dpk’s weblog

There was an article in the PI today about a pastor, Rev. Ken Hutcherson of the Antioch Bible Church, trying to get the church members to buy 3 shares of Microsoft, one of which is to be given to a new company, he/the church founded: “AGN Financial Network”. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to have followers buy MSFT stock, but it may be the first time he’s suggested buying shares for the church.

The purported goal is to collect enough shares that AGN (and thus Ken Hutcherson personally) will be able to influence Microsoft company management to stop providing benefits for same-sex domestic partners. Additionally, they will try to have Microsoft cease its efforts to have a law passed that bars discrimination against GLBT people.

The PI did the math. To get even 1% of Microsoft, Hutcherson would have to convince 31,000,000 people that his plan is a good one. Microsoft says in the article that “97% of [their] shareholders” support the existing policy, so that might go as low as 96% in this highly improbable scenario.

Even Hutcherson must be aware that he will not achieve the stated goal. So what “good” will come of this? If he is successful in convincing some to follow the plan, he will have leveraged the anti-gay hatred relished by much (most?) of the Christian community to further increase the church’s wealth. What will all of that additional wealth buy the church? Perhaps some more overseas trips for the White House envoy that never was.

I’d add more, but it would just be a rant about religion and intolerance and how I am intolerant of intolerance.

Edited: I just noticed that my post basically followed the same idea and form as Eli Sander’s earlier post over at SLOG. It’s a coincidence; I didn’t even see the PI article until about an hour prior to my post.

There are sites out there (in the tired “Rick Roll” category) that make it hard to close a tab, by adding hooks that allow for dozens or hundreds of alert dialog boxes to appear, preventing the tab from closing. One is http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com. Don’t go to this site, unless you want to see the bug in action.

I posted a bug on bugzilla, after doing a search. I didn’t see any, but as there are hundreds of thousands of other bugs on there, I didn’t want to spend hours hunting down an exact match, so I just went ahead with it. Turns out I should have searched for “rick roll,” rather than something more specific such as “javascript alert exit loop” or similar. Ah, well, such is the folly of search engines.

So, it got merged in to another bug that’s over 7 years old. Surprisingly, it has only gathered 60 votes in that incredible period of time. I’m asking you, the loyal dpk dot net reader, to use one of your 10000 votes on this bug, and to help raise awareness of this issue, so that it might be squashed.

Looking at the code, it seems like it might involve simply adding another button to the alert dialog box, that would just kill the tab’s javascript context. But, I don’t really know how to do all that. It kinda looks like there’s different alert box code for each “platform.” I dunno. I’m no mozilla pro.

You know how companies will register domains for products they plan to sell in the future? It looks like they just registered “networksolutionsclubscutelittlebabyseals.com”. The poor baby seals. :(

   Domain Name: NETWORKSOLUTIONSCLUBSCUTELITTLEBABYSEALS.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Network Solutions, LLC            domainsupport@networksolutions.com
      13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
      HERNDON, VA 20171
      US
      1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620

   Record expires on 08-Jan-2009.
   Record created on 08-Jan-2008.