thunt.net
Home

News

An open letter to the Internet regarding the 2008 Presidential Election (Gravel vs. Paul 2008)

Dear Friends on the Internet,

First off, I have no right to call you my friend, as on most sites I am but a lurker, not a participant. But today I end my silence to speak to you about a topic of extreme importance: the 2008 Presidential Election.

With our failure to provide a voting system at least as credible as our banking system (ie: double entry book-keeping and a viable paper trail) it is difficult for anyone who looks at the situation logically to become overly involved in the artificial conversation.

But where there's a will, there's a way. The only way to ensure success for truth-minded people everywhere is to understand that the nominations are more important than the actual elections.

Campaign Mode

I've got primary fever and I think it's time to kick it up a notch around here. I'll be switching thunt.net over into Campaign mode and kicking it off with a very special post that I actually took the time to write myself.

AP: Honeybee die-off threatens food supply

Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said. [link]

Sell out digg, before it's too late

My advice to digg is simple. The next time someone offers you money for your company, sell it.

It doesn't matter what the price is. Just sell and get out before it's too late for you business types.

Before your audience learns the truth.

We don't need you Digg.

You are just a centralized server that a community of users gather around. Without those users you are nothing but an empty shell.

This should be a wake-up call for anyone who still runs a compnay that exists because users store their information on your centralized server. Your days are numbered. Your service is not valuable enough to hold your users information hostage.

We've been through this fight before with Napster. It was a good idea for everyone to share their files, but having a centralized server was a weak implementation. When Gnutella came out, with it's decentralized server, you knew it was all over for the labels. Without a center, Gnutella could not be shut down. Once the information was on the internet it could not help but be spread.

How would Digg be helped by this decentralized strategy? For one thing, these idiotic cease and desist letters wouldn't bother you so much, because with no central location to shutdown it would be impossible for you to comply. Sure you could stop hosting the “digg software” for download, but naturally that job could be done by dozens of mirror sites. You could stop allowing “digg traffic” through your servers, but millions of smaller servers would pop up to handle the load.

Of course I'm just talking about Digg “the idea”, ie: the idea of a democratically controlled website where users vote stories up or down, to decide what makes it to the main page. The company Digg would be thoroughly destroyed by this idea because once the code was free and running on the users own computers instead of your centralized servers, you'd have no ability to add advertising to your content or to redirect the users to time wasting pre-load pages. Simply put there would be no way to monetize digg, so as a company it would cease to exist.

Choose now digg. Are you there to become a company that turns a profit for its shareholders or are you a democratic non-profit service for your users? The choice is yours, but if you choose the latter please sell out like the rest of the Web 2.0 crop of data honey pots. Yahoo Flickr, Yahoo Delicious, Google Blogger, Gootube, Wired Reddit, Fox Myspace, etc. Join the club of former free-websites and become the corporate controlled information censor we all know you want to be. Sell out digg, before it's too late.

Digg still under siege (and may have shut off submissions for a bit too)

Ever since users found out that Digg is censoring content regarding the HD DVD encryption key from its homepage, and blocking users who posted the content, there seemes to be a revolt at the popular news site (Could it be because the HD DVD Promotion Group is a sponsor of Revision3?). The homepage, second page and third page are all filled with stories that mention that key. Guess this is what happens when social news sites go wild.

UPDATE: Digg user submissions mysteriously stop working, hmmmmmm, intentional? Also, stories involving the hex key seem to have manipulated digg counts.

Do you think Digg has the right to bill itself to be a social news site, after this very public riot? To quote Chad: “Diggnation will be interesting to watch this week” [link]

Syndicate content