The second-worst idea I’ve seen regarding corporate plans for the future of the Interweb (just behind AT&T’s plan to extort web sites and intentionally slow down access to sites that don’t pay up):

AOL Vows to Institute Fee-Based Service

America Online is vowing to carry out its plans to institute fees for mass senders of e-mail, despite protests from groups representing 15 million people that claim the move will stifle communications instead of merely halting spam.

Political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, the AFL-CIO labor union and other organizations have criticized the service, which will charge senders a fee to route their messages directly to AOL users’ mailboxes without first passing through AOL junk mail filters.

AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., contends the system will help it reduce spam because only legitimate senders of mass e-mail are likely to pony up the fee — ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message. But critics say the system will end up blocking many e-mails from groups that can’t afford the fee.

AOL said it was undeterred and planned to offer the service within the next 30 days.

I’m surprised nobody’s talking about the effects on internet businesses. I’m about to go back to work for a company that sends out 100-300,000 user-requested mass emails per weekday. (Daily newsletters, etc.) There’s no room in the budget to pony up even a 1/4-cent fee per user, especially if this catches on with other ISPs.

Unless AOL plans on rolling out a spiffy new spam filter that magically identifies and catches EVERY mass email, currently-successful spammers will not be punished. Only legitimate mass emailers will be effected. Which means these companies and organizations either close up shop or start using the same filter-avoidance techniques as spammers.

I think AOL knows that and doesn’t care. It’s just another revenue stream.

Via Glenn Greenwald at Crooks & Liars:

“The Administration has not explained how a lasting peace, and lasting security, will be achieved in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is toppled.”

[...]

“Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms. Anti-American feelings will surely be inflamed among the misguided who choose to see an assault on Iraq as an attack on Islam, or as a means of controlling Iraqi oil.”

[...]

“In Iraq, I would be prepared to go ahead without further Security Council backing if it were clear the threat posed to us by Saddam Hussein was imminent, and could neither be contained nor deterred. However, that case has not been made, and I believe we should continue the hard work of diplomacy and inspection.”

[...]

“Secretary Powell’s recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary [of the presence of WMDs], but rather by its sketchiness.”

- Howard Dean, Feb. 17, 2003, before the war

Three years later, with no WMDs found, over two thousands soldiers dead, Iraq a disaster area without security, employment, or basic utilities, and sectarian civil war looming, Dean looks downright prescient, doesn’t he?

And for this he was labelled “crazy” by the Republicans and the media, and anyone who supported him and opposed the war was a “traitor.”

To those people, I (still) say a hearty “fuck you.” And don’t expect liberals to come up with a solution to your problem, either. This is your dishwashing liquid, YOU soak in it. That solution doesn’t exist anyway, much like Saddam’s WMDs.

UPDATE: And here’s more early prescience from Tom Tomorrow.

I’ve blogged in the past about V for Vendetta, and with its release date less than three weeks away, early reviews are starting to surface around the Interweb.

Over at CBR, Adi Tantimedh posts his thoughts on the movie as an adaptation of one of his all-time favorite comics. Elsewhere, liberal pundit and Vanity Fair contributer James Wolcott sings its praises, sounding a little bit like a cosmopolitan Harry Knowles in the process.

Wolcott:

[W]hen it was over I knew it was the movie our post 9-11 minds craved and unconsciously had been working towards, a movie that conjured the fear of terrorism and repression and didn’t just tell us how we got into the Orwellian predicament we’re in (terrain already attacked by Fahrenheit 9-11, Syriana, Why We Fight), but made the imaginative leap that would lift us out of the news, out of the political present, and stand up to that fear—face it with fury and compassion.

From the sounds of it, the filmmakers didn’t neuter the politics of Moore’s original work after all. I’m getting pretty excited about finally being able to see this.

My schedule is set:

March 22 – Last day at work
March 24 – Load my stuff into a U-Pack shipping container
March 26 – After spending a little time with Patty, Ward, and my cousins visiting from Illinois, I load up my Corolla and start driving
March 28 or 29 – Arrive in Tucson
April 3(?) – U-Pack container arrives
April 10 – First day back at AuntMinnie.com

Everything old is new again.

Did you ever wander into a bookstore on your lunch break and stumble across a book written by someone you used to know online? Not just any book, but a gorgeous, $50 brick of a book with pull quotes on the back cover from two authors you admire (Alan Moore and China Mieville)?

It’s a weird feeling, especially when you think, “I collaborated on something with this guy 10 years ago…”

I read in New Scientist a few months ago about the Sudoku craze that started in Japan and swept the globe, but I hadn’t had a chance to play it… until today.

Go and play Sudoku. The very short and simple instructions are on the left.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not too bad at it, although I’m slower than experienced players so far. I’ve always excelled at brute-force logic puzzles like this.

Apparently, Kevin Smith is making Clerks 2 and it’s NOT some kind of practical joke. I guess that whole “No more Askewniverse”/”Jay and Silent Bob are retired” promise lasted, oh… exactly one movie.

It’s actually kind of sad, isn’t it? Hard to believe I was once a huge Kevin Smith fanboy…

…in a battle to the funny, over in the comment section of this post on warrenellis.com.

The answer: remove all of Garfield’s dialogue, turning the strip into a character study of an insane man who talks to his long-suffering cat. Make sure you scroll down to read the additional strips in the comments section.

So while I was out of town, the vice president apparently shot some dude in the fucking face.

It was while he was hunting for quail, a fat, harmless, goofy-looking bird that serves as the official game for the Special Olympics of Hunting, as populated by upper-class twits trying to maintain a macho facade. Cheney managed to shoot an elderly, orange-vested campaign contributor instead of the wily quail, breaking about a dozen rules of hunting in the process.

Once again, we are presented with the basic conundrum of this entire administration, a question raised again and again for the last six years with still no answer: are they evil or incompetent?

If Cheney shot that old guy by accident, he’s incompetent. If it wasn’t an accident, he’s evil. So which is it? Is he dangerously malicious, dangerously stupid, or both?