Posted on Sunday, 20 June, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
HIstorian rock star Howard Zinn
People’s historian Howard Zinn has given permission to the folks at History Is A Weapon to put his classic A People’s History Of The United States, online, but that hasn’t stopped HarperCollins from chasing after the website’s developers with threats of a lawsuit for doing so. Last month HIAW published its response to the publishing giant.
While HarperCollins claims both they and the author have not given permission, but the person writing the Cease & Desist order didn’t seem to check her or his facts with Zinn, who had met the HIAW crew in advance and and also gave positive feedback after seeing it online. Download your archived copy here (while supplies last).
The online copy is far from an identical experience to the dead trees version . The site creators scanned the book’s some 650 pages and coded it via hand to correct scanning mistakes, missing some here and there. A lawsuit seems a little ridiculous. The site developers have said they’ll take it offline if and when they ever are asked to do so by Zinn or his family, so HarperCollins could quickly ascertain whether permission was given.
Posted on Saturday, 10 April, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
The latest issue on the stands
A piece I wrote for the Independent World Report, entitled “Blogging beyond borders,” as a Committee to Protect Bloggers critter was published today. While looking at the state of internet rights in Cuba and other Latin American countries, I wanted it to take a wider look at the state of internet rights worldwide. In spite of the efforts of Cuba, China, Iran, the UK’s digital economy law and Australia’s threats to heavily censor the web with its own draconian firewall, the InterWebs remain a borderless, wild frontier and focusing in regional situations makes less and less sense. When one government stifles access to it, the impact is felt by people in various parts of the globe who may be trying to get information in or out.
Posted on Tuesday, 30 March, 2010 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”
– Philip Pullman, upon being asked whether his book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was offensive.
Thanks Mr. Pullman, for saying things I think, but, you know, a lot better than I would.
Will a serene background image of a snow covered field and non-obtrusive piano really help me bang out serious prose? I don’t know about all the bells and whistles around Omniwriter Beta V2′s version of an immersive writing environment, but I’m sort of taken with the fading in and out interface and cool round buttons, and as a free download and a Mac only application its passed my minimum requirements to try out.
Posted on Monday, 30 November, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I’m very interested in reading this book by James Marcus Bach. He’s a self-taught games programmer who scored a swett gig at Apple with little to no direct experience and no management background. The introduction is posted at Gizmodo right now, which offters the following: “The book’s main purpose, as illustrated by the excerpt James has kindly permitted us to publish, is to show how education is not about pieces of paper on the walls, but the knowledge you cram inside your own head.”
“Chris was supportive. “You should not just read about software,” he suggested. “Try to find solutions to our problems in other disciplines.” Maybe Chris was more supportive than he ever knew. I treated that one casual suggestion as permission to spend work time to learn anything. I browsed many of the two hundred or so academic journals that came through the library. Even crazy stuff. I read “Anthropometry of Algerian Women,” and “Optimum Handle Height for a Push-Pull Type Manually-Operated Dryland Weeder.”
As much as I’d like to see her return to fiction for at least one more round, I usually look forward to about anything she publishes, which always seems to work as a sharp, double-bladd instrument, cutting through entrenched mainstream analysis while also giving the well-meaning “left” a few well deserved slices. Again using her homeland of India as a backdrop for showing the larger picture, this round looks at something contrary to most sensibilities, including my own, the “dark side of democracy.”
Why do people in places in mass revolt against something we know so many others are fighting to obtain?
The well-endowed peace industry, speaking on the peoples’ behalf, informed us that “Kashmiris are tired of violence and want peace.” What kind of peace they were willing to settle for was never clarified. Meanwhile Bollywood’s cache of Kashmir/Muslim-terrorist films has brainwashed most Indians into believing that all of Kashmir’s sorrows could be laid at the door of evil, people-hating terrorists.
To anybody who cared to ask, or, more importantly, to listen, it was always clear that even in their darkest moments, people in Kashmir had kept the fires burning and that it was not peace alone they yearned for, but freedom too. Over the last two months the carefully confected picture of an innocent people trapped between “two guns,” both equally hated, has, pardon the pun, been shot to hell.
SEO is a form of Google-Kremlinology in which firms attempt to figure out how to game search engines’ ranking algorithms, rather than trying to create the best, most interesting website they can and assuming that the engines will figure out how to highly rank their material. — Cory Doctorow
D3 distributed
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SEO is a form of Google-Kremlinology in which firms attempt to figure out how to game search engines’ ranking algorithms, rather than trying to create the best, most interesting website they can and assuming that the engines will figure out how to highly rank their material.
