Activist organization responsible for 99% of FCC complaint

Interesting to know that 99.9% of all FTC complaints this year come from a wingnut moral majority organization. 350 Complaints in 2000, 240 000 in 2003. I'm thinking that it's actually way higher than 99.9, but they didn't want to round it up to 100%. Go to church and stop watching, ya freaks. The pc's that they use to post all their complaints on the web form are no doubt infected with spambots that send out porn on a second-by-second basis.

Blogger and categories - a temporary solution

Perhaps those of us who chaff under Blogger's lack of categories could use del.icio.us categories instead. Like blog_copyfight or blog_I-hate-microsoft or blog_check-ca-man. Waddya think?

On an unrelated note

It seems to me that it might be interesting for the US to pass a constitutional ammendment stating that any one standing for election as a judge must not have been a declared member of a political party for no less than 10 years.

'We will be able to live to 1,000'

Sign me up

Spine-damaged canines heal

Ewww. The research was done at a veterinary hospital and the animals were all victims of accidents, which is nice, but then they reach the bit about the guinea pigs and I realise that I could never have worked in a research job that involves animal testing, I just don't have it in me.

News websites get less protection than print, judge rules

The Ninth Circuit (covers pretty much everything west of the continental watershed) is so liberal that our red friends down south want to break it up. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's because they were the ones that rules that the US Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional because it contained the phrase "one nation, under god". Meanwhile, this bastion of liberty has decided that news websites get less protection than print. Cuz the internet is less important doncha know.

Boing Boing: MSN Spaces = soylent green

Boing Boing has more on MSN Spaces, including a complete lack of standards in their HTML and yet another egregious abuse of a compulsory license.

Name: Hermione Granger, Affiliation: Hogwarts

Those wiley kids over at ICANN are going to use magic to solve all of our internet problems.

Human eggs divide without sperm

Did you know that human eggs contain a full complement of DNA but thar one set of chromosomes normally gets ejected within a few hours of fertilization? Me neither. Anyway, it seems that if you inject the egge with phospholipase C-zeta and do other tricky things, the egg starts to divide just as if a little swimmer had come along. And shortly thereafter you can harvest stem cells. Meanwhile the radical fringe reacted as you might expect:

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a London-based pro-life lobby group greeted the new procedure with caution. “I’d be happier if it was beyond all reasonable doubt that it could not become a human life.” She added that women must not be exploited to provide eggs.

Aaargh - Microsoft wades into wide world of Weblogs

So I read the headline to this article and I immediately thought: "Great, they'll stick a button in MSN that allows you to create a blog entry in response to any conversation so all the nugget heads who still use MSN (SHAME!!) would start filling the world up with Live Journal part 2. Then I am reading the article and I see:

Microsoft tied the Spaces service into its free e-mail and instant messenger services.

One of the new service's key features is a ``contact card'' that will include a user's profile information. The card will be visible to other MSN Messenger and Hotmail users, and it will give them a preview of any new content posted to a person's Web page.

MSN is also making it easy for users to publish lists of their favorites songs or albums, which they can import from Windows Media Player. Visitors to a person's Web page can click on the song titles and be directed to Microsoft's MSN Music site, where they can purchase the song.

More CIBC amusement

It seems a CIBC branch in Moncton thinks that the feds aren't the only ones producing legal tender in Canada. The math doesn't quite add up though ...

Brazil to break Aids drug patents

From the BBC news website.

Stamping out tolerance wherever it raises its ugly head

Jesus' General lets us know that the United Church of Christ tried to place an ad which invited sodomites to attend their church. CBS rejected the ad. He`s got a good blog, you should check it out.

Copyright Reform is Not a Spectator Sport

Are you now, or have you ever been, a teacher, researcher, education administrator, librarian, consumer or student? If so, you should read this.

From honeypot to bot in minutes

You know windows is in trouble when USA today does an expose on you average home PC's vulnerability to remote exploits as soon as it is plugged in to the net. Now adding a basic firewall to a cable modem should cost less than $20. I believe that the lack of competition in broadband access is suppressing this market as cable/DSL providers want to sell their customers the cheapest thing they can, and customers can't vote with their dollars to move to a provider who cares more about security. Of course a cable provider who knew anything about networking rather than pushing more and more over DRMed channels down the same pipe leading to unacceptable compression rates would also know that a firewall on their modems would lead to lower bandwidth costs and reduced customer service expense. Idiots.