As long as nobody stops me from teaching Lord of the Rings as history.

Seriously, it's like we we've been having a conversation about home-built plastic ultralight aircraft, and then somebody says, "Hey, there's this company out in Seattle that makes aircraft out of metal."

Doing it with molten metal is a new one on me, but people have been laser sintering metal powder for thirty years now, and I bet most of the dollar volume of 3D printers shipped today are of this type. They've been coming down in price too. I have a friend who's a research machinist who has one in his lab, and he tells me that the strength gap between cast metal parts and laser sintered parts has closed significantly over the years.

OK... I guess that clarifies everything.

Well, I guess I am. I believe the sun rises in the east, standing in the rain makes you wet, and white bread is better for you than arsenic. I'm just not sure which of my beliefs you consider "heretical".

Fun fact, by the way: the word "heresy" comes from the greek (hairesis), which means "a self-chosen opinion". So in effect the word "heresy" means to think for yourself.

Oh, cool, a conservative argument citing the 14th Amendment.

For what it's worth, I agree with you in principle, at least with part of your post. This is the government injecting a point of view into the public sphere, something it's better off not doing in my opinion.

Furthermore, while commercial speech is less protected than non-commercial speech, the government still ought to (and is supposed to IIRC) show there is a compelling public interest that would actually be served by restricting the speech in question.

So what is the public interest? The feelings of the 30% of Indians who reportedly find "Redskins" offensive? Well lets grant that for the moment. How does not allowing the "Redskins" trademark advance that? It doesn't stop them from calling themselves "Redskins", or using the logo, or even using copyright to protect a lot of their merchandise.

If this goes to the courts and is eventually overturned, it will be on the basis that it restricts commercial speech in a way that doesn't effectively serve any public purpose, even if we grant that not offending people is a public purpose.

Now all that said, I do find characterizing all American Indians as "history's losers" as offensive. And ignorant too. And as for the idea that gaining an upper hand by force and treachery entitles you to do whatever you want to the other side, I find that repugnant.

So what about free speech? They can still call themselves the "Redskins".

This is about trademarks, and the interests protected are somewhat different than those protected by the First Amendment.

The Redskins can still sell "Redskins" merchandise -- that's your first Amendment protections at work. What they can't do now is stop other people from using the word "Redskins" on merchandise of the type the Redskins organization sells, licenses or endorses. They may have copyright or trade dress claim if that merchandise borrows too much from their products. I don't know, this touches on areas of IP law which as an IT guy I've never had to worry about.

The Redskins logo is not affected by this ruling, IIRC. Somebody will have to show that depicting an Indian with feathers is offensive, which is going to be tough. So the Redskins organization retains a monopoly on products bearing their logo. Even if they lose on that they still have copyright on the logo. There may be a few peculiar situations where people can do something under copyright they couldn't do under trademark, because it doesn't involve any actual copying. But their logo T-shirt, beer glass, coaster, key-chain etc. business is perfectly safe.

So I don't see this development as something that is likely to hit the Redskins football team where it hurts -- in the pocketbook.

Well, when analog photography came in, some people thought it would be the death of painting, particularly of portraiture. Obviously that didn't happen. A photographic portrait is different, and it is certainly more convenient for all involved, but filtering an image through a painter's eyes, brain, training, imagination etc. still seems to have value for many people.

Now the transition to digital from analog photography is different of course; and as Mark Twain once noted, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Presumably you *can* do anything with digital that people once did with analog photography, but in art its not a simple matter to separate technique from intent. The naive view is you form an intention and pick a technique that will accomplish that intention, but in fact intention and technique inform each other. Artists always struggle with their tools. And they look at the result of other artists struggling with their tools. And so artistic movements are born.

So when a teacher makes the kids learn analog photography before they switch to digital, what he's trying to do is ground them in a 150 years of photographic aesthetics. He could do this by by making the kids reproduce the results of analog photography using entirely different techniques. But the kids' understanding of what came before them wouldn't be the same as if they actually put their hands to the authentic, if obsolete methods.

That was my point. What I said is that this kind of situation is what net neutrality is *for*. I didn't say Google was violating net neutrality. Nitwit.

I don't see what's evil about it.

THIS is what net neutrality is *for*. People who own the services can include and exclude whatever content they want, and if the users don't like it they really can choose a different service.

What Google is doing may be misguided, but it's not evil because it doesn't stop people from getting whatever they want.

Very few kids. And most of those didn't have modems. Adults often did, and they could buy things on CompuServe or AOL dialup, at 1200 baud. Not many people did, and those who did so did it more for the novelty value.

But I did slip from 1986 to 1967 in my reminiscing. It was the comic book thing. My dad had restaurant next to a convenience store and I used to buy my comic books there.

These were telemarketing operators who didn't have physical access to the credit card. Anyway, back in those days the data wasn't encrypted yet. So I fear I have led you to squander an insightful comment.

It's easy for an old timer to forget that people under the age of 40 have never ordered anything over the phone. At the time I'm talking about, the web was years in the future, and it was illegal to conduct commerce over the Internet (which we called "the ARPANet"). Most businesses ran entirely on paper, and most people had never seen a computer in person. Usually in the movies or TV they'd use a 7 track tape drive as the prop "computer", although those were obsolete even then.

So believe it or not, back then it was common to call a vendor on a phone, verbally tell him what you want, and then read off your credit card number and expiration date. This was simply the way you bought things if you weren't shopping at a bricks-and-mortar store (which we called "a store"). Nobody was worried about "identity theft" because thieves still dealt mainly in cash and transportable valuables and crooks were only just then cottoning on to the value of information.

You could also buy stuff by writing a letter to a vendor listing what you wanted and enclosing a check or money order (which was a check you got at the post office in exchange for cash and and extra nickel). Six to eight weeks later your stuff would arrive. For some reason it was always "six to eight weeks". That's how we used to buy stuff like propeller beanies and x-ray specs from poorly printed ads in the back of comics. The x-ray specs were a bust; all they'd do is make girls think you were creepy, which was actually kind of the point. You could also send away for itching powder and books of allegedly comical retorts you were supposed to use if somebody said something that made you feel bad and you couldn't think of anything original. "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits." That material killed -- usually the kid who tried to use it.

It was a simpler time. Kids couldn't get access to porn (which we called "dirty pictures") because they kept it on a shelf higher than we could reach. You had to know to sneak into the firehouse when the men were out on an alarm. We didn't have gaming consoles so we had to make our own fun. We'd go out in the healthy fresh air and throw rocks at each other. That was our version of a "first person shooter". Sometimes to fill up the time we'd have fist fights with kids who were a different race or religion from us. Or from the other end of the street. Or were just there. Believe me it kept you on your toes when you were walking home at night! But it wasn't hateful, it was just something to do when you don't have "Grand Theft Auto" to keep you distracted. The next day we'd be having a pickup baseball game (no adult supervision for *us*) down at the sandlot with the very same kids we'd just fought. We'd laugh, exchange insults, and swipe the other guys equipment when he wasn't looking, just as if nothing happened.

And I swear, every word I've written here is true.

Back in the 80s I worked for a company that did back office accounting systems. Then I moved to a large non-profit and was in charge of both back office and customer facing systems. This was when the Internet was for non-commercial traffic only, so "customer facing" meant a live operator at a dumb terminal hooked up to a minicomputer.

My new employer wanted me to develop a system that would among other things take credit cards from donors and volunteers. I was pretty confident on the technical end of things, but I wasn't sure about handing the financial data. So I called in a CPA friend I'd met at my prior job, and he looked over a the design documentation for the system to make sure everything was kosher.

"You can't store credit card information in the database," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because it's insecure," he said.

"But it's convenient," I said.

"That's the problem," he said. "Look, any of the operators will be able to look up credit card information on any donor. Some of these donors are rich. You'd be able to go on one hell of a shopping spree with just one of their credit cards."

"What if I make it harder to look up the data?"

"Then it's not convenient anymore," he said. "Look, you don't actually have a use for this data once you've processed the credit card transactions. And while you're keeping it around in case you might someday have a use for it, it leaves you wide open to theft. It'd be a disaster; customers won't do business with you because your reputation will be in the toilet. Get rid of it. Get it out of the database, any logs you have, and make sure it's not in any backup tapes."

And when I thought about it I realized he was right. There was no point in exposing my employer to risk for no real benefit. That's when I learned an important principle of security: don't hold onto sensitive data that you don't actually have a use for. I suppose you could generalize: don't keep sensitive data on any system where there is no compelling need to store it there.

Things have changed now; storing credit card data has come to be regarded as routine in the post-1 click, impulse buy Internet world. But even though it is the *norm*, that doesn't mean you should automatically do it. There's actually a use in a web store for storing credit card data which offsets the risk (which you should still minimize). There's no reason for a restaurant to store credit card information -- that's just blind habit. Waiter takes the customer credit card, runs the transaction, and hands the card back to the customer, and then restaurant no longer has the data. You can't lose what you don't have.

Of course in this case it's probably not P.F. Chang's fault. They bought a POS system which left them open. It probably is all slick and really very helpful at keeping things moving, like maybe taking the customers card at the table. It'd be interesting to know how the POS system vendor screwed this up, because clearly they did.

There is no encryption or security architecture that beats not having the data.

I dont think these rich, tech executives are trying to reform illegal immigration from south of the border.

They are trying to reform immigration so they can import as many engineers as possible in to the U.S. from other countries.

You don't think most of them got rich by actually writing code did you?

They mostly get rich by hiring/funding engineers to write code for them. The more engineers they have to choose from the happier they are because they have more startups to choose from and they can suppress engineering salaries which improves profitiability and the value of their stock portfolios.

Well, you're missing an important dynamic here, which is groupthink.

When people decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, the first thing they do is look around to see what other people think. And this is actually not a bad heuristic. Sometimes when you're in jail for civil disobedience it's because you are, in Thoreau's words, "a man more right than his neighbnors". But most of the time it's because you're a mule-headed crackpot. You should at least consider the possibility that if everyone else disagrees with you, it may be because you're wrong. But most people go further. They play it safe by only having opinions they see lots of other people having.

So shills actually do something far more significant than trick politicians and civil servants into believing there are armies of just plain folks out there who care so much about the natural rights of cable companies that they'll donate impressive amounts of time and money out sheer public spiritedness. Shills alter the public perception of what a normal opinion sounds like.

This isn't Civics 101. This is how politics works in the real world. It's a little bit like stage hypnosis. When diplomats are surprised or outraged in that particularly insincere way they have, everybody knows it's phony. But somehow they go along with it because -- well nobody seems to know why. Same when a politician cites the support of some group that everyone knows is paid to express support. People know it's fake, but they react as if it were real

I think this gets to yet another function of shills. I think they function as a signaler of fitness in the Social Darwinism game. It's a bit like buying an ad during the Superbowl; it doesn't really say anything about how your beer tastes. It signals that you're a successful, Serious Player in the beer game. Having flocks of flying PR monkeys at your beck and call doesn't mean that those monkeys spout anything but gibberish. It means you've got the resources to be a Serious Player; a kingmaker perhaps, and you've put skin in the game. And so we go along with the gibberish, because it's more important to be on the winning side than the right one.

^^^^ Now they have. Every level meta you go pushes the rock bottom that much lower...

This is another one of those political talking points that amount to nothing more than dishonest quibbling. Yes, the kind of "tenure" that university professors get would make no sense for a high school teacher, but that's not what "tenure" means in public schools. It has the same *name*, but it means something *different*.

It's practically impossible to get rid of a university professor with tenure. An elementary school teacher *can* be fired, but only for specific causes. Here are the list of causes which, under my states laws, a tenured public school teacher can be fired:

(1) inefficiency,
(2) incompetency,
(3) incapacity,
(4) conduct unbecoming a teacher,
(5) insubordination
(6) failure to satisfy teacher performance standards
(note) teachers can also be laid off due to staff reductions.

This seems like a pretty complete list of the justifications a reasonable person would need for firing a teacher. If a principal has documentation of any of these causes, the teacher is out. Immediately. The teacher can appeal to an arbitration board, but pending any reversal of the firing the teacher is not allowed back on campus.

It's actually quite straightforward to fire a tenured teacher. Two of my kids teachers were dismissed, even though they had tenure. One for gross inefficiency, the other for conduct unbecoming a teacher (she told a black student he should "go back to the plantation"). The teacher fired for bad conduct was the head of the local teacher's union. The union did not make a stink in either case; it generally doesn't. It's OK with dismissals for cause, so long as there is documentation and proper procedures are followed. If there weren't documented cause or the teacher didn't get his right of appeal, they'd fight that, as they should.

The myth that you just *can't* fire a tenured public school teacher is sometimes spread by lazy principals. They'll tell unhappy parents, "Gee, I'd like to get rid of that one, but he's got tenure. It's practically impossible to get rid of a tenured teacher." There was a case like that in my town where the principal kept telling parents there was nothing he could do about a certain teacher. Then they school got a new principal, and a few months later he fired the teacher in question.