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A group of Southeastern Kentuckians called the Pine Mountain Residents for Broadband are fed up with using phone lines to access the internet.
From the Rural Blog:
Pine Mountain Residents for Broadband was created after residents realized high-speed Internet wasn’t available in their area despite the multitude of advertisements and mailings from phone company Windstream advertising DSL access, Rend Smith writes for the Daily Yonder.
Windstream offers high-speed access to much of the rural area surrounding Pine Mountain and advertises heavily there. One resident, Samantha Sparkman, says she’s gotten as far as having a Windstream representative schedule an appointment for her house to be outfit for a connection only to see the technician never show up, Smith writes. They don’t feel like they need to bring the Internet to us because there aren’t enough houses,” Sparkman said at a recent PMRB meeting.
They’ve set up a website to advocating broadband expansion, and they’ve made a few videos:
If you watch the news, you’ve probably heard that Facebook will destroy your marriage and career and texting will corrupt your child. The dangers of social networks may be a bit overreported, and we’ll leave you to decide whether this next item is a valid security warning or pure paranoia.
The website Please Rob Me tracks location-based Twitter posts and puts them into a livefeed. You can narrow it down by location. The site’s “Why?” section explains:
The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.
The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.
Something like automatically tweeting from FourSquare (which is very annoying) can tell people you aren’t home. And if you’re not in the phone book (whatever that is), your address can still be public, if you’ve shared it online.
So the Please Rob Me folks say you’re leaving yourself open to crime if you share your location and your home address.
What do you think? Certainly burglary and stalking have been around longer than location-aware applications, but are careless internet socialites making others’ illicit activities easier? Or are people just being too worried?
Maybe it’s a combination of both. What are your thoughts?
Elizabeth Kramer reported on the mayor’s public art plan for WFPL. She’s posted the whole press conference online, so give it a listen if you’re interested.
Cuts are once again likely at TARC, as Stephanie Crosby reports:
Executive Director Barry Barker says they’ve proposed the cuts to offset a projected five-point-five million dollar shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year that starts in July.
Barker says the cuts would affect eight to ten percent of TARC riders.
“This is not where we like to be,” says Barker. “I’d much rather be adding service, improving service, but we need funding to do that that we don’t have. But what we want to do is listen to folks and mitigate the harmful impact as much as possible.”
TARC will hold public meetings on the proposed cuts the second week of March.
And a tweet from Isaac Spradlin asks the mayoral candidates, ”Why are we talking about light rail if we can’t even support our existing routes???”
The U.S. Secret Service said Johnny Logan Spencer Jr. of Louisville wrote and posted the poem, titled “The Sniper,” on a site called NewSaxon.org.
Special Agent Stephan M. Pazenzia said the poem describes a gunman shooting and killing a “tyrant,” later identified as the president.
Spencer is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dave Whalin on Friday for a detention hearing. He’s in federal custody charged with making threats against the president and threatening to kill or injure a major candidate for the office of the president.
Every two years, NPR gets complaints about Olympics reporting. Listeners don’t like hearing the results of events that occur in the middle of the day, but aren’t broadcast until prime time.
Ombudsman Alicia Shepard weighs in on that on her blog:
It is NPR’s job to report the news. And it is NPR policy to treat sports like any other new story by reporting it as it happens.
“NPR is a news organization,” says NPR’s Deputy Managing Editor Stuart Seidel. “We do not hold off on announcing the news to conform to television scheduling.”
Before announcing the results of the Men’s Downhill on All Things Considered Monday, host Melissa Block did, in fact, warn listeners with a “spoiler alert.”
[edit]
Seidel said NPR does not routinely provide spoiler alerts. “It is, however, the practice of our Newscast writers to include a line or two of copy at the beginning of a report about major sports events to give listeners an opportunity to divert their attention during the upcoming report on results,” he said.
Some hosts or reporters will warn the listener more subtly by stating something like: “And a quick update from the Winter Olympics…” as Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz did Sunday.
It’s interesting. To the public, sports are entertainment, elevated to such a level of interest to be news. How do you propose outlets balance their duty to report news with audience expectations of unspoiled sports watching?
The pennies honoring Abraham Lincoln’s life have been rolled out, and now there’s a new tails design on the penny.
I’m no coin collector, but I do like to see new designs. I haven’t seen any of the 2009 Lincoln commemorative pennies, though. Where are they?
A bill that would help public schools teach the Bible as a social studies course has passed the State Senate Education Committee.
From the Herald-Leader:
Sen. Tim Shaughnessy, D-Louisville, said he appreciated that Boswell presented the bill as a scholarly endeavor and not a religious experience.
But he said there are some “life skills” in the Bible that society would not want to advocate. He mentioned “ruthless warriors” and “multiple wives.”
Carroll said he believes teachers in the state can adequately teach Bible literacy.
In voting for the bill, Sen. Vernie McGaha, R-Russell Springs, told Carroll that “preaching” might help public schools.
Sen. Walter Blevins, D-Morehead, responded with an “Amen” during roll call but quickly added, “Yea.”
