Month: January 2001

Detroit Lions Get New Coach

The Detroit Lions just hired yet a new coach. How they did it illustrates why I have never been able to stomach rooting for the team.

First, the existing head coach Bobby Ross quit. Couldn’t blame him — the problem with the Lions, who have never come close to playing in a Super Bowl, are with the organization and are bigger than any particular set of players or coaches.

Second, they replaced Ross with Gary Moeller. Moeller was a former University of Michigan football coach fired from that job after he got in a mini brawl at a restaurant after having too much to drink. I thought Moeller was a horrible choice, but not surprising.

What was surprising is after a couple of wins, they gave him a three year contract. The reasonable thing would have been to put out some vague, “we’re going to evaluate our coaching situation at the end of the season.” But no, the owner had to go and give him a three year contract.

And then promptly fire him at the end of the season to replace him with Marty Mornhinweg. Mornhinweg is the choice of the new Lions president Matt Millen.

Millen knows football, and if the Ford family will just let him do his job he can probably turn the franchise around. On the other hand if the Lions keep insist on making stupid decisions, like they did with Moeller’s three year contract, it’ll be another 40 years before they find themselves seriously competing for a championship.

Fox: The Why Files Infringes X-Files Trademark

Okay, I’m so dense sometimes that I’ve visited The Why Files several times without ever realizing its title was a clever play on “The X Files.” Fox didn’t miss the word play, however, and is suing the University of Wisconsin-Madison which maintains the site.

Hmm, the X Files is a show about supernatural phenomenon, while The Why Files is a regular feature of cool science stuff. Oh yeah, I can see how someone reading the Why Files long story about Darwin and the Galapagos Islands might think the story was really a lost X Files episode or something.

Fox has been extraordinarily litigious with regards to web sites, and I hope the University of Wisconsin sticks to its guns and lets Fox’s lawyers fall flat on their faces in court.

Saudi Business Women Defy Restrictive Gender Laws

Some women in Saudi Arabia defy laws that make it illegal for men and women to work together.

The BBC reports that large numbers of women are beginning to ignore Saudi Arabia’s strict prohibition against men and women working together.

Under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic laws, it is illegal to have mixed sex workplaces. Many business women, some having spent time abroad in the West, are ignoring the law in order to hire the most qualified worker regardless of sex. The BBC quoted one business woman saying, “I wasn’t brought up in a way or even used to a way in the United States where I would have to be constrained by choosing a female worker if I think a male is more qualified, or is more helpful to me.”

Under Islamic law, it is also frowned upon for women to interact with male customers. Women in Saudi Arabia are getting around that stricture by turning to the Internet where they don’t have to meet their customers face to face.

Women are still forbidden by law to drive cars and can’t leave the country without written permission from their husband or father, but their growing economic clout might force changes in those rules. Where once the number of businesses owned by women was negligible, today an estimated 10 percent of private business are run by women.

Source:

Saudi women defy business curbs. The BBC, January 21, 2001.

Virtual Child Porn

About 12 years ago I was sitting around an editorial meeting at a newspaper I was working at the time when the issue of some bill to ban child porn came up. I pointed out that most child porn laws stood on relatively solid ground since the very production of child pornography is in itself a criminal act, but that within a couple decades the case would be more problematic as advances in computers allowed for the creation of realistic child pornography that didn’t require committing such a crime. What would the Supreme Court do then?

I think most of my fellow writers thought I was either completely offbase about how fast computer graphics technology would develop and/or concerned about why I always looked for the dark side in these sorts of things. Now Slashdot points out that the Supreme Court is going to decide whether or not virtual child porn is protected by the First Amendment.

It will probably be very tempting for some of the justices to argue that even when it is completely virtual, child pornography is obscenity and lacking completely any scientific or artistic merit. Unfortunately, such a ruling would create a huge mess. As an Los Angeles Times story points out, would adult models who look like they are minors also be covered? Soon sorting out the side effects of such a ruling becomes unbelievably difficult and tortuous.

On the other hand, the idea of people buying and selling child pornography, even completely virtual, is a highly repugnant one and if the Supreme Court does rule that it is protected speech, watch for a firestorm to develop (especially if it’s a close 5-4 vote with the Court’s liberals on one side and its conservatives on the other). Polls already show a majority of Americans think the courts are already too permissive in their toleration of speech, and a pro-child pornography ruling could tip those scales.

In fact, if the Supreme Court does rule that virtual child porn is protected speech, an amendment to overturn such a decision would probably have as much chance of becoming part of the Constitution as any proposed in the last 30 years (in fact I’d be very surprised if such a movement failed — the support for it would be tremendous).

Why I Read Slashdot

CNN ran a story about a small town in Georgia experimenting with a cutting edge technology that delivers up to 60 television channels, telephone service and DSL over copper wire phone lines. Revolutionary? Not.

Within a couple hours of posting the story on Slashdot, readers there posted links and information on dozens of places using such technology, many of them having done so for 3 or 4 years (apparently there is a stretch of Canada where this sort of thing has been available for several years).

In addition there is misinformation in the CNN story. While CNN’s David George implies that the technology involves sending out 60 television quality signals simultaneously, in fact this technology involves only a single channel at any given time which is switched at a central router. The main drawback of such a system, of course, is that it doesn’t scale very well — start adding tens of thousands of users and the costs tend to escalate quickly.

The one aspect that is truly amazing is that depending on the technology deployed at the back end, there is still plenty of bandwidth to be squeezed from plain old copper wires. Given the opportunity costs, don’t expect fiber optics to be arriving in your neighborhood anytime soon — odds are that for the forseeable future it will be cheaper to simply take the next upgrade path with copper.

Source:

Small town tests TV, DSL comob via phone lines. David George, CNN, January 22, 2001.

RSS Feeds in Conversant

Now this is cool. Conversant could already output RSS/RDF files, but now it can display them as well with a handy RSSBOX macro. Here, for example, is the RSS Feed from my LeftWatch.Com site,

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Damn Those Corporations for [Giving/Not Giving] Tsunami Aid

Ramsey Clark Joins Saddam Hussein’s Legal Team

M. Shahid Alam On 9/11 Terrorists

Project Censored Becomes Project Censorship

James Wolcott Roots for Death and Destruction

Like almost everything in Conversant, the appearance of the RSS feed is completely customizable, although I haven’t taken the time to customize the look in the above example.