educating eric

Yahoo! News - Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies : "'The slippery slope in the Netherlands has descended already into a vertical cliff,' said Wesley J. Smith, a prominent California-based critic, in an e-mail to The Associated Press." The hard thing here is that people struggle with the difference between forseeing and intending consequences. Killing people isn't the only way to relieve pain. Sometimes, pain relief might result in death... but "intending pain relief and forseeing possible death" is very, very different from "intending death (by means of a pain reliever)."

Delicious Library Nobody needs this application, but it sure would be cool to have! My favorite part is the "barcode scanning" feature. Maybe I could go through my entire library and finally get it organized!

Public Knowledge - The Intellectual Property Protection Act A good reference page on the latest erosion of rights (errr... I mean, "pieces of legislation") before Congress.

St. Paul Pioneer Press | 11/18/2004 | Judge gave sex felon custody of little girl : "Child advocates said Wednesday the decision to award custody of a nonbiological child to a felon with a criminal sexual history was startling." This is unbelievable on so many levels... And provides good ammo for folks who argue that "government" isn't a good mediator of family and social issues. Grab a pen and paper before reading this if you want to keep track of who's-having-children-with-whom, by the way -- this also provides good ammo for those who want to talk about the "breakdown of the family". Yikes.

Is this 34 year old movie clip the inspiration for iPod/iTunes advertisement? This is included here more as a mental note to myself (which, once written, is no longer "mental", but I digress) to consider the kinds of effects we can create on the Videonics MX-1. I'm thinking that a set of inverse colors and high-contrast posterized effects might yield something interesting...

Enough already with Powerpoint - just talk with me! A well-written article on the fact that PowerPoint ain't all it's cracked up to be (from a communication standpoint).

Conservatives Aim to Sink Pirate Act : "At one point, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation that would have held makers of music players like Apple's iPod liable for inducing copyright violations. The legislation, called the Induce Act, was eventually left out of the omnibus package. No so the Pirate Act, however. 'The Pirate Act isn't just ill-conceived, it's bad public policy. It needlessly and harmfully expands the role of government,' Rumenap said. '[Under this bill] Who pays the legal bills for Hollywood? The American taxpayers. And as a bonus, Hollywood companies get to collect the fines.'" One bad bill down, but more to go. Think this battle will ever end?

Panic - Extras - The True Story of Audion . The article itself will only be of interest to Mac geeks, but it has a valuable quotation: "The lesson? It seems you can either be free to do anything you want, to create anything you dream of without answering to anyone, or you can be rich. You're not likely to be both."

In my SPAM of the Day , one "Kelly Wall" asks just one simple question: "Is your Daughter Impotent?" I really don't think so. Really. Trust me. But thanks for asking!

Yahoo! News - In Vegas, an Unholy Alliance Politics make strange... oh, never mind.

A Stolen Election? A more well-reasoned article (by the author of "Why I'm For Kerry", which tells me he's not a Republican shill...)

St. Paul Pioneer Press | 11/09/2004 | Girl dies in bike-car crash : "In a rush to ride those two blocks home, Emily darted across the street against the red light. She didn't use the crosswalk at Upper 182nd Street West." In nine years, this could be Candela. How do you teach kids safe conduct in the face of the temptation of shortcuts for candy's sake? Yikes...

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked I'm as wary of computerized voting as anyone, but this seems to be jumping to conclusions.. although if you postulate that "greys" were using telepathy in black helicopters spreading chem-trails above the polling places, it makes more sense.

Boston.com / News / Nation / Siblings are convicted in first felony spam case; 1 acquitted Let's hope this is a lesson go SPAMmers... though it really only affects dumb SPAMmers.

Yahoo! News - Election Will Prompt Democratic Soul-Searching Will this be my one and only comment on the election? Probably not...