Pat Roberston Watch...What did He Do This Time??

This man truly sickens me. He also has a special place in my science fiction loving heart because I truly believe he is an alien living in a human husk, there is no other explanation for the things he says or does. His latest claim to fame is...wait for it...that he can leg press 2,000 lbs. This is in response to Madeleine "The Hulktress" Albright claiming she can leg press 400 lbs. Listen, I don't know what's going on here but can we leave the weightlift posturing to people who are actually weight lifting for a profession, or at least a huge part of their lives? I don't remember Ronny Coleman recently talking up his skill as a Tele-evangelical religious leader or world known political negotiator. I don't care how much Pat Robertson can leg press, I would still drop him in a fight. Yes Pat that is an open challenge.

And a quick blurb about these freshman MIT students who have totally automated their dorm room. I thought of a lot of jokes about this, but came to the conclusion that I was just hating and pissed that I did not have this when I was a freshman. Question is where did these kids get all this crap? I also want to know the percentage increase of girls they were speaking to before the modification and then after. Chances are no change (from an assumed start of maybe 5 girls total) which would suggest that their party button might be for late night LAN gaming sessions of UT and Civilization. Ahh yes, there was the joke. I feel better now.

Happy Slapping...I know, it Sounds Funny

I guess we all kind of know what the practice of happy slapping entails, maybe we have never given it a name. Or maybe what we know as happy slapping has taken to new heights with all the video recording and sending to other people. My friends and I used to have a similar practice to this called "The Clap" (no, not the venerial disease although that connection just made itself apparent in my mind). In high school we would sneak up behind each other keeping a distance of about 7 feet. Then when the time was right (which is where half of the real artistry came in) we would sprint up to the person in front of us and jump in the air, clap loudly (its like the rattle of a snake before it strikes), and come crashing down on the intended target (this part of the stunt is where the second half of the freestyle came in. Jump height and angle were totally left up to you as well as the loudness of the clap). Obviously the target would either go flying foward and fall, or go straight to the ground with us on top of them. It was truly a hysterical thing to watch and to do, terrible to be on the receiving end of one. Unlike these fools we didn't videotape it and send it to all our friends (probably cause we couldn't), we didn't laugh if someone was truly hurt, and we certainly only kept it to certain groups of our friends, not strangers. The critics in this article call this glorified bullying and I tend to agree. Instead of bitching though I might get some of my friends together and find the crew that happy slapped me and beat the everliving crap out of them. Sure, two wrongs don't make a right but it is sure to make you feel better. Retaliation is a danger with this method, but what's life without a little bit of danger. When we clapped on people (the clapper) we always feared becoming the clappee (the one who received the clap). It was a fact that if you were around you would eventually get clapped on and clap on someone else. It was mostly fun until an unfortunate day in the upper west side where an awful clap occurred. There were tears, yelling and red faced asians. I think that was the beginning of the end for the clap because we could see where this was going. Thank God we were intelligent, or we could have ended up in an article like this one.

Here's something totally off of the above topic. I am not a big conspiracy nut. I believe that there are things that authority figures do not want us to know, and that there might be some coverups sometimes. Alien abductions? Maybe but probably not. Gov't caused 9-11 and no plane crashed into the pentagon? Could be true, never really know. A conspiracy I have rarely ever given thought to however is starting to get me to believe in it, with the help of a few articles I have read recently. The first has some info on the difficulties associated with sending a return flight to the moon, for man to walk on the moon once again. The second talks of a spacecraft that crashed into a satellite it was supposed to dock with. Considering our current ineptness when it comes to space travel, how probable is it that we launched a successful journey to the moon and back in 1969, almost 40 years ago? I am not saying it's impossible, but it is highly unlikely. If you sat someone down that did not take the moon landing as fact, and was presented the information we have today about space travel and it's many difficulties then was told that we landed there in 1969, the person would call bullshit. I don't know, just food for thought I guess.

Do you think that's the moon your standing on? Do you really think that's air your breathing?

RIAA and MPAA Foolishness

These petty thieves will never stop will they? The RIAA has just opened suit against XM radio for releasing a product that time shifts what they are listening to. Can we please have some sort of federal mandate that can disband this organization as well as the MPAA? These two organizations make themselves look more frightened and confused every time I hear about another suit that they are passing. I mean they lost the fight back in the 80's against VCR's yet they are still trying. This is not even a matter of copyright infringement or stolen music. They simply want more money if any company expects to innovate on the current movie and music business models. I call shenanigans on both organizations.

Congress Tries to Enact more Stupid Restrictions

In this article is described a bill that would prohibit the viewing of social networking sites in school and public libraries and other places that children may connect with the interweb that happens to be federally funded. I am not saying that this is a totally bad idea, but I also think this is another example of people taking less and less responsibility for themselves and loved ones. People need to be more aware of what their kids are doing on the big bad nasty internet, it' as simple as that. Well maybe not, but that doesn't mean we need to invite the government to act as our keeper. You worried about your children meeting creepy and weird people on MySPace? Why don't you check out their myspace account all the time to make sure that everything on there is ok. Look at their messages, the types of pictures they put in their profile...etc. The more you know about this stuff and pay attention to your kid, the less they are likely to go meet 45 year old Steve in the park for some afternoon delight.

DVD Sniffing Dogs??

This is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard of. If it works, fine but that doesn't make it intelligent. The problems inherent in this system are obvious. Unless the dogs can also sniff out Copyright there are going to be a crap load of false positives, which leads to nothing more than wasted time for the dogs and the humans in charge of them. The MPAA wonders why they are not able to stop pirating, maybe it's because some of the ideas they implement involve DVD sniffing dogs, that just my $0.02 though.

Net Neutrality

Many people might not know what this is, or even why it's such a big deal. Well here is a simple unbiased explanation. Cable and telecom companies (these are the guys that provide you with a high speed connection) want to start charging companies like Google and Yahoo! for a priority spot in their sea of bandwith. They would charge these companies some unknown amount so that end users like you and me could enjoy their services in a more timely fashion then say a company who did not pay these fees and thus were not prioritized. This is the basic arguement, and though I have not put in every single detail I don't believe I have left anything out that changes it much. Many people are against this and have started a discussion on new neutrality. The reason this discussion is referred to net neutrality comes from the stance that these cable and telecom companies should be neutral in their offering of content and not make it a priority issue for services that are delivered today in a none prioritized manner. This is yet another example of an industry trying to take advantage of a situation that was not planned for in the business model AT THE EXPENSE of the end user. I have no problem with the telecoms wanting to make extra money off of some companies that use a good chunck of their bandwith. I don't think it's fair or right, but that is capitalism, if they can get the companies to pay so be it. But how is this newly added fee going to affect me and you, the end users? No one can say for sure, but I can't believe that we won't inccurr some added costs somewhere. You might be asking, "wait a minute, don't I already pay Timewarner (substitute name of your ISP here) for broadband access?" The answer is yes you do. You pay a cable or telecom company for broadband access so that you may access content, now they in turn want to charge the content providers that you are paying the ISP's to access to serve you that content at a favorable speed or transfer rate. The probelm lies in the analogy of biting the hand that feeds you. The broadband access would not support itself without the consumers to by it, and consumers wouldn't be so inclined to pay for access to this high speed web if their was no content to take advantage of a braodband connection. Yet in the wake of this partnership that has made everyone rich, cable and telecoms now call what they have been doing for these content providers "a free ride" saying that the investments they made to start and maintain these high speed connections need to be paid back somewhere and that companies who use it the most should be the one's to foot the bill. I guess I am glad that they did not push for the end users to pay for this, but appalled that they expect some type of restitution after we as end users already pay for their services. You can see why there is so much discussion, what do you think?

Interesting Article on Net Neutrality from the POV of the Cable companies.

Wii!

For those poor saps that don't know yet you better ask somebody. Nintendo's new system is the shiznite, and it's now called the "Wii" (as opposed to its pre-release name of the Revolution). Much discussion has been had over the quality of the name; is great or garbage and what it means to the system. The short story is "it doesn't matter!" (said like the Rock). Nintendo will make great games on a good cheaply priced system and people will snatch it up by the handfuls. With the next gen consoles priced between $400 and $600 dollars, a Wii priced at $250 will be what finds it's way into homes during the notoriously money tight christmas season. The fact that it plays old gamecube games is a huge factor seeing as how the gamecube still costs $100. And when you have games like Super Smash Brothers:Brawl coming out for it, there is no reason to doubt the system including the crappy name and all. Come on, Solid freakin' Snake is in it, with a Cardboard box! This is going to be hot.

Stephen Colbert on...

This is the hilarious transcript of Stephen Colbert (Formerly of the Daily Show, and now the host of the Colbert Report) speaking at the white house correspondents dinner. Man this is some funny isht. It takes some serious guts to stand up and insult the president all under the guise of being with him. He is basically backslapping the pres and Bush can't do anything back. If we find Colbert's dead body somewhere, we know why...

Hysterical

As seen on Break.com