Ralph Lauren Polo Steve Jobs

[iszhenyang]

Most boring site on the web

Although many people think the Associated Press is just a mouth piece for liberal government politics, it is in fact independently owned. So I'm not sure how its social networking policies violate the First Amendment:

The AP's social networking policy comes as the media at large begins adopting Facebook and Twitter guidelines during a time of explosive growth in online social media. The News Media Guild, representing about 1,000 AP journalists, says the AP's policy is perhaps the most restrictive the union has seen.

"I am unaware of anything else like that," Tony Winton, the guild's president, said in a telephone interview. "Parts of the policy seem to be snuffing out peoples' First Amendment rights of expression by a company that wraps itself in the First Amendment."

In case you forgot, here's what the First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's unclear to me what part of Congress, or any branch of the government, is setting AP free speech policy. After all, if blogging is more important than your job, you should work somewhere else.

The AP's rules are hardly surprising for anyone working in the private sector (note: I work for the public entity). Most of the people I know have to be careful about what they discuss on Facebook and their blogs. I'm fortunate in that I do have some legally guaranteed rights of expression, but I still try to avoid work related topics.

Yes, I'm being pedantic. But it's important to remember what our rights really are.

I love the title of this Ars Technica article: EU admits ICANN setup has worked well, wants change anyway.

On Thursday, the European Commission released a strategic document in which it called for some significant changes to the way that the Internet's name assignment system operates. Currently, the system is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a private, nonprofit corporation. The EU doesn't seem to have a specific beef with how ICANN operates, but it's been consistently unhappy about the fact that ICANN answers only to the US government and is incorporated under California law. With ICANN's current charter coming to an end this September, the EU is starting a campaign to give it a more international flavor.

The document makes it clear that the EU is very much in favor the general structure that was used to set up ICANN: a private sector entity handling the general operations, with governmental oversight of its decisions. In fact, the document is notable for the absence of any specific criticisms of any actions taken by ICANN during the past decade. A section entitled "How has ICANN performed in its first ten years?" is largely complementary, with the only real complaint being that it has no mechanism for binding oversight by the international community in essence, the EU is admitting that the setup has worked well without its input.

I find it rather amazing that the US government has managed to stay "hands off" with respect to ICANN. There's a lot of power there to punish countries and organizations that the US considers hostile, but no evidence (I'm aware of) it has pushed to do so. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut before some congressman gets an idea.

So why in the world would we want to give even more countries a chance to screw with things? We the Internet community have lucked out that ICANN has remained benevolent. Everyone knows what happens when you throw more cooks into a kitchen, and this quote already has me worrying about what the EU visions ICANN should do:

"The EU also believes that future internet governance arrangements should comply with key principles, in particular, the respect for human rights and freedom of expression as well as the need to preserve stability and security of the Internet."

I don't know about the EU, but for a cautious tale we only have to look a little north. What the Canadian Human Rights Commussion thinks is free speech is downright scary. Just remember that the US has a very broad view of what constitutes freedom of expression, that the Internet currently reflects this, and that many countries don't share our view.

I'm all for discussing alternatives to ICANN because we shouldn't assume it will always remain benign. But let's not change anything until problems occur.

The WSJ is breaking this news item tonight. Not much to report:

Ralph Lauren Polo Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part time initially.

Not terribly surprising, considering his appearance in the last year. I'm glad it was just a failing liver, and not a return of cancer.

In other news, I first learned about this because it was tracking in Twitter. Usually I get my breaking news from Drudge, but times change!

Entering by just falling backwards into the pool. I think I like this way better than the giant step.

Ralph Lauren More alternate breathing with the octopus. This time we did the whole shebang: out of air, sharing, swim to surface, inflate BCD orally.

Swim back and forth while only exhaling. Despite my first session performance, I think I swam just as far as anyone else, thank you.

Finally, neutral buoyancy exercises, laying at the bottom of the deep portion of the pool (14').

Actually, the neutral buoyancy exercises were kind of fun, even though I'm not sure I got it down 100%. You lay face down and slowly inflate your BCD until you can "pivot" up and down based on your breathing.

The instructor didn't say anything about my form, so I guess I was OK. What was really interesting was that I could see how a small change in depth affected my buoyancy. If I started going up, I'd just keep getting higher and higher unless I released some air. An obvious result, but still cool when you experience it first hand.

Polo Ralph Lauren Sko We did other crap too, but it wasn't really memorable or challenging.

Ralph Lauren Badeshorts For those wondering how my SCUBA lessons are going.

Tonight I had class session 3, which is really pool session 2. We spent a lot of time learning two skills (this is the PADI program):