According to news.com.com, maybe. One guy on the FEC suggests bloggers might be fined. A couple of random people suggest it's a First Amendment thing. A judge overturned a 4-2 FEC decision to exclude the Internet from these silly laws in 2002.

The story here, I think, is that the future of political viability for the Internet will be decided over a medium dominated by angsty furries. Once again you can blame the MSM for cherrypicking their facts and keeping the public in the dark.

The other night I decided to try out the "Internet TV" feature of Winamp. It's apparently been implemented for a while, but this was the first time I noticed it: streaming low-quality video "channels" not unlike streaming low-quality audio "channels" I can pick up through Shoutcast, but full so I can't actually join them.

Unsurprisingly it is packed with porn, along with various episodes of Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, and what have you. Finally I found an open server showing the feature Meet Your Meat 2, which I soon discovered was a short pro-vegan documentary on the lives and deaths of various animals immediately before us in the food chain.

Disappointed, I nevertheless sat through the film to get an idea of their side of things. Now mind you, I had the opportunity to visit family farms many times growing up (and in anticipation of your eager questions, I never tipped or otherwise fiddled with the livestock -- although according to the local lore such things apparently went on more than a little bit over the years) so it was a bit of a shock to see how things go on industry farms. And it definitely made it harder to get the bacon cheeseburger with cheddar and mayo down the day after, but not impossible.

It got me thinking, though, that there is a future is in synthetic meat products. A lot of energy goes into producing meat. A lot of effort goes into keeping my meat relatively disease-free, sometimes by loading it with antibiotics. As a fan of mock duck dishes (particularly curried) I can say that the texture can be faked with some effectiveness, but as a fan of seared chicken parmesano with rigatoni al dente I can also say the current crop of meat substitutes leaves something to be desired. You simply cannot take a fungus, bread it with soy milk and flour and a ton of spice, fry and serve topped with soy cheese, no-egg macaroni, and tomato sauce without wanting to hurl by the first bite.

Consequently I, like you just now, took a short yet pointless journey to end up with the realization that I'm going to continue doing a horrible thing because the alternative tastes like shit. An interesting metaphor for the larger political picture, don't you think?

I apologize to regular readers of my postings for abusing my account in this fashion, but:

Occasionally I search the Internet for free and legal audio downloads to substitute for the obnoxiously lame offerings of local radio, and the other night I ran across a program on the history of free speech during wartime in the U.S. It's an interesting listen if you're into history or are generally concerned about the topic and I felt it put things into perspective quite reasonably (i.e. Don't Panic.)

Check out the rest of the "Mind Over Matters" series on there as well -- I haven't listened to the "Eat the Airways" episodes yet but of the six or so programs I've listened to I haven't regretted choosing any.

At least it's not tech support.

I just noticed something on Google that bothers me. When I do a search, and it comes up with results, the links that I normally click on to visit the websites that were returned from my search now appear to be redirected through Google instead of being direct links to the search results.

In a nutshell, now Google can potentially see not only which topics I search for (unavoidable and expected situation) but which websites I visit from their results pages (unexpected and unnecessary to provide search functionality). I suppose this could be put to good purposes or nefarious purposes, but I would be happier if they didn't implement features that could be a step towards data mining my surfing habits.

No doubt, impotent outrage is brewing in the Internet geek community as I write. Unless this has been going on for weeks and I just haven't noticed.

EDIT: I should note that their privacy policy (under Links) does mention this, as well as an example of how they would put the gathered information to use.

EDIT, 2 hours later: And now it's back to the way it was before -- live test of future functionality? Somebody bump a switch? When it was on, it would call "http://www.google.com/url" with a parameter indicating the actual URL to visit and another indicating the rank of the search result. I understand what they're saying about this being a useful source of data for evaluating and tweaking their search engine, but couldn't it be made opt-in somehow (perhaps by making it an optional feature of their browser plugin?)

An interesting musing regarding the practicality of permitting users to add short explanations to their moderations and a request for more critical metamoderation of Funny moderations has been posted. Please submit your feedback and thoughts here if you experience problems posting in the other journal.

A lawyer who works in Texas gets a call about an emergency which requires him to immediately fly out of the state for a short period of time. He has no time to pack, so he calls home to tell his wife he is going.

The maid answers the call, but is quite hesitant about putting his wife on the phone. After quite a bit of interrogation, she admits that the wife is upstairs in bed with the mailman! The lawyer is furious, and wants to rush right home, but of course there is this emergency he must take care of. So instead, he tells the maid to go get the gun from the desk drawer and kill both his wife and the mailman. She protests, and thinking quickly the lawyer makes up an explanation that under Texas law it is legal to kill your adulterous wife and her lover. Using his silver tongue, he finally convinces her to do it. She puts down the phone, and soon the lawyer hears the sound of two gun shots, a scream, some loud thumps, and finally, two splashes.

The maid comes back to the phone. The lawyer asks, "Did you kill them?"

"Yes, " she replies.

The lawyer questions her again, "What did you do with the bodies?"

"I threw them in the pool," she responds.

There is a brief pause from the lawyer. He asks her, "Did you say the pool?"

"Yes! I threw them in the pool!" she says.

"Uh, is this 555-7724?"

What happens when the the British urge to meddle meets subtle American wit?

(regards to this cruel.com post)

Impress your friends and coworkers with the Goatse rescue floppy. Also available as an ISO image -- combine business and pleasure by multitracking that backup, service pack, or *BSD distribution with a Goatse boot CD today!

BTW: where's Simoniker?

So this guy dies and to his horror finds himself in Hell. A demon greets the man at the entrance and beckons him to follow to the processing office. Along the way he notices rooms containing different groups of tortured souls and learns from the demon that the torments are tailored to the group.

Muffled screams could be heard from one room, where rancid food is being shoved non-stop into the mouths of its occupants by imps. "Gluttons," the processing demon muttered as they walked past.

Further down the hall, more screaming. This time it's a group being shown a two minute clip on a film projector over and over again of a low-speed car collision where the occupants get out unharmed, talk a bit with each other, chuckle, get back in their cars and drive away. Perplexed, the man looks at the processing demon, who mutters "Trial lawyers."

But by far the worst was heard near the end of the hall. The man looks in the room and observes a bunch of screaming guys being forcefully given a bath, a beer, and a lapdance alternately by the hottest and most disgusted women he's ever seen.

"What's this?" the man asks. "Vanity? Prostitution?"

"Oh, it's not the women this room was designed to torture." replies the demon. "They're extras."

At this point the man is completely confused. "Why are the men screaming like that?"

"Beats me," says the demon, "but they're all here for abusing the Overrated mod option on Slashdot."

A man dies and wakes up to find he's in Hell. He's really depressed as he stands in the processing line waiting to talk to an admittance demon. He thinks to himself, "I know I led a wild life, but I wasn't that bad. I never thought it would come to this." Looking up, he sees that it is his turn to be processed into Hell. With fear and a heavy heart, he walks up to the demon.

Demon: "What's the problem? You look depressed."

Sinner: "Well, what do you expect? I'm in Hell."

Demon: "Hell's not so bad. We actually have a lot of fun. Do you like to drink?"

Sinner: "Sure."

Demon: "Well then, you're going to love Mondays. On Mondays we drink up a storm. You can have whiskey, rum, tequila, beer, whatever you want, and as much as you want. We party all night long. And you don't have to worry about your liver, because you're already dead! You'll love Mondays.

Do you smoke?"

Sinner: "Yes, I smoke cigars."

Demon: "You're going to love Tuesdays. Tuesday is smoke day. You get to smoke the finest cigars available anywhere. And you can smoke to your heart's content without worrying about cancer, because you're already dead. You're going to love Tuesdays. How about drugs?

Do you do any drugs?"

Sinner: "Well, in my younger days I experimented a little, but I never inhaled."

Demon: "Well, you can experiment with anything you want on Wednesdays. That's drug day. You can snort or shoot any kind of drug you'd like to experience, and you don't have to worry about overdoses or getting hooked, because you're already dead. You're going to love Wednesdays.

Do you like to gamble?"

Sinner: "Sure, I love to gamble."

Demon: "Well, Thursdays are for you! We gamble all day and night - blackjack, craps, slots, horse races, everything! You're going to love Thursdays.

Are you gay?"

Sinner: "No, I'm not."

Demon (wincing): "Oh. You're going to hate Fridays..."

While you might have been of the opinion that stealing movies is harmless fun, the laundry list of societal ills counterfeit DVD purchases help fund make it clear that the 15-year-old sneaking a camcorder into I, Robot is committing sins against humanity comparable in scale only to that of sysadmins who thought SPEWS level 2 was a good idea.

It was the summer of 104 when I first caught a glimpse of fundamental truth by consensus -- a conflicting concept, I realize, unless you have come to accept the precept that perception defines reality and mass perception moreso. Fresh with enthusiasm over my TrollBack victory yet stymied by the harsh sanctions against dissent recently imposed, I sought refuge in fully considering a situation which has occasionally provoked my curiosity.

Does nobody recognize the disturbing sameness in online communication? Some of you have of course; as trolls, you realize you can't paddle against the current without discovering the current in the first place. Cruelly relegated to read-only status, I had time to fully consider the emergent patterns here and on other forums, blogs, and the rest of the Internet.

You see repetitive drivel. So did I, until the unmistakable glimmer -- the merest hint, my friends -- of fundamental truth caught my eye from under a pile of posts justifying P2P use with suspect but undeclared motives. Immediately I set myself to finding a way to filter and distill to a most succinct form the common wisdom strewn throughout the Internet. Buried in its subconscious, if you will.

I'm no AI genius, but it seemed to me that what those guys are missing is simplicity. In one night I threw together some code that would download the Internet and run it through a regular expression filter that would look for statements that, in computer science notation, match the form SOMETHING is SOMETHING. I could have done the same thing with 'was' or 'will be' but my current concern is with the present. Singular.

Now you end up with a whole bunch of stuff when you do something like this, and it aborted halfway through downloading the Internet when I ran it the first time, wasting the second day of the experiment. After deleting some games off my hard drive, I ran the program again and when I woke up on day four I had a complete set of all declarative sentences and sentence fragments currently online downloaded and ready to parse.

This was a bit tougher, but certainly not impossible. First one has to make sure everything's spelt correctly, assuming things that aren't are proper names only if they show up in statistically significant numbers in the aggregate. Then throw out everything that isn't in American English. But here's where the magic occurs: if 'A is B' and 'B is C' then clearly 'A is C'. I suspected the scheme may need some tweaking, but in true hacker spirit I fired up the VB.net runtime anyway and hit the sack.

To my delight the program executed flawlessly, and I awoke to a status message informing me of its success. Tentatively, I pushed WINKEY+R and issued the command to display the output:

*BSD IS DYING

It's Christmas Eve, and if I wasn't down enough from all the assorted holiday obligations I've also got CNN on in the background. Apparently, my meat has a very slim yet present chance of being infected with mad cow.

I'm not particularly worried -- statistically speaking, people haven't been dropping like flies (although some of the symptoms of CJD sound suspiciously similar to Alzheimer's). But if you're concerned, I have a couple of links regarding beef handling in the U.S. for your holiday pleasure.

CNN story on the incident. One curiosity: the cow suspected of having mad cow aka BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is suspected of causing CJD or Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, is approximately 4 years old, but the fellow that wrote Mad Cow USA (which I read a few years back and thought was pretty interesting) was quoted in the article as saying it takes at least 6 years for BSE to show up in cows. It would be interesting to have this discrepancy examined and explained.

Click, choose first link, then 'Printer Friendly Display', then do a find in document for "MR. ACKERMAN". This is a debate over an amendment that would have prevented animals of certain species (including cows) from being introduced into the food supply if they are unable to stand or walk unassisted before entering the slaughterhouse. It did not pass, and you may want to use the 'noes' on this list to help guide your 2004 choices at the polls if that bothers you.

Ran across an MP3 of a somewhat interesting discussion in Canada regarding copyright and its effect on the artist.

High points (IMHO) include a description of moral rights/droit moral, which is a concept foreign to U.S. copyright law but otherwise quite common among the implementors of the Berne Convention, some examples of what copyright is doing right (from a starving artist's point of view), some examples of what copyright is doing wrong (from a fellow who, in his opinion, nearly had his book release sabotaged by a well-known copyright holder whom his book was intended to benefit), and Mark Hosler of Negativland (featuring some of his work).

Download page here. Approximately 41MB, 120min long.