Updated: 3/27/08; 6:25:39 PM.
A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Blog
Thoughts on biotech, knowledge creation and Web 2.0
        

Thursday, October 23, 2003


Legislature approves $310 million for biotech facility. AP via The Ledger Oct 23 2003 8:50PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

Well, almost $500 million from both the state and from the county is nothing to sneeze at but will they get their money's worth? Palm Beach County is not Southern California. The Scripps name may not go very far. And I believe that being close to high tech centers will be an important aspect for any biotech center in the future. San Diego has a vibrant high tech ecology. Does Southern Florida? A lot of things can be done with the Scripps name and $500 million but I do not think a top down approach is going to be what works best. We shall see, I guess.  10:22:10 PM    



Is this satire or irony?

Scalia. More fun with Tony:

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (news - web sites) ridiculed his court's recent ruling legalizing gay sex, telling an audience of conservative activists Thursday that the ruling ignores the Constitution in favor of a modern, liberal sensibility.

The ruling, Scalia said, "held to be a constitutional right what had been a criminal offense at the time of the founding and for nearly 200 years thereafter."

Scalia adopted a mocking tone to read from the court's June ruling that struck down state antisodomy laws in Texas and elsewhere."

I'm sure some of my smarter readers can come up with some other fine examples of things which had been a criminal offense for a very long time but have since been ruled unconstitutional....

....ah, the good old days.

When black servants were reduced to slavery, the colonial governing classes redoubled their efforts to stamp out racial mixing. Miscegenation in this era was not only a serious breach of Puritan morality, but also a serious threat to slavery and the stability of the servile labor force.
The earliest record available against the cohabitation of black-white servants was the case of Hugh Davis, a white servant in Virginia who was sentenced to a public beating on Sept. 17, 1630, before an assembly of blacks and others for defiling himself with a Negro. It was required that he confesses as much the following Sabbath (Burger 10).
The first law to deter racial intermarriage was enacted in the early colonial period. The General Assembly of the Colony of Maryland in 1661 deplored the fact that there were many cases of intermarriage between white female servants and black slaves. It legislated that if any free born white woman intermarried with a black slave; she would have to serve her husbands master as long as the slave lived (Burger 10-11).
In 1681, a new Maryland law decreed that any freeborn white woman who married a black slave with the permission of the slave''s master could retain her freedom. However, the master or mistress of the intermarried slave and the clergyman performing the ceremony were to be penalized by a fine. This law was an attempt to deter racial intermarriage by shifting the penalty to those allegedly responsible for the action of slaves (Burger 11).
Some other colonies also legislated against black-white marriages. North Carolina in 1715 set up a heavy fine and a period of servitude for any white woman who married a Negro. It also provided a 50-pound fine to the clergyman who officiated. Massachusetts in 1705, and Pennsylvania in 1725 also passed similar legislation (Burger 11).
In the legislatures of several of the states which had no prohibitive laws to prevent black-white marriages, bills to prevent such, were introduced several times in states such as WI, MASS, CONN, WA, KS, MN, IA, IL, MI, OH, PA, NY. Congress also considered bills to prevent this in D.C. The states which had laws against black white marriages followed a similar pattern, mostly southern and western states, while northern ones had no laws. After the U.S. became a nation, eventually 33 states prohibited one or more forms of interracial marriage (Burger 13).
After the adoption of the 14th amendment to the constitution, July 28, 1868, the question immediately arose whether or not state laws prohibiting intermarriage denied colored people the equality guaranteed to them by the amendment. Most cases were decided in State courts and the laws were upheld (Burger 13).

In 1883, the United States Supreme Court upheld a state statute upholding a larger penalty for adultery or fornication when committed by members of different races (Pace vs. Alabama). A similar Florida statute was overturned in 1962, but even as late as 1964 (just 35 years ago folks), 19 states still had these laws existing (with Indiana and Wyoming being the two non-Southern states with laws against miscegenation) (David 1).


I look forward to Scalia reading from Loving v. Virginia in a mocking tone in front of Clarence and Virginia Thomas. [Eschaton]

Thank goodness we have changed some of our laws in the last 200 years. Strict constructionists like Scalia left laws like the miscegenation ones on the books for over 100 years after we removed the spectre of slavery in the US and made everyone equal. Unless you were of different races. Think what would have happened if the Supremem Court had actually rulled that it violated the Constitution, as amended, to make it a crime for the 'races' to mix? If they had actually done the correct thing on Plessy vs. Ferguson? We would have had another 50 years to move through our problems of racial equality, With the government leading the way rather than hindering it. In hindsight we know that those judeges were wrong, that those who wrote the majority opinions in those cases were on the wrong side of history and could have removed years of suffering if they had been more courageous. I feel the same way about several on this Court. History WILL place them on the wrong side.  9:41:45 PM    



No Viruses on Mac. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg observes, [base "]After growing easier to use for several years, Windows PCs have taken a giant step backward because they are so insecure. Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers [sigma] But for consumers and small businesses, there[base ']s a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh[base ']s excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer [~] as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.[per thou] [Oct 22] [Apple Hot News]

I thought it was because the Mac held such a low percentage of the market that no one wanted to write a virus for it ;-) I'm sure some will try now but so many of the PC viruses spread because Windows opens up so much of itself to the outside without adequate security, at least at the level of the average users. OS X leaves most of the services off by deafult, making it unlikely that somone will open themselves up accidentally. Plus, much of the code underlying the OS is open source, menaing that millions have already looked at the code and not found anything easy. If they did develop something, the eyes of Open Source could very well find the fix before Apple does.  9:32:55 PM    



 
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Last update: 3/27/08; 6:25:39 PM.