DOPA

[amoken]

I'm sure zellandyne would really like to see this one go through, as well as several other teachers who use tools like this to teach. Not to mention the students who who are trying to make up for their crappy public school "education" by locating information. Oops! Where'd it go?http

Comments

[amoken]

zellandyne teaches writing, so the most obvious connection is that people do blog, and they can get money and fame out of it, and it's a valuable style to understand. I'm pretty sure she uses it for more than just that, but that alone is enough to cause pause for normal people, let alone crazies like me who don't believe in keeping information from kids just because a few of them might get hurt. I'm rather a proponent of giving them more information about how to avoid getting hurt. :P

Also, I haven't read the actual language of it, and if I did I still might not be clear on whether it would affect Wikis. I kind of doubt it does just because I'd expect Declan McCullough to mention that kids wouldn't have access to Wikipedia....yikes! That's where I get a lot of my starter information these days, after all. And it has a LOT more accurate info than I had available as a kid!

[cosyne]

ah. i somehow missed the sarcasm in your OP, so i was like 'huh, that's an odd thing for her to say' and the flywheels in the rantomatic were spinning up quite quickly ;-)
I still feel like mentioning that this guy gets extra Lame-o points for calling the legislation the 'deleting online predators act'. Like, "oooh, look at me, i can misuse technical jargon, therefore you will vote for my ill-concevied net censorship legislation, lusers!"

[mtbg]

Don't be too quick to dismiss a "clever" name for a piece of legislation. The naming of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act was a stroke of (evil) genius.

[cosyne]

no, i'm well aware of that. Whoever named U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act gets like infinity+1 lame-o points. And anyone who calls it "The Patriot Act" gets like 1,984,000 "Baaah, I'm a sheep" points.
OTOH, I suppose that the "Sekritly spying on your assez 'cause we think you'd rather be scared out of your few remaining wits than live in a democracy" Act probably wouldn't have passed...

[amoken]

It's a bit of a forced way to piggy-back on the COPA (Child Online Protection Act), which was better-advertised, well-discussed, and also controversial. Tons of NPR coverage, interviews with aghast librarians, etc.

[cosyne]

meh. the point people are missing is that the internet just makes it easier to communicate with people, even people you don't want to communicate with. rather than going back to it being hard to communicate with peolpe, i think society could focus on doing something about the people they don't want to communicate with.
I console myself with the idea that the next generation of 802.11 products will be powerful enough to turn apartment complexes into mesh networks which are completely independent of any backbone infrastructure, and that a generation or two after that it'll be whole blocks, and then whole cities which can have unregulated networks.

[amoken]

Whoa I totally spelled his name wrong, though at least my train of thought had reason to.