Smoke and Microsoft

March 9, 2011

Ms Charl Everton, Microsoft’s anti-piracy manager, says that running a pirated copy of Windows is tantamount to gun running, human trafficking and drug dealing. The same was said recently in a series of radio advertisements by British American Tobacco with regards to buying smuggled cigarettes.

Let’s examine these statements with a jaundiced, sceptical eye.

Microsoft is a mega-corporation that has been found guilty in both the European Union and the USA of anti-competitive behaviour, but this doesn’t mean it’s OK to buy counterfeit MS products. It doesn’t mean that those who pirate their products are rapists or genocidal megalomaniacs, either. We won’t go into the argument of whether or not the pirating of a software product is stealing; we’ll just accept for the purposes of argument that it is in some sense wrong, like copyright infringement.

The same can be said of smoking smuggled cigarettes—the smoker is depriving the national fiscus of the tax revenue that would have accrued had the cigarettes been legally imported.

So why do Microsoft and BAT make these absurd statements? What do they have in common?

Well, both Microsoft and BAT have a terrible public image. Microsoft is perceived in many quarters to purvey an inferior product that consumers are forced to buy because of Microsoft’s stranglehold on the PC software market. If you don’t believe me, just try to purchase a laptop computer without some version of MS Windows infesting its hard drive.

The cigarette companies sell a product that is known to be harmful to all who partake of it, and is fatal to a significant proportion of them, yet most of their customers are powerless to cease purchasing the product because one of its constituents, nicotine, is one of the most addictive substances known to man.

So, in order to divert attention from their own moral shortcomings, the companies must paint those who trespass upon their intellectual property as worse than they themselves are. They don’t want people to think, “Gosh, I know pirating software or buying smuggled cigarettes is wrong, but these guys are scumbags; ripping them off is a actually a public service, so I’ll go ahead and do it, anyway.” They want you to equate intellectual property infringements or petty smuggling as somehow akin to child rape—unthinkable.

There are perfectly legal alternatives, though. I stopped smoking, thereby saving my health and a stack of money to boot. I decided I would rather write with a quill and calculate with an abacus rather than buy another Microsoft product; I discovered Linux, which is superior to MS Windows in every respect and that there is a free office suite, OpenOffice, which is just as good as MS office.

Don’t pirate Microsoft’s rubbish and don’t smoke BAT’s rubbish, smuggled or not. But don’t buy the crap they purvey, either, or the crap they say.

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Computer con

March 1, 2011

There’s a very old joke which goes like this:

An English professor is enjoying extracurricular jollies with the wife of a colleague. He is atop the lady when her husband enters the room.
“I’m surprised,” exclaims the husband. “No, sir. I’m surprised. You are astonished,” says the professor.

Well, I’m both surprised and astonished at a scam that has been perpetrated in Ireland. Firstly, I’m surprised that anyone attempted this con because no sane criminal could possibly believe it would work. If someone came to me and said, “Hey Mark, I’ve had a brilliant idea for conning suckers out of their money. We take the Dublin phone book, right? Then we ring people up at random and say we’re from Microsoft and we have detected there’s something wrong with their computers. We tell them we can fix it online, but they must pay for a service contract. We get their credit card details and debit them say €100 or €200 and we don’t do a thing to their computers.”

“What do we say when they ask exactly what’s wrong with their computers?”

“We just make something up. Say their analogue navel rectifier’s got an exploit. Nobody who uses Windows knows anything about computers, anyway. If they sound really suspicious we just go into the wrong number routine.”

“Nah. Forget it. Nobody could be stupid enough to fall for something that obvious.”

But fall for it they did. In their droves. This is where the astonishment comes in. There are people who dress themselves in the morning and walk amongst us on their hind legs who are so stupid they would give out their credit card details over the telephone to strangers. A lot of them don’t even realise that they have been conned: they think there was an actual problem with their computers that the helpful folk at Microsoft have fixed for them.

Microsoft Ireland pay a person to be their ‘customer experience manager’. I would rather have the job of licking the mall toilets clean with my own tongue after a hot dog eating contest than fill that role, but it is filled by one Mary Ashe Winton, who has this to say:

Anyone who receives an unsolicited call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft should hang up. We do not make these type of calls, offering a technical support package.

Quite right, Mary. I hope Microsoft pay you top dollar in exchange for your rare gift of common sense.

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Base Station Blues

February 22, 2011

I recently received a letter from my local homeowners association regarding the erection of a cell phone base station in our suburb. They had received complaints about the proposed base station on grounds of possible adverse health effects, not because it would be an eyesore.

Base Station

The letter also stated that

several health organizations have expressed their concern regarding possible Tumours, Cancers, Chilhood Leukemia, changes in sleep patterns, headaches and other related diseases. 

I have asked for further and better particulars of these “health organizations” but have so far not received a reply.

It seems extremely likely that these fears are groundless. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Cell phone base stations are an ubiquitous part of the urban landscape across the globe. If they were really a health hazard as stated in this letter, their statistical impact on health would have been noticed by now.
  • RF radiation from base stations is long wavelength, non-ionising radiation, which means it cannot break down the DNA molecule and cause cancer.
  • Cell phone base stations broadcast at low energy levels—much less than TV or commercial radio stations. These energy levels are about 0.2% of the ‘safe’ levels reccommended by health authorities.

The fears expressed in the letter can be broken down into two categories: the cancers (tumours, cancer and childhood leukemia) and more subjective ailments (changes in sleep patterns, headaches).

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal, Mobile phone base stations and early childhood cancers: case-control study came to the following conclusion:

There is no association between risk of early childhood cancers and estimates of the mother’s exposure to mobile phone base stations during pregnancy. 

The American Cancer Association agrees

Most scientists agree that cell phone antennas or towers are unlikely to cause cancer. 

The headaches, changes in sleep patterns can be lumped together under the heading of EHS, or electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). A study in Environmental Health Perspectives snappily entitled Does Short-Term Exposure to Mobile Phone Base Station Signals Increase Symptoms in Individuals Who Report Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields? A Double-Blind Randomized Provocation Study concludes

Short-term exposure to a typical GSM base station-like signal did not affect well-being or physiological functions in sensitive or control individuals. Sensitive individuals reported elevated levels of arousal when exposed to a UMTS signal. Further analysis, however, indicated that this difference was likely to be due to the effect of order of exposure rather than the exposure itself. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has this to say on the subject of EHS

there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF
exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single
medical problem. 

I don’t care a jot whether or not they allow this base station to be built—I can’t see it from where I live and it may or may not improve my 3G data rates, but I certainly won’t lose any sleep over it, or worry about my health if they do decide to build it.

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Witchcraft Law

January 28, 2011

Shortly before midnight on March 2nd last year a Molotov cocktail was was hurled through the window of a house in the Western Cape. The resulting fire killed 22 year-old Yalezwa Phulwana and her 2 year-old daughter Liyema. Yalezwa’s two sisters managed to escape the burning house unharmed, but their mother, Nonjengezinye Matwa, was severely burned and hospitalized.

Sangoma


Two men, Kwanele James and Mzuvukile Thoswa, 24 and 25 years old respectively, were arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, arson and three contraventions of the Suppression of Witchcraft Act of 1957. The reason for these latter charges is that Kwanele James’ mother had recently died, and a sangoma had told him that Nonjengezinye Matwa was a witch and had caused the death of his mother, providing the motive for the arson attack.

Well, I had no idea that such a law existed. Interested in learning what the law actually says, I searched for it on the Department of Justice web site, but found that it is not available for download, and is only obtainable by paying a stiff fee on a commercial website (or schlepping off to the DoJ and getting a hard copy of the Government Gazette, also at a non-trivial cost). There are some free download sites, but none that I have found are comprehensive; certainly none have this piece of legislation available.

To harp boringly on about how much harm irrational beliefs cause would just be depressing, so I won’t do it. Instead, I’m going to harp boringly on about how the hell a citizen is expected to obey the law when he can’t even find out what it says? “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”, but how is the average Joe to overcome his ignorance? And could the obscurity of the law really not be a defence in court? I have googled (although not binged) diligently in an attempt to find out just how many laws are currently on the South African statute books, but the only answer I can come up with is “very, very many”. Far too many for any citizen to have even a vague idea of what they are and what they allow or forbid. I suspect that most of these laws are moribund, in that they are not enforced or known about even by legal professionals. If I am right, isn’t it high time we had a vigorous brush-clearing of the statute books; get rid of the dead wood and allow the light to shine through and illuminate the laws that are useful?

And I have a brilliant idea for keeping superfluous laws off the statute books: carve each Act onto a stone tablet and make legislators carry a copy of them in a backpack wherever they go. When they make a new law, their burden becomes heavier; when they repeal a law, they get that much lighter.

Soon even ordinary people will know where they stand in terms of the law and there will be no need for so many lawyers.

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Population Poser

January 14, 2011

There is a lot said and written about climate change and what should be done about it. We are urged to reduce our carbon emissions. The assumption is that climate change is a problem that can be solved by altering our mode of living. But climate change is not a problem, it is a symptom of a problem.

The real problem is the huge, enormous, out-of-control human population. This morning, there were 6,897,307,682 human beings infesting the planet. This number of people cannot be sustained without industrial, mechanized agriculture and distribution systems, which rely on fossil fuels to work. You may drive your electric car or hybrid, but those technologies are not suited to, say, a combine harvester or a container ship, and your car emissions are a drop in the ocean compared to the gigatonnes of greenhouse gases pumped out by industry and farted out by the millions of head of livestock we require to keep our population fed. The principal resource upon which we rely to sustain our population are fossil fuels in general, and particularly oil. These are not renewable and are becoming depleted as we use them up at an ever-increasing rate.

Overpopulation is common in nature. When resources are abundant, populations grow exponentially until the resources are depleted and the environment is degraded to the extent that the depleted resources cannot easily recover, and (if migration is not possible) then the population undergoes a collapse, and (if the species is lucky enough not to become extinct) remains at a low level until the depleted resources recover and the population can begin to grow again.

Our consumption of non-renewable resources can be likened to herds of elephants that push over trees to get at the topmost leaves, killing the trees until the forest has turned into grassland and there is nothing left to eat. Then, amidst much plaintive trumpeting, the animals die. In 1989 Richard C. Duncan published the ‘Olduvai Theory’ in which he claimed that industrial civilization has a life span of about 100 years, and that per-capita energy production would begin to decrease in the early 21st century. Electrical power shortages would begin to occur, and shortly thereafter the energy shortages would lead to a decrease in the production of food.

Why do human beings continue to breed in such numbers when it is clear that to do so is disastrous?
I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because most people don’t know—they cannot project current trends into the future and read their fate there. I was listening to a radio talk show the other day, and the hostess said that we cannot ask people to reduce the number of children they have because it’s ‘culturally sensitive’. What poppycock! this is too important to allow it to fall victim to political correctness–the fate of our species is at stake.

So is there a solution? We could do nothing; let nature take her course. What would happen then? I foresee that as the resources we require to merely survive become more and more scarce, people will begin to fight for them. Conflict and violence will become the default mode for those wishing to survive, but most will die amidst great suffering. Yes, nature will take care of our population problem, but there will be no such thing as human civilization at the end of the process.

In 1968 Garrett Hardin came up with a solution he called ‘mutual coercion mutually agreed upon’. People must be made to agree to do voluntarily what’s best for the group as whole. As he points out, this will not be easily achieved, especially in Western cultures where freedom, in reproduction as elsewhere, is regarded so highly. Perhaps the Chinese strategy of limiting women to a single birth is the way to go, enforced by compulsory sterilization following the birth of the child.

I can offer no solution of my own, but if you wish to do what’s best for your species, please turn off the lights and keep your zipper closed.

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Fatal Error

January 3, 2011

Computer programmers are supposed to be intelligent. So why do I continually come across illiterate, nonsensical error messages? I don’t know the answer to that, but this post is directed at programmers in an effort to get them to think about what they do and correct the problem. If you aren’t a programmer, feel free to do something else for now, normal service will be resumed soon.

Software companies spend millions on ‘useability’ research, getting their user interfaces as good as they possibly can, but the whole effect can be ruined by one application developer who is too lazy to do his job properly. Here are some things developers should think about when handling errors in their programs.

Who will be using the program?

Obviously error messages aimed at pre-school children will be very different from those aimed at post-graduate computer scientists. This is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be stated, but programmers seem not to be aware of this, or have forgotten it in the heat of the moment. Don’t put a message like this in a game, for example:

Error at mem 0xffff17ba: unphased bypass operation. Reset second pulse generator to continue.

(unless the game actually has something called a second pulse generator which the player could be expected to know how to reset.)

Who will read the message?

This is related to the preceeding question, but is not identical to it because often different error messages are generated for different audiences. I work for a large retailer writing and maintaining database applications that are used by employees in the our distribution centres. It is reasonable to display an error to the user of the system that looks like this:

Error 1234 has occurred. Please contact the support helpline on extension 5678.

The same program could have written a different error to a logfile for the support department:

Error 1234: Country code does not exist on the country table. Please escalate to the IT department.

Instead the following error message is both displayed to the user and written to the logfile:

ERROR!!! CANNOT PROCESS THIS RECORD.PROGRAM ABORTING!!!

Apart from the annoying capitalization and the adolescent abuse of punctuation marks, this error message is useless because it doesn’t tell anyone what the problem actually is, or how to solve it.

The user cannot read your mind.

A lot of error messages are generated because the user has entered data that is in a format that the programmer did not expect. This is entirely the programmer’s fault unless he made it clear in advance what he expects. For example, in the US dates are usually written in mm-dd-yyyy format, whereas in the rest of the civilized world they are written as dd/mm/yyyy. There can be few things as annoying as entering the date and a message pops up telling you that you have used the ‘wrong’ format. Why didn’t you tell the user in advance what the expected format is?

Date (dd/mm/yyyy):

Being proactive in letting the user know what you expect goes a long way towards reducing frustration.

Is the information you request necessary?

Here’s a gem:

You need to supply a fax number in order for your request not to receive fax notifications to be processed.

Why? This user probably doesn’t want fax notifications because he hasn’t got a fax machine. This programmer clearly hasn’t thought about what he is doing at all. Similarly, why should someone have to give his hat size in order to become a blood donor? If you really want to alienate your customers, invading their privacy in this fashion is a good way to go; if you want this information for some or other reason, like marketing perhaps, then by all means ask for it, but don’t insist that it is provided. I’ve ‘walked away’ from many ecommerce sites because of their insistence that I divulge impertinent information.

Don’t only give the error—give the solution

You’ve told the user about the problem, but what must he do to recover the situation? If you don’t tell him you’ve only done half the job.

Error: software patent violation. You cannot continue to run this program. Please write to your MP or Congressman to get software patents banned.

OK, that’s another hobby horse I don’t want to ride right now, perhaps another day, but the frustration level of not being able to do whatever it is you want to do because of an obscure software error without having the faintest idea of how to fix it is high. Inform the user–give him options that will allow him to progress, or at least recover to the state he was in before the error struck.

All these things can be summed up in two words: good manners. Treat your users with the respect they deserve as your customers. Your error messages should be pertinent, detailed, informative and allow your users to do their jobs as efficiently as possible. I leave you with this hilarious quotation from the Microsoft C# programming manual, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why error messages are as bad as they are:

The ButtonProperty value is a string that represents the property name used by the installer to retrieve the value of the button group. This property can be referenced by custom launch conditions to make decisions concerning application installation. For example, if the ButtonProperty is set to Buttons, you create a launch condition that examines the value of the Buttons property. If the first radio button is selected, Buttons takes the value contained in the Button1Value property. Likewise, if the second radio button is selected, Buttons takes the value contained in the Button2Value property. Many of the customizable dialog boxes have similarly configurable properties, which allow you to create a rich and complex installation experience for your users.

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Predictions for 2011

December 29, 2010


This is the time of year when psychics and other riff-raff of the mystical realms emerge from their malodorous lairs to make known their predictions of events for the coming year. I am not a psychic, but I am the proud owner of a second-hand crystal ball, into which I shall now gaze for your benefit.

Tombstones

My crystal ball reveals that the following people will shuffle off this mortal coil during 2011.

Aretha Franklin


Aretha Franklin (1942-2011): Her silver voice stilled at last, although still available on CD. Our loss is the gain of the choir invisible.

Stephen Hawking


Stephen Hawking (1942-2011): English physicist. He will finally succumb to motor neuron disease, but his radiation will go on.

Barry Ronge


Barry Ronge (?-2011): Movie critic. No more shall his fatuous features fill our telescreens, or his unctuous tones drip like rancid cooking oil from our radio loudspeakers, or his silly scribblings take up our newspaper columns. Yay.

Natural Disasters

There will be a powerful earthquake on the Pacific rim this year which will leave thousands homeless.

The year will begin and end with severe blizzards in the Northern hemisphere.

Hurricanes will ravage the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and the East coast of the USA in the third quarter of 2011.

My crystal ball is silent on the subject of meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions, so I presume there will be none.

Sport

New Zealand will break their world cup jinx and carry home the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

South Africa will regain the number one ranking in test cricket.

Western Province will win the Curry Cup for 2011.

Politics

I can’t seem to get anything in focus. It’s all just a blur of interchangeable figures talking incomprehensible gibberish. Therefore just more of what we had this year.

Miscellaneous

The following numbers will be drawn in the lottery during the course of the year: 3 5 8 13 21 34

We shall revisit these predictions at the end of next year to see how they stand up compared to those of the “real” psychics.

Chill out and have fun in the new year.

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Traditional Tragedy

December 9, 2010

I am enraged, depressed and bewildered. Every year this same horror story appears in our newspapers and no one seems to give a damn. This is the 21st century and we still condone the mutilation and murder of children in the name of “culture” and “tradition”.

Cape Times 8 December 2010


Every year parents, who presumably love their sons, send those sons to these initiation rituals where they have the tips of their penises hacked off with a rusty spear. This is supposed to initiate them into manhood.

“My father had it done, my grandfather had it done, my great grandfather had it done, therefore my son must have it done.” Spot the fallacy. To give some credit to the powers that be, these initiation schools have been outlawed in the sense that they are nominally illegal, but there appears to be no enforcement of the law, and there is no attempt to educate rural communities about the dangers of infection or basic hygienic measures. Even if they did those things, it would not be enough to appease my rage.

Imagine the following conversation between a policeman and a parent:

“Good morning, sir. It has reached our ears that you have hacked the beating heart out of your daughter’s chest. Would you care to explain why?”

“I’m an Aztec, officer. It is part of our culture and tradition to remove the hearts from our first-born daughters in order to please the gods.”

“Ah, well, that explains it then, sir. Have a nice day.”

That would never happen, would it? Why not? As a society we are prepared to tolerate almost any outrage, provided only that it is perpetrated in the name of religion, culture or tradition. You deny your child medical treatment because you adhere to a religion which says that seeking medical treatment denies faith, and the child dies, and your actions are condoned because of course we can’t possibly criticise anyone’s religion, no matter how idiotic it is.

I say that if we wish to regard ourselves as in any degree civilised, we must hold ourselves to standards of behaviour and moral conduct that transcend religion and culture. If a traditional practice is shown to be harmful, then it must be stopped. The way to end this annual penis-pruning is to arrest the sangomas responsible and charge them with murder, and also arrest the parents and charge them with manslaughter. Word will soon get around, and perhaps the next generation of children will be spared this barbarism.

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A Perminisions of Ancestors

November 10, 2010

Imagine this situation: you are running a medium-sized business and one of your employees comes to you with an unusual request. She says she has been seeing visions and that she spoke to a priest who advised her to go on a Christian Outreach Revival camp which would last for a month. She has no annual leave left, so she wishes to take unpaid leave. You are in the middle of your busiest season and you can’t spare her for more than a week, which is duly offered. Your employee goes to the camp without permission, and during her absence a disciplinary hearing is held as a result of which the employee is dismissed for being absent from work without leave.

Sangoma


This seems to me to be fair. Why should special allowance be made for an employee in order for her to indulge her superstitions? I’m betting that if this actually happened, the labour court would, rightly, uphold the employee’s dismissal.

However, this did not happen, but something similar did. Johanna Mmoledi was employed as chef de partie by the Kievits Kroon Country Estate. She claimed to have visions and was advised to go on a traditional healer’s course for a month. She duly applied for a month’s unpaid leave, was told she could have a week, took the month and was dismissed. When she returned she gave her employers a letter from a member of the North West Dingaka (traditional healers’) Association which read:

This serves to certify that Mmoledi was seen by me and was diagnosed to have a perminisions of ancestors.

Mmoledi’s union declared a dispute and the case went to mediation. Mmoledi claimed that she was justified in being off work on the grounds that she was sick, or feared that she would become so if she failed to attend the course. Her employers insisted that there were no grounds for believing that Mmoledi was sick, and just what the hell did “perminisions” mean, anyway? The commissioner, bizarrely, found in favour of Mmoledi, saying that the employer lacked empathy and understanding of cultural diversity and that Mmoledi was justified in absenting herself from work “rather than risking the wrath of the ancestors.” Well, this is no great surprise—everyone knows the bizarre and fantastical shapes into which the CCMA will fold itself in order to find for an employee (sorry, wekka.)

The case was taken on review to the labour court where, unbelievably, Judge Ellem Francis upheld the ruling of the commissioner. Finding that Mmoledi was justified in absenting herself, he said, “This case sadly shows what happens when cultures clash in the workplace.” Perhaps the judge considered the culture of actually pitching up for work when you are expected to to be unimportant in the context of this case, or perhaps he thought a belief in the “wrath of ancestors” trumped all other considerations. Or perhaps he didn’t think at all. This was not so much a “clash of cultures”, it was a clash of stupidity and common sense, a clash which stupidity won.

We hear various government ministers and trades union officials whining that despite growth in the economy, employment continues to stagnate. This case is an excellent illustration of why this state of affairs exists. What employer in his right mind would hire someone of Johanna Mmoledi’s ilk when he can possibly avoid doing so? Businesses continue to replace labour with capital wherever it is possible to do so, resulting in high unemployment, poverty, crime, and all the misery that those things bring in their wake.

As usual, our politicians are too stupid to realise that this is a problem of their own making.

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Responsibility

November 2, 2010

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled.
The ruling by King’s County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten stems from an incident in April 2009 when Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, both aged four, struck an 87-year-old pedestrian, Claire Menagh, with their training bikes.
Menagh underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later.

Johannesburg – A man apparently chopped his dog’s back legs off because she “stole” food from a neighbour in a squatter camp outside Sabie.
The female Africanis dog lay helplessly for more than a week behind the hut of her owner, Alfred Maganzi, 65, before residents of the Fok-fok squatter camp called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

Canis africanis


On the face of it these two news stories seem to have nothing in common. Half a planet apart, one a silly ruling by an overeducated first-world judge, the other a horrific act by an uneducated, unemployed third-world man; but at the root both made the same mistake: they failed to understand the nature of responsibility.

In order for responsibility to exist, the responsible agent must be able to understand that his actions will have consequences, and be able to make a reasonable assessment of what those consequences might be. In addition, to be held criminally responsible, he must make a conscious choice to perpetrate an act despite being aware that it will or may have adverse consequences.

Neither of those is true in either of these cases. Dogs’ and children’s brains are insufficiently advanced to be capable of anything but the most rudimentary reasoning, and to suggest that a four-year-old human or a dog is capable of performing a sophisticated analysis of cause and effect is ludicrous. When a dog is hungry its instinct will cause it to seek food, and if the only food available is in the hut of a neighbour, then it will take and eat it regardless of any human notions of ownership. (My dog Doofus, coincidentally also an Africanis, took and ate our Christmas chicken that was thawing out atop the oudoor barbecue. Scallywag and I had to make do with a Christmas meal of pizza and roast potatoes.) Similarly, children have very limited spacial awareness; they keep bumping into things and wandering around without looking where they are going. They surely cannot be held responsible for this—a characteristic of childhood behaviour.

However, it is reasonable to chastise dog or child for behaviour that we as adults would like to curb, in the interests of modifying future behaviour. We would like our children to know that running over old ladies with wheeled vehicles is not always a good thing, and we would like our dogs not to go around, like the Italian government, promiscuously gobbling up everything in sight regardless of where it is found. Mild rebuke is called for; suing and dismemberment are both grotesquely disproportionate.

I’m not familiar with the law in New York, but I presume there must be some legal guidelines as to the age at which a child becomes responsible (either in civil or criminal proceedings) for its actions, but I cannot believe that threshold would be as low as four, especially when they are deemed too immature to have sex until they are 18, or buy a beer until they are 21, or take marijuana ever. I don’t suppose we will ever know what caused the judge’s brainfart in actually believing that this child is responsible, but I’m quite sure his ruling will be overturned when, if ever, proceedings are initiated against the child, and no one will be the worse off. (The lawyers, as always, will be very much better off.)

The same cannot be said for the dog, which was put down after her week of agony. How any human being can be so devoid of empathy as to perform an act of such barbarism is beyond me—I do not have the mental equipment to understand it. I can only assume or hope that it is the result of mental illness, not an evil nature, and that Mr Maganzi receives, in either case, the treatment he deserves.

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