Hey Zuckerberg, Take Facebook Down for a Day

So now we know how Mark Zuckerberg feels about SOPA. The Facebook founder made his opposition to the “poorly thought out law” clear — a little belatedly, perhaps, but plainly — in a post on the social network Wednesday. The post is blowing up: it has 495,000 Likes at time of writing, and 70,000 of those were gained in the past hour.

But as many of the commenters on that post have pointed out, talk is cheap. If Facebook really wanted to oppose SOPA, they say, it would do what Wikipedia and dozens of other popular sites across the Internet have done Wednesday. It would go dark for a day in protest, and direct users to contact their representatives.

So why hasn’t it?

Doubtless the main argument against such a move is financial. Facebook made about $4.25 billion last year; by that reckoning, a single day of outage would cost the site nearly $12 million in revenue. Advertisers would be furious; space they bought in good faith would either be blacked out or appear next to blacked-out text. 

The day of protest also comes at an inconvenient moment in Facebook’s calendar. At a press event Wednesday night in San Francisco, the social network is set to introduce a set of apps based on its new Open Graph and Gestures platforms. Zuckerberg could hardly showcase those apps on a blacked-out social network, could he?

Well, yes, actually, he could. I can’t speak for all journalists, but I can say that most of us would be delighted if a by-the-book product launch (starring features we’ve known about for months) was replaced by an impromptu political rant against one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in recent years. Zuckerberg versus Congress? Sign me up for front row seats.Alternatively, just delay the launch by a day or two. You’re Facebook; it’s not like we’re not going to show up.

That argument goes double for advertisers. Facebook is in an enviable position right now. It’s one of the hottest properties on the planet. A Nielsen study has shown that users notice and interact with Facebook ads more than the alternative online forms (such as Google advertising). Who wouldn’t want a piece of that, even at the cost of losing one day’s worth of advertising?

The sales staff will tear their hair out, but you can make it up to them later. Or you could give your major sponsors a shout-out on the blackout page. Given that traffic to Wikipedia has actually increased during its day of darkness Wednesday, who’s to say they won’t actually get more click-throughs than they otherwise would have? Especially if there’s nothing else to check out on the page.

Besides, some things are just worth taking a stand for. Facebook has 800 million users; it’s on course to hit a billion this year. No one else has that kind of reach, and many of those millions don’t know about SOPA yet. Not all of them are going to check Wikipedia or visit Reddit; those sites will mostly be preaching to the choir, in any case. But we all check Facebook. The social network is where you’ll find the mainstream, middle-America voters that Congress is truly terrified of upsetting.

Granted, Facebook has a history of keeping its head down when it comes to politics and unrest. Its official response to 2011′s Egyptian uprising — the one that bears its name — was beyond cautious, although the site reportedly worked to protect activists behind the scenes. By that standard, the fact that Zuckerberg made any kind of statement at all is fairly radical.

But if he were only prepared to go the extra mile for his beliefs, and motivate his millions of users to do the same, we’d have this dangerous and destructive bill licked in an instant. In a flash, Zuckerberg would go from having the occasional dinner with the president to being a true Washington power player. Congress would have been put on warning: However much your major contributors want you to pass legislation, you don’t do it if it would anger Facebook. The lobbyists’ grip on the levers of power would be that much weaker.

I also think Zuckerberg and company have done a good job in spreading the message and Facebook being, arguably, the most common form of internet social communication has a degree of power by enabling people to communicate to their representatives. Removing a medium of protest is probably not the best strategic move.

What could Facebook achieve if it banded together and became a force for good? We’re still waiting to find out.

Source: http://www.mashable.com

World's Most Shocking X-Rays

This unfortunate person was attacked with a screwdriver. Believe it or not, doctors removed the weapon - and the patient made a full recovery.

Watch those nail guns. This worker didn't, and he wound up shooting a nail into his hand. Doctors removed it, and he was fine.

This scary-looking image shows what can happen when a toddler runs with a pen in his mouth. When he fell, the pen went through the inside of his upper lip - and kept going until it had reached almost to the eye socket. But he was lucky - it came out and he was fine.

London jogger Amy Preston had an Eiffel Tower keyring become embedded in her hand after she fell over while carrying her keys.

Russian Artyom Sidorkin, 28, was relieved when surgeons operated on him and found this five-centimetre fir tree growing inside his lung. He had had extreme pain in his chest and was coughing up blood. Doctors had been convinced he had cancer, Russian website mosnews.com reported.

Toddler Nicholas Holderman somehow escaped unharmed after landing on his parent's car keys and having one penetrate his brain.

Six nails embedded in the skull of construction worker Isidro Mejia, 39, after an industrial incident caused a nail gun to shoot nails into his head and brain on April 19, 2004, are seen in this X-ray image from Providence Holy Cross Hospital in Los Angeles. Five of the six nails were removed in surgery that day and the sixth was removed from his face on April 23, after the swelling went down.

This image provide by the University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona shows the x-ray of an 86 year-old man, Leroy Luetscher, who was accidentally impaled through his eye socket with pruning shears at his home on July 30, 2011. While working in his yard, Luetscher dropped a pair of pruning shears, which landed in the ground point-side down. When Mr. Luetscher went to pick up the shears, he lost his balance and fell face-down on the handle. Thankfully he made a full recovery.

This is what happened when a poorly supervised mental patient got hold of some nuts - the kind that screw onto bolts. At the point the x-ray was taken, the nuts were partway through the small intestine. They passed without incident. No harm done. Still a bit nutty.

Swallowing a box cutter blade sounds like something only a crazy person would do. In fact, the abdomen in this x-ray belonged to a mentally unstable man. "Swallowing objects is very common in mental institutions," says Dr. Tim B. Hunter, professor of radiology at the University of Arizona and a collector of unusual X-ray images. But the blade passed without harm. Once they reach the large intestine, says Dr. Hunter, swallowed foreign bodies often pass without harm.

This young man stepped on a nail while wearing sandals.

An undated X-ray shows steel balls and magnets inside of 8-year-old Haley Lents, after the Huntingburg, Ind. child swallowed the pieces from a magnetic toy set on May 8, 2008. The child required emergency surgery and was hospitalized for two weeks.

In this undated Metropolitan Police handout, x-ray images show how a teenage boy cheated death when a five inch knife was plunged into his head. The 16-year-old and two other young men were injured when they tried to stop a friend being robbed at a bus stop. He was rushed to hospital with the kitchen knife still stuck in his forehead after the attack in Walworth, South London.

An X-ray of an four foot long pine snake who swallowed a couple of light bulbs is on display during the grand opening of Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium Thursday, June 21, 2007 in New York's Times Square.