is sad commentary on a society that supposedly believes in an afterlife.
- well what about a large number of people in society that do not believe in afterlife? We didn't ask to be born, didn't ask to be humans, didn't ask for aging, illness, suffering, what is the problem for these people with anything that makes them feel younger, healthier and maybe happier?
I don't know, to me this Twitter tool is really synonymous with some sort of a twitch. Wouldn't the more appropriate name be 'Twitcher' with a slogan: Waiting for your twitch!
Seriously, 700 million USD for this just shows that a dollar is not worth that much today and also it shows that people don't know what else to invest their money into, they would jump on anything, reminds me of selling a pencil at 50% loss but 'making it up in volume'.
I support private schools, but not at the expense of public schools. We need to always have that support network for everyone in our society.
- So how do you support private schools exactly? Don't you mean that you are not against someone choosing a private school instead of going to a public one, but what about the double payment in this case? Shouldn't people, who send their kids to private schools get their tax money back? That's support.
I've worked as a computer programmer for over 20 years, and I have never seen or heard of any programmer being fired for incompetence, no matter the magnitude.
- as a team lead on many projects I can tell you that people have been fired for incompetence based on my post-project evaluations. You probably have been working on projects that did not employ post-project evaluations, in those situations it is possible for an incompetent developer (or anyone) to slide through unnoticed.
As far as I'm concerned, teachers deserve our support, and I think all of the bitching is just a smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions.
- deservingly so, I have worked for Ontario Hydro for some time and that place has a union for developers as well, it is nearly impossible to get rid of anyone there who is showing sub-standard performance, however overtime the place has been populated with contractors (the management prefers hiring contractors, who end up working there for years). When a permanent developer (permanents there are all union members) moves on, he is not being replaced. Were I a manager there I would approach this in the same manner.
Except that this is a stupid misconception. Reality has no political bias it has no morality. In many cases it is fiscally conservative. In many other cases it is more like Free source stuff. In reality behavior of living things is highly irrational and mostly selfish.
Again, from the 'are you smarter than the fifth grader' - cut social studies, instead change history lessons to teach history and not simply to memorize useless facts like what was the name of the favorite dog of the second wife of the twentieth US president.
Reading/writing/arithmetic/history/geography/biology/economy-sociology - cover this and you'll have somewhat a decent start.
More importantly: those who recognize lessons of history and have enough insight can benefit from this historical repetitiveness. Some use it to manipulate masses, some use it to make money. These are also the people who prefer that the masses wouldn't find out about it, thus they would like it that more people would acquire such an attitude that learning history does not matter.
I watched a few 'Are you smarter than the fifth grader' shows, I cannot believe what passes for education in the US. What was the name of the fifth president of the US? Who cares! Better tell me who was directly and indirectly responsible for creation of the Federal Reserve and who benefited from it most and why it is such a terrible idea that it is partially responsible for the current economic collapse. Now that is good information, but who wants the unwashed masses to know?
Heh, let's put it this way, at BellTV there are cubicles on the fifth floor of one of the buildings with explicit 'stop' signs on them with some explanation that if you walk into one of those cubicles you may see something that may offend you, well, if you do walk in you may see maybe 10 monitors with at least some of them showing porn and there are people sitting there looking at it and it is part of the job. They are basically QAs that really have to watch this stuff all the time. And they get paid to do this.
It's all based on trust. I am an author of a few extensions (add-ons) to FF and since the beginning I found out that there is basically no barrier to how I can modify the behavior of the browser. You see, add-on code is mostly JavaScript, html/XUL, CSS and calls to C functions but that is how the browser is built. Browser code is JavaScript, html/XUL, CSS and calls to C functions. So add-ons are rewriting what the browser really is, there is no separation (or sandboxing) of add-on functionality, because add-on functionality becomes browser functionality. I looked at add-ons as a vector of attack and I am telling you, it is possible for an add-on to monitor everything you do, to send this data to some site, it is possible for an add-on to do things behind your back, all of this is possible. Of-course add-on doesn't have the same power as a plug-in (plug-ins being basically what ActiveX controls are) like Adobe Flash plug-in for example.
Still, add-on can do plenty of damage, that's why it is important that you trust the authors but also it is important to be able to trust the delivery mechanism (thus AMO). However realize that even with AMO it is possible to inject malicious code into your browser. It is possible to construct an attack based on a combination of add-ons being installed for example, each one will do something small, but put them together and...
It is possible for one add-on to use another add-on's libraries (my add-ons have a library that can be shared among them for example). It is possible for one add-on to overwrite any other add-on's functions. This is nothing new and I don't believe that current architecture of FF allows any kind of code separation between add-ons that would prevent this, it's just not how this browser is designed.
So because TRUST is so important once it is violated it is very difficult to win it back (if at all possible) that's why I think this was such a stupid move by NoScript developer.
Im certainly not advocating spiking the water with anything but fluoride, but its interesting how we react to news like this.
- it's because of people like you that I end up buying distilled water for drinking and food preparation. In Ontario (Toronto) we have this problem - fluoride spiked water, I don't recommend drinking the tap water to anyone here.
However, AdBlock is illegally manipulating the author's content to remove ads designed to produce revenue. It's not merely disabling features, it's changing the presentation of web pages.
is especially nutty.
There is nothing illegal about changing the presentation of a page on a user's machine.
Your liver cells can multiple & grow, in the right environment; they will not mature into an adult human!
- neither will a fertilized egg in a Petri dish.
A blastocyst in a petri dish is in much the same situation as an infant discarded in the woods. It can survive for a time, but not too long. It needs nourishment in order to continue maturing.
- you keep trying to give bad analogies, an egg is no more an infant than a pile of raw metal ore is a finished BMW.
Apparently, you haven't heard of embryo adoption. There's no reason for those human embryos to be killed; they can be implanted and given a chance to continue the maturation process that already began. (Of course, their mortality rate is high--implantation doesn't always succeed. But high infant mortality rates don't mean we stop feeding discarded newborns.)
- I am sure there is place for everything in the world, so there is place for embryo adoption, however this absolutely does not mean that everyone wants their genetic material to be adopted! I wouldn't, I'd rather see it go to make some stem cells!
Secondly many fertilized eggs are discarded because they are defective, so they must never be implanted, however they can still be used for stem cell collection. So this stuff can easily be used for this purpose, do you prefer that a fertilized egg is thrown into a garbage can? I would prefer it to be used for stem cell collection, it's useful stuff!
Again, you are comparing fertilized eggs with newborns, this is absolutely ridiculous.
When people discard newborns, I don't harvest their organs, even though it would save others. I don't kidnap homeless people for their organs, either--and that doesn't mean I care about the homeless people "more" than I care about those who need organ transplants.
- you are comparing kidnapping of homeless and organ harvesting to retrieving stem cells from fertilized eggs in a Petri dish that will be discarded otherwise. This is highly irrational.
Eggs, even when they are fertilized, are not humans. They are a collection of cells. Those fertilized eggs that are left after IVF procedure and will be discarded can be used for something more productive - retrieval of stem cells. You will not force your point of view onto me, eggs are not newborns and they are not homeless people, they are not people at all and have no chance of becoming people, it because they are discarded and disposed of.
You may see some sort of rationale in your argument, I do not.
Are you saying that a sperm cell should not be regarded as having rights because it's not able to grow into an adult without coming into contact with an egg?
- he he, a sperm cell has no more rights than a skin flake under any circumstances.
In that case, it seems you have a similar problem with blastocysts: *they* don't grow into later-state embryos (let alone adults) if they fail to bind to the uterine wall (and that failure naturally happens quite often). What is it about the difference between:
* the sperm's dependence on the egg and
* the blastocyst's dependence on the uterus
that it causes you to see one as "deserving rights" and not the other?
- you are making no sense. First of all I don't believe in 'rights', especially in 'rights' of cells.
Secondly, I already said that an egg DISCARDED after IVF procedure that is fertilized should not cross anyone's 'moral' barrier because it never had a chance of becoming human after it was discarded. It's as if it was already aborted (maybe even naturally aborted, since it could have been discarded as something that is not viable or it could have simply been an egg that was not needed for an IVF. They extract more eggs for than necessary for a procedure and I believe legally they cannot implant more than 3 at a time.)
My point is that eggs discarded after IVF should can be fertilized without any religious fanatics throwing a fit.
It's already a "human". It doesn't need to develop into one.
- pffft, wrong. It is not a human any more than part of a living liver is a human (and part of liver can also grow outside of an organism).
See what I said elsewhere:... "X is an organism. Given food & a friendly environment, it will 'mature' into an adult human being."
That applies to: Teenagers, toddlers, infants, late-term fetuses, mid-term fetuses, early-term fetuses, embryos, blastocysts, and zygotes.
- except this has nothing to do with fetuses in a Petri dish. Petri dish is not a friendly environment for the purposes of making a few cells into a live fetus even, forget about a developed baby.
An egg that is fertilized in a Petri dish is not a human at all, and you were wrong about it in all comments made before and after my comment. An egg fertilized in a Petri dish and implanted into a human womb could produce a human (it could also be naturally aborted and produce nothing).
So, if a woman is going into IVF and some eggs are extracted that end up being discarded for whatever reason, they have no chance of becoming human at all, they could just as well be used to help actual real existing fully grown humans to live a healthy life.
Looks to me like you care about a few discarded cells in a Petri dish much more than you care about a living human.
the blastocyst has its own fully unique DNA and is thus a separate organism from either the mother or the father
- except that when outside of a mother, there is no way for this 'organism' to function separately at all. This is not a separate organism capable of development, but it can grow a few more cells that can be used for stem cell extraction.
An egg outside of a woman will not make a human even if fertilized, so there is no ethical problem - there is no way for this to become a human.
Are you claiming that an embryo fertilized in a Petri dish and that is not moved to a womb is able develop into human? Does it have more chances of developing into a human than a few million sperm cells in a sink? Now that IS fascinating!
There is no problem if eggs discarded after IVF procedure are used to create an in vitro blastocyst so that stem cells could be extracted. Of-course if you do not subscribe to 'masturbation = murder' argument.
Don't know if you have ever heard of the procedure called IVF but the point is there is no need for an abortion to get a few stem cells, simply using the eggs discarded during this procedure gets the same results accomplished.
Now, comparing this to abortion would be like comparing male masturbation resulting in ejaculation to be an abortion.
Slashdot Mirror
Just another planet firing up their LHC, nothing to see here.
anymore...
How about two giant aerodynamic scarecrows on each wing?
- not bad. Or we could have Natali Portman pour hot grits down my pants.
Well, it's an idea.
Homer Simpsons Shows How
This is the ONLY ONE CORRECT WAY.
Teach your daughter this same thing. Make her memorize your phone number.
- and to play hockey.
They wanted to have an Assistant Professor from the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization and Institute for Quantum Computing at University of Waterloo?
is sad commentary on a society that supposedly believes in an afterlife.
- well what about a large number of people in society that do not believe in afterlife? We didn't ask to be born, didn't ask to be humans, didn't ask for aging, illness, suffering, what is the problem for these people with anything that makes them feel younger, healthier and maybe happier?
I don't know, to me this Twitter tool is really synonymous with some sort of a twitch. Wouldn't the more appropriate name be 'Twitcher' with a slogan: Waiting for your twitch!
Seriously, 700 million USD for this just shows that a dollar is not worth that much today and also it shows that people don't know what else to invest their money into, they would jump on anything, reminds me of selling a pencil at 50% loss but 'making it up in volume'.
How about "cancer statistics for new york"
- I suppose it's approximately one person in twelve? Shouldn't be significantly different from Libras, Leos or Geminis.
I support private schools, but not at the expense of public schools. We need to always have that support network for everyone in our society.
- So how do you support private schools exactly? Don't you mean that you are not against someone choosing a private school instead of going to a public one, but what about the double payment in this case? Shouldn't people, who send their kids to private schools get their tax money back? That's support.
I've worked as a computer programmer for over 20 years, and I have never seen or heard of any programmer being fired for incompetence, no matter the magnitude.
- as a team lead on many projects I can tell you that people have been fired for incompetence based on my post-project evaluations. You probably have been working on projects that did not employ post-project evaluations, in those situations it is possible for an incompetent developer (or anyone) to slide through unnoticed.
As far as I'm concerned, teachers deserve our support, and I think all of the bitching is just a smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions.
- deservingly so, I have worked for Ontario Hydro for some time and that place has a union for developers as well, it is nearly impossible to get rid of anyone there who is showing sub-standard performance, however overtime the place has been populated with contractors (the management prefers hiring contractors, who end up working there for years). When a permanent developer (permanents there are all union members) moves on, he is not being replaced. Were I a manager there I would approach this in the same manner.
Except that this is a stupid misconception. Reality has no political bias it has no morality. In many cases it is fiscally conservative. In many other cases it is more like Free source stuff. In reality behavior of living things is highly irrational and mostly selfish.
Again, from the 'are you smarter than the fifth grader' - cut social studies, instead change history lessons to teach history and not simply to memorize useless facts like what was the name of the favorite dog of the second wife of the twentieth US president.
Reading/writing/arithmetic/history/geography/biology/economy-sociology - cover this and you'll have somewhat a decent start.
More importantly: those who recognize lessons of history and have enough insight can benefit from this historical repetitiveness. Some use it to manipulate masses, some use it to make money. These are also the people who prefer that the masses wouldn't find out about it, thus they would like it that more people would acquire such an attitude that learning history does not matter.
I watched a few 'Are you smarter than the fifth grader' shows, I cannot believe what passes for education in the US. What was the name of the fifth president of the US? Who cares! Better tell me who was directly and indirectly responsible for creation of the Federal Reserve and who benefited from it most and why it is such a terrible idea that it is partially responsible for the current economic collapse. Now that is good information, but who wants the unwashed masses to know?
I don't know, I just hate all taxes.
Heh, let's put it this way, at BellTV there are cubicles on the fifth floor of one of the buildings with explicit 'stop' signs on them with some explanation that if you walk into one of those cubicles you may see something that may offend you, well, if you do walk in you may see maybe 10 monitors with at least some of them showing porn and there are people sitting there looking at it and it is part of the job. They are basically QAs that really have to watch this stuff all the time. And they get paid to do this.
It's all based on trust. I am an author of a few extensions (add-ons) to FF and since the beginning I found out that there is basically no barrier to how I can modify the behavior of the browser. You see, add-on code is mostly JavaScript, html/XUL, CSS and calls to C functions but that is how the browser is built. Browser code is JavaScript, html/XUL, CSS and calls to C functions. So add-ons are rewriting what the browser really is, there is no separation (or sandboxing) of add-on functionality, because add-on functionality becomes browser functionality. I looked at add-ons as a vector of attack and I am telling you, it is possible for an add-on to monitor everything you do, to send this data to some site, it is possible for an add-on to do things behind your back, all of this is possible. Of-course add-on doesn't have the same power as a plug-in (plug-ins being basically what ActiveX controls are) like Adobe Flash plug-in for example.
Still, add-on can do plenty of damage, that's why it is important that you trust the authors but also it is important to be able to trust the delivery mechanism (thus AMO). However realize that even with AMO it is possible to inject malicious code into your browser. It is possible to construct an attack based on a combination of add-ons being installed for example, each one will do something small, but put them together and ...
It is possible for one add-on to use another add-on's libraries (my add-ons have a library that can be shared among them for example). It is possible for one add-on to overwrite any other add-on's functions. This is nothing new and I don't believe that current architecture of FF allows any kind of code separation between add-ons that would prevent this, it's just not how this browser is designed.
So because TRUST is so important once it is violated it is very difficult to win it back (if at all possible) that's why I think this was such a stupid move by NoScript developer.
Im certainly not advocating spiking the water with anything but fluoride, but its interesting how we react to news like this.
- it's because of people like you that I end up buying distilled water for drinking and food preparation. In Ontario (Toronto) we have this problem - fluoride spiked water, I don't recommend drinking the tap water to anyone here.
forget about the rest of your drivel, but this:
However, AdBlock is illegally manipulating the author's content to remove ads designed to produce revenue. It's not merely disabling features, it's changing the presentation of web pages.
is especially nutty.
Your liver cells can multiple & grow, in the right environment; they will not mature into an adult human!
- neither will a fertilized egg in a Petri dish.
A blastocyst in a petri dish is in much the same situation as an infant discarded in the woods. It can survive for a time, but not too long. It needs nourishment in order to continue maturing.
- you keep trying to give bad analogies, an egg is no more an infant than a pile of raw metal ore is a finished BMW.
Apparently, you haven't heard of embryo adoption. There's no reason for those human embryos to be killed; they can be implanted and given a chance to continue the maturation process that already began. (Of course, their mortality rate is high--implantation doesn't always succeed. But high infant mortality rates don't mean we stop feeding discarded newborns.)
- I am sure there is place for everything in the world, so there is place for embryo adoption, however this absolutely does not mean that everyone wants their genetic material to be adopted! I wouldn't, I'd rather see it go to make some stem cells!
Secondly many fertilized eggs are discarded because they are defective, so they must never be implanted, however they can still be used for stem cell collection. So this stuff can easily be used for this purpose, do you prefer that a fertilized egg is thrown into a garbage can? I would prefer it to be used for stem cell collection, it's useful stuff!
Again, you are comparing fertilized eggs with newborns, this is absolutely ridiculous.
When people discard newborns, I don't harvest their organs, even though it would save others. I don't kidnap homeless people for their organs, either--and that doesn't mean I care about the homeless people "more" than I care about those who need organ transplants.
- you are comparing kidnapping of homeless and organ harvesting to retrieving stem cells from fertilized eggs in a Petri dish that will be discarded otherwise. This is highly irrational.
Eggs, even when they are fertilized, are not humans. They are a collection of cells. Those fertilized eggs that are left after IVF procedure and will be discarded can be used for something more productive - retrieval of stem cells. You will not force your point of view onto me, eggs are not newborns and they are not homeless people, they are not people at all and have no chance of becoming people, it because they are discarded and disposed of.
You may see some sort of rationale in your argument, I do not.
Are you saying that a sperm cell should not be regarded as having rights because it's not able to grow into an adult without coming into contact with an egg?
- he he, a sperm cell has no more rights than a skin flake under any circumstances.
In that case, it seems you have a similar problem with blastocysts: *they* don't grow into later-state embryos (let alone adults) if they fail to bind to the uterine wall (and that failure naturally happens quite often). What is it about the difference between:
* the sperm's dependence on the egg and
* the blastocyst's dependence on the uterus
that it causes you to see one as "deserving rights" and not the other?
- you are making no sense. First of all I don't believe in 'rights', especially in 'rights' of cells.
Secondly, I already said that an egg DISCARDED after IVF procedure that is fertilized should not cross anyone's 'moral' barrier because it never had a chance of becoming human after it was discarded. It's as if it was already aborted (maybe even naturally aborted, since it could have been discarded as something that is not viable or it could have simply been an egg that was not needed for an IVF. They extract more eggs for than necessary for a procedure and I believe legally they cannot implant more than 3 at a time.)
My point is that eggs discarded after IVF should can be fertilized without any religious fanatics throwing a fit.
It's already a "human". It doesn't need to develop into one.
- pffft, wrong. It is not a human any more than part of a living liver is a human (and part of liver can also grow outside of an organism).
See what I said elsewhere: ...
"X is an organism. Given food & a friendly environment, it will 'mature' into an adult human being."
That applies to: Teenagers, toddlers, infants, late-term fetuses, mid-term fetuses, early-term fetuses, embryos, blastocysts, and zygotes.
- except this has nothing to do with fetuses in a Petri dish. Petri dish is not a friendly environment for the purposes of making a few cells into a live fetus even, forget about a developed baby.
An egg that is fertilized in a Petri dish is not a human at all, and you were wrong about it in all comments made before and after my comment. An egg fertilized in a Petri dish and implanted into a human womb could produce a human (it could also be naturally aborted and produce nothing).
So, if a woman is going into IVF and some eggs are extracted that end up being discarded for whatever reason, they have no chance of becoming human at all, they could just as well be used to help actual real existing fully grown humans to live a healthy life.
Looks to me like you care about a few discarded cells in a Petri dish much more than you care about a living human.
the blastocyst has its own fully unique DNA and is thus a separate organism from either the mother or the father
- except that when outside of a mother, there is no way for this 'organism' to function separately at all. This is not a separate organism capable of development, but it can grow a few more cells that can be used for stem cell extraction.
An egg outside of a woman will not make a human even if fertilized, so there is no ethical problem - there is no way for this to become a human.
Are you claiming that an embryo fertilized in a Petri dish and that is not moved to a womb is able develop into human? Does it have more chances of developing into a human than a few million sperm cells in a sink? Now that IS fascinating!
There is no problem if eggs discarded after IVF procedure are used to create an in vitro blastocyst so that stem cells could be extracted. Of-course if you do not subscribe to 'masturbation = murder' argument.
Don't know if you have ever heard of the procedure called IVF but the point is there is no need for an abortion to get a few stem cells, simply using the eggs discarded during this procedure gets the same results accomplished.
Now, comparing this to abortion would be like comparing male masturbation resulting in ejaculation to be an abortion.