I recently came across what I think is the most polite way I’ve seen of letting someone know that they are a liar. (I’ve taken the liberty of changing the names and faces.)

This is certainly more polite than what I usually do, which is click the “report spam” button on Facebook. I don’t think that actually does anything, although I’d like to think eventually you would get kicked off Facebook if that’s all you did on there. In a perfect world they’d at least train a bayesian filter to hide that kind of stuff from me.

With email forwards, I’m even worse. When I get something particularly egregious, I take the time (generally very little is required) to see if it’s true (it usually isn’t). Then I hit reply-to-all and call them out for being a liar. Well, I usually don’t use the word “liar”, although maybe I should start my messages with “You lie!” in a large, bold font from now on. Instead I just state the facts with links to my references.

In my heart of hearts, I had the best of intentions with this approach. I envisioned a world where people are simply unaware that they are lying, and that, once they are made aware that they are lying, they would stop lying because lying is bad. I honestly did. Well I guess to some extent I was being a jerk, otherwise I wouldn’t reply to all. But still—if I was disseminating false information, I would want someone to tell me so that I would know better. I was (almost) doing unto others as I would have them do unto me!

And at first I thought I was succeeding. Most of these ridiculous email forwards stopped coming to me. Then I found out Stephanie was still getting them from the same people. The people sending this garbage had said to themselves something like, “Kip doesn’t like it when I lie to him. He’s a jerk and tells everyone I’m a liar. I’ll just stop sending my lies to him, but I’ll still send them to everyone else.”

Oh well.

I didn’t hold the highest opinion of Time Warner Cable before, but lately they’ve sunk to a new low.  They want to start introducing bandwidth caps on users but they can’t do this for existing customers who signed up for unlimited internet.  So what do they do?  They offer a new “deal” where you can get cable, internet, and digital phone service for a “locked-in rate” for a year.  Buried in the fine print is the fact that you’d also be signing up for a bandwidth cap.  Even worse, the afore-mentioned locked-in rate requires you to sign a contract for a year of service.  So if you found out after the fact that your bandwidth was capped, you’d have to pay a $150 early-termination fee to get out of the contract.

What is even more ridiculous is that the limit is set at 20GB per month.  When I first read about the 20GB limit, I thought surely that is per day.  That I could live with.  The only way you’re likely to use 20GB a day is if you’re downloading torrents constantly (which I still say is none of their business—courts have already ruled that the ISP is not responsible for what users do on their network).  But 20GB a month is very easy to reach even if you’re not pirating anything, especially if you watch TV online, or if you use VOIP (i.e. Vonage, Skype).  It’s almost as if Time Warner’s internet department has some financial incentive to limit competition from Time Warner’s cable TV and digital phone departments!  No, that’s just crazy talk.

Recently Penny Arcade made a very funny comic about gifts they receive from PR firms, a topic which Joel Spolsky discussed about a year ago.  This seems like a good time to publicly state my gifts policy here at vacant-nebula.  I’ll now shift to the editorial “we” so that I we sound more important.

We, at vacant-nebula.com, like stuff.  Especially free stuff.  We will accept any gift, be it money or merchandise.  We particularly like high technical devices, such as anything that could be found in Best Buy.

Unlike many other blogs, we do not consider ourselves journalists, and as such we are not bound by any code of journalistic ethics.  In particular, this means that we do feel an obligation to disclose the source of any gifts, or even the fact that a gift was given.  We are even willing to praise products that we don’t really like, as long as this means we might get free stuff we do like in the future.

In short, we are preemptively selling out, even though no one is buying yet.  So send us stuff we want and we’ll tell people it’s great.  We won’t write any holier-than-thou blog posts about how we’re too good to accept free stuff.  If you would like to send us gifts, but you are unsure what products we would like, just drop us an e-mail and we’ll be glad to work something out.

PS- if anyone knows a Microsoft PR rep who has an Xbox 360 they are just dying to bribe a blogger with, send them here.