Category: Uncategorized

Animal Advocate Was on Van der Graaf's Hit List

Animal rights activist Volkert Van der Graaf is the prime suspect in the assassination of Netherlands politicians Pim Fortuyn last week, but what was Van der Graaf’s motive? Was he angered at Fortuyn’s views of fur farming and the environment? So far Van der Graaf is not talking, but details from the police investigation are coming to light that suggest possible motives.

Netherlands newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported today that the hit list that police recovered from a search of Van der Graaf’s car and home included 19-year-old Joost Eerdmans. Eerdmans was the closest thing that the Fortuyn’s List Party had to a point man on animal protection issues.

Eerdmans is a member of the Dutch Animal Protection Association and e-mails from an environmental/animal rights group called Wakker Dier had been forwarded to Eerdmans. The e-mails inquired about the party’s environmental and animal policies.

Eerdmans replied to the e-mails that since the party had just formed it did not have explicit positions on these issues yet, but as an animal lover Eerdmans promised to fight for animal-friendly positions.

Wakker Dier worked closely with Van der Graaf’s organization, Environment Offensive. Police are investigating whether or not Van der Graaf learned of Eerdmans’ involvement with animal and environmental policy within the Fortuyn List Party from the e-mails exchanged with Wakker Dier.

So far, two of the four people on van der Graaf’s hit list were people within the Fortuyn’s List Party who were likely to have had significant influence over animal and environmental policy in the Netherlands after the May 15 elections and who did not share Van der Graaf’s extreme position on either topic.

Source:

Justitie onderzoekt e-mails van milieuclub. Olof van Joolen, Algemeen Dagblad, May 14, 2002.

Death’s Not Pretty — But People Should Have the Right to Make It Painless

Diane Pretty was dying. The 43-year-old British woman was in the advanced stages of motor neurone disease, and she wanted the right to allow her husband to help her take her own life.

Pretty wanted to avoid the sort of suffering that those with motor neurone disease often experience — a persistent choking that slowly asphyxiates the sufferer until a coma and then death ensues. Not a pretty way to go.

So Pretty wanted her husband to be able to help her commit suicide and avoid this sort of horrific death. She went to the European Union and sued for the right to end her life to avoid the inevitable suffering. The judges told her no — she had no right to alleviate her suffering by killing herself.

Only three days later, what Pretty always feared happened. She suffered from choking and difficulty breathing until the asphyxia eventually sent her into a coma. On May 12, 2002, she finally died.

Her husband Brian told the BBC, “Diane had to go through the one thing she had foreseen and was afraid of — and there was nothing I could do to help.”

Motor neurone disease took away Pretty’s life, but the British and European courts took away her dignity and self-determination.

Sources:

Diane Pretty dies. The BBC, May 12, 2002.

‘It is wrong to say people can die’. The BBC, May 12, 2002.

Deep Linking, Road Maps and Bibliographic Citations

TechCentralStation.Com today posted an article defending the Dallas Morning News’ position banning deep linking. That paper is currently sending out cease and desist notifications to people who deep link to one of its stories. It wants all visitors to be funneled through its front page and required to register before visiting specific stories (that a) this is stupid and b) is technically achievable right now is besides the point).

James Miller argues that web sites have a property interest in specific URLs. According to Miller,

DallasNews.com has recently tried to limit deep links. Deep links bypass an Internet site’s home page and take a reader directly to the interior content. The normally libertarian web community is outraged over the paper’s assertion of its property rights. Property rights, however, confer the ability to exclude, for without exclusion it’s difficult to profit.

. . .

Deep linking has the potential to do vast damage to content providers. Imagine that I create my own table of contents for the New York Times and provide links to interior articles. Let’s say that my site becomes popular and attracts many viewers who used to use the site’s own, advertising-filled, table of contents. My parasite has now deprived the Times of advertising revenue. Other potential online news providers might now be reluctant to start sites because of the fear that similar parasites would eat their profits.

But a deep link is just a URL and what is a URL? An address to a publicly available resource on the web.

Now Miller is arguing that even if I make a resource publicly available, it is still my private property and I should be able to control the distribution of the address — people shouldn’t be able to just willy nilly republish my address if I want to have exclusive control over it.

Which makes about as much sense as saying that I have a property interest in my physical address and can veto any directories or maps that attempt to list or show the location of my house without first getting my permission.

To get back to information, what Miller is arguing for is akin to Newsweek asserting that nobody has a right to cite a specific article in a bibliography. After all, if I post on my web site today that I’ve already read the latest issue of Newsweek and all of the articles sucked except the one on page 32 about deep linking, you can use this knowledge to ignore everything but that single article, thereby depriving Newsweek and its advertisers of having the reader consult Newsweek’s own, official table of contents and/or browsing through the magazine sequentially (and thus viewing the ads that Newsweek and its advertisers depend on).

Certainly it would be possible to create some sort of property rights scheme for deep linking just as it would be possible to create a property rights scheme that would prevent me from telling you which article in Newsweek is worth reading this week. But, it does not seem very efficient to do so in either case (imagine if every annotated bibliography ever published had to seek permission from rights holders before citing and summarizing journal, magazine and newspaper articles.)

I don’t think Miller’s article succeeds at all in making the case that there should be any sort of property interest in normal, everyday deep linking. Certainly some forms of deep linking such as the pervasive linking by a competitor to proprietary business data may warrant attention, as happened with the Ticketmaster case, but granting newspapers a proprietary interest in what is essentially little more than a high tech version of a bibliographical cite doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Source:

Deep links? No way! James D. Miller, TechCentralStation.Com, May 13, 2002.

Is Formula One an Individual or Team Sport?

Ferrari created a huge controversy over the weekend when it decided that Formula One was, in fact, a team sport.

Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello was clearly in the lead and headed toward a win in the Austrian Grand Prix. But Barrichello is not the current points leader for the Formula One championship — Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher holds that position.

So, Ferrari ordered Barrichello to slow down so that Schumacher could win the race and increase his points lead in his quest to win the championship.

Neither race fans nor the International Automobile Federation were pleased. Fans booed Schumacher and the FIA has ordered Ferrari to explain itself at a June 26 hearing.

This is not the first time such shenanigans have taken place at a Formula One race. At the 1998 Australian Grand Prix, McClaren team officials also ordered a driver who was in the lead to slow down and allow another McClaren driver to win the race.

After that race the FIA said that such actions were permissible as long as a championship were at stake. “It is perfectly legitimate for a team to decide that one of its drivers is its Championship contender and that the other will support him,” the FIA said at the time.

Source:

Ferrari summoned by FIA. The BBC, May 13, 2002.

The Online Racing Championship Association

I ran across the web site of the Online Racing Championship Association while pursuing my current obsession with sports sims.

The ORCA is an organization that sponsors races that take place completely online. The interesting thing is they pay for real prize money — albeit relatively low stakes, in the $20/per race region — and they have a sponsor, Advance Auto Parts.

Individual cars also have their own sponsors, and this being autoracing combined with relatively customizable racing computer games, of course the virtual cars generally contain advertising for the sponsors just like real race cars.

ORCA has a nice page on its website outlining its Sponsorship and Advertising policies. Just $20 will let you sponsor a race, all the way up to a $500 buy-in to be a Series Sponsor.

That is just unbelievably cool. I’m just going to have to sponsor a car/driver and/or race at some point.

Novartis Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is

Just a couple weeks after suggesting that Great Britain’s failure to control animal rights extremism would deter Novartis from investing there, Novartis last week announced it will spend hundreds of million of dollars to build a state-of-the art research facility in Boston, Massachusetts.

Novartis will kick things off with a $250 million, 400 research center in an MIT-owned research park called Kendall Square.

From there Novartis expects to expand quickly. It is already in talks to lease another building in Kendall Square and is also reported to be looking for 2-3 other buildings in the area to lease.

Novartis joins Pfizer, Wyeth and Merck as companies that have chosen to invest significant research dollars in Cambridge, Mass.

The big loser in this, of course, is Europe. Europe used to be the hands-down winner in drug research, but it is quickly becoming an also-ran due to an unfriendly cultural and legal climate.

According to The Financial Times of London, of all research dollars spent in Europe and the United States, only about 41 percent of that money went to the United States. Today the figure is 58 percent. As a whole, European companies currently conduct 34 percent of their research in the United States, compared to only 26 percent in 1990.

Europe is far behind the United States when it comes to biotech, which is one of the reasons that attracted Novartis to the Kendall Square facility.

The upshot, of course, is that as the United States continues to receive the disproportionate amount of pharmaceutical investment, the animal rights movement’s focus could switch to the United States more than it has. On the other hand, the social climate is far more hostile to the animal rights movement in the United States.

After all, Great Britain’s left-liberal candidate used to brag that he would ban the hunting of foxes with dogs, while the U.S. left-liberal candidate in the last election bragged about how he had hunted as a boy in order to shore up his support in rural areas.

The recent defeats the animal rights movement suffered in the 2002 Farm Bill is a good example of just how little influence the animal rights movement has on national politics in the United States (one of the many benefits of not having a proportional representation system).

Source:

Seeking freedom in New England: The decision by Novartis to move research to Boston is the latest step away from Europe by a big pharmaceutical. Daniel Dombey and Victoria Griffith, The Financial Times (London), May 8, 2002.

Novartis coming to Cambridge. Scott van Voorhis, The Boston Herald, May 8, 2002.