Grip on pot
In response to "Washington's war on pot," 8/17: This is the only statement I will make regarding the increased number of arrests for marijuana possession:
Get a grip; it's only a plant.
AMY C. ABADILLA
FORMER HISTORIAN,
SEATTLE HEMPFEST
Sexist graphic?
Interesting photo/graphic on the article about the Gardner-Lowry lands commissioner race ["War of the greens," 8/17]. Are we to infer that Lowry has his arm around Gardner as an example of the "inappropriate touching" he is so famous for? Or is he simply patronizing her as a female?
I can't believe that the picture would be the same if Gardner were a male candidate.
LINDA PACHL
EVERETT
Declined!
After reading your article ["Porn to win," 8/17] I felt compelled to write. I had contacted Flying Croc concerning the promotion of ReportChildPorn (www.reportchildporn.com), asking for their support for this good cause; I was declined. I had asked them to build a counter for it, not using any pornography in their button for this page—I WAS DECLINED. JUST FYI.
KEVIN
PRESIDENT/FOUNDER
REPORT CHILD PORN
Scattered, half-assed
Thanks so much for providing the medium for Angela Gunn to flaunt both her ignorance of technology, as well as her scattered, half-assed writing ("In the realm of the senses," 8/17). Let me see if I can paraphrase the article: We still don't have decent virtual reality for the masses and all the dumbbell pundits were wrong, but here is some poorly researched information on an arbitrary grab bag of what's available now. To begin with, before humans can adapt to (i.e., effectively use) VR, computer interfaces will be required to precisely adapt to the human sensory system. The two are not mutually exclusive, as the ill-conceived subtitle implies.
Gosh, is MP4 really the first revolutionary technology that "promises to compress video by cutting out the bits our eyes won't miss"? Sorry Angela, RealNetworks et al. have been doing this for years. MP4 (MPEG-4) video is simply another in a long series of refinements in compression technology from the MPEG group, and will provide only a marginal quality vs. bandwidth improvement over current offerings from Real, Microsoft, or Apple Quicktime. Yes, MP4 SA (Structured Audio) has some nice new features to better handle multimedia, gaming, etc. But why all the hype ("You heard it here first...")? Get over yourself.
And how is it that the Seattle Weekly's star technology writer could pen an article on computer interfaces which neglects to note the huge potential impact of voice recognition, or that for a few hundred bucks you can buy a consumer-grade head-mounted display from Sony or I/O Display Systems, among others, or that a local company called Microvision generates virtual images by scanning a beam of light directly to the retina, or that there are firms out there such as Xybernaut who are making computers that are very much not "lodged on your desk," but fit in your back pocket? Is there a big shortage of technology writers these days?
DANIEL KITE
SEATTLE
Angela Gunn responds: Mr. Kite's head-mounted display appears to have cut off the article intro, which explained that our focus was how technology is adapting to the average computer (and human), very few of whom currently use head-mounted or retina-projected displays, or even voice recognition input. (As for voice-rec technologies, I wish I could say they were ready for prime-time, and they're certainly better than they were even 24 months ago, but accuracy is hovering well under the 99.99-percent range that would make them a serious substitute for ye olde keyboard-and-mouse.) In the audio section, I clearly state (and do again) that the interesting thing about SA audio-compression technology is what the lawyers will make of it, since it specifies music as a program rather than as data. As for Xybernaut's back-pocket-sized computers, I leave it to Mr. Kite to extol the virtues of having a computer next to your ass—presumably shortening the cord needed for his head-mounted display.
Police or soldiers?
I have read the many articles relating to police accountability in the Seattle Weekly with great interest since the WTO ministerial came to town, and while I have always had mixed feelings on the presentation, Geov Parrish's remarks in his 8/17 column have prompted me to write.
Parrish makes this remark: "I've generally been willing to believe the party line that the Seattle Police Department is on average pretty good . . . and that problems are confined to a few bad apples." This statement reveals the basic flaw of analysis that the police are here to protect the public, are reformable when they go awry, and that somehow weeding out the bad apples will return the police to its true path of the public protectorate. As a voice of progressive causes in Seattle, it is very alarming that Parrish would perpetuate the myth that the police department, as an institution, is generally OK, even while admitting that such is a "line."
The report issued by the National Lawyers Guild regarding the WTO reinforces the fact the police of today are not protectors of public safety but are in effect domestic military units. The object of a military formation is to treat all terrain as a war situation, and that includes preemptive strikes, like what we have seen against demonstrators recently. If the Pentagon can ignore international law with impunity, it stands to reason that a domestic force can and will ignore the Constitution of the United States. Since there is little difference between organization and strategy between domestic police forces and that of the military, then why should we expect them to behave any differently?
