Agreed, JavaRob. This is a much more productive conversation than the other one on this thread.
Your argument about the psycho wired to you is a variant of the Judith Thompson's classic "Attached Violinist" argument: You wake up one day to find that a famous violinist has been attached to your body. The terms are as follows: she must remain attached to you for nine months in order to live. After that time, she will be detached and you can go about your business. Thompson then asks: are you morally obligated to stay attached to the violinist?
Her answer is No.
The criticisms of that argument (sample link here) center around three questions:
1) Is the violinist situation exactly parallel to pregnancy? There is some doubt; after all, in *most* cases of pregnancy, the woman has engaged in an action which could arguably be construed as an invitation for the fetus to come in. Even sex with (failed) birth control is an action which entails known, forseeable risks.
2) Does the violinist have a moral obligation to allow you to detach? That is, there might be a paradox of obligations here... you might not be obligated to share your body, but she might not be obligated to let you go, either. In that case, should "might make right"?
3) Even if 1) and 2) are granted in the pro-choice side's favor, is Judith's conclusion of "No" a sound one? That is, is it truly correct that control over the body for nine months trumps being *killed*?
4) (out of three!) The link above introduces a new wrinkle: what if the violinist were your own child? Would your moral obligations change then? It is possible -- reasonable! -- that we have a greater moral obligation to our "blood" family members, even ones we have never met, than we do to strangers.
I think you'd be pleasantly surprised if you visited my church.
When I say "Reformers", I mean primarily Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, although there were many others. While they had their flaws like any other, I can say with certainty that they intentionally subjected Christianity to a level of criticism and scrutiny that is intellectually satisfying.
Easy, except that your definition bears no resemblance to any definition of life developed by those who study life: biologists and doctors.
The truth is that the abortion debate in philosophical circles has long past moved beyond the question of whether the fetus is alive. Everyone grants that the fetus is alive. The question debated now is whether the living fetus has a right that trumps or does not trump the right of the woman to control her body. You might read Peter Singer on this topic.
No, I don't find it hard at all. A human is not defined by his abilities to speak, think, or whatever. He is defined as a member of the human race by his genetic makeup.
It's actually much more difficult to justify denying unborn babies rights without making arbitrary distinctions based on their location.
For the sake of argument, justify that statement. (1) If the zygote is alive, why should it not receive equal protections? (2) If, somehow, you managed to imbed an already born person into the body of another person, would that person lose the claim to equal protections?
Well, wherever you end up religiously, I would discourage you from taking the Gospel of Thomas too seriously.
(1) From a "source" standpoint, it was found hundreds of miles and a hundred or so years removed from the life of Christ. Link here. The original translator of the GoT, Bruce Metzger, said that the Jesus in the GoT does not resemble in any way the Jesus of the four Gospels. (Can't find the link to his quote; here is a different Metzger quote on the topic. All of which means that Thomas stands over against Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; even if we were to take a hard line on the sources for the synoptics, that still leaves us with a very early Q and John as local, recent sources and Thomas as a distant, late source of the life of Christ. Not very impressive.
(2) The Gospel of Thomas has become popular in our time because of the resurgence of Gnosticism -- Elaine Pagels leads the charge, along with popularizations like The Matrix series. However, if one is going to consider Gnosticism as an alternative belief scheme, it would be worth considering *why* Gnosticism was considered heterodox early on:
It places an extremely dark view on the physical world and physical bodies of people, considering them sinful.
It has an extremely harsh system of salvation: only those with sufficient "enlightenment" to escape the flesh can be saved. The rest of the ignoramuses are toast. Oh, and enlightenment is predestined.
It creates a hugely fanciful system of gods and "demiurges" to explain the creation of the world.
In short, Gnosticism is not exactly a rational response to whatever flaws one sees in Christianity. Being a Christian myself, I would encourage you to branch out theologically and read the Reformers...:-)
Disclaimers: (1) Although I am comfortable with guns, I do not and probably will not in the forseeable future own a handgun. My relatives are a different story... (2) I have a gun-control position somewhere between the NRA's position and the Brady Center's position, which means that I'm not a wing-nut but I generally support gun rights.
The brutal truth about D.C., where the crime was committed, is that guns are easy to get. Possession is entirely illegal, which means that Ms. Cady probably didn't have one, as she lacked criminal intent. Had her husband, OTOH, been interested in "merely" killing her, getting a gun would have been relatively easy for him to do. He wanted something else.
The weak points in your argument are (a) you assume that because the law prohibits X, therefore people do not have X. In the case of weapons, this is entirely false. Even in Great Britain, which has moderately tight borders with regards to weapons and a total ban on handgun possession, criminals have guns and citizens don't. Also, (b) you assume that I'm talking about taking law enforcement into my own hands. Self-defense is more basic than law enforcement; it is a fundamental human right, even were the law to prohibit it. I do not and would never endorse vigilantes taking law enforcement into their own hands.
Summary of case: a woman went before a judge and asked him to extend a restraining order against her estranged husband, who had made several threats against her life. Against all sense of good judgment, the judge lifted the restraining order. The husband subsequently set the woman on fire, leaving her with burns over 60% of her body. A weapon could easily have helped here.
The judge, of course, has been demoted and justice is "served" from a statistical perspective. But the woman... she's in the hospital.
The right to carry a weapon is the right to protect yourself from becoming a statistic -- precisely because we don't trust the law enforcement system in *any* country.
On the other hand, to say "Ou has a well-documented history of writing negative articles on the subject of open-source software" is to state a fact, not to make an attack; and to continue, "therefore it is likely that his approach to the subject will be biased, his evidence selective, and his conclusions unreliable", is perfectly reasonable.
No, it's not perfectly reasonable. Your argument confuses point-of-view with improper methodology.
Only if his articles showed previous evidence of bias, selective evidence, and unreliable conclusions, could one conlude that his articles will likely do so in the future. His ability to use facts responsibly has nothing to do with which side he's on.
That said, it would be reasonable to say "Ou is making an argument about the bloat of Open Office. Therefore, I should find out how the OO programmers justify the size of OO, since presumably they are not idiots." That is, Ou has showed that OO is large, but not unjustifiably so.
Oh, and we should check his facts... but we should do that regardless of which side he's on.That is "critical thinking."
Everyone's arguments on this subject are couched in morality
Pro-life: "It is wrong to take the life of another" (possibly qualified to allow for exceptional circumstances."
Pro-choice: "It is wrong to deny a woman the right to control her own body."
Pro-stem-cell-research: "It is wrong to refuse to consider certain avenues of treatment just because of some people's moral objections."
The law is simply the current expression of what our elected leaders believe to be morally right and pragmatically doable. Change in elected leaders can therefore mean change in laws, because the represented views of right and wrong have changed.
"Be deemed trustworthy, both immediately and on subsequent or return visits. A site can establish its trustworthiness by: being accurate having no commercial links being authored or sponsored by a known trustworthy organisation (e.g. the NHS, a local hospital or well-known university) not displaying advertisements. Trust has to be maintained, and can be lost if the site is not updated regularly.
This turns out to be the most important characteristic. My wife sees patients all the time whose parents have "diagnosed" them based on web info. The web info is usually designed to undermine the trust in the patient's primary care doc by appealing to knowledge that the "medical community has surpressed." The only way to win here is for docs to have information that is both accurate and *viewed* as accurate out there on the web, for free.
Or, one more: you write a function which is an acceptable and secure, but undocumented, workaround in Win2K. Then it breaks in WinXP, but not obviously, so your company decides to package the app for WinXP. Then it breaks. What now?
Are you asking how the NYT people view it? I believe that they are mostly skeptics, and would say that God doesn't exist, but Jehovah, Allah, and Jesus are different manifestations of the same religious impulse. I.e., "God" is in our heads.
"Liberal" Christians, Muslims, and Jews would say that Jehovah, Allah, and Jesus are just different names for God, attached to Him/Her by people who fail to understand the full picture.
"Conservative" Christians and Muslims would say that (1) Jehovah and Allah are demonstrably different, as seen in their actions in the Bible and Quran/Koran/however you want to transliterate it, respectively, and (2) Jehovah (Allah) is God, and Allah (Jehovah) isn't. Christians and Jews would then divide over the status of Jesus.
FWIW, I think the conservatives at least understand the texts of their respective religions better than the liberals do.
You miss the point. It's not "traditions" that we care it about, it's "the ability to communicate." When my students no longer have any adjectives left in their vocabularies beyond "cool" and "sucky", they are unable to say what they really think, or even to imagine that they are thinking something more complex beyond "cool" or "sucky." When they cannot parse complex sentences because words like "whom" are too... "ooh, like that's so last decade, dood!"... intimidating for them, they are unable to understand what others think.
If you want to argue that 1337-speak has created a whole new language with the expressive range of standard English, then make that case. But it will be a tough sell. As far as I can tell, computer jargon has mostly Balkanized language, with Balkan-like results to follow.
And yes, I can imagine us all talking the way that Jefferson wrote in the Declaration. It would be slower and more powerful at the same time, which would be an interesting trade-off.
You may be right. OTOH, the actual quotes given in the ABC story are not exactly damning, either. What I read there gave the impression of divying up the question-answering tasks, which is hardly unexpected for a news conference. You'll notice that the answers aren't coached, AFAWCT.
What we, the readers, still have no perspective on is how press conferences with presidents normally go. Do you know? Is this truly atypical?
It may be. I'm cynical enough to believe anything of Bush or any other politician. But I'm also cynical enough to believe that perfectly normal events can be spun to look like sinister conspiracies.
My brother knows Arabic, but I don't, so I can't comment on which of the two translations listed in your wiki link is more "faithful" to the language. I would only note that the first translation given there agrees with you and the NYT; the second agrees with me (and no, I didn't edit the article to put it in, either:-P)
So much for translation. Semantically, however, there is no question of intent: the Muslims are affirming that Allah is the only god. I don't know whether "attack" is a correct characterization -- I think you read too much into my tone -- but certainly "denial" would be: Islam denies that other gods are in fact gods. The Shahadah is an important statement of that denial. And, the NYT translation obscures the point.
As for the abortion item, I see their point. The debate is solely about laws. Do the laws allow a choice, or do they not. A personal belief of whether abortion is wrong or not is irrelevant to what you think the laws should be. The "pro-life" camp trivializes and demonizes people like me.
I'm sorry, I strongly disagree. I think you are looking at it very one-sidedly...with bias, so to speak.
The debate is also about whether the current laws are right or wrong, just as the debates in the 1850's were over whether slavery laws were right or wrong. I happen to be one of the pro-lifers, as is my wife, and the issue is very much the dignity of human life for us. We have no interest in "controlling" other people or forcing them to be pregnant. If we could solve the problem by, say, fetal transplants or some other science-fiction solution, we would be perfectly happy. However, since that is not possible, we believe that in most (but possibly not all) cases, the value of a human life is greater than other values.
Does the term "pro-life" imply that the other side is "anti-life"? Yes, to those who see only in black and white. And, to give your point credit, it's not entirely fair to imply that you are anti-life. Does the "pro-choice" label imply that the other side is anti-choice? Also yes. And it's just as unfair. We aren't "anti-choice" (in general) any more than you are "anti-life" (in general).
It is true that the outcome of our desired policies would be a reduction in reproductive freedoms, just as the outcome of your desired policies is an increase in the death of people. But those are side-effects, not the main desired effect.
If you are not able to understand that point, then you are part of the "demonization" problem that you decry.
Of course there's media bias! It's bias towards sensational headlines. Whether those headlines are "liberal" or "conservative" matters only a little.
However, beyond that obvious point, more can be said about media bias.
"Bias" does not mean a malicious attempt to deceive; it means that the world seems a certain way to the editors, and therefore they write, edit, and print stories that make sense to them. Bias is therefore revealed not by blatant, willful lies -- which rarely happen anymore in reputable papers and TV news stories. Instead it is revealed by a choice in terminology, details, and layout.
Here are some examples:
The two sides in the abortion debate call themselves "pro-choice" and "pro-life", each reflecting the value that seems most important to them in that debate. However, when the Washington Post or CNN report on abortion issues, the terms they use are "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion." Those terms, justified by both as being 'more accurate' are a reflection of the bias of those organizations. In the worldview of their editors, the opposite of "pro-choice" is "antiabortion", regardless of how those "antiabortionists" actually see themselves.
The New York Times consistently reports Muslim demonstrators as chanting "There is no God but God." That nonsensical tautology isn't what they are chanting at all. Their actual phrase is "There is no God but Allah (and Mohammed is his prophet)" In other words, the chanters are affirming that "Allah is God and Jesus and Jehovah (as well as the minor medieval Arabic deities displaced by Islam) are not." The NYT, however, has a world-view that all gods are on equal footing. Their choice to translate "Allah" as "God" reflects their worldview, at the expense of putting nonsensical slogans in the mouths of the protestors.
Newspaper stories are usually written with a subtle code that indicates the view of the writer. The writer will typically interview both sides of an issue, but the side which is more agreeable to his own view will get different treatment in the story: more extensive quoting, front-page space, more sympathetic terminology in the frame around the quotes. If the writer perceives his interviewee as extreme, he will pick the most extreme quote out of a 10-minute interview. Likewise, if he perceives the interviewee as rational, he will pick a reasonable-sounding quote.
"Before the teleconference, Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense, went through a rehearsal of the scripted question-and-answer session, telling the troops that any nonscripted questions from the president should be handled by Kennedy.
When asked about the rehearsed event, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the coordination was done because of the "technological challenges" of a satellite feed, denying responses had been screened."
Forget the liberal/conservative bias for a minute and ask "why did the writer see this as important news?" Because it reflects a controversy, and because it places the president in a light which is familiar to his readers: GW is "well-known" for his inability to speak articulately in unscripted sessions.
The writer of this article, whether consciously or unconsciously, focused on story details that fit into his view of the president. How much of that view is conscious, we'll never know. But it's a sure bet that he was willing to believe (and wants us to believe) that responses actually were screened, because we *all* know that (a) spokesmen don't tell the whole truth and sometimes deny the obvious, (b) GW can't handle unscripted events well, (c) single phrases in "quotes" are not to be taken seriously.
That is a part of his worldview as a writer; it's a part of our worldview as readers. It's bias. AND, it's a great story because it raises *controversy*, the gold-winner in news stories.
Bah. Fool! Intelligent Design could never produce a secure browser! Don't you know that 99.9% of *real* computer scientists believe in *evolution*?!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument about the psycho wired to you is a variant of the Judith Thompson's classic "Attached Violinist" argument: You wake up one day to find that a famous violinist has been attached to your body. The terms are as follows: she must remain attached to you for nine months in order to live. After that time, she will be detached and you can go about your business. Thompson then asks: are you morally obligated to stay attached to the violinist?
Her answer is No.
The criticisms of that argument (sample link here) center around three questions:
1) Is the violinist situation exactly parallel to pregnancy? There is some doubt; after all, in *most* cases of pregnancy, the woman has engaged in an action which could arguably be construed as an invitation for the fetus to come in. Even sex with (failed) birth control is an action which entails known, forseeable risks.
2) Does the violinist have a moral obligation to allow you to detach? That is, there might be a paradox of obligations here ... you might not be obligated to share your body, but she might not be obligated to let you go, either. In that case, should "might make right"?
3) Even if 1) and 2) are granted in the pro-choice side's favor, is Judith's conclusion of "No" a sound one? That is, is it truly correct that control over the body for nine months trumps being *killed*?
4) (out of three!) The link above introduces a new wrinkle: what if the violinist were your own child? Would your moral obligations change then? It is possible -- reasonable! -- that we have a greater moral obligation to our "blood" family members, even ones we have never met, than we do to strangers.
Just thoughts.
Regards,
Jeff Cagle
When I say "Reformers", I mean primarily Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, although there were many others. While they had their flaws like any other, I can say with certainty that they intentionally subjected Christianity to a level of criticism and scrutiny that is intellectually satisfying.
The truth is that the abortion debate in philosophical circles has long past moved beyond the question of whether the fetus is alive. Everyone grants that the fetus is alive. The question debated now is whether the living fetus has a right that trumps or does not trump the right of the woman to control her body. You might read Peter Singer on this topic.
Well, I did, but that's because I bought software back in the Commodore 64 days, before EULA's existed.
It's actually much more difficult to justify denying unborn babies rights without making arbitrary distinctions based on their location.
Genetically, there's no question. What other species did you have in mind?
(2) If, somehow, you managed to imbed an already born person into the body of another person, would that person lose the claim to equal protections?
Just asking.
(1) From a "source" standpoint, it was found hundreds of miles and a hundred or so years removed from the life of Christ. Link here. The original translator of the GoT, Bruce Metzger, said that the Jesus in the GoT does not resemble in any way the Jesus of the four Gospels. (Can't find the link to his quote; here is a different Metzger quote on the topic. All of which means that Thomas stands over against Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; even if we were to take a hard line on the sources for the synoptics, that still leaves us with a very early Q and John as local, recent sources and Thomas as a distant, late source of the life of Christ. Not very impressive.
(2) The Gospel of Thomas has become popular in our time because of the resurgence of Gnosticism -- Elaine Pagels leads the charge, along with popularizations like The Matrix series. However, if one is going to consider Gnosticism as an alternative belief scheme, it would be worth considering *why* Gnosticism was considered heterodox early on:
In short, Gnosticism is not exactly a rational response to whatever flaws one sees in Christianity. Being a Christian myself, I would encourage you to branch out theologically and read the Reformers...
(1) Although I am comfortable with guns, I do not and probably will not in the forseeable future own a handgun. My relatives are a different story...
(2) I have a gun-control position somewhere between the NRA's position and the Brady Center's position, which means that I'm not a wing-nut but I generally support gun rights.
The brutal truth about D.C., where the crime was committed, is that guns are easy to get. Possession is entirely illegal, which means that Ms. Cady probably didn't have one, as she lacked criminal intent. Had her husband, OTOH, been interested in "merely" killing her, getting a gun would have been relatively easy for him to do. He wanted something else.
The weak points in your argument are (a) you assume that because the law prohibits X, therefore people do not have X. In the case of weapons, this is entirely false. Even in Great Britain, which has moderately tight borders with regards to weapons and a total ban on handgun possession, criminals have guns and citizens don't. Also, (b) you assume that I'm talking about taking law enforcement into my own hands. Self-defense is more basic than law enforcement; it is a fundamental human right, even were the law to prohibit it. I do not and would never endorse vigilantes taking law enforcement into their own hands.
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/10/14/news /maryland_news/03newsmd14burning.txt http://www.nbc4.com/news/5097879/detail.html?subid =10101441
Summary of case: a woman went before a judge and asked him to extend a restraining order against her estranged husband, who had made several threats against her life. Against all sense of good judgment, the judge lifted the restraining order. The husband subsequently set the woman on fire, leaving her with burns over 60% of her body. A weapon could easily have helped here.
The judge, of course, has been demoted and justice is "served" from a statistical perspective. But the woman ... she's in the hospital.
The right to carry a weapon is the right to protect yourself from becoming a statistic -- precisely because we don't trust the law enforcement system in *any* country.
Only if his articles showed previous evidence of bias, selective evidence, and unreliable conclusions, could one conlude that his articles will likely do so in the future. His ability to use facts responsibly has nothing to do with which side he's on.
That said, it would be reasonable to say "Ou is making an argument about the bloat of Open Office. Therefore, I should find out how the OO programmers justify the size of OO, since presumably they are not idiots." That is, Ou has showed that OO is large, but not unjustifiably so.
Oh, and we should check his facts ... but we should do that regardless of which side he's on.That is "critical thinking."
Pro-life: "It is wrong to take the life of another" (possibly qualified to allow for exceptional circumstances."
Pro-choice: "It is wrong to deny a woman the right to control her own body."
Pro-stem-cell-research: "It is wrong to refuse to consider certain avenues of treatment just because of some people's moral objections."
The law is simply the current expression of what our elected leaders believe to be morally right and pragmatically doable. Change in elected leaders can therefore mean change in laws, because the represented views of right and wrong have changed.
Or, one more: you write a function which is an acceptable and secure, but undocumented, workaround in Win2K. Then it breaks in WinXP, but not obviously, so your company decides to package the app for WinXP. Then it breaks. What now?
Question for the knowledgeable: could VOIP companies invoke the WTO for anti-competitive practices?
"Liberal" Christians, Muslims, and Jews would say that Jehovah, Allah, and Jesus are just different names for God, attached to Him/Her by people who fail to understand the full picture.
"Conservative" Christians and Muslims would say that (1) Jehovah and Allah are demonstrably different, as seen in their actions in the Bible and Quran/Koran/however you want to transliterate it, respectively, and (2) Jehovah (Allah) is God, and Allah (Jehovah) isn't. Christians and Jews would then divide over the status of Jesus.
FWIW, I think the conservatives at least understand the texts of their respective religions better than the liberals do.
Your neighbor breaks your hand so that you can't type. Yep, that's a DoS.
If you want to argue that 1337-speak has created a whole new language with the expressive range of standard English, then make that case. But it will be a tough sell. As far as I can tell, computer jargon has mostly Balkanized language, with Balkan-like results to follow.
And yes, I can imagine us all talking the way that Jefferson wrote in the Declaration. It would be slower and more powerful at the same time, which would be an interesting trade-off.
What we, the readers, still have no perspective on is how press conferences with presidents normally go. Do you know? Is this truly atypical?
It may be. I'm cynical enough to believe anything of Bush or any other politician. But I'm also cynical enough to believe that perfectly normal events can be spun to look like sinister conspiracies.
So much for translation. Semantically, however, there is no question of intent: the Muslims are affirming that Allah is the only god. I don't know whether "attack" is a correct characterization -- I think you read too much into my tone -- but certainly "denial" would be: Islam denies that other gods are in fact gods. The Shahadah is an important statement of that denial. And, the NYT translation obscures the point.
The debate is also about whether the current laws are right or wrong, just as the debates in the 1850's were over whether slavery laws were right or wrong. I happen to be one of the pro-lifers, as is my wife, and the issue is very much the dignity of human life for us. We have no interest in "controlling" other people or forcing them to be pregnant. If we could solve the problem by, say, fetal transplants or some other science-fiction solution, we would be perfectly happy. However, since that is not possible, we believe that in most (but possibly not all) cases, the value of a human life is greater than other values.
Does the term "pro-life" imply that the other side is "anti-life"? Yes, to those who see only in black and white. And, to give your point credit, it's not entirely fair to imply that you are anti-life. Does the "pro-choice" label imply that the other side is anti-choice? Also yes. And it's just as unfair. We aren't "anti-choice" (in general) any more than you are "anti-life" (in general).
It is true that the outcome of our desired policies would be a reduction in reproductive freedoms, just as the outcome of your desired policies is an increase in the death of people. But those are side-effects, not the main desired effect.
If you are not able to understand that point, then you are part of the "demonization" problem that you decry.
We had hopes and dreams for Microsoft? I just wanted my computer to boot without crashing. That's not exactly in the "dream" category...
However, beyond that obvious point, more can be said about media bias.
"Bias" does not mean a malicious attempt to deceive; it means that the world seems a certain way to the editors, and therefore they write, edit, and print stories that make sense to them. Bias is therefore revealed not by blatant, willful lies -- which rarely happen anymore in reputable papers and TV news stories. Instead it is revealed by a choice in terminology, details, and layout.
Here are some examples:
Here's a semi-randomly chosen story from the front page of CNN.com at the time of this writing: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/13/iraq.mai n/index.html. Take a look at these paragraphs:
"Before the teleconference, Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense, went through a rehearsal of the scripted question-and-answer session, telling the troops that any nonscripted questions from the president should be handled by Kennedy.
When asked about the rehearsed event, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the coordination was done because of the "technological challenges" of a satellite feed, denying responses had been screened."
Forget the liberal/conservative bias for a minute and ask "why did the writer see this as important news?" Because it reflects a controversy, and because it places the president in a light which is familiar to his readers: GW is "well-known" for his inability to speak articulately in unscripted sessions.
The writer of this article, whether consciously or unconsciously, focused on story details that fit into his view of the president. How much of that view is conscious, we'll never know. But it's a sure bet that he was willing to believe (and wants us to believe) that responses actually were screened, because we *all* know that (a) spokesmen don't tell the whole truth and sometimes deny the obvious, (b) GW can't handle unscripted events well, (c) single phrases in "quotes" are not to be taken seriously.
That is a part of his worldview as a writer; it's a part of our worldview as readers. It's bias. AND, it's a great story because it raises *controversy*, the gold-winner in news stories.
"(name) belongs to (org1). We should have told you that (org1) is funded by M$. In case you're wondering, (org1) is also funded by (org2) (org3) ..."
Knowing about those other organizations doesn't make their error seem any better to me, and I don't perceive it as trying to do so.
It's more likely a CYA move, in case someone complains about ATL's other associations.
Bah. Fool! Intelligent Design could never produce a secure browser! Don't you know that 99.9% of *real* computer scientists believe in *evolution*?! ;-)