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“For some reason, the GOP has chosen 2012 to relitigate reproductive freedom, an issue that was resolved decades ago. Why [Rick] Santorum, [Rush] Limbaugh et al. thought this would be a good time to declare war on half the electorate, I cannot say. But to ignore it would have been comedy malpractice.” — Gary Trudeau

“Only once in the long history of “Doonesbury” has Garry Trudeau’s syndicate ever intensely objected to one of his story arcs. It was 1985, a documentary purporting to show the reactions of a fetus had been released, and Trudeau satirized the film “The Silent Scream” with his own “prequel” strips featuring “little Timmy,” a 12-minute-old embryo. Those strips never saw wide release in newspapers. Now, Trudeau has decided to take on the abortion wars head-on for the first time in “Doonesbury’s” four decades in a series of strips depicting mandatory vaginal ultrasounds as rape.“
Slate has yesterday’s and today’s strips in color. Reader responses on Trudeau’s Blowback Blog at Slate have been mixed. Romanesko has a description / transcript of the strips.

Catherine Frazier, press secretary for Texas governor Rick Perry:

“The decision to end a life isn’t funny,” Frazier said. “There is nothing comic about this tasteless interpretation of legislation we have passed in Texas to ensure that women have all the facts when making a life-ending decision.“

Reuters: Author defends “Doonesbury” abortion strip.



Doonesbury strip on Texas abortion law dropped by some US newspapers. More. Reasons being given. The CT Journal Register: Of course we’re running Doonesbury next week. NY Daily News: Doonesbury’ abortion comic strips have newspapers, partisans divided

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A British stroke victim paralysed from the neck down and suffering from locked-in syndrome won the right to seek changes in a law that would enable a doctor to end what he has called an ”intolerable life” without risking murder charges.

Playing into an emotional debate on assisted suicide for those with severe disabilities, the case brought by the stroke victim, Tony Nicklinson, went one step further since he is physically unable to participate in his own suicide and is thus seeking to make it legal for a physician to take his life.

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Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled a speaking engagement in Toronto, citing security concerns related to violent protesters at a Vancouver event last year, the promoter said Monday.

Protesters blocked the entrance to the private downtown Vancouver Club on Sept. 26 and prevented Cheney from leaving for seven hours until the violence ceased, a statement from Toronto-based promoter Spectre Live said.

“On the advice of security, they were worried that quite simply Canada is just not a friendly country to them,” said Ryan Ruppert, president of Spectre Live.

Canada is a friendly country. They just dislike assholes.

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Just curious…how is your #Lent going?

Well, I managed not to molest any young boys. How’s yours?

Oh, wait, I already know;

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Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.

The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”

Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”

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For the last 20 years a little pub in Southampton, England, has been serving beer to the local community and all that time it’s had the same name – The Hobbit. But Saul Zaentz, the producer behind movies such as The English Patient and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has sent in the lawyers to do something about that.

Zaentz owns the merchandising rights to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and his lawyers have warned that if the pub doesn’t change its name and remove all references to Tolkien-related items by the end of May, its owners will be sued for infringement.

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A California judge ruled last week that Kaleidescape, the company behind a line of high-end home media servers, violated the terms of its DVD licensing agreement by allowing consumers to rip DVDs.

The DVD Copy Control Association sets rules that all manufacturers of DVD players must follow. The organization objected to the DVD-ripping functionality of Kaleidescape’s products and went to court to force them off the market. On Thursday, Judge William Monahan issued a broad injuncton barring Kaleidescape from selling its DVD-streaming products.

The case is a useful reminder that, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, major content companies continue to enjoy veto power over the design of digital media devices. Include a digital lock in your spec and the DMCA keeps anyone from bypassing it, even if the intended use might well be legal. Hollywood is using this power to prevent “DVD jukebox” products from reaching consumers.

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Let’s just pay them the money! They’ve made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways: a. We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper and b. We don’t have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash.

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Here are some numbers to blow your mind: The original Macintosh, released in 1984, had a monochrome 512 × 342 pixel display. That was 175,104 points. Today, the icons on iOS are 512 x 512 pixels, drawn from a 16.7 million color palette plus 256 levels of transparency.

28 years ago, a monochrome icon on the Mac was 16 x 16 pixels. It only took 32 bits of memory. Compare to the 512 x 512 pixels of each iOS’ icon. It takes four times the total video memory of the original Mac to represent a single icon in iOS at full size. Of course, iOS’ icons are not shown on screen at that size. They are much smaller. Eventually, however, you can be sure that there will be displays that would require that insane pixel density.