Salon: Don’t tweak the geeks! “Hacker historian Eric Raymond critiques Kakutani’s “wrongheaded New York Times assault on digital culture”, and gets some licks in for Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish as well.

…Kakutani and Borsook’s failure to notice the native

generosity and sustained cooperation typical of hackers and

geeks makes the predictable slam at libertarianism and Ayn

Rand that follows unintentionally humorous. Borsook and

Kakutani are correct in describing the “cyberculture” (not a

term hackers would use) as implicitly libertarian. Where

they go wrong is in their presumption that this means my

peers desire to kill and eat the weak. The truth is, we don’t

build our networks to abolish ordinary people — we do it to

empower them.

New Scientist: “Just a normal town…

out of nowhere a wave of chaos was to wash over

that world. In a millisecond it was gone. There were no

phones, no computers, no power, nothing. Yet nobody

had died, no buildings razed to the ground. And then the

blind panic set in.” EMP weapons may already be part of some nations’ arsenals.

CNN.com: No prescription for the Pill? The FDA considers allowing over-the-counter sale of the pill. The price would be right, and on the surface of it, it would be an extension of a woman’s discretion over her own body. But I think this is a very very bad idea. It comes down to the amount of irrationality, eccentricity and bad judgment there is around so many matters related to sexuality and sex. Because of the possible complications of hormonal treatment, skipping gynecological checkups (as unpleasant as the exams can be) would be tempting but potentially disastrous. Then there’s taking the pill continuously to suppress the inconvenience or discomfort of menstruation, which can be quite medically dangerous if unsupervised. And the problems with potential overdoses (for example, in an ill-advised attempt to induce an abortion). And the considerable potential for adverse interactions with other prescription medications, which no lay person can be expected to recognize or track. By all means, women should learn as much as they can about the incredibly complicated reproductive cycle and its hormonal manipulation, but by all means allow an MD who is qualified to do so and committed to “first doing no harm” be an expert consultant.

Can you really trust the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture and distribute oral contraceptives to give you reliable and complete information in an unregulated market, when the only protective considerations toward their “customers” they have are around product liability costs? Take a look at some of the direct-to-consumer ads for other medications and tell me if they appear to be thoughtful comprehensive attempts to make you an informed careful consumer, or if they’re just trying to sell you something while making the most perfunctory of nods in the direction of product safety, usually in rapidly-scrolling small print. Don’t you bet the industry is just salivating at the potential expansion of this market, and that they will trot out any number of physicians in their pockets to talk about how medically safe this will be?

Other drugs being considered for release from prescribing requirements include antihypertensives, oral diabetic agents, and anti-cholesterol medicines. I’m ambivalent about some of these as well, especially the antihypertensives.

Addendum: an article that develops a more comprehensive critique of the medical advertising phenomenon. “If direct-to-consumer advertising empowers anyone, it’s drug companies.” This comes from a thought-provoking anti-consumerist webzine I was just pointed to, Stay Free.

Responding to Hate Groups: Ten Points to Remember, from the Center for Democratic Renewal.

The excellent weblog Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room is too subversive for some people’s tastes, apparently. If you’ve been blocked from accessing his site from your workplace, you may not have seen this yet. So, as a public service:

ACCESS DENIED?: Several Obscure Store visitors report that their companies

— AT&T included — now block my site. It seems that obscurestore.com has

been added to some master list of sites to be filtered out. If you need to get

around that, you can also enter Obscure via redwood.he.net/~obscure. Also,

some people say they’re being directed to http://www.he.net when they punch up

obscurestore.com. If a friend or associate reports this, tell them to refresh

their browser to access the site via my new Web hosting service.

Now, finally, there might be some entertainment value in Election 2000. [Salon]