University of California, Berkeley, To Delete Publicly Available Educational Content (insidehighered.com) 337
In response to a U.S. Justice Department order that requires colleges and universities make website content accessible for citizens with disabilities and impairments, the University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts. Officials said making the videos and audio more accessible would have proven too costly in comparison to removing them. Inside Higher Ed reports: Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university's webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them. The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to listeners or viewers with disabilities. The Justice Department, following an investigation in August, determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley's free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues. Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the announcement in a March 1 statement: "This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from 'pirates' who have reused content for personal profit without consent."
The New Normal (Score:5, Insightful)
When it's mandated that everyone must be a winner, everybody loses.
Re:The New Normal (Score:5, Informative)
Did you literally not even read the first sentence of the damned summary? UC Berkeley is removing the content because the federal government requires any content they provide to be handicap accessible. Since it'd cost a prohibitive amount to make this content accessible, instead of keeping it up (which benefits 99% of the world) they're removing it because that 1% (or less) might have trouble accessing it. In other words, instead of content that was available to 99% of people, now it's available to 0% of people. In other words, instead of nearly everyone winning, and no one actually losing, everyone loses.
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Easy to say
Self evident things are often like that.
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Sticking up for the OP:
losers was referring to the property of whether they received the beneficial outcome, not a reflection of the population themselves eg in a tax break for the poor the losers are the rich (not being derisive to the rich).
Now to the argument:
You have a false equivalence. The better comparison is would it be worth striving for equality if the choice were between disabled parking spaces or every last parking space being taken away
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Well that's why democracy is garbage, the crap like this is what also ends up destroying business and various services, including what is covered in this story. Running a business and deciding who to sell to should be covered by the individual right to association as well as private property rights.
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T'weren't democracy - t'was bureaucracy which has no unique master.
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They won the lottery and are living on easy street for the rest of their lives.
While I don't necessarily agree that the videos should be taken down because they don't have captions, or whatever, this is a pretty astonishingly reprehensible statement. Why don't you blind yourself, if it's such an 'easy street'?
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Yes ... being deprived of two out of five senses, specifically the two used the most in detecting the world around you is definitely the same as winning the lottery.
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Hold on a sec. Maybe eventually they'll find volunteers or resources to assist in the conversion. In the shorter term they don't want to be sued so they are taking it down.
Our org is facing a similar issue. We publish older statistics for the public, but due to ADA-related issues, we are planning on pulling it off our site, instead adding a contact number for those wan
Free stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Free stuff should be exempt. Putting a cost (for the provider) to a free thing (for the public) will usually make that thing not free (for the public) anymore.
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If I sell a book am I required to sell an audio version?
If I sell a song am I required to transcribe it?
This is clearly shit.
Re:Free stuff (Score:5, Informative)
If I sell a book am I required to sell an audio version?
No, but you are required to license U.S. copyright in the book to the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.
If I sell a song am I required to transcribe it?
Songwriters and music publishers see sheet music as both an additional revenue source and as a way to more clearly establish copyright ownership.
17 USC 121 (Score:5, Informative)
The relevant statute is Title 17, United States Code, Section 121: Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities [copyright.gov]. It begins as follows:
Sanity in this sheep blood and gum on my hands (Score:2)
figure out all those Tool lyrics
Why are your hands covered in sheep blood and gum [pineight.com]?
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Free stuff should be exempt. Putting a cost (for the provider) to a free thing (for the public) will usually make that thing not free (for the public) anymore.
For the most part it's just an overhead to the budget. Like you use $X to design a web page for ordinary people, then +Y% for people with screen readers. If you're doing an infomercial for $X then subtitles for the deaf is +Y%. It's just a cost of being universally available that society wants us to take and it's usually not that high. It gets unreasonable is when you take something that's a byproduct of what you're already doing like holding lectures and you could offer them to the public almost for free b
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Is anyone working on preserving copies of this?
Re:Free stuff (Score:5, Informative)
There's a few torrents floating around the datahoarder subreddit
This guy is sending the entire archive to archive.org [reddit.com]
This guy has the whole archive and is seeding it a part at a time [reddit.com]
Barriers (Score:2)
Is closed captioning the only thing causing this decision? Youtube will automatically close-caption uploaded content, simultaneously eliminating any hosting costs.
The letter from the Department of Justice goes into ten pages detail on this; take a look at it: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-c... [berkeley.edu]
The statement with respect to youtube captioning was:
"Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."
However, in response to your question, no, close captioning was one barrier mentioned, b
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In which case, I assume any student can go to the appropriate university services department and get the video transcribed accordingly, like any other educational material.
The difference would be that it's an on-demand transcription, which would presumably cost a lot less than mandated transcription of all the videos regardless of demand, just because they're public.
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In that case, what they should do is re-upload anything that the on-demand transcription service has in fact transcribed.
if only it was unintended consequences (Score:3)
Textbook Companies Fight Back (Score:2)
I must be a pirate! (Score:5, Interesting)
allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from 'pirates' who have reused content for personal profit without consent."
Every time I learned something in school, it profited me, at least in the sense that I knew more than before. The whole idea of education is that people benefit from it. If you make something available to world+dog, do they need to get your permission to actually personally profit from it in some fashion? Of course not.
The way print media such as books get around the obligation to provide access for handicapped people is that copyright allows for 3rd parties that specialize in services to the blind, etc., to make copies of non-dramatic works (written, audio, etc) without having to seek the permission of the copyright owner [loc.gov]. Seems to me all the uni should have to do is appeal, and point out that there is already a legal remedy that exempts publishers of copyright non-dramatic media from having to comply with the act, given that the law shifts that right and responsibility to authorized 3rd parties.
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This is ridiculous... (Score:3)
DOJ: "Your free online course materials are not accessible to blind people. Make them accessible."
UCBerkeley: "Uhhh... how about we just make them inaccessible to everybody?"
DOJ: "That's fine."
In what world does this logic compute? DOJ absolutely does not care about accessibility... just look at the result of this travesty of an order.
This is 100% about reducing public access to information. No other interpretation even makes sense. DOJ and the rest of Washington should be ashamed of themselves for the serious and ongoing damage they inflict upon our society.
Re:This is ridiculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with the DOJ caring about anything. The only thing that's important is the letter of the law. The law says publicly-available material must be handicap-accessible. This material is not. Therefore, the university has to fix this situation, to get into compliance with the law. They could spend a bunch of money and transcribe it all, but that's expensive. So they chose the cheaper option: remove it all from public availability. So, if there's no material that's publicly-available, then they're not running afoul of the law that says all publicly-available material must be accessible, and they're OK.
What the DOJ cares about is irrelevant. Even if the DOJ doesn't like this, it's too bad: the law is the law. The law doesn't say "publicly-available material must be handicap-accessible, and if someone complains, you have to make it more accessible, rather than just removing it".
The DOJ isn't really to blame here; they're just enforcing the law as written. If you don't like it, then you need to get Congress to amend the law and pass a better one. There's two parties at fault here: 1) Congress, for writing a crappy law (it should have exempted stuff that's freely available, as in beer: no one's under obligation to provide stuff for free, and beggars can't be choosers), and 2) the self-serving moron who complained about this and made it into a big legal issue.
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What you say is perhaps the way it should be, but not precisely true either. The reality is that the DOJ has an absolutely incredible degree of leeway and discretion in terms of its enforcement agenda and priorities.
This is nothing nefarious, just the inevitable outcome of the confluence of the following factors:
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The spirit of the law thing only becomes relevant if you have a case that goes to trial; that's really something for a judge to decide. This isn't a court case, this is the DOJ enforcing the law as it's written and asking the university to comply with the law. The university is doing just that. They could refuse and turn it into a court case, but that costs a lot of money, which will all be taxpayer money (on both sides, CA state taxpayer money on the university's side and federal taxpayer money on the D
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In what world does this logic compute? DOJ absolutely does not care about accessibility...
No indeed, the DOJ cares about the law. The law says that non accessible stuff is illegal. The law doesn't say stuff has to exist. It's a perfectly logical interpretation of the law: either making it accessible or removing it moves them into compliance (that is not having anything non accessible).
The law is, as is very often the case, an ass.
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Good on Paper (Score:3)
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They "have to" pull it all if they don't have money to spend.
Kurt Vonnegut (Score:5, Insightful)
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
There's something frustrating and sad about this article but I'm afraid I can't remember what it is. Felt like a doozy though.
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The thing that always bothered me about that story is that I've known people who could not hit a moving human sized target even with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun, so how did she do it? It seemed obvious to me as a high school student reading this that the Handicapper General was not handicapped as much as some people. All handicapped are equal, but some handicapped are more equal than others.
The DOJ findings are absurd (Score:5, Informative)
The DOJ findings are ridiculous. I've been reading through that PDF and it seems totally unreasonable. Here are a few samples.
"Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet University and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, “Journalism for Social Change,” but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures."
What right does she have to reuse someone else's copyrighted materials? Just because the lectures are distributed online free of charge does not mean that you have a right to take content from them for derivative works and derive revenue from them.
"Approximately half the videos did not provide audio description or any other alternative format for the visual information (graphs, charts, animations, or items on the chalkboard) contained in the videos. For example, in one video lecture, a professor pointed to and talked about an image and its structure without describing the image, making it inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities."
Because details aren't provided here, I can only assume this was a recording of a lecture given in person to students. If so, the primary purpose of that lecture is to accommodate the students who are in the room, taking the class at that time. If there are students with vision disabilities in that class, the instructor would reasonably be expected to accommodate those students. However, most instructors don't design content to be accessible unless there's a specific need for it at that time. It is typically the responsibility of students to notify the instructor of disabilities, so the instructor can provide appropriate accommodations. I don't see why there should be an issue with posting a recorded copy of that lecture online. I suspect that part of the reason for removing the content from being publicly available is so they can limit access and follow the typical procedure where students with disabilities notify the instructor for the need of accommodations.
"Finally, UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens. As indicated below, the Department would prefer to resolve this matter cooperatively."
This seems remarkable given the volume of content. That the content is now being removed suggests this finding is completely false. That's particularly odd, considering this text, also in the report: "In December 2015, UC Berkeley reported that its YouTube channel had about 9,600 hours of course video and 4,200 hours of events and other video content on its YouTube channel. Its iTunes U platform had 10,400 hours of course video, 800 hours of events video, 18,000 hours of course audio, and 225 hours of events audio. About 75 percent of the same video content on YouTube is also available on iTunes U. In May 2015, UC Berkeley informed the Department that for “budget reasons,” beginning in the Fall 2015, UC Berkeley would limit access to new online content on YouTube and iTunes U to enrolled UC Berkeley students taking specific courses."
"To remedy the violations discussed above, UC Berkeley must at least take the following steps: [...] 6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Huh? There are actual damages because free content was deemed to be insufficiently accessible? This is bizarre.
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Huh? There are actual damages because free content was deemed to be insufficiently accessible? This is bizarre.
Welcome to $CURRENT_YEAR. So progressive!
So? Why doesn't UC put it to Public Domain? (Score:2, Insightful)
No longer UC's property, no longer UC's problem. And still available to whoever may wish to view it.
You actually can't do this. (Score:3)
No longer UC's property, no longer UC's problem. And still available to whoever may wish to view it.
You actually can't do this.
Trying to put something in the public domain to get out from under legal liability is the reason things like the MIT and BSD license exist: in order to attach a hold harmless clause, you have to assert Copyright, such that the only terms on which the content may be legally used is via agreement to the terms of the license.
It's unfortunate that there is not a blanket hold harmless exception for works placed in the public domain, but there's none. It's very difficult to make someth
Absolutely idiotic (Score:2)
If at all, this should only affect new content.
There's no way this should apply to stuff that's already there.
Unintended consequences (Score:3, Informative)
A perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Millions will lose access to valuable content, and it's unlikely that any of the people who couldn't access the content would agree that this is the right thing to do. If you're hearing impaired do you really want to screw over millions of people who aren't just because you can't access something? I doubt it.
Skip building a single F-35 and you could could pay a team of 1000 people to do whatever it takes to make the content accessible to people with disabilities, but noooooooooo, we gotta have that fucking airplane.
The government should pay for to make it accessible (or at least help) since they were the ones that decreed it had to be accessible. But again, noooooooo, we gotta build that fucking wall or give tax breaks to millionaires or train 10,000 extra ICE agents to round up families and deport them (at our expense, of course).
Our priorities are fucking stupid.
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If you're hearing impaired do you really want to screw over millions of people who aren't just because you can't access something? I doubt it.
I've encountered people with exactly this attitude. "If you don't make it in a form I can consume, then you can't make it at all." It doesn't matter if it's free, and transcription would cost the creator money. It doesn't matter if it's music without lyrics, they want it fully described. (Frank Zappa famously said "talking about music is like dancing about architecture".) It led to a rather bitter exchange on Quora which eventually led to me picking up "content warnings" for stuff that had been there for mo
Easy way to fix this (Score:2)
b. We don't want people with disabilities excluded from society.
c. We properly fund public education so that the material can be made accessible to them.
Seriously. In all the talk about how awful it is this content will get pulled nobody once noticed the reason: The law was written with the assumption that we properly fund education in a country where we've been cutting that funding for 40 years. Hell, the right have a name for this: Starve the Beast. But ya
Re:Easy way to fix this (Score:4, Informative)
The term for this is (Score:4, Insightful)
Crab mentality [wikipedia.org]- "If I can't have it, neither can you."
Pure Harrison Bergeron (Score:3)
From "Harrison Bergeron", by Kurt Vonnegut:
"In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.
Hazel and George watch ballet on television. They comment on the dancers, who are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio, which piques Hazel's curiosity and imagination regarding handicaps. Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron [wikipedia.org]
Problem is NOT the ADA (Score:4, Insightful)
All of that said, it's even more retarded bullshit that a university is going to pull the content when a cheap scalable solution exists: automated closed captioning and OCR of projector / blackboard material, which can then produce output for braille. There is a solution and it is cheap, why is this even a discussion? Will the output be buggy, sure, but in the intervening time before grad students can be enslaved to tweak transcriptions, it's workable.
On the other side of things, the universities know their legal requirements, and they already know from experiments like The Feynman Lectures on Physics to know that transcription is a huge chore. Easy fix: put the prof's notes online with the lecture.
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It's ridiculous the people trying to pawn the problem off on the ADA, politics, politicians, or the deaf people complaining.
What's ridiculous is assigning the blame to anybody else. It's an enormous expense to benefit the few, or in many cases, zero when no person with disabilities even uses the resource.
What would have been sane would be for the deaf person to ask her school to pay for a transcription, and then make that transcription available back to Berkeley. But nooo, the politicians just legislate everybody has to go through upfront expenses and effort, because it's not them doing the work. So now something that was useful
I'm reminded of Trees by Rush (Score:2)
And demanded equal rights
‘The Oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light
Now there’s no more Oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw
Automated transcription? (Score:2)
Aren't voice APIs good enough nowadays to automate transcriptions?
Re:ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
Make no mistake: this isn't "deafies" ruining a good thing, it's the government.
A government gone berserk with the only power it has: to make laws.
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This is not because of the government, this is due to a complaint:
"The Department opened its investigation of UC Berkeley based on a complaint"
Re:ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not because of the government, this is due to a complaint:
"The Department opened its investigation of UC Berkeley based on a complaint"
This is not because of a complaint, it's because of the government's response, which should have consisted of a bureaucratically-worded version of "...and?...so what, it's free?" instead of the present myopic, pigeon-holing, thinking-strictly-within-the-box, easily-predictable, and all-too-typical bureaucratic mess of unintended consequences whenever big government gets involved.
Strat
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What you're advocating is that the government ignore the law and do what is effectively legislating from the bench. Everyone wants what when the laws are stupid, no one wants it when the laws are clearly sound. The trouble is few people agree precisely on which is which.
It's still astonishingly stupid though.
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What you're advocating is that the government ignore the law and do what is effectively legislating from the bench.
No.
I'm saying the government should not be making so many laws covering so many things, so that similarly-stupid scenarios/occurrences are not so common. That government that governs least, governs best, and government that is closest to those people whose laws they affect, governs most equitably.
Strat
Normally we would have fixed stuff like this (Score:4, Insightful)
You elect people who want to tear down the government and the complain it's been torn down. Sheesh!
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"if half the bloody electorate wasn't working hard to make sure government didn't work because it's so convinced government doesn't work:
Parent can't be modded up enough
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if half the bloody electorate wasn't working hard to make sure government didn't work because it's so convinced government doesn't work.
Put aside the partisanship for a second and realize it *does not matter* which party is in power. The problem has nothing to do with whether the person in the WH has a (D) or an (R) after their name, nor those in Congress.
It's the problem with any huge bureaucracy be it government or private-sector; ineptness, ham-handedness, stupidity, laziness, corruption, incompetence, etc etc. Those and more are endemic to huge, bloated bureaucracies and are some of the reasons behind wanting to limit the size and scope
It's got nothing to do with partisanship (Score:3)
And again, you're side stepping the issue I raised. Yes, large organizations (notice how I'm not using the loaded term "bureaucracy" like you did?) will have problems. But without them we wouldn't have gotten to the moon or had the bloody Internet you're posting o
Re:ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is social justice at its finest. No sight for the sighted unless the blind can see.
Re: ugh (Score:2, Insightful)
At least this action is in full compliance with the "Americans With Stupidity Act".
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Bureaucratic Messes are usually related to poorly written laws.
Or laws that did not anticipate the future.
Well, that's why normally you don't make laws with retroactive effect. In this case, new materials would require adaptations for those who are not 100% able to use the course material, and the materials that already exist would remain unchanged.
To me this looks like theuniversity decided they've had enough of the Freemium model and decided to paywall their content. The law might be a good excuse, and they might rely on people not reading the fine print, or in my case, RTFA, to see if it is indeed a good jus
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Well, at least you are willing to own up to your utter stupidity by name.
You either think that Obama was in office in 1990, or have no idea how time works.
Re:ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
Its freaking Berkeley. You can bet those leftie loonies were pushing hard for that law. Guess they don't like their own dog food.
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The law was proposed by a democrat, but the vast majority of congress critters both republican and democrat voted for it. A republican president then signed it into law. Basically both sides liked it, so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
Re: ugh (Score:3)
so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
They'll both do just fine, thanks.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
The law was proposed by a democrat, but the vast majority of congress critters both republican and democrat voted for it. A republican president then signed it into law. Basically both sides liked it, so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
Because elected officials were willing to be known as "that guy who hates people in wheelchairs and expects them to drag their bodies up the steps of a building with just their hands"...?
Come on, this is the Social Justice m.o. -- Terrible law which has no business being passed gets passed because every official who votes for it gets to virtue-signal as being Caring and Pro-Diversity and Forward-Thinking, because "if it only helps one person this {128374-page law with 4 billion in bureaucratic overhead and hundreds of billions in compliance costs to ever man, woman, child, and business in our society} will have been worth it!"
Well, 40 years into the Progressive Revolution and we've long passed the point of diminishing returns, where now each new "right" for each new sub-sub-subgroup is actively depriving the majority of people from looking at a damn website, because the ability to look at a website that other people might not be able to look at is cruel and heartless and a tool of oppression by the white male heterosexist ablist hegemony.
Let's repeat that again -- the federal government has established that the simple act of people looking at a website is trampling on the equal-protection rights of a victim class. LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
You're not Rosa Parks; this isn't the 60s; nobody is siccing dogs on you or firebombing your home, they are LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
OH NOOES!
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It's odd that the right wing has the reputation for personal responsibility, because my experience is the opposite. A bunch of right wingers voted for it and a right wing president voted for it, but blame, blame, blame everyone else. Never every admit to any responsibility.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Informative)
You have zero knowledge of US history, but I am not surprised. ADA was a brainchild of Reagan. The act was established in 1990 (Reagan/Bush ruled as president from 81-92).
AFAIK, blind activist Patrisha Wright and representative Tom Harkin (Dem who has a deaf brother) were the brainchilds of the ADA. Reagan was against it and he may of actually precipitated it by threatening to revoke Section 504 of the (American) Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (which was opposed by Nixon and Ford, but passed by Carter) when he was in office.
However, after the Reagan era, Bush1 signed the ADA in 1990... and Bush2 signed the amended version in 1998...
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something bad happened, a republican must be at fault somehow.
Re: ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
How is he supposed to know if they ride Harleys?
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Deafies shouldn't be allowed to ruin good things like this for everyone else.
Found the Trump supporter.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How Does This Solve Their "Problem"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that's not entirely true. The ADA requires that content be accessible if students request it, too. The difference is that students who request it can get assistance with the non-accessibility-friendly content on a one-off basis in exchange for their tuition. It isn't that it is too expensive to do the captioning, but rather that it is too expensive to do it without compensation.
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It doesn't relieve them of the requirement AFAICT, but if they're like most universities they already have facilities in place to provide assistance to students with disabilities that will prepare closed captions or other replacement materials on a course-by-course basis and by request. Combined with limiting the potential audience to students (i.e. reducing the number of people that an ADA complaint could possibly come from), they may not feel they are likely to get into trouble.
Re:Liberals -- explain yourselves (Score:5, Informative)
Except that it was a law championed by President Bush, and signed by him. Actually, the first version was signed by Bush the Elder, and the revision was signed by Bush the Younger. So, you know, two Bushes.
The idea was that it's wrong to make handicapped people unable to participate in society.
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You! You and your facts! Get out of here with those!
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Big government Republicans aren't really a different party form the Dems, though - they're the two faces of the Uniparty.
When looking at laws, we should care about results not intentions. The result here was to remove educational content from the public domain that was useful for 99% of people, because one guy complained. Net detriment to society.
Re:Liberals -- explain yourselves (Score:5, Informative)
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Doesn't matter. He signed it, so it's his baby. He could have vetoed it.
It's just like Clinton signing the law overturning the Glas-Steagal Act, and causing the 2008 mortgage meltdown. Clinton apologists keep trying to put all the blame on Congress, but Billy signed it, so it's really his fault.
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Thank you for proving that the Bushes were not conservatives, but actually liberals.
Trump is neither Republican nor conservative, and, until a few short years ago, was a Clinton Democrat.
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Thank you for proving that the Bushes were not conservatives, but actually liberals.
Next you'll be telling us they're not true Scotsmen either.
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fallacy: No True Scotsman
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Thank you for proving that the Bushes were not conservatives, but actually liberals.
With an axiomatic statement like that, there is no fucking way to respond to it.
But I'll try. See, the political center has gone so fucking to the right that Reagan would be considered a commie by today's standards. That is why only stupid people use labels like "liberal" or "conservative" in absolute terms.
So... don't be stupid. Leave the dogma aside, travel the country and the world and talk to people with views different from yours, be them to your left and right.
You'll find your dogma to be quite
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They should use the capitalist approach to the problem. Move the servers offshore, and transfer the ownership of the content to a non-US based corporation, so that the law no longer applies to them.
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I also forgot the obvious part:
-Layoff workers in the US and vote bonus to executives for having such a great idea.
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Here's a better approach...and one that is more likely to actually happen. Anyone who cares to preserve the material will band together to download it all from Youtube, and upload it to TPB. You have 9 days, pirates. Arrrrrr!
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Liberals -- explain yourselves. Come on, I'm waiting. This is a law only a liberal would think to pass and this is basically the perfect Soviet style result.
There is a high school state champion wrestler in Texas who would like to point out to you that "liberals" are not the only people who write laws with unintended consequences.
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I mean, is spending taxpayer money on education in the first place a Soviet style result?
Sarcasm I'm sure since Berkeley has over $4billion (Score:2)
Just in case anyone is unaware, UC Berkeley has over $4 billion.
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So Republicans pass laws they don't mean, or what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I mean, you're right, UC Berkley is wussing out here, they've basically said "screw you guys I'm going home" because they don't want to spend $ to make their content accessible to people with disabilities. But are you saying that the government is wrong to try to enforce the law here, or that this law shouldn't be a law in the first place?
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Also before anybody points it out, I think it's fair to call a polite letter from the DOJ requesting co-operation [berkeley.edu] "enforcing the law" -- because everybody knows what's next if they don't play ball.
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