Friday, April 21, 2006

Too tired

Long day, too tired to blog. I’m off to bed. And I have nothing against cat naps…

More on intolerance of intolerance

Details of the lawsuit claiming that the GA Tech Safe Space initiative denies conservative students their free speech rights are in SoVo this morning. I note that complainants “are represented by the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.” Outside agitators!

Detailed in the suit are two specific instances in which the plaintiffs allege their freedom of speech was suppressed.

During a protest of a campus play, “The Vagina Monologues,” the two students were “ordered to cover material portions of a written protest of the controversial, ideologically-charged play,” according to the lawsuit.

[ADF senior legal counsel and leader of the organization’s Center for Academic Freedom David] French said the sign contained “some of the racy quotes from the play,â€Â� and that portion is what the administration “demandedâ€Â� be covered.

Malhotra did write a commentary on the play, titled “The Feminist Mistake,” which ran on the Young America’s Foundation website on March 6.

“Similar to the tactics of Communism, behind the fragile façade of equality and neutrality, the leftist agenda is most destructive to the women it presumes to protect,” Malhotra wrote.

The second instance cited by Malhotra and Sklar in the suit focused on campus police shutting down the College Republicans’ “diversity bake sale.”

The anti-affirmative action fundraiser featured a sliding scale for baked goods. For example, organizers charged white students $1 for a cookie while blacks and other minorities were charged between 25 and 50 cents. Some items were strictly for minorities with white students unable to purchase them. The event was to call attention to the unfairness of affirmative action, according to organizers nationwide. [...]

The ADF is suing four other universities in federal court dealing with freedom of expression on school campuses, French said. They include UNC-Chapel Hill, the entire Cal State system, Penn State and Temple University.

SEE ALSO: Intolerance of intolerance can get you sued, “When Christians talk about secular Americans being “tolerant” of Christian beliefs, they are misusing the word. What conservative Christians want is not toleration, but social control.”

Gay Paris mayor visits San Fran

I didn’t know:

The mayor of Paris arrived in San Francisco on Wednesday to kick off a three-day visit marking the 10th anniversary of the sister-city relationship between the two cultural hubs.

While in town, Bertrand Delanoë will meet with local leaders to talk about interests shared by the cities, including how to combat homelessness and discrimination and a desire to connect their growing digital media industries.

Delanoë, 55, is also one of the few high-profile politicians in France to be openly gay. [...]

In Paris, the fact that Delanoë is openly gay is a nonissue, his aides said Wednesday. He made his sexual orientation public when a journalist asked him about it before he was elected mayor.

But in 2002, Delanoë was stabbed in the stomach by a man who said he didn’t like homosexuals or politicians. He returned to work a few weeks later.

Not surprisingly he’s a propponent of same-sex marriage in predominately Catholic France.

The Google juggernaut

Google posted quarterly numbers yesterday: A VC says, Oh My:

Now let’s just take a second to comprehend those numbers.

We are witnessing a business that is approaching $10bn in annualized revenues growing at 80% year over year.

And we are looking at a business with operating margins of almost 50%.

How to compete?

Enter eBay.  It’s being reported on the WSJ website that eBay is in talks with Yahoo! and Microsoft regarding some kind of alliance to ward of competitive pressure from Google.

I expect a version of the Journal article on their public site in a day or so. For now, Money has a tad bit more the alliance story.

UDrive: online storage for everyone

In a Fortune magazine profile of Ray Ozzie - whose “assignment is to Webify everything” at Microsoft (again?) - Duncan found this:

Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information - movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever - could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Google apparently has similar plans. An internal memo accidentally posted online in March spoke of company efforts to “store 100 percent of user data” and mentions an unannounced Net-storage system called GDrive.