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Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO, of O’Reilly Media, approaches the argument against SOPA from the stand point that this isn’t a matter of “simply weighing the concerns of one set of lobbyists against those of another, but using a standard of care and independent judgment about what is best for our society.” (emphasis mine)

Do we want to stifle creativity or squelch it?

His interview with GigaOM :

…The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair. If you have a relationship with your customers, and they know you’re doing the right thing, they will support you.

The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway.
… Read More

 

And further comments that didn’t make it in to the above article:

…My point is that when evaluating the request for legislation like SOPA, Congress ought to be considering factors like:

* The credibility of those making claims. The motion picture industry has a history of opposing every new technology, even those that proved ultimately to grow the market. (MPAA head Jack Valenti’s claim that the VCR was the equivalent of letting “Jack the Ripper” into your home is the most famous example.)
… Read More

 

I have contacted my legislators to express my opinion about this piece of legislation that will change the internet from a place where there is a free exchange of ideas, to a place of corporate control.

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I have been shocked lately at how quickly our civil liberties are being stripped away. Don’t think that one day whatever group you belong to won’t be targeted, if it suits those in authority. This is not a Republican vs. Democrat issue. All but one Republican candidate (Ron Paul), along with our current president, support the National Defense Authorization Act.

The indefinite detention of American citizens as made legal by the passage of this act is a travesty of justice and an extraordinary violation of important civil rights enshrined in our constitution.

Nazi Germany sat by and watched group after group lose their civil liberties, because it didn’t affect them personally, until one day it did.

On the other hand, the Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011 will return those civil liberties to our citizens. It is cosponsored by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

From Dianne Feinstein’s website:

“We must clarify U.S. law to state unequivocally that the government cannot indefinitely detain American citizens inside this country without trial or charge. I strongly believe that Constitutional due process requires U.S. citizens apprehended in the U.S. should never be held in indefinite detention. And that is what this new legislation would accomplish.”
… Read More

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SOPA and PIPA are the newest assaults on individual liberties in this country. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act already protects the rights of copyright holders. This law is all about control. Imagine a world where Wikipedia no longer exists, and all information is owned by corporations. THAT is what these laws are ultimately about. The implementation of these bills will also cause security issues. It sounds like an opportunity for spammers and virus writers…

A group of prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills….

“…Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.” … Read More

via An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

John “TotalBiscuit” Bain is a UK Law graduate, professional gaming commentator and journalist.

Go to http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com for addtional evidence and links to the original source research on the Internet Wayback Machine.

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According to Wikipedia, “As of September 2011, the “shoppybag.com” website read that ‘ShoppyBag ceased all operations on July 31st, 2011.’”

This is good news for those of us who were concerned that it was nothing more than an email harvester.

As I wrote:

…just say NO to ShoppyBag and its spammy ways.

… Read More

 

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The lines at my voting location were a nightmare yesterday. All the extra paperwork. Plus I witnessed people’s ballots being rejected by the computer, and they had to get new ballots to re-vote (primarily elderly citizens).

And this is supposed to be easier?

I am very concerned about how it is going to work next year when we have a presidential election. The lines are going to be wrapped around the elementary school.

As I wrote last year:

Apparently some government official felt that we weren’t spending enough taxpayer money.

… Read More

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I have enjoyed Aaron Tay’s writings for a couple years. I found this tongue-in-cheek observation very insightful about the future of the library catalog, Steve Jobs style…

“Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a next generation library catalogue search with faceted browsing and web 2.0 features. The second is a revolutionary searching device that searches articles from databases. And the third is a breakthrough mobile internet device. So, three things: a next generation library catalogue; a revolutionary searching device that searches articles; and a breakthrough mobile user interface.  These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it icatalogue. Today, libraries are going to reinvent the catalogue!” … Read More

via Musings About Librarianship

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Lukas Koster in his article FRBR Outside the Box, discusses a very similar vision to what I have espoused. He calls the solution “a networked linked data model.” He explains that, while FRBR is a huge improvement over what we have now, he sees FRBR as a subset of the bigger solution. Using the networked linked data model, objects (whether they be books, movies, journal articles, etc.) are related to other objects (“based on” “part of”, etc.). Below he describes why he thinks FRBR is not enough (yet still vital):

Of course, this model, if implemented, would be an enormous improvement to the old public catalogue situation. It makes it possible for library customers to have an automatic overview of all editions, translations, adaptations of one specific original work through the mechanism of Expressions and Manifestations. RDA (Resource Description and Access) is exactly doing this.

However there are some significant drawbacks, because the FRBR model is an old model, based on the traditional way of library cataloguing of physical items (books, journals, and cd’s, dvd’s), etc. (Karen Coyle at SWIB10).

• In the first place the FRBR model only shows the Works and related Manifestations and Expressions of physical copies (Items) that the library in question owns. Editions not in the possession of the library are ignored. This would be a bit different in a union catalogue of course, but then the model still only describes the holdings of the participating libraries.
• Secondly, the focus on physical copies is also the reason that the original FRBR model does not have a place for journal titles as such, only for journal issues. So there will be as many entries for one journal as the library has issues of it.
• Thirdly, it’s a hierarchical model, which incorporates only relations from the Work top down. There is no room for relations like: ‘similar works’, ‘other material on the same subject’, ‘influenced by’, etc.
• In the fourth place, FRBR still does not look at content. It is document centric, instead of information centric. It does however have the option for describing parts of a Work, if they are considered separate entities/works, like journal articles or volumes of a trilogy.
• Finally, the FRBR Item entity is only interesting in a storage and logistics environment for physical copies, such as the Circulation function in libraries, or the Sales function in bookstores. It has no relation to content whatsoever.

… Read More.

via Commonplace.net

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Unless you have been living under a rock, you are aware that we had some significant weather on the east coast over the weekend. So once I completed the hurricane preparations, I had some free time.

I have been very interested in the Drupal CMS. I developed the South Bay Bible Fellowship website using Drupal 6 (I am up to version 6.22). I am also involved with two additional projects. One is for a company I work for that is hiring a web development company to revamp their website using Drupal, and they want me to provide ongoing maintenance. The other is for another church, where the committee has not yet chosen a development platform (I, of course, am pushing for Drupal).

I had been thinking that I needed my own server space with which to “play.” I had also been researching different hosting solutions. I am not disatisfied with the hosting company I have been working with for close to nine years:  for South Bay Bible Fellowship, and for another non-profit prior to that (which used Simple Machines forums). However, I have found the speed of disk access and the CPU was frustratingly slow at times.  Drupal can be very memory and CPU intensive.

I discovered Hot Drupal hosting. I get 1.5 gig of server space, 100000 mb bandwidth, 2 databases, and a development subdomain. It is $10 a month, and if I pay quarterly, my first year of domain registration is free (which is what I did, of course).

Choosing a domain name was actually harder than I thought. Finally I settled on a nickname a couple of unnamed coworkers *cough Jay* *cough Barbara* call me: “The Berdinka.” Hence theberdinka.com was christened.

So I bit the bullet and signed up for an account. While one eye was watching Irene move up the coast, the other was on my laptop, installing Drupal 7.7.

I sure know how to have a good time.

Drupal 7 includes support for semantic web metadata. This adds metadata  to web pages to give search engines tools to find the information stored on your website. This is smarter than simple keywords. There are tools for the developer to indicate relationships between the tags you establish for each node. I am looking forward to exploring this ability.

I am going to use it as a place to store revised articles I have written over the last couple years, and as a place where I can be contacted. It should be interesting.

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And, incidentally, erasing your history has no effect…… they can see everything on servers that you have no access to.

If you have checked your personal email while at work, your employers now know how to read your mail. Facebook. Whatever. I suggest that when you get home, you change your passwords, and stop doing personal stuff, and/or “recreational” stuff, when you are at work, getting paid to do the company’s business activities (aka “work”).

If they bother to look, yes, they can tell exactly (to the millisecond) how many minutes a week you play solitaire and Angry Birds. That might be a factor in their thinking when it’s time for the next round of layoffs … Read More

via Tech – for Everyone

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Marshall Breeding discusses the issue of relevancy ranking in the 21st Century OPAC.

It seems that most online catalogs and discovery systems attempt to present their search results according to relevancy. That’s what library users expect since most of the search environments they use likewise follow this approach. Yet, it’s really difficult to make relevancy work well for library collections, especially when intermingling results that include books, articles, and other kinds of materials.

… Read More.

via GuidePosts : Perspective and commentary by Marshall Breeding