TV is Big Brother
I was going to post the following as a comment to the article “The Most Dangerous Appliance in Your Home: The Television” but their captcha anti-spam thing doesn’t work (I f**king HATE captchas) so I’m posting it here in an extended form.
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I also agree with all of these statements. The best step you can take in fighting the constant feed of manipulation is to TURN IT OFF or better yet, cancel your cable subscription. I do watch some tv, mostly on dvd of downloaded episodes of currently running shows I actually enjoy.
Many Americans are in a habitual state of behavior by which the tv is turned on immediately after coming home from work, school or whatever fills their day. Often, the tv stays on through dinner and remains on until bedtime. Many of these people then watch more tv in their bedroom prior to sleep. Some fall asleep with the tv on, set to a sleep timer. “I can’t fall asleep without the tv” is one argument. The tv delivering some feeling of comfort and security is frightening to me. In these kinds of all too common cases, the bombardment of messages, suggestions and advertising is constant.
Try, for one week, to not turn on the tv when you walk into your home. The desire to watch will seem, at first, almost unbearable. After that week, you may just realize how little tv contributes to your life and, in fact, how much it takes away.
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18. December 2007 um 01:26
Thanks for telling me about the problem… I couldn’t figure out why people stopped leaving comments altogether.
Oh, and I hate the f#cking captcha just as much as you. I wish I had a better solution though… for a while I had been leaving my comments open, like this blog, for anyone to post and used Akismet to filter out my spam. I started to get such large amounts of spam that it ended up using all of my server resources just to accept and save all the incoming data, to the point of knocking my site offline. Akismet
was only helping me get rid of the spam after the fact. I tried using my .htaccess to limit bots and only allow my users to post. I’ve also tried to disable anything that automatically fills in the blanks, and I’ve done everything possible to prevent people from having to become “members.” *CRINGE*
Anyway if you’ve got a better way to handle the spam problem while still allowing for easy comments I would love to know a better solution. Thanks for the feedback.
18. December 2007 um 01:59
There is one option I’ve seen on a few sites. There is a line asking you to “type this word” which changes when you refresh the page. I’m not sure what it’s called. Since I don’t get much traffic yet, moderating comments works for for me now.
I did a quick search and found a variation of the captcha called reCaptcha. It’s a scan of words in books. Seems to work the same as captcha but more readable to humans than the stupid computer generated captcha images.