Category: Uncategorized

I tried to convince my wife that if she bought me this personal space ship, I’d be able to dramatically increase my productivity, but she wasn’t buying it. Something about if she had half a million to spend she might want to launch me, but it definitely wouldn’t be aboard my own private space ship. Guess I just have to save my pennies up.

Now all someone needs to do is start offering the kit for photon torpedoes and energy shields, and I’m in business!

A few weeks ago a company called Digital:Convergence Corp. began giving away a small bar-code scanner called the CueCat at Radio Shacks around the country, as well as to mailing the scanners to subscribers of Wired and other magazines.

The CueCat is based on a pretty good idea — embed barcode style tags in print publications. Sweep the tag with the bar code reader and up pops a web site related to whatever the printed material is about. Marketers could use the CueCat, for example, to embed links to specific product web sites in advertisements for those products.

The major problem with the current round of such services is this: they’re all proprietary systems owned by a single entity which causes all sorts of problems. In the case of the CueCat, for example, each scanner has a unique ID and the users is required to give log-in data to a Digital:Convergence Corp. web site, meaning Digital Convergence has the capability to track very detailed information about an individual’s behavior with the CueCat (see ZDNet’s Will privacy kill the CueCat?). Of course they promise not to, but we’ve seen a number of broken promises from companies about privacy. Personally the benefit of the CueCat is marginal compared to the privacy risk (many users confidence in Digital:Convergence Corp. wasn’t enhanced when one of their servers got hacked and the company didn’t even realize it — somebody outside the company discovered and informed the company about the situation).

The good way to do this would be to build this as a standard into web browsers. Have an independent standards body write a method of encoding URLs into bar codes and then have Netscape, Microsoft and others simply incorporate that into the browser, letting the user decide which bar-code scanner he or she will use (and if they can afford to give these away free, the cost can’t be too high).

That would be useful. Giving me a consumer data collection scheme disguised as a helpful peripheral is not.

China recently announced that it was intensifying its |one-child policy| designed to keep its population down. An editorial in The People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, announced “We cannot just be content with the current success, we must make population control a permanent policy.”

China claims that the one-child policy prevented the births of 250 million babies, but this is unlikely given the fact that, as the BBC notes, people in the countryside largely ignore the one-child policy and in urban areas rising income and educational levels would have likely led to a reduction in family size anyway. Besides almost all of the decline in China’s population growth rate occurred prior to the creation of the one-child policy.

The one very noticeable demographic effect of the policy has been the vast skewing of the sex ratio, with far more boys being born than girls — according to the BBC there are now 60 million more men than women in China and that number is going to continue to grow as children born in 1980s and 1990s, where the sex ratio skewed the most, reach adulthood.

Meanwhile, China arrested officials in central China who murdered a baby that was born to a mother who had already exceeded the official state quota. Most of the allegations of human rights abuses caused by the one-child policy involve such state officials who are given quotas for live births for their area but often very little guidance on how exactly they are to stop women from getting pregnant. Under pressure to meet the quotas some officials, such as the three recently arrested, are willing to commit atrocities.

On the other hand the veracity of many horror stories was challenged recently by the indictment of a prominent New York attorney who specialized in Chinese immigrant cases. Robert Porges, 61, was indicted for helping international smugglers evade immigration authorities and bring up to 7,000 illegal immigrants from China to the United States.

Among the things Porges stands accused of is falsifying horror stories of persecution under the one-chlid policy in order to gain his clients political asylum in the United States. According to the Washington Post,

To secure [INS] releases, Porges and his paralegals concocted thousands of fake political asylum stories, claiming, for example, that a Chinese woman had undergone a forced abortion because of China’s one-child policy.

<porges and his firm filed fake documents from the so-called relatives, usually the smugglers themselves, or forged signatures of people with no relation to the aliens.

While there are certainly human rights abuses associated with the one-child policy, such concoctions and inventions may have helped exaggerate the extent of such abuses.

Source:

China steps up ‘one child’ policy. The BBC, September 25, 2000.

N.Y. lawyer charged in immigrant smuggling. Hanna Rosin and Christine Haughney, Washington Post, September 21, 2000.

Vivisectors.Net recently began posting the names, telephone numbers, and addresses of Minnesota-area animal breeders and medical researchers who conduct animal experiments. The web site notes that the information was gleaned from publicly avoidable sources, but civil juries in the past have held web sites liable for posting such information (especially since medical researchers are not generally considered public figures). Whoever is behind the site is exposing themselves to a lot of potential liability.