garry’s subposthaven

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got "practical" and did something else "first." The idea was that they'd be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the "practical" career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you're doing.

Rev. Fred Harrell at City Church of San Francisco

Just had this happen to me over Thanksgiving and it went something like this...

Grandma: What the heck is a TicketStumbler? Are you still just playing at the computer all day?

Me: Oh, have you been to our site Grandma?

Grandma: No.

Me: Well Grandma, have you ever heard of Expedia, Kayak or Orbitz?

Grandma: No.

Me: What about Bizrate or Pricegrabber?

Grandma: No.

Me: Hmm...well essentially what we do is take sports & concert tickets from all over the internet and put them on one website. So instead of going to multiple websites you can just go to one. You know how you put all your recipe cards in one place? Well we do that, but with tickets.

Grandma: Oh I see. Well, that's nice dear; would you like a beer while you work? Or how about some more candy?

Me: I love you Grandma.

I'd rather offend people than pander to them, and if you write about controversial topics you have to choose one or the other.

An Italian court is to decide whether four senior Google executives should face prison, over the broadcast of a video clip showing a boy with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by his classmates.

The long-running trial, which centres around a three-minute clip showing four schoolboys making fun of the teenager and hitting him over the head at their school in Turin, in 2006, is being seen as a test case for the control of content on the internet.

...

Google removed the clip within 24 hours of being alerted of the upload. Prosecution lawyers argue that the broadcast still amounted to a breach of privacy and was defamatory as the company failed to adequately control content on the site. They say the Google had a "legal obligation to prevent" the video from airing in the first place.

The Google executives standing trial are David Carl Drummond, head of Google Italy's managing board; George De Los Reyes, a board member; Peter Fleitcher, in charge of privacy protection in Europe; and Arvind Desikan, head of videos for Europe.

They each face up to three years in jail and a fine if convicted.

That executives of an Internet firm could be held liable for user-generated content THAT WAS TAKEN DOWN WITHIN 24 HOURS is absurd. That people totally unrelated to the specifics of a very sad and tragic case can be sent to jail for three years is just ridiculous.

Seriously, there should be no case here. To put people behind bars for providing a free online publishing service is like bringing medical malpractice to our industry. Society doesn't need this.