Approaching the weekend - 20 May 2010
May. 21st, 2010 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning, people who read and patronize authors and libraries. Put your heads around the following problem - attempting to punish a publisher for bad dealings usually ends up hurting an author instead, so how does one go about managing to support an author and give them better leverage while also trying to register displeasure with a publisher for their actions?
And now, a Quick Comment: Washington's state Supreme Court ruled that it was not a violation of free speech for a library system to filter all computers and not offer any path for an adult to get a computer unblocked. The background on this is CIPA, the law that generally requires insitutions that receive federal assistance in technology or Internet access to put in place “technology prevention measures” that will prevent the underage from accessing adult materials. This normally takes the form of Internet filters on computers that can be used by children. Some systems have specific computers that only children can use, others have ways that adults can request, through the intervention of library staff, to have the filters turned off. Some systems give the option where adults can choose unfiltered or filtered access while not allowing children to make that choice. Point being, while the area of children is settled, basically, the question of whether adults can also be required to access through filters is still up in the air. The case is going to head to federal court, so the matter is not settled completely.
Most curious, I find, were the remarks of the State Librarian of Washington: “We have filters on our Washington State Library computers. As today's majority rules notes, public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.
Internet access, at the beginning of the World Wide Web, might have been more of a luxury or novelty, something that would fall under things that would be in a collection budget and the materials selector’s purview, but these days, Internet access should be considered part of core services. Libraries are moving their research needs to on-line databases because it’s cheaper to buy and it gets updated repeatedly, rather than having to spend the money on new print subscriptions. For people who cannot afford broadband access in their houses, the library is one of the few places that offers Internet for no cost nor the expectation that one purchase some other product in order to access the wireless.
When combined with the fact that Filters Don’t Work, because they’re unable to distinguish context and separate between things that are truly age-restricted and those things that are going to be informative and that everyone should have access to, the State Librarian’s apparent insistence that Internet access is still optional, and that filters are reasonable things for libraries to have and use makes it sound like she’s entirely okay with closing off avenues of legitimate research and information seeking because the technological filters are imprecise. That seems very un-library like to me. Thus, the generally standard practice of letting adults request overrides (or making it so that those of age can choose to have their browsing access be unfiltered) as a workaround for the filter problem. (Never mind, for the moment, about the difficulty and stigmatization of someone who comes up and requests that the filters be turned off for their purposes - you try explaining to the librarian that you’re doing research on STDs, or accurate sexual information, or other things that will be caught by the context-devoid filters...)
Blargh. Differences of opinions, I guess. I’m not really all that fond of the law that requires technology prevention measures, prefering to have someone go where they shouldn’t (and thus requiring the involvement of parents in their child’s browsing habits) than restricting someone from information they have a legitimate reason to access and forcing them to have to ask to unblock it. For sensitive topics and things that curious teenagers or other people are looking for, placing barriers in the way makes it that less likely for them to be able to access that information. That said, you can make a case to me that filters are appropriate for libraries, but I want you to prove to me that your filters can meet my tolerance on error, and that if we come across something that shouldn’t be filtered, that I can very easily unblock that site and not have it come back as being blocked again. So yeah.
Out in the world, unrest over Iraqi elections may mess with the drawdown timetable established by the last president. On the matter of the other Land War in Asia, we think we agree that an unstable stalemate is the best news we've had, and that such a situation needs to be broken before progress can be made.
The government of Thailand routed Red Shirts from an entrenched position around the financial sector of Bangkok, using armored personnel carriers, curfews, and shoot-on-sight orders, among other things, to move the protesters/rebels. The Red Shirts moved, but not without committing arson and destruction in their path.
Domestically, Who would have thought - people like their news organizations to fact-check things! The AP finds out by analyzing what people look at that people still rely on the (attempt at) unbiased media to tell them whether or not someone is lying sufficiently that the smoke from their pants is visible from two states over.
Rolling Stone reports on Richard Cheney's devious plan to take control of the Republican National Committee without actually being an officer or the chair, through the raising and deployment of monies outside the official power structure of the RNC. Thanks to the Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission decision, that task is a lot easier - funnel the dollars into appropriate corporations, who can then spend without limit to promote the candidates they want. And Rove and his minions can coordinate the outside and inside together without tripping over any laws, because they hold no positions anywhere. They’re free citizens who can be the frontmen for an organized effort. Just what you would expect from someone regularly accused of running the Presidency from the shadows while he was in power.
Oh, and Republican candidate Rand Paul, who appears to be holding to a very consistent libertarian position? There may be some issues with race there. Okay, a lot of issues with race and the Civil Rights Act. Although, as noted above, he is holding to a consistent position that insists the government should have as little to do with private business as possible, including telling business what they can and can’t do regarding who they do business with or hire. More mainstream Republicans are distancing themselves from Mr. Paul as well over the matter of his belief. Mr. Paul put out a statement trying to clarifying that he hates racism and that government was right to enact an end to racism in all public spheres, but that he thinks that private owners should be able to equally ban guns because they don’t want people shooting each other and ban black because they don’t want to serve them, no matter how stupid (and it is stupid) a business decision it is. Consistent libertarianism, no matter how socially awkward it may be. Now we’ll see whether or not that consistency gets him elected or trounced. It certainly seemed to work for his father, who talked about his own opposition to the rights-trouncing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lest one think that only sub-prime mortgages cause the great economic crashes, prime mortgages are accounting for a lot more foreclosures than they used to - possibly because of lost jobs, reduced wages, and all the other economic fallout that happened when the wheels came off of the rocketship without brakes that was Wall Street and the derivatives market.
the President called for federal immigration reform, pointedly indicating that he would need help from the opposition party if they were to pass anything that would be substantive. So Republicans would have to help build the bill, and then would have to actually decide not to filibuster the actual bill for short-term political points. Good luck, Mr. President.
Senator Grassley, among others, would appreciate having estate tax exemptions raised to just a little above his current worth, as well as having taxes on things above that cut 10 percentage points. Such legislation wouldn’t affect a whole lot of people anyway, so it seems a bit more nakedly self-serving...
A flash mob (of sorts) created a print magazine within 48 hours, called it 48 HR Magazine, and published. And then CBS, who has "48 Hours" as a show, told them they couldn't be 48 HR magazine, because people might confuse the two. It’s two narratives sort of intertwined at the article, the one about the power people have to generate stuff swiftly and well when all the right people get together, and the other where the idea might get squished because someone decided they were too close for comfort to their own established brands.
A scientist tasked to help with cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf has apparently been removed because his personal anti-LGBT and anti-diveristy policy writings were too much of a distraction. And thus, the difficulty of public life - brilliant minds may be restricted because their views in other arenas are unorthodox, and there are people that will seize on that to question all their credibility or their place on task forces and panels. In this particular case, unless the LGBT opinions directly hamper the work of cleaning up the spill, they should be irrelevant. Now, if those views made for conflict and hostility because someone who was LGBT felt they could not produce their best work with him and his views present, or he repeatedly went off on tirades about LGBT matters when trying to work on the spill, then there are reasons to remove someone, because the work is being interfered with. Unfortunately, we don’t get those details, because it doesn’t fit the idea of “Look! Political views sink scientist. They’re not unbiased, either!” that the Washington Times is promoting.
Finally, because they had nothing better to do, apparently, the House passed a resolution endorsing Craft Beer Week. I think they’re going to need more than a few beers to get this one to work out.
In technology, bigger range on quantum teleportation - a few kilmoeters. I’m beginning to think we’re getting close to developing the ansible. For what good it will do us, considering we’re still only stuck on one planet.
Google continues to pitch the future as living on the web (on their servers) and in the cloud, as some of the humble beginnings of interconnectivitiy between users are retired.
Also, a functional synthetic genome has been announced.
And finally, the conditions inside Apple's Chinese manufacturing operations, described as “hellish”, and provign the point that even the most benign-looking corproation can have quite the ugly factory presence.
When it comes to opinions, primary elections seem to be uppermost in the minds of the pundits. Mr. Franc captures the mood well, pointing out the obvious disadvantages of incumbency while trying to make sense of a Democrat winning in a spot that should have been a spot where Republicans were favored. The Editors of FrontPage Magazine are more enthusiastically in the camp of the Tea Party, predicting Rand Paul's success as a harbinger of things to come against incumbents, even if they have to hedge on whether the Tea Party will be able to put up more candidates through primaries.
Elsewhere, Mr. Inboden and Ms. Aronsson call for a return of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, where the U.S. pays more attention to the UK and other European allies, and the UK must decide it really can exert international influence and do so unapologetically.
On immigration, Mr. Williams recommends strict enforcement of the rules combined with streamlining the process so that people can enter the country legally, comparing amnesty and fine programs because not all immigrants can be caught to giving amnesty to all burglars because not all burglars can be caught. Perhaps the President can leverage Mr. williams to influence the stallers and intransigents in the Congress so that everyone’s dream of a coherent federal immigration policy and enforcement can be realized?
Mr. Harsanyi points to what he sees as the progressive opinion that The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) is too stupid to do things properly and that enlightened and intelligent people in charge of things can do better. He criticizes this opinion by linking it to despotism, top-down control, and statism, rather than letting it breathe as the realization that having one person or view in charge would allow things to move forward swiftly, while it runs the risk of going too far or being abused to evil ends. Where that position ends up, usually is, “It would be nice if one person were in charge, but since that’s dangerous, it would be nice if the opposition would stop being chowderheads in their knee-jerk, oppose-everything, mode and start actually trying to work together to make things better.”
Kind of like how several previous FEC commissioners want Senator Schumer to go back to the drawing board on an act that would restrict corporate speech in various ways but still permit major unions to spend freely, even if they have similar makeup to those corporations. A fair point to make - things should be uniform across various organizations of similar size and purpose. Perhaps the better thing to do is to require that all political speech and contributions made by anyone other than a single individual speaking for themselves be done through a PAC, and perhaps to limit the number of PACs to one per organization and require them to have the same name as the organization? So the ExxonMobil PAC can talk all it wants about oil rigs, and possibly be funded with ExxonMobil corporate dollars thanks to Citizens United, but ExxonMobil the corporation stays in the business of running the business? It would certainly help clear up some other things, too, although we suspect that organizations like FreedomWorks would still find ways to Astroturf and not disclose who funds them, so not everything would be fixed. I wonder what the unintended consequences of such an action would be, though...
Getting out of opinions, Mr. Stossel highlights some of the perverse incentives of civil forfeiture law, which, to him, allows police to seize and hold whatever they can try and attach to a person accused of a crime, and then place the burden of proof on the accused that their stuff wasn't used in the commission of the alleged crime if they want to get it back.
Last for tonight, in cases where the evidence is not as strong, hope that the jury thinks you're hot - attractive people are less likely to be convicted, and unattractive people often get longer sentences.
...and some moron who cut across a the baseball playing field because it was the fastest way to the concession stand. Now, if he had managed to assist in a 6-4-3 for the home team...
And now, a Quick Comment: Washington's state Supreme Court ruled that it was not a violation of free speech for a library system to filter all computers and not offer any path for an adult to get a computer unblocked. The background on this is CIPA, the law that generally requires insitutions that receive federal assistance in technology or Internet access to put in place “technology prevention measures” that will prevent the underage from accessing adult materials. This normally takes the form of Internet filters on computers that can be used by children. Some systems have specific computers that only children can use, others have ways that adults can request, through the intervention of library staff, to have the filters turned off. Some systems give the option where adults can choose unfiltered or filtered access while not allowing children to make that choice. Point being, while the area of children is settled, basically, the question of whether adults can also be required to access through filters is still up in the air. The case is going to head to federal court, so the matter is not settled completely.
Most curious, I find, were the remarks of the State Librarian of Washington: “We have filters on our Washington State Library computers. As today's majority rules notes, public libraries have long enjoyed broad discretion to select materials for their collections, and it makes sense that the same discretion would apply to the vast amount of materials on the Internet”.
Internet access, at the beginning of the World Wide Web, might have been more of a luxury or novelty, something that would fall under things that would be in a collection budget and the materials selector’s purview, but these days, Internet access should be considered part of core services. Libraries are moving their research needs to on-line databases because it’s cheaper to buy and it gets updated repeatedly, rather than having to spend the money on new print subscriptions. For people who cannot afford broadband access in their houses, the library is one of the few places that offers Internet for no cost nor the expectation that one purchase some other product in order to access the wireless.
When combined with the fact that Filters Don’t Work, because they’re unable to distinguish context and separate between things that are truly age-restricted and those things that are going to be informative and that everyone should have access to, the State Librarian’s apparent insistence that Internet access is still optional, and that filters are reasonable things for libraries to have and use makes it sound like she’s entirely okay with closing off avenues of legitimate research and information seeking because the technological filters are imprecise. That seems very un-library like to me. Thus, the generally standard practice of letting adults request overrides (or making it so that those of age can choose to have their browsing access be unfiltered) as a workaround for the filter problem. (Never mind, for the moment, about the difficulty and stigmatization of someone who comes up and requests that the filters be turned off for their purposes - you try explaining to the librarian that you’re doing research on STDs, or accurate sexual information, or other things that will be caught by the context-devoid filters...)
Blargh. Differences of opinions, I guess. I’m not really all that fond of the law that requires technology prevention measures, prefering to have someone go where they shouldn’t (and thus requiring the involvement of parents in their child’s browsing habits) than restricting someone from information they have a legitimate reason to access and forcing them to have to ask to unblock it. For sensitive topics and things that curious teenagers or other people are looking for, placing barriers in the way makes it that less likely for them to be able to access that information. That said, you can make a case to me that filters are appropriate for libraries, but I want you to prove to me that your filters can meet my tolerance on error, and that if we come across something that shouldn’t be filtered, that I can very easily unblock that site and not have it come back as being blocked again. So yeah.
Out in the world, unrest over Iraqi elections may mess with the drawdown timetable established by the last president. On the matter of the other Land War in Asia, we think we agree that an unstable stalemate is the best news we've had, and that such a situation needs to be broken before progress can be made.
The government of Thailand routed Red Shirts from an entrenched position around the financial sector of Bangkok, using armored personnel carriers, curfews, and shoot-on-sight orders, among other things, to move the protesters/rebels. The Red Shirts moved, but not without committing arson and destruction in their path.
Domestically, Who would have thought - people like their news organizations to fact-check things! The AP finds out by analyzing what people look at that people still rely on the (attempt at) unbiased media to tell them whether or not someone is lying sufficiently that the smoke from their pants is visible from two states over.
Rolling Stone reports on Richard Cheney's devious plan to take control of the Republican National Committee without actually being an officer or the chair, through the raising and deployment of monies outside the official power structure of the RNC. Thanks to the Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission decision, that task is a lot easier - funnel the dollars into appropriate corporations, who can then spend without limit to promote the candidates they want. And Rove and his minions can coordinate the outside and inside together without tripping over any laws, because they hold no positions anywhere. They’re free citizens who can be the frontmen for an organized effort. Just what you would expect from someone regularly accused of running the Presidency from the shadows while he was in power.
Oh, and Republican candidate Rand Paul, who appears to be holding to a very consistent libertarian position? There may be some issues with race there. Okay, a lot of issues with race and the Civil Rights Act. Although, as noted above, he is holding to a consistent position that insists the government should have as little to do with private business as possible, including telling business what they can and can’t do regarding who they do business with or hire. More mainstream Republicans are distancing themselves from Mr. Paul as well over the matter of his belief. Mr. Paul put out a statement trying to clarifying that he hates racism and that government was right to enact an end to racism in all public spheres, but that he thinks that private owners should be able to equally ban guns because they don’t want people shooting each other and ban black because they don’t want to serve them, no matter how stupid (and it is stupid) a business decision it is. Consistent libertarianism, no matter how socially awkward it may be. Now we’ll see whether or not that consistency gets him elected or trounced. It certainly seemed to work for his father, who talked about his own opposition to the rights-trouncing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lest one think that only sub-prime mortgages cause the great economic crashes, prime mortgages are accounting for a lot more foreclosures than they used to - possibly because of lost jobs, reduced wages, and all the other economic fallout that happened when the wheels came off of the rocketship without brakes that was Wall Street and the derivatives market.
the President called for federal immigration reform, pointedly indicating that he would need help from the opposition party if they were to pass anything that would be substantive. So Republicans would have to help build the bill, and then would have to actually decide not to filibuster the actual bill for short-term political points. Good luck, Mr. President.
Senator Grassley, among others, would appreciate having estate tax exemptions raised to just a little above his current worth, as well as having taxes on things above that cut 10 percentage points. Such legislation wouldn’t affect a whole lot of people anyway, so it seems a bit more nakedly self-serving...
A flash mob (of sorts) created a print magazine within 48 hours, called it 48 HR Magazine, and published. And then CBS, who has "48 Hours" as a show, told them they couldn't be 48 HR magazine, because people might confuse the two. It’s two narratives sort of intertwined at the article, the one about the power people have to generate stuff swiftly and well when all the right people get together, and the other where the idea might get squished because someone decided they were too close for comfort to their own established brands.
A scientist tasked to help with cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf has apparently been removed because his personal anti-LGBT and anti-diveristy policy writings were too much of a distraction. And thus, the difficulty of public life - brilliant minds may be restricted because their views in other arenas are unorthodox, and there are people that will seize on that to question all their credibility or their place on task forces and panels. In this particular case, unless the LGBT opinions directly hamper the work of cleaning up the spill, they should be irrelevant. Now, if those views made for conflict and hostility because someone who was LGBT felt they could not produce their best work with him and his views present, or he repeatedly went off on tirades about LGBT matters when trying to work on the spill, then there are reasons to remove someone, because the work is being interfered with. Unfortunately, we don’t get those details, because it doesn’t fit the idea of “Look! Political views sink scientist. They’re not unbiased, either!” that the Washington Times is promoting.
Finally, because they had nothing better to do, apparently, the House passed a resolution endorsing Craft Beer Week. I think they’re going to need more than a few beers to get this one to work out.
In technology, bigger range on quantum teleportation - a few kilmoeters. I’m beginning to think we’re getting close to developing the ansible. For what good it will do us, considering we’re still only stuck on one planet.
Google continues to pitch the future as living on the web (on their servers) and in the cloud, as some of the humble beginnings of interconnectivitiy between users are retired.
Also, a functional synthetic genome has been announced.
And finally, the conditions inside Apple's Chinese manufacturing operations, described as “hellish”, and provign the point that even the most benign-looking corproation can have quite the ugly factory presence.
When it comes to opinions, primary elections seem to be uppermost in the minds of the pundits. Mr. Franc captures the mood well, pointing out the obvious disadvantages of incumbency while trying to make sense of a Democrat winning in a spot that should have been a spot where Republicans were favored. The Editors of FrontPage Magazine are more enthusiastically in the camp of the Tea Party, predicting Rand Paul's success as a harbinger of things to come against incumbents, even if they have to hedge on whether the Tea Party will be able to put up more candidates through primaries.
Elsewhere, Mr. Inboden and Ms. Aronsson call for a return of the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, where the U.S. pays more attention to the UK and other European allies, and the UK must decide it really can exert international influence and do so unapologetically.
On immigration, Mr. Williams recommends strict enforcement of the rules combined with streamlining the process so that people can enter the country legally, comparing amnesty and fine programs because not all immigrants can be caught to giving amnesty to all burglars because not all burglars can be caught. Perhaps the President can leverage Mr. williams to influence the stallers and intransigents in the Congress so that everyone’s dream of a coherent federal immigration policy and enforcement can be realized?
Mr. Harsanyi points to what he sees as the progressive opinion that The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) is too stupid to do things properly and that enlightened and intelligent people in charge of things can do better. He criticizes this opinion by linking it to despotism, top-down control, and statism, rather than letting it breathe as the realization that having one person or view in charge would allow things to move forward swiftly, while it runs the risk of going too far or being abused to evil ends. Where that position ends up, usually is, “It would be nice if one person were in charge, but since that’s dangerous, it would be nice if the opposition would stop being chowderheads in their knee-jerk, oppose-everything, mode and start actually trying to work together to make things better.”
Kind of like how several previous FEC commissioners want Senator Schumer to go back to the drawing board on an act that would restrict corporate speech in various ways but still permit major unions to spend freely, even if they have similar makeup to those corporations. A fair point to make - things should be uniform across various organizations of similar size and purpose. Perhaps the better thing to do is to require that all political speech and contributions made by anyone other than a single individual speaking for themselves be done through a PAC, and perhaps to limit the number of PACs to one per organization and require them to have the same name as the organization? So the ExxonMobil PAC can talk all it wants about oil rigs, and possibly be funded with ExxonMobil corporate dollars thanks to Citizens United, but ExxonMobil the corporation stays in the business of running the business? It would certainly help clear up some other things, too, although we suspect that organizations like FreedomWorks would still find ways to Astroturf and not disclose who funds them, so not everything would be fixed. I wonder what the unintended consequences of such an action would be, though...
Getting out of opinions, Mr. Stossel highlights some of the perverse incentives of civil forfeiture law, which, to him, allows police to seize and hold whatever they can try and attach to a person accused of a crime, and then place the burden of proof on the accused that their stuff wasn't used in the commission of the alleged crime if they want to get it back.
Last for tonight, in cases where the evidence is not as strong, hope that the jury thinks you're hot - attractive people are less likely to be convicted, and unattractive people often get longer sentences.
...and some moron who cut across a the baseball playing field because it was the fastest way to the concession stand. Now, if he had managed to assist in a 6-4-3 for the home team...
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-21 09:08 am (UTC)Breaking the publishing stranglehold on authors is, I suspect, the only realistic way in which displeasure about any given part of the chain can be expressed without causing unintended harm. If you could get the same work through different sources, you could select the route most in tune with your position. Prevention of exclusivity deals would be a good thing to consider, but the practical result of introducing that is more likely to be publishers doing the same thing through other means, or being even more selective to guarantee as much income as they can.
Self-publishing might also be a vague possibility. But, while it is becoming slowly more viable and, if done properly, can meet or exceed the editorial quality of published works (although, these days, that doesn't appear to be a great challenge!), the printing and especially binding jobs done by self-publishing outlets like Lulu tends to be drastically lower quality. And this is completely ignoring the, possibly insurmountable, problem of actually getting such books into shops and libraries.
It's a problem that may well have no sane, productive solution...
no subject
Date: 2010-05-21 06:06 pm (UTC)Well, if we can do it (and find ways of getting them reviewed and carried by major distributors), that would be fairly awesome, I suspect.