] PORTLAND, Maine - Music buyers who applied for a share of
] a price-fixing settlement involving major U.S. record
] distributors and retailers will receive about $12.60
] apiece if a judge signs off on the deal.

Looking forward to my check.

Yahoo! News - Consumers in CD Settlement May Get Money

Elonka wrote:
] Sorry, but can we please avoid headlines that include
] profanity on Memestreams? I'm trying to get certain friends
] and family members to join the discussions here, but if they
] come in and see swear words, it's going to be an instant
] deal-breaker. I'm not saying that we should be
] Disney-qualified, but I would like to maintain a minimum level
] of civility.
]
] Or do other Memestreams members disagree? I'm willing to go
] with the will of the community on this, so if most of
] Memestreams feels that profanity is okay in headlines under an
] "we're all adults here, deal with it", then I'll switch my own
] course accordingly, in terms of what types of people that I
] try to invite into the community.

I don't know what to tell you. I can't stop people from cursing, I don't think its likely a culture that dosen't accept cursing will form, and I can't think of a reasonable way to code filtering abilities into MemeStreams that will not totally throw off our development roadmap. I don't know how to approach this problem.

In the future, we will likely provide the ability to apply filters to what content you see, giving you the ability to censor what you take in. Any filters would be determined by you, for you, and only apply to you. This is not currently on our roadmap. There are many things we have to do before we start working on features like that.

I refuse to type a single line of code that amounts to the implementation of censorship, but I have no problem doing things that allow people to censor what they see. As long as you are making those decisions for youself, and someone else is not making them for you, its fine. You get to decide how you want to raise your kids, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. If you want to censor what they see, fine. You want to censor what you see, fine. Its your right.

I just don't know how to approach this problem right now. Any way I can think of to enforce some type of "proper conduct code" goes against every belief I have in the way open communication systems should work. A technical approach could work, but we are not in a position at this time to implement one. I wouldn't know where to start. When the site internals are more mature, it will likely be a different story.

I don't expect the community to police itsself, in terms of its language, and nor should it. This is a free place. You can express whatever you want to express, however you want to express it, and you will be judged based upon it in the same way as in the real world. If someone curses all the time, and you don't like that, don't recommend their links or click thru them. They will not show up in the agent for you. As far as the main page goes, anything that makes it up there is, in theory, a reflection of the community. We have no way to directly influence the behavior of the community, nor should ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Same Shit Different Asshole

I wonder how he feels about Courvoisier.. Kim Jong-il.. the Ladies Man.

quoted:
===
The little that is known about Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader, conjures up a caricature of a diminutive playboy, a comic picture at odds with his brutal regime.

Diplomats and escaped dissidents talk of a vain, paranoid, cognac- guzzling hypochondriac.

He is said to wear platform shoes and favour a bouffant hairstyle in order to appear taller than his 5 feet 3 inches.

...

Mr Kim also has a reputation as a drinker. He was seen draining 10 glasses of wine during his 2000 summit with the South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and is known to have a taste for Hennessy VSOP cognac.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Profile: Kim Jong-il

] Command-and-control organizations, Hock says, "were not
] only archaic and increasingly irrelevant. They were
] becoming a public menace, antithetical to the human
] spirit and destructive of the biosphere. I was convinced
] we were on the brink of an epidemic of institutional
] failure."

This is a starting point for some extremely rich and interesting ideas.

The founder of Visa on Corporations

] It's not that I'm bitter. Oh alright then, I am. When I
] was doing a weekly round-up of interesting web links in
] 1996 (still the top search result for the phrase "GLR
] jokes", if you'd like to check), I found myself using
] something very similar to what experts now call the
] weblog format. And was I hailed as the pioneer of a brave
] new form of distributed grassroots journalism? No, I was
] not.
]
] I was regarded - quite rightly, as it turned out - as
] some sort of nut who re-used the same HTML to update his
] home page every now and again. Don't get me wrong: I'm a
] huge fan of fanzines, home pages, and the whole
] do-it-yourself attitude. But because publishing one of
] these usually requires some element of effort, sometimes
] that's reflected in their contents.
]
] On the other hand, it's getting so easy to update a
] weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts
] willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities, like a
] nation of Alan Partridges trying to fill an internet's
] worth of dead air: CDs they're listening to,
] scintillating accounts of their day at work, URLs of
] sites they feel they should acknowledge, despite having
] nothing new to say about them. It is like one of those
] terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single
] day of the year.

I love the conclusion of this article. It's so true:
"People used to worry about the government compiling a database of everything they knew about you and everything you did. But who'd have thought we'd be so keen to keep updating our own entries?"

Guardian Unlimited | Online | A blogger is a stalker's dream

] Nader takes on the SEC, will a campaign be next? Bit by
] bit, Ralph Nader does what he does best, annoying those
] who abuse power. This last year, he has kept with
] advocacy that is in parallel with smart campaign strategy
] and the creation of the SEC watchdog group is an example
] of that. The Greens are still debating him in the forums,
] wondering if he is still their guy. Maybe they should be
] asking if he's OUR guy?

Nader takes on the SEC, will a campaign be next? | Metafilter

] ROSEVILLE -- Michigan's Adopt-A-Highway program has a new
] partner: the National Organization for the Reform of
] Marijuana Laws.

Holy smokes! Pot fans take high road - 03/05/03

] LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Embattled pop star
] Michael Jackson wears a prosthetic nose and once paid
] $150,000 for a "voodoo curse" to kill director Steven
] Spielberg despite being deep in debt, Vanity Fair
] magazine reported on Monday.

I believe the way it works with voodoo, is that if you cast negitive energy, it comes back to you. So you have to mean it, and be willing to accept what evil comes back to you. Jackson seems to like problems.

Why do we care so much about this guy?

CNN.com - Report: Jackson put 'curse' on Spielberg - Mar. 4, 2003

] WASHINGTON - U.S. counterterrorism authorities,
] exploiting a trove of information gleaned from computers
] and other gear captured with Al-Qaida chieftain Khalid
] Shaikh Mohammad, raced Sunday to identify individuals who
] they believe might be poised to launch attacks in the
] United States.

Mercury News | 03/03/2003 | U.S. agents race to follow up on electronic data seized in raid

Tracking inbound and outbound links for blogs.

blogging ecosystem