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low grade twitter harassment is not going to be dealt with by the police

Unless the one harassed happens to be the mayor.

Freedom of speech is not freedom to impersonate or defame. From this article;

The @Peoriamayor account began in late February or early March with a photo of Ardis and a bio that stated he enjoyed serving the city and included his city email address.
The content of tweets, or entries on the account, ranged from ambiguous to offensive, with repeat references to sex and drugs — and comparisons of Ardis to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as Ford’s drug use while in office became public.
By about March 10, the bio of the Twitter account was changed to indicate it was a parody account.

As for indicating it is a parody account, how many people read the whole bio of a twitter poster?

Perpetually strapped into a car seat?
No, even leaving a baby in a car seat isn't safe...

• Armed Robbery with an AK-47: life in prison
• Shooting into a crowd: Probable execution if you actually hit anyone.
• Selling heroin to an adult police informant: eight years.

Of course, there are different penalties in different jurisdictions.

All the stations in my area have already announced they're going Digital Feb 17th no matter what. Electricity for those analog towers isn't cheap. I've heard of some markets that have already turned off their analog. Instead of one huge cut off, it'll more than likely be a trickle of stations until June.

I did like the suggestion I saw last time this came up about making it go B&W for 90 days prior to the switch. Although I personally thought it would be more motivating if you cut off the last 10 minutes of an hour long show with a spoof of Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

It's Digital TV time, Digital TV time, Digital TV time

(Chorus:)
Where the show at 4x
There it go 4x
Digital TV 4x
Do the Digital TV, Digital TV,
Digital TV with a digital converter 2x

Oh, if only it were fiction...

http://www.pjstar.com/php/index.php?/news/comments /peoria_cut_cable_causes_affects_phones_throughout _the_state/

Thanks for attracting my attention to this bit (which comes from the Peoria Journal Star article, by the way) --

Or have no idea about extreme basics like nouns and verbs, and why one of each must be in every sentence.

Oh the irony. (Hint: does his sentence have a subject? why no it doesn't.)

In any case, he's wrong. They needn't be. (Hint: count the nouns in the previous sentence.)

Is my point that Phil Luciano's English is at least as bad as his targets? Well, yes, it is: that seems fair to me. This from a guy who claims "I teach college English". Er, good one mate, you're certainly helping ...

Right.

"See? It it renders these pages, full of our own standards, the W3c be damned. What's not to like?"

Wait, wait.. OK, never mind. I thought I was going to be whelmed by word of IE 7.0, not overwhelmed mind you, but only whelmed. But the feeling passed, I'm OK now. Really.

Honestly, I use Firefox for almost everything simply because I prefer the way it behaves, meaning, it behaves.

Mar. 17, 2006, 50th anniversary of Fred Allen's passing. "As the chinese teapot said to the auctioneer's hammer, I'm going-going-gone!"

...then they wouldn't go down in circulation. After all, I go to the internet when I want to know, right now, what is happening in the world. However, I still like to read the newspaper when there is thoughtful and well written investigation of the facts of the world. As well, the newspaper is what I count on for local information and politics. The difficult part is that my hometown newpaper, The Journal Star can be read in about 5 minutes, and there is little to nothing of value in the paper about local events and information regarding the world close to me. Lots of ads, but little or nothing like what people remember newspapers to be. The trend here I think will continue; the information highway is broad and fast, but not very deep. I feel like information is pretty useless at times, if those who report it do not try to contexualize it to the world around us. This is what is missing from newspapers.

For some marginally good news for a change, as highlighted by jewishvoiceforpeace.org and corpwatch.org, according to an Apr. 15, 2004 Peoria Journal Star article:

Activists protested Wednesday outside Caterpillar Inc.'s annual shareholders meeting in Chicago, but lost their bid to get the Peoria corporation to study the use of its equipment in razing Palestinian homes overseas.

Stock owners defeated a proposal to determine whether the sale of bulldozers and other machinery to the Israel Defense Forces is consistent with Caterpillar's global code of business conduct. The Fortune 100 company's board opposed the measure.

Caterpillar's new chairman and CEO, Jim Owens, repeated the company's position that it feels compassion for displaced families but can't police the use of its more than 2 million pieces of equipment worldwide.

"After they've been sold, the owners of those machines determine how they're used," Owens told an audience of about 50 at the Northern Trust Building in Chicago's Loop. Some of the activists got inside the meeting because they or groups they represent own Caterpillar stock. Five of them spoke to board members before tentative voting results were announced; the measure earned support from about 4 percent of shareholders, which would allow it to be reintroduced next year.

Liat Weingart, co-director of San Francisco-based Jewish Voice for Peace, said more than 50,000 people have lost their homes in demolitions that often have no relation to Israeli security. Some Palestinians have been buried alive, she said.

Caterpillar is headquarted in Peoria, which is why the Peoria newspaper ran the story. I've been unable to locate any other newspaper running this story.

The Peoria newspaper portrays it as a loss for the activists, when in fact it is a major victory (the 4% means it has to be discussed at next year's shareholder meeting) and represents a creative and practical means for effecting change in corporate behavior -- much more practical than street riots.

As I've often stated, corporations should not be so large, last so long, and have Constitutional rights. However, if they have to be around, then the proposal contained in the conclusion of the seminal Small Is Beautiful for bridling corporations is good. Small is Beautiful says that since corporations are like mini-governments, run them as a democracy where all the stakeholders (all who are affected by the existence of the corporation, including investors but especially those who live near the corporation's activities) vote.

Failing those two -- i.e. if we can't ban large corporations and if we can't have stakeholders vote on how large corporations should be run -- then participating in the existing corporate governance process -- namely buying stock and voting at shareholders meetings -- is the next best thing.

This peaceful, legal alternative to reining in amoral powerful corporations has gone underreported.

See also the previous UnderReported.com stories:

• Feb. 6, 2004 With Israeli bulldozers, practice makes perfect
• Nov. 6, 2003 U.S. learning urban warfare from IDF: armored D-9s to take down buildings

I checked. Considering it was private, the one in my bathroom wasn't okay.

If the government puts it there, though...

Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.

On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.

In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.