Posted on by lhl

So, a friend and I were talking in the car, and I brought up my USC Staff/Faculty parking pass hanging on my rearview mirror. It occurred to me that it really is a strange thing that USC charges money for faculty and staff to park. In fact, with all of our collected work experiences, USC was the only “company” that we were aware of that had this sort of practice. You need to get to work, and you need to park to be there to do your work. The analogy my friend was that there was if there was a computer usage fee for your work computer…

We ended up agreeing that this was most likely a policy instituted to limit the number of people parking, and to maximize the amount of spaces available for the ticketing nazis (we both agreed that on the whole, the student ticketers are as a group, a scary set of small-minded mutants).

Hah, now may be a good time to say that all these thoughts are of course my own opinion (duh, it’s on my frickin’ weblog). This of course is obvious, but hits up an interesting topic; say if hypothetically speaking, some bigwigs of a University of Some College were to want to implement a technological solution to this very problem. It seems that in this hypothetical situation, a big disclaimer doesn’t cut it (nor does… um, common sense?) when some bigwigs receive hate mail because some people discover some objectionable material? Now, my questions are: Is the current disclaimer inadequate? What kind of precedent/legal implications would this hypothetical type of dynamic modification entail (would the next step be dynamically erasing all mentions of certain topics?)? What happens when (not if) such technological solutions are hacked/bypassed? And lastly, what kind of hate mail will be sent once some disclaimers gets tacked onto every page? (stemming the flow of such feedback being the original impetus for such a hypothetical endeavor).

Now, one interesting thing about this whole use of disclaimers, while perhaps its legal validity is strong, to me, it occupies the same sort of nebulous semantic space as say… of my use of the “hypothetical.” Anyway, interesting stuff to mull over, I think, hypothetically speaking.

Just thought I’d add that this whole, “disclaimer, what I’m saying is my opinion” thing reminded me of this psycho chick I met the other month who couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying were my own opinions on a topic. Umm, hmm, if I’m talking about something and my thoughts on the subject, why would you assume that it’s not my opinion? Who else’s would it be? Like I said, psycho chick (hello, Lithium, maybe?)