littletables's comments

littletables | 12 years ago | on: The CEO of Panera Bread attempts to live off food stamps for a week

Yes he should do this for a month, and he should try it as a woman. You can't buy tampons with food stamps.

I tried to survive with food stamps for a while when I lived on the streets as a teen. It was impractical for actually supplementing my survival. When you have nowhere to live, you have nowhere to cook.

littletables | 12 years ago | on: Tumblr responds to complaints about censorship

The complaints are not about censorship, they are about being de-indexed. "Adult" blogs are a separate category of NSFW, so this response doesn't address the issue - which is specifically regarding "adult" blogs.

In addition to disabling search for adult blogs, Tumblr has enabled robots.txt (Disallow: /) for all "adult" blogs so they're not findable from the outside any more either. On top of all this, Tumblr removed its Erotica category, which was formerly released in January 2010 with much pride on their part.

This all changed sometime early this year, and began to be noticed by sex bloggers both on and off of Tumblr in mid-May.

littletables | 12 years ago | on: Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire

IMO, this is a confusing puff piece with gaps you could drive a truck through. Typically for a serious profile, people from key timeframe points in a subject's life are interviewed as well, to prevent the story from being biased in favor of the subject's POV and to round out events for the historical record. This was not done here.

Also, points in this article are flatly incorrect. In one section the author states that Wales has said "mum" (nothing) about Edward Snowden, when the opposite is true (and in current headlines - Techmeme cluster here: http://www.techmeme.com/130625/p49#a130625p49). Wales' interest in finding Snowden's identity as a Wikipedia editor - against Wikipedia rules - can be plainly seen on Wales' talk page dated June 25, two days before this NYT article (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wa...).

This NYT article is very confusing. How much else in it is inaccurate? Was it a PR stunt?

littletables | 13 years ago | on: The Street Kids of San Francisco

I became homeless at the cusp of 14, escaping from sleeping with mice on a bare mattress from a Sunset District garage - where my crack-addicted mother (she, a Stanford engineering graduate) put me. I lived on the streets of San Francisco, almost exclusively the Haight until I was 17 1/2. The horrors of my story paled in comparison to the kids I crewed up with in Upper/Lower Haight, and there were a lot of us.

There still are. For many years I have done active outreach work to the homeless youth there as well as risk reduction community mediation meetings between homeless kids, their outreach service workers, and local residents (some of these meetings have taken place at The Booksmith).

I am currently very successful in the tech arena, despite never having returned to school after having to find a place to live and food to eat when I was halfway through ninth grade; I never graduated and have no formal education. I am a very lucky exception.

Why do I tell you this? So you can begin to understand why I have to tell you that if this article is claiming to be about life for, or about, homeless youth in the Haight, the article is so inaccurate it ought to be considered harmful.

This article is the biggest lie and mischaracterization of homeless youth in the Haight I have ever read. I'm too astonished at the moment to be outraged.

littletables | 13 years ago | on: Blogging and Blackmail

Lawrence Dignan, Editorial Director of CBS Interactive and Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Smart Planet has weighed in. It might be worth a read for anyone interested in discussion on the matter.

A word about Dennis Howlett - http://www.zdnet.com/a-word-about-dennis-howlett-7000005135/

Disclosure:

I am a freelance reporter and blogger for ZDNet, as well as CBS Interactive property c|net.

I don't know Howlett and have not observed his behavior or practices and I have no opinion on this. I simply saw that there was a significant response.

littletables | 13 years ago | on: That was quick: Grooveshark disappears from the Google Play Store (again)

Grooveshark is an eloquent discovery tool. Music discovery is always a challenge for music lovers.

Example just now made me want to comment here - very simple.

Friend posted a YouTube video with a song on Facebook. I went to Grooveshark and listened to the song, and others by the artists - not song samples, but the whole songs, which I made a little playlist with. Hooked on the band discovery, I just went and bought two albums.

littletables | 14 years ago | on: Back That Gmail Up

> I am baffled at how people continue using such a service for something as important as e-mail in 2012, while still being fully aware that their access can be completely cut off at random with no reason or recourse.

I am consistently baffled that people with higher than average technical skills assume that everyone is at their level.

Many people worry about Gmail/Google cutting them off with no/ or little recourse. The mistake in your assumption that I'm pointing out as an example is that most people don't know how to run their own mail.

So, no: I don't think everyone is assuming it won't happen to them. They just don't know what to do, and that's no reason to cast Gmail users as afflicted with the 'psychological law of self exception' (or willfully ignorant).

littletables | 14 years ago | on: We Are The Porn Generation

I cannot vote you down in my head hard enough simply because you have completely discounted the entire sexual experience of many women by relegating female sexuality to the emotive realm.

Women use and enjoy porn the same as men do - visual to physiological and to release. Period.

Porn is beneficial to women in many ways as consumers. Until people wake up to this, revenue streams and culture (of consent and equality, experience and discourse) alike will be hobbled.

Your heart is in the right place. But you're missing the rest of reality, as is this entire HN discussion.

littletables | 14 years ago | on: SOPA is back

I respectfully disagree.

This is a surveillance bill packed with purposefully vague language, and I attended a Town Hall with House Intelligence supporters of the bill that defended the need for its vague language - while telling the room of engineers, founders, journalists and security professionals that it would help defend the US against China and that we need the bill to protect us from hackers that do infringement. They actually said this.

The room was flummoxed. But besides that fact that the people that created and support the bill can't explain the difference between an ISP and a server, I'd like to encourage you to look at what this bill does: allows Homeland Security to obtain all the data on an individual and intercept - and alter or stop - communications of anyone they suspect of "disrupting" a network. And no, there is no concrete definition of network. In addition, it looks tailor-made to go after individuals that publish security bugs or exploits as a means to get these issues addressed.

The bill is also designed to protect companies that play ball with Homeland Security, effectively undoing decades of privacy laws. There is nothing to protect individuals, consumers, or users.

This is a serious problem. There are dozens of alarming articles from respected media sources, plentiful online campaigns to stop CISPA, activism by the EFF and Center for Democracy and Technology, attacks on pro-CISPA companies by Anonymous, protests by the ACLU and Free Press - and 3/4 of a million people have signed a petition to stop it.

Techdirt is a good resource to get up to speed: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=cispa

littletables | 14 years ago | on: On Anonymity

I'm just wondering how someone can have an online experience such that when they come across a website that allows anon comments, they are so taken aback that they write an entire blog post.

Not that I don't agree with her sentiment. I do. I guess it's even more refreshing to hear her POV when her experience of the internet seems naïve.

It's too bad we don't hear why she's decided to keep Disqus after coming to her conclusions.

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