I Can’t Make You Buy that Horror Comic Book

While researching the exceptions to non-competition agreements in California, I came across this exception:

16603. Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both.

This section is not intended to prohibit an agreement requiring a person to purchase or accept on consignment a minimum number of copies of a single edition or issue of a magazine or of a particular book or other particular publication.

As used in this section “person” includes a corporation, partnership, or other association.

As used in this section “horror comic book” means any book or booklet in which an account of the commission or attempted commission of the crime of arson, assault with caustic chemicals, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, theft, or voluntary manslaughter is set forth by means of a series of five or more drawings or photographs in sequence, which are accompanied by either narrative writing or words represented as spoken by a pictured character, whether such narrative words appear in balloons, captions or on or immediately adjacent to the photograph or drawing.

This definition of “horror comic book” would probably include most comic books out there, at least not the ones written specifically for children. I wonder what the history of this Code provision is.

WTS Epic Mount

Let’s not make this a trend, but here’s another sex-related IPTF story. Yes, the infamous WTS (“Willing to Sell”) Epic Mount story.

Now, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft players of a certain level can earn “mounts” or animals they can ride so they look cool and move faster in the virtual world. Problem is, they’re hard to come by–they’re extremely expensive. So a presumably female WOW player posted on Cragslist, offering to sell her “services” for an hour for 5000 gold. (Today, 5000 gold could cost around US $685.) An epic mount for an “epic” mount, get it? Haha. Hahaha.

So the next obvious question after “Isn’t this illegal?” is “Is this a taxable transaction?” Here’s a Howstuffworks article about taxation of virtual assets.

Be Careful What You Say: You Might Just Get It

Looking through the site logs (“blog logs?”), I noticed a short stream of incoming searches for, well, to avoid saying it again and fueling more searches driven our way, two four-letter words describing “illegal images of younger people” because of yesterday’s post on Commonwealth v. Maccini. Funny. Kind of. A bit scary.

Maybe then people looking for that kind of smut will now learn more about the state of technology and the law!

Joost – A Beta Review

I have to say that I was initially skeptical of Joost. Even though it’s an offering by the creators of Skype and Kazaa, a torrent-based method of delivering free video content, it sounds like the right stuff. But I was skeptical about how efficiently the content would be delivered and the quality of the content.

Not bad. I’ve only been watching “Stella” from Comedy Central, but it’s good. It halted a bit when I started, but I forgave it, and hit pause and walked away for a bit, and after a minute or two it cached enough content that the rest of my viewing time was pretty much seamless.

I get about 800×600 AVI-quality video, close to par with ripped video content. (Imagine that you rip a DVD to CD size (~700 MB), and that’s what you get—much better than YouTube Flash video.) The selections were well chosen for my personal demographic—definitely enough to keep me happy after I finished the second season of “The Office.”

I think this is going to be great—as long as it lasts. Pretty psyched.

Technically, I just want to add that I’m watching it on an Acer 5610Z laptop, which is an economy laptop, so not-too-high-powered. It doesn’t run on my Mac Powerbook—it only runs on Intel-based Macs. This is exciting. And I’m going to keep on watching Stella until it’s reasonably too late.

In regards to Stella: The guys from The State are there, and they’ve done a great job keeping the wit, humor, and style of The State going about a decade later. I’m also impressed by how racially integrated the cast is. Good show. Check it out on Joost, OK?

Woot: 5:31 8:00 8:07 7:34

So Woot’s special for May 8, 2007 has a picture of four atomic watches in a row. Here’s the secret:

The times are 5:31 8:00 8:07 7:34. What does it mean?

Let’s take out the spaces and punctuation (a little s/\D// action), and we get:

531800807734

Now flip this upside down, like we used to do in middle school on our calculators, and what do we get?

I won’t say it out loud because it might be obscene… But give it a shot. Too much fun.

Wishing Well

I was just thinking that if there was a wishing well where everyone had one shot to get what they wished, then inflation would go out of control. Everyone who asked for $1 M would drive prices up; then people would ask for $100 M, then $1 B, and so on. Global economies would collapse. And if everyone asked for true love, then would true love lose its meaning? World peace? Teddy bears?

Supreme Court Opinion Links to Online Video

As the American Bar Association Journal eReport e-reports, the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris refers to the URL of an online video of evidence from the case. The Supreme Court web site also hosts this video.

In a footnote to the opinion:

JUSTICE STEVENS suggests that our reaction to the videotape is somehow idiosyncratic, and seems to believe we are misrepresenting its contents. See post, at 4 (dissenting opinion) (“In sum, the factual statements by the Court of Appeals quoted by the Court . . . were entirely accurate”). We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself. See Record 36, Exh. A, available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb and in Clerk of Court’s case file.

Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. ___, at 5 n.5 (2007).

Further, from the ABA report:

A lone dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens said the case [Scott v. Harris] should have gone to a jury for decision. “The court has usurped the jury’s fact-finding function,” he wrote, since “whether a person’s actions have risen to a level warranting deadly force is a question of fact best reserved for a jury.”

Stevens challenged the majority’s interpretation of what the video shows, and he referred to his fellow justices as “my colleagues on the jury.”

(See, also, SCOTUSblog for a more substantive look at the decision.)

I’m wondering what technical infrastructure the Supreme Court web site has in place to start hosting video or other electronic content in the future. It seems fairly ad hoc at the moment. If you look at the file structure for serving the opinions, it looks like this:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1631.pdf

So all the opinions go into the “opinions” directory, and the PDF versions from 2006 go into the “06pdf” directory. Then the file is identified by the Supreme Court numbering system (“05-1631.pdf”).

On the other hand, the videos go into a “video” directory, with the filename as the case name:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb

This shows that the sysadmin is OK with the “video” directory just being a flat index of video by case name (and not the unique Supreme Court number), most likely meaning that they don’t plan on putting that many videos there in the first place. This means that this is a “one off” kind of thing with plans to add some video in the future, but not much. Furthermore, the naming convention only assumes one video per case.

So while the addition of a video URL may be interesting, they apparently don’t plan on doing much of the same in the future. If they did, then they should really change their file structure and naming systems to scale into the future.

As a quick suggestion, scalability is simple enough:

/opinions/06video/05-1631-01.rmvb

Better yet, as I prefer semantic filenames over “code” and non-proprietary formats, it *should* be

/opinions/06/video/scott-v-harris-05-1631-01-car-crash.avi

MiT5: Creativity, Ownership, and Collaboration in the Digital Age

Today, my buddy Adam and I presented at a roundtable at MiT5 about Adam’s project, Edtags.org. Here’s the abstract from the presentation:

Identifying Online Experts, Paul Ham, Adam Seldow
Our research involves building a community of experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education around a socio-semantic networking web site, Edtags.org. Through our work with the web-site, we have come across a recent set of questions regarding the make-up of the community and culture. How do we ensure that populations of participants are “experts” in a field? Is it a matter of “numbers” or must there be a screening process to verify the users for participation? Should we screen the content for our specific field, and if so how? What is the critical mass of endorsed sites on a socio-semantic network that changes it from a place where educators save bookmarks to a place where educators save bookmarks and discover new ones? Lastly, how can search engines best distinguish “credible” sites from “socio-spites” (socio-semantic networking spam sites)?

We presented alongside sam smiley, a professor at Lesley College, and ended up having a great discussion about ownership, copyright, content management, as well as identifying experts in an online community site. We also got to show off the latest version of Edtags.org, which just keeps on getting better and better.

Our biggest questions were regarding how to identify experts: are they self-identified (I’m a professor or through self-tagging), community-identified (through votes or friends), or moderated (by Adam)? Though we didn’t end up with concrete answers, we did receive a lot of feedback on how to think about expertise on-line and safe ways of developing community.

One thing that I’m definitely going to keep track of is avoiding “forcing” people to have friends. You can suggest friends and explain why: these are users who are similar to you based upon their tags or their bookmarks; these are bookmarks recommended to you based upon your bookmarks; etc. But don’t force people into communities.

Also, it sounds like right now that self-selection and organic-selection of experts seems to work and won’t inhibit our user growth.

Adam also announced our new project, through Seth, to open source and distribute the Edtags code hopefully by the end of the summer.

Threadless and David and Goliath

The shiznit’s going down on Todd Goldman and his company, David and Goliath. Essentially, Goldman decided to hire some artists to rip-off Threadless t-shirt designs.

For those who don’t know about Threadless (or D&G), it’s a community-based web site where t-shirt designers submit their work and people comment on them and then buy the final designs. They encourage participation by offering deals like if you upload pictures of you wearing their t-shirts, then you’ll get a discount. Great idea, very successful, and, best of all great, t-shirts. (I own a… Bunch.)

Since this has blown up on the Internet, Goldman’s lawyer has been e-mailing bloggers who are discussing this issue–”We have acquired articles posted on your website which contain defaming, derogatory and malicious statements about Mr. Goldman“–asking them to remove posts from their blogs. But now it looks like his lawyer is apologizing at least to the artists for the rip-offs.

Here are some of the rip-offs, posted on Penny Arcade:

S to the P to the A to the M

I’m always impressed when I go through and moderate the sp*# on this blog that our sp*# filter has caught over 34,000 sp*# comments over the 9 or so months this has been up.

I’m also encouraged that at least when the sp*#-ers are looking for posts to comment on, they read through a bunch of pages before finding a choice one to post their comments on… And then have them hung up on the sp*# moderation queue. Thanks, guys!

The other thing that impresses me about this blog is how low the consistent readership is compared to how many people actually find the content from search engines. Most of the time when I look through the site stats, I click on the Google searches, and the BCIPTF blog usually shows on the first page of results.

This means we’re either doing a good job of writing about interesting things, or the things we write about are so obscure that no one else writes about them.