> I think they do get it. the one thing governments hate is the uncontrolled spreading of information. Whether that's pr0n, plans for bombs, propaganda or state secrets doesn't matter. What they would all like - whether a country has a bill of rights, a constitution or whatever - is to have ultimate control over what their people get to see.
While I have no doubt there are many politicians out there who would sacrifice their own mother to Cthulhu to be welcomed as our new mind-controlling overlords, the idea that all governments out there are conspiring to get ultimate control over their citizens is clearly paranoia. Don't assume that just because (you think) it is happening in your country that it is happening everywhere else.
> For what the law states, they may as well cross the car in the middle of the street and leave it there.
In my country it is illegal to create a dangerous traffic-situation. Stopping your car in the middle of the highway for no good reason would be such a situation. I assume your country has a similar law.
> On my mobile-party-pays plan I have NEVER come close to going over my allocated minutes, so the marginal cost per minute is $0.00/minute.
I assume you still pay a monthly fee for those allocated minutes. So you pay (Monthly Fee) + (CostPerMinute * Max( (Minutes Called) - (Allocated minutes), 0) ) per month.
Suppose you only use your alloceted minutes, then you still pay (Montly Fee)/(Minutes called) per minute, which I doubt is equal to $0.00.
I never understood why you would have to pay to receive a text-message. I'm from the Netherlands and here only the one who sends a message has to pay, receiving is free. As far as I know it is like that in every courty in Europe (but I didn't check them all). Where you come from, do you have to pay to get called too? Because if you don't, the whole thing doesn't make sense - a one second call has way more data-transfer than a 100-character text-message.
Advantage of emulating a CPU would be that you can run the 'real' operating system, so you cannot possibly go wrong. Suppose the documentation of the legacy API is wrong, or the old OS does not correctly implement it. Programs could be written to rely on this incorrect behavior, and therefore would not work on a perfect emulation of the API as it is documented.
But I absolutely agree with you that if you have a complete and correct documentation of the API as it is used in the old OS, then a compatability layer is definitely the way to go.
Most of those happened a long time ago. You can't hold that against the people who are in charge today. I'm sure everyone on/. has at least a dozen murderers among their ancestors, but I don't see you complaining about that.
Those cells are still the property of the person who grew them, so it should be up to that person to give or deny permission. What he is saying is that, if the original owner of the cells has given permission, you don't need to ask the cancer cells for permission too, because the cells have no rights, but the person who spawned them does.
> Untrue; post-birth, alternative forms of nourishment are possible. It doesn't need to be the mother's milk, and in the absence of a third-party wet nurse, baby formula or equivalent will sustain life. Thus, the relationship between infant and mother is unlike that between fetus and mother-to-be.
Suppose I invent a device that mimics a uterus. You can put an embryo inside and it will grow into a baby. Does that invention suddenly make all embryos human being? Suppose we change the device so that it also accepts fertilized eggs. Does that make fertalized eggs (a single cell!) human beings? We upgrade the machine again, so that it can now also fertalize eggs with some sperm Does that suddenly make sperm-cells and egg-cells human beings? To define a human being as 'something with a humans DNA that is not directly dependend on another human's body' is absurd, because it (drastically) changes with advances in technology that are completely unrelated to what a human is. An embryo that is not considered to be a person today could be considered one tomorrow just because someone invented an artificial uterus, even though the embryo itself has not changed at all.
> Personally, I agree with the original poster: men (implicitly including all worldwide governments) should not have opinions on abortion one way or another.
Because, obviously, men play no role in the creation of the embryos at all.
> A body of predominately men dictating what the opposite gender must do with their bodies is as bad as a body of predominately whites dictating the living conditions for blacks. Yes, I am saying that any actual legislation on abortion is as bad as slavery and, I believe were it to be signed into law, history would tell a similar tale about how backward we were at the start of the 21st century. Until or unless we form a separate female legislative body, the abortion issue should not be considered by congress one way or the other.
If you were define an embryo to be a real person with all rights therewith associated, then abortion is murder. That is just a logical consequence (this would also make doctors who perform abortions assassins, since they are contracted to kill people). Should women be allowed to get away with murder just because the law is mostly written by men? No more than black men are allowed to murder just because the law is mostly written by white men. To say otherwise is political correctness at its worst.
Disclaimer: I am in favor of legal abortion, I merely disagree with the last paragraph in your post (a lot).
> Well, by your logic since that person in a coma will EVENTUALLY wake up then it's wrong to kill them, then the embryo will EVENTUALLY "wake up" too.
The difference between someone in a coma and an embryo would be that the former is already a person and the latter isn't (yet). By killing someone who is in a coma that person, with all their experiences, is lost. Killing an embryo means only a potential person is lost.
> And contraceptives are not even remotely the same thing. They don't terminate a life - they simply prevent it from occuring in the first place.
Like I said, I'm not really interested in saving life (human or otherwise) just because it's life. An alive thing that does not have a mind (yet), which includes sperm-cells, egg-cells, and embryos, is, in my opinion, not worth protecting, since nothing of value is lost by their death.
> People either believe embryo's are people or they don't.
That pretty much summarizes the whole abortion-debate, good point.
> It's pretty independent of religion to believe that people shouldn't legally be allowed to kill other people, so again, not sure where religion gets dragged in.
Is it? People legally kill other people in wars all the time. Depending on where you live, (assisted-)euthenasia may be legal (for some values of legal).
> What if you were aborted because you have a "defect"? That would have sucked huh? I am sure your friends and loved ones would think so now, after you have bee a part of their life.
If I had never existed, my friends cannot possibly miss me. Maybe if I had been aborted my parents would have another child, and maybe that child would become a better person than I am now. Wouldn't that better person's friends and loved ones think it sucks that my parents didn't abort me? We'll never know. A discussion about potential people is useless. If you are male, each day millions of your potential children die. If you are female, you lose at least one of your potential children per month, unless you decide to have babies non-stop from puberty till your meno-pause.
Why should we try to save human life anyway? I say we should protect people instead. If I were to go braindead because of some accident, I wouldn't mind if they 'pulled the plug', even though doing so would mean they killed a 'human life'. A body without a mind is just a bag of meat, regardless of what species it belongs to. Note that this does not apply to someone who is in a coma, since they might still wake up, so the mind is still 'in there'. Of course when there is reason to believe that a person in a coma is never going to wake up you should still consider killing that person.
Anyway since embryos haven't really got a mind yet I don't really see a problem in killing them. Sure, doing so prevents a potential person, but so do contraceptives.
> IMHO, if a DNA test says its human, then it's human and religion has nothing to do with it. No one should be allowed to kill or experiment on him/her without his/her permission.
That is ridiculous. People drop cells all the time, and some of those cells will still be alive. Those cells should not have any rights (but the person still has rights, so you probably shouldn't DNA-test any cell you find without the owner's permission).
Different plants like different soil. It is likely that many different sorts of veggies could be convinced to grow in that soil, but asparagas would probably like it best (I assume that's the reason they picked it, I didn't RTFA).
It says that lichen still needs water to grow, it can just manage to survive without it for long periods of time. If there is no liquid water available on mars, the lichen would die eventually.
Click? I always press f6, because hate to touch my mouse (laptop + not having a USB mouse with me = cursing + learning keyboard shortcuts) (and I've got google.com as my homepage so alt+home also does the trick). Is there a shortcut to start typing in the google searchbar immediately much like f6 does for the 'awesomebar'?
> So you can live in your gun free society but just remember that you are subject to whatever your government decides to do whether it be good or bad.
So are you, as long as the majority of your country agrees with the government. Guns may help (a little bit) when your government suddenly goes crazy and tries to turn your country into a military dictatorship and seriously annoys the population is doing so, but why the hell would they do that? Unless your country has lots of valuable natural resources, there is little to gain by supressing the population. So it is safe to assume the government won't go crazy and try to supress the population. But even if they did, do you think you stand a chance against the military? A more plausible scenario would be the government trying to silence someone who says something that annoys them. They can just higher a sniper to take that person out, no amount of guns will help the guy.
If a criminal thinks his victims probably carry a gun, then he must have a gun himselves, therefor in a country without gun control I expect to see a (significantly) larger percentage of criminals who own a gun than in a country without gun control. Also, I'd much rather get robbed because I couldn't defend myself than shot in the firefight that I initiated to protect 'myself' (read: my stuff).
> Criminals on the other hand already have a mind to break the law, and having a law against guns won't stop them for a second.
So what you are saying is that criminals in a country with gun control are just as likely to own a gun as criminals who live in a country without gun control?
How often do these honest citizens of yours need to defend themselves anyway?
Children need social interaction with their parents from time to time. This is important to them. If the child notices he/she is not getting any attention over a longer period of time (such as the whole summer), saying so does not make that child some greedy self-centered demon.
"This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what's important to me" That sentence says something about a single child, not 'the kids today'. I am unable to conclude from the sentence that the kid is spoiled.
There isn't much you can do about that. We know most people trying to 'crack' a luggage combination will start at 000 and keep adding 1 until they find the combination. This makes 005 a bad number, and 999 the best number. However, if everyone would, for this reason, choose their combinations only in the range [100,999], it would make sense for a smart attacker to begin cracking at 100, making combinations on every bag easier to crack (since the keyspace that needs to be searched has shrunk by a factor 0.9).
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That makes no sense at all. When people have no choice it becomes easier to take advantage of them.
> I think they do get it. the one thing governments hate is the uncontrolled spreading of information. Whether that's pr0n, plans for bombs, propaganda or state secrets doesn't matter. What they would all like - whether a country has a bill of rights, a constitution or whatever - is to have ultimate control over what their people get to see.
While I have no doubt there are many politicians out there who would sacrifice their own mother to Cthulhu to be welcomed as our new mind-controlling overlords, the idea that all governments out there are conspiring to get ultimate control over their citizens is clearly paranoia. Don't assume that just because (you think) it is happening in your country that it is happening everywhere else.
> For what the law states, they may as well cross the car in the middle of the street and leave it there.
In my country it is illegal to create a dangerous traffic-situation. Stopping your car in the middle of the highway for no good reason would be such a situation. I assume your country has a similar law.
GP started typing that post a few weeks ago.
> On my mobile-party-pays plan I have NEVER come close to going over my allocated minutes, so the marginal cost per minute is $0.00/minute.
I assume you still pay a monthly fee for those allocated minutes. So you pay
(Monthly Fee) + (CostPerMinute * Max( (Minutes Called) - (Allocated minutes), 0) )
per month.
Suppose you only use your alloceted minutes, then you still pay (Montly Fee)/(Minutes called) per minute, which I doubt is equal to $0.00.
I never understood why you would have to pay to receive a text-message. I'm from the Netherlands and here only the one who sends a message has to pay, receiving is free. As far as I know it is like that in every courty in Europe (but I didn't check them all). Where you come from, do you have to pay to get called too? Because if you don't, the whole thing doesn't make sense - a one second call has way more data-transfer than a 100-character text-message.
They are Dalek-bumps, you insensitive clod!
Advantage of emulating a CPU would be that you can run the 'real' operating system, so you cannot possibly go wrong. Suppose the documentation of the legacy API is wrong, or the old OS does not correctly implement it. Programs could be written to rely on this incorrect behavior, and therefore would not work on a perfect emulation of the API as it is documented.
But I absolutely agree with you that if you have a complete and correct documentation of the API as it is used in the old OS, then a compatability layer is definitely the way to go.
Most of those happened a long time ago. You can't hold that against the people who are in charge today. I'm sure everyone on /. has at least a dozen murderers among their ancestors, but I don't see you complaining about that.
Those cells are still the property of the person who grew them, so it should be up to that person to give or deny permission. What he is saying is that, if the original owner of the cells has given permission, you don't need to ask the cancer cells for permission too, because the cells have no rights, but the person who spawned them does.
> Untrue; post-birth, alternative forms of nourishment are possible. It doesn't need to be the mother's milk, and in the absence of a third-party wet nurse, baby formula or equivalent will sustain life. Thus, the relationship between infant and mother is unlike that between fetus and mother-to-be.
Suppose I invent a device that mimics a uterus. You can put an embryo inside and it will grow into a baby. Does that invention suddenly make all embryos human being? Suppose we change the device so that it also accepts fertilized eggs. Does that make fertalized eggs (a single cell!) human beings? We upgrade the machine again, so that it can now also fertalize eggs with some sperm Does that suddenly make sperm-cells and egg-cells human beings?
To define a human being as 'something with a humans DNA that is not directly dependend on another human's body' is absurd, because it (drastically) changes with advances in technology that are completely unrelated to what a human is. An embryo that is not considered to be a person today could be considered one tomorrow just because someone invented an artificial uterus, even though the embryo itself has not changed at all.
> Personally, I agree with the original poster: men (implicitly including all worldwide governments) should not have opinions on abortion one way or another.
Because, obviously, men play no role in the creation of the embryos at all.
> A body of predominately men dictating what the opposite gender must do with their bodies is as bad as a body of predominately whites dictating the living conditions for blacks. Yes, I am saying that any actual legislation on abortion is as bad as slavery and, I believe were it to be signed into law, history would tell a similar tale about how backward we were at the start of the 21st century. Until or unless we form a separate female legislative body, the abortion issue should not be considered by congress one way or the other.
If you were define an embryo to be a real person with all rights therewith associated, then abortion is murder. That is just a logical consequence (this would also make doctors who perform abortions assassins, since they are contracted to kill people). Should women be allowed to get away with murder just because the law is mostly written by men? No more than black men are allowed to murder just because the law is mostly written by white men. To say otherwise is political correctness at its worst.
Disclaimer: I am in favor of legal abortion, I merely disagree with the last paragraph in your post (a lot).
> Well, by your logic since that person in a coma will EVENTUALLY wake up then it's wrong to kill them, then the embryo will EVENTUALLY "wake up" too.
The difference between someone in a coma and an embryo would be that the former is already a person and the latter isn't (yet). By killing someone who is in a coma that person, with all their experiences, is lost. Killing an embryo means only a potential person is lost.
> And contraceptives are not even remotely the same thing. They don't terminate a life - they simply prevent it from occuring in the first place.
Like I said, I'm not really interested in saving life (human or otherwise) just because it's life. An alive thing that does not have a mind (yet), which includes sperm-cells, egg-cells, and embryos, is, in my opinion, not worth protecting, since nothing of value is lost by their death.
> People either believe embryo's are people or they don't.
That pretty much summarizes the whole abortion-debate, good point.
> It's pretty independent of religion to believe that people shouldn't legally be allowed to kill other people, so again, not sure where religion gets dragged in.
Is it? People legally kill other people in wars all the time. Depending on where you live, (assisted-)euthenasia may be legal (for some values of legal).
> What if you were aborted because you have a "defect"? That would have sucked huh? I am sure your friends and loved ones would think so now, after you have bee a part of their life.
If I had never existed, my friends cannot possibly miss me. Maybe if I had been aborted my parents would have another child, and maybe that child would become a better person than I am now. Wouldn't that better person's friends and loved ones think it sucks that my parents didn't abort me? We'll never know.
A discussion about potential people is useless. If you are male, each day millions of your potential children die. If you are female, you lose at least one of your potential children per month, unless you decide to have babies non-stop from puberty till your meno-pause.
Why should we try to save human life anyway? I say we should protect people instead. If I were to go braindead because of some accident, I wouldn't mind if they 'pulled the plug', even though doing so would mean they killed a 'human life'. A body without a mind is just a bag of meat, regardless of what species it belongs to. Note that this does not apply to someone who is in a coma, since they might still wake up, so the mind is still 'in there'. Of course when there is reason to believe that a person in a coma is never going to wake up you should still consider killing that person.
Anyway since embryos haven't really got a mind yet I don't really see a problem in killing them. Sure, doing so prevents a potential person, but so do contraceptives.
> IMHO, if a DNA test says its human, then it's human and religion has nothing to do with it. No one should be allowed to kill or experiment on him/her without his/her permission.
That is ridiculous. People drop cells all the time, and some of those cells will still be alive. Those cells should not have any rights (but the person still has rights, so you probably shouldn't DNA-test any cell you find without the owner's permission).
Thank you very much!
Different plants like different soil. It is likely that many different sorts of veggies could be convinced to grow in that soil, but asparagas would probably like it best (I assume that's the reason they picked it, I didn't RTFA).
It says that lichen still needs water to grow, it can just manage to survive without it for long periods of time. If there is no liquid water available on mars, the lichen would die eventually.
Click? I always press f6, because hate to touch my mouse (laptop + not having a USB mouse with me = cursing + learning keyboard shortcuts) (and I've got google.com as my homepage so alt+home also does the trick). Is there a shortcut to start typing in the google searchbar immediately much like f6 does for the 'awesomebar'?
> So you can live in your gun free society but just remember that you are subject to whatever your government decides to do whether it be good or bad.
So are you, as long as the majority of your country agrees with the government. Guns may help (a little bit) when your government suddenly goes crazy and tries to turn your country into a military dictatorship and seriously annoys the population is doing so, but why the hell would they do that? Unless your country has lots of valuable natural resources, there is little to gain by supressing the population. So it is safe to assume the government won't go crazy and try to supress the population. But even if they did, do you think you stand a chance against the military?
A more plausible scenario would be the government trying to silence someone who says something that annoys them. They can just higher a sniper to take that person out, no amount of guns will help the guy.
If a criminal thinks his victims probably carry a gun, then he must have a gun himselves, therefor in a country without gun control I expect to see a (significantly) larger percentage of criminals who own a gun than in a country without gun control. Also, I'd much rather get robbed because I couldn't defend myself than shot in the firefight that I initiated to protect 'myself' (read: my stuff).
> Criminals on the other hand already have a mind to break the law, and having a law against guns won't stop them for a second.
So what you are saying is that criminals in a country with gun control are just as likely to own a gun as criminals who live in a country without gun control?
How often do these honest citizens of yours need to defend themselves anyway?
> There are plenty of stories of soldiers who, even in the heat of battle, would deliberately shoot to MISS the enemy.
They probably hope the enemy will return the favor.
That video is HORRIBLE. That thing will give my nightmares for days.
Please someone put that woman out of her misery.
Children need social interaction with their parents from time to time. This is important to them. If the child notices he/she is not getting any attention over a longer period of time (such as the whole summer), saying so does not make that child some greedy self-centered demon.
"This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what's important to me"
That sentence says something about a single child, not 'the kids today'. I am unable to conclude from the sentence that the kid is spoiled.
There isn't much you can do about that. We know most people trying to 'crack' a luggage combination will start at 000 and keep adding 1 until they find the combination. This makes 005 a bad number, and 999 the best number. However, if everyone would, for this reason, choose their combinations only in the range [100,999], it would make sense for a smart attacker to begin cracking at 100, making combinations on every bag easier to crack (since the keyspace that needs to be searched has shrunk by a factor 0.9).
So you shouldn't be suprised.