hotmail - anybody can acquire a deleted address.

There's been a rash of LJ communities where the owners had left/disappeared leaving things just humming along, then suddenly becoming hijacked with spam posts, often in Russian, sometimes in English but linking you to a Russian site. It turns out the semi-abandoned account of the owner or another mod got reactivated by someone who'd acquired an older email address registered to the mod's account and used that to gain control of the comm.

LJ Knows Good Music - what's going on?:

This appears to happen if someone manages to get access to a maintainer account by re-registering an old email address that is still listed on the account. Hotmail is especially nice for that as addresses are deleted for inactivity and can be re-registered. Therefore, it's advisable (not just for maintainers, but for everyone) to remove all email addresses you don't control or no longer want to use from your account.

LJ Knows Good Music - what's going on?:

so if i have an old hotmail account that got deleted for not being in use, some other person can register that account and then ask for the livejournal passwords? i didn't know that.

LJ Knows Good Music - what's going on?:

Yes, that's what is so dangerous about leaving old addresses in your account. While an old account can help you regain access to your LJ if you no longer have access to your current email, it's really a security risk if you don't control the old email account any more. And Hotmail's policy is really quite dumb, from a security point of view.

actually, LJ follows a similar policy with the ability to rename an account to one that's been completely deleted and removed. ljname@livejournal.com becomes an active address again.  for that matter, is the policy any different from letting a domain name lapse? someone else gets it, someone else can create ANY email address from that domain.

The original recommendation is best: if changing email addresses, go back and delete old ones using the link above.  They still had a reference to acroyear@io.com attached to me, for example.

one for bronxelf and Damned Good Design

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Pennsylvania Business Name Rules Challenged:

Here's an interesting church/state court case. A man in Pennsylvania is suing the state for not allowing him to register the name of his business, a film company, as "I Choose Hell Productions." Pennsylvania law says, "An association name may not contain words that constitute blasphemy, profane cursing or swearing or that profane the Lord's name." Sounds like a pretty blatant constitutional violation to me.

wah eeh?

Pharyngula: Say what?:

Speaking of incessant, grating whines…here's another Minnesota pest, Michele Bachmann. She spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (by invitation…how deranged have the Republicans become, anyway?) and offered this jewel of logic:

I just wondered that if our founders thought taxation without representation was bad, what would they think of representation WITH taxation?

Don't even try to comprehend the strange thoughts that flit through that tiny brain.

Meanwhile in other "conservative" states...

Pharyngula: Who is buying all that porn?:

An analysis of the consumption of internet pornography found that there are only small differences between states, but that there are some patterns. The patterns will not surprise anyone.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

…

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election - Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

So Republican states gobbled up more nekkid pitchers than Democratic states… but of course, one could argue that it was just the few Democrats in Utah who were slavering most obsessively over porn, while the Republican Mormons were being upright (no, wait, maybe that's the wrong word…) Montana is a conservative state, too, but maybe the ready availability of all those cows helps slake their forbidden lusts.*

What about those good Christians?

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

Heh. Now we all know what "values" is a code word for.

I sometimes wonder if the only reason the Religious Right keeps trying to make certain behaviors illegal (like porn, sexual practices and preferences, alcohol consumption, good tv, gambling, and of course fiscal discipline and minority voting) is because they really can't help themselves.  Everything about the Gospels is all about taking control of your own life and your own choices, and since they can't do it, they keep trying to fall back on the nanny-state to do it for them, just like their interpretation of the old testament says it should.  They want to have THE LAW make the rules for them rather than actually live to the code they espouse by choice.

Well, hate to break it to you, but THE LAW did nothing to stop drinking during prohibition and did nothing to stop adultery among puritans and did nothing to stop "teh gay" from being about 7-10 percent of the population at any particular moment in the history of mankind.

the movies that suck list...

Not every movie is worthy of an Oscar. Hell, some movies aren't worthy of anything much but scorn and derision. The Razzies were born in 1981 and as long was we are all copping to the great movies we've seen, let's fess up to the not-so-great ones we've watched... either in a theater or in the private shame of our homes by highlighting them in bold.

Mind you, not all of these in theaters (those I italicized), the rest were usually just HBO back when there wasn't much else to watch on TV in the long afternoons except MTV, or in the R-rated case in the 80s, sneaking to watch them after the parents went to bed...
( the list of those that didn't make the cut didn't make the cut... )

I note the leveling off towards the end (none from 2003-onward) as I simply started spending my time more carefully...glimpses on HBO of some (like Cat in the Hat) reaffirmed my decision to not bother.

Of all of those, the only one that saddened me was Cannonball Run II - the first film was a piece of brilliance in how all the actors were satirizing themselves and the worst stereotypes that the critics accused them of (which, of course, meant the critics didn't get the joke and panned the movie anyways).  The second was just sad.

Of those on the list that I think don't desrve to be on it?  nevermind, there aren't any.  Newsies comes close...I guess I was just a touch too old to appreciate it at the time.  I'm older now so maybe I should give it another chance?

BTW, where the hell was Breakin' Two, Electric Boogaloo?

Lone Ranger had potential, but just fell horribly flat.  I really wonder if Disney can actually get their new one to bite, given how few other westerns have done anything since Unforgiven.

Some of those we own but haven't really sat down to watch.  Same with the oscar nods list.

For the Best Picture nods, it's better I just list them without the whole bolding thing, 'cause there ain't that many:
Chariots of Fire (one of my all-time favs), Raiders, ET, Tootsie, Right Stuff, Amadeus, Killing Fields, Dangerous Liaisons, Driving Miss Daisy, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams, Awakenings, Beauty and the Beast, Fugitive, Forrest Gump (I've seen every scene - I just don't know if I've ever seen it all in order, and certainly never in one sitting), Four Weddings and a Funeral, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Titanic (just like Gump, never all in one sitting), Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, Saving Private Ryan (again, never in one sitting), Couching Tiger (only 'cause it was on the plane), LotR: Fellowship, Moulin Rouge (need to see that again), LotR: Two Towers, LotR: RotK, Master & Commander (on the plane - we own it but haven't watched it since), Finding Neverland, Good Night and Good Luck (on the plane)

and that's it (ok, maybe more than I thought).  of the recent ones, only Frost/Nixon interests me, but not enough to not wait for HBO.