First, I'd like to give special thanks to I/Oerror who's been keeping a hawk's eye on this. I found a couple of the articles for this post on his Twitter feed during my daily news crawl. I wish I had the time to dedicate to scanning feeds constantly for stuff like this.
I haven't been posting about this for two reasons: first, because hearing that stuff like this is going on within the United States of America to decent people who haven't done anything upsets me greatly. There is simply no reason to mistreat people like this, all it …
A couple of years back the Transportation Security Agency started deploying full body scanners at some airports around the country which use millimeter wave radar to scan travelers and show them as if they were nude (note: actual image, NSFW) to ensure that they weren't concealing anything under their clothes. Nevermind the fact that they utterly failed in the practicals, but never let it be said that a little thing like "it doesn't do what we want it to" stops a government project. Needless to say this has many people upset and has even resulted in no small amount of …
The only thing that Java coders spend more time on than the user interface is the code in the installer that detects which variant of the JRE you're running and errors out because there are three extra characters in the canonical name of the JRE binary? Wasn't the whole point of Java to have a language that could be implemented everywhere and execute in any runtime environment that adhered to the spec?
Unless you're dealing with the federal government, it has long been a given that the police can't enter and search the place you live without a properly filed and signed search warrant, as guaranteed by the fourth amendment to the US Constitution, which reads thus: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The DC metroplex is the only place I've seen to date in which the following sequence of events can occur within sixty seconds:
A woman with a handicapped parking tag in the rear window of her Volkswagon Beetle (new school) pulls into a handicapped parking space outside of a small deli.
A young man driving a Corvette slams to a halt directly behind the Volkswagon approximately four seconds after the woman shuts her engine off.
The young man in the Corvette (sans handicapped tag or license plate) begins to hammer on his horn with the vigor of a bandolier of …
One of the cornerstones of the Internet is making information available to whomever wants it for low or no cost. Case in point, the TCP/IP stack within the operating system you're now running to read this post was probably originally posted to the Internet better than twenty years ago under the BSD license. In fact, if you dig around inside the "About.." panes of Windows chances are you'll find that little block of text (at least, everything up to Windows 2000 had it, it's been a couple of years). The fan cultures that many of us partake of grew …
You know, one of these days Lyssa is going to walk into my office and find me stone dead, keeled over my laptop clutching my chest, possibly with blood streaming from my nose and mouth and steam spraying wildly from my ears.
Last last month and early this month, a disturbing amount of WTF appears to have been cropping up around the country. While that shouldn't really surprise anyone as it seems like a common state of mind anymore, I still find it fascinating in the "Wow, that's how they cut someone out of a wrecked car?" way.
Not long after moving to DC I gave up on the concept of going to gathers organized by users of meetup.com for a variety of reasons. Most of them involved never being able to find the agreed-upon locations of things that I'm interested in, though a few factor in getting there so late that everybody'd already gone home. Needless to say, after a few such fuckups I decided that it was more interesting to do other things. A couple of years later (but about two weeks ago) Jason asked in passing that he'd found a meetup called Chaos In …
