While I don't have anything against IVF per se, I do think that the idea of fertilizing more eggs than will be implanted is wrong. If someone wants one child, then fertilize one egg, implant it and go from there. So it may take a little longer, so what?
That said, I do agree that those who insist on being biological parents rather than adopting display an astounding lack of understanding about what being a parent is all about: raising a child in a physically, mentally and emotionally caring environment. Parental love is not soley the realm of biology. It's a matter of providing for the needs of someone who's not able to provide everything for themselves, spending time with them, experiencing their successes and failures, and watching them grow into a whole person.
This, of course, is vearing off into an entirely different subject than it started on, but there it is.
I agree that ignoring the destruction of non-implanted embryos is one of the greatest hippocracies of the "right-to-life" movement. It's an issue that I wasn't even aware of myself untill a year or so ago. Perhaps the IVF community hasn't wanted to talk about it because it would dirty their image.
However, the creation or prolonging of one human life does not justify the destruction of another. Look at much of the medical research that occurred in the first half of the century. There was a calousness towards the lives and wellbeing of the subjects, because they were viewed as being less "worthy" or deficient. Today, such research standards would never make it past even a cursory review by an ethics board, and rightly so. Now, people say, "an embryo isn't really human (at least not yet), so it's ok to treat it as a commodity."
On the subject of whether or not non-embryonic stem cell research is being done, I'm afraid I haven't heard much said on the subject recently. It would certainly be nice to see it receive as much press and "potential" funding as embryonic stem cell research.
Don't take that as an approval of Bush's actions in this case or general. I think that, like most polititians, Bush is a weasel who'll do whatever he thinks will create the greatest opportunity for himself. I'm merely trying to point out some of the facts and inconcistencies of the current debate. Politics is an unavoidable concequence of the stupidity and foolishness of humanity in general.
What research? Let's see some actual numbers and actual research reports. The last time I heard of anyone doing serious research into non-embryonic stem cells was close to two years ago, and they weren't yet at the stage of having conclusive evidence regarding the "usefullness" of said stem cells. What I'm saying is that the scientific pundits (who have a large influence on where the money, public or private, goes) have, for the most part, dismissed non-embryonic stem cells out of hand. Perhaps this is because they don't get them as much controversy and air time. Many of teh lead researchers seem to have been drawn into that mindset as well.
What really chaps my hide about this whole debate is that both sides seem to be deliberately ignoring the the fact that human embryos are not the only source of human stem cells. Proponents of stem cell research instist that only embryonic stem cells will do, and don't want to be bothered with researching the viability of stems cells taken from adults or the placenta and/or umbilical cord of new-born babies. Those who oppose the use of embyonic stem cells often blindly lump the other sources of stem cells right in with them.
In the end, we end up with perfectly legitimate means of aquiring stem cells being ignored, because both sides have gotten on their high horses and, instead of working with researchers and ethicists to find a way to achive the goals without destroying/killing embryos*.
This is what happens when a scientific and/or ethical issue (there doesn't seem to be too many scientific issues that aren't also wrapped up in ethical issues) enter the real of politics. All reasonableness and willingness to act for both the physical and ethical/moral well-being of others goes out the window. It becomes and issue of power and who will dominate who.
* And I don't buy the, "well, they were going to be gotten rid of anyway" argument. Just because someone else was going to kill your neighbor down the street if you didn't doesn't mean it's ok for you to go ahead and do it.
Did the game playing help make the player more intelligent, coordinated and focused, or is it that people with those qualities tend to be attracted to computer/video games?
Mind you, I think the study make an important point to those who rely on such studies for information, but I think that a longer term study to look at the causalities would also be helpfull.
They provide an enhanced version of lpd that provides full functionallity for most of their latest printers (i.e. the Color LaserJet 4550, and the LaserJet 8150, which we use here at work). They also provide a gui replacement for lpr, gpr, that allows you to do printer configuration for each print job (i.e. duplex printing, print quality, etc), in addtion to setting defaults. Quite handy.
Ok, so I downloaded the patches and tarballs, checked to make sure the md5 sums matched and then went to patch my kernel source. linux-2.4-xfs-1.0.patch.gz wants to put everyting in/tmp/null. I'm running patch as `patch -p0`, which what I used for linux-2.4.3-core-xfs-1.0.patch.gz, and that went fine.
Just remember to skip the intermission, or you'll go stark raving mad just from shear (yes, I meant to spell it that way) bordom. The movie itself was rather interesting, but the middle section was enough to make me start twitching. I know, I know, it was intended to simulate the long journey through empty space and all that, but at least if I were actually making that journey, I could be reading a book, listening to *good* music (not the modernistic "let's sound intellectual" crap used in the movie), playing a game or something.
[disclaimer] I work at the company I'm about to refer to/endorse.[/disclaimer]
LSI Logic makes FC adapters that support IP over FC in addition to acting as storage device controllers (FCP). There aren't Windows drivers to support IP over FC for the LSI HAB's but our Linux driver does.
Most game makers couldn't design/produce a worthwhile game if God himself showed them all the right little storylines, plot hooks, character development, special effects, head trips, combination of game play, interaction with others (in multiplayer games), etc. For once I'd like to see a game that didn't bleeding rehash the same stupid Hollywoodized plots and character motivations (if they even bother with such).
Of course, not all games need plot or character development, i.e. sports games, strategy games, or arcade style games (although it's certainly possible). But be honest, when was the last time you saw a game that wasn't: 1) a slap a famous name (player or association) on it and release it just before christmas 2) a rehash of Risk/Supremacy with a few more elements thrown in or 3) a repackaging of Karatika (from the Apple II days) or Tetris?
I firmly believe that "there's nothing new under the sun", but come on! At least show a little creativity. Please?
"We've been forecasting worm-based industrial espionage to happen for quite some time," said Mikko Hyppönen, anti-virus researcher for F-Secure Corp.
"It has finally happened. I'm just surprised it happened at the top."
Oh, come on. Are we honestly expected to believe that this is the first time this has happened? This sort of thing goes on all the time, they even admitted it earlier in the article. Perhaps this is the first time it's happened to a really large corporation that's then let it the information leak out to the public, but the first time it's ever happened?
The last few weeks, I've been unable to log into any of the official napter servers, it always times out in the "finding best server" phase. However, I can log into just about any of the unofficial networks.
`Course, I can't seem to log into the gnutella network either. *grumble*
Moving older, slightly outdated information to a publicly-accessible reading area would be a reasonable way to "recycle" those words that would help the cash-strapped student, while keeping the real value of up-to-date information for those readers with both money and interest.
You could do this by keeping each revision of each page (or page set) in something like cvs, and the viewer's subscriber level controls whether or not they get the latest revision or not.
The problem is, we don't live in a perfect world. Any philosophy of right and wrong (aka how to behave) that doesn't account for that is woefully inadequate, if not down right misleading.
It was a bad idea when it started. I mean, come on! The data transfer rates are something like 2400 bps (my first modem, which was a handme down over 7 years ago!). Because of the orbits, a ridiculous number of satelites is required, which jacks the maintainence costs through the roof. Then there's the nasty little oops, as you mentioned, of it screwing up radio astronomy. Just let the bloody thing die already.
A while back (~4-5 yrs ago), there was a fairly large movement among local ISP's in the US to set up local (intra-city) peering points, so as to avoid having geographically close destinations reached through geographically wide routes. I don't know what ever happened to it, beyond the initial setup (I remember such peering happening in the Seatle, WA and Austin, TX areas, at the time). Perhaps it died out when so many of the smaller ISP's got eaten by the big boys.
Perhaps something similar would be beneficial in Europe and elsewhere.
Actually, you don't have to register a work w/ the Library of Congress in order for it to be covered by copyright law. It does make defending your copyright easier, but it's not required.
The thing to watch out for here is that, the last time I checked, the FrontPage extensions (to the webserver) available for non-MS operating systems were a major security hole. They have to be run as root, etc.
> Admittedly I haven't kept up with developments in secure distros, but does anyone make a > "locked-down by default" distro based off Red Hat/Debian/*BSD?
In the Linux area, take a look at the Nexus project. It's being built from scratch, as opposed to being based on an existing distribution.
Terry Pratchett must be taken in low doses. Otherwise he just becomes annoying. I made the mistake of reading Interesting Times, The Last Continent, Pyramids, Hogfather, Equal Rites, and Masquerade within about a four month period. I loved Interesting Times, and Last Continent and Hogfather were pretty good, but I've never been able to finish Masquerade and the thought of buying another Pratchet book makes me nauseously bored.
They must have caught on. I first noticed this a week or so back (and you can't create a new account for cypherpunk either). You can log in as ciferpunk/ciferpunk, though (according to the info given at account creation, a 70+ year old woman from American Samoa who makes $150,000 a year).
That's why you never give it access to those areas of your brain. Of course, it would still leave you open to someone cracking your system and then feeding you bogus visual and/or auditory data. That could get really nasty. If you were a mental health person, you would have to first make sure that the patient wasn't connected to a compromised system, if they appeared to be suffering from halucinations of some kind. The key thing is to never let the system have a level of access where you can't simply pull a plug or whatever, and break the connection. If, however, you had a full sensory interface (visual, auditory, olifactory, tactile inputs, but not necessarily motor control), as oposed to just visual and auditory, how could you ever be sure that you had actually unplugged instead of being fed that input by a program?
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't have anything against IVF per se, I do think that the idea of fertilizing more eggs than will be implanted is wrong. If someone wants one child, then fertilize one egg, implant it and go from there. So it may take a little longer, so what?
That said, I do agree that those who insist on being biological parents rather than adopting display an astounding lack of understanding about what being a parent is all about: raising a child in a physically, mentally and emotionally caring environment. Parental love is not soley the realm of biology. It's a matter of providing for the needs of someone who's not able to provide everything for themselves, spending time with them, experiencing their successes and failures, and watching them grow into a whole person.
This, of course, is vearing off into an entirely different subject than it started on, but there it is.
I agree that ignoring the destruction of non-implanted embryos is one of the greatest hippocracies of the "right-to-life" movement. It's an issue that I wasn't even aware of myself untill a year or so ago. Perhaps the IVF community hasn't wanted to talk about it because it would dirty their image.
However, the creation or prolonging of one human life does not justify the destruction of another. Look at much of the medical research that occurred in the first half of the century. There was a calousness towards the lives and wellbeing of the subjects, because they were viewed as being less "worthy" or deficient. Today, such research standards would never make it past even a cursory review by an ethics board, and rightly so. Now, people say, "an embryo isn't really human (at least not yet), so it's ok to treat it as a commodity."
On the subject of whether or not non-embryonic stem cell research is being done, I'm afraid I haven't heard much said on the subject recently. It would certainly be nice to see it receive as much press and "potential" funding as embryonic stem cell research.
Don't take that as an approval of Bush's actions in this case or general. I think that, like most polititians, Bush is a weasel who'll do whatever he thinks will create the greatest opportunity for himself. I'm merely trying to point out some of the facts and inconcistencies of the current debate. Politics is an unavoidable concequence of the stupidity and foolishness of humanity in general.
What research? Let's see some actual numbers and actual research reports. The last time I heard of anyone doing serious research into non-embryonic stem cells was close to two years ago, and they weren't yet at the stage of having conclusive evidence regarding the "usefullness" of said stem cells. What I'm saying is that the scientific pundits (who have a large influence on where the money, public or private, goes) have, for the most part, dismissed non-embryonic stem cells out of hand. Perhaps this is because they don't get them as much controversy and air time. Many of teh lead researchers seem to have been drawn into that mindset as well.
What really chaps my hide about this whole debate is that both sides seem to be deliberately ignoring the the fact that human embryos are not the only source of human stem cells. Proponents of stem cell research instist that only embryonic stem cells will do, and don't want to be bothered with researching the viability of stems cells taken from adults or the placenta and/or umbilical cord of new-born babies. Those who oppose the use of embyonic stem cells often blindly lump the other sources of stem cells right in with them.
In the end, we end up with perfectly legitimate means of aquiring stem cells being ignored, because both sides have gotten on their high horses and, instead of working with researchers and ethicists to find a way to achive the goals without destroying/killing embryos*.
This is what happens when a scientific and/or ethical issue (there doesn't seem to be too many scientific issues that aren't also wrapped up in ethical issues) enter the real of politics. All reasonableness and willingness to act for both the physical and ethical/moral well-being of others goes out the window. It becomes and issue of power and who will dominate who.
* And I don't buy the, "well, they were going to be gotten rid of anyway" argument. Just because someone else was going to kill your neighbor down the street if you didn't doesn't mean it's ok for you to go ahead and do it.
Did the game playing help make the player more intelligent, coordinated and focused, or is it that people with those qualities tend to be attracted to computer/video games?
Mind you, I think the study make an important point to those who rely on such studies for information, but I think that a longer term study to look at the causalities would also be helpfull.
They provide an enhanced version of lpd that provides full functionallity for most of their latest printers (i.e. the Color LaserJet 4550, and the LaserJet 8150, which we use here at work). They also provide a gui replacement for lpr, gpr, that allows you to do printer configuration for each print job (i.e. duplex printing, print quality, etc), in addtion to setting defaults. Quite handy.
Ok, so I downloaded the patches and tarballs, checked to make sure the md5 sums matched and then went to patch my kernel source. linux-2.4-xfs-1.0.patch.gz wants to put everyting in /tmp/null. I'm running patch as `patch -p0`, which what I used for linux-2.4.3-core-xfs-1.0.patch.gz, and that went fine.
Um, yeah, that too. ;)
Just remember to skip the intermission, or you'll go stark raving mad just from shear (yes, I meant to spell it that way) bordom. The movie itself was rather interesting, but the middle section was enough to make me start twitching. I know, I know, it was intended to simulate the long journey through empty space and all that, but at least if I were actually making that journey, I could be reading a book, listening to *good* music (not the modernistic "let's sound intellectual" crap used in the movie), playing a game or something.
LSI Logic makes FC adapters that support IP over FC in addition to acting as storage device controllers (FCP). There aren't Windows drivers to support IP over FC for the LSI HAB's but our Linux driver does.
Of course, not all games need plot or character development, i.e. sports games, strategy games, or arcade style games (although it's certainly possible). But be honest, when was the last time you saw a game that wasn't: 1) a slap a famous name (player or association) on it and release it just before christmas 2) a rehash of Risk/Supremacy with a few more elements thrown in or 3) a repackaging of Karatika (from the Apple II days) or Tetris?
I firmly believe that "there's nothing new under the sun", but come on! At least show a little creativity. Please?
Oh, come on. Are we honestly expected to believe that this is the first time this has happened? This sort of thing goes on all the time, they even admitted it earlier in the article. Perhaps this is the first time it's happened to a really large corporation that's then let it the information leak out to the public, but the first time it's ever happened?
`Course, I can't seem to log into the gnutella network either. *grumble*
You could do this by keeping each revision of each page (or page set) in something like cvs, and the viewer's subscriber level controls whether or not they get the latest revision or not.
The problem is, we don't live in a perfect world. Any philosophy of right and wrong (aka how to behave) that doesn't account for that is woefully inadequate, if not down right misleading.
It was a bad idea when it started. I mean, come on! The data transfer rates are something like 2400 bps (my first modem, which was a handme down over 7 years ago!). Because of the orbits, a ridiculous number of satelites is required, which jacks the maintainence costs through the roof. Then there's the nasty little oops, as you mentioned, of it screwing up radio astronomy. Just let the bloody thing die already.
A while back (~4-5 yrs ago), there was a fairly large movement among local ISP's in the US to set up local (intra-city) peering points, so as to avoid having geographically close destinations reached through geographically wide routes. I don't know what ever happened to it, beyond the initial setup (I remember such peering happening in the Seatle, WA and Austin, TX areas, at the time). Perhaps it died out when so many of the smaller ISP's got eaten by the big boys.
Perhaps something similar would be beneficial in Europe and elsewhere.
Same thing here. I live in the Wichita area and I'd never even heard about this show until it got mentioned here on slashdot.
Advertise, advertise, advertise.
Actually, you don't have to register a work w/ the Library of Congress in order for it to be covered by copyright law. It does make defending your copyright easier, but it's not required.
The thing to watch out for here is that, the last time I checked, the FrontPage extensions (to the webserver) available for non-MS operating systems were a major security hole. They have to be run as root, etc.
> "locked-down by default" distro based off Red Hat/Debian/*BSD?
In the Linux area, take a look at the Nexus project. It's being built from scratch, as opposed to being based on an existing distribution.
http://nexus-project.org/
Terry Pratchett must be taken in low doses. Otherwise he just becomes annoying. I made the mistake of reading Interesting Times, The Last Continent, Pyramids, Hogfather, Equal Rites, and Masquerade within about a four month period. I loved Interesting Times, and Last Continent and Hogfather were pretty good, but I've never been able to finish Masquerade and the thought of buying another Pratchet book makes me nauseously bored.
They must have caught on. I first noticed this a week or so back (and you can't create a new account for cypherpunk either). You can log in as ciferpunk/ciferpunk, though (according to the info given at account creation, a 70+ year old woman from American Samoa who makes $150,000 a year).
That's why you never give it access to those areas of your brain. Of course, it would still leave you open to someone cracking your system and then feeding you bogus visual and/or auditory data. That could get really nasty. If you were a mental health person, you would have to first make sure that the patient wasn't connected to a compromised system, if they appeared to be suffering from halucinations of some kind. The key thing is to never let the system have a level of access where you can't simply pull a plug or whatever, and break the connection. If, however, you had a full sensory interface (visual, auditory, olifactory, tactile inputs, but not necessarily motor control), as oposed to just visual and auditory, how could you ever be sure that you had actually unplugged instead of being fed that input by a program?