The Root of the Problem is that Columnists Are "Dumb"

The debate over personal firearm ownership rights in the U.S. is not going to be solved here today. It’s raged for decades, and like any nigh-intractable argument, settling it once and for all would probably require - oh, I don’t know, some kind of really impressive gun, or something.

But please consider this a tilt at the windmill of media boneheadedness, or a futile middle finger directed at the limitless supply of mindless drivel that commentators seem to come equipped with (I assume they carry it in spare clips on a sort of bandolier strap, but what do I know?)

Kids in the Boardroom - the Story of AMC-14

Imagine you're a boy who's throwing $150 million up in the air to pass the time, until a gust of wind catches it just wrong and it gets stuck up a tree. Several passing grownups offer to help get it down, but that would be too humiliating, so you just leave it up there as a write-off.

While that’s not exactly what happened here, it’s just as stupid.

This story is set amidst the hallowed, locker-lined halls of SES Americom high school, a telecommunications satellite conglomerate based in Luxembourg...

Best Omnishambles of 2012 - Year-end Doom

This heartwarming little nugget of sociopathy dates from a few months ago, but deserves to be remembered, lest the unwary tread these treacherous shores again in days to come.

Imagine you have a very hip and popular gathering, such as SXSW, and you need to both promote your wireless services as well as provide them - but paying real estate owners to rent antenna space costs too much money, and even innovative ideas like paying temps to carry portable hotspots around seems a bit too spendy... wait, what about all those grubby folks lying around in alleys and bus shelters, they don’t seem to be doing anything important!

Europeans Will Doom Us All

If science fiction movies have warned us once, they’ve warned us a thousand times - and will do so a hundred thousand more - that machines will be the death of us all. But in an unexpected ray of hope from across the ocean, scientists may be working to prevent our inevitable self-created annihilation from coming to pass... or are they?

The Internet Offers Unlimited Opportunity for Doomed

Opportunity - the Chinese have over 8700 words for it, if I remember my high school Spanish class. The internet has proven to be a boon for all types of marketing and promotions - you can buy everything from Vi8gra to Vigara to Vaigira with just a few clicks of your mouse, taps from your fingertip, or even without human intervention because you have a virus in your browser.

It’s something about the spellbinding allure of the raw potential of an untapped market - the wide-open vistas of sheer promise, the waiting tsunami of cash which draws in people from all walks of life and every corner of the globe - as well as those posessed of every form of moral failing.

Now some entrepreneurial souls have discovered a crafty new way to earn a living. Just put people’s mug shots online, SEO the living daylights out of them, and ruin a person’s chances of ever getting a job again. Then - and this is the genius bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars to take the photos down when they come begging you.

You see, in many U.S. states, the actions of law enforcement are placed online for public scrutiny and review. This includes mugshots of people who are arrested, whether it’s for murder, or financial fraud resulting in global economic collapse (hah, I kid), or even because they nabbed the wrong guy and he got released an hour later.

Rather than just waste this valuable raw material of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of a mouse and some devious manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can ensure that anyone Googling a person’s name will see that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. Forever. (just ask Rick Santorum)

So the next time you walk into a job interview, you’d better have a pretty funny story to tell about that time you got booked by the cops because you look a little bit like a mugger when you wear your football hoodie.

And if that weren’t enough to satisfy your appetite for cynicism, there’s this enticing offer from the southern region of a prominent northern-hemisphere continent which I won’t bother to name for fear of redundancy.