I do not think I would call them “zombie” dogs, but draining a dog of blood and then 3 hours later bringing it back to life is certainly freaky.[1] I shudder to think of this being used on humans. What does this mean for the soul? I really have no clue, a question to ask Fr. Pollard.

[1] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html

Mr. George Weigel asks why Catholics in the United States, overall, give so little.[1] It is in many ways an interesting question. As the collection baskets circle the Church, donations of a few dollars seem to be the norm. Father Pollard asks of us that we give our first hour’s wages each week, something that I would tend to guess averages out fairly well to the $20/week/household that he cites the Witchita, Kansas diocease as giving.[1] He is correct, such a low rate (something like 2.5 percent of the yearly salary), probably does boggle the minds of many Protestants or Jews.

An equally good question though is what the Pastor is and would do with the donations. One Pennsylvania parish is providing free tuition to parishioners because a number of families (something like 700 of them) agreed to tithe to provide the parish with funds to run the school. This stands in marked contrast with the attitudes of some Arlington Diocese parishes, notably St. Joseph’s, but I have heard there are others, that expect the school to contribute funds to the parish. When a Catholic family is struggling to find the money to pay the tuition at Catholic Schools for several children, it is a bit much to expect them to then find the budget to tithe. They are already giving to the Church: via the school. Similarly the Knights of Columbus do great things in many parishes, but do so on their own budget, a mix of volunteer hours and council funds, using parish facilities (and thus electricity), but otherwise providing the means themselves. This is need not be a problem of chicken and the egg, rather, the Pastor could do, as the Pennsylvania Pastor noted above did, create an increase in giving by clearly stating where that money will go. When St. Joseph’s needed a new school, the parish was able to raise the amount. Other parishes have seen the same thing, and Mr. Weigel notes that a metropolitan diocese will, for example, raise more than the $135 million it needs from its five year capital campaign.

[1] http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2378/pub_detail.asp

I partly agree with Mrs. Michele Malkin and partly disagree with her regarding the decision that cable companies do not have to share their infrastructure.[1] I agree with her mostly on the political content and disagree with her mostly on the technical content.

The cable companies have invested significant capital into their networks. They have a right to the profits derived from their use. I do not know to what extent, if any, public land has been used for the network, nor to what extent, if any, tax dollars have subsidized its deployment. To the extent that either is true, conditions for the use could naturally be placed by the granting government. That is, the government could say that you can only use public land to deploy the cable network if and only if you agree to allow competitors use of the network. I think that it is also fairly clear however that a cable company would be reluctant to invest in an area with such a restriction. Overall, while the localized monopolies likely are not ideal, they are also not truly anticompetative, except to the extent where supported by government (IE a government restriction, if any such exist, mandating but one cable company can operate in an area). So overall, I really do not disagree with the decision here.

I do disagree that there are alternatives for cable Internet. In some, mostly fairly urban, areas, one or more forms of DSL may be available. It often is not, and sometimes in surprising places. I can just barely get DSL for example, just outside of Herndon and Reston. DSL, where available, is, however, a viable alternative to cable Internet. Satellite, wireless, and dial-up however are not.

Satellite Internet is subject to the same flaws as satellite television. Unlike television however, satellite Internet is, at least for now, extremely sensitive to weather. Imagine your Internet going out with each snow storm. That is not truly an alternative to always-on service. It is, however, close, and I imagine that with time it will be.

Wireless Internet has significant concerns with security, reliability, and speed. It is typically slower than your cable connection, though perhaps not so noticeably as to bar it as an alternative on these grounds alone. Its security concerns are even greater. The use of a wireless router for a home network nicely summarizes the flaws here. The wireless network is inherently unsecurable, and it is fairly easy to crack into one, and gain illicit access to both the network’s outside connection and to the computers connected to that network. Imagine paying for your next door neighbor’s Internet use. The same holds true of wide area connections. For this reason, wireless is primarily useful when deployed at a city or store level, because the implication of an untrusted network is, in these scopes, explicit. Further, the free nature of the connection makes the inability to secure access to it irrelevant. Lastly are the reliability concerns. Common housing materials, especially the tin and aluminum used for siding, fireplaces, and, in some houses, even between floors to retard fires, will disrupt and degrade the signal. Electrical interference can as well. For these reasons the home network is not a viable solution for everyone, and for the same reasons the wide area connection will sometimes fail. It should then be fairly clear that it is not in general a viable alternative to an always on, reliable, and relatively secure (single access point) connection that DSL or cable Internet would provide.

Lastly I include dial-up, simply because it is absurd to include it at all. The oldest of the Internet connection technologies, and nearly globally available, it is also the slowest. Its existence is the reason why we differentiate between an “Internet connection” and a “high speed Internet connection.” Clearly then, when the market has already seen fit to differentiate this type of service from the DSL and cable Internet services, it is NOT an alternative.

[1] http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002858.htm

In an equally unsurprising decision, the Supreme Court decided that file sharing services may be sued if “they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally.”[1] This seems to me a necessarily messy but also logical conclusion to reach. It seems to me that the Sony Betamax argument would protect the creation of mp3s, but not the distribution of them. While I personally view file transfer as being morally equivalent to recording something off the radio, that is not the argument being made. Rather, it is being argued that the mp3 distribution service is legal because it can be used legally, despite the fact that it is marketed for illegal use. The implication is clear here. If you create a file sharing service and market it for all those legal uses and it just happens that most of the shared content is illegal, you would stand a much better chance in court.

One part of the decision does bother me though. The Supreme Court apparently took into consideration the failure to take “easily available steps to reduce infringing uses.”[1] There are no “easily available” steps to reduce infringing uses that will have a noticeable effect on the availability or ease with which infringing content can be shared. Thus I worry that this inclusion will be used to widen the doors to what can be shut down far further than is rational or supportable. The fear that the EFF and others came to this case with could be substantially realized if this requirement is read too broadly, or too cluelessly.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062700471_pf.html

In a decision that should not have surprised me, but somewhat did after a series of more hopeful articles, the United States Supreme Court voted 5-4 to ban the display of the 10 Commandments in courtrooms. Somehow, their own frieze is “neutral” and thus allowable.[1] I am not really sure how that logic works.

Particularly puzzling to me is how, given the decidedly religious bent of our founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence with its references to a Creator, to the letters of all the founding fathers, Justice Souter found that the Constitution mandates neutrality not just between religions, but between religion and “nonreligion.”[1] It is thus at all surprising that there was a dissent from Justices Scalia and Thomas (and obviously others, 5-4 after all), who take different views on originalism, but both come down as originalists.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062700416_pf.html