Jury responses: they are sometimes arbitrary. It would seem they simply didn't believe you.

Was this trial reported in the legal press?

This week, it's the Olympics and drugs testing.

Punish those athletes for being better than us? or is it something deeper?

Just a heads-up to anyone who enjoys heckling helpless innocents: I will be the guest at Twickfolk on August 22nd. The club is at the Cabbage Patch, which is practically opposite Twickenham railway station. There is usually parking on the street the pub is on. Full directions are at the club's site.

I don't actually expect most of you to want to come, but at least this way I won't hear from anyone afterwards "Oh, you should have told me."

Feel free to forward this information to anyone you think might be interested. The night will be guitar, banjo, and autoharp, mostly American traditional and contemporary songs. I wish I could find a single unified field description of what it is I do as a musician, but basically it's pretty haphazard: anything I happen to like. It's safe to say, though, that I do like songs that tell stories. If you need samples, try the MP3s on my site.

wg

And this is spam. The only subject people talk about when "Internet" is part of the conversation. And we solve it by shutting our eyes?

That's what Wendy thinks this week. I think she's right about one thing else, too: these spammers are selling illegal goods. Why aren't the police arresting them?

We've met Susanna M before, albeit briefly, back in July when she was Susanna Clarke.

This is the same woman. The same writer. Or... is it?

More power to your laptop. Power in the airline seat is great! - but not if the aircraft can't take off...

If you can think of anything more obviously stupid than arresting a singer on the grounds that he might be a security threat, please feel free to mention it...

Wendy can't. I'm with Wendy...

It probably tells us something aobut our various natures. My ideal house would be a memory. It would notice where I put things, and it would know what they are. So when I say: "Where's the TV controller?" it would be able to say: "In the fridge, with the spatula..."

Wendy's ideal house would have five washing machines and moveable walls.

Can we come up with better ideas than Dilbert's?

It's Wendy's Day - the anniversary of her first log onto the Net - well, not today, obviously. But then, Mothers' day is never the day your mother was born, so who gets to say when it should be?

Wendy's opinion is good enough for me. If she says it's Tuesday, then it's Tuesday, and end of argument...

True Names. It was a short novel, long novella, by mathematician and cybernetics teacher, Vernor Vinge - and the idea was that if you hid in cyberspace, you could be superhuman.

The idea was that you'd be anonymous. A lot of people seem to have got the wrong idea about this. In Vinge's novel, the Authorities did penetrate the anonymity of Netizens, and only their superhuman information capacity enabled them to escape. In the real world, Netizens seem to have forgotten this bit, and behaved as if the Net was a cloak of invisibility, rather than just a good jungle in which to hide...

Edited by author 10-22-2004 03:18 PM
It would seem, then, that the only reason the Americans allowed all that "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" junk was that they didn't have anything to fear.

Now that they have something to fear all that crap goes out the window.

From 35,000 feet.

Boy! was I scared about posting this one! But I managed to get all the odd HTML entities through, OK.

And I wonder if this story renders correctly on Mozilla?

Edited by author 11-04-2004 03:04 AM
We live in a great country!

Dan
-------
NowBaby

A country where posting spam is not regarded as socially useless, eh? Do you have hanging chads there?

Here's something about Chadbut he's hanging someone else...