The first steps to Johny Five.

iRobot's PackBot Explorer to hit the war-torn streets: "

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard much about iRobot’s
PackBot—we understand they’ve been busy making those things that have been scrubbing and vacuuming our floors—which since we first checked it out over a year ago has since been recruited by the armed forces for Iraqi and Afghani military ops. Their latest version of the PackBot, the Explorer, doesn’t seem too different from the original modular machine, but has a variety
of surveillance and intelligence options including three cameras. Well, nice to check in and hear it’s doing well for itself—just don’t get all blowed up, ok PackBot?





[Via SpaceDaily]

(Via engadget.com.)

Oops

Apparently, Commerce bank has moved the last time to deposit a check so that it clears the next morning from 3pm to 6pm.

This I find out after a ten block sprint at ten to three.

New York City needs one of these. Damn you Seattle.

When a Treo 650 connects to a web server, this is the ID it sends:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/hspr-H102; Blazer/4.0) 16;320x320"

Windows 98?

male angst on craig's list

Laura sent this along to me...

-=-=-=-

-=-=-

From:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/rnr/81550467.html

 

Re; Men Don't Know What They Want - Here's Why

---

Reply to: anon-81550467@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-06-29, 3:06AM PDT


Brilliant best of for the day.
---------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: anon-81548932@craigslist.org
Date: 2005-06-29, 2:07AM PDT


It's not the 1950s anymore. You are the new Modern Woman, and that means you're entitled not to marry the first man that shows interest in you. Fair enough, but what does that mean? Think of every guy that's ever shown interest in you. And interpret the word 'interest' loosely - whether he casually asked you out after school, wrote you a 14-page sonnet for Valentine's Day, or grabbed your ass at the bar. it's interest, isn't it? Think about how many of those guys you reciprocated interest in. Well, it couldn't have been that many, otherwise you'd be having sex with every guy that grabbed your ass, which I doubt is the case.


But rewind a bit, think about when you first started dating, not too long after the cooties stage. When Johnny the quarterback asked you out, weren't you thrilled? He had gorgeous eyes and a brilliant smile and he was the perfect boyfriend. until you found out he was dumb as a box of bricks. Well, Johnny didn't seem so perfect after that, and maybe you realized being hot wasn't the only thing you should look for in a guy.

So eventually you looked for your intelligent stud, shooting down other suitors who were otherwise physically attractive but dumb as posts, and finally found him in your college English class. Owen was a nice guy, he wrote incredible poetry and flattered you with his verses, but he was kind of a pussy. In fact, he was completely a pussy. He hated parties and thought binge drinking was "the bane of our generation" and basically seemed like he was already thirty-five years old. Well, you weren't 35 yet, so maybe it was time to find a fun guy. Owen might have made a good boyfriend for a girl someday, but you weren't that girl, and it wasn't someday yet.

You found Mr. Fun Guy at the frat party you went to that night. It took you awhile before you started talking to Mr. Fun Guy, known as 'Mike' to his friends and 'Shithead' to his fraternity brothers. He was actually a lot more intelligent than you thought, drunkenly yet coherently rambling on about George W. Bush and his corrupt foreign policy plans. And obviously he was fun, as he easily socialized with everyone in between his sixth and seventh keg stand. So you were thrilled when Mike gave you his attention, so thrilled that you gave him head that night.

And then you found out why he was called Shithead. You thought maybe it was some gross story involving actually feces, but the truth was much more disgusting:

"Well, most girls end up thinking he's a shithead, actually."

The next party you saw Mike at, his arm was wrapped around some other girl. Mike was a player. Well, fuck that shit. Fuck that shithead. If you just wanted ass, you could've gotten it from the other six or seven guys that hit on you that night. You really liked him, and you promised yourself then that you'd never give another guy head unless it was clear he really liked you too.

And so college ends and you take your degree and you go off to law school, like the other hordes of college students who don't know what to otherwise do with their lives. That's when you meet Trent, a different kind of flavor than the guys you're usually into, with the vintage jeans and piercings and tattoos. But Trent, well, he's hot and he's smart and he's fun, so you give him a chance even as all the other hipster/alternative/grunge/punk guys that have hit on you and fail whine, "that's not fair!"

Trent's smart, easily able to shift his expert opinion from subjects ranging from music to. well, music. But, well, he kind of has this problem with ambition. As the cliché goes, he smokes a lot of weed and he doesn't realty have a job, aside from selling the weed he has that he manages not to smoke. And sure, it's so superficial to care about income and you don't want a sugar daddy, but. well, it's about time you start thinking about the future, right? You don't want a family now, but you know you will someday, and seeing as you're going through grad school to ensure your future, shouldn't your future husband?

So, see ya Trent. And yeah, almost everyone in your law school classes have tried to make a pass at you, and you finally relent and date Curtis. Curtis is intelligent on every level you care about, he's socially capable and a great conversationalist with you and everyone you know, and obviously he has ambition if he's in law school. Great guy, except. he's not hot. He's just not. He's not hideous, but you admit to yourself that a physical connection is important, and maybe you're not as superficial as men tend to be, but you can't ignore the fact that you like a lean body and nice eyes. You know, like Johnny.

Where am I going with this?

This doesn't happen with men. We're not constantly being approached; we're doing the approaching. If you go on five dates, that probably meant you rejected forty other guys. You shouldn't be forced to date every guy you meet, especially when you determined they're just going to be another Johnny/Owen/Mike/Trent/Curtis, and you know it didn't work out with them.

But us? Well, we're usually one of the forty, and even if we're one of the five, we usually still end up dumped anyway. So seeing as we're being rejected 80-90% of the time, how the hell are we in any position to have any standards? How the fuck do we know what we want? When we show interest in girls that meet some very basic criteria, a girl that we find attractive, and maybe on a particularly picky day, a girl we can stand talking to for more than five minutes, and we're still getting rejected eight out of ten times. well, Jesus Christ. It's no wonder we think with our penis. Our brains can't think, because it has nothing to base thinking on.

So this is what happens to guys like me. We meet a girl that we find attractice and cool, and we want to date her. And lo and behold, she's the rare ten percent that want to date us. But then down the line other factors come into play. Maybe this particular girl is also pothead deadbeat, or we find out "cool" and "smart" are sometimes exclusive qualities, or maybe she just likes to stay in all the time and be boring. We don't find this out until weeks, or maybe months down the line, and that's when we realize "hey, maybe this isn't going to work out."

Ah yes, and the famous "fear of commitment" line comes out. Men are constantly backing out of relationships within weeks or months, before it gets serious, because of some innate inability to engage in a serious relationship. Except it has nothing to do with fear of commitment, we simply don't want to commit to someone we're not interested in. And unlike women, we don't get a chance to even figure out what we like, and what we don't like, because we're getting shot down all the goddamn time.

Oh, and we become "assholes" too, because during these weeks or months when we're trying to figure all this out, we're having sex. God forbid.

 

And now the Times comes out too against the new Freedom Tower design.

Church & State discussed by NYU law prof Noah Feldman.

He defines two very useful terms: legal secularism, and values evangelism.

He argues that both of these, the current opposing sides in the debate, are insufficient to resolve the crisis.

A critique of New York.

Would the Right Honourable Jedi MP please stand up.

Summer camp for atheists

This sounds like an excellent addition to Hindu Summer Camp.

Seriously.

Let me be the first to say it: The new World Trade Center / Freedom Tower design is crap.

Let me think of the words and phrases this design invokes:

Boring.

Suxor.

Now even more Libeskind free.

Phallic.

-=-

Where's the ground breaking awe inspiring science to make this a beautiful jaw dropping technical marvel?

I want columns of standing high energy sound waves playing their part in creating structural integrity fields.

I want a building twice as high as the old one, at 220 stories.

If not, I want a tower 1787 feet high. Enough about the Declaration, let it reflect the Convention. After all, everybody declares independence.

I want Curves.

I want Gargoyles.

And nanotech.

Worldchanging technology.

And Lasers.

Ok. Maybe not lasers.

With billions of dollars at stake, the visions from the competition to create the a new design for the world trade center have clashed with other more recent requirements, such as emergency service and office space considerations.

And once again, we are left with a shadow of what might have been.

To what might have been.

By the way, has anybody noticed how damn good Wikipedia's article on Roe v Wade is?

I'm getting sick of people quoting the law without understanding it at all. (I'm guilty as charged too.)

Federal jurisdiction has long been extended beyond simple control over interstate matters, with or without congressional bullying by threats to withhold hundreds of millions in highway funds to non compliant states. The Civil Rights Acts in the 60s affected businesses with no interstate commerce links. You can imagine how little influence those laws would have had in instances where a restaurant was being forced for the first time to serve black patrons in states that vehemently legislated otherwise.

Generally, people tend to wring their hands over federal interference in state affairs and smoke the federalism pipe when they don't agree with federal policies and vice versa.

Journalist's blog documents DEA's war on California: "Cory Doctorow:
My friend Ann Harrison is covering the ongoing skirmishes in the drug war in California. The state of California has legalized growing and distributing pot to people who have medical marijuana prescriptions, but the DEA has begun to arrest these people on federal charges (despite the fact that federal laws only have jurisdiction over interstate matters, so pot grown and distributed in California is outside the DEA's jurisdiction).

The DEA is conducting this war like a guerrilla attack on the people of California. Private citizens who record their busts from public sidewalks are assaulted by DEA agents who try to erase their camera-memory. The press-conferences are closed to the public. The dispensary raids concentrate on computer records of patients and growers, and many of those arrested face ten-year minimum sentences.

Ann is bent on blowing the lid off of this. While the stories she files with newspapers get trimmed to 'news haiku,' on her blog she's publishing transcripts of the secret press-conferences, information on the use of local law to do the Feds' bidding, and the myriad ways that the DEA is cooking the process to wage its war on Americans.

Q: Does the California law that permits patients to use medical cannabis have any bearing at all on protecting the medical cannabis dispensaries?

Pena: Before I answer that question, one thing, and I think it is really important that I forgot to mention and I think it's a public concern. On these three grow locations that we visited, they all had illegal wires tapping into PG&E the outlets all over the houses, very unsafe. I'm sure that you have heard of the situations were houses have been burning down, this causes a great deal of concern for us.

Like I said once you see that CD which we are handing out you will see the wiring system which is what causes the fires that were all contained in the three different areas that we went to. So this is how some of our houses are getting burned down.

What is your question again?

Link"

(Via Boing Boing.)

So that's what bills of attainder are.

One party state watch: Congressional...: "

One party state watch: Congressional Republicans warn Major League Baseball against allowing George Soros to take an ownership stake in the Washington Nationals.

Roll Call reports that the following from Government Reform Chair Tom Davis (R-VA): 'I think Major League Baseball understands the stakes. I don't think they want to get involved in a political fight ... I don't think it's the Nats that get hurt. I think it's Major League Baseball that gets hurt. They enjoy all sorts of exemptions' from anti-trust laws.

Do these jokers need to be reminded of the constitution's prohibition of bills of attainder.

"

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Apparently Bush the younger was on television tonight attempting to link Bin Laden to Iraq.

Meanwhile, Canada has legalized Same Sex Marriage.


Also, has anybody else noticed the story about General Motors Management not being allowed to sell purchase or sell shares in GM, the policy to last indefinitely?

history

I met somebody today who used to own an Apple Lisa.

Do you have any idea how expensive those were?

Google introduced Video.google.com today.

You can apparently search for video, and play it using a slightly updated version of VLC .0.8.2 (which came out yesterday.)

The version that Google puts up for download is for windows only, and uses ActiveX.

I have bacon in the freezer I really should be "taking care" of pretty soon.

This device sounds great. How is the bacon cooled overnight though? Perhaps a nice modification would be a connected tank of Liquid Nitrogen to make sure that the bacon sits nice and cool.

Wake n' Bacon: wake up and smell the... bacon?: "src="http://img.engadget.com/common/images/3868866987697409.jpg?0.44719566945168576" align="top" border="1" height="163" hspace="4" vspace="4" width="420" />

There are oh so many ways to bring home that bacon, but only a precious few to get those lovely saturated fats ready
for your system. But thanks to the Wake n’ Bacon, now you too can shave a few steps off your morning process while also
managing to add a little oily greasiness to your environs. As soon as your alarm goes off, boom, halogen lamp broils
you up some bacon in about 20 minutes no problem—just don’t keep smacking the snooze button, or you might wind up with
some seriously charred remains.



[Via Near Near Future]

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"

(Via engadget.com.)

The question of whether we are spending enough money to protect the troops in Iraq can best be described by asking the question, "Do American Government officials travel in US Military vehicles when traveling in Iraq?"

The Answer.

Air Guitar World Championships.

There are videos.

Does the use of the phrase "London-Rome Axis" bother anybody else?

If I didn't have dinner plans, I would be here:

Giant Robot: "

Today, the store Giant Robot, known in L.A. and San Francisco for its selection of cool toys, books and clothes (hello, Mr. Dob), opens a New York location - Giant Robot New York - in the East Village. And tonight, there's an opening reception from 6-10PM, with sponsors like Dumpling Man, Glaceau, Uglydoll and Matador/Beggars (we suspect there will be eats, good tunes, and, hopefully, a lifesize Jeero!)! Plus, the artwork of Eishi Takaoka (whose sculpture is on the cover of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore) will be displayed for through July.

Giant Robot

437 East 9th Street

Between 1st Avenue and Avenue A

"

(Via Gothamist.)

Here and Now

Here and Now
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

David Enders (on the left), before another trip to Baghdad.