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Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security
The
2003 Jefferson Muzzle
"winners" are out. This year's crop starts with John Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress, and works its way down through the school board that voted to put Harry Potter on the restricted shelf. Innovation in censorship deserves recognition, read and enjoy. And in other stupid news,
the winners of the
Stupid Security Competition
have been announced. I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Ned: And Harry Potter... and all his wizard friends... went STRAIGHT to hell for practicing witchcraft!
Todd: Yay!
Is there some kind of a Moore's law for Censorship? Something like "For every disgusting act of censorship, in 12 to 18 months there will be one twice as disgusting?"
some other thoughts:
People who are easily offended deserve to be... a lot!
The real war against liberty for all.
Rev. Lovejoy: I've got to go and burn some Harry Potter books before children discover the joy of reading.
I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Read the article. They stopped an airplane passenger because he was carrying a box of gunpowder tea. After some investigating and discussing, they decided he could, in fact, carry the tea, but they had to impound the box with the evil word "gunpowder". So, they transferred the tea to a plastic bag, after which the passenger proceded to the plane.
So, no, they're not protecting you. They let the gunpowder tea onboard, those incompetent fools! What next? Bazooka Joe gum?
I'm telling you, what we need is more restrictions. I'm glad these gentlemen got the recognition they so richly deserve.
A.C. for obvious reasons.
In 2001 I was interning as a system/network administrator for a publishing house (hint: textbooks). It was (alas) a mostly NT shop for the typists, editors, etc. "grunt workers." The graphics and design teams were mostly using Macs. We had an NT box with 5 30 gig drives serving as a file server.
One of the C-level pointy hairs must have logged into the file server one day and realized that most of the space was used up. He sent a memo to our department (Technical Operations) saying how he found a large number of TIF, EPS, and PSD files on the drives taking up "inordinate amounts" of space and that they need to be deleted immediately. I kid you not. Dunno whether he thought they were horrific pirate music files or what, but they were taking up space so by god they needed to go.
My manager printed out a copy of the memo, handed it to me, smiling, and said "write a batch file to do what he wants." I did. Ten minutes later, the fileserver had about 80 gigs more storage space.
All of us on the floor laughed our asses off most of the day.
The night shift spent most of their time restoring backups (fortunately most of the artsy folks had their own backups as well) cursing us for carring out the order.
The C-level never contacted TechOps again.