usernamenumber | May. 9th, 2005

May. 9th, 2005

Sand sculptures. Wow. Just... wow. And more here.

Current Mood: envious

0467839 ended a recent post with "YOU CAN'T WATCH FAMILY GUY ON A POEM... ARGHHHH..." (context here), which got me thinking...

www.text-image.com can accomplish miracles. =:)

All I have to do is animate it. *grin*

On the subject of the Real ID thing (thanks to those who replied), the most interesting discussion that I've seen on the subject is here at security guru Bruce Scheiner's blog (which I found via Wil Wheaton-- sometimes I just love the internet). The article is Scheiner's arguments against the bill, which are a lot more coherant than the stuff at unrealid, but the really interesting stuff is in the comments where there are a number of well thought out back-and-forths by proponents of both sides. In particular the comments by Jarrod, Cypherpunk and Henning Makholm (insert grumbling about not being able to link to specific comments here) all tended to echo my thoughts from the previous post so the responses to them were interesting (and surprisingly civil!).

I'm still convinced that this is hardly the totalitarian power play it's being made out to be, but the practical concerns raised, like the cost of implementation, whether it provides any real security enhancement (even if it doesn't, though, it would still make IDs harder to fake), the possibility of later mandating RFID for the IDs and the lack of privacy guidelines for retained proof-of-identity documents, make it easier for me to think of this as a bad idea.

I just read another disturbing bit here, which I was linked to by

dfn_doe. It's in an earlier section, so I hadn't paid it as much attention, but it bascially says that the Secretary of Homeland Security can, at his sole discression, waive any laws that he deems "necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section". Umm... the hell? Please someone tell me that doesn't actually mean that the secretary can say "I deem it necessary to repeal Roe v. Wade in order to construct this road". I mean, it's ludicrous of course, but with "sole discression", who's to stop him? It doesn't help that the very next clause prohibits judicial intervention of any kind in the Secretary doing exactly what he wants persuant to the previous clause. Now that's scary (I wrote the bit about being convinced that it's not a toalitarian power play before reading it).

So yeah, someone please tell me I'm misunderstanding this. Maybe my dad's right. Maybe I should go into law. Sometimes I think it's the only way I'm ever going to understand what the hell is going on.

Oh, and I'm _still_ totally confused as to whether or not this thing is still attached to the emergency spending bill.

...which, I just read in trying to find the answer to that question, has passed by a landslide even though everyone was saying the vote would be on Tuesday. Maybe it's a different spending bill. For what it's worth, the text of the passed bill seems pretty to-the-point and ammendment-free.

*sigh*. Two nights in a row spent researching this stuff. Why is it that the more open and transparant our system is the more powerless I feel? I know the answer to that is "because you've never lived under the thumb of a truly opressive regime", but it still feels good to ask.

Current Mood: I need new mood icons
Current Music: The super mario bros theme in my head for some reason

Addendum: How the hell did people get anything done in the days before the intarweb?

Wow, the new Doctor Who series makes me so happy. They've done some things that I'm not crazy about, but even those I have to admit they've done really well. A while ago I read an article by someone who had previewed the sixth episode, Dalek, and said that it was not just the best Dalek episode ever, but also one of the best DW episodes period. Then, a few days after it came out a friend of mine, who is the only person I know who (that I am aware of) knows as much or more about that show than I do, said the same thing. I just got around to watching it, over a week after it came out, and damn, it was good. Without giving anything away let me just say that in some ways it was another instance of them doing something that, had it simply been outlined to me, I would have thought was an awful, awful idea. But they actually did it really well. Then I watched the 7th ep, which just came out, and it has Simon Pegg (the guy from Spaced and Shawn of the Dead) as the villain! Huzzah! Simon Pegg makes me so very, very happy (thanks again to

mlechan for introducing me to him) and his performance was delightful. I mean, come on,

Aaawww yeah!

If any of you are into Doctor Who and haven't seen it yet, head over to tvtorrents.com and check it out (damn you DW for not being legitimately available out here!!). I am really, really starting to love Eccleston's Doctor and Rose is already one of my favorite companions. I was talking to

heiligekuh recently about how, during college, I thought I'd grown out of the show. Everything needed to be serious, hard science fiction and even at its best Doctor Who was pretty fluffy. But the new series has really reminded me of why Doctor Who is such a fun show, even when it isn't necessarily good sci-fi. Like early Red Dwarf it is a character-driven show where the plots are only there to give a cast of well-chemistried, interesting characters a premise around which to interact. It's especially interesting when there's a fun villain like Pegg (damn them all forever if they don't bring back my beloved Master... in fact, make Pegg the next Master, that would be fantastic!).

The character-driven elements of the show have been helped by the fact that throughout the new series (but especially in the last several episodes) Eccleston and the writers have shown a real understanding of what makes the Doctor work: He's fanatically idealistic and yet arguably the wisest being in the universe. Literally no one knows better than him how utterly meaningless and doomed every cause that he fights for is and yet he holds himself to perfection. Failure eats away at him because to do anything less than succeed is to be party to destruction, to the unthinkable for an idealist. ( minor spoiler for Dalek ). The Doctor has been around off-and-on for over forty years and 9 personas. But despite this, the Doctor is not really a complex character. Really, he's kind of simple and that's the appeal. You can get the gist of him in an episode, but the more you've seen, the more things like his "I tried!" line in the pilot mean to you.

And yes, before anyone tells me, I know I'm making to much of this, that the show isn't *that* good, but there's something about it that always leaves me feeling really positive, so I wanted to share. And there it is.

/fanboy

Edit:
Another great thing the new series has brought with it: icons (none of which are mine, I just like them). =:)