A couple of weeks ago, Harvard president Larry Summers made waves with some remarks suggesting that the under-representation of women in certain fields at top universities may be attributable to “innate” differences between men and women. Summers has since defended himself in the press, and there’s been a lot of healthy commentary to the […]
It looks like the world’s largest ISP, America Online, is going to cut off access to Usenet newsgroups. Usenet, the 25-year-old distributed online conferencing system, was one of the foundations of many users’ experience of “virtual community.” It’s also extremely hard to censor.
From Brian McWilliams’s column at Betanews:
According to a notice on AOL’s Web site, […]
Like most inveterate TV watchers of my generation (or a generation younger, or a generation older), I’m still wrapping my mind around the death on Sunday of Johnny Carson, the man who was both an icon of American television and a deeply and obviously human being with gifts that vastly exceeded (what little we think […]
The Macintosh turned 21 yesterday, and thanks to some archived video now available online, you can revisit Steve Jobs’s original introduction of the Macintosh. The applause of the crowd when the word “Macintosh” first scrolls onscreen is a reminder of what a revolution it was to have bitmapped text and graphics on a consumer-grade […]
Earlier in January, I posted a number of Thoughts on Wikipedia that were really designed to be answers to some of the frequent, too-glib criticisms I was hearing about this “open-source” encyclopedia.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Patrick Ross read them, and he seems to have properly understood that the notion of a counterweight to traditional […]
(Warning — long posting/review)
I managed to catch the new Michael Radford/Al Pacino “Merchant of Venice” film on Monday, and I found a lot to like about this production. The text of the play is sensitively edited and converted into an acceptable screenplay. Much of the text that is necessarily sort of declamatory on […]
The BBC is re-airing its miniseries called “The Power of Nightmares.” I haven’t seen it, and am unlikely to, unless it airs on BBC America. But I did read the associated articles on the BBC website. I don’t accept the producers’ characterization of Al Qaeda as a “phantom enemy,” but I think […]
This is one of those things that you have to read to believe — the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s James DeLong is getting nervous about IBM’s recent decision to release 500 patents for use by open-source developers. The patent release is not without strings — you can’t take advantage of the patents and then […]
I see that I’m part of the 20-year Google Usenet timeline!
I also noticed that it was not, in fact, the first instance of my stating Godwin’s Law, although for some reason it seems to be the first instance that Google could dig out of DejaNews. (Maybe there was some copyright-law violation that got the earlier […]
Here’s what I’m not saying here — I’m not saying the old paradigms of fact-gathering and reporting don’t work. I believe they often do. But the reflexive dismissal of alternative models of information-gathering dismays me, not least because I believe the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press was supposed to have meaning […]