David, I'd go look at your blog, except for the fact that you constantly (and redundantly) post the URL in every one of your comments that I've seen. Blog-pimping is bad, m'kay?

Let's see, twice the size of Texas would be 520,000 square miles. If it's been "growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s," then roughly:

2007 = 520,000 sq mi
1997 = 52,000 sq mi
1987 = 5,200 sq mi
1977 = 520 sq mi
1967 = 52 sq mi
1957 = 5 sq mi

Take 1977 with about 500 square miles, or say a 25 x 20 mile area. What are the odds that anyone would even notice a 25 x 20 square mile area of water with garbage floating in it at the density shown in the videos (and probably less at that time), especially in that area? And a decade before that?

I don't mean to trivialize it, but from skimming through that video, and doing a Google image search, so far my impression is that these folks are being rather hyperbolic using terms like "an island twice the size of Texas," which makes me skeptical about their other data. If it can't be seen (and therefore measured) from the air, how did they come up with these figures for area and total mass?

An area of polluted water with occasional pieces of floating garbage is not an "island continent."

Anyone who complains about this scheme is saying more about themselves and their expectations than about Radiohead. What a brilliant cross between a marketing plan and a psychology experiment.

Maximum materials usage for minimal storage capacity -- compelling!

comstock, yes, Edge stuff has some amount of "elite brainiac clique salon" smell to it, but there are always some interesting insights or angles in there. Although some of these (like the Rucker doodle above) do come across like Deep Thoughts written in a high school yearbook to impress your classmates...

Now how the hell am I supposed to get any work done for the rest of the afternoon?

Many Muslim conflicts involve one sect attacking another, usually for sectarian reasons

Ooops!

Preaching end-times rapture theology may be weird and disturbing, but they're just making wacky predictions -- they're not inciting anyone to go out and start the apocalypse now. Pat Robertson may say some really strange stuff, and he's quite critical of Muslims, but he's never to my knowledge asked his listeners to kill them and he doesn't curse them as "the sons of apes and pigs" the way many Muslim imams routinely refer to Jews in Saudi Arabia, Gaza, Iran, etc.

As for the whole "root causes" poverty argument, most poor and/or undereducated people do not resort to violence. When the US went through the Great Depression, poor people didn't turn into suicide bombers. When you think about it, it's rather insulting to the poor to imply that poverty leads to violence.

The "American imperialism" argument (or for that matter, the "Zionist oppressor" argument) ignores the many violent conflicts involving Muslims which have little or no involvement by America or Israel, e.g. in Indonesia, the Maldives, Darfur, etc. Many Muslim conflicts involve one sect attacking another, usually for sectarian reasons, and have nothing to do with the US; some of these conflicts, e.g. Sunni vs Shia have been going on since long before the US existed. The last analogous Christian conflict was in Northern Ireland, and it's over. Islam probably has a long way to go before it reaches that point.

jamesgyre, please give examples of Christian preachers who preach the equivalent of "kill all the Jews" or "if you blow yourself up in a marketplace, you will get 72 virgins in heaven."

One major difference between Christians and Muslims is that Christians who are violent and intolerant are going against the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament, which is widely held to supercede the more barbaric, eye-for-an-eye mentality of the Old Testament. Whereas in the Koran, the later passages are more violent and anti-Semitic, and mainstream Islamic scholars hold that the later passages are held to abrogate, or supercede, the more peaceful earlier sections. So in fact, the radical Muslims are actually "more observant" than the peaceful ones. This is one of the reasons that it's so difficult for the more secular, peaceful Muslims to pull their religion into the modern era -- pure Islam believes that all other religions ("the polytheists") must be conquered or destroyed. Christianity says that if you don't believe in Jesus, really terrible things will happen to you in the afterlife; Islam says that if you don't believe in their religion, really terrible things will happen to you in this life.

Of course, actually using these would mean that some Thatcher-hating lefty is going to have to be subjected to her face each time they look at their child, and that the child will grow up with Thatcher's face imprinted into their cortex.

Now where's my Che Guevara toilet paper....

There are definitely some Christians who are intolerant, e.g. homophobic, racist, etc. But (a) unlike their Muslim equivalents, violence and intimidation committed by groups like the KKK is totally condemned by all official Christian bodies and (b) the percentage of Christians who belong to groups like the KKK or who bomb abortion clinics (a rarity nowadays anyway) is somewhere far below 1%.

It's pretty clear from both public behavior and from polling of Muslims that there is a very significant percentage of Muslims who approve of suicide bombings, forced conversion of non-Muslims, are anti-Semitic, riot at symbolic offenses like cartoons, think that suicide bombers get 72 virgins in heaven, etc. Go watch some of the Friday sermons on Palestinian Authority TV at memritv.org and then compare that to a US televangelist. There's no comparison.

I'm not talking about things like the Inquisition or supporting slavery -- no one argues that Christianity has done some very evil things in the past -- but in recent times, to say that Islam and Christianity are roughly equivalent, or that there is not a large segment of Islam that is barbaric and violently intolerant, is itself either self-deluding, pathologically polite, or ignorant.

muslims are hardly a homogeneous group. some are into peace and love, some are into violent coercion of others.

True.

kind of like christians.

I guess I missed the reports of Christian priests giving sermons exhorting their flocks to "slay the infidels if they do not accept Christ" and monks suicide-bombing women and children. And the list of repressive Christian theocratic governments that don't let women drive a car or even appear in public without their husband or a male relative accompanying them, and which impose the death penalty, sometimes by stoning, for adultery or homosexuality. And I don't recall violent Christian mobs rioting in the streets, enraged by Piss Christ or the dung-covered Virgin Mary painting.

But everyone crowing about "clash of civilizations" will be happy

Um, no.

The religion of peace, love, and fluffy bunnies strikes again!

I know I'm going to buy some of his stuff, I just can't make up my mind which one to start with...

frow, so you're saying that because we took over from the Native Americans, we have no right to enforce our national borders? Basically anyone who wants to walk or fly in and declare themselves to be an American can do so without any restrictions whatsoever?

The whole "they're just trying to make a better life" argument doesn't hold up, either. There are hundreds of millions of people all over the world who would love to come to America and have a better life here. Should we let them all in and double or triple our population? Or are Mexicans, Guatemalans, etc. just lucky because their geographic location makes it easier for them to sneak in? Although I suppose if anyone can get to Mexico, then they can sneak in from there (this is already happening to some extent). Of course, people in Darfur can't afford a plane ticket to Juarez, so in reality they're SOL.

Do you leave the doors to your home unlocked, so that homeless people can wander in and live there? They just want a better life, after all.

btw, my problem isn't with the people who are trying to get in -- I would probably do the same thing in their situation. My gripe is with the US business community and government (both parties, for the most part) who are letting them in to provide a supply of ultra-cheap, fearful labor. With employers unwilling to pay a living wage to people who wash dishes or mow lawns (unless they're willing to live in overcrowded conditions), they can proclaim that "no Americans will do these jobs" and give them to illegals that are grateful to make minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Mexican government is happy, as their most poverty-stricken citizens leave the country, get their health care at US emergency rooms, and send huge amounts of money back to relatives in Mexico. It's clearly a huge scam being perpetrated by both governments and their business communities.

It's an illegal immigrant shelter, right? Odd how that word always gets left out, and anyone who's against illegal immigrants is immediately painted as "anti-immigrant" and "racist." But hey, the concepts of obeying the law and national borders are soooo uncool and farrightwingneoconbushnazi, right?

Ransick probably fancies himself to be creating the 21st century equivalent of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to freedom. Hey Ransick, could you please invest the same amount of effort in doing something to fight poverty and corruption in Mexico, so people won't feel the need to stream into the US and depress the wages of working class Americans?

FWIW, my mother was a legal immigrant.

A great way to generate lots of dead-tree trash!

So did he get permission to use the game music, or is it claimed that this is "fair use?"

I don't always agree with Ostertag's politics, but I've always liked his music, especially the stuff with Fred Frith and John Zorn.

Then there are the other ones. The ones who don't/can't type. I have resorted to taunting them in my answers. I'm sure that there will be a name for this anonymous taunting soon

Pathetic?

stark and beautiful and horrible all at once

Yeah, ol' Chuck had more angst and existential dread than a roomful of dressed up Goth kids.

I always find discussions to be tedious anyway.

Case in point...

Skep, I remember that as a kid I didn't get some of the references and humor in Peanuts, stuff that I now understand as an adult. But even so, as a kid I loved Peanuts, so for me it works on both levels.

One of the things I never liked about Peanuts is that the characters never seemed to be very child-like. They always seemed like little adults in disfigured bodies

Skep, do you think that Stewie Griffin needs to act more like a real baby, too? Good grief.

Claudius, I would say that things like citizen reporting and watchdogging via the net would be far more powerful forces for changing and improving society than the ability to copy mp3s and movies. Let's face it, all this DRM stuff is mainly about entertainment media. The reason why things like the RIAA battles get so much attention is that for many people, having free music, games, movies, etc is much more crucial to them than whether their government is spending itself into bankruptcy, selling the country out to China, etc. If the media conglomerates go out of business due to file sharing or customers deserting them, it's not like it's going to strike fear into the hearts of the oil companies or the entrenched political parties. I think that file sharing and "free culture" is basically fiddling while Rome burns. And it deludes people into thinking that they're being "revolutionary" by stealing stuff that they want with very little effort or risk -- is it any surprise that it's such a popular meme?

It's sort of cool in a cheesy retro-object-fetish way, but for actual photography, I'm not convinced that you couldn't get the same lo-fi results with a digital camera and Photoshop - let's face it, you're probably going to scan the prints and use Photoshop on them anyway.

"The Smoking Gun" looks like half the components were sourced from the local head shop. "Smokehouse flavor," indeed...

The upshot is that a new economic order is being ushered in that will sweep away the verities of the old one.

I hear vague hints of this in a lot of BB posts. Would someone please be more explicit about what this grand, glorious, totally-different future might be like? And how can it be so totally different if basic things like food, housing, medical care, love, hate, war, and other aspects of human behavior are not likely to be affected by the fact that you can make copies of mp3s and movies without paying for them? I can believe that something like a Kurzweil-style superhuman AI might make the world totally different, but file sharing? I don't think so.

Sabik, of course there are cases like Disney / Cinderella that are very questionable. But I'm talking about what I would consider to be "easy" cases, which are the majority of what people are trading. A lot of people think they have a "right" to things like songs that were written in the last 20 years, where it's pretty clear that the work is legally protected by copyright. For example, the fact that Nirvana songs are "part of our culture" doesn't mean that the copyright holders don't own them. For that matter, everything that's on TV, the net, CDs, DVDs, etc. right now is "part of our culture," but that sure doesn't mean (and it would be very arrogant to claim) that "we own them." It's just way too convenient and self-serving to say that if you define something as culture, suddenly you don't have to pay for it.

Free Culture, a national organization sprouting up on college campuses that advocates loosening the restrictions of copyright law so that information — from software to music to research to art — can be freely shared.

Look, no one is restricting anyone from creating "free culture." If you want to give away / share your own songs, writing, art, software, etc., or provide it under copyleft or whatever, that's wonderful and generous. The problem I have is with people who think that they have a "right" to someone else's creations for free, and use terms like "culture" and "digital feudalism" to try to reframe "I want free stuff" as some sort of noble social cause, as if the RIAA is telling Rosa Parks she has to sit in the back of the bus.

JS7A, no artifacts, even on complex polyphonic material? Even Lexicon, Eventide, SoundToys, etc, don't make that claim.

Squid, actually there are many time-compression algorithms that do in fact work by speeding up the audio (uniformly, not by detecting and removing silence or "unimportant" parts of the signal), and then pitch-shifting (transposing) it back down to compensate. Speeding up the audio is easy; glitchless pitch-shifting is the hard part, especially for polyphonic material or an entire mix.

Mohammed would demand that the Queen submit and convert to Islam, or be beheaded.

There's some serious English-language deficit going on at that site.

Interesting that when neo-Nazis do this, it's BB news, but when Scandinavian Muslim fundamentalists riot in the streets and threaten to kill people because they're offended by a cartoon... nothing.

From the conference program:

There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers.

A related topic would be aggregator sites that generate little original content, and mainly rely on other sites for their content and discussion material. The conventional wisdom is that the aggregator sites "pay" the content-generator sites by sending traffic to them, but has anyone ever done a "who benefits more" study?

Well said, Spoon. The point you make is so obvious that you have to wonder about a post that assumes that this isn't a problem. It's like the "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, just trust me" argument -- "I wouldn't sell this used mp3 more than once, just trust me!" Sure, it would be nice to be able to resell mp3s like used CDs, but it's an inherent disadvantage to "bits only" delivery that's not accompanied by bigbrother remote auditing of your hard drives and media players. You want to be able to resell it, you have to buy it on physical media. As long as the "bits only" version is a lot cheaper than the disc version, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff. And if not, then like any other entertainment purchasing decision, just don't buy it.

I think you need to work on your bridge-building skills, bricology.

Meanwhile, there are a large group of moderates on both sides of the aisle who already get along.

Good point. Of course it's easier to get people to buy your book, vote for you, give you money, etc., if you can demonize the "opposite side." Many Christians and many secularists are guilty of this.

The way I see it, you get to ask the question one time: "Do you believe in Jesus?". If my answer is "No." then it stops right there. Don't ask about it again. Don't bring it up in conversations. Don't try to preach to me or force your religious beliefs down my throat.

I agree completely, as long as the same rule goes for the "proselytizing atheists" like Dawkins. Please don't force your atheism down my throat.

FWIW, I'm not a Christian, although I used to be, and I know a lot of good people who are Christians.

Amphetamine users and paranoid schizophrenics do this sort of thing all the time...

Folk artist Martin Sanchez transformed almost an entire city blog in Riverside, California into an art installation/house/chapel

Second (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do.

They just can't quite let go of that condescending attitude towards religion, can they?

Breaking news: There are Christians who aren't racist, misogynist, redneck gun nuts! Incredible but true!

Phenom = spam, spam, spam, spam...

Disaster vegetarianism? Didn't Naomi Klein write a book about this?

Michael, you're making a lot of incorrect assumptions. I'm probably older than Cory, I do make creative content (just for fun), and I give it all away for free, but hold full copyright in it. And I have a very low opinion of the record industry (see #44), but that doesn't make illegal copying of their content ok.

My simple question to you would be this: "Is it wrong to buy legislation to protect a failing business model?"

Yes, of course it is wrong. It is also wrong to violate the legal rights of a record company (and copyright protection existed long before the RIAA and their lobbyists -- it's not something they "bought to protect a failing business model") because you don't like them, or think that they are engaging in unfair business practices, especially for something that's purely entertainment, like music, novels, and movies. I think cable TV prices are far too high, but I don't buy a descrambler and then claim "but I wouldn't have paid for those channels anyway." Once you do that, you've dropped to their level and are playing games of "but what they're doing is worse than what we're doing," "they forced us into this," etc. And you end up with the downward spiral that we now have, with the RIAA and the illegal downloaders in a race for the bottom, pointing fingers at each other on the way down.

I asked what most people would regard as a simple question:

Do you think it is wrong to download an mp3 which someone ripped from a copyrighted CD, where the person downloading the mp3 does not own a legal copy of that CD?

Cory said:

Phasor@52: Which person? Which CD? Do I get incensed over kids who download their favorite TV songs? No. Or people hwo download music they own on vinyl (technically illegal)? No. The jazz fan downloading bootleg rarities of a band whose every CD she owns, who has attended fifty concerts by that artist, etc? No.

I could be more specific (e.g. what about a 25 year old American with a job downloading an illegal 128 kbps mp3 copy of Sonic Youth Daydream Nation, which they do not and have at no time owned in any format, where the downloader and the server are both located in the US?), but I think you've made my point by your sheer evasiveness. If you want to have the last word, go for it. Thank you.

What do you think the word "should" means in the sentence "Is it wrong to download for free something that you should be paying for?"

Do you think it is wrong to download an mp3 which someone ripped from a copyrighted CD, where the person downloading the mp3 does not own a legal copy of that CD?

Teresa:

Also, if you're going to insist on referring to unlicensed filesharing as theft, you should also be referring to record company doings as barratry, price gouging, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and other appropriate terms for criminal acts.

OMG, I actually agree with you on something.

But as always, two wrongs (record company greed and illegal filesharing) don't make a right. The record companies probably claim that their extortionate pricing and obnoxious DRM is necessary due to sales lost to filesharing. I don't see either side as having the moral high ground.

Teresa, thanks so much for contributing to the discussion.

No one (at least not me) is arguing against your right to decide whether to enforce the copyrights on your work. But again, my question is, if non-enforcement of copyrights helps to encourage disregard for copyright law, which would make it more difficult for authors who do wish to enforce their copyrights to do so, do you think this is (a) good, (b) bad, or (c) don't care?

Cory:

The point of being an entrepreneur is to pick the strategy that makes you the most money, not the one that ensures that you have maximal control.

What if the strategy that maximizes your profits also has the side effect (intentional or not) of encouraging casual disregard for US copyright law? Do you see this as a plus, a minus, or do you simply not care?

Whether you choose to answer the question or not, I applaud your honesty about your motivations.

It's interesting that posters who disagree with the BB "mutant orthodoxy" are often labeled by other posters as "conservatives" and even told to go away, but I give the BB staff a lot of credit for allowing dissenting opinions to be posted.

You know, Bush (who I'm not defending in general) gets criticized as simple-minded and jingoistic for saying things like "you're for us or you're against us," yet I see a lot of people here with the same old black-and-white mentality.

Conservatives are bad, m'kay?

Cory:

If "theft" isn't "murder" because there's a different outcome, then "infringement" isn't "theft" because one results in the loss of physical goods that cost something to manufacture, while the other is a civil offense that represents, at worst, a potential lost sale, but this is by no means a foregone conclusion.

There are plenty of precedents for referring to illegal copying of information as theft. For example, theft of trade secrets. Theft of a customer list, a private database, or other proprietary information. The owner is not deprived of their original bits, they are merely copied, but by making illegal copies of them, the owner is harmed -- their proprietary information is devalued.

The argument that people who make illegal copies are fans who generally consume more legal music than other people seems like an admission that harm is being done, but that a side effect more than compensates for the harm. If the media creators want to use that model, e.g. give away free stuff to whet consumers' appetites (e.g. amazon.com music samples), that's great, but ethically, it's the creator's decision to make, not the consumers', if only because it encourages self-serving claims like "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so they're not losing any revenue." If I use that logic, I can spend all my disposable income on other stuff (stuff that can't easily be pirated, e.g. beer) and then say hey, CDs are overpriced, so I couldn't have afforded to buy them anyway. And you know there are people spending $300 a month on their cellphone bill who listen to tons of illegally downloaded mp3s yet claim that they wouldn't have bought any of them anyway. Doesn't it seem odd that people spend huge amounts of time, effort, and words to exercise and defend their "right" to download things which they claim aren't good enough to pay for?

Phenom, this is the third thread you've spammed. You do realize that your posts are going to be deleted?

Moderator?

Phenom, this is the second thread I've seen you spamming on. Go away...

Moderator?

Phenom, please stop spamming.

Moderator?

Add a couple of non-functioning pressure gauges to the base, antique-stain the wood, and voila, instant steampunk visegrips!

This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance.

In other words, a video projector projects some SMS text through clouds of stage fog? Or is there something more to it?

Teresa:

Since you've shown up in Boing Boing's comment threads, you've jumped to more conclusions and made more unsupported assertions than just about anyone in this conversation.

I would be glad to debate any specific conclusion, assertion, or implication that I've made in a thread, preferably in that thread at the time I make it. If you want to paint me with a broad brush, that's your right, but in the absence of anything specific, I have to treat your comment as an unsupported assertion.

From the most recent reports:

CBS 2 HD spoke to one woman who was there, but did not want to be identified.

"She got her cell phone, broke it on a couple of customers and she threw it on the floor, hit them," the woman said.

Good point, think of all those Max Ernst collages that are chock full of copyright violations and would result in lawsuits if they were done in 2007. I actually remember wondering about that the first time I saw one of his works. Of course, there's a vast amount of public domain material that can be used by artists for collage, so it's not like it's impossible to create great art just because copyrights are enforced.

If they actually "lived there for up to three weeks at a time" and there was no running water except the sinks in the public restrooms, how did they bathe? What did they do when they needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night? If they pulled that off, i.e. really "living in the mall," I'd be impressed, but I don't buy it. I'll bet they just snuck up to their little room every now and then and played videogames for a few hours and then went home. Which is cool, but I think they're enhancing it in the retelling...

Apologies for my snafu in #2, I meant Klein, not Wolf.

I'm waiting for her to claim that Reagan violently overthrew the Carter administration in the nationwide chaos that followed the Three Mile Island disaster...

btw, it's interesting to consider global warming as an example of "disaster socialism." GW is potentially a natural disaster, and many left-leaning entities are attempting to use it as a point of leverage to cause re-organization of economies and increase the power of trans-national governing bodies at the expense of national sovereignty, etc. The same tactics that Wolf decries are used, e.g. fear, crisis, "everything is different now," "the old rules have to be suspended," "we must do something immediately before it's too late," etc.

There's a good rebuttal of Wolf's thesis in this NY Times book review, "It’s All a Grand Capitalist Conspiracy":

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/books/29redb.html?pagewanted=print

Actually, if you follow the links to their site, it does seem like they consider this to have been some sort of cross between an art installation and a sociological statement about consumerism (how original!). It's interesting that although they display the usual cynical condemnation of consumer culture on their "Malllife" pages, they were planning on making the loft "super-sweet" by adding laminated wood flooring, and they already had a PS2, both of which would be considered decadent consumer luxuries by many people in third-world countries. Maybe they'd justify this as some sort of clever ironic statement, who knows? Seems like they could've done something a lot more creative with this concept than just building a hidden room and playing videogames in it.

This is one of many cases where freely available material on the net is being used by for-profit companies. These guys were just unusually lazy parasites who didn't bother to change a few words to make it less obvious. You can't stop this sort of thing without big brother policing and copyright-enforcement tasers, you know...

You know, they really need to split AT&T up into a bunch of smaller, more competitive companies.

Oh... wait...

Cory:

I criticize these efforts when they attack fans who are doing things that, had they taken place in the real world, would have been called "culture," not "infringement."

Well, to take one example, sampling of old records by hip-hop artists has been going on since well before the Internet was in use by the general public, and after an initial period of non-enforcement, copyright owners cracked down and you can't use samples without authorization now. And people have been getting sued for stealing copyrighted melodies or plagiarizing written material since well before TCP/IP existed. On the other hand, it's always been an accepted part of the culture that you can be influenced by another artist -- you just can't directly incorporate easily recognizable chunks of their creations into your own work. Redefining this as "culture" is like saying that shoplifting shouldn't be prosecuted because it's so commonplace, stores still make lots of money, and it gets people into the store and makes it more likely that they'll shop there.

I agree that it's impractical to check online content against all copyrighted material, and requiring prior clearance is a draconian measure. The alternative, which is widely criticized on BB, is to "spot enforce" with a heavy hand. i.e. when a copyright violation is found, prosecute the hell out of the violator, so that the other 99% of unprosecuted violators are so afraid of the consequences of detection that they desist. As far as I can tell, the BB party line is that none of these options is acceptable, ergo copyrights are obsolete and should be discarded. This seems like saying that you can't possibly pull over every car that's breaking the speed limit, therefore there should be no speed limits, and everyone will just magically cooperate and drive at optimal speeds.

any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs

I'm surprised that the Alabama legislature hasn't attempted to close the current law's gaping buttplug loophole...

/rimshot

"Using a hand drill, a small hole is formed at the base of Nigel's skull..."

Shades of Bloodsucking Freaks!

Great retro-synth soundtrack, too.

I'm surprised that they didn't replace the pigs with halaal animals to avoid offending Muslims. But at least they deleted that big bad soldier...

Some additional information has been released:

A 45-year-old Manhattan woman who died in police custody at the airport in Phoenix on Friday was on her way to Tucson to enter an inpatient alcohol rehabilitation program, her family’s lawyer said today.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/a-new-yorkers-puzzling-death-in-phoenix/index.html?hp

From the latest version on cnn.com:

Investigators said officers went to check on her five to 10 minutes later. Police policy requires that be done every 15 minutes.

If the cops weren't brutal, why did shy die in their custody?

Don't you think we should get the coroner's report before we assume anything about how she died?

I'm still waiting for someone to suggest what the cops should have done if she refused to leave the gate area and continued shouting angrily and running around. If these cops were so brutal, why didn't they spray or taser her?

Nowhere in the report does it say that she was running around, throwing a fit. It says she was shouting.

Actually the AP story says:

She was rebooked on the next flight, but "she became extremely irate, apparently running up and down the gate area," US Airways spokesman Derek Hanna said Saturday.

Yes, it's tragic that this woman is dead, no matter what she did. But reasonable adults don't throw a temper tantrum because they missed their flight and the gate crew won't make an exception to the rules for them. And resisting arrest, followed by nonstop screaming while in custody, makes it clear that she was not some meek, innocent victim who the cops arrested for no reason. If she had some mental disorder that results in such behavior, why was she traveling alone? Would you want to be in an aircraft at 30,000 feet with someone who's capable of acting like that?

To all the people who think that what happened here is somehow justified because she was shouting, you're exactly the kind of bootlickers Bush and Co. love to have as citizens.

Wow, nice mischaracterization, with a nasty insult thrown in for good measure! Something tells me that the moderator will probably leave that one intact.

taking any of the statements of the police or TSA as fact is a mistake at this point

And taking as fact that the police killed this woman would also be a mistake.

It's a homicide and the perpetrators should not believed.

I'm glad to see that you're keeping an open mind as we wait for more information to come in.

So it's ok to run around screaming and throwing a fit in an airport, i.e. she shouldn't have been arrested, and the TSA is to blame for this woman's death? Based on what we know so far, what should have been done differently?

I'm definitely not defending the moderator's editing of BB posts, which I find odd and a bit disturbing. But your ISP is providing what most of us now consider an essential service -- cutting off that service is like cutting off your phone service (I'd say worse). If BB cut off my ability to post, I'd curse them briefly, shrug, and move on.

The bottom line is, the owners can run the site any way they please. They're not an ISP, or a utilities provider who's cutting off your electricity, or a grocery store that won't sell you food. It's just a web site, and it's not like there aren't thousands of others if you don't like this one.

joeh, that's not really a fair comparison -- BB is a free site (of course, in exchange for that we have to endure a barrage of Federated Media advertising) and you can still read it even if a moderator bans you from posting. Of course, if a moderator is overly aggressive and bans people who don't deserve it, the site's reputation may suffer as a result.

Are we sure this isn't blotter?

skeptical, I think that's probably caused by a brief, focused burst of mojo-mesons from his pineal gland.

In other words, I have no idea.

Interesting -- centrifugal force makes the dice line up in a column up against the inside wall of the cup:

http://www.juggling.org/jw/87/3/tips.html

Still impressive, but not as superhuman as it first appears.

But can he do it without the crystal meth?

Call me cynical, but somehow I don't think that all these ubermensch 20-somethings would volunteer to eat Army grub and get shot at if the mission were say, Darfur, instead of Iraq. But I have to admit that "I'm too smart to fight for oil" is a very handy excuse.

The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB117702894815776259.html

Bosses, professors and mates are feeling the need to lavish praise on young adults, particularly twentysomethings, or else see them wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit. Employers are dishing out kudos to workers for little more than showing up.

The NPJ phenomena is well enough known that there are consultants who work with corporations to help them deal with younger employees who are NPJs -- there was a segment about this on a TV news program recently. For example, the NPJs expect to be awarded senior positions very quickly, just because they feel they deserve it. NPJs have a low tolerance for work that isn't fun (and even cool jobs always involve some amount of grunt work). And of course NPJs by definition expect high praise for baseline levels of work, e.g. installing a patch, backing up a server, and tend to spend large amounts of time telling everyone within earshot what they've accomplished.

I'm not saying that all, or even most, 20-somethings are NPJs (or that all NPJs are young people), but there's a lot of them, and they tend to stick out.

Hey you kids get outta my yard!

philipb, narcissistic/coddled and savvy are not necessarily mutually exclusive...

And because the kids are such "coddled," "narcissistic praise junkies,"

Unfortunately this is true in many cases...

I don't see a current limiting resistor, only LEDs -- now that's a crime.

I wonder what ever happened to the "William Tell" Burroughs bullet?

anangbhai, you have a call from a very pissed off dolphin on line 3...

I hope someone will chime in with why we should legalize this stuff.

I suspect that jimson weed (which grows wild, so it's out there for any fool who wants to try it) is one of those "self-policing" drugs whose legal status is somewhat irrelevant. For example, the kid who tried it in our school had such a horrible experience that to my knowledge, none of the other kids ever tried it, not even the ones who were doing acid, mescaline, etc. It could've been legal and it wouldn't have made much difference -- taking the drug was its own punishment.

"Describe the course of the Rhine?" Uh oh...

I'm not clear on what their legal definitions of "interests" and "person" are, and how a chimp "has interests" or "is a person" in a way that's not also satisfied by a rat, goldfish, or earthworm.

A friend in high school tried jimson weed, and reported "real" monsters chasing him and other "solid" hallucinations, not just enhancements or distortions. Plus, he seemed to have lasting cognitive problems after a single episode. Compared to the "normal" hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, etc., it sounded like really nasty stuff, basically a guaranteed bad trip.

Pyros:

For example, it would be virtually impossible to imagine that we do away with the Senate even though it is a demonstrably undemocratic body. If we all agreed that it should be abolished, it still wouldn't happen.

Are you saying that the very definition of the US Senate is undemocratic, and if so, please elaborate. If you're saying that the way it's curently run, and/or the members are acting undemocratically, there's a solution: vote them out.

Obviously you understand that the hallowed Constitution makes deep, structural changes impossible. Suppose for a moment that deep structural changes WERE needed?

For example?

The bottom line is this: people want to be free, and people deserve to be free.

Without defining what sort of freedom you mean, this sentence doesn't tell us anything, unless you mean absolute freedom, e.g. you can shoot my dog and burn my house down, and I can steal your books and eat your parrot. People in prison for murder want to be free -- do they get to be free, too?

Without adequate representation people will not be truly free. Our hallowed Constitution does not permitt and adequate level of representation, therefore people are not as free as they could be.

You're throwing grandiose generalities around without being specific about what the problems are and how you think they should be fixed. Are you just saying that our current elected officials suck (I certainly agree), or that representative democracy itself is fundmentally flawed? How?

btw, I wouldn't complain about the length of your posts if I actually knew what your complaints and proposed solutions were after I finished reading. For example, I think that one specific change could be made, within the framework of the Constitution, that would improve the government a lot: term limits. What's your wish list?

ok, I stand corrected on added versions vs replacing the original. Mea culpa...

Something tells me that there will be re-tweaks and added footage each time a new media format comes out. Gotta keep consumers re-purchasing those classics, you know. "Final cut," riiiiight...

Changing the hallowded [sic] Constitution in any meaningful way is basically tantamount to a dissolution of the Republic.

Ending slavery and granting the right to vote to women weren't meaningful changes?

If you think that anything short of changing the entire system of government isn't meaningful change, then yes, you probably need to buy an island somewhere, or find a country more to your liking. btw, are there any countries whose form of government you find acceptable?

And Pyros, maybe this is just me, but posts as long as yours tend to make my eyes glaze over.

So have the Japanese come up with a combination mp3 player and sex toy yet? Maybe a next-gen version of the Hello Kitty vibrator?

There's nothing like putting a nice sharp knife-edge directly adjacent to an ordinary utensil like a grater to put the danger back into your everyday food prep!

A new movement is sweeping the country, led by four determined boys from South Park, Colorado. The organization was created to protect Hollywood's classic films from the hands of their directors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Hat

What, no one has turned these into lolcats yet?

Your argument is a bit like saying we should arrest Civil War re-enactors because they're engaging in something that looks a lot like paramilitary training.

This is all about what's typical versus what arouses suspicion. Most people know about Civil War reenactments, and easily recognize the blue and gray uniforms, etc. Almost by definition, the "artists" wouldn't be doing recreations of germ warfare experiments if it were a typical thing that many people had already done, unless I've been missing the Germ Warfare Tent at the state fair. Doing something that (a) is very uncommon and (b) could be mistaken for something very dangerous is obviously taking a bit of a risk. Those guys probably thought they were being cool and subversive playing their silly art game and through bad luck and some heavy-handed law enforcement, it backfired on them. Although I agree that the resources would be better used elsewhere, pardon me if I don't feel a huge amount of sympathy for them.

At the very least, this seems like an absurd waste of resources by federal prosecutors.

Either someone is trying to save face with their superiors by insisting that those guys were committing a Serious Offense, and/or they picked up on the general "the government is stupid" vibe of the "art project" and decided to screw them over with the letter of the law.

btw, I should add that I do agree that the government overreacted wildly, and shouldn't have continued to pursue a case once the facts were known. But the "artists" were idiots to set up a situation that practically invited an inadvertent mischaracterization. You know, if a serial rapist has been terrorizing your town, it's probably not the best time to make a simulated snuff movie...

We were planning to recreate some of the germ warfare experiments that were done in the '50s (which were so insane that they could only have been paid for with tax dollars). We had two strains of completely harmless bacteria that simulated the behavior of actual infectious diseases — plague and anthrax.

Hey, why not -- and how about some recreations of lynchings or rapes, to be followed by indignation when the paranoid authorities barge in and confuse them with the real thing! Or maybe stand on a street corner with a blower shooting harmless white powder into the air, as a performance art piece on people's concepts of contagion and fear. Only some authoritarian moron from Homeland Security wouldn't recognize it as art!

btw, are there any details on what "material transfer agreement" they violated? Was it basically that they fraudulently represented themselves as a legit research lab in order to obtain the bacteria? They try to make it sound like "they can get you for filling out a warranty card incorrectly," but they never say exactly what the "technicality" was.

As for Bible verses contradicting each other, it's interesting to note that in Islam, they have a fairly consistent way of dealing with this, known as abrogation: where later verses in the Koran contradict earlier ones (and like the Bible, this happens in a zillion places), the later ones always abrogate, or supersede, the older ones.

The only problem is, the older verses are the more peace-loving, let's-all-get-along bits (written when Mohammed was just getting started and didn't have a lot of power), and the later verses (written after Mohammed had killed and enslaved a lot of rivals and enemies) are the violent, intolerant, kill-the-unbelievers ones. Sort of like the Bible's Old and New Testaments, but in backwards order. Ooops.

There must be a Doctor Who fan involved, because the research project is called Tardigrades In Space (TARDIS). I wonder how well tardigrades survive time travel...

If the cops did let them go unharmed, it was probably to release them to their father or husband, who very likely beat them for dishonoring their families so publicly. If they're "lucky" they won't end up as victims of a so-called honor killing.

Yes, the press in Saudi Arabia is so much more truthful and reliable than the evil Zionist-controlled American media. And women have more rights, and there's a lot more religious freedom and tolerance of gays and lesbians... all the things you would expect from a fundamentalist Islamic society operating under sharia law.

which then lead to one of the girls pepper-spraying them in the face

Too bad the girls didn't have a taser...

Have a good time all the time

- Viv Savage of Spinal Tap, when asked about his philosophy of life

This is tricky, and not just limited to older people, because any of us could be dead tomorrow, or a year from now, due to a car wreck, plane crash, etc. e.g. how would it affect your priorities if you knew you only have 30 days left? You probably wouldn't spend much time sitting around reading novels or watching sitcoms, right? You'd probably quit your job immediately, unless you have no loved ones and you really, really love your job. Now let's say it's 500 days, or 8500 days, instead of 30 -- how would that affect your choices? I guess his technique is an attempt to find a balance between "I could be dead tomorrow" and "I've got all the time in the world to read comics and make giant knitted action figures."

I'm surprised he didn't call it the Clock of the Short Now...

an alternate history about a quisling Britain that makes peace with Hitler and helps create a stable, thousand-year Reich on the Continent

Substitute "Bin Laden" or "Ahmadinejad" for "Hitler" and "Caliphate" for "Reich" and you get yet another alternate history...

Noen, every President gets tons of memos and briefings warning of various possible threats and threat tactics, with varying degrees of probability. In hindsight, it's easy to sit and back and say "he saw it coming but he intentionally let it happen." I'm sure there were lots of other possible threats that they heard about in chatter, which never materialized; if Bush increased security with respect to those threats, and nothing happened, the "totalitarian Bushnazi police state" folks would be screaming bloody murder about draconian security measures "and nothing bad has happened anyway," e.g. when they started cracking down on security in the NYC subway system. This is just another case of Bush being damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Do you really believe that Bush is an evil genius who fakes being inarticulate? Again, I'd like to hear the evidence, since we have vast amounts of evidence that he's inarticulate and not exceptionally intelligent.

In my #18:

"definitely questions" --> "definitely question"

ugh!

The one thing we can be fairly sure of is, if the Bush administration did know that the attack was coming, they sure wouldn't have wanted to stop it.

Is this just proof by assertion, or do you have evidence? You're saying that Bush knew that thousands of Americans would be killed (on 9/11, it looked more like it was going to be tens of thousands), that the stock market would probably drop like a stone, and he held back from stopping it? He wanted a mass murder of civilians so that he could start a war? This from the guy who sometimes breaks down in tears when he talks about fallen soldiers? Are you basing your claim on a general feeling that he's an evil warmongering monster, or actual facts? Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but your claim basically puts him on the same level with a Hitler or a Pol Pot, and lefty paranoia aside, he's not even close.

You know what he's right, we shouldn't question our leaders, we should all follow like little sheep and believe whatever they told us because governments never lie to the goverened [sic].

We should definitely questions our leaders, and we should also question paranoid conspiracy theories, especially when they have little or no factual support. I'll take Occam's Razor over emotionally-based "logic" any day.

Hats off to Rushkoff for having the courage to break from the herd -- I'm sure he'll be widely criticized for daring to do so. Rove must have got to him!

[Paglia is] a high class wingnut and will be one of the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Couldn't you just exile her to one of the post-revolutionary gulags?

a nation full of people who are scared of imaginary bogeymen

You mean Bush, Cheney, and Rove?

This is the same Naomi Wolf who once claimed that there were 3.5 million anorexics in the UK, right?

Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She's full of paranoid fantasies about the world.
- Camille Paglia

Hmm, odd that she left out step 11, confiscation of privately owned firearms...

Can we nominate her for a Darwin Award, even though she survived?

or was the bomb worn on the outside of the clothing at a rally because if it were worn normally (i.e. hidden on the inside of the clothing) it wouldn't make for an interesting image / statement?

Merc, the "interesting statement" that is being made by that photo is "I want to blow up a bunch of Jews." Interesting!

That's one of the more charming examples of OCD I've seen this week.

The reason they are charging her is not to punish her. It's to threaten *everybody* *else* into fear and obedience.

I would describe it as "make an example of her so that other people with no common sense think twice before they do the same thing."

Of course, that's not nearly as dramatic and fearmongery as "threatening everybody else into fear and obedience."

It's kind of funny that the people who are constantly accusing the authorities of trying to incite paranoia and unwarranted fear are doing exactly that.

So shirtsonaplane, have you actually had the balls to wear one of your fine creations while going through airport security? I suggest the cavity search design for your first attempt.

Any unusual items or behaviors are first identified as a sign of terrorism.

Oh good grief, spare us the Chicken Little routine. Walk down any city street or go to any club and you'll see and hear plenty of unconventional behavior, dress, ideas, etc. Weird people are not being rounded up and sent to secret concentration camps. Mosques are not being shut down and Muslims being deported en masse. With some very specific exceptions, usually involving airport security, daily life in the US has not been significantly affected by post-9/11 security measures. Any time that it does happen, e.g. someone's detained for taking photos of a bridge, it's plastered all over the media, but if you look at the frequency of those events versus the size of the population, it's very rare.

This is a wild (and unrealistic) overreaction to a real problem. The fact that it's an overreaction doesn't mean that there isn't a problem (piracy).

Actually no, I don't think she should be walking around with dangling-wire electronics strapped to her chest in public anywhere. I wouldn't blame other people on a subway for being nervous about someone who looked like that, seeing as how you don't normally see someone wearing a breadboard in public, MIT geeks aside.

Some years ago (pre 9/11), I wore a circuit board strapped to my chest as part of a Halloween costume. I wouldn't do that now, or at least I wouldn't wear it outside the party. Is that really such a big inconvenience?

Al Qaeda has to love incidents like this -- what better than to get everyone to feel sheepish about pointing out possible bombs? "It looks suspicious, but it will probably turn out to be one of those electronic gadgets and I'll look like an idiot. I just won't say anything."

Mmmm, bacon...

ivymike, I've had to take electronic prototypes on a plane with me, and it's very simple -- you put them in checked baggage, typically with a bunch of other gear like multimeters, scopes, probes, etc. I've never had a problem. If you insist on taking blue-wire prototypes in your carryon luggage, much less strapped to your chest, you're asking for trouble. It's an easily avoided situation, and I don't consider it an incursion on some vital civil liberty that I have to put that stuff into checked bags. If the cops start busting into the office and taking me to jail because I have a waveform generator, then that's another story.

Yeah, those damned Amish and Buddhists must be stopped before they kill again!

animals not slaughtered according to Koranic procedures are forbidden

Let's be explicit: the animal has its throat cut and slowly bleeds to death. A bolt to the head is bad enough, but halal slaughter procedures are even more barbaric.

So how do you face towards Mecca while in an orbiting spacecraft?

And I'm sure that nun will make a big stink about how offensive it is that she's being searched. Not.

Now imagine a Muslim woman in a hijab being searched by a guard wearing a great big ol' crucifix -- the comments about "right-wing Christian oppression" and "theocratic jackbooted thugs" etc would be coming thick and fast.

Any position that advocates getting stuff for free at little or no risk is bound to be very popular, whether it's ethical or not. Various people then kick in with all sorts of rationalizations and justifications why it's ethical, or why it's supposedly not depriving content creators of revenue, or if it is, it's ok because the content creators' prices are too high, how it's a herald of a wonderful new world, etc etc, but most of the people who are getting stuff for free really don't give a crap -- they just want easy access to free stuff.

If a technology appeared which allowed people to steal real physical objects (including people) with no risk (e.g. a remote teleporter that could find and transport objects through walls), I have little doubt that large numbers of people would not hesitate to use it merely due to the fact that it's now depriving someone of an actual object. Would we then say, "it's an unstoppable trend, so you might as well stop complaining and figure out how to build a business model around it?"

Dying a painful death due to bestiality-induced rectal rupture and massive internal hemmoraging has never struck me as particularly romantic, but that's just me.

Howabout giving the text a black background?

Then the offending posts would look like a CIA document released under FOIA, with all the verboten parts redacted by the spooks. I love it.

Teresa, of course my real preference would be for you to post a response debunking or arguing with whatever I posted on a topic (as we're doing now). Marking up my post by removing the vowels also tells me nothing about why you disliked that part of it -- others have already posted some rather puzzling examples of this. To me, free speech means I say something, then someone else responds with their comments, not that they respond by obscuring the parts of what I said that they don't like.

#87, same here. Maybe there could be a notice stating

Portions of comments which violate the posting guidelines, and/or which the editor strongly dislikes, may be rendered somewhat difficult to read via deletion of vowels by the editor

Doesn't that sound eminently reasonable?

What's weird is the Democrats appear to be going along with this, even though it would effectively cover up the Bush administration's past crimes.

Gosh, could it be that the Dems have been corrupted by the telco lobbyists, just like the Repubs? Impossible!

On most sites I'm familiar with, the moderator deletes posts containing off-limits content in their entirety, and warns users that they may be banned if they persist. I've never seen "editing via selective obfuscation" before. I'd rather have my entire post deleted (preferably with some sort of notice so I know that it got through, and so that others can gauge how many posts are being deleted) than have it partially defaced.

epi_mom, is it your opinion that non-Muslims should not comment on the widespread oppression of Muslim women in many countries?

I understand that some women choose the burka freely, out of modesty, but unfortunately it is part of and a symbol of the oppression of so many Muslim women that it's hard not to make that association. If Catholic priests started saying that the Bible supports wife-beating and that women should not be allowed to drive a car, I would have a much different attitude when I saw a nun wearing a habit, even if that particular nun didn't believe those things.

btw, a true hardcore-Islamic burquini would also have the mouth covered, with only an eyeslot -- maybe it would have a built-in snorkel? Anyway, the burka is not supposed to show the shape of any part of the woman's body, so the burquini is probably haraam according to the clerics.

Want to get rid of drug-related crime? Legalize recreational drugs and make drug addiction a medical problem, not a criminal offense. But a lot of government agencies and police departments would get their budgets slashed, so don't hold your breath...

How long until drug testers are built into doorknobs, steering wheels, and computer mice?

And you know, you could probably get good DNA and drug test samples from the dried saliva on used postage stamps removed from envelopes.

I cringe to think what the world will be like in five or ten years.

I think that if you have a back yard with an opaque fence or shrubbery around it, you should be able to do whatever you like in that back yard without worrying that some pervert at the NRO is ogling you.

A point that's been made by others is that yes, if you leave your blinds open, someone walking past can see inside your home, but all they take away with them is a memory. That's a lot different than that image being recorded for posterity, databased, posted on YouTube, etc.

So how many death threats has Burke Breathed received so far?

http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/09/02/opus/

Stylish, yet still highly effective at preventing men from being turned into uncontrollable wild animals by the sight of female hair and flesh...

Next up on BB: techniques for defeating the alarm systems on late model cars! After all, if we didn't post it, someone else would, and "information wants to be free!"

Being on drugs does explain odd behaviour, but it does not excuse it - I don't see what is so confusing or controversial about that.

Odd, sure, but totally despicable behavior like this? No way. Any decent person could be on a bowlful of mushrooms and drunk on a fifth of rum, and they wouldn't do such a thing. This is not a story for the Reuters "Oddly Enough!" section.

Pronounced guilty on the spot, I soon learned there is no presumption of innocence in retail, and that's pretty much how the system is intended to work.

So her basic defense is "they should just believe me that I wasn't shoplifting?" i.e. she made a dumb, lazy mistake but she shouldn't have to suffer any consequences for it? So people can ticket-switch away, safe in the knowledge that if they're caught, they can say, "I didn't mean to do that?" The only thing that would make her story complete is her sputtering in an indignant tone of voice, "do you know who I am?"

Somehow I don't think that 30-40 years from now anyone is going to remember Andrew Meyer the way that Savio or Hoffman are remembered today. He's just an egotistical jerk -- the fact that he was busted doesn't somehow magically validate any points that he was trying to make.

And as for media self-policing, there seem to be plenty of outlets for anyone who's critical of the war or the current administration.

An out of control person who's really drunk or on something like meth or PCP can require a serious beating to stop them, but I get the impression that pretty much no one can resist a taser, unless it can't penetrate their clothing. I guess the tradeoff is supposed to be that a club could easily break bones, cause concussion, etc., whereas a taser is "only" a risk to someone with a weak heart. But there are enough people with heart problems (some who don't even know it) that I've always been surprised that tasers are legal.

It's always easy to second-guess the cops, but keep in mind that once someone starts resisting arrest, the cop has no way of knowing whether that person is (a) stupid or (b) dangerous, so the safe thing is to assume (b) and act accordingly until they're under control.

Woodring's art definitely counts as a Wonderful Thing.

Shouldn't that be Design Within Reach of the Rich?

I'm puzzled how a company that sells a $6000 wool rug can claim "authenticity is something we're proud to do; elitism however is not." I guess that means that anyone with six grand can buy one.

Ham radio may seem quaint and outdated, but in the event of a natural disaster or a failure of the power grid, ham radio operators with generators are really, really valuable.

Shepherd is jaw-droppingly stupid, but sheesh, that opening bit from Whoopi (note that it's not included in the transcript) was a bunch of hand-waving gibberish. She's previously said things like "people are free to believe whatever they want about religion" (fine) but at the same time, she loves to take any opportunity to make members of an organized religion (especially Christianity) look stupid (and unfortunately there are plenty of opportunities). I almost wish she'd just come out and say "I think that many Christians are deluded idiots" and take the heat, rather than this self-serving mix of pseudo-tolerance and sarcastic condescension.

In 1977 it might have been considered incongruous, but now it's just eclectic.

We can only hope that a bunch of kids wearing "Hope I Die Before I Get Old" shirts and shouting out requests for Green Day covers show up at the concert.

Also deeply ironic in light of present culture.

Squid, I think the idea is that if someone is looking to blow up a plane with XYZ, knowing that security is actively searching for XYZ may deter them from trying it. Terrorists tend to look for novel, unexpected weapons and techniques, so publicly announcing, "we realized that XYZ could be used to take down a plane," takes XYZ off the list of surprise tactics.

As for box cutters, rules put in place after 9/11 require that the cockpit doors be locked during flight, so a terrorist may be able to kill a lot of people in the main cabin using boxcutters, but he/she shouldn't be able to take over the plane that way.

Given what authority-drunk zombie idiots most TSA employees are, I'm surprised that Slavin's experience wasn't even worse, e.g. arrested and cavity-searched as soon as he started arguing with them.

As for Delta, they're the worst major airline. I swore a year and a half ago that I'd never fly Delta again, even if it means an extra connecting flight.

Of course, that debate took place in an era when copies were analog, i.e. had generation loss, and there was no way to easily and anonymously distribute perfect copies worldwide at virtually no cost, without shipping actual physical media.

This is not a user-friendly design. Unless a magazine has a spine with the title on it, you can't tell which magazine is in a slot without a tedious "sideways shuffle" through the hanging mags, or by pulling out magazines one at a time until you find the right one. And mags that do have wider, printed spines don't hang from a wire or dowel very well. You can't pack nearly as many hanging mags into a given volume, compared to a plain old stack.

Cynic, I think that what's happening is that a lot of protesters, rather than trying to protest in a way that has maximum effect while remaining just within the edge of legal behavior, are just giving in to their emotional need to rant, rage, and vent. Which I'm sure feels great for about five seconds, until you get tasered, maced, or whatever. And the only people who think it's cool (the freaking out, not the getting-tasered part) are the ones who are already on the side of the protester. Anyone who's on the fence is probably just going to think "what an immature idiot," rather than actually remembering whatever point the protester was trying to make.

The video with Mr. Euro-Lothario taking a whiff of VULVA off the back of his hand, while two nekkid women stroke and frolic nearby, is too funny. Presumably this depicts the exciting fantasies generated by the inhalation of VULVA.

I think the real application of this product (if it's real) is in pranks. Sneak into the conference room shortly before your next Big Meeting, discreetly slather a bit onto the nearest AC vent, and wait for the fun to begin...

Spinach, in theory the security checking is supposed to prevent terrorists (yes, they do exist, despite the apparent BB consensus to the contrary) from taking weapons and bombs onto planes (which they would like very much to do). In practice, it's just a time-wasting annoyance which serves only to keep a bunch of stupid, lazy people ungainfully employed in government jobs.

btw, the fact that Homeland Security and the TSA are inept, bloated, inefficient, authority-hungry government agencies doesn't "prove" that the threats they are supposed to be protecting us from don't exist.

Has anyone considered the effect on the power grid of turning millions of lights back on within a period of few minutes? Sudden load spikes are a good way to discover failure modes...

Frowelishnu, the only elected official who I'm aware of who has pushed to send US troops into Darfur is Joe Biden:

http://securitydilemmas.blogspot.com/2007/05/us-troops-in-darfur.html

Both Democrats and Republicans should be ashamed of how little attention they've given Darfur.

But as that article points out, the UN is unlikely to support any non-trivial role for the US military, so we would get the same "occupying American force" / "Western invaders" criticism as in Iraq. Plus, the Darfur combatants are mainly Muslim, so we'd be called anti-Muslim, "Christian crusaders" etc etc.

It makes me sick that the UN doesn't have the balls to actually do anything in Darfur but wring their hands and issue strongly worded statements.

ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives

I'm breathlessly awaiting the first BB post that uses the scare term "ultra-left-wing."

/crickets

Iraq bans Blackwater mercanaries

Vicious killer canaries-for-hire?

Anyway, good riddance to Blackwater...

"Of course," the guy said, flashing a tight smile.

[...]

"Yeah," the guy said, flashing Greg a weak grin.

I agree with Burz -- it's not very good writing, but it got the point across, and the point is important and scary.

Linky no worky...

Actually, China used to be (is?) famous for their high quality graphite...

http://www.pencils.com/yellow.html

TheCynic, I think it's more like having a replicator that can create a perfect clone of a gourmet meal, cooked exactly as the gourmet chef would've done it, on your dinner table for free, versus having the exact same meal but paying for the experience of eating it in a restaurant. How many people would pay for the "restaurant experience," and how often, if they could get the meal for free? How many people would go for the cloned meal and justify it by saying, "well, I wouldn't have paid to go to the restaurant anyway, so they're not losing any revenue?"

TK, yes, pencils. There are no steampunk rollerball pens yet, so we have to make do with pencils made of unobtainium for now.

The bracelet looks cool, but if you look at the photos on that page, note that he's holding his wrist straight -- bend your wrist back, and you've got the edge of the PCB digging into your skin.

From the Reznor interview:

When our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago I would think "Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I'm not relevant". But on this record, I know people have it and I know it's on everybody's iPods, but the climate is such that people don't buy it because it's easier to steal it.

Speaking of fun, if those knives are at all sharp, I see a lawsuit coming as soon as someone accidentally sits their hand or arm down on top of one...

btw, what does "offers an attentive to the traditional table setting" mean?

was used as a location for an episode of the first series of Doctor Who starring the ninth Doctor<