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.
This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .
I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.
I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?
After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.
"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.
"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.
"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.
"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.
I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.
I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.
After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.
Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood