Comment Re:Not all that bad (Score 1) 360
Shelves of books falling on people will kill people--which is a good reason for safety standards.
'Cause not everything is yet available online--and not everything online is accessible.
I'd say that less than a quarter of the books in my (public) library are online, and about half of the materials available for download are crippled by DRM or format locks.
People will do for each other out of a natural inborn sense of decency
Your post reads a bit differently when, as in my area, "to do for" someone means "to kill" him (or her).
Ah, idiomatic expressions.
That is usually the effect.
Half the time, the first we hear of the book is when someone tries to challenge it. The story gets into the media, and sales spike. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't authors and publishers out there deliberately trying to court banning for the publicity's sake.
Usually the challenges start with trying to completely ban the book.
Most challenge policies are written to make that difficult, so the challengers then fall back to the position of trying to get them removed from the Required Reading Lists, and finally to requesting exemption and alternate reading materials for students.
Not that you'd know it from the article, or even the article's source article--both exhibit an amazing paucity of information--first time I've seen the summary more informative than the articles
Politics, probably. There's a lot of backlash against political correctness - some people would see reading such a book in schools as 'liberal indoctrination' intended to make white people feel guilty about being white.
I'd give you odds it's the reverse - that someone searched through an eBook library and banned every one with racial epithets regardless of context.
Usually, anymore, it is an organization that specializes in book or curriculum challenges. It will have a list of "objectionable" materials; downloadable complaints; challenges with page numbers and everything included; and all the press releases needed. The parent/teacher/administrator/pastor/insert authority figure does not even have to read the book.
Check out the Parents Action League's Book Alert Page (sorry, can't remember how to insert a link) for an example.
Not to say that AVG and Clam aren't great, but the average user wants to set it up and never look at it again, which is what Norton can give you that AVG and Clam can't.
Except, of course, that Symantec/Norton will attempt to trick you into manually paying for a subscription renewal, when you are being auto-billed...which is another thing Norton can give you that free AV can't.
Any operating system that requires anti-virus software to be safe should be avoided at all costs.
...except for the three times a year that you have to do paperwork/reports on a G--d--'d IE6-compliant website.
Because it doesn't hurt to have a reminder that the people we deal with on a regular basis don't think the way we do, and don't necessarily have even the most basic knowledge we take for granted.
"Is this "Foxfire" thing the Internet Service Provider y'all use here?"---actual quote from today.
Yeah--you unplug if there's lightning: that "should be" common sense. Here, though, not so much lightning as "sweet raccoon love" on the transformer. Or big surges after blackouts, or golf ball size hail, or drunken accidents.
For not-worst-case-scenarios, I tell my patrons to get the highest rated surge protector available locally and to put an in-line protector on the adapter cable, and to change them out after any major surge, or annually, if they didn't notice a surge, as we usually get one major electronics-frying surge a year. The ones who listen don't come in with that kind of problem. The ones who come in with fried components are either new in the area or are the ones who didn't get the message the first time.
Not only that, if you live in a rural area (or anywhere with poor infrastructure), surge protectors are essential. In my town, a high-rated wall-plug surge protector combined with an in-line protector, changed out annually, prevents disasters.
I learned about the relationship between surges and fried motherboards the hard way.
It's later than you think, the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun.
