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Archive for the ‘Nuvo-Techno’ Category

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Twitter: What are you doing?

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 23, 2008

STOP THE MADNESS!

Two of my best Internet friends have invited me to Twitter. In case, like me, you are an old man or woman:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Oh my gosh!!! Can you imagine?!

Okay, let’s walk through this.

  1. I already have a wife who asks this question, quickly and frequently. Since the introduction of the Global Husband Positioning System (i.e., cell phones and IM) this has really gotten to be quite an exact science.
  2. I am already, as this blog painfully proves, preposterously self obsessed, and pushing my every thought, movement, crisis, challenge, failure and experience out to the waiting millions. Plus I have … a BlackBerry, okay? I need another… thing?! (what is it? an “app”? a “platform”? a “social space”? a canker sore?) to obsess over?
  3. No. Just no!!!

Posted in Blogophilia, Heart and spirit, Nuvo-Techno | 13 Comments »

Jersey barriers

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 19, 2008

confusion.jpg

Get this:

New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus.com, a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students.

Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive. One thread, for example, on the “most overrated Princeton student” quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

JuicyCampus may be violating the state’s Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn’t allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule — and no way for users to report or dispute the material, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said Tuesday.

What a load of baloney! I have litigated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act frontwards, backwards and sideways, and believe me — this would be an unbelievable stretch. If Milgram’s interpretation were to fly, it would make that statute an omnibus be-a-good-person-online law with essentially no meaningful limitations. Not that I doubt that the Attorney General would love to have such power, but that would certainly be beyond anything contemplated by the New Jersey Legislature when it was passed.

Of course beyond what the Act itself provides, such an application of it would be unconstitutional too.

Unfortunately, neither of those are giant concerns to many judges in the Garden State.

By the way, this is not an endorsement of online defamation, especially when done anonymously. On the contrary. But please, let’s call a fraud a fraud.

Posted in Lex scripta, Nuvo-Techno, Oppression | 1 Comment »

Overlawyered: Wikiality, part 732

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 5, 2008

Ted Frank:

There are numerous scholarly books and law review articles on the history of the Federalist Society. The only book or article the Wikipedia article cites in its references section? “101 People Who Are Really Screwing America,” also cited 9 times in the article. Second is the People for the American Way’s hit piece on the organization, cited five times. Also cited: Daily Kos. Welcome to Wikipedia’s NPOV policy, where the N apparently stands for Nader, rather than neutral.

Or, you know, “nuts.”

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Politics and Poker | 1 Comment »

Diagnosis

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 24, 2008

Lisa Sanders in the New York Times:

“[T]he very hardest kind of diagnosis — an unusual presentation of an unusual disease.”

This is a fascinating article about the workings of great medical minds and technology in our time.

Posted in Homo sapiens, Nuvo-Techno, Scientificus | Leave a Comment »

With “Friends” like that…

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 15, 2008

This actually sounds about right:

A Staten Island judge says that sending a MySpace friend request to someone who has an hamburglar.jpgorder of protection against you is against the law.The ruling this week lets stand charges that a 16-year-old broke the law when she sent friend requests on the social networking site to a woman and her two daughters.

Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. ruled that even though MySpace users can ignore, deny or block friend requests, “that request was still a contact, and no contact was allowed” by the temporary order of protection.

It is odd to hear of a 16-year-old female being restricted by an order of protection, though.

Posted in Lex scripta, Nuvo-Techno | Leave a Comment »

Textonyms

Posted by Ron Coleman on February 5, 2008

Yahoo! News:

It may look like gobbledegook, but the most streetwise of teenagers would have no trouble translating and responding to it in kind.A new language is being developed by cell phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.

Key words are replaced by the first alternative that comes up on a mobile phone using predictive text — changing “cool” into “book,” “awake” into “cycle,” “beer” into “adds,” “pub” into “sub” and “barmaid” into “carnage.”

The new code of youth, I guess.

Posted in Americana, Nuvo-Techno | 3 Comments »

On your mind, on your blog, on your slide rule

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 9, 2008

Jonathan Gewirtz at Chicago Boyz writes about the “Perfect [Internet] Storm.” The whole thing should be read, but I was struck by this opening sentence:

A fascinating post by Wretchard on the dynamics of public events in the Internet age, and on the ways in which such events are now subject to quantitative analysis of the type that has previously been reserved for quantum systems and securities markets[.]

Not quite, I think. As Glenn Reynolds recently pointed out in an aside, there is plenty of reason not to be overenthusiastic about the proposition that the Web provides “razor-precise metrics.” Anyone who has a blog knows this, and for a guy with that big of a sample size in terms of readership, demographics, etc. to remind us of it is instructive.

The post at Chicago Boyz actually veers off in a somewhat different direction. But it’s worth considering this:  The phenomenon described there, which distinguishes between what people will say in virtual life versus and what they will publicly say in real life, is certainly complicated by what we may think they’re saying online and what we deduce that means in real life.

In fact, it’s only a matter of time before some massive, steam-driven, state-of-the-art “quantitative analysis” predicts or describes some extraordinary Internet phenomenon and turns out to be dead wrong. Considering that this is the presidential election season, that time could come very soon.

Don’t be fooled by predictions and analyses just because there are integers.

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Scientificus, Stragety | 7 Comments »

Facts matter

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 4, 2007

From Shannon Love, the distaff-side “Chicago Boy” :

Instapundit links to an article by Melanie Scarborough that purports to show that either a telecom engineer or the Bush administration is lying about the domestic “wiretapping” with the clear implication that Bush is the liar.

Unfortunately, her premise is based on a complete misunderstanding of how modern telecommunication works. Both parties are telling the truth.

It depends on the actual, physical, boots-on-the-ground facts. Something that journalists, and a lot of the rest of us, hardly ever care about before slinging our opinions.

Posted in Americana, Medialites, Nuvo-Techno | 3 Comments »

More on the Facebook fantasy

Posted by Ron Coleman on November 15, 2007

As predicted: No one but Microsoft, evidently, was buying into the $15 billion valuation in the last “funding” round. Silicon Alley Insider:

The joke was indeed on Microsoft.

Fonzy says it’s even worse than that.

Posted in Futurama, Gelt, Nuvo-Techno | 1 Comment »

Google / MoveOn intrigue

Posted by Ron Coleman on October 25, 2007

MoveOnBob Cox at the San Francisco Examiner is all over it!:

Internal documents obtained by The Examiner shine new light on MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad and raise fresh questions about the far-left advocacy group’s misleading statements on the issue and its relationship with Google, a major donor to its political action committee.

The documents show how MoveOn.org used dubious claims of trademark infringement and threats of litigation to silence critics of its recent controversial full-page ad in The New York Times attacking Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. general in Iraq, which appeared the day he was testifying before Congress on the war effort. Among those critics was Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is seeking a third term….

After The Examiner exclusively reported Oct. 11 that Google had banned four anti-MoveOn.org ads placed by the Collins campaign, Google and MoveOn.org each sought to portray the ban as unrelated to the Petraeus ad controversy. The documents obtained by The Examiner, however, show a direct link between the two events….

None of the complaints filed by MoveOn.org with Google or CafePress.com asserted that a “third party” was making fraudulent use of MoveOn.org’s name to collect financial contributions….

[But] on Sept. 19, MoveOn.org’s Erik Olson — husband of [Google COO] Carrie Olson — filed a trademark complaint with Google seeking to block any mention of MoveOn.org by any advertiser for any reason, including ads that criticize MoveOn.org by name.

It was this complaint that Google cited as the basis for banning Sen. Collins’ anti-MoveOn.org ads. Google’s complaint form used by MoveOn.org required that the trademark owner make a legal affirmation that the complainant has a “good faith belief” that the use of the trademark is not “permissible under law.”

MoveOn.org, however, did not cite any specific ad, nor did it provide Google with any evidence of trademark infringement. The advocacy group has since said publicly that the Collins ads are permissible under the law.

There’s a lot more. This story has gotten beyond my little opinions about trademark law — but not past Bob Cox. Read the article.

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Oppression, Politics and Poker | 2 Comments »

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