6/4/2003
I live in Richardson, just outside of Dallas. Oftentime the cops here will dress up in construction worker outfits and act like they’re doing something useful, but instead are clocking you driving through ‘their’ fiefdom and in turn, radioing their buddies who will chase you down. Below is a similar story:
The drive-thru window at the McDonald’s on U.S. 41 in Fort Meyers, Florida is an unfortunate metaphor for all that is wrong with the current state of consumer privacy. It seems that customers expecting no more than a Big Mac and fries got a free bonus — a citation from a police officer.
It seems that the fellow working the drive-thru window was not your normal minimum wage employee, but rather an undercover cop, obscuring his badge beneath a yellow vest and paper hat. Press reports paint a murky picture of how exactly it was that Officer Glen Eppler came to man the drive-thru window, taking orders as he radioed alleged seat belt and drug violations to his colleagues lying in wait in a police cruiser down the street.
Although the Fort Myers police department released a statement praising McDonald’s for their cooperation, franchise owner Samir Homsi told the Fort Myers News-Press, “I’m upset, because I didn’t know anything and they didn’t ask me.” McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois also disclaimed any knowledge of the incident and repudiated the operation. Police claim a “manager” approved the operation before leaving McDonald’s and had implied permission had been granted by upper management. Police also claim they “got the idea” after McDonald’s employees came to them with complaints about customers. And two other, anonymous, employees who “appeared to be managers” told The News-Press that McSTING “was not the restaurant’s idea.”
Consumers should be able to have clear expectations of the privacy afforded by the businesses they deal with. This is why businesses, from websites to banks, that collect customer information have a privacy policy for consumers to review. This way, consumers can make a choice whether or not to deal with a firm based on its policies vis-a-vis sharing consumer data with other businesses or the government; and how important those concerns are relative to other factors such as cost, quality, and service. When dealing with a face-to-face cash retail business such as McDonald’s, where there is no written policy, consumers base such privacy expectations on factors such as reputation and their own history dealing with that firm. Certainly nothing in McDonald’s history indicated that a drive-thru worker would be looking for drugs or issuing seat-belt tickets. (Over two nights of manning the window, Eppler and company issued 29 citations and made six arrests.)
McDonald’s rebuke of McSTING should go a long way toward regaining trust of consumers in Ft. Myers and elsewhere, particularly if it’s backed by action. With the Pentagon publicly announcing plans to take information from business databases, and bookstores barred from speaking when their records are routed by the FBI, consumers have to be more careful than ever about the interface between private and public information-gathering. By infiltrating the prying eyes of the nanny state into something as seemingly innocuous as the drive-thru window, the responsible parties in McSTING served to further undermine the relationship between customer and firm, earning them the right to be called a Privacy Villain.
I can’t wait to see how Tia and her twelve sisters pan out. Ahh, and of course LifeLog, making sure that dozens of bureaucrats everywhere know what brand of toothpaste I use, what kind of spending habits I have and what size bra I wear (err, yea) — because if they don’t have an accurate log of my daily life, the Terrorists Will Win™. If the terrorists win, they will surely usher in a world in which all of your actions are monitored at all times and privacy is just another word in the dictionary.
If you give an inkling about science or astronomy specifically, this should be filed in your “Bad Ass” folder:
NASHVILLE — If an asteroid is discovered tonight and found to be on a collision course with Earth, you may have a robot to thank for the warning. If a star blinks for a nanosecond, you won’t notice it, but a robot might, and it will deduce that an object no bigger than this city, roaming the solar system in Pluto’s realm, has just passed in front of a distant star.
A surprisingly cheap new crop of thinking and seeing machines work alone, scanning the heavens every night, from dusk to dawn with no coffee breaks, looking for objects that humans have so far failed to find.
Robots have already bagged several dozen asteroids and a few comets. They lock onto fluctuating stars and observe nightly changes. Before long, they’ll discover planets.
The robots make judgements about where to point and what to look for. They adjust their routines to the weather. They notice new things and track them. And finally they crank out partially digested data ready for analysis by higher life forms.
Back in college, I enjoyed reading the latest and greatest telescopic creations by astronomers. One thing that pushed me away from any large purchase was simply the timing: I didn’t have much free time between playing video games and skipping classes (it was a hard life). Putting one of these automated telescopes on top of a roof in the middle of College Station (also referred to as BFE) would have given me both the bragging rights and know-how that any self-infatuated geek such as myself needs to continue his strenuous half-ass attempts at completing difficult goals such as discovering Darth Vader or Klingons.
And that’s not the coolest part either (well, it is, but here is some more neat-o news):
Due out any day is version 3.0 of RTML, or Remote Telescope Markup Language, a cosmically inclined variant of the HTML computer language that underpins the World Wide Web.
RTML is being tailored to deal with astronomers’ syntax. It will be employed to point telescopes, coordinate the efforts of multiple observatories in remote locations, then shuttle the data off to the astronomer who sought it. The results will be formatted for standard web browsers.
RTML will run the MOnitoring NEtwork of Telescopes (MONET), which will consist of an observatory in Texas and another in South Africa. Observing requests will come from dramatically diverse controllers — three professional research institutions along with high school classrooms worldwide.
How cool is that? Here is some example code of what RTML looks like currently (version 2.1) - and note how it is XML-based, not HTML-based. Be sure to read that whole article as I only snipped out a few points.
Saw this off Slashdot a few days ago (I’m still catching up after all that downtime). The ever-friendly Nigerian’s are hosting one of those synergistic technical conferences for the hopelessly naïve and blindingly gullible:
I am Mr. Laurent Mpeti Kabila, a senior assistant leader of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone.
I present to you an urgent and confidential request: I request your attendance at The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. This is an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us.
Like most Nigerians, you’re probably finding that it’s increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That’s why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.
“This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free.”
- Dr. Collins Mbadiwe
With testimonials like that how can you go wrong? Oh, and I must recount the Business Proposal Generator I mentioned a while back. Tis groovy and all that other down-with-it hoopla, w3rd.
I think I know the other two people in all of Texas that have seen: “Logan’s Run” — or at least the only two that will admit to it. If you haven’t had the (dis)pleasure of seeing a 30-ish Michael York in a semi-spandex outfit run haphazardly through ice caves, jungles, civic centers and the halls of Montezuma then you really haven’t lived. The plot is actually a proto-Demolition Man with a nice dash of euthenasia thrown in for good measure. Additionally, if you’ve seen Toy Story then you should recall that quote used in this blog post title (if you haven’t go ahead and terminate your life, you should be ashamed of yourself, when Disney makes a movie, you’re supposed to go watch it, twice). And on with the show:
“Angkar” is the name used to refer to the organization which was said to make all the official decisions during the Pol Pot regime. Even Pol Pot himself explained his actions by saying that Angkar had ordered them. Phy Chan Than describes Angkar as“a picture of the god which people during the Pol Pot era lived in feared awe of.” Angkar was the person who “held the handles of the machine of the regime” and “sucked the strength of the people” in order to “build the power of the regime.” No single person actually held the position of Angkar, and it was more a mythical entity imbued with enormous, divisive strength.
Phy Chan Than paints Angkar seated like a god; huge wings are attached to its body since Angkar was always waiting “like a vampire” to catch people up for the slightest mistake. The hands of Angkar hold farm implements (a shovel, a stick, a knife, an axe), which are usually used to tend the soil and to grow things. During the Pol Pot regime, however, these tools became the preferred tools for mass murder. As Phy Chan Than explains it, “if Angkar says that you live, you live. If Angkar says that you die, you die. In that regime there was only a mouth and whatever it said was just.” The tongue of the mouth curves down to suck the blood and strength of the people found below. Below the throne of the Angkar surges a sea of the blood and tears of the Khmer people.
Here is an artist rendition of what our little friend Angkar may have looked like:
Ahh, now you see the tie-in with the
Cargo Cultish green toys from the
Crane Game in
Toy Story, right? And how does this relate to “Logan’s Run?” I guess you’ll have to be a good sport and rent it, or download it, or draw flip-book depictions of what it could be like with the
little stick figured men kicking each other and being run over by cars.
You aren’t going to get me Sandman!
It’s true, I saw it on the Internet:
BELLEVUE, WA, July 15, 2004 — Semi-Unabridged Webster Corp., publishers of the Semi-Unabridged Webster Dictionary of 1923, today announced it has granted a license of English language intellectual property rights to Microsoft Corporation. The licensing deal makes Microsoft the first company to ensure its products and services will be in copyright compliance with the use of English.
“We are very grateful for Microsoft’s acknowledgement of our intellectual property rights and for their support in our efforts to make English available to all for a reasonable licensing fee,” said Preston Gates Ellis, CEO and General Counsel for the recently-formed Semi-Unabridged Webster (SUW). Ellis acknowledged that Microsoft received a particularly favorable licensing due to its “small investment” in his company, but declined to provide detailed numbers.
Ellis reiterated his earlier statements that SUW does not claim to have intellectual property rights to the entire English language, but that “crucial words and usages have been appropriated in clear violation of our rights.” He declined to give specific examples of such infringement, as that might aid in helping the infringers disguise their culpability. “The best guideline we can offer at this point is that, if you want to use English, you need a license.”
Legal observers have pointed out that other dictionary publishers also have rights to use the Webster name, but SUW is in a unique position because its dictionary was published in 1923. Due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, all previous dictionaries have entered into the public domain, leaving the long out-of-print Semi-Unabridged Webster tome with priority as the oldest copyrighted lexicon.
SUW Corp., which acquired rights to the dictionary shortly after forming earlier this year, plans no legal actions against individual users of English until after its lawsuits with AOL/Time Warner and possibly other media conglomerates are settled. “We would suggest, however, that everyone be mindful of today’s announcement in that regard,” Ellis added. “At this point, for example, it should be understood that MSN is the only on-line service that is legally authorized to send or receive e-mail messages written in English.”
Ellis also reacted angrily to critics who’ve suggested his company is just a legal stalking horse for Microsoft and not actually a dictionary publisher. “We are in the dictionary business, and we will prove that by putting out an update of the 1923 edition in the near future to further extend our intellectual property rights.” He also refuted claims that SUW is threatening lawsuits only against those who are critical of it or Microsoft. “We absolutely believe in everyone’s right to speak their mind freely,” he stated. “But those who are unwilling to acknowledge of rights of legitimate copyright holders shouldn’t use our language to do so.”
And in other news, I am now licensing Old English (Beowulf), as well as Middle English (Chaucer would be proud). In the near future I plan to license several versions of French, German and Jive — something to look forward to. If I catch any sort of infringement, not only will you be sent to blogging hell, but you will suffer no linkage from me, along with a $3.27 fine, with no ketchup.
Not quite late breaking, but this story cracks me up every time I see it:
MBABANE, Swaziland (Reuters) — Swaziland’s absolute monarch has singled out women wearing pants as the cause of the world’s ills in a state radio sermon that also condemned human rights as an “abomination before God.”
“The Bible says curse be unto a woman who wears pants, and those who wear their husband’s clothes. That is why the world is in such a state today,” Mswati, ruler of the impoverished feudal nation of about one million, said late on Thursday.
The Times of Swaziland reported that the monarch, who reigns supreme in the landlocked country run by palace appointees and where opposition parties are banned, went on to criticize the human rights movement.
“What rights? God created people, and He gave them their roles in society. You cannot change what God has created. This is an abomination before God,” the king told an audience of conservative church leaders.
Women on the streets of capital Mbabane were not impressed.
“The king says I am the cause of the world’s problems because of my outfit. Never mind terrorism, government corruption, poverty and disease, it’s me and my pants. I reject that,” said Thob’sile Dlamini.
That’s right Sharleen and Gnome-Girl, every time you wear trousers baby Jesus cries.
In honor of this newly found and enlightened epiphany, all those not groveling at my feet are hereby considered enemies of Timland. You now no longer qualify for any sort of emergency aid or loans. And you will never work in this town again!
