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.

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.

All those young adjunct professors who are publishing like mad, refusing no committee assignment, and enduring any indignity their superiors can dream up in the vain hope of grasping the brass tenure ring. Often the decisions of the tenure committee are inexplicable, so you have no option but to put your nose to the grindstone and pray.

That doesn't excuse the attitude "I've got mine, to hell with this place," but it makes it more understandable.

I've been to Europe. You should go too, because if you're right and they're 50 years ahead of us, you should check it out.

Judging from the state of things in Europe, the Great Decline isn't going to be so bad. Sure a few of the people there don't speak American and a lot of 'em have queer opinions. But the grub, once you get used to it, isn't half bad for foreign muck. And a lot of the places they've got seriously kick-ass beer, and that goes a long way in my book.

And they've got a lot of hot women. I think it goes with the whole picturesque thing. I've got to admit they're really good at that. I mean, we have majestic mountains, and so do they, but *they* but these crazy cuckoo clock houses on 'em. Yeah, it's kind of gay, but if that's the way things are going we might as well get used to that sort of thing. I mean, what's the point of swimming against the tide of the future if in the end what you're fighting against is houses with fancy fretwork and really good beer. I can live with that.

I agree with you on this one, but it does raise interesting questions.

What if the researcher were running SETI@Home? That would still be wrong. But would it be *as* wrong? As in "fired and barred for life* wrong?

What about someone who uses his office computer to do some Christmas shopping, or to check movie times? That seems to me to be a judgment call. There are behaviors which in moderation are harmless to the employer and which benefit the employee, but when taken to extreme are abuse.

This stuff is worth thinking about, because the simple answers are going to be too restrictive, and too restrictive is, for practical purposes, the same as too permissive. People don't respect rules that don't make sense, they find ways around them. That inflates the cost of enforcement too.

I wouldn't go that far. I don't have a problem with police simply *having* these things. I don't have a problem with police having SWAT teams either, and they're even more dangerous. People do have a *lot* more guns than they used to, and those guns are a *lot* more powerful. There's no excuse for treating the public at large as an enemy, even the ridiculously heavily armed segment of the public, but that doesn't mean there aren't situations where a police commander needs more firepower and protection than he used to have. And that should be fine so long as he doesn't get too enamored of those things.

As an engineer I'm all too familiar with the dangerous seductiveness of a golden hammer. A professional is always wary of a golden hammer; he doesn't want to use it, but that doesn't mean he doesn't like to have one in the toolbox. Look at the video in the linked article (bad form I know). That's exactly what the commander in the video is saying: he needs to have it, but he doesn't want to use it. But the *other* commander, the one who called America a "war zone", he's pretty much declared that the people under his protection are a very shiny nail that calls for a very special hammer.

No matter how we equip police, or what powers we give them, that equipment and those powers will be easy for someone with the wrong attitude to abuse. So what we need to do is *regulate* how police use these things. And those regulations have to be enforced; they have to have teeth otherwise they're just wishful thinking.

I believe there's a simple solution to the dangers of handing the police golden hammers. Any commander who uses a SWAT team or piece of military or intelligence agency hardware should be sentenced to fill out a mountain of paperwork, and run the gantlet of investigating committees asking hostile questions. For a responsible commander protecting the lives of his men or of civilians, that price would be nothing to pay. But it would take enough of the shine off the golden hammer to deter the trigger-happy commanders.

Well, I haven't read the book either, but most of the meat of your question is in the presumptions it makes. Let me address them respectfully.

The main thrust of your post is that race is an objective reality but that studying it is politically incorrect. It is true that racial theories will tend to be dismissed as crackpottery. But there's more to it than just the bad aftertaste of Nazi pseudoscience. First, race as a scientific concept is too squishy to become a useful theory; it generates too many intuitively attractive hypotheses that can't be tested empirically; and that invites us to interpret myth as fact.

Case in point: the Germans. My sister married into a family from Germany, and my daughter lived for awhile in Hamburg and made many friends there, and guess what? That's an awful lot of blue eyes and fair hair. The temptation is to think this is the genetic heritage of the "German Race"; that it comes down to them from a small group of fair haired, blue-eyed proto Germans in the far distant past. But there's no *evidence* to support that; it's just a satisfyingly simple myth.

There are nomads in very "Yellow race" looking Central Asian steppe tribes that have blond hair and blue eyes. Aha! Some adventuring proto-German probably spread his wild oats on the Silk Road! But that's the *myth* speaking. The facts are *equally* consistent with the genes flowing the other way, or flowing to both places from a third source, say the Slavs. Even if we presume that the sharing of these features is due to interbreeding, the facts don't support one scenario over the other. Julius Caesar doesn't mention the appearance of Germans in his account of the Gallic Wars in 51 BC; they might have been light-skinned, fair skin and blue eyed as many Germans are today. But they *equally likely* might have been none of those things. A few hundred years would easily suffice for such features to go from rare to very common in such a small population.

But the idea of "race" as we have received it is very definite on the matter. Take the case of one Frederic Austin Ogg, an otherwise intelligent and educated historian writing at the height of the respectability of "racial science":

Yes, but *why* did he believe this? What evidence did he have?

Well, we now have genetic information now to address the question of how racially pure of the Germans are. The answer is, "not very". There was plenty of "intermarriage" (or at least inter-boinking) going on between Germans and others, even apparently *Africans*, although not necessarily *directly*. But the genes don't care, they just spread themselves as far and wide as they can. And that's the norm with humanity: populations are too genetically permeable for pure-bred peoples or "races" to exist.

If you go beyond a few superficial features to the whole spectrum of genes, the various three and five race divisions of the human race that were concocted in the 19th and early 20th C all fall apart, and a more complicated picture of extensive interbreeding emerges.

That should be a final nail in the coffin of "race", but science provides one more, a painful rejection for advocates of racial purity and self-love: Most of the genetic diversity in the human race resides within black Africans. So if you were to start with the *genes* and divided humanity into five "great races", what you'd end up with is four somewhat arbitrarily grouped African races and one catch-all race for everyone else in the world (e.g. Germans and Celts would be in the same category as Dravian Indians and Australian Aborignes).

Now any one can see dividing humanity up into "races" this way is useless, but in fact there's actually *more* factual support for this than any of the three race or five race schemes of 19th century "racial science".

And here we have why "race" is such a *scientifically* reviled concept. The appeal of "race" isn't how it fits the facts, it's how it uses very selectively chosen facts to reinforce preconceptions. It's such a seductively powerful confirmer of preconceived belief that no matter how thoroughly the concept of "race" is smashed against the anvil of data, there will always be people trying to piece it back together again. And that makes it a nuisance for anthropologists, the way perpetual motion is for physicists and crackpot *DaVinci Code* theories are to historians.

We ought to be careful when ascribing an attitude like xenophobia to all of humanity, because even though it exists and even if we assume it has always been commonj, it's beside the point when it comes to the plausiblity of "race". The question isn't what people say or even think about people who are oustide their group The question is whether they'll *do* individual memebers of outside groups. And when you use genetics to rip the covers off what people have been actrually *doing* (as opposed to saying or even thinking), what you discover is what should be an unsurprising fact: they've been having sex with people they aren't supposed to be doing it with. Lots of it. For a very long time. Everywhere you look.

So you may pick a small number of anatomical or genetic features and find a geographically coherent group where practically everyone has them. But that's *all* you've found: a geographic cluster of certain traits. You can choose a different set of traits that makes the group look very diverse. That means you have *not* found a large group of people who have descended more or less exclusively from some small primordial subgroup of humanity. Such a thing evidently doesn't exist.

But *smart* hominids don't hit with their fist; they hit with a handy stick or rock. (1) It works far better, and your opponent isn't getting up for a second round, (2) hitting without a weapon is more likely to cause injury to the hitter, both from the punch and from the retaliation, (3) this identifies you as a hominid other monkey-men should respect, and monkey-ladies should consider surfing the gene pool with.

People tend to take things like punching as "natural", ignoring the *cultural* training that teaches us to go for the fist first. Punching is *not* a natural behavior. Grabbing, taking the ground and biting *are*, which comes as a surprise to a lot of martial artists in their first street fight. Hand-to-hand combat systems are just about *all* adjunct training methods fo military weapons use. That's why so much of the basics of empty-handed combat make so little sense. They make lots of sense when you graduate to the sword or the spear. A punch is perhaps a useful backup move when you've lost your weapon, or as a surprise trick, but not much more. The few martial arts that truly come from a brawling background emphasize grappling.

The problem I have with these theories is that they don't explain why the hand is so poorly adapted to *deliver* punches. It wouldn't be complicated, you've got all you need to start with given normal variations in hand anatomy. Favor the guys with extra sturdy 5th metacarpals, and voila! Boxer's fractures are a thing of th evolutionary past.

It's just hard to buy that punching exerts such a dramatic evolutionary pressure on various anatomical features and leaves the fist something a person has to be *taught* to make properly, and which *still* tends to injure itself while punching without the benefit of gloves or taping.

It seems more plausible that the response of facial development to the presence of testosterone is a matter of *sexual* selection than survival based selection, that humans evolved to hit with clubs and rocks and that fists are a less critical corner case. People who come up with these theories evidently don't have much experience hitting things with their bare hands, which is not surprising given that they've got these handy opposable thumbs.

Er... Why would Apple sue vendor using the Apple trademark to sell Apple products? That's what trademarks are *for*.

This is more like, imagine the iPhone was called instead the SpryntPhone. Sprint, the *carrier*, would object to Verizon and AT&T selling "SpyrntPhones" because it sounds like "Sprint Phones". They wouldn't object to those carriers selling "Samsung" phones because that doesn't affect their trademark.