Sunday, June 30, 2002

isn’t it funny how statistics that don’t dovetail with asscroft’s plan don’t get widely reported?

The Sons and Daughters of Liberty

[snip]
'A further indication that many Americans are ahead of their representatives in Washington in wanting to be safe from Ashcroft is an April 24 Associated Press report: "Despite the fear of future terrorist attacks, a majority of Americans are unwilling to give up civil liberties in exchange for national security, according to a Michigan State University study. Nearly 55 percent of 1488 people surveyed nationwide said they don't want to give up constitutional rights in the government's fight against terrorism. . . .

'The telephone survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was conducted from November 14 through January 15 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points." Sixty-six percent "opposed government monitoring of telephone and e-mail conversations.'
[/snip]

Be a true Patriot: go here to sign a petition to repeal the Patriot Act because:



Think about it. Do you really trust Ashcroft to safeguard your liberties? A man whose own constituents thought so poorly of him they voted to send a dead man to Washington instead of re-electing him?
posted by lee on 06/30/02 at 05:23 PM

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Television is a corrupt family member with charisma ...

Power windows is an interesting essay about the alleged maginalization of TV in the age of the net ... and why there are few, if any, signs that the P C will replace America's altars. Author Disenchanted argues it is more likely that TVs will become portals to the web than disappear.

[snip]
While the PC's role in the home has changed frequently through its different stages, from accounting toy to word processor, desktop publisher, communicator, and hi-fi component, it won't ever have the same emotive power as the television and therefore never command the same room presense. The relationship between a PC and its user is more like the relationship between a newspaper and its reader: one-on-one, impersonal, focused, and sensitive to interruption. The TV, on the other hand, entertains a whole family, has warmth, and can slip into the background to become a subliminal presense.

Remember we said TV was the Great Integrator, having already combined the best of the movies, radio, newspaper and magazine reporting, television has already begun to integrate the Internet into its own, pre-ARPA web. Being a form of passive but hypnotic entertainment, television channels can probably threaten established Internet portals (although not search engines) for the role of introducing new web sites to people who want to surf the Internet. In fact, the hardware to pull off that kind of PC-to-TV connection costs less than a dollar: it's just a patch cable that plugs into your PC's audio jack, plus a piece of software that runs in the background listening for cues hidden steganographically in the TV show's soundtrack. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to put a tuner in a PC and buying a monitor big enough to enjoy Who Wants to be a Millionaire. To television, all the world's a stage, and the biggest web sites are merely players ...
[/snip]
posted by lee on 06/30/02 at 04:14 PM

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Fluffy as you’ve never seen him

aninfraredcat.jpg
images by Linda Hermans-Killam


Infrared Zoo Gallery. Interesting to see the infrared pictures - I can see why my nephew really, really wants a set of genuine night vision goggles, or whatever they're called. This site is pretty interesting but loses a lot because the navigation is poor to non-existent.
posted by lee on 06/30/02 at 04:22 AM

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if you see a popup, it’d better be MY popup

Major Web Publishers Sue Gator. Including the New York Times. Now, I don't use Gator, but I know a lot of people who do and really like it. Gator has to pay the rent somehow, and I don't see how a Gator popup could be any less annoying than those stupid Orbitz ads running on NYT.
posted by lee on 06/30/02 at 12:20 AM

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The FBI’s latest secret alert - the one I read about in the New York Times

Some secret: New F.B.I. Alert Warns of Threat Tied to July 4th (free registration required).

By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DAVID JOHNSTON

New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 29 Federal authorities have issued a secret alert to state and local law enforcement agencies warning them of the possibility of a terrorist attack in the United States around the Fourth of July holiday, senior government officials said.

The message from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, like others issued in recent weeks, was not made public because intelligence analysts concluded that the threat was too vague to justify a public warning, the officials said.

"The F.B.I. possesses no information indicating a specific and credible terrorist threat related to the July 4 Independence Day time frame," said the message, which was sent on Wednesday. "However, the political and cultural significance of this date warrants increased vigilance."

The intelligence reports related to the Fourth of July have been assembled from multiple sources, among them foreign security services, the electronic monitoring of suspected terrorists and interviews with Al Qaeda operatives arrested overseas in recent days and those in detention at Guantסnamo Bay, Cuba.

"We're very concerned about July 4th," a senior government official said. "The lack of specificity increases the concern and anxiety that is there."

The decision not to issue a public alert was made after a series of meetings among national security and counterterrorism officials over the last several weeks, the officials said.

But they cautioned that the situation was fluid and that new information could result in a public warning at any time ...


They were gonna keep it a secret because it's the stuff of Oscar Meyer.
posted by lee on 06/30/02 at 12:12 AM

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Thursday, June 27, 2002

More Bushit

Bush & 911 Foreknowledge. Even the loonies know he knew.
posted by lee on 06/27/02 at 02:28 PM

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Arafat to Bush: Who Elected You President?

Arafat Calls for Democratic Elections in the United States; World Reaction is Mixed

by Rahul Mahajan (a candidate for governor of Texas)

"Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat stunned the world yesterday by demanding that the United States hold democratic elections for a new Chief Executive before it attempts to continue in its role as broker between Israel and Palestine.

"Mr. Bush is tainted by his association with Jim-Crow-style selective disenfranchisement and executive strong-arm tactics in a southeastern province controlled by his brother," said Mr. Arafat, who was elected with 87% of the vote in 1996 elections in the West Bank and Gaza, declared to be free and fair by international observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. "Our count shows that he would have lost the election if his associates hadn't deprived so many thousands of African-Americans, an oppressed minority, of the right to vote. He is not the man to bring peace to the Middle East."

Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela with 62% of the popular vote, concurred with Mr. Arafat. Chavez has long been a victim of Bush's anti-democratic attitude, as the Bush administration funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through the "National Endowment for Democracy" to anti-Chavez forces and reportedly gave the go-ahead for an attempted military coup by those forces. "After it was over and I was back in power," said Chavez, "his administration actually told me 'legitimacy is not conferred by a majority vote.' Unless, of course, it's a majority of the Supreme Court. I respect the local traditions, however quaint, of the United States, but he hardly sets the best example for the Middle East, does he? Why don't we get back to that idea of an international conference to settle the question of Palestine?" ...

If Bush had won the election in Florida, the Miami Herald would have released their recount results instead of hiding them.
posted by lee on 06/27/02 at 02:43 AM

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Wednesday, June 26, 2002

I wondered when this would happen

Federal appeals court rules Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of words 'under God'.

It's about time. Only took 45 years to point out the obvious.
posted by lee on 06/26/02 at 07:45 PM

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more verisign hate letters

Read E-Commerce News: Falling Prey to the VeriSign Beast. Our Verisign war stories are numerous, and maybe some day I'll contribute the worst ones to somebody collecting them (hopefully an attorney filing a class action suit against them). Verisign is bleeding, and yet they continue mauling customers. I will NEVER purchase a Verisign product again, be it a domain name or one of their overpriced and meaningless security certificates, and I tell all my clients to run away from Verisign just as fast as they can.
posted by lee on 06/26/02 at 06:51 PM

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run far, run fast, from Verisign

Check out VerisignOff.org :: Take back your name from Verisign. We've transferred nearly all of the domain names we own or manage from VeriSign to DNS Central. We still have a couple left to move, but those are registered via Verio -- which is nearly as bad as Verisign (formerly known as Network Solutions). While the procedure can be a pain in the butt, it's worth the peace of mind knowing you won't lose a carefully built brand or domain name because of an arrogant twit at Verisign screwing up. We were also extremely pissed when Verisign mistakenly changed our nameserver with NO authorization and also refused to admit they'd screwed up (we suspect they ran an Interland script where something was transposed. Interland apologized and gave us a decent credit. Verisign did everything they could possibly do to lose our business.) DNS Central lets us lock our domain names.

If you registered your domain name at Verisign or Network Solutions, just move it. Pay the few extra bucks.
posted by lee on 06/26/02 at 04:20 AM

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