Token monthly post

To the family members that continue to forward right-wing talking points, ridiculously outlandish stories, or emotional pleas to forward emails to raise awareness for a missing child/horrendous disease/conspiracy theory despite my varying snarky responses or links to Snopes, please accept the following video response. Remember it every time your cursor hovers above that Fwd button.

Google can be used for evil

I was reading a news alert in GMail regarding Rupert Murdoch placing a bid to buy a large UK media company, when this advert popped up:

The Ultimate Tea Party - www.heartland.org - The Patriot’s Toolbox is the #1 source for Tea Party activists

Targeted advertising? Not working so well.

The Memory Hole Strikes Back!

I use Firefox, and I use a lot of tabs. I mean a LOT of tabs - Firefox usually eats up between 250-500Mb of memory and takes a minute or so to fully open when I restart. The reason for this is that I like to keep an eye on some sites that I occasionally post at, especially those places where you can't (or I'd rather not) subscribe to the comments.

One such site you might remember was Christian Governance (formerly "Christian Government"). Well, a few days ago I noticed one of the pages I never bothered to close started coming up with a 404 error - page not found. I kind of chuckled to myself because I figured that they must have closed down or changed domain names again. For some reason, I didn't close the tab. I then noticed a few minutes ago that the page started loading again, so I revisited it, and found the post back up again, but with the comments section completely wiped out. Unfortunately, the Google cache has been updated to the latest version without the comments. Even more unfortunate, I can't recall the comments happening at that post.

I posted again there, asking where the comments disappeared to. I'm curious what the excuse for the use of the memory hole will be (if one is forthcoming). Anybody else surprised that a Christian website that claims to hold personal responsibility as a virtue will drop an entire section of comments if they don't like the direction a conversation is going?

A little further digging confirms that, yup, the two main threads I posted on a while ago have been scrubbed clean of all comments. Yet again, my neglect to obtain a screenshot of comments at a fundy site has come back to bite me in the ass.

All that time wasted arguing with closed minded ignoramuses, with nary a record of my brilliant wordsmithing saved for future reference!

Piracy and the internet

In "celebration" of the latest copyright protection law recently introduced the the Canadian Conservative government, here's on of my favorite clips from The IT Crowd: