The general rules of this game are no different from any other drinking game. A drink is either a shot or a good gulp from a beer (or cider). Different events call for different numbers of drinks and all you do is watch the speech and play along. If all goes well, you'll be unconscious by the time they show the other party's response.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 10:38 AM | TrackBack 0

Of course I will have myself cloned as soon as I can; of course everyone will get themselves cloned as soon as they can. I will go to the Bahamas, New Zealand or the Canaries; I will pay the asking price (moral and financial demands have always counted for little next to the demand for reproduction). I will probably have two or three clones, as you have two or three children; between their births, I will allow for an adequate gap (not too narrow, not too wide); as an already mature man, I will behave like a responsible father. I will make sure my clones have a good education; then I will die. I will die without pleasure, because I do not wish for death. Through my clones, I will have reached a certain form of survival-not completely satisfying, but superior to the one which ordinary children would have brought me. For the time being, it is the most that western technology can offer.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:52 AM | TrackBack 0

"In what was designed to be a "safety valve," the Copyright Office is holding its tri-annual search for exemptions to the DMCA's prohibitions on circumventing access controls. The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted comments last December that outlined four "classes of works" that should be exempt, including copy-protected CDs, region-coded DVDs, DVDs with unskippable promotional material, and public domain works that are only available on DVD. They are asking people to write in support of the four exemptions that they have proposed. The Copyright Office is only accepting comments until February 19th, so get on it!"

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:42 AM | TrackBack 0

''People write because it seems like it'll be an easier job than carpet laying, that they might meet more girls,'' he says. ''And they write because the world strikes them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing that to everybody's attention. You know, a scary place, a menacing place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But mainly, kind of glorious.''

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:38 AM | TrackBack 0

When you do math the New Democratic way. According published reports that I've seen there were 81962 party members eligible to vote in today's NDP leadership election. In addition there were 1600 eligible labour voters. That means that of a possible 83562 ballots that could have been cast today labour accounted for 1.91 percent of the total. There was a 53.38 percent voter turnout today. 44609 votes cast, of which 957 came from labour and the other 43652 came from individual members. That's a 53.23 percent turnout for the riding members and a 59.81 percent turnout for labour. Labour accounted for 2.14 percent of ballots cast today. So why did they get 25 percent of the influence?

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:30 AM | TrackBack 0

First it was a hacker who attempted to interfere with their big day. Now Bourque has learned that security surrounding voting procedures during today's NDP leadership vote was compromised. Indeed, much has been made by the Party about its reliance on the Internet to allow NDP members their right to vote. To be clear, only NDP members are allowed to vote and most were eligible to do so voted prior to today via mail. Yet, Bourque has learned that just about anyone could have voted in the election via the Internet today simply by assuming the name of a member and voting in his/her place. For instance, Bourque reader David Artemiw reports that "It's extremely easy for a non-party member to cast a vote. How do I know? I just did it." As he recounts it on his blog, "I knew the name of a party member who had no intention of voting. She joined because she wanted to go to Jack Layton's Barenaked Ladies party. So how did I do it? First, I asked this party member for permission. Then, I sent an e-mail from an e-mail account I created to both vote@fed.ndp.ca and ndphelp@elections.com. In the e-mail, posing as the party member, I claimed to have lost my log-in ID. I gave them the party member's address and phone number and they sent me back all the log-in information. Nothing was done to ensure that I was who I claimed to be." Have others also acted on this opportunity to skew the NDP leadership vote count ? How many ? Were the names of unsuspecting NDP members picked off membership lists, with wholesale substitute voting undertaken without either the individual member or even the Party itself knowing anything about it ? It remains unclear if the NDP is aware that their vote count was tainted by this shocking defect in their electoral process. Add to all of this the developing concerns about why so few votes were done over the Internet, why close to half of all eligible members failed to record a vote, and why convention organizers repeatedly delayed announcing the voting results, especially given the few actual votes cast today alone.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:29 AM | TrackBack 0

A study of water bottles at a Calgary elementary school found bacteria in kids' bottles that would prompt health officials to issue boil-water advisories, had the samples come from a tap.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:27 AM | TrackBack 0

My mail servers now reject more spam than they deliver mail. This, sadly, appears to be the trend. I am compelled to spend my time and my money attempting to stave off the abuse: I will probably need to pay additional charges for more rack space in the 1-3 months in order toinstall a proxy SMTP host/firewall and, of course, I have to purchase the machine, configure it, pay for the bandwidth it uses, etc.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:23 AM | TrackBack 0

For the sake of argument, this survey will assume that we are heading towards a networked society of ubiquitous, mobile communications capable of constant monitoring. Whether this arrives in 20, 30 or 40 years does not really matter. The point is that the destination seems not merely possible, but probable, so it is not too soon to ask: what do we want this technology to do?

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:22 AM | TrackBack 0

Earl Hurd of election.com said he believes someone used a "denial of service" program to disrupt the voting -- paralysing the central computer by bombarding it with a stream of data.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 09:17 AM | TrackBack 0

The chief justice also wants to outlaw coeducation. "I want education for women, but we want men and women not to sit together," Mr Shinwari said yesterday.

Posted by GeeTee at January 27, 2003 08:33 AM | TrackBack 0