If you're going to require the proof of non-existence of anything, you're already outside the realms of logical thought. I don't just mean that as a judgement, I mean that as a matter of the very rules of logic. As such, I'm not really going to put much weight in you saying that being an atheist is illogical.
Finally, leprechauns are fictional characters created by the human mind. Whatever/whoever/etc created this universe and gave humans a consciousness is not fictional. Since no one has proven what or who created this universe, we really can't logically rule anything out at this point, can we?
Our very concept of god is a fictional creation of the human mind. Why do I say that? Because it is created without any actual factual basis. That's the very definition of fiction.
However, I've never claimed that sometimes reality never coincidentally lines up with fiction. Now, say you have a quarter in your hand and you tell me that quarter was not in fact made by the U.S. mint but was made by a guy named Joe Smith in his basement. I examine this quarter with the aid of instruments and can't tell any difference between it and a regular quarter. I ask you for proof of your story and you say you have none, you just got the idea in your head from out of the blue. But you tell me I can't rule it out because I can't know that you are wrong.
Now, there may actually by chance be a guy named Joe Smith making perfect quarters in his basement somewhere even though neither I or you actually know it. The laws of reality as we know them make this completely and totally plausible on the face of it. However, as logic dictates, when you're making claims like this the burden is on you to back it up with proof. I'm not going to claim that what you're saying can't happen, I'm claiming that with a high probability of certitude, it didn't happen.
Now, let's go back to your original statement:
Claiming that there simply is no god, is just as a religious statement as saying there is one. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of god).
See, here's the problem. You're claiming that it is religious to believe that quarter was made the normal everyday mundane way. It's not religion, it's just logic. Occam's razor. So no, I do not agree with you that it is religious for me to think that all the fictional god concepts people have come up with are simply that - fiction.
Cash is going away because it's terribly inconvenient compared to electronic methods. So now you're this theoretical criminal who deals in gold. How you going to use that gold for anything other than paying another criminal, since nobody else is going to want to take your inconvenient gold, except maybe if they charge you a ridiculous surcharge. Sure, they'll be some places that pop up and advertise heavily that you can pay with gold, no problem, no extra charge. But guess where the first place is that the cops will put under surveillance so they can tell who uses a lot of gold?
All this is pretty silly anyway, though. As cash dies, what will replace it are anonymous cash cards. They already have them in plenty of other countries. If/when cash is phased out here, they'll have to exist and not specifically for criminals. You think most people are going to want to run their credit card down at the porn store?
The machines charge about 30% more than the current trading price for gold
Yeah, that seem about right, considering the level of logic in most of the "we must return to the gold standard" posts I've seen. They may actually manage to make this a viable enterprise.
I now present several guest posters who will now provide examples of just the posts I mean.
Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear. I'm not saying she doesn't have to turn over evidence. I'm saying that there's no need for the drive to somehow have information on it that somehow exonerates her. But it should would help.
She doesn't. But if does provide her hard drive and it provides evidence that conflicts with the RIAA evidence, it is more likely to throw the RIAA evidence into doubt.
It's kind of like an alibi. You don't have to have an alibi. But if they have a photo of someone who looks just like you from the security camera of a robbed bank and someone reports a getaway car with the same model as yours, having a strong alibi will go a long way towards defusing that evidence.
1% of those denied the ability to pick their child's sex at the embryo stage will leave a baby in a dumpster
You pretty much invalidated the entire rest of your argument with this. First, do you think that 1% of babies being left in the dumpster is acceptable? Wouldn't you want to avoid that. Second, by your own admission, the number of people who could afford sex selection is very low, so outlawing it wouldn't actually made a dent in the overall societal problem of higher male to female ratio. And dumping a baby in a dumpster is already illegal.
I give up on arguing with you. You are impervious to both fact and logical deduction.
First off, you're totally muddling up things that aren't comparable. Robbing someone is bad because you deprived the robbed person of their money. Killing someone is bad because you take away their life. Destroying an early embryo (at least to me and a lot of other people) is not any more "bad" than having a tooth pulled. So now you're back down to indirect effects, not direct ones.
Allowing sex selection of embryos to prevent later abortions while at the same time working on the fundamental problems driving the preference of one sex would be a much better idea to both address the problems of the society and to prevent an actual "bad" thing (abortion of later term babies).
This is a much better solution than outlawing the sex selection of embryos, while not being able to outlaw sex selection via abortion (without outlawing abortion altogether). Because in either case you get the loveless miserable men you are so worried about, but in one case you get that and you get a bunch of aborted late term babies.
Your preference would almost literally throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I completely disagree that they don't matter to the topic. You have a few different effects of the issue of embryonic selection: 1) the effect on the embryo that is chosen, 2) the effect on the embryos that are not chosen, 3) the effect on society.
You've address #1 and #3 but left out #2. That's what part of my post was addressing.
So, lets get to #1 and #3. Take the real world example of India. The simple fact was that women were considered a burden there because the parents had to pay an expensive dowry for their marriage. So they aborted them when they found out they'd be girls, or just murdered the babies after being born. They already have laws against sexual selection, but they did no good at reducing the problem.
So, basically, the society is already fucked. They need to do other things to fix it, not just trying to treat the symptom.
Okay, I'll go ahead and make a moral argument for you. Well, at least one that isn't IMMORAL.
In IVF as it exists today, multiple embryos are produced because the success rate isn't 100% (much like the success rate of regular pregnancies, many ending in miscarriage). So you wind up with this handful of embryos that are viable. The doctor picks one to implant first. They are all viable, so there is no basis to pick one over the other. Or is there? If the couple says "try a boy first", is this immoral?
I would argue that it is morally neutral. As long as they don't try every boy embryo and when they run out, destroy all the girl embryos and start over.
Okay, so take it a step further, what if they ARE going to create embryos and destroy the ones that are girls. Well, this depends on your belief in what makes someone human and where the line (distinct or fuzzy) is. Your little toe is not human, but it's not unreasonable to think that within 100 years we could make a clone from you using only your little toe. We wouldn't consider someone cutting off their own toe as immoral, yet a toe has orders of magnitude more cells than any of these embryos do.
To me, this is no more "immoral" a choice as a couple who decides to keep trying to get pregnant after a couple of miscarriages. And in fact, in those you are much more likely to have crossed that fuzzy line into humanity when they lose the baby.
Except that, depending on your beliefs, there's a point between conception and birth where a person eventually becomes human. If you believe a structure containing a few hundred cells is no more human than a wart, then destroying it is in no way equivalent to murder and your analogy does not hold.
However, the alternative in countries like China is that parents will carry the child to term and kill it after it has been born, at a stage where pretty much everyone considers it human.
Thus, by outlawing something that's not murder, you encourage an outcome ending in murder.
Claiming that there simply is no god, is just as a religious statement as saying there is one. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of god).
You know, I consider myself an agnostic rather than an atheist. But it doesn't take a fundamental change of your statement to make it seem rather silly:
Claiming that there simply are no leprechauns, is just as superstitious a statement as saying there are. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of leprechauns).
The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical, however. 'Dark energy' needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy needs to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future. That said, Dr. Obousy's warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.
Translation: We have a theory based on a lack of theory.
All this beating up on the NSA is fun and stuff, but are we really complaining that we don't have a competent domestic spying agency? We've already proven as a society to be incapable of electing a majority of leaders that respect privacy and are willing to give up a little temporary safety for essential liberty. So would it actually make us happy to have a bunch of g-men who are intelligent when it comes to new technology and could really fully exploit all the powers of databases and networks and algorithms to spy on us in an incredibly thorough manner?
I'm not sure what the point of your continued posts are, considering you're arguing a different point that I was talking about. I simply pointed out how the more titles are available, the less likely it is that I'll pick any one title at random (example being the itunes app store). As such, I'm afraid I really have very little interest in reading the rest of your post.
So what you are saying is it's easier for me to find your book on your website when I've never heard of either than to find it on amazon which already has [...]
Nope, didn't say that. It was in response to the previous poster who wrote,
Attention. If I can look at and search for thousands of books in one place, I am more likely to notice your book if it is there.
The most effective way to get people to notice your books isn't just by listing them on Amazon. It's through a lot of other advertising methods. Unless either of us has a study to back this up, we're just going off of opinion. My opinion is that the number of people that buy an author based on those things you listed is very low. It helps Amazon in that it probably sells some number of books, but for any given author, I'm guessing the fraction of sales driven by these methods is negligible.
All that said, I never wrote that you should NOT be on Amazon. I simply pointed out that just being on Amazon isn't what's going to drive your book sales.
Could be that they fixed the numbers/bullet points. Another AC said "What is with those carriage return looking bullet points, anyway?" What about the indent? Was the explanation what I said?
When you say "not on slashdot", do you mean some other time than now? This would seem true given your "keeps breaking it" comment. But it's still a bit unclear. I note that the following code produces the proper auto-numbered result:
<ol> <li>item 1 <li>item 2 <li>item 3 </ol>
item 1
item 2
item 3
As far as the indent level goes, the left edges of the text in both lists' items line up with each other. Since the numbers with periods and the single dot take up different amounts of space, the overall left edge for the unordered one does look indented. I'm not sure which way I'd actually prefer it. The HTML spec may actually say it should be that way. In any case, it isn't slashdot, it's your browser. Just try editing a plain-jane html file with both types of lists and you'll get the same result even without slashdot's css. I find both FF3 and IE7 format it the same way.
Perhaps this is all a browser problem? Are you still not seeing auto-numbered lists?
Wait, what? Did you not listen to the commentary on the Futurama DVDs? It's an incredibly expensive show to make - the most expensive animated show of all time. It takes nine months to make an episode. That's nine months of labor, plus all the cost for doing all the 3d effects they do. We're talking about in the ballpark of a million dollars per episode.
Now, Adult Swim was great in playing all the reruns of Futurama. But they paid 10 million dollars to rerun the hell out of 72 episodes. That's chump change compared to how much it costs to actually make original episodes. Do you think Cartoon Network was willing to shell out the kind of money that they need to even just cover costs?
Not bloody likely. That's not in the profit model of Cartoon Network. Yes, they are a business just like all the other channels.
So if you want to support Futurama, then be realistic and realize that this has nothing to do with not showing gratitude to Adult Swim. Having Comedy Central shell out for new episodes of Futurama will actually help Adult Swim, as now they'll be able to buy the reruns for those. It's win-win! Turning your back on Comedy Central in effect is also screwing over Adult Swim.
Your comment might be taken more seriously if you weren't making it about a company that makes an average of $14 billion in pure profit per year with an average profit margin of 25% across all its revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to require the proof of non-existence of anything, you're already outside the realms of logical thought. I don't just mean that as a judgement, I mean that as a matter of the very rules of logic. As such, I'm not really going to put much weight in you saying that being an atheist is illogical.
Finally, leprechauns are fictional characters created by the human mind. Whatever/whoever/etc created this universe and gave humans a consciousness is not fictional. Since no one has proven what or who created this universe, we really can't logically rule anything out at this point, can we?
Our very concept of god is a fictional creation of the human mind. Why do I say that? Because it is created without any actual factual basis. That's the very definition of fiction.
However, I've never claimed that sometimes reality never coincidentally lines up with fiction. Now, say you have a quarter in your hand and you tell me that quarter was not in fact made by the U.S. mint but was made by a guy named Joe Smith in his basement. I examine this quarter with the aid of instruments and can't tell any difference between it and a regular quarter. I ask you for proof of your story and you say you have none, you just got the idea in your head from out of the blue. But you tell me I can't rule it out because I can't know that you are wrong.
Now, there may actually by chance be a guy named Joe Smith making perfect quarters in his basement somewhere even though neither I or you actually know it. The laws of reality as we know them make this completely and totally plausible on the face of it. However, as logic dictates, when you're making claims like this the burden is on you to back it up with proof. I'm not going to claim that what you're saying can't happen, I'm claiming that with a high probability of certitude, it didn't happen.
Now, let's go back to your original statement:
Claiming that there simply is no god, is just as a religious statement as saying there is one. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of god).
See, here's the problem. You're claiming that it is religious to believe that quarter was made the normal everyday mundane way. It's not religion, it's just logic. Occam's razor. So no, I do not agree with you that it is religious for me to think that all the fictional god concepts people have come up with are simply that - fiction.
Cash is going away because it's terribly inconvenient compared to electronic methods. So now you're this theoretical criminal who deals in gold. How you going to use that gold for anything other than paying another criminal, since nobody else is going to want to take your inconvenient gold, except maybe if they charge you a ridiculous surcharge. Sure, they'll be some places that pop up and advertise heavily that you can pay with gold, no problem, no extra charge. But guess where the first place is that the cops will put under surveillance so they can tell who uses a lot of gold?
All this is pretty silly anyway, though. As cash dies, what will replace it are anonymous cash cards. They already have them in plenty of other countries. If/when cash is phased out here, they'll have to exist and not specifically for criminals. You think most people are going to want to run their credit card down at the porn store?
The machines charge about 30% more than the current trading price for gold
Yeah, that seem about right, considering the level of logic in most of the "we must return to the gold standard" posts I've seen. They may actually manage to make this a viable enterprise.
I now present several guest posters who will now provide examples of just the posts I mean.
Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear. I'm not saying she doesn't have to turn over evidence. I'm saying that there's no need for the drive to somehow have information on it that somehow exonerates her. But it should would help.
She doesn't. But if does provide her hard drive and it provides evidence that conflicts with the RIAA evidence, it is more likely to throw the RIAA evidence into doubt.
It's kind of like an alibi. You don't have to have an alibi. But if they have a photo of someone who looks just like you from the security camera of a robbed bank and someone reports a getaway car with the same model as yours, having a strong alibi will go a long way towards defusing that evidence.
1% of those denied the ability to pick their child's sex at the embryo stage will leave a baby in a dumpster
You pretty much invalidated the entire rest of your argument with this. First, do you think that 1% of babies being left in the dumpster is acceptable? Wouldn't you want to avoid that. Second, by your own admission, the number of people who could afford sex selection is very low, so outlawing it wouldn't actually made a dent in the overall societal problem of higher male to female ratio. And dumping a baby in a dumpster is already illegal.
I give up on arguing with you. You are impervious to both fact and logical deduction.
First off, you're totally muddling up things that aren't comparable. Robbing someone is bad because you deprived the robbed person of their money. Killing someone is bad because you take away their life. Destroying an early embryo (at least to me and a lot of other people) is not any more "bad" than having a tooth pulled. So now you're back down to indirect effects, not direct ones.
Allowing sex selection of embryos to prevent later abortions while at the same time working on the fundamental problems driving the preference of one sex would be a much better idea to both address the problems of the society and to prevent an actual "bad" thing (abortion of later term babies).
This is a much better solution than outlawing the sex selection of embryos, while not being able to outlaw sex selection via abortion (without outlawing abortion altogether). Because in either case you get the loveless miserable men you are so worried about, but in one case you get that and you get a bunch of aborted late term babies.
Your preference would almost literally throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I completely disagree that they don't matter to the topic. You have a few different effects of the issue of embryonic selection: 1) the effect on the embryo that is chosen, 2) the effect on the embryos that are not chosen, 3) the effect on society.
You've address #1 and #3 but left out #2. That's what part of my post was addressing.
So, lets get to #1 and #3. Take the real world example of India. The simple fact was that women were considered a burden there because the parents had to pay an expensive dowry for their marriage. So they aborted them when they found out they'd be girls, or just murdered the babies after being born. They already have laws against sexual selection, but they did no good at reducing the problem.
So, basically, the society is already fucked. They need to do other things to fix it, not just trying to treat the symptom.
Okay, I'll go ahead and make a moral argument for you. Well, at least one that isn't IMMORAL.
In IVF as it exists today, multiple embryos are produced because the success rate isn't 100% (much like the success rate of regular pregnancies, many ending in miscarriage). So you wind up with this handful of embryos that are viable. The doctor picks one to implant first. They are all viable, so there is no basis to pick one over the other. Or is there? If the couple says "try a boy first", is this immoral?
I would argue that it is morally neutral. As long as they don't try every boy embryo and when they run out, destroy all the girl embryos and start over.
Okay, so take it a step further, what if they ARE going to create embryos and destroy the ones that are girls. Well, this depends on your belief in what makes someone human and where the line (distinct or fuzzy) is. Your little toe is not human, but it's not unreasonable to think that within 100 years we could make a clone from you using only your little toe. We wouldn't consider someone cutting off their own toe as immoral, yet a toe has orders of magnitude more cells than any of these embryos do.
To me, this is no more "immoral" a choice as a couple who decides to keep trying to get pregnant after a couple of miscarriages. And in fact, in those you are much more likely to have crossed that fuzzy line into humanity when they lose the baby.
Except that, depending on your beliefs, there's a point between conception and birth where a person eventually becomes human. If you believe a structure containing a few hundred cells is no more human than a wart, then destroying it is in no way equivalent to murder and your analogy does not hold.
However, the alternative in countries like China is that parents will carry the child to term and kill it after it has been born, at a stage where pretty much everyone considers it human.
Thus, by outlawing something that's not murder, you encourage an outcome ending in murder.
Claiming that there simply is no god, is just as a religious statement as saying there is one. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of god).
You know, I consider myself an agnostic rather than an atheist. But it doesn't take a fundamental change of your statement to make it seem rather silly:
Claiming that there simply are no leprechauns, is just as superstitious a statement as saying there are. You're believing in something with no proof (the non-existence of leprechauns).
Would you also hold this statement to be true?
But when their pre-implantation diagnostic services began including the baby's eye and hair color, even the Pope objected
I'm pretty sure the Pope was objecting the entire time. Last year, they even made it official company policy that IVF=abortion.
There ain't no such beast as legitimate telemarketing.
Main Entry:
1 legitimate
[...]
3 a: accordant with law or with established legal forms and requirements
I think the word you're looking for is "ethical", or, possibly, "nice".
The physics behind the warpship is purely theoretical, however. 'Dark energy' needs to be understood and harnessed, plus vast amounts of energy needs to be generated, meaning the warpship is a technology that could only be conceived in the far future. That said, Dr. Obousy's warpship design uses our current knowledge of spacetime and superstring theory to arrive at this futuristic concept.
Translation: We have a theory based on a lack of theory.
You had me, right up until the FDA part. They haven't exactly been a model of competence.
All this beating up on the NSA is fun and stuff, but are we really complaining that we don't have a competent domestic spying agency? We've already proven as a society to be incapable of electing a majority of leaders that respect privacy and are willing to give up a little temporary safety for essential liberty. So would it actually make us happy to have a bunch of g-men who are intelligent when it comes to new technology and could really fully exploit all the powers of databases and networks and algorithms to spy on us in an incredibly thorough manner?
I'm not sure what the point of your continued posts are, considering you're arguing a different point that I was talking about. I simply pointed out how the more titles are available, the less likely it is that I'll pick any one title at random (example being the itunes app store). As such, I'm afraid I really have very little interest in reading the rest of your post.
So what you are saying is it's easier for me to find your book on your website when I've never heard of either than to find it on amazon which already has [...]
Nope, didn't say that. It was in response to the previous poster who wrote,
Attention. If I can look at and search for thousands of books in one place, I am more likely to notice your book if it is there.
The most effective way to get people to notice your books isn't just by listing them on Amazon. It's through a lot of other advertising methods. Unless either of us has a study to back this up, we're just going off of opinion. My opinion is that the number of people that buy an author based on those things you listed is very low. It helps Amazon in that it probably sells some number of books, but for any given author, I'm guessing the fraction of sales driven by these methods is negligible.
All that said, I never wrote that you should NOT be on Amazon. I simply pointed out that just being on Amazon isn't what's going to drive your book sales.
Works the same either way I view it, in FF or IE. As mentioned above, it's probably pulling your CSS from a cache from before they fixed it.
Could be that they fixed the numbers/bullet points. Another AC said "What is with those carriage return looking bullet points, anyway?" What about the indent? Was the explanation what I said?
Yes, it's all those "extensions" I have installed in IE7, eh?
When you say "not on slashdot", do you mean some other time than now? This would seem true given your "keeps breaking it" comment. But it's still a bit unclear. I note that the following code produces the proper auto-numbered result:
As far as the indent level goes, the left edges of the text in both lists' items line up with each other. Since the numbers with periods and the single dot take up different amounts of space, the overall left edge for the unordered one does look indented. I'm not sure which way I'd actually prefer it. The HTML spec may actually say it should be that way. In any case, it isn't slashdot, it's your browser. Just try editing a plain-jane html file with both types of lists and you'll get the same result even without slashdot's css. I find both FF3 and IE7 format it the same way.
Perhaps this is all a browser problem? Are you still not seeing auto-numbered lists?
Wait, what? Did you not listen to the commentary on the Futurama DVDs? It's an incredibly expensive show to make - the most expensive animated show of all time. It takes nine months to make an episode. That's nine months of labor, plus all the cost for doing all the 3d effects they do. We're talking about in the ballpark of a million dollars per episode.
Now, Adult Swim was great in playing all the reruns of Futurama. But they paid 10 million dollars to rerun the hell out of 72 episodes. That's chump change compared to how much it costs to actually make original episodes. Do you think Cartoon Network was willing to shell out the kind of money that they need to even just cover costs?
Not bloody likely. That's not in the profit model of Cartoon Network. Yes, they are a business just like all the other channels.
So if you want to support Futurama, then be realistic and realize that this has nothing to do with not showing gratitude to Adult Swim. Having Comedy Central shell out for new episodes of Futurama will actually help Adult Swim, as now they'll be able to buy the reruns for those. It's win-win! Turning your back on Comedy Central in effect is also screwing over Adult Swim.
Your comment might be taken more seriously if you weren't making it about a company that makes an average of $14 billion in pure profit per year with an average profit margin of 25% across all its revenue.
Okay, you decide it's too expensive to continue to pay American taxes, that's fine.
BTW, we've decided it's too expensive to continue to enforce your copyright on Windows.