Damien Mulley

He was driven to a remote area near the Sherman Hills neighborhood east of Laramie, tied to a split-rail fence, tortured, beaten and pistol-whipped by his attackers, while he begged for his life. He was then left for dead in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist who found him on Snowy Mountain View Road at 6:22 pm, some 18 hours after the attack, at first mistook him for a scarecrow. He was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.

Matthew Shepard.

Guy tries to top himself by putting a nailgun to his head and pulling the trigger. Twelve nails later and he’s still alive. He goes into the Emergency Room of the local hospital a day later complaining of a headache. And the x-ray shows:

via Seth comes advice from Paul Graham on worrying about your business idea being copied.

As a rule, startups shouldn’t worry so much about competitors, especially big companies. Competitors are a second-order problem. Startups should worry more about making something worth copying and less about whether someone will.

Warning naked men. Lots of em. As their warning message states:

This blog does contain adult and gay material. If you are under your country’s legal age (18 or 21), do not scroll down and leave this page now.

Foreign Policy Magazine has a blog. Go there so you can tell others that you read it.

Tom Murphy asks do PR people need New Media skills?

We need to be pragmatic in how we bring new tools to our campaigns. That doesn’t mean slow, that means pragmatic.

10 ways to create content for your blog and the cynical counter to this article: 10 ways not to create content for your blog. I like the cynical one more.

Via Boing Boing comes a legal paper called “Fuck” which discusses the word and the law around it. Censorship, free speech, harassment etc, fuck is very important.

Choice quote:

Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

From an Irish perspective it is something worth looking into especially with our history of censorship and the Church and State’s constant worries about morality. On the same note I notice that Fuck.ie is available. I wonder has anyone tried to register it. Maybe I should try and register an RBN and see what happens?

This post was proudly sponsored by the FCC and the momentum for the post was helped by listening to Track 3 from Music For the Jilted Generation – Their Law by the Prodigy

A while back TheRegister wrote about a guy in California that has a 7 hour roundtrip commute. This guy works in Cisco and drives 186 miles from his house to get there and then when finished for the day drives 186 miles back.

With his family still sleeping, Givens heads out the door at around 4:30 a.m. from a horse ranch at the edge of the astonishing Yosemite National Park. On a good day, he can make the 186-mile trip to Cisco’s sprawling offices in less than three hours.

To highlight the fact that broadband isn’t ubiquitous in Ireland, perhaps there should be a competition to find the person with the longest daily commute in Ireland? It’d be great if a broadband company sponsored this but there would be a very strong possibility the winner themselves are not in a broadband area and so it might look a tad funny if a broadband company gives the person a voucher for dialup Internet. Of course they could gibe them broadband for boats and install a satellite dish.

EDIT: When I type in Telework Ireland, the Telework Ireland site is first in the results. The site is down now but if it was up you’d notice all the cowebs on it. Not been updated in a long long while. The first ad for this search is a job ad for Google.

Another state of the blogosphere and more fantastic stats but that’s even more fascinating is that Technorati still exists. What does it do apart from stats and surveys? Technorati is just a blog stats company in my view. How many years has it been running? I’m still quite curious as to what the business model for this is? How are they making money again?

I’m with Marc Canter on this one, show us the money!

I listened to Tom Raftery’s Podcast with David Sifry and I wasn’t impressed at all. He seemed quite evasive on many technorati related questions like funding and making money. The site is slow, the way it seems to rank things is a bit like playing black magic and I’ve rarely seen stuff come my way from it. Compare that to daily traffic from Tailrank. Technorati has been at it for a good bit now, shouldn’t they start making a profit soon or selling themselves to someone? Though all it needs is a little time and a Google algorithm tweak and they could be quite screwed. Maybe I’m blind but what value does it bring to net users? Do they secretly sell their surveys to the NSA and FBI? If they make themselves a blog version of Nielsen then yeah, they might be on to some gold.