Schizophrenic Link Hopping is where I make you work for your government cheese. Click on a link that interests you. It will open a new window, so you can return to the list easier. Officially, it is topically spawned from You Can't Make This Shit Up (YCMTSU pronounced: ick' em soo). Even though some of it is true, and some of it is just me taking poetic license on reality. Nonetheless, it's a snapshot of the human condition from those trying to live it and probably the reason why God will soon smite us all.
Have you seen this man? Be On the Look Out. He is Clay Walker, Police Chief of Manalapan, Florida. According to a Miami Herald article by Noah Bierman, Walker plans on Manalapan being one of the first cities to use digital cameras with infared technology to capture license plate tags on vehicles passing through his town of 321 of the richest people in the United States. It seems there were several robberies last winter amongst the $500k homes.
Is Manalapan the first of many privacy dominoes to fall? Miami-Dade officials are looking into using it. The VP of the PIPS technology boasts that Palm Beach has been testing its on-street surveillance cameras since December. Even though Tampa Police scrapped their facial recognition system in Ybor City, a local nightclub hotspot, after several years with no arrests attributable to that system:
Police Chief Clay Walker says that if all goes well with the first phase -- placing two cameras on a quiet road that leads to the island's ''point'' neighborhood -- he'll put a camera directly on A1A, so that everyone who passes through the busy area will be recorded.
People in the United Kingdom are used to having cameras trained on them in public places, is this a needed public safety measure that the U.S. will just have to accept?
In it, Terdiman mentions the release of the Simon Wiesanthal Center's annual report, Digital Terrorism and Hate 2004, which the SWC is selling for $20.00 in CD-format. I'm big on free information on the internet, especially if it is important enough, so I'm a littled irked that the SWC expects me to pay for its "report". Other than that, I can't comment on it. All I can do is not give them a free link to their store. Terdiman also quotes an essayist, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, about Newsgaming.com's September 12th game:
the goal of the game is to develop in the player "empathy for the people who will become terrorists out of that experience, of having seen innocent people killed."
Basically, the game goes like this: You're the U.S. military. The terrorists are in the village. You shoot the terrorists and inevitably kill innocent bystanders. Other people in the village see this and then become terrorists, too. The point of the September 12th game is, as near as I can fathom, that you kill Osama and a thousand more take his place.
Empathy is one thing. Teaching your kids that the U.S. military is in a no-win situation while someone's relatives are actually fighting in (Fallujah) Iraq, right now, is up to you. Newsgaming.com also recently released a Madrid game. Its goal is to "homage the victims of the Madrid terror attacks, as well as all the other cities that have experienced these hideous crimes."
While Wardrip-Fruin may be a Brown scholar and believes that the popularity of online gaming may be a way to communicate ideas since the straight-text e-book has flopped commercially for the most part, I partially disagree. Blogs, which are predominately text, have become huge. In addition, while I could perhaps imagine myself having a little empathy for someone's situation, if say, I was reading their Trapped in Fallajuh blog, I think it's in poor taste to turn the War on Terror or the Madrid Bombing into a videogame to begin with. But maybe that's just me.
And finally, I thought games were just supposed to be fun, right?
Furor over media showing flagged draped caskets. Is it disrepectful? Is the Pentagon hiding information from us? Is this White House trying to cover up the numbers of, or the political impact of U.S. forces being killed in an increasingly unpopular war?
Blah, Blah, Friggin' Blah!!!
I found this link on Samizdata (and followed it to a NASA PR):
Bob Jacobs
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-1600)
April 23, 2004
NOTE TO EDITORS : n04-059
Columbia Crew Mistakenly Identified As Iraqi War Casualties
Many news organizations across the country are mistakenly identifying the flag-draped caskets of the Space Shuttle Columbia's crew as those of war casualties from Iraq.
Editors are being asked to confirm that the images used in news reports are in fact those of American casualties and not those of the NASA astronauts who were killed Feb.1, 2003, in the Columbia tragedy.
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts.
News organizations across the world have been publishing and distributing images featured on the web site.
- end -
The web page at memoryhole showing the photos of flagged-draped coffins is dated 22 April 04, and the photos themselves are from a CD of photos sent to memoryhole from Dover AFB:
All photographs showing caskets (or other devices) containing the remains of US military personnel at Dover AFB. This would include, but not be limited to, caskets arriving, caskets departing, and any funerary rites/rituals being performed. The timeframe for these photos is from 01 February 2003 to the present.
So, memoryhole is quite clear about the caskets. It was Fox news (and others) that screwed up.
Welcome to my Sandbox. I appreciate any of you that have gone to the mical.net/sandbox/ site to read Dennis Hooker's free book in PDF file format, and I'm sure he does too. This morning, I got a bright idea. Uh-oh, you say. Well, this one might have worked out for the best for everyone.
When you want to read Sandbox, you can now go to deviantART. I uploaded the four parts of his book that he graciously split it into there. As soon as I hear back from Dennis, I'll turn over the keys to some accounts I had to create in order to accomplish this. That is, if he feels like dealing with feedback about his book. I no sooner finished uploading one of the 'lunchtime-downloadable-parts' of the four parts of Sandbox when other deviants started adding the files and the account to their watch list and favorites list. So, that was pretty exhilirating.
Each part is a zipped PDF file and is only between 150 and 300 KBs, so you can snag and read each one as you have the time to do it.
I hope putting Sandbox there is a good thing. Hopefully, it will give this personally empowering information some added exposure and solve some of the other issues Dennis and I had talked about. Now, not only can people go to the Sandbox site and download it from a fast server, but it will keep track of alot of statistics, and has a nice feedback and commenting function built right in.
