Category: News

If you aren’t familiar with the actions of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, go look it up in wikipedia. I won’t link here. To summarize, they feel that America is too tolerant of homosexuality, and everything bad that has happened in the past twenty years is the punishment of god for that tolerance: 9-11; the Columbia; Katrina; dead US soldiers; they are all being punished for our sins.

One of their more recent practices is to bring their protests to the funerals of our Iraqi war dead. They picket outside with signs like “God Hates America” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” This caused some counter-protests, such as the group of motorcycle riders who would go to the funerals that were being picketed and rev their bikes so no one could hear the WBC sing their hateful songs.

Now, a Maryland father has won a lawsuit and been awarded $11 million against Fred Phelps and his “church” for “intent to inflict emotional distress” amongst other things.

This couldn’t happen to a better church. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will do any good. Even if the award is upheld after appeals, I’m sure the church will declare bankruptcy, and other fundies will come out of the woodwork to support their trips around the country. It’s a good first step, though.

I support the first amendment, and I support Fred Phelps’ right to say stupid, hateful things. There are more appropriate places for protected speech than during private funerals, though. This is probably hypocritical on my part, but I cheer the lawsuit, and its result.

AP has (apparently) confirmed that Comcast is blocking Bittorrent regularly. A back-of-my-envelope thought on this matter is that they are saving bandwidth to sell to other people, so it’s part of their business model to manage the network traffic through their backbones. Seems that this will have continuing impacts on their customers and the ongoing debate over network neutrality.

Which brings me to a thought I’ve had in times past. I’ll preface this thought with the statement that I’m a network moron. I have some vague notion of how packets bounce around the world via copper and fiber and other transmission streams, but no firm knowledge. That being stated, I think that there is a market for newly built residential subdivisions to have super-high-speed internet built in to the homes. If a large subdivision were to have its own fiber drop, and optical connections into every house, that would be a selling point for a lot of people, especially here in Atlanta. I would certainly be willing to entertain a large up-front cost that was rolled into my mortgage. Maintenance could be part of a homeowners agreement. Then we wouldn’t be dealing with the crappy customer service that Comcast or AT&T deals out to their little customers. We’d be a major commerical customer who would require better upkeep.

It’s a thought. I wonder if this is happening anywhere?