IIRC, the proper scientific theory is that two creatures must be of the same species in order to produce fertile offspring. Since a mule can't breed, it isn't really a species, is it?
You're kidding, right? All the usual domesticated dogs are the same species. Yes, that little yappy thing really is the same species as a German shepherd!
Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.
An obvious pseudonym establishes that there is someone (or a specific group) using a specific name (as opposed to Anonymous Coward, which represents a large class of people). It doesn't tell you who s/he is, but it does create a link between different postings made using that name. That is the sense in which it establishes an identity. Also, the fact that it is an obvious pseudonym ("Mendax Veritas", for example) makes it clear that there is no intent to deceive; it's a fictitious identity, but an identity nevertheless, and I'm being honest about the fact that it's fictitious.
Do we really need a situation where it is possible to say anything you want, even false comments that are damaging to others' way of life and livelyhood, without having any real possibility of having to be responsible for your actions?
Well, you can decide for yourself how much stock to put in the assertions of someone who is not willing to sign their real name to their words. I don't suggest that you blindly believe anything you might read on the net, but anything posted anonymously has to be read with some suspicion.
There are a few degrees/varieties of anonymity, though, and, in my mind, corresponding degrees of credibility:
"Anonymous Coward" clearly says that you aren't willing to identify yourself. I don't know who you are, and I don't even know what other postings might be yours. AC postings have low credibility, in my view.
A pseudonym that isn't obviously a pseudonym (e.g. posting as "Phil Jones" when that isn't your name) implies a real identity that isn't there. It may be a fictitious identity, or it may be someone else's stolen identity. Either way, the implicit deception leads me to question the credibility of such a person.
An obviously pseudonymous account establishes an identity (the Mendax Veritas who posted this is presumably the same person or group who posted previous Mendax Veritas messages), but does not provide you with a link back to the real person. (One can be obtained by court order or corporate espionage, but the average citizen can't get it, which is good enough for most purposes.) Credibility can be determined by the poster's history; if I've made sense before, maybe I'm making sense now. This strikes me as more honest than a seemingly-real identity.
With this in mind, my answer is, yes, people should be able to say things without being too easily held accountable for them. Sometimes it just isn't safe to let your identity be known; the death squads, the political police, or your employer may not approve. Or you may find yourself getting sued not because your claims are false, but as an attempt to silence you.
As the Cato article observes, auctorial anonymity has a long and distinguished history. It would be a shame to effectively lose it simply because public discourse moves from the print domain to the internet.
Perversely, one of the only two times I have ever had significant wrist pain from computer usage was just after my company brought in an "ergonomics expert". This individual told me my keyboard was positioned too high, and adjusted it to a lower level. The pain began shortly thereafter. I put my keyboard back to where it had been before, and the pain went away. Moral: take "ergonomics experts" with a grain of salt.
I suspect the real problem was not the keyboard, but the mouse. Since the keyboard and the mouse sit side-by-side, lowering the keyboard meant lowering the mouse also. This forced my wrist to bend at an odd angle whenever I used the mouse, and indeed, it was after using the mouse almost exclusively for an hour (in a paint program) that I first noticed the pain.
The other wrist pain incident was just after Microsoft came out with their "middle-button wheel" mouse. I made heavy use of the wheel when I first got one of these things, and found that it led to wrist pain (perhaps because rapidly spinning the wheel with the middle finger is a rather unnatural motion). So I stopped rotating the wheel (back to scroll bars, alas!) and the pain went away.
I strongly urge anyone experiencing wrist pain from computer use to take the problem seriously and get it taken care of early. One of my coworkers has been out on disability for nearly three years now because he ignored his wrist pain.
It seems odd to me, too, but the text says, "You will be responsible for the implementation of Linux applications". I'm guessing that they mean fairly small multimedia tools (e.g. a simple waveform editor) to include on the CDs that come with their cards.
As I said before, there's not really enough information to tell exactly what's going on. Until someone from Creative, or someone who interviews for the position, posts here, we probably won't know what this means.
Despite what I just said, I'm going to add one more open-source license to the world. However, breaking with current practice, this one will be quite short and not written in lawyerese. I call it "The Poetic License", and here it is:
This source code is free. One flower becomes many. Make your code free too.
Of course, this leaves the restrictions and legal remedies somewhat unclear, but I think the license's brevity and artistic merit (cough) make up for that.
I feel there are too many more-or-less-open-source licenses, and the really annoying part is that they sometimes conflict with each other such that you can't merge code using License A with code using License B.
IANAL, but the GPL and LGPL seem to me quite adequate for non-commercial work, and I don't see why you'd want to release source at all for a commercial work (it just encourages competition). And if you don't object to your open source code being used in commercial products, why bother copyrighting it at all? The public domain is a viable alternative if you don't care what anyone does with the code.
It doesn't sound like driver development to me, but rather applications work that will be dependent on the existing drivers. I don't see any indication one way or the other about whether the resulting applications will be open source. ("Working with our Open Source team" doesn't necessarily mean you'll be part of it -- you might just have to interact with them.)
I suspect someone will have to go for an interview to get more details, unless someone at Creative Labs reads Slashdot and can clarify this for us.
The project is a metaphor for everything that's both right and wrong about technology: well-intentioned people are using it to try to make the world better; at the same time continuously unleashing forces we haven't fully considered or agreed upon, and can't or won't control.
Gosh, Jon, you make it sound like something new! As if any technology in all of history was deployed only after it and its consequences were fully understood and determined to be "safe". It is the nature of new technology to be less than fully understood, and to change the world in ways that cannot be predicted. Sure, we don't know exactly where this genetic technology will take us, but the only way to find out is to take the trip and see where we end up. So what are you pissing and moaning about? (I can just imagine you trying to talk Gutenberg out of printing the Bible. "But you know, Johannes, we don't know where this printing technology leads! Terrible social upheaval may result once information currently limited to the elite becomes available to the unwashed masses! Think of the dangers, man!")
Could employers and insurance companies obtain an individual's genetic information? Could government agencies or law enforcement authorities use genome research to invade privacy and predict behavior? Could prospective spouses demand DNA screenings to reject unsuitable mates?
Well, right now, if you apply for health or life insurance, the insurance company may send you to a doctor to get checked out. Isn't the difference between that and a full genetic analysis just a matter of currently available technology?
More importantly, though, most of these concerns don't have simple yes-or-no answers; they depend on context. For instance, we might agree that it is not appropriate for government agencies to use genetic analysis to determine which individuals, out of a large pool of law-abiding citizens, might in the future commit a crime. But on the other hand, how about using genetic analysis as one tool in profiling a serial killer currently at large? Similarly, we might not want people analyzing a prospective spouse's DNA for just any old purpose (though I can't think of any problems with this offhand), but how about doing it specifically to determine whether these two people would have a high probability of producing children with certain genetic disorders? (I suppose it depends what you call a "disorder". Down's Syndrome, sure, but what about a tendency toward middle-age balding? That's inherited, and therefore genetic, isn't it? And perhaps undesirable? But I tend to think that society will work out, in the first decade or two of this technology's availability, where the boundaries are between filterable and unfilterable traits.)
The genome project evokes a world practically bursting with technological hubris
Oh, good heavens, Jon. Go read the book of Ecclesiastes. "All is vanity." It's the one thing humans are consistently good at.
We have set out on a project whose goal is to alter the nature of human existence, without the interest of a single national political leader or a single Congressional debate
This has to be the funniest line in your whole stupid article. Congressional debate? You think that would do any good? You think anyone on Capitol Hill would have anything of substance to say on the subject? (Huff... puff... Immoral... the Bible says... blah, blah, blah...) Let's keep the politicians out of this. They can worry about legislation once there's something real to legislate about. Let's not risk having the whole project aborted because Jesse Helms decides it's immoral.
Why have an idiosyncratic or rebellious offspring when you can choose a cheerful and pliant one?
Funny, my wife and I have always said we'd rather have a hellion than a passive, "Yes, Mother" little idiot. (Well, we got our wishes!)
In altering the nature of new life, parents can not only live vicariously through their offspring but completely shape their lives.
Go look at the beauty pageant pictures of Jon-Benet Ramsey and then try to tell me that there aren't already lots of parents who live vicariously through their children. That's nothing new.
But more fundamentally, there is a major error implicit in your statement. You seem to think that parental "shaping" of a child's genes deprives the child of freedom. This is incorrect; children do not choose their genes. The difference here is between random chance and parental determination. The child has no say in the matter in any case.
Furthermore, I disagree completely with the notion that genetic makeup "completely shapes" anyone's life.
In fact, not doing it seems as inconceivable as doing it.
This is the most intelligent and perceptive statement in your article -- quite possibly, in your entire journalistic career.
Well, not really, but nobody else has claimed it yet... I could parse most of the silly words, but 1337 got past me. (My fault for being over 30, I guess.) What is it?
Check back when you've had a couple of kids, are working 60 hour weeks...
Actually, I have a four-year-old daughter, and I have worked in Silicon Valley startups for the last several years. I have to admit, though, that we used disposable diapers when my girl was a baby. It was not lost on me, as I was writing, that I too sometimes make decisions based on my own convenience (or the limits of my and/or my wife's stress-management skills).
Of course, I suppose Jon Katz is less upset about my (or your) freely-made choice to add more disposable diapers to the landfills than he is about the heartless, amoral corporations that should have refused, on moral grounds, to create such a product. We ought to have been protected from such dangerous choices. Isn't that right, Jon?
I just asked a friend in the office next to mine if his son wore cloth diapers. He said they tried that for a few months but switched to disposables because of cloth's tendency to leak (and also, of course, the greater convenience of disposables).
So I'll accept that diapers weren't a good example, but I think the rest of my argument stands.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Time to boycott etoys.com. Unfortunately, I've already finished my Christmas shopping. Guess what I got my nieces and nephews? Right... gift certificates from etoys.com! Now I just want to jump and down screaming profanities. But I'm in the office, so that probably wouldn't be a good idea. I'll just stew in my anger for a while, maybe take it out on some hapless C++ code that through no fault of its own was written by one of the office morons.
Yeah there were 20 people causing trouble, but there were also 39,980 peaceful protesters
Sure, but from the media's perspective, they weren't as newsworthy as the rioters. "More newsworthy" basically equates to "sells more newspapers" or "gets higher TV ratings". Violence sells. For peaceful protests to get on the news, the peaceful protesters will have to be having sex in the streets, since sex is the only thing other than violence that is reliably considered newsworthy. (Of course, then the real point of the protest will be missed, since the media will cover it as a street orgy rather than as a protest.)
Additionally, the media is largely composed of dull-average intellects that wouldn't understand the issues being raised, so even if they did report on peaceful protests, they wouldn't be capable of communicating what the protests were about. Even direct quotes from the protesters would get garbled in the process of writing and editing for publication. The protesters would come out sounding like morons, not because the media was trying to make them look bad, but because the reporters were themselves morons.
Even by Jon Katz's standards, this was an incredibly inane, stupid article. I'll just respond to a few points.
The protestors in Seattle made some telling, nearly irrefutable arguments. Corporatism has, in fact, damaged the environment by creating incalculable amounts of products that pollute and trash the earth.
Blaming companies that produce products for cluttering the earth with garbage is almost like shooting the messenger. The real fault lies with halfwit consumers who buy all these cheap, transitory products and throw them away. Consumers like to do this because it's convenient; they don't want the hassle of taking care of a durable or reusable product. (As just one example, consider the popularity of disposable diapers despite the existence of cloth diapers and pick-up diaper-cleaning services.) Big corporations are not to blame for the laziness and stupidity of the average consumer. I suppose Katz would reply that corporations have a moral responsibility to create products that are good for the public rather than products that the public wants to buy. The problem with this, of course, is that companies that follow Katz's advice go out of business because hardly anyone buys their products. So the blame remains with the consumer.
Corporations have increasingly acquired and sought to monopolize whole elements of culture, from movies to books to the press.
When there's money in something, businesses will want to dominate the market for it. This is what successful businesses do. Businesses that don't try to dominate will be marginalized, more or less by definition. This basically guarantees that, over time, any market will be dominated by companies that want to dominate their markets. This is nothing new, and it's almost tautological, so I feel embarrassed for Jon Katz that he should need to have it pointed out to him.
This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed.
What planet do you come from, Jon? "Safer" products have always been the ones that are mass-marketed. It has never been otherwise. When in your life did you ever see a big display in a mainstream bookstore for serious literature? When the new Danielle Steel "novel" comes out, there's a big cardboard rack full of them, placed so as to draw your attention as you enter the store. Have you ever seen such a thing for Tropic of Cancer, Ulysses, or Naked Lunch? Of course not. So it's silly to argue that the "dulling-down" of the mass market is anything new, or (for that matter) that it's driven by corporations (who really couldn't care less about the content of their products; again, the real blame lies with the consumers who only want to buy dull, insipid, unchallenging art).
But, of course, Jon Katz doesn't want to blame ordinary individuals for their free choices. It's much more comforting for him to twist the realities of economics and blame big evil corporations for inflicting all these awful products on helpless citizens.
Katz thinks corporations are destroying personal freedom, and yet he seems to want them to make moral choices for people by only offering "good" products, in essence forcing the people to use "good" products by ceasing to produce "bad" products. Is that really your definition of freedom, Jon?
How are "most other cars" more interchangeable with a Taurus?
In the sense that when you're shopping for a car, one mid-size sedan isn't that different from another. You can buy Ford's, Chrysler's, Toyota's, or whatever, and get something that satisfies your needs more or less equally well. Interchangeability of parts wasn't the point. (For that matter, you can't interchange Mac parts and PC parts either, except for those components that conform to public standards such as SCSI.)
The situation with computers is a bit different. If you want to run a closed-source program that only runs on MacOS, you have to have a Mac. In fact, you have to have an Apple Mac, since Apple has deliberately prevented the development of compatible systems.
"Monopoly" isn't really the right word, in a strict sense; as you say, "closed platform" is technically more accurate. But part of my point was to hint that Apple is able to get away with only a one-year warranty for pretty much the same reason that Microsoft has been able to do many of the things they're currently in hot water for doing -- because they have no competition within their particular domain. That, in turn, is true because they have done everything they could to ensure that no such competition could exist.
I'm not up to date on Mac prices, but it certainly used to be the case that Macs cost significantly more than PC's of similar power. This, together with Apple's one-year warranty, shows that whether you want to call it a "monopoly" or not, Apple's singular control of the Mac market has been harmful to consumers, just as Microsoft's domination of the PC OS/apps markets has been.
I don't know how Apple gets away with only offering one year when Gateway, Dell, Quantex, etc. all offer three-year warranties on their hardware.
It's because Apple has a monopoly on Macs. Gateway, Dell, etc. are irrelevant; if you want a Mac, you buy it from Apple and you take whatever warranty they feel like offering. Besides, people buy Macs for religious reasons. Most of them probably neither know nor care what the warranty is like. The important thing to them is that having a Mac is righteous.
Well, yes. I didn't say it was true. I have no idea whether it is or not, though I tend to doubt it. I actually suspect that he joined the OTO hoping to pick up some magical powers with which to further his material comforts. IIRC, there is evidence of his involvement with a number of other occult or pseudo-occult organizations at around that same time, including the AMORC (which would have been a much better place to learn how to control the minds of sheeplike followers).
Also, for all you Christians out there, Hubbard was a disciple of Aleister Crowley, a.k.a. the Beast 666, founder of modern satanism, back in the 30s-40s.
Crowley was not a Satanist by any sensible definition. He would better be described as a neo-pagan (and there is some evidence that he was the real creator of the formal rituals of Gardnerian Wicca; this view is supported by some of Gardner's closest associates, including Doreen Valiente).
It is also not really correct to describe Hubbard as a "disciple" of Crowley's, for two reasons:
Hubbard was a member of a temple of Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis in Los Angeles (the "Agape" lodge). Crowley was unhappy with that temple and the conduct of its leaders, and placed it under interdict (kicking them all out of the OTO, essentially) not much later. So Hubbard's involvement with Crowley was indirect at best, and through people who Crowley considered unfit to be in the OTO.
Hubbard later claimed to have been spying on the OTO for US Naval Intelligence, which, if true, would suggest that he was not a serious student.
He was not a favorite of Crowley's, as evidenced by Crowley's written remarks on Hubbard's "idiocy".
The actual quote (IIRC) is, "I grow fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts" and was in reference to not just Hubbard, but probably the whole Agape lodge (the context is not entirely clear; at minimum he was referring to Hubbard and/or Dr. Jack Parsons, the rocketry pioneer who was also a member of the Agape lodge and later blew himself up in a rather weird lab accident).
Crowley's bit was that once you moved up far enough in his hierarchy, you'd start your own religion according to your personal belief system. Interesting, to say the least...
Not quite right. The idea was not that you would start your own religion, but that once you reached a certain level (OTO 7th or 8th degree, I think? I don't have my references handy), you were entitled, if you chose, to start your own organization in which you could teach your own interpretation of what you had learned, according to whatever teaching methods you chose. It's closer to starting your own sect than your own religion, and was fundamentally based in Crowley's view that each adept has his or her own version of the truth.
I don't recall Heinlein being mentioned in that story, but no doubt there are many different versions of it running around. The one I heard said that Hubbard made a bet that he could start his own religion at a Milford writer's conference in the '50s. Did Heinlein attend any of those?
Regardless of the story's veracity, it is certainly true that Heinlein's fictional religion from Stranger in a Strange Land has become the basis of a real-world religion. Consult www.caw.org for the web site of the Church of All Worlds. They're just as deluded as Scientologists, but they're a lot nicer.
The spin-offs, anthologies, merchandise, et al, were DC trying to milk Gaiman's creation for every possible cent. I haven't read any of them
Well, that last part sort of says it all, doesn't it? You're judging things without knowing anything about them. If Vertigo really just wanted to milk things, they would have assigned another writer to Sandman and continued the series. But they didn't. They've actually been quite respectful of Gaiman's creations, and most of their Gaiman-related projects have been well done. John Ney Reiber's Books of Magic was excellent, as is Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Dreaming. (Kiernan's miniseries The Girl Who Would Be Death also deserves notice.)
Second, the method seems to be taking advantage of the fact that a preview pane has to open code somewhat.
Sort of. The Preview pane isn't really required; opening the message will do just as well. The Preview pane just makes it happen a little more automatically.
I'm not sure what you mean by "somewhat". In order to display the message at all, whether in the Preview pane or a message window, the mail client has to process the HTML and execute any embedded scripts. This is how the virus is activated.
This is considered a "new kind of virus"... People never learn from history, it would seem. This type of virus has existed with DEC VMS 5.5, and probably both earlier and later versions. Don't learn from history, and you'll sooner or later repeat it.
Sorry, I've never used VMS, so I don't know what viruses were made for it or how they might have worked. You seem to be suggesting (absurdly) that VMS had ActiveX controls and supported JavaScript in HTML-formatted email messages. If this is not what you mean, would you please elaborate?
However, I guess I can look at the bright side. I've been worried, for a long time, that a virus writer would exploit file dead-space. There's plenty of room at the end of most binary files to tuck a routine or two, then all you'd need is a bootstrap and some way to re-assemble the fragments in the correct order. A trivial task.
You'd still need to be able to get control to flow to that bootstrap routine, though. A virus scanner might think it strange if a program's start address was beyond the end of its image, or if the program began with a jump to such an address. That would be a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the proper scientific theory is that two creatures must be of the same species in order to produce fertile offspring. Since a mule can't breed, it isn't really a species, is it?
Now, I've heard occasionally about dogs breeding with wolves. Unless that's an urban legend (quite possibly!), that would be inter-species breeding, I think.
An obvious pseudonym establishes that there is someone (or a specific group) using a specific name (as opposed to Anonymous Coward, which represents a large class of people). It doesn't tell you who s/he is, but it does create a link between different postings made using that name. That is the sense in which it establishes an identity. Also, the fact that it is an obvious pseudonym ("Mendax Veritas", for example) makes it clear that there is no intent to deceive; it's a fictitious identity, but an identity nevertheless, and I'm being honest about the fact that it's fictitious.
There are a few degrees/varieties of anonymity, though, and, in my mind, corresponding degrees of credibility:
- "Anonymous Coward" clearly says that you aren't willing to identify yourself. I don't know who you are, and I don't even know what other postings might be yours. AC postings have low credibility, in my view.
- A pseudonym that isn't obviously a pseudonym (e.g. posting as "Phil Jones" when that isn't your name) implies a real identity that isn't there. It may be a fictitious identity, or it may be someone else's stolen identity. Either way, the implicit deception leads me to question the credibility of such a person.
- An obviously pseudonymous account establishes an identity (the Mendax Veritas who posted this is presumably the same person or group who posted previous Mendax Veritas messages), but does not provide you with a link back to the real person. (One can be obtained by court order or corporate espionage, but the average citizen can't get it, which is good enough for most purposes.) Credibility can be determined by the poster's history; if I've made sense before, maybe I'm making sense now. This strikes me as more honest than a seemingly-real identity.
With this in mind, my answer is, yes, people should be able to say things without being too easily held accountable for them. Sometimes it just isn't safe to let your identity be known; the death squads, the political police, or your employer may not approve. Or you may find yourself getting sued not because your claims are false, but as an attempt to silence you.As the Cato article observes, auctorial anonymity has a long and distinguished history. It would be a shame to effectively lose it simply because public discourse moves from the print domain to the internet.
I suspect the real problem was not the keyboard, but the mouse. Since the keyboard and the mouse sit side-by-side, lowering the keyboard meant lowering the mouse also. This forced my wrist to bend at an odd angle whenever I used the mouse, and indeed, it was after using the mouse almost exclusively for an hour (in a paint program) that I first noticed the pain.
The other wrist pain incident was just after Microsoft came out with their "middle-button wheel" mouse. I made heavy use of the wheel when I first got one of these things, and found that it led to wrist pain (perhaps because rapidly spinning the wheel with the middle finger is a rather unnatural motion). So I stopped rotating the wheel (back to scroll bars, alas!) and the pain went away.
I strongly urge anyone experiencing wrist pain from computer use to take the problem seriously and get it taken care of early. One of my coworkers has been out on disability for nearly three years now because he ignored his wrist pain.
As I said before, there's not really enough information to tell exactly what's going on. Until someone from Creative, or someone who interviews for the position, posts here, we probably won't know what this means.
- This source code is free.
Of course, this leaves the restrictions and legal remedies somewhat unclear, but I think the license's brevity and artistic merit (cough) make up for that.One flower becomes many.
Make your code free too.
IANAL, but the GPL and LGPL seem to me quite adequate for non-commercial work, and I don't see why you'd want to release source at all for a commercial work (it just encourages competition). And if you don't object to your open source code being used in commercial products, why bother copyrighting it at all? The public domain is a viable alternative if you don't care what anyone does with the code.
I suspect someone will have to go for an interview to get more details, unless someone at Creative Labs reads Slashdot and can clarify this for us.
Sun? Integrity? I must have misread it.
More importantly, though, most of these concerns don't have simple yes-or-no answers; they depend on context. For instance, we might agree that it is not appropriate for government agencies to use genetic analysis to determine which individuals, out of a large pool of law-abiding citizens, might in the future commit a crime. But on the other hand, how about using genetic analysis as one tool in profiling a serial killer currently at large? Similarly, we might not want people analyzing a prospective spouse's DNA for just any old purpose (though I can't think of any problems with this offhand), but how about doing it specifically to determine whether these two people would have a high probability of producing children with certain genetic disorders? (I suppose it depends what you call a "disorder". Down's Syndrome, sure, but what about a tendency toward middle-age balding? That's inherited, and therefore genetic, isn't it? And perhaps undesirable? But I tend to think that society will work out, in the first decade or two of this technology's availability, where the boundaries are between filterable and unfilterable traits.)
Oh, good heavens, Jon. Go read the book of Ecclesiastes. "All is vanity." It's the one thing humans are consistently good at. This has to be the funniest line in your whole stupid article. Congressional debate? You think that would do any good? You think anyone on Capitol Hill would have anything of substance to say on the subject? (Huff... puff... Immoral... the Bible says... blah, blah, blah...) Let's keep the politicians out of this. They can worry about legislation once there's something real to legislate about. Let's not risk having the whole project aborted because Jesse Helms decides it's immoral. Funny, my wife and I have always said we'd rather have a hellion than a passive, "Yes, Mother" little idiot. (Well, we got our wishes!) Go look at the beauty pageant pictures of Jon-Benet Ramsey and then try to tell me that there aren't already lots of parents who live vicariously through their children. That's nothing new.But more fundamentally, there is a major error implicit in your statement. You seem to think that parental "shaping" of a child's genes deprives the child of freedom. This is incorrect; children do not choose their genes. The difference here is between random chance and parental determination. The child has no say in the matter in any case.
Furthermore, I disagree completely with the notion that genetic makeup "completely shapes" anyone's life.
This is the most intelligent and perceptive statement in your article -- quite possibly, in your entire journalistic career.Well, not really, but nobody else has claimed it yet... I could parse most of the silly words, but 1337 got past me. (My fault for being over 30, I guess.) What is it?
Of course, I suppose Jon Katz is less upset about my (or your) freely-made choice to add more disposable diapers to the landfills than he is about the heartless, amoral corporations that should have refused, on moral grounds, to create such a product. We ought to have been protected from such dangerous choices. Isn't that right, Jon?
I just asked a friend in the office next to mine if his son wore cloth diapers. He said they tried that for a few months but switched to disposables because of cloth's tendency to leak (and also, of course, the greater convenience of disposables).
So I'll accept that diapers weren't a good example, but I think the rest of my argument stands.
I hate lawyers.
Additionally, the media is largely composed of dull-average intellects that wouldn't understand the issues being raised, so even if they did report on peaceful protests, they wouldn't be capable of communicating what the protests were about. Even direct quotes from the protesters would get garbled in the process of writing and editing for publication. The protesters would come out sounding like morons, not because the media was trying to make them look bad, but because the reporters were themselves morons.
Wow, I'm really feeling cynical today.
But, of course, Jon Katz doesn't want to blame ordinary individuals for their free choices. It's much more comforting for him to twist the realities of economics and blame big evil corporations for inflicting all these awful products on helpless citizens.
Katz thinks corporations are destroying personal freedom, and yet he seems to want them to make moral choices for people by only offering "good" products, in essence forcing the people to use "good" products by ceasing to produce "bad" products. Is that really your definition of freedom, Jon?
In the sense that when you're shopping for a car, one mid-size sedan isn't that different from another. You can buy Ford's, Chrysler's, Toyota's, or whatever, and get something that satisfies your needs more or less equally well. Interchangeability of parts wasn't the point. (For that matter, you can't interchange Mac parts and PC parts either, except for those components that conform to public standards such as SCSI.)
The situation with computers is a bit different. If you want to run a closed-source program that only runs on MacOS, you have to have a Mac. In fact, you have to have an Apple Mac, since Apple has deliberately prevented the development of compatible systems.
"Monopoly" isn't really the right word, in a strict sense; as you say, "closed platform" is technically more accurate. But part of my point was to hint that Apple is able to get away with only a one-year warranty for pretty much the same reason that Microsoft has been able to do many of the things they're currently in hot water for doing -- because they have no competition within their particular domain. That, in turn, is true because they have done everything they could to ensure that no such competition could exist.
I'm not up to date on Mac prices, but it certainly used to be the case that Macs cost significantly more than PC's of similar power. This, together with Apple's one-year warranty, shows that whether you want to call it a "monopoly" or not, Apple's singular control of the Mac market has been harmful to consumers, just as Microsoft's domination of the PC OS/apps markets has been.
It's because Apple has a monopoly on Macs. Gateway, Dell, etc. are irrelevant; if you want a Mac, you buy it from Apple and you take whatever warranty they feel like offering. Besides, people buy Macs for religious reasons. Most of them probably neither know nor care what the warranty is like. The important thing to them is that having a Mac is righteous.
Well, yes. I didn't say it was true. I have no idea whether it is or not, though I tend to doubt it. I actually suspect that he joined the OTO hoping to pick up some magical powers with which to further his material comforts. IIRC, there is evidence of his involvement with a number of other occult or pseudo-occult organizations at around that same time, including the AMORC (which would have been a much better place to learn how to control the minds of sheeplike followers).
Crowley was not a Satanist by any sensible definition. He would better be described as a neo-pagan (and there is some evidence that he was the real creator of the formal rituals of Gardnerian Wicca; this view is supported by some of Gardner's closest associates, including Doreen Valiente).
It is also not really correct to describe Hubbard as a "disciple" of Crowley's, for two reasons:
The actual quote (IIRC) is, "I grow fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts" and was in reference to not just Hubbard, but probably the whole Agape lodge (the context is not entirely clear; at minimum he was referring to Hubbard and/or Dr. Jack Parsons, the rocketry pioneer who was also a member of the Agape lodge and later blew himself up in a rather weird lab accident).
Not quite right. The idea was not that you would start your own religion, but that once you reached a certain level (OTO 7th or 8th degree, I think? I don't have my references handy), you were entitled, if you chose, to start your own organization in which you could teach your own interpretation of what you had learned, according to whatever teaching methods you chose. It's closer to starting your own sect than your own religion, and was fundamentally based in Crowley's view that each adept has his or her own version of the truth.
Regardless of the story's veracity, it is certainly true that Heinlein's fictional religion from Stranger in a Strange Land has become the basis of a real-world religion. Consult www.caw.org for the web site of the Church of All Worlds. They're just as deluded as Scientologists, but they're a lot nicer.
Well, that last part sort of says it all, doesn't it? You're judging things without knowing anything about them. If Vertigo really just wanted to milk things, they would have assigned another writer to Sandman and continued the series. But they didn't. They've actually been quite respectful of Gaiman's creations, and most of their Gaiman-related projects have been well done. John Ney Reiber's Books of Magic was excellent, as is Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Dreaming. (Kiernan's miniseries The Girl Who Would Be Death also deserves notice.)
Sort of. The Preview pane isn't really required; opening the message will do just as well. The Preview pane just makes it happen a little more automatically.
I'm not sure what you mean by "somewhat". In order to display the message at all, whether in the Preview pane or a message window, the mail client has to process the HTML and execute any embedded scripts. This is how the virus is activated.
Sorry, I've never used VMS, so I don't know what viruses were made for it or how they might have worked. You seem to be suggesting (absurdly) that VMS had ActiveX controls and supported JavaScript in HTML-formatted email messages. If this is not what you mean, would you please elaborate?
You'd still need to be able to get control to flow to that bootstrap routine, though. A virus scanner might think it strange if a program's start address was beyond the end of its image, or if the program began with a jump to such an address. That would be a dead giveaway that something fishy was going on.
That was a troll, right?