Month: August 2007

Bud Selig’s Travels

Isn’t this ironic as all get-out?

While Barry Bonds was breaking the home run record in San Francisco, baseball commissioner Bud Selig was in New York, preparing to meet with his chief steroids investigator.

Selig watched Bonds’ 756th homer on television Tuesday night, then met with George Mitchell on Wednesday before returning to Milwaukee, a person with knowledge of Selig’s whereabouts said.

Commissioner Selig is responsible for the Steroids Era in baseball (by refusing to do any testing until last year) and he couldn’t be bothered to see the fruits of his labor. Hypocrite.

Whaddup, bitches?

I won’t be able to say that in New York if this law passes:

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.

The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.

Somebody should bitch-slap Councilwoman Mealy before she embarrasses her momma again.

This is a fine example of slippery slopes in action. The Council banned the use of the “n-word”, so why shouldn’t they ban the “b-word” as nearly as offensive? And then “fatty” because it’s nearly as offensive as “bitch”, and then “retard”, and then “dullard”, and then “not exactly a genius”. Why not ban all the words in the English language, on the grounds that each one can hurt somebody’s feelings if used in the right context?

Then New Yorkers, who used to be the freest people in the world until they started banning smoking in bars and fast food and hard words, will just sit in their many corners banging their heads against their many walls and moaning, almost imperceptibly, about the abject emptiness of their lives.

The bitches.

What could you do with fat fiber?

Doc Searls wants to know what you would do with a Gigabit fiber connection between your dwelling unit and the Internet. My answer: nothing I couldn’t do with Verizon’s standard 15 Mb/s connection. Am I missing some vital need that I have and don’t know about? Tons of bandwidth is cool until you get the bill for it, and paying for more than I need doesn’t seem all that smart to me.

White Space Faux Pas

The great white space coalition’s submissions to the FCC are a big bust:

A group of companies including Microsoft and Google had hoped to convince regulators that some new devices could carry high-speed Internet connections over television airwaves without interfering with broadcast signals.

But it didn’t work as planned, according to a report released this week by the Federal Communications Commission. After four months of testing, the agency concluded that the devices either interfered with TV signals or could not detect them in order to skirt them.

Why am I not surprised?

See more discussion by free marketeer Jerry Brito at TLF and by consumer warrior Harry Feld at Public Knowledge.