ScareFest 2008 Lexington

This tiny news advert caught my eye last week.

MrsCopilot is quite the Horror buff, with bookshelves stuffed and straining under the weight and bulk of the almighty Steven King and a DVD collection of blood, murder, mayhem and pychotics. ScareFest 2008, Seemed like just to thing to spring on her as a surprise. Stars of Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" (one of her favorite feel good flicks.) Sid Haig and Bill Mosely are scheduled to appear.

Off we go for a spooktacular Saturday afternoon. Lexington Convention center. Check.
Yep that's a Good sign,
this appears to be the place.

Inside was as advertised.

Creepy Artists and Collectible merchants crammed side by side with psychics and mystical crystal salesman,
With back area lined with genre celebrities available for autographs and pictures.

What better way to spend an afternoon than celebrity gawking and rampant discretionary spending. Admission, Tarot Reading, T Shirt, Autographed Photo, a few nick nacks, etc. There were also Panel Discussions and film Screenings in two other halls we did not attend. Haunting the floor were the assorted monsters and ghouls only too happy to mug for the camera. The weekend events included a costume contest and a Friday the 13th cast reunion and Screening. Upon entry, a small reminder is posted informing you that entering the premises gives Paramount permission to use your likeness in an upcoming Anniversary DVD re-release of the classic. The event was sponsored by Ghost Chasers International, but they were kind enough to invite the competition, Ghost Hunters International investigator an TV star Shannon Slyvia. Nice lady, sold me a shirt. The guy who drew the longest line though was definitely Sid Haig. Small Children (under 6 admitted free) were in line to have their picture taken with him. Just down the Aisle his cast mate from Devils Rejects and House of 1000 corpses were also popular. CandyMan, One of the guys who wore the Jason mask, Tom Savini and Pluto from The Hills Have Eyes (Micheal Berryman) were talking with fans and signing autographs, showing little wear from the VIP party at the hotel the night before. What frightened me more than the Zombies, Spirit Photographers or Mystical Crystal Vendors (I just love saying Mystical Crystals) was the line that did not exist in front of David Naugton. This guy transforms "in camera" into the baddest werewolf captured on film, while at the same time manging to make us laugh all through the movie. Here, see for yourself. That deserves at least a 2 person deep que. All of the emo, goth and teens of the damned seemed more interested in mindless serial killers than one of the greatest wolfman thespians of all time. I would have asked him too, how he feels sitting across the room from the line formed in front of Captain Spaulding, but I was too busy standing in that line to get Sid Haig's autograph. I've been to my fair share of conventions, Comics, Star Trek, Sci-Fi, Electronics, Embedded, Microsoft, AMD, Linux etc.. but somehow I had never made one of these. I had no idea what to expect, but was eerily unsurprised by what I saw. We skipped on a lot of what ScareFest had to offer, I hear there was even a UFO panel. Next time it comes around, maybe we'll attend the whole weekend, and catch a few panels. All in all, a fun day, and it certainly surprised MrsCopilot, and in a good way. MrCopilot

Craigslist Bringing Looters Together at Robert Salisbury Home

Often the Internet is touted as a worldwide communication medium that brings people together. Well in Jacksonville, Oregon this week, the Internet certainly brought quite few people together.

They were responding to a Craigslist posting about a man forced to leave his home in a hurry and abandon his property including his Horse and all needed new homes.

This delighted the surrounding community and surprised Robert Salisbury, the owner. Salisbury came home to find around 30 people rummaging through his property. En route he passed a truck filled with his lawn equipment and cars loaded with his belongings.

"I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back," Salisbury said. "They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did."

"They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true," Salisbury said. "It boggles the mind."

It certainly does. Police are promising to prosecute anyone found with Mr Salisbury's property, while at the same time promising amnesty to anyone who returns their ill gotten goods "no questions asked." Check out the AP Video for more.

This is not the first time a Craigslist hoax has resulted in disaster. Last year in April a Tacoma Washington woman had a rental property basically gutted by scores of people responding to an unknown hoaxer's ad on the popular service.
Home trashed after cruel Craigslist hoax @ WKGW


Horrible! I wonder though, did there used to be a Mrs. Salisbury?

MrCopilot

"Ancient" Audio and the Phonautograph

You may remember an April Fools hoax a few years ago about audio captured on clay pottery that made its way around the net. Or you may remember the Mythbusters covering the possibility (Busted, If I remember correctly).

Leaving Edison as the first able to "record" audio for future playback. Well, not exactly. According to the NYTimes, that honor goes to a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who "recorded" a 10 second clip of “Au Clair de la Lune” on of all things PAPER almost 20 years before Edison and his tin foil and nearly 30 years before the wax cylinder.

Scott’s device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered.
NYTimes

The NYTimes article has even included the clip in MP3 format. Holy Digital Conversion, Batman. Apparently it took almost 150 years, a few engineers and the assistance of computers and scanners to be able to playback any of his recordings. But hey, first is First right. It goes on to state how excited a group of audiophiles and historians are that this important piece of history has been uncovered and will be presented at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif on Friday. But then again these guys are an excitable bunch anyway.

Read the full article here.

OK, sure the guy "recorded" sound, he apparently was very upset that Edison beat him to the patent office and generally received all the glory. Somehow though, I think recording 10 seconds on 2 sheets of paper would make an LP sized recording equivalent to an encyclopedia and thus slightly impractical.

What do you think?

Talkingmachine.org has a rather lengthy piece on the Scott and his curious phonautograph device, including some lovely photos.


MrCopilot

Chickens Come Home to Roost

I am angry.

Like everyone else in this country, I have heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright say "America's Chickens come home to roost" about 4 billion times. I've heard Barrack Obama talk about his white grandmother. I've watched the talking heads express disgust and shock and horror at all of it.

What I haven't seen is the context either was said in. Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post thoughtfully points out that when the chicken statement is heard in context and properly attributed, all of a sudden the disgust and shock and horror are missing. Replaced instead by a general feeling of "Can I get an Amen!" Don't believe me? Set aside 10 minutes of your life and watch the whole sermon that was hacked up and looped over and over.

Barrack Obama's speech following the media blitz of Rev Wright snippets was a powerful adult treatment of race relations likened by many, who have actually watched or listened to it in it's entirety, to speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.

I did not get to see it. You could have watched the news for 48hrs straight after the speech was given, and you wouldn't have seen it either. I was fortunate enough to read a large excerpt of it. It gave me chills. The speech is over 37 minutes long. The advice given by one pundit was sit down with your children and watch it with them. I couldn't agree more.

Context is everything. Sound bites are meaningless. Whenever you see 5 seconds of video looped over and over on CNN, Fox, etc, it should give you pause and cause you to wonder what is as Paul Harvey would say "the rest of the story"

This is not a political blog. In no way am I endorsing any candidate. (Vote Quimby) Every once in a while, the media perverts truth to such an extent people must speak out.

OLPC A Good Idea, Badly Misunderstood

ITWire has a rant disguised as an opinion piece titled OLPC: one bad idea per child by Sam Varghese.

I should let it be known I have written on the OLPC XO before. All of my articles have showered it with praise. My kid wants one, I wouldn't mind tinkering a bit with it myself. So it should come as no surprise how I feel about Sam's article. Although no real point was made, I will do my best to address his comments.

For instance, we have personal computers and poorer denizens of this earth do not. Development agencies are very good at exploiting this sense of guilt - which is fairly common in the West. These agencies have do-good agendas, well-meaning no doubt, but more focused on their own survival than anything else. One thing common to practically all these agencies is that they actually believe that Western technology can alleviate any and all problems in the Third World.

As proven time and again, technology from whatever part of the world can and does alleviate SOME problems in the Third World. Desalination, Purification, Solar Ovens, Solar panels, Cellular Phones, are all great examples.

Similarly, with these agencies, ads of poor children drinking water from a filthy stream are a good way to bring in a stream of donations, which in turn help to keep said agency running. It pays wages for a number of people who can then salve their consciences by convincing themselves that they are doing "good". Helps them to sleep at night, I guess.

Any actual good done, I suppose is irrelevant to your rant, I mean narrative.

And so we come to the One Laptop Per Child project. Not exactly built on the same lines as a project aimed at development in a poorer country, but exploiting many of the same feelings. The initial stated goal was to supply laptops that would cost $US100 to children in underdeveloped countries - Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, and Pakistan were those which initially signed up to participate.

An actual fact, Bravo.

Associating the project with the idea of "open source" was a wonderful way to get people involved - Red Hat supplies a customised GNU/Linux distribution for the XO - but that idea has now been diluted to some extent by the intrusion of Microsoft which is developing a version of Windows XP to run on the little laptop.

These are the stated principles of the OLPC project.

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms.
http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/

That part of "on their own terms" requires the XO to be able to run whatever software the child prefers and is capable of running. Microsoft is working as hard as it can to get the XO to run a stripped and gutted version of XP on it. The XO will ship with its own software and the purchasing country can choose to install whatever it likes. For OLPC's official stance on free software please refer to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_on_open_source_software

Microsoft knows that catching them young is key to creating a whole new generation of Windows users - people who have no choice but to accept whatever the company dishes out.

That's 2 facts, Kudos.

As the OLPC's Ivan Krstic wrote,"To claim we should prohibit XO customers from running XP in the interest of freedom is to claim everyone should be free to make a choice - as long as it's a choice we agree with."

Yeah, what he said.

I don't know about the robustness - when I asked whether my son could drop the laptop from a height of five feet (it is supposed to be able to withstand such a shock), the man who had the laptop on display said "no" very fast.

It wasn't yours? You expected to be able to throw down the display model (possibly the only one) at a conference? I'm shocked they didn't let you hit it with a hammer. For demonstration of its robustness, see David Pogue with his demo unit. Note what happens at 1:25.

The OLPC appears to be on the defensive when approached by the media. I asked Jim Gettys, the vice-president of software, whether he was willing to spend some time talking about it recently while he was in Melbourne. His answer was "maybe." I gave him a time and place but though he showed up, he told me that he had to speak to a number of other people first. I waited for what I considered a reasonable amount of time and then went about my own business.

What you considered to be a reasonable amount of time. You mean as a blogger who wasn't giving a talk at the conference involved in a worldwide organization who had appointments with actual press and possibly people who would help the cause. In other words he had a job to do, and if he could fit you in he would.

Gettys's talk at the Linux conference in Melbourne in January is one of the few for which video is not available on the web. I wonder why. There are slides - with the standard heart-rending pictures of poor children from various countries who apparently will be the beneficiaries of this munificence.

Actually it is 60 pages with a few pictures of children who did receive the XO laptop and a few pictures showing the environment in which they are used. All but one of the pictures of children show well dress schoolchildren working happily on their laptop. In between those pictures is a wealth of information that you dismiss without a word. You can and should download the presentation , actually read it instead of just looking at the pictures and decide for yourself.

(His talk clashed with one delivered by Dirk Hohndel of Intel and I attended the latter).

I can hardly wait to read the incredible story you will write based on a talk you actually attended.

Not every country which has been approached to join the project has looked favourably on Negroponte's advances. Way back in 2006, India categorically rejected the project. The Times of India quoted the ministry of human resources development as saying it was intrigued that no developed country had been chosen to be part of the project "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group".

Guess you have not seen this then. http://olpc.tv/2008/02/20/khairat-village-kids-show-off-their-xo-laptops/ The Indian government was under the same false impressions you are. Mainly

Technology can only do so much to eradicate deep-rooted cultural and social problems in developing and under-developed countries. You need political action to solve these problems, a laptop will do nothing to help. It may actually do more damage than good by creating wants which people then seek to satisfy by stealing.

If the village has ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD, who is going to steal them?


Try looking at this in a different way. We are not talking about whether we should be supplying these people with food, clean water, electricity, etc OR a laptop. We are talking about spending money on supplying books which are expensive, heavy and easily damaged or an XO for a child. Which does more good? Which is more utilitarian? Which is a better investment? Better yet which is the child more likely to learn from?

Not for nothing is this called a ground-breaking project. They'll have to break a lot of ground in a great many countries to bury all the waste that is left behind as the project's legacy.

Oh, sorry, I thought you were a reasonable person, I see now I was mistaken. You really think this is all being done for a nefarious profit based motivation don't you? It is easy to believe that OLPC is a selfish organization if you are unfamiliar with empathy and selfless acts of human decency. Shame on you sir.


MrCopilot

Net Neutrality Take 2

The last time Net Neutrality was taken up by congress, a concerned citizen felt it necessary to voice his opinion to his local representative.

He forwarded me the response he received in hopes I would share it with you dear readers.

Feel free to scroll down, click and read the whole thing, it is an excellent example of political speech and passing the buck.

The gist (for the lazy) was that although the Honorable Ed Whitfield voted for for the original bill, he voted against the amendment giving anyone the authority to enforce it. Then he notes that the Senate failed to pass its own version and the bill died just like Schoolhouse Rock describes.

My advice to this young man, and to all of you, is to not be discouraged and make sure his voice is heard again on the newest upcoming Net Neutrality bill making its way through the political meat grinder in Washington right now. Also make sure your friends do the same. Be sure to mention as a registered voter the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008” (HR 5353) is an important issue for you and will certainly inform your future voting decisions.

As more and more media corporations (TimeWarner, etc) control consumer access to the Internet, regulation and controls must be established to ensure equal access to content from a variety of sources. I see no better institution than the Federal Communication Commision, short of creating one for this purpose (not the worst idea I've heard), to fill that role.





For more on the new bill http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h5353/show and track its progress

MrCopilot