How you know you work with an older demographic

From my workplace's monthly newsletter: "It's easy to log on to the website - simply google .org, and click on "Welcome to ".

Huh

Looks like something kind of questionable is going on at Amazon.

As if it wasn't hellacious enough working customer support for Amazon.com on Easter, the online book store's reps must now explain why gay romances (and other books) are too "adult" to rank.

Straight romance like Jackie Collins and straight porn like this book of Playboy centerfolds is still ranked on Amazon.

But not the homosexul stuff: Gay romance publisher Mark Probst noticed hundreds of such books lost their rankings over the past two days, including Transgressions, about a 17th century liaison between a cavalry trooper and a farmer's son, and False Colors, about a 19th century naval lieutenant attracted to his commanding officer.

Hmm.

Argh

Dear College Administration,

1. Seriously, you send a flier about a ski trip as an attached file? Annoying, I'd prefer you just put it in the body of the message, but fine. You send a flier about a ski trip attached as a .ppt? Really? Is something suddenly wrong with .doc or .pdf? Powerpoint? Really?

2. See, here's the thing about campus email. Do you remember that time I think last spring when you sent out an announcement saying that email is now considered an official means of communication from the administration, in the interest of reducing the amount of paper? Well, I was apparently silly in assuming that meant that if you sent out a notice through email, you would not then print out four hundred copies of the exact same letter and put it in our campus mailboxes. Because...do I need to spell it out for you? Please say no.

Feeling unfulfilled

Dear admissions offices of universities I applied to,

PLEASE stop sending me emails that do not, in fact, reveal whether I have been accepted or not. I'm sure the open houses you're hosting are very interesting and I would love to attend - especially you, UCL - but I lack the means to do so. All that's coming from those emails is I see an email from someplace I applied, and get very excited, and open it, and discover it is not that exciting.

Yours,

A slightly high-strung applicant

Party at Google's house!

One of those few internet videos that is well worth your two minutes or so.  http://www.cracked.com/article_15825_internet-party-what-happens-when-googles-parents-leave-town-for-weekend.html

I <3 PBF

Hahaha.

Hee.

Hah.

S?

I don't know what's more intriguing, this CNN, uh, 'story', or the URL for it.

Screencap, in case it goes away:

Google once again forces me to praise them

It's pretty ridiculous when there's such a huge ratio of "things I like about a huge corporation" to "things I dislike about same corporation". I'm speaking, of course, of Google. In the dislike column, there's that censorship bit most notable in China, and...I'm sure there are some other things. In the other column, there's pretty much everything else: their searches, e-mail, what they've done with Blogger, Google Books, Maps, and their breath-of-fresh-air approach to web design, amongst other things.

And now this, which is fairly impractical but really frickin awesome. It's only applicable to a few US cities so far, but basically, you can now get a street-level picture of many streets in those cities. I can now sit at my computer in New Mexico and 'walk' down the streets of Manhattan. It's somewhere between simply clicking through a series of static images and an actual animation. But it's fairly revolutionary, pretty useless, and - again - really awesome.

Hello, government!

Happy Dubiously-Legal and Morally-Reprehensible Wiretapping Day! Hope all the friendly little ISPs out there have just bent over and taken it from the government without argument.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to contemplate whether America's wiretapping or Britain's omnipresent CCTV systems are more frightening.

Conservapedia

Oh, America. Apparently, Wikipedia (which, uh, anyone can edit) is helplessly biased towards liberals. Thankfully, now we've got Conservapedia! For example:

Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.^[3]. Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

Uh. Yeah. Sure. (the Habsburg family, apparently, went out of power sometime in the mid-1800's, if you're wondering).

From their main page:

Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept? Add to the explanation of what it means, and how it does not exist on other religions.

...what? No, seriously - what?

The concept of faith is also strongly emphasized in other major religions, although this is by no means true of all major non-Christian religions.

Same can be said for the concept of organized worship. So?

While faith is mentioned 229 times in the Bible's New Testament, the concept is mentioned only twice in the Old Testament (KJV) which forms part of the basis for the Jewish religion.

Because A) of course there's no chance this could be a translation error, and B) because that particular word isn't used, obviously it's not an important concept.

Their entry on atheism is actually not as bad as I'd expect. Probably because in the past day or two the site's been 'discovered' by bloggers and I'm sure plenty of editing is going on.

Atheist morality is based upon emotion, experience and empirically derived ethics, such as those promoted by secular humanism. Atheists hold that the Bible cannot be our source of morality as it contains countless calls for immoral behavior such as killing any who try to convert you, stoning homosexuals and adulterers to death, and the institution of slavery. Instead, most Christians actually rely on their own innate philanthropic sense (which has evolved as a necessary element of communal living over millions of years) to cherry pick the pleasant parts of the Bible and ignore the rest.

Yes, of course every atheist everywhere thinks that the bible can't be used as a moral compass. And all Christians "cherry pick" bits and pieces out. (Wouldn't that be called hypocrisy?)