Are you sure that they're filtering because of COPA and not for some other reason? I work for a consortium of 35 public libraries and not one filters because of COPA. A few have filter software installed on computers in the children's room, but that's it.
Yup. They're filtering because of COPA. Before COPA, the PCs in the Children's Department were filtered and the PCs in the Adult area were not, so patrons could decide which was appropriate for their use or the use of their children. We had a nice computer and Internet use policy, and would have stayed with that system. Instead, we now have filters on all our computers (even the staff ones), and we have to keep unblocking things like the local Board of Education site, or a local car dealership, or the RAINN website.
I started out at a library in a different state, and I'm still in touch with the librarians there. They also had filtered access in the Children's Department and unfiltered access in the Adult area, which minors could access with parental permission. Now everything is filtered to meet COPA. They aren't real happy either.
Please, mod most of the Insightful posts above as "overrated." The posters simply don't know what they are talking about, though I can't blame them because TFA never mentions this part of it.
But as a librarian in a public library, I DO know what I'm talking about, and most of the posters are not overreacting. This is the same way COPA worked, and a great number of public libraries now have filters on all their computers (including staff ones) because of it.
It's easy to say "if you don't want to filter, don't take the money." In reality, that often isn't possible. Any library that is a part of a consortium may not have the ability to make that decision. Every public library except one in my county is part of our local library consortium. (There are HUGE local funding and service penalties if you are not). The library consortium receives a big chunk of money from the e-rate program, without which they would be forced to do some serious program-cutting. The consortium as a result decided they needed to filter so as not to lose it. Therefore, all of us libraries that are a part of it now have filtered access regardless of what our individual boards would have chosen. (For the record, my library board voted to forgo any money and skip the filtering, but in the end, due to the consortium's filtering, we have filtered access.)
So, despite many libraries in the county wanting no filters or filters on select computers, essentially every public library in the county has filtered access.
Using a monetary approach to forcing the issue is brilliant because many people then assume the libraries have a choice. That simply isn't true. Despite almost universal opposition from the librarians, library users, and library workers I know, every public library I have ever worked in now has filters because of COPA.
Essentially, if you're an administrator and you decided that your institution does not wish to or cannot comply with the blocking rules, the answer is simple: Don't apply for USD money.
Except that a lot of individual libraries may not actually have that choice. In the case of my library and COPA, we chose not to take the money. However, since we are a part of the county-wide library consortium and our Internet access is through them and they could not afford to take the hit from losing that funding, they filtered. That meant our access was filtered.
We could have attempted to withdraw from the county-wide consortium, but there are steep local funding penalties for that, plus we'd then have to somehow finance all our own internet access, computers, electronic databases, etc. without the discounts offered to the large consortium. We'd also be penalized in what services our patrons could receive for free. We'd lose a lot of our inter-library loan capabilities and be cut off from other shared library services. All in all, it would have meant some pretty big changes and cuts in service for our patrons. We just couldn't do it. (I don't even want to think about the cost of withdrawing all our records from the county-wide catalog and paying for a new server for the intergrated library system and paying the vendor for the software and support and getting all that up and running.)
So it's very easy to say, "JUst don't apply for the money." Unfortunately, it isn't that simple for many libraries.
Sure, I watch girls play games all the time. They play Sudoku, Solitare, FreeCell. They like puzzle games, and that's cool. But it's almost always going to be on a casual basis.
You obviously don't know the women I know.:) We're obsessive gamers, though mostly RPGs (pen and paper or MMORPGs). My mother would have been a gamer if she hadn't had two kids and a lot of work to handle. Twenty-some years ago, after several days straight of playing Space Invaders on the Atari and no food being cooked or laundry being done, she had to swear off games.
I think a great many women would game more than casually if 1) they had the time, and 2) they were introduced to a game and had the access to play it regularly.
Unless someone can fundamentally change the nature of programming, or indeed, development, they aren't going to do it.
That's just silly. I'm not saying most women are going to want to program, but that's because most people (men OR women) don't want to program. I was lucky in that my parents bought a TI-99 for my brother and me and some old programming magazines, and from those, we worked out how to write basic programs in BASIC. But while there are a large number of parents who might think to buy their son a computer and books on programming, I think there are a lot less who would think to do that for their daughter. They might get her a computer, but I'd bet they'd choose a lot different games and books to go along with it. And generally, an interest in coding doesn't spring from nowhere.
It's kind of a nasty self-perpetuating circle. Women aren't interested in coding because they aren't introduced to it. Women aren't introduced to it because they aren't interested in it.
I have stopped caring about how many girls play games or how many girls develop games. It's not a big deal.
You know, I'm with you on this one. I mean, I care, but I also care about global warming, and I know which one concerns me more. Women game. More women would probably game intensely if they had time and access. Woooo. Now can we stop with the articles overanalyzing things? I just wanna get my magister's gear.
I'm with you in the 30-and-over gaming women category. I grew up playing computer games, and I'll play almost anything. WoW is my current addiction, but I've gone through tons of types of games, from solitaire to IF to console games to muds to single-player computer games to MMORPGs.
I've found that most women like playing games, but no one really puts a controller in their hands in a situation where they're allowed and have time to actually relax and play. If they do, they'll get into the more hardcore games. But if they are never given that chance, then they tend to gravitate to the shorter games they stumble across or that others are likely to show them and that they have time to play in between other tasks.
(Speaking only for myself, I will say that I tend to get bored with repetitive games if they aren't puzzle games of some sort. I dropped my CoH subscription because the gameplay was all the same. "Will I run to an office building or a warehouse to push buttons this time?" Tetris may be repetitive (or "simple" according to some articles), but it involves some rapid thought and calculation and is much more satisfying for that reason. Like how I find crossword puzzles and sudoku much more fun than those silly Wishing Well games in newspapers...)
In both cases, you take your eyes off the road to either line up the coffee cup to your mouth OR to fiddle with the options on the stereo.
Sure, but my cell phone conversations tend to last a hell of a lot longer than a sip of coffee, and they sure take more concentration. I'd also say that I see more people speaking on cell phones and driving at the same time than I do putting on make up, drinking, or eating. Maybe that's a function of it being harder to see people with lipstick, coffee, or a hamburger, but most of the time when I have to fling myself out of the way of an incoming car, there's either 1) a cell phone in the driver's hand, or 2) multiple kids in the backseat and a slightly maniacal parent driving.
To address what others have said (not the poster I'm replying to), just because there are other things that are distractions doesn't mean a cell phone isn't a pretty serious distraction, and since people don't seem to be smart enough not to use them while driving, maybe we should consider legislating their use.
I'd also like people to do an informal survey of friends and family. How many minutes a day do they spend eating in the car? Putting on make up? Drinking coffee? Talking on a cell phone? I'd hazard a guess that a good many people spend more than half their time driving with a cell phone in their hand, and that none of the previously mentioned distractions even come close to that. That doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, but it does mean there's a greater amount of time where cell phones are a danger.
(I won't address the banning of children in cars, tempting as it may be.);)
It doesn't surprise me. Currently, men are overwhelmingly the audience for video games.
But is that really true anymore? Maybe certain types of games (first person shooters, for example), but about half of the people I game with regularly are women. I'm talking CoH, CoV, WoW, Everquest, muds, and puzzle games primarily, though a lot of women I know play console games with their kids.
The opinion piece wasn't really about female gamers. It was about professional gamers and the differences between the genders in who gets sponsorship. Aaron McKenna says that guys get sponsorships based on skills and women based on their looks, and that hurts the gaming itself. I wouldn't be shocked if that were true right now, but that's because we're discussing publicity and marketability. When companies are choosing who will be their public face, they tend to go with the best looking specimens with adequate skills they can find. That this hasn't yet taken over the male gamers' representations is the surprise for me. I'm sure that will be coming.
As others have already stated, gamers are gamers. I tend to hate articles about female gamers, or what it would take to draw more women to gaming, or why women don't like certain types of games, or how they play differently than men. If it's a good game and a woman has access to it and the time to play it and an introduction to it, she's likely to play it. Everything else is just gravy.
I'm a big fan of Amazon.com when looking for book information, but I'd also like to point out that public libraries often pay for access to book databases for their patrons, many of which can be accessed from home.
My library subscribes to Novelist and Novelist K-8, which can be awesome when looking for fiction.
Many libraries also pay for patron access to the Books in Print database.
Finally, if you're determined enough, you can find some interesting things in WorldCat, the union catalog of OCLC libraries. This is now searchable from Google and other places.
Actually, this is significantly different from a police officer asking to search your car, as in most states it is illegal for library staff to turn over information on library patrons' resource usage without a warrant or unless the PAtriot Act is invoked. I can't speak for Massachusetts, but in the two states I've worked in, library records (including use of electronic resources) are specifically named in state privacy laws. I cannot give out that information without a warrant unless I have a warrant (or a national security letter).
I was annoyed with the coverage of this when it first ran because many news articles portrayed the library director as having a choice in the matter and choosing to impede the FBI. It would have been nice to see an article that ran that essentially said, "Library Director follows law and demands warrant so evidence not later thrown out of court or abused."
They are not after the data because they want to know how many people are searching for porn. They're after the data because they want to use it to bolster their case for the Child Online Protection Act, an act which is a thinly veiled attempt to push anti-porn decency laws.
Exactly.
COPA would require age-verification schemes, which the DOJ says are necessary because porn is so prevalent and filters are not effective.
What I'd like to know is that if filters are so ineffective, then why according to the Children's Internet Protection Act are public and school libraries required to have them installed in order to receive technology funding?
I am a librarian, and our filters are ridiculously ineffective. They block lots of stuff they shouldn't, and I can only fix the ones that I know about. If a patron is too shy to ask to have the filtering turned off or the page unblocked... well, they can't see something they're entitled to see. So, they let in porn, block sites that aren't porn, waste lots of staff (and patron) time, and cost us money. We had a policy and system and a choice of filtered or unfiltered access before this. *sigh*
The problem with both CIPA and COPA is taht they attempt to solve a moral issue with a technological solution, and I simply don't think that's feasible.
Yeah, but Bush's administration is responsible for CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act, passed in 2000), the crappy piece of legislation that means I'm constantly wasting my time unblocking Web sites for such dangerous things as the car dealership down the street or the local school board, but my determined library patrons can still get to porn.
Filters suck. They don't work, and when they DO block something, large portions of the time it's something someone has a right to see, and many people are simply too shy to ask to have the site unblocked. We had a perfectly reasonable system and Internet use policy before CIPA and the damn government got involved.
I also note that the Bush administration has asked for possible testimony from anti-filtering experts to help them make the case for COPA. If filters are being acknowledged as being ineffective, why are we still required to use them?
I resent my library having to spend money on an ineffective technological solution to a moral issue when the implementation not only wastes money and computer resources, but also staff time, and in doing so manages to discourage taxpayers from sites they have every right to see. But hey... If it's for the children, I should be proud to sacrifice, right?
I found this sentence from the article very interesting:
Late last month, the department sent a warning to officers about Locatecell.com, which sells lists of calls made on cell phones and land lines.
According to that sentence, it isn't just cell phone records they're selling. It could well be your home phone line's records. I don't see why they'd only steal or buy the information from cell companies...
So, don't assume you're safe just because you don't use one.
People like me" being people who don't go off half-cocked, I guess. I suppose that it would be too much for you to point out that the gag order only applies in cases where a search warrant has been issued by a FISA court,
Er, no. That's incorrect.
A gag order also applies if a National Security Letter has been issued. No court is involved in issuing these letters. That's been the big issue for libraries.
Obviously we can't conclude whether or not this actually occurred based solely on this article. It's based on the comments of two professors with no other confirmation. However, it's also unfair to attack someone who pointed out that if a gag order exists (possible with NSLs), there wouldn't be any confirmation available.
As near as I can remember, interlibrary loan forms did NOT include my SS#.
You probably didn't go to a school that used your SSN as your student ID number. My undergrad school did not; my grad school did. If you want an ILL, usually you have to use your student ID number. If it's the same as your SSN, you're screwed.
If you go to the University of Mass site, you can check out their interlibrary loan and I don't see any "official Peking" version even available.
Er... I'm a librarian. ILL forms don't list what's available or what isn't available. If you want a specific version, you write that down somewhere on the form. Looking at the UMass library online ILL form, I'd probably append the version information to the title. Whoever then enters the information in the ILL system will figure out how to handle the version request.
I can't tell you if the story is true or not. I certainly don't have the information to make that call. What I can tell you is that the points you brought up do have explanations.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but you will be hard pressed to find a real life female who's playing a dwarf in World of Warcraft for example. They're all humans, night elves, or undead. (The undead female is pretty hot)
I play a female dwarf. I also have a female troll, gnome, orc, tauren, undead, and night elf. The night elf and undead are my least favorite. The troll is my main, and the tauren and dwarf my second and third.
I'm not unusual amongst the women I know who play WoW.
I'm not all that annoyed by the avatars themselves; most people (men and women) like to play interesting-looking or attractive characters. Exactly what counts as interesting-looking or attractive, though, is highly subjective. (I think the undead females look creepy rather than sexy, for example. My troll is sexy to me--lean and mean, baybee!)
What DOES piss me off are some of the ghastly actions for the female characters. The/dance command comes immediately to mind. While the male characters have interesting dance moves, the female characters have dances that are essentially some form of gyration. Most notable for this is, of course, the night elf female's stripper dance, but I have yet to see any sort of active female dance move. The closest I've seen is a few of the female orc's moves, like the knee-hand switch.
I am thrilled that WoW offers the wide range of female characters that they do. I think it's a spectacular game with amazing depth and nice detail. I also think that it could use some more female developers, because I'd like a chance to ogle some AFK male's bits at some point too. (Uh, if you haven't noticed, the females jiggle a lot when you go afk. A lot.)
Whenever someone says something like, "All the women I know like to choose big breasted super-heroines!" I always have the urge to tell them they need to meet more women.:P
The thing that really irks me about the CIPA is that every library I've worked in has had an Internet use policy that did not allow patrons viewing porn on the library machines, and the staff did their best to enforce it. It wasn't perfect, but no solution will be. In fact, every library I've worked offered BOTH filtered and unfiltered access so patrons and parents could make a decision what was right for their family.
Now we waste our time unblocking sites like the local Board of Education, a local car dealers, anything with the letter X in it a number of times, various political commentary sites, HBO, construction equipment sale sites, and more, and people are still accessing porn.
So, this law has 1) been ineffective in stopping people from accessing porn 2) required the use of a technical solution which
a) cost my library a lot of money and
b) blocked taxpaying adults from accessing perfectly innocent sites (and many of them are too shy to request the filters be turned off) 3) wasted the time of both staff and patrons 4) given parents a false sense of security and 5) led local politicians to threaten to withhold all local funds from libraries unless we could ensure that the filters worked perfectly. (I'm not kidding.)
Forcing a technological solution to a moral problem does not work. It simply creates an indiscrimate hurdle to anyone trying to use the system. I hope Australia's representatives realize this.
I really don't feel that religion has anything to do with this. Most people, even the so called religions right are NOT anti-science.
They aren't anti-science. They just often don't understand the scientific process and want to introduce topics that cannot be evaluated by it into science classes. If allowing pseudo-science in the classroom doesn't pretty much screw over teaching people what science actually is, I don't know what does.
Let's use the obvious example: intelligent design. It's a fine theory. I believe it myself. But it's not a scientific theory. When you try to apply the scientific method (Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experimentation), you can only get through about two steps. It's definitely not testable. Yet many people believe it's a theory that should be taught in a science classroom. They don't understand that in science, it isn't how correct a theory is, but the process used to create and test that theory that matters.
I'd be open to putting ID in a science classroom if we applied the scientific process to it to see how far we got, but that isn't how it's being handled. It's being "taught" as "Evolution has holes, and here's this other theory. Here's where you can get more information." That involves no science, no exploration, and no discussion, and in my book is pretty much an affirmation of ID.
So does religion have a place in weakening our science curriculum? It can, yes. That doesn't make the religious right anti-science. It makes them poor scientists, and that's often worse.
Homosexuals sue to get married, which is an act under GOD and not man.
Really? I wasn't aware of that. And here I got legally married by a district magistrate and didn't even know he was working for God. And all those papers I filed, did they go to God too?
Is God responsible for insurance coverage and cost differences based on marital status of a household?
Marriage is not only a religious institution. Historically, it's been used as a way to determine inheritance, cement alliances, transfer property, and establish responsibility and rights for others. Saying it is only a religious institution is a fairly narrow view. It can also be legal, cultural, societal, economic, and religious.
First off, thank you.
Second, you need to come to my library. I have most of what you mentioned.:) The more obscure computer science books I don't generally have because they don't circulate much. However, if I can start building a more technical clientele, they might start going out. I'll work on that.
Again, thanks.
My library is partway there. We have an RFID system, and eventually we will be getting small portable scanners that we can use to walk along and notify us if something is misshelved.
However, the RFID system doesn't work as well as the hype would have you believe. With certain items, you can have a receiver 10" (yes, inches)from it and it won't be able to pick up the tag. So before you start pestering your local library to enable a more complex RFID system, let us get the bugs worked out of the current one.;)
All right... I'm going to shamelessly drift from the original topic and glom onto your comment about computer books in public libraries. Man, I hope you check past posts.
I'm a librarian for a public library, and one of the things I do is purchase books for our computer center collection. I'm always on the lookout for ideas on what else we should purchase.
So... what topics do you tend to look for?
I admit my forays into purchasing books on things like Snort haven't resulted in a whole lot of circs yet, but I'm hopeful.
The only way for people to actually get educated is for people to have a list of all the best books and the way the library is current set up its impossible to 1. read every single book 2. know which books are the best books
Of course, the nice thing about libraries is that they have librarians, who are there to help you find the information you need. At least, libraries should have librarians. Some have part-time undergrads, which is not the same thing AT ALL. So when universities skimp on the librarians, you suffer.
PDAs are more portable than books, and the internet is a better model of distribution. These are facts and you cannot argue against it.
Actually, those are opinions, not facts. Watch me argue!;)
Whether or not a PDA is more portable than a book depends on the book in question and the situation you're in. If I'm going through airport security, a small paperback is more portable and less of a hassle than a PDA.
Regarding the Internet as a model of distribution, it honestly depends what you are looking for. I can pull more information from the print copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States in a short amount of time than I can from its Internet counterpart because locating the correct table in the crappy interface on the census site takes longer, as does loading the pdf files. It's also faster for me to snag a print copy of Consumer Reports magazine and check the one-year index in the back than it is to click my way into an online database and do a search for what I'm looking for and sort through the results.
If you're a history major or doing any sort of in-depth research on a project, you expect some of your sources to be books. I suspect I'm "of your generation" and I can tell you that my friends and I tend to prefer reading a book to reading a screen if it's a long document.
A good library has a collection policy that realizes that a wide variety of formats generally best meets the needs of its wide variety of patrons. Good librarians know the strengths and weaknesses of using different formarts. Eliminating formats usually results in fewer options to meet the needs of the patrons. Of course, if the library patrons really needed a more social space for projects, sometimes you have to make that difficult choice... but really, the optimal choice would be to not rule out a format.
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Are you sure that they're filtering because of COPA and not for some other reason? I work for a consortium of 35 public libraries and not one filters because of COPA. A few have filter software installed on computers in the children's room, but that's it.
Yup. They're filtering because of COPA. Before COPA, the PCs in the Children's Department were filtered and the PCs in the Adult area were not, so patrons could decide which was appropriate for their use or the use of their children. We had a nice computer and Internet use policy, and would have stayed with that system. Instead, we now have filters on all our computers (even the staff ones), and we have to keep unblocking things like the local Board of Education site, or a local car dealership, or the RAINN website.
I started out at a library in a different state, and I'm still in touch with the librarians there. They also had filtered access in the Children's Department and unfiltered access in the Adult area, which minors could access with parental permission. Now everything is filtered to meet COPA. They aren't real happy either.
Please, mod most of the Insightful posts above as "overrated." The posters simply don't know what they are talking about, though I can't blame them because TFA never mentions this part of it.
But as a librarian in a public library, I DO know what I'm talking about, and most of the posters are not overreacting. This is the same way COPA worked, and a great number of public libraries now have filters on all their computers (including staff ones) because of it.
It's easy to say "if you don't want to filter, don't take the money." In reality, that often isn't possible. Any library that is a part of a consortium may not have the ability to make that decision. Every public library except one in my county is part of our local library consortium. (There are HUGE local funding and service penalties if you are not). The library consortium receives a big chunk of money from the e-rate program, without which they would be forced to do some serious program-cutting. The consortium as a result decided they needed to filter so as not to lose it. Therefore, all of us libraries that are a part of it now have filtered access regardless of what our individual boards would have chosen. (For the record, my library board voted to forgo any money and skip the filtering, but in the end, due to the consortium's filtering, we have filtered access.)
So, despite many libraries in the county wanting no filters or filters on select computers, essentially every public library in the county has filtered access.
Using a monetary approach to forcing the issue is brilliant because many people then assume the libraries have a choice. That simply isn't true. Despite almost universal opposition from the librarians, library users, and library workers I know, every public library I have ever worked in now has filters because of COPA.
Essentially, if you're an administrator and you decided that your institution does not wish to or cannot comply with the blocking rules, the answer is simple: Don't apply for USD money.
Except that a lot of individual libraries may not actually have that choice. In the case of my library and COPA, we chose not to take the money. However, since we are a part of the county-wide library consortium and our Internet access is through them and they could not afford to take the hit from losing that funding, they filtered. That meant our access was filtered.
We could have attempted to withdraw from the county-wide consortium, but there are steep local funding penalties for that, plus we'd then have to somehow finance all our own internet access, computers, electronic databases, etc. without the discounts offered to the large consortium. We'd also be penalized in what services our patrons could receive for free. We'd lose a lot of our inter-library loan capabilities and be cut off from other shared library services. All in all, it would have meant some pretty big changes and cuts in service for our patrons. We just couldn't do it. (I don't even want to think about the cost of withdrawing all our records from the county-wide catalog and paying for a new server for the intergrated library system and paying the vendor for the software and support and getting all that up and running.)
So it's very easy to say, "JUst don't apply for the money." Unfortunately, it isn't that simple for many libraries.
Sure, I watch girls play games all the time. They play Sudoku, Solitare, FreeCell. They like puzzle games, and that's cool. But it's almost always going to be on a casual basis.
:) We're obsessive gamers, though mostly RPGs (pen and paper or MMORPGs). My mother would have been a gamer if she hadn't had two kids and a lot of work to handle. Twenty-some years ago, after several days straight of playing Space Invaders on the Atari and no food being cooked or laundry being done, she had to swear off games.
You obviously don't know the women I know.
I think a great many women would game more than casually if 1) they had the time, and 2) they were introduced to a game and had the access to play it regularly.
Unless someone can fundamentally change the nature of programming, or indeed, development, they aren't going to do it.
That's just silly. I'm not saying most women are going to want to program, but that's because most people (men OR women) don't want to program. I was lucky in that my parents bought a TI-99 for my brother and me and some old programming magazines, and from those, we worked out how to write basic programs in BASIC. But while there are a large number of parents who might think to buy their son a computer and books on programming, I think there are a lot less who would think to do that for their daughter. They might get her a computer, but I'd bet they'd choose a lot different games and books to go along with it. And generally, an interest in coding doesn't spring from nowhere.
It's kind of a nasty self-perpetuating circle. Women aren't interested in coding because they aren't introduced to it. Women aren't introduced to it because they aren't interested in it.
I have stopped caring about how many girls play games or how many girls develop games. It's not a big deal.
You know, I'm with you on this one. I mean, I care, but I also care about global warming, and I know which one concerns me more. Women game. More women would probably game intensely if they had time and access. Woooo. Now can we stop with the articles overanalyzing things? I just wanna get my magister's gear.
I'm with you in the 30-and-over gaming women category. I grew up playing computer games, and I'll play almost anything. WoW is my current addiction, but I've gone through tons of types of games, from solitaire to IF to console games to muds to single-player computer games to MMORPGs.
I've found that most women like playing games, but no one really puts a controller in their hands in a situation where they're allowed and have time to actually relax and play. If they do, they'll get into the more hardcore games. But if they are never given that chance, then they tend to gravitate to the shorter games they stumble across or that others are likely to show them and that they have time to play in between other tasks.
(Speaking only for myself, I will say that I tend to get bored with repetitive games if they aren't puzzle games of some sort. I dropped my CoH subscription because the gameplay was all the same. "Will I run to an office building or a warehouse to push buttons this time?" Tetris may be repetitive (or "simple" according to some articles), but it involves some rapid thought and calculation and is much more satisfying for that reason. Like how I find crossword puzzles and sudoku much more fun than those silly Wishing Well games in newspapers...)
In both cases, you take your eyes off the road to either line up the coffee cup to your mouth OR to fiddle with the options on the stereo.
;)
Sure, but my cell phone conversations tend to last a hell of a lot longer than a sip of coffee, and they sure take more concentration. I'd also say that I see more people speaking on cell phones and driving at the same time than I do putting on make up, drinking, or eating. Maybe that's a function of it being harder to see people with lipstick, coffee, or a hamburger, but most of the time when I have to fling myself out of the way of an incoming car, there's either 1) a cell phone in the driver's hand, or 2) multiple kids in the backseat and a slightly maniacal parent driving.
To address what others have said (not the poster I'm replying to), just because there are other things that are distractions doesn't mean a cell phone isn't a pretty serious distraction, and since people don't seem to be smart enough not to use them while driving, maybe we should consider legislating their use.
I'd also like people to do an informal survey of friends and family. How many minutes a day do they spend eating in the car? Putting on make up? Drinking coffee? Talking on a cell phone? I'd hazard a guess that a good many people spend more than half their time driving with a cell phone in their hand, and that none of the previously mentioned distractions even come close to that. That doesn't mean they aren't dangerous, but it does mean there's a greater amount of time where cell phones are a danger.
(I won't address the banning of children in cars, tempting as it may be.)
It doesn't surprise me. Currently, men are overwhelmingly the audience for video games.
But is that really true anymore? Maybe certain types of games (first person shooters, for example), but about half of the people I game with regularly are women. I'm talking CoH, CoV, WoW, Everquest, muds, and puzzle games primarily, though a lot of women I know play console games with their kids.
The opinion piece wasn't really about female gamers. It was about professional gamers and the differences between the genders in who gets sponsorship. Aaron McKenna says that guys get sponsorships based on skills and women based on their looks, and that hurts the gaming itself. I wouldn't be shocked if that were true right now, but that's because we're discussing publicity and marketability. When companies are choosing who will be their public face, they tend to go with the best looking specimens with adequate skills they can find. That this hasn't yet taken over the male gamers' representations is the surprise for me. I'm sure that will be coming.
As others have already stated, gamers are gamers. I tend to hate articles about female gamers, or what it would take to draw more women to gaming, or why women don't like certain types of games, or how they play differently than men. If it's a good game and a woman has access to it and the time to play it and an introduction to it, she's likely to play it. Everything else is just gravy.
I'm a big fan of Amazon.com when looking for book information, but I'd also like to point out that public libraries often pay for access to book databases for their patrons, many of which can be accessed from home.
My library subscribes to Novelist and Novelist K-8, which can be awesome when looking for fiction.
Many libraries also pay for patron access to the Books in Print database.
Finally, if you're determined enough, you can find some interesting things in WorldCat, the union catalog of OCLC libraries. This is now searchable from Google and other places.
Actually, this is significantly different from a police officer asking to search your car, as in most states it is illegal for library staff to turn over information on library patrons' resource usage without a warrant or unless the PAtriot Act is invoked. I can't speak for Massachusetts, but in the two states I've worked in, library records (including use of electronic resources) are specifically named in state privacy laws. I cannot give out that information without a warrant unless I have a warrant (or a national security letter).
I was annoyed with the coverage of this when it first ran because many news articles portrayed the library director as having a choice in the matter and choosing to impede the FBI. It would have been nice to see an article that ran that essentially said, "Library Director follows law and demands warrant so evidence not later thrown out of court or abused."
I really don't understand why the USA stops felons from voting
They don't. It's a state-level decision. Currently felons are allowed to vote in most states after they serve their time.
They are not after the data because they want to know how many people are searching for porn. They're after the data because they want to use it to bolster their case for the Child Online Protection Act, an act which is a thinly veiled attempt to push anti-porn decency laws.
Exactly.
COPA would require age-verification schemes, which the DOJ says are necessary because porn is so prevalent and filters are not effective.
What I'd like to know is that if filters are so ineffective, then why according to the Children's Internet Protection Act are public and school libraries required to have them installed in order to receive technology funding?
I am a librarian, and our filters are ridiculously ineffective. They block lots of stuff they shouldn't, and I can only fix the ones that I know about. If a patron is too shy to ask to have the filtering turned off or the page unblocked... well, they can't see something they're entitled to see. So, they let in porn, block sites that aren't porn, waste lots of staff (and patron) time, and cost us money. We had a policy and system and a choice of filtered or unfiltered access before this. *sigh*
And to top it off, politicians are still trying to punish libraries if those filters don't work properly.
The problem with both CIPA and COPA is taht they attempt to solve a moral issue with a technological solution, and I simply don't think that's feasible.
Yeah, but Bush's administration is responsible for CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act, passed in 2000), the crappy piece of legislation that means I'm constantly wasting my time unblocking Web sites for such dangerous things as the car dealership down the street or the local school board, but my determined library patrons can still get to porn.
Filters suck. They don't work, and when they DO block something, large portions of the time it's something someone has a right to see, and many people are simply too shy to ask to have the site unblocked. We had a perfectly reasonable system and Internet use policy before CIPA and the damn government got involved.
I also note that the Bush administration has asked for possible testimony from anti-filtering experts to help them make the case for COPA. If filters are being acknowledged as being ineffective, why are we still required to use them?
I resent my library having to spend money on an ineffective technological solution to a moral issue when the implementation not only wastes money and computer resources, but also staff time, and in doing so manages to discourage taxpayers from sites they have every right to see. But hey... If it's for the children, I should be proud to sacrifice, right?
I found this sentence from the article very interesting:
Late last month, the department sent a warning to officers about Locatecell.com, which sells lists of calls made on cell phones and land lines.
According to that sentence, it isn't just cell phone records they're selling. It could well be your home phone line's records. I don't see why they'd only steal or buy the information from cell companies...
So, don't assume you're safe just because you don't use one.
People like me" being people who don't go off half-cocked, I guess. I suppose that it would be too much for you to point out that the gag order only applies in cases where a search warrant has been issued by a FISA court,
Er, no. That's incorrect.
A gag order also applies if a National Security Letter has been issued. No court is involved in issuing these letters. That's been the big issue for libraries.
Obviously we can't conclude whether or not this actually occurred based solely on this article. It's based on the comments of two professors with no other confirmation. However, it's also unfair to attack someone who pointed out that if a gag order exists (possible with NSLs), there wouldn't be any confirmation available.
As near as I can remember, interlibrary loan forms did NOT include my SS#.
You probably didn't go to a school that used your SSN as your student ID number. My undergrad school did not; my grad school did. If you want an ILL, usually you have to use your student ID number. If it's the same as your SSN, you're screwed.
If you go to the University of Mass site, you can check out their interlibrary loan and I don't see any "official Peking" version even available.
Er... I'm a librarian. ILL forms don't list what's available or what isn't available. If you want a specific version, you write that down somewhere on the form. Looking at the UMass library online ILL form, I'd probably append the version information to the title. Whoever then enters the information in the ILL system will figure out how to handle the version request.
I can't tell you if the story is true or not. I certainly don't have the information to make that call. What I can tell you is that the points you brought up do have explanations.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but you will be hard pressed to find a real life female who's playing a dwarf in World of Warcraft for example. They're all humans, night elves, or undead. (The undead female is pretty hot)
/dance command comes immediately to mind. While the male characters have interesting dance moves, the female characters have dances that are essentially some form of gyration. Most notable for this is, of course, the night elf female's stripper dance, but I have yet to see any sort of active female dance move. The closest I've seen is a few of the female orc's moves, like the knee-hand switch.
:P
I play a female dwarf. I also have a female troll, gnome, orc, tauren, undead, and night elf. The night elf and undead are my least favorite. The troll is my main, and the tauren and dwarf my second and third.
I'm not unusual amongst the women I know who play WoW.
I'm not all that annoyed by the avatars themselves; most people (men and women) like to play interesting-looking or attractive characters. Exactly what counts as interesting-looking or attractive, though, is highly subjective. (I think the undead females look creepy rather than sexy, for example. My troll is sexy to me--lean and mean, baybee!)
What DOES piss me off are some of the ghastly actions for the female characters. The
I am thrilled that WoW offers the wide range of female characters that they do. I think it's a spectacular game with amazing depth and nice detail. I also think that it could use some more female developers, because I'd like a chance to ogle some AFK male's bits at some point too. (Uh, if you haven't noticed, the females jiggle a lot when you go afk. A lot.)
Whenever someone says something like, "All the women I know like to choose big breasted super-heroines!" I always have the urge to tell them they need to meet more women.
Another US public librarian chiming in here...
The thing that really irks me about the CIPA is that every library I've worked in has had an Internet use policy that did not allow patrons viewing porn on the library machines, and the staff did their best to enforce it. It wasn't perfect, but no solution will be. In fact, every library I've worked offered BOTH filtered and unfiltered access so patrons and parents could make a decision what was right for their family.
Now we waste our time unblocking sites like the local Board of Education, a local car dealers, anything with the letter X in it a number of times, various political commentary sites, HBO, construction equipment sale sites, and more, and people are still accessing porn.
So, this law has
1) been ineffective in stopping people from accessing porn
2) required the use of a technical solution which
a) cost my library a lot of money and
b) blocked taxpaying adults from accessing perfectly innocent sites (and many of them are too shy to request the filters be turned off)
3) wasted the time of both staff and patrons
4) given parents a false sense of security and
5) led local politicians to threaten to withhold all local funds from libraries unless we could ensure that the filters worked perfectly. (I'm not kidding.)
Forcing a technological solution to a moral problem does not work. It simply creates an indiscrimate hurdle to anyone trying to use the system. I hope Australia's representatives realize this.
I really don't feel that religion has anything to do with this. Most people, even the so called religions right are NOT anti-science.
They aren't anti-science. They just often don't understand the scientific process and want to introduce topics that cannot be evaluated by it into science classes. If allowing pseudo-science in the classroom doesn't pretty much screw over teaching people what science actually is, I don't know what does.
Let's use the obvious example: intelligent design. It's a fine theory. I believe it myself. But it's not a scientific theory. When you try to apply the scientific method (Observation, Hypothesis, Prediction, Experimentation), you can only get through about two steps. It's definitely not testable. Yet many people believe it's a theory that should be taught in a science classroom. They don't understand that in science, it isn't how correct a theory is, but the process used to create and test that theory that matters.
I'd be open to putting ID in a science classroom if we applied the scientific process to it to see how far we got, but that isn't how it's being handled. It's being "taught" as "Evolution has holes, and here's this other theory. Here's where you can get more information." That involves no science, no exploration, and no discussion, and in my book is pretty much an affirmation of ID.
So does religion have a place in weakening our science curriculum? It can, yes. That doesn't make the religious right anti-science. It makes them poor scientists, and that's often worse.
Homosexuals sue to get married, which is an act under GOD and not man.
Really? I wasn't aware of that. And here I got legally married by a district magistrate and didn't even know he was working for God. And all those papers I filed, did they go to God too?
Is God responsible for insurance coverage and cost differences based on marital status of a household?
Marriage is not only a religious institution. Historically, it's been used as a way to determine inheritance, cement alliances, transfer property, and establish responsibility and rights for others. Saying it is only a religious institution is a fairly narrow view. It can also be legal, cultural, societal, economic, and religious.
First off, thank you. Second, you need to come to my library. I have most of what you mentioned. :) The more obscure computer science books I don't generally have because they don't circulate much. However, if I can start building a more technical clientele, they might start going out. I'll work on that.
Again, thanks.
My library is partway there. We have an RFID system, and eventually we will be getting small portable scanners that we can use to walk along and notify us if something is misshelved.
;)
However, the RFID system doesn't work as well as the hype would have you believe. With certain items, you can have a receiver 10" (yes, inches)from it and it won't be able to pick up the tag. So before you start pestering your local library to enable a more complex RFID system, let us get the bugs worked out of the current one.
All right... I'm going to shamelessly drift from the original topic and glom onto your comment about computer books in public libraries. Man, I hope you check past posts.
I'm a librarian for a public library, and one of the things I do is purchase books for our computer center collection. I'm always on the lookout for ideas on what else we should purchase.
So... what topics do you tend to look for?
I admit my forays into purchasing books on things like Snort haven't resulted in a whole lot of circs yet, but I'm hopeful.
The only way for people to actually get educated is for people to have a list of all the best books and the way the library is current set up its impossible to 1. read every single book 2. know which books are the best books Of course, the nice thing about libraries is that they have librarians, who are there to help you find the information you need. At least, libraries should have librarians. Some have part-time undergrads, which is not the same thing AT ALL. So when universities skimp on the librarians, you suffer.
PDAs are more portable than books, and the internet is a better model of distribution. These are facts and you cannot argue against it.
;)
Actually, those are opinions, not facts. Watch me argue!
Whether or not a PDA is more portable than a book depends on the book in question and the situation you're in. If I'm going through airport security, a small paperback is more portable and less of a hassle than a PDA.
Regarding the Internet as a model of distribution, it honestly depends what you are looking for. I can pull more information from the print copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States in a short amount of time than I can from its Internet counterpart because locating the correct table in the crappy interface on the census site takes longer, as does loading the pdf files. It's also faster for me to snag a print copy of Consumer Reports magazine and check the one-year index in the back than it is to click my way into an online database and do a search for what I'm looking for and sort through the results.
If you're a history major or doing any sort of in-depth research on a project, you expect some of your sources to be books. I suspect I'm "of your generation" and I can tell you that my friends and I tend to prefer reading a book to reading a screen if it's a long document.
A good library has a collection policy that realizes that a wide variety of formats generally best meets the needs of its wide variety of patrons. Good librarians know the strengths and weaknesses of using different formarts. Eliminating formats usually results in fewer options to meet the needs of the patrons. Of course, if the library patrons really needed a more social space for projects, sometimes you have to make that difficult choice... but really, the optimal choice would be to not rule out a format.