I lead a conflicted life, technologically. I owned the original 128k Mac, and was a professional Mac II programmer for several years. Then I started at Microsoft and had a DOS and later a Windows machine on my desk. The Windows OS matured while the Mac OS languished. When I got married we bought ourselves a home computer, the first I'd owned for over a decade, and Macs weren't even an option. The OS had become a joke, and the hardware and software ecosystem was a tiny island.

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Things have shifted since then. The advent of Mac OS X, a real operating system at last, brought them back into the game, and their shift to Intel made that game highly competitive. Their design has always been good and its now the best in the world, orders of magnitude ahead of the competition.

The Slippery Slope of Healthcare: Why Bad Things Happen to Healthy Patients and How to Avoid Them. Kindle $27.09 $ 27. 09 $28.50 $28.50. This title will be released on March 24, 2020. Hardcover $30.00 $ 30. Pre-order Price Guarantee. FREE Shipping by Amazon. Oct 15, 2019 Having stumbled upon it, some Mac users will end up following the malicious prompts provided on the page, and that’s a slippery slope. Let’s delve into the technical nature of this online fraud. Obviously, Mac users do not go to the spoof web page in question because they want to. A slippery slope is an argument that suggests that a certain initial action could lead to a chain of events with a relatively extreme result, or that if we treat one case a certain way then we will have to treat more extreme cases the same way too. MacSlope brings fully featured slope stability analysis to the Mac OS Desktop. MacSlope is an app designed to calculate and search for the critical factor of safety of earth slopes, using common methods of limit equilibrium slope stability analysis.

But even so I held a religious conviction that the Mac represented a totalitarian regime which crushed freedom. And this is of course in many ways true. And Microsoft, which many despise as a monopolist, nonetheless enables an incredibly free and fertile hardware, software, and media economy. Laptops come in every shape and size, gaming desktops which bring fantastic worlds to life at incredible speeds, servers that run the world, from thousands of vendors. Software and music and movies from everywhere. (Linux is at the far end of this continuum of freedom, but for reasons I will shortly explain it's not a good option for me.)

So I probably wouldn't be writing this post if it weren't for the iPhone. My wife Sara wanted a phone that was a PDA, so that she could manage her complex parenting schedule on the fly without carrying two devices. While I, for my part, hated my Motorola Q (running Windows Mobile 5) with a passion. It was just a year old but everything about it was unexpectedly hard to use. Every time I used it I was annoyed. It was a complete compromise - it didn't do anything well. End result: we spent our children's college education for a pair of these beauties.

Executive summary: the iPhone is a complete delight, with every detail crafted to please. And that started me thinking. Don't I deserve to have the rest of my life work that way? I realized in a flash how sick I am of configuration, of devices that work together only begrudgingly, software designed by people who seem not to actually use software. I manage our home network, and it's an enormous pain. (And this should explain why Linux isn't an option for me).

Then our wireless router died. And I made a sudden but profound decision - I was going to replace it with an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. And I did. And it's beautiful. And it just worked, with incredibly intuitive setup tools. And because it's from a company that understands what real people need, it included the facility to plug in a USB hard drive to create a file share. So I was able to throw out my aging (and loud! and hot! and power-hungry!) file server computer with a tiny USB hard drive. And that just worked too.

So now I fear that I am lost. The prospect of a life filled with beautiful things that just work calls to me with a siren song that I cannot easily resist. Even Sara, a staunch Windows person, is becoming convinced by her iPhone and glimpses of iPhone and iMovie. Unless I am convinced otherwise I suspect we will slowly replace our computing infrastructure with Apple products.

But there is hope for we Microsoft shareholders. First of all they are starting to get it, look at the Xbox if you don't think so. And secondly their server group (for which I currently work) absolutely delights, and looks to continue to do so. There the commitment to users, in this case developers and IT professionals, is unmatched. Unshelved.com loves being on Windows Server. So there's that.

Meanwhile the Barnacle household is sliding down the slippery slope to Apple. And we're liking it.

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UKnowledge > J. David Rosenberg College of Law > Law Faculty Publications > Law Faculty Scholarly Articles > 675

Abstract

E.J. Graff has documented how any change in the marriage rules inevitably leads to predications of apocalyptic cries warning of “death of marriage and civilization itself.” The conservative fit over the possibility of the social acceptance of same-sex marriage therefore has an ancient if repetitive script. Still, the “threat” of same-sex marriage poses for conservatives at least one atypical wrinkle. Unlike discussions of equal or even greater rancor, that raging over same-sex marriage forces its opponents to tread with special delicacy. In the case of abortion, opponents are able to argue in absolute terms: abortion is wrong, period, even if law requires that it be tolerated in some specific circumstances such as rape, incest, or health of the mother. Same-sex marriage, however, requires its opponents to target their arguments toward the “same-sex” qualifier without in any way impugning “marriage” itself. They must assume the difficult position of arguing simultaneously that marriage is an incomparable social good that must also be utterly denied to an entire class of persons due to their constitutional natures.7 Such targeting—it if can be conscientiously accomplished at all—necessitates more sophisticated argumentation than that deployed in abortion arguments. One such special tactic is the slippery slope argument. In its crudest form, the argument opposes same-sex marriage on the ground that if that is allowed, then how could we not also allow other forms of deviant sexual practices? The trinity of deviant forms invariably conjured includes polygamy, incest, and bestiality. This Article concentrates on the first, polygamy.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2002

Repository Citation

Donovan, James, 'Rock-Salting the Slippery Slope: Why Same-Sex Marriage is Not a Commitment to Polygamous Marriage' (2002). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 675.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/675

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