Let me tell you a story about a boy named John.

John was born in Canada to a wealthy family. When he was 4, his family moved away from Canada, leaving behind his friends and everything he knew. His father, like the rest of his family, was a very conservative man with a strict set of values and beliefs. He told John that there were people out there that didn't agree with those beliefs. He was told that there was a new power in the world that did not agree with his values. This new power was aggressive and strong. Their power was greater than any other in the world. And they hated John's family and what they believed in.

John's father had a friend who was in charge of a resistance group. A group that fought against the overlords who were dominating the world. The overlords wanted very much to destroy the resistance. John was trained to fight the overlords and to do anything he could to stop them.

The overlords preached propaganda to the world. They claimed that they wanted to unite the world under a flag of peace and justice. They claimed that they respected everyone's freedom to do what they believed.

But John's father told him the truth. John's father told him that the overlords were aggressors. He told John that the overlords would not let John believe what he wanted because it was different from what the overlords believed. He told John that one day the overlords would come. They would attack John's country and topple its government. They would occupy his country and take his friends prisoner. They would hunt down and murder John's father and his friends and everyone in the resistance.

John's father also told of a more horrible fate. He said that if John was captured, he would be taken away to a deep dark dungeon. He would be humiliated and beaten. The overlord soldiers would mock his beliefs and degrade him. John couldn't believe this was true, but his father had never let him down before.

Then one day, when John was 14, the soldiers came. They came and attacked John's country. They toppled John's government. They occupied John's country and they started taking prisoners. They had no respect for John's beliefs and mocked him in the street. The soldiers called him names and badmouthed John's family.

One day, John got hold of a grenade. He thought that if he could kill just a couple of the soldiers, it might help to scare the soldiers out of the country. He was afraid for his father, for his family, for his friends, and for his way of life. He threw the grenade at the soldiers and killed one of them. He started to run away, but before he got far, the remaining soldiers caught him. They attacked him and took him away.

John knew what was coming next. He was put in a plane and they flew him to an island. On the island there was a dungeon. The dungeon was dark and dank. While John was there the guards taunted him. They were worse than the soldiers in John's homeland. They would degrade John and if John didn't react how they wanted, they would beat him.

John had heard the propaganda. The overlords had said they were committed to justice and freedom. They had said they prided themselves on the "fairness" of their "trials" and that everyone was entitled to their "day in court". But John knew better. His father had told him there would be no trial. And there wasn't. For 4 years, John sat in that dungeon. He was alone and afraid. Other prisoners even killed themselves to escape the pain. He heard rumors of torture. He didn't know when his turn would be. But he knew it would be soon...

You may know these overlords. In fact, you probably do.

We are the overlords.

John is a real boy. His real name is Omar. He is 19 years old and has lived in Guantanamo Bay "prison" for the last 4 years. He allegedly threw a grenade at a US soldier and killed him. He has yet to go to trial.

This kid was brought up being told that the US soldiers were the enemy. He was told that the US is trying to destroy the values of his people. He was told the US soldiers were aggressive overlords who want to steal his land, his money, and his culture. He was told this from an early age.

Then, one day, the soldiers DID come. They came and toppled his government. They came and occupied his country. They came and stole his people's money. They said that his people didn't know how to govern themselves and that their traditional values were wrong and outdated.

Everything this kid was told came true.

So he decided he needed to fight back. He got a grenade and threw it at some of the occupying soldiers. He managed to kill one of them, but he was caught and detained. He was then shipped overseas and put in a prison. He was not granted a trial. He was humiliated, degraded, and possibly tortured.

What we have done is shown ourselves to be everything he was taught we are. We are just as bad as our reputation. We claim to be peace-loving, but we bring war. We claim to provide justice, but we provide degradation and unlawfulness. We claim to be a fighting force of freedom, but to him, all we bring is captivity.

What he did was wrong. But what we did was worse. We could have taken this young boy and taught him the error of his thoughts. We could have shown him that in America, everyone gets their day in court. We could have shown him that in America, children who commit crimes out of ignorance are not treated the same as adults. We could have shown him that in America, prison is about rehabilitation, not about punishment and humiliation.

But we didn't.

We claim that Al Qaeda made him who he was. But were they entirely to blame?

I happened upon cnn.com today and discovered something that perked my interest. They announced that Abu Ayyub al-Masri is the new leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Is it just me or..

Does our new friend Abu...

...Look exactly like Johnny Depp?

Scary... huh?

Read This.

You will notice that there is a little graph off to the left that shows "Movie sales" surging up over the last 10 years. Over the last year or 2, "for some reason" the profits start to level off. It must be those pirates who are stealing all the money. We could hunt them down and sue them, or maybe we could grab the nearest Econ. 101 student to explain to us what this graph means.

Enter Econ. 101 Student

Well class, to explain what you are seeing, we are going to reconstruct the "Graph" on a smaller scale:

Fred the Filmmaker sells Movies. He sells 10 movies each year (his movies suck). He sells some of his movies on VHS and some on DVD. Both the VHS tapes and DVDs sell for 13 dollars. The VHS tapes cost Fred $10 to produce and the DVDs cost him $3 to produce. So like Hollywood, Fred makes far more money on a DVD sale then on a VHS sale.

So for each DVD Fred sells, he makes 10 dollars and for each VHS he sells, he makes 3 dollars. Now as DVDs become more popular, he sells more DVDs then VHS tapes. His first year, he sells no DVDs and 10 VHS tapes. His customers pay a total of $130 and Fred makes $30 profit. The next year, he sells 1 DVD and 9 tapes. Each following year, one of his customers converts from VHS tape to DVD. After 10 years, all his sales are DVDs. At this point, he is still selling $130 worth of media, but now he is making $100 a year instead of $30.

However, now that no one is buying VHS tapes and Fred still has only 10 friends, his sales seem to "level off". If you are having a difficult time imagining how this graphs out, just look at this:

Look familiar? It is very similar to the graph the movie industry is using to show their sales are "leveling off". This is just another graph used to show how much the industry is suffering when, in fact, they are still raking in the bucks. I bet if you got hold of a chart that shows sales in terms of units sold, you would find there has been very little noticable change over the years. I would even go so far as to guess sales have been increasing over the years, as people get more and more impressive home theaters.

Of course I won't even get started on how much most current movies suck.

Check this out.

It is an ongoing story about this guy who's friend had her sidekick stolen. She left it in the back of a cab and this other girl found it and just started using it. The girl who took it took pictures of herself and of her friends using it and also used AIM on it. Sidekicks automatically upload that kind of stuff, so when the guy's friend got a new Sidekick, she found the pictures and AIM logs on there. So this guy has been posting his whole story on a website. It is a pretty good story. I always love these kinds of things.

The story is probably safe for work (language and some sassy pictures of a fully clothed 16-year-old girl).

Apparently this guy is really good about responding to emails; however he has been slashdotted and dugg in the last couple days and I don't know if he is going to respond as well as he has.

I went out to dinner with my grandpa today. When we got back, he said he had something interesting to show me on his computer. I didn't expect to see anything really interesting, but when he brought it up, I was about as surprised as I have ever been. What follows is an undoctored screenshot from my grandpa's computer. I repeat. I have not done anything to modify this picture:

View image

Look closely. There are no cards hidden.

Yes, there are, in fact, 2 cards that read "8 of hearts" and no 4 of spades. This game of solitare is unwinnable.

It is uttery amazing. And this is coming from a programmer. There are 2 possible scenarios here:

1: Microsoft messed up the program when they wrote it such that there is a possibility that a card may be converted to another card. I would like to note that while this is the more likely scenario, most 1st year computer science students could right a functional solitare game that would not ever encounter this situation.

2: There was a memory error on his computer that just happened to result in a switched card. The odds of this happeneing are probably about the same as the odds that a second 8 of hearts would show up in place of the 4 of spades in a brand new deck of cards from the store.

Either way, it is quite impressive that this happened, and my grandpa hasn't ever seen it happen before out of the thousands of games of computer solitare he has played over the past 10 years or so.