BB reader wishbook says,
With the recent passing of televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, I thought it was a fitting time to share the shrill sounds and sights of the 1975 album, "Oops! There Comes A Smile: Songs & Stories By Jim & Tammy & Their Friends."Link. Also noteworthy is the lyrical name of the woman to whom this one belonged, visible in this larger jpeg: Link.To that end, I've flickr'd scans of the album and created a link to the creepy track, "God Is Watching You," in which the Tammy-voiced pig puppet proclaims "he sees everything you do, and he hears everything you say; my God is watching all the time!" For the penitent or masochistic, there is alo a megaupload link to the entire album.
Reader comment: Anonymous says,
The lizard looks suspiciously like the Winslow from various Phil Foglio comics, chiefly Buck Godot. Perhaps the Bakkers were really Winslowists in disguise!
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Chris Pirillo: "The box said Requires Windows 95 or better. So I installed OS X."
Link. Snapshot of cosplay competition participant just trying to score some dadburned pansit or something for chrissakes, at a mall in the Philippines. (thanks, Rain)
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Video Link (excerpt).NASA takes both Homer and Barney to Cape Canaveral to train them into astronauts. They pit the two in competition against one another as they can only take one to space. With NASAs' alcohol ban, the training goes well for Barney (he even does a backflip and sings the opening lines of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major General's Song"), but the future is grim for Homer when he learns that Barney has been chosen to go on board with Buzz Aldrin and the fictional astronaut Race Banyon (whose name parodies Race Bannon). However, when Barney has a toast with the people at NASA, he drinks champagne that was apparently non-alcoholic, goes berserk and fastens himself to a jet pack. After taking off, the jet pack fails and he bounces off the roof of a pillow factory and onto the road, where he is run over by a marshmallow truck. A scientist declares Homer the default winner of the competition, and he goes up into space with the two other astronauts.
Reader comment: Alan says,
You would be remiss in your Homer astronaut post if you didn't at least mention the genesis of the overlords meme. Link.
Link (Thanks, Susannah!)At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot’s “humanoid” qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code. Today’s humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. They are not the docile companions of our collective dreams, robots designed to flawlessly serve our dinners, fold our clothes and do the dull or dangerous jobs that we don’t want to do. Nor are they the villains of our collective nightmares, poised for robotic rebellion against humans whose machine creations have become smarter than the humans themselves. They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.
But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.
Link.Yahoo! executives say one thing in public, an official Chinese document says something else. Oops.
I just discovered today that the Dui Hua Foundation, which does excellent, low-key work on Chinese human rights issues, has a blog. Last week they posted a full English translation (PDF) of a document that has surfaced recently on the web: the Beijing State Security Bureau'??s request to Yahoo!'s Beijing office for information about the e-mail account huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn. That's the account used by Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who is now doing 10 years in jail for divulging state secrets.
The folks at Dui Hua say they've examined the document and believe it to be authentic. If it is indeed authentic, this document would seem to clear up any lingering questions about whether Yahoo!'s Hong Kong office was involved in handing over Shi Tao's account information.
But it also raises new questions. Here is what the document says (emphasis added)...
Previously on BoingBoing:
Previously on BB:
A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.Link.It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.
The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.
The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This is a rare, overdue moment of sanity from the legal system about web agreements, which are universally abusive and one-sided.
"How hard is it to send out an e-mail letting people know about [any changes]?" she said.Link (via /.)According to the court documents, Douglas signed a contract for service with America Online. The business was then acquired by Talk America, which continued to provide telephone service to AOL's former customers. However, Talk America changed the contract AOL had with its customers and posted those changes on its Web site without notifying the customers first.
