New York State of Revolt
The New York Daily News in an editorial Monday encouraged a tax revolt: "It's tax season again, and millions of New Yorkers are preparing to be scofflaws. They're going to fill in Line 56 on the state's long-form tax return or Line 27 on the short form by reporting that they made no out-of-state purchases, over the Internet, by catalog or in person, in 2004. Most will be lying. And good for them, we say. Don't pay this tax."
The Daily News noted that Gov. George E. Pataki (R) vetoed the addition of a line to tax returns that required people to report their out-of-state purchases but that the legislature overruled him. It also listed some notable names of people who on their tax returns claimed to have made no Internet, catalog or out-of-state purchases in 2004: Pataki, Lt. Gov. Mary Donohue (R) and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (D). I thought Spitzer spent all his time online.
| ___About Random Access___ Random Access is a daily column by Robert MacMillan that explores the latest trends in technology and how they are changing daily life. Random Access won't tell you why a new gizmo will revolutionize your ad server. It will tell you about episodes from daily life -- exasperated waiters who use blogs to vent about their customers, whole runs of salmon injected with nanoparticles for individual tracking in Norwegian fjords and the growing number of DJs who are sick of being sidelined in favor of iPods. (Only one of these stories is fake.) Most of what you see will be culled from news sources and blogs from around the world, though we will supplement Random Access with original files on the novel, unusual, bizarre and reactionary happenings in the world of technology and society. E-mail: Send links and comments. | | |
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Rest in Virtual Peace
How would you like to walk through a cemetery with a remote control, occasionally zapping graves to launch a video reel on a flat-screen television embedded in the headstone so you can get the edited highlights of someone's life? That's San Mateo, Calif., inventor Robert Barrows's vision of the graveyard of the future. The Wall Street Journal reported that Barrows has filed a patent for a weatherproof, hollowed-out tombstone that will include the TV and a microchip.
While one could ponder the transitory nature of life, the permanent nature of death requires more thought than we tend to give to our high-tech communications, one source told the Journal: "Whether you'll be putting words, symbols or videos on your tombstone, 'you've got to think long term, very long term,' says Chris Epting, a pop-culture historian. 'Today, everything is so from-the-hip. We fire off e-mails and the next day look at them and say, "Why did I send that?" You can't do that on a tombstone.'"
This is off-topic for a technology column, but read on. The Journal also quoted Paul DiMatteo, who tries to help people think twice about the memorials they want to leave for their loved ones: One family, "having lost a loved one in a commercial fishing accident, wanted an etching of a hand coming out of water, pulling down a boat. Mr. DiMatteo talked them out of it by saying, 'When you go to the cemetery, you should remember the happy times.' ... One man recently had him carve this simple epitaph: 'Thanks for stopping by.'"
The Decline of Western Civilization, Wedding Edition
Got absolutely nothing to do Saturday? Spend it glued to your Webcam presentation of the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. The BBC today reported that British firm Network Webcams is setting up two cameras near the Windsor Guildhall where the nuptials will take place. "Royal wedding fever has already begun online as people trade memorabilia and bid for the best view of proceedings," the Beeb reported. "Various media outlets have offered up to [5,000 pounds] to local hotels and other buildings in order to set up cameras on roofs. On auction site e-Bay, a shopfront in Windsor has been offered for hire for the day."
Is That All There Is?
A new study suggests that I might suffer some abuse from my coworkers if I admitted to not only knowing, but liking that song. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Palo Alto Research Center found that sharing iTunes music libraries on an office network "turns out to be something like a peacock spreading his feathers for display," CNET's News.com reported.
From News.com: "I just went through [my playlist] and said, 'I wonder what kind of image this is ... giving me,'" reported one of the study's subjects. "I just went through it to see if there was stuff that would be ... annoying, that I would not like people to know that I had." I could take some potshots, but I don't want to risk the taunts over my well-documented Jacques Brel fixation.
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