Body Parts
By Michael Swaine
At first she had thought that she was looking upon a shambles and that the bodies, but recently decapitated, were moving under the influence of muscular reaction; but presently she realized that this was their normal condition.
--Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Chessmen of Mars
www.tarzan.com/mb-cm.htm
In Minnesota they're growing three-legged frogs, an accident of pollution. In England they're growing headless frogs, a deliberate cloning experiment. Ultimately, it could lead to headless humans raised for a medical spare-parts inventory, according to a ClariNet story. A headless human would just float and feed, like a shark.
This also, from ClariNet: Like cyberspace sharks, copyright-infringement robots are now prowling the Net, single-mindedly hunting and seizing in their sharp teeth the unwary GIF, the drifting excerpt. It's an ocean out there.
And one company is using drift nets. Ah, yes, Microsoft. As I write this, Microsoft is being sued by Sun Microsystems, is under investigation by the U.S. government and the E.U., and has been hit with an injunction by the Justice Department. The situation may have shifted some by the time you read this, but one thing will still need emphasizing: Microsoft did violate the consent decree, deliberately and flagrantly.
That's just my opinion, of course, but it's a lot more solid than most of the nonsense being written about the Justice Department action. Take this gem from c|net, by Jim Balderston, senior analyst at Zona Research:
[Can] the Justice Department dictate to Microsoft how it will design and distribute its software? If Justice has that rightýwhat prevents Justice from telling other companies how to design and distribute their software? Absolutely nothing.
