Death threats against bloggers are NOT 'protected speech'
I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users — This is truly disturbing.
It makes no sense to expect moderation to work in purposeful anarchy. What was he trying to accomplish? Pan the river of nastyness for nuggets of brilliance? Based on what Frank wrote above, he suggested Kathy Sierra as one of the people Mean Kids should pick on. Did Kathy ask for a gang of intellectual anarchist to pick on her? All I read form Frank’s post of clarity is pointing fingers at others and admitting his inability to control an intentionally uncontrollable situation when, IMHO, he is directly responsible for letting his naivety and vain pursuit of brilliant conversations hurt others.
How did that go? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions? So fucking true.
Don Park's Daily Habit — Don’s reaction is close to mine. There is no need for tolerance here. The police are involved — and I hope they are taking it seriously.
The Patent Thicket That May Destroy VoIP
Expect plenty more lawsuits in the near future as this all comes out in court. The big players will use their patents to keep out competition, and the small players will use the patents to try to create an NTP-style lottery ticket.
Techdirt
png version 1.1.0 has been released!
PNG is an almost-pure-ruby PNG library. It lets you write a PNG without any C libraries.
Polishing Ruby — Could come in handy…
Writers, Programmers, and Patents
But what computer programmers see is that widespread enforcement of software patents would mean that a significant portion of their professional lives would suddenly require regular consultation with lawyers. This pisses them off in precisely the same way—and for precisely the same reasons—that patents on plot devices, analogies, literary styles, and other prose concepts would piss off writers.
TLF
The basis for the talk is Seaside, a web framework for Smalltalk that Avi wrote several years ago. The problem with Seaside is you’re not going to use it! There are a lot of interesting ideas in Seaside that people should know, so this tutorial is way of spreading the ideas outside of Smalltalk.
Phil Windley's on Technometria — An account of an interesting talk given at ETech 2007 by Avi “Seaside” Bryant.
A List Apart No. 234… is out… go have a read.
My dislike for the SaaS acronym is long-held. For a while I tried to avoid using it on this blog, but in the end it became too established to resist. I still hate it though, and I’m not alone. Paul McNamara … ends by making a pitch for the term ‘webware’, which is currently being popularized by a CNET site run by Rafe Needleman
ZDNet.com — On-demand vs Saas vs webware — I also strongly dislike SaaS, find ‘On-demand’ a bit precious, we’ll see if webware wears well.
Pico: TI's Mini Movie Projector
Texas Instruments is showing off its Pico, a DLP projector that is chiquitito enough to be incorporated into the bottom of a cellphone.
The 1.5-inch gizmo, which contains three lasers, a DLP chip capable of driving widescreen TV images, and a power supply, can be used to beam DVD-quality video onto a wall or a screen, giving you a bigger image than anything you’d find on even the biggest smartphone LCD screen.
Gizmodo — This could be big… I wonder if it will project on a screen the size of a laptop… get rid of that LCD thing.
