Kim Komando is an idiot
Jan. 26th, 2008 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOn the way out to the grocery store this afternoon, I stumbled across the Kim Komando show on our local Rush Limbaugh affiliate, KTTH 770, "The Truth!" You can get a feel for KTTH by its lineup: along with Limbaugh, they have Glen Beck, Michael Medved, Michael Savage, and Bill O'Reilly. Not exactly your intellectual powerhouse.
Komando's show ("America's Digital Goddess") is all about technology for the masses. It's a call-in show where people ask "What kind ofdrugs should I take[?] digital camera should I buy?"
Anyway, a caller was on her show and asked a very sensible question: "If I use an on-line distribution service for my photographs, what kind of copyright control to I keep over the pictures?"
Komando said that if you uploaded to Flickr your photos would be "under one of these Creative Commons licenses" and you would lose control over the copyright of your pictures. She sited as an example a young woman whose face wound up on Verizon Wireless billboards because her friend had uploaded a photograph of her to Flickr and had used the Creative Commons license.
Komando is simply wrong about that. There are many different licensing agreements available to Flickr users. My photographs are licensed under the Creative Commons with (a) attributions required, (b) non-commercial use, (c), no derivative works, and (d) persistent licensing. I retain copyright of those photographs. If you want to use them for commercial purposes, come to me and we'll hammer out a fair trade; if you expect to profit from using my photograph, I expect to profit from letting you use it. That's it. That's the whole deal.
Komando left the poor caller with the impression that if she used Flickr, she would lose all control over her pictures, because Flickr encourages the use of CC licensing. I won't argue that there hasn't been special controversy in the photographic community over CC licensing, especially when you do something stupid like forget to mark the photo non-commercial, or fail to enforce the persistent licensing requirement. But Komando's comment is a nasty and ill-informed disservice to her listeners, to Flickr, and most especially the Creative Commons.
(She's an idiot for another reason: her buying guide rarely mentions Macs and never Ubuntu. Her reasoning seems to be that Windows boxes are cheaper, therefore your work or school will use Windows, therefore you want Windows too. The whole world uses Office, which is written by Microsoft. It will therefore run best on an operating system also written by Microsoft. Therefore, you want Windows too. She's like these people, only with a bigger audience who take her seriously.)
Komando's show ("America's Digital Goddess") is all about technology for the masses. It's a call-in show where people ask "What kind of
Anyway, a caller was on her show and asked a very sensible question: "If I use an on-line distribution service for my photographs, what kind of copyright control to I keep over the pictures?"
Komando said that if you uploaded to Flickr your photos would be "under one of these Creative Commons licenses" and you would lose control over the copyright of your pictures. She sited as an example a young woman whose face wound up on Verizon Wireless billboards because her friend had uploaded a photograph of her to Flickr and had used the Creative Commons license.
Komando is simply wrong about that. There are many different licensing agreements available to Flickr users. My photographs are licensed under the Creative Commons with (a) attributions required, (b) non-commercial use, (c), no derivative works, and (d) persistent licensing. I retain copyright of those photographs. If you want to use them for commercial purposes, come to me and we'll hammer out a fair trade; if you expect to profit from using my photograph, I expect to profit from letting you use it. That's it. That's the whole deal.
Komando left the poor caller with the impression that if she used Flickr, she would lose all control over her pictures, because Flickr encourages the use of CC licensing. I won't argue that there hasn't been special controversy in the photographic community over CC licensing, especially when you do something stupid like forget to mark the photo non-commercial, or fail to enforce the persistent licensing requirement. But Komando's comment is a nasty and ill-informed disservice to her listeners, to Flickr, and most especially the Creative Commons.
(She's an idiot for another reason: her buying guide rarely mentions Macs and never Ubuntu. Her reasoning seems to be that Windows boxes are cheaper, therefore your work or school will use Windows, therefore you want Windows too. The whole world uses Office, which is written by Microsoft. It will therefore run best on an operating system also written by Microsoft. Therefore, you want Windows too. She's like these people, only with a bigger audience who take her seriously.)
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Date: 2008-01-27 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-27 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-27 08:36 am (UTC)Why have you no interests list? Just asking...
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Date: 2008-01-27 08:55 am (UTC)Not only that...
Date: 2008-01-27 02:19 am (UTC)Having just spent the last day and a half in a conference on **this very subject** (for extensive information go to www.asmp.org -- The American Society of Media Photographers) or the US Copyright Office.
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Date: 2008-01-27 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-27 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-27 06:30 am (UTC)("The Truth" = "Pravda").
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Date: 2008-01-27 03:54 pm (UTC)Can you please tell me why this reasoning is so flawed? If one wanted to, with minimal prior knowledge or ability, purchase a computer and have it "just work" (in as much as MSoft products ever work), why would one even consider something other than a windows box for all the reasons you just mentioned (ie: it's what I'll be using at work/school, it's native for the programs that I really need to be running, and therefore enough of the people I know who use computers use this system that I'll be able to find someone to help when it inevitably breaks for some inexplicable reason)?
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Date: 2008-01-27 05:10 pm (UTC)I'm inxlined to think that you'll do more good for your kids by installing OpenOffice, which is free. Ir's not difficult to install, and being able to cope with difference is important.
Five years from now, MS Office will be different. And maybe then Elf will see a need for his kids to know how to use it. But they'll learn more from a change like that than from struggling with what MS does.
And at the moment BECTA, who set the IT standards for British schools, are in a solidly unethusiastic wait-and-see mode on new MS software. O'd want to check which version of Office they recommend, but the core of any advice on this is to find out what the school is doing.
And if data is going to pass back and forth between school and home PC, there's a strong argument for using a different OS, which doesn't use the same web browser, and doesn't succumb to the same computer viruses.
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Date: 2008-01-27 05:38 pm (UTC)My mother is looking to buy a computer. We're sending her a Mac. Because Macs have a far better reputation as "easy to use machines that don't get infections from the outside." They're far less vulnerable to viri, trojans, and the like, they're extremely easy to use, and they really are just about at the level of an appliance for reliability and usability. You open it when you need it; you close it when you don't. I would tell just about anyone over the age of 25 who needed a new computer to buy a Mac.
Anyone under 25 I would recommend they buy a used laptop from a reputable dealer and install Ubuntu. It's just as reliable as Windows XP, is also far less vulnerable to viri and such, is meant as a consumer desktop, and for less than $10 you get a complete office suite (MS Office costs what?), a complete desktop publishing suite (Framemaker is pricey), a complete graphics editing toolkit (Photoshop, $$), and so on.
Miss Komando's advice is outdated and wrong; in a world full of good food, she's recommending Kraft Mac & Cheese to masses who don't know any better.