Linky to image.

Found via Digg.

Here's the article.

Okay, check this out.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps was also on hand at the conference and took broadcasters to task for their current content, speaking of "too little news, too much baloney passed off as news. Too little quality entertainment, too many people eating bugs on reality TV. Too little local and regional music, too much brain-numbing national play-lists."

That's right…the people that will bend over backwards to fine folks because a vast (vast!) minority of letter writers will bitch about anything and everything are going to tell television what's the right content they should have. The people who get their panties in a wad about profanity and nipples and don't trust you to change the channel if you don't like what you're seeing…are getting ready to use the police power of the government to regulate what can and cannot be shown on television.

Why? Because the networks show baloney and people eating bugs and that's not, in their estimation, quality.

Newsflash, you dumb pricks. The vast majority of people like baloney and bugs. If they didn't, and they tuned out, then the networks wouldn't show it. The networks are in this for one thing and one thing only: money. If high brow entertainment sold well, then Spike TV would be doing Merchant Ivory marathons instead of Bond.

Here's how this is going to work. Because Nanny Government thinks that you Americans aren't smart enough to pick your own radio and television programming, they're going to legislate it. Or lean on people so that they don't even have to go through Congress. And sadly, some of you Americans aren't smart enough to realize that this is a really terrible idea. Because first they're going to go after network television, then cable. They've already said they want to.

So ask yourself if the government, which can't protect our borders, protect our ports, get out of the military's way to let them do their jobs, balance their own checkbook, or teach your children, is who you want telling you what you can eat and what you can watch and what you can listen to.

And ask yourself if you want the government to have the power to dictate these things to you, especially when at any moment, your opposition could have control of the government. For you liberals, imagine what it would be like if right wing Christian conservatives had absolute power over television. For you conservatives, imagine what it would be like if left wing hippies had absolute power over television. Let your worst suspicions and nightmares run rampant.

Because that's what you're inviting in. Half of you might be partying, but the other half–the smart ones–are very patiently waiting for it to be their turn to fuck with your world.

Wouldn't it be so much safer just to not allow anybody that sort of power in the first place?

That's the second time in as many days I've been reading what seems to be an enjoyable comic strip collection and suddenly I'm face to face with a character taking a dump.

Shit is one thing. Shit being created is another thing. Did I miss the memo where the act of defecation was declared hilarious? Man…

It's seeing a post on Warren Ellis' site entitled "Testicular Juicing" and not clicking the link.

So Earthlink has gone batshit insane. They use blacklists that apparently think half the free world are spammers and as a result, I wasn't getting a lot of my mail. They were basically sending the e-mails into the bit bucket and sending a notice back to the people who e-mailed me. Sadly, since most people are illiterate when it comes to error messages, they saw something that looked like an "undeliverable e-mail" error and took it as such, without realizing that what the text of the message clearly said was actually "we think you're a dirty, filthy spammer, so you can just take your e-mail and toss off."

So I took Cringely's advice and went with Gmail. Not really his advice, but just his findings. Gmail is, for better or for worse, the most reliable e-mail service around, according to Cringely's testing. The web interface was pretty sweet. Accessing it through my MDA phone is quick as slick hell.

I lasted on it for two days.

The reason? Simple. Conversations.

The good thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations. So if I send you an e-mail with the subject line of "Sup?" And you respond and then I respond, there's a very good chance the subject lines are then "Re: Sup?" So Gmail says, ah, you are conversing, let me put that in one long chain for you.

The bad thing Gmail does is group your e-mails together into Conversations without any thought process behind it whatsoever. I send off e-mails to publicists with the subject line of "Coverage." Any e-mail I get back or send with that subject line is now considered to be part of the same Conversation, regardless of who I sent it to or when I sent it. It will pull things out of my Archive and tag it with the Conversation.

Here's the kicker: once tagged as a Conversation, it can't be undone. Ever.

So rather than have a long ongoing Conversation that shouldn't be, I've plugged Gmail into Outlook and to hell with it.

Now, here's the fun part of techie bastards. If I were to take this to a support forum as a complaint/suggestion, I would get a lot of responses probably, and they would boil down to two basic types:

1) Limitation of the service. Maybe some day it will get fixed, maybe it won't. But that's the way the cookie crumbles right now.

B) Why would you want to send a bunch of e-mails to different people with the same subject line? I don't have that problem, but that's because I guess I can be unique in my subject lines.

The 1) people are reasonable. The B) people infuriate the shit out of me. Because they don't seem to understand what the world needs.

The world needs functionality. The world does not need us to conform to someone's idea of functionality.

Like with Windows XP. If it installs an update, it will constantly remind you to reboot. If you Google around, you will find lots of people who just say, Eh, go with it. Reboot. What's the big deal?

Well, the big deal, fuckers, is that I'm in the middle of something and I can't reboot right now. I'm not one of these dumbshits who will never reboot their machine–I don't need a reboot nanny. In fact, fuck it: I just don't feel like doing it right now. Why should I have to?

The point of technology is to add value, not to make us change our ways to conform to somebody else's idea of how something should work. The real winners in providing these services will let you roll your own thing however you want to do it. Which is probably why Wordpress works so well. If you can't do it out of the box, there's somebody who can tell you how (or a plugin).

What the hell was my point?

Oh yeah. My e-mail's working. That's it, I guess.

Linky.

Found via Eddie Campbell.