these guys and gals, with their skillz, don't just fall off a map now.

now these talented, hard-working folks who just got screwed have a real impetus to get the hell out of retail.

i, for one, have never counted on retail staff to have any knowledge, whatsoever.

these guys and gals should land on their feet. they didn't get to 14 bucks an hour in retail by sucking. now, maybe, they'll stop working for a company that sucks, and find an actual, viable, useful outlet for those skillz.

where are my unicorns?

lord almighty, are we in need of some serious unicorns.

tomorrow, i hope there's nothing but unicycles, corn, and unicorns.

Ooh, and Nico!

uh-oh. this has cadets of bergen county written all over it. watch for this next season, folks.

and, more importantly, i aged out so i don't get to play the flaming contrabass bugle! tarnation!

Let's not forget the very sad state for all literary magazines, not just SFF.

Heck, I'm lucky if I find five literary magazines counting Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker at my local BnN or Borders.

Circulation is down everywhere, for everyone.

Why, I recall the sad day when I found a BnN with more magazines about the care and feeding of Alpacas than they had literary magazines.

Alpacas. In a major metropolitan area, no less. In the dead center of that area, and the shadow of a giant professional sport-team stadium!

Another confusing aspect of the commercial property angle is the "hard drive".

I freelance. I have a computer, and a hard drive. It is my work computer, and my work drive, yes. They are also my lifeline to friends and family, and personal property.

If a DHS employee at a border crossing confiscated my computer for any length of time, both my personal data and my professional data are gone.

When I travel with it, is it a commercial property, or a private property?

If I hop on a plane with the wrong computer, and I hire somebody to go get my computer and bring it to me - a scenario that isn't as unlikely as I'd like to think - what do I do when the computer is deemed "commercial" and gets swallowed into the DHS all of a sudden?

In this day and age of integrated communication devices, computers and hard drives and flash drives are like your cellphone or blackberry. If they're confiscating hard drives because it's a commercial thing, why aren't they also confiscating the courier's cellphone, or blackberry? A Sidekick is a pocket computer, after all, and one that can be used for commercial purposes containing commercial data.

A computer "hard-drive" is usually both personal and professional. Since the tapes were - apparently - deemed not commercial property, when they are the most commercial part of the stuff carried, and they should have been confiscated, too.

If we don't raise a stink about stuff like this, government middle-management never will.

Here's another article on it. It was never a conspiracy. More like total ineptitude, and - again - if the hard drive was deemed scary, why are the tapes allowed through?

The notion that this is a commercial snafu would insist upon the confiscation of the tapes.

Even a scenario where the hard-drive gives the DHS employees the willies should have led to the confiscation of the tapes. Because tapes can hold "dangerous" data really well, too.

Ask me who I believe more on the phone call thing, a government employee covering his ass in a media storm, or a record exec who would have probably really liked to get that hard drive back around call #1?

Pff... This is no conspiracy. This is a bunch of border guards exercising bad authority.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1572314/20071018/death_cab_for_cutie.jhtml

Quote:"
"I don't buy the whole 'politically motivated' thing. They had no means of listening to the music on the drive at the time they confiscated it. In some ways, I think that whole side of things is a bit of a red herring. It seems like a funny coincidence," he laughed. "I mean, a hard drive containing data, and if it was confiscated for commercial reasons, why would they let him leave with the tapes? There's something that doesn't make sense about the whole concept of it being confiscated for commercial reasons.

"My initial thought was that Customs didn't know what was on it, so they thought it was a security issue, and they seized it," he continued. "And then I think, 'Does U.S. Customs have no idea things like FTP sites exist in the world, and data can be brought across borders much more easily and without any questions, and not on a hard drive?' "

in case i forgot in my hurried rush of anger to spread the word - because i'd frikkin' love to hear this darn album already! - i came upon this courtesy of "making light".

Oh, it's a political statement? (which would make it like Sputnik from the USSR, the continued presence of the International Space Station, and Neil Armstrong's flag-planting on the moon, and... etc. etc.)

Space progress is always a political statement, isn't it?

anyone else remember that Aeon Flux episode where larger hardy looking creatures contain that magic forget-all pill in their back?

It looked like a Tardigrade, didn't it?

Ah, homeland security, how you make me feel not safe.

Anytime the government expands exponentially in such a short time period, the system is going to be very, very wonky for a long time because that's how government programs work.

In fact, it may never get fixed.

The best solution is a dramatic cut in the size of government, including this non-safety-inducing beefed up security presence that only diminishes our nation's reputation and true security.

I say it diminishes our true security because this level of border over-zealousness present at airports and ports and whatnot only creates the illusion of security when it is as broken and flawed and randomly violent/evil as we have seen.

Though we only see the worst cases in the media, my own minor cases have been quite bad, and I suspect are endemic to a much larger matrix of seriously awful awfulness wherein good people are rendered powerless and bad people know how to slip through the cracks.