Well it looks as if the whole ‘hype’ over the whole treating bloggers as lobbyists has helped a bit. Turns out that the proposal was defeated in a vote of 55 to 43 in the Senate. You can see the roll call at the Senate.gov website. One interesting factiod: 48 Republicans voted against the requirement, and 43 Democrats voted for the requirement.
Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have just announced Halo 22, a concert DVD from the With Teeth tour. Scheduled to be released on Feb 27th, you can check out the mini-site here at beside you in time. I for one am looking forward to this! Just a quick update, return back to your regularly scheduled shenanigans.
I was browsing news tonight and noticed an article over at Digg with the headline: Bloggers Who Criticize Government May Face Prison. I found that to be a major attention grabber and wanted to take a look at the underlying information. As happens to often, the underlying information does NOT indicate a deliberate attempt to ‘censor’ or police the content of any blog. I tracked the story down through several intermediate websites, finally ending at a site called GrassrootsFreedom.com. To qoute it:
The Senate would make exercising your First Amendment rights a crime. The Senate voted 93 – 2 to amend S. 1 to include criminal penalties for knowing and willful reporting failures. That would include when the government thinks you should have known to report and civil disobedience.
That really doesn’t look like the wording of this bill intends to allow censorship does it? However, here we get to the whole point of this post, which is unintended consequences. When lawmakers write a bill regulating something, there are always ways to work around, twist, or pervert the intent of the regulation. The only way to prevent the government from messing something up is to prevent them from actually making a rule allowing them the power in the first place.
As if you couldn’t tell earlier, I am essentially completely against big government in any shape or form. I do not want anyone at all telling me what is proper or not, other than my own moral code, as long as I do not harm to another. Why can’t we have a government that allows this type of freedom?
I saw this post over at Cre8d Design, and find it interesting considering my last post about creating my own custom theme. I’m definitely going to keep an eye on this to see if there are any resources I can use putting some collections or themes of my own together.
Still working at getting everything I like. I’ve noticed that the current theme just doesn’t seem to work properly when using Internet Explorer. As a matter of fact, with all the difficulties I’ve had with it I’m going to end up scrapping it, and plan on implementing my own custom theme. I’m going to try to maintain the dark background, light text theme, but make it more of a liquid, variable width. That’s the long-term plan at least.
Otherwise, I’ve got to put something together to reactivate the WoW-Item system in the forum. I’m still looking for a good method to track guild items that would not require too much coding or customizing, but it’s beginning to look like I might need to do it from scratch. I’m taking a look at cake-php and ruby on rails to see if I can use either of those to throw up a quick temporary site and refine it as it goes along.
