"They that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

• Terrorist Suspects
  
• movie reviews
• BenQ
  

The above quote is, at best, a paraphrase of what Benjamin Franklin said about freedom, security and how they relate to each other. I say it's a paraphrase becase short google of these terms and you'll find it in several different versions, though I'm sure one of them has it right and I'm not really going to spend much time researching it. I heard it a long time ago but it's one of those quotes that stays in your head for a while and pops up again when you start thinking about certain things, like the terrorist suspects who were arrested.
If you've been following the news (at least in Canada and likely the United States), 17 men in the Toronto area were arrested for conspiring to attack a target in the Toronto area. After more investigation, the police turned up 3 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (triple what was used in the Oklahoma city bombing). CSIS (CIA Jr.) said that while the group, ranging in age from 19-43 did not have any official ties with Al-Qaeda the attacks would have been motivationally inspired by them. In the talks that followed, Canada's immigration act came into question. An American Congressman expressed his support for an idea for Canada to shut its borders to immigrants (thestar.ca) and refugees until it can fix its security risks. Now, I'm not sure how close or far this idea is from actually happening, but it did get me thinking. This idea was an example of a security measure that would enhance the security of Canada's border but in addition it would also remove a liberty that had been previously available. This thought (hence the quote) garnered a question in my mind: What are we willing to give up to get the safety we want? I'm not saying that we shouldn't close our borders and try to weed out all the risks that we have in the system, but I do think that we should take a serious look at what level of balance between freedom and security we are prepared to take.
Thinking back almost 5 years ago, to the September 11th attacks, I was in high school when it happened. Hanging out in the halls between classes in one of my senior years, I first learned about it from another friend who had just came in for his first class. The hysteria that followed I don't think i've seen or participated in again: CNN website got more traffic than they could handle and most all the television networks (that's about 40 out of 45 maybe...prevue network, local broadcast, and kids networks had other things on) were covering it and there was an announcement over the PA system after lunch when we were in class about it. In the days and news reports that followed, I noted one thing in particular had happened that had never happened before. Before the attacks, Canada and the United States had shared what was known as the longest unguarded border in the world, roughly 8,891 km (or 5,522 miles). This was even commemorated by a special gate that was said to always remain open, known as the Peace Arch, which was located between Surrey, BC, and Blaine, Washington (it was guarded but only by law enforcement and not military personnel). After the planes hit the towers, all American flights were either grounded or diverted to Canada (east and west coast Canadian international airports were receiving the diverted flights) and the United States closed all of its border gates, including the one to and from Canada. The gate, even though it was a monument, was closed.
Do I overthink or overponder on things? Probably. Obsessively? Likely. But this has been running through my mind lately.

Movie Reviews

This summer has been a summer of blockbusters. In my last blog entry I reviewed the DaVinci Code and its ideas. This time I will review a few other movies that I've seen (Warning: There are most likely spoilers abound):

• X-Men 3: Last Stand
• Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
  
• The Sentinel
• Mission Impossible 3
• Freedomland
• Doogal
  

X-Men 3:

If I could only see one movie this summer this one would probably have been it. Though it left a few questions unanswered as they pertain to the previous movies I came out with a rather positive attitude towards it. I was entertained by it and liked it. It played out like a movie would. The basic storyline is this: The humans have found a way to "cure" mutants of their powers and special abilities, making them human. Magneto (Eric Lenshire) doesn't want to change and sees the humans as a threat, gathering like-minded mutants along the way to form an army that would see this cure and its source destroyed and would kill anyone who stands in their way, advising mutants who didn't join them to stay away from them. On the good side, we have a handful of mutants on Professor's Xavier's side who still wish to seek peaceful co-existence with the humans if possible; they end up standing with the humans against Magneto's Brotherhood. One thing that movie and comicbook fans got to see was the reappearance of Jean Grey as her alter ego, Phoenix. Without spoiling it I will say that I wasn't disappointed with how she was played.

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown

Having not seen the first movie I wasn't familiar with any of the characters from it so they were all new. Nevertheless, this was a kids movie so I had certain expectations anyways. All in all this movie was ok. It had its funny parts, which I did laugh at, but there wasn't really anything about it that set it apart from other cartoons.

The Sentinel

I was rather disappointed with this movie, but maybe it was because I went in with high expectations. The basic premise of it was that a secret service agent has been charged with conspiring to kill the President and another agent has to stop him. Enter Michael Douglas, who plays the agent suspected of conspiring, and Kiefer "Jack Bauer" Sutherland, who has to find and bring him in. All year I've been watching Jack Bauer play the rogue CTU agent who uses all these cool techniques to take out bad guys. This time he plays the good cop trying to take out the Jack Bauer character. So Kiefer's role has been someone toned down from what I'm used to seeing from him. In any case, the movie did seem to drag at parts but was interesting as well.

Mission Impossible 3:

Tom Cruise is back as a special task force for the Government who teams up with others to perform top-secret missions that would seem impossible. This time Ethan's a married man who's apparently left the field but is called back again because of his intimate knowledge of a mission. So Ethan again finds himself using his bag of tricks to perform a certain mission that requires him to break into an ultra high security area that apparently can't be broken into and find something in order to defeat a villian and save the day. This movie would have been another case of SSDD if not for one thing I particularily enjoyed about it: The villain. Played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, I found the villain to be the most intriguing part of the movie.

Freedomland

This movie was about a woman (Julianne Moore), who teams up with a special investigator (Samuel L Jackson) to find the location of the woman's son, who was in the back seat of her car when she was carjacked. During the investigation, the woman's story turns out to be more than what it seemed. The movie seemed to have a subplot that involved racial divisions within a city and how police respond to situations by race. But what really made the movie interesting was Julianne Moore. Her acting was really well done in that movie (Jackson's was as well but her's was great) and it made it really almost believable.

Doogal

This was a typical kids movie that had a satirical appeal for almost all ages. It is the first movie I've ever seen Jon Stewart (Mr. Daily Show) in and I think he did a good job.

***

Ben Q.

In (early) January I had trouble with my relatively new BenQ dvd rewriter. After a few days of troubleshooting and sending in a request to the official BenQ site for help, I finally found that I was running my computer on 100W. Given that I was running 2 hard drives, 2 optical cd drives, a floppy drive and a PCI Video Card, I required about 230W to run it. The tech I bought the PSU from couldn't believe I'd been running my computer off of that little power; he thought it wouldn't run at all. (Backstory: I'd upgraded my computer motherboard, CPU and RAM, then bought and installed a second hard drive, but neglected to do so to the Power Supply).

I'm only blogging about this now because this week I received a reply to my inquiry (which I made in January). What did it say?

The drive is defective. There is a one year warranty from the date of purchase.

Gee thanks...

Anyways, that's my post for this update. You have a nice day...