I was hoping to find one with Obama's picture. No dice.
I think one of the most interesting things about the advancement of the internet under Comandante Al Gore is how it's gone from primarily being a friendly network for middle school kids to talk to their friends after school when their parents wouldn't let them play at each other's houses and turned into an omniscient behemoth filled with hackers, perverts, and social networking sites that have gotten far more people fired and murdered than laid. Let's face it, if it weren't for the ability to pull up a pornographic image of any possible situation with the click of a button, we may as well scrap the whole thing and just go back to using bag phones and fax machines for communication and the library for all of our 'Pedia needs.
But, even with all that in mind, the internet has certainly done its part in expanding our everyday accessibility to information that we normally wouldn't have known or, more importantly, cared about such as the whereabouts of our elementary school girlfriends - probably pregnant and on welfare - or stories in the Las Vegas Review Journal.
In the "Karma's a bitch" department of the Las Vegas Sun, you may have come across this story detailing the LVRJ's attempts to stop other websites from illegally posting their copy. Now you may think, "Ah come on, it's the internet, everything is so easy to look at! Lighten up guys! Half the country is under water and the other is under oil. Surely we can devote our attention elsewhere, no?"
And then you read that the party being accused is none other than Killerfrogs.com, and you may soften your stance towards their fascist practices.
Now, if I were a smaller man, more inclined to let prior events cloud my objective judgment, I might take this as an opportunity for some schadenfreude towards our pals over at the Eastern Bloc. However, as the best internet battles are commonly fought in the comments section, I appoint the task to you, our five remaining off-season readers. And if you want to note the irony of a website that backhands outside content with an iron fist getting into a legal tussle for posting the information from another website, well, just don't say you heard it from me.
In all seriousness though, this is just a glaring reminder of the world in which we currently live in. Where counselor can download the latest Dave Matthews Band album from a schoolgirl in Japan in the blink of an eye, and in the same blink get arrested for it. I'm not sure the specifics of the charges against KF - from what I see over there, they have their own morning link dump where readers can go for one click access to the day's TCU related stories, much as we do on our own site and everything looks to be properly sourced. I've never personally noted anything over there that looked to have been improperly documented, but apparently a mistake was made and, if I had to take a guess, they'll take down the specific content and everyone will move on.
And while it may seem trivial for the Journal to take such hard assed measures against a non-affiliated website for posting their material, apparently without alerting the guilty party beforehand, the bottom line is that on the internet, there's always someone watching. And if a relatively minor publication in the big scheme of things such as the LVRJ is keeping tabs on Killerfrogs, whose to say that other sites aren't doing the same to us? I sure would hate for our fair site to become obsolete simply because a person or persons posted material without attributing the source.
However, I don't mean this as a lecture, but perhaps a call to arms for those who might lazily copy and paste an article or link to provide their own commentary on an issue in the future, while merely using the story itself as complementary material. If we want to read Graham Watson's take on TCU's spring game - and BOY do we ever! - that's what the dump is for. Doesn't mean you can't post it under a separate headline, but at least give some of your own insight on what the writer has to say and provide a link at the bottom. Because, let's face it - if all this site offers is the morning dump and pasted articles from other sources, we're basically KF, jr. without the advertising royalties. And we're seeing firsthand where that gets you. Sometimes nice guys DO finish first, eh?
