lol, it was sarcasm. But the real math is in the profits. One could construct an economic formula to represent the profitability of fiction in popular markets relative to the general unexpectedness of its events and the use of cliffhangers and secrecy to keep the reader attached. I say "unexpectedness" and not "unpredictability" because it may really be that such outcomes, because they are determined by the desire to compel and surprise the reader in order to make the book profitable, are actually extremely predictable.
For example, I used to annoy my wife my predicting the ending to NCIS episodes long in advance. The killer would almost always be (1) the person you least suspect, because the character has no real rational justification for the crime in the early episode and (2) the one superfluous character introduced in the episode, since they didn't want to pay much and dedicate screen time to characters who did not push the plot forward. In short, because the writers of the show were trying so hard to be surprising, they would cook up contrived motives that could be presented in the last five minutes of the episode, and then make the one person who seemed most innocent actually turn out to be guilty. But then, this is predictable. It's just like how if you've watched enough episodes of House, M.D., you can easily guess that the person who first gets sick during the prologue is not the actual person who's going to pass out and end up in Dr. House's care.
In short, it is somewhat silly to analyze literature in terms of a kind of Asimovian statistical "psychohistory," when the real principles that structure the literature are so evident. For example, whether or not a particular character appears in future books is not determined relative to characters' appearances in prior books, but according to the MO of the author, which is not something that remains static over the years but which develops and fluctuates according to his historically-conditioned priorities. Vale is honest about the limitations of the statistical approach, but what I think is necessary is to recognize how that which derives from human freedom but ultimately manifests in statistical ways is always also at the same time codetermined by implicit principles and formulae (e.g. the economic viability of such and such kind of writing), especially economic ones.
The next book opens with an interesting but hard to follow prologue concerning random throwaway characters that you never heard of and will never hear about again.
Almost nothing really significant happens for tens of chapters, even though every chapter bleeds into the next with a cliffhanger making you want to read the next one. Plus there's several gratuitous sex scenes to keep the Slashdotters interested.
After many chapters of pretty much no development, something horrific happens toward the end making the fans say, "NO! He can't do that!" and so they read on.
It closes off with an unsatisfying cliffhanger ending with a teaser epilogue that advertises yet another book. We still learn pretty much nothing about what is north of the wall and any protagonists we rooted for are that much farther from achieving anything good. There's no deep moral significance and nothing to be learned about life except that one is better off not being a character in one of George R.R. Martin's books.
Rinse and repeat until the series becomes unprofitable. (Unless Martin gets hit by a car, seven novels simply will not be enough.)
I don't think it will ever be a problem, anyway, inasmuch as free-will is not something that can be developed through a quantitative increase in heuristics and processing power. It is a qualitatively different kind of intelligence, and not something that we can invent. The problem, however, will always be that because people believe that they can endow something with free-will, there will be (A) attempts to create superior robots that mimic free-will to a convincing degree, and (B) people who foolishly believe that their AI has free-will, and therefore should be treated as a person. It's analogous to the way in which many people are convinced that their dogs qualify as persons on the same level as human beings. In the future, it is likely that people will become so attached to AIs that they go so far as to insist that they are people.
Maintenance manuals are a good idea, but VR editions would probably cost more time and money than a company is willing to spend, especially when they'd rather have to buy something new than fix something old.
One can argue for increased protein, but the frequent claim that this represents a better, more "natural" way of living is suspect. We have to come to terms with the fact that humanity's natural state is technological. We cannot even survive in most of the climates in which we live without clothing, which is a basic form of technology. The protests against processed food are, in a sense, highly dishonest, because (1) they delude themselves into thinking that the technological aspect of our food is the problem, rather than any issue of self-control, and (2) especially for Americans the call for government regulation shows that while we pretend that the market itself can regulate everything and set the terms of value, we are uneasy with the results, which tend to devalue human life and well-being for the sake of profit.
Besides, I certainly don't need to go to the freezer section to buy unhealthy, fatty food. Some of my favorite homemade meals, such as traditional Mexican enchiladas, are bad enough for me.
Yeah, every so often they decide once again that the cable modem that I own must somehow belong to them, and they start billing me for renting my own equipment.
I think there's definitely something about gamertags that impacts the way people respond to you. I remember when playing Gears or War or Halo there seemed to be an unspoken policy of avoiding being on the team of someone with an all-lowercase name, because it at least seemed to often be the case that such a person was a young kid or a newer player. Of course, looks are deceptive. There are many good players who use all-lowercase gamertags. But even if we cognitively know that our assumptions are faulty, that does not stop us from unconsciously acting upon them before we think about it. (Hence Pascal says that human reason is subject to imagination: you could put the world's smartest philosopher on a secure plank hanging over a cliff, and even though he knows that he won't fall, he will probably still be afraid of it.)
The only name change I paid for on Xbox Live was to make my gamertag more interesting and less newbish, so that other experienced players would be less likely to avoid being on my team. You can say that one's skill should speak for itself, but you have to win a game first in order for your skill to speak, and in team-based matches a set of bad teammates can easily make you look like a newb.
So most of them will choose names that give the impression of a callow youth trying to grossly overcompensate for their (obvious) inadequacies. Not only are these individuals easy to spot, their choices are more likely to make them targets for scorn and derision rather than convey the impression they are better than they really are.
I agree. The mark of many newb gamertags will often be that he or she chooses a name that he or she *thinks* is intimidating. It would be better to imitate very closely gamertags of players who *are* intimidating, when these have some distinctive character. I opted for something in the middle, which would not look like it was trying to be too clever but would not immediately appear to be newbish.
Yeah. One can say that death is merely built into the system if the system itself is considered determinative of all value. Hence one can agree that from a naturalistic and materialistic standpoint, one can no more say that death is wrong than that fly death is wrong, or that evolution itself is wrong. But if we believe in a system of value that extends beyond the raw system of evolution--if we believe that there is anything worthwhile to human life beyond being a mere instantiation of the power of evolution and the endless cycle of life and death--then we can believe that death is wrong.
Not that I think this criticism applies to what Jhon said, but a great inconsistency lies in the fact that many of us cannot help but believe that our lives are worth something, that the people we love should not simply die, but still we profess a nihilistic materialism that cannot of itself ground the value of human life. The question we have to ask then is whether our striving toward improvements in medical science is merely for the sake of showing off the wonders of technology, or whether we really believe that people should live longer. If we answer the latter, are we not implying that life is morally superior to death, that technology is not wrong if it makes us more than another cog in the evolutionary system?
I have read theological attempts to claim that human death is justifiable simply in view of evolution and the cycle of life. They argue that even if we die horrible deaths, at least we are doing good by feeding the worms that eat our bodies. But who can actually profess this view in all honesty apart from depression or mere cynicism? How many of us can really say, "At least the poor worms will have something to eat"?
That aside, I do agree with Jhon that the moral value of extending life is not necessarily the same at that of living forever. Nevertheless, we should not consider death valuable in itself simply because it is a mechanism of evolution. Technology, even if it violates the usual flow of nature, is not thereby something immoral or destructive. We are technological beings and the products of evolution, and the kind of nature-freedom dualism that makes people to think that technology and nature are incompatible simply doesn't make sense.
True--and, in fact, it makes more sense for someone who really wants to remain anonymous to remain silent and let an imposter be the center of attention. He might have posted to exonerate Dorian because he felt sorry for him, but what does it really matter? It's not like he was under arrest or being investigated by the police. Perhaps he posted to clear Dorian because he didn't like someone else getting credit, even if he won't stand up and take the credit himself. Or maybe Dorian just posted in order to further the confusion and try to trick people into thinking that he isn't the guy.
1. Any computer storage medium capable of storing all of the data in the universe would have to be larger than the universe itself, even if it only stores the basic state (determinate or indeterminate) of all matter in the universe. That's one heck of a computer.
2. We would have no concept of the 'real' world that was not given by this world to us, so we could hardly even suppose that such a world existed. To even hypothesize such a world is almost certainly to reproduce our own world in slightly different terms, and project it onto a mysterious "other." E.g.: Star Trek, women from other planets just happen to be different colors. Hence the idea of a world that is not so mathematically predictable is dependent from the beginning upon our experience of this world and its mathematical characteristics (notwithstanding the complaints that math is not quite so clear-cut as portrayed).
3. This is just a kind of Idealism which, instead of seeing the world of ideas as being more mathematically simplistic, sees it as less. Yet this view is not for that reason any less Idealism.
It's easy to point broad fingers at multiple centuries of people without any real evidence. To accuse the church of a coverup is just wild hearsay because the church makes an easy villain. In the first place, your premise is faulty: the medieval church did not obtain its power from royal mandate. I recommend reading Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners for a better understanding of the complexities of the relationship between church and state in the middle ages.
We're getting there. Next we put a woman inside the robot, and send to fight giant space jellyfish and the space pirates who enslave them. Rainbow hyper beam FTW!
Your concern is understandable, but history simply is not such a straight-forward a competition between papal authority and glorious, humanistic science. In fact, one classic debate over the scientific method was between Pascal and Descartes. Descartes believed that vacuums could not exist based on accepted philosophical (Aristotelian) principles, whereas Pascal argued that only empirical observation can rule in that area--and so he proved the existence of the vacuum through experiment. So which one was the more faithful Catholic? Pascal, actually. Descartes professed to be Catholic (and was, at least formally), but he generally held views more in line with post-Catholic Enlightenment thought, while Pascal was a die-hard Augustinian who firmly believed in traditional theology as well as papal authority--even though that put him under suspicion for his association with Jansenism.
Hmm, that's interesting that he misunderstood the tides--and somewhat surprising, since even in Dante, Aquinas, and others there seems to have been some (admittedly vague) idea that the tides were caused by the moon. A quick Google search brings this up: Here.
Very true. When you analyze the narrative structure of his account it fits a particular kind of mythos that will elicit an emotive response from a particular group of people. This is not to say that the story can be proven false, but it should at least caution people against assuming without any proof that it is true. Part of the appeal of the story is its lack of explanation: no clear reason is given for the intrusive questions about his religion, and his initial reluctance to be scanned does not explain the onslaught of dimwitted and inconsiderate security officials. Open questions allow the story to vary from a too-commonplace story of "my name happened to be on the terrorist watch list," in order to imply that the problems of TSA profiling stretch much farther than simple cases of mistaken identity. In short, one should be skeptical of the story because even while explaining nothing, it accomplishes everything that the audience wants it to. It provides a (groundless, unevidenced) reason for outrage.
The weakest part of the story, in fact, comes at the very end, when the reader (and the author) are already so engaged that the demand for proof is mitigated. His supposed evidence that his apartment was illegally searched is that his photograph went astray. Seriously? What if he simply misplaced it? What if someone else took it? What if his apartment was broken into? We could just as likely believe that Robin Williams broke into his house and stole his photo.
To be fair, I don't like the situation of the TSA either. I have frequently been selected for extra screening because I look Middle Eastern (I'm Mexican) and because, especially when traveling alone, I'm frequently anxious about making it to the plane on time.
There's no such thing as a neutral term. There is only politics. The above poster was actually conscientious by using the most negative terms for both sides: "anti-life" and "anti-choice," because one side fashions itself "pro-choice" and the other "pro-life." But because of politics, in the media the dominant language used favors one side over the other: "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion." They group pro-lifers along with terrorists who bomb abortion clinics. This is like saying that Martin Luther King Jr. belonged to the Black Panthers.
Certainly it's not fair to call pro-choice "anti-life," but neither is it fair to call pro-life "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice." Pro-choice advocates are not fighting for death but for freedom. But pro-life advocates are not fighting against freedom, but for human dignity--for a child who does not choose to die. So what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but politics decides which roses should be considered sweeter.
Yeah, it's funny, I'm from Arizona and Valley Fever has never been a big deal to us. We don't even think about it, because it's usually never dangerous. I've thought that perhaps it's more dangerous for people who don't grow up around it, because we have been exposed to it in small levels for a long time. Whatever the case, it is likely that the incidence of the disease is higher than recorded, since it is often just written off as a flu-like illness unless it is severe.
Exactly--this claim is overly generalized to fit all 'networks.' The problem, then, is that this is less science and more philosophy. If its claims are valid, then its applicability to any particular network needs to be heavily filtered through practical considerations and common sense. But then, we still have to justify in the first place the use of a broad (and even metaphysical) model as determinative (and not merely illustrative) within empirical science. I'm not sure such a justification can be made on these terms (i.e., in regard to a general theory of network repair).
Personally I'd like WHOIS to be semi-private; public enough that law enforcement can find out who's who easily enough (just as the ownership of cars, houses, etc. is not private), but with some privacy so that I can express controversial views without it affecting my academic career. Parts of academia are very, very political, and people sometimes scour the Internet looking for dirt on their enemies.
Slashdot Mirror
lol, it was sarcasm. But the real math is in the profits. One could construct an economic formula to represent the profitability of fiction in popular markets relative to the general unexpectedness of its events and the use of cliffhangers and secrecy to keep the reader attached. I say "unexpectedness" and not "unpredictability" because it may really be that such outcomes, because they are determined by the desire to compel and surprise the reader in order to make the book profitable, are actually extremely predictable.
For example, I used to annoy my wife my predicting the ending to NCIS episodes long in advance. The killer would almost always be (1) the person you least suspect, because the character has no real rational justification for the crime in the early episode and (2) the one superfluous character introduced in the episode, since they didn't want to pay much and dedicate screen time to characters who did not push the plot forward. In short, because the writers of the show were trying so hard to be surprising, they would cook up contrived motives that could be presented in the last five minutes of the episode, and then make the one person who seemed most innocent actually turn out to be guilty. But then, this is predictable. It's just like how if you've watched enough episodes of House, M.D., you can easily guess that the person who first gets sick during the prologue is not the actual person who's going to pass out and end up in Dr. House's care.
In short, it is somewhat silly to analyze literature in terms of a kind of Asimovian statistical "psychohistory," when the real principles that structure the literature are so evident. For example, whether or not a particular character appears in future books is not determined relative to characters' appearances in prior books, but according to the MO of the author, which is not something that remains static over the years but which develops and fluctuates according to his historically-conditioned priorities. Vale is honest about the limitations of the statistical approach, but what I think is necessary is to recognize how that which derives from human freedom but ultimately manifests in statistical ways is always also at the same time codetermined by implicit principles and formulae (e.g. the economic viability of such and such kind of writing), especially economic ones.
The next book opens with an interesting but hard to follow prologue concerning random throwaway characters that you never heard of and will never hear about again.
Almost nothing really significant happens for tens of chapters, even though every chapter bleeds into the next with a cliffhanger making you want to read the next one. Plus there's several gratuitous sex scenes to keep the Slashdotters interested.
After many chapters of pretty much no development, something horrific happens toward the end making the fans say, "NO! He can't do that!" and so they read on.
It closes off with an unsatisfying cliffhanger ending with a teaser epilogue that advertises yet another book. We still learn pretty much nothing about what is north of the wall and any protagonists we rooted for are that much farther from achieving anything good. There's no deep moral significance and nothing to be learned about life except that one is better off not being a character in one of George R.R. Martin's books.
Rinse and repeat until the series becomes unprofitable. (Unless Martin gets hit by a car, seven novels simply will not be enough.)
I myself miss Sim City 2000 the most, especially for the wacky newspapers.
Grant is the only one I'll miss. I might watch the show again now that the other two are gone.
Nah, they'll be perfect when nuclear winter comes around. ;o)
I don't think it will ever be a problem, anyway, inasmuch as free-will is not something that can be developed through a quantitative increase in heuristics and processing power. It is a qualitatively different kind of intelligence, and not something that we can invent. The problem, however, will always be that because people believe that they can endow something with free-will, there will be (A) attempts to create superior robots that mimic free-will to a convincing degree, and (B) people who foolishly believe that their AI has free-will, and therefore should be treated as a person. It's analogous to the way in which many people are convinced that their dogs qualify as persons on the same level as human beings. In the future, it is likely that people will become so attached to AIs that they go so far as to insist that they are people.
Maintenance manuals are a good idea, but VR editions would probably cost more time and money than a company is willing to spend, especially when they'd rather have to buy something new than fix something old.
One can argue for increased protein, but the frequent claim that this represents a better, more "natural" way of living is suspect. We have to come to terms with the fact that humanity's natural state is technological. We cannot even survive in most of the climates in which we live without clothing, which is a basic form of technology. The protests against processed food are, in a sense, highly dishonest, because (1) they delude themselves into thinking that the technological aspect of our food is the problem, rather than any issue of self-control, and (2) especially for Americans the call for government regulation shows that while we pretend that the market itself can regulate everything and set the terms of value, we are uneasy with the results, which tend to devalue human life and well-being for the sake of profit.
Besides, I certainly don't need to go to the freezer section to buy unhealthy, fatty food. Some of my favorite homemade meals, such as traditional Mexican enchiladas, are bad enough for me.
Yeah, every so often they decide once again that the cable modem that I own must somehow belong to them, and they start billing me for renting my own equipment.
I think there's definitely something about gamertags that impacts the way people respond to you. I remember when playing Gears or War or Halo there seemed to be an unspoken policy of avoiding being on the team of someone with an all-lowercase name, because it at least seemed to often be the case that such a person was a young kid or a newer player. Of course, looks are deceptive. There are many good players who use all-lowercase gamertags. But even if we cognitively know that our assumptions are faulty, that does not stop us from unconsciously acting upon them before we think about it. (Hence Pascal says that human reason is subject to imagination: you could put the world's smartest philosopher on a secure plank hanging over a cliff, and even though he knows that he won't fall, he will probably still be afraid of it.)
The only name change I paid for on Xbox Live was to make my gamertag more interesting and less newbish, so that other experienced players would be less likely to avoid being on my team. You can say that one's skill should speak for itself, but you have to win a game first in order for your skill to speak, and in team-based matches a set of bad teammates can easily make you look like a newb.
So most of them will choose names that give the impression of a callow youth trying to grossly overcompensate for their (obvious) inadequacies. Not only are these individuals easy to spot, their choices are more likely to make them targets for scorn and derision rather than convey the impression they are better than they really are.
I agree. The mark of many newb gamertags will often be that he or she chooses a name that he or she *thinks* is intimidating. It would be better to imitate very closely gamertags of players who *are* intimidating, when these have some distinctive character. I opted for something in the middle, which would not look like it was trying to be too clever but would not immediately appear to be newbish.
Yeah. One can say that death is merely built into the system if the system itself is considered determinative of all value. Hence one can agree that from a naturalistic and materialistic standpoint, one can no more say that death is wrong than that fly death is wrong, or that evolution itself is wrong. But if we believe in a system of value that extends beyond the raw system of evolution--if we believe that there is anything worthwhile to human life beyond being a mere instantiation of the power of evolution and the endless cycle of life and death--then we can believe that death is wrong.
Not that I think this criticism applies to what Jhon said, but a great inconsistency lies in the fact that many of us cannot help but believe that our lives are worth something, that the people we love should not simply die, but still we profess a nihilistic materialism that cannot of itself ground the value of human life. The question we have to ask then is whether our striving toward improvements in medical science is merely for the sake of showing off the wonders of technology, or whether we really believe that people should live longer. If we answer the latter, are we not implying that life is morally superior to death, that technology is not wrong if it makes us more than another cog in the evolutionary system?
I have read theological attempts to claim that human death is justifiable simply in view of evolution and the cycle of life. They argue that even if we die horrible deaths, at least we are doing good by feeding the worms that eat our bodies. But who can actually profess this view in all honesty apart from depression or mere cynicism? How many of us can really say, "At least the poor worms will have something to eat"?
That aside, I do agree with Jhon that the moral value of extending life is not necessarily the same at that of living forever. Nevertheless, we should not consider death valuable in itself simply because it is a mechanism of evolution. Technology, even if it violates the usual flow of nature, is not thereby something immoral or destructive. We are technological beings and the products of evolution, and the kind of nature-freedom dualism that makes people to think that technology and nature are incompatible simply doesn't make sense.
True--and, in fact, it makes more sense for someone who really wants to remain anonymous to remain silent and let an imposter be the center of attention. He might have posted to exonerate Dorian because he felt sorry for him, but what does it really matter? It's not like he was under arrest or being investigated by the police. Perhaps he posted to clear Dorian because he didn't like someone else getting credit, even if he won't stand up and take the credit himself. Or maybe Dorian just posted in order to further the confusion and try to trick people into thinking that he isn't the guy.
1. Any computer storage medium capable of storing all of the data in the universe would have to be larger than the universe itself, even if it only stores the basic state (determinate or indeterminate) of all matter in the universe. That's one heck of a computer.
2. We would have no concept of the 'real' world that was not given by this world to us, so we could hardly even suppose that such a world existed. To even hypothesize such a world is almost certainly to reproduce our own world in slightly different terms, and project it onto a mysterious "other." E.g.: Star Trek, women from other planets just happen to be different colors. Hence the idea of a world that is not so mathematically predictable is dependent from the beginning upon our experience of this world and its mathematical characteristics (notwithstanding the complaints that math is not quite so clear-cut as portrayed).
3. This is just a kind of Idealism which, instead of seeing the world of ideas as being more mathematically simplistic, sees it as less. Yet this view is not for that reason any less Idealism.
Maybe it's not the *idea* of capitalism, but it is the kind of capitalism that we practice.
It's easy to point broad fingers at multiple centuries of people without any real evidence. To accuse the church of a coverup is just wild hearsay because the church makes an easy villain. In the first place, your premise is faulty: the medieval church did not obtain its power from royal mandate. I recommend reading Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners for a better understanding of the complexities of the relationship between church and state in the middle ages.
We're getting there. Next we put a woman inside the robot, and send to fight giant space jellyfish and the space pirates who enslave them. Rainbow hyper beam FTW!
Very true.
Your concern is understandable, but history simply is not such a straight-forward a competition between papal authority and glorious, humanistic science. In fact, one classic debate over the scientific method was between Pascal and Descartes. Descartes believed that vacuums could not exist based on accepted philosophical (Aristotelian) principles, whereas Pascal argued that only empirical observation can rule in that area--and so he proved the existence of the vacuum through experiment. So which one was the more faithful Catholic? Pascal, actually. Descartes professed to be Catholic (and was, at least formally), but he generally held views more in line with post-Catholic Enlightenment thought, while Pascal was a die-hard Augustinian who firmly believed in traditional theology as well as papal authority--even though that put him under suspicion for his association with Jansenism.
Hmm, that's interesting that he misunderstood the tides--and somewhat surprising, since even in Dante, Aquinas, and others there seems to have been some (admittedly vague) idea that the tides were caused by the moon. A quick Google search brings this up: Here.
...is a geek supposed to get a girlfriend?
NASA Scientists Plan to Approach Girl by 2018
Very true. When you analyze the narrative structure of his account it fits a particular kind of mythos that will elicit an emotive response from a particular group of people. This is not to say that the story can be proven false, but it should at least caution people against assuming without any proof that it is true. Part of the appeal of the story is its lack of explanation: no clear reason is given for the intrusive questions about his religion, and his initial reluctance to be scanned does not explain the onslaught of dimwitted and inconsiderate security officials. Open questions allow the story to vary from a too-commonplace story of "my name happened to be on the terrorist watch list," in order to imply that the problems of TSA profiling stretch much farther than simple cases of mistaken identity. In short, one should be skeptical of the story because even while explaining nothing, it accomplishes everything that the audience wants it to. It provides a (groundless, unevidenced) reason for outrage.
The weakest part of the story, in fact, comes at the very end, when the reader (and the author) are already so engaged that the demand for proof is mitigated. His supposed evidence that his apartment was illegally searched is that his photograph went astray. Seriously? What if he simply misplaced it? What if someone else took it? What if his apartment was broken into? We could just as likely believe that Robin Williams broke into his house and stole his photo.
To be fair, I don't like the situation of the TSA either. I have frequently been selected for extra screening because I look Middle Eastern (I'm Mexican) and because, especially when traveling alone, I'm frequently anxious about making it to the plane on time.
There's no such thing as a neutral term. There is only politics. The above poster was actually conscientious by using the most negative terms for both sides: "anti-life" and "anti-choice," because one side fashions itself "pro-choice" and the other "pro-life." But because of politics, in the media the dominant language used favors one side over the other: "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion." They group pro-lifers along with terrorists who bomb abortion clinics. This is like saying that Martin Luther King Jr. belonged to the Black Panthers.
Certainly it's not fair to call pro-choice "anti-life," but neither is it fair to call pro-life "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice." Pro-choice advocates are not fighting for death but for freedom. But pro-life advocates are not fighting against freedom, but for human dignity--for a child who does not choose to die. So what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but politics decides which roses should be considered sweeter.
Yeah, it's funny, I'm from Arizona and Valley Fever has never been a big deal to us. We don't even think about it, because it's usually never dangerous. I've thought that perhaps it's more dangerous for people who don't grow up around it, because we have been exposed to it in small levels for a long time. Whatever the case, it is likely that the incidence of the disease is higher than recorded, since it is often just written off as a flu-like illness unless it is severe.
Exactly--this claim is overly generalized to fit all 'networks.' The problem, then, is that this is less science and more philosophy. If its claims are valid, then its applicability to any particular network needs to be heavily filtered through practical considerations and common sense. But then, we still have to justify in the first place the use of a broad (and even metaphysical) model as determinative (and not merely illustrative) within empirical science. I'm not sure such a justification can be made on these terms (i.e., in regard to a general theory of network repair).
Personally I'd like WHOIS to be semi-private; public enough that law enforcement can find out who's who easily enough (just as the ownership of cars, houses, etc. is not private), but with some privacy so that I can express controversial views without it affecting my academic career. Parts of academia are very, very political, and people sometimes scour the Internet looking for dirt on their enemies.