Most libraries have already tackled this topic, and provide at least some annotated links, as well as suggestions for Web directories aimed at children. For a non-local example, try the Internet Public Library's offering. Your local public library probably has something similar, tailored to local interests.
Republicans are traditionally viewed as more mainstream on cultural and social values than Democrats, and that perception was only strengthened by the president's affair with a White House intern.
But what could possibly be a better example of mainstream values than having an affair with a White House intern? Isn't this the great American dream? God save us from folks who want to forbid us from having all the crazy circus sex we like with White House interns (and let's not forget the interns of other governmental departments -- I hear the interns over at the Pentagon are top-notch.)
Throw away your togas and break out the chitons! Talk to your friendly neighborhood classics department for help on making your organization more authentic.
I think the book you're thinking of is the first book in the Otherland series by Tad Williams, "City of Golden Shadow." The second and third are "River of Blue Fire" and "Mountain of Black Glass." The fourth hasn't been published yet. You can check http://www.tadwilliams.com for more information and excerpts from the books.
This lobbying on NPR's part against LPFM really incenses me, and normally I'm a big fan of NPR and their news coverage. (I sure do hope Click and Clack are innocent of all this...)
This is a free speech issue. The FCC has no business regulating broadcasters on such a small scale -- but at least with beginning to regulate LPFM they'll decriminalize it. I've often toyed with the idea of putting together my own small-scale radio operation, but the idea of buying the equipment just to have it confiscated later by the FCC isn't very appealing.
Odd John is a terrific story. I read a reference (with plot summary) to it in one of Julian May's Galactic Milieu books (The Surveillance, the first half of The Metaconcert.) It sounded terrific, but when I tried to find it, I was out of luck since it was long since out of print. One day, I saw the Odd John and Sirius reprint at some bookstore in the mall, and snapped it up immediately.
Anyway, they're both great books. Olaf Stapledon's writing was certainly ahead of his time, and probably ahead of ours. While the premise of Odd John has been covered plenty of times since then (like in Ted Sturgeon's More than Human) I've never heard of anybody tackling something like Sirius with anything like the depth he gives it. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to reading any of Stapledon's other books, but since my library's got those on the shelves, I'm not in any rush to do it.
I would assume that he doesn't really qualify as a public figure, which makes the libel claim easier (which points out a shortcoming in American law which was meant to support free press but has ended up leaving us with an unaccountable press, able to publish inuendo without any basis in fact)
Hm. Are you saying that being a public figure makes pressing libel claims easier, or that not qualifying as one does? Not sure how to parse that.
Anyway, as for the problem of public figures having an easier time pressing libel charges (the idea being that they've got more to lose), Times v. Sullivan (1964) addressed this by giving public figures a higher burden to meet to successfully bring their case, i.e., "actual malice" (knowledge of falsity and/or reckless disregard for the truth).
How all this works in actual practice is another idea entirely, as usual.
The problem with university housing is that residents don't sign a normal lease. The housing agreements pretty much give away all the rights one would expect from a normal landlord at the outset -- or so the housing director at my university told me when I asked him.
We've got highly-restricted dorm visitation hours here, too, in Mississippi, which aren't controlled by individual universities but by the state college board, so neither the students nor local administration have anything to do with it. I suppose things could change if someone put up a fight, but nobody else seems to think it's a problem. And somehow I doubt voting would change a thing. I mean, both Thad Cochran and Trent Lott are Ole Miss alumni -- we'd only get more of the same.
McGrath responded to this scenario: a student uses a campus Internet connection to decide which political candidates to support. That person is misusing university equipment, she said, just as if she used her legislative office phone to make long-distance personal phone calls.
On the other hand, the same student, viewing the same pages for a class assignment, is using the equipment properly, she said.
That's exactly the same as forbidding students to use the university library unless they're only checking out books directly related to some class assignment. What a great way to further Arizona students' education, huh?
That's why a lot of people (or maybe just me) throw some random item in the cart to screw up the statistics. If you throw in enough items that aren't in your marketing demographic, it might confuse the junk-mailers and such enough that you'll be left alone for a little while.
And of course you shouldn't use your real name, address, etc. when filling out the form for the card in the first place. Duh. And don't pay with credit cards! Make sure you use cash when you're getting those cereal discounts, baby food and Depends! You don't want Them to know where to find you, eating your Cap'n Crunch.
Congratulations on having worked out a more-or-less reasonable compromise. I only wish the library system I used to work for had fared as well, but they fell to the ravings of the porn-paranoids shortly after I left town to go off to school, and installed WebSense on all of their terminals (and deleted telnet! That's something I'll never understand -- it's essential to using so many library-type resources, like the online catalog at my university's. Where does that come from?)
I think the ALA's position on the filtering matter is terrific: privacy screens should do the job perfectly well. As for the fears about "perverts hogging the terminals," I've never seen a library yet that didn't have a time limit in place on computer use when there are other people waiting to use the machines -- just like for the books.
Something else that bothers me about filtering software is the nasty things it seems to do to any computers it's installed on. Both the crippled computers at my old library and the ones at my old high school crashed at least once an hour, and in the latter case, most of them were completely unusable. (I s'pose that might be attributable to flaws in Windows, but that's too easy an explanation.)
Keep up the good work! I hope to fight in the trenches myself after I finally graduate and go get my MLS.:)
The purpose of bills like this is to win big political points for their author.
The problem with this is that while McCain may be a great guy and all, rewarding him with our votes and support is not necessarily a good thing. It's plain as day that McCain is doing his darnedest to build up a reputation for being what the somewhat-informed masses will see as an "internet-savvy" politician. He already is, in fact. Most of the net-related bills in the past few years have had his name in blinkenlights all over 'em. He's building a reputation with stuff like this (partly deserved, don't get me wrong -- I sure don't see anybody else making much of an effort.)
One day soon he's going to bring that reputation of his to bear behind another one of his infamous censorship bills. I mean, sure, if you're pro-censorship, he's a great guy and you should donate to his campaign funds and such, even if you're not in Arizona. He'd be worth it. But if you're not in favor of the scary scary prospect of having scary scary laws telling you what you can and can't say or publish, don't forget that even our 'friend' McCain has other plans.
Undermining the halfway-good things is cynical and unproductive, but if you're in favor of the current bill -- and not in favor of censorship -- don't go overboard with the praise.
I think you're right; the whole thing is silly. I just posted the bit about the Oliver Stone case... I dunno. I thought it was funny. And whatever one thinks of ol' Katz, it's always nice to have some more examples of weird entertainment-industry-blame-fests than just a couple of emails. Or a thousand. Whatever.
Really, I think the MPAA is a load of hogwash... I should look into who funds them. The money's going to waste. If a parent really -is- concerned about what her kid sees, and has some sort of authoritarian bent anyway, she can (and does) research the movies on her own. There're all sorts of groups willing to provide information, ratings and whatnot keyed to every demographic, no matter how bizarre -- and they do it because they already believe the MPAA's not sufficient.
The idea that a movie, book, etc. can incite violence like that is absurd -- especially since in the NBK case, they're claiming that it incites violence in "people like that" as well as the general public. Just think about the team of lawyers and psychologists even the smallest independent filmmaker might have to hire to make sure their movies won't "incite" the criminally insane to violence. It's almost funny -- but what if this sort of thing gains a court precedent?
The idea behind this particular case is that they want to view intellectual property as being like a regular physical commodity, in that, just like with consumer safety lawsuits, you could sue for damages if you're harmed by the film (like you could if you were harmed by, say, a faulty child safety seat or something like that.) What a scary thought.
The 'moral majority' -- that the politicians claim is demanding ever-increasing restrictions on what we can and can't view -- should take matters into its own hands and do it themselves (like some of them are already doing, to their credit.) Putting the responsibility for what they feel they should be doing for (to?) their children into the hands of an association that isn't accountable to anyone, least of all the people they're supposed to be serving, is not the way to do things.
Probably why so many people are confusing the MPAA ratings with law -- it may not be government, but it sure feels like it, in the sort of tangly bureaucratic way that makes me itch.
Thanks for your response.
It's not a terribly well-formed one, but it'll have to do for now.:)
A woman in Amite, Louisiana, was suing Oliver Stone along with just about everybody else involved in the production and distribution of the film -- she'd been shot during a crime spree that was supposedly inspired by the movie. The shooters were said to have watched Natural Born Killers repeatedly before setting out on their adventure. Or whatever you'd call it.
Both of the criminals -were- over 18 at the time of the crime. This case isn't even a "kids are impressionable, let's protect them" one -- according to the plaintiffs, we're all impressionable, and the defendants should have known the movie "would cause and inspire people such as the defendants to commit crimes."
Let's just lock it all up, why don't we?
Oh, forget it. I'm not really sure what I was trying to say here. It is an interesting case, though. People have tried this sort of thing before, and it generally doesn't work, but who knows what a jury in a smallish southern town will say about it?
Slashdot Mirror
Most libraries have already tackled this topic, and provide at least some annotated links, as well as suggestions for Web directories aimed at children. For a non-local example, try the Internet Public Library's offering. Your local public library probably has something similar, tailored to local interests.
Republicans are traditionally viewed as more mainstream on cultural and social values than Democrats, and that perception was only strengthened by the president's affair with a White House intern.
But what could possibly be a better example of mainstream values than having an affair with a White House intern? Isn't this the great American dream? God save us from folks who want to forbid us from having all the crazy circus sex we like with White House interns (and let's not forget the interns of other governmental departments -- I hear the interns over at the Pentagon are top-notch.)
Throw away your togas and break out the chitons! Talk to your friendly neighborhood classics department for help on making your organization more authentic.
I think the book you're thinking of is the first book in the Otherland series by Tad Williams, "City of Golden Shadow." The second and third are "River of Blue Fire" and "Mountain of Black Glass." The fourth hasn't been published yet. You can check http://www.tadwilliams.com for more information and excerpts from the books.
This lobbying on NPR's part against LPFM really incenses me, and normally I'm a big fan of NPR and their news coverage. (I sure do hope Click and Clack are innocent of all this...)
This is a free speech issue. The FCC has no business regulating broadcasters on such a small scale -- but at least with beginning to regulate LPFM they'll decriminalize it. I've often toyed with the idea of putting together my own small-scale radio operation, but the idea of buying the equipment just to have it confiscated later by the FCC isn't very appealing.
Odd John is a terrific story. I read a reference (with plot summary) to it in one of Julian May's Galactic Milieu books (The Surveillance, the first half of The Metaconcert.) It sounded terrific, but when I tried to find it, I was out of luck since it was long since out of print. One day, I saw the Odd John and Sirius reprint at some bookstore in the mall, and snapped it up immediately.
Anyway, they're both great books. Olaf Stapledon's writing was certainly ahead of his time, and probably ahead of ours. While the premise of Odd John has been covered plenty of times since then (like in Ted Sturgeon's More than Human) I've never heard of anybody tackling something like Sirius with anything like the depth he gives it. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to reading any of Stapledon's other books, but since my library's got those on the shelves, I'm not in any rush to do it.
I would assume that he doesn't really qualify as a public figure, which makes the libel claim easier (which points out a shortcoming in American law which was meant to support free press but has ended up leaving us with an unaccountable press, able to publish inuendo without any basis in fact)
Hm. Are you saying that being a public figure makes pressing libel claims easier, or that not qualifying as one does? Not sure how to parse that.
Anyway, as for the problem of public figures having an easier time pressing libel charges (the idea being that they've got more to lose), Times v. Sullivan (1964) addressed this by giving public figures a higher burden to meet to successfully bring their case, i.e., "actual malice" (knowledge of falsity and/or reckless disregard for the truth).
How all this works in actual practice is another idea entirely, as usual.
The problem with university housing is that residents don't sign a normal lease. The housing agreements pretty much give away all the rights one would expect from a normal landlord at the outset -- or so the housing director at my university told me when I asked him.
We've got highly-restricted dorm visitation hours here, too, in Mississippi, which aren't controlled by individual universities but by the state college board, so neither the students nor local administration have anything to do with it. I suppose things could change if someone put up a fight, but nobody else seems to think it's a problem. And somehow I doubt voting would change a thing. I mean, both Thad Cochran and Trent Lott are Ole Miss alumni -- we'd only get more of the same.
McGrath responded to this scenario: a student uses a campus Internet connection to decide which political candidates to support. That person is misusing university equipment, she said, just as if she used her legislative office phone to make long-distance personal phone calls.
On the other hand, the same student, viewing the same pages for a class assignment, is using the equipment properly, she said.
That's exactly the same as forbidding students to use the university library unless they're only checking out books directly related to some class assignment. What a great way to further Arizona students' education, huh?
That's why a lot of people (or maybe just me) throw some random item in the cart to screw up the statistics. If you throw in enough items that aren't in your marketing demographic, it might confuse the junk-mailers and such enough that you'll be left alone for a little while.
And of course you shouldn't use your real name, address, etc. when filling out the form for the card in the first place. Duh. And don't pay with credit cards! Make sure you use cash when you're getting those cereal discounts, baby food and Depends! You don't want Them to know where to find you, eating your Cap'n Crunch.
Congratulations on having worked out a more-or-less reasonable compromise. I only wish the library system I used to work for had fared as well, but they fell to the ravings of the porn-paranoids shortly after I left town to go off to school, and installed WebSense on all of their terminals (and deleted telnet! That's something I'll never understand -- it's essential to using so many library-type resources, like the online catalog at my university's. Where does that come from?)
:)
I think the ALA's position on the filtering matter is terrific: privacy screens should do the job perfectly well. As for the fears about "perverts hogging the terminals," I've never seen a library yet that didn't have a time limit in place on computer use when there are other people waiting to use the machines -- just like for the books.
Something else that bothers me about filtering software is the nasty things it seems to do to any computers it's installed on. Both the crippled computers at my old library and the ones at my old high school crashed at least once an hour, and in the latter case, most of them were completely unusable. (I s'pose that might be attributable to flaws in Windows, but that's too easy an explanation.)
Keep up the good work!
I hope to fight in the trenches myself after I finally graduate and go get my MLS.
The purpose of bills like this is to win big political points for their author.
The problem with this is that while McCain may be a great guy and all, rewarding him with our votes and support is not necessarily a good thing. It's plain as day that McCain is doing his darnedest to build up a reputation for being what the somewhat-informed masses will see as an "internet-savvy" politician. He already is, in fact. Most of the net-related bills in the past few years have had his name in blinkenlights all over 'em. He's building a reputation with stuff like this (partly deserved, don't get me wrong -- I sure don't see anybody else making much of an effort.)
One day soon he's going to bring that reputation of his to bear behind another one of his infamous censorship bills. I mean, sure, if you're pro-censorship, he's a great guy and you should donate to his campaign funds and such, even if you're not in Arizona. He'd be worth it. But if you're not in favor of the scary scary prospect of having scary scary laws telling you what you can and can't say or publish, don't forget that even our 'friend' McCain has other plans.
Undermining the halfway-good things is cynical and unproductive, but if you're in favor of the current bill -- and not in favor of censorship -- don't go overboard with the praise.
I think you're right; the whole thing is silly. I just posted the bit about the Oliver Stone case... I dunno. I thought it was funny. And whatever one thinks of ol' Katz, it's always nice to have some more examples of weird entertainment-industry-blame-fests than just a couple of emails. Or a thousand. Whatever.
:)
Really, I think the MPAA is a load of hogwash... I should look into who funds them. The money's going to waste. If a parent really -is- concerned about what her kid sees, and has some sort of authoritarian bent anyway, she can (and does) research the movies on her own. There're all sorts of groups willing to provide information, ratings and whatnot keyed to every demographic, no matter how bizarre -- and they do it because they already believe the MPAA's not sufficient.
The idea that a movie, book, etc. can incite violence like that is absurd -- especially since in the NBK case, they're claiming that it incites violence in "people like that" as well as the general public. Just think about the team of lawyers and psychologists even the smallest independent filmmaker might have to hire to make sure their movies won't "incite" the criminally insane to violence. It's almost funny -- but what if this sort of thing gains a court precedent?
The idea behind this particular case is that they want to view intellectual property as being like a regular physical commodity, in that, just like with consumer safety lawsuits, you could sue for damages if you're harmed by the film (like you could if you were harmed by, say, a faulty child safety seat or something like that.) What a scary thought.
The 'moral majority' -- that the politicians claim is demanding ever-increasing restrictions on what we can and can't view -- should take matters into its own hands and do it themselves (like some of them are already doing, to their credit.) Putting the responsibility for what they feel they should be doing for (to?) their children into the hands of an association that isn't accountable to anyone, least of all the people they're supposed to be serving, is not the way to do things.
Probably why so many people are confusing the MPAA ratings with law -- it may not be government, but it sure feels like it, in the sort of tangly bureaucratic way that makes me itch.
Thanks for your response.
It's not a terribly well-formed one, but it'll have to do for now.
Interesting bit about Natural Born Killers:
A woman in Amite, Louisiana, was suing Oliver Stone along with just about everybody else involved in the production and distribution of the film -- she'd been shot during a crime spree that was supposedly inspired by the movie. The shooters were said to have watched Natural Born Killers repeatedly before setting out on their adventure. Or whatever you'd call it.
Both of the criminals -were- over 18 at the time of the crime. This case isn't even a "kids are impressionable, let's protect them" one -- according to the plaintiffs, we're all impressionable, and the defendants should have known the movie "would cause and inspire people such as the defendants to commit crimes."
Let's just lock it all up, why don't we?
Oh, forget it. I'm not really sure what I was trying to say here. It is an interesting case, though. People have tried this sort of thing before, and it generally doesn't work, but who knows what a jury in a smallish southern town will say about it?