The Null Device
2000/5/28
It had to happen: The Kul Teng Funk Overdose remixes Richard Stallman. Check it out, penguinheads!
Double standards: It appears that many popular censorware packages will pass religious conservative groups' sites condemning homosexuality, but block the same opinions on other pages: (WIRED News)
One reason why some manufacturers of blocking software are hesitant to block powerful conservative groups is financial: They have similar goals and even, occasionally, marketing alliances. NetNanny, for instance, says it has a relationship with Focus on the Family.
Liquor bootlegger turned recording/film empire Seagram declares war on Internet anonymity: (press release, via Slashdot)
Let me now turn to my fifth point. We must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide to commit crimes. Anonymity must not be equated with privacy. As citizens, we have a right to privacy. We have no such right to anonymity.
Richard Dawkins replies to Prince Charles' populist anti-scientism:
Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale. Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf.
It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature."