With the SCO mess and Groklaw I remember reading that it is actionable libel to claim bad IP in the form of FUD. There may be better references but here is one:
But the Lanham Act provides a remedy for something called "trade libel". It says, in pertinent part, the following:
"Any person who...in connection with any goods or services...uses in commerce any...false or misleading description of fact, which...in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, or qualities...of his or her or another person's goods, services or commercial activities...shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is likely to be damaged by such act."
Did you read that carefully?
Read it again.
What it essentially means that if someone in your company says something misleading or false about another company, you could be in BIG trouble.
If it really was Steve Jobs, I think Xiph and maybe others would have a claim. I'd support a lawsuit. The depositions could get very interesting.
At least it would stop the rumbling and FUD and make them put-up or shut-up.
I don't think the word means what you think it means.
According to Webster: "marked to the highest degree by grandeur, excellence, brilliance, or competence"
Yet you simply say it manages to sort-of document a cumbersome updated legacy format for office documents.
I haven't looked at Mono, but must ask if you design your software like the OOXML - so that if I make a trivial change in the obvious place in one source file, it will break the whole thing unless I also update dozens of other places which I wouldn't guess would be referenced. Touch x.c causes the entire system to be recompiled under make? If you consider such "superb" design, I'd hate to see what you would consider bad design. Oh yea, completely functional yet minimal, clean, and modular code.
I would think the word "superb" wouldn't be applied to a rust-bucket that happened to run well enough (if you don't mind the smell of burnt oil) to get you a few miles to work each day. I would want both the powertrain, body, and interior to be clean and well engineered too.
You can do a superb job of specifying an atrocious design. In ISO-9000 processes, I usually refer to a perfectly repeatable cement life-jacket. Of course you'd sink like a rock, but as long as they are made within tolerance... Perhaps this is what you were referring to.
But you haven't said the underlying design is horrible, and it does sound like it is the binary formats recoded into XML. That might make it easy to write a converter, but says nothing about whether the coding is a good or bad design.
Even so, the OOXML document is not very well done. Minimally, the legacy support should be in various annexes, to separate it from the core design. There could be a lot of other structural improvements.
But this comes down to a fundamental question - DID YOU USE THE OOXML document - reading it fully just like you would do to ODF - to implement the section of Gnumeric, or did you simply highlight the excel-like sections which you already had code for and it just worked?
The proper way to test the questions is to give a group who has never seen either ODF or OOXML both specs and have them split up and start coding - without an oracle like OOo or Excel - and see how fast and how well they do. Let Novell sponsor such a contest, maybe over one of the holidays or something if you really want to decide the issue.
When will drive letters go the way of floppy disc drives (or at least let me add or remove a drive without completely hosing my system)? When will we have actual symbolic links? When will you ship with everything possible disabled until needed or manually enabled? When will defragging a disk or some obscure network function not lock up every task? When will you not install by default two thousand modem or other.inf files (or at least keep them in an archive)? When will you not keep asking to insert a driver disk when the files are already in c:\windows\system32\ (and will "install" if I just point the directory there)? When will you disable autoplay features by default, or at least make them prominent in a security area (instead of editing obscure system setting panels)? When will you get rid of, split, or otherwise do something reasonable with the trash "heap" otherwise known as the registry? Are you ever going to allow me to change my hardware and do autoconfiguration (Both MacOS and Linux will let me boot from a disk in another system, a CD, etc. and manage to find all the necessary and most of the exotic hardware)?
The XP Embedded version can be created with or without IE or WMP, but I don't know how many DLLs have chunks of code designed to launch or provide IE or other MS product functionality (designed to give Netscape Users "a jarring experience" in the words of a Microsoft person). Is Microsoft ever going to sort and layer things so that there will be an isolated kernel, application layer, GUI, device drivers, (and if so, when), or is "Windows" going to continue to integrate things, e.g. "The Spreadsheet and Editor are now 'part of the operating system'"?
Rationale: Many security problems are due to everything running as Administrator, with privileges, or as part of the OS. One thing I like about GNU/Linux is that each part is separate, so Firefox runs on X which runs using services, which runs using the kernel, with only the kernel having privileges. Generally a buffer overflow problem in X, or Apache doesn't let someone format my hard drive. Also you can put something to analyze or intercept things between such layers - even things like ltrace or strace.
So according to most of the above posts saying ID ought not be taught science is not the search for the truth. It is the search for natural (or material) explanations. Even if they are less likely or even perhaps demonstrably wrong.
Maybe Vince Foster was the victim of an errant lead meteorite, and the gun and suicide note had nothing to do with it as it might show design, so the CSI team using just "science" can't show any design or plan, only come up with "natural" explanations?
This is where I differ. I believe "Is X the product of design or natural causes" is both a reasonable and scientific question, and there is no reason it ought not be asked in Kansas biology classes, no more than if they were covering human physiology they should ask if the blackened lung tissue was caused by infectious disease, some internal breakdown, or smoking.
Should they also bring back eugenics, which Darwin also gave a big push? Remember the full title of his work. But if evolution is correct, then eugenics follow, though I think most people here wouldn't admit they are neo-nazis (or that the Nazis were only wrong in detail, not overview - we breed and engineer animals, and now want to clone, and if we are just beasts with large cerebrums where does ethics come in or at least how can you argue against using our knowlege of breeding).
There seem to be two reasons everyone wants embryonic stem cells although they've produced little except cancerous tumors:
1. If anyone ever does make them work, they can be patented so make big bucks for that person.
2. There seems to be a primitive and barbaric part of us that associates strong ju-ju with human sacrifice.
Larry Niven's "Jigsaw Man" was not wrong - it has occured. But we will only take organs from humans we can define down into inhumanity.
The South would still have African Americans an non-humans today if organ transplant or other therapies which required body parts were discovered in 1850 instead of later.
As an aside, monks had to do various things (e.g. chant the liturgy) which required them to be literate and otherwise well educated unlike most peasants. Illiterate copying letters? Haven't you heard of Augustine and Aquinas or Albert the Great and the university of Paris?
Divine right of kings? I think that was protestant more than Catholic as the kings were often excommunicated, and the Church/State was the original check and balance.
You can also find further discussion (no one thought the earth was flat, Henry VIII probably delayed the industrial revolution for 300 years by his persecution, etc.) you can go to lewrockwell.com and look for the Thomas Woods archives.
Of course really studying accurate history might interfere with various prejudices and bigotries.
The Tao is actually the set of laws common to all - things like not murdering and stealing, but also with some duties. The link above gives a listing and comparison, but the entire text of the Abolition of Man is available.
The problem with the original comment is that he confuses his opinion for truth, whereas his views on evolution (we don't have a mechanism but we know absolutely we weren't designed), the environment, or even economics (is Keynes or Mises right? Interestingly, Misesian sites have better economics and doubt darwinianism) are dogmatic statements, and not something which can be empirically verified.
Remember the full title of Darwin's work was ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE. Shall we talk about races, and eugenics, and maybe the Nazis had the right idea? Get rid of our soul and a lot of things become easy.
Science is not dogma, but many here seem to confuse the two. Or treat scientists as a priesthood.
The information which we want to be free has already been released or exists, but others are attempting to restrict it. They publish information but then say you can only read it once, or for a number of days, and can't let anyone else read it, etc. And all those restrictions are artificial and tyrannical to implement.
I don't think people would mind if people desired to keep their songs to themselves. Or if they would let them be free. Not some middle way.
If I have information, I might want to keep it private. Borders or Barnes and Noble could have an online ordering which would just involve an order number where I could pick things up at a local store same day and pay cash, but they don't. I can pay online with shipping, but they collect that info.
There is no "right" to information about me, even if it is true. Much of it is created without my consent, sometimes without my knowledge. As that information gets created, I become property or something to be analyzed, not a person.
(rant)
The same slashdot crowd that absolutely hates dogma so wants to ban even any discussion that Darwin might have been wrong in "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but lets just not mention the Favored Races part or the other Eugenics stuff that makes everyone but neonazis squeamish.
Speaking of Eugenics and Nazis - The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger who wrote "The Pivot of Civiliation" (project gutenberg has it as an etext, among other places: http://www.textlibrary.com/TITLE/pivot/), she was at least consistent on abortion and such for the purpose of applying darwinism to humans.
Republicans aren't inconsistent, they just want the unborn to have a fair trial and several years of appeals and other due process before being aborted.
Democrats somehow don't want capital punishment with even a 24 hour waiting period to reconsider. Arrest and trial is far less efficient, ought not the policeman exercise a "choice" with his gun?
The discussion starts off being completely off track and stays there.
What most people are saying is that we ought not ask questions. We ought not think.
If a body is found smashed at the bottom of a building, we must all assume it was an accident that he fell from the top of the building. We cannot ask if there was any intent - either suicide or homicide - that resulted in what we saw.
The argument about complexity I find interesting. Everyone here explains it as if it is a solved problem (I've not seen any links to the darwininan side of the debate with calculations, though I've seen the ID's advocates calculation).
Oh! Oh! Heresy! Burn the heretic! I've uttered the forbidden question! I cannot ask who has the better model. Darwin is Dogma. It's equations - whenever they end up appearing are ordained by nature, not some intelligence.
But whither SETI? Consider if a different model of life could arise and increase in complexity much faster than the current carbon/DNA/Protein model we are built with (and would note that we use silicon and copper to build our complex devices, not organic components).
We are unscientific because we refuse to even do research looking for a possible matrix where life could arise because we assume it would be possible or easy for the DNA/Protien one.
Also consider if intelligence could occur via electromagnetic emissions across something the size of a star cluster. A single syllable might take 10,000 years or longer to utter so we wouldn't detect it, but there might be some way it could create life. But this can't be asked either because we KNOW we arised spontaneously.
Imagination is suppressed. Research that asks the wrong questions is censored - and in a more severe way than anything the FBI does.
But is this dogma or science, and whose side is being dogmatic?
Studies on Dvorak - the patent holder
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The QWERTY design is reputed to be far inferior to the "scientifically" designed Dvorak keyboard, which allegedly offered a 40 percent increase in typing speed. Supposedly, the Navy conducted experiments during World War II demonstrating that the costs of retraining typists on the new keyboard could be fully recovered within 10 days. The story is claimed to validate path dependence: no typists learn Dvorak because too many others use QWERTY, which increases the value of QWERTY all the more.
That is an ideal example because the number of dimensions of performance is small, and in those dimensions, the Dvorak keyboard appears overwhelmingly superior. Yet upon investigation, the story appears to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking and a shoddy reading of the history of the typewriter keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard, it turns out, is about as good a design as the Dvorak keyboard and was better than most competing designs that existed in the late 1800s when there were many keyboard designs maneuvering for a place in the market.
Ignored in the stories of Dvorak's superiority is a carefully controlled experiment conducted under the auspices of the General Services Administration in the 1950s comparing QWERTY with Dvorak. That experiment contradicted the claims made by advocates of Dvorak and concluded that retraining typists on the Dvorak keyboard made no sense. Modern research in ergonomics also finds little advantage in the Dvorak keyboard layout, confirming the results of the GSA study.
So on what bases were the claims of Dvorak's superiority made? Critical examination shows that most, if not all, of the claims of Dvorak's superiority can be traced to the patent owner, August Dvorak. His book on the relative merits of QWERTY and his own keyboard is about as objective as a television infomercial. The wartime Navy study turns out to have been conducted under the auspices of the Navy's chief expert in time-motion studies--Lt. Comdr. August Dvorak--and the results of that study were clearly fudged. There is far more to the story, but it all leads to the conclusion that the QWERTY story qualifies as no better than a convenient myth. --- Footnote 11 from the above excerpt:
For a full debunking of the QWERTY myth, see S. J. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, "Fable of the Keys," Journal of Law and Economics 33 (1990): 1-25.
Note what the opponents are saying. Not that they can demonstrate the correctness of their position, but that they can sling enough mud and portray their opponents as "... ignoramuses...".
Darwinists are apparently out of logical argument so can only rely on ad hominem attacks.
They won't challenge the ID team because they can't do so because it would require them to engage in scientific debate.
Also note the two definitions of "science".
The open minded "We have to come up with a natural explanation even if it is absurd", instead of the really bigoted "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena".
Investigation is not science? Observation is not science? Testing hypotheses and Measurement are not science? Experimentation, Logical Argument and Theory Building are not science?
Apparently none of these are "science" to darwinists, at least if they conflict with darwinism (do they yet allow punctuated equilibrium yet as not quite heresy?).
If none of these things are science to darwinists, I find it hard to imagine what is?
Some of the first few posts immediately said the ID people were ultraliteralist fundamentalists who thought the earth was 6000 years old, etc.
I can say that I don't know how old the earth is. I've looked at the experiments that claim to measure it, but they have to make some assumptions (with huge potential for error) about initial conditions. But "we don't know exactly" doesn't sound as scientific as "4.5 billion years".
The ID people simply say it is a proper question to ask how something came to be - accident or design. We need not consider the nature of the designer (I can imagine a pure energy creature which is diffuse and only utters one syllable every few centuries, so we can't hear what is said due to the time mismatch - your pentium is running at gigahertz and would take "forever" in its timing to hear you say a complete sentence).
When a body has fallen from a building, we usually ask if it was accidental or intentional, and if the latter murder or suicide.
Passing a law saying all falls are by definition accident would seem absurd, but currently the law is such that all nonpatented lifeforms arose by accident.
In the article at K5 it notes that people have proposed mechanisms whereby the complex mechanims might have evolved, but those aren't in the fossil record, nor actual experiments.
In another bit of sillyness the digitial life forms are not representative of organic ones, and some complexity is in the system (e.g. how do you know the 100 monkeys have produced shakespeare without already having a complete copy of shakespeare).
The case for ID is presented in various books too, which are worth reading, as are articles.
But the whole thing is this discussion and debate is completely censored. Yes CENSORED. In a way possibly worse than the tizzy people get in over the filters used on computers in schools and libraries. You cannot discuss any heresy against darwin in school. You can't even bring up scientific criticism (note the above points were scientific, didn't bring in God, the bible, etc.).
If science is about theories, experiments, and challenges, why doesn't this apply to evolution?
Why is design v.s. natural processes a question that cannot be asked in schools? That only one side can be presented, although those who argue for design only discuss scientific experiments, discoveries, and such?
So much for liberty and freedom from the cybercrowd - they want to censor what they don't consider popular. They are intolerant against any idea which might threaten some old and generally non-experimentally verifiable theory.
I also worry about some of the geology - plate tectonics was like ID in 1905, and astrophysics, 100 years ago steady state and big bang were though equally probable, Mars had life that built canals, and things like neutron stars and black holes are inferred.
One great OO evil I see is instead of allowing "a=b", which would be obvious, you must do SetValueOfA(GetValueOfB()); Which simply retrieves the private copy of B and sets the private copy of a. If "A" is doing something critical, e.g. in an embedded system, so it must be limited as to range, how fast it changes, or validated against other variables to keep things safe or sane, use SetValueOfA, as it tells you that it is doing something more than a=arg in the body.
Comments are similar. First, the worst peeve is when they get out of sync. More comments, the more likely they are to get out of sync when code changes but comments (some may be a few lines away, or at the function header, etc.) don't so you are trying to figure out which of two has a bug.
When the function of code is clear from the topology, local variable names should make things clear (I use i,j,k for throwaway indexes, curtated names for temporaries, e.g. something in converted engineering units, and longer names for important variables).
Many comments are very important indicating subtlety, e.g. if you are accessing something from a buffer which is really a struct but don't want to worry about doing unions and endians, it would be made very clear by simply saying "Pulling a 32 bit unsigned as record size starting at byte 8" - and that comment would be clearer than doing the union/struct/htonl stuff.
Comments ought to be like a gloss on the code, explaining the subtleties or exceptions. When something appears simple but is doing something underneath, it needs commenting. Or if you doing something where EOF will be an exception or signal handled completely outside the block of code so it doesn't appear you forgot.
They should be few because if these critical comments are merely a half-dozen among several hundred, how do you find them? Look for "CRITICAL:" - will that be maintained?
Good code with clear topology (see "The Programmer's Stone" on the Quality Plateau), with comments bringing into high relief the nonobvious is a beautiful balance - for lack of a better word, it is Zen.
Comments won't fix badly written code. Good code won't be helped, and may be obfuscated by lots of redundant text (isn't it better to see the whole routine on one screen, than have to scroll across several because every operation occurs twice - once in code and once in comments?).
In Government (aka public) schools, you can't even talk about the differences or controversies within evolution, nor the various hoaxes (the peppered moths, ontogony recapitulates phylogeny, piltdown man, etc.) since the grand inquisitor (or if you prefer, secular humanist mullahs) of the ACLU will come in and shut you down for heresy.
Were there even a discussion about intelligent design (even one that said nothing about the nature of the designer), I think people would be more open minded.
But war breeds war. If we cannot even discuss evolution except as dogmatic truth in any governmental forum (and the courts and congress expand the definition of "government" daily), why should you expect people to respect the opinions on those who are on the side of the oppressors.
Evolution is true? Then debate it. Present both sides and those who have to make up things or evade or mindlessly cite authority texts will look silly.
But then we would have to have a truly open society.
What was lost from the initial enforcement of the endangered species act is that it is functionally a Taking. If I buy or own property to build something, then the government says I can't and it loses value, they have "taken" the property.
The government should be free to buy up property to protect species, but not prevent private property owners from doing what they want with their property.
Most people here complain about the DCMA - they buy $10 software and the government says they can't change skins, transfer pictures to a PDA or whatever, but ignore $250,000 that government says (after the fact, or capriciously) you can't build on or alter.
Maybe if they called the DMCA the Endangered Software Species Act, everyone here would stop complaining about restrictions on the use of something they theoretically own.
So there won't be enough virgins to throw into volcanoes or whatever to prevent an angry GAIA from decimating humans. It is a plot so that we won't have any method to avert destruction.
When religous zealots predict apocalypse, they sound silly and are dismissed.
When secular scientists do so, for some reason anything they say is swallowed without examination. In the 1970s it was a new ice age.
The earth changes, as does the sun. We just had a huge Tsunami and are in danger of similar ones closer to the "modern" world. Or earthquakes (what are the building codes near the New Madrid fault - around Arkansas and Missouri - again?). Then there are the mouldy oldies that can cause a plague - against us or our monoculture crops (Mad Cow anyone?).
The problem I noted in beginning this is more serious. 50% of teen agers have a STD, what happens when something fatal like AIDS (or something that is extremely debilitating and/or expensive) enters into the MTV culture - assuming things like HPV aren't already 'it'? That is another real threat, but I don't see people asking MTV to become more Victorian (and Syphillis in an age without effective treatment brought that age on).
There is also cost involved in preparing for disasters that don't happen. New and sensational threats (especially ones that will fund research for many years) ought not be dismissed, but not overracted to. There are a lot of plain and common threats we ignore. Is there a reason that when we abandon common sense about real threats we must become puritanical about rare things? Smokers are persona non grata - even on the beech where people are developing melanomas.
Science is making the democratic fallacy - if you have a pain, you usually see a doctor, not have a group of people vote on the diagnosis.
I AM curious if the late 1970's journals were just as unanimous about the certain to be upcoming Ice Age.
If there is an existing bias in the Journals' review boards that reject anything that doesn't tow the party line on apocalyptic global warming, of course no such articles will be published regardless of the quality of the argument.
Scientists are not the new holy priesthood who have no biases (or needs for funding - though a lot of the scientific apocalyptic talk does sound like a televangelist - global warming is coming! contribute now!). There are some honest ones, but others who are political and follow scientific fads and fashions. They are human too.
IF you read history (does anyone, even here?) Plate Tectonics was contraversial and was a quack theory when it was proposed in 1905 - it is considered the correct explanation today.
How much pollution did Mt. St. Helens just inject into the atmosphere? How much chlorine did Mt Pinatubo inject into the ozone layer - oh, but those are good little chlorine molecules, not like the bad CFCs that sink into the soil, and are digested by bacteria, but can make ozone swoon and decompose 60 miles away...
Correleations may or may not be meaningful.
Causation - in the strict scientific sense - requires some strictness to prove.
So we can have government create more things for corporations to impose IP restrictions on. Because there is a greater chance to profit from Embryonic stem cell research than other kinds, that is why corporations want it funded. But they will want to put the last piece of the puzzle in and patent and license the product.
And I don't think your history is correct. Sometimes people working for the government came up with inventions, but they weren't being paid to do them.
Linux managed to be written without government funding. BSD wasn't done via a grant to do BSD. And bureaucrats then make the decisions on what to research, not the scientists. And FSF or opensource model would do far better than government to fund "basic research". NASA might be the least bad example, but note the argument about Hubble and the failed missions.
Most Eggs are fertilized outside the womb - in the Fallopian Tubes. Also they are alive. If they were dead they would not be of any use in establishing stem cell lines.
Your point is invalid. What you are saying is that preventing natural processes from proceeding makes something "potential". What you are actually doing is depriving the embryo of access to the nutrients it needs to develop. You aren't a potential if you are locked in somewhere and starve to death.
It is dangerous to learn science or philosophy from Monty Python.
You may have very deep religious beliefs but so did the Aztecs, and they weren't bothered by cutting out the hearts of thousands each year.
They aren't potentially human, they are merely at an earlier stage of development. If you needed a transplant, you could have someone close to you conceive and have a baby and let it grow until it was big enough to harvest the organ. If a human being can be sacrificed at X, sacrificing it at X+3 shouldn't bother you either.
Either Humans have dignity by virtue of their being human and any intentional death (including creation of an embryo to murder it) is murder, or it is merely some subjective idea the powerful impose on victims - Nazis can dehumanize Jews, Communists can dehumanize dissenters, and we can kill sufficiently immature (biologically) humans.
For now, the unborn is the only class of human beings enough people aren't repulsed by. The Nazis would have accellerated medical research if they weren't in such a hurry to exterminate the Jews and others, but they were doing eugenics and wanted to breed the aryan superman, not bioengineer him.
Calling something a "religious belief" does not make its truth or falsity change. Thou Shall Not Kill is either a universal and transcendent principle ("sacred" would be the term all but theophobes would recognize), or it is only something for the elite and not the disenfranchised. Nazis and Arians in 1940 Germany. The Commisars in the Communist countries (who were atheists that slaughtered millions of the "inconvienient"). In the modern west, those who haven't been aborted.
You can try to follow a logical trail to prevent your own killing/murder, but it will eventually lead to what is a religious belief which you cannot prove in the mathematical sense, so must impose some idea of human dignity. But then the exercise is to try to create a definition that allows the murder of those whom you want to murder, but doesn't happen to include you. But then it is all subjective.
If human dignity is objective, it belongs to all human beings - and the embryo as well as the zygote, fetus, baby, toddler, adolescent, adult, and elderly are all human. They are not fish, tomatoes, or rocks.
Someone was made able to walk without murdering innocent human beings. Yet it seems that there is a dark side to this world - and I would say demonic - something else that is rarely believed in - that seems to think only Molech can do miracles, and he requires the sacrifice of innocent children before he will do his magic. We now call the priests of Molech "researchers", but they would rather murder a human person (and patent the stem cell line? Where are all the IP libertarians now?) even if the research is less productive.
You might be able to find a local contracting agency which will take the $x/hr from your potential employer, take care of social security, benefits, etc, and pay you the remainder.
You should be able to negotiate a deal or see if the employer has a preferred agency.
Note there are probably more advantages (e.g. deductibility) as an independent, but you might want to look into being your own corporation. The "Rich Dad" series has a few good books that will lead you in that direction.
I would like to see a real discussion on the abortion breast cancer link or not. There are various studies on both sides (and I think there are some showing an increased risk), but in the sound bites or short articles, they don't cover the controversy. Also note that the original article didn't report, it dissed the studies - "alledged link", "so-called counseling". Cause or increased risk? Of course the reporter could have simply cited N studies M of which indicate a link, N-M don't. A lot of "mainstream scientists" are both liberal and not epidemiologists. A meterologist might have an opinion on the ABC matter but that doesn't make it informed.
Then "global warming". The problem is that the climatological models aren't predictive, yet they are the "evidence" "we are all going to die in 50 years" (panic sells, or better known as FUD, which most readers here seem to dislike when it is against something they support). Scientists don't get grants to study nonissues.
There have been many books written about the problem - The Apocalyptics by Edith Effron (remember when "everything caused cancer"), and two by Dixie Lee Ray on environmental extremeism (if you worship GAIA you should still separate church from state).
Politicized science is a serious evil. If there are risks to abortion, they should be disclosed, but instead it becomes a pro-life/pro-abort discussion. If there are environmental concerns, it ends up being the tree-huggers v.s. the strip-miners. Totally polarized and no one really wants to know the truth because it might not be on their side.
I don't know how to depoliticize science - though removing federal funds might help (so it wouldn't depend on politicians to fund pet results).
Slashdot Mirror
With the SCO mess and Groklaw I remember reading that it is actionable libel to claim bad IP in the form of FUD. There may be better references but here is one:
http://blog.ebusinesslawgroup.com/labels/Libel.html
But the Lanham Act provides a remedy for something called "trade libel". It says, in pertinent part, the following:
"Any person who...in connection with any goods or services...uses in commerce any...false or misleading description of fact, which...in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, or qualities...of his or her or another person's goods, services or commercial activities...shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is likely to be damaged by such act."
Did you read that carefully?
Read it again.
What it essentially means that if someone in your company says something misleading or false about another company, you could be in BIG trouble.
If it really was Steve Jobs, I think Xiph and maybe others would have a claim. I'd support a lawsuit. The depositions could get very interesting.
At least it would stop the rumbling and FUD and make them put-up or shut-up.
I don't think the word means what you think it means.
According to Webster: "marked to the highest degree by grandeur, excellence, brilliance, or competence"
Yet you simply say it manages to sort-of document a cumbersome updated legacy format for office documents.
I haven't looked at Mono, but must ask if you design your software like the OOXML - so that if I make a trivial change in the obvious place in one source file, it will break the whole thing unless I also update dozens of other places which I wouldn't guess would be referenced. Touch x.c causes the entire system to be recompiled under make? If you consider such "superb" design, I'd hate to see what you would consider bad design. Oh yea, completely functional yet minimal, clean, and modular code.
I would think the word "superb" wouldn't be applied to a rust-bucket that happened to run well enough (if you don't mind the smell of burnt oil) to get you a few miles to work each day. I would want both the powertrain, body, and interior to be clean and well engineered too.
You can do a superb job of specifying an atrocious design. In ISO-9000 processes, I usually refer to a perfectly repeatable cement life-jacket. Of course you'd sink like a rock, but as long as they are made within tolerance... Perhaps this is what you were referring to.
But you haven't said the underlying design is horrible, and it does sound like it is the binary formats recoded into XML. That might make it easy to write a converter, but says nothing about whether the coding is a good or bad design.
Even so, the OOXML document is not very well done. Minimally, the legacy support should be in various annexes, to separate it from the core design. There could be a lot of other structural improvements.
But this comes down to a fundamental question - DID YOU USE THE OOXML document - reading it fully just like you would do to ODF - to implement the section of Gnumeric, or did you simply highlight the excel-like sections which you already had code for and it just worked?
The proper way to test the questions is to give a group who has never seen either ODF or OOXML both specs and have them split up and start coding - without an oracle like OOo or Excel - and see how fast and how well they do. Let Novell sponsor such a contest, maybe over one of the holidays or something if you really want to decide the issue.
I think the justifications would apply or not apply to both.
If the blogger said Candidate X was having an affair...
If the newspaper got a tip saying Candidate X was having an affair...
Or consider the current national security decisions (are we going to war with Iran) from "anonymous government sources".
I would note that the information exposed is usually something a third party is trying to hide - to remain anonymous, or to get away with something.
Oh, and in court, the witness protection program, etc. people have been convicted by "anonymous" testimony.
No anonymity, then sometimes vital information won't be exposed to public scrutiny.
And the information is credible or not in and of itself.
This is a trade-off.
When will drive letters go the way of floppy disc drives (or at least let me add or remove a drive without completely hosing my system)? .inf files (or at least keep them in an archive)?
When will we have actual symbolic links?
When will you ship with everything possible disabled until needed or manually enabled?
When will defragging a disk or some obscure network function not lock up every task?
When will you not install by default two thousand modem or other
When will you not keep asking to insert a driver disk when the files are already in c:\windows\system32\ (and will "install" if I just point the directory there)?
When will you disable autoplay features by default, or at least make them prominent in a security area (instead of editing obscure system setting panels)?
When will you get rid of, split, or otherwise do something reasonable with the trash "heap" otherwise known as the registry?
Are you ever going to allow me to change my hardware and do autoconfiguration (Both MacOS and Linux will let me boot from a disk in another system, a CD, etc. and manage to find all the necessary and most of the exotic hardware)?
The XP Embedded version can be created with or without IE or WMP, but I don't know how many DLLs have chunks of code designed to launch or provide IE or other MS product functionality (designed to give Netscape Users "a jarring experience" in the words of a Microsoft person). Is Microsoft ever going to sort and layer things so that there will be an isolated kernel, application layer, GUI, device drivers, (and if so, when), or is "Windows" going to continue to integrate things, e.g. "The Spreadsheet and Editor are now 'part of the operating system'"?
Rationale: Many security problems are due to everything running as Administrator, with privileges, or as part of the OS. One thing I like about GNU/Linux is that each part is separate, so Firefox runs on X which runs using services, which runs using the kernel, with only the kernel having privileges. Generally a buffer overflow problem in X, or Apache doesn't let someone format my hard drive. Also you can put something to analyze or intercept things between such layers - even things like ltrace or strace.
So according to most of the above posts saying ID ought not be taught science is not the search for the truth. It is the search for natural (or material) explanations. Even if they are less likely or even perhaps demonstrably wrong.
Maybe Vince Foster was the victim of an errant lead meteorite, and the gun and suicide note had nothing to do with it as it might show design, so the CSI team using just "science" can't show any design or plan, only come up with "natural" explanations?
This is where I differ. I believe "Is X the product of design or natural causes" is both a reasonable and scientific question, and there is no reason it ought not be asked in Kansas biology classes, no more than if they were covering human physiology they should ask if the blackened lung tissue was caused by infectious disease, some internal breakdown, or smoking.
Should they also bring back eugenics, which Darwin also gave a big push? Remember the full title of his work. But if evolution is correct, then eugenics follow, though I think most people here wouldn't admit they are neo-nazis (or that the Nazis were only wrong in detail, not overview - we breed and engineer animals, and now want to clone, and if we are just beasts with large cerebrums where does ethics come in or at least how can you argue against using our knowlege of breeding).
There seem to be two reasons everyone wants embryonic stem cells although they've produced little except cancerous tumors:
1. If anyone ever does make them work, they can be patented so make big bucks for that person.
2. There seems to be a primitive and barbaric part of us that associates strong ju-ju with human sacrifice.
Larry Niven's "Jigsaw Man" was not wrong - it has occured. But we will only take organs from humans we can define down into inhumanity.
The South would still have African Americans an non-humans today if organ transplant or other therapies which required body parts were discovered in 1850 instead of later.
For the chapter titled
p ?id=CH001
"How the Monks saved civilization" from
How the Catholic Church built western civilization by Thomas Woods
here is a link where they will email it to you
http://www.catholicchurchbook.com/offers/offer.ph
As an aside, monks had to do various things (e.g. chant the liturgy) which required them to be literate and otherwise well educated unlike most peasants. Illiterate copying letters? Haven't you heard of Augustine and Aquinas or Albert the Great and the university of Paris?
Divine right of kings? I think that was protestant more than Catholic as the kings were often excommunicated, and the Church/State was the original check and balance.
You can also find further discussion (no one thought the earth was flat, Henry VIII probably delayed the industrial revolution for 300 years by his persecution, etc.) you can go to lewrockwell.com and look for the Thomas Woods archives.
Of course really studying accurate history might interfere with various prejudices and bigotries.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/ab olition4.htm
The Tao is actually the set of laws common to all - things like not murdering and stealing, but also with some duties. The link above gives a listing and comparison, but the entire text of the Abolition of Man is available.
The problem with the original comment is that he confuses his opinion for truth, whereas his views on evolution (we don't have a mechanism but we know absolutely we weren't designed), the environment, or even economics (is Keynes or Mises right? Interestingly, Misesian sites have better economics and doubt darwinianism) are dogmatic statements, and not something which can be empirically verified.
Remember the full title of Darwin's work was ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE. Shall we talk about races, and eugenics, and maybe the Nazis had the right idea? Get rid of our soul and a lot of things become easy.
Science is not dogma, but many here seem to confuse the two. Or treat scientists as a priesthood.
ABCDE
The information which we want to be free has already been released or exists, but others are attempting to restrict it. They publish information but then say you can only read it once, or for a number of days, and can't let anyone else read it, etc. And all those restrictions are artificial and tyrannical to implement.
I don't think people would mind if people desired to keep their songs to themselves. Or if they would let them be free. Not some middle way.
If I have information, I might want to keep it private. Borders or Barnes and Noble could have an online ordering which would just involve an order number where I could pick things up at a local store same day and pay cash, but they don't. I can pay online with shipping, but they collect that info.
There is no "right" to information about me, even if it is true. Much of it is created without my consent, sometimes without my knowledge. As that information gets created, I become property or something to be analyzed, not a person.
(rant)
The same slashdot crowd that absolutely hates dogma so wants to ban even any discussion that Darwin might have been wrong in "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but lets just not mention the Favored Races part or the other Eugenics stuff that makes everyone but neonazis squeamish.
Speaking of Eugenics and Nazis - The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger who wrote "The Pivot of Civiliation" (project gutenberg has it as an etext, among other places: http://www.textlibrary.com/TITLE/pivot/), she was at least consistent on abortion and such for the purpose of applying darwinism to humans.
Republicans aren't inconsistent, they just want the unborn to have a fair trial and several years of appeals and other due process before being aborted.
Democrats somehow don't want capital punishment with even a 24 hour waiting period to reconsider. Arrest and trial is far less efficient, ought not the policeman exercise a "choice" with his gun?
The discussion starts off being completely off track and stays there.
What most people are saying is that we ought not ask questions. We ought not think.
If a body is found smashed at the bottom of a building, we must all assume it was an accident that he fell from the top of the building. We cannot ask if there was any intent - either suicide or homicide - that resulted in what we saw.
The argument about complexity I find interesting. Everyone here explains it as if it is a solved problem (I've not seen any links to the darwininan side of the debate with calculations, though I've seen the ID's advocates calculation).
Oh! Oh! Heresy! Burn the heretic! I've uttered the forbidden question! I cannot ask who has the better model. Darwin is Dogma. It's equations - whenever they end up appearing are ordained by nature, not some intelligence.
But whither SETI? Consider if a different model of life could arise and increase in complexity much faster than the current carbon/DNA/Protein model we are built with (and would note that we use silicon and copper to build our complex devices, not organic components).
We are unscientific because we refuse to even do research looking for a possible matrix where life could arise because we assume it would be possible or easy for the DNA/Protien one.
Also consider if intelligence could occur via electromagnetic emissions across something the size of a star cluster. A single syllable might take 10,000 years or longer to utter so we wouldn't detect it, but there might be some way it could create life. But this can't be asked either because we KNOW we arised spontaneously.
Imagination is suppressed. Research that asks the wrong questions is censored - and in a more severe way than anything the FBI does.
But is this dogma or science, and whose side is being dogmatic?
http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/scripts/printtech.cgi/ pubs/pas/pa324b.pdf
Starting at page 8:
The QWERTY design is reputed to be far inferior to the "scientifically" designed Dvorak keyboard, which allegedly offered a 40 percent increase in typing speed. Supposedly, the Navy conducted experiments during World War II demonstrating that the costs of retraining typists on the new keyboard could be fully recovered within 10 days. The story is claimed to validate path dependence: no typists learn Dvorak because too many others use QWERTY, which increases the value of QWERTY all the more.
That is an ideal example because the number of dimensions of performance is small, and in those dimensions, the Dvorak keyboard appears overwhelmingly superior. Yet upon investigation, the story appears to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking and a shoddy reading of the history of the typewriter keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard, it turns out, is about as good a design as the Dvorak keyboard and was better than most competing designs that existed in the late 1800s when there were many keyboard designs maneuvering for a place in the market.
Ignored in the stories of Dvorak's superiority is a carefully controlled experiment conducted under the auspices of the General Services Administration in the 1950s comparing QWERTY with Dvorak. That experiment contradicted the claims made by advocates of Dvorak and concluded that retraining typists on the Dvorak keyboard made no sense. Modern research in ergonomics also finds little advantage in the Dvorak keyboard layout, confirming the results of the GSA study.
So on what bases were the claims of Dvorak's superiority made? Critical examination shows that most, if not all, of the claims of Dvorak's superiority can be traced to the patent owner, August Dvorak. His book on the relative merits of QWERTY and his own keyboard is about as objective as a television infomercial. The wartime Navy study turns out to have been conducted under the auspices of the Navy's chief expert in time-motion studies--Lt. Comdr. August Dvorak--and the results of that study were clearly fudged. There is far more to the story, but it all leads to the conclusion that the QWERTY story qualifies as no better than a convenient myth.
---
Footnote 11 from the above excerpt:
For a full debunking of the QWERTY myth, see S. J. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, "Fable of the Keys," Journal of Law and Economics 33 (1990): 1-25.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ ID=44129
...".
Note what the opponents are saying. Not that they can demonstrate the correctness of their position, but that they can sling enough mud and portray their opponents as "... ignoramuses
Darwinists are apparently out of logical argument so can only rely on ad hominem attacks.
They won't challenge the ID team because they can't do so because it would require them to engage in scientific debate.
Also note the two definitions of "science".
The open minded "We have to come up with a natural explanation even if it is absurd", instead of the really bigoted "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena".
Investigation is not science?
Observation is not science?
Testing hypotheses and Measurement are not science?
Experimentation, Logical Argument and Theory Building are not science?
Apparently none of these are "science" to darwinists, at least if they conflict with darwinism (do they yet allow punctuated equilibrium yet as not quite heresy?).
If none of these things are science to darwinists, I find it hard to imagine what is?
Some of the first few posts immediately said the ID people were ultraliteralist fundamentalists who thought the earth was 6000 years old, etc.
I can say that I don't know how old the earth is. I've looked at the experiments that claim to measure it, but they have to make some assumptions (with huge potential for error) about initial conditions. But "we don't know exactly" doesn't sound as scientific as "4.5 billion years".
The ID people simply say it is a proper question to ask how something came to be - accident or design. We need not consider the nature of the designer (I can imagine a pure energy creature which is diffuse and only utters one syllable every few centuries, so we can't hear what is said due to the time mismatch - your pentium is running at gigahertz and would take "forever" in its timing to hear you say a complete sentence).
When a body has fallen from a building, we usually ask if it was accidental or intentional, and if the latter murder or suicide.
Passing a law saying all falls are by definition accident would seem absurd, but currently the law is such that all nonpatented lifeforms arose by accident.
In the article at K5 it notes that people have proposed mechanisms whereby the complex mechanims might have evolved, but those aren't in the fossil record, nor actual experiments.
In another bit of sillyness the digitial life forms are not representative of organic ones, and some complexity is in the system (e.g. how do you know the 100 monkeys have produced shakespeare without already having a complete copy of shakespeare).
The case for ID is presented in various books too, which are worth reading, as are articles.
But the whole thing is this discussion and debate is completely censored. Yes CENSORED. In a way possibly worse than the tizzy people get in over the filters used on computers in schools and libraries. You cannot discuss any heresy against darwin in school. You can't even bring up scientific criticism (note the above points were scientific, didn't bring in God, the bible, etc.).
If science is about theories, experiments, and challenges, why doesn't this apply to evolution?
Why is design v.s. natural processes a question that cannot be asked in schools? That only one side can be presented, although those who argue for design only discuss scientific experiments, discoveries, and such?
So much for liberty and freedom from the cybercrowd - they want to censor what they don't consider popular. They are intolerant against any idea which might threaten some old and generally non-experimentally verifiable theory.
I also worry about some of the geology - plate tectonics was like ID in 1905, and astrophysics, 100 years ago steady state and big bang were though equally probable, Mars had life that built canals, and things like neutron stars and black holes are inferred.
One great OO evil I see is instead of allowing "a=b", which would be obvious, you must do SetValueOfA(GetValueOfB()); Which simply retrieves the private copy of B and sets the private copy of a. If "A" is doing something critical, e.g. in an embedded system, so it must be limited as to range, how fast it changes, or validated against other variables to keep things safe or sane, use SetValueOfA, as it tells you that it is doing something more than a=arg in the body.
Comments are similar. First, the worst peeve is when they get out of sync. More comments, the more likely they are to get out of sync when code changes but comments (some may be a few lines away, or at the function header, etc.) don't so you are trying to figure out which of two has a bug.
When the function of code is clear from the topology, local variable names should make things clear (I use i,j,k for throwaway indexes, curtated names for temporaries, e.g. something in converted engineering units, and longer names for important variables).
Many comments are very important indicating subtlety, e.g. if you are accessing something from a buffer which is really a struct but don't want to worry about doing unions and endians, it would be made very clear by simply saying "Pulling a 32 bit unsigned as record size starting at byte 8" - and that comment would be clearer than doing the union/struct/htonl stuff.
Comments ought to be like a gloss on the code, explaining the subtleties or exceptions. When something appears simple but is doing something underneath, it needs commenting. Or if you doing something where EOF will be an exception or signal handled completely outside the block of code so it doesn't appear you forgot.
They should be few because if these critical comments are merely a half-dozen among several hundred, how do you find them? Look for "CRITICAL:" - will that be maintained?
Good code with clear topology (see "The Programmer's Stone" on the Quality Plateau), with comments bringing into high relief the nonobvious is a beautiful balance - for lack of a better word, it is Zen.
Comments won't fix badly written code. Good code won't be helped, and may be obfuscated by lots of redundant text (isn't it better to see the whole routine on one screen, than have to scroll across several because every operation occurs twice - once in code and once in comments?).
In Government (aka public) schools, you can't even talk about the differences or controversies within evolution, nor the various hoaxes (the peppered moths, ontogony recapitulates phylogeny, piltdown man, etc.) since the grand inquisitor (or if you prefer, secular humanist mullahs) of the ACLU will come in and shut you down for heresy.
Were there even a discussion about intelligent design (even one that said nothing about the nature of the designer), I think people would be more open minded.
But war breeds war. If we cannot even discuss evolution except as dogmatic truth in any governmental forum (and the courts and congress expand the definition of "government" daily), why should you expect people to respect the opinions on those who are on the side of the oppressors.
Evolution is true? Then debate it. Present both sides and those who have to make up things or evade or mindlessly cite authority texts will look silly.
But then we would have to have a truly open society.
They specialize in more high-brow titles. A lot of the best sci-fi, the ancient classics, economics, history, etc.
http://www.blackstoneaudio.com/
What was lost from the initial enforcement of the endangered species act is that it is functionally a Taking. If I buy or own property to build something, then the government says I can't and it loses value, they have "taken" the property.
The government should be free to buy up property to protect species, but not prevent private property owners from doing what they want with their property.
Most people here complain about the DCMA - they buy $10 software and the government says they can't change skins, transfer pictures to a PDA or whatever, but ignore $250,000 that government says (after the fact, or capriciously) you can't build on or alter.
Maybe if they called the DMCA the Endangered Software Species Act, everyone here would stop complaining about restrictions on the use of something they theoretically own.
So there won't be enough virgins to throw into volcanoes or whatever to prevent an angry GAIA from decimating humans. It is a plot so that we won't have any method to avert destruction.
When religous zealots predict apocalypse, they sound silly and are dismissed.
When secular scientists do so, for some reason anything they say is swallowed without examination. In the 1970s it was a new ice age.
The earth changes, as does the sun. We just had a huge Tsunami and are in danger of similar ones closer to the "modern" world. Or earthquakes (what are the building codes near the New Madrid fault - around Arkansas and Missouri - again?). Then there are the mouldy oldies that can cause a plague - against us or our monoculture crops (Mad Cow anyone?).
The problem I noted in beginning this is more serious. 50% of teen agers have a STD, what happens when something fatal like AIDS (or something that is extremely debilitating and/or expensive) enters into the MTV culture - assuming things like HPV aren't already 'it'? That is another real threat, but I don't see people asking MTV to become more Victorian (and Syphillis in an age without effective treatment brought that age on).
There is also cost involved in preparing for disasters that don't happen. New and sensational threats (especially ones that will fund research for many years) ought not be dismissed, but not overracted to. There are a lot of plain and common threats we ignore. Is there a reason that when we abandon common sense about real threats we must become puritanical about rare things? Smokers are persona non grata - even on the beech where people are developing melanomas.
Get real.
Science is making the democratic fallacy - if you have a pain, you usually see a doctor, not have a group of people vote on the diagnosis.
I AM curious if the late 1970's journals were just as unanimous about the certain to be upcoming Ice Age.
If there is an existing bias in the Journals' review boards that reject anything that doesn't tow the party line on apocalyptic global warming, of course no such articles will be published regardless of the quality of the argument.
Scientists are not the new holy priesthood who have no biases (or needs for funding - though a lot of the scientific apocalyptic talk does sound like a televangelist - global warming is coming! contribute now!). There are some honest ones, but others who are political and follow scientific fads and fashions. They are human too.
IF you read history (does anyone, even here?) Plate Tectonics was contraversial and was a quack theory when it was proposed in 1905 - it is considered the correct explanation today.
How much pollution did Mt. St. Helens just inject into the atmosphere? How much chlorine did Mt Pinatubo inject into the ozone layer - oh, but those are good little chlorine molecules, not like the bad CFCs that sink into the soil, and are digested by bacteria, but can make ozone swoon and decompose 60 miles away...
Correleations may or may not be meaningful.
Causation - in the strict scientific sense - requires some strictness to prove.
And each line may be a separate patent.
So we can have government create more things for corporations to impose IP restrictions on. Because there is a greater chance to profit from Embryonic stem cell research than other kinds, that is why corporations want it funded. But they will want to put the last piece of the puzzle in and patent and license the product.
And I don't think your history is correct. Sometimes people working for the government came up with inventions, but they weren't being paid to do them.
Linux managed to be written without government funding. BSD wasn't done via a grant to do BSD. And bureaucrats then make the decisions on what to research, not the scientists. And FSF or opensource model would do far better than government to fund "basic research". NASA might be the least bad example, but note the argument about Hubble and the failed missions.
Most Eggs are fertilized outside the womb - in the Fallopian Tubes. Also they are alive. If they were dead they would not be of any use in establishing stem cell lines.
Your point is invalid. What you are saying is that preventing natural processes from proceeding makes something "potential". What you are actually doing is depriving the embryo of access to the nutrients it needs to develop. You aren't a potential if you are locked in somewhere and starve to death.
It is dangerous to learn science or philosophy from Monty Python.
You may have very deep religious beliefs but so did the Aztecs, and they weren't bothered by cutting out the hearts of thousands each year.
They aren't potentially human, they are merely at an earlier stage of development. If you needed a transplant, you could have someone close to you conceive and have a baby and let it grow until it was big enough to harvest the organ. If a human being can be sacrificed at X, sacrificing it at X+3 shouldn't bother you either.
Either Humans have dignity by virtue of their being human and any intentional death (including creation of an embryo to murder it) is murder, or it is merely some subjective idea the powerful impose on victims - Nazis can dehumanize Jews, Communists can dehumanize dissenters, and we can kill sufficiently immature (biologically) humans.
For now, the unborn is the only class of human beings enough people aren't repulsed by. The Nazis would have accellerated medical research if they weren't in such a hurry to exterminate the Jews and others, but they were doing eugenics and wanted to breed the aryan superman, not bioengineer him.
Calling something a "religious belief" does not make its truth or falsity change. Thou Shall Not Kill is either a universal and transcendent principle ("sacred" would be the term all but theophobes would recognize), or it is only something for the elite and not the disenfranchised. Nazis and Arians in 1940 Germany. The Commisars in the Communist countries (who were atheists that slaughtered millions of the "inconvienient"). In the modern west, those who haven't been aborted.
You can try to follow a logical trail to prevent your own killing/murder, but it will eventually lead to what is a religious belief which you cannot prove in the mathematical sense, so must impose some idea of human dignity. But then the exercise is to try to create a definition that allows the murder of those whom you want to murder, but doesn't happen to include you. But then it is all subjective.
If human dignity is objective, it belongs to all human beings - and the embryo as well as the zygote, fetus, baby, toddler, adolescent, adult, and elderly are all human. They are not fish, tomatoes, or rocks.
Someone was made able to walk without murdering innocent human beings. Yet it seems that there is a dark side to this world - and I would say demonic - something else that is rarely believed in - that seems to think only Molech can do miracles, and he requires the sacrifice of innocent children before he will do his magic. We now call the priests of Molech "researchers", but they would rather murder a human person (and patent the stem cell line? Where are all the IP libertarians now?) even if the research is less productive.
That is an evil attitude.
You might be able to find a local contracting agency which will take the $x/hr from your potential employer, take care of social security, benefits, etc, and pay you the remainder.
You should be able to negotiate a deal or see if the employer has a preferred agency.
Note there are probably more advantages (e.g. deductibility) as an independent, but you might want to look into being your own corporation. The "Rich Dad" series has a few good books that will lead you in that direction.
I would like to see a real discussion on the abortion breast cancer link or not. There are various studies on both sides (and I think there are some showing an increased risk), but in the sound bites or short articles, they don't cover the controversy. Also note that the original article didn't report, it dissed the studies - "alledged link", "so-called counseling". Cause or increased risk? Of course the reporter could have simply cited N studies M of which indicate a link, N-M don't. A lot of "mainstream scientists" are both liberal and not epidemiologists. A meterologist might have an opinion on the ABC matter but that doesn't make it informed.
Then "global warming". The problem is that the climatological models aren't predictive, yet they are the "evidence" "we are all going to die in 50 years" (panic sells, or better known as FUD, which most readers here seem to dislike when it is against something they support). Scientists don't get grants to study nonissues.
There have been many books written about the problem - The Apocalyptics by Edith Effron (remember when "everything caused cancer"), and two by Dixie Lee Ray on environmental extremeism (if you worship GAIA you should still separate church from state).
Politicized science is a serious evil. If there are risks to abortion, they should be disclosed, but instead it becomes a pro-life/pro-abort discussion. If there are environmental concerns, it ends up being the tree-huggers v.s. the strip-miners. Totally polarized and no one really wants to know the truth because it might not be on their side.
I don't know how to depoliticize science - though removing federal funds might help (so it wouldn't depend on politicians to fund pet results).