed into law on May 11, 2005 by President Bush. It's to be fully implemented by May 11, 2008 at the very latest.Don't believe me? Have a look at the official congressional documentation on the Real ID Act - H.R. 418. Are you wondering how they got this past everyone? They attached it to the Emergency Supplmental Appropriations Act - H.R. 1268 bill, a bill for funding our troops in Iraq. It was passed into law as US Public Law 109-13. I mean who would want to have voting against support of our troops on their voting record, right?
Interested in more information? Want to join in the fight? Take the No National ID pledge. Regardless of your "religious" affiliations, this is certainly a worthwhile cause to contribute to, so they can continue to fight this law.
The National ID card will grant the ability for the Government to apply economic sanctions on an individual level. I hope you find this as disturbing as I do.