Letter Never Sent

For all you Iain M. Banks fan I have a great link for you. He recently did an interview on the BBC and you can get the entire interview in mp3 format. Or if you’d rather have it streaming. Enjoy. For those of you who haven’t read his work. Get some now. It’s really nice to hear one of your favorite authors in his own voice. He has a great Scottish accent.

I’ve been messing around with my nokia 3390 which in many respects is more like a gameboy/palm pilot than a phone. Just last week I received the data

cable and car charger I had ordered from some place in Hong Kong. The package had some neat Hong Kong stamps on it and a label from Chinese customs.
At first I couldn’t get the damn data cable to work and then after some lenghthy research on the web and trying many different things I finally got everything working. I quickly replaced the standard operator logo with something better using the Logomanager software and I also uploaded some other stuff like ringtones and picture messages. The ability to customize everything is one of the best things about mobile phones. If you’d like to change your phone check out some of these places for stuff:

Arcade Ringtones: replace your boring ring with the theme music from Ms. Pacman

Chewie’s Nokia Bits: More ringtones in rttl format. If you have Logomanager or something similar you can just copy these to Logomanager and then upload to your phone.

Iguana Mobile: actually a lot of places like Iguana Mobile will send logos to you via SMS for a nominal fee. However, Logomanager can do screen captures of the exact dimensions of the logos so I usually just pull up a company like this, find a logo I like, and capture it with Logomanager. That way you get it for free.

An interesting exchange between socialist congressman Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Alan Greenspan. Greenspan reveals a belief in abolishing the minimum wage. Someone throw this guy in the klink or the hoosgow or whatever it’s called now.

It turns out that the recent missile shield test was rigged. The Defense Department equipped the target missile with a GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) beacon. This is essentially the same thing as cops catching a thief that wears a siren and flashing lights. The interceptor was basically led right to it by the missile itself. Why are we spending money on this? Does anyone even want this? It’s a ridiculous and disgusting use of public funds. Evidently this important piece of information was kept secret from the press until a few days ago. Read the full story here at Salon.

Police departments around the country are having trouble hiring cops according to the NY Times, but does anyone care? I know I don’t.

On the subject of Thomas Jefferson again, an nice article on Jefferson’s edit of the bible (great idea). It’s being reprinted by the Unitarian Universalist publishing arm The Beacon Press. Compare it side to side with the King James Version both versions are available online. It occurred to me that in many protestant dogmas the divinity of Christ and the sinfulness and weakness of humanity are doubly emphasized. There’s a relationship between the two. For the purposes of dogma and blind acceptance it’s important to remove Jesus Christ and his message from the province of human understanding. It would be dangerous for people to associate themselves to closely with the person of Christ. So, consequently, the ethics are neglected while the authority of God is affirmed. This would account for the lack of lively discussion at church.

Some Jefferson quotes:

“Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.” –Thomas Jefferson

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
–Thomas Jefferson

Great stuff from cryptome! Just read it…find out what your government is secretly up to. This particular article involves plotting by the CIA and British ‘Intelligence’ MI6 and MI5. According to this American Republicans and covert ops were agitating to have Britain join the NAFTA agreement because they are threatened by the growing power and influence of the European Union. As follows: Of course, at the heart of all this is something more than MI6’s fear of European law, and the legal exposure of its criminality. At the heart of the matter lies a major, geopolitical issue – the Bush administration’s determination to weaken the European Union and kill the euro as an international currency. If the Republicans don’t stop Britain from adopting the euro, there is a clear possibility that the euro will one day replace the dollar as an international currency, and deprive the Republican Party of its preferred method of bankrolling the arms companies that it serves – by printing more dollars. This is another important issue that the media avoid discussing. The euro is a problem not for Britain, but for America. It is America’s battles that are being fought inside the Conservative Party.

I saw Planet of the Apes today. Maybe I went in with too high of expectations, but it wasn’t the summer blockbuster I had been expecting. Even the much lauded makeup work by Rick Baker failed to adequately impress me. The original still beats it out by a huge margin. The Burton ‘reimagining’ was completely forgettable. This seems to be happening with many newer movies, lots of hype but little or no substance. Wait for the video to come out or download it from the internet instead. Actually, the only thing it did for me is make me want to watch the original again.

With the recent arrest and detention of Dmitry Sklyarov by the FBI for violating the DMCA its refreshing to see that some of the founding members of our democracy forsaw some of the problems and issues surrounding copyright. There’s a great article at the MSNBC website about Jefferson’s views and fears regarding copyright. As Jefferson wrote of copyright, “Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” This whole worship of intellectual property is really dangerous to democracy. Hopefully catastrophe can be averted. I was reading this business article at the NY Times and all these corporate execs were getting all worked up about copyright infringement going out of their way to emphasize that people are threatening intellectual property because they’re stealing music and video off the internet. The whole thing is crazy. The business community is so blind.

Find out who’s on the take. Check and see how politicians are lining their pockets. It’s all at opensecrets.org. Just plug in your zip code and find out how your ‘representatives’ are being financed.

Ok, I don’t wanna receive anymore copies of the sircam virus. ok?! Damn people, don’t open attachments that end in .vbs .bat .exe etc. You will eventually infect your system with something nasty. My mom got it and I received an email that said ‘Check out these files. I need some help.’ or something like that. I knew she had a virus. Of course my mom was like, ‘Oh, I have lots of viruses.’ Sheesh.

I found a neat little site today that showcases some good flash animation. There are some nice cartoons done all in Flash. It really shows what you can do with it.

Today the Carabinieri (Italian federal police) killed a protestor and ran over him outside the G8 summit.

It seems like all you ever hear today is bad news. The age old battle between might and right continues on. Paying too much attention can make you really pessimistic and thinking about it too much can make you plain paranoid. In the past few days a lot of things have been happening and I’ve also come across some other interesting news.

I was under the impression that the CIA was prohibited from spying on its own citizens. Evidently this is no longer the case. If THEY decide you’re involved in ‘espionage’ or ‘terrorism’ they can spy on you. The term terrorism is thrown around easily these days. People who have subscriptions to certain magazines are terrorists and individuals who read certain books are terrorists. I wonder if they’ve got a file on me. See, that’s what I mean by paranoid.

By the way, anyone interested in these issues should regularly read Cryptome. It’s a great site on all these issues.

A Russian programmer has been arrested in the US by the lame asses at the FBI. His crime: writing software. Hopefully one day the FBI and other such organizations will be distant bad memories. As an optimist, you have to believe in progress. Anyway, an article about his arrest can be found here and another article at the NYTimes. He was arrested for violating the DMCA, The Digital Millenium Copyright Act, by authoring a program that breaks the encryption on the Adobe E-Book. Here’s a good quote on this subject: Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer who has written a popular textbook on the subject, agreed. “Trying to secure this is like trying to make water not wet,” he said. “Bits are copyable by definition.” Everyone should boycott Adobe, especially their crap e-book that’s sold at Barnes and Nobles.

More evidence of a lack of brain power at the FBI. The Keystone Kops lose their own guns.