And people wonder why politicians aren't considered intellectual...

Okay, I just found found this article on Tech Dirt that's talking about a proposed bill in New York that'd ban people from using an electronic device while crossing the street. Are you kidding me? A couple people kindly remove themselves from the gene pool (without even trying for a Darwin Award) and this is the way to "fix" the problem. Anybody who is backing this bill is saying that people are too stupid to pay attention to their surroundings. While their at it why don't they propose that all cars should have audio distractions removed from them before they can be sold in the US. Even better, anything that can cause a driver to take their eyes off the road (like a billboard) should be illegal. That way there's absolutely NO possible way people can be distracted and cause injury to somebody else with a vehicle.

Seriously people, what is this world coming to? Has common sense really been tossed out the window? I like to think that with the advancing sciences that humanity is getting smarter, but things like this really make me question that...

Quote from 1984

[on the subject of Newspeak] "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered in only six words--in reality, only one word."