(no subject)

My Way News - Engineer: GPS Shoes Make People Findable:

(AP) - Isaac Daniel calls the tiny Global Positioning System chip he's embedded into a line of sneakers "peace of mind." He wishes his 8-year-old son had been wearing them when he got a call from his school in 2002 saying the boy was missing. The worried father hopped a flight to Atlanta from New York where he had been on business to find the incident had been a miscommunication and his son was safe.

Days later, the engineer started working on a prototype of Quantum Satellite Technology, a line of $325 to $350 adult sneakers that hit shelves next month. It promises to locate the wearer anywhere in the world with the press of a button. A children's line will be out this summer.

I'm of mixed minds. One, if the kids a runaway, and they know their shoes have the chip, they'll just swap them. If there's a perp involved, then if they know this is possible, they may swap the shoes - one of the first things kidnappers do, if they're the keep them and not use them up type, is change the clothes and the hair of the victim to avoid being recognized.

But then there's the real annoying fact - *someone* is going to create a tool that taps into the outgoing signal these shoes are sending and sell it to desperate perps. Its exactly the same black market that exists where people reverse-engineer the radio signals that scientists put on big cats and whales so that the hunters can (illegally) find them. THEN they'll swap the shoes as soon as they do since they know the kid has 'em.

Open tracking information, no matter how well encrypted, will get broken by somebody if there's a desire that outweighs reasonable self-restraint.

ND joins the 20th century...

Now if only they'd join the 21st...
N.D. Senate OKs cohabitation law change - Yahoo! News:

Living together out of wedlock would be downgraded from a sex crime to fraud, and then only if the couple claims to be married, under a proposal that passed the state Senate on Friday.

The bill was changed from an outright repeal of the state's anti-cohabitation law. The amended proposal would make the false representation of marital status a misdemeanor crime for a man and woman who live together.

Cohabiting couples who do not falsely claim marriage would not be penalized.

[...]

"This is, in fact, the 21st century, and I believe it's time to put to rest this 19th-century legislation," said state Sen. Tracy Potter.

Gee, that's nice. As the article says, its not like this "sex crime" blue law had been enforced in years, though the accusations enough can cause havoc as we all know.  In fact, it was probably out of fear that calling it a "sex crime" bumped it up to "cruel and unusual punishment" since that would put their names into the national sex offenders registry, associating them with rapists and child porn convicts.  Doesn't THAT make sense?

Now tell me why it's "fraud" to merely "claim" to be married? What is "claimed" anyways?

If you're expecting any one of those 375 benefits of marriage (according to a New York appeals court) that are built into the legal system (custody protection, visitation rights and medical authorizations, tax filing status, joint property ownership, automatic insurance beneficiary, automatic inheritance, 5th amendment spousal privilege and a whole lot more) and you don't have that license, then fine - you're being fraudulent.  The law remains the law regarding those automatic protections (protections that you can't even enforce through legal personal contract in Ohio, Michigan, or Virginia thanks to the lies of the right-wing nutballs - lying for Christ, God I love it.  Really.).

But if my friends who are, to themselves, married decide to just openly say so on public forums, not expecting any *specific* benefit or protection, then you can take your "fraud" claims and piss off.

But really, if the law didn't automatically grant all of those protections, this wouldn't be an issue because marriage would have to be only a personal choice.

In the end, all the right-wing nutcases want is to hold onto their elitism while they still have it (while at the same time, constantly accusing the left of elitism - damn I love their irony and hypocrisy.  Really.).  They have these protections built in, rights that have simply openly declared that homosexuals do not have and should never have. (unless they do the "right" thing and marry the opposite sex against their own identity)

And THAT is pure hatred and bigotry, plain and simple.

today's at40?

Was from Feb 1980.  As such, aside from a Pat Benatar song, everything there owed more to the 1979 sound than to anything cool and 80s like. The number of late-disco mellow songs was really annoying.

So the fact that I had to miss most of it 'cause of an MSFB meeting didn't exactly bother me much.

No memories today, sorry.

At the time, being only 9 and in a home where the "oldies" station was played the most, I only knew what bits and pieces of pop music I knew from "Solid Gold" on TV.  I was in my first of two years in the San Diego area of California.