Thursday, November 24, 2005

Limon’s Thanksgiving

Still angry about the Limon Lafave disparity, I’m trying to follow what’s going on. Evidently yesterday’s hearing was about holiday privileges:

A man the Kansas Supreme Court determined was given an unfair sentence for a sex crime because it involved a homosexual act will get to spend Thanksgiving with his entire family under eased release rules ordered Wednesday.

Matthew Limon was released from prison earlier this month after serving 5 ½ years of a roughly 17-year sentence for performing a sex act on a 14-year-old boy when Limon was 18. Had Limon’s partner been a girl, he would have faced a maximum 15 months in jail, a disparity that moved the state’s high court to rule he be resentenced.

His release to family in western Kansas includes mandated counseling and no interaction with minors. Defense attorney Byron Cerrillo argued those rules would have interfered with Limon’s holiday observances and church attendance, claims District Judge Richard Smith accepted despite Miami County Attorney David Miller’s challenge that the defendant had two prior sexual offense convictions and could be a danger to the community.

Smith ordered that Limon be released of his house arrest on Thanksgiving and Christmas and be allowed to be in the company of minors while he is under family supervision. The judge also said the defendant could attend weekly religious services, but he cautioned that he must be supervised at all times.

“That means not even stopping at a filling station and going to the restroom unsupervised,” Smith said.

The hearing to see if they can continue to keep this man - who’s already served 5 1/2 years for consensual sex - in “supervised release” is scheduled for Jan. 19. I’ll be following up.

NOTE: Reliant, as I am, on news accounts, I don’t know whether he’s spent 4 1/2 (SoVo) or 5 1/2 (Witchita Eagle) in prison. For the time being, I’ve gone with the Eagle.

Ranking the blogosphere

NZ Bear at The Truth Laid Bear wants to ensure that the TTLB Ecosystem he’s set up is as accurate a reflection of “what is truly popular and interesting in the ‘sphere” as possible. To that end he has implemented a change, “when the Ecosystem scans a blog’s front page for links, it now simply ignores any inline trackback sections that are found, while still counting the links within posts or on a blog’s blogroll.”

His concern is that linkfests, where bloggers are invited to attach their posts to another’s via trackbacks, artificailly inflate rankings. Always open to feedback, he asked for comments. I wrote one that I decided I rather like so I’m posting it here:

I support whatever you conclude. I value the TTLB Ecosystem and appreciate your efforts building and maintiang it. I also think it’s a good idea to have a result with open trackbacks filtered out. But please consider this: It’s legitimate for bloggers to try to get seen, and open trackbacks is one way to do it. Like caption contests to comments, so are linkfests to trackbacks. Now that’s not TTLB’s mission but if an idea strikes you as to how to measure, say, the “most ambitious” blog, I’d support that.

At the college I work for I’m setting up an online film festival. I’m allowing online voting, with no filter, which will be obviously skewed by those who are scamming the system. My thinking is that if they care that much, good for them. Filmmaking takes commitment. And in a competitive field, self-promotion. Their voting shows they’ve got some of what it takes to be a filmmaker. Have you heard the stories of Madonna’s early rise? It worked for her, and that ambition deserves some recognition, though maybe different recognition.

The online film festival voting is only qualifying voting. We’ll validate it later with a paper ballot which will be regulated to one person one vote. And the qualified pool is so large as to go beyond including only the scammers. We’ll see how it works.

Blogging takes a similar commitment. And those bloggers pushing their blogs out there are doing something worth noticing. My experience is that traffic isn’t correlated to meaningful, thoughtful posts in most instances. And the links I get are often to my least thoughtful posts. So both traffic and links are imperfect measurement tools. Adding ambition to the equation doesn’t hurt. And arguably - depending on how it is weighted when factored in - could help.

Via Joe Gandelman. I prize my place in Joe’s blogroll, and thank him for including me in today’s holiday linkfest!

It’s the blades…

...not the razor:

The cost of building a Microsoft Xbox 360 video game console is nearly 40 percent higher than the retail price, technology and microchip research company iSuppli said on Wednesday.

The firm estimated the total cost to manufacture and test a premium Xbox 360, the software giant’s sleek and powerful new gaming machine, which debuted on Tuesday, was $552.27, compared with its retail price of $399.

Microsoft aims to sell about 5.5 million premium and lower-priced basic Xbox 360 units by the end of June. The machine will compete with the PlayStation 3 from Sony and Nintendo’s Revolution, each due out in 2006.

Console makers have historically subsidized manufacturing costs by creating and selling their own video games and by collecting fees from publishers who make titles for their systems. Several new Xbox 360 games are priced as high as $60.

UPDATE: The Times says,”the Bill Gates team has delivered a legitimately excellent gaming and home media system.”

Happy Thanksgiving

We’re in Athens to celebrate with Doug’s family at his mother’s house. The Jittery Joe’s at Five Points is closed, so we went to the downtown Starbucks instead. The photo is of the Georgia Bulldog out front, to the left is the main campus entrance from downtown.