When I was young, if we saw a car comming down the street, someone would yell car, and our game of kickball or whatever would stop untill the car passed. Now, you have to all but run them over to get them to move out of the middle of the road.
Perspective colors all.
When you were the one playing kickball in the street, you may have thought that you and your friends had a perfect record in getting out of the way of cars. Now that you're the one driving the car, the damn kids have to be "all but run over".
Unless you had a guy with a stopwatch timing you then and another guy timing the kids now, selective memory could be making today's youth seem less considerate than you were when you were a kid.
Do you really think you have always been perfectly mature and respectful of others at every point in your life?
At the risk of veering slightly off-topic, what exactly do you think we have now? Cities and states set speed limits artificially low, then allow the cops to pick and choose who gets slapped with a speeding ticket.
Changing every speed limit sign in the country to "We'll let you know" would hardly be any fuzzier than the current system.
Less material to make the product..., no shipping cost from the publisher to the distributor, so why the same price?
In the absence of meaningful competition, any savings in expenses are kept by the company. Occasionally the savings are passed along to shareholders (dividends). Usually, however, it ends up as bonuses for upper management.
Ah, the crux of the issue. "Who cares if it might be a human life? It's in the way of my rutting."
That you consider this to be "the crux of the issue" strongly suggests that your problem with abortion isn't the harming of innocent life, but that "those damned heathens are out there fornicating and I don't have any way to stop it!"
This is the sole reason why I (and many other moderates, I suspect) refuse to support the pro-life movement. A non-trivial number of pro-lifers aren't so much concerned with the life of the unborn child as they are about meteing out punishment to those who dared to engage in intercourse out of wedlock. If there were such fervor for the well-being of the child after birth as well as before it, then the protest-outside-of-clinics crowd would be picketing in the streets every time the local department of family services allowed a child to die at the hands of an abusive caregiver.
Instead, we often see a rather jolting shift in attitude after the birth of a child. What once was "a most holy and blessed fetus, not to be harmed in any way" suddenly becomes "the spawn of a welfare whore, sucking at the teat of government entitlement programs at the cost of productive taxpayers like you and me."
Of course, many (probably most) pro-lifers can stomach this hypocrisy as little as I can, and donate their time and money to protect children after birth as well as before. Yet the pro-life movement will never achieve any meaningful goals until it drives zealots like those behind the "Wanted: Dead or, umm, Dead" Nuremburg posters out of the movement.
I've a friend in the Singapore navy, though, and he says that the American Navy is very arrogant, and likes to show off by steaming close by, but being completely invisible on radar.
Though I don't doubt that the U.S. Navy indulges itself with this kind of ego-stroking, I find it a little hard to believe that this goes on with full permission of the national security bean-counters.
Though "security through obscurity" is anathema to your average/. reader, the philosophy does make sense for stealth craft and state-of-the-art weaponry*. When you parade your best toys in public, you're almost begging for foreign agents ("script-kiddies", if you will) to show up and start probing your gear for weaknesses and vulnerabilities (e.g. "the Commanche tail rotor causes this odd type of distortion in radar signals. By recalibrating our equipment to look for it, we can achieve missile lock with our SAM units").
The benign form of intimidation mentioned by your friend in the Singapore Navy heads off a lot of aggression before it starts, but there's also something to be said for only letting your enemy begin to develop counter-measures when it's too late for them to possibly come up with something.
* note that this assumes you've already probed the hell out of your gear with equipment equal-to-or-better-than that available to likely opponents.
Dance Dance Revolution and the next Big Thing?
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2
Considering the robust success of DDR, I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.
While the last thing American arcades need is yet another Street Fighter clone, this combination of concepts would almost certainly be different enough to draw in the most jaded fighter fan.
Considering the typical Slashdot reader...
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2
I'm surprised the "Hygiene is a Hazard" article didn't get higher billing...
Outstanding points on why a direct democracy cannot work. However, there are several flaws with the "proportional democracy" model of the Lower House that you didn't mention in your post.
First and foremost, being able to give parties representation in the legislature based on percentage of the national vote is definitely a mixed blessing. The "coalition building" you speak of would ideally force politicians to negotiate and compromise in their legislation packages, but in reality tends to increase the amount of gridlock in government.
As a real-world example of this, I point to the Israeli government several months ago when Ariel Sharon succeeded Ehud Barak as Prime Minister. At the time, there was significant uncertainty whether Sharon would be able to assemble a coalition in the Knesset that would allow a working government to form. He managed to do it, but if he hadn't, Israel would have been without a functional government.
Proportional democracy also tends to let "fringe" voices in. While this makes under-represented groups like the Libertarians happy, it also makes certain extremist groups (like communists and neo-nazis) VERY happy, as they can definitely muster the votes to get a seat or two.
The two-party system of the US certainly isn't ideal (I don't particularly like being a Libertarian in ultra-Democratic Palm Beach County), but I'm not sure that a proportional system would REALLY be any better.
Blizzard sent a letter this week demanding the owner of blizzard.net turn over the domain to them or face legal action.
Disclaimer 1: I am NOT a lawyer. Don't even THINK about considering the following information as legal advice, as any lawyer worth his/her salt could probably find a way to weasel around what I'm about to say.
Disclaimer 2: I am, however, taking an Internet Law class this semester, and this is one of the topics we've examined.
That said, in the course of this class, we looked at a case VERY similiar to this one, which can be cited as (for you lawyer-types out there) 189 F.3d 868, or Avery Dennison Corporation v Jerry Sumpton (US Court of Appeals, 9th District).
The background of this case was as follows: Mr. Sumpton bought up a number of common surname domains (e.g. yourlastname.com) in order to resell vanity email addresses from them (e.g. jon@katz.com). Two of the last names he registered in this fashion were "Avery" and "Dennison", resulting in avery.com and dennison.com.
Anyhow, Avery Dennison (a supposedly very well-known office supply company) got pissy about it and sued to acquire the domain names from Mr. Sumpton.
The district court initially granted summary judgement in favor of Avery Dennison, and Mr. Sumpton appealed. The appelate court reversed the lower court's decision based on the fact that Avery Dennison, Inc.'s trademarked name didn't meet the "famousness" element required for trademark dilution protection (you basically have to be as well-known "Nike" or "Coke" to qualify), and also that because "Avery" and "Dennison" are common surnames and already registered by a number of non-office-supply companies.
Now, Blizzard's case is slightly stronger (in my VERY nonexperienced eyes) because "Blizzard" isn't a typical last name, and a "reasonable" person could possibly think that Blizzard the gaming company was offering this service, instead of some third party doing so.
That said, if Avery Dennison (which has been around since the 1800s) doesn't qualify as being "famous" enough to qualify for dilution protection, then I doubt a software company who's been around for far less time will either, unless a less-than-bright judge presides over the case.
Let me reiterate once again that I am not a lawyer. I'm merely posting this rather crude summary of the case because I happen to have a bit more exposure to this wrinkle of law than others might, and I wanted to give some measure of reassurance that if blizzard.net has adequate representation and a judge whose head isn't permanently buried within his/her rectum, they've got a reasonable chance of winning this one.
Why the hell Blizzard is wasting their time with this kind of crap instead of getting Diablo II finished, I'll never know...
But in general, the commercials were lame. Concur?
Definitely.
Aside from a handful of standouts (most of which have been mentioned by now), this year's offering really didn't live up to the distinction of being "Super Bowl Ads."
A good one that hasn't been mentioned yet was the Oldsmobile spot spoofing The Gap's "Just Can't Get Enough" ad. It started off looking like the spoofee, but the people just kept getting uglier and uglier until the car finally ran them off the soundstage. The group of people I was with literally hit the floor laughing at that point.
Didn't quite compare to the dancing monkey and cheetah commercials, but it was light-years ahead of the majority of the *.com ads.
Your story reminds me of another commercial hawking what I think are Daewoo's submissions to the SUV market. It features two completely yuppie women (both driving SUVs) who simultaneously notice a parking spot and subsequently notice the other woman eyeing it as well. Some serious off-roading occurs in the race to get there first, during which time a caption is shown that reads:
"No parking spot is this important. Okay, maybe it is, but please don't do this."
No matter how many times I see this commercial, I usually end up sitting on the floor laughing by the time it ends.
that Yahoo doesn't really care much about the nature of content on the Internet, so long as they are able to get people to find it via their website.
Searches for off-the-top-of-my-head terms (i.e. beastiality and necrophilia) show that Yahoo will quite happily index content that most people favoring Internet censorship would want suppressed.
Of course, having their listings indexed by category makes it fairly easy for them to prune the database of anything they deem inappropriate, but the more they do this, the more they risk self-destructing, as the business model for your typical portal site depends upon instilling a mindset into your users that your portal is the best way to find anything and everything they want on the Net. If people were to start getting hit with tons of "No match found" messages when looking for even slightly-illicit things, I'd be willing to bet that Yahoo would tank faster than a Mars probe set with English units.
If the camera makes the high street safer and the criminal more scared, is it a totally bad thing?
The problem with this logic is that the definition of who is a "criminal" can be a very fluid thing. The most innocuous thing today can be a major crime tomorrow, should the government decide to make it so.
Even worse (and a bit more likely, IMHO) is the possibility that corporations will look upon this technology as the Holy Grail of obtaining marketing data. Right now, companies can only track your purchasing in very crude ways (such as grocery store clubs and the like). However, think of the abuses possible if this system was put in your local shopping mall for the ostensible purpose of "saving the children from baby-snatchers" (or some similar nonsense involving kids*). Once this system is in place, companies could not only associate your face with everything you buy, but also anything you pick up to look at, or even items you glance at in store windows as you pass by. Once they have your face associated with a shopping list, they cross-reference that data with the database of driver's license information (including photo, name, and address) that they bought from the government**, and spend the next five years happily filling your mailbox with flyers imploring you to buy their product.
Don't get me wrong, the potential benefits of this system are quite large, but the $64,000 question is whether the potential abuses are even larger.
* Yes, I realize that this is a legitimate problem, but using this technology to combat it is a bit like using a bazooka to kill roaches... extreme overkill.
I would think that police departments might take an interest in these as well (excepting for the high cost, of course). With the exception of certain flaws that others have mentioned (i.e. being knocked on your back) these things would seem to be ideal for riot gear, especially if his "bear repellant spray" arm cannon could be outfitted with tear gas (or maybe pepper spray) instead.
Besides, the military has a tendency to be very traditional about the weapons it uses. It usually takes a crushing defeat or extreme circumstances (e.g. Pearl Harbor was a major factor in the rise to prominence of U.S. aircraft carriers) for the armed forces to adopt anything as radical as these suits.
>> The powerpc chip is meant for macintosh products and thats all the is to it.
Not so. IBM has been making heavy-duty UNIX workstations based on PowerPC chips (such as the RS-6000, if memory serves me correctly) for quite a while now, and Motorola has also been selling slightly-modified versions of the chips for use in embedded systems for a long time.
Apple may be the most noted user of PowerPC technology, but it's far from being the ONLY user of it.
>> The anti-Microsoft sentiment is rather high at Georgia Tech.
I'd have to disagree with you on this. While it's true that the current official policy is that both Windows and MacOS are supported, it's been my experience that the bulk of software used in my classes (I'm a CompE major) has been available exclusively for Windows, necessitating long hours in labs for myself and those others who don't happen to have a Windows box in their room.
An even stronger indication of "how things really are" is the fact that the overwhelming majority of students on this campus have Windows machines, with a portion of that crowd (typically CS students) setting up a dual-boot scheme to run Linux. The MacOS is used (to my knowledge) by an extremely sparse number of people outside of computing labs, as I've yet to find more than a handful of other Mac owners on this campus.
I believe the reason for this isn't so much platform prejudice (although that certainly factors into it, especially among the student body), but the undeniable fact that there just aren't the number of engineering-based applications for the MacOS (and possibly Linux/UNIX, though I may be wrong on this) as there are for the Windows OS's, thus making Microsoft's dominance pretty much a fait accompli at a school so devoted to engineering.
It was at -1 when I posted. It got promoted back to 0 soon after.
In retrospect, the "learn to moderate" line was needlessly inflammatory, but "censoring" useful information has always been a hot button of mine, and as people are prone to do occasionally, I knee-jerked.
Yet another object lesson in the pitfalls of flaming, even if it seems justified at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was young, if we saw a car comming down the street, someone would yell car, and our game of kickball or whatever would stop untill the car passed. Now, you have to all but run them over to get them to move out of the middle of the road.
Perspective colors all.
When you were the one playing kickball in the street, you may have thought that you and your friends had a perfect record in getting out of the way of cars. Now that you're the one driving the car, the damn kids have to be "all but run over".
Unless you had a guy with a stopwatch timing you then and another guy timing the kids now, selective memory could be making today's youth seem less considerate than you were when you were a kid.
Do you really think you have always been perfectly mature and respectful of others at every point in your life?
I could have written a better script if I stuck a felt tip marker up my ass and then played twister for a few hours.
I've always wondered how Mr. Goatse made a living...
Just imagine fuzzy speed limits.
At the risk of veering slightly off-topic, what exactly do you think we have now? Cities and states set speed limits artificially low, then allow the cops to pick and choose who gets slapped with a speeding ticket.
Changing every speed limit sign in the country to "We'll let you know" would hardly be any fuzzier than the current system.
Less material to make the product..., no shipping cost from the publisher to the distributor, so why the same price?
In the absence of meaningful competition, any savings in expenses are kept by the company. Occasionally the savings are passed along to shareholders (dividends). Usually, however, it ends up as bonuses for upper management.
My great uncle claims to have done this once, but no one in the family believes him.
Every time he brings it up, the rest of us call him a lye-er.
Why settle for death when we have far worse torments at our disposal?
That you consider this to be "the crux of the issue" strongly suggests that your problem with abortion isn't the harming of innocent life, but that "those damned heathens are out there fornicating and I don't have any way to stop it!"
This is the sole reason why I (and many other moderates, I suspect) refuse to support the pro-life movement. A non-trivial number of pro-lifers aren't so much concerned with the life of the unborn child as they are about meteing out punishment to those who dared to engage in intercourse out of wedlock. If there were such fervor for the well-being of the child after birth as well as before it, then the protest-outside-of-clinics crowd would be picketing in the streets every time the local department of family services allowed a child to die at the hands of an abusive caregiver.
Instead, we often see a rather jolting shift in attitude after the birth of a child. What once was "a most holy and blessed fetus, not to be harmed in any way" suddenly becomes "the spawn of a welfare whore, sucking at the teat of government entitlement programs at the cost of productive taxpayers like you and me."
Of course, many (probably most) pro-lifers can stomach this hypocrisy as little as I can, and donate their time and money to protect children after birth as well as before. Yet the pro-life movement will never achieve any meaningful goals until it drives zealots like those behind the "Wanted: Dead or, umm, Dead" Nuremburg posters out of the movement.
Though I don't doubt that the U.S. Navy indulges itself with this kind of ego-stroking, I find it a little hard to believe that this goes on with full permission of the national security bean-counters.
Though "security through obscurity" is anathema to your average /. reader, the philosophy does make sense for stealth craft and state-of-the-art weaponry*. When you parade your best toys in public, you're almost begging for foreign agents ("script-kiddies", if you will) to show up and start probing your gear for weaknesses and vulnerabilities (e.g. "the Commanche tail rotor causes this odd type of distortion in radar signals. By recalibrating our equipment to look for it, we can achieve missile lock with our SAM units").
The benign form of intimidation mentioned by your friend in the Singapore Navy heads off a lot of aggression before it starts, but there's also something to be said for only letting your enemy begin to develop counter-measures when it's too late for them to possibly come up with something.
* note that this assumes you've already probed the hell out of your gear with equipment equal-to-or-better-than that available to likely opponents.
While the last thing American arcades need is yet another Street Fighter clone, this combination of concepts would almost certainly be different enough to draw in the most jaded fighter fan.
I'm surprised the "Hygiene is a Hazard" article didn't get higher billing...
(C'mon. You know you laughed...)
Outstanding points on why a direct democracy cannot work. However, there are several flaws with the "proportional democracy" model of the Lower House that you didn't mention in your post.
First and foremost, being able to give parties representation in the legislature based on percentage of the national vote is definitely a mixed blessing. The "coalition building" you speak of would ideally force politicians to negotiate and compromise in their legislation packages, but in reality tends to increase the amount of gridlock in government.
As a real-world example of this, I point to the Israeli government several months ago when Ariel Sharon succeeded Ehud Barak as Prime Minister. At the time, there was significant uncertainty whether Sharon would be able to assemble a coalition in the Knesset that would allow a working government to form. He managed to do it, but if he hadn't, Israel would have been without a functional government.
Proportional democracy also tends to let "fringe" voices in. While this makes under-represented groups like the Libertarians happy, it also makes certain extremist groups (like communists and neo-nazis) VERY happy, as they can definitely muster the votes to get a seat or two.
The two-party system of the US certainly isn't ideal (I don't particularly like being a Libertarian in ultra-Democratic Palm Beach County), but I'm not sure that a proportional system would REALLY be any better.
Blizzard sent a letter this week demanding the owner of blizzard.net turn over the domain to them or face legal action.
Disclaimer 1: I am NOT a lawyer. Don't even THINK about considering the following information as legal advice, as any lawyer worth his/her salt could probably find a way to weasel around what I'm about to say.
Disclaimer 2: I am, however, taking an Internet Law class this semester, and this is one of the topics we've examined.
That said, in the course of this class, we looked at a case VERY similiar to this one, which can be cited as (for you lawyer-types out there) 189 F.3d 868, or Avery Dennison Corporation v Jerry Sumpton (US Court of Appeals, 9th District).
The background of this case was as follows: Mr. Sumpton bought up a number of common surname domains (e.g. yourlastname.com) in order to resell vanity email addresses from them (e.g. jon@katz.com). Two of the last names he registered in this fashion were "Avery" and "Dennison", resulting in avery.com and dennison.com.
Anyhow, Avery Dennison (a supposedly very well-known office supply company) got pissy about it and sued to acquire the domain names from Mr. Sumpton.
The district court initially granted summary judgement in favor of Avery Dennison, and Mr. Sumpton appealed. The appelate court reversed the lower court's decision based on the fact that Avery Dennison, Inc.'s trademarked name didn't meet the "famousness" element required for trademark dilution protection (you basically have to be as well-known "Nike" or "Coke" to qualify), and also that because "Avery" and "Dennison" are common surnames and already registered by a number of non-office-supply companies.
Now, Blizzard's case is slightly stronger (in my VERY nonexperienced eyes) because "Blizzard" isn't a typical last name, and a "reasonable" person could possibly think that Blizzard the gaming company was offering this service, instead of some third party doing so.
That said, if Avery Dennison (which has been around since the 1800s) doesn't qualify as being "famous" enough to qualify for dilution protection, then I doubt a software company who's been around for far less time will either, unless a less-than-bright judge presides over the case.
Let me reiterate once again that I am not a lawyer. I'm merely posting this rather crude summary of the case because I happen to have a bit more exposure to this wrinkle of law than others might, and I wanted to give some measure of reassurance that if blizzard.net has adequate representation and a judge whose head isn't permanently buried within his/her rectum, they've got a reasonable chance of winning this one.
Why the hell Blizzard is wasting their time with this kind of crap instead of getting Diablo II finished, I'll never know...
But in general, the commercials were lame. Concur?
Definitely.
Aside from a handful of standouts (most of which have been mentioned by now), this year's offering really didn't live up to the distinction of being "Super Bowl Ads."
A good one that hasn't been mentioned yet was the Oldsmobile spot spoofing The Gap's "Just Can't Get Enough" ad. It started off looking like the spoofee, but the people just kept getting uglier and uglier until the car finally ran them off the soundstage. The group of people I was with literally hit the floor laughing at that point.
Didn't quite compare to the dancing monkey and cheetah commercials, but it was light-years ahead of the majority of the *.com ads.
Actually, the name of the movie was Gattaca. The suitability of it as a variation of Pacino's "Attica! Attica!" chant cannot be denied, though.
Your story reminds me of another commercial hawking what I think are Daewoo's submissions to the SUV market. It features two completely yuppie women (both driving SUVs) who simultaneously notice a parking spot and subsequently notice the other woman eyeing it as well. Some serious off-roading occurs in the race to get there first, during which time a caption is shown that reads:
"No parking spot is this important. Okay, maybe it is, but please don't do this."
No matter how many times I see this commercial, I usually end up sitting on the floor laughing by the time it ends.
that Yahoo doesn't really care much about the nature of content on the Internet, so long as they are able to get people to find it via their website.
Searches for off-the-top-of-my-head terms (i.e. beastiality and necrophilia) show that Yahoo will quite happily index content that most people favoring Internet censorship would want suppressed.
Of course, having their listings indexed by category makes it fairly easy for them to prune the database of anything they deem inappropriate, but the more they do this, the more they risk self-destructing, as the business model for your typical portal site depends upon instilling a mindset into your users that your portal is the best way to find anything and everything they want on the Net. If people were to start getting hit with tons of "No match found" messages when looking for even slightly-illicit things, I'd be willing to bet that Yahoo would tank faster than a Mars probe set with English units.
If the camera makes the high street safer and the criminal more scared, is it a totally bad thing?
The problem with this logic is that the definition of who is a "criminal" can be a very fluid thing. The most innocuous thing today can be a major crime tomorrow, should the government decide to make it so.
Even worse (and a bit more likely, IMHO) is the possibility that corporations will look upon this technology as the Holy Grail of obtaining marketing data. Right now, companies can only track your purchasing in very crude ways (such as grocery store clubs and the like). However, think of the abuses possible if this system was put in your local shopping mall for the ostensible purpose of "saving the children from baby-snatchers" (or some similar nonsense involving kids*). Once this system is in place, companies could not only associate your face with everything you buy, but also anything you pick up to look at, or even items you glance at in store windows as you pass by. Once they have your face associated with a shopping list, they cross-reference that data with the database of driver's license information (including photo, name, and address) that they bought from the government**, and spend the next five years happily filling your mailbox with flyers imploring you to buy their product.
Don't get me wrong, the potential benefits of this system are quite large, but the $64,000 question is whether the potential abuses are even larger.
* Yes, I realize that this is a legitimate problem, but using this technology to combat it is a bit like using a bazooka to kill roaches... extreme overkill.
** But that is a subject for another rant.
I would think that police departments might take an interest in these as well (excepting for the high cost, of course). With the exception of certain flaws that others have mentioned (i.e. being knocked on your back) these things would seem to be ideal for riot gear, especially if his "bear repellant spray" arm cannon could be outfitted with tear gas (or maybe pepper spray) instead.
Besides, the military has a tendency to be very traditional about the weapons it uses. It usually takes a crushing defeat or extreme circumstances (e.g. Pearl Harbor was a major factor in the rise to prominence of U.S. aircraft carriers) for the armed forces to adopt anything as radical as these suits.
>> The powerpc chip is meant for macintosh products and thats all the is to it.
Not so. IBM has been making heavy-duty UNIX workstations based on PowerPC chips (such as the RS-6000, if memory serves me correctly) for quite a while now, and Motorola has also been selling slightly-modified versions of the chips for use in embedded systems for a long time.
Apple may be the most noted user of PowerPC technology, but it's far from being the ONLY user of it.
>> The anti-Microsoft sentiment is rather high at Georgia Tech.
I'd have to disagree with you on this. While it's true that the current official policy is that both Windows and MacOS are supported, it's been my experience that the bulk of software used in my classes (I'm a CompE major) has been available exclusively for Windows, necessitating long hours in labs for myself and those others who don't happen to have a Windows box in their room.
An even stronger indication of "how things really are" is the fact that the overwhelming majority of students on this campus have Windows machines, with a portion of that crowd (typically CS students) setting up a dual-boot scheme to run Linux. The MacOS is used (to my knowledge) by an extremely sparse number of people outside of computing labs, as I've yet to find more than a handful of other Mac owners on this campus.
I believe the reason for this isn't so much platform prejudice (although that certainly factors into it, especially among the student body), but the undeniable fact that there just aren't the number of engineering-based applications for the MacOS (and possibly Linux/UNIX, though I may be wrong on this) as there are for the Windows OS's, thus making Microsoft's dominance pretty much a fait accompli at a school so devoted to engineering.
Actually, he's been working on a digital photography utility called Cameraid.
So although he's been quiet on the gaming front, he's still maintaining a presence with his other projects.
Why not just "geek"?
Think about it. Both "sides" already know what it means, and it can be verbed fairly well:
"He geeked his copy of Windows to run five seconds without crashing."
"She's geeking up a new filter for gimp at the moment."
Granted, it sounds strange, but most new words do until they've been used for a bit.
It was at -1 when I posted. It got promoted back to 0 soon after.
In retrospect, the "learn to moderate" line was needlessly inflammatory, but "censoring" useful information has always been a hot button of mine, and as people are prone to do occasionally, I knee-jerked.
Yet another object lesson in the pitfalls of flaming, even if it seems justified at the moment.
Seeing as how a NY Times article is referenced in the main post, the previous comment is anything BUT off-topic.
Learn to moderate.