Rubberwoman (shockwave) is creepy.
Archive > June 2005
These are the losingest kittens of the kitten war.
Canada now provides legal recognition for same-sex marriage. Very pleasant news indeed! Good work, my friends.
“There are so many things to worry about in life. Don’t.” This fine quote is on the Internet and I’m sure you can find where I got it from if you try hard enough.
Trevor Blake: Osama bin Ladin and Kim Freeman
Information leading to the arrest of Osama bin Ladin would bring you USD $25 million. Multiply that times forty to get USD $1 billion and you’ve got the amount required as bail for Kim Freeman. Osama bin Ladin organized the most lethal attack on United States soil in history. What did Kim Freeman do? She is alleged to be a madam of two brothels. With such screwy priorities as these, it seems like there is more than one set of laws in this country. Wait a minute, there are!
Trevor Blake: Amended Section 2257
Amended Section 2257 becomes law in the United States at midnight tonight (June 23, 2005). This law requires that all Web pages, Usenet servers, ftp sites, and other forms of the Internet keep a record demonstrating that “every performer portrayed in a visual depiction of actual sexually explicit conduct” is over the age of 18. This law applies to both primary and secondary sources: that is, it applies to the people who initially made the images and to those who link to it, archive it, reproduce it and so on, irregardless of where the image was made in the world.
I’m sure if I dug hard enough I could find links in pleasant that qualify for my going to prison and paying huge fines based on this law. Rotten.com and GapingMaw.com have already ‘gone black’ because of this law (sure am glad I archived rotten.com last night). Speaking of archive, do you think archive.org has the required paperwork for all the images they ‘distribute?’ What about Google image search? Or Usenet archive Xusenet (or for that matter usenet itself)? If you don’t lock down your wireless and bone up on security at home, are you a ‘distributor’ if something on your computer is potentially accessible? What if someone in your house uses your computer and sees something the government doesn’t want them to see? What if your notion of “actual sexually explicit conduct” is different from the government? Does the physical location of the computer hosting the offending image matter (answer: it matters if the government wants it to matter)?
Goodbye, Sensual Liberation Army and IndieNudes. Goodbye Ernie’s House of Whoop Ass and Stile Project. Goodbye Voyeurweb. Goodbye Bare Witness, Baring Witness, Naked for Peace, Naked Protesters, Naked War Protests, Running of the Nudes and World Naked Bike Ride.
“The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and — though the principle was never clearly stated — permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.” – George Orwell, 1984
Brazilians Buck Rising Gas Prices with Innovative Fuel: Three decades after the first oil shock rocked its economy, Brazil has nearly shaken its dependence on foreign oil. More vulnerable than even the United States when the 1973 Middle East oil embargo sent gas prices spiraling soaring, Brazil vowed to kick its import habit. Now the country that once relied on outsiders to supply 80 percent of its crude is projected to be self-sufficient within a few years. [...] Today about 40 percent of all the fuel that Brazilians pump into their vehicles is ethanol, known here as alcohol, compared with about 3 percent in the United States. No other nation is using ethanol on such a vast scale. The change wasn’t easy or cheap. But 30 years later, Brazil is reaping the return on its investment in energy security while the United States writes checks for $50-a-barrel foreign oil.
dodgeit: free receive-only email with no set up and rss. Pick a throwaway address (say deeznuts@dodgeit.com). Give that address out whenever you need to. Check deeznuts from dodgeit.com. Subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on the mailbox.
A seedling growing in the black pot in Elaine Solowey’s nursery on a kibbutz in Israel’s Arava desert is 2,000 years old. It is the oldest seed ever known to produce a viable young tree. The seed that produced Methuselah was discovered during archaeological excavations at King Herod’s palace on Mount Masada, near the Dead Sea. Its age has been confirmed by carbon dating. Scientists hope that the unique seedling will eventually yield vital clues to the medicinal properties of the fruit of the Judean date tree, which was long thought to be extinct.
Incubus, starring William Shatner, Allyson Ames, Milos Milos (as “The Incubus”), Eloise Hardt, Robert Fortier, and Ann Atmar, has resurfaced with a digitally restored image and soundtrack. DVD and VHS versions are available for sale world wide. Incubus was the first American movie to use the artificial language Esperanto. You will hear a young William Shatner speak it in this 1965 film, a few years before he found fame as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.
I like to watch / CopVision is a program that watches television. Specifically, it watches COPS on Fox. It is not a video, it is a software process that tries to make sense of a live video feed. COPS is all it has ever known, and it probably thinks it is COPS. It has started to watch television as the show. CopVision learns its language from closed captioning subtitles transmitted in the television signal. Everything that is said on COPS is tucked away in its memory to help it understand what it’s seeing. It analyzes every frame, searching the field for outlines that remind it of something it has seen before. When it recognizes a contour it tags it with a guess as to what might be going on, gathered from its experience of words and pictures that go together. [stills] [video]
After you are amazed by the 14,000+ photographs in the Squared Circle group at flickr, check out the Squared Circle Experimental Colr Pickr. Requires flash.
There has been much speculation about events at Roswell, New Mexico, USA. The truth is that events crucial to the development of space flight occurred there. Here is that truth. It may not be what you are expecting. It may not be what you like. But it IS the truth.
Bowling for Columbine did it to the gun culture. Super Size Me did it to fast food. Now The God Who Wasn’t There does it to religion.
The town of Laurent, South Dakota is a vision that has been in the making for many years. Our vision is for a place where our nation’s signing community can gather together to live, work, play, and worship in comfort and beauty. Laurent, S.D. is not just for deaf or hard of hearing people — the town welcomes and embraces hearing people from all walks of life who want to be a part of the sign language community.
