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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

hat trick: my third post to boing-boing this month.
edit: ok, i got scammed a bit. it was viral marketing for some movie that opens tomorrow.

Superhero-shaped UAVs buzz Manhattan

By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Tuesday, Jan 31

These three fellows made superhero-shaped RC airplanes and buzzed New York with them, giving the city the aerial defenders it has dreamt of for so long. Much of the video was recorded with UAV cameras, which makes for dramatic footage.

Flying People in New York City (Thanks, ArbitraryAardvark!)


deleted.


Monday, January 30, 2012

A person may not be detained and required to identify himself. Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 53 (1979) Nor may he be punished for refusing to identify himself..


I keep losing that cite, so now i can search for it in my blog if i need it again.
keywords: arrested for ID

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut/comments/p39js/thug_police_arrest_man_for_recording_legally_in/

http://www.baronbob.com
baron bob's home of the mustache pacifier, the 'stache box, and other cool gifts.
http://www.baronbob.com/human-organ-lunch-tote.htm I used to actually carry these when i was a courier.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky,
Authorship, Audiences, and Anonymous Speech, 82 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1537,
1561 n.127 (2007).
(cited in dissent to a tenth circuit (colorado case) upholding the stolen valor act; that is, the case held that the government can outlaw false speech, an obviously wrong conclusion. (obvious to everyone except eugene volokh.)

Sunday, January 22, 2012

today i got a story picked up by boingboing, but it's a more important story than last time (which was about how to win carny games.)

22
Click here to find out more!
Foreign journalist claims corruption, brutality, death threats from Japanese airport officials

By Cory Doctorow at 12:16 pm Sunday, Jan 22




Christopher Johnson, a Canadian journalist residing (until recently) in Japan published a ghastly account of his return to Tokyo after a short pre-Christmas trip. He was flagged at the border (he implies that this is related to his coverage of Fukushima), held, threatened, and shaken down for bribes before being detained without counsel or a phone call. He says he was eventually deported, though not before being ordered to sign a falsified confession and being threatened by an official at gunpoint, who demanded that he purchase a hyper-inflated plane ticket, which, Johnson believes, included a kickback for the official.

This time, he came back with a young, stocky guy. He was wearing a blue uniform. “Do you see this gun?” he said in Japanese, turning around to show me a weapon in its holster. “I have the legal authority to use this if you refuse to get on that flight. Now are you going to buy that ticket?”

I was angry now. They are forcing me at gunpoint to buy an overpriced ticket.

The [guards] ushered me out of the room and through the airport. They still had my bag, my passport, my wallet, credit cards, everything. I had no choice. They whisked me through the airport like a criminal. I didn’t have to line-up for x-ray machines or immigration. [They] pushed me through VIP lines, ahead of pilots and flight attendants.

Japan's outsourced airport detentions operation is the subject of its own Amnesty International report.

Gulag for gaijin (Thanks, arbitraryaardvark!)

(Image: Immigration, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bryansblog's photostream)

the comment thread is very hostile and skeptical, but i'm still glad i got some extra coverage for the story.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

My internet connection isn't working right today. So I figured I'd grab something I could read offline. This is a new computer since I last downloaded Lewis Shiner's novels. I had to google for my own blog entry to find where those were, and while there I read his autobio.
One of these days I want to write my own, even though I don't write well and I'm not famous, not having done anything worthwhile. Maybe 5 people will read it; it will be mostly for myself. Like this blog; I have no reason to think anyone reads this except the 5000 people a year who wind up here by mistake from google searches. (Another blog I had last year got 250,000 hits before wordpress killed it for being too pornographic.) I use these sidebar links all the time; this is more of a homepage than a blog.

mark your tools.
this has been on my to-do list for a while.

Friday, January 20, 2012

http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-What-Want-Girls/dp/145632764X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326738731&sr=8-1
11 year old self-publisher, "how to get what you want for girls."

Sunday, January 15, 2012


http://www.stansberryresearch.com/pub/reports/201112PSI_issue.html


Saturday, January 14, 2012

i got a thing about carnies, that i found on reddit, posted on boingboing.
i got something about ron paul coming in second in new hampshire - on the democratic side, posted to ballot access news.

monday is the night of january 16th. have an ayn rand party.


HOWTO beat carny games

By Cory Doctorow at 6:02 am Saturday, Jan 14

Mark's written about winning rigged carny games before, and now the Art of Manliness has a nice little guide to winning five midway challenges, including the secrets behind them (for example, the milk-can has a collar welded around the inside of its mouth that makes it just a few millimeters bigger than the ball you're tossing) and strategies for beating them.

The secret to winning Milk Can is to give the ball a bit of backspin and hit the back of the can’s rim. The backspin will decrease the ball’s momentum, and instead of bouncing off the can, it will slide into the hole. Easier said than done, of course!


Ron Paul Placed Second in New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary
January 12th, 2012

On January 12, the New Hampshire Secretary of State posted election returns on his web page from the January 10 presidential primary. It is the custom in New Hampshire to count write-ins in the Democratic presidential primary received by all candidates who appeared on the Republican presidential primary ballot, and vice versa. No tally is made for write-in candidates who were not on any party’s presidential primary ballot.

The returns for the Democratic primary can be seen here. Ron Paul received 2,273 write-ins in the Democratic presidential primary, so he placed second in that primary behind President Obama, and ahead of the other thirteen candidates whose names were printed on the Democratic ballot. No one will ever know how many write-ins Hillary Clinton received, since her votes weren’t tallied because she wasn’t on any 2012 primary ballot in New Hampshire. But, the total number of write-ins for people who weren’t on any primary ballot, in the Democratic race, was only 759, so obviously Clinton received a smaller number than 759. Mitt Romney placed third in the Democratic primary, with 1,808 write-ins. Thanks to Robbin Stewart for this news.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/313732/sin-city
http://www.hulu.com/watch/313731/gangs-of-new-york
http://www.hulu.com/watch/313729/rabbit-proof-fence
http://www.hulu.com/watch/314877/supercop
http://www.hulu.com/watch/313726/ame%CC%81lie
http://www.hulu.com/watch/313190/midnight-express
http://www.hulu.com/watch/311372/ramayana-the-epic
http://www.hulu.com/watch/306482/velvet-goldmine

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/07/080107fa_fact_elliott

I enjoyed this new yorker article about human guinea pigs, since that's something I do.
It was mentioned in a book i'm reading "here is a human being: at the dawn of personal genomes" that my brother sent me for christmas,along with the latest grisham.
It's about a guy who had his genome decoded and made public, something I'm interested in myself. I figure if I knew my DNA, my guinea-pigging could be more medically valuable, especially if I can recruit a cadre of other guinea pigws to also get this done. I have mentioned it in conversation with the guy who runs the jasper clinic in kalamazoo, but not really sold him on the idea.

Sunday, January 01, 2012

Today 77 yen will get you a dollar. 1/1/2012.
Wonder what it will be this time next year.
Gold today is at $1564.
A euro, near colapse, will get you $1.30, about the same as usual.

slashdot skyping orangutans story for maria

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