I think that if you can't be liked and accepted, then attention and acknowledgment of existence are a good second.
Being ignored or being treated as invisible is unbearable. So if you can't be liked, at least if you act out, people become aware of you. Humans are a social animal, and if nobody even treats you like you exist, from your perspective, you can be all alone, even while surrounded by people.
I would think that loners avoid being around people because then they aren't exposed to being ignored -- their 'invisibleness' isn't in their face, so it's not as painful, but I don't know. These are just my perceptions from my experiences.
to say that the response on a community level has any meaning for the psychology of the individual
Those members of the community aren't themselves individuals? The parents, siblings, friends, and other relatives of the victims had no 'psychology' in response to their loved ones being murdered?
are the amish robots? they feel no emotion?
Obviously not -- love, forgiveness and empathy are very strong and powerful emotions.
culture modifies basic human psychology. but human psychology never changes
Perhaps the situation is the reverse of what you propose. Perhaps a culture of sacred violence has modified the basic human psychology of love, empathy and forgiveness. Perhaps both feelings of revenge and forgiveness are inherent in human psychology, neither one being more 'natural' or 'artificial' than the other. I don't see any convincing evidence either way to show which is more basic to human nature -- revenge or forgiveness, but I see plenty of evidence of both happening. From my point of view, it's up to you to provide evidence of why revenge should be considered more 'basic'. I see revenge and forgiveness as universal. For every revenge anecdote you can find, I can find a forgiveness anecdote.
On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, "We must not think evil of this man."[17][dead link] Another Amish father noted, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."[18][dead link]
Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts."[17][dead link]
A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.[19] Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts' widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts' sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him.[20] The Amish have also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter.[21] About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts' funeral,[20] and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims.[22] Marie Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy. She wrote, "Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you've given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you."[22]
The Amish do not normally accept charity, but due to the extreme nature of the tragedy, donations were accepted. Richie Lauer, director of the Anabaptist Foundation, said the Amish community, whose religious beliefs prohibit them from having health insurance, will likely use the donations to help pay the medical costs of the hospitalized children.[23]
Some commentators criticized the swift and complete forgiveness with which the Amish responded, arguing that forgiveness is inappropriate when no remorse has been expressed, and that such an attitude runs the risk of denying the existence of evil;[24][25][26] others were supportive.[27][28] Donald Kraybill and two other scholars of Amish life noted that "letting go of grudges" is a deeply-rooted value in Amish culture, which remembers forgiving martyrs including Dirk Willems and Jesus himself. They explained that the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.[29][30]
Funny, I was just reading this blog post entitled, "Sacred Justice":
The punitive foundations of our culture, like most cultural foundations, are expressed in myth. In our case, the foundation myth is what theologian Walter Wink has called the myth of redemptive violence -- believing that a harm can be made right by humiliating or physically harming the offender, that violence is a necessary and appropriate response, even that such violence is healing for the victim. It is normative in our society to seek vengeance for a harm done to us. Anyone brought up in our culture has seen thousands of hours of movies and television in which the schoolyard bully is finally beaten and humiliated by his victim, or the ruthless outlaw is shot dead by the gentle sheriff. The schoolyard victim and gentle sheriff are empowered and healed by this response, and often given a sexual reward for their violence. We are all constantly tempted to reenact this mythology.
Yeah, but I'm talking about people's consciousness, what's on the mind of the public. There's a difference between what the public is generally aware of and how they perceive it ( "doctors are giving kids too many drugs these days" ) versus what's actually happening. My memory was that people were unaware of this until the 90s. Well, I was unaware of it, anyway. I could be wrong.
Yeah, but Watterson talks a lot about the classic cartoonist who inspired him. In fact, artists are usually quite straight forward about who their influences are, who has inspired them, and who they look up to. All the ones I've met are eager to position their work in some school or movement in art, or describe how it "kind of takes from X artist" -- basically describing their work as a mash-up of different "issues that other artists have dealt with". I've never heard anyone say that "This is like nothing else, completely original." It seems to be only naive outsiders who think of great works of art as results of solitary, isolated genius.
This "The pills must be working" strip has got to be phony. First, in this example of it, the copyright date is 1986. Back then, ADD was on nobody's radar screen, and certainly not pills for it, and anybody hearing about a child being on pills for any mental disease would have been horrified, and had no idea what this strip was about. Putting children on speed for ADD was a meme that blew up in the 90s.
Secondly, there are a few clues that this isn't a real strip. First, the four-panel daily comics were never in color, even to this day. So the loss of color in the last panel that seems integral to this comic's story is a tip-off. Second, when Waterson doesn't put dialogue in bubbles, there is a single line emanating from the character speaking, like this. Notice also that Hobbes never moves in the purported authentic strip. That's a no-no among serious comics -- they always move things around from panel to panel, to keep visual attention. Notice how Hobbes moves in the second, real comic. First he looks at Calvin, then us, then the paper. Motion in each panel.
Also it seems to me that the lettering isn't as space-consuming as it is in authentic Waterson strips. Too much white space. I don't recall any white-space back-and-forth like in the first panel -- certainly not with that much white space. When two people are dialoguing in the same panel, he puts words in bubbles.
Notice too that there are *no* word bubbles in this cartoon. In the examples I just found in a google image search, bubbles were the norm. This strip is the opposite.
Finally, I've read all the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies several times and don't recall this strip ever. This is the first I've seen of it:)
Oh, I was doing some more googling, and here's another obvious forgery. Notice how in this one also, Calvin and Hobbes never move in the strip. Of course, the fonts of the lettering give it away, but I think this one was intended to be an obvious phony. And here's another bad copy.
Don't get me wrong; I like the message of the strip! It's just not Waterson:)
Yeah, but all I'm saying is that there is a lot of big companies who have a lot investing in refining oil and selling gasoline. Folks like BP, for instance. They're not really going to want this change to happen all that fast or smoothly.
...there are no geopolitical overtones concerning fuel sources: you just need sea water.
The prospect of moving from a 'geopolitical fuel' to a non-geopolitical one itself has geopolitical implications. Buggy whip manufacturers aren't going to take this lying down, and neither are oil-rich monarchies.
Then once you're up there, all you have to do is throw all the gold back down.
Well, you'd have to "throw" it down slowly enough so that it doesn't become a molten, white-hot projectile and embed itself several miles in the ground when it crash-lands.
How much will it rain next week? Where will the Dow Jones index be in one year? How much of a problem would a Y2K bug be to computer systems, businesses, and the economy in general? Should we have spent as much as we did to prevent the Y2K bug, or was it a boondoggle? How bad will swine flue be? A pandemic? How many inoculations should a country purchase? Knowing such things would help us very much in planning our resource allocation, and relieve human suffering.
Outside of textbook math problems, the kind that any unschooled person can solve without any conscious knowledge or education of math or physics ( "I need to get out of the way of this train or it will plow through me" ), we can't really do all that much to predict the future.
Funny, I think Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement, in particular given that probably the majority of the code Apple ships with OS X is derived from other people's open source projects to begin with.
Apple did popularize the first GUI desktop (I know they didn't invent it). And isn't the BSD kernel they based OSX on actually based on the Unix system developed privately in Bell Labs?
What I'm saying is that all too often people claim that "Free software has never done anything, it's proprietary software that does all the innovation!" or vice-versa. The reality seems to be a tight intertwining and iterative feedback process, as far as I can tell.
I just got done hearing a report from a young guy who suffered amnesia in India. He was a Fullbright scholar studying for a year, but when he came to, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing, or even who he was. He got taken into drug rehab because people thought he was a heroin user. He bought into this storyline because he had absolutely no basis for challenging it. He finally called his parents and started apologizing profusely for being a bad son. "We just talked to you on Tuesday".
He said that the only clues he had as to who he was were how other people treated him, so he totally went with it. There seems to be a mental need to conform to your surroundings and other people's expectations of you.
I think this was the last story on This American Life. Yay for NPR!:)
I don't know... for a species that has gone to every continent but Antarctica with stone-age technology, I think we are doing just fine with our natural "TV in every room" instincts. As a society, we haven't been able to muster enough resources and organization to put colonies on the moon and Mars for scientific and exploration purposes. But say a private company starts moon holidays with a private spaceship, and some young couple on their honeymoon decide that the moon is a really beautiful place...
Yes, but having a closed library also intersect nicely with more nefarious interests:
Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse: "
The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.
"The Observer has obtained a 40-year-old confidential document from the secret Vatican archive which lawyers are calling a 'blueprint for deception and concealment'. One British lawyer acting for Church child abuse victims has described it as 'explosive'.
"The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of 'strictest' secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.
They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to 'be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.'
"Texan lawyer Daniel Shea... said: 'These instructions went out to every bishop around the globe and would certainly have applied in Britain. It proves there was an international conspiracy by the Church to hush up sexual abuse issues. It is a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment.'
"
I understand the value of not having old works destroyed by centuries of even careful use. I also see some value in a researcher or lawyer saying "I'd like to see any and all documents you have relating to an instance of child abuse that happened in 1962 in Madison Wisconsin at Saint Mary's of the Springs involving..." without having to know the names of specific documents. Or should researchers consult the index titled "Child abuse documents"?
If I die, my kids won't be able to go to my boss and demand that he continues to pay them my salary, why should writers be any different?
If you do work-for-hire (most people do), after you die, you stop working, so you stop producing value, so you are no longer paid, and nothing gets passed on to your survivors. An author of a book or other creative work which continues to sell is still generating value, so their survivors would have a claim. They're sort of working from the grave, so to speak.
Certain kinds of other benefits continue to be given to the survivors after death of the original recipient, such as retirement accounts. Are you against that also?
Part of the beauty of the library is the copyright owner/author/interest holder is NOT able to control access to the work. How many publishers would love to say "this book is for retail sale only: all lending is prohibited" on all their books?
This is the same mistake another poster made. Go to any library and try to make a photocopy of any of their volumes in its entirety. They will stop you, because they are going along with the copyright scheme where the owner controls the right of making copies, not who is holding on to an individual volume. But of course, that same library is very happy to lend you any of their copies!
Books are more like CDROMs than internet downloads. If I give you a CDROM, I don't have it any more -- I haven't made a copy of it. It sucks that this must be explained to the slashdot crowd, but here we are.
My opinion is that it's because we'd waste a ton of money and effort pre-empting every problem that we'd never eventually encounter at any point on down the line. It's a good use of resources to deal only with real, actual problems, and not imaginary ones. We can't predict the future.
Go into any public library, and you will find that they will actively stop you from photocopying wholesale any of their books -- but they're happy to lend them to you! In other words, they abide by the copyrights of the author and publisher.
The article also notes that the archive has been open to scholars since 1881, and about a thousand a year access it for study. So let's nip any DaVinci Code-ish conspiracy theories about the archive in the bud here.
That's fine, but the wikipedia page says that "[t]here is no generic browsing, and researchers must ask for the precise document they wish to see, identifying it either by consulting the indices or from some other source."
So if you want to find outwhat the Vatican knows about, say, UFOs, Bigfoot, and Nessie, and none of the documents in the secret archive are referenced in the indices or any outside material, you are SOL.
By that definition, isn't one moment of your existence as a human organism experimenting with DNA, as your basic metabolism requires the construction of thousands of different types of proteins every second? So we are all scientists, each and every one of us, and the worms and the ants and the bacteria are also. Heck, the DNA molecule themselves are, since no consciousness of what you're doing is involved!
Slashdot Mirror
I think that if you can't be liked and accepted, then attention and acknowledgment of existence are a good second. Being ignored or being treated as invisible is unbearable. So if you can't be liked, at least if you act out, people become aware of you. Humans are a social animal, and if nobody even treats you like you exist, from your perspective, you can be all alone, even while surrounded by people.
I would think that loners avoid being around people because then they aren't exposed to being ignored -- their 'invisibleness' isn't in their face, so it's not as painful, but I don't know. These are just my perceptions from my experiences.
to say that the response on a community level has any meaning for the psychology of the individual
Those members of the community aren't themselves individuals? The parents, siblings, friends, and other relatives of the victims had no 'psychology' in response to their loved ones being murdered?
are the amish robots? they feel no emotion?
Obviously not -- love, forgiveness and empathy are very strong and powerful emotions.
culture modifies basic human psychology. but human psychology never changes
Perhaps the situation is the reverse of what you propose. Perhaps a culture of sacred violence has modified the basic human psychology of love, empathy and forgiveness. Perhaps both feelings of revenge and forgiveness are inherent in human psychology, neither one being more 'natural' or 'artificial' than the other. I don't see any convincing evidence either way to show which is more basic to human nature -- revenge or forgiveness, but I see plenty of evidence of both happening. From my point of view, it's up to you to provide evidence of why revenge should be considered more 'basic'. I see revenge and forgiveness as universal. For every revenge anecdote you can find, I can find a forgiveness anecdote.
Why do you think it's invalid?
On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, "We must not think evil of this man."[17][dead link] Another Amish father noted, "He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he's standing before a just God."[18][dead link]
Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts."[17][dead link]
A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.[19] Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts' widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts' sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him.[20] The Amish have also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter.[21] About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts' funeral,[20] and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims.[22] Marie Roberts wrote an open letter to her Amish neighbors thanking them for their forgiveness, grace, and mercy. She wrote, "Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you've given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you."[22]
The Amish do not normally accept charity, but due to the extreme nature of the tragedy, donations were accepted. Richie Lauer, director of the Anabaptist Foundation, said the Amish community, whose religious beliefs prohibit them from having health insurance, will likely use the donations to help pay the medical costs of the hospitalized children.[23]
Some commentators criticized the swift and complete forgiveness with which the Amish responded, arguing that forgiveness is inappropriate when no remorse has been expressed, and that such an attitude runs the risk of denying the existence of evil;[24][25][26] others were supportive.[27][28] Donald Kraybill and two other scholars of Amish life noted that "letting go of grudges" is a deeply-rooted value in Amish culture, which remembers forgiving martyrs including Dirk Willems and Jesus himself. They explained that the Amish willingness to forgo vengeance does not undo the tragedy or pardon the wrong, but rather constitutes a first step toward a future that is more hopeful.[29][30]
The punitive foundations of our culture, like most cultural foundations, are expressed in myth. In our case, the foundation myth is what theologian Walter Wink has called the myth of redemptive violence -- believing that a harm can be made right by humiliating or physically harming the offender, that violence is a necessary and appropriate response, even that such violence is healing for the victim. It is normative in our society to seek vengeance for a harm done to us. Anyone brought up in our culture has seen thousands of hours of movies and television in which the schoolyard bully is finally beaten and humiliated by his victim, or the ruthless outlaw is shot dead by the gentle sheriff. The schoolyard victim and gentle sheriff are empowered and healed by this response, and often given a sexual reward for their violence. We are all constantly tempted to reenact this mythology.
Yeah, but I'm talking about people's consciousness, what's on the mind of the public. There's a difference between what the public is generally aware of and how they perceive it ( "doctors are giving kids too many drugs these days" ) versus what's actually happening. My memory was that people were unaware of this until the 90s. Well, I was unaware of it, anyway. I could be wrong.
Image: Calvin (The ADD Remix) (originally created by Jordan Fish for the Wesleyan Argus)
Sheesh. Sorry you guys really want it to be from Watterson, but it's not. Just have a flippin' look at it!
Yeah, but Watterson talks a lot about the classic cartoonist who inspired him. In fact, artists are usually quite straight forward about who their influences are, who has inspired them, and who they look up to. All the ones I've met are eager to position their work in some school or movement in art, or describe how it "kind of takes from X artist" -- basically describing their work as a mash-up of different "issues that other artists have dealt with". I've never heard anyone say that "This is like nothing else, completely original." It seems to be only naive outsiders who think of great works of art as results of solitary, isolated genius.
This "The pills must be working" strip has got to be phony. First, in this example of it, the copyright date is 1986. Back then, ADD was on nobody's radar screen, and certainly not pills for it, and anybody hearing about a child being on pills for any mental disease would have been horrified, and had no idea what this strip was about. Putting children on speed for ADD was a meme that blew up in the 90s.
:)
:)
Secondly, there are a few clues that this isn't a real strip. First, the four-panel daily comics were never in color, even to this day. So the loss of color in the last panel that seems integral to this comic's story is a tip-off. Second, when Waterson doesn't put dialogue in bubbles, there is a single line emanating from the character speaking, like this. Notice also that Hobbes never moves in the purported authentic strip. That's a no-no among serious comics -- they always move things around from panel to panel, to keep visual attention. Notice how Hobbes moves in the second, real comic. First he looks at Calvin, then us, then the paper. Motion in each panel.
Also it seems to me that the lettering isn't as space-consuming as it is in authentic Waterson strips. Too much white space. I don't recall any white-space back-and-forth like in the first panel -- certainly not with that much white space. When two people are dialoguing in the same panel, he puts words in bubbles.
Notice too that there are *no* word bubbles in this cartoon. In the examples I just found in a google image search, bubbles were the norm. This strip is the opposite. Finally, I've read all the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies several times and don't recall this strip ever. This is the first I've seen of it
Oh, I was doing some more googling, and here's another obvious forgery. Notice how in this one also, Calvin and Hobbes never move in the strip. Of course, the fonts of the lettering give it away, but I think this one was intended to be an obvious phony. And here's another bad copy.
Don't get me wrong; I like the message of the strip! It's just not Waterson
Yeah, but all I'm saying is that there is a lot of big companies who have a lot investing in refining oil and selling gasoline. Folks like BP, for instance. They're not really going to want this change to happen all that fast or smoothly.
Whose talking about AI? Those drones are piloted remotely.
...there are no geopolitical overtones concerning fuel sources: you just need sea water.
The prospect of moving from a 'geopolitical fuel' to a non-geopolitical one itself has geopolitical implications. Buggy whip manufacturers aren't going to take this lying down, and neither are oil-rich monarchies.
How do they go about determining who the best people in a company are?
Then once you're up there, all you have to do is throw all the gold back down.
Well, you'd have to "throw" it down slowly enough so that it doesn't become a molten, white-hot projectile and embed itself several miles in the ground when it crash-lands.
I heard that there's obscene amounts of unobtainium in one of the moons of Pandora, and it's yours for the taking!
How much will it rain next week? Where will the Dow Jones index be in one year? How much of a problem would a Y2K bug be to computer systems, businesses, and the economy in general? Should we have spent as much as we did to prevent the Y2K bug, or was it a boondoggle? How bad will swine flue be? A pandemic? How many inoculations should a country purchase? Knowing such things would help us very much in planning our resource allocation, and relieve human suffering.
Outside of textbook math problems, the kind that any unschooled person can solve without any conscious knowledge or education of math or physics ( "I need to get out of the way of this train or it will plow through me" ), we can't really do all that much to predict the future.
Funny, I think Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement, in particular given that probably the majority of the code Apple ships with OS X is derived from other people's open source projects to begin with.
Apple did popularize the first GUI desktop (I know they didn't invent it). And isn't the BSD kernel they based OSX on actually based on the Unix system developed privately in Bell Labs?
What I'm saying is that all too often people claim that "Free software has never done anything, it's proprietary software that does all the innovation!" or vice-versa. The reality seems to be a tight intertwining and iterative feedback process, as far as I can tell.
I just got done hearing a report from a young guy who suffered amnesia in India. He was a Fullbright scholar studying for a year, but when he came to, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing, or even who he was. He got taken into drug rehab because people thought he was a heroin user. He bought into this storyline because he had absolutely no basis for challenging it. He finally called his parents and started apologizing profusely for being a bad son. "We just talked to you on Tuesday".
:)
He said that the only clues he had as to who he was were how other people treated him, so he totally went with it. There seems to be a mental need to conform to your surroundings and other people's expectations of you.
I think this was the last story on This American Life. Yay for NPR!
I don't know... for a species that has gone to every continent but Antarctica with stone-age technology, I think we are doing just fine with our natural "TV in every room" instincts. As a society, we haven't been able to muster enough resources and organization to put colonies on the moon and Mars for scientific and exploration purposes. But say a private company starts moon holidays with a private spaceship, and some young couple on their honeymoon decide that the moon is a really beautiful place...
Yes, but having a closed library also intersect nicely with more nefarious interests:
... said: 'These instructions went out to every bishop around the globe and would certainly have applied in Britain. It proves there was an international conspiracy by the Church to hush up sexual abuse issues. It is a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment.'
"
Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse:
" The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.
"The Observer has obtained a 40-year-old confidential document from the secret Vatican archive which lawyers are calling a 'blueprint for deception and concealment'. One British lawyer acting for Church child abuse victims has described it as 'explosive'.
"The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of 'strictest' secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.
They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to 'be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.' "Texan lawyer Daniel Shea
I understand the value of not having old works destroyed by centuries of even careful use. I also see some value in a researcher or lawyer saying "I'd like to see any and all documents you have relating to an instance of child abuse that happened in 1962 in Madison Wisconsin at Saint Mary's of the Springs involving..." without having to know the names of specific documents. Or should researchers consult the index titled "Child abuse documents"?
If I die, my kids won't be able to go to my boss and demand that he continues to pay them my salary, why should writers be any different?
If you do work-for-hire (most people do), after you die, you stop working, so you stop producing value, so you are no longer paid, and nothing gets passed on to your survivors. An author of a book or other creative work which continues to sell is still generating value, so their survivors would have a claim. They're sort of working from the grave, so to speak.
Certain kinds of other benefits continue to be given to the survivors after death of the original recipient, such as retirement accounts. Are you against that also?
Part of the beauty of the library is the copyright owner/author/interest holder is NOT able to control access to the work. How many publishers would love to say "this book is for retail sale only: all lending is prohibited" on all their books?
This is the same mistake another poster made. Go to any library and try to make a photocopy of any of their volumes in its entirety. They will stop you, because they are going along with the copyright scheme where the owner controls the right of making copies, not who is holding on to an individual volume. But of course, that same library is very happy to lend you any of their copies!
Books are more like CDROMs than internet downloads. If I give you a CDROM, I don't have it any more -- I haven't made a copy of it. It sucks that this must be explained to the slashdot crowd, but here we are.
My opinion is that it's because we'd waste a ton of money and effort pre-empting every problem that we'd never eventually encounter at any point on down the line. It's a good use of resources to deal only with real, actual problems, and not imaginary ones. We can't predict the future.
Your mistaken dissemination for copying.
Go into any public library, and you will find that they will actively stop you from photocopying wholesale any of their books -- but they're happy to lend them to you! In other words, they abide by the copyrights of the author and publisher.
The article also notes that the archive has been open to scholars since 1881, and about a thousand a year access it for study. So let's nip any DaVinci Code-ish conspiracy theories about the archive in the bud here.
That's fine, but the wikipedia page says that "[t]here is no generic browsing, and researchers must ask for the precise document they wish to see, identifying it either by consulting the indices or from some other source."
So if you want to find outwhat the Vatican knows about, say, UFOs, Bigfoot, and Nessie, and none of the documents in the secret archive are referenced in the indices or any outside material, you are SOL.
By that definition, isn't one moment of your existence as a human organism experimenting with DNA, as your basic metabolism requires the construction of thousands of different types of proteins every second? So we are all scientists, each and every one of us, and the worms and the ants and the bacteria are also. Heck, the DNA molecule themselves are, since no consciousness of what you're doing is involved!