I happen to think that newborns are less sentient than the animals in the breakfast I just had and less deserving of protection from society.
I'm amazed by your willingness to take your worldview to it's logical conclusion. Most people try and having it both ways - and don't see themselves doing so.
I'm just thankful you don't set the rules. At least most people still understand that infanticide is evil, and that it's society's duty to protect children - though it seems you're too wrapped up in your theories to understand these simple things.
If you really live what you say you believe, then you're a monster!
The magical thinking is that there is a given point that suddenly and magically makes someone a person.
At one point it might be similar to an apple. I have no qualms about killing apples or apple trees.
So SO stupid.
Do you not see? In your world-view there isn't a difference between an apple, an apple tree, a zygote or an adult human. They are all just patterns of matter. But then you're trying to reach out and say there's something more to a born human than an unborn human - which is wholly arbitrary.
(Plainly this philosphy of yours is contradictory because you DO believe there is something inherantly valuable about a human life, because you have a notion of rights - but anyway).
You can't have it both ways. You want to say the adult's life is special (though they're just matter, so really not any more special than an apple), but the unborn child is not special because it's just matter.
Oh except that you say the adult is self aware.
What about when you've been anaethsetised? or drunk? or concussed? Do you have a right to life then? How about when you were 1-hour old - were you self aware then? You suppose so, but for myself I don't remember being aware of anything. What justification can you offer to give rights-to-life to any of these different examples person but deprive it from the unborn child?
What about a concious adult? You say they're self aware. How do you know? Maybe it's all an illusion - like the turing test. And anyway, who appointed you the one to define this arbitrary litmus test of whether a person has rights to life or not?
Perhaps the fairest way to resolve this would be to allow the baby to gain conciousness in the same way that an anaethsetised person would gain conciousness, then give them a chance to choose for themselves whether they would like to live or not. I certainly am glad I was given that chance, and I suspect you are glad that you were also.
Certainly no-one has the right to deprive a person of such a choice, in the present or in the future.
GP was talking about a person, and so am I. That's why we call them "unborn child", and "baby in the womb". Noone can discard a human life without being a murderer. Therefore to justify themselves - just like in any genocide, those in favour of killing unborn babies, have to label abortion as not killing, and the baby as not human.
What a stupid argument.
Let me ask you a question. Why are you not guilty of magical thinking when you put a living human adult in a different category to a zygote or a dishwasher? Why do you afford adult human cell collections moral rights that you don't afford zygotes or dishwashers. I'll tell you why: It's because your concience tells you that human life is special and must be preserved, and that murder is an outrageous crime, and yet you mock those who believe likewise for unborn children.
Stupid stupid stupid.
Word play. Redefining "person" to suit your own ends. All for a little convenience in your life. Toss the baby in the trash- who cares anyway.
I want Universal Firmware - or at least universal to the CPU architecture (ARM, MIPS etc.). It could be supported right now if Android were to make Kernel Device Trees required or if we had *gasp* discoverable busses as we do on the PC.
Then we would be able to have Android or Linux distributions for mobile like we have Linux distributions for the PC. I could buy all kinds of interesting devices from China, and know that I will be able to upgrade them with my favourite "distro" without having to hack about with some guy's weekend project on the XDA developers forum.
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... ,
https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
I have had 6 happy years using you every day. You showed me so many things - the world of Linux I never knew. I will never forget the time we've shared.
But you've you've changed. You're not the OS I once loved. I'm sorry to have to tell you this. I don't wish to hurt you. But I have to tell you the truth...
I guess I hoped Ubuntu would succeed because it was good Free Software not in spite of it. It seems like Ubuntu is cooling off on some of the values that make free software great including openness (secret Mir developments), collaboration (going their own way on new infrastructure), respect for privacy (Amazon Dash) etc.
I wish the Ubuntu guys would stop trying to be another Apple, and instead focus on what they and the community can offer than Apple never could.
On the subject does can anyone make a suggestion about where best to go in terms of other distributions. I want to stay in the Debian family. Debian Stable is too behind the curve. Debian Testing seems rather volatile - a friend told me wine disappeard for a while on his install. Mint seems quite ok, but does it try too much to be a windows clone. Really I want something like debian but with some user polish, and a ~6-month release cycle.
Did they make any moves towards using standard C++ features rather than the MOC ugliness? What with Boost::Signals, sigcxx and C++11, I see no reason why they have to bastardise the language to provide signals.
A lot of the software IS crappy and it is certainly Windows only.
Amen to that! One of the first things that got me interested in developing this software was how expensive decent electronic test tools with capable software really are. Unless you're willing to drop some serious cash, you get a device that contains no more than £15 of parts being sold for >£400, with VB6 software than is generally no more than barely usable with each manufacturer reinventing the wheel over and over.
sigrok is cool because we can use the same software to sample from any device, but they can all share the powerful decoding features of the software, no matter how expensive the logic analyser hardware. Then we can begin to do cool stuff by piping the collected data through any script or FOSS tool that we might care to try - even in continuous real time. For example recently I have been working on an IS decoder (digital sound) that can extract the digital data from an audio interconnect, then pipe it into a wav. I can now hear what my DSP chip is producing, and that with a device that costs less than £30.
Bert Vermeulen has been working on adding support for analog sampling for oscillascope devices. Maybe one day soon we will be able to leverage the power of GNU Radio, and have them work as a spectrum anaylser, a demodulator.
The possibilities are endless, and lightyears ahead of anything the proprietory world has to offer.
I don't quite understand the trajectory of the probe. For example in the last shot, it swoops past Mimas zooming straight toward the Saturnian surface, then appears to change direction curving vertically, passing through the rings (why no hail of ice damage?), then swoops back around and turns around heading toward Encledatus at top speed. How is this even possible?
...this probably won't help Wine much. As this post explains http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-September/086885.html :
"IIRC, it's been discussed before, and it simply wouldn't work. D3D has too many ties to the Windows API that a non-Windows based implementation wouldn't be appropriate for Wine (try getting an HDC from a D3D resource, or passing an HWND to D3D). Gallium would have to substitute these for X11 resources, or custom resources that tie into X, so wouldn't reflect the Wine's internal state.
Additionally, not all drivers will support Gallium (eg. nVidia binaries), so a D3D10->GL path will still be needed."
I meant they should be standard in gnome/ubuntu since it is becoming THE desktop of choice.
It's getting popular precisely because it tries to make the desktop more GUI centric and less terminal centric. Most users (rightly or wrongly) find the terminal unintuitive and intimidating, which is why if Ubuntu wants to grow it can only do so by doing the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.
It seems to me these days (certainly here in the UK) we have almost no sense of optimism about progress. In the middle of the last century when so much SciFi was created, there was this grand humanistic notion, that one day technology would solve all the wrongs of the world, and we'd all live in peace and harmony e.g. Star Trek.
These days our optimism has shriveled and died, so that now we no longer dream of a utopia - we just dream of getting by without too much discomfort, and it seems to me like modern SciFi (where it exists) reflects this.
Now that I've switched away from windows after getting stuck with Vista, it's so annoying that the next release by all accounts is actually going to be passably good (though is that astroturfing?).
It's annoying because Windows is like a wife-beating husband. You live with it for years and years of pain, disappointment and broken promises, but just when you think you're ready to leave forever they turn around all smiles and sweetness.
I'm tired of MS's patent crap. I'm tired of the DRM. I'm tired of the FUD. I'm tired of mediocre product after mediocre product. I'm tired of their high prices. I'm tired of them stacking the ISO. I'm tired of embrace extend extinguish. I'm tired of fixing other people's computers from malware. I'm tired of the overwhelming OS storage footprints, and everything else they do to ruin computing for everyone. I'm tired of the whole company and I wish everyone would dump them forever.
But just as people begin to consider it, they give you a bouquet of flowers.
Those aren't accounted for by religion either, now are they? Where did god come from? That's not answered in your Bible, is it? Yet that is a far, far more amazing thing than the universe; a magical man that can create whole universes?
Well the difference between God and the Universe is that the universe began to exist; it is contingent - but the origin of the universe would have to be incontingent. I don't know if you've heard of that concept before, but incontingent objects are objects with no cause. There are only two types of objects that philosophers have ever put in this category: abstract objects such as shapes and numbers, and minds. But numbers can't be the cause of anything themselves, but minds can. So in the same way as abstract objects such as numbers simply exist and are causeless, so to this definition fits exactly the definition that the an originator of the universe would need to have.
You really need to put away those tired old arguments. Repeating nonsense like that and you other sillyness which have been thoroughly refuted so many times is a very dishonest thing to do. In the very unlikely case that you've never seen that bit of trash refuted before, you have now. If you repeat it ever again you're a liar.
Look I'm your friend here, and I'm not angry or anything, but I must say I'm quite troubled by the rudeness of many people in this subthread - people might be more willing to take you seriously if you'd take them seriously, or at least be polite.
No. You may have been told by those in authority in your church group that atheists have never thought about the issue, but that is not the truth.
Don't think I'm flaming you here - but please realize that's pretty much the most arrogant and patronizing thing anyone's ever said to me. I have observed that the English Atheist, in general, has not thought seriously about this question. I have not been told this, as you claim, I have observed this first hand in countless conversations with many people over the years.
What you describe is the Anthropic Principle, and far from never being seriously thought about, it's been debated to death all over the internet.
Aside from the extreme fallacy of claiming that if an atheist can't explain how something happened, it must have been a specific god,
You haven't understood my point. I never argued fine tuning demonstrates the existence of God - though for Atheists it does remain an unresolved problem. I was explaining that many Atheists (that I have spoken to) tend to be lazy about doubting Atheism in just the same way as he accuses some Christians of being lazy, when they are asked hard questions, such as those about fine tuning.
it can also be pointed out that the universe is not precisely tuned for human life.
In fact, in all of it we know about, with the exception of one tiny portion of one tiny planet, we can't even breathe. And even on that part there are places where it's so hot and humid you'll die within hours, so cold you'll die within minutes, wind so strong it'll kill you, ground that shakes, falls, burns, fills suddenly with water, or just collapses under you unexpectedly. And that's not to mention all the other life forms, from large predators to tiny micro-organisms, that kill millions of us every year.
You say the universe isn't hospitable enough - ok I understand that. But that's a distraction, because even for this universe to be even barely hospital at all an astonishing level of tuning is required to ensure that the universe doesn't implode, atoms don't evaporate, and stars can burn. This is a very serious problem for the Atheistic worldview, but very rarely have I seen Atheists stop and doubt and think on this, and this is my point - Atheists are not per se any less lazy about doubting than Christians are sometimes as GP was claiming.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to think that newborns are less sentient than the animals in the breakfast I just had and less deserving of protection from society.
I'm amazed by your willingness to take your worldview to it's logical conclusion. Most people try and having it both ways - and don't see themselves doing so.
I'm just thankful you don't set the rules. At least most people still understand that infanticide is evil, and that it's society's duty to protect children - though it seems you're too wrapped up in your theories to understand these simple things.
If you really live what you say you believe, then you're a monster!
I'm not an american, therefore I don't care about US politics. I'm not right wing - I'm a socialist. Republicanism has nothing to do with it.
It's a red herring. Almost all baby terminations are done purely for convenience.
Just because something happens, doesn't mean it should be legal, especially when it's morrally repugnant.
Define sentient. Define special.
The magical thinking is that there is a given point that suddenly and magically makes someone a person.
At one point it might be similar to an apple. I have no qualms about killing apples or apple trees.
So SO stupid.
Do you not see? In your world-view there isn't a difference between an apple, an apple tree, a zygote or an adult human. They are all just patterns of matter. But then you're trying to reach out and say there's something more to a born human than an unborn human - which is wholly arbitrary.
(Plainly this philosphy of yours is contradictory because you DO believe there is something inherantly valuable about a human life, because you have a notion of rights - but anyway).
You can't have it both ways. You want to say the adult's life is special (though they're just matter, so really not any more special than an apple), but the unborn child is not special because it's just matter.
Oh except that you say the adult is self aware.
What about when you've been anaethsetised? or drunk? or concussed? Do you have a right to life then? How about when you were 1-hour old - were you self aware then? You suppose so, but for myself I don't remember being aware of anything. What justification can you offer to give rights-to-life to any of these different examples person but deprive it from the unborn child?
What about a concious adult? You say they're self aware. How do you know? Maybe it's all an illusion - like the turing test. And anyway, who appointed you the one to define this arbitrary litmus test of whether a person has rights to life or not?
Perhaps the fairest way to resolve this would be to allow the baby to gain conciousness in the same way that an anaethsetised person would gain conciousness, then give them a chance to choose for themselves whether they would like to live or not. I certainly am glad I was given that chance, and I suspect you are glad that you were also.
Certainly no-one has the right to deprive a person of such a choice, in the present or in the future.
GP was talking about a person, and so am I. That's why we call them "unborn child", and "baby in the womb". Noone can discard a human life without being a murderer. Therefore to justify themselves - just like in any genocide, those in favour of killing unborn babies, have to label abortion as not killing, and the baby as not human.
What a stupid argument.
Let me ask you a question. Why are you not guilty of magical thinking when you put a living human adult in a different category to a zygote or a dishwasher? Why do you afford adult human cell collections moral rights that you don't afford zygotes or dishwashers. I'll tell you why: It's because your concience tells you that human life is special and must be preserved, and that murder is an outrageous crime, and yet you mock those who believe likewise for unborn children.
Stupid stupid stupid.
Word play. Redefining "person" to suit your own ends. All for a little convenience in your life. Toss the baby in the trash- who cares anyway.
It's so nice to see a Republican actually care about someone who does not reside in a uterus, provided they have a valid US passport.
And you don't care about people in the uterus? If not, then why not?
I want Universal Firmware - or at least universal to the CPU architecture (ARM, MIPS etc.). It could be supported right now if Android were to make Kernel Device Trees required or if we had *gasp* discoverable busses as we do on the PC.
Then we would be able to have Android or Linux distributions for mobile like we have Linux distributions for the PC. I could buy all kinds of interesting devices from China, and know that I will be able to upgrade them with my favourite "distro" without having to hack about with some guy's weekend project on the XDA developers forum.
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... , https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
Dear Ubuntu,
I have had 6 happy years using you every day. You showed me so many things - the world of Linux I never knew. I will never forget the time we've shared.
But you've you've changed. You're not the OS I once loved. I'm sorry to have to tell you this. I don't wish to hurt you. But I have to tell you the truth...
I've switched to Mint.
I guess I hoped Ubuntu would succeed because it was good Free Software not in spite of it. It seems like Ubuntu is cooling off on some of the values that make free software great including openness (secret Mir developments), collaboration (going their own way on new infrastructure), respect for privacy (Amazon Dash) etc.
I wish the Ubuntu guys would stop trying to be another Apple, and instead focus on what they and the community can offer than Apple never could.
On the subject does can anyone make a suggestion about where best to go in terms of other distributions. I want to stay in the Debian family. Debian Stable is too behind the curve. Debian Testing seems rather volatile - a friend told me wine disappeard for a while on his install. Mint seems quite ok, but does it try too much to be a windows clone. Really I want something like debian but with some user polish, and a ~6-month release cycle.
Mod parent up.
RTFA: They have made some good progress on this - but I can't tell if MOC is dead yet.
Did they make any moves towards using standard C++ features rather than the MOC ugliness? What with Boost::Signals, sigcxx and C++11, I see no reason why they have to bastardise the language to provide signals.
A lot of the software IS crappy and it is certainly Windows only.
Amen to that! One of the first things that got me interested in developing this software was how expensive decent electronic test tools with capable software really are. Unless you're willing to drop some serious cash, you get a device that contains no more than £15 of parts being sold for >£400, with VB6 software than is generally no more than barely usable with each manufacturer reinventing the wheel over and over.
sigrok is cool because we can use the same software to sample from any device, but they can all share the powerful decoding features of the software, no matter how expensive the logic analyser hardware. Then we can begin to do cool stuff by piping the collected data through any script or FOSS tool that we might care to try - even in continuous real time. For example recently I have been working on an IS decoder (digital sound) that can extract the digital data from an audio interconnect, then pipe it into a wav. I can now hear what my DSP chip is producing, and that with a device that costs less than £30.
Bert Vermeulen has been working on adding support for analog sampling for oscillascope devices. Maybe one day soon we will be able to leverage the power of GNU Radio, and have them work as a spectrum anaylser, a demodulator.
The possibilities are endless, and lightyears ahead of anything the proprietory world has to offer.
I don't quite understand the trajectory of the probe. For example in the last shot, it swoops past Mimas zooming straight toward the Saturnian surface, then appears to change direction curving vertically, passing through the rings (why no hail of ice damage?), then swoops back around and turns around heading toward Encledatus at top speed. How is this even possible?
...this probably won't help Wine much. As this post explains http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-September/086885.html : "IIRC, it's been discussed before, and it simply wouldn't work. D3D has too many ties to the Windows API that a non-Windows based implementation wouldn't be appropriate for Wine (try getting an HDC from a D3D resource, or passing an HWND to D3D). Gallium would have to substitute these for X11 resources, or custom resources that tie into X, so wouldn't reflect the Wine's internal state. Additionally, not all drivers will support Gallium (eg. nVidia binaries), so a D3D10->GL path will still be needed."
I meant they should be standard in gnome/ubuntu since it is becoming THE desktop of choice.
It's getting popular precisely because it tries to make the desktop more GUI centric and less terminal centric. Most users (rightly or wrongly) find the terminal unintuitive and intimidating, which is why if Ubuntu wants to grow it can only do so by doing the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.
...makes you think, doesn't it?
Hey I drew that diagram! Small world.
It seems to me these days (certainly here in the UK) we have almost no sense of optimism about progress. In the middle of the last century when so much SciFi was created, there was this grand humanistic notion, that one day technology would solve all the wrongs of the world, and we'd all live in peace and harmony e.g. Star Trek.
These days our optimism has shriveled and died, so that now we no longer dream of a utopia - we just dream of getting by without too much discomfort, and it seems to me like modern SciFi (where it exists) reflects this.
Seconded. And unless you're willing to shell out for a WinXP license for the sake of a single app it's even less appealing.
Now that I've switched away from windows after getting stuck with Vista, it's so annoying that the next release by all accounts is actually going to be passably good (though is that astroturfing?).
It's annoying because Windows is like a wife-beating husband. You live with it for years and years of pain, disappointment and broken promises, but just when you think you're ready to leave forever they turn around all smiles and sweetness.
I'm tired of MS's patent crap. I'm tired of the DRM. I'm tired of the FUD. I'm tired of mediocre product after mediocre product. I'm tired of their high prices. I'm tired of them stacking the ISO. I'm tired of embrace extend extinguish. I'm tired of fixing other people's computers from malware. I'm tired of the overwhelming OS storage footprints, and everything else they do to ruin computing for everyone. I'm tired of the whole company and I wish everyone would dump them forever.
But just as people begin to consider it, they give you a bouquet of flowers.
Will this ever end?
Those aren't accounted for by religion either, now are they? Where did god come from? That's not answered in your Bible, is it? Yet that is a far, far more amazing thing than the universe; a magical man that can create whole universes?
Well the difference between God and the Universe is that the universe began to exist; it is contingent - but the origin of the universe would have to be incontingent. I don't know if you've heard of that concept before, but incontingent objects are objects with no cause. There are only two types of objects that philosophers have ever put in this category: abstract objects such as shapes and numbers, and minds. But numbers can't be the cause of anything themselves, but minds can. So in the same way as abstract objects such as numbers simply exist and are causeless, so to this definition fits exactly the definition that the an originator of the universe would need to have.
You really need to put away those tired old arguments. Repeating nonsense like that and you other sillyness which have been thoroughly refuted so many times is a very dishonest thing to do. In the very unlikely case that you've never seen that bit of trash refuted before, you have now. If you repeat it ever again you're a liar.
Look I'm your friend here, and I'm not angry or anything, but I must say I'm quite troubled by the rudeness of many people in this subthread - people might be more willing to take you seriously if you'd take them seriously, or at least be polite.
No. You may have been told by those in authority in your church group that atheists have never thought about the issue, but that is not the truth.
Don't think I'm flaming you here - but please realize that's pretty much the most arrogant and patronizing thing anyone's ever said to me. I have observed that the English Atheist, in general, has not thought seriously about this question. I have not been told this, as you claim, I have observed this first hand in countless conversations with many people over the years.
What you describe is the Anthropic Principle, and far from never being seriously thought about, it's been debated to death all over the internet.
Aside from the extreme fallacy of claiming that if an atheist can't explain how something happened, it must have been a specific god,
You haven't understood my point. I never argued fine tuning demonstrates the existence of God - though for Atheists it does remain an unresolved problem. I was explaining that many Atheists (that I have spoken to) tend to be lazy about doubting Atheism in just the same way as he accuses some Christians of being lazy, when they are asked hard questions, such as those about fine tuning.
it can also be pointed out that the universe is not precisely tuned for human life. In fact, in all of it we know about, with the exception of one tiny portion of one tiny planet, we can't even breathe. And even on that part there are places where it's so hot and humid you'll die within hours, so cold you'll die within minutes, wind so strong it'll kill you, ground that shakes, falls, burns, fills suddenly with water, or just collapses under you unexpectedly. And that's not to mention all the other life forms, from large predators to tiny micro-organisms, that kill millions of us every year.
You say the universe isn't hospitable enough - ok I understand that. But that's a distraction, because even for this universe to be even barely hospital at all an astonishing level of tuning is required to ensure that the universe doesn't implode, atoms don't evaporate, and stars can burn. This is a very serious problem for the Atheistic worldview, but very rarely have I seen Atheists stop and doubt and think on this, and this is my point - Atheists are not per se any less lazy about doubting than Christians are sometimes as GP was claiming.