A 500 gb hard drive. And it’s portable!

Via [The Shifted Librarian]

“Your Life on Disk.

John Robb wants his information to shift with him, and I don’t blame him. I do, too, which is why I was floored to see the LaCie Big Disk 500GB portable hard drive referenced on the Dreamweaver Talk mailing list. The dimensions are just a tad too large for true shirt-pocket or in-jacket portability (6.7×1.7×10.6 and 5.51 lbs.), but I’m amazed that a 500GB drive is already this small. And the price? $949. That’s less than $2 PER GIGABYTE.

This trend certainly has implications for cyborglogging!”

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Great moments in American justice

“State can make inmate sane enough to execute

The New York Times says the federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled yesterday that officials in Arkansas can force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic drugs to make him sane enough to execute.” <From a newsletter from The Independent>

Excuse me, but has this country just gone completely mad? It is ok to FORCE someone to take meds so they can be “well” enough to execute? This is Monty Python meets Kafka after the lunatics took over the asylum.

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Bush bravado backfires

China has joined Russia, France, Germany, and Belgium in opposing an Iraq war. Saudi Arabia plans to stop allowing US troops there.

Dubya’s plan to cow the world into submission by demonstrating the US has the mightiest penis on the planet is obviously failing. Rather than getting his way, allies are becoming former allies, and the US is losing, not gaining clout.

That’s what happens when ignorant provincials think they can play with the grown-ups.

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NYC denies march permit for Feb 15.

There will be a rally on Feb 15. near the U.N. in New York City - but no march. The City cited “security risks” and a judge agreed. What nonsense. NYC routinely has huge marches.

Blocking a march for no good reason practically challenges the more radical elements, like the Black Bloc Anarchists, to cause trouble. The more conspiratorical minded might wonder if that, at least partly, was the intent.

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Shelter from the storm

Beautiful things or that which is not Inferno

From the Viridian mailing list

“By the time we send out our next Viridian Note, the United States may be at war.  This is a sad and ugly historical period, so it’s time for us Viridians to mindfully contemplate pretty things.  Such action is a moral necessity. In the memorable words of Italo Calvino, in his beautiful book INVISIBLE CITIES:

“There are two ways to escape the suffering. The first is easy for many: accept the Inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the Inferno, are not Inferno, then make them endure, give them space.“

In this Note we Viridians are vigilantly giving considerate space and time to things that are Not-Inferno. If you see one that you fancy, by all means help make it endure.”

Read the whole posting, then surf to the wondrous places listed therein.

And speaking of wondrous things, Boing Boing bills itself as “a directory of wonderful things”, and it is.

Let’s all keep the wonder.

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Saudis Plan to End U.S. Presence

“Saudi Arabia’s leaders have made far-reaching decisions to prepare for an era of military disengagement from the United States, to enact what Saudi officials call the first significant democratic reforms at home, and to rein in the conservative clergy that has shared power in the kingdom.

Senior members of the royal family say the decisions, reached in the last month, are a result of a continuing debate over Saudi Arabia’s future and have not yet been publicly announced. But these princes say Crown Prince Abdullah will ask President Bush to withdraw all American armed forces from the kingdom as soon as the campaign to disarm Iraq has concluded”

The balance of power is shifting all over the globe. Pulling away from America. Europe, now Saudi Arabia.

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