Ah, the joys of instant news

I thought this headline was peculiar:



 

This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the print world too, though. It still does from time to time, of course. Fortunately, now it can be fixed instantly. When I clicked through, the headline was normal.

The New York Times doesn't allow comments on letters

I find that strange. Why not allow people to respond to other reader's responses to Times articles. Considering that comments are hidden from readers by default when they are allowed, this seems only reasonable and in no way disruptive.

This was prompted by this letter from a Catholic priest criticizing Gail Collins' recent column on Planned Parenthood funding. The letter itself is representative of how people of his perspective view the matter, but his criticism of Collins' is unjust. I actually think that both the column and the letter are right, to a certain degree. Undoubtedly, the first and foremost reason for the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is because the anti-abortion activists view it as morally equivalent to the Third Reich (seriously, Godwin's Law is fulfilled every five minutes, or less, in that world). Giving money to Hitler is naturally unacceptable whatever Hitler wants to do with it.

Second is the dubious claim the writer mentions about how giving Planned Parenthood money for contraceptives, etc., increases subsidy for abortion (which assumes that the federal money will not be replaced with increased donations and that PP or donors would subsidize abortion less rather than let contraception and other things be subsidizes less, which contradicts their own demonization of the organization). Ironically, this contradicts the way the good Monsignor's own Church's organizations get money from the government without violating the establishment clause.Third, though, is the Catholic prohibition on contraception and the Evangelical opposition to anything that makes what they deem to be sexual immorality easier.

That's for the activists. For establishment Republican politicians, they pick fights on things like this to keep pro-lifers on the reservation after more than 30 years of doing uncommonly close to nothing on the issue (including thirty-three years of having seven or more Republican justices on the Supreme Court). Even if they didn't get even the Planned Parenthood funding cut, they can at least use the Democrat's fighting to defend it as a means of renewed demonization of them on this issue.

I just tested out the new New York Times paywall

You can reset your count by clearing out the nytimes.com cookies. Really. You can clear those cookies in 15-20 seconds tops in Firefox. They supposedly spent millions to erect this thing? I'd heard that was the case, but couldn't believe it. Good grief.

Still, I'm not sure how they'd do it otherwise. Keeping track of how many articles you've viewed serverside would probably have to involve going by IP address, and they'd end up getting tons and tons of false positives that way (especially in office buildings and other institutions where they'd be most likely to get paying customers; they aren't going to piss those people off). De facto nagware might be the best they could come up with.

Update: If you set up a cookie exception for nytimes.com that only allows cookies for the current session, then the 20 articles will reset automatically with each restart of your browser. That way, most people will really never see the paywall, unless they change it of course.

Shocker: New York Times tries to shutter @FreeNYT

They're taking the curious tack of claiming Trademark violation. What happens when an identical account is opened, possibly by the same guy, under a handle that doesn't include NYT in it?

WordPress Themes Lacking

WordPress needs a better system for bringing aesthetically high-quality themes to the top. Last night I spent quite some time wading through a huge ocean of stylistic catastrophes finding nothing that I liked.

I guess part of the problem is that WordPress lacks any kind of WYSIWYG theme editing (aside from placing widgets). If you're not proficient with CSS, you're screwed. I guess I'll have to load that CSS book onto my Kindle and brush up.

Update: Okay, there is a theme editor in the works, but it explicitly states that it's not ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, it seems that development is currently stalled with the last updates being last Spring. There is always this really old webapp, but it seems very limited in the sort of themes it can generate.

Some numbers just shouldn't be trumpeted

Point in case, Lulu.com's iBookstore numbers:

As of August 1st:

• Over 1,000 Lulu titles available on the iBookstore


• Over 5,000 Lulu eBooks have been purchased through the iBookstore


• Over $23,000 in Lulu author royalties paid from iBookstore sales

That's over a period of almost four months. They might as well say in that box: You'd make more money selling CDRs with PDFs of your book on the street corner, or publishing your book on Blogger with adsense.

My point is merely about the rather mystifying decision to publicize those pathetic numbers. Why the numbers are so low is another question entirely. Part of it is no doubt that Lulu.com is essentially a self-publishing platform and therefore is mainly, if not entirely, niche and amateur content. But another big factor is that the Apple iBookstore isn't selling much of anything to anyone. Moneyquote:

In August, author Joe Konrath revealed he was selling 200 books a day for the Kindle and only 100 per month on the iBookstore. This has now accumulated to 70,000 Amazon sales and just 400 sales via the iBookstore. [ed. note: emphasis added]