According to USA Today, Topps, the folks famous for their baseball cards, already have a 90-card “Enduring Freedom” trading card set out and in stores. The cards feature picutres and biographies of people like George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani and Osama bin Laden. Ugh. As if the Topps “Desert Storm” set wasn’t bad enough.
Month: October 2001
Will Apple Cripple the IPod?
The Register has some interesting speculation about the iPod. Since the MP3 player uses Firewire, it can copy several gigabytes worth of MP3 files very quickly — but it could also transfer those files back to another computer just as quickly, making it ideal for people to use to copy and trade large numbers of MP3s (“here, have a copy of my record collection.”) But since the iPod requires people to use Apple’s iTunes 2 prorgram, Apple could disable such downloading in the final version of the product. From The Register,
MP3 is popular because it’s compact and makes swapping and sharing music easy. So does iPod. With its capacity to hold around 1000 songs, all of which can be installed on the player in around ten minutes, it could be seen as a copier’s dream. Upload 150 CDs worth of songs then download them to another Mac in another ten minutes.
That certainly seem possible with the pre-release version of iTunes 2 we looked at, but since Steve Jobs hinted that such duplication may be made impossible, we wonder if the ability to copy MP3 files back off the iPod will be removed from the shipping version. Either that or some sort of watermark will be added to the files to ensure they can only be used with the source Mac. Apple has made no such announcement officially, so we’ll just have to see.
The Real Question About MSN
…is not, why is MSN blocking non-Microsoft browsers from accessing the site, but rather, who in their right mind would want to visit the MSN page? I thought my web sites were poorly designed, but the MSN home page is a disaster of information overload. Blocking browsers like Mozilla was probably done as a favor to such users by some right thinking Microsoft employee.
Animal People: Sure People Died on Hijacked Planes, But What about the Animals?
Sometimes animal rights activists reach such new lows that it is difficult to believe that sane people actually believe such things. Such was my reaction to an editorial in the October 2001 edition of Animal People which actually compared the plight of the flight attendants who apparently had their throats slit by terrorists to the fate of animals in slaughter houses.
The unsigned editorial, “Osama bin Laden on meat and denial,” notes that among the effects of the terrorists was a training manual of sorts which advised the terrorists to look upon the killing of human beings in the same way they might look upon the ritual slaughter of animals. That people willing to commit such horrendous terrorist acts would have no problem with this is obvious, but the Animal People editorialist also finds the analogy to be a sound one. According to the editorial,
That terrorists might slash the throats of some jet riders to intimidate others, without causing them discomfort, en route to murder thousands, is self-evidently preposterous. Yet bin Laden obviously did manage to convince the hijackers that their deeds would have no more negative moral consequence than killing animals for meat. Many and perhaps most of the nine billion animals sent to slaughter in the U.S. each year, as well as the billions killed abroad, have at least as long to sense doom as did the September 11 victims. Neither are the animals’ last cries as unlike the cell phone calls made by some of the September 11 victims as the typical meat-eater would like to believe.
Equally disturbing to meat-eaters might be awareness that doomed animals, too, often put up frantic resistance, like the passengers who tried to retake United Airlines flight 93, saving countless lives by causing the hijackers to crash the plane far from any target.
The editorial then goes into a long-winded specious argument that meat eating is, if not the sole cause of violence in human societies, then at least a major contributing factor, or as the editorial sums up its case, “The horror of September 11 was a reflection of human attitudes toward meat. You don’t have to take our word for it. Take the word of Osama bin Laden.”
There is, of course, an alternative explanation which is that there are only two groups, to this writer’s knowledge, who insist on devaluing human life to the point of seriously comparing the death of a cow in a slaughter house to the death of a woman who has her throat slit by a box cutter — terrorists working at the behest of Osama bin Laden and the animal rights extremists.
Source:
Osama bin Laden on meat and denial. Animal People, October 1, 2001.
Eloquent Commentary on Animal Rights Terrorism
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, animal rights activists and Animal Liberation Front defenders argue that their brand of terrorism isn’t comparable to what happened at the World Trade Center the Pentagon. Certainly the two are not comparable in terms of scale and loss of life, but they are united by the simple fact that the goal is to terrorize people in an effort to change their behavior. When activists set a researcher’s home on fire or fire bomb a laboratory, they are not attempting to make a reasoned argument about the role of animals in medical research, but rather are sending a pretty clear message — stop this or else.
Gillian Reynolds, writing in the London’s Daily Telegraph, did an excellent job of puncturing the notion that there is any real difference in aims among terrorists. Reynolds wrote about a broadcast in Great Britain about the terrorism faced by Colin Blakemore, who has been targeted by animal rights activists largely because he is willing to publicly defend himself and debunk many of the activist claims. Reynolds wrote,
How can people who profess to care for animals be so vile to fellow human beings? …
A bomb was sent [to Blakemore] through the post, packed into the kind of cardboard tube that usually carries posters. His children had picked it up, looked at it. Had they opened it, at least one of them might have died, the others showered with HIV infected needles with which the explosive was also said to be packed. A letter arrived, razor blades attached to the top, lacerating the hand of the secretary who opened it. Gangs of screaming people invaded the Blakemore garden, tried to break down the front door. On police advice, they put in security gates and cameras, had panic buttons installed. The protesters came on Christmas Day, on Easter Sunday.
This is, in its most literal form, terrorist behavior. Blakemore and his family have suffered through it.
I couldn’t have said it better.
Source:
Conscience and the call to arms. Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph (London), October 23, 2001.
EFF’s Odd Idea of “Chilling Effects of Terrorism”
The Electronic Freedom Foundation has an interesting web page that “attempts to convey the chilling effect that responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have had on information availability on the Internet as well as some sense of the effect on people trying to provide this information.”
The page lists web sites that have been taken down as well as firings and pressure applied to traditional media outlets as well. What I thought was interesting, however, is that EFF apparently has its ideological blinders on — there isn’t any mention of censorship efforts directed at people who have been perceived as too gung ho about the war against Afghanistan.
The EFF notes, for example, that Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was pulled by some stations because of his comments, but doesn’t note that Ann Coulter was let go by National Review for her bellicose columns. And not a word about Arizona State University where officials removed an American flag from a cafeteria out of “concerns for the feelings of international students on campus.”
Memo to EFF: censorship works both ways.