QLD man charged for propagating a baby-swinging viral-vid!

this time the “do-gooders” are the Queensland police with their heads up their arses, with the way they’re *choosing* to enforce the law:

A Queensland man has been charged for re-publishing on a video-sharing site a viral video of a man swinging a baby around like a rag doll.  The video he uploaded to the site was reported to police by a Britton.

The controversial three-minute video had already been published widely across the internet and shown on American TV news shows. The clip can still be found online today.

Chris Illingworth, 60, a father of four from Maroochydore, thought he would share it with fellow users of Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events. In two years, he has uploaded hundreds of videos to Liveleak.

(source: theage.com.au)

the implications for ordinary internet users who propagate certain material is enormous.  in the minds of Do-Gooder Extremists, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re the subject in the video, the videographer, performing citizen journalism, or simply passing/soliciting comment on the subject – all seem to be fair game for those who charge themselves with the task of “protecting the children”.

as the article goes on to suggest, this year we have indeed reached hysterical levels of ridiculousness in efforts to combat child abuse and child porn (and yes, there’ve been some excellent wins, too).

just for the record, i abhor child abuse & child porn.

but for the love of god, is it too much to ask for you do-gooder maniacs put your efforts where they might actually MATTER and COUNT for what you supposedly stand for?

cuz from where i’m standing, these mindless shenanigans are just wasting my tax-payer money.

i can only hope(?) there’s A LOT more to this Queensland man that hasn’t yet come to light – other than being an ordinary netizen – to justify this crap.

Say NO to compulsory internet censorship in Australia

“Clean Feed”?  WTF?  NFW!

i’ve sat on my hands long enough before weighing in on this topic, waiting to see if it was all just a bad dream and i’d wake up and the world would be a sensible place again.

yeah, ok, i’m awake now.

seems Senator Conroy has either lost his mind, or thinks we never had one.

i’m fed up with do-gooder Catholics who think they can save the world/us by hiding it from us, and parade it as “protecting the children” so they can hurl their intelligence-insulting “what?  are you against children being protected from bad stuff?” bullshit.

i vehemently reject his proposal for compulsory ‘net censorship in Australia.

you can read all about the bone-headedness of his plan here at nocleanfeed.com.

PLEASE contact your local MP, and Sen. Conroy himself.

i’ll try to be as polite as i can be in the face of such a stupid stupid man…

Dodo wins, godammit! :-(

All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, on a PC that’s had no new software installed on it, no recent reconfiguration, or any observable signs of malware infection, mum & dad’s Dodo dial-up account stopped working last week – authentication issues _after_ a successful initial PPP connection.  And this isn’t the first time this’s happened…

Mum spent 4 hours on the phone to Dodo tech-support, except this time they weren’t able to resolve the problem.  Exhausted and beaten, she caved and said “OK, give me ADSL”. :-(    She’ll soon be on 256/64kbps, 500MB(peak)+500MB(off-peak) for $25/month.

I nearly flipped (as you can imagine from my earlier posts re Dodo!), but a quick run through BroadbandChoice.com.au confirms that Dodo’s $25/month ADSL (without bundled voice services) is about as cheap as entry-level ADSL gets, and that’s about as much as she wanted to pay.

Given Dodo’s ferocious telemarketing campaign to get their dial-up cusomters onto more modern services, people more cynical/paranoid than me might wonder if there really was a technical problem at all…

Touche Dodo, you won this one.

* Update:  i setup a new dial-up connection with somewhere else as a stop-gap until the Dodo ADSL kicks in.  it worked first time, further proving that there was no technical issue at the client end.  i feel myself becoming cynical/paranoid…

* Update2:  when i called up to cancel the dial-up account (i never used it, just mum & dad), the chook could see that i’d had technical problems, and offered to escalate the issue to *level 3* tech-support.  i wonder how many more hours they’d expect mum to spend on the phone trying to sort out their borked system?  (all the while she’d be running up & down stairs dozens of times because there’s no mobile (GSM) reception in their basement where the PC is).  thanks for the offer Dodo, but you’d already won, this particular chook just didn’t know it so had to run the pleading script past me…

Teen shot at Northcote skatepark

http://www.theage.com.au/national/teen-shot-dead-by-police-20081211-6wtt.html?page=-1

” ‘This is a dreadful tragedy,’ Assistant Commissioner Cartwright said.

He defended the actions of the officers and said they had been trained to fire at the central body mass rather than shoot to wound.

‘The movies would portray that you can shoot to disarm people. That’s not our experience. These are events that are life-threatening, people are extremely nervous, agitated, scared,’ he said. ”

WTF???  Well of course it’s “not your experience” if you train them to shoot-to-kill.  The kid was “up to 14m away” from the officers, but all three fired simultaneously, aiming – as trained – for the central body mass.  No wonder he’s dead.  And no more opportunity for a 15yo to learn why he frakked up…

Are police incapable of being trained to shoot the frakker in the legs instead of the central body mass?

Am I living in America now?  Someone pinch me please…

why i love IceTV :)

Target Earth (1998)
Seven HD, 12:30am to 2:20am
Sun, 7 Dec 2008, 110 minutes, M, Sci-Fi, Repeat

Oh, you know, the usual; alien invasions and all that.  They always have to drop the odd hint that they’re on the periphery of our planet and lurking with intent.  And why is it always a little girl who has the means of foiling them?  I’ll bet Meloni and Cross were happy to escape to TV land.  Christopher Meloni, Marcia Cross, Chad Lowe, John C. McGinley.

…told me everything i needed to know not to bother watching ;)