Disqus - Latest Comments for piercepresley

Re: Scalia Rages Against Supreme Court’s Gay Rights Ruling

Pierce — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 14:11:44 -0000

Or Solomon.

Re: Scalia Rages Against Supreme Court’s Gay Rights Ruling

Pierce — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 14:11:13 -0000

I would argue that the state recognizes your marriage for the purpose of giving you those rights and privileges it deems appropriate (e.g. survivorship, visitation, insurance). I'd say you and your partner marry each other, but if you want or need a minister, etc. to formalize the bond, have at it.

Re: Mexican-American Boy Who Sang National Anthem At NBA Finals Taunted By Racist Tweets

Pierce — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:16:28 -0000

Actually, since there's been genetic studies showing three nearly simultaneous migrations to the Americas (with different languages, which could very well mean they came from different areas), you can't even give Native Americans a blanket pass on originality.

Re: Why Star Wars is Like Religion

Pierce — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:17:15 -0000

And the apocrypha make an appearance!

Re: What is a river of news?

Pierce — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:05:29 -0000

I also had display issues, but in GReader. If you want to look into why this isn't working on Google's Edsel, I can gin up a screenshot. If not, I'll go back to trying to find (or make) a replacement. (Sadly, read status is critical for me, so river of news isn't my thing. Digging on Farfo, tho!)

Re: An Increasing Number of Atheist and Agnostic Alcoholics Anonymous Groups Are Altering the Twelve Steps

Pierce — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:19:18 -0000

I'm starting to think that a lot of things like AA's powerlessness declaration are the equivalent of low-level sports psychology like "swing through the ball": ways to get around the "helpful" things our brains will do otherwise. Demanding that one exercise the willpower necessary to not give in to an addiction despite everything is profoundly unrealistic in the long run; learning to live life in a way that one doesn't have to will one's way through is a far better idea. There are a lot of Dan Dennett's "good tricks" sprinkled in religious and quasi-religious practices (and a lot of idiocy and evil, natch); good for We Agnostics and the like for trying to pry them from the mire of religiosity.

AA groups becoming "go Jesus or go away" is unsurprising, as entirely too much of politics, law and society have already gone there, and seems antithetical to its mission.

Re: Google Reader's demise, part 2

Pierce — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:10:00 -0000

The cross-platform, -machine, -language, -universe tracking of read/unread is going to be the big loss for me, especially since Google had recently released Listen, an Android pod following app that tracked labeled GReader feeds and that was poised to make me a regular pod listener. Very few feeds fall into a category where I would be happy with what I understand to be the river concept; hell, I'm anal enough about this that I feel bad when Boing Boing bankruptcy forces me to mark many articles read. (It's still the best signal-to-noise ratio of the firehoses, IMO.)

Is there another setup that will work? Probably.

Can I get it to work for me? Possibly.

But GReader was there, hooked into Evernote, Facebook, Twitter and everything else, had superhigh info density and didn't require me to do a lot in the way of thinking.

Also, Google screwed the pooch here, announcement-wise. I don't doubt there are a lot of people (like me) who have barely, if at all, made the jump to G+, and they really haven't made it clear how G+ can replace the functionality.

Re: Getting the band back together

Pierce — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:48:33 -0000

Good resolution, and good news. Looking forward to more journalism-pushing!

Re: Are there any wireless laser printers that work?

Pierce — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 23:40:16 -0000

Running the Brother install program worked for me with my big tabloid inkjet, but I didn't like the performance (those files can get big). I'm guessing the lasers don't have the cool LCD panel, either, which would likely suffice for entering the SSID and encryption info if you couldn't get the installer to play nice.

Re: Mitt Romney’s Second Term Promises

Pierce — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:15:29 -0000

Leave the NHL out of this.

Re: Social Conservatives Cheer Islamic ‘Ex-Terrorist’ Huckster At Values Voter Summit

Pierce — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 21:35:21 -0000

Or nuts to, well, nuts.

Re: What is longform anyway?

Pierce — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:08:54 -0000

I remember waxing rhapsodic back in 1998(!) or so about the opportunities new media gave news organizations for finally expanding beyond the shallow, sporadic coverage that was then the norm. (I was a junior in college and can perhaps be forgiven my extreme optimism.) Part of this was the fact that the Internet combined the ability to be quick-hitting with the ability to be in-depth, to finally give the subject matter experts the space to fully explore the landscape of their topic and to fully consider the ramifications of various scenarios. It's only taken 14 years for the future to finally (try to) arrive in the form of Matter and other experiments. Of course, I also expected to have a flying car by this point.

Re: S3 for Poets

Pierce — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:39:31 -0000

The instructions are simpler, but it can appear that what you're instructing someone to do (for those using cpanel or the like) is to add a subdomain, which is handled in the hosting server, instead of a CNAME record, which resides on the DNS server. A quibble, perhaps, but not insignificant. A note about the CNAME record being required and a mention of DNS might not be amiss.

Re: Next Knight News Challenge Calls for Mobile Visionaries

Pierce — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:11:49 -0000

Mobile is extremely important to anyone (or any company) that cares about reaching poorer or more rural audience members. Very often, a mobile device is the primary and sometimes only connection to information services, which means that creating way to present journalism to these audiences becomes absolutely vital if democracy and freedom are to continue.

Re: Scripting News: Journalist or not? Wrong question

Pierce — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:29:58 -0000

The "who is a journalist" discussions seem to revolve around who gets the cachet (and, sometimes, legal protections) of being a journalist. Strangely, the cachet seems mostly to attach to the information; journalists are down there with used car salesmen, lawyers and politicians in popularity polls, but their work enjoys far more favor.

It should be unarguable that there are standards and practices for creating what we call professional journalism. What they are is up for debate, as is how one acquires them, but whether they are encoded in something like the SPJ Code of Conduct or passed along by grizzled one-eyed editors, they are out there.

I'd disagree that anyone who does journalism (or reportage, my preferred term) is a journalist, just as I object to calling anyone who swims a swimmer. The constant whirlwind around citizen journalism or the morass that is hyperlocal content farms clearly highlight the difference between journalism and pantomiming it.

Watching the newspaper industry and the craft of journalism (not the same!) clearly shows that the outsider/insider divide isn't limited to tech journalism. The quid pro quos change as do the events and leaks, but if you look at the pre-Iraq invasion political press, you see scores of reporters squelching dissent (or, worse, not seeking any alternative voices; hi, Judith!) to preserve their access; you also see outsiders denied that journalistic cachet, because they didn't have access.

I don't have an answer to this, and clearly all the attempts at professional journalism don't, either. Maybe for once the techno-utopians will be right and the democratization of publishing will neuter the insiders. Maybe my flying car will arrive, too.

Re: Scripting News: Should we trust Bill Keller?

Pierce — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:25:23 -0000

All through Keller's piece, I kept wondering why the man at the head of what should be regarded as the best journalism standing (due to its staff) was writing such petty and picayune attacks as if Assange's socks or skipping (nice bit of hearsay, that) or whatever mattered. With stewards like this, is it any wonder old school journalism veers between being hopelessly adrift and running aground?

Re: The one app I won’t be buying

Pierce — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 19:25:51 -0000

Bryan ... open up ... tell us how you REALLY feel.

Re: http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/2810795040

Pierce — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 09:43:49 -0000

I don't know that we're going to redefine friendship and privacy more than we're going to recognize the fundamental change that the explosion of connection and data mean. That is, when you were college age, a photo of you drinking would have enough of a scandal to necessitate leaving town (and a daguerreotype, heh). When I was college age, there were probably a few photos of me drinking, but they were prints in some shoe box somewhere. Now, there can be dozens of photos from a single party that are, because of _other's_ privacy settings, freely available to a billion people.

Re: Innovations in Nigerian Spam

Pierce — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:29:26 -0000

I have one that's better than this even. It claims to be from the Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes division of the FBI. There's so much win in it I posted it below, but my absolute favorite part is all the bureaucratic folderol it claims has to happen before you get your money. Classic!

ANTI-TERRORIST AND MONETARY CRIMES DIVISION
FBI HEADQUARTERS IN WASHINGTON , D.C,
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING
935 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW WASHINGTON , D.C. 20535-0001
Website: www.fbi.gov
ATTN: BENEFICIARY.
This is to officially inform you that it has come to our notice as we had thoroughly completed an Investigation with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System, which report confirmation stated that there are illegal transactions with you and some Impostors claiming to be Prof. Charles C. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, others are officials in Banks such as Oceanic Bank, Zenith Bank with other banks listed in our report, while some impostors claimed to be Federal Bureau Of Investigation Agents, and E.F.C.C Agent and ICPC Agent. Meanwhile, during our Investigation FBI realized the reason why you have not received your payment because you are been deceived by these imposters.
Moreover, we notice that you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment. Based on that FBI has contacted the Federal Ministry of Finance FMF on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by coordinating your payment in the total amount of USD 8,000,000.00 USD which has been programmed with an ATM CARD, which you can use to withdraw your funds anywhere in the world. You now have the lawful right to claim your funds which has been programmed with ATM CARD.
With the Federal Bureau of Investigation involvement in this transaction, you are now be rest assured that this transaction is legitimate and completely risk-free, our duty is to Protect and Serve citizens of United States and other part of the world. Now I advise you to contact the ATM CARD CENTER via E-mail for instructions on how to procure your Approval Slip, which contains details on how to receive and activate your ATM CARD for immediate use of your funds being paid to you through ATM CARD. We have confirmed that the amount required to procure the Approval Slip will cost you a total sum of 325 USD which will be paid directly to the ATM CARD CENTER , Via Gram. Below you shall find contact details of the Agent whom will process your transaction from Federal Minister of Finance:
CONTACT INFORMATION
FEDERAL MINISTER OF FINANCE
ATM CARD CENTRE
NAME: MR. PAUL SMITH
EMAIL:mr.paulsmith3@sify.com
Contact Mr. Paul Smith of the ATM Card Centre with your information as follows:
Full Name:
Mailing Address:
City:
State:
Nationality:
Direct Phone / Mobile Number:
Current Occupation and Your Age:
Once you have sent the required information to Mr. Paul Smith he will contact you with instructions on how to make the payment of 325 USD for the Approval Slip after which he will proceed towards delivery of the ATM CARD without any further delay. You are hereby been authorized/guaranteed by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation to commence towards completing this transaction, as there shall be NO delay once payment for the Approval Slip has been made to the authorized agent.
Once you have completed payment of USD 325 to the agent in charge of this transaction, immediately contact us back for more investigation for conformation of your ATM card. The both offices are working 24hours to get this project complete.
Robert S Mueller,
Executive Director,
Federal Bureau Investigation, FBI

Re: Scripting News: Barriers to entry eventually break

Pierce — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:55:00 -0000

You know how the answer to a riddle is obvious when you hear it?
This is why I read scripting.com.

Re: Love Of Whose Country?

Pierce — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:16:30 -0000

As much as I rolled my eyes at the tired conservative tropes sprinkled through Brooks's piece, especially the nauseating hijacking of the civil rights movement, I have to say I'm not terribly optimistic about a third party or new populism arriving any time soon. I've been waiting for this particular uprising and the repudiation of America's cratering politics and the horrific policies it has allowed since I figured out Reagan was full of crap. Give me net neutrality and a sliver of meaningful election finance reform, and I'll start to think that maybe something could come of this.
I recently read a paper that said online news is an inferior good; that is, one for which the demand decreases as consumer income increases. This poses a serious challenge for online news outlets, since the old advertising revenue driven model that has carried over from traditional media aims to maximize attractiveness by aiming at reaching an audience with the greatest amount of disposable income. But if one figures out the business model puzzle, it could mean that at least a portion of news media might finally be aimed at informing low and middle income Americans.

Re: Is Housing Inherently Bubbly?

Pierce — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 15:42:16 -0000

I'm really starting to be impressed with just how many ways folks have found to blame the everyday mortgagees for this crisis. And how many sides it keeps coming from.

Many of these folks were told that a house was the only foolproof investment, that their home value would grow rapidly enough to get them out of the hole and that the professionals were perfectly willing to lend money to them in their current position. I'm not saying that the buyers shouldn't have done more due diligence, but when the people who should know (and who should be leery of loaning money that likely won't be repaid) are unanimous in cheerleading for the idea, it's hard to blame the buyer fully.

(And there is more than a whiff of "I didn't buy a house, and look how smart that was in hindsight" to Matt's posts on this topic. I bought a house with a VA loan--the terms of which forbade a lot of the stupid lender tricks--and later rented, but these weren't sound financial decisions in the sense that I knew what I was doing and chose the best of several options. They were what I could do with what I had at the time.)

Re: http://blog.sasquatchmedia.com/post/1071792253

Pierce — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:50:25 -0000

I tend to think that it did, at least for rank and file journalists. But I still don't think modern journalism was (or is) an intensely capitalist enterprise (though that has a nice ring). We weren't being objective because it made the most money, or if we thought it did we were demonstratively wrong. It was and is seen as the right way to do things. (I tend to hedge my bets on this, mostly because of the degradation of the meaning of objectivity. But I'm right there with you on transparency and honesty.)
The cynic in me has to ask two questions: They may value those things, but are they willing to pay for them? If so, how much?

Re: http://blog.sasquatchmedia.com/post/1071792253

Pierce — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:29:15 -0000

I think the science-journalism connection is oversold, and I think we've been telling ourselves we're objective (just like scientists) because it feels good rather than it actually having much connection to reality.
The two myths that are strangling American journalism are that economics ceased to be a major influence on its practice when it moved from partisan backing to naked commercial support (aka the rise of professional journalism), and the belief that those who make money off of it value objectivity (or truth) as much as journalists do. Pointing those things out is not to say that economics is the only influence on journalism or that those making money off of it do not value objectivity at all, just that we've been telling ourselves some stories that don't jive with reality, and continuing to do so is hurting journalism.
What these two myths have done is let us avoid the probably jarring determination of just what journalism is worth in the market (and what it really costs, and what those two numbers mean for employment and profit) and tied us to publishing and broadcast industries that are quickly losing steam and increasingly seeing journalism as a loser. (Oh, for the days we were a loss leader!) As long as we journalists avoid that conversation and that determination, journalism will wallow in the doldrums or worse.
This isn't to say that we don't face challenges with public perception or changing conditions, nor that there isn't any other myth that's hurting journalism's ability to navigate this treacherous path, nor to say that I have figured out the solution (or even the whole of the problem). I say this as a journalist with tremendous respect for anyone trying to do journalism, as someone who would love to work for a newspaper or wire service again, as someone who deeply values many of the things professional journalists value and aspire to achieve. Journalism has a proud history and is very important to democracy, and it is worth preserving the good and advancing its cause.
But we have got to start talking about the economic realities, or journalism may become a shadow of its former self.

Re: Facebook Exodus Planned for May 31: Will You Quit?

Pierce — Sun, 16 May 2010 06:43:37 -0000

Ah crap, I left too early.