Web/Tech

"Things that just had to happen sooner or later" department. In Rhode island, a bill of rights for the homeless:

LOL, OMG, WTF -- or, in pre-digital terms, amazed, stunned, stupefied. Those are my reactions to really big numbers.  When I was in Michigan City, we had a computer that was in two big cases against the wall -- 40 megabytes of storage, and they ran the whole newspaper operation. I think my first home computer had something like 60 or 80 mb.

Interesting ethical dilemma in the social media age:

Should students and teachers ever be friends on Facebook? School districts across the country, including the nation's largest, are weighing that question as they seek to balance the risks of inappropriate contact with the academic benefits of social networking.

Young people not eager to get their licenses and start driving? It's practically un-American:

Young Americans are eschewing cars for alternative transport, leaving carmakers to wonder if this is a recession-induced trend or a permanent shift in habits.

The Pulitzer was already beginning to seem a liitle enervated and effete to me, with the likes of Tom Friedman and Eugene Robinson winning for columns. Now this awful, awful, AWFUL cartoon has won. And check out more of his work here -- all just as terrible. They're unfunny, poorly drawn label cartoons that would have seemed trite even in the 1930s. What the hell were they thinking?

Was this an overreaction -- would a suspension have been more a more just punishment than an expulsion?

An Indiana high school senior has been expelled for a Tweet he says was posted from home on his personal account.

For the first time in its 71-year history, the Chicago Sun-Times says it will not make endorsements in the upcoming elections.

In an editorial published Monday, the Sun-Times essentially said as a newspaper endorsements are passé at a time when there are so many other sources of information that “allow even a casual voter to be better informed than ever before.”

Digital-age common sense from the New York Times op-ed page:

Have you been getting feweer Christmas cards each year? It's a trend I've certainly noticed:

A quick introduction to the Stop Online Piracy Act: