Actually, this method was first used by the Talmud...colored inks and everything...the idea was the basic text of Torah was surrounded by (I believe) 17 different commentators in the margins...
This idea was further borrowed by later Christians to make Biblical concordances and glosses.
Hey....I'm Jewish, does that mean that BT is going to come after me for quoting Talmud?
Oh, wait, prior art, it's the other way 'round. I lived in London for almost 2 years and put up with BT's huge inflated prices, broken phonecards, and soforth...looks like they owe ME...jam today!:)
...by including John Travolta in this movie, this P.O.S. will help stem off the tendency to cast "pretty boys with big names" in "mainstream" sci-fi...and instead they'll cast people who are actually suited to the part (think Dune).
Well, okay, here's another thing that relates to my first reason--maybe he IS the ONLY best pick for this part!
On a related note, a number of my colleagues are insisting that China recently EXECUTED some spammers. Any stories/f.u. on that would be great!
I wonder if the guards yelled "JUST HIT DELETE" before shooting the offenders...
This is another example of "creeping corporatism"
on
The Corporate Republic
·
· Score: 1
One huge problem here is that corporations are becoming more and more like government entities, but without any Constitional restrictions on them. The amount of drug testing, background screening, and confidentiality paperwork that I had to go thru to get my current job at a certain large publishing firm was unbelieveable. On top of that, employees here are urged not to do "anything" that would cast the company in a bad light.
So, you say, I'm a worker of the Information Age; just take it elsewhere, right?
Well, the flipside of huge corporations is that they now provide services that the government has in the past, but that they do to a much lesser extent than they used to. At my new place of employment, I have both a 401K AND a retirement plan that will keep me out of Fluffy's can of food when I'm 70...Social Security sure as hell won't. While many states have programs to subsidize commutes, many companies don't participate...mine does. I have real medical, dental, visual, and so forth. I also belong to a Bar Association society that is practically a guildhouse--I can get cheap supplemental insurance, disability insurance, etc....ever try to live on Welfare or disability payments?
The tiny little dotcoms and startups that I worked at in the past let me dress in pajamas and live in a Dune-like orange spice cloud of drugs if that was my choice....but...which is worth more in the long run, the right to smoke buds and have blue hair or some security for your future?
The choices are ugly and few. The US Government is doing nothing to secure people's futures...in the financial or in the personal sense..."Private Sector" can't be used as a shield to hide behind invasive behavior on a business's part any more...more to the point it shouldnt' be....
Stephenson's "Snow Crash" was right on....not in the technical sense, but in the sense that corporations are slowly becoming mini-nation states.
Never mind the songs...under the category of "Why hasn't anybody else said this before...":
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
Kyle's Mom is about to execute either Terrence or Philip; I forget which one...and he's in the electric chair...and Kyle's Mom asks him if he has any last words...to which he replies:
"How about: GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING CHAIR?"
Why nobody's used this as their real last words on record yet is beyond me...
Hey...for Win** users at least anyway...go to http://www.thelimitsoft.com and download Cookie Crusher...tastes great, less filling, and it KILLS DOUBLECLICK CRAP DEAD! Works on IE, NS, and Opera! For even more fun use AdsOff (site under renovation; get a copy from someone who has it)
Both of these utils are simple to use and stable! If enough people use em it may just force these idiots to be honest...
...no, I don't mean the polyester leisure suit. I mean Polartec, nylon, bulletproof fabrics, firemen's stuff, spacesuits, etc etc etc...
Oh, okay, so I DO own about 50 items of PolarTec. But I still think that the ability to take things that are inflexible/inorganic and then find a way to wrap them around your body has been one of the greatest "supporting players" in mankind's progress...especially in the last 100 years.
Well...may as well jump in with what I want first:
--I want my damn Visor delivered already! --I have the usual stuff at Amazon...various books and CD's that are just too decadant for me to justify spending money on right now --a decent laptop, one that can support dual-boot without barfing too much --one of the NEW Motorola WAP phones --one of those cool Swiss Army Knives as mentioned below --Polartec! This is the greatest shit ever invented! Go to www.landsend.com for a groovy selection...warmer than wool; dries out overnight so you don't have to go to work filthy. --A bottle or two of Absinthe, shipped quasi-legally from a wide variety of web sites --Offbeat silver rings and earrings, of the sort found at Marche Noir (website is out there somewhere) --(BIG TICKET ITEM) My tickets to the Helsinki Jazz Festival this coming summer; airline tix, hotel reservations, etc...
What I'm thinking about giving my geeky pals:
--Hardware, according to specific needs --IOU for shopping spree at this one great "junker shop" in NYC's Chinatown, supplier of sub-$100 boxen for Linux installs for much of the community here --Stuff from people's Amazon wish lists --Gift certificates from museum shops (always great places for offbeat unusual stuff) --Silly Underwear for my man (last year, JoeBoxer put out a swell pair of gear-covered boxer briefs with the words "Love Machine" on the waistband--perfect or what?) --Expensive premium booze --Homemade meals --Ergo-items (back wedges, wrist rests, etc) that people never seem to remember to get for themselves
This may not apply to everyone, but between high school and my last car three years ago I managed to go through 5 or so cheap used American-made cars...I have given machines these names in the past:
Hmmm....only problem with blocking Doubleclick cookies though is that it seems to break one's abilities to shop at at least one well-known Ecommerce site.
From the WWWAC List, as posted by a user there:
"I was having trouble putting items in my buy.com shopping cart. It kept telling me I should check my cookies to make sure I had them enabled. I do have them enabled. However, in my hosts file I have the hostname ad.doubleclick.net pointing to 127.0.0.1. (I seem to get about 30% fewer ads from this as I surf.) Problem is, buy.com is broken when you point ad.doubleclick.net to nothingness. I removed my block on Doubleclick and buy.com worked fine"
I must say the all-or-nothing implications of this is making me spew my coffee.
"We need what are now called "old fashioned girls" who don't mind cooking our meals, rubbing our sore shoulders, and running our bath water for us."
Byte me, Rob. What you want is a slave who's dumber than you. I'm a geek girl with a real life AND real talents who dates guys who don't feel threatened by me.
Hope this helps...I don't know if they still make em, but a (former) standard catalog item from IKEA is their "Kavalier" (sp?) computer hutch. Not all that cheap, but VERY nicely made with lots of little touches. I have a 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse, tower, external modem, several joysticks, PalmStuff, a laser printer, speakers, a copy of Linux Undercover, two reams of paper, lots of software boxen, and many squeezie toys crammed into mine. I also have a little stool--"Vitamin" from Ikea--that has a hydraulic seat thingie that makes it compress neatly under the keyboard drawer when not in use--the entire unit has two doors that close over the whole mess when not in use. I love mine. Try calling the 800# on www.ikea.com for a catalog; they are apparently backlogged on the requests from their site.
Luckilly, I'm being let out of my veal-fattening pen at 1 due to the hurricaine...I and my boyfriend will then jointly program our modems to do the dialing for us whilst I kick back with a Jack & water and flip the bird towards VA....
Gotta say the Springboard feature is what rocks the most about this. I was going to get a Palm VII but the wireless rates are outrageous...OTOH this little baby has so much more potential..and it's muy affordable for an 8meg unit...
I *especially like the $40 backup module!
(brief digression)
If someone really wanted to make a buck, they'd make attractive utility-style belts for BOTH genders with little pockets on em for all the tiny "4 WheatThin"-sized batteries and snapons that Joe/Zoe Technophile will be carrying...I have a StarTac and two backup batteries for it; right now only the phone has a belt holster. What would be REALLY cool is boots with little pockets on the shins...saw a pair ages ago with a cigarette holder on em; same idea.
Hmmm...train your Dust Bunnies?
on
Smart Dust
·
· Score: 2
Greaaaaat....just what I need...dust bunnies that run away when I try to vacuum them...*g*
But seriously, folks...after the military uses and all that...think of the commercial applications. Want a clean room? How about a REALLY clean room? Or...I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with this problem--you want to have a clean carpet but have lotsa furniture/periodicals/old components salvaged from dumpsters all over your apartment.
I'd LOVE to see a commercially available "hoover-hive"--a pack of nanocleaners that pick up individual dust particles and evil dust mites and basically anything smaller than an earring back...and get rid of them in a receptacle of some sort...regardless of how much crud one has on the floor. Think of an AirPort type thing giving em directions. Put it on a timer and leave for work or whatever. Two hours later, your pad is dust and dander free...and you didn't have to hastilly stack/move/burn all of your old copies of InfoWorld to do it. All the little 'nans are back in the hive, recharging, when you return.
Also, I remember reading that one of the major problems with super-large fuel tankers is that there are something like 50 MILES of seals--all of which can leak--to inspect, not to mention ultrafine stress points that can pop any minute. Again, imagine a Volkswagen-sized hive of 'nans that runs all over a ship while it's in port, and does a complete surface stress test. Hell, make em hardier and perhaps a little bigger and give every square inch of a supertanker instant stress-test analysis ALL THE TIME. Take this idea and apply it to other hard-to-inspect systems like any major city's water supply (ever get stuck in Midtown Manhattan due to a water main break?), power, gas, etc. Given the info in the articles tagged up, this is all doable.
The important thing here is that the Net was used effectivley here by consumers to MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Perhaps for the first truly recordable, documented time ever, consumers didn't have to rely on government, privacy groups, or "merchant goodwill" to protect their data. Rather, a bad idea was brought to the online world's attention, out in the open air...and for the first time ever, a mass of customers was able to act as one body in forcing a change.
This kind of "sunlight is the best disinfectant" policy in action is one of the brightest hopes I've ever had for the Net. It's wonderful to see it in action. The moral of the story is: KEEP BEING OUTRAGED and ACTING ON YOUR IMPULSES TO EMAIL OFFENDING PARTIES! Hey...we all helped make at least some differences in the whole RedHat IPO/E*Trade situation. Now this.
We're those people on the Internet that Congress was warned about! *grin*
Hey! Sure, give us a teaser and DON'T give us a URL where we can see the archived show! Or, if anyone taped it, do they want to do the charitable thing and put it up for us all?
Damn...and I have CNN at work..sheee--it. Can't believe I missed it!
This goes out to everyone who thinks that this sort of thing is OK "as long as they have nothing to hide" :
I've seen--and lived through, first hand--totally different sets of treatment from law enforcement officials based on mere appearances and assumptions.
Also, as an attorney (putting on my Hunter S. Thompson hat for a second) let me say that if you go and read the case law, especially that from the 80's onward....the second you start combining "urgent situations" (according to the cops) with "reasonable suspicion" (also according to the cops) 99.9999% of all Constitutional procedural protection goes STRAIGHT DOWN THE TOILET. Law books are filled with cases of courts upholding gross missteppings of the boundaries of warrants, warrantless searches, etc.
Giving the government an easier way to snoop here will only encourage abuses. Despite the mess, witnesses, risks, etc. there are STILL hundreds of cases a year of the cops kicking down the wrong doors, shooting up the wrong people, and causing huge damage while trying to dig up ANY kind of dirt on a suspect. Can you imagine the level of snooping that will go on once this kind of invasion becomes bloodless and messless?
Conformity is everything to any tyrrany, and this will be used to enforce it at whatever level that any particular official feels threatened, which gets back to my point about appearances. NOTE: Personal anecdote follows, stop reading if you're in a rush. Case in point:
I almost got shot in Maryland for accidentally running a stop sign that was obscured by an untrimmed tree. To make a long story short, I was dressed down and my car (must have) matched a profile of some sort. Well, out of nowhere I get pinned in by two patrol cars full of VERY agitated cops. They drew weapons on me, which of course would normally be illegal for a traffic violation but in this case there was of course an emergency. They asked for my license and nearly put a cap in my ass when I reached for my backpack to get out my wallet...after that I moved very VERY slowly and announced every sneeze and fart. After 45 minutes of bullshit they let me go--with a ticket FULL of trumped-up traffic violations which even the local judge laughed at when I went to challenge it. The moral of the story is that I almost died because I wore an earcuff and drove a shitty looking Buick in the wrong residential neighborhood at night (I was lost) and didn't see a stop sign.
SHIFT SCENE: I am being sworn in to the Bar in D.C. I have on my suit. I am going into a courthouse. I throw my backpack onto the conveyor belt...and at that moment I panic 'cause I realize that I left my folding Bowie knife in the bottom of the bag (I had helped a friend move and had it for cutting rope). No problem--the guy took one look at ME and didn't even look at my bag. My Palm Pilot on my waistband set off the Stupid Metal Detector. Again, the guard said, "Oh, that's cool, I want one of those" and let me take it in without any further examination.
Now, that "Pilot" could have had plastic explosives and anthrax in it. Or PCP. If I had left it in any judge's chamber or even in a crowded courthouse I could have killed a LOT of people if that had been my intent. But hey, it's all OK, right? After all, I'm a white chick in a suit who looks like she's in a hurry, what harm could I cause, right?
Remember: Freedom once lost is impossible to regain.
Gotta say...I agree with all the comments about the "public image" of geeks, as distorted by the Me-De-Duh, especially post-Columbine.
Had to share a great quote by the late, great Frank Zappa that could be applied to this one. He said it in response to the question: "What do you think of interviews in the music industry?" His priceless answer: "Interviews with people who can't speak by people who can't write for people who can't read."
Now, think about every "expert" on "youth culture" "computer culture" and "geeks..."
Feel free to add any good Jello Biafra quotes to this thread!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this method was first used by the Talmud...colored inks and everything...the idea was the basic text of Torah was surrounded by (I believe) 17 different commentators in the margins...
:)
This idea was further borrowed by later Christians to make Biblical concordances and glosses.
Hey....I'm Jewish, does that mean that BT is going to come after me for quoting Talmud?
Oh, wait, prior art, it's the other way 'round. I lived in London for almost 2 years and put up with BT's huge inflated prices, broken phonecards, and soforth...looks like they owe ME...jam today!
Jon/Slashdot Staffers--this man should get the prize.
Moderate this up!
...by including John Travolta in this movie, this P.O.S. will help stem off the tendency to cast "pretty boys with big names" in "mainstream" sci-fi...and instead they'll cast people who are actually suited to the part (think Dune).
Well, okay, here's another thing that relates to my first reason--maybe he IS the ONLY best pick for this part!
Now can I have the book?
On a related note, a number of my colleagues are insisting that China recently EXECUTED some spammers. Any stories/f.u. on that would be great!
I wonder if the guards yelled "JUST HIT DELETE" before shooting the offenders...
One huge problem here is that corporations are becoming more and more like government entities, but without any Constitional restrictions on them. The amount of drug testing, background screening, and confidentiality paperwork that I had to go thru to get my current job at a certain large publishing firm was unbelieveable. On top of that, employees here are urged not to do "anything" that would cast the company in a bad light.
So, you say, I'm a worker of the Information Age; just take it elsewhere, right?
Well, the flipside of huge corporations is that they now provide services that the government has in the past, but that they do to a much lesser extent than they used to. At my new place of employment, I have both a 401K AND a retirement plan that will keep me out of Fluffy's can of food when I'm 70...Social Security sure as hell won't. While many states have programs to subsidize commutes, many companies don't participate...mine does. I have real medical, dental, visual, and so forth. I also belong to a
Bar Association society that is practically a guildhouse--I can get cheap supplemental insurance, disability insurance, etc....ever try to live on Welfare or disability payments?
The tiny little dotcoms and startups that I worked at in the past let me dress in pajamas and live in a Dune-like orange spice cloud of drugs if that was my choice....but...which is worth more in the long run, the right to smoke buds and have blue hair or some security for your future?
The choices are ugly and few. The US Government is doing nothing to secure people's futures...in the financial or in the personal sense..."Private Sector" can't be used as a shield to hide behind invasive behavior on a business's part any more...more to the point it shouldnt' be....
Stephenson's "Snow Crash" was right on....not in the technical sense, but in the sense that corporations are slowly becoming mini-nation states.
Okay...for a site that has a lot more original content than Amazon.com...go to:
http://www.brains4zombies.com/
This site manages to stretch one joke farther than Amazon has stretched US Patent laws...
Never mind the songs...under the category of "Why hasn't anybody else said this before...":
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
Kyle's Mom is about to execute either Terrence or Philip; I forget which one...and he's in the electric chair...and Kyle's Mom asks him if he has any last words...to which he replies:
"How about: GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING CHAIR?"
Why nobody's used this as their real last words on record yet is beyond me...
Hey...for Win** users at least anyway...go to http://www.thelimitsoft.com and download Cookie Crusher...tastes great, less filling, and it KILLS DOUBLECLICK CRAP DEAD! Works on IE, NS, and Opera! For even more fun use AdsOff (site under renovation; get a copy from someone who has it)
Both of these utils are simple to use and stable! If enough people use em it may just force these idiots to be honest...
...no, I don't mean the polyester leisure suit. I mean Polartec, nylon, bulletproof fabrics, firemen's stuff, spacesuits, etc etc etc...
Oh, okay, so I DO own about 50 items of PolarTec. But I still think that the ability to take things that are inflexible/inorganic and then find a way to wrap them around your body has been one of the greatest "supporting players" in mankind's progress...especially in the last 100 years.
Well...may as well jump in with what I want first:
--I want my damn Visor delivered already!
--I have the usual stuff at Amazon...various books and CD's that are just too decadant for me to justify spending money on right now
--a decent laptop, one that can support dual-boot without barfing too much
--one of the NEW Motorola WAP phones
--one of those cool Swiss Army Knives as mentioned below
--Polartec! This is the greatest shit ever invented! Go to www.landsend.com for a groovy selection...warmer than wool; dries out overnight so you don't have to go to work filthy.
--A bottle or two of Absinthe, shipped quasi-legally from a wide variety of web sites
--Offbeat silver rings and earrings, of the sort found at Marche Noir (website is out there somewhere)
--(BIG TICKET ITEM) My tickets to the Helsinki Jazz Festival this coming summer; airline tix, hotel reservations, etc...
What I'm thinking about giving my geeky pals:
--Hardware, according to specific needs
--IOU for shopping spree at this one great "junker shop" in NYC's Chinatown, supplier of sub-$100 boxen for Linux installs for much of the community here
--Stuff from people's Amazon wish lists
--Gift certificates from museum shops (always great places for offbeat unusual stuff)
--Silly Underwear for my man (last year, JoeBoxer put out a swell pair of gear-covered boxer briefs with the words "Love Machine" on the waistband--perfect or what?)
--Expensive premium booze
--Homemade meals
--Ergo-items (back wedges, wrist rests, etc) that people never seem to remember to get for themselves
Hmmm...that does it for now...
This may not apply to everyone, but between high school and my last car three years ago I managed to go through 5 or so cheap used American-made cars...I have given machines these names in the past:
71impala
73caprice
80olds
81chrylser
85buick
83grandprix
67volvo
Of course, individual stations can be parts or stuff in the trunk.
I also have named machines based on different places where I stored real stuff, ie:
handbag
backpack
topdrawer
shoulderbag
filingcab
Go nuts! Just pick a theme and go for it.
Just set up a new server for some vanity domains a few weeks ago and named it frenchfries. Think my next theme will be fast food...
Hmmm....only problem with blocking Doubleclick cookies though is that it seems to break one's abilities to shop at at least one well-known Ecommerce site.
From the WWWAC List, as posted by a user there:
"I was having trouble putting items in my buy.com shopping cart. It kept
telling me I should check my cookies to make sure I had them enabled.
I do have them enabled.
However, in my hosts file I have the hostname ad.doubleclick.net pointing
to 127.0.0.1. (I seem to get about 30% fewer ads from this as I surf.)
Problem is, buy.com is broken when you point ad.doubleclick.net to nothingness.
I removed my block on Doubleclick and buy.com worked fine"
I must say the all-or-nothing implications of this is making me spew my coffee.
Comments? Technical solutions to this?
Rob wrote (in part):
"We need what are now called "old fashioned girls" who don't mind cooking our meals, rubbing our sore shoulders, and running our bath water for us."
Byte me, Rob. What you want is a slave who's dumber than you. I'm a geek girl with a real life AND real talents who dates guys who don't feel threatened by me.
What kind of crap sexist advice is this anyway?
Hope this helps...I don't know if they still make em, but a (former) standard catalog item from IKEA is their "Kavalier" (sp?) computer hutch. Not all that cheap, but VERY nicely made with lots of little touches. I have a 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse, tower, external modem, several joysticks, PalmStuff, a laser printer, speakers, a copy of Linux Undercover, two reams of paper, lots of software boxen, and many squeezie toys crammed into mine. I also have a little stool--"Vitamin" from Ikea--that has a hydraulic seat thingie that makes it compress neatly under the keyboard drawer when not in use--the entire unit has two doors that close over the whole mess when not in use. I love mine. Try calling the 800# on www.ikea.com for a catalog; they are apparently backlogged on the requests from their site.
Hey there...for all of your edification...
it's 703 742-0400
All circuits are busy now.
Luckilly, I'm being let out of my veal-fattening pen at 1 due to the hurricaine...I and my boyfriend will then jointly program our modems to do the dialing for us whilst I kick back with a Jack & water and flip the bird towards VA....
And one for "Bill Gates" is "Steal GLib" ...er, Ivan Suds Troll...er...
Hmmm...WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH LINUS TORVALDS?
Gotta say the Springboard feature is what rocks the most about this. I was going to get a Palm VII but the wireless rates are outrageous...OTOH this little baby has so much more potential..and it's muy affordable for an 8meg unit...
I *especially like the $40 backup module!
(brief digression)
If someone really wanted to make a buck, they'd make attractive utility-style belts for BOTH genders with little pockets on em for all the tiny "4 WheatThin"-sized batteries and snapons that Joe/Zoe Technophile will be carrying...I have a StarTac and two backup batteries for it; right now only the phone has a belt holster. What would be REALLY cool is boots with little pockets on the shins...saw a pair ages ago with a cigarette holder on em; same idea.
Greaaaaat....just what I need...dust bunnies that run away when I try to vacuum them...*g*
But seriously, folks...after the military uses and all that...think of the commercial applications. Want a clean room? How about a REALLY clean room? Or...I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with this problem--you want to have a clean carpet but have lotsa furniture/periodicals/old components salvaged from dumpsters all over your apartment.
I'd LOVE to see a commercially available "hoover-hive"--a pack of nanocleaners that pick up individual dust particles and evil dust mites and basically anything smaller than an earring back...and get rid of them in a receptacle of some sort...regardless of how much crud one has on the floor. Think of an AirPort type thing giving em directions. Put it on a timer and leave for work or whatever. Two hours later, your pad is dust and dander free...and you didn't have to hastilly stack/move/burn all of your old copies of InfoWorld to do it. All the little 'nans are back in the hive, recharging, when you return.
Also, I remember reading that one of the major problems with super-large fuel tankers is that there are something like 50 MILES of seals--all of which can leak--to inspect, not to mention ultrafine stress points that can pop any minute. Again, imagine a Volkswagen-sized hive of 'nans that runs all over a ship while it's in port, and does a complete surface stress test. Hell, make em hardier and perhaps a little bigger and give every square inch of a supertanker instant stress-test analysis ALL THE TIME. Take this idea and apply it to other hard-to-inspect systems like any major city's water supply (ever get stuck in Midtown Manhattan due to a water main break?), power, gas, etc. Given the info in the articles tagged up, this is all doable.
Looks like we killed the peacock. WHAT maps for sale section? I can't navigate anywhere in the site once I DO get in.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...................
Someone wanna mirror at least a screen shot of the posters so we can all have a look?
The important thing here is that the Net was used effectivley here by consumers to MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Perhaps for the first truly recordable, documented time ever, consumers didn't have to rely on government, privacy groups, or "merchant goodwill" to protect their data. Rather, a bad idea was brought to the online world's attention, out in the open air...and for the first time ever, a mass of customers was able to act as one body in forcing a change.
This kind of "sunlight is the best disinfectant" policy in action is one of the brightest hopes I've ever had for the Net. It's wonderful to see it in action. The moral of the story is: KEEP BEING OUTRAGED and ACTING ON YOUR IMPULSES TO EMAIL OFFENDING PARTIES! Hey...we all helped make at least some differences in the whole RedHat IPO/E*Trade situation. Now this.
We're those people on the Internet that Congress was warned about! *grin*
Power to the E-ple.
Hey! Sure, give us a teaser and DON'T give us a URL where we can see the archived show! Or, if anyone taped it, do they want to do the charitable thing and put it up for us all?
Damn...and I have CNN at work..sheee--it. Can't believe I missed it!
IS it archived anywhere?
This goes out to everyone who thinks that this sort of thing is OK "as long as they have nothing to hide" :
I've seen--and lived through, first hand--totally different sets of treatment from law enforcement officials based on mere appearances and assumptions.
Also, as an attorney (putting on my Hunter S. Thompson hat for a second) let me say that if you go and read the case law, especially that from the 80's onward....the second you start combining "urgent situations" (according to the cops) with "reasonable suspicion" (also according to the cops) 99.9999% of all Constitutional procedural protection goes STRAIGHT DOWN THE TOILET. Law books are filled with cases of courts upholding gross missteppings of the boundaries of warrants, warrantless searches, etc.
Giving the government an easier way to snoop here will only encourage abuses. Despite the mess, witnesses, risks, etc. there are STILL hundreds of cases a year of the cops kicking down the wrong doors, shooting up the wrong people, and causing huge damage while trying to dig up ANY kind of dirt on a suspect. Can you imagine the level of snooping that will go on once this kind of invasion becomes bloodless and messless?
Conformity is everything to any tyrrany, and this will be used to enforce it at whatever level that any particular official feels threatened, which gets back to my point about appearances. NOTE: Personal anecdote follows, stop reading if you're in a rush. Case in point:
I almost got shot in Maryland for accidentally running a stop sign that was obscured by an untrimmed tree. To make a long story short, I was dressed down and my car (must have) matched a profile of some sort. Well, out of nowhere I get pinned in by two patrol cars full of VERY agitated cops. They drew weapons on me, which of course would normally be illegal for a traffic violation but in this case there was of course an emergency. They asked for my license and nearly put a cap in my ass when I reached for my backpack to get out my wallet...after that I moved very VERY slowly and announced every sneeze and fart. After 45 minutes of bullshit they let me go--with a ticket FULL of trumped-up traffic violations which even the local judge laughed at when I went to challenge it. The moral of the story is that I almost died because I wore an earcuff and drove a shitty looking Buick in the wrong residential neighborhood at night (I was lost) and didn't see a stop sign.
SHIFT SCENE: I am being sworn in to the Bar in D.C. I have on my suit. I am going into a courthouse. I throw my backpack onto the conveyor belt...and at that moment I panic 'cause I realize that I left my folding Bowie knife in the bottom of the bag (I had helped a friend move and had it for cutting rope). No problem--the guy took one look at ME and didn't even look at my bag. My Palm Pilot on my waistband set off the Stupid Metal Detector. Again, the guard said, "Oh, that's cool, I want one of those" and let me take it in without any further examination.
Now, that "Pilot" could have had plastic explosives and anthrax in it. Or PCP. If I had left it in any judge's chamber or even in a crowded courthouse I could have killed a LOT of people if that had been my intent. But hey, it's all OK, right? After all, I'm a white chick in a suit who looks like she's in a hurry, what harm could I cause, right?
Remember: Freedom once lost is impossible to regain.
No, Pi was NOT hyped as much NATIONALLY as BWP...but...in NYC, it got a LOT of coverage and also had a great website...very informative...
Sheesh, am I the only person here who saw it?
Anyway, I think that if you're gonna start calling movies "a success 'cause of the Net" then you have to include movies like Pi in the discussion.
BTW if you haven't seen it yet, rent it...now....
LIN-ux...as in Lynn-ux...rhymes with "Finn...."....based on the name "Linus...."
To be terribly geeky and quote Cmdr. Data..."One is my name...the other is not...."
Gotta say...I agree with all the comments about the "public image" of geeks, as distorted by the Me-De-Duh, especially post-Columbine.
Had to share a great quote by the late, great Frank Zappa that could be applied to this one. He said it in response to the question: "What do you think of interviews in the music industry?" His priceless answer: "Interviews with people who can't speak by people who can't write for people who can't read."
Now, think about every "expert" on "youth culture" "computer culture" and "geeks..."
Feel free to add any good Jello Biafra quotes to this thread!
--ranting after Sunday coffee