Sun Mar 15 1998 12:00:
The Red Hat thing was great. I
got an oversized mug and a mouse pad for knowing the name of Linus'
daughter. Useless trivia knowledge pays off again! The mug is
benchmarked at half a liter of liquid and can keep its cargo warm for
about 15 minutes.
Does anyone know how the V-chip works? Because it seems to me that they're going to have to keep fine-tuning the ratings system, and are they just going to make people keep buying new TVs? Or will the chips be reprogrammable on the fly? In which case the government can control what we watch. In any event, the government controls us all by secretly funding the networks to put crap programming on. My other television conspiracy theory is that the dubba-dubba-WB is run by white supremacists who are trying to keep urban blacks from rising up in revolt by pacifying them with unfunny ethnic comedy. You laugh at me now, but when they start producing The Animated Adventures of Steppen Fetchit, I will be vindicated.
This is what government is good for. Funding cool and useful stuff that private industry [working for you!] wouldn't touch. $50 million is about 6 cents per American. I'd put in a dollar for a geographical satellite.
As long as I'm going through the rather sparse [graph] news at newshub, take a look at this. I say get used to moral decay. Moral decay is here to stay. I should do a moral decay page. It's a pretty interesting article, though. The Malaysian government realizes that they can't censor the net, so they're resorting to other tactics.
I'm putting this here for lack of anywhere better to put it. Read it and weep.
China: pornography, dissident political information
France: Information from newsgroups (may be out-of-date)
Singapore: sex,
religion, politics, homosexuality, gum-chewing, and HTTP headers
It's very difficult to find this information. You'd think there's be a worldwide censorship watch somewhere, but if there is I can't find it. Help me out on this list.
You know what I want? I'll tell you what I want. I want to be able to control how HTML tags are processed by my browser. I want to be able to define new tags and control what and how they display by means of a script (eg. I could make the <censor> </censor> tags I did as a joke a while back actually work), which script could be downloaded by others and integrated into their own browsers so that they could see my tags, and see standard tags the same way I see them, if they so desired. I want Netscape to work like emacs, basically. This would solve the problem of nonstandard HTML tags; it would take maybe five seconds to download a script and add it to the browser's library; it could even be automated. Is this what XML does? If so, <annoying commercial lady>I want it!</annoying commercial lady> Hm, I don't know what that tag would do, though.
