links for 2009-08-03

"I’m getting sick of the auto-dms. Chris Brogan is sick. Sean Percival is sick. Robert Scoble is sick. Jeremiah Owyang is sick. The list goes on and on, and we’re not the only ones. Starting today I’m taking a stand." Auto-DM's in the Twitter world are the worst.

"The Associated Press — which thinks you owe it a license fee if you quote more than four words from one of its articles — doesn't even care if the words actually came from its article. They'll charge you anyway, even if you're quoting from the public domain."

Go and laugh.

"The Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF), the First Amendment legal defense arm of the American Library Association (ALA), has joined publishers, booksellers, writers and other media groups in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a statute that, if upheld, would allow the government to ban a wide range of material it deems to lack value, including many mainstream books, magazines and movies. The law in question, a 1999 law that makes it a crime to create, sell or possess any photograph, film, video or sound recording in which an animal is harmed or killed, subjects anyone convicted under the law to a possible five-year prison term and fines. The lawsuit concerns the criminal conviction of a Virginia man, Robert Stevens, who was sentenced to three years in prison for creating several documentaries that included scenes of dog fighting."

"The US military has found the remains of the last American still officially missing in action from the Gulf War. Capt Michael Scott Speicher, an F18 pilot, was shot down over Iraq on the first day of the war in January 1991. Last month, an Iraqi citizen took US marines, based in Anbar Province, to the crash site. He told them where the remains had been buried in the desert. Subsequent excavations recovered bones and bone fragments. Capt Speicher was identified through his dental records."

"But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon’s new “cybercommand” acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns." Cyberwar is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot.

The Chaser's take on those who believe every aspect of the Bible is true and see if they will help kill people who have broken biblical laws.

"A new strain of the HIV virus has been discovered in a 62-year-old woman from Cameroon, West Africa. Only three strains of the virus that causes Aids were previously known, all from chimpanzees. But the new form of HIV, discovered by researchers from the University of Rouen in France, appears to be closer to a strain found in wild gorillas. The team think it came from gorilla-to-human transmission – but the patient said she had no contact with apes." Not good news.

So cool.

Social networking site geared towards female writers.

"That title goes to Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, who, in addition to being the first female mayor of Atlanta, and the first African-American woman to serve as mayor of a major southern city, has been working on ending the sexual exploitation of teens in her community since 2006." Can you say awesome program.

"Researchers are just beginning to study the phenomenon, but the few who do estimate that openly polyamorous families in the United States number more than half a million, with thriving contingents in nearly every major city. Over the past year, books like Open, by journalist Jenny Block; Opening Up, by sex columnist Tristan Taormino; and an updated version of The Ethical Slut—widely considered the modern "poly" Bible—have helped publicize the concept."

"After seven years of the new regime, I had the opportunity to compare the class of 1999 with the class of 1992. In 1992 I set an course in Artificial Intelligence requiring students to solve six exercises, including building a Prolog interpreter. In 1999, six exercises had shrunk to one; which was a 12 line Prolog program for which eight weeks were allotted for students to write it. A special class was laid on for students to learn this and many attended, including students who had attended a course incorporating logic programming the previous term. It was a battle to get the students to do this, not least because two senior lecturers criticised the exercise as presenting too much of a challenge to the students. My Brazilian Ph.D. student who superintended some of these students, told me that the level of attainment of some of our British final year students was lower than that of the first year Brazilian students." Crazy.