If you were gay (I am), it is doubtful that you would be asking that question. I am not saying that gay behavior fits a stereotype (although some assuredy does), but I, nor any of my friends, have much difficulty recognizing a gay person when we meet them, whether they are in the closet or out.
I don't understand the phenomenon, but it is real.
Star Trek shows no same-gender loving couples, either in the continuing story, or acknowledged in flashback. This is what I miss, and what I rue that Star Trek omits.
There isn't any social pressure now for gays to get together with members of the opposite sex. Gay men and women tend to have a lot of gay friends, and straight parents. The tendency towards gayness propogates just fine without any bisexual intermingling. And you don't need to hedge your bets as far as nuture-nature: with some exceptions, gays are born, not made, and this really isn't open to dispute.
Of course, it is disputed, but not by anyone who had studied the matter and who also has any sense. Yes, these few paragraphs have been written by a gay man, but I don't think that fact has colored my rationality.
Researchers say Nimda is set to propagate again after rechecking Nimda's code.
So, researchers concluded that Nimda rechecked its own code and discovered that it (Nimda) had been programmed to propagate again?
I consider this an amazing programming feature. Self-analyzing artificial intelligence. This would require that Nimda is aware that it is aware, which meets the definition of true consciousness.
I know, that was a deliberate misreading of an unintentionally ambiguous sentence, but it does bring up the question: will viruses ever really be intelligent? As in, conscious?
I'm goingto play devil's advocate: why is crypto important to the average citizen?
I send a lot of e-mail, and sometimes I say bad things about people, but nothing that I wouldn't say to their face. I'll send my enemies copies of my e-mail if they wish. Actually, I don't have any genuine enemies, but I will extend the scope of the word to include people who just piss me off.
I am not planning any crimes, or adulterous relationships, so my wife, and my children, and the police can read my e-mail, as well.
I know that there are legitimate reasons for many people to send encrypted e-mail, but the word MANY does not encompass the word MOST. If you aren't a paranoid freak, or a criminal/adulterer/kiddie porn distributor, is it really that terrible that a law enforcement official protecting your family from terrorists might be reading the sexual fantasies that you are sharing with your girlfriend?
If you are sharing a trade secret with someone who has a need to know in your company, the feds aren't going to post it on the Internet. If you are leaking a trade secret to your competitors for money, then I hope the feds come knocking at your door.
The fact is, master criminals will be using whatever crypto the government hasn't cracked yet, or will sending messages by inconspicious conventional methods. Criminal fuckups will get their e-mail hacked and prevented from delivering that heroin to school children in Seattle.
Is that such a loss? Is freedom so important that it overshadows all other values? If I am free to watch what I want, read what I want, say what I want, eat what I want, fuck whom I want, and live where I want, is the loss of a little privacy really so critical?
I agree with you in many respects. I just happen to believe that patriotism is evil. Call me an iconoclast. I can partially explain why I feel this way with a statement you made earlier:
you are free to disagree with me and I'm not going to beat your ass in for it, regardless of how much I may want to...
Words of violence in a minor dispute over iconology?
Michelangelo's David is just a chunk of stone, agreed. However, it is also a nearly unparalleled work of art, and totally unique. Flags are mass-produced, so you can't claim rarity, and they aren't even particularly beautiful. The flags of many countries are at least as aesthetically pleasing.
When is a flag worth protecting? When it is still an uncut bolt of fabric sitting in a Hong Kong warehouse? After that fabric has been printed in New Jersey? When it has been cut into rectangular pieces and sewn at the edges? After it has been wrapped in plastic, packed in a box with dozens of other flags, and loaded onto a pallet with dozens of identical boxes? After the Wal-Mart clerk puts it on the shelf? After you purchased it and displayed it in front of your home?
I don't know what you hold dear, or what you consider of value to you (possibly nothing), but at the very least you *should* derive some value from your family.
I derive ultimate value from my family, as I should. All human life is valuable, but, yes, I value my family more than I value the lives of other humans. Because I value life, and love, and kindness, and goodness, and Mozart and cool spring mornings and puppies and kittens and myriad other things, I object to anything that can produce irrational, hateful behavior, as the veneration of flags or crosses or crescent moons causes much too often.
Remember that the terrorists who destroyed the WTC almost certainly loved the crescent moon but hated the US flag.
I served in the US military for many years. I was proud to protect our country, and I feel personally rewarded by the triumph of NATO and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. I spent 15 years in Europe and Asia, and my presence made a difference. The flag made no difference except for to stir hot blood. Patriotism is the beginning of evil (one of the beginnings of one evil). Sure, it has made many feel noble and proud, but at what cost to our future?
I have always been vocal about my discomfort with the flag, and had men in uniform throw bricks through the bedroom window (behind which my children slept) because I had besmirched the object of their veneration. This is irrational and insane, and goes against the very ideals that the US is supposed to preserve.
Anyway, if you choose to respond, you might want to answer personally, as this thread is long dead.
The flag represents nothing that the human mind does not invest it with, and to invest any piece of fabric with something as nebulous as "ideals" is foolhardy, especially when you make the corollary implication that our country - the US -possesses only one set of them.
You have your ideals, I have mine. The tens of millions of those who live in the US each have their own ideals, some startling similar to mine or your own, some startlingly dissimilar. My own ideals do not include veneration of fabric.
I am an American. I am glad that I was born here, but I would have been equally glad to be born in Denmark or Belgium or Canada or England or Ireland or Wales or Scotland or Sweden or Switzerland or numerous other places. I don't consider the location of my birth something to be proud of, any more than I am proud of anything that I did not personally accomplish.
Patriotism and nationalism and xenophobia are all symptoms of the same disease, just in varying degrees. This illness has infected members of Christian Identity groups and militias, which is why I mentioned them specifically. You can be a Christian and not share these attributes, as you can be an American. I wasn't implying otherwise. I was stating baldly that the members of the lunatic fringe (who almost all consider themselves patriots and Christians) will now have one more thing to mutter darkly about. The quote concerning FEMA was real, and it terrified me.
Be proud of what you can contribute to this nation and to the happiness that your hard work can sometimes give to your friends and family (if you are fortunate enough not to die prematurely, whether of natural causes, accidents, or in an explosion caused by very patriotic, very sincerely religious ultra-nationalists), and not because the donors of the sperm and egg which formed you happened to be within the borders of any particular country at the time you were born.
That the US flag is flying in this photo has as much relevance to this tragedy as the question "Does Mayor Giuliani likes decaf?".
Let's leave pariotism and nationalism and the xenophobia that comes with it where it is already festering: with the Christian Identity groups and militias who will all be clucking their tongues right now and saying things like "I told you so," with psueudo-sagacity and righteousness in their eyes.
I live in an area where such sentiments are commonplace, and the most intelligent opinion I heard from any of their ilk was "Now FEMA and the federal government has another excuse to violate our rights," without a thought to the suffering. The other denizens of the trailer parks and the bunkers whom I was unfortunate enough to serve today (I work retail) didn't have large enough vocabularies to form a sentence that articulate, but they did nod agreement.
Since when is coming up again on other servers different from coming back online? Or does the fair and square qualifier impart to you some sinister meaning?
At the ISP where I work, we have many different servers, each with different comical names. If we are hosting a customer's website on Scooby, and we transfer it to Taz, is there something not fair and square about that action? If so, then we and many other ISP's are operating unfairly every day, as such transferences are fairly common (due hardware failures and upgrades, as two examples).
I think that you need to read the Yahoo article carefully.
Suppose that I am an employee at a large department store. I've worked there for many years, and I've been present during the apprehension of shoplifters who were arrested and convicted of their crime. One day at work I see on of these former perpetrators enter the store. Would it be unreasonable for me to monitor their activities with especial care?
Second scenario:
There is a concealed room above the same department store where a team of observers sit, watching the shoppers as they enter. These observers have photos of known shoplifters taped to the walls of their hideaway, and they are comparing the faces of the all of the patrons (honest and dishonest) with the faces of the known perpetrators. Is this unreasonable?
Addendum to scenario 1:
I follow a customer one day because I believe that he/she is a former shoplifer, only to realize that I was wrong, and that my facial recognition skills are not as acute as I had imagined. The store detective (who I notified) wasted half an hour.
Addendum to scenario 2:
One of the trained observers in the hideaway erroneously identifies an honest customer as a shoplifter. The store detective wasted half an hour.
Scenario 3:
Automated software performs the same comparisons that the trained observers performed, only it does this with extreme efficiency. It occasionally makes mistakes, and on this occasion it made a mistake on the same day that I did. The store detective wasted another half an hour.
Final proviso:
In each of the these instances, no arrests were made, because none of the suspects were observed taking unpaid merchandise from the store.
How about if it's not raining, but it is in fact hailing, and the stones are slamming into the face of a jogger who has slipped and is supine on the sidewalk, and the jogger's teeth are being smashed out by the hail of golf-ball sized stones?
How about if a duck is swatting your testicles with its webbed feet, and your testicles are so swollen that one more swat they will explode, and the sticky contents will splash all over your thighs?
Oh, what relevance does this have to your post? Nothing. Which is exactly my point... what relevance did your post have to the thread at hand?
This is NOT a troll. Please read carefully before modding it as such.
Have you ever actually played Active Worlds? It may be laudably "goal-free," but the graphics are abysmal - slow, jerky, and low-res - and the conversation is insipid and juvenile.
After 4 or 5 years, the Active World folks have done nothing except increase their subscriber base (how, I don't know, considering the faults I enumerated). Active Worlds was ugly by any standard even when it was new, and it hasn't improved much. The overall interface is still clunky, the chat interface is the worst I've ever experienced.
I don't think that is what Neil Stephenson had in mind.
Re:Why subscribe to software in the future...
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
>M68000 CPU
The M68000 CPU was amazing, and outperformed anything by Intel when it was released (and for many years thereafter).
>1 MB RAM
The 1040ST had 4 MB of RAM, and by replacing the MMU, you could upgrade further.
I had a 50MB HD, and that was huge. It was divided into 5 partitions, and each contained hundreds of files and programs.
I ran bulletin boards on it for years, connected to UUCP servers, composed and played music, word processed, programmed in C and assembler, and played wonderful games.
I listened to demos of British Telecom's Laureate Text-to-Speech System many years ago (1995? slightly earlier?) at the BT Laboratories in Ipswich, England. It was brilliant, mimicking Bill Clinton perfectly.
It seemed like a real security threat. I always surmised that the reason it never made a more public appearance was because of this risk. Imagine world leaders in disfiguring "accidents," swathed in bandages, but assuring us in completely normal voices that everything was all right, with the real politician assasinated and a lip-syncing actor behind the bandages...
CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno was traveling in Pennsylvania and reported hearing "what sounded like a tremendous sonic boom" through the closed windows of his air-conditioned car.
I know this is/was supposed to be funny, but the air conditioning was a relevant detail: the boom was loud enough that it could be heard through closed windows, and over the hum of air conditioning.
This means that it was a loud boom, for those still not paying attention.
I am a Yank who lived in Bury St. Edmunds off and on for 15 years... and walked through the Abbey Gardens every day on the way to work. I would literally (no slight exageration) give my left testicle (or my right, it doesn't matter) to live there again.
Bury St. Edmunds is one of the most enchanted places on earth. You can't imagine how gobsmacked I am to read this article. It is sort of like me discovering Internet access is available at the Pearly Gates (okay, I'm actually an atheist who doesn't believe in the Pearly Gates, but you get my point).
It's almost enough to make a man believe in miracles!
...when you can just drive down from Canada with a suitcase nuke.
This is more serious than you would think. I've been stationed at military bases all over the world, and on many occasions seen cars abandoned for days outside of military perimeter fences without being visited once by military police.
...the identity and contact information of domain name registrants are entitled to no more privacy protection than are a business or home addresses in the physical world.
First of all, are identity and contact information entitled to anything? I don't know about you, but my telephone number doesn't have any rights. I have the right to disclose or not to disclose information, but information itself has no rights. Second, assuming that Timothy P. Trainer was actually referring to the rights of registrants, and the responsibility of REGISTRARS to ENSURE that registrants provide accurate and current information, I now must ask whether he thinks that registrants somehow exist in the incorporeal world, and regular folks exist in the physical world? That's what his words imply.
As a registrant, I want to assure him that I am just a normal guy who is distinguished only by having information in the WHOIS database. I assume that the same applies to most registrants.
However, back to the question of privacy: I happen to largely agree with Timothy P. Trainer. Can the editor of the Washington Post keep his identity and contact information private? Did we allow Bill to keep his blowjob private? Do paparazzi allow celebrities to escape from their candid photos? Doesn't the public almost always relentlessly claim the right to know, regardless of how empty that knowledge frequently is?
I was never entirely gripped by the X-Files, but I did find it at times diverting. Still, I did notice an interesting social phenomenon that seemed to correlate with the popularity of the X-Files:
America seemed to get dumber. Before the X-Files made paranoia almost chic, the only black helicopter and gray proctologist fans were those you met furtively clutching copies of News of the World. If you caught them and smirked, they were buying it for a friend (sort of like all of the inflatable dolls that no one ever buys for themselves, and the millions of Playboys sold every year to those who only peruse the articles).
After the X-Files, it was okay to be dumb. People who weren't escapees from mental wards would tell you with a straight face that they'd had their fillings removed so that the government wouldn't spy or them. In the years of its peak popularity, I talked to an increasing number of the imbecilic who believed that every episode of the X-Files were real FBI secret reports re-enacted for television.
I've always wondered whether the X-Files was merely liberating the existant mentally feeble, or creating them anew?
Is television really so powerful that a well-crafted science fiction series can increase the gullibility of millions of Americans?
Slashdot Mirror
If you were gay (I am), it is doubtful that you would be asking that question. I am not saying that gay behavior fits a stereotype (although some assuredy does), but I, nor any of my friends, have much difficulty recognizing a gay person when we meet them, whether they are in the closet or out.
I don't understand the phenomenon, but it is real.
Star Trek shows no same-gender loving couples, either in the continuing story, or acknowledged in flashback. This is what I miss, and what I rue that Star Trek omits.
There isn't any social pressure now for gays to get together with members of the opposite sex. Gay men and women tend to have a lot of gay friends, and straight parents. The tendency towards gayness propogates just fine without any bisexual intermingling. And you don't need to hedge your bets as far as nuture-nature: with some exceptions, gays are born, not made, and this really isn't open to dispute.
Of course, it is disputed, but not by anyone who had studied the matter and who also has any sense. Yes, these few paragraphs have been written by a gay man, but I don't think that fact has colored my rationality.
Researchers say Nimda is set to propagate again after rechecking Nimda's code.
So, researchers concluded that Nimda rechecked its own code and discovered that it (Nimda) had been programmed to propagate again?
I consider this an amazing programming feature. Self-analyzing artificial intelligence. This would require that Nimda is aware that it is aware, which meets the definition of true consciousness.
I know, that was a deliberate misreading of an unintentionally ambiguous sentence, but it does bring up the question: will viruses ever really be intelligent? As in, conscious?
What do you Slashdotters think?
no gender-neutral language yet
And no gender ambiguity. No lesbians, no gay men, no transgendered.
Is the future going to be so straight? Not if the present is any indication.
Why the blinders, Paramount? Is the gay Star Trek audience really so insignificant that you still ignore us?
Gay bashers cheerfully ignored.
By my calculations, before taxes, you paid $28366.26 for your piece of novelty soil.
Are you fucking crazy?!?
No, it isn't, actually. "Tolerance" is spelled "tolerance" in the UK and "tolerance" in the US.
I don't know why I have bothered responding to this troll, but there it is.
I'm goingto play devil's advocate: why is crypto important to the average citizen?
I send a lot of e-mail, and sometimes I say bad things about people, but nothing that I wouldn't say to their face. I'll send my enemies copies of my e-mail if they wish. Actually, I don't have any genuine enemies, but I will extend the scope of the word to include people who just piss me off.
I am not planning any crimes, or adulterous relationships, so my wife, and my children, and the police can read my e-mail, as well.
I know that there are legitimate reasons for many people to send encrypted e-mail, but the word MANY does not encompass the word MOST. If you aren't a paranoid freak, or a criminal/adulterer/kiddie porn distributor, is it really that terrible that a law enforcement official protecting your family from terrorists might be reading the sexual fantasies that you are sharing with your girlfriend?
If you are sharing a trade secret with someone who has a need to know in your company, the feds aren't going to post it on the Internet. If you are leaking a trade secret to your competitors for money, then I hope the feds come knocking at your door.
The fact is, master criminals will be using whatever crypto the government hasn't cracked yet, or will sending messages by inconspicious conventional methods. Criminal fuckups will get their e-mail hacked and prevented from delivering that heroin to school children in Seattle.
Is that such a loss? Is freedom so important that it overshadows all other values? If I am free to watch what I want, read what I want, say what I want, eat what I want, fuck whom I want, and live where I want, is the loss of a little privacy really so critical?
I agree with you in many respects. I just happen to believe that patriotism is evil. Call me an iconoclast. I can partially explain why I feel this way with a statement you made earlier:
you are free to disagree with me and I'm not going to beat your ass in for it, regardless of how much I may want to...
Words of violence in a minor dispute over iconology?
Michelangelo's David is just a chunk of stone, agreed. However, it is also a nearly unparalleled work of art, and totally unique. Flags are mass-produced, so you can't claim rarity, and they aren't even particularly beautiful. The flags of many countries are at least as aesthetically pleasing.
When is a flag worth protecting? When it is still an uncut bolt of fabric sitting in a Hong Kong warehouse? After that fabric has been printed in New Jersey? When it has been cut into rectangular pieces and sewn at the edges? After it has been wrapped in plastic, packed in a box with dozens of other flags, and loaded onto a pallet with dozens of identical boxes? After the Wal-Mart clerk puts it on the shelf? After you purchased it and displayed it in front of your home?
I don't know what you hold dear, or what you consider of value to you (possibly nothing), but at the very least you *should* derive some value from your family.
I derive ultimate value from my family, as I should. All human life is valuable, but, yes, I value my family more than I value the lives of other humans. Because I value life, and love, and kindness, and goodness, and Mozart and cool spring mornings and puppies and kittens and myriad other things, I object to anything that can produce irrational, hateful behavior, as the veneration of flags or crosses or crescent moons causes much too often.
Remember that the terrorists who destroyed the WTC almost certainly loved the crescent moon but hated the US flag.
I served in the US military for many years. I was proud to protect our country, and I feel personally rewarded by the triumph of NATO and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. I spent 15 years in Europe and Asia, and my presence made a difference. The flag made no difference except for to stir hot blood. Patriotism is the beginning of evil (one of the beginnings of one evil). Sure, it has made many feel noble and proud, but at what cost to our future?
I have always been vocal about my discomfort with the flag, and had men in uniform throw bricks through the bedroom window (behind which my children slept) because I had besmirched the object of their veneration. This is irrational and insane, and goes against the very ideals that the US is supposed to preserve.
Anyway, if you choose to respond, you might want to answer personally, as this thread is long dead.
Thanks for the conversation.
The flag represents nothing that the human mind does not invest it with, and to invest any piece of fabric with something as nebulous as "ideals" is foolhardy, especially when you make the corollary implication that our country - the US -possesses only one set of them.
You have your ideals, I have mine. The tens of millions of those who live in the US each have their own ideals, some startling similar to mine or your own, some startlingly dissimilar. My own ideals do not include veneration of fabric.
I am an American. I am glad that I was born here, but I would have been equally glad to be born in Denmark or Belgium or Canada or England or Ireland or Wales or Scotland or Sweden or Switzerland or numerous other places. I don't consider the location of my birth something to be proud of, any more than I am proud of anything that I did not personally accomplish.
Patriotism and nationalism and xenophobia are all symptoms of the same disease, just in varying degrees. This illness has infected members of Christian Identity groups and militias, which is why I mentioned them specifically. You can be a Christian and not share these attributes, as you can be an American. I wasn't implying otherwise. I was stating baldly that the members of the lunatic fringe (who almost all consider themselves patriots and Christians) will now have one more thing to mutter darkly about. The quote concerning FEMA was real, and it terrified me.
Be proud of what you can contribute to this nation and to the happiness that your hard work can sometimes give to your friends and family (if you are fortunate enough not to die prematurely, whether of natural causes, accidents, or in an explosion caused by very patriotic, very sincerely religious ultra-nationalists), and not because the donors of the sperm and egg which formed you happened to be within the borders of any particular country at the time you were born.
That the US flag is flying in this photo has as much relevance to this tragedy as the question "Does Mayor Giuliani likes decaf?".
Let's leave pariotism and nationalism and the xenophobia that comes with it where it is already festering: with the Christian Identity groups and militias who will all be clucking their tongues right now and saying things like "I told you so," with psueudo-sagacity and righteousness in their eyes.
I live in an area where such sentiments are commonplace, and the most intelligent opinion I heard from any of their ilk was "Now FEMA and the federal government has another excuse to violate our rights," without a thought to the suffering. The other denizens of the trailer parks and the bunkers whom I was unfortunate enough to serve today (I work retail) didn't have large enough vocabularies to form a sentence that articulate, but they did nod agreement.
We live in scary times.
Since when is coming up again on other servers different from coming back online? Or does the fair and square qualifier impart to you some sinister meaning?
At the ISP where I work, we have many different servers, each with different comical names. If we are hosting a customer's website on Scooby, and we transfer it to Taz, is there something not fair and square about that action? If so, then we and many other ISP's are operating unfairly every day, as such transferences are fairly common (due hardware failures and upgrades, as two examples).
I think that you need to read the Yahoo article carefully.
I really don't see the big deal.
Let's look at it from several perspectives.
First scenario:
Suppose that I am an employee at a large department store. I've worked there for many years, and I've been present during the apprehension of shoplifters who were arrested and convicted of their crime. One day at work I see on of these former perpetrators enter the store. Would it be unreasonable for me to monitor their activities with especial care?
Second scenario:
There is a concealed room above the same department store where a team of observers sit, watching the shoppers as they enter. These observers have photos of known shoplifters taped to the walls of their hideaway, and they are comparing the faces of the all of the patrons (honest and dishonest) with the faces of the known perpetrators. Is this unreasonable?
Addendum to scenario 1:
I follow a customer one day because I believe that he/she is a former shoplifer, only to realize that I was wrong, and that my facial recognition skills are not as acute as I had imagined. The store detective (who I notified) wasted half an hour.
Addendum to scenario 2:
One of the trained observers in the hideaway erroneously identifies an honest customer as a shoplifter. The store detective wasted half an hour.
Scenario 3:
Automated software performs the same comparisons that the trained observers performed, only it does this with extreme efficiency. It occasionally makes mistakes, and on this occasion it made a mistake on the same day that I did. The store detective wasted another half an hour.
Final proviso:
In each of the these instances, no arrests were made, because none of the suspects were observed taking unpaid merchandise from the store.
I ask: does the method of observation matter?
This is NOT a troll...
How about if it's not raining, but it is in fact hailing, and the stones are slamming into the face of a jogger who has slipped and is supine on the sidewalk, and the jogger's teeth are being smashed out by the hail of golf-ball sized stones?
How about if a duck is swatting your testicles with its webbed feet, and your testicles are so swollen that one more swat they will explode, and the sticky contents will splash all over your thighs?
Oh, what relevance does this have to your post? Nothing. Which is exactly my point... what relevance did your post have to the thread at hand?
This is NOT a troll. Please read carefully before modding it as such.
Have you ever actually played Active Worlds? It may be laudably "goal-free," but the graphics are abysmal - slow, jerky, and low-res - and the conversation is insipid and juvenile.
After 4 or 5 years, the Active World folks have done nothing except increase their subscriber base (how, I don't know, considering the faults I enumerated). Active Worlds was ugly by any standard even when it was new, and it hasn't improved much. The overall interface is still clunky, the chat interface is the worst I've ever experienced.
I don't think that is what Neil Stephenson had in mind.
>M68000 CPU
The M68000 CPU was amazing, and outperformed anything by Intel when it was released (and for many years thereafter).
>1 MB RAM
The 1040ST had 4 MB of RAM, and by replacing the MMU, you could upgrade further.
I had a 50MB HD, and that was huge. It was divided into 5 partitions, and each contained hundreds of files and programs.
I ran bulletin boards on it for years, connected to UUCP servers, composed and played music, word processed, programmed in C and assembler, and played wonderful games.
I still miss it, to be truthful... *Sniff.*
Your Mileage May Vary, though I don't know what the final W stands for, unless it means Wildly.
I listened to demos of British Telecom's Laureate Text-to-Speech System many years ago (1995? slightly earlier?) at the BT Laboratories in Ipswich, England. It was brilliant, mimicking Bill Clinton perfectly.
It seemed like a real security threat. I always surmised that the reason it never made a more public appearance was because of this risk. Imagine world leaders in disfiguring "accidents," swathed in bandages, but assuring us in completely normal voices that everything was all right, with the real politician assasinated and a lip-syncing actor behind the bandages...
As opposed to a boom not loud enough to be heard through closed windows, over the hum of air conditioning.
CNN Washington Bureau Chief Frank Sesno was traveling in Pennsylvania and reported hearing "what sounded like a tremendous sonic boom" through the closed windows of his air-conditioned car.
I know this is/was supposed to be funny, but the air conditioning was a relevant detail: the boom was loud enough that it could be heard through closed windows, and over the hum of air conditioning.
This means that it was a loud boom, for those still not paying attention.
I am a Yank who lived in Bury St. Edmunds off and on for 15 years... and walked through the Abbey Gardens every day on the way to work. I would literally (no slight exageration) give my left testicle (or my right, it doesn't matter) to live there again.
Bury St. Edmunds is one of the most enchanted places on earth. You can't imagine how gobsmacked I am to read this article. It is sort of like me discovering Internet access is available at the Pearly Gates (okay, I'm actually an atheist who doesn't believe in the Pearly Gates, but you get my point).
It's almost enough to make a man believe in miracles!
...when you can just drive down from Canada with a suitcase nuke.
This is more serious than you would think. I've been stationed at military bases all over the world, and on many occasions seen cars abandoned for days outside of military perimeter fences without being visited once by military police.
Not a very comforting thought, is it?
...the identity and contact information of domain name registrants are entitled to no more privacy protection than are a business or home addresses in the physical world.
First of all, are identity and contact information entitled to anything? I don't know about you, but my telephone number doesn't have any rights. I have the right to disclose or not to disclose information, but information itself has no rights. Second, assuming that Timothy P. Trainer was actually referring to the rights of registrants, and the responsibility of REGISTRARS to ENSURE that registrants provide accurate and current information, I now must ask whether he thinks that registrants somehow exist in the incorporeal world, and regular folks exist in the physical world? That's what his words imply.
As a registrant, I want to assure him that I am just a normal guy who is distinguished only by having information in the WHOIS database. I assume that the same applies to most registrants.
However, back to the question of privacy: I happen to largely agree with Timothy P. Trainer. Can the editor of the Washington Post keep his identity and contact information private? Did we allow Bill to keep his blowjob private? Do paparazzi allow celebrities to escape from their candid photos? Doesn't the public almost always relentlessly claim the right to know, regardless of how empty that knowledge frequently is?
From the article:
...a lack of shampoo left them at their wits' end.
...chilli sauce had to be used instead of a missing cleaning gel."
And:
Imagine the astronauts who used the substitute cleaning gel for the missing shampoo!
It isn't even implied that the towers were human-constructed, if you take the time to read the article...
I was never entirely gripped by the X-Files, but I did find it at times diverting. Still, I did notice an interesting social phenomenon that seemed to correlate with the popularity of the X-Files:
America seemed to get dumber. Before the X-Files made paranoia almost chic, the only black helicopter and gray proctologist fans were those you met furtively clutching copies of News of the World. If you caught them and smirked, they were buying it for a friend (sort of like all of the inflatable dolls that no one ever buys for themselves, and the millions of Playboys sold every year to those who only peruse the articles).
After the X-Files, it was okay to be dumb. People who weren't escapees from mental wards would tell you with a straight face that they'd had their fillings removed so that the government wouldn't spy or them. In the years of its peak popularity, I talked to an increasing number of the imbecilic who believed that every episode of the X-Files were real FBI secret reports re-enacted for television.
I've always wondered whether the X-Files was merely liberating the existant mentally feeble, or creating them anew?
Is television really so powerful that a well-crafted science fiction series can increase the gullibility of millions of Americans?