h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Spellcheck" also gets flagged as wrong, as do the letters in most smileys. I just thought of another excuse for mental dysfunction: I'm a Bostonian.

Well, i dunno. You lot carping on about 'twixt-ears porridge. Come here & meet an expert and I'll introduce you to my personal physic-Ian. He's standing by awaiting delivery of my evening tonic...

I don't understand you, and you don't understand me. That's a given.

According to my local newspaper, an eyewitness said that the suspects in the bombing weren't sure whether it was permissible for them to drive their car out of Massachusetts and into New York State. I can't imagine a native-born American wondering such a thing.

The farther away you are from your own country, the harder it is to figure out what one is expected to do, and what other people mean when they say or write things. It used to be called Culture Shock. Maybe it still is.

There was a comment earlier about what constitutes terrorism. It seems many things do -

"Tamera Jo Freeman was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled a Bloody Mary into her lap. She spanked each of them on the thigh with three swats... A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor. The incident aboard the Frontier flight ultimately led to Freeman's arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act"

http://www.latimes.com/la-na-airline-felonies20-2009jan20,0,5183005.story

Meanwhile, people who really *are* planning serious harm go undetected until it's too late.

As with a lot of reporting about legal issues, the article seems to be incomplete and inaccurate. I didn't see anything in the artciel that sourced anything that has to do with terrorism. When I started searching for other information about it, I found that someone had already written what I probably would have written about it (Although it's much longer than what I would have written):

http://www.popehat.com/2009/01/22/2793/

Reporters and editorial writers often use too broad a brush in order to make things more interesting than they really are (or they're ignorant). It looks like the lady wass drunk and causing a scene. There's a point at which outrageous behavior can no longer be tolerated, and if you're on a plane, you get locked up for Interfereing with a Flight Crew.

It's not directly on point, but there are other things that sound like they might refer to terrorism but they acutally aren't. In Georgia, we have a crime called Terroristic Threats and Acts. It sounds pretty bad, but it actually describes a variety of activity including threateneing a person with an act of violence, yelling fire in a crowded theater, cross burnings, and throwing objects at a vehicle on the highway. Some of that's pretty minor and other parts are pretty scary acts that might by considered terrorism.

I read news from a lot of sources, but you have to be really skeptical. A lot of media sources are pushing an agenda or at least have some sort of bias. In the rush to get to some sort of story in print or on the air, fact checking might not be very thorough.

NPR, on of the few sources that I trust to work hard to get things right (even if they do seem pretty liberal to me) has run some interesting stories on the media and how they get things wrong, and how those incorrect impressions affect our views over the long term.

Thanks for the link, Two Bit.

Interesting piece - thanks two bit

Several different newspapers mentioned yesterday that surveillance cameras are being touted as a means of detecting would-be crimes, including terrorist acts. How far this will go depends on the general public's acceptance of eroding levels of privacy.

the and council had to remove CCTV cam's from a towns area (can't remember where)because it was a predominately Muslim area, privacy etc was the reason

Were they government-owned cameras? Private companies [stores, for instance] often have surveillance cameras to prevent theft. What happens, though, is that when a crime is committed, the police have to get the stores'permission to scrutinize the security tapes.

government we have them all over the place now, but some still moan about intrusion etc. But as we say! if you ain't got nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear etc

That's a lame argument.

I personally have no objections if cameras are about or not. Every things monitored one way or another nowadays. Call it big brother or whatever, wait while everyone gets bar-coded or the like - sci-fi going mad as per

Private citizens often use their cell phones to take pictures. This drives some celebrities crazy -- Owen Wilson, for instance, who gets nervous when he's walking down the street and passes young women talking on their cellphones. Are they going to take his picture as soon as he passes them>

If you want privacy, go inside. If you're out where the public can see you, you're rolling the dice.

Frankly, there's so much information that's out there that most stuff is lost in all the chaff. Having tried to deal with the challenges of managing that data in a way that's meaingful and in compliance with federal regulations, it's enough to make you want to throw up your hands.

It's so disheatening to watch TV and see all the things they have and then go to work and see the tools we have to work with. So far, I've only seen one thing that's anything close to being like they have on TV. Stilll you wind up with a data management issue afterwards. What do you with it all? How do you make it useful? How do you protect information from disclosure?

Every day the matter of the Marathon bombings gets stranger. Now the Boston Globe is reporting that there are many in Russia who think the Tsarnaev brothers are innocent victims of an attempt to frame them. But in Massachusetts, every funeral home that gets the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev finds itself surrounded by protesters. So far, no Boston-area cemetery has agreed to be the final resting place for the body. Plus, a couple of Jokhar's college friends are in serious hot water because they removed items from his college dorm room. Although they later gave many of the items to the authorities, they have been charged with obstruction of justice. They had nothing to do with the actual bombings, though.