Dreamwidth

I have received seven er, actually, a total of fourteen additional invite codes for Dreamwidth.  If you want to try out Dreamwidth, let me know in a comment and I'll send you an invite code.  If you want me to use a different address than your LiveJournal address, you'll need to tell me in your comment.

Why should you use Dreamwidth?  Well, let me start you off with three reasons:

• It's a backup in case LiveJournal completely implodes, and you can still automatically crosspost everything you post there to your LiveJournal (and other sites you may have blogs on, for that matter) if you want to;
• Dreamwidth has a commitment to privacy that LiveJournal has never had, and has pledged to never ever sell user data (and, if memory serves, to never put advertising on user journals);
• Dreamwidth has a better security model than LiveJournal; you can subscribe to someone else's journal to read their posts on your reading page, without having to grant them access to your restricted posts to do so.

There's other reasons I could cite, but those'll do for a start.

Double standards, a game you can't play

C|Net is reporting that Lower Merion School District will face no charges whatsoever for covertly photographing underage students using laptop webcams, allegedly including photos of students "partly dressed or sleeping" — because "federal and local prosecutors looking into the incident were unable to prove criminal intent on the part of school employees".  (Emphasis mine.)

Now, if a private individual not associated with the school district was found to be in possession of 56,000 photos of sometimes-partly-dressed high school students, without their knowledge, criminal intent wouldn't have even been on the table.  Mere possession of the photos would have been enough to nail the coffin shut on kiddie-porn charges, because if you're a private individual, possession is enough to damn you.  Even if the US Postmaster sent you a package as part of a sting operation and you never even opened it or knew what it was.

(There's plenty of cases on record of innocent people who have had their lives ruined that way in kiddie-porn witch hunts.  You want to nail someone on kiddie porn charges, but you don't have any actual or even circumstantial evidence that he has, or ever had, any in his possession, and can't find any grounds that a judge will buy into for a search warrant?  No problem, just mail him some, then arrest him for possessing it the moment he takes the package out of the mailbox, while he's still looking at the package in confusion because he hasn't ordered anything.)

But because this is a school district doing it, they got a free walk.

Double standards, anyone...?

"Super SATA" for moar bettar audio! (not)

* cough * cough * BULLSHIT * cough *

"I have disabled Comments on this post so that respectable visitors do not have to read the remarks made by a small number of extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals who cannot tolerate people expressing opinions that do not concur with their own."

Here's one of those "extremely ignorant, rude, malicious and disingenuous individuals":

How on earth can a SATA cable delivering 0s and 1s to their respective destination have any effect on those 0s and 1s?  The answer is, it can’t.  Unless it’s a magical one made of pixie shoes.  After all, if a SATA cable was so poor as to cause errors in the transmission of data, you wouldn’t be able to listen to the music in the first place: your operating system wouldn’t boot, and in the case of a NAS device, well, it just wouldn’t work.

(Via slashdot)