tech.mchiu.com

Verizon and Cingular have no balls

The religious right is seriously screwing up America. I remember a line in the movie "Escape from LA" that made me shudder, but seems to be becoming a reality here in the US:

Snake Plissken: Got a smoke?

Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking nation! No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women - unless you're married - no foul language, no red meat!

Snake Plissken: Land of the free.

It seems like everything in the US is becoming too politically correct to the point that it's offensive to hear someone being politically correct nowadays. People are too sensitive, too anal, and too religious these days that they have no tolerance for anything that should just be natural and unavoidable.

Howard Stern was successful in avoiding the FCC and the religious right altogether by moving his broadcasts over to satellite where restrictions imposed on his radio show are lax since people are paying for the content that they choose to listen to.

Now, without any intervention from the government, Verizon and Cingular are self-imposing restrictions to the lyrical content of the MP3 ringtones that can be sold. Talk about a dumb business maneuver. Why would you want to restrict your maximum sales with something as stupid is this? I don't know... maybe it's pressure from their customers to restrict this kind of content, or maybe it's pressure from the FCC to deliver this kind of content, but oh well... Personally, I don't care much for downloading ringtones with profanity, but I would like to know that I can purchase it if I ever find a song I like that happens to have the word "cocksucker" in it. Why can't the religious right understand this very basic concept? I can sort of understand concerns with freely broadcasted material that may be considered as "offensive" when someone is inadvertently flipping through the radio dial or TV channels and comes across Janet Jackson's bare breast, but this is content that you specifically look for and then have to purchase. How dumb are you to go through all that to purchase a ringtone and then complain that it had offensive material?

Unfortunately, I can't access WSJ's article, Verizon and Cingular Self-Regulate Ringtone Filth, but blogsite Avernon.com summarizes the content of the article including a partial list of 35 words that are deemed "offensive".