Atypical Geek - Slashdot User

Submission + - Net companies consider the 'nuclear option' to com (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Atypical Geek on Friday December 30, 2011 @01:32PM

Atypical Geek writes: Alec Liu of Fox News reports that Amazon, Facebook and Google are considering a coordinated a coordinated blackout of the internet to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act being debated in Congress. From the article:

Such a move is drastic. And though the details of exactly how it would work are unclear, it's already under consideration, according to Markham Erickson, the executive director of NetCoalition, a trade association that includes the likes of Google, PayPal, Yahoo, and Twitter.

With the Senate debating the SOPA legislation at the end of January, it looks as if the tech industry’s top dogs are finally adding bite to their bark, something CNET called "the nuclear option."

"When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA,” Declan McCullagh wrote, “you’ll know they’re finally serious.”

Major media companies continue to press hard for the proposed law's passage. Richard Bennet writes in the New York Post that "SOPA is a careful and reasonable way of dealing with crime... protecting Americans from bogus Web sites should be a government priority."

Submission + - Teachers Union Boycotts LA Times Over Evaluations (newsweek.com)

Submitted by Atypical Geek on Friday August 20, 2010 @09:41AM

Atypical Geek writes: According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics.
Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.

According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was "an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning."

Submission + - Electric Car Subsidies Are Handouts for the Rich (slate.com)

Submitted by Atypical Geek on Sunday August 01, 2010 @04:04PM

Atypical Geek writes: Charles Lane, writing for Slate, argues that subsidies for electric cars are an example of 'limousine liberalism'; a lavish gift for well-off Americans to buy expensive cars for the sake of appearing green. From the article:
How rarefied is the electric-car demographic? When Deloitte Consulting interviewed industry experts and 2,000 potential buyers, it found that from now until 2020, only "young, very high income individuals" — from households making more than $200,000 a year — would even be interested in plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars.

Lane also takes issue with the billions of dollars in subsidies offered to automakers for the manufacture of batteries, arguing that research (warning, PDF) concludes that the money will not help in jump-starting the economies of scale that will drive down prices. At least, not as much or as quickly as the President has argued.

The Obama administration claims that offering subsidies for early adopters will open a wider market for electric vehicles, bringing costs down to mass-market levels. Lane counters that such a market does not exist because the majority of Americans have no interest in purchasing electric cars.
Of all the findings in Deloitte's market research, the most poignant was its profile of electric car "non-adopters." They have average household incomes of $54,000, live in the suburbs and rural areas, and depend heavily on their cars. There are millions and millions of non-adopters all across America. They are the middle class.

Slashdot Top Deals