When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him. You're doing it because you've been taught to take orders from anyone who speaks in complete sentences and has a manager he can put on the phone. These pranks don't erode my trust in other people any more than the thousands of Nigerian scam emails I get each day. They might, however, give me a little more courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.

Precisely. If this guy is able to pull off this kind of crap without any ulterior motive other than his own amusement, imagine what someone actually *trying* to cause serious harm might be able to get away with. Remember, these "stupid" people are the ones who keep society running at a very fundamental level. If they can be convinced to drink strangers' pee and smash their own windows, is it really all *that* hard to imagine that hotel staff might be convinced to hand your room keys to burglars, or that fast food workers might be convinced into inadvertently poisoning their food?

Let's be clear: this has nothing at all to do with trust; it has to do with authority. The pranksters didn't call up and ask for a personal favor; each time they called up and pulled rank, relying on an appearance of professionalism to manipulate people lower in the hierarchy. If it only costs a few thousand dollars of damage here and there to erode the do-what-you're-told-and-don't-think-about-it culture that modern businesses encourage, it will be a bargain.

Unfortunately, these incidents will probably just lead to more training regarding the org chart rather than to an environment in which employees are not actively discouraged from questioning their managers' instructions.

Actually, Samuel Johnson, widely regarded as one of the greatest contributors to the English language, is famously quoted as saying "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.

Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.

I'm pretty sure that the reason that nobody on Slashdot agrees with you has more than a little to do with the fact that you're a "Married with Children" fan.

Admittedly, "The Beast with a Thousand Backs" or whatever it was called did more to creep me out than to amuse me. That being said, as a literary critic I can't agree with the assertion that a single second of any episode of "Family Guy" could be classified as "meh." For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of. In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.

So there's that.

I wish I'd been there the day in debate class where they taught me how to make the argument that my opponent's position was "soul deadening," on the authority, no less, of "every mature, moral person." It seems like a pretty powerful argument, after all: anyone who would even attempt to dispute your position is then either immature or immoral, and in either case universally despised, which has to put a serious dent in his standing to argue his point with the likes of an ethical powerhouse of your eminence.

Indeed, your argument is so powerful that it shows us that Voltaire, previously thought to be one of the great ethical minds, is in fact a blubbering degenerate -- after all, his resolve to fight for free expression even for distasteful or outrageous opinions is by your argument tantamount to directly acting out the furthest slippery-slope consequences of those expressions.

Another thing I've learned from you just now is that abstract arguments do not apply to concrete situations. For instance, I may believe in freedom of religion in the abstract, but when a Muslim moves in next door all bets are off -- after all, there is now the concrete threat of my family being the victim of a "holy war," which trumps my ideals (and for that matter statistics) and tells me that I need to take action.

Truth be told, you're (perhaps unintentionally) basing your ethics around what makes you feel outraged or uncomfortable, rather than on ideals or on lucid consideration of how cause leads to effect. Forget the twentysomething videogame addicts -- even the core audience for Hannah Montana can tell you that right and wrong are universal and that you don't get to make exceptions based on your personal likes and dislikes.

If these exact videos were coming from an open-source python program and there was a link to sourceforge in the article, you'd be calling it cool. If it were a new feature in GarageBand and they'd announced it at MacWorld, it would have been *the* highlight of the conference. What this program does is explore the harmonies that are compatible with a melody, and you can see from the "Roxanne" video that it does a really, really good job of it. Maybe plugging it directly into a Casio-style accompaniment generator is not exactly the best thing to do with it, but this is definitely a *very* cool little program in its own right.

Basically what's being said here is that the academic publication system is vulnerable to the sorts of SEO attacks that briefly caused search engines to be befuddled by sites full of interlinked pages full of nonsense text and viagra ads. The academic publication system just moves a little slower, so it's going to take them a little longer to update things.