lookin

It's not easy trusting the government when it's in the process of becoming more opaque. Fundamental decisions are being made behind closed doors. Could anyone have believed a dozen years ago that we'd have a federal court that did not publish its decisions and was not subject to oversight? Even Congress wasn't - and isn't - told the full truth. If the government thinks it needs secrecy in certain areas, it should lead the public debate about which areas and how much freedom citizens are willing to give up in return. Getting ratted out by a contractor is not a trust-building maneuver. In my opinion, it's not about trusting what goes on behind closed doors; it's about making sure the doors are rarely closed and don't stay shut for long. Once they're shut, how is anyone to know what's going on behind them? What if a war on terror becomes a war on gay porn? I don't especially need James Clapper checking into my browser history. While I don't expect that to happen any time soon, I also don't expect the government to rein in its new-found technical capabilities on its own. I think, without public input, expansion of targets is inevitable. Where has restraint been shown so far? I've linked to this article before about changes we asked the Germans to make after 9/11. It's a decade old, but still provides food for thought about how trust is built when a government is transparent to its citizens, and citizens are opaque to the government. I think we are moving in the opposite direction.

- Coming soon to a city near you!! AUNTIE MAME MEETS THE COLLIER BROTHERS When I say I want to get away from it all, Darling, I don't mean everything. - Directed and Redirected by OZ - A Major Production ®

Interesting point and one I hadn't thought of. It must have been hard for him, and not surprising if he felt his countrymen ought to have let one slide. Maybe the constable later wished he'd known about Turing's contributions to the nation and would have let him skate. From what I've read about Turing, he was richly blessed in the parts of his brain that could blaze mathematical trails that few others could follow, but not very advanced in the parts responsible for sensing trouble and staying out of it. He was certainly naive, as you say. For whatever reason, Turing admitted breaking the law to a sworn officer and stepped into a shit pile that most of his gay countrymen had figured out how to avoid. Reminds me of some friends of mine who had an intruder climb through their window while they were away and steal a couple of nice plants from their grow room. They thought it was their teenage neighbor and called the local Sheriff to check the windowsill for fingerprints. The snag was this was thirty years ago, long before Prop 215, and the Sheriff laid a passel of charges on my friends that required a high-priced lawyer to get pared down to something manageable. To this day, none of us knows what they were thinking, other than that they weren't doing anything terribly wrong as they saw it, and the law was the problem and not them. They were right, of course, but the law was still the law and sometimes the constabulary takes a rather dim view of those who break it. My friends could probably have stayed out of trouble by sucking up their property loss and so could Turing. Whether it was a sense of entitlement or plain old naivete, they got a little too close to the bear. What happened to Turing afterwards was awful. Though I wasn't an adult, I was fooling around with other guys in the U. S. just a few years after Turing did in England. Some of my older friends had gone through hell a decade earlier for getting caught having gay sex. Even as a fairly naive teenager, I knew the importance of carrying on below the radar. Still, I've done more than my share of stupid things, and know how lucky I've been. Wish Turing had also caught a break.

I tried finding a source for that and I can't. When Turing was arrested in 1952, almost no one would have known what he did during the war or would have given him an award for it. The codes he cracked were still in use by several countries long after the war was over and the British didn't want anyone to know they had broken them. Churchill knew of course and told the folks at Bletchley that they had shortened the war by two years, but they must never talk about it. It wasn't until 1970 that anyone who worked there said anything, and then it was one of the American code breakers who had been on assignment at Bletchley during the war. It took another decade or two for the story to get into the public domain. I think it would make a terrific movie. Not the fictionalized Enigma which didn't even mention Turing, but the real story. If the German U-boats had been able to operate without detection, the British would have had a much closer call than they did. After he found the British starting to show up wherever his subs were, Großadmiral Dönitz started to believe his unbreakable code had been broken, but the generals in Berlin assured him it was impossible. If I understand correctly, one of the keys to breaking the Enigma code was the realization that, because of the way the machine was designed, no plaintext letter could ever be encoded as itself. "Aha!", said Turing, and some other very smart folks, "let's see what we can do with that." A replica of the Turing Bombe - the originals were destroyed after the war

OK boys, bend your knees and touch your toes, and I'll show you where the red nose goes!

Thought-provoking indeed, MsGuy. But I have to remember that the folks who are dealing with these issues are already a couple of generations ahead of me. And who knows what's in the crib?

Mon Dieu! I must have left it in San Francisco!

Looks like a pillow muncher to me.

Reminds me of this old joke.

A guy gets his very first new Mercedes and decides he'd like to have a rabbi say a blessing. So he asks an Orthodox rabbi to say a bracha over it. 'Nothing doing.', says the rebbe. 'We don't trouble Adonai about a car!' Next he calls a Conservative rabbi who asks if he belongs to the congregation. When the guy tells him he doesn't, the rabbi says, 'Sorry, we can't do a bracha for a non-member.' Finally he asks a Reform rabbi, who is much more accommodating. 'Sure, why not?', says the rabbi. 'Um, tell me though, what's a bracha?'

Good gosh! I never stopped to think that my little posts might be bringing down the Board. Sincere apologies to Lucky and to any others who were similarly put off. As it turns out, December is shaping up to be a fairly busy month, so I'll be just an occasional lurker for the next little while anyway. Can't wait to check back after the holidays and see what you've done with the place!

Per this old chestnut from Harry Hershfield, the posts here are just horrible to read. And not nearly enough of them!

Cheer up. Maybe the website won't be any better in December, and he'll decide to bomb them instead.

Up to 3gpm! power-reverse for quick tidy up! free gallon of Rush™ if you order today!

I always check out these too-good-to-be-true stories, but not this one. I wanted to enjoy it for a little while. I had a good ten minutes until NCBored did the needful. During that time, it occurred that Apple hasn't caught many breaks lately. Twenty billion nickels in the driveway would have been a kick in the iKeister.

A pretty good one, if you ask me!

From FourAces' article: McClendon said replacing the image will take about eight days and that Google has spoken to the Barrera family "to let them know we're working hard on the update." From MsGuy's article: It said replacing the image could take eight days. . . . Google Maps vice-president Brian McClendon said: "Since the media first contacted us about the image, we've been looking at different technical solutions. Perhaps they need the extra week for the blur-filter to kick in.

First they have to find out what server it's on. The article FourAces linked was interesting. Sounds like the Germans got Google to agree to blank out the houses of all the folks who requested it.

Following my own advice, I tossed my boytoy cookies (three of them) and can sign out again. Oddly, a few seconds after I erased one, it would show up again in my cookie list, as if OZ had told the programmers to keep shooting them out again. Anyway, I finally got them all removed and can now log off from time to time. So to speak. PS: Good gosh! OZ and I hit 'post' in the same minute. That means it's noon in India and OZ is already up and at 'em. No wonder we're not getting any progress reports from India.

I liked the pictures but, not speaking Spanish, I can only wonder what they got up to. If there's any info you're able to share on this guy, I'd be much obliged!

If it's scat you're after, you might want to hold off till AdamSmith drops by. This thread's got fruit, fiber, and drugs. It shouldn't be long now.

Perhaps you pissed him off or something. My ex-proctologist once told me that dietary fiber was highly overrated, but that was before I found out he was moonlighting as a mortician.

Hey! Was that a shot? Swap poem for theorem and get rid of the Almost and you sound like my freshman physics TA.

In case it helps, I just tried signing out and got this message: Safari can't open the page Too many redirects occurred trying to open “‎www.boytoy.com/index.php?mdf=logout”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page. Needless to say, I'm still signed in.