Last week Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise tweeted “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” referring to about Steelers quarterback Ben Rothlisberger, who was facing suspension for off-field conduct. Rothlisberger was in face suspended for six games. Wise later admitted that he had made up the suspension rumor – “As part of a bit on my show today, I tried to test the accuracy of social media reporting. Probably not the best way to go about experiment.” Now Wise has himself been suspended for a month by the Washington Post.
What struck me as remarkable is that…
One looks to me like a smiling person. The other looks like a frog. Wikipedia agrees with me. I am right. My girlfriend is wrong. Also, graphic representations of emoticons are heretical.
That is all.
Like so many good ideas, once seen, it is instantly inevitable and I can only curse myself for not thinking of it first. Available across the pond from Nation Design.
UPDATE: The like stamp inspired me to add a “like” button to this blog. Why? Because we can. Knock yourselves out.
A few days after the bar exam, my laptop hard drive gave up the ghost and my boot sequence ground to a halt with an ominous ‘no operating system found’ message. I didn’t lose anything of consequence – all my files are automagically backed up by Syncplicity (highly recommended, now with mac client in public beta) – but I needed a new computer.
Ooooh… shiny…
After surprisingly little soul-searching I got a Macbook Pro. I later realized this was the purchasing equivalent of a midlife crisis. I was raised as…
The Eighth Amendment of our Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Aside from the jurisprudential gloss the phrase has acquired over time, it’s an odd one. Sure, let’s prohibit needlessly cruel punishments but only if they’re unusual? Why carve out constitutional protection for time-honored methods of torture but prevent innovations in cruelty? Rob Cottingham provides an excellent example:
If you’ve sat through enough of these, there’s no doubt that powerpoint can meet the cruelty prong and yet it’s the sheer ‘usualness’ of it, the part that makes it so intolerable when yet another deer-in-the-headlights presenter nervously recites…
Dilbert author Scott Adams posted some great cartoons on his blog following the lost prototype fiasco at the world’s most secretive tech company.
According to Adams these cartoons will never make the newspapers, not because they’re any less funny than the ones that will, but because the newspaper pipeline is simply too slow and cumbersome to accommodate comics based on today’s lighting-fast news cycle.
I’ve hated the keyboard I’ve had in my office for years and I never did anything about it. Although I’ve fretted over processor speed and memory, laid out for a bigger display and the extra terrabyte, I’ve never gave much serious thought to the two parts of my computer I interact with constantly – the keyboard and mouse. While the display market seems to revolutionize itself every year, the technological development of the keyboard may as well be frozen in amber. I didn’t even know what I was missing until I strolled down the keyboard…
Adobe set the graphics world abuzz a few days ago with a sneak peek video of their new Content-Aware Fill to be released in the new version of Adobe Photoshop next month, CS5.
via John Nack
This is not earth-shattering news in the sense that it makes possible what was previously impossible, but because it makes quick, easy and effective was was previously slow, painful and easy to screw up. Anyone with a copy of Photoshop, some time on their hands and a good eye for image manipulation could doctor an image in a way that would…
Emily Bazelon’s in Slate, How Should Facebook and MySpace Handle Cyberbullying? provides some fascinating insight on how social media companies view their role in responding to cyberbullying and how their reactions are affected by current law regarding privacy and immunity across state, national and international jurisdictional lines that has the potential to be a rat’s nest of contradictory standards.
The approaches taken by social giants Facebook and MySpace differ on how proactive they are willing to be in policing the sites:
MySpace uses an algorithm to patrol for users who are lying about their age and says it deletes
The venerable New York Review of Books dips into the gutter of the blogosphere in Robert Darnton‘s Blogging, Now and Then.
Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
But rather than rail on about the supposed debasement of our popular and literary culture by this (well almost) new medium, Darnton makes an interesting foray into the history of…
The Electronic Frontier Foundation teamed with the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic on Law, Technology and Public Policy at Boalt Hall and unearthed through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests a fascinating window into how the government uses social networking sites to gather evidence in cases – EFF Posts Documents Detailing Law Enforcement Collection of Data From Social Media Sites.
Amazingly enough, the IRS seems to be a the forefront in terms of ethical policies:
Generally, you are allowed to review information from publicly accessible, unrestricted websites. Unrestricted websites do not require further action to gain access, such as
The Bluebook Rule 18 outlines the citation format for sources on the internet. It’s been a small dream of mine to have this blog somehow cited in a judicial opinion. The brass ring went to Prof. Doug Berman of the Sentencing Law and Policy blog long ago. A cite would entail a prospect both exhilarating and frightening – the image of a judge and/or his or her clerks huddled around a computer both (a) bothering to read this blog and (b) inexplicably considering it an authoritative source for a proposition of some kind; one can only imagine…
Mark Herrmann, whose The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law is one of my favorites and a necessary read for anyone interested in practicing in a law firm, has written a keen for his misadventure in blogging in the ABA’s Litigation Journal, Memoirs of a Blogger (.pdf). At the time, Herrmann was still writing for the Drug and Device Law Blog. Since submitting the article Herrmann left Jones Day to go in-house at Aon Corp. and retired from the blogosphere.
As usual, it’s well-written and incisive – a good primer for anyone considering starting a blog,…
