When Jessamyn West was here for SLA, this topic came up at the after-event gathering. I meant to post something about it at that time when the story was still somewhat fresh but never got to it, being as busy as I was with much more important matters like cute baby pictures and Flash-based Friday Fun Links.
A recent invite to the annual Sask Blogs summer picnic reminded me of the fact that the Sask Blogs Aggregator, a site which creates a rolling summary of posts from various Saskatchewan-based and Saskatchewan-themed blogs, is still down.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
In mid-April, a right-wing, Sask-based blog named "Small Dead Animals" posted a link to another conservative site named FreeDominion that had posted a story about Canadian civil rights lawyer, Richard Warman. As with most blogs, FreeDominion accepts comments. Warman saw these and made the claim that the comments were defamatory. He sued but in a unique twist, he didn't just name FreeDominion (which allowed the comments) but also sites that linked to the FreeDominion story such as Small Dead Animals (and therefore, were re-publishing these comments indirectly in his view.)
Although the case was still in the works and linking to a third-party site that may contain libelous or defamatory material hadn't yet been defined as legal or illegal by a court, the Sask Blogs aggregator shut down their service completely out of concern that a similar charge could be leveled against them - either for linking to Small Dead Animals or to any of the other dozens of blogs that who were part of their feed and which may contain similar borderline comments which could be actionable.
Here's a summary from the Regina Leader-Post of the whole situation.
I gotta say, I'm with the right winger on this and think that the civil rights lawyer is stretching too way far. If FreeDominion libeled you or allowed you to be libel, that's one thing. But suing every single site that links to the story (or links to a site that links to the story - hey, I just realised, because of all the links I've thrown out to the various sites involved in this case, I'm implicated now too! In fact, because of the interconnected nature of the Internet, every possible site that includes links to other sites is guility as well! Oh-oh - do you know what that means? That's it - shut down the Internet - it's over. Links are no longer allowed!)
Okay, kidding aside, does anyone see the irony in a civil rights lawyer being responsible for an action that's stifled freedom of speech and sharing of information, not only in the original offending site but for numerous harmless bystanders? To me, this is sort of like the copyright issue where someone is trying to apply old-world views of how things work now to a new world. In the old days, yeah, if someone else repeated a libelous statement, they were responsible. But in the Internet age, where a link is a click away, a statement can go out to a million people as easily as to a dozen, the old paradigms simply don't work anymore. "The genie is out of the bottle" is a phrase I think of all the time in situations like this. Warman is trying to corral the spread of whatever libelous statements were made but somewhere, someone is going to be able to access them. That's the new world and we all have to accept that.
At any rate, the Sask Blogs aggregator was a great, volunteer service that I miss a lot. I tend to read blogs that are in my narrow areas of interest or written by people I know so Sask Blogs was a simple way for me to get an overview of what people were writing about across the province - from all viewpoints, all writing styles, all geographic locations, all manner of topics from personal to political and everything in between.
Hopefully this case will be resolved and Sask Blogs will be back soon.
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Monday, June 30
Link to Another Blog That Allows Its Users To Post Libelous Comments - Get Sued Yourself!
by
Jason
on Mon 30 Jun 2008 11:42 PM CST
Saturday, June 21
A Peek at Peak Oil
by
Jason
on Sat 21 Jun 2008 09:37 PM CST
Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket. It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards.
This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to "never" depending on which study you read. (The "never" people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current production. On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped. But with massively increasing demand from China, India and other developing nations, the odds are that either technology or the promise of massive profits inherent in $200 (or $300 or more) barrels of oil still won't be enough to meet demand. (Oil is at $135/barrel today which is an increase of about 35% since the start of 2008, nearly double what it was at this time last year and seven times the $20/barrel price that oil hovered for most of the 1980's and 1990's.) So instead of gas that's $1.39/litre (~$4/gallon in the US) today, you could be looking at $4-5/litre gasoline ($15/gallon) in the very near future. The other related issue is, of course, climate change. Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment. (A digression - "fossil fuels" is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards. The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage. A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.) Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops. (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.) The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either. In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.) Why am I writing this now? I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact - economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. - but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-. (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year - a place I never thought I'd find myself!) Recent studies have declared that there is a "Saudi Arabia of oil" under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957).  I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area. The landscape now looks like the moon - instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of pumpjacks.  I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later. I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do! Tuesday, June 3
Hope...
by
Jason
on Tue 03 Jun 2008 10:39 PM CST
Pace doesn't watch TV very much but while I was watching Barack Obama give his speech tonight having finally clinched the Democratic nomination (or did he?), Pace sat right down in front of the TV and watched, enthralled, for a few minutes.
I didn't have my camera handy for that very cool shot so I give you this collage from Flickr instead:  Monday, May 26
Kiva.org
by
Jason
on Mon 26 May 2008 10:09 PM CST
Kiva is a web site that helps facilitate micro-credit loans to entrepreneurs around the world. (As always, Wikipedia has more information about this organization if you're interested.)
Shea got a Kiva gift certificate as a Mother's Day Gift and is helping two people: Ruth Celenia Santana Morales who sells clothes and jewelery in the Dominican Republic and Umedjon Nurov who raises beef cattle in Tajikistan. One of the coolest things about the site is that once the loan is repaid (the loans have a 99.7% repayment rate) you can either withdraw it or turn around and loan it to someone else. I first heard about Kiva via the Bill Clinton book, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change The World. There are various other organizations out there that are similar to Kiva but which have different approaches and cater to different needs, groups, countries and so on. Heifer International is one I heard about via Cenobyte for example. Tuesday, May 6
Obama vs. McCain - It Begins...Again
by
Jason
on Tue 06 May 2008 08:31 PM CST
Tonight's primaries aren't completely settled and as I write this, Indiana still has to be called. But barring a major backroom deal with both committed and uncommitted super-delegates, Michigan and Florida recounts or incriminating photos of Barack Obama with Osama Bin Laden come to light, the Democratic party nomination has been Obama's for the last two months or so.
So with the Presidential race looking like it will be John McCain versus Barack Obama in the fall, it's interesting to note that this isn't the first time the two men have squared off. The following exchange provides a glimpse behind the power politics of Washington and the character of each man: Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain Exchange Letters on Ethics Reform | U.S. Senator Barack Obama Thursday, April 24
The Dubyaburg Address
by
Jason
on Thu 24 Apr 2008 07:28 PM CST
Thursday, April 10
10 Things Every Adult Should Know
by
Jason
on Thu 10 Apr 2008 09:36 PM CST
So I've had this list of "10 Things Every Adult Should Know" kicking around for a few weeks, never sure when to post it. I really like a lot of what the guy says...
8. You have no right to be proud, unless you did it yourself. That goes for anything from racial pride to patriotism. Your race, gender and nationality are fucking accidents of birth. Being proud of something you got stuck with when mamma squeezed you out is stupid. You have a right to be proud of your own personal accomplishments, and perhaps those of your children (if you were actually a good parent, and your kids didn't succeed by sheer bloody-mindedness alone). That's it. Your parents fucked, Mom got knocked up, and ~9 months later, there you were. Race, gender and nationality handed to you out of some cosmic lottery machine. Fuck your white pride, black pride, national pride, and all the horseshit that goes along with it. ...but the obsession with anal sex (two of the ten items, three if you count the one about "if you have sex, you will get pregnant" as some sort of subtle pro-anal message, are about bum sex) sort of takes away the impact of the foul-mouthed but otherwise accurate points in the other 7/10 of the list. (via Reddit though I've long since lost the link to the thread with comments.) Friday, March 21
IIPA Slam Canada For Not Fixing Copyright "Deficiencies", CBC to release program via BitTorrent DRM-free
by
Jason
on Fri 21 Mar 2008 07:22 PM CST
A couple copyright-related stories that warm the cockles of my Canadian heart...
While the inclusion of China and Russia on the "Priority Watch List" isn't surprising, the report also has strong words for a more surprising: Canada. ESA, IIPA slam Canada for not fixing copyright "deficiencies" Sources indicate that the CBC is set to become the first major North American broadcaster to freely release one of its programs without DRM using BitTorrent. This Sunday, CBC will air Canada Next Great Prime Minister. The following day, it plans to freely release a high-resolution version via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions. This development is important not only because it shows that Canada's public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada. (via Michael Geist) Monday, March 17
Wednesday, March 5
Obama: Politics 2.0
by
Jason
on Wed 05 Mar 2008 10:54 PM CST
I've been reading a lot about the race for the Democratic nomination in the US between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
This article from the New York Times caught my eye for doing a particularly good job of capturing the essence of the differences between their campaigns - Clinton, a baby boomer, is part of the establishment who sees politics as a fight between "us vs. them". Obama, technically also a boomer but younger, is much more open, accessible, collaborative, and inclusive in how he operates his campaign and how he comes across generally. And where have you heard those words before? Oh yeah, in every buzzword-laden article written about Web 2.0 in the last few years. For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who
emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands
of individual decisions, [Obama's political message] is a persuasive way of seeing the world.
For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source
software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling
theory of how change happens. |
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