Home of the brave

As I sat in DFW waiting for my boarding call from American Airlines, I noticed a young man--kid, really, nearby dressed in full army uniform (sandy-coloured, camouflage wear). It's not something I often see in Canada. Moments later, the P.A. announced "We invite our first-class passengers to board Flight #XXXX".

After a couple of minutes of glancing around taking in the scene while avoiding eye contact with anyone else taking in the scene, the following message came: "We now invite our AAdvantage clients to come forward for boarding as well as any of our military in uniform". At that point, a thought started formulating in my mind. By the time I heard "Passengers with seating in Zone A are now asked to...", the thought was complete:

We greatly respect our brave, patriotic young citizens who put themselves in harm's way risking life and limb so that we can continue to enjoy all the freedoms we hold so dear...but not as much as we respect large sums of money.


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Will WikiLeaks destroy the internet as we know it?

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose its DNS provider, so it had to change its domain name from wikileaks.org to wikileaks.ch.

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose access to income sources when PayPal, MasterCard, and others stopped accepting payments on its behalf.

We’ve seen Wikileaks lose hosting services from Amazon, when Amazon rightly determined that Wikileaks had violated its terms of service (the part where you need to own your own content was a clear violation).

We’ve also seen Wikileaks’ ringmaster, Julian Assange, finally tracked down and arrested. Weirdly, though, he wasn’t arrested for trafficking in stolen government documents, but for some conveniently strange sexual deviance charge.

I honestly can’t tell how to parse that one. We don’t really know Assange, so we don’t know if he is a sexual offender, but isn’t it curious how those charges suddenly showed up? I’m obviously not a fan of the guy, but the timing is…interesting.

But even though Wikileaks continues to take a licking, it still keeps on ticking.

How is it possible that a simple Web site can so infuriate governments the world over, but still remain active?

We may start to see in-depth packet analysis for all traffic, so that torrents containing classified information can be disrupted. We may see ISPs required to block any encrypted or binary communication, so anything that’s unreadable by governments can’t travel across the network. We may see citizens permanently cut off from the Internet (and, by extension, cut off from their friends, jobs, and society) because they’re hosting files that only just might be similar to files of interest.

Full Story.

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When you get a Facebook status update like...

...it's time to cull the herd. You are the weakest link...goodbye!

Hint: By all means inform us of your new baby, new job or colon cancer, but for the love of God, keep your sniffles to yourselves. 400 updates a day is enough to make someone sick.


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Sweet or what?!

I've had very little inspiration to post anything here for some time, but today I came across something I absolutely love and it made me feel so good, I wanted to share it and hopefully, it makes you feel good, too.





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