Tell the FCC to say no to Hollywood’s insane “Selectable Output Control” kill-switch – Boing Boing.

Thanks go out to Inquisitr, RumorMillNews, The Agitator, and Techdirt

“The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead,” he said. “What would you have them erect? Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?”

Heavens no, Antoinin, we couldn’t have something OTHER than a christian symbol on government land now, could we?

Courtesy of the WSJ

I think that’s a cop-out, but I understand the reasoning behind it and I think that, while it’s a stupid policy with all sorts of inherent landmines, it’s not intentionally bigotted.

That’s not what I want to bitch about today.

What I want to bitch about today are liberal absolutists who spew cliche rhetoric out of their asses in the guise of being “intelligent and inclusive”.

One of the commenters to the story said “I don’t care if anyone is gay as long as they don’t throw it in my face.”

Here’s where the shit-storm of idiocy began.

The immediate reaction from the PC lemmings was:  “Oh!  So it’s okay as long as they hide it!”  and  “Oh!  God forbid two guys should kiss where you can see them!”  and “It’s bigots like you who keep people in the closet!”

You see, to the PC lemming, there are no shades of grey.    There is no difference between the kindly old woman who votes pro-life  and the person who bombs abortion clinics.  There is no difference between Rush Limbaugh and Colin Powell.  There is no difference between Bill Cosby and the KKK.

In for a penny, in for a pound.  Right?

Yeah.  Fuck you.

I spent almost 20 years working in theatre.  I think it’s safe to say that I’ve interacted with more homosexuals on an average week than most people do in an average decade.  I lived in a building in which the resident fags (they called themselves that) dubbed the west wing of the building “Dyke Alley”.  One of those “dykes” was a former girlfriend of mine.  I spent a season working with the Ice Capades, for God’s sake!   My gay friends run the gammut from “undetectable” to “flaming”.  And you know what?

I get really fucking annoyed at gays who “throw it in my face”.

Yeah.  Call me a biggot.  Please.   I need the laugh; this week has been a bit long and depressing.

People who “throw it in your face” are those who can’t define themselves as anything other than (in this case) their sexuality.   For them, everything is about their sexuality.  They aren’t a painter, their a gay painter.  They aren’t an accountant, their a lesbian accountant.   They insist on injecting their sexual orientation into every situation–regardless of the appropriateness.  They’re (wait for it…..) throwing it in my face.

To go back to an earlier context:   I respect Colin Powell; I may disagree with him on some things, but he presents himself as an intelligent, well-informed, highly-skilled person who is a republican.  Rush Limbaugh is an annoying one-trick pony who attempts to cram “republican” down people’s throats.

I’m a big boy.  My despise for Rush Limbaugh (”in your face” homosexuals) in no way precludes my affection or respect for Colin Powell (homosexuals in general).

Can you PC Absolutists understand that concept? Or do I need to dumb it down even more?

So far, nothing newsworthy, right? Right. Here’s the kicker:

They were his own images.

Yeah, you read that right. Best guess is that some jackass took Jon’s images, stripped the typography from them, and submitted them to the aforementioned stock art site. But instead of a “whoops, our bad”, Jon was instead greeted with a “whoops, we’re suing your ass”, courtesy of a law firm that apparently specializes in fucking over legitimate artists**. Yes sir, the The Intellectual Property Group PLLC is a company that is reputed to “[Represent] businesses and professionals across the Country and Overseas in the Art, Media, Internet, and Entertainment fields” (weird capitalization theirs, not mine). Tell me again how this gels with suing the original artist for his entirely lawful and legitimate use of his own artwork? Go on, I’ll wait.

No? Yeah, didn’t think so.

So this “law firm” decides to contact Jon and offer to settle the matter for $18k. How the hell is that any different than just paying the stock art site? From the artist himself:

I refuse to pay THEM for work I created. That is the epitomy of ridiculous. The attorney didn’t like my response. He threatened to sue. I say BRING IT ON! I have no doubt I can win in court.

A-fucking-men. Glad to see someone not bending over and taking it from these bastards.

Now, I know that everyone makes jokes about lawyers. They say that they’re the lowest of the low, that they prey on the weak, and that they’d generally serve better as the foundation of a building than the foundation of law. All those lawyers that people make such jokes about? THOSE lawyers would spit on the lawyers who have brought this “case”. Know why? Because instead of backing off and realizing that hey, maybe this guy’s got a point, they decided to contact all of his clients, and “inform the client[s] that I’m being investigated for copyright infringement and that the logo I designed for them may have been stolen from their client.”

Holy shit, that’s some balls.

So, for all the readers of this site (stop laughing), I urge you to help in any way you can. How, you may ask? Simple. Jon is on Twitter and his friends have started a #SaveJon campaign in order to increase visibility and bring attention to this issue. If you use Twitter, please spread the news of his issue far and wide, and make sure to use the #SaveJon hashtag when you do. He’s got a new Tumblr blog up since everyone trying to see how he’s getting shafted has apparently destroyed his server. And if you have a few spare bucks, he’s got a legal defense fund set up. He may need it.

And if you feel so inclined, email the fine folks over at Art Laws by clicking here (an AOL address for a “professional” organization – I love it!) and let them know what you think of their plans to sue Jon for using his own artwork. Remember to treat these wonderful people with exactly the same amount of professionalism and courtesy that they have been treating Jon with. And as much as I despise having to say it, remember that they’re lawyers and can make your life a living hell for absolutely no other reason than that they don’t like you.

I personally can’t wait to see how this plays out, and see exactly how far Jon can cram his counter-suit up their collective asses.

* – they don’t really fuck pigs. That was just hyperbole on my part. It was a joke, an opinion, when I said that the people at stockart.com fuck pigs. To clarify, the people at stockart.com DO NOT FUCK PIGS. So if you’re looking for someone to fuck a pig of yours, do NOT ask anyone at stockart.com, as they DO NOT FUCK PIGS. stockart.com ARE NOT PIG FUCKERS. I hope that clears things up.

** – this probably isn’t what they specialize in, although whatever is said on their site is certainly belied by their actions.

Why, you might be asking yourself, do you give a shit? Because your author and humble narrator is a goddamned idiot, that’s why.

At my job, one of my job functions is to run a script every month that detects inactive users. In this case, inactive is any account that has not logged in for over 90 days. Well, the script that I use to do it is homebrew, and VBscript. I’m not nearly as big a fan of VBscript as I am of PHP, but that’s neither here nor there; VBscript is what I’ve been given and VBscript is what I’ll use.

sidenote: I know I mentioned compilation up in the first paragraph, and I also know that PHP and VBscript are interpreted, not compiled languages. My response to that? Shut up.

So, several of the higher-ups have noticed that there are occasional users that slip through the cracks of this script that I use. A couple of modifications and tweaks later, problems are fixed and all is right with the world. Well, today I get notice that there’s a user who has not logged in since May of last year – lot longer than 90 days. Not good.

So what did I do? Why, I spent hours and hours examining code, finally ending up rewriting several hundred lines of code from scratch to see why the hell my scripts simply will NOT catch this one particular user. This takes a bit of doing, as for each test run, it takes about 15-20 mins to see if it’s gonna work or die. For those of you that are interested, when checking the lastLogon Active Directory attribute, you MUST check all the domain controllers in your domain, or your results are worthless. Yes, all of them. Even the ones that are on a ship, connected by an always-saturated satellite connection. Even the ones that are running on a TCP/IP connection that is transmitted by way of small woodland creatures carrying the goddam packets back and forth (and badgers have no concept of TTL or a sliding window acknowledgment system making the whole thing just worthless, really). Every single one, or your results mean nothing.

FIVE. HOURS. LATER…..

I’m elbow deep in LDAP and ADSI, trying to see what the hell could be causing this one user to not show up. Still. And since the lastLogon attribute is 19 digits long (thank you Microsoft), it’s not human-readable. Seriously, I think it’s measured in nanoseconds. Well, on a whim, I throw together yet ANOTHER script to determine what the human-readable timestamp is. October 22, 2008. Do you know how many days that is from that date until today (January 13, 2009)? Because I do.

83.

83 goddam days.

On the plus side, I may now have a more streamlined version of the previous script, one that isn’t domain-dependent. Yay, plus-side.

Christ.

[From And now you know… [The Agitator]]

After watching that, and realizing that Sarah Palin is completely inept and ignorant of anything outside of her own myopic worldview, I want to know what exactly it is about her that is appealing to conservative republicans and why is she being looked at for 2012? What part of “didn’t know that Africa was a continent” and “couldn’t identify the countries that were involved in NAFTA” seems like a good choice for anything other than the “after” picture of a botched frontal lobotomy procedure?

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains