Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church have, for some time now, been traveling the country protesting at the funerals of American soldiers killed in the line of duty. Back in 2006, they protested outside the funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who was killed in action at the age of 20. See this article, the original complaint, and Monica’s (of Spark a Synapse) post on the same topic for the unpleasant details. English as a language lacks invec­tives of suffi­cient force and color to condemn this kind of behavior in the terms justice demands. However, has WBC done anything properly [ . . . ]

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Netflix has gone and done something wonky that messed up the Netflix widget and broke the site for a while. Lovely if(isset($var)) state­ments have fixed the problem, but the queue still doesn’t show. At least, not from where I’m sitting. It might be a magpie issue. Your cache may vary. Either Netflix changed the format of the RSS feed with my queue in it, thereby messing up the regular expres­sions the Netflix widget uses to extract pertinent movie data from the feed, resulting in a null set of results, and which will require actual work on my part to fix, or my cache [ . . . ]

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News reporter gets the wrong problem when reporting on the firing of a teacher for showing a bootleg copy of The Simpsons Movie to young students. The complaint is that showing a PG-​​​​13 film to 3d-​​​​5th graders is inap­pro­priate. Nothing is said about how showing a bootleg of such a film is inap­pro­priate. In my not so humble opinion, the latter is the worse offense. The rating system is private, voluntary, and pretty arbitrary. The film might well be just fine for children in a super­vised classroom setting. Copyrights, however, are the law. Teachers should be fired for infringing copy­rights in the classroom before we even [ . . . ]

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[Note from the Chamberlain: All fixed!] What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more. Obsessive-​​​​Compulsive Bookworm   Book Snob   Literate Good Citizen   Fad Reader   Non-​​​​Reader   What Kind of Reader Are You?Create Your Own Quiz And besides, it’s about all I have time for right now.