Thanks to Hollywood, all of us have had a sneaking suspicion that high ranking, high powered government agencies have incredible powers to track down and find people thanks to computers and the information age. To some extent this has led to a begrudging acceptance of the fact that if the government really wanted to, they could hack your phone, or read your emails, and to a large extent we are glad that the people who fight bad guys have these amazing powers. We like to believe that the best hackers in the world work for us. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelation about NSA snooping there are some things that are a part of ordinary American life that you are going to have to think twice about now. The NSA, and POTUS have gone on record saying that they only collect metadata, which for the most part seems to be true (at least for now). As someone who got a degree in Database Administration I can tell you that a collection of metadata can only serve one purpose, it can only serve as an index, to help you refine your search of a larger set. So the basic idea is that you use the metadata to come up with a list of suspicious individuals who have unusual or targeted information behavior, ie. they get calls from suspicious numbers or have encrypted traffic, and once you have that list of suspects, then you can search a larger, and more elaborate information system for really incriminating evidence, ie. recorded calls, emails, etc. So metadata in and of itself is not incredibly useful or incriminating, but becomes extremely useful when you have a larger set of data to parse ie. the actual phone recordings and emails of all Americans, so it seems likely that the collection of metadata in huge amounts indicates that the NSA or some secret co-operative branch does in fact have a larger and more detailed store of information (your entire digital record of everything you have ever done on phone or internet). What you need to be considering now, in light of all these revelations from Snowden and Manning, is how ordinary things that are a part of American life today will now have changed and be monitored.

Primetime Views of Saturn And an Upcoming Planetary Family Portrait.

I just finished reading a very interesting article about how employers use credit reports to discriminate against job applicants here “The Long Shadow of Bad Credit in a Job Search”, which was very eye opening.

Over the years I have heard many horror stories about people getting notices from their IP service provider about being nailed for downloading “Tracked” torrents etc. One of the first steps in making sure this does not happen is shop around for IP Service providers, some of them respect your privacy much more than others. I once got a letter from my ISP complaining about my use of Bittorrent when I was using it to download Linux OS iso’s, a perfectly legitimate use, but they regarded any use of Bittorrent to be infringement. I dropped them and went with a lesser known, slightly more pricey, but much more discrete service provider.

Since I have relocated to Hawai’i about two years ago, I have decided to put together some useful information that I wish I had known when I moved here.

1.  ABSOLUTELY under no circumstances should you move here unless you are making at least $50,000 a year. You may have a job offer that you are really excited about, but that isn't quite offering 50k, trust me, turn them down, it isn't worth it.
2.  Be ready to pay about $3,000 in deposits and fees to get an apartment here. Apartments in good locations are steeply competed for, usually you will be one of 10-15 people interested in a particular place, and military gets preferential treatment, just a fact of life here on the island.
3.  Everything here is more expensive, in general, the formula for price here is take the mainland price and add $2. For example, you see subway commercials that say $5 footlongs, here they are $7 footlongs, you see Pizza Hut advertise $10 large pizzas, here it is $12 large pizzas, a box of Mac-N-Cheese that would cost you $1 on the mainland costs $3 here, and yes, the cheapest food of all, Ramen noodles, is about $2 a package here.
4.  Do not search online listings (like Craigslist)  for Apartments, instead search Honolulu Star Advertiser or have someone search community boards posted at the local grocery store chain known as Foodland, there are always good deals on houses and rooms and apartments for locals that usually cost several hundred dollars less per month than commercially advertised ones. The typical Hawaiian Apartment does not come with a dish washer nor an Air Conditioner/Heater, usually both are a waste of energy and money here.
5.  from day one, go to the local COSTCO and get a membership, COSTCO is one of the few places where you can get decent priced food on the island, also they sell gas about 10 to 25 cents per gallon cheaper than the island average.
6.  make sure you have a recent copy of your birth certificate and social security card, where the names on each match EXACTLY, if they do not match you will have problems. When you have those, sign up for a local ID/Drivers license as soon as possible, once you have local ID with a local address you will become Kamaina (comma-eye-nuh), which means 'local' and will be able to qualify for discounts at almost everything (parks, events, movies, restaurants), and that saving adds up fast. Starting in 2013 Hawai'i passed a law that requires stricter standards and more paperwork to get local drivers license and ID, the passport/utility bill/voter registration/etc that sufficed on the mainland will NOT fly here, it must be Birth Certificate and Social where the names match exactly.
7.  Learn to live without A/C, for the most part Hawai'i is a place where the temp stays the same all year, day and night, so except for the hottest time of summer, you should not need AC, sometimes people can't handle the humidity, and feel like they are sweating all the time, which will make you think you are hot, you are not hot, just get used to it, electricity is expensive here, and the difference in a monthly bill of a household that uses A/C and one that does not use it is nearly $200/month. Use a circulating air fan instead.
8. Learn to cook things at home that you enjoy, treating yourself to slightly more expensive items from the grocery store is far more practical than eating out often here. Someone who lives here and gets a Starbucks in the morning, eats fast food breakfast and eats fast food lunch can easily kiss 10-15% of his annual income goodbye. Remember, everything costs roughly $2 more here. Learn to like rice. I am not saying that to emphasize you must be cheap and sparing, simply telling you that almost everything here comes with a side of white rice and macaroni salad, and I mean everything, including breakfast, so learn to like it, and you will be happier here.
9.  Not all the fast food chains are here on Hawai'i such as Olive Garden and Dominoes. The major chains we do have such as McDonalds, Pizza hut, Taco Bell etc are actually Hawaiian Corporate spin-offs i.e. McDonalds Hawai'i, Pizza Hut Hawai'i and Taco Bell Hawai'i, and often do not carry the same deals or menu items.
10.  "TOWN", "Mauka" (MOW-KUH) and "Makai" (MUH-KAI), the entire island of O'ahu is in Honolulu County, the city of Honolulu proper is not called "Honolulu", it is instead called "Town", if the morning news report says traffic is bad going into Honolulu, they will say "Town-bound Traffic is bad this morning", if you say "I am going into Honolulu tonight" people will look at you funny and ask "Where is Honolulu?", instead say you are "going to Town tonight". Hawai'i has two new directions in addition to the normal compass directions of North, East, South and West, they have the directions "Mauka" and "Makai", which mean "towards the mountain" and "towards the water", respectively. If you imagine two people on opposite slopes of a mountain it could get confusing using ordinary directions, especially if they are circumnavigating the mountain, so it just becomes easier to tell people to move away from the water, or towards the water. The key to remembering and understanding those directions is that "Kai" is the Hawaiian word for "Water", so Makai means "towards the water" and the other one does not.
11.  Do most of your grocery shopping at "Foodland" and sign up for their free member rewards program "Maikai" card (not to be confused with Makai, this is Maikai (MY-KAI), and watch the weekly specials, usually one week per month they will let things go for prices people can actually live on, this is targeted at locals and if you stock up and do bulk shopping during this time you can live fairly well here. Under no circumstances should you shop at Malama Market, that chains sole purpose for existing is to gauge tourists. I made the mistake of shopping there my first week here, I got three tiny plastic bags of groceries (maybe enough for a week) and my bill was $115. Outrageous! They make quite a lot of money gauging tourists, don't be one of them.
12. In Hawai'i, instead of the annual "Smog" check for vehicles we have the "Safety Check", which can be done at most gas stations (but not all) and auto shops, it costs roughly $15 per inspection, and is meant to verify if your vehicle is road worthy. They check your lights, horn, windshield wipers and washers (vog often can leave residue on your windows, washer fluid is vital here, see more on VOG below) and blinkers etc. Mandatory paperwork to own and operate a vehicle are License, Insurance, Registration, Safety-Check and if you get pulled over you will likely be asked for all four. some places here will try to screw you on safety check, in my opinion the very best place on O'ahu to get you safety check is at the 76 Gas Station on Farrington Highway and Leoone St., in Waipahu.
13.  Traffic and Rush Hour- I can say without hyperbole or exaggeration, that in terms of roadways and number of vehicles, O'ahu is at full capacity, between 5:30 am and 8:00 am and 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm, O'ahu traffic is very near to grid-lock, in most major traffic arteries of the island, you will be lucky during these times if you can go as fast as 10 miles per hour, and you need to add about an hour to your travel time, double that if there is an accident.
14.  Turtle Laws- it is unlawful to be within ten feet of a Tortoise/Turtle. Sometimes the Turtles are friendly or will be curious, sometimes swimming up right next to you in the Ocean, just move away. Do not feed them, play with them, ride them, touch them, allow yourself to be photographed messing with one etc. People have been successfully prosecuted here, after the fact, on photographs alone. Don't mess with the Turtles.
15.  Pronunciation there are many strange Hawaiian words, and our usual rules of English do not apply, English speakers have a tendency to love diphthongs (combining vowel sounds or actually double pronouncing vowel sounds) but not Hawaiian words, the usual rule here is that ever single letter gets pronounced, without skipping or combining. For example we have a mountain range on O'ahu called "Ko'olau" but since most map and street sign spelling omit apostrophes you might see it as Koolau, which you might be tempted to pronounce as "cool, ow", but it is correctly pronounced as "KO-OH-LAU". It is also important to note the our letter W actually takes on two sounds here, if it appears as the first letter of a word, such as "Waimanalo" it makes the usual English sound you would expect, but if it appears anywhere else in a word (even the same word that started with W) it is actually pronounced as a "V", like the local town of "Ewa" is not pronounced as "OOWA" but rather as "EV-AH" (like our word "ever" minus the last R sound). So yes, you have most likely been pronouncing the name of our state incorrectly, the correct pronunciation is "Huh-Vai-EE". Hawaiian geography and language have been heavily influenced by British English, so many things here are called differently than an American English speaker would expect, such as Trash cans are called "Rubbish Bins" and one does not take out the trash here, instead one takes out the rubbish. Lines are called Queues (pronounced like you are saying the actual plural of the letter 'Q'), shopping carts are called "Wagons" and the shopping cart return is the "Wagon Return". Almost all the islands here have a Windward and Leeward side, most of our pleasant weather is governed by the Trade Winds, or Trades, typically South-Westerly winds, the side of the island that faces these winds is called "windward", where there is usually much more rain and humidity, and the other is "Leeward", which comes from British English and generally means "protected side".
16. Do not swim, surf, snorkel or do anything in the water during a full moon, We have a Box Jelly problem and they tend to swarm during full moons.
17. Do not honk your horn in traffic--out here people simply have learned to slow down, and deal with long lines and traffic jams, there can be thousands of cars almost at a standstill on the highway, and you won't hear a single horn honking. So honking the horn has come to mean something else out here, if you honk your horn out here it means you want them to pull over and fight you. Be warned. This is not Los Angeles where you aren't driving right unless you honk ten times per trip.  If you honk out here don't be surprised if several big angry Samoans get out of their car and surround you.
18. VOG- an abbreviation for "Volcanic Smog", the Big Island has an active volcano, and when the winds are right the volcanic plumes blow directly onto the other islands instead of out to sea. Depending on activity level and duration of the badly directed winds the concentrations of VOG can get quite awful, and often affect people breathing and allergies negatively, to the point that especially sensitive people and the elderly  have to be hospitalized. The chemicals from the VOG often combine with water in the air and can coat your vehicle in residue, and can actually make a windshield that was clean in the morning almost impossible to see through without cleaning, hence it is important to have working windshield wipers and sprayers, with good cleaning fluid, not just water

The people of Hawai’i are wonderful, and friendly,  life here is slower. This has nothing to do with Hawaiians being lazy or anything like that, they simply enjoy a more easy-going life, that means that the typical main-lander will have to deal with some culture shock when moving here. Do not be in a hurry, everywhere here on the island you can see signs that say “Slow down, this isn’t the mainland”, and that philosophy permeates all aspects of life here. Do not complain about slow or crappy service, do not rush quickly around “slow” people in the grocery store aisles, do not cut people off in traffic here, because when you behave like that here, you are the one with the problem, and everyone who sees you will know it.

You know, I have heard it said, often, that “there is nothing new under the Sun”, and that could be possible, but our understanding of our world and our place in it is not etched in stone. In fact, each of us sees the world uniquely, and we understand it differently. If you took two people, and had them read and experience the same book, the two stories they experience are quite different. My answer to the people who say that “there is nothing new under the Sun” is that “a man cannot set foot in the same river twice”. The typical view of that anecdote is that the reason a man cannot set foot in the same river twice is that all the water has changed, and hence it is a new river, but I think this anecdote is true for another reason, that man is a river as well, moving through time, changing with every new turn or bend and each new increase in understanding, so the anecdote is doubly true, not only because the river is changing, but because the man is not the same man from moment to moment. So there is something new under the Sun after all, the way we see, and re-see our world.

Child born with HIV is functionally cured - latimes.com.

Warning!! This Article Contains Semi-Adult Themes and Material, Do Not Read if you are Religious, Squeamish or Prudish. I have contemplated getting a full sleeve tattoo, and have researched possibilities, and I recently saw this Amazing Mermaid Tattoo… which I thought was absolutely beautiful, so I researched the topic a little more, and could not believe my eyes when it came to what people thought the meaning and symbolism of Mermaids was. There are some particularly bad examples at Mermaid Meaning and Symbolism and a real stinker at What is the meaning to a mermaid tattoo? The meaning of the Mermaid has almost always been a universal one, one that was cited by Robert Anton Wilson in his Illuminatus Trilogy. There is an obvious sexual connotation Mermaids, but it is amazing that so few people don’t analyze the specific meaning of this Universal sexual symbol, the Mermaid is incapable of virtually all sex acts except one, oral sex or fellatio. In an almost completely male environment, such a powerful symbol of oral sex would seem to be a strong indicator of homosexual impulse, and indeed the Mermaid Tattoo among mariners could have been a sign or emblem of homosexual sub-culture. The common explanation that the Mermaid tattoo serves as a target of the seaman’s desires is dubious and problematic, and why choose an image that cannot satisfy your sexual desires, wouldn’t a complete naked woman serve that purpose better? One of the most famous of all Mermaids, Disney’s Ariel, of “The Little Mermaid” was adapted from a Gay Love Letter from Hans Christian Andersen to his beloved Edvard Collin. Many literary historians believe that the Mermaid of his story represented Andersen and the love he felt for this young man, a vessel for his unrequited homosexual desire, and his inability to express his love physically (ie blocked by fish physiology). Of course, the Mermaid Tattoo became a social meme decades ago, so may no longer carry the homosexual meaning that it originally did, but it seems likely, especially under psycho-sexual iconography and analysis, that the maritime use of the Mermaid Tattoo was to indicate availability and/or enjoyment of performing oral sex.