Clonaid, Lullabyes, Gerbils

Your recommended daily dose of insanity. FattyBoeBatty writes "Napster has been sued again, but this time it's by a company that makes meditation music -- and for once it's not about copyrights. They're afraid that without their company's warning labels, unsuspecting Napster users will be lulled to sleep by the tranquil melodies and will fall asleep at inopportune times (i.e. driving, operating heavy machinery, etc.)" A bunch of people submitted this story about Clonaid, a group of people wearing tin-foil hats who want to clone a human (and whose leader will give speeches for a measly $100,000). Finally, Hacky writes: "Security Service MI5 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies, it has been revealed."

Comments

Wow, I never thought I'd see it...

[Cheshire Cat]

Clonaid makes the Scientologists seem almost rational in comparison. Almost.

Stupid case

[hugg]

There needs to be a way to weed out dumb court cases. Maybe you could ask ten people, and if nine of them say "that's dumb" then you throw the case out. Or maybe use some kind of roulette wheel with flashing lights or something.

Meditation marketing ploy

[artemis67]

The suit by the company selling meditation music is obviously a big marketing ploy.

Little podunk company brinks suit against one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the 'net, 'cept to make their suit stand out, they throw in some extra marketing razzmatazz about how their music is so effective in putting people to sleep that it needs warning labels.

Yeah, right.

Why didn't they just contact Napster and tell them to add their songs to the filtering system? I wonder if even a single one of their songs is being traded...

Still, though... they are going to reap a lot of recognition out of this. Too bad they're doing it at the expense of our already-overburdened court system.

You know...

[Yu Suzuki]

...it's easy to poke fun at groups like Clonaid, because after all, their ideas are pretty far removed from "normal" society and have almost no (if any) basis on fact. But I'm not sure if it's a good idea to write off everything they do as fodder for the "humor" category. Human cloning presents some serious ethical and moral issues, and we should be prepared for the possibility that some group like the Raelians will actually clone in human. The cloning process has been pretty extensively documented to the public -- I certainly wouldn't have any trouble believing that some fringe group could pull it off.

When we mock groups outside mainstream society, we only give them more reason to retaliate. Just look at Columbine, or at the Oklahoma City bombing in which Timothy McVeigh was motivated by the cover-up of those who died at Ruby Ridge. I'd think the supposedly free-minded people at Slashdot would know better to mock ostracized groups and deride them as "tinfoil-hat wearing" (note that nowhere in the CNN article are the Raelians actually described as wearing tin-foil hats). These people may be different from us, but their actions could present a real, serious issue.

Yu Suzuki