George W Bush.

Check And Mate. USA Wins!

-S

... or any other isolated work environment, like a submarine, military base, etc.

But as soon as those plastic sheets start making it home in people's brief-cases and notepads, the cost of operation starts to creep up.

Its an interesting niche product that solves one problem ( consumables ) at the expense of creating another problem ( proprietary, expensive print substrate ).

-S

To an author, I think the attraction of Science Fiction is that it allows them to put a veneer of plausibility on settings which would otherwise be too fantastic to be credible. This allows them the freedom to explore ideas or situations which couldn't possibly occur if set in "the real world."

But the current world has become sufficiently complex and interesting that writers such as William Gibson and Margaret Attwood no longer need to set their stories in some near-future dystopia - our current dystopia is sufficient to tell the stories they want to tell.

Gibson's last few books have been set in, effectively, the present day. There's no need for him to go to 2030 or beyond to explore the idea of immersive, ubiquitous computing and communication: we all have smart-phones in 2009. Everyone I see on the streets of San Francisco is walking around in a trance, like they're jacked into Cyberspace.

There's no need for Margaret Attwood to set The Handmaiden's Tail in 2195, there's plenty of opportunity to explore theocracy and coercive reproduction in the crazy, polluted and Balkanized world of the present day.

I think that Science Fiction writers who rely on the old cliches of Warp-drive and alien worlds simply aren't trying hard enough.

21st Century Earth IS an alien world... all you have to do is pay attention.

-Sean

G A T T A C A

-S

Agreed. In 2004, Brazil turned around and started subjecting US visitors to the same treatment the US was meting out to Brazilian travelers.

As they say on the school playground: "The United States Started it."

The 2016 Olympics should be interesting for American travelers.

-S

Or... National Dairy Goat Awareness Week

Goat Awareness Week Proclaimed by Reagan

June 21, 1987

WASHINGTON -- President Reagan took time out Friday from visiting with Chad's president, tracking South Korean unrest and trying to influence a Senate trade bill to proclaim last week "National Dairy Goat Awareness Week."

Acting on a congressional resolution, Reagan praised dairy goats for their ability to thrive in harsh surroundings and for their link with American history.

I'm glad we all have our priorities in order.

-S

There are times and places for each. Streaming lets you discover new music with little risk. Downloading lets you listen to specific music any time and any place, without regards to network conditions.

Surely, there is room in this world for both models.

-Sean

I'm not very familiar with RIM's network architecture, so it wasn't clear to me whether the UAE needed RIM's help in distributing the spyware or whether it was entirely the doing of the local phone carrier in the UAE.

Would the UAE had to have had RIM's help or did they simply buy the services of the third-party spyware vendor?

-Sean

• The implicit assumption of a mechanistic relationship behind the supposed correlation.
• An Inability to put forward a falsifiable theory based on testable hypothesis (how does it work? No, really. How. Does. It. Work?).
• Unchanging over time, despite the availability of new information (is it better than an FMRI scan? If no, why? If yes, why?)
• Results tainted by the confirmation bias of the psychologist (the test works, except when it doesn't. Just like Astrology and Homeopathy.)

And, finally, the fact that they are protesting the publication of these images means that they assume that the images work... but they don't know how. That's the same as the DMV forbidding the publication of Eye-Charts to prevent blind people from getting their driver's license. As if we know those specific eye-charts work for testing eye-sight, but we don't know how they work and cannot, therefore, make new or better eye-charts.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... and this cigar smells like bullshit.

-Sean

...the FBI is carrying out a Chicken investigation using Chicken guidelines on what is and is not constitutional, and as part of that investigation they've compelled the Chicken of a service provider and are using a Chicken justification to argue that nobody's First Amendment rights are being violated.

Chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken. Chicken. Chicken. CHICKEN!!!

-Chicken

How about the "Super-Hyper-Colossal-Magnetoresistence Effect?"

At some point, you run out of superlatives and need to go Exponential:

Magneto X 10^Super-Hyper-Colossal

-S

You know you're living in an alternate reality when a Republican congressman from Utah introduces a privacy-rights bill that is supported by the ACLU.

In other news: millions of damned souls are displaced by advancing glaciers.

-S

Glenn Greanwald says it well:

The idea that Specter is a "liberal" Republican or even a "moderate" reflects how far to the Right both the GOP and our overall political spectrum has shifted. Consider Specter's most significant votes over the last eight years, ones cast in favor of such definitive right-wing measures as: the war on Iraq, the Military Commissions Act, Patriot Act renewal, confirmation of virtually every controversial Bush appointee, retroactive telecom immunity, warrantless eavesdropping expansions, and Bush tax cuts (several times). Time and again during the Bush era, Specter stood with Republicans on the most controversial and consequential issues.

In my opinion, what the DemocratIC party needs more of isn't warmed-over has-been Republicans but, rather, liberal Democrats who are actually, you know, LIBERAL.

-S