Hasta La Gadget!

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus wrote these powerful words in 1883 in support of indigent Russian Jewish refugees who came to America to escape persecution. Emma died in 1887 without knowing her impact.

In 1903, her great sonnet “The New Colossus” was made a permanent part of the Statue of Liberty. Since then, it has signified the statue’s beacon of hope for each new generation of immigrants.

Today, more than a century later, the words of a poet have more power, influence and moral authority than all the protesters who decry “illegal” immigration.

Franklin Roosevelt said, “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

It’s literally true for everyone except Native Americans. The idea that some people, especially children, can be “illegal” is a misnomer of biblical proportions.

Dennis Kucinich said it best: “I take issue with many people’s description of people being illegal immigrants. There aren’t any illegal Human Beings as far as I’m concerned.”

The question must be asked. Where is the empathy or Christian charity among those who protest children? Did these children choose their fate? Did they maliciously and knowingly choose to be born into poverty and strife? The idea is as absurd as protesting their presence.

The idea of sending these children away is inhumane, inexcusably hateful and morally reprehensible.

There is no justification for the conduct of these protesters. They are exhibiting misplaced anger, fear and bigotry. There is not a drop of Christian behavior among the lot.

This is not a game of political football. This is about America’s basic humanity. These are innocent children who have been sent here by desperate parents. Opposition to helping them is beyond anything an American should even consider.

Almost everyone involved with the “send them away” protests is making a mockery of their Christianity and the Christian principles they claim to uphold.

They should be thumped on the head with their Bibles and told to read Mark 10:13-16 about Jesus and the children.

Mark wrote the following…

People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

And from Matthew about Judgment Day: “Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

How can any American, Christian or not, turn away innocent children? It is unfathomable. It is sickeningly shameful and those who protest the presence of orphaned or abandoned children should pray to their God for forgiveness because they have no claim on Christianity.

If the protesters truly believe in Judgment Day, they should be very, very worried.

When The Truman Show debuted to great acclaim sixteen years ago this summer, film critics were, initially, slightly baffled. Audiences were intrigued, though, by the story of a man whose life was being secretly broadcast to the world and had billions of viewers.

Eventually, he becomes aware that secret cameras follow his every move and that his entire existence in a seaside Florida town is a series of observed and orchestrated events. The film began to earn praise as a fantastical masterpiece, and, ultimately as prophecy.

Because we are all now living in The Truman Show.

“I don’t think there’s much difference between Truman Burbank’s situation and all of us in the Internet era,” said Jason Wesbecher, CEO of Docket. “Facebook has just admitted to secretly manipulating emotions of 700,000 of its users right about the same time that the Washington Post reports 90 percent of the NSA’s Snowden documents aren’t about surveillance targets at all; they are about us and our lives: medical records, school transcripts, photos of toddlers on swing sets, and, yes, bikini selfies.”

Political, social, and technological forces have come together to make 2014 the year of The Truman Show. We might have seen this coming. A year after the film became a box office smash, CBS broadcast a wildly successful concept reality show that involved a diverse group of people living under one roof and constantly on camera. Given the Orwellian name of “Big Brother,” the production was the first mass, public indication that people are willing to surrender their privacy in exchange for money, convenience, and fame.

Which sounds a bit like the business model of Facebook.

When the social network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, argued in 2010 that “the age of privacy is over,” he was suggesting the web was creating a radical new set of norms. He insisted that Facebook’s privacy settings were being changed because people were not concerned about being public, and, in fact, indicated that if he were starting his social media business today that “public’ would be the default setting for users of the free service.

Danah Boyd, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a principal researcher at Microsoft, argued that Zuckerberg’s assertions were bunk, and the surrender of privacy was about a kind of invisible transaction.

“There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place,” she wrote. “What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn’t mean that folks who live their lives in public don’t value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.”

She is mostly correct.

But if you read Google’s Terms and Conditions page for Gmail, which, of course, no one does, you learn that the service reads your emails and cross-references them with search history, sites visited, and Google+ data. What is there for the Gmail user to gain from that loss of privacy? Rules of engagement only have meaning when both parties are aware they are being engaged.

Maybe, though, we are willing to give up even eternity for a little free web distraction. In 2010, the British retailer Gamestation got 7500 customers to “grant us a nontransferable option to claim, now and for ever more, your immortal soul.”

Wesbecher of Docket insists we need to utilize the circumstances created by the web for the benefit of our businesses and personal lives. His startup has created a “sales enablement” software that allows email users to know, not just when an email they sent has been opened, but how much time was spent reading attached documents, and even where they were forwarded and who else is reading.

“We, obviously, still have choices,” Wesbecher said. “We can go off the grid, dump our social networks, and replace Google with the privacy-friendly DuckDuckGo search engine. But our obsessions with social media and the web means we are creating enough data every day to fill up 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads. I don’t think turning away from it all is realistic, however. We just need tools to make the web work better for us, instead of against us.”

We are, in a sense, still traveling toward something on the Internet that we cannot yet see, and Truman Burbank, unsurprisingly, had the metaphor to describe our journey back in 1998 when he was explaining to Marlon about a place called Fiji.

Marlon: “Where the hell’s Fiji? Near Florida?”
Truman: (Pointing to golf ball) “See here?”
Marlon: “Yeah.”
Truman: “This is us.” (Guides finger halfway around ball.) “And all the way around here is Fiji. You can’t get any further away before you start coming back.”

The web and us? We are all still a very long ways from Fiji.

Also at: Texas to the World

Everyone remembers the deadly, shape-shifting T-1000 from Terminator 2.Thanks to a team of scientists from Boston Dynamics and MIT, though…it might be possible to build one. They’ve developed a material that’s capable of changing its shape and consistency at will. Is…that a good thing?

Dazzle camouflage is not subtle; the in-your-face style popularized in WWI seems more suited to a modern art gallery than a battle zone . Now, in commemoration of the Great War, a 1918 relic floating on the banks of the Thames has gotten a brand new paint job that honors its past.

Read more…

Unless you have the funds or if you’re lucky enough to have a company pay for business or first-class tickets for you, chances are you will end up sitting in the economy section of the plane. This isn’t a big deal if the flight is empty or if you get an empty seat next to you, but on flights that are full, safe to say that it can be a rather claustrophobic situation.

However it seems that instead of figuring out how to make airplanes even more comfortable, Airbus has recently filed for a patent that seems to suggest that they are trying to figure out how to cram as many people into a plane as possible. As you can see in the patent diagram above, it reveals plans for seats that one might expect in a bus.

The seats are small and shaped like bicycle seats and can be lifted up or pulled down when needed. This helps to create more space in the plane, which in turn could allow for passengers to be allowed onto a flight. While we can’t tell if these seats will be comfortable, they certainly don’t look like it.

Not to mention it would make eating pretty difficult as there does not appear to be any trays, or in-flight entertainment for that matter unless they’re planning to hand out tablets to their passengers. It is possible that these seats could be used solely for domestic flights or flights take last an hour or two, but what do you guys think? Is this a flight you would like to get on?

Airbus Patent Reveals Plans For Uncomfortable-looking Seats

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