EXTREMELY BORED

I just read an article about a man who at the age of twenty three was in a severe car crash that left him in a coma. twenty three years past and the doctors scan his brain to find that it was fully functional all along. The man was paralyzed and unable to let his condition be known to those that constantly surrounded him.

How the hell do you live for 23 years completely unable to do anything but think? After all this time he now has some sort of special keyboard that allows him to type what he wants to say. The guy seems legitimately happy to boot! I'm sure it can be gathered by the way I'm approaching the subject that I don't think I could handle it.

In the article it was also stated that doctors have had a lot of trouble properly diagnosing people in what seem to be comas. Apparently a large number of patients that are diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are actually in a minimally conscious state. Who knows how many more are out there just like this man who has had to sit and listen to everything going on around him without ever being able to communicate? I think that the test that was performed on this man that revealed that he was misdiagnosed should be conducted on anyone who might be in a vegetative state just to be sure. I'm sure that doing that will cost a lot of money and more often than not would be a waste of time, but for the people who might be awake- It has to be worth it. If I was in that situation I would hope to at least have the chance to tell my family I love them and that I want to move to Oregon so that I could be Euthanized.

I'm unfriending the dictionary

Apparently the word of the year is unfriend-(the act of removing a contact on a social networking site such as face book.) I understand that the dictionary needs to include new words every year to keep up with how the English language is growing and changing, but really, unfriend? It bothers me that this was even one of the words considered for addition to the dictionary. What did it beat out to get this honor?
Hash tag for one. Honestly I think that hash tag would have made more sense to add to the dictionary considering that Twitter has become more than the micro blog it was intended to be and "hash tag" isn't as self-explanatory as unfriend. It doesn't take a seasoned etymologist to understand what unfriend means. I get that most of the words being added recently have been centered in modern technology-technology is the most rapidly advancing aspect of our country except for maybe our national debt.
All of this makes me think of how the language is continually bastardized until it is just a mockery of its original form. It really makes me sad to see such a decline, but if there is one thing that I have noticed is most "english speakers" don't speak true english. I guess the word being added to the dictionary shouldn't bother me too much, I mean, most people don't ever pick up a dictionary anyway.
Oh yeah funny tidbit, the spell check on this blog keeps telling me that unfriend is not a word.

Yaaaaaaaaarg!

Pirates are in the news again. Of course it isn't the cool ones with the spiffy clothes, it's the Somalians with the assault rifles. It seems they've highjacked a chemical tanker with a North Korean crew. I'm not entirely sure why, but hey- why are there pirates in this day and age anyway? The reason is simple. These people don't have the technology to compete with the armed forsec that are trying to stop them, but they still have more guns than sense. It is easy to see the leap from I have nothing but the clothes on my back and this gun, to maybe I could take stuff from other people by attacking them with this gun?
These Somalian pirates don't have a whole lot to lose. The transitional government in Somalia has a somewhat tenuous grip on power simply can't afford to divert their atention to stopping these pirates. So who suffers most? Everyone else in the world. I think it is fairly easy to shrug off a major problem if it's just hurting others and not greatly affecting you. So who is filling the role of the protectors? The Un lead by U.S. again. Some shipping companies also employ mercenaries to protect their ships when sailing through troubled waters. What does this have to do with me? very little. I just think it's cool that piracy still exits in a way not involving music. It means that I might have the chance someday to meet a pirate. I hope I will be properly armed.

Courtney Love-s to get sued

So I was checking CNN.com again and I couldn't resist finding out what Courtney Love had done to get herself into trouble again. Turns out this time she is being sued for offensive messages she had posted on Twitter about a fashion designer.
This seems like a simple enough case, except that any case involving Twitter or any modern technology is scrutinized heavily by everyone in law. Apparently Laws regarding technology follow about five years after the technology has made it into the mainstream and since Twitter hasn't been around for very long, people are waiting to hear the outcome of this libel case involving Twitter.
The biggest question is whether or not you can say what you want without consequences when using things like Twitter. Apparently you can still find yourself being sued as if you were printing this information on the front page of the newspaper. How do you preserve freedom of speech in a social medium? Right now it's looking like you don't.
This isn't the first case involving Twitter, just the highest profile case going on right now. A motion to dismiss the case altogether was overruled simply because it is important for cases dealing with previously unaddressed areas of American law to come to fruition so that a precedent can be set. Maybe Courtney Love can do something helpful for a change and win this case so more of these lawsuits don't pop up in the future.
I understand that Twitter is sometimes more than the simple micro blog it was meant to be, but it isn't the New York Times.
Maybe I should get rid of all the negative stuff I said about Rupert Murdoch before he takes me to court.

Rupert Murdoch is a dinosaur

I read an article on CNN.com talking about how Rupert Murdoch is planning on taking all of News Corp's websites off of search engines like google. The reason, he claims, is that google is stealing his news. In addition to removing his sites from these search engines, he is also planning on making websites like the Wall Street Journal subscription based. What? Really?
First of all sites like google aren't "stealing your news" they are linking people directly to your website, secondly News Corp as a whole doesn't have anything special to offer that you can't get somewhere else online for free. There was a time when the Wall Street Journal was something special but that ended roughly around the same time that Rupert Murdoch bought it and reformatted it to a People magazine clone. It seems like Rupert has reached the end of his rope in the online market. He is well known for owning My space which coincidentally is expected to go under soon as it is losing lots of users to Face book. What does Murdoch do about it? He smears Face book in the wall street journal saying that it is detrimental to people leading healthy social lives. Wow. It's amazing that such mud throwing made it passed grade school.
Okay Mr. Murdoch, you might have been able to build one of the largest media empires in the world a few years back, but you are about to bring it back down to where you started from. Since when is it a good idea to revert back to out-dated business models like charging for Internet content that is free everywhere else? I could understand if he offered something that others do not, but he doesn't. Good lord this man is a dinosaur! He really can't seem to move forward and adapt to the times and like a dinosaur, he and his company are going to go extinct if they don't evolve quickly.
Granted, I could rant about Rupert's poor business sense concern the future of mass media all day, but here is the real kicker: Rupert Murdoch flat out said that he understands that this move will significantly decrease the amount of visitors that he has to these sites, but the kind of people who would get to his site through google aren't the kind of readers he needs.
I think I'm going to leave it at that before I have an aneurysm from all the blood rushing rushing to my head.
Rupert Murdoch-avoid falling meteors
p.s. I'm sorry I didn't have your websites bookmarked, dirtbag

Water on the moon?

I was listening to a little news talk radio (from South Africa) for my global mass media project and one of the current events they were talking about was that yesterday we found water on the moon. Apparently the water is in the soil which really just amounts to us finding that there are hydrogen and oxygen atoms on the moon. I'm unimpressed mostly because I see this as just another way for someone to capitalize on the ignorant masses. How long is it until we start seeing bottled moon water for sale? Of course the price would be astronomical...sorry for the bad joke.
The main problem that I have with this is that everyone is still so focused on outerspace when we hardly even know about our own oceans. This greatly bothers me considering that many people believe that we evolved out of the ocean and oh yeah the ocean cover over three quarters of our planet. It seems to me that we keep finding new life with crazy adaptations that often inspire and enthrall scientists worldwide. I can say that the space race and space travel in general has provided us with many technological advancements. I also believe that if we furthered our aquatic research we would see similar technological advancement and a lot of it would actually be applicable in every day life. I also think it would be helpful because underwater colonization seems like a more viable option than putting people in space. As a scuba diver I have enjoyed the ocean for about ten years and i honestly enjoy that it isn't overrun with people, I just wish there was more attention paid to it so that I could reap the benefits.

Lawnwork in the buff

I read this article about a guy doing lawnwork in his backyard naked getting a class c misdemeanor citation from a fort worth deputy. The guy was 71 years old. He was in his backyard. Naked. Doing lawn work. Wow. I would say that was fine except that the guy had a chainlink fence around his backyard that didn't have privacy slats. Oh and he lives across the street from a park and that street is heavily travelled.
The cop did a background check to make sure the guy wasn't a sex offender and the guy was clean so he just got a ticket. I gotta say I think getting a ticket is the last thing on my list of deterrents of working with sharp blades naked. Moreover I think this is a good exaample of a trend that I've noticed. Old people get away with just about everything.
Honestly I can't say that I know what would happen to me if I attempted something like this but then again the tought had never crossed my mind before now anyway. I can see why people wouldn't want their children seeing that but everyone else should just grow up. Every man who has ever been to a locker room at a gym has had that unfortunate sight before, and just about every woman will have to see a naked old man some day.
Sometimes I wish that this country hadn't been founded by puritans...