11-Year-Old Jams YYZ

Stuff this good just needs to be shared. Enjoy!

Left4Dead w/ Bots on Expert, Mercy Hospital Lvl. 4

Playing with bots isn’t impossible on Expert, but it’s quite hard. Made it through Mercy Hospital level 4 with a rag-tag bunch of crazy computer scripts. Zoey is twice the bot Francis will ever be.

Inspirational Kevin Laue

Gotta give it up for this kid who hasn’t let an obstacle stop him from doing the things he loves. Incredible!

Nation’s #1 John Wall to Kentucky

With John Wall, joining the already #1 recruiting class in the nation, Kentucky is going to be absolutely loaded!

Next year is going to be exhilarating. I’m getting buzzed already!

Dojo Info 5/14/09

1. Losing your footing and finding the ground
   Where do you turn when it looks like everything is coming crashing down around you? There’s only one person bigger than it all.
2. Can a Palm Pre multitask better than an iPhone?
   Always on the lookout for the next iPhone killer; especially if it came to T-Mobile.
3. The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act
   U.S. Senate (§ 909) that would not only criminalize free speech but provide elevated protection to pedophiles. Contact your Representatives to vote “No!” on this outrageous legislation.
4. “Super Reefs” Fend Off Climate Change, Study Says
   I’m certainly no scientist but isn’t pretty much everything on the planet cyclical? Things go up, things go down. To a certain extent, it’s arrogant for humans to even think what they do affects our gigantic Earth in any significant way.
5. Sellers in Louisville Raffle Home for Mission Work
   Raffle their house? In this market? It just might happen, especially when you’ve got The Man Upstairs on your team.

Does the Patriot Act Supercede the Constitution?

For Annette Lundeby, her son Ashton and their family, it has.

The following is from Teen homeschooler jailed under Patriot Act. Examples like this should show every reasonable people why citizens should want our government to have less power, not more; smaller government, not larger.

A 16-year-old homeschooled boy from North Carolina was taken away from his home in handcuffs two months ago and has been held by the FBI in Indiana ever since, a victim, his mother claims, of the Patriot Act spun out of control.

According to Annette Lundeby of Oxford, N.C., armed FBI agents and local police stormed her home around 10 p.m. on March 5, looking for her son, Ashton. The officers presented a federal search warrant and seized the tenth-grader’s computer, cell phone and bank statements.

Ashton was then taken to a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind., charged with making a bomb threat in Indiana from his home computer.

His mother, however, told Raleigh’s WRAL-TV that she argued with the authorities, claiming someone must have hacked into her son’s IP address and used it to make crank calls. The agents’ search, she claims, also failed to uncover any trace of bomb-making materials.

“Undoubtedly, they were given false information,” Lundeby told the station, “or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats.”

Allowed little access to see her son over the last two months, facing a court date that keeps being pushed back and given no information by FBI agents sitting behind a gag order on the case, Lundeby now says the USA Patriot Act has unjustly imprisoned an innocent boy and stripped her son of due process.

“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she told WRAL-TV. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”

Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the USA Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – or P.A.T.R.I.O.T. – Act armed law enforcement with new tools to detect and prevent terrorism. Among other measures, it better enables interagency cooperation and allows law enforcement a wider array of technological and surveillance tools to more quickly and stealthily investigate terrorist threats.

Dan Boyse, a former U.S attorney not connected to the case, explained to WRAL-TV how Ashton Lundeby could have been swept up by the Patriot Act.

“They’re saying that ‘we feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we’re going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States,’” Boyce told the station.

Boyce theorized that if an FBI agent came to the conclusion that Lundeby was a serious terrorist threat, the usual rules of law enforcement don’t apply.

“There’s nothing a matter of public record,” Boyce said. “All those normal rights are just suspended in the air.”

Ashton’s mother told the television station, “Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from. This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”

This is about and unfair a situation as I recall having ever read. Spread the word. These people’s North Carolina representatives need to look into this.

Update 5/9: As is the case with most things, there’s more to the story than one side presents. Here’s some additional information from William Norman Grigg. And a piece by Wired.

Dojo Info 5/8/09

1. Suspect detained over ‘extremist’ bumper sticker
   “A Louisiana driver was stopped and detained for having a “Don’t Tread on Me” bumper sticker on his vehicle and warned by a police officer about the “subversive” message it sent, according to the driver’s relative.” Oh my! I had no idea Louisiana was a fascist state. Are they going to lock me up for posting this?
2. Test drive: All-electric Mini and Ford Fusion Hybrid
   Cool stuff! But no prices??
3. Video Game Hall of Fame Gains Momentum, Support
   Of course it’s a great idea. I just hope they give me credit because I did it first: Paladin’s Video Game Hall of Fame.
4. Microsoft’s Full Body Motion Controller Revealed?
   Microsoft says that it will “completely transform how people think about home entertainment.” Hmm… OK, we’ll see Mr. Copy What Other Companies Do But Try To Make The World Think It’s Your Idea Company.
5. Amazon’s big-screen Kindle DX makes its debut
   2nd Gen > 1st Gen

Caruso So Over the Top, The Top Left Town

So easy even a Caveman could do it. Wait… I did? Oh yeah, back in 1995: Caruso on Caruso.

Beer Pong Savants

Some of this HAS to be special effects, right? RIGHT?!?!

If not, big time props to the fellas: Matt Compton, Steve Olson, David Anderson and Michael Schimp.

Update 5/9: And there’s more! Maybe we should have a Pong Bracket Contest?

Red=Evil, Blue=Good and Media Partisanship

I thought about this topic for quite some time, never posting. Can’t say why, for sure. Perhaps it’s my ADD or quote possibly early onset Alzheimer’s (my wife says it’s the Amber Ale) but whatever the case, I hadn’t gotten around to posting until tonight… when the topic quietly resurfaced and caught my fancy.

[Another aside, the reason it surfaced was due to the sci-fi books I read. For example, in The Hidden City by David Eddings which I'm currently finished up, the final battle is fought by the primordial opposing forces—one representing good, the Bhelliom, and the other representing evil, Klael. After a brief physical match they break down to their elemental light and gas forms and... like most literary pieces I've ever read, including Star Wars light sabers, the good is blue and the evil red.]

So this reminded me of the whole Red State/Blue State topic in politics. Ask someone today which political party is Red and they’ll say Republicans, with the Democrats being blue. But it hasn’t always been that way.

So when the switch and why? This from Wikipedia:

Early on, some channels used a scheme of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. The first television news network to use colors to depict the states won by presidential candidates was NBC. In 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for the NBC Nightly News, asked his network’s engineers to construct a large electronic map of the USA. The map was placed in the network’s election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years; NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map as showing Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide as a “sea of blue”.[6] CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme—blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[7] If anything, by 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time Magazine and the Washington Post used an opposite scheme.[8][9][10]

So it began with the Republicans as the blue party. I’m not the only one who’s caught the switch. Along the way, someone in the media realized their opportunity to make the change and now it’s generally accepted by the public; complete with the underlying, hidden meaning that if the Republicans are red, they must be evil.

Very sneaky.