Of course, you can die if you drink too much water. People have died from water intoxication. The EU should have allowed the dehydration advertisement, and required warnings about the potential for intoxication. It would be amusing to hear the water bottler's justification for including the positive yet removing the negative...

All of my passwords are "AhhhhThePainICanNotTakeIt". This way even if I break, they will never actually get at my data.

Yeah, you are right. I was not thinking about that story when I wrote it, but I do remember reading it.

I thought I was being profound! Man, this was just like the time I tried my hand at poetry... Sometime part way thru, I realized that it was good: too good. I was remembering Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and transcribing the parts I liked. Bummer.

Thanks for the reminder though. :)

We read about the true revolutions that have happened in the past, but we seldom thing about what it is like to go thru them. I am not talking about the "little events" like civil wars, or world wars, or the latest dance craze. I am talking about the true revolutions that took the world as it was known, stood it on its head, shook it around, and transformed it utterly. Think about the transition between hunter gather and agriculture, or from horse and buggy to automobile, or from unicellular life to multicellular life. There was a before, and then there was an after. And oh, what an after! Here is another such revolution happening right under our noses: The demise of public privacy. The formation of various databases has already taken a toll on privacy. Credit reporting agencies track our financial movements, advertisers track our preferences. And soon now, the information from public cameras will track the rest of our life. It has not quite happened yet. As you can see from this article, it took much time and skill to integrate the information and make decisions from it. I am sure that other governments are more advanced than they admit, but it is not *easy* as of yet. But, the times, they are a-changing... We have had the video technology for ages. We are just starting to get the wireless technology right now. What is left? "Just software". As long as there is a desire to do the job, people are going to get the software done. And there are many groups wanting to be able to track public movement. Governments to "protect" us all (Think of the children!), or corporations looking for more marketing insight. Too many people want it to pretend that we can stop it from occurring. Soon, soon now, there will be no public privacy. It will be as unbelievable to our descendants as life without cellular walls or the white out that was used with typewriters. A relic of a bygone age. How long? 10 years maybe. 20-30 years, absolutely. Is it good? Is it bad? Meaningless questions. It is here. And we need to think of the world we want to create in its aftermath. All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. --W. B. Yeats