Monday, September 19, 2005

TimesSelect & Sully on WaPo

I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do. I’m likely to pay. And keep quoting. I sure don’t blame them for trying.

My is-it-Slate-or-iTunes pal, a Times subscriber who doesn’t face this dilemma, sent this Editor & Publisher article today.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan calls TimesSelect a “web-cage” and the $49.95 cost a “hefty annual fee” (it’s $4.16 a month; I spend more on Coca Cola) in his post announcing that tomorrow:

[T]his blog is going to be streamed to the Washington Post’s online opinion section. WaPo, unlike the NYT, is trying to reach out to bloggers and increase the interaction between old and new media. They approached me; and I’m always up for an experiment. WaPo will carry my lede item at any given time, and a couple of teaser headlines for the rest. I have no idea what to expect; and neither do they.

Good for him. We’ll see.

He ends with one more swipe at the Times:

...David, John, Tom, MoDo, et al. You deserve a little better, I think.

Somehow I think Andrew would jump at the chance to have their pitiful perch.

Talk of a ban on gay parenting in Georgia

Just a few days ago The Carpetbagger asked is the entire anti-gay crusade falling apart? Apparently not here in Georgia:

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers say, they have discussed submitting legislation to ban gay foster parents and adoptions by homosexuals when the Legislature convenes in January. The state Senate majority leader said recently that he would welcome such legislation.

Those who favor such bans argue that the state should not expose children to what they say is an unnatural, if not deviant, lifestyle. They say such children may be stigmatized, lack proper adult role models and have a greater chance of growing up homosexual themselves.

Is it politics or do those who oppose gay adoption really care for the children:

[Executive director of Georgia Equality Chuck] Bowen said gays have a history of taking in children who are hard to place: those with HIV or developmental disabilities and crack babies.

Renn McClintic-Doyle of Stone Mountain, who has been a foster parent of seven children and adopted two, said the state cannot afford to lose gay foster parents, especially considering the need. Georgia has about 15,000 children in foster care and 4,000 foster homes.

Photo-foiling & OCR

This new gadget from Georgia Tech is a digital photo blocker:

The technology they’ve devised detects the presence of a digital camera up to 33 feet away and can then shoot a targeted beam of light at the lens, according to Shwetak Patel, a grad student at the university and one of the lead researchers on the project.

That means that someone trying for a surreptitious snapshot of, say, a product prototype or an amorous couple gets something altogether less useful--a blurry picture (or a video) of what looks like a flashlight beam, seen head on. (A video of how the system works can be viewed here.)

So (if!) they block the surreptitious shot, next challenge, the surreptitious scan:

NEC has developed software that lets you wave your cameraphone at a page of text for 3-5 seconds and produce a scan that includes optical-character-recognition-extracted text as well as any images and a graphic of the page itself. This is abominably cool, so of course there are a couple of alarmist Luddite publishing types who are predicting that this will napsterize the printed page and cause gigantic copyright headaches.