Ed Felton on the Associated Press announcement last week that it would be developing some kind of online news registry to control use of news content: It was hard to make sense of this, so I went looking for more information. AP posted a diagram of the system, which only adds to the confusion — your satisfaction with the diagram will be inversely proportional to your knowledge of the technology. As far as I can tell, the underlying technology is based on hNews, a microformat for news, shown...

One might suspect bias. Michael Scalisi: Given the rumor mill chatter, it sounds like the mythical Apple tablet is all but a done deal. People seem to be talking with certainty about how, either later this year or early next year, Apple will unveil a multitouch tablet with a 10-inch screen, 3G wireless broadband, and iPhone OS possibly subsidized by a Verizon Wireless contract. It would basically be a big iPod Touch. I’m no Apple hater, and I welcome an Apple device to the (don’t call it a) netbook...

I posted this here on May 21, 2008, during the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The original title of the post was Racism and sexism: it’s time to change the paradigm. I changed the title this time because recent events have changed my emphasis and give it renewed relevance. Ford’s message is one I personally take very much to heart. Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University and author of The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations...

Administered the drugs that killed him, that is. I wouldn’t want to be that doctor. Last night The Daily Beast had Marcia Clark (blonder than I remember her) pondering the next trial of the century. Clark says prescription-drug abuse is the drug story of our time and prescription narcotics “the cocaine of the new millennium.”

The 911 tape has been released. CNN: In the call, Lucia Whalen reports seeing “two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I’m not really sure, and the other one entered, and I didn’t see what he looked like at all.” “I just saw it from a distance, and this older woman was worried, thinking somebody’s breaking in someone’s house and they’ve been barging in,” Whalen says. “She interrupted me, and that’s when I noticed. Otherwise,...

Proving Daniel Gross’s Newsweek Cover Story true, there’s good news and bad out today… WSJ: New-home sales soared in June from the previous month, the third increase in a row and supplying fresh evidence the housing market is beginning to recover from its long crisis. Sales of single-family homes increased by 11.0% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 384,000 compared to the prior month, the Commerce Department said Monday. Though, year-over-year, new-home sales were 21.3% lower...

From Janie Lauder of the NYTimes Caucus Blog: It’s official. Sarah Palin stepped down as governor of Alaska on Sunday, without dropping one hint about her future. Instead, she used her farewell address “to exercise my freedom of speech,” as she put it. [...] She cited accomplishments of her abbreviated administration, condemned big government and warned Alaskans against relying on Washington money for state development: ”Be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn’t come free.” She...

Following up on my two earlier posts on the topic, Dr. Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a member of that country’s Parliament who graphically and stridently opposed the repeal of a law there that criminalizes sex between men, this week backed out of teaching a human rights course at NYU’s Law School in the fall: In a statement released on Wednesday night, Richard L. Revesz, the N.Y.U. law school’s dean, said that Dr. Thio had changed her mind about teaching...

NOTE: forgive my overlap with Jazz. I can only hope it gets chalked up to great blogging minds thinking alike… Says the NYTimes: Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances...

The NYTimes has a a major piece out today, For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky, about the impact of Google’s Chrome on Mozilla’s Firefox. The story is a typical can-the-new-entrant-bring-down-the-incumbent style business tale. The setup is in the new offices of the feisty David, Mozilla Firefox, that has survived and thrived despite the twin Goliaths, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari: “We’ve learned how to compete with Microsoft and Apple,” says [Mozilla CEO...

A couple stories on the sex offender front… TechCrunch’s MG Siegler was browsing the top 10 paid iPhone apps list today: [T]he list appeared pretty typical: A bunch of games, a camera app, etc. Then I noticed one called Offender Locator [iTunes link], mostly because it has a creepy icon. I figured it was a game — it’s anything but. It’s an app to show you registered sex offenders living around you. While all 50 states require that sexual offenders register themselves, and allow...

Harvard Law Professor Steven Shavell has a new paper that “explains why abolishing copyright for academic publications is a good idea — and why the open access movement that seeks a similar goal is unlikely to succeed.” You can download (and comment on) the paper here. From the abstract: The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright...

I almost missed the shocking news that The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source,” has sold itself to a Chinese company, Yu Wan Mei, that also sells fish by-products. Onion publisher T. Herman Zweibel accepted a heathen bargain without the slightest twinge of regret: After subjecting me to a good 20 minutes of infernal bowing and other assorted chinky-dinkery, he offered to pay me what I’ve been assured is an appropriately absurd parcel of riches to take this tiresome publication...

I sure do give him credit. That guy sees just about everything as a teachable moment! He just is not willing to let this stupid (er, did I say “stupid”?) issue get in the way of things: President Obama said Friday that he “could have calibrated” his words more carefully in the controversy over the arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white police officer, but added that there had been an “overreaction” by both sides in a case that touched off an intense discussion about race...

This will likely ricochet around the blogosphere today: Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used. Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required...

An apology from Amazon: Jeffrey P. Bezos says: This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission. With deep apology to...

I’m guessing it would have… Interesting that this tops the news this morning. I was in the middle of my post last night when Obama made his comments. Still, some part of me felt I should have been giving health care its due. Not so the traditional media. A ratings bonanza! I noticed the police report had been taken down both by the Boston Globe and the NY Daily News. Hard to take things down on the Internet. It can be found here. We all want to talk race. But it could happen to any...

From the transcript of President Obama’s news conference last night in response to Lynn Sweet’s question about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge: OBAMA: Well, I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here… Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that...

Defective By Design updates it’s 1-star reviews and tags action. They’ve generated hundreds: If you haven’t written a review yet, here are direct links to the review forms. Take a few minutes to explain to potential Kindle buyers why they shouldn’t get one: 6″ Kindle, Kindle DX. If your review wasn’t published by Amazon, definitely let us know. We’ll be busy picking our next product to target (if you have any suggestions, email us at info@defectivebydesign.org)....

We’re all familiar with the party of Lincoln as emancipator of the slaves. But listening to the nearly 30 hours of David Blight’s Open Yale course on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, I’ve learned a thing or two about the birth of the Republican party. It came of a very exciting time in politics: [T]he Republican Party was really born amidst hundreds of meetings across the North, to discuss the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to react to it, to figure out some way to politically...

My headline is lifted from the Candy.com launch press release. Robin Wauters at TechCrunch has this far more interesting fact: Candy.com is now a shiny new, online store for all sorts of sweets after the domain name was sold for a whopping $3 million back in June. The fairly old-school website offers a range of lollipops, jelly beans, gum, candy bars and dispensers which it ships all across the United States. They’ll have to sell a hell of a lot of jelly beans to make that back. VIDEO: I Want...

Apparently Carter left the church a while ago but it is in the liberal and feminist blogosphere again now because the former president issued a position paper this week again severing all ties: [M]y decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible...

In the WSJ no less. Favorite passage: [B]asic constitutional rights cannot depend on the willingness of the electorate in any given state to end discrimination. If we were prepared to consign minority rights to a majority vote, there would be no need for a constitution. A bit more: The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it. In 1978 the Court (8 to 1, Zablocki v. Redhail) overturned as unconstitutional a Wisconsin...

Every one of us would have been just as outraged. The charges had better go should have gone away fast. With an apology. Instead, Gates is being represented by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who has taken on previous cases with racial implications. The Boston Globe: Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident...

Pointing to the question posed by Time Friday, Can Marijuana Help Rescue California’s Economy?, Gregor Macdonald says try it: By some estimates marijuana crop production in California accounts for roughly 14 billion in gross sales. That would make marijuana the states largest single cash crop. One has to believe that current growers would happily trade the costs and risks of concealment for the visibility of taxation. Which would also afford property protection. The current estimate is that...