Journal Journal: deleted
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I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry.
So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.
Been on Slashdot for at least a decade now, I forget when I joined. Have had "excellent" karma since before they used fuzzy words instead of numbers to describe it. Haven't had mod points for the past few years... then suddenly this month I've had mod points five or six times. Either the dice are loaded, or they ran out of other moderators, or the whole system is broken.
I've lurked at
But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.
I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.
It's been touched on before in various Slashdot discussions, but the mainstream media is starting to pay more attention to Ron Paul, darling of the Internet libertarian set, and the attention isn't very flattering. An article in The New Republic, "Angry White Man" lays out in detail how Paul's newsletters have over the years published a wide variety of paranoid and racist material. As Cato Institute scholar Tim Lee points out, it's not really important whether Paul wrote the statements or someone else did. His name is on the publication. What sort of an executive doesn't take responsibility for statements made under his name?
It's a shame. Voters are looking for a third way, and for a time Ron Paul seemed a breath of fresh air. But when you get into the rough-and-tumble of presidential politics, everything is scrutinized. I'm thankful that the press is finally investigating Paul in more detail, but I suspect that many Paul supporters will try to pretend that he's still a worthy candidate. They'll ignore his "extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society" and they'll pretend his newsletters never contained headlines like this one about racial disturbances in the Adams Morgan district in Washington, D.C.: "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo."
That's not confronting political correctness. That's racism. I don't want a president who tolerates crap like this to be written under his name, whether by him or by someone else.
I'm getting so tired of reading Slashdot comments in which the ill-informed hold forth on the fair use exception in copyright law. It is particularly galling when someone makes a pronouncement about a "truth" of fair use that is actually fact-dependent. For example, use of copyrighted materials for teaching has been recognized as falling under the fair use exception. However, that doesn't mean that a professor can just copy a few chapters of this book, a few from that book, and some from another book, slap it together, and use it as a coursebook without paying any licensing fees.
Fair use is a balance that cannot be codified with the sorts of clean boundaries that apply in mathematics. The law is about human behavior, and human behavior gets messy. It gets particularly messy when you're talking about the legal fiction that is copyright law. Pretending that it isn't, and attempting to distill it down to easy pronouncements doesn't help our understanding of it, any more than Lou Dobbs is really telling us what's going on in the money markets. Sure, a clean, crisp pronouncement goes down easy, but it's nothing but sugar water. Unfortunately many people like the taste of sugar water, and they spread the same misinformation to other people. It happens over and over again here on Slashdot, every time a story about copyright pops up.
I know just enough about TCP/IP to be dangerous. So I don't hold forth on the subject. I wish the vocal ill-informed would realize that just because they've read a few comments by other ill-informed Slashdotters doesn't mean that they actually know anything about fair use. Wisdom of the crowds, my ass.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman