Elonka :)

[ So so true. I once looked up "Alexandria", the only reason for which being that my big media disk -- my "library" if you will -- is named Alexandria, and i wanted to see if i could find a name for a secondary drive used to backup that one. I was looking for ancillary libraries to the "great" one of Alexandria.

3 hours later I was reading all about the entire history of the Greek and Byzantine empires, and then Persia and all manner of ancient history among other things. The comic reminds me that at the time I considered positing a Wikipedia Investigative Growth Law, which states that each Wikipedia page you visit will result in no less than 2 subsequent page views of linked pages, and as many as 10 or more. Thus, the number of open tabs in your browser will increase exponentially until a) your browser crashes b) your eyes fall out of your head or you fall asleep from exhaustion or c) you have to leave your search due to unavoidable work, spousal or child-related duties.

I had a similar experience starting from a look at the page on Heraldry. Dear god, I lost most of a Saturday.

Oh, yeah, the hard drive got the name Serapeum. Click, if you dare ;)

-k ]

'The Problem with Wikipedia' - Webcomic

The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.

...

“Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better,” said Lynn Parrish, the spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in Washington. “If this had been implemented years ago, it could have prevented many crimes. Rapists are generalists. They don’t just rape, they also murder.”

Boy do I not like the sound of this. Detained by TSA on your way back from France? "Put your DNA in this database. Trust us, it will only be used for good. We would never dream of misusing the data about your entire genetic makeup.

It's just like a fingerprint!"

Jesus. Welcome to the U.S. of Fear, Paranoia and Surveillance.

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling - New York Times

South of the city, in Tukwila, the baristas at Cowgirls Espresso wear sheer negligees and visible pink panties. It's the same story in any number of other suburban bars and drive-through stands, like the Natte Latte in Port Orchard or Moka Girls in Auburn - bikinis, racy lingerie, fetish clothing, and plenty of suggestively exposed flesh.

At Best Friend Espresso in Kenmore, at the northern end of Lake Washington, the outfits take their inspiration from Playboy-style sex fantasies. The staff will go for the naughty schoolgirl look one week, then don black-framed glasses the next to look like sexy secretaries.

Welcome to "sexpresso" - the latest coffee fad to hit America, in which the country's seemingly boundless fascination for Italian-style Java is combined with its equally boundless fascination for half-naked women.

Coming with a theme for a coffee bar is nothing new in America. In Los Angeles, there are cafes where you can buy second-hand books, get cut-price legal advice, throw pots, or listen to really, really bad live music provided by local bands. Strangely, nobody until now has thought of combining coffee with sex.

sounds great, though i doubt they'll be coming to the bible belt anytime soon...

Independent | Sexpresso coffee shops take Seattle by storm

Another take... nice.

al-mooninites on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Decius wrote:
Thats not what is going here. To quote Noteworthy, they are still calling these 'hoax devices,' as if they still don't understand what happened. They are charging these people with the same crime they'd be charged with had they purposefully operated a bomb hoax. Putting a bunch of signs up that someone confuses for a bomb is not the same thing as putting a bunch devices up that are designed purposefully to be confused with a bomb.

[ This was the point i made (in a different thread... i didn't know this one existed). Using the term 'hoax' is wrong and deliberately misleading because it implies that these were intended to be mistaken as bombs, which they clearly were not.

Charge the guy with low grade vandalism and move on. I really can't see how anyone in their right mind thought this was some kind of giant Al Quaeda plot to blow up bridges.

A bit stupid? Yes. Criminal? Hardly.

I agree with Flynn32 and I've said it before : all it takes for the terrorists to win is for citizens to live with a constant sense of fear. That is the point. Not an ancillary point, not an added 'benefit', but the point of terrorism. It's to make us so afraid to live our lives as free people that we stop doing so.

It's working.

To analogize to the kind of war everyone seems to think we're still fighting, every time someone says 'Well, that's just the world we live in,' we give a little ground. Every time a politician argues for 'security' over any kind of freedom, a breach is opened in our defences. Everytime a law is passed that infringes civil liberties, our infrastructure suffers a massive blow.

This mentality of fear will destroy our society every bit as thouroughly as a global thermonuclear war, just more slowly. And in many ways, it'll be all the more painful, because we'll get to watch ourselves die. We'll get to see the cancer wreak it's havoc until the body collapses.

Fear is a cancer of the mind.

RE: cbs4boston.com - Hoax Devices Creating Gridlock In Boston

Several illuminated electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger.

The Moonenites as terrorists?

hm.

This whole scheme seems like a silly ad campaign, but ultimately it only shows how on edge the police and DHS are these days. perhaps a little too much so, if only by a tiny margin. Still, no major civil liberties are apparently being infringed, so I'm basically on the side of "better safe than sorry" on this one. Though I hope the kid doesn't go to jail or anything for essentially doing his job. Doesn't seem like it ought to be his fault that his employer and their client made a poor choice.

Sure, sue the marketing firm and Turner and get the half mil or so of restitution, but charging the kid as a criminal is kind of insane, really.

All that being said, my main beef is with the use of the term "hoax" here. It's a completely -- and probably willfully -- incorrect way to describe this situation. A hoax involves purposeful deception; in this case the implication is that the devices were intended to be seen as bombs, or, minimally, as some kind of real threat. Obviously no one intended for these to be seen that way... it's so far from the truth that it's offensive. Call it what it is: a somewhat ill-advised marketing campaign which was misinterpreted -- though not so unreasonably -- by the public and the authorities.

Boston Devices a Cartoon Publicity Ploy | ajc.com

Acidus wrote:
1- I was on the high school swim team for 3 years
...
5- I have 2 Hillary Duff songs on an iPod playlist. I sing them when I drive.

I like this idea. I'm a pretty open book, so this is tough, but here goes...

1. As a child I believed I wanted to be an architect when I grew up. Alas, "drawing" is not among the skills I have found easy to acquire.

2. I once suffered from altitude sickness while at a restaurant perched on the peak of a mountain, while eating an obscure Austrian pastry. This happened on the same day that I was briefly stranded, separated from my parents, knowing the German words only for "milk", "chocolate", "please", "thank you" and "French fries", on that very Austrian mountain, but that's a story that many here will already know.

3. One of my most prized possessions is a small origami swan that belonged to my mother.

4. At the risk of having my geek credentials revoked, i will admit that my relationship with computer programming, etc., began quite late. I didn't write a line of code until my senior year of high school, when I took AP Computer Science. At that time, I embarrassed myself by thinking that "UNIX" was a programming language, and having an almost non-existent relationship with the internet. And being a Mac user before it was cool.

5. I am quite fond of public speaking and leading large meetings, and derive great pleasure from distilling the most relevant bits of information from otherwise broad and far-ranging conversations.

RE: 5 Things You don't know about Me

THE smallpox virus first became entangled with the human species somewhere between three thousand and twelve thousand years ago -- possibly in Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. Somewhere on earth at roughly that time, the virus jumped out of an unknown animal into its first human victim, and began to spread. Viruses are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they are the smallest life forms. Smallpox developed a deep affinity for human beings. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious disease, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It was declared eradicated from the human species in 1979, after a twelve-year effort by a team of doctors and health workers from the World Health Organization. Smallpox now exists only in laboratories.

I've been meaning to meme this for week and a half, but am just now getting around to it.

What I've linked to is Preston's article, which summarizes the full length (though short) book on the topic.

I say without hesitation that this is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read, and among the most engaging too. Those of you who read The Hot Zone (same Richard Preston) and thought it didn't get much more frightening than that, well, I'm almost sorry to bring this up.

From the true stories of the eradication efforts in the 60's and 70's to the high-security halls of Vector and USAMRIID, a fairly convincing portrait is painted of what seems likely to be the single most dangerous human pathogen we know.

In particular, anyone who lives in Atlanta, where the CDC is one of only 2 legitimate repositories for the virus, will find some very interesting material. For example, having read this book, I'm essentially certain that I lived just a couple of blocks from the BSL4 lab where active experimentation with large doses of active, "hot" smallpox was taking place. I probably drove past the building on my way to Aikido that week, and practiced in the Emory rec center, which is directly behind the main CDC campus. I always knew, of course, that the CDC worked with a lot of nasty stuff, but it's different to read about it in detail and realize that the author isn't talking about some anonymous site in the middle of nowhere, but a building in your neighborhood, one that you see on a weekly or daily basis.

I'll summarize by saying that the book was lent to me by a coworker on a Wednesday, the evening of which I left for a business trip to DC. By the time i hit the ground in Atlanta Thursday night -- 4 hours of reading on the plane and a few more in the hotel room -- i'd finished the book.

If you're even passively interested in this stuff, I suspect you'll want to read this book.

The Demon In the Freezer

National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services
Budapest Hungary

Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!

[ Anyone else think this would be perfect for a new Wii channel, just like the Weather and News channels? :)

I only have one gripe, and that's their iconography. It sucks. I thought there had been a nuclear/radiological event in Quebec, but it turns out that the tripartite nuclear symbol in an orange box means "epidemic hazard" rather than, you know, what it should mean.

If the box had been green, then it would have been a biological/bioterror situation. Presumably they know about the actual biohazard symbol in hungary (it's there to the right...)?

They need to work on the icons, but otherwise it's pretty much the awesomest thing i've seen this week. -k]

RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.

...

Think Sun's Grid computing, only cheaper, with virtualized machine images. I've got an immense project needing lots of CPU power and RAM but it should only last a few weeks if I do it right. This might be the ticket.

Neat.

I like the following line from the guide :

"You can also terminate your instances by logging onto the instances with your ssh tool and running the "shutdown -h" command. Don't forget the "-h", otherwise you will put your instance into single user mode. You will find the latter quite useless."

Indeed, though I wonder how many people there are that are writing applications requiring multi-image distributed computation that don't already know the shutdown -h now command...

Amazon - EC2