The Rational Response Squad is giving away 1001 DVDs of The God Who Wasn't There, the hit documentary that the Los Angeles Times calls "provocative — to put it mildly."
There's only one catch: They want your soul.
It's simple. You record a short message damning yourself to Hell, you upload it to YouTube , and then the Rational Response Squad will send you a free The God Who Wasn't There DVD. It's that easy!
(Yea i'm lazy and that was modified copy from their site…)
On September 28th, 2006 habeas corpus died. You've probably heard of habeas corpus, and might even know that it is a very important protection for the citizens of this country. What a lot of people do not know is exactly what it is. If you are detained or brought in for questioning by the police they are only allowed to detain you for a short period of time. If in fact they have not charged you with a crime then your lawyer may submit what is know as a writ of habeas corpus. This states that if you do not intent to charge the person in question then you must release them. This is to prevent authorities from detaining someone indefinately with out charging them. This is to prevent people from being jailed with out being charged and convicted with a crime. So how does this bill suspend habeas corpus? Well if something is not expressly excluded then it is in legal terms it is included. According to the bill (errr…law) enemy combatants are not afforded habeas corpus rights and can be tortured during interrogation. But who exactly constitutes a enemy combatant? Well that my friends is up to President Bush and President Bush alone to determine. Since the wording does not exclude US citizens it could be me, or you, or your parents, siblings, children, yes even your minor children. Anyone in the world can be declared an enemy conbatant by Bush. Since habeas corpus is suspended for these enemy combatants, when they come to take your child away there is little you can do about it. They don't have to tell you where they are taking the person, or what they will do to them, but they are allowed to torture them physically, mentally and sexually. They can keep them detained forever with out ever charging them with a crime and you will never see them again or know what happened to them. This may sound like a bizarre distopian society from a books like "1984", but it's not. It is your world, and if you live in the US then it is your country, and your problem.
It is obvious that our government is no longer looking out for our best interest. Infact they are not just neglecting our interest but infact working in direct opposition to our interest. It is time for the people of this country to take action. The democratic party isn't doing anything. Each day they grow more impotent and powerless against the Bush Regime. The people must effect change!
In case you were not aware http://www.worldcantwait.org is organizing a day of mass protest on October 5th . There will be protest in over 80 cities that day. If your reading this then you probably know me personally. With this in mind please be aware that I will be completely and totally disappointed in you if you do not participate in some way. You don't have to walk out of work or school, but you can go out when your done. You can also help promote the event by printing and handing out fliers at school, in the street, and post them around the neighborhood, stick them on cars, hell, staple it to your forehead if you need to.
Just incase your intelligent here is the information you will need to look up the bills for reference: The House resolution is HR 6166. The Senate bill is S. 3861.
Theme Music:
For the last two weeks or so i've been completely consumed by 9-11. If you had asked me 4 years go where we would be today regarding 9-11, I would have told you that most of the questions would be answered. Some how though, 5 years have slipped by and none of the questions have been answered, and now hundreds more exist. At most we've been given explanations made up of half truths, psuedo-science and out right lies. As more and more time passes I become more and more sure that the only way to effect change is through revolution. So what exactly is a revolution? Lets take a quick look at the definition as it applies to the current subject:
rev‧o‧lu‧tion [rev-uh-loo-shuh
n]
–noun
Here in the United States of America our system of government boils down to a very simple premise. "…of the people, for the people, and by the people." These nine ten word above all else sum up the very essence of our system of government. Lets take a look at these words for a second. Firstly in "…of the people,", of states that the persons making up the body of the government are the same people that the system governs. Second we have "for the people," which suggest that the government exist for the benefit of the people it governs. Finally we have "by the people." which shows derivation, meaning that the people are the source of the government and its direction.
So how exactly does a revolution take place in a country "by the people"? The short answer is that it doens't. The long answer is, technically it can, but why would "the people" want to move away from a system that is designed specifically to benefit and empower them? It is relativly safe to say that so long as the government is of, for, and by the people their won't be a revolution. When the people begin to loose faith in the system that allows them to elect their peers to positions with in the government then it is no longer a government "of the people". When the government begins to eliminate the rights of the people, and shift money from programs that serve the people to the eleet "upper crust" of society it is no longer a government "for the people". When the government is given special privilages over the people the people become disenfranchised and begin to feel that the government is a seperate entity that they have no power over, and it is no longer a government "by the people".
I'll leave you with the following quote from George Orwell's 1984: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
With that in mind go start a revolution!
I think of all of the things about NYC that I miss (other than Mike and Larry of course) I miss Complacent Nation's flash-mob open-source style events the most. Watching all of these people dance to randomly generated live music while constantly moving around the streets of NYC makes me want to cry. Mostly because I know nothing this beautiful, fresh, and spontaneous will ever happen here in Middle Tennessee. 
I was just about the give up my search and delay this project until I had some free time to design something myself. That’s when I stubled on mp[3]act. It looked like a well designed site, which meant the interface for the system would likely be just as nice. I immedeatly dove into the demo site and began poking around. After poking around for a few minutes I had almost forgotten that I was working with it from with in a web browser. After a pleasent few minutes poking about in the demo it was now time for the pre-im-going-to-try-this-out test to determine if it this project was as good as it looked. It was time to look at the package dependancies. I was expecting a sizable hornets nest of difficult to set packages with odd configurations. What I instead got was a simple list of standard LAMP packages, with no special and/or funky setup.
It looks to me, like the perfect solution to my problem. I’ll be setting mp[3]act up this week and detailing my progress in my wiki. Once all is said and done there will be a Ubuntu walk through to follow.
I just stumbled upon this on slashdot.org. DIY Projector Plans released under the Creative Commons License are available via BitTorent download here.
I’ve been quietly watching and fantasizing about building my own projector from inexpensive and readily available components for quite sometime. I remember when I first saw plans like this selling on eBay and wondered if it was really worth it. I was sure that making a projector would be possible, I just wasn’t sure if it was feasible. After reading this PDF I will definitely be taking the next $400-600 dollars of entertainment money from our budget and building one for the second floor in our house.
While reading the document I reached a section that addressed the issues of the LCD usually having only a VGA port style input and most home entertainment devices only having Coaxial, s-video, or Composite outputs. And began chasing ideas of getting a converter, but then remembered that at the heart of my ultimate entertainment center (in my head) lies MythTV and Linux. Then like a little movie all these great little projects began flashing through my mind from years past. Mini ITX motherboards, The Open Embedded Project, various inspiring case mods, projects and tidbits from Make Magazine, my serious lack of experience and know how in electronics. 
So I have decided that this will be the next project I will be working on. I am going to design an all in one DIY Projector and MythTV setup in and self contained unit. In my mind (with only a couple of minutes of casual consideration) it will only require a power cable and a Coaxial cable, although it might also be nice if it had a network cable running to it so that databases and external sources of video and audio are available. It could likely use with a wireless network card, but will have to consider bandwidth utilization of various video and audio formats to see if it can ride on the existing wireless network or should put on a separate wireless network.
Anyway…I will be posting the results of my venture into the DIY Projector/Home Entertainment Center project as I go along. If the successive post suddenly stop then I’m probably having too much fun to post, and if they change direction then my incredibly short attention span is probably being diverted away by my family or something else more interesting at the moment.
I was all excited about wiring my house with CAT5 when I first moved in, and stayed motivated up through getting my first run installed. After that the love affair was over.
Soon after getting the first run installed, I realized that there is no clear or easy path to run the rest of the wire through out the rest of the house. All of the walls that I can reach are insulated, and all of the interior walls that are not insulated are impossible to reach with out pulling out sheet rock and insulation. What to do?
[tangent]Every time I mention this to anyone the first and obvious answer is wireless. Believe me I thought of that already and as a matter of fact that is already capart of the grand scheme. However wireless alone will not be enough. I need more throughput than wireless offers. Not much more but the paltry 10Mbits that 802.11b offers will choke when I’m backing up data or streaming video across the network from say a file server, and/or moving various large files
around such as CD/DVD ISOs. 802.11g would be sufficient @ ~50Mbit, but should an 802.11b device connect to the access point then everything slows down to 10Mbits. I want the network to be as accessible as possible. In order to keep my primary throughput from hitting the floor when an 802.11b device enters the picture, I have decided to get a second access point to serve 802.11b/g and then set the existing access point to only allow 802.11g. Since this helps us avoid a network wide slowdown when an 802.11b device is introduced we have partially solved our problem.[/tangent]
Ok, now that that’s over with lets get back to the original post; running CAT5 through the insulated exterior walls. Ultimately the only major issue with running the cable is getting a run through a single point from the top floor to the bottom floor. Once that is done, I can easily run cable to any point on the first floor via the crawl space under the house. I was thinking that I could use some sort of tube, and feed that down from an accessible point on the top floor down to the an accessible point on the bottom floor. But I’m still not completely convinced that this will work as well as it sounds. I’m also concerned about the network cable running past electrical wires that might cause interference. I suppose I could probably find an insulated tube. In any case it ultimately feels like a hacked up solution. But supposing that this works, and I get the first floor run I still have the top floor to deal with.
Since some of the rooms have zero accessible space around them on all side, and the other rooms have zero accessible space on the walls where I would like to install the cable. Short of re-sheet rocking the offending walls in these rooms and their respective ceilings how would you attack this problem?
