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17. september 2005
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency responsible for top-level domains, has approved the .cat suffic, but again deferred on the .xxx suffix for adult material.
Obviously, cats are more important than porn.
No, you don't have to inform me that the .cat domain is really for the Catalan language (mostly used in parts of Spain, for example Barcelona). I still bet lovers of our feline friends will be dying to get some of those top-level-domains. It's not as if all .tv sites on the net are even remotely related to the islands of Tuvalu.
3:55:10 PM 
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This is only about a subset of the blogosphere, but still interesting:
A new AOL blog survey shows most bloggers are not aspiring "cyber journalists" or political activists; they blog as a form of therapy.
According to the AOL "Blog Trends Survey," nearly 50% of bloggers say they do it because it serves as self-therapy, and one-third of bloggers who responded say they write frequently about self-help and self-esteem topics. The survey also revealed that when it comes to relieving real-life pressures or dealing with personal issues or tragedies, six times as many respondents prefer to write in their blog or read blogs written by others suffering from similar problems rather than to seek counseling from a professional.
Conversely, only 16% say they blog because they're interested in journalism; as few as 12% say they blog in order to break or stay ahead of the latest news and gossip, and a fractional 8% blog in order to expose political information.
Imagine how crazy all us bloggers had been without that therapy!
3:35:14 PM
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After three days of bloodshed that killed more than 200 civilian Iraqis, a leading Sunni cleric is calling for an end to the killing of civilians.
Sheik Mahmud al-Sumaidaei, a leading Sunni cleric whose group is linked to the country's insurgency, criticized militants for targeting civilians. He called for Iraq's religious and ethnic groups to take a stand against further bloodshed.
"I call for a meeting ... of all the country's religious and political leaders to take a stand against the bloodshed," al-Sumaidaei said during his sermon at Baghdad's Um al Qura Sunni mosque.
"We don't need others to come across the border and kill us in the name of defending us," he declared, a reference to foreign fighters who have joined the insurgency under the banner of al-Qaida. "We reject the killing of any Iraqi."
Hopefully, he has hired some extra bodyguards for the occasion.
11:35:31 AM
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Cindy Sheehan was the media's pet for some time before the Hurricane, and she's still desperate to stay in the limelight. Of course, her media pimps just use the idea of a grieving mother to bash Bush; they know that Sheehan's extremist views will turn off the vast majority of Americans if they were ever reported. I bet the mainstream media will ignore Cindy's latest outburst, too.
George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. [bold added]
Wow. If the feds are too late to help, they are racists, and when they come, they are occuppiers. With the loonie left, you just can't win.
PS: Keep an eye on which news sources will mention this insanity.
9:23:15 AM
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James Pinkerton argues that Tony Blair has de facto declared the Kyoto treaty dead.
Kyoto Treaty RIP. That's not the headline in any newspaper this morning emerging from the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, but it could have been -- and should have been.
Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with "brutal honesty" about Kyoto and global warming, and he did. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had some blunt talk, too.
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, "My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now? "No country, he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, "They're not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto." India and China, of course, weren't covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty -- which the US never acceded to -- expires in 2012, there's not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
So what will happen instead? Blair answered: "What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it." Bingo! That's what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course -- that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.
The nice thing about representative democracy, is that it's free to tie up the country in long-term treaties that your successor will have to clean up. European politicians who signed up to what they must have known to be a flawed treaty did it just to appear "pro-environment", and knowing that they could also scoring some points bashing Bush for not signing up to it, knowing themselves they were not affected by it (like Russia or Germany, which will meet the Kyoto "goals" without even trying) or will never have to bother trying to meet the obligations (like most others).
Kyoto is a mix of bad science, runaway bureocracy and typical spineless euro-politics. If that's the best the enviro-nuts can come up with to save the planet, it's not worth saving.
9:13:22 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2005; 12:24:45.
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