My street is taken over by Latino gangs. (Most of the gang members are kids from Central America.) These guys hang out in front of my building selling rock all day.
The owner's had cameras installed to deter the selling of crack in front of the building. The problem is, nobody cared. The cameras are small and not easily seen. They went about slingin' rock as usual.
I decided to print up a sign with a big camera on it. I typed out something like "This building is watched by Surveillance Cameras. Any illegal activity will be recorded and taken to the police." (Don't worry all you privacy zealots, the police don't care about recordings of gangs dealing crack. I tried. I just want them and the crackheads they attract to go elsewhere.)
The problem is, they don't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. Rather than ask somebody I went to Babelfish and typed it in and pasted it into my nifty sign.
I posted these signs all around the building. An hour later they were all gathered around one sign laughing at the ridiculous translation. They took them down to show to their friends. Apparently the were really funny.
What about the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor? It uses compact spheres of radioactive material that self-regulate so there can never be a meltdown. And it heats helium gas that drives a turbine directly.
It seems to be the safest and best nuclear technology available.
The police in my town, San Francisco, recently concluded a two year investigation on Sex in Strip Joints. Apparently the officers concluded that there is indeed sex going on in strip clubs. They spent many man-hours undercover stuffing notes into thongs and getting BJs in the back. It took two years and probably more than a million dollars to discover this.
And how is the regular San Franciscan's life affected? Well, I would guess there's more hookers on the street and more Johns driving around because the strip clubs are now off-limits.
Police resources are finite. They should really choose their investigations with a view to Quality-Of-Life of the average citizen. Will our investigation improve people's lives and take down Genuinely Bad People? (That should be the first question they ask themselves. Of course my idea of Genuinely Bad People is apparently much different from theirs.)
Sometimes we go to clubs together in bad neighborhoods and I don't feel I have to "defend her honor" or some silly chivalristic bullshit. Any guy touches her, he's going to regret it.
In fact one time I was at a club and lost her. I look down the room and there's a guy holding his wrist like it had just moved in a way that it did not have the evolutionary capacity for. He has a hurt look on his face and his wrist is on a gimbal. He had touched my friend's ass. Wrong. I walk over and we leave and go somewhere else. Laughing about it. (You gotta like a girl like that.)
Actually, according to Dante the very depths of hell are reserved for traitors, who are encased in a lake of ice. The Divine Heat Sink.
This lowest circle, the ninth, consists of people who have betrayed someone close to them: Brutus and Cassius, Cain, and the worst of them all, Judas, is being chewed on by Satan himself.
Some of the comments made me laugh so I want to share the funniest airline story I know.
Some airline executive opened a low-cost carrier in the rural Middle East. People got on the plane with goats and other animals. At first they refused to take the animals but the people started protesting and nobody was going to fly. They relented and allowed the animals on board.
During the flight, the Captain notices that one of the landing gear is having problems and won't go down. So they have to land on one and slide it in. The Captain makes the announcement and the airline executive is scared shitless. He's in the crash position while everybody around him seems unaffected.
The pilot lands the plane skillfully, putting all the weight on the one gear while slowing down and then the other side hits the ground and they spin out gently into the sand. The executive is joyful and he looks around. People start gathering their possessions and animals without batting an eye. They thought this was how planes normally landed!
working with a licensed plumber. When people asked if I was a full time plumber they would be dismayed and sometimes concerned when I told them I worked with computers mostly during the day. People generally want their plumbers to be plumbers.
Just imagine his client's faces when he said he creates sex toys in a virtual world on the side. (I imagine he probably didn't tell them that or left plumbing before this but still, it would be funny to see.)
(BTW, Plumbing is fun. Except when it involves feces.)
I live in a 'Sanctuary City', San Francisco, where illegals are welcomed and protected. Let me tell you what this means for me.
My block is owned by the "Surenos", a Mexican gang that controls the drug trade. These guys deal drugs all day and night on my street. I wake up in the morning and go out and am welcomed by a Sureno offering some crack or meth or horse. Don't bother calling the police. They have lookouts. They'll be gone for 15 minutes then come back when the police are gone. (And this is not a run-down area. Average rent on my block is $1200 for a one-bedroom.)
The 'Surenos' are at war with the 'Nortenos' who own other streets. They shoot at each other all the time. (20 times in front of my place. Only 5 hit anyone--thank god it was rival dealers and not regular people--oh and a stray hit a government building which was the only time I saw any real police investigation.)
In the rare instances a Sureno is arrested, the police are forbidden from notifying ICE so the dealer sits in a jail cell for a few hours, is given a court date which he will never go to, and then is back in front of my place. I've seen this many times. Many times. If the Sureno in question becomes well known to the police, he becomes useless for dealing and is moved away, probably to LA and another Sureno arrives.
Sometimes at night the sound from the street is reminiscent of Tijauna (a place I've been to and loved, BTW): people yelling in Spanish across the street to each other, women singing, a boombox blaring Tejano music, catcalls and dancing. It's a party! (I can see your objection if I lived in the Mission District, a historically Mexican neighborhood, but I don't. And I'm a native, it didn't always used to be this way.)
Of course the wealthy neighborhoods do not tolerate a lick of this shit and so the police keep it to certain areas. There are no Surenos and Nortenos in front of the Mayor's house, or Nancy Pelosi's house. I guess we should really make illegals feel more comfortable here. Then America can be more like Tijuana!
By your logic, Spain should have a say in Northern California politics. Through war and treaties though, it became OUR FUCKING COUNTRY (meaning America's).
I wonder how well I would fare if I went to Mexico and demanded citizenship and government services. Could I have a Mexican "Anchor Baby"? (I suspect they would laugh their asses off before deporting me back.)
A country has a duty to its own citizens to protect its borders. This government is lax because cheap labor is much more expedient.
"Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife--the one that you remember--because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see."
"Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps."
Their last most famous female astronaut wore a diaper in a cross-country ride for a little revenge-torture. And the one before that disintegrated in the atmosphere while the one before that asploded.
Yeah you can lock yourself inside while the New Orleans Police Dept. is outside to take your guns and then Blackwater agents come to "repatriate" you to a barbed-wire camp and then FEMA agents come to see if you're a corpse yet while the National Guard is cutting holes in your roof. Meanwhile the floodwaters rise inside the steel bulkhead.
The protagonist (not Hiro Protagonist, the other protagonist) has to write code on a display that he knows is Van Eck phreaked. He has to write code so that the people looking have no idea what he's writing so he has to obfuscate in many clever ways--I forget how.
It's a fascinating look at the underworld of the Garbage Dwellers. It's really sad, horrible, horripilating, and awful.
The author says a recent garbagefall killed hundreds of people. And you're right: the people burn insulation off wires. Which still produces dioxins and carcinogens.
An excerpt:
Wandering from pile to pile, calling out, "Piyesa! Piyesa!" (Parts! Parts!), are brokers of electronic and computer components, a new and lucrative category of waste. I ask Bobby what's worth the most, and he replies without hesitating, "Epson." An empty refillable printer cartridge in working condition can go for as much as 350 pesos. Bobby knows the prices for all these, too: Monitor, 50 pesos. Motherboard, 30. Circuit boards for 25 a kilo, to be melted down for trace amounts of gold. Pentium chips, if the pins can be straightened, 50.
I read an article in Harper's Magazine about a bunch of people living in a garbage dump in the Philippines. The kids gather all the computers into a pile and then light it on fire. They stand around the fire and poke it so everything plastic burns. Then they gather the metal components and sell them. And if that isn't bad enough, the garbage sometimes falls over and kills 200 people living in garbage huts underneath!
There's a great hard Sci-Fi novel by Greg Bear called "Queen of Angels." The novel is set in the binary new year, 2048. Nanotech has transformed civilization and Therapied people get the best jobs/housing/care. "High Naturals" do not need therapy and are up there with the Therapied. The Untherapied, artists, outcasts, dreamers, and visionaries are becoming social outcasts.
This is not the best part though: Citizen Oversight is a clearing-house of all surveillance data--which is a terrifying thought in 40 years. Think of every single RFID chip, nano-camera, and swipe card going into one place. Imagine the immense power of that place.
Greg Bear posits that Citizen Oversight began as a way to keep track of population statistics and give the long view on civic needs. Then a very bad president named Raphkind comes along and says Law Enforcement has control over Citizen Oversight and America becomes an uber-police state. You'll get a fine in the mail for absent-mindedly dropping a bit of wrapper on the sidewalk or crossing a few seconds before the light changes. The people get fed up with this and Citizen Oversight is given to an ACLU-type organization with elected officials. It is no longer Big Brother and even the police have to come begging for info an a serial murderer. Citizen Oversight will only say if the murderer is in the country or not. Even if they have complete footage of the murder!
Anyways, Bear is an excellent author/thinker and his books give me hope for the future and my nieces and nephews. (Damned if I'm having kids.)
How about the City Councilman who said niggardly in a meeting? Even though the word has nothing to do with anything racist, he was forced to resign for even daring to use the word.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of something I read.
The orchestra leader for Muzak said the only song he couldn't translate to Muzak was "Another One Bites the Dust." (Although he tried. Seriously.)
My street is taken over by Latino gangs. (Most of the gang members are kids from Central America.) These guys hang out in front of my building selling rock all day.
The owner's had cameras installed to deter the selling of crack in front of the building. The problem is, nobody cared. The cameras are small and not easily seen. They went about slingin' rock as usual.
I decided to print up a sign with a big camera on it. I typed out something like "This building is watched by Surveillance Cameras. Any illegal activity will be recorded and taken to the police." (Don't worry all you privacy zealots, the police don't care about recordings of gangs dealing crack. I tried. I just want them and the crackheads they attract to go elsewhere.)
The problem is, they don't speak English and I don't speak Spanish. Rather than ask somebody I went to Babelfish and typed it in and pasted it into my nifty sign.
I posted these signs all around the building. An hour later they were all gathered around one sign laughing at the ridiculous translation. They took them down to show to their friends. Apparently the were really funny.
You can still buy crack in front of my building.
What about the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor? It uses compact spheres of radioactive material that self-regulate so there can never be a meltdown. And it heats helium gas that drives a turbine directly.
It seems to be the safest and best nuclear technology available.
The police in my town, San Francisco, recently concluded a two year investigation on Sex in Strip Joints. Apparently the officers concluded that there is indeed sex going on in strip clubs. They spent many man-hours undercover stuffing notes into thongs and getting BJs in the back. It took two years and probably more than a million dollars to discover this.
And how is the regular San Franciscan's life affected? Well, I would guess there's more hookers on the street and more Johns driving around because the strip clubs are now off-limits.
Police resources are finite. They should really choose their investigations with a view to Quality-Of-Life of the average citizen. Will our investigation improve people's lives and take down Genuinely Bad People? (That should be the first question they ask themselves. Of course my idea of Genuinely Bad People is apparently much different from theirs.)
for the first hand-held device, to be used by local law enforcement:
IF heartbeat > 90 bpm
THEN "They're trying to kill you! Go in Guns Ablazin!"
(Please forgive my BASIC. I haven't used it since the Timex PC.)
Exactly.
Sometimes we go to clubs together in bad neighborhoods and I don't feel I have to "defend her honor" or some silly chivalristic bullshit. Any guy touches her, he's going to regret it.
In fact one time I was at a club and lost her. I look down the room and there's a guy holding his wrist like it had just moved in a way that it did not have the evolutionary capacity for. He has a hurt look on his face and his wrist is on a gimbal. He had touched my friend's ass. Wrong. I walk over and we leave and go somewhere else. Laughing about it. (You gotta like a girl like that.)
I know a girl who's an expert in Krav Maga. She teaches it for a living.
I feel much safer with her when I go out, and I'm 6'7" and weigh about 17 stone.
Actually, according to Dante the very depths of hell are reserved for traitors, who are encased in a lake of ice. The Divine Heat Sink.
This lowest circle, the ninth, consists of people who have betrayed someone close to them: Brutus and Cassius, Cain, and the worst of them all, Judas, is being chewed on by Satan himself.
Just fyi.
Some of the comments made me laugh so I want to share the funniest airline story I know.
Some airline executive opened a low-cost carrier in the rural Middle East. People got on the plane with goats and other animals. At first they refused to take the animals but the people started protesting and nobody was going to fly. They relented and allowed the animals on board.
During the flight, the Captain notices that one of the landing gear is having problems and won't go down. So they have to land on one and slide it in. The Captain makes the announcement and the airline executive is scared shitless. He's in the crash position while everybody around him seems unaffected.
The pilot lands the plane skillfully, putting all the weight on the one gear while slowing down and then the other side hits the ground and they spin out gently into the sand. The executive is joyful and he looks around. People start gathering their possessions and animals without batting an eye. They thought this was how planes normally landed!
(Forgot where I heard that.)
I was anxious to read the article to see if the Mitichlorians had something to do with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's not-death experiences.
working with a licensed plumber. When people asked if I was a full time plumber they would be dismayed and sometimes concerned when I told them I worked with computers mostly during the day. People generally want their plumbers to be plumbers.
Just imagine his client's faces when he said he creates sex toys in a virtual world on the side. (I imagine he probably didn't tell them that or left plumbing before this but still, it would be funny to see.)
(BTW, Plumbing is fun. Except when it involves feces.)
I live in a 'Sanctuary City', San Francisco, where illegals are welcomed and protected. Let me tell you what this means for me.
My block is owned by the "Surenos", a Mexican gang that controls the drug trade. These guys deal drugs all day and night on my street. I wake up in the morning and go out and am welcomed by a Sureno offering some crack or meth or horse. Don't bother calling the police. They have lookouts. They'll be gone for 15 minutes then come back when the police are gone. (And this is not a run-down area. Average rent on my block is $1200 for a one-bedroom.)
The 'Surenos' are at war with the 'Nortenos' who own other streets. They shoot at each other all the time. (20 times in front of my place. Only 5 hit anyone--thank god it was rival dealers and not regular people--oh and a stray hit a government building which was the only time I saw any real police investigation.)
In the rare instances a Sureno is arrested, the police are forbidden from notifying ICE so the dealer sits in a jail cell for a few hours, is given a court date which he will never go to, and then is back in front of my place. I've seen this many times. Many times. If the Sureno in question becomes well known to the police, he becomes useless for dealing and is moved away, probably to LA and another Sureno arrives.
Sometimes at night the sound from the street is reminiscent of Tijauna (a place I've been to and loved, BTW): people yelling in Spanish across the street to each other, women singing, a boombox blaring Tejano music, catcalls and dancing. It's a party! (I can see your objection if I lived in the Mission District, a historically Mexican neighborhood, but I don't. And I'm a native, it didn't always used to be this way.)
Of course the wealthy neighborhoods do not tolerate a lick of this shit and so the police keep it to certain areas. There are no Surenos and Nortenos in front of the Mayor's house, or Nancy Pelosi's house. I guess we should really make illegals feel more comfortable here. Then America can be more like Tijuana!
By your logic, Spain should have a say in Northern California politics. Through war and treaties though, it became OUR FUCKING COUNTRY (meaning America's).
I wonder how well I would fare if I went to Mexico and demanded citizenship and government services. Could I have a Mexican "Anchor Baby"? (I suspect they would laugh their asses off before deporting me back.)
A country has a duty to its own citizens to protect its borders. This government is lax because cheap labor is much more expedient.
Christopher Hitchens said it best:
"Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife--the one that you remember--because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see."
"Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps."
Their last most famous female astronaut wore a diaper in a cross-country ride for a little revenge-torture. And the one before that disintegrated in the atmosphere while the one before that asploded.
Yeah you can lock yourself inside while the New Orleans Police Dept. is outside to take your guns and then Blackwater agents come to "repatriate" you to a barbed-wire camp and then FEMA agents come to see if you're a corpse yet while the National Guard is cutting holes in your roof. Meanwhile the floodwaters rise inside the steel bulkhead.
But you've got cat6! No worries.
That was an incredible and disturbing story. I was actually holding my breath waiting for the last pages to load.
Extreme cave diving is not altogether sane i think.
The protagonist (not Hiro Protagonist, the other protagonist) has to write code on a display that he knows is Van Eck phreaked. He has to write code so that the people looking have no idea what he's writing so he has to obfuscate in many clever ways--I forget how.
Hope they don't fuck it up. I mean, how can you 'actionize' quantum physics?
o ry_id=3987&page=2
(You could have a car chase, but by observing the chase you collapse the wave-form and the cat dies. Hmmmm, maybe Lynch could pull it off.)
Here's some amateur-created trailers:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?st
In accordance with my latest MRI.
My avatar will bitch and moan and lay down a lot and take pills and flake on people and blame it on his back.
Here is the article:
http://harpers.org/TheMagicMountain.html
It's a fascinating look at the underworld of the Garbage Dwellers. It's really sad, horrible, horripilating, and awful.
The author says a recent garbagefall killed hundreds of people. And you're right: the people burn insulation off wires. Which still produces dioxins and carcinogens.
An excerpt:
Wandering from pile to pile, calling out, "Piyesa! Piyesa!" (Parts! Parts!), are brokers of electronic and computer components, a new and lucrative category of waste. I ask Bobby what's worth the most, and he replies without hesitating, "Epson." An empty refillable printer cartridge in working condition can go for as much as 350 pesos. Bobby knows the prices for all these, too: Monitor, 50 pesos. Motherboard, 30. Circuit boards for 25 a kilo, to be melted down for trace amounts of gold. Pentium chips, if the pins can be straightened, 50.
I read an article in Harper's Magazine about a bunch of people living in a garbage dump in the Philippines. The kids gather all the computers into a pile and then light it on fire. They stand around the fire and poke it so everything plastic burns. Then they gather the metal components and sell them. And if that isn't bad enough, the garbage sometimes falls over and kills 200 people living in garbage huts underneath!
There's a great hard Sci-Fi novel by Greg Bear called "Queen of Angels." The novel is set in the binary new year, 2048. Nanotech has transformed civilization and Therapied people get the best jobs/housing/care. "High Naturals" do not need therapy and are up there with the Therapied. The Untherapied, artists, outcasts, dreamers, and visionaries are becoming social outcasts.
This is not the best part though: Citizen Oversight is a clearing-house of all surveillance data--which is a terrifying thought in 40 years. Think of every single RFID chip, nano-camera, and swipe card going into one place. Imagine the immense power of that place.
Greg Bear posits that Citizen Oversight began as a way to keep track of population statistics and give the long view on civic needs. Then a very bad president named Raphkind comes along and says Law Enforcement has control over Citizen Oversight and America becomes an uber-police state. You'll get a fine in the mail for absent-mindedly dropping a bit of wrapper on the sidewalk or crossing a few seconds before the light changes. The people get fed up with this and Citizen Oversight is given to an ACLU-type organization with elected officials. It is no longer Big Brother and even the police have to come begging for info an a serial murderer. Citizen Oversight will only say if the murderer is in the country or not. Even if they have complete footage of the murder!
Anyways, Bear is an excellent author/thinker and his books give me hope for the future and my nieces and nephews. (Damned if I'm having kids.)
How about the City Councilman who said niggardly in a meeting? Even though the word has nothing to do with anything racist, he was forced to resign for even daring to use the word.
Well said. Hear hear.