Proposal for Internet Laws
I read today about
a man in Japan that was arrested (in real life) because he cheated in a video game.
Apparently we're setting some kind of trend where virtual crimes can be punished in the real world. As long as that's where we're heading, I've composed a list of laws that need to be understood about any virtual activity.
- If there are items on the ground in a video game, to pick them up is stealing.
- Killing someone in a video game is murder.
- Killing someone on your team is treason.
- Picking to play on the side of the Germans or Russians in a video game is also treason.
- Development of a game where you can play as the Germans or Russians is considered an act of war against the US.
- The games "Grand Theft Auto" and "Thief" are completely illegal. The publishers and vendors will be prosecuted for entrapment.
- A computer virus is considered a biological weapon, and the creation of a virus will be prosecuted at an international level as the development of weapons of mass destruction.
- If your computer gets a virus you will be quarantined from the Internet (to prevent you from spreading it by your ignorance).
- Online dating services that charge for membership will be guilty of running a prostitution racket.
- You must have a license to operate an email account. If you cannot forward responsibly, then your email privileges will be forcibly revoked.
- Web pages cannot make noises or play music unless the user requests it by pressing a button. Web pages that automatically play music upon being visited will be prosecuted for disturbing the peace, and the Web pages will be impounded.
Google (TM)
Google Talk is all the rage among my computer nerd friends. If you haven't heard the hype yet (it probably hasn't spread away from the nerds yet), allow me to enlighten you.
Google Talk is a very simple (watered-down) chat client, similar to the Instant Messengers from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN. It pretty much has only two features: a regular text messaging, and a voice chat (both features that the other clients have had for a long time). It doesn't even send files.
You might ask, Why do the computer nerds (who should know better) like it, if it's such a piece of junk? Well, I'll tell you. You see, the hard-core computer nerds have a very strong bias against Microsoft, and hate everything that they make, even if it's better than the alternatives. In a similar fashion, they love everything with the brand name "Google", without regard to whether it's good or not. Google is just a corporate entity like any other (including Microsoft).
The reason I post this to the non-nerd world is simply that I fear that other people will be blinded by the Google name and fail to see that this particular program is a folly. I think it was silly of Google to make a chat client in the first place. What's the point of switching to a brand new chat program that no one even has yet? Even if the feature set were better than other IM's (which it isn't), don't you choose your chat based on which one your friends are on?
Bubble Boy
I drove to Colorado with my Dad. It takes a lot longer than when I drive myself, so I had a lot of time to kill. I blew my first bubble with bubble gum. There's not a story behind it, I'm just proud of myself.
Food experts needed
I've been seeing these billboards for McDonald's, advertising their new chicken sandwiches. I don't go to McDonald's a lot, but those sandwiches just looked
so good that I couldn't help it.
I had the Chicken Club, and I have to say that I was disappointed. The old chicken sandwich was just a processed meat patty. I like the processed meat better. It's always the same consistency and always tender and juicy.
So this gets me thinking. What's wrong with processed food? I mean, it's got such a bad rep, but why? I have no idea why it's considered bad for me. For that matter, I don't understand what all the hype (good or bad) is behind organic foods, preservatives, or even fresh foods. What kind of motivation do I have to eat "healthy" when I don't know why these things are considered healthy at all?
I could draw some kind of analogy between this and other areas of my life, but I think I'll keep that to myself.
No hawk
The mohawk had to come off this week, due to legal complications, but it's been a fun experience. Here's some of the responses that I've experienced:
- Con
People stare a lot. Sometimes I would forget that I had a mohawk, and I'd just see this guy staring at me and wonder if he knew me or something, or see some girl that just couldn't take her eyes off of me. I'd be pretty sure that she must've wanted me bad, and then I'd remember that I had a haircut.
- Pro
I went to the zoo the day after I got the 'hawk, and little kids would stare at me like crazy. They're even more shameless about it than adults, and don't mind staring. They're really nicer about it, though. I think that most of them haven't yet learned to hate people that look different, so they just thought I was interesting or something and I ended up having all of these little kids telling me stories about the snakes and bats that we were looking at. Apparently it's easier to make friends with little kids when you look funny. Maybe clowns should start wearing mohawks.
- Pro
A girl in the Detroit airport gave me her phone number and wanted to hook up with me in Vegas. I suppose it's possible that she liked me because of my charm or boyish good looks, but since I don't really get a lot of girls offering me their phone numbers, I'm going to assume that the mohawk was the new thing that encouraged that.
- Pro
At the Braves' game in Atlanta I got put on the big screen. When I saw them with their Fan Cam putting people up on the screen, I was pretty sure that I was a shoo-in, so I had Kim get ready, and she got a picture of it as evidence.
- Pro
After the game, the lady selling Braves visors liked my haircut and gave me one for free.
- Con
At said game, I got really sun-burnt. The loss of a super-power is pretty unfortunate, but let's not dwell on that anymore.
- Con
Camille doesn't like me anymore and Kim thought I looked ugly.
- Con
The term "WT" was used to describe me on a much more frequent basis (rivaling the frequency with which I actually deserve it).
- Pro
My boss, surprisingly, didn't even care. He just took pictures of it and put them on the wall.
- ???
The bishop didn't express an opinion. He just kept asking, "What happened?" over and over. I didn't really have a good answer for him.
- Con
I got pulled over in Nephi on the way back from Las Vegas (where I'm just another one of the many freaks and didn't get any special reactions at all). I was going pretty fast and it was obvious when the cop had seen me, so I pulled right over before he even had to turn his lights on. I would have thought he'd be pretty appreciative of this, but he wasn't pleased with me at all. He even threatened to take me straight in to jail.
It's possible that the last one didn't have anything to do with the mohawk, since I hear that Pete Lattin got arrested in Fillmore just for speeding, and he's a pretty clean-cut guy. I don't imagine that the mohawk helped, though. In fact, just for contrast, consider what happened to me today when I went to court for the same ticket. Today, however, I was mohawk-free and I wore a shirt and tie. The Judge told me to go get my ticket reduced by the DA, despite that I admitted that I deserved the ticket that I got, and the DA cut my fine in half upon hearing that I was a BYU student.
I think that people might treat you different as a mohawk-wearer, but even so, the pro's seem to balance out the con's. I just don't understand why everyone doesn't have mohawks. I guess it's a good thing they don't, or they'd all be super-villains like me.
Rashmi
Lost in the desert
I could have died and been lost in the desert today, and no one would have been the wiser. Consider the following scenario.
I'm driving back from Las Vegas where I went to Jordan and Ariana's wedding reception. I get to St. George and I stop for some gas and some food, and then head on my way. About half-way between St. George and Cedar City, I cross an over-pass, and suddenly my wheel starts rumbling severely. I pull over to the side of the road, and just as I feared, I have a blown-out tire.
I get my spare tire and jack out from the trunk, and start to jack up the car. The road has a slight decline, and the car rolls forward as it raises off the ground, and rolls off the jack. If only I had a brick or cinder block to put in front of the tire to keep it from rolling. I look around the side of the road for a rock to use. The ground to the side of the road slopes down into a tree-covered gully, but on the hill I see a large flat rock, about 5 inches thick. It's a good bet, so I go pick it up. It's really big and heavy, and it's awkward for me to pick up on the hill. I start carrying the rock to the car, but I slip and stumble backward, falling down on the ground. The rock drops hard on my chest, breaking several ribs and puncturing a lung. I pass out as I'm rolling down the hill into the trees. I die a few hours later.
I don't get back to Provo at all that night. My roommates don't think anything of it, because I hardly ever sleep in my own apartment anyway, and this is the second weekend in a row that I've taken a trip without telling them where I'm going. They don't even know I'm gone.
I don't go to Church the next day, but since I have such a hard time waking up every morning anyway, most everyone is used to me sleeping in, and no one is really that surprised that I'm not there, so they don't think anything of it.
Only a few of my friends even know that I've gone to Vegas, but they know that I could stay a few days just as easily as come back today, so they're not really surprised that they don't see me after a few days. Ronnie goes back to Louisiana and never knows if I come back from Vegas or not. All he knows is that I don't answer my Gmail. Jason moves back to Salt Lake and likewise thinks nothing of the fact that he hasn't seen me after a week. Tyler knew that I was gone, but quickly forgets and is just annoyed that I'm not around for him to watch TV at my place. His girlfriend then gets back in town and he stops coming over, so he never realizes that I haven't come back.
The only one of my friends that knows that I've headed back to Provo is Amy Jo. After she's been back in Provo for a few weeks she calls me when she's bored one day, but when I don't return her calls she just writes me off as a jerk and stops calling.
I don't show up to work the next week. No one at work is really surprised, since they're used to me setting my own schedule, working from home, or just taking breaks whenever I feel like it. It takes until the end of the month for them to call, and then they just want to know my new class schedule. I don't give one to them, but they don't worry about since I don't follow a schedule anyway.
Meanwhile the highway patrol finds my car on the highway. They put a notice on it, and when it remains there for a day or two, they assume it's abandoned and impound it. They never even notice my body down in the gully.
My family calls after a week or two, and I don't answer. They just complain about how crappy of a son/brother that they have, and get annoyed with me for never calling them back. After a few months of not hearing from me, they'll call my grandma and see if she's seen me. No one hears from me, and it's not until I don't come home for Christmas that they suspect that something might be wrong, as opposed to me just being a jerk.
This didn't
all happen, of course. I did get a flat tire outside of St. George, but I didn't drop the rock and I was able to get back into town and buy a new tire. All in all it took me about 4 hours to get through St. George on my way back home. It is kind of depressing, though, to realize that if something had happened to me that it would have taken 4 months before anyone even
started looking for me. Now I know how Bryant feels.
Skinvincible
When Spider-man got his
cosmic powers, Magneto came to check him out in case he was a mutant. That's when I learned that some mutants don't show their powers when they're born, but develop them later in life. I assumed that's the way it was with my super power.
I'm a fair-skinned guy, and it's not surprising that I'm sensitive to the sun, and I'd been burnt pretty good when I was a kid. About a year ago, though, I spent a week with my brother in Las Vegas during the summer. It's different going to Vegas with my brother, because we didn't do any of the touristy things. We just hung out by the pool all day every day, and then went to the casinos at night. Even though I laid by the pool without any sunscreen for about four hours every day, I didn't get burned or tanned or anything. It was as if the sun had no effect on me whatsoever. I was skinvincible.
I don't know how long I've had this power, but that was the first time I'd seen it in effect, but now I can't remember being really sunburned since high school when we'd go boating. This week, however, I discovered that my power wasn't a mutant evolution after all, but from a different source.
On Monday I spent a large chunk of the day outside in the sun at the Braves game. The newly-exposed skin on my head got burned bad. Maybe the worst burn that I've ever had in my life. Yesterday it blistered up. Last night the blisters burst. This morning my head is swollen all around the burn on one side. I look like I had some birth defect that makes my head lop-sided.
Now some might say that my skinvincibility was just a joke or my imagination, or that I simply don't get enough sun to test it since I'm just a indoor-dwelling computer guy. I insist that my powers were real, and it's obvious to me what has happened. I simply lost my power when I shaved my head. Every super-hero has a weakness. I guess the haircut was mine.
Pledge of Allegiance
There's never been much competition between Coke and Pepsi for me. Dr. Pepper gives it a run for its money, but can never completely over-take it. You know how sometimes you go in to a restaurant and order a Coke, and the lady says, "Is Pepsi ok?" and you're like, "No," and hope that they have Dr. Pepper? Yeah, I'm sure everyone knows that feeling.
We went to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. Really, the museum is a collection of every Coke advertisement that has ever been created, and there are bits of history sprinkled throughout, mostly just to explain the changes in the propaganda. By the time we got through the second room I'd already been complete convinced that Coca-Cola was the best product ever invented. As I became further indoctrinated by the rest of the museum, I started to make plans to show my newly increased loyalty to Coca-Cola. I didn't think I'd ever be able to drink the once-beloved Dr. Pepper again. I'd use Coke on my breakfast cereal. Eventually I'd phase out water, too (even though that could lead to the painful state where my urine would be carbonated).
There is a tasting room at the end of the self-guided tour of the museum. They have almost every variety of drink that Coke makes, all available to try for free. My first cup of Coca-Cola Classic was oral heaven. I'm sure that it tasted only as good as every other Coke I've ever had, but I doubt it had ever been received with such an emotional attachment. I moved on through all of the varieties of diets and caffeine-frees, and then on the other Coke drinks, like Barq's and Sprite. By this fifth marginal cup of soda, I'd lost the initial satisfaction, but there were other drinks to try: Tab, Pibb, Poweraide, Minute Maid, and every other aid you could think of were there to be tested. I couldn't let the opportunity pass by, so I tried them all. By the time I was finished, I'd begun to feel disgusted towards soda and I didn't want any more for quite a while. Then I saw the international room.
A whole second tasting room, this one with varieties of drinks that were available in other countries, totaling more than the varieties of the first room. I felt obligated, pushed on my ingrained love of the Coca-Cola company, and so I tried all of these, too. I'd already had more soda than I could still be enjoying, but it didn't help matters that Coca-Cola has an obvious dislike of foreign countries. I mean, why else would they force such horrible flavors on them? They must have run out of fruit-based flavors, because they had Fanta flavored like seeds and nuts and what must have been some kind of tree bark. The Italian brand (I think it was called "Beverly") was so bitter that I had to use the lychee nuts to wash the flavor out of my mouth.
When we left the museum I felt so sick to my stomach that I didn't think I could ever drink anything ever again. After a few hours I realized I was wrong and I saw that I needed a Coke, but I drank water for the rest of the day, so I'd say that after all was said and done, the propaganda overload and its back-fire cancelled each other out, and I don't think that any permanent damage was done. Only time will tell if the tide was changed in the battle between Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper. Maybe next time that a restaurant serves Pepsi I'll just leave and go eat somewhere else.
