In case it actually matters to anyone, I’m taking a break from blogging to get a life. May return in the future.
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.)
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.
Trying out , 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.
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.