Mr. Quarles, tear down this wall

As promised, today is the day that McClatchy implements paywalls on its newspaper sites, including the News & Observer. While I will most likely always be a newspaper subscriber, I don’t see myself linking to any more N&O online stories because paywalls break links. One of my pet peeves is when sites break links. News sites especially.

In a time when newspapers are seeing their readership flocking to online news sources, McClatchy seems bent on turning them away. Tell me how that makes any sense?

Lenovo no go

In addition to the ton of other stuff I got done this weekend, I spent a lot of time getting my gadgets up and running. Last night I’ve stayed up way too late futzing with my new Lenovo laptop, for instance, trying to get Red Hat’s Fedora Linux installed on it. Apparently this is something that’s damn near impossible. It’s taken all (and I mean all) of my considerable Linux skills to make any progress with this.

Lenovo apparently took some shortcuts with its laptop firmware which throws Linux for a loop during an installation. Rather than work around it, Red Hat tends to frown on Lenovo’s broken implementation. They do this in spite of Lenovo being, oh, just the world’s largest PC manufacturer whose North America headquarters is, oh, just fifteen miles away from Red Hat’s headquarters. You’d think these two companies could get it together but you’d apparently be smoking something if you did.

My solution involves hacking Fedora’s installer and learning far more about it than I care to know. I’ll post my working solution once I find it. For now, suffice to say that a if a grizzled Linux veteran like me has this much trouble simply getting Linux set up on a new laptop then it’s no wonder most people don’t want to touch it.

Avoid entanglements

I don’t know if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a Buddhist or not but I swear Facebook teaches me more about Buddhism every day.

You see, being politically-minded I enjoyed debating some of my Facebook friends on election issues. It was good fun and I did so with zeal at the time. Now that elections are behind us, I have moved on.

Facebook, on the other hand, apparently has not moved on. I have Facebook friends with whom I’ve traded political comments. for instance, that now appear in my Facebook feed all the time, even though the only thing we’ve seemed to discuss has been our opposing political views. Granted, they’re still my friends and I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking differently from me, but I find it amusing that somewhere in Facebook’s algorithms we’ve become entangled.
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Amplifying murder

Thinking more of Roger Ebert thoughts about the media’s role in mass murders, I have to agree that he’s right. The media perpetuates this behavior. If the media was more responsible in its coverage there would be less incentive for these mentally ill individuals to kill.

Mass murders are terrorism, plain and simple. A terrorist’s goal is to promote fear. Promoting fear requires the attention of the media. If terror isn’t spread by the media or other means, the terrorist fails.
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Last man standing

Two things happened at Thursday’s Parks board meeting/holiday social. We bid farewell to long-time board member and previous chair Jimmy Thiem, who has served his full six years on the board. It’s been great working with Jimmy and we will certainly miss his parks expertise. I hope we can put him to use on upcoming parks committees like one for Dix Park.

There’s another aspect to Jimmy’s “retirement” from the Parks board that I only realized afterward: I’m now the senior member of the board. This boggles my mind as it seems like only yesterday that I was a fresh-faced newbie on the board. Now I’ve seen all of the previous boardmembers rotate off to be replaced by fresh faces.
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I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother

This is a great read from a mother with a mentally ill son.

America needs to start giving mental illness the attention it deserves.

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

via I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.

Media glory

In the wake of yesterday’s horrendous mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, I have avoided most of the associated media coverage. I did find this quote from film critic Roger Ebert to be insightful (courtesy of Boing Boing):

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
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Gangster Style

Today I read a disturbing account of how a software developer became the target of Chinese hackers after he sued China for pirating his software. The hackers nearly destroyed the man’s business:

An independent analysis later found that four of the five active filters were copied almost verbatim from CYBERsitter and that Green Dam could not operate correctly when those filters were disabled. It’s possible the code was stolen in an earlier hack, but Milburn believes the thieves simply bought a copy and broke the encryption protecting the code.

In interviews with reporters, he said he was considering a lawsuit and vowed to pursue an injunction.

On June 24 — 12 days after Milburn went public with his legal intentions — the hackers made their first appearance. Working from her home office 150 miles south of Santa Barbara in Orange County, Jenna DiPasquale, 39, who is Milburn’s daughter and Solid Oak’s one-woman marketing department, received a carefully forged e-mail containing hidden spyware.

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ReadWrite – Have You Or Someone You Know Ever Fake-Liked Something On Facebook?

ReadWrite says its fake Facebook Likes story really struck a nerve. The magazine is asking others for their stories:

Meanwhile we’re looking for more examples of fake likes. Our writer, Bernard Meisler, put his story together by asking people he knew on Facebook to look out for fake likes and send him examples. Now we’d like to find even more.

Apparently this is happening a lot, and nobody seems to know why.

Facebook told us it must be people accidentally pressing a “like” button on their mobile app. But can there really be that many people pressing the wrong button, all the time?

If you have a theory, we’re all ears.

via ReadWrite – Have You Or Someone You Know Ever Fake-Liked Something On Facebook?.