Links for 2006-01-13
- The Bureaucrat in Your Shower Fascinating little article with a bit of a Libertarian perspective about how the US government stops Americans having proper showers like they had when they were kids...
- Internet is for porn (World of Warcraft edition) I first heard this song in a car in Los Angeles from a friend of a friend who was doing a doctorate on technology and the porn industry. This version has a World of Warcraft video full of dancing moo cows and trolls. Awesome.
- Cory Doctorow details another fight he's had with Andrew Orlowski, and runs through how different it is to a fight he had with Wikipedia It's an interesting article that again explores Orlowski's continued journalistic license and the hypocrisy of many of his attacks on Wikipedia.
- Vote for the Daily Mail ludicrous headline of the year! More entertaining / scary than you can possibly imagine. It's almost a hard process working out and analysing exactly which headline was most scurrilous and damaging...
- World of Warcraft 1.9.3 will support Intel-powered Macs Well that's another thing ticked off my list of reasons not to go out and buy a new iMac then...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
For those who are curious to know, "The Internet is for Porn" is from the musical Avenue Q. You can see it on Broadway and in Las Vegas right now.
→ Posted by: Phinnias at January 13, 2006 1:34 AM
Of course the US Government has an interest in the use of showers: there's already battle lines being drawn in some parts of the world over water consumption, and it's only going to get worse.
At least most US water is metered (as the article mentions in passing), and use of water in showers is pretty insignificant compared to, say, car-washing or those ornamental fountains, but I still think governments have the right (and often are right) to try and limit the (mis)use of water.
→ Posted by: Paul Mison at January 13, 2006 8:49 AM
Paul, domestic use of water isn't the problem, even in the water-wasting US. Nearly 48% of water in the US is used for thermoelectric power generation - so cutting use of electricity would be the best possible thing for cutting use of water, not metering it for domestic consumers.
Even discounting use for power generation, domestic customers aren't the worst culprits: that's irrigation, which uses up 65% of the remaining water after accounting for power generation.
All figures are for 2000, by the way, the most recent ones from the US Geological Survey (water.usgs.gov).
→ Posted by: Ian Betteridge at January 13, 2006 3:48 PM
I can wholeheartedly recommend the entire Avenue Q soundtrack (it's available on iTunes). The show is definitely coming to London at some point in the near future (the last our West End specialist heard, it was possibly coming to the Albery).
→ Posted by: Scott Matthewman at January 18, 2006 9:15 PM