Attack of the Blog!

Well, in case anybody needs some crappy, ripped-off 3d models, I give you daz3d. These guys are the digital equivalent of a shady looking dude in a trench coat selling “genuine rolexes.” If you just want a knock-off that looks okay (provided nobody looks too close!) and don’t care if it breaks, go for it! It’s your money.

Oh sure, if you report a violation they might decide to remove it, but the fact that their forums require a login helps them hide the fact that they offer infringing artwork in the first place.

If you’re a hardworking CG artist or studio who doesn’t appreciate opportunistic bastards stealing your ideas and selling them at Wal-Mart prices, check their site out and get a copyright lawyer if you find anything that’s yours. If you just find this behavior reprehensible, feel free to let them know:

DAZ Productions, Inc.
12637 South 265 West #300, Draper, UT 84020
(here’s a map in case you want to drop by in person)
800-267-5170
801-495-1777

If Generation X has the curse of having too much perspective on the significance of the Internet, then Generation Y’s plague is having none whatsoever. You can see this now as kids who grew up on MySpace enter the workforce and crash headlong into a very simple fact: putting your entire life online can put your job on the line.

An example of this kind of stupidity happened this week, when a software programmer did very real damage to the company he works for by whining and exaggerating on his personal — but public — blog. I won’t name either the blogger or the company because this is much ado about nothing, bringing headaches to his innocent coworkers and supervisors, who have had to deal with the media and industry fallout.

The basics are these: Mr. Fresh Out Of College And Unable To Understand That All Jobs In Your Early 20’s Suck was feeling grumpy, so he jumped online and started blogging away about the horrible condition the company was in. The things he said had a grain of truth to them, but misrepresented the facts and caused a PR firestorm. Luckily most of the industry news sources that have picked up the story have looked at both sides of the story, giving some higher-ups the chance to provide hard data refuting his whiny claims. The blogger himself retracted the post, saying he felt bad and blaming his rant on “a bad day.”

No harm done, right? Wrong! Here’s where I turn my attention to you. Yes, you, Blogger McJackass. Why? Well, first of all, Google cached the post, so everyone can still read it. You spread misinformation about the company you work for, potentially damaging its stock value. You have wasted company resources by yanking people away from actual tasks that add to the company’s value and made them waste time on defusing this mess. It wouldn’t be hard to do some math and calculate how much you cost the company. You were having a bad day? That’s an excuse? You’re lucky I’m not your boss, because I’d fire you. And then laugh while you were astonished by your inability to find another company willing to hire you.

This is part of a larger problem of permanent adolescence and lack of responsibility that clings to Generation Y like those a pair of nasty tight Emo jeans. To quote a friend of mine who runs a software company:

What they don’t realize is that when someone goes in for a job interview, it is now common for the prospective employer to look them up on MySpace, Facebook, etc. They have put public information out there, so the employer wants to see how they comport themselves.

The crappy part is that the brightest kids with the most cutting edge understanding of code that software companies want to hire are ridiculously young. They’ve spent all of their adolescent lives blogging away under the happy delusion that what they say doesn’t have any consequences. Although they’re technically adults, college provides some prolonged insulation from the reality that your words are real, they mean something, and they can have impact beyond your pimped-out MySpace profile. Coders straight out of college have no conception of how one irrational digital rant can have a very real impact on business.

The blogger took down the post, but the damage is done; he has hurt the company he works for, caused a firestorm over a non-issue, and left a huge dent in his professional reputation. Next time he’s job hunting, a prospective employer will be able to see that if he’s having a bad day, he might just stab the company, his coworkers, and the shareholders in the back because he doesn’t understand the relationship between publishing words and people being able to read them.

Generation Y: you have real jobs now. Realize that you should act conscientiously, think beyond yourself, and if you do not take responsibility for your actions, you will endure embarrassment, damage to your reputation, and cause nothing but collateral damage to your friends and coworkers. Personal responsibility sucks, huh? I have only one sensitive, caring, thoughtful thing to say about that: tough.

I was just chatting online with one of my human minions, and we were commiserating on the fact that it’s difficult to find the motivation to exercise. I attempted to say “motivation sucks” and was met with the following:

IM Administrator: Warning:The message you have attempted to send includes content which is inappropriate and will not be transmitted.

WTF? I asked the minion what that was all about, and she informed me that her place of employment had a tight filter on naughty words. Because after all, if you prevent people from typing bad words, they’ll lose interest in using them, right?

I was instantly treated to a tutorial in how my minion and her fellow worker drones evade the foolish automated filter. Once they became aware of it, they instantly set about seeing what was and was not allowed. This filter caused them to start using words they hadn’t uttered since grade school. But nothing inspires rebellion more than restriction, so what can you expect?

Apparently you can say “blows” but not “sucks,” showing an astonishing bigotry against people who enjoy lollipops. You can’t mention someone’s rooster, but if you have an interest in cockpits, feel free to discuss. When a permutation of the word didn’t work in context, the drones simply made a few 1337 substitutions and continued their conversation like normal people. It didn’t take long to adapt; licking, boning, and barfing are fine, but remember that it’s not polite to sh!t, scr3w or fvck. The Big Brother approach to profanity would be creepy if it weren’t so worthless and easy to evade.

This kind of censorship isn’t as evil as The Golden Shield, but it’s just as stupid and wrong. Oh noes! People are using potty mouth words! Time for a history lesson, humans: Profanity is contrived, and usually based on racism.

Holy shit! I said shit! But why is it a dirty word? Let’s find out, shall we? Shit as we know it came to English through Proto-Germanic skite, making it one of the oldest words in the world. This word was handed down in Old English as scitte, evolved later in Scots and Irish English as shite, and in Chaucer’s London Dialect (which formed the basis of modern English) as shit. Which is a shame, because shite is a lot more fun to say. What did this word mean? To purge excrement from the body. That’s it. But funny how that last bit causes no controversy. Why? Because “purge” and “excrement” are French words. So what makes French so special? Why is it that we can say “intercourse” and “garbage,” but not “fuck” or “crap”? Especially when the words mean exactly the same thing?

Blame racism. When the Normans conquered England, they brought a new language of power with them. Suddenly Anglo-Saxon, the native language of England for nearly a thousand years, was out of favor because it was the language of the politically and economically disadvantaged. Those snotty Normans looked down on English, and use of it indicated lower status. Just as only speaking Spanish will not help you make progress in the modern U.S., Anglo-Saxon dialects were transformed from a rich and beautiful language to the ramblings of the poor. Just like a high school clique, the Normans declared all that was non-French to be “uncourtly.” But, just like a high school clique, they preserved Anglo-Saxon words for repugnant things, and the stigma lingers to this day. Words like “chivalry,” “courtesy,” and “wine” are French. “Fart,” “wart” and “beer” are Anglo-Saxon.

During the English Renaissance, when all things Greek, French, and Latin were all the rage at court, Anglo-Saxon words fell permanently out of disfavor. The racism was so overt and lasting that until recently, FCC censorship laws actually used the term “Anglo-Saxon” to describe the sort of filthy naughty no-no things you couldn’t say on TV. Think of all the words that used to get your mouth washed out with soap. They’re all Germanic.

The racist campaign of the Normans to impose their own Newspeak was so effective that it persists a thousand years later with total perfection. Some stuffshirt saying “Pardonez-moi, where is the restroom? I need to defecate.” means the same damn thing as “Hey, where’s the crapper? I need to take a shit.” Norman Newspeak is so pervasive that even after learning this, English speakers are still reluctant to reclaim the older words in their own language.

Censorship, like all means of thought control, serves but one purpose: to keep those who are in power in power. All this lofty rhetoric about preserving the masses from immorality is a ruse. It’s stupidly easy to debunk the false structures put up to keep us under Big Brother’s watchful eyes. To that I say Screw Censorship.

Some people are up in a tizzy over an embryo that had some abnormalities corrected in the lab, thus paving the way for designer babies in the future. I don’t understand the relevance of the argument. Since most people get their understanding of science from movies, let’s recall Gattaca, where genetic apartheid discriminates against children unfortunate enough to be born to parents who roll the genetic dice the old fashioned way rather than taking their gametes to the DNA tailor. This movie sums up the claims of anti-designer-baby activists, who fear that the advent of designer DNA would create a society where some people “would be considered inferior.”

Wait . . . CREATE a world like this?? I’m sorry. We already have a world where some people are inferior. You don’t even have to come up with a complicated historical or political argument. Just go to the nearest high school. There always have been social elites who treat other people like dirt, so let’s just skip this argument and move on to what’s relevant.

Opponents of DNA tailoring say that this is unnecessary tampering with nature. By this logic, they must also be opposed to corrective surgical procedures of any kind. Are you a baby born with a cleft palate? Leukemia? A congenital heart valve deformity? Tough rocks, buddy. God wanted you to be deformed, and fixing your problems is an affront to nature.

The “no tampering with nature” argument is completely hollow. If you really want to torpedo a screaming church lady’s argument, just ask her if she dyes her hair. Then tell her that God can see her roots coming in. Regardless of religious beliefs, curing human illness is supposed to be a good thing, remember? How could a kind and loving God be anything less than ecstatic that human beings have begun to figure out how to eliminate the root cause of terrible suffering? The whole wrathful, angry king that demands cringing and fear from helpless creations is so last millennium.

We already have “designer babies” in the form of infants who have corrective surgeries for club feet and a myriad of other deformities. We continue the process as children age with acne medications, dental braces, and LASIK. Yet you don’t hear the hijackers of religion and ethics complaining about these procedures. How is surgery at the embryonic and molecular level, stopping maladies before they have the chance to develop, worse than inflicting psychological and physical scars by cutting someone open with a scalpel? A quick DNA shuffle will one day be safer, healthier, and less costly than waiting until a problem manifests itself to deal with it.

If you could prevent a baby from having Tay-Sachs, Hemophilia, Sickle Cell Anemia, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington’s Disease, Celiac Disease, or Cystic Fibrosis, wouldn’t you? Ethicists complain when fetuses are aborted because they have a handicap. DNA manipulation would eliminate such abortions, and thus terminate this kind of discrimination against disability. In a generation, the diseases wouldn’t even exist anymore, making the debate over genetic purification pointless.

Of course, this is where the “slippery slope” argument comes into play. Once you’ve torpedoed the irrational opposition to designer babies based on the idea that it tampers with nature, opponents then latch onto the idea that people will begin rearing a generation of genetically superior, good-looking, hyper-intelligent, athletic, mentally stable and multi talented superhumans.

OH NO! It’s the end of the world! The captain of the football team just cured cancer after getting a perfect score on his SAT! Help!

The last straw that opponents cling to is the idea that genetic engineering will produce a generation of freaks with purple hair, glowing eyes, or that parents will want to switch the race of their baby to something they find more desirable. To that, I say “maybe” and “oh well.” That’s the risk factor of this step in human evolution, and even then it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with bad parenting. Life will suck for these freak babies, but they’ll also have a harder time reproducing, so they’ll likely be relegated to the shallow end of the gene pool and wade off. On top of that, this level of customization is still many, many years off, and it will always remain expensive. Rich people have always found ways to raise freaky offspring, so I don’t really see how it will change much when they can pre-equip their spawn with outlandish garb.

This is the next step of evolution, where humans seize the godlike power of creation and wield the power to shape their own bodies as they will. Designer babies are not a threat. They’re a solution. And the slope-browed opponents of advancement will still be banging rocks together when the rest of the world has moved on to a life of longevity and intelligence that in the past we could only dream of.

At least once a month I have to log into Facebook and un-tag pictures of myself. There is a segment of the Facebook population who feels that they are doing a public service by identifying every single person in every single photo they see. It never occurs to them that the people in the photos may not wish for complete strangers to be able to see what they look like. There are plenty of layers of privacy on Facebook that allow users to put as much or as little personal information out there as they like. Some people put their whole lives online– their phone numbers, their addresses, and whatever they’re doing right at the moment.

An unfortunate loophole in Facebook’s privacy structure allows others to tag a photo of you without giving you the ability to approve or reject the tag. Users are simply notified when someone has uploaded a identified you in a photo. Instead of having critical control over labeling personal images, we users just have to keep an eye out and see if the image identified as you is (a) really you, (b) really a photo you’d like to have online and (c) really a photo of you you’d like to have online and clearly identified for the world to see. MySpace, at least, offers the tagged user the option to reject being pointed out.

Privacy issues related to social networking sites are likely to remain controversial for some time. Before the Internet, social networking had to be done in person. Now, it’s done at the click of a button. Facebook allows users to de-tag photos of themselves, but it doesn’t change the fact that they now have identifying material linked to your picture. There is already enough concern over their sketchy and broad privacy policy. They can sell, use, or share any data — any data — that they collect. And that includes those racy spring break pictures your idiot drinking buddy decided to share with the world.

Before you tag, please think about it. People should only be allowed to identify themselves in photos unless they’re in a jailhouse lineup. Facebook may not understand this, but hopefully its users can. Unless a friend has explicitly told you that they are comfortable with you identifying them in images that their friends and friends of friends might be able to see, don’t point. It’s rude.