Sunday, June 30, 2002
Fluffy as you’ve never seen him
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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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 ...
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posted by
lee on 06/30/02 at 04:14 PM
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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:
- It negates the powers of the judiciary and legislative branches of government.
- It allows random arrests and detention without hearings or trials for anyone or any group designated by the President.
- It allows retroactive prosecution.
- It allows the concealment of Presidential records.
- It permits secret "Military Tribunals" for presidentially-designated "terrorists."
- It legalizes "sneak-n-peek" searches and seizures.
- It allows the unlawful infiltration and surveillance of legal, domestic religious, labor and political organizations.
- It allows the wholesale surveillance of private citizens, private business records and other materials without proof of probable cause.
- It destroys all e-mail and internet privacy.
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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