Tuesdays are always fun.
Oct. 25th, 2006 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptToday was a reasonably good day - reading wasn't bad, class was interesting, and there was a baseball game. Tomorrow, I think I'll be seeing ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
welah, now that he's relatively re-settled in an area near me again. Also, Firefox 2 is out, for those who use Firefox as their browser. Go, get.
Maybe it's the Okami kick, but this is just a nice Flash piece. Hosted by Newgrounds, but The Echo combines stellar art with good music.
Llewellyn understands perfectly well the workings of love when he says, "It's because they're about you."rain_luong has done a wonderful job with this story so far, showing many myriad things about love and dating.
The bank may be analyzing your voiceprint when you call the automated system. All in the name of preventing fraud, of course, and minimizing the chance that there will be such things as human errors. For some reason, preferring machine error is a trend these days that I don't entirely agree with - machine errors, much like human ones, can be colossal. And harder to find and fix until after they've been exploited.
Some Canadian music artists are looking a little funny at the music industry's insistence on suing people who are sharing music. They've banded together to create the Canadian Music Creator's Coalition. What's best, though, is their statement on the need for copyright reform. The RIAA should take a page from this statement. (I think I've linked this before - deja vu and all that.) Since it wasannaonthemoon who linked it, she also provided a short blurb about how Barenaked Ladies is using alternative means to make good money for themselves selling their album at less than a CD cost.
Neater science extends the remote medicine concept further by telling us MRI may be possible over the Internet. There are some other issues, like billing, interpretation, and egos that still have to be worked out, but even if it's just a training tool, it's neat to know that such things can be done over distance. Getting much smaller, but staying with remote control, a nanomotor developed by Chiang Mai University will power medical nanorobots. So now we can find the tiny tumores that are hiding, or other such small things. On a much less pleasant note regarding remote control, the election in November is still easily hackable. Beyond that point, as Common Dreams says, the election is a matter of the votes not counted, rather than the ones on the record.
kaura_nighthawk found Project Vote Smart, which intends on being a clearinghouse of finding out about the candidates in the upcoming elections and their positions on issues that are supposedly important to Americans. In return, I offer you political jockeys Fantasy Congress, where you can draft a team of Congresscritters, join a league, and see who can accumulate the most points through legislative action in a session of Congress. Obviously, teams are releasing Mark Foley to free agency right now, but maybe some of the incoming members will look like they've got possibilities in the draft.
We already knew that the troops in Iraq and elsewhere are struggling with having sufficient armor and supplies in their deployments oversees. There's problems back home, too. Military families often have to go to a food line to make things meet. Supporting the troops should mean ensuring that there's enough food on the table for their families. Instead, apparently, it goes to ensuring there are enough televisions and ice-cream in the rearguard. (Not to say that entertainment isn't useful, but from the descriptions in this account, there's more than enough stuff there that could probably buy a few extra sets of body armor.) On perhaps the most positive (or cynical) note, the administration is developing a timetable for turning over control to Iraqi security forces. This is positive. The timing may arouse some cynicism, though - 12 to 18 months. Something timed to land just in the revving up for a political run at the White House. I'm not necessarily saying that the bullshit detector should be going off, yet, but if things stay on that timetable, I wonder how much the Republican party will hype up that they managed to quell the violence in Iraq, leaving off the stem, "three years after the war was over."
Environmentally, the hole in the ozone layer is the biggest on record. And I'm still probably helping to contribute to that, drawing power off the grid to blog. I just don't know what can be done about it - this problem seems like one that's better suited for corporations and governments to resolve than individuals.
An odd religious thing - The Unfinished Task Population Ticker purports to show us in the people in the world, the people who hear and believe in the gospel (Christians, and one should probably say Muslims as well, with the exception of the Son of God bit), those who hear and don't believe in the gospel (those nasty pagans with their multiple gods and, heaven forbid, goddesses. Wonder if anyone's protested Okami because Amaterasu is a female deity.... Also, those horrid, horrid, atheists and their lies and science and heresies.), and those "not having an adequate opportunity to hear the gospel" - those souls untainted by being drawn into the whole Christianity debate. One might envy those people on that ground, if not on others. What this is supposed to do, I suspect, is inspire the evangelists to spread their word to the half of the populace that has not yet heard the good news, possibly because of more pressing concerns such as staying alive and finding sufficient food to eat. What I wonder that it does do, though, is galvanize the evangelicals to go after the segment that wilfully doesn't believe. Or point to it and say, "See? We are an oppressed minority!" Also, as the original linker noted, one wonders where those figures come from. Further along the line of Christianity, if it hasn't been noted before to all people, it should be. The Bible has had changes made to it by humans. Those changes can likely be traced backwards to the responsible parties. And that goes a long way back.
That's it from me.
welah, now that he's relatively re-settled in an area near me again. Also, Firefox 2 is out, for those who use Firefox as their browser. Go, get. Maybe it's the Okami kick, but this is just a nice Flash piece. Hosted by Newgrounds, but The Echo combines stellar art with good music.
Llewellyn understands perfectly well the workings of love when he says, "It's because they're about you."
rain_luong has done a wonderful job with this story so far, showing many myriad things about love and dating.The bank may be analyzing your voiceprint when you call the automated system. All in the name of preventing fraud, of course, and minimizing the chance that there will be such things as human errors. For some reason, preferring machine error is a trend these days that I don't entirely agree with - machine errors, much like human ones, can be colossal. And harder to find and fix until after they've been exploited.
Some Canadian music artists are looking a little funny at the music industry's insistence on suing people who are sharing music. They've banded together to create the Canadian Music Creator's Coalition. What's best, though, is their statement on the need for copyright reform. The RIAA should take a page from this statement. (I think I've linked this before - deja vu and all that.) Since it was
annaonthemoon who linked it, she also provided a short blurb about how Barenaked Ladies is using alternative means to make good money for themselves selling their album at less than a CD cost. Neater science extends the remote medicine concept further by telling us MRI may be possible over the Internet. There are some other issues, like billing, interpretation, and egos that still have to be worked out, but even if it's just a training tool, it's neat to know that such things can be done over distance. Getting much smaller, but staying with remote control, a nanomotor developed by Chiang Mai University will power medical nanorobots. So now we can find the tiny tumores that are hiding, or other such small things. On a much less pleasant note regarding remote control, the election in November is still easily hackable. Beyond that point, as Common Dreams says, the election is a matter of the votes not counted, rather than the ones on the record.
kaura_nighthawk found Project Vote Smart, which intends on being a clearinghouse of finding out about the candidates in the upcoming elections and their positions on issues that are supposedly important to Americans. In return, I offer you political jockeys Fantasy Congress, where you can draft a team of Congresscritters, join a league, and see who can accumulate the most points through legislative action in a session of Congress. Obviously, teams are releasing Mark Foley to free agency right now, but maybe some of the incoming members will look like they've got possibilities in the draft. We already knew that the troops in Iraq and elsewhere are struggling with having sufficient armor and supplies in their deployments oversees. There's problems back home, too. Military families often have to go to a food line to make things meet. Supporting the troops should mean ensuring that there's enough food on the table for their families. Instead, apparently, it goes to ensuring there are enough televisions and ice-cream in the rearguard. (Not to say that entertainment isn't useful, but from the descriptions in this account, there's more than enough stuff there that could probably buy a few extra sets of body armor.) On perhaps the most positive (or cynical) note, the administration is developing a timetable for turning over control to Iraqi security forces. This is positive. The timing may arouse some cynicism, though - 12 to 18 months. Something timed to land just in the revving up for a political run at the White House. I'm not necessarily saying that the bullshit detector should be going off, yet, but if things stay on that timetable, I wonder how much the Republican party will hype up that they managed to quell the violence in Iraq, leaving off the stem, "three years after the war was over."
Environmentally, the hole in the ozone layer is the biggest on record. And I'm still probably helping to contribute to that, drawing power off the grid to blog. I just don't know what can be done about it - this problem seems like one that's better suited for corporations and governments to resolve than individuals.
An odd religious thing - The Unfinished Task Population Ticker purports to show us in the people in the world, the people who hear and believe in the gospel (Christians, and one should probably say Muslims as well, with the exception of the Son of God bit), those who hear and don't believe in the gospel (those nasty pagans with their multiple gods and, heaven forbid, goddesses. Wonder if anyone's protested Okami because Amaterasu is a female deity.... Also, those horrid, horrid, atheists and their lies and science and heresies.), and those "not having an adequate opportunity to hear the gospel" - those souls untainted by being drawn into the whole Christianity debate. One might envy those people on that ground, if not on others. What this is supposed to do, I suspect, is inspire the evangelists to spread their word to the half of the populace that has not yet heard the good news, possibly because of more pressing concerns such as staying alive and finding sufficient food to eat. What I wonder that it does do, though, is galvanize the evangelicals to go after the segment that wilfully doesn't believe. Or point to it and say, "See? We are an oppressed minority!" Also, as the original linker noted, one wonders where those figures come from. Further along the line of Christianity, if it hasn't been noted before to all people, it should be. The Bible has had changes made to it by humans. Those changes can likely be traced backwards to the responsible parties. And that goes a long way back.
That's it from me.
