"You will learn who your daddy is, that's for sure, but mostly, Ann, you will just shut the fuck up."
-Henry Rollins
YouTube - The Bottom Line
Topic: Electronic Music
9:26 am EST, Jan 17, 2007
For some reason I didn't consider this before but YouTube is a virtual treasure trove of plunderphonic audiocollage videos. This is Negativland passing judgement on recent U.S. history in a, well, rather damning way. I'll try to make a point of posting interesting stuff of this sort on a regular basis.
We thought it sure would be handy if life came with status codes, but since it doesn't, we did the next best thing and printed them on stuff you wear. But not just any old stuff - we had to try something different, and print them on undies. So we bring you HTTPanties for the discriminating woman who would prefer a web-savvy and somewhat-direct approach in the romance department.
Feeling frisky? Well then don the black "200 OK" panties and see where they take you. Alternatively, the white "403 Forbidden" style sends a very different and hopefully clear message. New for 2005 we bring you two more styles: 411 Length Required and 413 Requested Entity Too Large.
And now, in what will surely drive a "Not Safe For Work" flag, your moment of zen.
As some of my co-workers noted, there are many more HTTP code that could be pantified:
300 Multiple Choices 305 Use Proxy 402 Payment Required 406 Not Acceptable 415 Unsupported Media Type 417 Expectation Failed 501 Not Implemented 502 Bad Gateway
Fucking awesome. And yes, I think the above codes need to be printed up asap. "305 Use proxy" in particular cracked me up.
Also, best ThinkGeek "Customer Action Shots" section ever. Usually that shit is full of, well, not attractive ladies showing off their panties, that's for sure.
It seems like what's missing is a tag dictionary which is able to group & graph relationships between words based on their actual definition. Such as being able to place in a hierarchy "Fruit" within the context of "plant" "apple" "leaf" in a way which would be relevant. It would be difficult to create such a dictionary, and to keep it modern might even be more difficult. If you look at something like Wiki-pedia(which has hyperlink style references to related topics and words which are connected to other words/topics), and you stripped out of that all of the back story and just kept the main topic and the words which are hyperlinked, organized these words in a treestyle hierarchy, and built a comparative reference based on common typos and variations, you might get close to the tool you're looking for. Such a task might seem nightmarish at first, but since there are much fewer words and phrases in existence than new ones every year, eventually the tool would become useful.
I felt the same way when I was doing research into this, about 4 years ago now. I think that basically describes a universal ontology, and the fact is that such a thing has massive hurdles, not least because of multiple word meanings.
Sadly, you'd have to put "Fruit" not only into the context of the words you noted (and others), but also in the context of the slang usage for "effeminate" or "gay". "apple" would have to be linked to the fruit-plant sense and the computer-hardware-software-corporation sense and the Beatles-music sense, etc. etc.
Wikipedia handles that with those disambiguation pages, as would (presently at least) any sufficiently complex word-to-word or phrase-to-phrase ontology. Or, that's my meagre understanding of the situation at least.
Crooks and Liars � Barney Frank kicks Patrick McHenry around the House floor
Topic: Politics and Law
9:34 am EST, Jan 16, 2007
He cracked me up when he said his past behavior was not relevant…Hilarious.
For politics junkies this is absolutely hilarious. Barney Frank, who knows his Roberts Rules pretty much backwards and forwards, takes a few guys to the mat and squashes them because they don't know the rules. Brutal, and to steal a Boston idiom, it's wicked pissah.
[ Nice. I did that when I was at Boy's State in New York. I was a "Senator" and me and this other guy harassed everyone with procedural objections until the other "Senators" told us they'd put our names on the roll as if we were there if we'd just leave.
10. Managers at Anti-Terrorism agencies sometimes accidentally leave the firewall open. 9. Former terrorist masterminds are cool as long as they agree to talk politics. 8. The President is likely to beleive anything a terrorist underling promises him during a crisis. 7. You should kill any Indians who live in your neighborhood with your bare hands because they might be terrorists. 6. CTU watches Fox news on every available TV because its the best source for raw, balanced information. 5. Lawyers nittering about civil liberties are just getting in the way. 4. Detention camps work! 3. Los Angeles has ticket collectors on the subway. 2. Jack Bauer tearing off a man's jugular with his teeth is the new black. 1. Cloe is dating Rush Limbaugh!
[ Ha! Regarding number 2, did everyone else find it a strikingly perfect homage to Mr. Sutherland's earlier work? I fully expect to hear him say "Yen, I used to ride with the dirty underwear gang out of Liberty, Missouri" in a later episode, or maybe, "I'm a school teacher from New York!" -k]
Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions. When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV.
This is either going to be really great or really aweful. There is no middle ground with stuff like this.
[ Agreed, though I'm encouraged that Stevenson is doing the screenplay. Not that novelists always make good screenwriters, but at least the vision will remain true. I'm tentatively optimistic, and I've always thought this was the more likely NS book to make it to TV, as much as I might love the concept of seeing Hiro Protagonist up there... I don't see how they could make Snow Crash work. -k]
has been re-enabled! Post away. We've tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, SideKick and Nintendo Wii, and the feature seems to work on all of these platforms. We still have some bugs we're still tracking with the most recent update, but we should have those cleared up over the course of Sunday...
Boing Boing: Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware
Topic: Politics and Law
4:42 am EST, Jan 14, 2007
And beyond the question of what constitutes justice for Ms. Amero, how might this ruling affect other teachers using computers with children? Will some teachers limit their use of technology in the classroom, fearing greater liability risks if porn they didn't ask for shows up on an unsecured, school-owned PC?
[ You better fucking believe it will. I'd be completely rethinking my use of computers unless there was some indemnification process and the school had a competent tech crew.
And, yes, a 40 year sentence would be completely outrageous. I realize they haven't done sentencing yet and the likelihood is that it won't be that bad, but fuck, she could've raped one of those kids and gotten less than 40 years. -k
If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.
