"Real Beauty"---Or Really Smart MArketing?

Rebecca Traister, a staff writer for an online news and culture journal, Salon, writes about how advertising companies such as Dove and Bath and Body Works use "deceiving" gimmicks as promotional techniques to get people to buy their products. She does't think Dove does a great job in choosing the way they advertise certain products such as their cellulite firming cream. In the ad the use non-professional models of all shapes and sizes to show that it works for all types of people. But cellulite doesn't have anything to do with weight or body build, so the ad seems misleading.
     Also, she pointed out a Bath and Body Works campaign for little girls that were launching a line of "Real Beauty Inside And Out" personal care products deisgned to help the little girls feel and be their best. She thought it was funny how they were trying to get a point across to the girls that real beauty was about trust and at the same time basically ripping them off witht their sales gimmick.

Is it really about establishing real beauty or is it all just for the money?

Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

Why The Future Doesn't Need Us is an essay written by Bill Joy; the cofounder of Sun Microsystems. One night at a conference, Joy encountered two of his scientists friends; Ray, who studied consciousness, and John, who invented the first blind reading machine. All three scientist started enaging in a conversation about technology and Ray bought up the fact that improvement of technology was going to increase and that humans were going to become robots. John said it wasn't possible becaaause robots  couldn't be conscious. Thus came the argument that technology is going to take over and humans aren't going to be needed.

Joy listed an example of a technology/scientific advance that could go along with the argument. In an excerpt by unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, it states how in the future, either two things will occur; the machines mightbe permitted to making their own decisions without human oversight or else human control over the machines might be retained.