A Peculiar Blog

I’ve been noticing an increase in the amount of comment spam in recent weeks. Usually the Akismet and Bad behavior plugins do most of the work of keeping the crap out of the comments but there’s been a higher than normal level of sewage backing up in the comment queue and, to continue the analogy, I’ve had to do something of a power flush and turn the bathroom faucets full open to hose out the crap left in some comments.

Recently Viacom got themselves a court order requiring Google to hand over a complete list of (get this) Every video watched by YouTube users. The logs in question include the login names an IP addresses of those users.

In a Stumbleupon kind of way people get a different random entry every time they use the random url, which allows them to get a look at more of your blog than they ordinarily would, probably finding interesting stuff along the way that they would otherwise have missed.

Once again Iran is in the news, once again it’s because they’re refusing to halt their uranium enrichment program. The US state department is once again talking about sanctions:

Just in case you thought China was the only country doing stuff like this, they’re not. The Iranian government is working on a law that’s going to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society” (translation: give the government more license to kill people that openly disagree with it.) They’re already blocking websites that either have sexual content, anything religious that does not agree with Islamic doctrines, and of course, anything that doesn’t agree with government approved politics.

The mortgage industry took a big hit not too long ago when a major lender ended up having to be sold off at bargain basement prices along with a huge load of government bailout money to go along with it. Now with more major financial institutions looking at serious trouble, there’s talk going on about he shot of another government bailout to keep the economy from suffering any more than it already has.

Lawrence Roberts is one of those names that most people using the Internet have probably never heard or read before. He’s one of the people that were involved in developing what has come to be the Internet that we all use today. Specifically, He did a lot of the groundbreaking work in “networking through data packets”

This Columbia University computer science professor has decided to get into the “big brothe” act and has co-founded a New York-based company named Sense Networks to (you guessed it) sell tracking software to other companies.

He spoke recently at the National Governors Association’s semiannual meeting and talked about a growing polarization in America. He made this 44 minute speech, citing statistics about voting habits and such, painting the picture that apparently people in this country are physically segregating themselves into groups that all tend to vote the same.

This election has turned out to have been rigged eight ways from Sunday so that Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe could continue to stay in power. From what I’ve read, there’s really no question about it, the election was totally bogus and Mugabe shouldn’t be Zimbabwe’s President any more than Hannibal Lecter.