Con report! Con report! Tell me about Otakon, Dave. My only joy is living vicariously through you.

Re /m13:

48 hours? Holy crap.

Wireless keyboards are technically feasable, but the problem with associating a keyboard with the computer becomes even more problematic. At least with physical cables, you can ensure that a normally hooked-up keyboard talks to only one computer at a time. Worse yet, anyone who can intercept your transmissions can see every key you type, unless you're doing encryption in the keyboard.

My fear is that the developers will one-day rush into this without considering the details, and we'll end up with something easily compromised, like WEP and the various cell phone encodings.

Dave Asher has wired his new computer and big-screen TV into a massive home theatre that occupies the better part of his living room. He bought a wireless keyboard, but the technology seems to actually have *devolved* since the old PC/jr days, and it's now rotting in a box, having been replaced by a garden-variety wired keyboard. Anyways, with the improvements in the various digital formats and the advent of DVD-R burners, the download experience is becoming rather startling. There are maniacs who get TV anime translated, subtitled, encoded, and distributed within 48 hours of the initial airing, in near-DVD quality.

"Legacy internet," he says. What a hell of a time to be alive, man!

Reading your thoughts on how the internet--and communication--ought to be always gets me all wistful and pissed off. I _want_ things to be the way you describe, and I have little hope that it will actually happen. *Sigh* You and Buckminster Fuller. Sheesh.

(Hi, Mitch.)

Re /m9:

Historic precedence can be a tricky thing. A lot of states have laws against using tax money for religious purposes, which complicates efforts to use vouchers for religious schools. The problem is that the laws were enacted by rabid anti-Catholics, in many cases supported by the Klan. That doesn't make the law wrong, per se, but it does make it uncomfortable.

As for fonts, I'm fascinated by the aesthetic arguments, but I'll admit that I don't "feel" them, if that makes sense. I'm the same way with modern art. You can go on about color and brushwork and it'll make sense to me, but if you showed me another piece I'd draw a blank.

Oh, one other thing:

Why pledge allegiance to an inanimate object? That's simple. Inanimate objects don't generally have opinions. Demagogues can claim to speak for and relay the opinions of "the people" or "der Volk". Theocrats can claim divine inspiration for their bad ideas and grand corruptions. Monarchists (or even worse, monarchs) are tied to the personal biases and selfish interests of whatever fallible fool they've put on the throne. What imbecile would claim to speak for a piece of fabric tied to a pole? What interests hath a rag flapping in the wind? The flag is an abstract, neutral, disinterested focus of attention for the general populace.

The really cool thing about pledging allegiance to the flag and not Congress or the constitution, is that it separates citizenship from governance. The members of government swear to uphold the constitution; the citizens of the republic swear allegiance to the flag. It's an interesting distinction.

Yo. Just noticed that you had a message board. Contrarian that I am, I've two comments:

1) I honestly don't understand aesthetic arguments about simple font-types. I *like* Arial. It's transparent; any font that I don't notice as a font (Hey, that's a gothic font! I wonder what it says...) is jake by me.

2) I'm a hard-shell agnostic - I'd probably be an atheist if I didn't think denial of the unprovable to be more nonsensical than belief of the improbable - but I'm also a member of the Polybian hypocritical school of public religion. Piety is a useful support for popular governance, and shouldn't be undermined by the petty arrogance of the professionally atheistic. Add on top of that the day-to-day difficulty of bridging the common policy differences between the "Red" and "Blue" sections of the country, and the wisdom of pissing off the religious masses over something as hopelessly trivial as the Pledge of Allegiance strikes me as somewhat lacking. Save the ammunition for serious matters, like the periodic local attempts to teach creationism and the like to ignorant rug-rats in public schools.

Also, if you want to play "Oh you historically ignorant fools!" games with this separation of church and state business, I recommend you read up on the actual separation of church and state for the first century-and-a-half of the republic. The Catholic parochial system emerged as a religious form of self-defense against the rabidly Protestant public school system of most localities. Historic precedent is not a winning argument for proponents of separation.

Re /m6:

QT boards are single-threaded, but light-weight enough that setting up a new one for each topic isn't a burden on the system. They have some reasoning in their FAQ.

They kept your mother out of the NHS? Are you serious?

Re /m7:

The way I'm using it, RSS is a standard way to describe what's new at a web site. Essentially, it lists the titles and addresses of the 15 or so most recent posts. You might have a desktop app that lists new things on the web and it might have a "channel" for ZedneWeb, or you could go to an aggregator site which would have a similar listing.

See http://blogspace.com/rss/ for more info.

On another note, can you summarize what an RSS channel is? (In 600 seconds, of course. ~_^ )

Can I start subordinate threads here? It seems that "New Topic" starts a new *board*. [mumble, grumble, discussion thread technology. hmph.]

Anyway, what I was going to say: My mother refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in high school, because she felt it was dumb to swear fealty to a _flag_. Because of that, she was considered a Communist and kept out of the National Honor Society, a point she will mention with a touch of pride.

In my mind, this relates somewhat to flag burning, as well. See, here's the thing: _Because_ I love America, _because_ I love the ideals on which it was founded, _because_ I am thankful every day for the freedoms that my countrymen fought hard for, I want the right to burn a flag if I feel that would express my views. To ban it would be akin to setting fire to the Constitution.

(Posting on a Unitarian's message board, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it feels good to say, anyway.)

Re: /m4

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten the Chelsea Clinton jokes. That's even worse than the pounding Katherine Harris got, Ms Clinton was just a kid.
(I'm experimenting with Quick Topic's reply-by-e-mail feature. If this message is unedited, we'll know it worked...)

Re: Reporting appearance in the news.

When the Clintons were coming into office, the local Allentown paper ran a headline, "Why are democrats' daughters so ugly?"

Nice. Really nice.

Ah, glorious feedback. There will be a new episode before the end of the year, and hopefully several others. The thing is, every time I think I've gotten back in the groove, I slip out again.

Hi, world. I want faster progress on Dave's fiction projects.

(Just doing what I'm told. Hi, Dave.)

Greetings. This board is for readers of ZedneWeb who wish to respond to posts, ask questions, say "Hi" to the world, or demand faster progress on Dave's fiction projects.

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