Tasers are torture, says the UN. But waterboarding? What's that? "We 'ave not 'eard of zees waterboarding. Should we be concerned?" (You may know it by its older name, "Chinese water torture".)
When people elect a bunch of mendacious fools to lead them, you get governments. When governments elect a bunch of mendacious fools to lead them, you get the UN.
Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing points to a paper by John Tehranian(PDF) out that according to a strict application of copyright law as the MPAA and RIAA would like to apply it, an average person during the course of a normal day could, all quite accidentally, commit acts of copyright infringement totalling over $12 million in penalties. That's about $4.4 billion per person, per year, just in the course of going about your day.
And THAT is ridiculous.
Catalog Choice is a free site operated as a service by the Ecology Center to help people cut down on junk mail and get of unwanted printed catalogs out of their mailbox. Yeah, that's right, proactive junk mail reduction. (As the site points out, over eight million tons of trees are logged every year just to make paper to print catalogs on, and the annual production and disposal of junk mail consumes more energy than three million cars.) Apparently even a lot of the catalog publishers like the service, because every catalog they mail out to someone who doesn't want it and is just going to throw it in the trash without ordering from it costs them about 80 cents.
There's just one problem: The web designer who put the site together apparently wanted to show off what he could do with AJAX, because the site is almost unusably slow. It almost never actually opens any new pages — it just simulates multiple windows in the existing frame, with fading and transparency and all kinds of the latest fully-buzzword-compliant Web bling, and good god, something as simple as selecting a name from a drop-down list results in sustained 100% CPU usage on a 2.4GHz Athlon. Some of the pages consume 100% of CPU just sitting there doing nothing. Make sure you get everything done on your first login, because the bloat will bring your conputer to its knees and introduce so much lag you'll never get your password entered the same way twice in a row.
Great service, but it's one of the must unusable sites I've ever seen.
[1] If you want my opinion, that means they're not being charged anywhere near enough to mail the accursed things. It'd cost ME a buck and a half to mail one of these things; it should cost THEM a buck and a half each, if not more. I shouldn't have to subsidize their catalog distribution operation. Let'em pay honestly for their postage like anyone else.