Monthly Archives: September 2015

High Noon at ICANN’s Accountability Gulch

Deja vu all over again?

Basically, ICANN is up to its bad old tricks to escape accountability. It hates that stuff. The problem is getting so bad that heresy is being spoken,

So the choice being faced in Los Angeles is a stark one: do we want to make ICANN accountable or not? And if not, can we actually have an IANA transition? Will there be any support for it? A growing number of people would prefer the status quo (U.S. oversight) to an ICANN without a membership and the CCWG-proposed community empowerment mechanisms.

Let the record show that I said years ago that US government involvment was likely better than cutting ICANN loose without adult supervision. I confess that the CCWG had me thinking they might have done the near-impossible. But now it appears we see regression to the ICANN mean.

Posted in ICANN | 1 Comment

Winning Graphics

SandersClintonI don’t know who made that picture, I saw it at Down With Tyranny, but it’s the sort of thing that wins elections.

Graphics like the following, from the same source, are much more informational, but I think much less effective for most people:
Compare

Update: Does Rand Paul belong in the top picture? I thought he was more isolationist. Actually, if you go by the second debate, wasn’t Donald Trump also?

Posted in 2016 Election | Comments Off on Winning Graphics

Good Karma, Bad Karma

I’m busy. Read Grimmelmann and Grossman…and of the Karma Police.

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Good Karma, Bad Karma

Bummer

Finis?Les Guignols de l’info are being destroyed (or if you prefer, decapitated) by the new owner of Canal+ the French cable network. According to Le Parisien, “Canal + : «Les Guignols» décapités, les auteurs historiques virés” the network fired the four long-standing members of the writing team. After many years of being broadcast in the the clear, whatever is left of the show will now appear behind a subscribers-only crypto wall for TV watchers; Canal+ has also stopped adding to the portal for internet users.

Supposedly there will be clips on Daily Motion somewhere, but I didn’t find much recent stuff when I looked just now.

This will degrade my ongoing knowledge of French politics by at least 50%, and — even more serious — remove a decent chunk of my video comedy diet. Plus it was my main source of new French slang.

Doubleplusungood.

Posted in Completely Different, Politics: International | 1 Comment

Line of the Day

It’s early, but I’m calling it for this parenthetical aside in the NYT’s retelling of Carly Fiorina’s disastrous turn as HP’s CEO:

The centerpiece of those deals was the company’s $24.2 billion merger with Compaq Computer, which divided the HP board and greatly increased the company’s work force, size and breadth of products.

The deal was so personal to Mrs. Fiorina that she referred to HP as “Héloïse” and Compaq as “Abélard,” a pair whose romantic letters became treasures of medieval French literature, which she studied at Stanford. (Abélard was eventually castrated after fights with Héloïse’s family, a detail Compaq executives were unaware of at the time.)

Posted in 2016 Election | Comments Off on Line of the Day

Short and Sour

Props to the Clinton campaign for this video summing up the painful GOP debate on Wednesday:

Posted in 2016 Election | Comments Off on Short and Sour