I got your net neutrality right here, pal

Okay, one political piece, and only because Bad Reporter is consistently silly, even when he's right on. 

It is beyond me how anybody can put Omarosa on his staff and then throw a term like "lightweight" at another woman, or another man, or a piece of furniture.

But I did notice that, while there were multiple signatures on that call to step down, Dear Leader only attacked one of them, who happened to have double X chromosomes.

However, I'm not going to rant about that today. Clay Jones has more than covered it.

Nor am I going to suggest that Omarosa's departure leaves only Ben Carson to be some of Trump's best friends.

  

But as long as we're talking about firing people, Alex has been riffing for the past few days on the idea of employing robots and today's is particularly funny, mostly because HR has become so entrenched in procedure that they might as well actually be robots.

Well, except that robots are logical, and logic is only employed in the workplace as a counterweight to common sense, sort of a sea-anchor to slow everything down to a gentle, aimless drifting.

For instance, it's long been a rule that everybody demands references from applicants but nobody is allowed to provide references for former employees.

The road to the modern workplace leads through the Looking Glass.

Alex captures all that mindless doofery on a regular basis, which is why it's a favorite of mine, which in turn is why Charles Peattie sent me their annual Best Of collection for 2017, which I am really enjoying and which is technically very good as well -- hardbound and full color (colour) throughout.

He said he knew I wouldn't review it because I reviewed the 2016 annual and he's right, I'm not going to review it.

And I didn't, did I?

No, I didn't.

 

And yes I do play favorites, but with strips I particularly like and only with people as an afterthought, though it may become hard to like anything at all now that, as Mike Thompson notes, Big Mouse has purchased the bulk of Fox's entertainment holdings.

Thing is, when you've been on the reporting/writing/producing side of things, the word "Disney" doesn't conjure up a mouse because your first association is an attorney, specifically someone telling you "NO" in terms of trademarks and copyrights and the Sonny Bono Law.

As noted here before, Disney is one of the companies with whose works you do not mess, alongside Dr. Seuss and the US Olympic Committee.

Which is why, if you Google "Sonny Bono Law," you not only get links to The Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, but the Wikipedia summary in the corner includes this symbol.

I don't know who designed it. I wonder if Disney sent them a cease & desist letter?

 

Which makes me wonder if we even have to worry, as Kevin Necessary does here, about net neutrality?

If the Mouse owns everything, they can decide who gets to stream it and the speed will be secondary -- which is to say, if the folks at the headend don't have access to the material, our access speed will become immaterial.

I've semi-cut the cord, dropping to basic cable because I'm too far out in the sticks to use rabbit ears, and picked up Sling on a Roku-enabled smart TV, which is not a plug but leading up to this: I realized the only things I was watching were news and football, and then streaming things on Amazon and Netflix, which made most of my cable tier a waste of money.

Sling offers two packages, orange and blue, for $20 and $25 respectively, though you can get both for $40 a month.

There is a whole bunch of stuff in either package, but NFL Network is on blue, while ESPN is on orange, and I'm sure the reason for that is that, while a lot of the crap on cable is free for companies to carry, those two services are highly desirable and are priced accordingly to Sling or your cable provider or whoever.

Oh, and, by the way, ESPN is owned by Disney, which damn near goes without saying.

So they could boost prices to make speed irrelevant.

We have a free press, of course, but, as A.J. Leibling and others have said, that requires that you own a press.

For a time, we did, in the form of an open internet, but I'm thinking low-impact samizdat will continue to circulate freely. Might have trouble streaming a radical documentary film, but as long as you aren't sucking up bandwidth, you may be able to still be out there, which leads us to ...

 

... today's Half Full, which is, on the surface, innocent enough, but really touched off my grouchy old man because, yes, I remember smileys.

People posted actual thoughts in them thar days, goddammit, and, sure, we might use a smiley to indicate sarcasm or irony, but people who did ASCII art were looked upon with at best a sort of bemused appreciation for their having put a lot of time and effort into something so silly.

And we were all on dial-up, goddammit, and you couldn't even get on line after 3 in the afternoon because all those goddam kids got out of school and tied up the ISP's phone lines and god help you if you wanted to get access the week after Christmas because they were not only out of school but they'd just gotten new computers.

Anyway, access got faster and then they let in people who thought little yellow faces laughing or barfing or being sad counted as intelligent commentary, not to mention pictures of shit.

And animated gifs of John Travolta turning to the side.

Here's my take on net neutrality: Choke that &$%#er down to where only text can get through -- Courier, none of your fancy crap -- so we can get back to having intelligent goddam conversations.

John freakin' Travolta.

Gimme a break.

 

I miss the old days:

 

Comments

[sean martin]

What's truly dazzling about Disney and its mouse is how it will find ways to make sure things that should have been in public domaine by now, arent. The way WD handles it, Steamboat Willie will *never* leave copyright.

[Lori B]

I got a postcard ad for Sling and thought it looked pretty good, until I read a ton of bad reviews for their customer service and technical issues. It must be working ok for you. (I admit, I'd really just like to watch HGTV, a guilty pleasure, without having to pay an arm and a leg for the next tier Comcast cable package.)

[Mike Peterson]

They had a rough launch. I've had no real problems.