19 Mar 2009
Obama's Critical Early Test

Great rant by Dan Gillmor. Let's see how much Obama really understands about Ronald Reagan's presidency, and if he'll listen to that understanding in the next few weeks.

We have a chance to reform the corrupt political and corporate governance that has created a system in which the people at the top brazenly tell the rest of us to go screw ourselves. It's a small chance, but if we don't do it now we will never do it, and the market economy itself will have no real future.

(link) [BoingBoing]

via MyAppleMenu:Reader

07:16 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Mormons demand ICANN plugs net smut hole

Three idiotic things here: first off, the effort is led by the guys who tried to claim copyright on Linux, which was, pardon the pun, patently false. Secondly calling port 80 a "smut hole" is beyond bizarre - and expecting to "block" or filter it (as a port) in any effective fashion to screen porn is absurd, especially by ICANN, which only controls DNS. But the killer:

Utah is 58 per cent Mormon, and according to a recent study has the highest consumption of internet pornography of any US state, boasting an average of 5.47 porn subscriptions per 1,000 broadband users.

I think my irony meter is permanently broken now ...

Mormon anti-pornography activists led by SCO Group chairman Ralph Yarro III are calling on ICANN to give more political clout to those who want to kick porn off the web.

(link) [The Register]

07:08 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link