Stop This Evil Now

This woman needs to be stopped. She's hurting the human race.

Experts Predict Deluge of World Cup-related PR Pitches

Security experts are predicting a deluge of World Cup-related PR pitches from IT companies over the coming weeks, as lazy PR flacks try to get their shit clients mentioned in some lazy articles from lazy reporters writing for the nth time about how much productivity could be lost to World Cup madness.

"We're expecting security companies to be particularly tedious this summer," an expert said. "They'll start warning reporters about the danger of viruses and spam that pose as World Cup gossip. We expect the number of such pitches to amount to at least 31% of reporters' inboxes by mid-June."

Those wankers who make software for spying on employees are also expected to chuck out a tonne of lazy pitches about how much productivity will be lost from staff reading ESPN at work.

ICANN Approves Dot-Redneck Domain

The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers today announced that its board of directors voted unanimously to approve a new ".redneck" top-level internet domain.

The vote comes after a grueling three-day approval process that saw the successful registry spend almost $100 on application fees and lobbying.

“We're very pleased with the result,” .redneck sponsor Dr Dobson Perkins said in a statement. “This new top-level domain finally cordons off a special 'red-state district' of the internet for every god-fearing, fag-hating patriot in the country.”

The .redneck domain is a “sponsored” TLD, meaning only certain qualifying individuals will be able to register a name.

“We believe roughly 62,040,610 Americans qualify to register a name,” Perkins said.

ICANN president Paul Twomey denied charges that the approval of .redneck was unduly influenced by the US Department of Commerce.

“It was the pommies, mate,” he said in a press conference. “Those pommy bastards sent a letter at the last minute saying if we didn't approve .redneck they'd go whining to the UN or something.”

“'Strewth,” he added.

But not everybody was in favor of the new domain being introduced.

European commissioner Viviane Reding said: “Today is truly a tragic day for the interweb superbahn. I used a computer once, and I don't remember seeing any necks, red or otherwise.”

Registering a .redneck domain will cost $750 per name per year. Perkins said the high price was justified by the extensive manual screening process required to protect users of the domain from “feminists, homos, immigrants and the elite media”.

The ICANN board voted 13-0 in favor of Perkins' proposal. Michael Palage abstained.

Joichi Ito has been missing in World Of Warcraft for several weeks and was unable to attend the meeting to register his vote.

For security reasons, the remaining ICANN board members have been locked in a soundproof chamber until July 2008, and could not be reached for comment.

“Does this mean I still don't get to run .web?” Chris Ambler said, in a comment posted to Bret Fausett's blog.

Little, Brown "works hard for the money"

Having been an author for umpteen years, I suppose nothing should surprise me about the venality of publishers, but somehow the recent behavior of Little, Brown - once an outfit with a classy reputation - leaves me scratching my head. As many of you know, they are printing a new edition of " teenage Harvard sensation" Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" with the several dozen "similarities" to (read: plagiarisms from) Megan McCafferty's books excised and an "apology" to Ms. McCafferty appended.

According to Robin Abcarian in the LAT, Steve Ross of Crown (McCafferty's publisher) is taking the proper attitude:

When Steve Ross, publisher and senior vice president of Crown Publishers and Three Rivers Press, learned that a first-time teenage novelist might have borrowed a few passages from the works of one of his own authors, Megan McCafferty, his first instinct was to consider it "a youthful indiscretion."

After all, the alleged transgressor, Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, was being heralded as a kind of literary prodigy, a kid with a voice who'd scored a two-book deal worth close to $500,000 while still in high school. Who'd want to squelch that?

But as Ross' staffers compared the newcomer's novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," with two of McCafferty's novels, he became alarmed and then angry when they turned up 40 passages in "Opal Mehta" that seemed borrowed or lifted directly from McCafferty's two popular young adult novels, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings."

"This is literary identity theft," Ross said Tuesday. McCafferty, he said, "feels that something fundamental was taken from her."

Viswanathan's Boston-area phone number was disconnected, but through her publisher, Little, Brown & Co., she apologized Monday in a written statement, saying she had made an unintentional mistake.

Forty unintentional mistakes?! How's this for a new cliché? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on Little Brown for being such blatant liars. Meanwhile, how will Harvard react? I imagine this kind of plagiarism on one of Ms. Viswanathan's sophomore papers would get her kicked out of the institution. All writers' organizations (Author's Guild, PEN, WGA, etc.) should also be appalled and behave accordingly.

D'oh!

As you may have noticed, some script kiddy appears to have compromised my Blogger password earlier this afternoon. Thankfully, the little Larry-Page-obsessed cretin didn't change the password, so I was able to log back in and change it to something a little harder to guess. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Larry Page Catches Wasp in Jar

Via John Battelle.

Larry Page Steals a Volkwagen

Via Michael Moore.

Everybody Loves Larry Page

Via Slashdot.

Larry Page Gets Fishing-Hook Lodged in Eye

Larry Page Births Dog-Face Boy

Via Kos.

Larry Page Has One Boob Bigger Than Other

Via BoingBoing.

Larry Page Preserved in Amber

Via Tom Foremski.

Larry Page Loses Tongue in Bar Fight

Via Om Malik.

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HACKED BY 7337SEaLSCREW

we 0wn yo pUnK a$$ dirty bastard

"password" is *not* a password. tard. lololol.

blog ain ev3n funny

Bill Gates Breaks His Own "Rich" Record

Yippee!

I just won $100 in the newsroom sweepstakes by correctly guessing how many times Bill Gates would say the word "rich" in his keynote speech on Monday!

I picked 36 -- the most times he has said "rich" in a keynote EVER!

I'm usually way off, but I had a feeling he was going to break his record this time. Just call it a hunch. Maybe I am becoming Adept.

His previous best was 33 times, when he talked at PDC last September.

All my coworkers thought he'd started to "quit beating that meaningless adjective to death", because his average so far this year is 9.42 times per public speech (lower even than 2004 levels!) compared to an average of 12.65 over all his keynotes last year.

It's hard to believe that he hasn't made a public speech that did not include the word "rich" since May 2002, almost four years ago.

My editor thinks it is deliberate. He says it's "some radical form of self-hypnosis".

"It's a big inside joke he plays on the worthless plebs in the audience," my editor tells me. "Some people imagine the audience nude to calm their nerves when speaking in public. Gates just keeps reminding himself how obscenely wealthy he is."

That doesn't seem plausible to me. I don't think it's deliberate. He must have billions of much more important things on his mind.

Google Ajaxulates Yahoo Finance

I just got an instant message from my source.

"See," he said. "Told you so."