Panel recommends ending tenure at Kentucky's community and technical college system →
What a manifestly stupid thing to do.
What a manifestly stupid thing to do.
So not only did ABC cancel one of the best shows on TV, but they’re also not going to even bother showing the remaining episodes? Thanks a lot, geniuses.
The problems Wall Street is having right now — problems whose technical aspects I don’t begin to understand fully, since among other things my grasp of economics is pretty weak — has journalists everywhere scrambling for something to say about it. I suspect that many of them (even, or especially, the ones whose job it is to cover investments and such things) don’t really understand the current panic either, but that hasn’t stopped them and our intelligent politicians from agreeing that there are two root causes at work here:
So that’s it. If we just calm down and let market forces to their work, this will all work out, right? Except that the Fed has been keeping tabs on this situation, thus calling into question the whole purpose of regulatory oversight in the first place. And these stupid investment decisions weren’t made by a few isolated individuals — experienced, senior investors have been making them for a long time, and congratulating each other on making them, and encouraging other investors to make them, too.
So what is the root cause here? Really, it all comes down to greed. That’s the one thing that the Fed is not going to regulate, since after all it’s pretty much the foundation for market capitalism in the first place. And since the root cause of this particular crisis falls within the blind spot of our economic system, it’s unlikely that we’re going to learn anything from it. After all, greed — this base human impulse — lies at the heart of our banking system, and thus our economy, and thus (really) our whole society. $85 billion is a lot for the government to swallow, but it’s small fry compared to changing the underpinnings of our culture.
This is really insane — someone goes to Walmart to scan and reprint an old family photo and is stopped by an employee who says that the picture can’t be reprinted because it’s copyrighted.
In disbelief, I point out that the photo is almost 100 years old and the people are all dead. Undeterred, the Wal-Mart employee informs me that “Copyright lasts forever. It’s the law.” My scans up to that point are deleted and I’m free to leave the store with my old photos unscanned. I guess I should be thankful they didn’t have a portable shredder on hand to seize my photos and do away with them right then and there.
Just do what Ashley and I did after our problems with Walmart: go to Target. The prints are better and they don’t ask you a single question about copyright.
Dude, basic HTML: you close tags with a slash. Though it is funny watching the text get progressively larger as the <h1> tags build up. (via getupgetout)
Walmart has a policy of not reprinting photos that “look professional.” So even though our wedding photographer has given Ashley and I all the negatives and told us that we can do whatever we want with them, Walmart doesn’t believe us and wants a signed release before they’ll do anything. Oh, and they kept the CD full of images that we gave them.
Who appointed them the copyright police? If I had a DSLR camera and turned in some photos that “looked professional,” would I have to prove to them that I took the pictures before they’d print them for me?
I don’t know, maybe this is good for photographers or something. All I know is that it’s making me very angry right now.
Update: I should have said, “I know this is good for photographers.” I certainly don’t want to make it any easier for someone to go around ripping off other people’s work.
In the clip above, a voter explains that she can’t support a Muslim.
Gold. (via fatmanatee)
This one drives me crazy. Call Obama what you want, but the man is not an elitist.
This little nugget of insanity has been making the rounds on the Web lately.
These are some of the best movies that the filmmaking culture is turning out now. Every year there are at least 20 or 25 films that are somewhere between excellent, very good or good enough to watch and think about later. If regular people in Boston and Saskatchewan are living such insulated and cut-off lives that they can’t be bothered to go to some of these films unless it has an advertised ‘happy pill’ vibe then the hell with them. They’re children. I have no time for childishness, and neither does anyone else of any worth. Life is short.
While I suppose it’s comforting to think that movies are some great piece of the human experience, or whatever, consuming them really isn’t all that necessary to being a decent human being. Why does going to see a movie have to be a chore? What’s wrong with people wanting to go see a movie for pure escapism?
Seriously, this high-minded contempt of the so-called philistines of middle America is getting old. Living in a cultural capital doesn’t make people any better than the rest of humanity. It just apparently makes them snobs.
Few things to me are more vital than journalism practiced according to high standards. Simply put, Google could do much more to protect this public trust: Offer support to journalism education and professional groups dedicated to truth seeking and time-honored ethical values. And assist newspapers directly, just as I think it’s time for newspapers to band together to sue to protect content.
Neil Henry may be a journo professor at UC-Berkeley, but he clearly doesn’t understand how journalism on the internet works. He blasts Google News for “provid[ing] more news every day, free of charge no less!” But all Google News does is provide links to existing content on — wait for it — newspaper sites. They don’t write any news themselves! Doesn’t Marketplace have any fact checkers? They need to learn some (in Henry’s words) “time-honored ethical values” and not deal in such “biased rants.”
Another Huffington Post blogger weighs in:
Rowling created this world that lives in our imaginations, and this is her final gift to her people. So no, it is not just about readers not wanting to know anything about the book in advance, it is about readers not wanting anybody else to know anything about the book in advance, so its arrival can be experienced by everyone all at once. It’s like a Schroedinger’s cat thing — the story has not actually ended one way or the other until the official release, and then suddenly the ending is at hand, there for all to share in together.
Oh, for goodness sake. Knowing the ending doesn’t change enjoyment of the book one bit. And the NYT review didn’t reveal the ending anyway, so what’s the big deal?
The New York Times got its hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J.K. Rowling’s series, and posted a review on its Web site. And people are mad, MAD, that the ending might be spoiled by reports like this. Case in point:
With who knows what spoilers? That’s not rhetorical; I don’t know what spoilers because there WAS NO SPOILER WARNING EITHER WAY. So I didn’t read it (though in scrolling to the end to see if there was a “with” involved — a sure tip-off to the identity of the book-buyer — I did see the words “Ginny Weasley” and my heart flared with fear, and hope, because Ginny Weasley is AWESOME). But honestly, embargoes are in place for a reason, and entreaties from the author (or the Crying Game director, for that matter) are there specifically for the benefit of the public — the very same public the NYT is purporting to serve with their rushed-to-print review …
Please. Screaming about spoilers implies that the pleasure derived from a story comes solely from plot — and that’s plot in its most basic, pedestrian form: this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Sure, plots hold a reader’s interest, but they aren’t the sole component of a good story. Knowing, for example, (spoiler!) that Rosebud is just a sled doesn’t make Charles Foster Kane a less interesting character, or his losses by the end Citizen Kane any less tragic. In some cases, knowing how things end improves appreciation of a work; (spoiler!) Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense gains pathos when the audience knows that he’s actually already dead.
Anyway, the Times report hardly spoils anything. Below is the nearest thing to a “secret” I could find (spoiler!):
Harry’s journey will propel him forward to a final showdown with his arch enemy, and also send him backward into the past, to the house in Godric’s Hollow where his parents died, to learn about his family history and the equally mysterious history of Dumbledore’s family. … Indeed, ambiguities proliferate throughout “The Deathly Hallows”: we are made to see that kindly Dumbledore, sinister Severus Snape and perhaps even the awful Muggle cousin Dudley Dursley may be more complicated than they initially seem, that all of them, like Harry, have hidden aspects to their personalities, and that choice — more than talent or predisposition — matters most of all.
That hardly gives anything away, and only makes me more interested in reading the story. And that’s because the ambiguities mentioned here tug out what makes Harry Potter’s story so engaging. The older and more experienced he becomes, the more the world strips off its veneer of black and white, so that Harry finds himself in a world of shifting, gray ambiguities. The opening scenes of The Order of the Phoenix illustrate this well: Mundungus Fletcher, supposedly a wizard on the side of good, leaves his post watching Harry to engage in a criminal deal, exposing Harry and his bullying cousin Dudley to the deadly Dementor’s kiss. But then the old neighbor lady — who always seemed like a harmless muggle — turns out to be a spy sent by Dumbledore to watch Harry from the very beginning of the first book! With her help, Harry escapes — and is promptly expelled from Hogwarts for using magic in front of a muggle; never mind that Harry’s used magic expressly to save that muggle from certain death.
If the layers of ambiguity and uncertainty continue to pile up until the end, when the Dark Lord does battle with a nearly-dark-himself Harry, the story will have come to a satisfying conclusion. I only hope that old Draco Malfoy, the snotty rich-kid bully who’s pushed Harry around from the beginning, will finally listen to his conscience and do some good for a change.
