*Transcendental *Logic

Look! The world, at least the outside world, appears distinctly unboring today! Well gee, that’s worth noting…

• Let’s start upbeat, with one of the funniest things you’re likely to run across this week (at least, if you’re a nerd): A bilingual gentleman gets ahold of a copy of Star Wars, Episode III that’s been subtitled by translating into Chinese and then back into English. Poor Anakin may have said “They’re all over me!” in his native language, but apparently what he meant was “They are in my behind!” Don’t read this while drinking anything, or operating heavy machinery…
• Also fascinating is this list of architechtural tricks that stores use to psychology people into buying more stuff. You thought it was an accident that you had to walk through the whole store to get to the milk on the back wall? Oh, you sweet, ignorant thing you…
• Lifehacker has a neat piece on a great alternative to throwing out your worn or broken merchandise — send it back to the manufacturer! Not only do you not have to deal with it anymore, but if you’re a good letter-writer, chances are much better than you think that they’ll send you a new one. (I sent a letter today to SanDisk, asking if they’d replace the plastic cap that fell off the back of my USB drive. We’ll see what happens…but if LifeHacker is right, I should be sending letters a lot more often!)
• Getting rapidly less pleasant but still fascinating in that Jackass-kinda-way, the FCC ordered a study on the effects of media-ownership consolidation destroyed. Hmm, yes. That’s the way to improve things — burn the information! BURN IT ALL!! We don’t need no stinking books besides the Bible, anyway, right?
• Not like I needed convincing after a Diebold e-voting machine was dumpster-dived and cracked, without removing the government “seals”, in four minutes…but University studies have now got the cracking down to one minute, and have developed a “virus” that can spread from machine to machine. Diebold, are you just not trying, or are you harbingers of the New Dictatorship, or stupid, or what?
• The BBC has a good, relatively meaty piece on the fiasco that is the US report on Just How Threatening Is Iran, Anyway — apparently the UN doesn’t want to go along with our propaganda on this one, calling the study “erroneous” and “misleading”. Rats, foiled again!
• And last and not least–at least, not least in importance, but definitely least in terms of Happiness Value — you thought we were out of the woods after the PATRIOT act? Think again — the NSA bill coming before the US Senate soon is just as bad or worse, reports Wired. Not only does it attempt to legalize the obviously-to-a-third-grader-illegal warrantless wiretapping program, but goes further and classifies a whole slew of things that used to be considered surveillance as something else, thus giving the CIA pretty much free reign to sick the Thought Police on the American public. (So this is rather like the “America does not torture, because we’ve redefined torture to exclude everything America does” trick…apparently the government is confident that the American people have the critical reasoning ability of six-year-olds. Pretty soon they’ll start spelling out the long words, and then we’re doomed. ;)

And that’s your Linkage for today. ;)

-PD

This entry was posted 2 years, 2 months ago on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 12:28 pm and is filed under link fodder, nifty things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.