Apparently the NSA with all of its billions of dollars of equipment, internet trawling, and email-sniffing were outwitted by these two-bit Russian spies for years. Ahh, I love it when my tax dollars fund unconstitutional, liberty-destroying surveillance regimes that don’t even work!
On an article about a privacy flaw in the HTC Droid Incredible, some genius decided to post this brilliant series of comments:
And 13 people have fanned this guy. Wow.
Here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: animal rights. More and more people are talking about animal rights in a casual sort of way without really thinking about what that would mean. I’ll just be up front and say it: Animals don’t have rights. Here’s why:
Ask a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred different stupid looks. Duh, rights let you do things, right? Actually, not exactly. That ability has always been there. Animals illustrate this very well; they literally have the capacity to do anything within their power. They can eat, drink, sleep, run, jump, kill, maim, invade, and stalk, sometimes on a daily basis! Nothing constrains an animal besides natural factors such as hunger, disease, and predation.
Having no rights is in fact a state of perfect anarchic freedom. You can do whatever you want, up to and including acts however savage and barbarous as you wish, and others can do the very same to you if they are able. The social order is determined by strength and ability to resist the predation of others. It is an animal existence.
But humans don’t do that stuff. That’s because we have rights, a human construction intended to restrain negative human behavior. For example, my right to life and property prevents you from murdering me or stealing my stuff without getting punished. The key is this: rights constrain potential malicious behavior by using the threat of justified retaliation by the wronged party or a so empowered third party (the government, police, etc). Censor me or search my bags without permission and you’ll get sued. Steal my stuff and you’ll get locked up. Attack me and you’ll get shot. etc.
Animals can’t have rights because rights are (1) mutually agreed-upon societal constructions that are (2) understood by and enforceable against the bound parties. Not only are animals bereft of an empowered third party to enforce these hypothetical rights, but there isn’t even any type of mutual agreement that certain behavior is malicious and wrong in the first place! For example, humans believe that killing without provocation is wrong; animals don’t, and can’t, or else all the carnivores would starve.
This is because to an animal, might makes right; there really is no behavior that is “wrong” in the human sense of the word. The lion eats the gazelle because it’s hungry, and the gazelle drinks at whatever watering hole it wants because it’s thirsty. Were these animals to gain rights, then the lion would be infringing the gazelle’s right to life (and triggering the gazelle’s right to self-defense), and the gazelle would be infringing on some other animal’s property rights. How would the animals understand these things?
In the wild, only an animal with no rights can interact with another animal. Otherwise, for example, predator animals would have to be legally be punished for their victims’ right to life to mean anything. Similarly, if animals had a right to live lives free of cruelty, then if that right were to be enforceable against humans for factory-farming them (as many animal rights activists desire), then the right would have to be equally enforceable against other animals for forcing them to live lives full of fear where they can be brutally eaten alive at any time.
Animal behavior itself is incompatible with the idea of rights. The moment animals get rights, then other animals must be legally punished for violating those rights or else they’re meaningless. The take-home point is this:
Animals cannot have rights until other animals can be legally punished for infringing those rights. As such an idea is absurd in the extreme, we have to reject the notion that animals can have rights.
Next up on the gravy-train of ridiculous comes an actual thing that actually happened and was actually brought about by actual people: baseball bat manufacturer Louisville Slugger has just lost a lawsuit brought by the mother of a boy who was killed in a tragic baseball accident. Their crime? Manufacturing aluminum baseball bats, which the grieving family argued “are dangerous because they cause the ball to travel faster than those hit off wooden bats.”
No lie.
No joke.
To quote the post I found this in:
I guess the jury believes that had warning labels been placed on the bats, Patch would have read the label, refused to play and be alive today.
(the comments over there are pretty great, too.)
Clearly we need to do this universally. Imagine now many lives would be saved if everything were labeled or banned! Like maybe this:
Or this. It’s for the children. Obviously.
There’s some grade-A asshattery over at Dizzy Thinks:
Rarely have I laughed so loudly and so hard as when I read through Adobe Gripes, a user-submitted image blog of all the galling user interface cock-ups in today’s “professional” Adobe software. I like it because I have to use that crap and it’s cathartic to see that others as as annoyed as I am that any company’s UI department could be so bad. If you feel as I do, then you’ll like it, too! Give it a shot: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
You’ll groan over things like this obviously fake-ass menu:
GRRRRRR!
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked (in the role of Windows IT guy) to fix printing problems, install various basic PDF utilities and disinfect malware-infested computers, I’d have enough money to buy all the Macs needed to banish these routine issues for good.
Seriously! It’s 2008 and Windows still doesn’t include PDF support or anti-virus software out of the box,1 and keeping printers working reliably is still a nightmare.