Posts Tagged ‘internet’
So a few people on the Internet couldn’t help but notice that after 16 years of existence, Google chose today as the day they would honor Cesar Chavez’ birthday . . .
Today also happens to be Easter Sunday, the day that marks the Resurrection of Christ for the Christian faithful around the world, but hey, I don’t know why people are freaking out over Google’s choice of a leftist labor leader over the chosen Savior of two billion people. After all, Google has chosen to ignore Easter for thirteen straight years now. The last time Google recognized Easter was in their third year of existence back in 2000.
So I’m trying to figure out my reply to Google’s ongoing snub of the two billion faithful and I’m remembering how I was told that if you want to be a Christian, you should strive to be Christ-like in everything you do. Whenever you come to a decision point, you should ask yourself, WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? In this case, I asked myself, how would Jesus respond?
Unfortunately, I can’t really imagine what an Internet Jesus would tweet about this, so I decided to do the next best thing and take a positive course of action.
There, fixed it for you, Google!
I’m also fixing the default search engine on all the browsers in the house as well.
Happy Easter, all.
A decision was made in our house a week ago, a truly monumental decision as we said our goodbyes and put to an end a twenty-year long relationship.
I’ll call it the end of a love affair, although at times it was equal parts love and hate, especially when the bill came due, but other than those three months of wandering out in the desert in Aguanga, for twenty long years, whether it was cable programming through actual cable laid in the ground, or the same channels broadcast via satellite, cable TV had been a fixture in each and every home where I’ve lived.
Perhaps it sounds overly dramatic, but it really did feel like such a monumental decision, like a bridge that you cross and once you cross it, there might never again be any going back. Even knowing in the back of my mind that it would be as easy as a phone call to restart the service, it still felt like it was a life-changing moment as I called to cancel all those channels we’d been enjoying for so many years. (Yes, we do take TV that seriously in our house.)
Well, you know what? So far, we don’t miss anything as far as the programming goes and not paying the $70 / month? Very sweet indeed. Even when they tried to talk us down to $30 / month for just the basics, the decision had been made and we were determined to cut the cable to which we’d been bound.
As my eyes cleared and I realized that you can indeed have a great television set up with no monthly cable programming bill, I realized that I might even be a bit late to the party and there’s probably a lot of people in the youngest generation now who will live their whole lives and never sign up for cable and pay a monthly cable bill. For the rest of us, who have known nothing but cable our entire lives, I give you a five-point plan to ditching the cable bill and not missing very little of the service that went with it.
- It’s easy to forget that stations still broadcast over the airwaves, but they do and you can get most or all of your local channels for free by making a one-time purchase of an antenna like the Leaf for $37 delivered. How many channels you’re going to get depends on where you are, here in So. Cal. our antenna pulled in 30 stations (with maybe 7 or 8 in Spanish) when I visited my good friends in Nashville, they were pulling in 8, so it’s a little hit or miss, but local news and weather and exclusive channels you won’t find anywhere else make it a no-brainer.
- Once you’re pulling in your free local channels, for the rest of this to work, you’ll definitely need to ditch the dial-up if you haven’t already and you’ll probably need to upgrade if you’re on the cheapest DSL at 1.5 Mbps.
- Get a streaming player like the $50 Netgear NeoTV NTV200 which gives you full HD streamed from your wireless router. We started watching streaming TV on a couple PCs that were hooked up to our TVs via HDMI cables, but these little streaming players draw a lot less energy than a PC, so spend a little now and you’ll end up saving money on your energy bills in the long run. I also love small gadgets, the more they look like something Q would hand James Bond, the better. We have both the aforementioned NeoTV and a Roku in our house, both have performed nearly flawlessly. Internet enabled Blu-ray players or Smart TVs are two more options worth looking in to.
- Subscribe to HuluPlus for $8 a month and you’ll have some of the greatest shows on TV, most with every episode of the entire series available and all of them available completely on your own schedule. In our house, it was Arrested Development where we first discovered the joy of watching a great series, show by show, night after night, from the first episode to the last. Now we’re addicted to Lost and we get to feed our addiction every single night. The fact that we can go through the 120 episode series two, three, four episodes a night as opposed to waiting an entire week between episodes stretched out over six years, are you kidding me? I don’t think I could ever watch a series that way again. Just let me know when the series has had it’s run and all the episodes are available and we’ll enjoy it from beginning to end, a couple episodes a night, one night after the other.
- For another $8, subscribe to Netflix and you have the perfect combo, with HuluPlus specializing mainly in TV on demand and Netflix specializing mainly in Movies on demand. Yes, Netflix had by many people’s accounts 2011′s absolute worst PR disaster, but that’s old news at this point, the selection of movies they stream is pretty darn good, the same delay as the time it takes for a movie to make it from the theaters to your movie channels, but once it’s on Netflix, you can watch that movie a the time of your choosing instead of the schedule dictated by your movie channel.
So there it is, old news to a younger generation perhaps, but for those of us who have had nothing but cable bills our whole lives, with a good Internet connection, an antenna, a streaming player and a paltry $16 a month for HuluPlus and Netflix, as hard as it may be to visualize, you can ditch that cable bill and you might even find what takes its place far more enjoyable.
The double-barrel decisions to punt on the bill capped an extraordinary week of public pressure — and an extraordinary reversal of fortunes for Hollywood, whose lobbyists seemed to think they were on cruise control to passage of bills aimed at protecting their content from online thieves.
Source: Politico
Don’t you just love happy endings? Actually, in my case, I’m more of the Leaving Las Vegas ending type of guy, but still, to imagine the big money Hollywood lobbyists smug with the certainty that they had bought and paid for the votes of enough senators and congresspeople to ensure the passage of Chinese government censorship for America, only to see the tech heavyweights use their platforms on the Internet to rally public opinion to the tune of millions and millions of Americans signing petitions and calling their representatives . . . it’s a beautiful thing.
Power to the people – when organized and sufficiently motivated, even the biggest money of the big lobbiests can be defeated. Now if we could only get the same kind of public outcry to let the Obama administration know that “we can’t wait” on jobs and Keystone XL . . .
* technically, these bills have not been killed but punted, most likely until after the election. SOPA and PIPA are both heavily damaged in public perception though, so most likely it’s back to the drawing board instead of Congress trying to rework them. Let’s just hope they can find a way to address the concerns of the intellectual property rights holders without trampling the freedom of the Internet.
If this doesn’t show why SOPA is so misguided and completely wrongheaded, check out the fact that even it’s own co-sponsors are not in compliance with the proposed law!!!
From Jamie Lee Curtis Taete at vice.com:
The above screencap shows the homepage of Florida congressman/SOPA co-sponsor/probable PIPA supporter Dennis Ross’ website.
Which features the appropriately titled illustration “Overweight Government Pig” by cartoonist John S. Pritchett. You’ll notice that Dennis cropped out the part where it says “© John Pritchett”. We contacted John, and he told us:
“To my knowledge, I did not license the usage of my “Overweight Govt. Pig” illustration to Dennis Ross.”
Wuh oh!
Source: Jamie Lee Curtis Taete at vice.com via Sarah Roman at usamericanfreedom.com
I felt it my duty as a law-abiding citizen to contact the Congressman and let him know of the offense:
Dear Congressman Ross,
This is to inform you that your use of the “overweight government pig” image at your website is in violation of copyright laws, and that your removal of the copyright holder’s name from the image shows premeditation and a willful disdain for said copyright laws on your part.
In keeping with the spirit of the draconian SOPA law which you support, we demand you blacklist your website and remove all traces of it from the Internet.
Thank you for your compliance. Long live Chinese-style totalitarian control of the Internet in America.
Sincerely,
Mike Cornelison
Congressman Ross only takes comments from addresses inside his 12th district of Florida. Feel free to contact him from my Bartow, Florida office:
255 N Broadway Ave
Bartow, FL 33830-3912
Contact Congressman Dennis Ross
On a day known around the Internet as “Dump GoDaddy Day,” I received the following email from my own webhost, 1&1, an email that was both spot-on politically as well as being a well-timed effort to capitalize on the exodus of tens of thousands of domains from GoDaddy.
Dear Sir/Miss,
You may have heard about Protect-IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently under consideration in Congress. If passed, among other things, SOPA requires Web hosting companies like 1&1 to police websites in order to prevent them from communicating copyrighted information on the internet. We would like to make sure you are aware of 1&1’s official position on SOPA.
As a global provider of domains and hosting services, we oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect-IP (PIPA) Acts currently under consideration. While we observe the concerns of those who are troubled by the potential impact on protecting intellectual property online, 1&1 feels there is an urgent need to strike a balance between dissemination of and access to information and protection against its illegal use within the public domain.
The US government is currently reviewing SOPA and PIPA as possible ways to prevent unlawful distribution of copyrighted materials available on the internet. These current proposals, if passed, would allow for significant interventions into the technological and conomical basis of the internet. This could put the vast benefits and economic opportunities of entirely legal and legitimate e-business models at risk. Generally, companies offering technological services should not be forced to be the executor of authority in such matters. If they were to act upon every implication of content infringement without any judicial research into the actual usage of its customers, the integrity behind their customer’s freedom of information and speech would be enormously harmed.
1&1 Internet, Inc. has worked through associations and with related companies to ensure that these aspects are taken into account. Thus, we welcome the serious consideration by the US Congress of the potential harmful effects on Internet freedom should SOPA and / or PIPA be passed as law, and hope the stability of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS) remains intact.
We encourage every Internet user concerned about these plans to contribute to the debate and to raise their voice with their local representatives in the House or Senate. One way to express your concerns could be to use one of the websites that emerged to protect user interests in the current legislative debate, such as http://fightforthefuture.org/.
At 1&1 we support you, our customer, and an open internet. If you find that you are supporting a company that encourages SOPA and wish to drop them as a provider, please follow the simple instructions contained on the website linked below.
Thank you for being one of our extremely valued customers, and for taking the time to read this.
Best regards,
Frederick Iwans
General Manager 1&1 Internet Inc.
No surprise that politicians who have been bought and paid for by the entertainment industry are behind these bills, and some of them may be so completely naive they might imagine fighting piracy is the only thing that these bills will enable, but there is a lot more to worry about beyond the unfair honus the bills would place on web hosts. Look into it deeper, and these bills also give the government the power of judge, jury and executioner to take down any website they find objectionable. If you give the government a kill switch for any website it deems objectionable, just watch the abuses ensue. Absolutely, positively, we do not want to allow our government to get on the slippery slope towards Chinese authoritarian control of the Internet.
If you browse the Internet, you’ll see a beautiful coalition of left-wing bloggers and right-wing bloggers all united against these legislative abominations. Here’s an article from Declan McCullagh where he makes 2012 predictions, and at the top of the list: SOPA opponents may go nuclear. Now there’s one apocalyptic prediction we should all help make a reality.
SOPA supporters are the 1%. Don’t let the 1% kill freedom on the Internet.
Source: ibtimes.com