Archives for 2008 June
Now Silly Statements Warrant “Going After” Someone
Date: June 7, 2008
I keep up with most of what goes on with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties protection group. Recently, one of the issues that the EFF became involved with was when Cicero, Illinois, town president, Larry Dominick, tried to use the law to discover “the identities of the author of two MySpace profiles that allegedly included defamatory comments and unnamed privacy violations.” Sounds like this was some serious stuff, right? No, apparently. Read on.
Paul Graham Thinks Technology Makes Us Procrastinate More
Date: June 5, 2008
Outside of Paul Graham being the creator of Viaweb/Yahoo! Store, an early contributor to spam filtering and owning a site with an amazingly dated web design, he is also a little afraid of the technology he works with. In a May 2008 essay, Disconnecting Distraction, Graham goes down the thorny, technologically deterministic path, warning computer users of the dangers of procrastination, as brought on by evil technology. While I would love to write a reasonable, argumentative essay in reply to Graham’s poor assumptions, I find he makes so many questionable statements that it would be impossible for me to do that in the typical essay format. And so, I will take his words apart in bits and pieces. It’s really the best I can do.
“Iron Man” Review: A fantastic comic book adaptation, updated perfectly for our time
Date: June 4, 2008
I’m always wary of comic book adaptations. They are either wonderful or terrible. “Iron Man,” however, took the cake. It is one of the best I’ve seen, hands down. With the exception of my personal love for “V for Vendetta” and its message that probably can’t be trumped, I would say it is the best. Major thumbs up goes to how well it was updated for our time, too; it shows that “Iron Man” was good writing, all the way back in the 60s.
