It's not "justifying thievery" to call bs on bs claims. There are good reasons to be a moral person which AREN'T fabrications. Don't get mad at the people who point out that someone advocating for an issue you care about is advancing specious arguments to support that issue. Get mad at the person/people who are using lies to try to support that issue. It does a disservice to your cause to have it supported with falsehoods. That's true no matter what your cause is. If the only reasons you can articulate for supporting a cause are lies, you should probably re-examine your devotion to the cause...but I bet you can probably come up with reasons which aren't misleading, inflammatory, and false.
fortunately, the law doesn't rely on existence of a pure monopoly before it determines that illegal anti-competitive behaviour has taken place. although since the courts seem to have their heads up their bottoms when it comes to software and the software industry, i rather doubt we'll see anything happen the way it should.
Perhaps the ticket sellers could do more...although I'd imagine the only thing that would be likely to work is to require that all tickets have a name associated with them at time of sale, and that only the named party is able to use them. Barring that...it's a distributed attack. The scalpers can get thousands of people to buy tickets on their behalf for a small payout, and then they can take ownership of those tickets and resell them at a high premium. How are the ticket sellers suppose to know that Bob is buying on behalf of a scalper and has no interest in going to see the show? Short of the preventative measure I mention, I don't know how they can.
Well, you can certainly choose to feel otherwise, but if the provider of the entertainment I want to attend wants to sell the tickets to their event at a price which I am able to pay, and some douche does an end run around the provider's restrictions to monopolize the supply and then sells those same tickets for a price I'm not able to justify paying...I get a little ticked by that. If a band/team/whatever else wants to give their fans an equal shot at being able to attend their event, they should be able to do so. They want to be choosy about who they sell to and sell below market price? They should be able to do so. Ticket scalpers take that ability away from them. And piss off lots of other people. Like me.
For the record, I was not suggesting that he publish every submission. I don't expect him to be running 4chan, I expect him to run WikiLeaks. I'm taking issue with his attempts to maintain a veil of secrecy over the operations of WikiLeaks--who is involved (the other people working on the site, not the submitters), where their financing comes from (do they have any conflicts of interest in who they out versus who they don't?), how they vet material that is submitted...I'm sure I could come up with more. They're not open about these things. These things have nothing to do choosing to be choosy about what submissions they make public; they have everything to do with WikiLeaks being held to the same standards of openness it calls for from other organisations.
This is exactly what I thought. I think there's room here to find a cheap piece of crap software with an offensive EULA (preferably from a large publisher), and if there were an active campaign to buy that piece of software, reject the EULA, and seek redress from the publisher. I highly doubt people are going to be willing to do that with SC2, but some cheaper piece of software people don't really want.... I'd be willing to buy a $30 piece of software to participate, for one. You'd just have to have a lawyer on board and prepared to file a class-action in the (not-unlikely) event that the publisher failed to refund the purchase price. I don't think it would take millions (although that would be grand), even several tens-of-thousands would probably give most publishers a serious issue...not financially, but they'd not be logistically ready to handle that sort of concerted interaction with their customers. Anyhow, it's a fun thought....
I second the crayola keyboard/mouse combo. The large keys are good for little hunt-and-pecking. And I think the color coding of letters/numbers/control keys is useful as well. And the mouse is smaller than normal as well, which works well for small hands. There's a few other things I'd look into doing as well. Until recently (my daughter is now 4), I had the right mouse button mapped to be a left click so that no matter what she pressed she got a click action instead of pop-up menus she couldn't read and didn't understand where they came from. Finally, there's the desktop environment itself. I set her up with an old laptop (well, core duo) I had with Windows on it. I looked at the Linux based kids environments and just didn't see anything I really dug...plus most of the kids software you may decide to buy (my daughter likes the Diego games) is usually windows based. However, I didn't really want to give her the full windows interface, so I installed a kids desktop environment on top of it. I ended up getting Magic Desktop from Easybits. I'm not totally satisfied with what I got, but I've continued to look and have yet to see something I think is better. The pluses-you can add any program you want to the desktop, or remove ones there. The browser is opt-in only--the admin has to pick what sites are available, anything else won't load (not even embedded content); nor is there an address bar unless you type in the admin password. And the icons are big, it comes with a number of both (mildly) entertaining games as well as educational games. You can set it to start up on log in, so it will keep your kid from exploring Window's seamier side for a number of years until they get more savvy. The downside? It's a finicky piece of software which can sometimes fail to start up cleanly; and although it in theory lets you exit to windows and then restart it, I have almost never had that work properly, I have to log out and back in before it starts properly again. Plus, it hasn't been updated in a good while. I keep hoping someone else will come out with something better (seriously, can it be that difficult?) but thus far no joy.
absolutely. i understand if Assange and his fellows want to stay off the grid as much as they can, try to keep their lives private. Fine. But the public organisation, Wikileaks, which seems predicated on the idea that ALL information should be public, that the public needs to know everything in order to keep everyone honest...their operations should be completely open. "We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people." They weaken their claim by resorting to secrecy in their own activities. If they feel that making public the operations of the organisation would impinge on their individual privacy, then I'd say that perhaps they are too personally involved and that, in the interests of better serving the public (their stated raison d'etre), they should maintain better separation between their private life and their job. The other tack, attempting to cloak their professional activities with personal privacy, is untenable. And I completely dismiss out of hand any suggestion that they're trying to protect wikileaks from hostile governments with privacy. If those hostile governments are omniscient enough to keep track of all their credit card expenditures as they travel on the rail networks, they are surely already well aware of where Wikileaks' financing comes from as well as any other details they want to know about the operations. I doubt they're truly keeping wikileaks secret from the government, only from the public.
There's doubtless a lot of nuance to the subject. In my case: I have some issues I care about...say, issues related to bicycle riders (traffic laws pertaining to; paths for use by; etc). It's something I care about...maybe not passionately, but I do want to see the "right" things done. I also have a job. And a family. And I can't follow every procedural vote and read every set of laws under consideration to see how they might impact that issue (leaving aside the many other issues I also care about). Given the penchant politicians have for burying unrelated items in large bills that are sure to pass, I want an easy way to know when something impacting an issue I care about is being considered by my representatives. I look to special interest groups to help keep me abreast of those developments. They haven't given me my opinion...I've chosen them because they have positions somewhat aligned with mine. If they make it easier for me to register my disapproval of some piece of legislation to my representative(s), so much the better.
Hear, hear! The MP is not elected solely to represent the constituents who are not intimidated by trying to craft reasoned arguments that might sway an MP. They're also elected to represent the views of their many constituents who, on a given issue, may find that an interest group has articulated their position better than they themselves could, as well as those constituents whose opinion on some issues may be as concise as "yay" or "nay". If the MP isn't providing a better way for those constituents to bring those views to the MP's attention, the MP bears the blame for alternate methods of communication with them which spring up.
An enlightened MP would realize that there is an opportunity to create a system which furthers the needs of democracy. A system that works for and with the constituents as well as managing the "pressure groups". I think that if the MPs had a website similar to those used by the "pressure groups", one where citizens and/or pressure groups could add issues they are concerned about on their own, and one where individual citizens could pick the statements they agree with, enter their contact info, and be added to a simple tally for their MP, that much of the "spam" could be eliminated. If citizens wanted to add comments in their own words when agreeing with a position statement, those comments would be made available to their MP; otherwise, they would just be added to the tally for the position statement. Special interests could be encouraged to post their own position statements to the site and direct their partisans to go "agree" with it, they'd still be able to make known to MPs that "lots of us feel strongly about this position". Added bonus for them--they may be able to reduce their IT spend, in the basic case being able to make do with a very simple site that just links to the issues they are supporting on the Parliamentary issue site.
Anyhow, that's what I think an enlightened MP would do. Which Mr. Raab appears not to be.
Well, I agree as well. I first went to go look at the photos, then came to the comments because I was certain I couldn't be the only one who didn't think they were so very well done. Great concept, could use some more time cooking in photoshop.
Best all round solution != Best possible all round solution. And there should be a little more planning for the "hit-by-a-bus" scenario. No sane developer would want that sort of single-point-of-failure in a system they develop...why are they willing to accept it when it's wet-ware instead of hardware/software? There needs to be a succession plan, period. That's the bigger issue imo. The scaling thing? That might be a bonus, it may be unnecessary, I surely don't know. But acting like the status quo is the best of all possible worlds is just foolish.
Completely concur. This IS making API calls, whether they want to call it that or not. Your example of being able to a) do a clean room implementation of the APIs and b) mocking out the APIs and in either case being able to run the code without use of WP, at all, is key. They seem to want it such that any of their internal, but public, APIs require GPL, but there's all these other external, public APIs they conveniently borrowed (Atom, RSS, etc) which don't. But you can't have it that way, you can't just declare that one API call requires one license which another API call into the same system doesn't. Well, you can write whatever license you wish that *does* try to do that, but it wouldn't then be GPL.:) They're making a false distinction where their stuff isn't an API, but Web standards are. It's a shame that Thesis did, in fact, copy the GPL code because this would be a much more interesting fight if they hadn't.
source? that's an interesting claim about the AP. while it wouldn't totally surprise me that something like that existed on some scale, i didn't find info about it with a cursory search. and surely you don't mean "every" story? i mean, do the liberals and conservatives *really* need a different recap for the previous night's baseball games? if you have any source for what you say is taking place, i'd be interested in more detail. thanks.
Your ability to disseminate my email after I've told you what it is does not make my email public. It simply means that sending it to someone unscrupulous (hope you recognize yourself) is unwise, and puts me at risk of having it made public. After you've made it public? Yes, it's public. But it's not inherently public simply because the risk exists. Risk of being made public. Fact of being public. Not the same thing.
This. And it's interesting because it makes me wonder how many other "flight" impulses could be short-circuited in other animals. Do mice go running up to cats? Rabbits start frolicking when eagles fly overhead? It'd be interesting to get some picture of what the world on antidepressants would be like. I'd imagine predators would still get hungry and eat...but would their prey stop caring...? Wait...I think I've seen this film....
Except email doesn't have a "central authority" which keeps a master list of email addresses. It's NOTHING like street addresses. Instead, it's like the location of each of my pieces of furniture. I am the only central authority with knowledge of what furniture I have and where it is. My street address (i.e., domain name) is public. The furniture I buy (email addresses I create) are not public. If I send an email to someone and say the polka-dotted couch is in the kitchen, that is a private communication between two parties. It's not public unless the other party chooses to publicize it.
I fully agree that journalists have never been...objectively objective.:) But I think there was more to it than a marketing slogan, and it was most certainly not confined to TV news (in print, it was often a distinguishing feature between, say, tabloids and broadsheets). I think that the institutional attempt to achieve objectivity was a worthwhile pursuit, no matter how Sisyphean. I think it leads to a higher quality product. The consumer is still on the hook for evaluating what bias might be present, but I think that's made easier when gross overt bias isn't present.
Eh, well, I confess, using a TV journalist wasn't a great example...it was just fresh in mind from TFS. Better example: if a newspaper journalist is able to talk to a lot of workers, they might be able to pry loose useful information. Said newspaper reporter can usefully offer anonymity that isn't very feasible for the TV reporter doing on-the-spot reporting. Since they're not showing the source on camera and have spoken to many workers, firing them all would probably be untenable. So I do think functionally keeping journalists away from workers does present some real difficulties. The question is, what is the right level of access. If this were at a company facility, there'd be no question in my mind that the access can be as limited as the company wants. What makes it a little troubling for me is that this is a disaster taking place on a tremendously large expanse of public property. Declaring large swaths of public property off limits to journalists bothers me a bit. Likewise, many of the workers aren't making a career of working for BP. Rather, they're people who have had their livelihoods destroyed by the actions of BP, and they're doing the work that they're doing b/c they want to try to get back to normal and because they don't have any other way to make a buck. Hearing their stories and what they make of their work and the clean-up effort seems like an important part of the narrative of what's taking place. But if they're de facto un-interviewable b/c of rules like this, well, that also bothers me a bit. I don't really believe BP deserves any protection from what its victims might say about it, regardless of whether or not said victims are currently getting money from BP to help out.
Except that is made kinda difficult when they're all housed in BP housing, transported to and from work sites on BP transportation, and probably not wanting to lose their BP monies for chatting with Anderson Cooper.
Well, while I don't disagree, I think the popular usage of "news" has long since ceased to mean "objective discovery and reporting of facts and implications of those facts". Instead, "news" has become segmented by demographic. You have news for the liberal, news for the conservative, news for the dumb, news for the elitist, news for the nerds.... I pine for a day when it was considered embarrassing for a news organization to not be making a serious and overt attempt at objectivity (and yes, of course it was never truly objective...but I think the ideal actually mattered). At any rate, by today's standards, the Daily Kos is a "news outlet" just as is Red State, MSNBC, Fox News, and all the others....
The list in the memo sounds a lot like (although not exactly the same as) Websense categories. My guess is the folks at TSA aren't deciding what "controversial opinion" is, but are delegating that to some company they've contracted their web-filtering to. And my guess is that it would be the category which contains things like websites associated with KKK, Aryan Nation, ALF, and other groups with extreme positions. I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt it's much different than what nearly any major corporation is doing that has signed up for some web-filtering service.
Of course, the credibility of the summary is GREATLY diminished by referencing Alex Jones's conspiracy-mongering website.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "justifying thievery" to call bs on bs claims. There are good reasons to be a moral person which AREN'T fabrications. Don't get mad at the people who point out that someone advocating for an issue you care about is advancing specious arguments to support that issue. Get mad at the person/people who are using lies to try to support that issue. It does a disservice to your cause to have it supported with falsehoods. That's true no matter what your cause is. If the only reasons you can articulate for supporting a cause are lies, you should probably re-examine your devotion to the cause...but I bet you can probably come up with reasons which aren't misleading, inflammatory, and false.
fortunately, the law doesn't rely on existence of a pure monopoly before it determines that illegal anti-competitive behaviour has taken place. although since the courts seem to have their heads up their bottoms when it comes to software and the software industry, i rather doubt we'll see anything happen the way it should.
Perhaps the ticket sellers could do more...although I'd imagine the only thing that would be likely to work is to require that all tickets have a name associated with them at time of sale, and that only the named party is able to use them. Barring that...it's a distributed attack. The scalpers can get thousands of people to buy tickets on their behalf for a small payout, and then they can take ownership of those tickets and resell them at a high premium. How are the ticket sellers suppose to know that Bob is buying on behalf of a scalper and has no interest in going to see the show? Short of the preventative measure I mention, I don't know how they can.
Well, you can certainly choose to feel otherwise, but if the provider of the entertainment I want to attend wants to sell the tickets to their event at a price which I am able to pay, and some douche does an end run around the provider's restrictions to monopolize the supply and then sells those same tickets for a price I'm not able to justify paying...I get a little ticked by that. If a band/team/whatever else wants to give their fans an equal shot at being able to attend their event, they should be able to do so. They want to be choosy about who they sell to and sell below market price? They should be able to do so. Ticket scalpers take that ability away from them. And piss off lots of other people. Like me.
For the record, I was not suggesting that he publish every submission. I don't expect him to be running 4chan, I expect him to run WikiLeaks. I'm taking issue with his attempts to maintain a veil of secrecy over the operations of WikiLeaks--who is involved (the other people working on the site, not the submitters), where their financing comes from (do they have any conflicts of interest in who they out versus who they don't?), how they vet material that is submitted...I'm sure I could come up with more. They're not open about these things. These things have nothing to do choosing to be choosy about what submissions they make public; they have everything to do with WikiLeaks being held to the same standards of openness it calls for from other organisations.
This is exactly what I thought. I think there's room here to find a cheap piece of crap software with an offensive EULA (preferably from a large publisher), and if there were an active campaign to buy that piece of software, reject the EULA, and seek redress from the publisher. I highly doubt people are going to be willing to do that with SC2, but some cheaper piece of software people don't really want.... I'd be willing to buy a $30 piece of software to participate, for one. You'd just have to have a lawyer on board and prepared to file a class-action in the (not-unlikely) event that the publisher failed to refund the purchase price. I don't think it would take millions (although that would be grand), even several tens-of-thousands would probably give most publishers a serious issue...not financially, but they'd not be logistically ready to handle that sort of concerted interaction with their customers. Anyhow, it's a fun thought....
I second the crayola keyboard/mouse combo. The large keys are good for little hunt-and-pecking. And I think the color coding of letters/numbers/control keys is useful as well. And the mouse is smaller than normal as well, which works well for small hands. There's a few other things I'd look into doing as well. Until recently (my daughter is now 4), I had the right mouse button mapped to be a left click so that no matter what she pressed she got a click action instead of pop-up menus she couldn't read and didn't understand where they came from. Finally, there's the desktop environment itself. I set her up with an old laptop (well, core duo) I had with Windows on it. I looked at the Linux based kids environments and just didn't see anything I really dug...plus most of the kids software you may decide to buy (my daughter likes the Diego games) is usually windows based. However, I didn't really want to give her the full windows interface, so I installed a kids desktop environment on top of it. I ended up getting Magic Desktop from Easybits. I'm not totally satisfied with what I got, but I've continued to look and have yet to see something I think is better. The pluses-you can add any program you want to the desktop, or remove ones there. The browser is opt-in only--the admin has to pick what sites are available, anything else won't load (not even embedded content); nor is there an address bar unless you type in the admin password. And the icons are big, it comes with a number of both (mildly) entertaining games as well as educational games. You can set it to start up on log in, so it will keep your kid from exploring Window's seamier side for a number of years until they get more savvy. The downside? It's a finicky piece of software which can sometimes fail to start up cleanly; and although it in theory lets you exit to windows and then restart it, I have almost never had that work properly, I have to log out and back in before it starts properly again. Plus, it hasn't been updated in a good while. I keep hoping someone else will come out with something better (seriously, can it be that difficult?) but thus far no joy.
absolutely. i understand if Assange and his fellows want to stay off the grid as much as they can, try to keep their lives private. Fine. But the public organisation, Wikileaks, which seems predicated on the idea that ALL information should be public, that the public needs to know everything in order to keep everyone honest...their operations should be completely open. "We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people." They weaken their claim by resorting to secrecy in their own activities. If they feel that making public the operations of the organisation would impinge on their individual privacy, then I'd say that perhaps they are too personally involved and that, in the interests of better serving the public (their stated raison d'etre), they should maintain better separation between their private life and their job. The other tack, attempting to cloak their professional activities with personal privacy, is untenable. And I completely dismiss out of hand any suggestion that they're trying to protect wikileaks from hostile governments with privacy. If those hostile governments are omniscient enough to keep track of all their credit card expenditures as they travel on the rail networks, they are surely already well aware of where Wikileaks' financing comes from as well as any other details they want to know about the operations. I doubt they're truly keeping wikileaks secret from the government, only from the public.
There's doubtless a lot of nuance to the subject. In my case: I have some issues I care about...say, issues related to bicycle riders (traffic laws pertaining to; paths for use by; etc). It's something I care about...maybe not passionately, but I do want to see the "right" things done. I also have a job. And a family. And I can't follow every procedural vote and read every set of laws under consideration to see how they might impact that issue (leaving aside the many other issues I also care about). Given the penchant politicians have for burying unrelated items in large bills that are sure to pass, I want an easy way to know when something impacting an issue I care about is being considered by my representatives. I look to special interest groups to help keep me abreast of those developments. They haven't given me my opinion...I've chosen them because they have positions somewhat aligned with mine. If they make it easier for me to register my disapproval of some piece of legislation to my representative(s), so much the better.
Hear, hear! The MP is not elected solely to represent the constituents who are not intimidated by trying to craft reasoned arguments that might sway an MP. They're also elected to represent the views of their many constituents who, on a given issue, may find that an interest group has articulated their position better than they themselves could, as well as those constituents whose opinion on some issues may be as concise as "yay" or "nay". If the MP isn't providing a better way for those constituents to bring those views to the MP's attention, the MP bears the blame for alternate methods of communication with them which spring up.
An enlightened MP would realize that there is an opportunity to create a system which furthers the needs of democracy. A system that works for and with the constituents as well as managing the "pressure groups". I think that if the MPs had a website similar to those used by the "pressure groups", one where citizens and/or pressure groups could add issues they are concerned about on their own, and one where individual citizens could pick the statements they agree with, enter their contact info, and be added to a simple tally for their MP, that much of the "spam" could be eliminated. If citizens wanted to add comments in their own words when agreeing with a position statement, those comments would be made available to their MP; otherwise, they would just be added to the tally for the position statement. Special interests could be encouraged to post their own position statements to the site and direct their partisans to go "agree" with it, they'd still be able to make known to MPs that "lots of us feel strongly about this position". Added bonus for them--they may be able to reduce their IT spend, in the basic case being able to make do with a very simple site that just links to the issues they are supporting on the Parliamentary issue site.
Anyhow, that's what I think an enlightened MP would do. Which Mr. Raab appears not to be.
I hear cars that run on fryer oil are nice because they always smell like french-fries. This car...maybe not so much.
Well, I agree as well. I first went to go look at the photos, then came to the comments because I was certain I couldn't be the only one who didn't think they were so very well done. Great concept, could use some more time cooking in photoshop.
Best all round solution != Best possible all round solution. And there should be a little more planning for the "hit-by-a-bus" scenario. No sane developer would want that sort of single-point-of-failure in a system they develop...why are they willing to accept it when it's wet-ware instead of hardware/software? There needs to be a succession plan, period. That's the bigger issue imo. The scaling thing? That might be a bonus, it may be unnecessary, I surely don't know. But acting like the status quo is the best of all possible worlds is just foolish.
Completely concur. This IS making API calls, whether they want to call it that or not. Your example of being able to a) do a clean room implementation of the APIs and b) mocking out the APIs and in either case being able to run the code without use of WP, at all, is key. They seem to want it such that any of their internal, but public, APIs require GPL, but there's all these other external, public APIs they conveniently borrowed (Atom, RSS, etc) which don't. But you can't have it that way, you can't just declare that one API call requires one license which another API call into the same system doesn't. Well, you can write whatever license you wish that *does* try to do that, but it wouldn't then be GPL. :) They're making a false distinction where their stuff isn't an API, but Web standards are. It's a shame that Thesis did, in fact, copy the GPL code because this would be a much more interesting fight if they hadn't.
Insightful, not informative. ;)
source? that's an interesting claim about the AP. while it wouldn't totally surprise me that something like that existed on some scale, i didn't find info about it with a cursory search. and surely you don't mean "every" story? i mean, do the liberals and conservatives *really* need a different recap for the previous night's baseball games? if you have any source for what you say is taking place, i'd be interested in more detail. thanks.
Your ability to disseminate my email after I've told you what it is does not make my email public. It simply means that sending it to someone unscrupulous (hope you recognize yourself) is unwise, and puts me at risk of having it made public. After you've made it public? Yes, it's public. But it's not inherently public simply because the risk exists. Risk of being made public. Fact of being public. Not the same thing.
This. And it's interesting because it makes me wonder how many other "flight" impulses could be short-circuited in other animals. Do mice go running up to cats? Rabbits start frolicking when eagles fly overhead? It'd be interesting to get some picture of what the world on antidepressants would be like. I'd imagine predators would still get hungry and eat...but would their prey stop caring...? Wait...I think I've seen this film....
Except email doesn't have a "central authority" which keeps a master list of email addresses. It's NOTHING like street addresses. Instead, it's like the location of each of my pieces of furniture. I am the only central authority with knowledge of what furniture I have and where it is. My street address (i.e., domain name) is public. The furniture I buy (email addresses I create) are not public. If I send an email to someone and say the polka-dotted couch is in the kitchen, that is a private communication between two parties. It's not public unless the other party chooses to publicize it.
I fully agree that journalists have never been...objectively objective. :) But I think there was more to it than a marketing slogan, and it was most certainly not confined to TV news (in print, it was often a distinguishing feature between, say, tabloids and broadsheets). I think that the institutional attempt to achieve objectivity was a worthwhile pursuit, no matter how Sisyphean. I think it leads to a higher quality product. The consumer is still on the hook for evaluating what bias might be present, but I think that's made easier when gross overt bias isn't present.
Eh, well, I confess, using a TV journalist wasn't a great example...it was just fresh in mind from TFS. Better example: if a newspaper journalist is able to talk to a lot of workers, they might be able to pry loose useful information. Said newspaper reporter can usefully offer anonymity that isn't very feasible for the TV reporter doing on-the-spot reporting. Since they're not showing the source on camera and have spoken to many workers, firing them all would probably be untenable. So I do think functionally keeping journalists away from workers does present some real difficulties. The question is, what is the right level of access. If this were at a company facility, there'd be no question in my mind that the access can be as limited as the company wants. What makes it a little troubling for me is that this is a disaster taking place on a tremendously large expanse of public property. Declaring large swaths of public property off limits to journalists bothers me a bit. Likewise, many of the workers aren't making a career of working for BP. Rather, they're people who have had their livelihoods destroyed by the actions of BP, and they're doing the work that they're doing b/c they want to try to get back to normal and because they don't have any other way to make a buck. Hearing their stories and what they make of their work and the clean-up effort seems like an important part of the narrative of what's taking place. But if they're de facto un-interviewable b/c of rules like this, well, that also bothers me a bit. I don't really believe BP deserves any protection from what its victims might say about it, regardless of whether or not said victims are currently getting money from BP to help out.
Except that is made kinda difficult when they're all housed in BP housing, transported to and from work sites on BP transportation, and probably not wanting to lose their BP monies for chatting with Anderson Cooper.
Well, while I don't disagree, I think the popular usage of "news" has long since ceased to mean "objective discovery and reporting of facts and implications of those facts". Instead, "news" has become segmented by demographic. You have news for the liberal, news for the conservative, news for the dumb, news for the elitist, news for the nerds.... I pine for a day when it was considered embarrassing for a news organization to not be making a serious and overt attempt at objectivity (and yes, of course it was never truly objective...but I think the ideal actually mattered). At any rate, by today's standards, the Daily Kos is a "news outlet" just as is Red State, MSNBC, Fox News, and all the others....
The list in the memo sounds a lot like (although not exactly the same as) Websense categories. My guess is the folks at TSA aren't deciding what "controversial opinion" is, but are delegating that to some company they've contracted their web-filtering to. And my guess is that it would be the category which contains things like websites associated with KKK, Aryan Nation, ALF, and other groups with extreme positions. I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt it's much different than what nearly any major corporation is doing that has signed up for some web-filtering service.
Of course, the credibility of the summary is GREATLY diminished by referencing Alex Jones's conspiracy-mongering website.
The bike looks cool. Their marketing blurb beneath the pic is a bunch of buzzword laden hooey.