"Imagine how much better life in third-world countries would be if just a fraction of the intelligence and energy that have gone into building the Internet had been applied to subsistance-level agriculture. Or if some of the high-ability, high-concept managers who have been drawn to Internet and computer businesses had gone into politics. I don't think there would be nearly as much hunger and misery in the world if so much talent hadn't been sucked into computers and the Internet. "
Really? The two major places where people are seroiusly dying from hunger right now are a) North Korea -- a close Communist totalitarian dicatorship; b) Sudan -- a country that has had a civil war for 40 years and tolerates slavery.
Please explain how your Unix engineer friend would have been able to solve these problems.
This seems to me an example of the hubris of computer geeks in general. Solving something like world hunger is not like solving a technical problem -- in fact treating social problems as technical problems is one of the worst methods in the world to truly solving them.
What is weird is the implication that providing good data services is not real work. I'm not a big fan of McNealy, but why would you want him to waste his obvious talents by going into something as ridiculous as politics?
Give me a break. A patent over a specific gene doesn't mean a company literally owns that gene in your body, and sexual reproduction wouldn't violate said patent.
As somebody else phrased it in a question, "Or are they simply saying that if they go to the trouble of describing the genome in a useful way, and packaging it up, that people will have to pay to get that package."
That is precisely what they are doing -- just like although you can't patent gravity you can patent useful descriptions of gravity. The patent will give 17 year exclusivity for those companies to develop products that incorporate said genes such as treatments for genetic diseases.
I now the rest of you think such cures are just going to fall from the sky, but in the real world these things cost tons of money and nobody's going to invest that with out a property right of exclusivity so they can recoup costs and make a profit.
There are two separate issues here: a) how does technology impact religion in general and b) how does technology impact specific religious movements in particular.
There is no doubt in my mind that free speech and free use of technology generally hurts particular religious movements, especially the dominant ones, while at the same time spreading the religious meme so to speak far and wide. It's interesting that the U.S. has both technology in abundance and some of the most liberal speech laws in the world and yet we are by far the most religious nation in the West. When you ask Americans how many of them believe in a heaven or hell as an actual place you usually get about 50 percent where you ask the same question in Europe you'll get may 5 or 10 percent.
Certainly technology and freedom can be very complementary to religious belief and the two can coexist nicely under the right political arrangements (the problem with Katz is that he's a victim of an excessive hypersenstivity to the conflict between religion and state. He goes as overboard in his way as the religious right does in its way).
What technology does do, though, is increase the number of religious movements since its easier to get information out about your new religious movement. My wife is Wiccan and a lot of those folks are very technologically savvy and use technology to debunk mainstream myths about them as well as connect with others interested in that religious movement.
Actually China's one-child law had very little effect on its rate of population growth. Plot the birth rate in China from 1970 to 2000 and then you'll see most of the decline in growth occurred before the one-child policy.
The fact is the Chinese quickly found the one-child policy impossible to enforce except in urban areas (something like 60% of China's population is rural).
As an atheist the claim that relgion and freedom are always at odd is the most ridiculous piece of BS I've read in a long time. In fact the values incorporated by the Judeo-Christian cultural/religious systems formed a key part in transmitting and furthering ideas of freedom (see Orlando Patterson's "Freedom: Freedom In The Making of Western Culture."
That religion's relationship with freedom is often ambiguous and often very negative is true, but much the same thing could be said about important secular proponents of freedom such as Rousseau or Bentham.
This whole "look at the Christian action game and smirk" kind of comments seems to me the worst form of anti-religious bigotry. The criticism Katz relies on is a classic red baiting technique aimed at Christians -- since some Christians blame vidoe games for Columbine, lets just act as if all Christians believe this so then we can jump up and down and call them hypocrites when a religious action game comes out.
Do people choose to committ crimes or are they conditioned by environmental factors, etc., of which they have no control, to committ crimes.
This software is an example of the problems inherent in adopting the latter view; it results in an Orwellian situation where can, at least in theory, identify the poor malcontents and get them treatment before they committ grave acts of violence.
I would argue such solutions are nonsensical because they lack the ability to measure the sort of free will that led Klebold and Harris to choose to kill while plenty of others who fit their personality types refrain from making said choices.
This is just another stupid concession to the idiotic idea that there is no element of personal responsibility/choice in criminal actions.
"Think about this. Thousands of charity and non-profit organizations go scraping for money to feed the homeless, help orphans, teach kids, you name it. Yet our country's citizenry spends MILLIONS each year donating to POLITICS and politicians instead."
Since you're saying this I'm assuming that you know the amount donated to charities vs. the amount spent on campaigns (obviously nobody posting to Slashdot would think of posting something completely unsubstantiated). I would like to know just how much more is contributed to political campaigns vs. charitable organizations.
*Anybody* can give soft money without having to report it as a campaign contribution.
The reason the FEC is going after this web site is because it endorsed a specific candidate. If a corporation put on its web site, "Vote for candidate Y" that would be considered a campaign donation. Actually if a corporation mentioned in its internal newsletter who it thought employees should vote for, that would also count as a donation.
A lot of groups and nonprofit organizations simply don't include "please vote for candidate X" in their newsletters because the hassles are too great. This was what happened to the Christian Coalition -- you come too close to saying "we would prefer candidate Y" and you get in a lot of trouble (the CC and unions have both gotten into trouble for producing voter guides that the FEC thought were too politicized).
...from campaign finance harassment of free speech. This sort of thing has been happening in RL for years. Jesse Helmes got the FEC to go after an ACT-UP chapter that made disparaging comments about him, arguing their comments constituted an illegal campaign donation.
I also think mandatory disclosure is stupid. Ralph Nader had to bend over backwards to in 1996 to coordinate his trips so he didn't go over certain spending limits so he didn't have to disclose income and asset information. I think Nader's a hypocrite, but why should he have to disclose where he's getting his money from (and how much)?
I like FamilyPC but they have a habit of reviewing software that is never actually even released. For example the latest issue (November 1999) includes a list of recommended games that parents might want to buy for their kids. Among the games they recommend is Sierra's Babylon 5 game which was canceled last month. Not only do they recommend it but they put a little graphic next to the recomendation to indicate FamilyPC staff have actually played the game and give it a score of 89 out of 100.
Re:Helping Quentin hack your school.
on
One for the Kids
·
· Score: 1
First of all this Justice Department site is hilarious primarily because it is so hypocritical.
As to the page you refer to, however, since most schools don't have employees who really understand the computer systems they use fixing problems can be very expensive. A student at a school near where I live managed to hack his school's network and screw it up real good -- the final bill for the consultants who came in to fix it was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
"The vote is another example. For some reason everyone in America thinks it very important to have the right to vote, but most choose not to vote."
This didn't make any sense. I think it is important for me to have the right to look at pornography, although I choose not to look at pornography. I think it is important for me to have the right to leave the country whenever I want though I have never traveled overseas. I think it is important to have the right to vote though I sometimes choose not to vote.
Good point. As for whether or not Singer should be fired for his views, I think the prevailing opinion of those protesting him is that he never should have been hired in the first place and it came as quite a shock to learn that Princeton had selected him for that chair. I do agree that academic freedom is important and that Singer shouldn't be fired.
The point about Trump vs. Buchanan was excellent. Katz seems to be formulating a very odd argument for a positive freedom argument claiming that in order for me to have free speech you must incur an obligation to hear me out without undue criticism. But Katz himself can't even stick to that within his own piece, disparaging "blockheads" and surely impinging on their free speech.
I also wonder where Katz comes down on the creationism vs. evolution teaching debate, because my opinion and the opinion of the scientific community is largely one that advocates censoring the creationists in the classroom (just as we also censor the views of the Flat Earth Society in earth sciences courses).
I don't understand where the whole "censorship" angle comes in. Suppose Katz for his next "article" for Slashdot decide to argue that the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (an alleged document outlining a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world forged by the Russian Tsars sevet police) was in fact true and that we needed to do something about all the damned Jews everywhere?
Would Slashdot run the piece? Would they be guilty of censorship if they didn't? Would the users be a bunch of patriotic blockheads for arguing that a person who makes such arguments doesn't deserve to get the sort of prominence being featured in Slashdot can garner?
I mean I think if my local newspaper started running a weekly column written by the David Duke, for example, I would drop my subscription and urge the newspaper to reconsider its decision.
Whoever said the problem with the liberal fascists such as Katz is that they can't stand the fact that free speech runs both ways -- that Singer has the right to say it's not wrong to kill infants and we have the right to say such a person is unfit to hold a prominent position at one of America's elite universities.
And Princeton is free to make up their mind as well and hire or fire Singer as they so choose.
Does Singer advocate murder. You decide, this is what he said Tuesday night at a debate on the euthanasia issue:
"Killing an infant is not equivalent to killing a person because by a person I mean something more of a rational self-aware being," Singer said. -From the Associated Press
Nobody, btw, is arguing that Singer doesn't have a First Amendment right to say what he's saying; the issue is whether or not Princeton should be supporting him in that.
Katz said this is what universities need to do but I say that's BS. A racist who thinks blacks should be murdered to purify the white race in America raises a lot of interesting ethical issues, but is no more deserving of a prominent professorship at Princeton than Singer is.
BTW, the obvious implication of equating Singer's position with Dyson's is that it is a roundabout way of equating abortion with infanticide (which Singer tends to do as well) -- hey Katz are you going to take up the prolife crusade next?
"Are GM seeds/food/etc even safe? In the US, medicine cannot be sold unless it's approved by the FDA."
There are *no* protocols for testing the safety of genetically modified food either through direct genetic engineering or traditional hybridization techniques. There is simply no analogue to the sort of methods used to screen pharmaceutical compounds (and such protocols are impossible to design from a practical standpoint).
There is no evidence yet that there are any specific problems with genetically modified foods that are any different that the sorts of problems encounter with hybridized foods.
Of course it's a hoax, look at who wrote the article -- Douglas Rushkoff. Wasn't Rushkoff complaining the other day about the evils of technology? Well, today he's around back to his day job of an uninformed hack constantly spreading the latest hype. Rushkoff's always been clueless.
Singer is also on record as advocating forced euthanasia of elderly people and others who are no longer living what he deems quality lives.
The ironic thing is Singer recently wrote a very self-righteous article saying those of us Americans who don't contribute at least 20 percent of our income to stopping world hunger are equivalent to mass murderers, but if we follow Singer's logic consistently we could get around this by donating our income to euthanize poor people in hungry nations which would also serve to alleviate human suffering.
Whoever said Singer was very consistent hasn't read him very closely -- he's constantly making acceptions to his utilitarianism which render it all but meaningless.
Interesting to see the sort of folks who whine and moan to no end when government talks about regulating the Internet turn around and support such severe regulation against the computer industry.
As for a remedy for Microsoft, a severe remedy runs the risk of tanking the market. There are a number of mutual funds who are still posting huge returns thanks largely to MS. The Wall Street backlash against anything other than a slap on the wrist to MS could be very ugly.
And very stupid since even if MS is found guilty the verdict will likely be overturned on appeal as events that are well-documented here demonstrate the idiocy of the government's case.
"However, I cannot be around my hypothetical kid all the time and if content regulation helps me control when my kid is exposed to elements of society that are of the more unsavory kind, then so be it."
I really don't want the government setting limits for my child. That's my job.
There's no way anybody's going to keep kids from experiencing unsavory things -- kids are exposed to unsavory experiences in plenty of ways, the Internet being the least of my worries as a parent (you're more likely to be exposed to unsavory images in my neighborhood from the sexually explicit music blaring from the cars -- next these politicians will want content regulation there as well).
I've known a couple kids who were suspended from school for viewing sexually explicit images on the school computers. First, the filters are a joke. Second, the only one who thinks its the end of the world are the educators (one child actually got banned from using the Internet at school for part of one school year and all of the next for pulling a rather lame Playboy-esque nude of a woman). The parents on the other hand tend to be a bit more levelheaded.
When you do freelance work for newspapers or magazines they're pretty straightforward about the fact that they own the nonexclusive right to republish the piece you sell them. This isn't something they hide or sneak into arcane legal language -- you're on a work for hire arrangement.
What happened here is an ongoing debate over whether publishing an article in an electronic form such as a web site is the same as publishing it in other venues. Is an article appearing in the New York Times web site archives in the same status as say an article appearing on their microfilm archives? I go to the library occasionally to use the microfilms of the NYT and the freelance authors don't get compensated for the articles I print out. Should they if I go to the web NYT instead?
I don't have a lot of opinions about the NAACP squatting Nigger.Com, but the Wired story is factually inaccurate in that it gives the impression that the NAACP thought fast and registered that domain name before any hate group could get to it. In fact another party originally tried to register Nigger.Com back in 1996 or 1997 and Network Solutions told that they wouldn't allow them to register the domain. Then a few weeks later Network Solutions turned around and agreed to sell Nigger.Com to the NAACP. The quote from the ACLU lawyer that it was first come first serve for these controversial domains is complete nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on:
"Imagine how much better life in third-world countries would be if just a fraction of the intelligence and energy that have gone into building the Internet had been applied to subsistance-level agriculture. Or if some of the high-ability, high-concept managers who have been drawn to Internet and computer businesses had gone into politics. I don't think there would be nearly as much hunger and misery in the world if so much talent hadn't been sucked into computers and the Internet. "
Really? The two major places where people are seroiusly dying from hunger right now are a) North Korea -- a close Communist totalitarian dicatorship; b) Sudan -- a country that has had a civil war for 40 years and tolerates slavery.
Please explain how your Unix engineer friend would have been able to solve these problems.
This seems to me an example of the hubris of computer geeks in general. Solving something like world hunger is not like solving a technical problem -- in fact treating social problems as technical problems is one of the worst methods in the world to truly solving them.
What is weird is the implication that providing good data services is not real work. I'm not a big fan of McNealy, but why would you want him to waste his obvious talents by going into something as ridiculous as politics?
Give me a break. A patent over a specific gene doesn't mean a company literally owns that gene in your body, and sexual reproduction wouldn't violate said patent.
As somebody else phrased it in a question, "Or are they simply saying that if they go to the trouble of describing the genome in a useful way, and packaging it up, that people will have to pay to get that package."
That is precisely what they are doing -- just like although you can't patent gravity you can patent useful descriptions of gravity. The patent will give 17 year exclusivity for those companies to develop products that incorporate said genes such as treatments for genetic diseases.
I now the rest of you think such cures are just going to fall from the sky, but in the real world these things cost tons of money and nobody's going to invest that with out a property right of exclusivity so they can recoup costs and make a profit.
There are two separate issues here: a) how does technology impact religion in general and b) how does technology impact specific religious movements in particular.
There is no doubt in my mind that free speech and free use of technology generally hurts particular religious movements, especially the dominant ones, while at the same time spreading the religious meme so to speak far and wide. It's interesting that the U.S. has both technology in abundance and some of the most liberal speech laws in the world and yet we are by far the most religious nation in the West. When you ask Americans how many of them believe in a heaven or hell as an actual place you usually get about 50 percent where you ask the same question in Europe you'll get may 5 or 10 percent.
Certainly technology and freedom can be very complementary to religious belief and the two can coexist nicely under the right political arrangements (the problem with Katz is that he's a victim of an excessive hypersenstivity to the conflict between religion and state. He goes as overboard in his way as the religious right does in its way).
What technology does do, though, is increase the number of religious movements since its easier to get information out about your new religious movement. My wife is Wiccan and a lot of those folks are very technologically savvy and use technology to debunk mainstream myths about them as well as connect with others interested in that religious movement.
Actually China's one-child law had very little effect on its rate of population growth. Plot the birth rate in China from 1970 to 2000 and then you'll see most of the decline in growth occurred before the one-child policy.
The fact is the Chinese quickly found the one-child policy impossible to enforce except in urban areas (something like 60% of China's population is rural).
As an atheist the claim that relgion and freedom are always at odd is the most ridiculous piece of BS I've read in a long time. In fact the values incorporated by the Judeo-Christian cultural/religious systems formed a key part in transmitting and furthering ideas of freedom (see Orlando Patterson's "Freedom: Freedom In The Making of Western Culture."
That religion's relationship with freedom is often ambiguous and often very negative is true, but much the same thing could be said about important secular proponents of freedom such as Rousseau or Bentham.
This whole "look at the Christian action game and smirk" kind of comments seems to me the worst form of anti-religious bigotry. The criticism Katz relies on is a classic red baiting technique aimed at Christians -- since some Christians blame vidoe games for Columbine, lets just act as if all Christians believe this so then we can jump up and down and call them hypocrites when a religious action game comes out.
Typical Katz stupidity.
Do people choose to committ crimes or are they conditioned by environmental factors, etc., of which they have no control, to committ crimes.
This software is an example of the problems inherent in adopting the latter view; it results in an Orwellian situation where can, at least in theory, identify the poor malcontents and get them treatment before they committ grave acts of violence.
I would argue such solutions are nonsensical because they lack the ability to measure the sort of free will that led Klebold and Harris to choose to kill while plenty of others who fit their personality types refrain from making said choices.
This is just another stupid concession to the idiotic idea that there is no element of personal responsibility/choice in criminal actions.
"Think about this. Thousands of charity and non-profit organizations go scraping for money to feed the homeless, help orphans, teach kids, you name it. Yet our country's citizenry spends MILLIONS each year donating to POLITICS and politicians instead."
Since you're saying this I'm assuming that you know the amount donated to charities vs. the amount spent on campaigns (obviously nobody posting to Slashdot would think of posting something completely unsubstantiated). I would like to know just how much more is contributed to political campaigns vs. charitable organizations.
Thank you.
*Anybody* can give soft money without having to report it as a campaign contribution.
The reason the FEC is going after this web site is because it endorsed a specific candidate. If a corporation put on its web site, "Vote for candidate Y" that would be considered a campaign donation. Actually if a corporation mentioned in its internal newsletter who it thought employees should vote for, that would also count as a donation.
A lot of groups and nonprofit organizations simply don't include "please vote for candidate X" in their newsletters because the hassles are too great. This was what happened to the Christian Coalition -- you come too close to saying "we would prefer candidate Y" and you get in a lot of trouble (the CC and unions have both gotten into trouble for producing voter guides that the FEC thought were too politicized).
...from campaign finance harassment of free speech. This sort of thing has been happening in RL for years. Jesse Helmes got the FEC to go after an ACT-UP chapter that made disparaging comments about him, arguing their comments constituted an illegal campaign donation.
I also think mandatory disclosure is stupid. Ralph Nader had to bend over backwards to in 1996 to coordinate his trips so he didn't go over certain spending limits so he didn't have to disclose income and asset information. I think Nader's a hypocrite, but why should he have to disclose where he's getting his money from (and how much)?
I like FamilyPC but they have a habit of reviewing software that is never actually even released. For example the latest issue (November 1999) includes a list of recommended games that parents might want to buy for their kids. Among the games they recommend is Sierra's Babylon 5 game which was canceled last month. Not only do they recommend it but they put a little graphic next to the recomendation to indicate FamilyPC staff have actually played the game and give it a score of 89 out of 100.
First of all this Justice Department site is hilarious primarily because it is so hypocritical.
As to the page you refer to, however, since most schools don't have employees who really understand the computer systems they use fixing problems can be very expensive. A student at a school near where I live managed to hack his school's network and screw it up real good -- the final bill for the consultants who came in to fix it was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
"The vote is another example. For some reason everyone in America thinks it very important to have the right to vote, but most choose not to vote."
This didn't make any sense. I think it is important for me to have the right to look at pornography, although I choose not to look at pornography. I think it is important for me to have the right to leave the country whenever I want though I have never traveled overseas. I think it is important to have the right to vote though I sometimes choose not to vote.
Good point. As for whether or not Singer should be fired for his views, I think the prevailing opinion of those protesting him is that he never should have been hired in the first place and it came as quite a shock to learn that Princeton had selected him for that chair. I do agree that academic freedom is important and that Singer shouldn't be fired.
The point about Trump vs. Buchanan was excellent. Katz seems to be formulating a very odd argument for a positive freedom argument claiming that in order for me to have free speech you must incur an obligation to hear me out without undue criticism. But Katz himself can't even stick to that within his own piece, disparaging "blockheads" and surely impinging on their free speech.
I also wonder where Katz comes down on the creationism vs. evolution teaching debate, because my opinion and the opinion of the scientific community is largely one that advocates censoring the creationists in the classroom (just as we also censor the views of the Flat Earth Society in earth sciences courses).
I don't understand where the whole "censorship" angle comes in. Suppose Katz for his next "article" for Slashdot decide to argue that the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (an alleged document outlining a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world forged by the Russian Tsars sevet police) was in fact true and that we needed to do something about all the damned Jews everywhere?
Would Slashdot run the piece? Would they be guilty of censorship if they didn't? Would the users be a bunch of patriotic blockheads for arguing that a person who makes such arguments doesn't deserve to get the sort of prominence being featured in Slashdot can garner?
I mean I think if my local newspaper started running a weekly column written by the David Duke, for example, I would drop my subscription and urge the newspaper to reconsider its decision.
Whoever said the problem with the liberal fascists such as Katz is that they can't stand the fact that free speech runs both ways -- that Singer has the right to say it's not wrong to kill infants and we have the right to say such a person is unfit to hold a prominent position at one of America's elite universities.
And Princeton is free to make up their mind as well and hire or fire Singer as they so choose.
Does Singer advocate murder. You decide, this is what he said Tuesday night at a debate on the euthanasia issue:
"Killing an infant is not equivalent to killing a person because by a person I mean something more of a rational self-aware being," Singer said.
-From the Associated Press
Nobody, btw, is arguing that Singer doesn't have a First Amendment right to say what he's saying; the issue is whether or not Princeton should be supporting him in that.
Katz said this is what universities need to do but I say that's BS. A racist who thinks blacks should be murdered to purify the white race in America raises a lot of interesting ethical issues, but is no more deserving of a prominent professorship at Princeton than Singer is.
BTW, the obvious implication of equating Singer's position with Dyson's is that it is a roundabout way of equating abortion with infanticide (which Singer tends to do as well) -- hey Katz are you going to take up the prolife crusade next?
"Are GM seeds/food/etc even safe? In the US, medicine cannot be sold unless it's approved by the FDA."
There are *no* protocols for testing the safety of genetically modified food either through direct genetic engineering or traditional hybridization techniques. There is simply no analogue to the sort of methods used to screen pharmaceutical compounds (and such protocols are impossible to design from a practical standpoint).
There is no evidence yet that there are any specific problems with genetically modified foods that are any different that the sorts of problems encounter with hybridized foods.
Of course it's a hoax, look at who wrote the article -- Douglas Rushkoff. Wasn't Rushkoff complaining the other day about the evils of technology? Well, today he's around back to his day job of an uninformed hack constantly spreading the latest hype. Rushkoff's always been clueless.
Incorrect. Singer is quite clear that he is in favor of forcible euthanasia of elderly people who don't have a high quality of life.
Singer is also on record as advocating forced euthanasia of elderly people and others who are no longer living what he deems quality lives.
The ironic thing is Singer recently wrote a very self-righteous article saying those of us Americans who don't contribute at least 20 percent of our income to stopping world hunger are equivalent to mass murderers, but if we follow Singer's logic consistently we could get around this by donating our income to euthanize poor people in hungry nations which would also serve to alleviate human suffering.
Whoever said Singer was very consistent hasn't read him very closely -- he's constantly making acceptions to his utilitarianism which render it all but meaningless.
Interesting to see the sort of folks who whine and moan to no end when government talks about regulating the Internet turn around and support such severe regulation against the computer industry.
As for a remedy for Microsoft, a severe remedy runs the risk of tanking the market. There are a number of mutual funds who are still posting huge returns thanks largely to MS. The Wall Street backlash against anything other than a slap on the wrist to MS could be very ugly.
And very stupid since even if MS is found guilty the verdict will likely be overturned on appeal as events that are well-documented here demonstrate the idiocy of the government's case.
"However, I cannot be around my hypothetical kid all the time and if content regulation helps me control when my kid is exposed to elements of society that are of the more unsavory kind, then so be it."
I really don't want the government setting limits for my child. That's my job.
There's no way anybody's going to keep kids from experiencing unsavory things -- kids are exposed to unsavory experiences in plenty of ways, the Internet being the least of my worries as a parent (you're more likely to be exposed to unsavory images in my neighborhood from the sexually explicit music blaring from the cars -- next these politicians will want content regulation there as well).
I've known a couple kids who were suspended from school for viewing sexually explicit images on the school computers. First, the filters are a joke. Second, the only one who thinks its the end of the world are the educators (one child actually got banned from using the Internet at school for part of one school year and all of the next for pulling a rather lame Playboy-esque nude of a woman). The parents on the other hand tend to be a bit more levelheaded.
When you do freelance work for newspapers or magazines they're pretty straightforward about the fact that they own the nonexclusive right to republish the piece you sell them. This isn't something they hide or sneak into arcane legal language -- you're on a work for hire arrangement.
What happened here is an ongoing debate over whether publishing an article in an electronic form such as a web site is the same as publishing it in other venues. Is an article appearing in the New York Times web site archives in the same status as say an article appearing on their microfilm archives? I go to the library occasionally to use the microfilms of the NYT and the freelance authors don't get compensated for the articles I print out. Should they if I go to the web NYT instead?
I don't have a lot of opinions about the NAACP squatting Nigger.Com, but the Wired story is factually inaccurate in that it gives the impression that the NAACP thought fast and registered that domain name before any hate group could get to it. In fact another party originally tried to register Nigger.Com back in 1996 or 1997 and Network Solutions told that they wouldn't allow them to register the domain. Then a few weeks later Network Solutions turned around and agreed to sell Nigger.Com to the NAACP. The quote from the ACLU lawyer that it was first come first serve for these controversial domains is complete nonsense.