Misc

Things that caught my eye on the web recently:

  • marnanel supplies the ultimate version of all those “which local dialect do you speak?” questionnaires that people have been doing lately.

  • Zarf, otherwise known as Andrew Plotkin, gives us LOLGRUES. Makes a change from cats, I suppose.

  • scribb1e thought I’d like The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. Some of them are good, some of them are typical “the church is the people, not the building” Christian greeting-card verse (but as cartoons!) The artist shows some signs of creationism, but as I’m no longer a Christian, I don’t have to do my “please get off my side, you’re making it look stupid” bit.

    Inevitably, the cartoon with the most comments is the one about gay marriage. Inamongst the usual godhatesfags stuff (or rather, God hates the faggotry but loves the fags, naturally) there were a couple of links to interesting interviews with N.T. Wright (no relation), the Bishop of Durham. There was also an interesting comment from Tyler on just what Paul did mean by arsenokoites (the word translated by the NIV as homosexual offenders, about which there’s considerable debate as it’s a novel coinage as far as we know). Tyler points out that the Septuagint puts the two words that Paul has used in his portmanteau word right next to each other in everyone’s favourite bit of Leviticus (scroll down a bit for the Greek). So it looks like you practising gays (or even those of you who aren’t practising because you’ve got very good at it) are pretty much out as far as Christianity goes. Have you considered atheism?

  • If your internet connection comes from BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse’s Talktalk service, you should be aware of the evil that is Phorm, a cunning plan to intercept all your web browsing and use the knowledge of what you’re interested in (from your web searches) to display targetted advertising on collaborating websites. Richard Clayton has spoken to Phorm and has technical details of how the system works. It’s a horrible hack, in all senses of the word.

    Talktalk aren’t all bad though: they just told the British recording industry to get stuffed in a highly entertaining way. The BPI are now threatening to sue.

1 Comment on "Misc"


  1. The BPI are now threatening to sue.
    This is more brilliant than I could have imagined. Their opening move is to reveal how outrageously uncooperative they are. Fantastic.

    So now in the talks with the government the ISPs can point at this and explain why they don’t want to have to work with the BPI.

    I suspect (hope) this is going to be one of those things that a government minister announces ‘will happen’ but the amount of noise about it and just how generally ridiculous it is, will lead to it not happening.

    Reply

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