I forgot to raise one point against the original article. The author says that these worries are prompted by "life cycle" analysis and says, "Such analysis is useful, but really it's making lots of you think way too hard for your own good."

Perhaps he's just making a joke, but this is frequently a problem with a certain strand of environmental activism - take our word for it; don't think for yourself.

It reminds me of an ethanol activist I heard on NPR a couple of years ago. In response to a study showing that the production of ethanol still used more energy than it produced, he just said something like, "Well we know we're doing the right thing."

Obviously the supposed energy inefficiency of cycling is bogus, but the response should be to encourage people to think more, not less.

As Brett (#4) says, for most of us we're already consuming more than enough fuel for biking. If anything I eat less since I started biking to work.

The manufacturing cost of bikes of course mean they aren't energy 'free,' but obviously that comparison isn't going to come out in the car's favor.

Re: pro-choice

This just goes to show that our ordinary categories can mislead us in unusual situations. Presumably this coat, though 'alive' in some sense, had no central nervous system and so we have no more reason to think it has consciousness than we do a plant or bit of mold growing in the fridge (which is also alive, at least as much so as this coat).

Presumably we have no reason to be queasy about killing the mold in the fridge, but somehow the fact that these are mice cells makes this seem like something different.

Also the 'pro-choice' remark reflects confusion at another level. To be pro-choice is not necessarily to be pro-abortion or to think that one would choose abortion oneself. It's to be, er, in favor of, er, individuals having a choice about doing it.

I'm pro-choice about watching American Idol, Survivor, and Jerry Springer, although I find the idea rather disgusting and would find it very difficult to imagine choosing it for myself except under extreme circumstances.

Evil Jim,

You're certainly right that if people go into the security line with a pissy attitude that's likely to contribute to a pissy experience all around.

But is there any evidence that this is what happened to the woman with the nipple rings? If she had just been sweeter would they have spared her the tweezers?

Also, in comparing your own experience you should consider how 'mainstream' you are. If you're like me, you're a youngish white guy who dresses more or less normally for a middle class American, and you don't have any tattoos, piercings, etc. (Maybe you're not - I'm not assuming). I also don't generally carry any special technical, scientific, artistic, or other unusual but innocuous equipment with me.
In that case, the fact that people like you and me often avoid being hassled doesn't mean that the system doesn't unfairly and arbitrarily target appearances and behaviors outside the norm.
Also, just because the TSA employees we've encountered are nice, professional people doesn't mean that the system hasn't given them arbitrary and poorly checked authority over us.

Telling quote from the end of video 4 (Right at 9 mins)that should be used by anyone responding to cease and desist orders on hosting the videos:

"A Scientologist can be defined by a single question: Would you want others to achieve the knowledge you now have?"

Telling quote from the end of video 4 (Right at 9 mins)that should be used by anyone responding to cease and desist orders on hosting the videos:

"A Scientologist can be defined by a single question: Would you want others to achieve the knowledge you now have?"

Re: Wrybread (#3)

Christians who talk with the same kind of unquestioning certainty - who think they can 'save people' from medicine they need - come off as equally delusional. See for example Kirk Cameron: http://www.wayofthemaster.com/ The guy's a bit wacky.

Or look at religious broadcasting. The only thing that holds back the feeling that most of those guys are out of their minds is the recognition that many of them are scam artists.

In general fanaticism often comes off looking like mental illness. I would speculate that mental illness often lies behind fanaticism (religious or otherwise), but I don't know whether there is any evidence for that.

---
By the way, in video IV - what is it that Tom Cruise can do at the scene of an accident that no one else can? And whatever it is, why does he just stop when he happens to see one? Shouldn't he seek them out (I'm sure there are plenty around ? If he's that indispensable why is he wasting his time making movies instead of looking for car crashes?

EnglishNerd,

Have you ever been an employee? There are certainly jobs where one is paid to be merely a cog in a machine, where creativity is neither required nor, often, desired. But there are plenty of jobs other than 'writer' or 'actor' or 'artist' in which people are hired to create things and where people are hired because the employer thinks what the employee creates is worth the agreed compensation package.
The idea that there's a sharp line between 'writer: the art-ist - great force of creativity' and 'employee: the mere drone who does what he's told' is both silly and insulting.
Don't get me wrong - I'm with the writers on this one. Given that their standard terms of compensation rely on residuals, they'd be stupid not to demand residuals from online content. The rationale behind the residuals system applies equally well to streaming video. But BoinkBoink is also correct - it's not a fundamental right of nature (or even a fundamental legal right) that writers get residuals.

I agree with TheRascalKing - any lock can be broken by those with the right knowledge. (It's similar in many ways to the fact that any DRM can be broken) Of course if you have something really valuable, it's worth investing in the latest, harder to break (but not unbreakable) locking technology, but for most purposes you can rely on the fact that most people don't know how to do it, and that most people don't want to steal your stuff (or don't want to go to any effort to do it).

Peterus,

You assume that the people at Gitmo are all (or even mostly) terrorists or that they were taken from the battlefield. In fact many were handed over to the Americans by third parties who were paid bounties; you can imagine why such bounty hunters might not be the most reliable sources as to who was and wasn't fighting against the Americans.

In America we used to think it was just in the 'bad' countries that someone could be picked up poor evidence and held indefinitely without trial. Gitmo is striking, blatant evidence that our country is willing to engage in those same violations of the most basic of civil liberties - the right of habeus corpus.

Look everyone knows how writing works. A writer closes herself off from the world, forgets everything she's ever read, and write something completely new and original from scratch, drawing in no way on previous intellectual property or on the larger culture influenced by such creations.

Anyone who writes like that deserves to have sole and exclusive use of their original creations. I think it's criminal that news programs are able to sell advertising by talking about the existence of such characters!

I mean look at Disney - they gave the world such original characters as Snow White, Cinderella, and Pocahontas. Or look at Shakespeare and his original creations - Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and King Richard.

They won't keep your memories, Dybbuk. But if they can find a way to charge you a license fee for them, they'll definitely try that.

@#24 (Automatt)

Of course even with DRM your work product still gets distributed freely. DRM doesn't stop the pirates, it just screws paying customers.

Yes, it would be a shame if people in the media miss an important press release - they might have to do independent research when writing a story, instead of just taking companies at their word.

So which number is my 'contact' number? My home phone, my cell phone, or my work phone? On which of those do I want telemarketers calling me with stock scams? None. Maybe this is good advice for somebody who has an unimportant phone number they can use and then discard, but for most people it's horribly bad advice.

E-mail is a better idea, as long as you use a throwaway email address (or have a great spam filter). But then why suggest the phone number option to begin with?

Other than an occasional BoingBoing linked item, this was my first visit to the Consumerist. Based on the articles I've sampled, I'm not very impressed. Dismiss me with whatever ad hominem theory you like; it won't make this bad advice any better.

Ugh, I just have to add this one to the bad list:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/hardballs/get-your-complaint-resolved-by-posting-it-to-the-companys-stock-forums-297566.php

Post your phone number on internet stock forums? Yikes!

So I'm all for giving consumers tips to fight back against scammy businesses and indifferent corporate leviathans, but the couple of sections I read sounded pretty sketchy to me.

The tips on how to record customer service calls without getting in trouble is the most egregious. Basically it tells you to trick the customer service rep into thinking you were joking when saying 'This call may be recorded for training purposes.'

As several comments there effectively demonstrate, that is horrible advice.

Another story involves someone threatening to picket in front of a car dealership that ripped them off. The person's fliers accused the dealership of lying, even though (by the person's own account) no one at the dealership had lied to him (they just failed to tell him about an advertised deal). Following through with his threat would appear to have made him open to charges of libel and/or slander (presumably there would have been written and oral versions of the false charge made during such a protest).

Way to go, Lich. Now everybody named "Michael Hunt" is on the no fly list.

But for certain purposes, what is important is that the children were given health care. If the question at hand is whether children are currently receiving adequate health care, it need not be important to know who is doing the providing. (Indeed, some means of measuring whether children receive health care may not be very revealing as to who provided it). Similarly, it may sometimes be easier to identify that a group has been exploited than to clearly identify a guilty party.

In such situations, it can be awkward or misleading to use the active voice.

It's certainly the case that the use of passive voice is sometimes unclear or misleading. Being a good writer involves knowing when passive voice is and isn't appropriate. For students at a certain level, a blanket prohibition on the passive voice may be easier than trying to teach them when it is appropriate.

But it's silly to treat such a prohibition as a rule for mature writers, and it's simply wrong for a word processor to identify it as a grammatical error.

The passive voice is great, and I would speculate that even those who "love good prose" are also in favor of the passive voice. It's certainly the case that philosophical writing more or less requires the use of passive voice - so much so that I find standard word processor grammar checks useless.

The rule 'don't use passive voice' is much like the rule 'don't start a sentence with a conjunction.' Both are crutches, sometimes useful in teaching people to write when you're not yet ready to explain when it is and is not appropriate to use the (provisionally) forbidden form. But neither should continue to be held to in the writing of a mature author.

@devoinregress

You say
"Until someone brings up a better idea on how to reach them I will be sending these cards back with my movies."

Isn't this rather like the logic behind DRM itself?

Step 1: We want to... (get our message across)/(prevent people from copying digitally encoded media)

Step 2: Someone suggests a method... (return a card with every return)/(cripple media files with DRM)

Step 3: Someone shows us that this won't... (get our message across)/(prevent people from copying digitally encoded media)

Step 4: We decide to... waste our time and annoy others by persisting in the ineffectual method.

Bob,

Let me just add to Cory's comments about the law an important conceptual observation about terms like 'theft' and 'murder.' It's just not plausible to think that we define these in terms of the comparability of outcomes.
If you give me a CD as a gift, the outcome is that the object has been transferred from your control to mine. If, instead, I steal the CD from you, the outcome is that the object has been transferred from your control to mine. Those sure look like comparable outcomes. Does that mean that receiving gifts is just a kind of theft? Or perhaps it means that stealing is just another way of receiving gifts.
Also, theft sometimes fails to produce its characteristic outcome. If a thief is caught, the object may be returned to its original owner. The ultimate outcome, then, is that the original owner has the object.

Spoon,

You have no more evidence for your claim than you have in the opposite direction. Not everyone who was sharing music on Napster was doing so to the exclusion of buying CDs. Indeed, some people had to be buying the CDs in order to put them on Napster. And while the number of Napster users may have decreased as dramatically as you suggest, many people immediately migrated to other file sharing programs and, as you yourself say, are now using bit torrent.
For my part, I never made much use of Napster - I only used it if there was a song I really wanted to listen to (usually older songs that weren't in constant radio rotation) but didn't want to buy the whole CD. And I've got a huge CD wallet full of CDs I bought before them. As a result of the RIAA lawsuits, I no longer buy CDs, nor do I download the tracks from file sharing. I don't even give CDs as gifts anymore.
I use eMusic exclusively, so I'm not buying any major label stuff. And for someone with tastes as pedestrian as mine, that's quite an accomplishment for the RIAA.
How many more people are there like me? I have no idea.

Kyle,

Why do you keep beating up the same straw man? Nobody is claiming that their aren't differences between humans and other animals. They question is which of those differences, if any, are relevant to the determination of legal or moral personhood. Guess what, there are also differences between men and women; there are differences between Catholics and Lutherans; there are differences between me and you. There are differences everywhere, and no one is denying that. But which differences are morally and legally important?

Now your point (1) is actually interesting and relevant in this regard. If you had taken more philosophy classes you may have encountered Morals By Agreement by David Gauthier, in which he develops a more sophisticated version of this point. One problem with this view, which Gauthier accepts, is that it implies we have no obligations to the disabled or the infirmed who are little threat to us and are in no position to reciprocate any benefits we might give.
But note that this criterion - the capacity for mutual benefit and responsibility - is not a biological category at all. In fact there are members of our own species who lack this capacity (actually we're all born lacking that capacity). Moreover, there is nothing that can rule out in the abstract that members of some other species (or even some mechanical intelligence) might have this same feature.
It is thus a matter for empirical investigation whether some apes are capable of such a relation with us. For what it's worth, I share your skepticism in this regard, but it's not worth much since I know very little about primate research.

One thing you would have learned from more philosophy training is clarity and rigor in your arguments. If the bounds of personhood are determined primarily by mutual benefit and accountability, then species membership as such has nothing to do with it. Species membership is nothing but a red herring.

Kyle Armbruster,

You still haven't addressed my central criticism. Why should we think that the biological category 'homo sapien' should be mapped exactly on the legal category 'person' or the (distinct) moral category 'person?'

You haven't addressed the further point (which Tensegrity beat me to), which is that we already recognize corporations as legal persons. You seem to be advocating a rather sweeping restructuring of our legal system, one that would have rather sweeping economic implications.

Finally, the question of whether we would be in a position to recognize the personhood of some alien species is entirely separate from the question of whether they might actually be (moral) persons. Moreover, even if we COULD identify the intelligence of alien life, your argument absurdly implies that would be irrelevant to their moral and legal status, since they would belong to a different species.

You seem to think this is irrelevant because it's so unlikely that we'd ever meet such a species. But the point isn't that we need to plan for that contingency - what our views are about hypothetical scenarios is an important way to test the boundaries of our concepts. This is especially important for contested concepts like 'person.'

Guess what, Anangbhai, corporations are also persons in the eyes of the law. What's at issue here is a legal category, not a biological category.

Outside of law, there is also something we might call the moral category of personhood. Even in this arena, however, there's no reason to think that this matches onto any biological categories.

Pick your favorite science fiction story where humans are no longer the dominant species on the planet. If your justification were correct, that would mean that the aliens, or giant bugs, or killer bacteria that had taken over were the only 'persons.'

You might also benefit from doing a Google search for the term "straw man argument."

Re: Kyle Armbruster

You say that past injustice committed by, if not our ancestors, at least our nation is a strange thing to fixate on. Do you feel the same way about celebrating July 4th - after all the American revolution took place a long time ago, and I certainly didn't fight in it. I didn't write the Declaration of Independence, nor did I vote for the members of the Continental Congress who endorsed it.

How can it be consistent to regard the positive aspects of the past as proud parts of OUR heritage, but when those very same people did bad things we treat them as long dead people that have nothing to do with us? So far as I can tell you can't have it both ways - you can't take credit for the good (OUR history of liberty) but deny responsibility for the bad (some dead people who murdered civilians, enslaved children, etc).

Re shoes:

I also have wide feet; I generally have to settle for shoes that are a bit too long, even where wide sizes are available. But I don't think I could ever bring myself to wear a Nike product. Apart from the issue of their labor practices (which is, sadly, not going to be much different for any shoes or clothes widely available in America), I blame Nike for the increasing commercialization of all aspects of our lives - why can't I just wear shoes or clothes without becoming a walking advertisement?

I can't see that check mark without being reminded of everything I hate about marketing and corporate America.

Aren't ISBN numbers extremely easy to find if you have title and author information? Just search for the book on Amazon or on the publisher's webpage.

Mike makes a clever point, but his logic is off.
To see this intuitively, consider his final claim
that the change in measure of the copies "is believed to be due to physical changes in the reference kilo."

What physical changes in the reference kilo could this be? A change in color wouldn't have this effect, nor would a mere change in shape. It would have to be a change in its mass. The error is in mistaking the unit of measure for the property that it measures.

Let's call the reference kilogram R, and let's suppose that Mike is right that the definition of a kilogram is 'The mass of R.'

Already this definition is ambiguous between two readings.
D1: 'The mass of R at the time of its selection in 1889'
D2: 'The mass of R right now' (Where 'right now' serves as an indexical, indicating the timeframe of the relevant writing, speaking, or interpreting of the term 'kilogram.'

Obviously under D1 there is no problem with saying that R has lost mass. Both Mike and the scientists quoted in the article, of course, seem to be using D2.

However, under D2 the following is true when uttered now: 'The original mass of R in 1889 was greater than one kilogram. However, at that time people used the term 'kilogram' to refer to that larger quantity of mass.'

Thus, even on D2 we can perfectly intelligibly compare the mass of R in 1889 to its mass now using the term 'kilogram.'

Re: Anonymous #10

You're right, the only options are DRM-ed media or giving all media away for free.

Oh wait, not it isn't. I pay money to eMusic every month, and they pay money to artists and investors, and yet I don't have to worry about DRM on my music files.

Of course even if your suggestion was the only alternative to DRM, that wouldn't affect Cory's argument, which is that effective DRM is impossible. If your business model requires a perpetual motion machine to work, that doesn't mean you should keep spending money on companies that promise to deliver perpetual motion machines. It means your business model is broken.

I've noticed that this post contains the terms "Asimov" and "Silverberg," so you should be prepared for a DMCA taketown notice, Cory.