Another Monday's work in the box.

[silveradept]

These late Mondays are definitely going to be an interesting thing. Getting out when it’s dark definitely means I have to start planning for temperature when I leave as much as when I arrive at work. Payday will finally happen at the end of the week, yay! And I get to throttle the Postal Service, as they apparently did not see fit to forward on an important bill of mine even though I’m pretty sure I filled out the forwarding instructions well in advance of the bills’ arrivals. As things are now, though, it looks to be good. Maybe starting next month, I’ll get all the old stuff forwarded on to me.

Cold is alternately retreating and advancing over territory in my nostrils. Another hot shower tonight and some decongestants, perhaps, and I’ll be good. I think.

And that’s enough of my life. You want the news. So here we go.

Potential replacement for the Attorney General post announced. So, what’s he like? An ass-kisser or an ass-kicker?

Actually, this is not news. The wall-to-wall O.J. coverage is a distraction. I doubt that it contributed to a Chinese gamer died after playing games for three days straight - that whole food thing, y’know, but it might have let the following gems slip by unnoticed, like the Secretary of Transportation saying that bike and walking paths aren't part of infrastructure as part of a campaign to avoid raising gasoline taxes, or perhaps increasingly sophisticated automated surveillance technology, including stuff that might peek in your windows with the related first unmanned vehicle kill recorded, so that you can be spotted and shot down without too many humans intervening, which could become important because Blackwater USA, the "private security firm" has been banned from operations in Iraq. That war, which, even according to Alan Greenspan, had a strong oil motive.

Hrm. People are speculating about Condolezza Rice's sexuality. As I said to przxqgl, I wonder if the Republican party has more closeted homosexuals than all the other parties have open and closeted ones. Still I don’t see the point in speculating, unless it’s to put forth a point that people who support a party that, in its current incarnation, wants to make them second-class citizens, if not force them to hide themselves on pain of humiliation or breaking the law seem pretty insane. But perhaps that’s a minor party doctrine quibble with some. And perhaps for others, they do want to be punished for it. A self-injury fetish, perhaps.

To close out this section - The Word according to W: 50 religious insights from George W. Bush.

Mathematical models from your data could be used to tell you what year you're most likely to die. I wonder, though, if that self-knowledge will become self-fulfilling or possibly reduce the expectancy some. Staying on the doctor track, but mixing in the successful con artist part from before and we get How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors.

Taking out the doctors part and adding in politics regarding marriageable age versus statutory rape and we get a hoax that was supposedly selling young girls as brides, potentially legally, if any girls were actually involved, which they were not.

From the “Stupid, stupid rat creatures!” files, bladespark has excellently chronicled the RIAA's dumbest move yet - sending cease-and-desist orders on the MP3 tracks that Reznor himself released in promoting his new CD. After this fiasco, Reznor said something to the effect of “Fuck it. Steal my music - here, it’s right here, at yearzero.nin.com.” As you can see, pissing off the artist is a bad, bad thing.

Anyway, that’s all from me tonight (and it probably looks more like a standard post from me, too). Well-wishes are appreciated, of course. And storytime starts next week. I have people, this is good. Now we’ll see if I can perform for them.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

If it doesn't offer food, the idea of calling it a cafe is sort of silly.

And yes, I read that part. I said parts of it were freaky. But I also thought the wall-thing was going to be for the army to use only?

really, anyone is "sinful" if they aren't married, but have sex to them, right?

I think a lot of the smaller bands that do things internet only are counting on word of mouth to get them going, and possibly even getting heard by one of the bigger bands and offered to open for them. A lot of bands tend to pick small or local bands to be their opener so that those bands can get exposure. Then, you have the people at the concert who want their cds and shirts and who want to know wher ethey can go see them and things can take off for them that way.

[silveradept]

You would think so, but café, as I recall, can mean coffee, so anywhere that isn't serving coffee of come sort probably isn't really a café, either. It has since evolved to be "tiny place that offers some sort of consumable thing", which, in this case, apparently includes Internet access.

The Internet was going to be a ARPA thing only, then it became a universities thing, and then with the Web, it became an everything thing. A lot of the technology the government commissions finds its way to people, police departments, and others, whether adopted or discarded by the government. That it can be done is enough inducement for people to do it. And if it's not illegal at the time, then it's going to be used until it is illegal, and even then past that under different guises and justifications, depending on who's ordering it.

Yes, premarital stuff is sinful for them. But at least they're doing the boys and girls thing - the people who do women-and-women and men-and-men stuff are extra sinful because they're not using the equipment as YHWH intended and breaking an Old-Testament injunction that can be interpreted to say "No homosexuality."

Word of mouth does a lot, as does headlining for a bigger band, but to get really big these days, you still need to sign to a label. It's getting better that there are more large names jumping to running their own labels independent of the cabal and doing what they really want to do, but radio play and the other stuff is still mostly controlled by a few corporations. So locals, unless there a university radio broadcast or a "local scene" segment, don't get easy access to the nationwide radio network, so that lots of people can hear them and then decide whether to buy them or not.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I think most eateries offer coffee, so they can still be called a cafe. It's when it doesn't serve any type of beverage or food that it's weird. Then again, I'm sure most of the patrons at an Internet Cafe wouldn't be drinking coffee.

I can just see it. Instead of filling out a paper census, it's going to be "be in your house at x time" and they comne around with the little sensors. And even if they use it to determine "friend or foe" - what if the person had been running/exercising, or was having a heart attack...then their heart beat would be racing, too.

I thought there also are parts of the bible where you can interpret it to mean that homosexuality is okay?

We're moving away from analog radio though and into satellite and internet radio, and the satellite providers have channels where they specifically showcase the indie and smaller bands.

[silveradept]

Well, the people who like wireless the best are coffee drinkers, too, sometimes, so I wouldn't be too comfortable with that statement. Might turn out to be way wrong.

The problem with the "sensor" bits is that for people who are dodging the law or otherwise don't want to be sensored will find good ways of getting around it. It still is a pretty big invasion of one's privacy - "a man's home is his castle" and "no government should care what we do in our bedrooms" - after all, what happens if someone's making the beast with two backs when the sensors come around?

There are some parts that suggest there may have been homosexual relationships between characters in the Bible, and other teachings of Yeshua about how everyone should be able to come to the kingdom of God. Plus, plenty of Yeshua's behaviors, like hanging out with Roman tax collectors and sinners, suggest that he would probably be cool with homosexuals.

Yeah, satellite and Internet radio can offer more channels to listen to, and run programming outside of the advertising radio control, but you pay for satellite radio, and certain organizations have been cracking down hard on Internet radio, assessing them royalty fees far in excess of their costs or what they should be assessed based on their listenership. It's a similar backwards mentality exercised there.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Well, then I suppose the sensor holder get a show....and that's really disturbing to think about. Ew. Bad enough you canhave peeping toms through windows, now they won't even need the window!

do internet cafes also provide wifi for people with laptops? But then, they'd probably charge for it, and there are loads of places with free wifi, so I wouldn't go to an internet cafe.

backwards it is. I'm still not really understanding the whole royalty thing. Do regular stations pay royalties for playing songs?

[silveradept]

Told you that's not a fun thought. Imagine it being used in states where sodomy's still illegal on the books and Lawrence v. Texas gets overturned. Real easy to just cruise around looking for lawbreakers.

The cafés probably do offer wireless and charge for it at the rate they would for others. It's an easy way of increasing capacity without installing additional materials. Unless the infrastructure's bad or data is horribly expensive to the shop owner, why wouldn't they have wireless?

Regular stations do pay royalties for playing songs. There's a universal fee, I think, that all record stations pay, and then that organization, be it ASCAP or the RIAA or something, is supposed to divide that royalty payment among the artists that are played on the radio station so that everyone gets their cut. There may be exemptions in place for certain radio station types, like those that wouldn't be operating for profit, but I don't remember. I just recall that several Internet radio sites were being threatened with large royalty bills based on what they had done over the last few years.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I could see stuff like that happening, and what a nightmare it would be, too.

I sort of remember that too. What about the sites that let you run your own radio station Like the yahoo one, and I think iTunes supposedly has one too. How would they handle those?