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Washington's IT Guy

Posted by kdawson on from the seal-of-approval dept.

Timothy found a profile of Carl Malamud up at The American Prospect, characterizing it thus: "Carl Malamud — underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible. The man should be up there on the list with Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the big Free Software projects, and the Creative Commons."

14 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What the fuck in Tim blathering about? I mean, HUH?

    --
    "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
    1. Re:WTF? by sortius_nod · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      I think he smoked too much crack, just random dribblings.

    2. Re:WTF? by AgtSkippy · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      My thoughts exactly.

  2. Re:What by PatPending · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This ranks with Doctors Reverse With Drugs Autism-Linked Fragile X Syndrome In Mice from June 12, 2010

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    What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
  3. Re:Wow. by AnonGCB · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    The apostrophe? That's the only thing I see that might be misunderstood to be improper.

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  4. "Liberal" is now a verb? by Eternal+Vigilance · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    FTFA: "One man's quest to liberal all government information"

    Whatever "to liberal" means, of one thing we can be sure: it has no meaningful real-world effects. :-/

    1. Re:"Liberal" is now a verb? by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I believe that is what is known in the as a "typo".

      See, a "typo" is where someone intends to write one thing, but they don't actually type all the correct letters, or they leave some letters out by mistake, or they do type the correct letters but put them in the wrong order.

      In this case, it appears to be a typo caused by a "brain fart", as it is called. More on "brain farts" in another lesson - the gist is that a mental glitch caused the individual to type a similar but different word than intended, as opposed to a mental glitch causing an individual to tap an incorrect letter. This is similar to the type of glitch that causes an omission of a letter.

      Unfortunately, while automatic "spell checkers", as they are called, generally catch typos and warn of the incorrect spelling, a mistaken but otherwise correctly spelled word will not be caught by the "spell checker".

      In this case, the intended word was "liberate", not "liberal".

      Homework:

      List five other common typos.

      Have you ever caught a typo before? If so, how did you deal with it?

      What do you think about people who mock simple typos, particularly when the typo is a correctly spelled word on its own? Do you think this behavior is childish? Why or why not?

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
  5. KDawson Strikes Again by FlyingGuy · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    god I wish he would stop approving shit.

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    1. Re:KDawson Strikes Again by blackraven14250 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      bad mod...

    2. Re:KDawson Strikes Again by Inda · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Rubbish. He's real. He has a website and a CV.

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      This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  6. Re:What by Nebulo · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    No kidding. There's half a dozen passages in that article that would make better introductions.

    Nebulo

  7. Reading Comprehension by sexybomber · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Carl Malamud — underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible.

    He also sells shells by the seashore. Tongue-twisters tend to torture those who might think about reading the article, but are now too confused to continue. Good Gods, sir, at least read it out loud before hitting "Post".

    1. Re:Reading Comprehension by Arimus · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Thank god for that - its not just me who found that summary 'odd'.

      I know I've not had my morning coffee yet but can normally make some kind of sense of /. summaries without having to re-read thing several times. (And yes I gave up and jumped to the comments without reading the article.)

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      --- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
  8. OK, I'll play... by dsoltesz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What the unholy fuck is this?

    I think /. has officially jumped the shark. It's bad enough the "News" gets posted hours and days after it stopped being relevant, but now I'm required to wade through this gibberish? I thought I was having an acid flashback. The suspense was killing me, so I succumbed to the temptation and actually RTMFA (well, skimmed TFA because it was long and rambling and I stopped caring after the first paragraph, especially when I realized, with great disappointment, I was not having an acid flashback). I'm sure Malamud is a very lovely man (and apparently at least a borderline kook), but really? Why the fuck do I care? Did this really "Matter" enough to get promoted to a front page article? And what thesaurus lists "biographical drivel" as a synonym for "News?"

    On the plus side, the discussion thus far has been quite entertaining.