Looks like tor.com has just been hacked and defaced. Luckily, they apparently didn't do anything more than mess with the top story (about jet packs); all the community stuff looks like it's still there. Still, I expect it's time to change all the passwords, and try to sniff out whatever loophole they used to get in…
Whoops, for some reason that link didn't close right.
Paula @361:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lede_(news)#Terms_and_structure
"Although some would spell the word as lede others maintain that the beginning text should be described with the word lead." (The article uses either "lede" or "lede/lead" from then on.)
I suspect it started out as "lede" but somewhere along the way people who didn't know the correct spelling started writing it down as its homonym, "lead."
Craig @320 - You'll believe what you want to, but I swear the word "witch" never even entered my head until someone else mentioned it in a post. I guess I was just thinking something generic like "villain who had a house dropped on her," or else casting the comparison in terms of that specific character rather than to witches in general. I don't know. I do know I was very startled when someone did mention "witch," because it had honestly never crossed my mind.
I had thought that people who just did not like seeing Clinton depicted as a villain were getting upset and seizing on any reason to do so. Now I see that they are reacting to a comparison to "witch," which I learn via Google that Hillary Clinton has been called directly in the past. Mea culpa. I would not do that. Much as I think it would be funny to see Hillary cast as a pop-culture villain—any villain, including the Wicked Witch, the Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, or Darth Vader—I do not think she, or any other woman, deserves to be called a witch.
Apart from that…I've spent the last hour writing and crossing out responses, but you know what? When you're accused of an -ism, anything you say to try to prove you aren't just sounds like lame excuses or justification. So I'll just say that while I dislike Hillary Clinton as a person (just the same as I dislike Bill Clinton), I am satisfied in myself that it is not because she is a woman.
@297 - That was your mistake. The fun stuff doesn't start until the last half.
Paula @274 - Sure, they can assert whatever they want to. They'll still have to litigate it if they want it to stick.
And of course what the reader reads is up to the reader. Nobody said it wasn't. What the AP says (at least by what I quoted) is that, because of the way readers do read (mostly only reading the first couple paragraphs of a work), quoting the first couple of paragraphs is effectively quoting a substantial enough portion of the entire story to make it unnecessary to view the longer work—and hence no longer a fair use.
It's for a judge to say whether or not that is a valid argument, but from my own experience in education I can understand where they're coming from (albeit not sympathize with their assertions or their methods).
Ted @265 - On the first point, I think your analogy is flawed, but neither of us is going to convince the other by arguing about it so I'll just agree to disagree.
On your second point, I don't know that the fair-use-or-not argument is entirely so cut and dried. Quoting from this Ars Technica article:
The AP objects that this isn't fair use. "AP considers taking the headline and lead of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes 'hot news' misappropriation," wrote an AP lawyer. The idea appears to be that posting the first few paragraphs of a news story, especially a breaking one, really does amount to republishing the heart of the piece verbatim, and it might be enough to keep users from checking out the original source.
This does make a certain amount of sense to me—when I was in Journalism class in college, we were instructed that when writing for newspapers, we had to encapsulate the entirety of the story in the first couple of paragraphs, so that people would get the gist of the story, then fill in details with the rest. This was because experience had shown most people didn't bother to read more than the first couple of paragraphs of most newspaper articles anyway.
Further down:
Should cases like this ever go to court, the AP would no doubt argue that a "substantial" portion of the work was used (factor three), enough so that people didn't visit the original story (factor four), and that the use wasn't "transformative" because most of the posts in question had little user content beyond the quote (factor one). All of these are debatable, of course, but the point is that they would actually need to be debated before a judge in order to know if the use in question was fair.
So, it's one thing to argue that a work is fair use or not. But on the other hand, nothing obligates the AP to say, "Oh, well, that's all right then, that use is fair." They are perfectly within their legal rights to send cease-and-desist notices, and pursue the matter in court if the other party does not back down.
It's up to a judge to decide if a particular use is fair—and what's worse, a judge deciding that it would be OK for The Drudge Retort to quote so much of News Story A does not automatically mean it would be all right for Making Light to quote so much of News Story B. The precedent would help the court make the decision in the case of Making Light and News Story B, but it would still have to be litigated. (In my NAL understanding of the matter, of course.)
Which is annoying, since litigation has gotten so costly that a lot of the time large organizations are able to prevail by threat—the smaller parties usually can't afford to defend themselves in court.
@257 - Ted: The thing is, we don't necessarily know that the little guys' behavior was "perfectly legal." Because fair use is a defense, not a right, we can say that it is "defensible"—but the only way for it to be outright determined that it was "legal" would be for a court of law to issue findings on that specific issue. The court would have to apply the 4-point fair use test to it and decide on which side of the law it fell.
(This is just based on my understanding from what I have read. IANAL, but I do like using the acronym because when else would I get to type ANAL in all caps like that?)
Xopher @247 - OK, I see you were focusing on the "witch" part, I was focusing on the "house landed on" part. I suppose I can see how someone could consider the piece sexist in that context. (Though there are some who would feel sorry for the poor witch—bad enough that she had a house drop on her, but to be branded with Hillary Clinton's name too?)
I still don't think the intention of the piece was necessarily sexist. I will admit to disliking Hillary Clinton, but this dislike is predicated on her and her husband's behavior while he was in office, and on some of the policies and programs she favors—gender doesn't enter into it. In fact, if there is one thing I do respect Hillary for, it is running in spite of the obstacles that her gender posed. I do think it is about time we had a female President—I just don't think it should be Hillary.
This is why I hate political correctness so much—if I had found it through some other context, I could see myself linking to that image on my blog without any sexist intent, just because I thought it was an amusing statement of how decisively Obama carried the nomination over Hillary—like a house landing on her. Had I done so, then any accusations of sexism would have come as a complete surprise to me.
But thanks to PC, I need to watch anything I say or do because there's a chance I might accidentally offend someone in some completely unintended way.
Paula @245: All right, then show me the context which demonstrates that image was specifically intended (either in Coleman's repost of it, or by the person who created it) as a put-down of Those Uppity Feminists, rather than as a humorous commentary on how decisively Obama has claimed the nomination of his party?
It seems to me there's a difference between how a work of content is intended and how an individual chooses to receive it. (Hell, whole fields of literary criticism are founded on that principle.) Just because you choose to view it as sexist does not mean that it somehow embodies the platonic ideal of sexism.
Xopher @244: I think the post in question runs afoul of textual communication's lack of emotional context—what might come off as a conversationally-phrased denial when spoken aloud can sound a lot more like weaseling when read flat in text. When you say, "I do not understand why Robert Cox could not have said that instead of weaseling when asked," you're failing to consider that maybe Cox thought he did say that (only not in so many words).
(oops, forgot to change that last "them" to "him" when I changed the subject of the sentence from plural to singular. Oh well, it still works.)
@239 - Because, of course, we all know that any time anyone makes fun of Hillary Clinton, they are automatically sexist. Just like when they make fun of Barrack Obama, they are automatically racist. Or when they make fun of John McCain, they're automatically ageist.
Because, after all, a person's only defining characteristic is the minority group to which he belongs. (Oh, look, I used "he" in a gender neutral sense, I must be sexist!) Everything else about them is unimportant.
Here's the brief review of the book I posted to my LJ yesterday:
I thought it was an interesting piece of writing, with young adult characters who are reasonably believable in the choices and mistakes they make. There's some interesting technological gimmickery in it, too, much of which is not too far from reality. Also, an interesting history lesson about the Yippie counterculture of the '60s and '70s.
Its one big flaw is the flaw common to much libertarian political SF: the bad guys (Homeland Security) are painted as universally, almost cartoonishly eeevil ratbastards rather than the ordinary folks with feet of clay they (probably) are in real life. It feels like the book is knocking down straw men in the service of its political thesis, especially since the DHS villains take some measures in the book that they have not (yet) done in real life. But I suppose you could say Doctorow is advising people on what to do when and if they do take those measures.
Anyway, I read it for free and don't feel like I got short-changed. So I guess that's something.
How ironic that Andrew Burt should do this.
Andrew Burt was responsible for the first real unfettered access I had to USENET, back in the days when my telnet access was through a CP/CMS machine, and so telnet into Nyx was all cluttered with ANSI codes and improper scrolling yet still readable. aburt's Nyx site was where I originally went to read the newsgroup rec.arts.anime that a friend had told me about, and where I was then inducted into online writing circles where we wrote our tales and shared our stories freely on the Internet. Though defunct now, alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest were really jumping back in the day.
And Burt was also a more direct champion of writing circles, too, in his work with Critters. According to the article, he believed that espousing some of the principles of the Open Source movement in writing would lead to more and better writers.
And now look what he's doing. What a shame that it should come to this.
Oh, and one more thing...
Typically, webhosts have some sort of "archive manager" function as part of their control panel, which will let you download your own total site backups, independent of any backups that the ISP operator may or may not keep.
If your site contains important, irreplaceable stuff, it's a good idea to use this at least once a week. Once (if) they get their stuff back and get set up on HostGator, it would probably be a good idea for AW to do this at least once a week from now on.
Working for a small webhost as I do (basically, it's just me and my boss), and admittedly not knowing the whole story, I do have some sympathies for JC. The amount of bandwidth that the community was apparently using seems quite excessive for a BBS community from my experience, but never having visited Absolute Write I don't know what might have been causing it. If they're a small hosting service, they probably have to pay through the nose for extra bandwidth, and the whole thing was costing them money--plus it was leaving fewer resources left over for everyone else who hosts with them.
I'm also a bit less than sympathetic to AW if it's true that they were even indirectly inciting a mailbombing attack on someone--even a scammer. I take a dim view of denial-of-service attacks of any sort; they end up causing far too much collateral damage.
I do think JC should return the database, but he's probably afflicted with legal-deer-in-the-headlights syndrome, afraid that if he returns it he could be open to liability from Bauer suing him or something, so he feels like the safest thing is to do nothing at all until he has some better idea of what's going on.
David Goldfarb: To the best of my (admittedly rather sketchy) knowledge, btw, California has no toll roads and never has. (Toll bridges is something else entirely.)
As opposed to the Internet, which is one gigantic troll bridge...
Because you can't just adjust inspiration like a thermostat. You can't simply decide not to be inspired by the characters in the movie or TV show you just watched, or the book you just read, and get inspired for something else original instead. Your inspiration is what it is, and if you can't write about what you're inspired to write about, then that creativity is stifled.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 15 |
| 2007 | 1 |
| 2006 | 18 |
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