This actually happened over a month ago (Sept. 1), but the meme seems to be picking up steam. I first saw it on Bazima. It’s a meme well worth propagating:
“Laquetta Shepard, a diminutive 24-year-old black woman from Louisville with tears in her eyes, stepped into the middle of a group of about five Ku Klux Klan supporters,” according to the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal. ” ‘They have the freedom to stand there and say what they want, and I have the freedom to walk where I want to walk,’ Shepard said. ‘They told me I was standing in the wrong place.’ ”
Laquetta Shepard has a website. No surprise, she wants to be a teacher. “I would be a good teacher,” she says on her home page.
Scratch that, Laquetta. You are a good teacher.
(Note: There used to be a picture accompanying this post of the incident described above. I removed it because I realized (a) I was stealing bandwidth from SF Gate by directly linking to it in the IMG tag, but (b) copying it to my site would have been a copyright violation. You can still see the picture by following the link to the story in the Louisville paper.)
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The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project released pilots of its first courses this week.
This is a great initiative. MIT is making content generated by its faculty (lectures, exams, reading lists, etc.) available for free for use by the educational community.
I was surprised that everything was PDF & HTML, but looking at their timeline, I see that formatting situation is part of the current pilot phase. The official “launch” — with XML-formatted, metadata-tagged, searchable content — is still a year away.
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Trying out Google, since Atomz, frankly, gives crappy results. See the search tool on the right.
Scratch that. Sigh. For the second day in a row, Blogger won’t update my template.
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Evan said that Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing software, is “software…designed to steal things.” Meg objected. Ev rebutted. Jason commented that “If it is truly designed to steal, Kazaa should function much like Amazon with recommendations, top 10/25/whatever lists, and collaborative filtering, except with a ‘Steal now with 1-Click’ button in place of the ‘Buy now with 1-Click’ one.”
Regarding Jason’s comment, I think that’s like saying the Mafia isn’t designed as a criminal organization because they don’t advertise under “Crime, Organized” in the Yellow Pages.
An activity that was explicitly designed to circumvent the law in the way he described would likely fail because it would lack the “plausible deniability” that Napster and now Kazaa have tried to maintain.
I believe Ev is expressing that while there are legitimate, legal uses for Kazaa technology, no reasonable person would assume that the majority — or even a significant minority — of Kazaa file transfers are legal according to copyright, nor would any reasonable developer create such a tool with the expectation that its usage would be legal. I would say that Kazaa and similar tools perhaps are not “designed to steal,” but are designed with the full knowledge that their primary usage will not be legal, given current laws.
I don’t have an ethical problem with file sharing per se & think the recording industry is really ignorant of the opportunity they’re missing. However, when you look at the practices of Kazaa (including realizing they are making and profiting from software used for illegal activities, sticking spyware in their product, hijacking affiliate program revenue from other sites, etc.), this doesn’t strike me as an ethical company.
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People who use style sheets to set fixed pixel sizes for their fonts. Gee, that 11 pixel high font might look great on your 800×600 CRT screen, but I can barely see it on my 1400×1050 LCD screen. Making it gray doesn’t help — gray fonts on a white background frequently just disappear on a backlit LCD display, unless you’re at the right angle.
I picked on Missy, but I could have pointed out a bazillion other sites with the same problem, especially weblogs. C’mon, people — fixed font sizes are so 1999. If you use relative sizes, I can enlarge (or shrink) the fonts to something that’s comfortable in my computing environment.
Had I know that an LCD panel is tied to a specific resolution, I wouldn’t have gotten the high end screen. Sure DVD’s look nifty, but most text is tiny tiny tiny. It hurts my eyes.
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Ray Ozzie and John Robb have argued against the need for pingback auto-discovery. Robb: “If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog.” Ozzie: “So, how long before someone implements a blog UI that resembles a standard topic/response outline/tree discussion format?” (Uh, Ozzie, ever heard of Slashdot and all it’s clones? Sheesh.)
Two incorrect assumptions by these guys:
1. “Auto-discovery = discussion.” If your blog posting auto-discovers other blog posts that reference it, one outcome could be discussion. But it’s still up to you whether you respond or not.
2. “Auto-discovery is for the blog author.” Even if the author isn’t interested in engaging the referring blogs, auto-discovery providers the *readers* with an opportunity to explore the various other thoughts on the blog posting.
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Paul Bausch of OnFocus created this nifty web service called, Book Watch. Basically, it scans the Weblogs.com list of recently updated weblogs, visits those weblogs, and scrapes out the links to books listed on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powells. It collects that data, then lists the most-linked-to books.
Mockerybird has taken it a step further. Grabbing the OnFocus list, he uses the Google API to do a Google search on each of those books and retrieve the top five news items for each book. Cool!
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The CD Mix of the Month Club is a great idea. Send this guy a mix CD you’ve burned this month and he’ll send you a copy of his. [link via Molly]
Great idea, that is, until he got some free publicity. Now the poor guy is gonna spend all month burning CD’s. If he starts to get 250+ CDs a month, he won’t even have time to listen to all of them while he burns 250+ copies of his own mix.
There needs to be a peer-to-peer method (or chain letter method?) to manage this, so that it’s not one guy sitting by himself in his apartment copying the same mix CD over and over and over again all month. That’s kinda sad.
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According to MSNBC, the first AOL computer is hitting the market. It’s a low-cost box from Microtel powered by a Cyrix C3 processor and comes installed with the Lindows OS, a Linux distribution designed to look and work as much like Windows as possible (so much so that Microsoft (unsuccessfully) sued them). Lindows uses WINE, a Windows emulator, to allow it to run many Microsoft Windows applications. The default browser is Netscape 7, and AOL is creating a version of AOL 7.0 (the application for accessing the proprietary AOL networks) for Lindows. I presume this must mean that AOL is re-coding their application to use Netscape’s Gecko rendering engine as the browser instead of Internet Explorer’s.
I’ve long been a skeptic about Linux on the desktop. Linux’s strenth — diversity and customizability — is precisely what makes it a poor choice for the average consumer who buys their computer at Sears. It will take:
- standardization* of a GUI interface ,
- an easy migration path from Windows applications to Linux applications, and
- a big pot of corporate money to assume the risk of taking on Microsoft.
At one point, several years ago, I though Corel Linux might have enough oomph to get it done, but Corel (and Corel WordPerfect Office Suite) had already become a bit player by that point. SUN’s acquisition of StarOffice was a clear move in that same direction, with the next step being SUN’s recent announcement that they’ll begin shipping a personal computer with Red Hat Linux as the OS. But Corel didn’t have the capital to pull it off, and SUN doesn’t have the consumer recognition. If AOL gets off its ass and embraces a simplified Linux distro like Lindows, it could poke into some of Microsoft’s market. Don’t get me wrong — it won’t unseat Microsoft. Gates’ fortress isn’t the consumer market, but the business market — all those machines on everybody’s office desk run Windows, and that’s not going to change because of AOL & Lindows. But eating away at Microsoft’s consumer market — something only Apple has made an effective run at — is still a Good Thing™
* By “standardization” I don’t mean “adherence to open standards,” I mean “everything the same.” This is the sticky issue that open source zealots don’t understand. Consumers aren’t interested in source code and, for the most part, they aren’t interested in choice either. Consumers are interested in sameness. It’s an ugly fact, but it’s true. Choice — difference – complicates purchasing decisions. The more complicated the decision, the less likely a consumer is to purchase it. When we’re talking about operating systems, this means that they want an interface that’s the same as everyone else’s. Consumer’s don’t care about the code; 99.98% of humans don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it. Nor do they want to make decisions between KDE, Gnome, tvm, or the command line. They just want what their neighbor has.
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