Well it depends on who you are scared of.  If you are just cheating on your girlfriend, then you deserve to get caught but better to piss of a girl than a giant corporation.  Take me for example, how screwed would I be:

Lets say the oil companies get wind of my new free energy device.  First thing they would do is google my name.  13,300 results for James Lyngaas.  Well everything on the first couple pages are mine.  It found lyngaas.net, thesmartass.info, facebook.com/thesmartass.  It found a linkedin profile, 2 of my blogs, an archive.org profile, a ted.com profile, google profile, a flickr profile, ancestry.com relatives, profiles of my friends and well going to a couple of those sites or profiles would indicate my username is normally trimidium.  So I googled my username and found 4,690 results and well just about all of them are from me.  It found my artwork, it found answers to questions I have given on yahoo, it found forum posts I have made, Well even if it didn’t find them on Google, you could go to popular sites and look up my profiles there.

Want to see what I was doing recently?  Then you need only filter the google search results to show stuff in the last week.  Want to know what my interests are?  Then look for my wish list at amazon, or find what I subscribe to on twitter.  Want to know my political status?  Just search my blogs for keywords (of course, even if you didn’t know it you voted for Bush a few years ago).  When was I online last, hmm, lets check with instant messenger profiles.  Music status?  I have 2 different last.fm accounts and a Pandora account.  I haven’t used a dating site in several years, but there are still old profiles out there.  Even if i Deleted them you could find them cached on archive.org and find out lots of personal info from it. Public tax info can fill in job, address, income, debt etc…  You ever fill out a census (the most invasive survey ever)?

Delusions of privacy ~~~
I showed up to a job interview one day and the guy had a printout of my myspace profile which said James (AKA The Smartass) and I had to “explain” it to him.  I thought it was none of his business and it certainly had nothing to do with how good I could fix computers, but it dawned on me.  Privacy is just an illusion, so is truth, every single thing is just the perspective we spin it with.  I believed having a website called thesmartass had nothing to do with fixing a computer, but the person who was interviewing did not believe this. I wanted to be his wage slave, so I had to smooth it over with him (I did end up getting that job).  

Spin is everything.  So much so in America that there is no reason to kill people these days.  You just put them in terrible debt and discredit them.  If they really start to step on your toes you just google them, see what bad shit they have been doing online and then setup a perfectly legal way to bust them for it.  Having trouble thinking up something to bust me for?  Well per the patriot act I have no freedoms.  So for absolutely no reason one day I could disappear because Homeland Security declared me a terrorist. 

In fact, this post will probably get flagged by some agency just because of the words I am using, since they can filter out keywords right through Google News (which generates feeds based on known blogs etc).  Or a robot will come to this page, and read for other words, and if enough words are flagged a real person will check out the page and assess if I pose a threat. 

Maybe my own site is secure, but perhaps one of the forums I post on is not, and perhaps somebody finds a backdoor into that forum and they determine one of my passwords.  Well if I used this password on other sites, then they can go back to all those other sites and try to get in with that password.  Or maybe they will just start sending me phishing emails (which a lot of people are dumb enough to fill out) and get me to try to login to sites that I am a member of, only the sites just look like that site. 

I once had a job offer from a legitimate private investigator to hack into people’s myspace and facebook accounts to determine where people were and what they were doing.  I flatly refused, as I am not ignorant and know that is highly illegal and unethical.  However since I didn’t do it, I’m sure he just found somebody else who would.

I don’t even see the need to break into those since since you can find so much on google and then make your way back to other things.  Then I don’t even need to pay somebody to analyze these things since most of these big public sites have beautiful API’s and they can extract your data, and mash it up with google maps, show your exact routine, dating preferences, twitter subscriptions, political affiliation, religious beliefs, friends, jobs, tax info, etc… You are being profiled and assessed right now. 

These are things that anybody can do and I didn’t write this to scare you.  Think about it though, if you are still a kid, then your parents are probably scared shitless of you getting hurt so they might be using a keylogger on your system and seeing everything you type.  They do it out of fear and love, however jaded it is.  But what if you scared the gov’t mule?  Well if I had a gov’t agency at my disposal and you scared me I would develop my own meta search engine and have it cross reference every name with usernames and then auto mashup every profile site into nice TPS reports for me. 

Despite these things I actually believe in open source and am thrilled shitless that these sites all offer public data.  Even government is starting to look towards providing raw data online.  I don’t mind the massive amount of information at all, because I have given up the extremely ignorant belief in personal privacy. 

I still remember when I was in my Junior year of High school and my school switched from wonderful yellow tickets to a card that got read by the computer, which had our social security numbers printed right on the front of the card below the bar code.  Parents threw a shitfit and the next year that was changed to a different number.  The old system wasn’t broken, it even worked better and faster.  However the old system didn’t harvest data.  The new system did and data is the new gold standard.

The world we live in is going to increase available data exponentially and there is no such thing as being anonymous on the internet anymore.  You post a comment on any page ever and it spits out an IP address.  I can trace that IP address back to your ISP in a couple seconds if you aren’t using an anonymous proxy.  If you ever did anything really bad on the internet somebody would subpoena the ISP for their logs, which would tie back to your name, and they would throw your real name and username all over the web until they found a bunch of other junk to charge you with. 

So you now know that you are not anonymous anymore.  Don’t be scared of it, as fear causes endless problems.  I for one think I am going to start posting comments and things with my actual name.  Because then I will be more conscious of what I say. 

How screwed are you?  You are 100% screwed if you use the internet more than once a week.  So just get over it and break your illusions of privacy and security and just start being a nice person online.  Try not to piss anybody off too badly, or else be prepared to change your name and start paying people to leave false clues on all your old sites through the tor network and even then if you land on the oil companies shitlist, you are probably still screwed.  I have too many friends I don’t want to stop talking to.  I have too many sites I visit that I don’t want to quit visiting, I don’t want to move to a new country and start all over as a farmer with no computer.

So fuck it, I am James Lyngaas, and I have no delusions of privacy.

I think so. I mean religious nuts will try to say that death is what gives meaning to life, but LIFE is what gives meaning to life. You can take all the vitamins and live and eat healthy, but eventually your cells will die off and so will you. So why should we not find ways to cheat it? Our knowledge and technology are all expanding at an exponential rate. Every year we cut down on size requirements for nano technology and we continue to expand our knowledge in areas like genetics and neurosciences.

Who’s to say we can’t life forever and improve our quality of life? I mean once we isolate the Dick Clark Gene who’s to say that we can’t make a way to put it into other people? And once we better understand the body, who’s to say we can’t put some nanobots into people to enhance all their abilities (like tv show jake 2.0 which was more or less a modern version of the 6 million dollar man).

Everyday I get closer and closer to having free wireless internet EVERYWHERE I go. Who’s to say that I can’t have a dedicated server monitoring my body functionality from devices powered by my own electricity that are inside of me.

I saw a guy once who had put RFID chips into his wrists and then rewired his house, and car, and pretty much everything to respond to this.

I saw a mind controlled computer program that people could move objects on the screen around simply by sending the right mental signals.

All of this is expanding so fast that it’s only natural to expect it to conglomerate and expand our evolution.

It depends on the people I was around. I mean if I am being forced into something the best thing would be to choose the one least likely to cause me more hardship.

-I think it would be hard to be Islam, since I would have to go for that whole sacred cow thing, and stop eating cheese burgers.
-Buddhism is easy, I mean you just live life in the moment and care about all things.
-Christianity, I wonder if somebody has some BS studies showing how much of the world that covers. Still, it’s again easy, since being Christian doesn’t have any hard-set rules. I mean if you break it into denominations then there is, but even then everybody ignores the rules and just feels more and more guilty about it.

You want a religion to follow and not feel guilty about? My friend invented a religion called “Feed the Ducks“. He converted his Catholic girlfriend to this after awhile. Basically it consists of “Take time out of your day to do good things, like feed the ducks… and things will work out for the best.”

Man, are you kidding? Oh yeah you are! Alas, if a donkey started talking, EVERYBODY would listen!

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” – Fulton J. Sheen

Basically a bunch of gay artsy-fartsy (technical term) types got together and started labeling things postmodernist (and then shortened it to po-mo, not to be confused with homo). It allowed them to say that their terrible writing and artwork was actually something more intelligent than it actually was.

Today there is debate over whether or not the term actually exists…

Below is an interview with a postmodernist:
Q: Why are you postmodernist?
A: That wasn’t me. I am changed now. I have different views. It was another moment.
Q: You did write it. It has your name on it.
A: And what is a name? A collection of ink stains on processed tree bark?
Q: No, I think it’s a…
A: a (article) – Not any particular or certain one of a class or group. Dictionary.com.
Q: Pardon?
A: This interview is not about Nanny McPhee. It’s not about fire hydrants or scallion pancakes. This interview is over. Do you want to ask any questions? The interview has just begun.

Yep yep…That’s right, it’s crap is what it is…

Perhaps a question my landlord should of asked a few months ago… ahem, nevermind…

Basically this guy, we’ll call him Joe Smith (actually that was his name, no joke…. seriously), was chillin’ like a villain when some writings by an “ancient prophet” were revealed to him. 

Yep, everybody has a belief.  Even if they realize that it was invented by some random dude who knew how to market himself to those with weak minds.  Take Scientology for example, funny stuff, invented by a science fiction writer and is a trendy choice for religion these days by our celebrity elite.  Or the people who believe that the lizard people are really controlling the world…. That is hilarious. 

I could spend the time to really explain their beliefs, however I there is a movie that can better explain it than I.  behold…

Not so indifferent if you need to tell me you don’t care, but whatever floats your boat.

Because it shows Jesus to be mortal and thereby undermines the entire structure of Christianity. Yes, I can see that pissing some people off.

Well “FkHead Republican”, We have all considered a good ol’ genocide now and then, but in the end it just wouldn’t make us happy. See you have come to depend on those border jumpers to prepair your food, and do all the shitty jobs you don’t want. So if they were all rid of their jobs would be filled by white trash. The same white trash that we don’t typically have to see thanks to trailer parks and wellfare! Then if we eliminated the gay’s you wouldn’t have any lesbian porn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And what about the loss of comedy about minorities, like PCU:
Rand: Hey, poor boy! Go and have all your parties with all your new friends! I can see it now, Andrews. You and all the knee-jerk, bleeding-heart liberals, sipping tea and playing patty-cake. And those useless hippie pot-heads, those commie-pinko leftists. The bunny huggers, the pillow biters…
Droz: Whoa! Whoa! Which ones are the pillow biters again?
Rand: The BUTT-PIRATES! And those beastly man-haters, tell those chicks to shave their pits then call me! And those goddamn whiny crybaby minorities, you can keep them all!

Sorry bud, I am just not willing to give up my comedy and lesbian porn, and I DON’T want to start seeing more white trash serving my food…

Only if you think it is. You are free to spend your time however the hell (no ironic pun intended) you want. I mean all we really do in life is find ways to provide an emotional state. We crave happiness, so we go out and seek things that make us happy, like money, and ho’s. So do whatever it takes to get you to the feeling you are looking for, and don’t do whatever doesn’t.