I don't post here often anymore, so I hope it speaks to how urgent I find this matter that I am posting this now.

U.S. House Bill HR 3261, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act, and its sister Senate bill, the Protect IP Act, if passed, will be an unmitigated disaster and will cripple or kill the Internet as we know it.

If you haven't been paying attention, I beg you, please start, right now.

If you think it can't possibly be that bad, it absolutely can.

If you live outside the U.S. and think there's nothing you can do--not so.

Please visit the following link and take action to stop this pernicious legislation before Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Tumblr, Plurk, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and countless other sites like them are wiped from the face of the Net or made inaccessible to U.S. citizens.

http://americancensorship.org

E-mail your Congresspeople. Petition the U.S. State Department. Attend a town hall meeting. Share a link or video with your friends. The only way to stop this madness is to make the voice of every Netizen heard.

Attn: Annelies van den Belt, CEO of SUP, parent company of Livejournal

Ma'am,

As I am unable to find a way to contact you directly, I am writing an open letter to ask if you are aware of how disrespectful and unresponsive some of your Livejournal staff are of your paying customers.

I would like to refer you to this Livejournal post and its comments, where in less than one day over 5,000 users have expressed their distress over the recent unwelcome changes to Livejournal comment pages; and in particular to this subthread and this one.

This is how SUP employees treat your customers? Our voices and our dollars are irrelevant to you--why? Because some of us don't live in Russia, don't share your developers' preferences, or valued your product because of its differences from your competitors?

This, my personal Livejournal, which I rarely use anymore, is not a paid account, as I'm sure you've already checked. But I maintain three others that are. I sometimes buy paid time or icons for friends. There are many others whose modest individual purchases collectively bring a great deal of money into your coffers. Why are you allowing these arrogant employees of yours to take away the functionality that we value and have paid for, and worse, to thumb their noses at us when we express our dissatisfaction?

I had just begun to hope, with the improved way the last DDoS attack was handled, that things were turning around for LJ and that my faith in your company would be vindicated, and now you do this to us. This is not how a legitimate, respectable company treats its customers. Please, please address these concerns before you drive us all away to Dreamwidth or InsaneJournal and destroy years of LiveJournal community and history.

Thank you for your time.

Hi all. I know it's been a long time since I've posted anything of substance here. I'm kicking around some ideas about personal stuff I'd like to post, but right now I find this news item sufficiently alarming (and angering) that I think it's worthy of a signal boost.

Government Refuses to Act on Cancer-Causing Insulation

"There are millions, likely tens of millions of homes in the United States probably contaminated with this [lethal] material. The inventories show it was pretty much distributed from coast to coast, most heavily across the tier of Northern states -- New England, the upper Midwest and the Northwest -- and in all likelihood, it's still there," toxicologist Weis said.

( Read more, it gets worse... )