I think this may be the best posting on the Skip Gates arrest case — The Reality-Based Community: Nightmare on Ware Street.
You can read the full police report here.
PS. I know Prof. Henry Louis Gates from way back — we had the same Mellon fellowship in different years — and he was, then at least, universally known as 'Skip'.
Update (7/25): The post at Justice Building Blog looks good too, especially in light of some of the comments below.
OK, here's a question:
I suppose one answer is that people sign up for a Twitter feed….
When I went shopping for a cell phone about a year ago, I knew I wanted four things: I wanted great call quality and a speakerphone; I wanted a clamshell style phone; I wanted a GSM world phone so I could take it anywhere, and swap out the SIM card when needed; I wanted a national family plan that didn't cost too much since even the kids don't chew up the minutes, but we do use them when we are away from home. We were more or less stuck with AT&T as a call provider, as they have the strongest signal indoors in our house; there was only one other company that had a strong signal too, but they were much more expensive.
I ended up with a RAZR Z9. It seemed to fit my needs, being a quad-band clamshell with great sound. It had some other disadvantages, like clunky software and a reputation for a little lack of ruggedness, but I decided I could live with those. AT&T unlocked it for me without any argument.
Indeed, everything has gone fine with this phone until I got off the plane in Manchester. Unlike my old, reliable but sometimes comical, NEC 525, it wouldn't find a signal.
On the old phone I had to reset the networks to Europe; there's no control for that on the Z9, and the manual suggests it should switch automatically.
So I go to the AT&T help pages. Nothing seems of much use. I check out the plan description and see that international roaming isn't selected — aha! Now, why anyone would want a quad-band phone that wasn't set up to work abroad, I can't begin to imagine, but then again, AT&T has gotten into legal trouble for turning int'l roaming on without warning people and then sticking them with their insanely high rates. So I'll just turn it on then. Wait, what's this? There's been a problem with my request, and they can't fulfill it. And I should click the image below for live person assistance? But there is no image below…. Ah. In the very fine print well below it says that if there is no image, I should just call them… but the PHONE ISN“T WORKING.
So I email for help. And I get a reply within minutes:
Thank you for contacting AT&T.
We appreciate your business and know that your time is valuable. An AT&T Online Specialist has been assigned to your case and will respond to your concern within 2 business days; however, our response may be sooner. We will do our best to exceed your expectations.
Now at this point, I'm thinking that isn't going to be hard, since my expectations are pretty low. Good thing I've got a UK SIM card sitting somewhere in my luggage. I only want the US SIM connection to pick up messages anyway.
Between the time when I started this note, and getting to this point in the account, I got a second note from AT&T, this time from a real person. The person tells me I don't have international roaming set up on my account. So I reply asking to have it activated. And they say it's fixed, turn it off, wait a minute, turn it on.
So I do. But it still doesn't work.
And then 10 minutes later, it does.
Jimmy Carer again demonstrates that he's a much better person than he was President: Losing my religion for equality.
This can't have been easy for him.
I'm leaving for the UK today, but I won't be going to any parties — especially not any all-night parties.
I'm aware that US cops can use excessive force in busting up a party — a political fund-raiser at that! — but the difference is that by all accounts the US cops were acting illegally and used excessive force. It appears that the UK cops were just a little enthusiastic about enforcing a pretty draconian law.
Even so, it's instructive to recall that although the civil liberties situation in this country is in many (but not all!) respects at an ebb, things are in fact worse in several other liberal democracies. I'd take French health care, but not French cops or treatment of minorities. I'd take British tolerance for middle-class dissent and eccentricity, but not the intolerance for young people enforced by ASBOS. According to the worn notices tied to lampposts in the part of Manchester I visit there was, and maybe still is, an ASBOS order in effect which pretty much makes it an offense for groups to congregate on the street in the evening. In practice, I imagine that it's a license to arrest young people, at the cops' whims.
The pseudonymous Mordaxus says, Kindle Brouhaha Isn't About DRM:
The issue is caused not by DRM, but by cloud computing. The problem is that Amazon has a cloud service in which Kindle customers can keep their e-books on Amazon's shelf, and shuffle them around to any Kindle-enable device they have (like a Kindle proper, or an iPhone running the Kindle app). Customers can even delete a book from their Kindle and get it back from the cloud at a later date.
The event is that Amazon removed the book from the cloud, not that it had DRM in it. If you are concerned by this, you should be concerned by the cloud service. The cloud service enabled Amazon to respond to a legal challenge by removing customers' data from the cloud. They didn't need DRM to do it. In contrast, if iTunes store or the Sony e-book store had improperly sold a book, they wouldn't be able to revoke it because they don't have a cloud service as part of the store. (eMusic, incidentally, regularly adds and removes music from their store with the waxing and waning of desire to sell it.)
This is why we need to look at it for what it is, a failure in a business model and in the cloud service.
Well, yes, OK. But also no: Without the DRM part, the Kindle users would have been able to copy their e-books to local storage (or to read on other devices) and wouldn't be as vulnerable to this. Plus, Amazon didn't just delete off-site copies, it deleted all local copies (which doesn't logically require DRM, but is likely enabled by it). And Amazon even delted user annotations on the deleted works — including at least one student's homework.
Jotwell Blenderlaw