December 16, 2011
Joshua Kopstein on Motherboard.tv has a very good analysis of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) debate in committee yesterday. He argues that politicans can no longer feign ignorance of the things that they want to legislate. Congressional knuckleheads should not try to legislate something that they know nothing about. The consequences of SOPA, if passed, will royally screwup the way the Internet works. What do I mean by screwup? Well, it will lead to erroneous shuttering of allegedly copyright infringing websites in toto rather than the parts of those sites that might be infringing, and its proposed methods of censorship will introduce new security risks into the way network traffic is routed through DNS, which will likely be a boon to criminals who find ways to exploit this. This isn’t how laws should be made. They should be carefully considered and effected to address specific, identifiable problems with surgically specific solutions. SOPA bucks how laws should work with a scorched earth approach that will create new opportunities for *real* criminals who do *real* harm. Let’s not pretend that the “copyright piracy data” SOPA supporters flaunt points to *real* offenses–it clearly has been shown to lead to additional sales.
First spied on Slashdot here.
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Computers, Rights, Technology | Tagged: censorship, postaday2011, rights, sopa, yro | 
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 16, 2011
I was happy to read here that the committee meeting convened to markup SOPA today didn’t go as well as the big media supporters had wanted. Apparently, things got off to a great start when:
The session is likely to be a long one. Early in the hearing, Chairman Smith asked for unanimous consent to skip reading the bill aloud. But Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a fierce opponent of the proposal, insisted that a clerk read the whole thing—a process that took about an hour. With that kind of acrimony, the Committee is likely to be working late into the night.
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 15, 2011
The political cartoonist David Rees got pissed off about SOPA enough that he came out of retirement to create new anti-SOPA comics above and here (there’s a lot more censorship yuck-it-ups there than the one that I posted above). Today’s the day–tell your congressional representatives that this kind of big-business-wants-to-rule-the-internet crap is unacceptable!
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 14, 2011
The Stop Online Piracy Act is a bad law that will screw up the Internet for Americans in terribly devastating ways. I’m with these guys against SOPA. You should join the fight, too by going here to find out how to call your Congressional representative.
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 14, 2011
Mathematica is one of my favorite tools. I first learned about it (version 2–it is now version 8) as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech. I learned how to use it in the computer labs, but I wanted to use it in my dorm room. Unfortunately, I was reminded about the necessity of a floating-point unit to using complex calculating software at a speed faster than a sliderule; my Apple Powerbook 145B was woefully underpowered, lacking the necessary FPU that would have made Mathematica fly. As it was, I plotted one curve and it took 45 minutes to complete the operation. It was shortly after that that I upgraded to a Power Macintosh 8500, which significantly sped things along.
Mathematica was originally built by an exquisitely smart fellow named Steven Wolfram. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Georgia Tech when he come for a visit and lecture–I believe talking about his work thus far on what become his book A New Kind of Science and the upcoming release of Mathematica 3. Even though I probably didn’t say anything of substance or intelligence when I met him, he was still very polite and cordial to me.
Apparently, Mathematica’s development paralleled Steve Job’s work on the NeXT computer and then his return to Apple. Wolfram has some nice things to say about Jobs and his influence on Mathematica in the Guardian here.
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 9, 2011
Lately, I have been spending my (little) free time exploring and browsing eBay’s Vintage Computing category here. Besides finding things that I would like to buy but can’t, I have been learning a lot about the early days of personal computing that I could not have done by simply reading a book. So much of this stuff is hands-on, experiential, and word-of-mouth. This is why I enjoyed browsing Computer Shopper in the early 1990s. That megalithic tome was chock full of advertising and configuration matrices. It was by decoding the possibilities of computing at that time that I learned much of my early knowledge about computers. Incidentally: does anyone know where old issues (early-mid 1990s) of Computer Shopper can be found in scanned form or for sale?
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 8, 2011
Reading about robots lately has got me thinking about building some automation into my MacBook.
I have been playing around with Automator, the workflow automation software for Mac OS X. Apple has a good place to begin with learning how to use it here. Also, MacStories compiled a list of Automator actions and resources here.
Once I have something working, I will share the results here.
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
December 4, 2011
Thanks to my home built Lion install flash drive (I purchased Mac OS X through the App Store and created a bootable install drive), I am performing a nuke-and-pave on my late-2008 MacBook. As you might have read before here, I haven’t qualms about performing a reinstall. While the install is progressing, I am reading David Levy’s Love+Sex with Robots. I believe that this is the missing component to my Asimov chapter. Ah, a reboot . . .
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
November 19, 2011
Yesterday, I launched the Science Fiction Research Association’s (SFRA) Google+ page, which you can find here. Like the organization’s Facebook Page and Twitter Feed, the SFRA Google+ page is another way that we can circulate information about the organization and our annual conference (in Detroit in 2012) while also facilitating engaged discussions about research and teaching science fiction and fantasy across all media.
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Posted by Jason W Ellis
