Cake and grief counseling will be available at the conclusion of the test.  WANT!  My new hero at wonderlandblog.com (never heard of him before) made a “Companion Cube” cupboard.  The Companion Cube is a surprisingly overly popular prop from the game Portal.  Portal is one of the games from The Orange Box and is separately available from the Xbox Live Arcade.  If you have a 360, get the Portal demo on XBLA, it’s a very fun game…

Anyways, the carpenter here has thoroughly documented how to create one for yourself.  Get info on The Orange Box too.  Portal is one of the funnest games I’ve ever played…

Oh, man.  Super nice models of the Nautilus (Disney version) from the Nautilus Drydocks (go there for more pictures).  I’m looking at the 66-inch model, and there’s exceptional attention to detail.  You could almost shoot with this as the hero model.  Even the wheelhouse is fully detailed.

They even have additional options to convert it to a Radio Controlled sub that can go into the water.  But you’ll never catch me putting such a toy into the drink.  Knowing my luck, somebody with a model HMS Warrior would come along and sink my sub.

There’s a lot of buzz on the popular, tech blogs about the new T-2 amplifier from Neuhaus Labs.  It’s built on vacuum tubes and hand-wound transformers.  I’ve got about 14 years [at the time of writing this post] in the Pro Audio and Video manufacturing industries, so naturally, I was very curious to look at the T-2.  Short answer:  It’s a WIN!  Here’s my opinion.

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America’s entire science-fiction history is full of stories warning of a dystopian future where books are outlawed, art is destroyed, and the punishment for reading poetry is death.  Who thought that having “electronics books” was a good idea?  Not me, and here’s the proof:

Talk about irony. In an Orwellian moment, owners of Amazon’s Kindle discovered that their recently purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm had been deleted by Amazon. Apparently, a third-party retailer who specializes in selling public-domain books used Amazon’s self-service platform to sell copies of two Orwell titles. Unfortunately, those books aren’t public domain in the U.S.A.

So, with a kindle, “they” can reach out and remove books from your possession.  Sounds a little like depriving you of your property without due process.  Here it comes.  It’s starting to happen for real.  This is the warning sign.  We’re already suckers for DRM crap and DCMA garbage; we can’t copy, move, lend, or basically use anything we pay for and own.

But there’s a flip side.  It turns out that, as usual, we are our own worst enemies.  Society has bred a kind of soccer mom criminal.  It’s become socially acceptable to simply go to a Torrent website and illegally download copyrighted material whenever it suits us.  Music, movies, books, games, and software.  Shoot, if young women could illegally download pregnancy, I’m sure they would.

So, the bad news is that we will end up creating the Firemen or Grammaton Clerics ourselves.  It won’t be government, but private corporations.  Think about it, who wants to get rid of your rights the most?  Is it your job, or the government?  The Government that we always seem to fear is by the people and for the people; the Government is ourselves (at least for now).  But what is the government becoming?  It’s becoming privatized.  We already know that huge corporations buy our politicians.  Since Corporations are running America, maybe we should be concerned about them being “big brother.”  Perhaps they already are:

At Work, here’s what happens:

1. Someone accuses you of doing something wrong to your boss.
2. Your boss didn’t like you anyway, and the accuser is kind of cute.
3. The boss concludes whether or not you are guilty.
4. You are not informed about the specifics of the charge.
5. You are not allowed to know who accused you.
6. You are not allowed to cross examine witnesses.
7. You are not allowed to examine evidence.
8. You have no representation.
9. You are terminated by a pink slip; it’s the first you’ve heard of it.
10. You realize you should have joined a union.

Man, at least with the government, you get some kind of fair shot.

Anyways, these dystopian book-burning warnings come in all shapes and sizes.  Pay attention to them!  Some of my favorites are Equilibrium, Idiocracy, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Gattaca, V for Vendetta, I Robot, The Matrix, Metropolis, and Animal Farm.

Source: SHIFT