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Wednesday, July 24, 2002 |
posted by Blake July 24 12:46 PM | 30 comments. Odds of Death Due to Injury, United States, 1998 Your lifetime odds of dying from:
Air and space transport, 1 in 5,092
Poisoning by solids and liquids, 1 in 344
Drowning, 1 in 9,396
Firearms, 1 in 202
Jumping from high places, 1 in 7,402
[MetaFilter]
6:01:35 PM 
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Terrorist Information and Prevention System
"A national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity."
Operation TIPS, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice and developed in partnership with several other federal agencies, is one of the five component programs of the Citizen Corps. Operation TIPS will be a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.
Retrograde Activities and Treachery System
"A national system for paranoid nuts to report neighbors they don't like."
Operation RATS - the Retrograde Activities and Treachery System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American bigots, paranoiacs, nosy neighbors, snoops, snobs, and others a formal way to report innocent actions by others that offend them. Operation RATS, a project of the U.S. Department of Anachronisms, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities that will be selected based on the number of statues they have erected to Senator Joseph McCarthy.
According to this AP article, the US Postal Service has released a statement stating that it will not be participating in the recently inaugurated Terrorism Information and Prevention System. The USPS was approached by what the article describes as homeland security officials, in order to explore the possibilities of involving the service in TIPS.
"By deputizing utility workers, delivery drivers and other private employees as de facto government agents, the government has created a way to search your home without a warrant," Dasbach said. "The only reason the government wants to recruit private citizen-spies is that they can do things the government can't do legally, such as monitor your private behavior with absolutely no suspicion that you've done anything wrong."
To combat this menace, we've instituted Operation TIPS-TIPS. If you spot somebody you believe may be a TIPS informant, do two things:
- Mark the informant. In a subtle way, place the mark of the all-seeing eye (the eye-in-the-pyramid from the Great Seal, shown above) on their home, vehicle or person. Chalk is best, though it must be renewed. This is like Hobo Signs.
- Register them here.
[Michael J. Hehir's Radio Weblog]
11:15:25 AM
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XML and ASP.NET. XML and ASP.NET is the one book you need to master XML in the .NET Framework. It includes all of the technologies needed to program .NET web applications including XPath, XSLT, XML Schemas, and the Microsoft XML Parsers. This book also incorporates an incredible breadth of XML technologies from basic queries using XPath to advanced serialization techniques, thoroughly exploring Microsoft’s .NET implementation of XML. A wealth of clearly written and real-world sample code makes this a must-have for any developer interested in a focused, detailed, and complete view of XML and how it fits into Microsoft’s .NET initiative. [O'Reilly Safari]
11:06:15 AM
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NASA NEWS: International Space Station Viewing.
 NASA NEWS is reporting
Beginning this week the International Space Station (ISS) will make a series of eye-catching passes over North America. So instead of complaining your lacking an interesting summer, get out the lawn chairs a pair of field glasses and go camp out in the back yard. For more information, you can listen to the story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.
Everyone can see the ISS-- even if you don't own a telescope. NASA News reports that between now and mid-August the space station will make several passes over the United States and Canada. Spotting it is easy, all you need are your eyes, a clear sky and a flyby schedule for your hometown which can be located by visiting one of these three popular web sites: Chris Peat's Heavens Above, Science@NASA's J-Pass [excellent site] or NASA's SkyWatch. By typing in some simple information, like your city or zip code, the sites will respond with a list of suggested spotting times, accurate within a few minutes. [Mary Wehmeier's Blog Du Jour]
11:04:12 AM
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Suit Up!. This strikes me as what text-entry will be like when we get those headgear-and-gauntlet cyberspace rigs that movies keep telling... [EmptyBottle.org]
11:03:12 AM
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Itsy Bitsy Mobile-Size Movies. A Minneapolis Web designer has created a movie for mobile phones. No, he doesn't expect people to watch feature-length films on their cell phones, but he predicts they will enjoy 'Cell Phone Theater.' By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]
10:59:42 AM
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Infinite Wealth. Barry Carter writes: Since one idea can be shared by billions of people and they all win and ideas and knowledge are infinite, wealth has become infinite. Paul Pilzer, in Unlimited Wealth, shows how technology, which rests entirely on knowledge power, is the driver of a new alchemic world with new rules of wealth-creation. The dream of past alchemists was to turn lead into gold. Today, using knowledge and ideas, we, for example, turn sand into something more valuable per pound than gold, computer semiconductor chips. Infinite wealth goes against common sense and our experience. Infinite wealth is too good to be true. It is like creating something from nothing. This nothing, however, is actually something. It is ideas in people’s heads that comes from knowledge, which is created from information inside of billions of neurons and neural connections. Tangible wealth is today created from information. Deepak Chopra, in Creating Affluence, approaches infinite wealth from a scientific and spiritual perspective showing that ideas, beliefs and knowledge are the creators of physical and non-physical wealth as well as the universe itself. Using quantum physics, he shows that atoms, which make up everything in the universe, are made of information, knowledge and intelligence and not solid material. Though the nature of quantum physics will be explained in more detail later, the bottom line is: Information, knowledge and intelligence today are the primary forces driving wealth-creation and the human brain is the primary creator of knowledge. For the first time in history the masses of individuals own the means of production—their own minds and brains. Wealth-creation, therefore, can no longer be controlled, it must be liberated and based upon individual freedom. (07/23/02) [Synergic Earth News]
10:55:33 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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