Although it was too overcast on Sunday at DEF CON to achieve the kinds of temperatures with my Fresnel lens that I had hoped, Riana managed to make a great bad pun about the situation. (So there is at least one bright spot.)
"Would you rather give up your address and date of birth to a secure database and not be pulled aside and questioned," he said, "or would you rather not give it up and have an increased likelihood that you're going to be called out of line and someone's going to do a secondary search of your bag and they're going to ask you a lot of personal questions in the full view of everybody else?"
I would rather Secretary Cherthoff not make me make that choice. But I'm not sure the answer he expects is so well justified:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing.
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
In answer to Robert Browning's question, the Latin name for parsley is apium.
I'm just back from the Rusticatio Californiana in Petaluma, where I spent a week speaking only Latin. (I can count the exceptions on one hand.) The Rusticatio spoken Latin immersion course was one of the best things I have ever done. As I remarked on the last evening, it's hard to know how to explain the Rusticatio experience to people who weren't there -- not least because all our jokes and conversations have to be translated from Latin into modern languages. But I would wholeheartedly recommend the Rusticatio, which is an annual event, to anyone interested in spoken Latin.
Not only did I have two dreams in Latin during the Rusticatio, but I experienced moments of genuine Latin fluency toward its end, in which I forgot momentarily that I was speaking Latin and conversed for perhaps minutes at a time without consciously struggling for vocabulary or grammar. And my fellow attendees (pretty much all academics, except for me) were wonderfully geeky. The kinds of arguments I overheard and participated in -- and the kinds of jokes I heard and perpetrated -- well, I suppose I can only say mirabile dictu.
Immersion is a wonderful way to improve one's knowledge of any language, and I was amazed to feel, as Annula predicted, my Latin knowledge become "activated" over the course of the week -- supplemented with lots of everyday vocabulary from the classes -- so that I ended up with no doubt in my ability to express myself. A highlight of the event was that we planned, rehearsed, and performed a rather absurd comedy, all in Latin. (That included a trip into town where we bought props at Walmart and produced documents at Fedex Kinko's. That is, apud Kinkonem Fedecis. More literally, it might be apud Fedecem Kinkonis, but in point of fact it's Fedex who possesses Kinko and not the other way around.)
Also, you would not believe how many songs have been translated into Latin.
A lot of people produced very apt versions of English sayings and proverbs. One effort of mine was:
"Propinquus" nihil valet nisi in ludo solearum vel pyrobolis.
On a more literary note:
Praelusio modo erat: nam ubi libros incendunt, incendant in fine etiam homines.
(Heinrich Heine)
Frigidissime hiemavi aestate Franciscopoli.
(Mark Twain)
There is a standing challenge now between me and a Latin teacher from Santa Monica to see who can first produce a version of the saying Liquor ante cervisiam, numquam timeas / Cervisia ante liquorem, numquam aegrotior [sc. eris], but (1) in rhyme and (2) using a double dative.
Finally, I had no end of amusement with the phrase ablativo absoluto facto. ("The ablative absolute having been made...")
When I returned from my week of Latin yesterday, speaking English was surprisingly difficult and foreign. I kept wanting to use ablative absolutes, ablatives of instrument, relative clauses of characteristic, and so on. Twice I accidentally started a sentence in Latin when I had meant to speak English, and once I actually had to ask how you say something in English because I could only remember the Latin word. I never thought such a thing would happen, but it did. Re vera. I think my immersion managed to saturate me.
Fred has just posted a concise summary of the incentives of people involved in the DRM struggle, accounting, I think, in large part for why they act as they do. If you follow DRM and want some depressing but well-considered analysis, have a look.
When I was at WinHEC, I asked a bunch of people why they put up with this status quo, instead of fighting the DMCA. Why did they, the indigenes of the new world of technology, accept the movie industry's Treaty of Tordesillas? I didn't get any satisfying answers, but here are three conjectures:
I wanted to mention two other phrases from the Rusticatio. First, a pair of questions that you will probably never be asked in Latin:
Collegistine solus vasa tua? Deditne tibi aliquis tibi ignotus aliquid ut idem tecum in aeroplano feras?
Second, the actual way of conveying this famous advice in Latin:
Semper gere subligar.
Who was it built the sacred store
Where I encountered Universal NOR?
The pedagogue they called Stanley.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The style of literary criticism proposed by Rachel Chalmers et al. is pretty exciting, but I would like to remind Rachel of prior art for the license recitation concept.
I recently wrote that Congress had stacked the deck against free speech by creating an expedited review process for decisions holding parts of the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, but not for decisions that go in the government's favor.
Jim Tyre learned that this isn't so bad, because there was already an equivalent expedited review procedure that either side is entitled to use. 28 USC 1253:
Except as otherwise provided by law, any party may appeal to the Supreme Court from an order granting or denying, after notice and hearing, an interlocutory or permanent injunction in any civil action, suit or proceeding required by any Act of Congress to be heard and determined by a district court of three judges.
Since challenges to the CDA are required by the CDA to be heard and determined by a district court of three judges, it looks as if there is an appeal as of right for private parties who lose CDA constitutional challenges. This was discovered by Nitke lawyer John Wirenius, who is now using it to take the Nitke case to the Supreme Court.
Some people have heard that the Supreme Court gets to decide whether to hear appeals or not. Technically, the law has created a distinction between an "appeal" (which the Supreme Court is required to hear, but which is not procedurally available in most situations) and a "petition for a writ of certiorari" (which the Supreme Court is not required to grant, but which is procedurally available in situations in which a person has lost a case in a Federal appellate court, and some situations in which a person has lost a case in a state Supreme Court.) See Supreme Court Rules 10 and 18.
After twelve years of playing NetHack, I finally won for the first time this evening. My Valkyrie ascended to demigoddess-hood.
NetHack is an incredible game. What a thrill!
Contact: Seth David Schoen
