I have been enjoying this Harvey Mudd symposium on philosophy and the Net all day, but it has just taken a sharp turn for the stupid. Never mind porn, child-snatching, identity theft, chat addiction, terrorist steganography and all that other penny-ante stuff: One philosopher on the panel just opined that the Net is responsible for undermining unconditional commitment and, by extension, (Christian) religious faith. Hello? Sir? Are you familiar with modern capitalism? (No, of course not, you’re a professor in the UC system.) After 150 years of employment-necessitated rootlessness and a generation of life in the post-corporate-loyalty era, I think anyone in the world beyond tenure could tell you exactly what killed unconditional commitment. I’m so glad these people have conspired to remind me why I haven’t gone back for my Ph.D yet…

Mimi Harrison speaks for almost everyone I know — even the employed people. This essay is guaranteed to make you somewhat dizzy.

Oh, bother: I was a Girl Scout for years (Brownie, Junior, Cadette, Senior, First Class, leader!) and I distinctly remember learning not to be a whiner, which means that these the-Net-is-mean-to-girls things really cheese me off. On the other hand, 84 percent of these girls say they apply their own common sense to the problem, which is most encouraging. (Suppose the Sharpei virus writer is a Scout? I hope so. That would rock.)

I’ve been following Woody Paige’s Denver Post column since he pissed off Utah. Today’s offering is a nice piece of the kind of writing that baseball fans love and everyone else fears — the bad-break (in several senses) story.

I am accused, on occasion, of being a pain in the ass to editors. Such accusations make me very sad, sad indeed, because no editors know from pain-in-the-ass writers ’til they’ve read this… this MAGNIFICENT!!!… thread from a disgruntled Minneapolis freelancer. “Chain Mail Bitch” doesn’t like to be edited… at all… about anything… ever. He also does not care for explaining things, making subject matter interesting to readers, preaching to the converted, or describing the music in a music scene. And this is his own evaluation of his work; wait ’til you read his editors’. Eight pages of this will make your tummy hurt, but after just two you will skip down the street like a little girl.

Memo from the Irony Gods to Wired: Your reporters buried the best part of this article, the one in which America is — and really, it is — relying on Russian lawyers to come in and protect the US Constitution from the vultures of copyright. My head hurts so, so much.

Gets my vote for most amusing shattering of glass ceiling: A 17-year-old girl announced yesterday that she’d written the new Sharpei virus to prove that not only boys can create computer mayhem. The new bug was also created, claims “Gigabyte,” as proof of concept for viruses in the new C-sharp programming language, as an intellectual exercise, and as a way to annoy Microsoft.

She’s got a great lawsuit, but that does her bupkes with no money for a lawyer: This blogger got fired because of stuff she said on her personal Web site.

Is meta-self-referential a phrase? It should be, I declare pompously, as I blog this opinion piece about blogging about blogging. Read it anyway, as Andrew Orlowski’s an interesting guy, though Chris Locke’s book deserves better than it gets here. (Disclaimer: I wrote a blurb for his last book. Putting the ‘self’ in meta-self-referential, that’s me.)

Missed the Grammys? My friend Jeanne sure didn’t. I think they need to hire a color commentator next year and I think it ought to be her.