Closing the site to tourists to preserve the crystals (how fragile are they to evaporated sweat?) might make sense if there were something to ge gained by science types in studying them; of course, I can't imagine what kind of long-term research they would want to do.
Or they could just limit the number of people they allow to pass through there. It's not as if Naica, Mexico gets a ton of tourists as it is, and how many non-locals are going to drive a far ways in order to see them?
Did you work for Egghead Software, too?
Back when Egghead's business plan involved stealing money from customers in face-to-face transactions, as opposed to the faceless e-commerce they prefer now, we'd do pretty much the same thing. While I was too low on the totem pole (PT Sales Associate) to be told so, it did definitely seem as if we'd hold off mailing flyers so they'd arrive after the sale ended and that we never got the really popular rebate certificates until they were expired.
Of course, while working there I gained a whole new contempt for customers, and pretty much the rest of humanity in general. While screwing "honest" customers was probably a bit of an overreaction, there was a bit of fraud going on. A surprising number of people (one should have been surprising enough) told me to my face that the reason they didn't have the receipt for the product they were returning was because they had sent it in for the rebate.
Most people had the common courtesy to lie about why they had lost the receipt, why the rebate form had been torn from the box, why the UPC was missing, etc.
It would actually be very interesting if space were like the high seas: there is no accepted law of the high seas. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has been neither signed nor later ratified by Albania, Armenia, Ecuador, Eritrea, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Peru, Syria, Turkey, the United States, or Venezuela (or by several others, for that matter). The United Kingdom did not give its Accesion (still not a ratification) until 1997, and even then only with reservations.
So basically, if the laws of space were like the laws of the sea, everyone would agree that there is a law, but would argue about what that law is. The Open Skies Treaty has not entered into force yet, and in any case would only apply from Vancouver to Vladivostok, excluding the Pacific Ocean. The US may not recognize any claims of sovereignty beyond the planet, but whoever claims that sovereignty certainly will.
One thing I noticed about both PhatKat and lance links's comments is that they question the use of metaphor in discussing politics. A good portion of Solove's paper was the use of metaphor in politics: precisely because you can influence the decisions people make by posing the question in a certain way, you must give extra consideration to which metaphor you use.
I don't think Solove was saying that Kafka presents a more accurate depiction of the problems regarding online privacy. Instead, the bulk of his paper suggests that the dehumanized and -izing collection of perfectly innocuous data, which is then acted upon in a dehumanized/-izing manner, is a greater threat than turning all of Batman's toys over to the government. Yet most lawmakers are concerned only with the latter; Solove suggests that they are concerned with this aspect only because they are fighting against Big Brother. Change the metaphor they think of and change the action you get from them.
Solove suggests using Kafka as a metaphor rather than Orwell. This is not because he thinks that Kafka has better descriptive power, that the internet can actually be summed up in that metaphor, but because he thinks he will get a certain reaction out of the various legislatures if the question is posed in these terms. Narrative as a tool to induce behavior, rather than as a method for gaining understanding. Basically, he's working from postmodernist assumptions regarding the place of metaphor in discourse, but his paper is not nearly as unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) dada-esque in its prose style.
I'd like to suggest that the relation between a theory and a paradigm isn't as binarily rigid as this post suggests. Calling the theory of evolution a paradigm suggests that it is the basis for an entire field of research, setting the criteria for what constitutes acceptable methods and topics of inquiry. Newton's Principia and Opticks count as paradigms, but they are most certainly theories as well. Evolution's merits have nothing to do with its theory- or pradigm-hood.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they could just limit the number of people they allow to pass through there. It's not as if Naica, Mexico gets a ton of tourists as it is, and how many non-locals are going to drive a far ways in order to see them?
Of course, while working there I gained a whole new contempt for customers, and pretty much the rest of humanity in general. While screwing "honest" customers was probably a bit of an overreaction, there was a bit of fraud going on. A surprising number of people (one should have been surprising enough) told me to my face that the reason they didn't have the receipt for the product they were returning was because they had sent it in for the rebate. Most people had the common courtesy to lie about why they had lost the receipt, why the rebate form had been torn from the box, why the UPC was missing, etc.
So basically, if the laws of space were like the laws of the sea, everyone would agree that there is a law, but would argue about what that law is. The Open Skies Treaty has not entered into force yet, and in any case would only apply from Vancouver to Vladivostok, excluding the Pacific Ocean. The US may not recognize any claims of sovereignty beyond the planet, but whoever claims that sovereignty certainly will.
I don't think Solove was saying that Kafka presents a more accurate depiction of the problems regarding online privacy. Instead, the bulk of his paper suggests that the dehumanized and -izing collection of perfectly innocuous data, which is then acted upon in a dehumanized/-izing manner, is a greater threat than turning all of Batman's toys over to the government. Yet most lawmakers are concerned only with the latter; Solove suggests that they are concerned with this aspect only because they are fighting against Big Brother. Change the metaphor they think of and change the action you get from them.
Solove suggests using Kafka as a metaphor rather than Orwell. This is not because he thinks that Kafka has better descriptive power, that the internet can actually be summed up in that metaphor, but because he thinks he will get a certain reaction out of the various legislatures if the question is posed in these terms. Narrative as a tool to induce behavior, rather than as a method for gaining understanding. Basically, he's working from postmodernist assumptions regarding the place of metaphor in discourse, but his paper is not nearly as unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) dada-esque in its prose style.
I'd like to suggest that the relation between a theory and a paradigm isn't as binarily rigid as this post suggests. Calling the theory of evolution a paradigm suggests that it is the basis for an entire field of research, setting the criteria for what constitutes acceptable methods and topics of inquiry. Newton's Principia and Opticks count as paradigms, but they are most certainly theories as well. Evolution's merits have nothing to do with its theory- or pradigm-hood.