Quite the opposite, blowing up the airport would have a lot more of an impact. Because it would show that the whole security theater is as meaningless as it actually is.
Then again, why bother, the whole security theater is already inconveniencing the people enough that they are more fed up with it than with the terrorists.
I think you are missing the point. Terrorist don't want to show that security theater is meaningless. On the contrary, they would want our government to simply amp security up to suffocating levels (e.g., we spend $$$$$$$$$$ to counter their $). This is a classic asymmetric warfare gambit play and we are taking the bait.
Note this doesn't say anything about how effective any actual security measure would be because as we all know, no security measure perfect and even if there were one, the TSA wouldn't be able to implement it anyhow...
Have your students never heard of Google Earth? You don't need to buy a single thing, it's free for educational users.
And that gives a damn-near perfect, rotatable, zoomable view of anything you like and you can even get plugins that compare area, measurements, etc. using proper sphere-following routes.
But, no, let's continue printing things out on 2D paper that is GUARANTEED to be distorted, and then argue about what distortion we prefer.
I thought Google Earth uses the vilified Mercator projection. Otherwise north is not north, or angles aren't preserved...
The Behrmann is undistorted at 30deg, where Gall-Peters is undistorted at 45deg. This makes the Gall-Peters have a bit too much vertically stretch distortion at the equator for my taste.
Under the law, you can sell your patent to whomever you want. This proposed legislation in Maryland just prevents their state universities (which are effectively controlled/directed by a board chartered by the state) from directly selling University patents to trolls. It doesn't set legal precedence, it just directs the policy of an entity that is nominally under state government control.
This law doesn't (and can't) prevent non-state universities in Maryland from doing so, or anyone else in the state for that matter. It even can't prevent the company that the University sold the patent to from later selling them to a patent troll (it only requires that the University research past practices of the entity that it licenses to, but as we know past performance doesn't guarantee future results).
In fact, depending on how some universities' independent licencing entities are legally structured, they might practically be considered patent trolls themselves (i.e., patent assertion entities whose primary business model is to assert patents or obtain licensing fees). Depending on how this law is interpreted, it might prevent the cross assignment of a patent originally created by a joint partnership industry/research group of the university from transferring the patent to the university's own licencing arm, leaving the industrial partner the only entity in Maryland legally capable of licensing a patent from a joint partnership to others (and I suspect an industrial partner probably wouldn't be financially motivated to license to competitors). Now that would some accidental unintended consequence of this bill wouldn't it?
Who gives a shit what percentage of your income you spend in a rental? More important is how much absolute money you have left after paying for housing (e.g, the amount you spend on food, entertainment, retirement savings, etc). Seems to me that optimizing for housing percentage of salary is totally bogus.
However, more important is quality of life and the metropolitan area you live in is generally less important than exactly where you live in that city and what you like to do with your spare time. For example, if you like the sun, Seattle sunshine is a bit scarce (for my taste anyhow). On the other hand, if you want to live in your parent's basement you probably can't do that in Cali as most houses don't have basements and affordable houses tend to be on the small size (not to mention the difficutlies if your parent's don't actually live there). If you like fishing and barbecue, don't go to Austin (but there are plenty of places near enough to Austin to commute for that, although the traffic is getting a bit prohibitive for that). Don't know much about Pittsburgh (only visited twice). Seems like it might be nice, except in the winter (when my father-in-law got snowed in for a couple days).
I've worked at several places with restaurants. The thing is, they tend to be whoever *paid* the most for the privilege to be there to get a big captive audience.
So the on-campus food tends to be overpriced, low quality, so people tend to go off campus.
Would be great to actually make the campus space available to outside businesses and customers, to save employees the drive to go somewhere.
As a practical matter, I doubt there will be many outside customers (other than "tourists"). If parking at Google's current campus is any indication, there will be no place for outside customers to park (which will deter many folks from even attempting it). I'm guessing it's mostly a "ruse" to keep the current employees of Google to stop inviting their friends for a "free" meal an going forware most non-vendor/customer guests will be only invited to lunch as paying customers...
But those Google employees still eat, right? Meaning somebody cooks for them, cleans, etc. In other words, the jobs moved elsewhere, that's all.
Of course when we eliminate all public jobs, we can all work for the communist state (or the company store, take your pick). It might be more efficient, but not the command economy world I want to live in... Basically Google is unintentionally walmart-ing a food mono-culture, is that how we want to live?
Also, and this isn't often brought up, but giving a untaxed fringe lunch benefit to their employees, Google is circumventing taxes by eliminating sales tax (that would be collected by local businesses) and payroll tax (that employees would have to pay on the money Google gives them for "free" lunch) from a more normal economic exchange. Thus they are really robbing from the community.
I'm confused. If Stacy Nowak and Gallaudet U want to use a video from anywhere on the net don't they have the obligation to make sure that they are ADA compliant. Assuming the proper license, if they want to use anyone's video from the net I would think that it is their responsibility to make it compliant for their students.
The finding that the DoJ made was that Berkeley was subject to ADA Title II provisions (which applies to State and Local Government Entities) that imposes the requirement that if they provide access to materials, equivalent accessible access must be provided. Title II requirements for accessible access don't apply to random non-government entities on the net.
nope that was it, and i wasn't trying to be facetious, i was not aware of the braille machine, though one wonders who pays for that 1300 dollar device...
the analogy in this case would be that berkeley should be responsible for purchasing the machine for the deaf and blind person. because, you know, why not? if they're responsible for transcribing the audio, why aren't they also held liable for rendering the transcription into braille?
at some point you really must draw the line. my view of the scope of this law is that if there is a single person classified as disabled who cannot access this content free of charge to themselves, berkeley is doing something contravening the ADA and can be held liable for it.
a blind and deaf quadripalegic then, if they so chose could sue berkeley to have this information made accessible in their preferred transfer medium.
this course we are taking will certainly result in equality, we will all be equally poor and ignorant.
You don't want to quit do you. Is Berekely responsible for buying the computers for sighted-hearing students to render the YouTube videos? Of course not. But even sighted-hearing people generally can't decode VP9 or MP4 videos without the computer? The blind deaf person will have to purchase their own braille reading machine.
I figured you would go the blind-deaf-quadriplegic angle. You should read up about Christopher Harmon... Perhaps spending money on people like him is a waste of money and public money could be spent better than to give this person interpreter services, but the spirit of the ADA was to at least do what is at least affordable to help people like Christopher out before abandoning him to his final passing that put an end to his increasing life of solitude.
... yes, and at that point they've effectively argued that to release content in one medium, one must necessarily release content in all mediums. do the blind and deaf perchance require braille as well and a mail delivery of a transcription of a purely audio base.
Once transcribed to electronic text form, there are reasonable automated translators to convert Braille ASCII to contracted Braille for convenient rendering on dot-less Braille technology such as a Refreshable Braille Display (aka RBD) kind of like this one available with free shipping on Amazon...
There is no need to kill trees and use snail-mail in the modern era...
(yes, I know you were attempting to be facetious, and you will no doubt up your ante to those with even more limiting disabilities)
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
Apparently, you didn't read my link to title II of the ADA to carefuly. State and local government entities (like UC Berkeley) are restricted by the ADA. Since the professors probably yielded the copyrights to those lectures to UC Berkeley (a state government institution), they videos are likely restricted by the UC Berkeley legal requirements under the ADA.
FWIW, there are many restrictions on "free" speech. You can't just freely distribute copyrighted material, you can't yell fire in a crowded room, etcs... You might argue that a ban on freely distributing copyrighted material is "harming the public", but I don't know if you would get much traction with that generic argument (well maybe with/.-ers, but probably not the public at large).
The law in many areas is about consensus, and for better or worse, we have a large amount of consensus that public institutions need to make accommodations to prevent discrimination. This case is about discrimination on disabilities nothing more, nothing less, Diana Moon Glampers, here we come...
Truth be told, I'm waiting for political preference to be a protected class of individuals under the law to show the silliness of this, but I ain't holding my breath...
Windows 7 is almost 10 years old at this point. how long should MS support it for?
My car is over 10 years old. How long should the manufacturer still support it? At ten years of age do they say, "Oh sorry, we won't service it any more."? "Cracked windshield, blown muffler? Yeah, that's too bad. We don't carry what you need and oh by the way, you can't go to a third party and get it from them either."
Actually, car manufacturers don't legally have to support their cars after 10 years either... Most of them do, but they don't have to.
Disabled students would simply not have access to these videos, and as usual depend on obtaining knowledge using other means. Maybe having a friend transcribe content, or having lecture notes. It's only an issue if the university demands those deaf students use those videos as a requirement to study.
You realize that one of the people that brought this complaint was a deaf *professor* who wanted to use the "free" material for her class at a university for the deaf and couldn't do that. Instead of captioning the videos for her class, she wanted Berkeley to do so at Berkeley's expense for benefit of her and her students...
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
hrm... could they release purely audio recordings of lectures? not quite as good, but still serviceable.
unless.... could they demand closed captioning on audio recordings too? that would be hilarious.
i think berkeley should release audio recordings in the future and see what happens.
you know it's gone off the rails when making an end-run around the ADA is the right thing to do.
Except for the small detail that for audio only recordings, since Stacy Nowak and Glenn Lockhart (the parties that initiated the USDoJ investigation) are deaf, they could have demanded audio-transcriptions as ADA accommodations...
I would have said "nice-try", but actually you probably should have thought about that since it was pretty obvious...
They already used "automatic text-to-speech software". The jackasses who sued said that isn't good enough (for a free video), and the court agreed.
IANAL, but to be "technical", the issue didn't get to a court yet, there was an *administrative* investigation and finding w/ remediation recommendations handed down by the US-DoJ (executive branch, no judicial). As with most administrative finding, if the remediation is not complied with, generally result in the US-DoJ bringing civil and/or criminal charges in a judicial court (which is often negotiated into a consent-decree before damages and criminal penalties are assessed).
Berkeley simply attempted to render the remediation recommendations moot by taking down the videos in the finding. This is probably helped along by the fact that the remediation included a requirement to "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II.", which is basically unlimited damages to random people as long as the material was up. Given the complainant was a professor attempting to use the free material to teach a class, it seems like anyone could claim to want to use the material in course and claim damages higher than any one person...
That's true, it's not about students at Berkeley, anyone in the US could have brought this lawsuit.
In fact Stacy Nowak, a professor at Gallaudet University, wanted to use these videos for a course and initiated the complaint with the USDOJ that eventually led to UC-Berkeley taking down these videos...
No, they have to make reasonable accommodations to their students. Seems a bit of a stretch to say that they have the same obligation to non-students as to students.
The USDOJ apparently decided in favor of Stacy Nowak (a professor at Gallaudet University) who "would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, 'Journalism for Social Change,' but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures."
Including to "6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Berkeley *already* makes reasonable accommodations for their tuition-paying students by offering to caption any videos for them. The DOJ decided that if they make the material available to anyone, they must do this for anyone. As a result, they no longer make the videos available to non-students.
This is part of the reason why we can't have nice things...
Nah, the lesson here is that it's IMPOSSIBLE to keep government and economics as separate as possible, and that trying to keep them away is not a sustainable solution.
This isn't true, at all. The government has one asset: it holds a monopoly on violence. All things the government does or can do stem from that one basic fact. Having the government do anything else is bad because they will mix the assets they have to achieve objectives. Some things are more "benign", at least in modern conception, like taking people's homes by force or shooting/jailing/etc them for not paying taxes, the bulk of which antithetically go to providing other people with food and housing. Then there are bigger issues, like the fact we are coming up fast on the transition from a scarcity-based economy to a post-scarcity economy thanks to extreme automation - the place controlling who lives and dies is not the place I want deciding what to do with all the extra people who are no longer needed to drive the economy.
That's cute, you think the economy doesn't control the government. It does so on so many levels it is hard to understand how impossible it would be to separate. For example...
* The need for donor money to pay for election campaigns. * The military industrial complex * The Fed * GDP growth rate correlation to election results (basically one of Nate Silver's hypothesis)
As to your point, there is no need for the government to decide who lives and dies, when people are no longer needed to drive the economy, they can simply *create* economic activity by spending more on the military (or other "homeland" protection) scheme. Just because the military can kill people (directly via drones, or indirectly by selling arms into parties in active conflict zones), doesn't mean that the military has to. They don't have to follow typical economic rules.
Slashdot Mirror
it turns out the budget was REDUCED by $400 million
In other news: the chocolate ration was raised from 30 grams a week to 20 grams a week. ;)
Wasn't that a Michelle Obama school lunch strategy...
Quite the opposite, blowing up the airport would have a lot more of an impact. Because it would show that the whole security theater is as meaningless as it actually is.
Then again, why bother, the whole security theater is already inconveniencing the people enough that they are more fed up with it than with the terrorists.
I think you are missing the point. Terrorist don't want to show that security theater is meaningless. On the contrary, they would want our government to simply amp security up to suffocating levels (e.g., we spend $$$$$$$$$$ to counter their $). This is a classic asymmetric warfare gambit play and we are taking the bait.
Note this doesn't say anything about how effective any actual security measure would be because as we all know, no security measure perfect and even if there were one, the TSA wouldn't be able to implement it anyhow...
You are acting like you know what the profile is and just aren't telling us. I'm guessing in reality you have no idea.
FWIW, according to this article SpaceShipTwo riders will experience 3Gs on takeoff and 6Gs on decent.
As a reference point, SpaceShipOne riders experienced about ~5G of deceleration when it re-entered the atmosphere...
Have your students never heard of Google Earth? You don't need to buy a single thing, it's free for educational users.
And that gives a damn-near perfect, rotatable, zoomable view of anything you like and you can even get plugins that compare area, measurements, etc. using proper sphere-following routes.
But, no, let's continue printing things out on 2D paper that is GUARANTEED to be distorted, and then argue about what distortion we prefer.
I thought Google Earth uses the vilified Mercator projection. Otherwise north is not north, or angles aren't preserved...
The Behrmann is undistorted at 30deg, where Gall-Peters is undistorted at 45deg. This makes the Gall-Peters have a bit too much vertically stretch distortion at the equator for my taste.
It sets a legal precedent.
Under the law, you can sell your patent to whomever you want. This proposed legislation in Maryland just prevents their state universities (which are effectively controlled/directed by a board chartered by the state) from directly selling University patents to trolls. It doesn't set legal precedence, it just directs the policy of an entity that is nominally under state government control.
This law doesn't (and can't) prevent non-state universities in Maryland from doing so, or anyone else in the state for that matter. It even can't prevent the company that the University sold the patent to from later selling them to a patent troll (it only requires that the University research past practices of the entity that it licenses to, but as we know past performance doesn't guarantee future results).
In fact, depending on how some universities' independent licencing entities are legally structured, they might practically be considered patent trolls themselves (i.e., patent assertion entities whose primary business model is to assert patents or obtain licensing fees). Depending on how this law is interpreted, it might prevent the cross assignment of a patent originally created by a joint partnership industry/research group of the university from transferring the patent to the university's own licencing arm, leaving the industrial partner the only entity in Maryland legally capable of licensing a patent from a joint partnership to others (and I suspect an industrial partner probably wouldn't be financially motivated to license to competitors). Now that would some accidental unintended consequence of this bill wouldn't it?
Who gives a shit what percentage of your income you spend in a rental? More important is how much absolute money you have left after paying for housing (e.g, the amount you spend on food, entertainment, retirement savings, etc). Seems to me that optimizing for housing percentage of salary is totally bogus.
However, more important is quality of life and the metropolitan area you live in is generally less important than exactly where you live in that city and what you like to do with your spare time. For example, if you like the sun, Seattle sunshine is a bit scarce (for my taste anyhow). On the other hand, if you want to live in your parent's basement you probably can't do that in Cali as most houses don't have basements and affordable houses tend to be on the small size (not to mention the difficutlies if your parent's don't actually live there). If you like fishing and barbecue, don't go to Austin (but there are plenty of places near enough to Austin to commute for that, although the traffic is getting a bit prohibitive for that). Don't know much about Pittsburgh (only visited twice). Seems like it might be nice, except in the winter (when my father-in-law got snowed in for a couple days).
I've worked at several places with restaurants. The thing is, they tend to be whoever *paid* the most for the privilege to be there to get a big captive audience.
So the on-campus food tends to be overpriced, low quality, so people tend to go off campus.
Would be great to actually make the campus space available to outside businesses and customers, to save employees the drive to go somewhere.
As a practical matter, I doubt there will be many outside customers (other than "tourists"). If parking at Google's current campus is any indication, there will be no place for outside customers to park (which will deter many folks from even attempting it). I'm guessing it's mostly a "ruse" to keep the current employees of Google to stop inviting their friends for a "free" meal an going forware most non-vendor/customer guests will be only invited to lunch as paying customers...
But those Google employees still eat, right? Meaning somebody cooks for them, cleans, etc. In other words, the jobs moved elsewhere, that's all.
Of course when we eliminate all public jobs, we can all work for the communist state (or the company store, take your pick). It might be more efficient, but not the command economy world I want to live in... Basically Google is unintentionally walmart-ing a food mono-culture, is that how we want to live?
Also, and this isn't often brought up, but giving a untaxed fringe lunch benefit to their employees, Google is circumventing taxes by eliminating sales tax (that would be collected by local businesses) and payroll tax (that employees would have to pay on the money Google gives them for "free" lunch) from a more normal economic exchange. Thus they are really robbing from the community.
I'm confused. If Stacy Nowak and Gallaudet U want to use a video from anywhere on the net don't they have the obligation to make sure that they are ADA compliant. Assuming the proper license, if they want to use anyone's video from the net I would think that it is their responsibility to make it compliant for their students.
The finding that the DoJ made was that Berkeley was subject to ADA Title II provisions (which applies to State and Local Government Entities) that imposes the requirement that if they provide access to materials, equivalent accessible access must be provided. Title II requirements for accessible access don't apply to random non-government entities on the net.
nope that was it, and i wasn't trying to be facetious, i was not aware of the braille machine, though one wonders who pays for that 1300 dollar device...
the analogy in this case would be that berkeley should be responsible for purchasing the machine for the deaf and blind person. because, you know, why not? if they're responsible for transcribing the audio, why aren't they also held liable for rendering the transcription into braille?
at some point you really must draw the line. my view of the scope of this law is that if there is a single person classified as disabled who cannot access this content free of charge to themselves, berkeley is doing something contravening the ADA and can be held liable for it.
a blind and deaf quadripalegic then, if they so chose could sue berkeley to have this information made accessible in their preferred transfer medium.
this course we are taking will certainly result in equality, we will all be equally poor and ignorant.
You don't want to quit do you. Is Berekely responsible for buying the computers for sighted-hearing students to render the YouTube videos? Of course not. But even sighted-hearing people generally can't decode VP9 or MP4 videos without the computer? The blind deaf person will have to purchase their own braille reading machine.
I figured you would go the blind-deaf-quadriplegic angle. You should read up about Christopher Harmon... Perhaps spending money on people like him is a waste of money and public money could be spent better than to give this person interpreter services, but the spirit of the ADA was to at least do what is at least affordable to help people like Christopher out before abandoning him to his final passing that put an end to his increasing life of solitude.
And why is it so tasty?
The song of the siren...
How about growing it on a mesh of a recycled toilet paper. Yummy
Might want to wash that down with Beer made from recycled water...
Did you know Chernobyl won't be clean for literally millions of years?
Apparently, w/o human intrusion for 30 years, the land around Chernobyl is thriving with life.
http://news.nationalgeographic...
An interesting quotable from this article...
Essentially, this means that human populations have a bigger negative impact than radiation.
So, now IBM wants to get into the diploma mill business too... I guess the transformation is complete.
... yes, and at that point they've effectively argued that to release content in one medium, one must necessarily release content in all mediums. do the blind and deaf perchance require braille as well and a mail delivery of a transcription of a purely audio base.
Once transcribed to electronic text form, there are reasonable automated translators to convert Braille ASCII to contracted Braille for convenient rendering on dot-less Braille technology such as a Refreshable Braille Display (aka RBD) kind of like this one available with free shipping on Amazon...
There is no need to kill trees and use snail-mail in the modern era...
(yes, I know you were attempting to be facetious, and you will no doubt up your ante to those with even more limiting disabilities)
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
Apparently, you didn't read my link to title II of the ADA to carefuly. State and local government entities (like UC Berkeley) are restricted by the ADA. Since the professors probably yielded the copyrights to those lectures to UC Berkeley (a state government institution), they videos are likely restricted by the UC Berkeley legal requirements under the ADA.
FWIW, there are many restrictions on "free" speech. You can't just freely distribute copyrighted material, you can't yell fire in a crowded room, etcs... You might argue that a ban on freely distributing copyrighted material is "harming the public", but I don't know if you would get much traction with that generic argument (well maybe with /.-ers, but probably not the public at large).
The law in many areas is about consensus, and for better or worse, we have a large amount of consensus that public institutions need to make accommodations to prevent discrimination. This case is about discrimination on disabilities nothing more, nothing less, Diana Moon Glampers, here we come...
Truth be told, I'm waiting for political preference to be a protected class of individuals under the law to show the silliness of this, but I ain't holding my breath...
Windows 7 is almost 10 years old at this point. how long should MS support it for?
My car is over 10 years old. How long should the manufacturer still support it? At ten years of age do they say, "Oh sorry, we won't service it any more."? "Cracked windshield, blown muffler? Yeah, that's too bad. We don't carry what you need and oh by the way, you can't go to a third party and get it from them either."
Actually, car manufacturers don't legally have to support their cars after 10 years either... Most of them do, but they don't have to.
Disabled students would simply not have access to these videos, and as usual depend on obtaining knowledge using other means. Maybe having a friend transcribe content, or having lecture notes. It's only an issue if the university demands those deaf students use those videos as a requirement to study.
You realize that one of the people that brought this complaint was a deaf *professor* who wanted to use the "free" material for her class at a university for the deaf and couldn't do that. Instead of captioning the videos for her class, she wanted Berkeley to do so at Berkeley's expense for benefit of her and her students...
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
hrm... could they release purely audio recordings of lectures? not quite as good, but still serviceable.
unless.... could they demand closed captioning on audio recordings too? that would be hilarious.
i think berkeley should release audio recordings in the future and see what happens.
you know it's gone off the rails when making an end-run around the ADA is the right thing to do.
Except for the small detail that for audio only recordings, since Stacy Nowak and Glenn Lockhart (the parties that initiated the USDoJ investigation) are deaf, they could have demanded audio-transcriptions as ADA accommodations...
I would have said "nice-try", but actually you probably should have thought about that since it was pretty obvious...
They already used "automatic text-to-speech software". The jackasses who sued said that isn't good enough (for a free video), and the court agreed.
IANAL, but to be "technical", the issue didn't get to a court yet, there was an *administrative* investigation and finding w/ remediation recommendations handed down by the US-DoJ (executive branch, no judicial). As with most administrative finding, if the remediation is not complied with, generally result in the US-DoJ bringing civil and/or criminal charges in a judicial court (which is often negotiated into a consent-decree before damages and criminal penalties are assessed).
Berkeley simply attempted to render the remediation recommendations moot by taking down the videos in the finding. This is probably helped along by the fact that the remediation included a requirement to "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II." , which is basically unlimited damages to random people as long as the material was up. Given the complainant was a professor attempting to use the free material to teach a class, it seems like anyone could claim to want to use the material in course and claim damages higher than any one person...
That's true, it's not about students at Berkeley, anyone in the US could have brought this lawsuit.
In fact Stacy Nowak, a professor at Gallaudet University, wanted to use these videos for a course and initiated the complaint with the USDOJ that eventually led to UC-Berkeley taking down these videos...
No, they have to make reasonable accommodations to their students. Seems a bit of a stretch to say that they have the same obligation to non-students as to students.
The US Department of Justice would be the one disagreeing with you on this.
The USDOJ apparently decided in favor of Stacy Nowak (a professor at Gallaudet University) who "would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, 'Journalism for Social Change,' but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures."
Including to "6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Berkeley *already* makes reasonable accommodations for their tuition-paying students by offering to caption any videos for them. The DOJ decided that if they make the material available to anyone, they must do this for anyone. As a result, they no longer make the videos available to non-students.
This is part of the reason why we can't have nice things...
Nah, the lesson here is that it's IMPOSSIBLE to keep government and economics as separate as possible, and that trying to keep them away is not a sustainable solution.
This isn't true, at all. The government has one asset: it holds a monopoly on violence. All things the government does or can do stem from that one basic fact. Having the government do anything else is bad because they will mix the assets they have to achieve objectives. Some things are more "benign", at least in modern conception, like taking people's homes by force or shooting/jailing/etc them for not paying taxes, the bulk of which antithetically go to providing other people with food and housing. Then there are bigger issues, like the fact we are coming up fast on the transition from a scarcity-based economy to a post-scarcity economy thanks to extreme automation - the place controlling who lives and dies is not the place I want deciding what to do with all the extra people who are no longer needed to drive the economy.
That's cute, you think the economy doesn't control the government. It does so on so many levels it is hard to understand how impossible it would be to separate. For example...
* The need for donor money to pay for election campaigns.
* The military industrial complex
* The Fed
* GDP growth rate correlation to election results (basically one of Nate Silver's hypothesis)
As to your point, there is no need for the government to decide who lives and dies, when people are no longer needed to drive the economy, they can simply *create* economic activity by spending more on the military (or other "homeland" protection) scheme. Just because the military can kill people (directly via drones, or indirectly by selling arms into parties in active conflict zones), doesn't mean that the military has to. They don't have to follow typical economic rules.