So, do you know where the $18-$25 you pay to buy a CD is going? If you haven’t been keeping up with the fight against payola, well, now you do. Sony has fessed up, and admits that they bribed several radio stations and their employees to add their bubblegum-pop crap that no one would otherwise listen to to their playlists. And damn, how they bribed:
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They screwed up
An unheard-of series of terrorism-related events has result in an unheard-of action taken by police in London: they fire five shots at a suspect at point blank range, and we mean point blank: according to witness, the muzzle was held against the suspect as he was on the ground, and the trigger was pulled. Five times.
“As he sort of went down, two of them sort of dropped on to him to hold him down, and the other one fired. I heard five shots.”
In a place where police officers normally aren’t armed to begin with, this is a lousy way to start using firearms for anti-terrorism measures.
And what’s worse? Police could not find a link between the suspect and the bombings, nor did he have any explosives. Fantastic.
The long, strange road back to DSL
Those of you patient enough to regularly check this site have seen my ongoing frustration with Comcast High Speed Internet and their constant issues. Being a net junky, I just can’t get by without some form of high speed data service… I simply feel naked without it. This isn’t a good feeling when your cable modem constantly fizzles out on you when you so much as beam negative thoughts towards it. Finally, after yet another particularly long net outage, I gave up on cable, and decided, after a long, thought-to-be-permanent departure, to give DSL a try.
Got a stash? Drive a car!
Starting tomorrow, civil liberties are going to be cut back just a little further in New York as mass transit riders will be subject to random bag searches, as a direct result of the second attack on the London underground.
While I agree that such a measure might be prudent, for now, there is the standard objection that I have whenever this country engages in such “stepped up safety measures.” Of course, with any new measure to combat terrorism comes the convenient advantage that law enforcement gains in using their new powers to fight non-terrorism related crimes:
Kelly said passengers selected for searches will be approached by officers, who will ask them what they are carrying, and request them to open their bags. If an officer looking for explosives finds some other form of contraband, police said that person would be subject to arrest.
So if you have ANYTHING in your carryables that you want kept private – the stash of weed, the MP3 player with “illegal” MP3s, the embarrassing spare set of undies that may or may not already be used – you best keep it off the subway, buses or commuter trains from now on.
Seems like the terrorists don’t need to attack the subways here. Law enforcement is encroaching on our way of life just fine, thank you very much.
I wonder how long it will be until mandatory car searches become the norm?
I want this. More than anything.
The Optimus keyboard. Still in the concept/design phase, but imagine a keyboard where every key is user or application-definable, and is a display in itself. The images on the keys change depending on language settings, or what they control in a particular application.
VERY nice. Supposed to exist sometime in 2006. We’ll see if that actually happens.