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The Mighty Gewg has noted I am someone with an aberrant sense of right and wrong. Thanks for the complement, good sir. It is better to be the devil's advocate than a groupthinker.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.

When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.

And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"

So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.

My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.

Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).

Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".

* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.

Squished an annoying bug in rehash that prevented formkeys working due to changes in how mod_perl works, I dunno worse, the abuse of the MP1 API, or the hack I had to code to emulate the old behavior; here's the comment I left about it:

                # UNBELIEVE HACKINESS AHEAD
                #
                # Ok, under MP1, it was possible to use param as a "semi-persistant" scratchpad
                # that is, to save a new element in the hashref, and get it back by future calls
                #
                # This worked because the older APR methods allowed you to store into the HASREF.
                # even though this behavior was wrong, and bad according to MP documentation. MP2
                # now removed the STORE method from the APR tables so any attempt to write to them
                # goes BANG.
                #
                # Since we can't do that now, we're going to have to fake it. On our first call to
                # getCurrentForm, we'll copy the param tables to a hashref, then shove it into the
                # apache2 pnotes, and then retrieve it on demand.
                #
                # This is a fucking hack, but I can't think of a better way than to refactor a TON of
                # perl, and perl is not a language that makes it easy to refactor ...

Here's another rejected submission, which in retrospect shows the submitter's bias a bit, and isn't really tech-related enough for the site. There are probably better examples of the impact of social media, although I don't think any are quite as sustained as these folks. It is interesting that the advocate for the child has only been recently appointed.

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

In one of the stranger stories that shows the effects of social media, a judge issued an arrest order Tuesday for a Florida woman, Heather Hironimus, who fled with her son to prevent his childhood circumcision. The unmarried parents of the boy, now 4, had previously signed a court-approved "parenting plan" that included the boy's circumcision. Potential surgeons have backed out after the mother's refuses consent or becoming the target of anti-circumcision protesters who side with her. [charlotteobserver.com]

An army of special interest groups opposed to circumcision has rallied behind the mom. With websites and local demonstrations, these so-called "intactivists" have closely followed the parents' yearlong battle over the boy, named Chase. [sun-sentinel.com] Neither the boy's mother nor father, Dennis Nebus, are Jewish. He has said he believes circumcision is "just the normal thing to do."

The intactivists have a website [chasesguardians.org] and a Facebook page [facebook.com] dedicated to their cause which allows them to coordinate messaging to doctors considering taking part. As one writer experienced, an intactivist followed her in the supermarket to question her opinions about the topic. [time.com]

The Centers for Disease Control recently came out in favor of circumcision [drugs.com] despite efforts by the Internet activists.

The attorney for the mother said he filed a motion to have a court-appointed guardian ad litem for the boy [local10.com] and is seeking to have a mental health professional evaluate the boy's "emotional state" to determine if circumcision is "something that would be advisable." He said the goal is to make sure the child "has an independent voice" and isn't caught up in his parents' squabble." "It's the boy who's really going to have to live the rest of his life with the decision."

Here's a recent rejected submission that I thought this was weekend-worthy, although in retrospect it's not particularly well written. It's a good sign it got rejected, since it means the editors are getting enough stuff to work with. :)

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

DNAinfo is reporting the elementary (typically ages 5-11) Public School 116 in the Manhattan neighborhood of Kips Bay is "abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead." [dnainfo.com] Jane Hsu, the school's principal, sent a letter to parents that states:

"The topic of homework has received a lot of attention lately, and the negative effects of homework have been well established."

"They include: children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities and family time and, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning."

"In fact, you may be surprised to learn that there have been a variety of studies conducted on the effects of homework in the elementary grades and not one of them could provide any evidence that directly links traditional homework practices with current, or even future, academic success."

Instead of traditional homework such as math problems, they are giving the students menus of ideas that such as visiting a park with a friend, playing chess with a parent, conversations with relatives, unstructured reading, writing a poem about snow, or measuring the perimeter of a household object. The activities have a time requirement of only 20 minutes, and do not require a successful completion, only an attempt.

As one may guess, the concept was not universally embraced. [dnainfo.com] Joe Fiordaliso, president of Community Education Council for District 3 said:

"Here's an analogy: my kids are taking piano lessons," Fiordaliso said. "If they don't practice in between lessons, how are they going to advance beyond Yankee Doodle and ever think about playing something by Chopin?"

Some parents have started spending time fill out their child's education by creating their own assignments. Another parent notes:

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

Perhaps getting the parents more involved was part of the idea all along. A further statement from the principal said:

"We are creating opportunities for students and their families to engage in activities that research has proven to benefit academic and social-emotional success in the elementary grades. We look forward to seeing the positive impact our newly-designed homework options will have on our students and their families."

No word if "Hello World" was part of the assignment menus.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/

This morning (3/18/15) we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page [Abu Ghraib photos] has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?"

Currently deep in working on getting the first rehash (MP2 slashcode) release put together. lithium got rebuilt and is now on the MP2 release. Since this upgrade is disruptive anyone, we decided to go full-in and put in a migration to MySQL cluster as well; which will require some code changes for Search, but otherwise was mostly a drop in upgrade.

I have a friend named Jamie. She's in her 40s, and she might go to prison for four years on the 23rd of this month.
She had a DUI from 2012, which she was guilty of, and one from 2014, which she was not. Because of her prior conviction, she's getting a much harder time by the courts. She's been offered the choice of signing for four years of prison, or taking it to trial and possibly getting 10 years if found guilty. She's a mother with two sweet, young little girls. She won't get to see them for four years. They're going to end up with her mother in Idaho.

She let a friend drive her truck, who was sober, but because she was next to the truck drinking shortly after it parked, she was hit with another DUI when the cops pulled up over a domestic disturbance, which is common here. Her friend already told that she was not the one behind the wheel, but it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Here's where it bothers me. She is innocent, and she's being given the choice of admitting to a crime she didn't commit and getting four years, or fighting it, possibly losing, and getting ten years.

This is disgusting to me.

I'm writing this, I suppose, to ask for advice. How can I help her?

Time is of the essence.

There was a provocative SoylentNews' Michael Brown Shooting Discussions: Six Months Later story that showed up earlier today.

I've been reading through the comments, and I've noticed that a lot of perfectly fine comments have been incorrectly modded down.

For the good of the community and for freedom of expression, the comments linked to below should be modded up:

• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154929 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154988 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155015 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154907 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155043 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154871 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154900 [soylentnews.org]

We really need to find a way to better avoid abusive mis-moderation like that. Even with the recent changes, we still have people severely abusing the "Troll" mod, as evident from how those comments were incorrectly moderated.

There needs to be some way to prevent such mis-moderation from happening in the first place. When that fails, there needs to be some way of correcting them faster, as well as punishing those who engaged in such abuse.