"The [Bahamian government Plays and Films Control ] board chose to ban it [Brokeback Mountain] because it shows extreme homosexuality, nudity and profanity, and we feel that it has no value for the Bahamian public," Chavasse Turnquest-Liriano, liaison officer for the control board, said Wednesday.
Purportedly Via Cult of Mac:
Another Apple II Lab Bites the Dust: "
Vance Carruth, a third grade teacher from Huntington Beach, California, is retiring -- and his clutch of twenty Apple IIe systems will be going with him, the Mac Mothership website reports.
Even though the technology is almost thirty (30) years old, Vance's third graders fight over the chance to get use of one of these puppies."
... the school system purchased Apple IIe's for each classroom back in the 80's. In the early 90's they were replaced by IBM compatibles and most recently by Dell's. Each of the teachers were told they could take their Apple IIe home or move them to a designated storage room. Most elected to not take them home. The storage room later became Mr. Vance's classroom and he inherited the equipment. Mr. Vance decided to setup and network the desktops and has been supporting this effort with other machines that he has salvaged parts from for the last fifteen (15) years.
Now the real bad news. Mr. Carruth, (AKA Mr. Vance - Student's nickname for him) will be retiring this coming June. This comes only after 39 years of service at the same school. Once Mr. Vance has gone, there will be no other teacher to take on this support effort and the Apple IIe legacy along with Mr. Vance will vanish from Smith School.
Purportedly Via Lessig Blog:
In the late 1990s, I travelled a bunch to South America to talk about cyberspace. In conference after conference, I listened to South Americans describe how they were waiting for the government to enact rules so they could begin to develop business in cyberspace. That reaction puzzled me, an American. As I explained to those who would listen, in America, business wasn't waiting for the government to 'clarify' rules. It was simply building business in cyberspace without any support from government.
Yet as I listened to the Japanese describe the stuff they were doing with content in cyberspace, I realized we (America) had become South America. One presentation in particular described an extraordinary database the NII had constructed to discover relevance in linked databases, and drive traffic across a database of texts. I was astonished by the demonstration, and thought to myself that we could never build something like this in the U.S., at least until cases like the Google Book Search case was resolved.
And bingo รข€’ the moment of recognition. We are now, as the South Americans in the 1990s, waiting for the government to clarify the rules. Investment is too uncertain; the liability too unclear. We thus wait, and fall further behind nations such as Japan, where the IP (as in copyright) bar is not so keen to stifle IP (as in the goose that ...).
(Oh, and re broadband: NTT is now well on its way to rolling fiber to the home. Cost per home -- between $30-50/m, for 100 megabits/s).
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