Doctor Recommended
100% Natural

Yea, I was a hypocrite today.  It was all for a wonderful, grand and morally-upright cause though.

I voted to name a bridge in Hungary after Chuck Norris.

Try it yourself.

It’s articles like this that make me want to will my baseball cards to the The Onion when I die.

Other notables: “Untitled 1995,” “Checks for Degrees,” “Theory of Falling,” “Microcosm of Marxism,” CIA Black Highlighter,” and “Overturn laws of Thermodynamics“

Exhibit A: This video of some people that really should not be wearing skin-tight clothing, singing about some kind of granola crunching nirvana that has never existed.

Look, “the Internet” is just a gigantic collection of independently run networks. Some are privately owned, some are owned by NGO’s and others are financed via taxes.

There are over 150,000 routers that relay packets back and forth, many of these are owned by large companies.

Some of these companies want to charge variable rates — and already are charging variable rates. It is a concept that is neither new, nor foreign to the service world. For instance:

• Broadband rates versus dial-up, OMG! Can you believe there you are charged based upon how much you use? Different tiers even?
• Yield management takes place in the aviation industry (e.g. first class, business)
• Postage is a variable rate (e.g. while parcels may take the same “routes” they are charged based upon their size, destination and a host of other factors)
• Cellular packages (e.g. family plans, whenever/where ever minutes, roaming)
• Seating at entertainment venues (e.g. front row, floorside, benchside, 50-yard line, nose-bleed)
• Lines at an amusement park (e.g. general admission, Flash Pass)
• Insurance premiums (calculating your health, life, and car insurance all involves numerous continuously-changing variables which helps makes spreading risk an efficient enterprise)

The problem with the telecom industry however is that it is a highly regulated industry. It is not the product of a free-market distribution of resources. And none of the “net neutrality” legislation will fix it.

Rather than deregulate the industry, “net neutrality” will only add more costly and inefficient layers of regulation and oversight to it. After all, oversight and execution of the policies have to be financed somehow, guess who gets to pay for that?

What costs money? You see, in order to make sure every packet is living in some kind of Egalitarian-world, equipment will need to be installed to monitor and analyze the packets. And don’t forget the new civil servant positions that must be erected to analyze the data reports. Guess who finances that now? And so on.

Having a hard-on for Google and other web services is not going to nullify the laws of economics, namely scarcity. And any kind of nationalization of the network will result in a terribly ineffective method at distributing scarce resources.

If you are frustrated with dropped or static-filled calls today, imagine having a dropped call in the future because network operators can no longer discriminate (oooo, an evil word!!!) and reallocate bandwidth based upon peak usage.

Chuck Norris really should round-house kick this fallacious argument into the recycle bin. Bring back the freedom of contract.

Colbert’s latest exposé covered the all-too controversial open encyclopedia: Wikipedia.

One wonders if O’Reilly will get in on the action, declaring that his edits – specifically neo-edits – are more “reality-based” than others.

So we all know of Garry Kasparov as a world-class chess player. But did you know he also writes op-eds for The Wall Street Journal? Paid registration is typically required, however CoyoteBlog has a summary of his latest criticism of Putin. Other editorials: 1 2 3

I wonder that if in Russia, chess players are the equivalent to Tinseltown actors? If so, is the Russian Chess Federation analogous to the Film Actors Guild?

Another interesting note involving chess and Kasparov: after his bout with Deep Blue he contended that there were several human masters calling the shots behind the curtain.

Also, recent research seems to vilify the grand stalemate conspiracy in which Bobby Fischer accused the Soviets of deliberately stalemating one another to effectively game the system.

Ever come across a website that uses the same exact graphics and layouts as your own?  You might be interested in the large side-by-side comparison archives at Pirated Sites!

How about content?  Think someone is stripping the content and posting it as their own, without attribution?  Check out Copyscape.  Note: unfortunately it is difficult for the algorithms at Copyscape to fully differentiate citing/referencing and flat out plagiarizing.