Which politicians can we vote into office that will make things any different? Folks blamed the Bush administration for excessive tightening of freedom -- and yet what has Obama done to lift those restrictions? Hope and change, right.
24/7 monitoring on a nearby ship was the ONLY change that would have made a difference, at least in terms of technology. As someone else pointed out, operators in NYC did hear the distress call... but what could they do about it? Hope the ship stayed afloat for a few weeks while they sent a rescue vessel? "Look, he wouldn't bother writing out 'glub glub glub', he'd just SAY it." "Perhaps he was dictating?"
I've been living in relatively small towns (pop. 50,000 and 20,000) for the past fifteen years, attending convservative evangelical churches. Two of them make extensive use of multimedia presentations, which I have to admit was a bit of an annoyance to me -- I stop seeing the worship as a sincere expression of faith from the heart but instead it starts looking as you said, iike a Vegas performance.
I have tried using my Kindle when we're told to pull up a specific chapter, but the interface is so tedious I'm just getting to the passage by the time the preacher finishes reading it. Much faster than to grab a dog-eared print copy and flip to the right section. My wife likes using her smartphone, though, and I've even seen smartphones among folks I wouldn't have expected. This particular congregation is largely older ranchers.
Can you cite some specific examples where God's name was redacted to emphasize Jesus' deity? There are no "original texts"; there are only oldest possible copies. Whenever I'm puzzled by popular interpretation of a difficult passage, I pull up a side-by-sidecomparison of the oldest source material and English translation. I don't read more than three words of Greek or Hebrew, but those two sites helpfully provide word-for-word literal translations (e.g., "Thus for loves the God the system as besides the son of-him the only-generated he gives that every the one-believing into him no should-be-being-destroyed but may-be-having life eternal"). While there are numerous places that a word with multiple possible meanings can (and does) lead to conflict over interpretation, I have never seen any translation issues that change the basic theology.
Used to be, I'd tell people my wife and I met online and fell in love before ever meeting in person; folks would react with awe and amusement at such a rare story. Now, of course, there are probably more matches made online than off. But back in 1988 when it was 300 baud dialup... hoo boy, what a trip. The guy had an Apple ][ with 16 modem cards each attached to a separate phone line so 15 people could dial in locally at once, with the 16th reserved for connecting with another system in another city.
Oh, and we had to whistle the carrier tones to maintain the signal. Uphill in the snow both ways.
Because who would ever need to do Linux stuff and Windows stuff simultaneously?
I can't tell if you're joking or not about the dual-boot suggestion. I have been working from home for about 15 years now, and I couldn't get half my job done with that kind of a setup. I use the Linux box for everything possible (read: anything I have a choice about) and the Windows box, supplied by my Microsoft-dependent employer, for everything they require Microsoft applications -- Outlook for email *sigh*, Visual Studio for development *sigh* and the like. I can't VPN into their servers from my Linux box because the IT dudes only allow access from the computer they sent me.
I'd like to say that I am at least able to do all my document writing in Libre Office, but I finally had to give that up after one too many compatibility issues -- it looks great in Libre, prints fine for me, then when I send it to a colleague the formatting is all screwed up in MS Office. So, yeah, I *could* dual-boot 25 times a day as I switch between web development, office email, documentation, and personal activity (read: slashdot)... but I'd rather burn the extra electricity than waste all that time waiting for the desktop to reload.
Then either the witnesses are lying or the source of the passive voice "it has been reported" is lying. People living nearbyheard cries through their open window prior to the gunshot, but did nto see anything. They believe, without any actual evidence, that it was Martin who was in distress. Martin's girlfriend can only provide hearsay evidence of what she claims she heard over the phone. Zimmerman's friend Joe Oliver can only report what Zimmerman told him -- more hearsay. One eyewitness said from the start it was too dark to tell who was assaulting whom, and the kid who originally said he saw Martin on top has recanted that statement, claiming he was pressured by the police to alter his report.
I don't know what to believe, but given Zimmerman's past history of unprovoked violence I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else comes of this, it's an excellent example of how that SYG law allows for insane vigilante warfare, making the streets more, not less, dangerous.
Meh the future is gonna be embedded ads that you simply can't escape.
Son, that's not the future; that's older than dirt. From the earliest days of radio on, in the middle of a show a character would drop in for a visit because "I just had to tell you about this amazing new dish soap from Palmolive" or whatever.
Full disclosure: I am a conservative, evangelical Christian so anything I say on the subject is going to be biased...
Having said that, I think it's a horrible solution even if you start with the obviously flawed premise that everyone believes in the same (if any) deity. Look at what happened the first time that was tried: There he was, RIGHT AMONG THEM, zapping people right and left and exhibiting supernatural weather phenomena right in their midst (mountainside on fire with a disembodied voice speaking directly from it, etc.) Those very people who personally witnessed an omnipotent sovereign leader failed to follow his leadership -- golden calf one day, taking home the idols of their defeated territory the next day, disobeying a direct order to march against the people they were told to defeat... the list goes on and on.
The point of that little theological lesson is, even when the huddled masses have what is arguably the perfect leader, they manage to screw it up. So good luck finding that true moral center among the likes of us. If anything we're even less inclined towards a moral center because after a few millenia without having James Earl Jones' voice speak to us out of a pillar of flames, we've stopped even pretending to care.
I hope you're kidding. Your post ("Mute some of the nonsense and lies" and subsequent replies are all exactly what we DO NOT WANT. Sure, it would be great to silence the "nonsense" coming from the opposition. And that's exactly how they feel about you. If you have the ability to silence someone else's speech because you think it's nonsensical or untrue, what on earth makes you think that only you will be able to do that, and only those whom you think should be suppressed will be suppressed?
No, I hope our society never reaches the point where it really is technically possible to silence someone who says idiotic things. First they came for the Republicans and I did not speak out because I was not a Republican...
My own experience with Facebook friends isn't nearly so clear-cut. My friends fall into one of four categories: People I know from childhood (school), people I know from work, people I know from church (conservative, evangelical) and people I know from a dialup BBS network in the 80s. Of those four groups, only the BBS nerds are an even mix of men and women; in the other three groups women dominate (heh) by a vast majority.
And unlike the survey results mentioned in TFS, my female friends tend to be the ones to chatter about personal issues -- daily photos of children and grandchildren doing cute things, updates about their mood or health, etc. The men write about political issues, cars and other "guy toys", restaurants they like, hunting... and some of them only visit Facebook once a month or less.
So the real news here is... your mileage may vary?
From the way you say "When I walk into a bar..." it sounds like you're still doing it, and still unattached. No real surprise there. How can you possibly know that the woman on the end works on the linux kernel, or the third one from the right can recite every Monty Python sketch from memory, or the one next to her is an astronaut? I've known some brilliant, wonderful people who looked like... well, like I do... and some stunningly attractive people who were complete morons. That is enough to convince me that conclusions about a person based on appearance alone are worthless.
Unless, of course, you're as shallow as those attractive morons and all you care about is external beauty.
It includes the "wizard hat" one, the kama sutra one, and many others. I have re-read it hundreds of times over the last ten years and still laugh uncontrollably at scenes like this:
Wellhung: I'm limp. I can't sustain an erection. Sweetheart: I'm standing up and turning around; an incredulous look on my face. Wellhung: I'm shrugging with a sad look on my face, my weiner all floppy. I'm going to get my glasses and see what's wrong. Sweetheart: No, never mind. I'm getting dressed. I'm putting on my underwear. Now I'm putting on my wet nasty blouse. Wellhung: No wait! Now I'm squinting, trying to find the night table. I'm feeling along the dresser, knocking over cans of hair spray, picture frames and your candles. Sweetheart: I'm buttoning my blouse. Now I'm putting on my shoes. Wellhung: I've found my glasses. I'm putting them on. My God! One of our candles fell on the curtain. The curtain is on fire! I'm pointing at it, a shocked look on my face. Sweetheart: Go to hell. I'm logging off, you loser! Wellhung: Now the carpet is on fire! Oh noooo!
This one actually reveals the fiction behind the scenes -- I find it difficult to believe she would stay in character, acknowledge what he was doing, and use proper punctuation even as he was wrecking the scene; she would have just left the conversation. But even if the whole thing is a work of fiction, it's the funniest damn story I have ever read in my life.
Sure, and we could easily email our (dozens, hundreds, whatever) of our friends daily with all the photos and news updates we care to share with them, eliminating FB entirely.
That's why FB is *not* any kind of attack. An attack implies an unauthorized insertion into the data stream that forces us to unknowingly share our data with the attacker. We willingly give FB our data, knowing full well (if we read any of the news on the subject at all, or the TOS) that they will use that data to their financial benefit. Calling that an attack is lying saying your dentist can be arrested for assault after the pain he inflicts on your teeth and gums.
No, it's rather clear (although I ran it through Audacity's noise removal first, so I suppose I cheated). In fact I was so surprised by the sudden exclamation of "Oh, fuck!" that I went back to the website to read more detail about the recording and confirm that I had heard correctly.
Unscripted history in the making is the best kind of history.
WRT to the stilted speaking style, also of some amusement (to me anyway) is the tendency in turn-of-the-century recordings to use operatic divas to record Tin Pan Alley popular songs. You end up with this hilarious combination of BBC-perfect pronunciation and trilled R's with whimsical lyrics, often using faux-black dialect.
I'm with the AC on this one. Normally I'm in the tinfoil hat crowd myself, and I detest the "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide or to fear" argument... but I honestly can't see how this information could be abused. It's not a violation of any privacy rights -- I'm out in public along with the data on my vehicle. It doesn't deny me any freedom of movement, it doesn't reveal my stash of weed or guns hidden under the seat, it doesn't make them privy to my whispered conversation about plans to rob a bank or blow up the nearest Chuck E. Cheese's. So what constitutional rights are being curtailed or even threatened?
On the other hand, it CAN more quickly locate my car if it is stolen or the gardener who let himself in and abducted my child; it will (as others have pointed out elsewhere in this topic) also make it easier to check for outstanding warrants or unpaid traffic tickets. As someone who has had my own share of speeding tickets, I still can't object to that -- it was my own fault for getting the tickets, and if I don't pay them on time, it's my own fault for making the problem worse when (not if) I get caught.
When I was in high school in 1980, I had a friend who went to college while I finished my last year of high school in a remote rural town in East Texas. We stayed in touch by writing letters, and as soon as I learned his mail was left at the front desk in the dorm and lots of people got to see the envelopes before he picked them up (he really should never have told me that) I made it my life's work to embarrass him. I would address the envelopes to FirstName "Embarrassing Nickname" Lastname, or follow his name with "c/o some embarrassing fictitious organization"; I would put even more bizarre things on the return address. We also were trying to learn Russian for kicks, and each of us had a dictionary we used to translate a few words or phrases. And to further confuse one another we would often the rearrange words random at.
I told you that story so I could tell you this one: Once I got it into my head to address a letter to him care of the C.R.A.P. I had been reading about Nixon and his Committee to RE-Elect the President (CREEP), so I thought the Committee to Re-Assassinate the President, spelling out the acronym CRAP, was a hilarious parody. Now, this was back in 1980 when domestic terrorism was the farthest thing on anybody's mind, and remember I was in a backwoods rural town. STILL, despite all that and the obviously childish scrawl on the envelope, the local postmaster notified the Secret Service. Only then did my friend's previous letter make sense -- he had said something about "I suppose you have heard from the SS no I don't mean the German kind but the American kind" and I had no idea what he was talking about. Out of the blue I got a call from a guy in the "big" city a few counties over (population 50K to our 10K) identifying himself as an agent with the Secret Service and he had to come out and interview me about a letter I had sent threatening President Carter's life. He came out and grilled me on the subject thoroughly; my mother had me show him other letters we had exchanged. To make it more exciting, I had drawn a big hammer-and-sickle emblem on the top of the page... I have no idea why... AND written the first paragraph in as much Russian as my little dictionary could provide... AND transposed a bunch of the words, making it look to your average antiterrorism unit like some secret code. I had to get out my dictionary to look up the words and translate it for him; it said something like "You idiot, I got a headache trying to understand all the gibberish in your last letter so this is my revenge on you". Oh, and there was also a joke filling half the last page, where I had drawn an imitation of a memo paper-clipped to the letter giving instructions from the FBI to keep an eye on these troublemakers and don't forget to throw this memo away before you re-seal the envelope.
And did I mention I'm a Canadian citizen, complete with green card? Let me tell you, "shitting bricks" doesn't even begin to describe how I felt. He took samples of my handwriting to put on file for comparison against anything else I might ever write; he took all ten fingerprints; he had my entire letter preserved in plastic folders around each page. His job was to put the fear of God and Jimmy Carter into me, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. My mother told me afterwards that as he walked back to his car he literally had to stop, he was doubled over laughing so hard. Of course since they had already talked to my friend they knew it was just kids being funny, but he wanted to make sure it never went beyond that point.
Now: think about how thoroughly they pursued that incident in the peaceful 80s, and think about what would happen to kids today who did exactly the same thing. Never mind that my mother was born in the US or that I had been here since I was six years old... I'd be on the train back to Toronto faster than you could say "Fuddle duddle!"
I've tried maybe 15-20 distributions in the past 15 years, and finally settled on Arch. I like it for its minimalist base installation that lets ME choose the desktop environment without installing a bunch of crap I don't need; I also like its granularity that installs ONLY the packages I choose and their dependencies without a lot of additional crap I don't need.
So, you might say, use Linux From Scratch or Gentoo instead. I did! I used LFS for five years, but once I had learned enough from it in terms of what's going on under the hood, I got tired of always having to tweak compiler flags and build 800 dependencies in exactly the right order any time I wanted to upgrade. Likewise with Gentoo, I don't think I was ever even able to get a build environment it liked.
Arch is exactly the right balance. Somebody else went to the trouble of working out all the dependences and compile flag tweaks needed to build the binaries; I just have to download the binaries and I'm done. But I still have that fine control over exactly *what* packages get installed. When my desktop environment is a simple bare Fluxbox, I don't need the whole Gnome enchilada with gadgets and widgets and applets and I don't know what all else.
Count me in on the dirty trick bandwagon. I can't stand the man myself (and this is coming from a conservative Christian who thinks Newt is an awful, awful person) but I can't stand domain trolling either.
Only if he's a medical professional. HIPAA does not apply to the general public, only medical service providers.
I'm really torn on this one... On the one hand, yeah, free speech. On the other hand... that borders on stalking, and possibly endangering her. On the other other hand, do we really need yet more government intervention to enforce niceness? Where do you draw the line at "you can be THIS much of a jerk, but any more and the law steps in"?
Slashdot Mirror
Which politicians can we vote into office that will make things any different? Folks blamed the Bush administration for excessive tightening of freedom -- and yet what has Obama done to lift those restrictions? Hope and change, right.
24/7 monitoring on a nearby ship was the ONLY change that would have made a difference, at least in terms of technology. As someone else pointed out, operators in NYC did hear the distress call... but what could they do about it? Hope the ship stayed afloat for a few weeks while they sent a rescue vessel? "Look, he wouldn't bother writing out 'glub glub glub', he'd just SAY it." "Perhaps he was dictating?"
I've been living in relatively small towns (pop. 50,000 and 20,000) for the past fifteen years, attending convservative evangelical churches. Two of them make extensive use of multimedia presentations, which I have to admit was a bit of an annoyance to me -- I stop seeing the worship as a sincere expression of faith from the heart but instead it starts looking as you said, iike a Vegas performance.
I have tried using my Kindle when we're told to pull up a specific chapter, but the interface is so tedious I'm just getting to the passage by the time the preacher finishes reading it. Much faster than to grab a dog-eared print copy and flip to the right section. My wife likes using her smartphone, though, and I've even seen smartphones among folks I wouldn't have expected. This particular congregation is largely older ranchers.
Can you cite some specific examples where God's name was redacted to emphasize Jesus' deity? There are no "original texts"; there are only oldest possible copies. Whenever I'm puzzled by popular interpretation of a difficult passage, I pull up a side-by-side comparison of the oldest source material and English translation. I don't read more than three words of Greek or Hebrew, but those two sites helpfully provide word-for-word literal translations (e.g., "Thus for loves the God the system as besides the son of-him the only-generated he gives that every the one-believing into him no should-be-being-destroyed but may-be-having life eternal"). While there are numerous places that a word with multiple possible meanings can (and does) lead to conflict over interpretation, I have never seen any translation issues that change the basic theology.
Dang, I was going to make a snarky comment but somebody beat me to it about dangling participles.
Used to be, I'd tell people my wife and I met online and fell in love before ever meeting in person; folks would react with awe and amusement at such a rare story. Now, of course, there are probably more matches made online than off. But back in 1988 when it was 300 baud dialup... hoo boy, what a trip. The guy had an Apple ][ with 16 modem cards each attached to a separate phone line so 15 people could dial in locally at once, with the 16th reserved for connecting with another system in another city.
Oh, and we had to whistle the carrier tones to maintain the signal. Uphill in the snow both ways.
Because who would ever need to do Linux stuff and Windows stuff simultaneously?
I can't tell if you're joking or not about the dual-boot suggestion. I have been working from home for about 15 years now, and I couldn't get half my job done with that kind of a setup. I use the Linux box for everything possible (read: anything I have a choice about) and the Windows box, supplied by my Microsoft-dependent employer, for everything they require Microsoft applications -- Outlook for email *sigh*, Visual Studio for development *sigh* and the like. I can't VPN into their servers from my Linux box because the IT dudes only allow access from the computer they sent me.
I'd like to say that I am at least able to do all my document writing in Libre Office, but I finally had to give that up after one too many compatibility issues -- it looks great in Libre, prints fine for me, then when I send it to a colleague the formatting is all screwed up in MS Office. So, yeah, I *could* dual-boot 25 times a day as I switch between web development, office email, documentation, and personal activity (read: slashdot)... but I'd rather burn the extra electricity than waste all that time waiting for the desktop to reload.
Then either the witnesses are lying or the source of the passive voice "it has been reported" is lying. People living nearbyheard cries through their open window prior to the gunshot, but did nto see anything. They believe, without any actual evidence, that it was Martin who was in distress. Martin's girlfriend can only provide hearsay evidence of what she claims she heard over the phone. Zimmerman's friend Joe Oliver can only report what Zimmerman told him -- more hearsay. One eyewitness said from the start it was too dark to tell who was assaulting whom, and the kid who originally said he saw Martin on top has recanted that statement, claiming he was pressured by the police to alter his report.
I don't know what to believe, but given Zimmerman's past history of unprovoked violence I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else comes of this, it's an excellent example of how that SYG law allows for insane vigilante warfare, making the streets more, not less, dangerous.
My bigger concern is when, not if, the Bad Guys [tm] get hold of this technology. But hey, what are the odds of that happening?
Meh the future is gonna be embedded ads that you simply can't escape.
Son, that's not the future; that's older than dirt. From the earliest days of radio on, in the middle of a show a character would drop in for a visit because "I just had to tell you about this amazing new dish soap from Palmolive" or whatever.
And who can forget this Flintstones plug for cigarettes?
Get all your friends to repost and we can raise three cheers for slacktivism!
Full disclosure: I am a conservative, evangelical Christian so anything I say on the subject is going to be biased...
Having said that, I think it's a horrible solution even if you start with the obviously flawed premise that everyone believes in the same (if any) deity. Look at what happened the first time that was tried: There he was, RIGHT AMONG THEM, zapping people right and left and exhibiting supernatural weather phenomena right in their midst (mountainside on fire with a disembodied voice speaking directly from it, etc.) Those very people who personally witnessed an omnipotent sovereign leader failed to follow his leadership -- golden calf one day, taking home the idols of their defeated territory the next day, disobeying a direct order to march against the people they were told to defeat... the list goes on and on.
The point of that little theological lesson is, even when the huddled masses have what is arguably the perfect leader, they manage to screw it up. So good luck finding that true moral center among the likes of us. If anything we're even less inclined towards a moral center because after a few millenia without having James Earl Jones' voice speak to us out of a pillar of flames, we've stopped even pretending to care.
I hope you're kidding. Your post ("Mute some of the nonsense and lies" and subsequent replies are all exactly what we DO NOT WANT. Sure, it would be great to silence the "nonsense" coming from the opposition. And that's exactly how they feel about you. If you have the ability to silence someone else's speech because you think it's nonsensical or untrue, what on earth makes you think that only you will be able to do that, and only those whom you think should be suppressed will be suppressed?
No, I hope our society never reaches the point where it really is technically possible to silence someone who says idiotic things. First they came for the Republicans and I did not speak out because I was not a Republican...
My own experience with Facebook friends isn't nearly so clear-cut. My friends fall into one of four categories: People I know from childhood (school), people I know from work, people I know from church (conservative, evangelical) and people I know from a dialup BBS network in the 80s. Of those four groups, only the BBS nerds are an even mix of men and women; in the other three groups women dominate (heh) by a vast majority.
And unlike the survey results mentioned in TFS, my female friends tend to be the ones to chatter about personal issues -- daily photos of children and grandchildren doing cute things, updates about their mood or health, etc. The men write about political issues, cars and other "guy toys", restaurants they like, hunting... and some of them only visit Facebook once a month or less.
So the real news here is... your mileage may vary?
Yes! My wife and I each have a tracfone, and between the two of us it's costing us *maybe* $10 a month, at the very most.
King might be OK with that, but his estate... not so much
From the way you say "When I walk into a bar..." it sounds like you're still doing it, and still unattached. No real surprise there. How can you possibly know that the woman on the end works on the linux kernel, or the third one from the right can recite every Monty Python sketch from memory, or the one next to her is an astronaut? I've known some brilliant, wonderful people who looked like... well, like I do... and some stunningly attractive people who were complete morons. That is enough to convince me that conclusions about a person based on appearance alone are worthless.
Unless, of course, you're as shallow as those attractive morons and all you care about is external beauty.
That WAS part of the original, all from the same guy. A more complete archive of his legendary cybertrolling can be found here: http://people.ambrosiasw.com/~andrew/funny/bloodcyber.html
It includes the "wizard hat" one, the kama sutra one, and many others. I have re-read it hundreds of times over the last ten years and still laugh uncontrollably at scenes like this:
This one actually reveals the fiction behind the scenes -- I find it difficult to believe she would stay in character, acknowledge what he was doing, and use proper punctuation even as he was wrecking the scene; she would have just left the conversation. But even if the whole thing is a work of fiction, it's the funniest damn story I have ever read in my life.
Sure, and we could easily email our (dozens, hundreds, whatever) of our friends daily with all the photos and news updates we care to share with them, eliminating FB entirely.
That's why FB is *not* any kind of attack. An attack implies an unauthorized insertion into the data stream that forces us to unknowingly share our data with the attacker. We willingly give FB our data, knowing full well (if we read any of the news on the subject at all, or the TOS) that they will use that data to their financial benefit. Calling that an attack is lying saying your dentist can be arrested for assault after the pain he inflicts on your teeth and gums.
No, it's rather clear (although I ran it through Audacity's noise removal first, so I suppose I cheated). In fact I was so surprised by the sudden exclamation of "Oh, fuck!" that I went back to the website to read more detail about the recording and confirm that I had heard correctly.
Unscripted history in the making is the best kind of history.
WRT to the stilted speaking style, also of some amusement (to me anyway) is the tendency in turn-of-the-century recordings to use operatic divas to record Tin Pan Alley popular songs. You end up with this hilarious combination of BBC-perfect pronunciation and trilled R's with whimsical lyrics, often using faux-black dialect.
I'm with the AC on this one. Normally I'm in the tinfoil hat crowd myself, and I detest the "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide or to fear" argument... but I honestly can't see how this information could be abused. It's not a violation of any privacy rights -- I'm out in public along with the data on my vehicle. It doesn't deny me any freedom of movement, it doesn't reveal my stash of weed or guns hidden under the seat, it doesn't make them privy to my whispered conversation about plans to rob a bank or blow up the nearest Chuck E. Cheese's. So what constitutional rights are being curtailed or even threatened?
On the other hand, it CAN more quickly locate my car if it is stolen or the gardener who let himself in and abducted my child; it will (as others have pointed out elsewhere in this topic) also make it easier to check for outstanding warrants or unpaid traffic tickets. As someone who has had my own share of speeding tickets, I still can't object to that -- it was my own fault for getting the tickets, and if I don't pay them on time, it's my own fault for making the problem worse when (not if) I get caught.
When I was in high school in 1980, I had a friend who went to college while I finished my last year of high school in a remote rural town in East Texas. We stayed in touch by writing letters, and as soon as I learned his mail was left at the front desk in the dorm and lots of people got to see the envelopes before he picked them up (he really should never have told me that) I made it my life's work to embarrass him. I would address the envelopes to FirstName "Embarrassing Nickname" Lastname, or follow his name with "c/o some embarrassing fictitious organization"; I would put even more bizarre things on the return address. We also were trying to learn Russian for kicks, and each of us had a dictionary we used to translate a few words or phrases. And to further confuse one another we would often the rearrange words random at.
I told you that story so I could tell you this one: Once I got it into my head to address a letter to him care of the C.R.A.P. I had been reading about Nixon and his Committee to RE-Elect the President (CREEP), so I thought the Committee to Re-Assassinate the President, spelling out the acronym CRAP, was a hilarious parody. Now, this was back in 1980 when domestic terrorism was the farthest thing on anybody's mind, and remember I was in a backwoods rural town. STILL, despite all that and the obviously childish scrawl on the envelope, the local postmaster notified the Secret Service. Only then did my friend's previous letter make sense -- he had said something about "I suppose you have heard from the SS no I don't mean the German kind but the American kind" and I had no idea what he was talking about. Out of the blue I got a call from a guy in the "big" city a few counties over (population 50K to our 10K) identifying himself as an agent with the Secret Service and he had to come out and interview me about a letter I had sent threatening President Carter's life. He came out and grilled me on the subject thoroughly; my mother had me show him other letters we had exchanged. To make it more exciting, I had drawn a big hammer-and-sickle emblem on the top of the page... I have no idea why... AND written the first paragraph in as much Russian as my little dictionary could provide... AND transposed a bunch of the words, making it look to your average antiterrorism unit like some secret code. I had to get out my dictionary to look up the words and translate it for him; it said something like "You idiot, I got a headache trying to understand all the gibberish in your last letter so this is my revenge on you". Oh, and there was also a joke filling half the last page, where I had drawn an imitation of a memo paper-clipped to the letter giving instructions from the FBI to keep an eye on these troublemakers and don't forget to throw this memo away before you re-seal the envelope.
And did I mention I'm a Canadian citizen, complete with green card? Let me tell you, "shitting bricks" doesn't even begin to describe how I felt. He took samples of my handwriting to put on file for comparison against anything else I might ever write; he took all ten fingerprints; he had my entire letter preserved in plastic folders around each page. His job was to put the fear of God and Jimmy Carter into me, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. My mother told me afterwards that as he walked back to his car he literally had to stop, he was doubled over laughing so hard. Of course since they had already talked to my friend they knew it was just kids being funny, but he wanted to make sure it never went beyond that point.
Now: think about how thoroughly they pursued that incident in the peaceful 80s, and think about what would happen to kids today who did exactly the same thing. Never mind that my mother was born in the US or that I had been here since I was six years old... I'd be on the train back to Toronto faster than you could say "Fuddle duddle!"
I've tried maybe 15-20 distributions in the past 15 years, and finally settled on Arch. I like it for its minimalist base installation that lets ME choose the desktop environment without installing a bunch of crap I don't need; I also like its granularity that installs ONLY the packages I choose and their dependencies without a lot of additional crap I don't need.
So, you might say, use Linux From Scratch or Gentoo instead. I did! I used LFS for five years, but once I had learned enough from it in terms of what's going on under the hood, I got tired of always having to tweak compiler flags and build 800 dependencies in exactly the right order any time I wanted to upgrade. Likewise with Gentoo, I don't think I was ever even able to get a build environment it liked.
Arch is exactly the right balance. Somebody else went to the trouble of working out all the dependences and compile flag tweaks needed to build the binaries; I just have to download the binaries and I'm done. But I still have that fine control over exactly *what* packages get installed. When my desktop environment is a simple bare Fluxbox, I don't need the whole Gnome enchilada with gadgets and widgets and applets and I don't know what all else.
Count me in on the dirty trick bandwagon. I can't stand the man myself (and this is coming from a conservative Christian who thinks Newt is an awful, awful person) but I can't stand domain trolling either.
Only if he's a medical professional. HIPAA does not apply to the general public, only medical service providers.
I'm really torn on this one... On the one hand, yeah, free speech. On the other hand... that borders on stalking, and possibly endangering her. On the other other hand, do we really need yet more government intervention to enforce niceness? Where do you draw the line at "you can be THIS much of a jerk, but any more and the law steps in"?