21 septembre 2018

A Case of Piracy Overkill?
Discussion of the proposed 'broadcast flag' legislation in the U.S., which would require that all new media receivers detect content intended for broadcast and thereby refuse to allow the purchaser to make a copy. More...

Why Tables for Layout is Stupid
OK, I'll admit it. I use tables for the design of my website and just about everything else. I plead innocence: the ugly standards war between Netscape, Microsoft, and the standards bodies left me unable to code in any other way. Until now, maybe. More...

Bloglines Most Popular Blogs
I'm currently sitting at the bottom spot on the Bloglines 'most popular blogs' list (which would be, I guess, 100th place), a position that has ironically generated a bit more traffic in the last few days. I was at a much higher position, as Bloglines was visited by the early adopters. But as the site attracted a more general audience, my site has begun to slip. More...

PrepCom3 Activity Report
Interesting account of how open access is being removed, bit by bit, from documents prepared for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). More...

The Lemma Dilemma
Jerry Fodor treats us to a retelling of the Stanley and Livingstone story, one in which Stanley first had to rule out the possibility that he was seeing Queen Victoria before uttering, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." Fodor is reacting, in this review, to the non-inferential theory of cognition offered by José Luis Bermúdez in his book Thinking without Words. More...

Three R's: Reading, Writing, RFID
Schools have never been bastions of democracy and individual rights; we have seen over and over again how a students' right to freedom of expression, for example, is quite limited (hence the explusion of a Georgia student for wearing a Pepsi shirt on the school's Coke Day). So it is perhaps not a surprise to see the first major use of RFID tags to track people taking place in a school environment. More...

EdNA Online adds ALIA RSS feeds to MyEdNA
This looks like a really good story that popped up in Edu_RSS from the EdNA RSS feed. But the link provided was to a registration page, and the link from EdNA's home page redirects to a login. More...

Atom as the New XML-Based Web Publishing and Syndication Format
Comprehensive coverage of Atom, touted as a replacement for RSS. What's interesting about Atom (aside from the fact that they're finally decided on a name for it) is that it is being "created through an informal consensus process by volunteers in the Web developer community at large." There's a lot of material here, and the page is mostly useful to you only if you are an XML developer. More...

League Bloggin': Learning Objects in the Real World
One of the earlier learning object projects, Wisc-online has seems to fade from the mainstream recently as more visible initiatives have come to the fore. But Wisc-online hasn't vanished; according to this report they have created a nice collection of about 1,000 learning objects. More...

Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention
Four new exemptions are added to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): lists of Internet locations blocked by filtering software, programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete, formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware, and access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function. More...