by Chris Barrus
From the transcript of Letterman show with Warren Zevon
Dave: what was the diagnosis?
WZ: it’s lung cancer that’s spread.
Dave: that’s tough.
WZ: it means you better get your dry cleaning done on special.
…
Dave: from your perspective now, do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?
WZ: not unless I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich. you know.
For 558 pounds, you can buy this gift-case containing all 92 naturally occuring elements in the Periodic Table — yes, uranium is included.
Provocative Washington Post piece about the privatization of public life, and the shift from being “citizens” to being mere “consumers”.
We are watching the slow-motion collapse of American citizenship. For more than two centuries, ordinary citizens were important actors on this country’s stage. Their vanguard entered political life with a bang in the 18th century, rising up to fire the shot heard ’round the world. Over the ensuing decades, tens of millions more served their revolutionary republic as citizen-soldiers, jurors, taxpayers and citizen-administrators who helped to extend government authority and services across a sparsely populated continent. At the same time, government extended voting rights to citizens once excluded from the electorate.
Now our government no longer needs us. The citizen-soldiers have given way to the professional all-volunteer military and its armada of smart bombs and drone aircraft. The citizen-administrators have disappeared, too, replaced long ago by professional bureaucrats. Americans may still regard each other as fellow citizens with common causes and commitments. But the candidates seeking votes on Tuesday see us as something less: not a coherent public with a collective identity but a swarm of disconnected individuals out to satisfy our personal needs in the political marketplace. We see them, in turn, as boring commercials to be tuned out.
It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there’s no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as “customers” rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.
Yikes! Evan Dorkin has a blog.
Much like how the 1990s were dominated by black consumer technology design (black stereos, black refrigerators, black clock radios, etc.), the first decade of the 21st century will be remembered as the decade of brushed metal and blue LEDs. The metal look has already been around for a couple of years now with the trend towards steel “professional grade” kitchen appliances, car advertisements with silver cars, the Titanium PowerBook I’m typing this ‘blog entry on. Heck even most of the logos on movie posters.
Along with the bare metal, blue LEDs are the other key feature of early 21st century design. Admittedly, they do look very cool, but ten years from now we’ll look back the metal and blue as we do with the black (and impossible to see) stereos from the 1990s. Anyway, Business 2.0 looks at the current reign of blue.
Looking around for some blue here, and all I’ve got handy is the T68i phone which is blue, has blue LEDs, and connects to my computer over, er, Bluetooth.
We’ve all seen the famous “inside the LEM” video of Apollo 11 making the first manned landing on the moon. Here are the other four (doesn’t have Apollo 15 up yet).
From 2600:
As we reported in our current issue, there was a chapter where Mitnick told his own story about his years on the run, his frustration while in prison, and his overall background. In this chapter, he expressed a good deal of anger at the people who helped to capture him and who profited from his story – New York Times reporter John Markoff and computer scientist Tsutomu Shimomura. Before the book hit the stands, a threatening letter was sent to Wiley and Sons (the book’s publisher) by Markoff’s attorneys and the chapter was pulled. (Wiley and Sons claims this action was taken independently of the legal threat.) This, however, occurred after review copies with the chapter were sent out.
Now the chapter has appeared in a public Yahoo! discussion group called kevins_story – accessible at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kevins_story/. We can only guess what will happen next. Ironically, as always, it probably wouldn’t have turned into such a big deal without all the legal shenanigans.
Keep telling yourself it’s only a parody…
Washington DC – The RIAA is lobbying for vendors of CD-RW drives to conduct background checks and require a 3 day waiting period before the drive can be sold.
The extensive background check would include cross referencing credit card numbers with local merchants sales logs looking for purchases of dual-cassette decks between the years of 1980 and 1987. It would also include checking for installation of file sharing software, knowledge of the Internet, and the ability to hum. Any of which would bar the purchaser from receiving his drive.
“A CD-RW can be a dangerous weapon when it falls into the wrong hands,” said RIAA President Hilary Rosen, “You wouldn’t sell a gun to a convicted felon and you shouldn’t sell a CD-RW drive to a Gnutella user. The 3 day waiting period gives us time to verify that no copyrighted material is on the purchasers hard drive and to make sure they have a membership in the Columbia House CD club.”
Of course you knew it was only a matter of time before the advertising industry got hold of the hypersonic directed sound the military was working on.
It’s the most promising audio advance in years, and it’s coming this fall: Hypersonic speakers, from American Technology, focus sound in a tight beam, much like a laser focuses light. … When it rolls out in Coke machines and other products over the next few months, audio quality will rival that of compact discs.