I'm reposting this in its entirety from Everything2, mostly because it's an old site and this piece is over 15 years old, and I can't bear it being at risk of vanishing.  I looked it up again today because I knew people at the Ghost Ship, none who are confirmed dead so far, but many who are grieving.  This piece is not only beautiful in its ( Read more... )

So one time this culture discovered that a readily-available plant had a really tasty component, and they began harvesting, and then cultivating and later, processing and refining and making all kinds of analogs and variations on the tasty stuff. Everyone loved it, and it sold like gangbusters, and the refineries and plantations and products ( Read more... )

Bruce Schneier in the Guardian:

"The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet - and now we have to fix it. Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the ( Read more... )

This morning in the news we find two very broken systems:

1.  "Copyright" "Enforcement":  The fact that neither YouTube's complex "takedown" system nor the DMCA (federal law) as practiced could stop Lionsgate (a film distributor) from forcibly removing this completely legal film TWICE is a pure example of how very broken the current system is.   ( Read more... )

Isn't it funny how citizens of the US have heard almost nothing but bland reassurances about how that whole cost-of-an-entire-war-to-bail-out-the-banks thing worked out?

Yes, well. One of our country's greatest remaining investigative journalists has some news for you…the whole thing is an amazingly good read, but here's an important taste:

…On ( Read more... )

Drones.  It's a huge topic, but this article by the ACLU does a great job with its major points and substantive links-for-more-info.  (That's also a real, researched article; and this is a blog post; so compare accordingly.)

My own take on drones - which are little remote-controlled (or even self-controlled, to various degrees) flying machines that ( Read more... )

Just a fun question that occurred to me today:  Out of all the people you know, which handful would you most rather be stranded with if the real, apocalyptic shit were to hit the fan?

(Not necessarily zombies - the idea isn't to pick for a specific skillset, but rather the people you know who you'd most trust in a full-scale redonkemergency.  And ( Read more... )

It's yet another example of the kind of imprecise language that gives me hives: Companies and their customers refer to purchasing rights to controlled content as "buying", when it's emphatically not. A perfect example showed up in the news today:

Did she violate any terms? Amazon will not tell. Perhaps by accident? Amazon does not care. The ( Read more... )

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