The downward slide...

---

Well...

NKY evangelist's trial exposes lavish lifestyle: Man accused of keeping hundreds of thousands of dollars


An INTERNET evangelist?!? We're all in the wrong business...

Mind you, it wouldn't be surprising for anyone claiming that the economic structure of the world will soon collapse to be carrying gold and jewels. That's assuming that gold and jewels will be worth anything then. Much better to stockpile canned goods and clean water. And guns to protect it all. And... oops! I'm beginning to sound like a survivalist. No, don't stockpile anything! If we're going down the tube lets make Mama Earth happy and all go together. Give her a chance to get over us, recover, and start afresh...

---

Probably not

Can ultra-orthodox Jews live with the web?

The Ultra-Orthodox can't live with many, many things that have come about since the industrial revolution, at least part of the time. I don't think that the internet will be that easy for them to open up to...

---

Ummm... Wow!

Ontario girl's online banking speech goes viral

""I’m trying to get people to notice that the government is doing something wrong to us and we need to change what's happening," she said."

God bless her, and her family.

---

You know,

while while I hate it when CEOs and business leaders lie to their shareholders, the public, etc., about anything, something like this drives me crazy because it's only done, by a small shareholder, to further themselves financially and further some sort of agenda.

Yahoo confirms fabricated info on new CEO’s resume

They hired him to reverse their 'financial lethargy'. In internet terms that doesn't mean that they're not making money. It means they're not making record profits every quarter.

This is just a small blip in the internet world...

---

More of the same...

...the enshrining of everything as a religion to supposedly protect it from the government and the law.

Sweden recognises new file-sharing religion Kopimism


(The cartoon is a little dated, but it's by the great comic book artist Will Eisner, and it fits perfectly despite its age...)

---

So,

the

Stop SOPA

one-day strike is over. Will it accomplish anything? Why was it important?

It's about business, and making certain that U.S. business continues to make every cent that they feel they're entitled to. But it is more than that. I believe that the U.S. government is using business as a means of creating a way to control the internet, and to make certain that something is in place to be able to censor what the U.S. public sees if it so chooses. It's not an accident that the bill being presented to the U.S. Congress is so far-reaching. Much like the previous act, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it will be abused by all sectors to get what they want, at enormous expense and trouble to little people who can't compete against big corporations or big government. What these large entities say will win. Always. And that's what they want.

Since it began, the DMCA has largely proven a failure. So now we have this. It's not going to stop, but people need to continue the fight.

So, the one-day strike is over, but the war isn't won. Keep these things in mind if you're asked to support a protest against something like this. Don't think that your recreational blogging/surfing/listening/watching won't be affected, because it will.

Seriously.

---

An issue of a rather serious nature

No, seriously.
Click the image above to find out why the U.S. wants to
censor foreign websites. They claim it's all about helping
their friends in business, but it's just the beginning.
And it's about foreign websites. That includes Canada.
Seriously.

---

How lovely.

Mystery buyer acquires vatican.xxx web address

Perhaps it was purchased by some good Catholic in order to prevent it from being purchased by someone who might misuse it or hold it for ransom? Naw...

The one thing that the intertubes has done is brought all the slime the has hidden in the corners and shadows of the world out into the open. What is even worse than that is that it seems to have made it somehow mainstream, and, with a lot of people in a public sense, somehow acceptable. It really is dragging civilization (or what passes for it) down even faster than it was going before...

---

A big day

in Internet history.

On this date in 1969 the first

Arpanet

network was begun.

You might not consider this a big deal, but it really was. I was on the early ARPANET/MilNet network for a few years before the actual Internet came into being and the only alternative was BBS systems. Though still connected through a telephone gateway it was the first real bi-directional communication over computers, at least in my experience...

---

Arghhhh!

Blogger has once again changed their format, so it will be a learning curve for a while. I offer my apologies in advance...

---

Oh, yes,

on this date in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee published

the formal proposal for the World Wide Web.

Or, as it has become unofficially known, the 'World Wide Waste of time'.

---

So,

are the reindeer going to have problems running into the exhaust chimneys?

Facebook sets up data centre in Lapland, Sweden

"Facebook is heading to Lapland, lured not by the possibility of seeing Father Christmas but because of the climate."

I wonder, if other companies follow their lead, what will happen to the climate there? Ultimately it must have some effect on it...

---

A small change

Something that you, dear reader, may notice in the coming days and weeks, is the loss of the cute little graphics that illustrate my blog posts, and which, at times, are possibly the most interesting part of the posts, I imagine.

An ISP I use to host them has just sent my yearly bill, and after some thought and prayer about it, I've decided that, in honour of my Secular Franciscan profession and promise of simple living, it's something that I can no longer justify. As such, I won't be renewing the account. It's not a big loss for me. All I used it for was a repository for these graphics and a way to shuffle things back and forth from home to wherever, and I'll be losing the 'silentservants' name as some rapacious domain reseller will reserve it right away, but it's a small thing anyway. It's all about the articles blogged, right? Right?

Coming soon to a blog near you...

---

This is the

8,296th post to this blog. It means nothing by itself, but it begs the question 'why?'...

---

And most of us

didn't know and couldn't really care.

Buildings house secret servers that keep Net humming

But terrorists and other anti-West groups might, so kudos to USA Today for telling them where all this necessary technology resides. Idiots. Though I suppose it is already common knowledge.

Freedom of speech is getting to the point where the media, and consequently the media subscribers, know, and have publicly announced, where a military strike is going to take place before it even starts. What a whay to ensure success! The public's supposed 'right to know' may well be our downfall.

(Though privacy laws sometimes even prevent an individual from knowing critical information about themselves, their health, and so on. On one hand we have the right to know, and on the other we don't. I could tell you a story...)

---

This headline

is something that should likely be promoted in every faith, and not just to seminarians.

IRAN: Key cleric calls for more prayer, less Web surfing

---

A guide

for religious Jews, to help them overcome one of the evils of the internet:

GuardYourEyes.org

It's good to see some of the Jewish community recognizing one of the biggest problems of the internet and trying to do something about it. We hear about it in the Christian community quite a bit...

---

I just cannot understand

why people want to do this.

Skeletons in the closet see daylight with new app

Why do people want to confess to things publicly so the world can see it? Do they have such a huge desire to be the focus of 'the world'? To have that moment of importance that everyone is watching something they're confessing? Do they not know that nothing, really, NOTHING is anonymous on the intertubes? Secondly, who reads these things? Is our world so full of voyeurs that we all need to know other people's secrets, and to hear them air their 'dirty laundry'?

Why is it so hot in here? And what am I doing in this handbasket?

---

Who owns what?

A Cloud over Ownership  

"Online services set content free from the physical world's constraints—including those that have defined the very idea of possession."

But, ultimately, where does it end? If businesses are allowed to claim ownership over genetic material (they have, successfully) they ultimately everything will belong to some facet of capitalism anyway...

---