But if I remember correctly, once the keyboard was pointed out to him, he was able to type quite rapidly. So I'm guessing that keyboards must still be used in the 23rd century.
As someone who's done a lot of canoeing (human-powered, not motorized), I wonder how stable the pictured solar powered canoe is. Those panels sticking up like they are look likely to cause the canoe to flip over if they were to catch a strong gust of wind.
I keep hearing this inane banter from the right day after day. Put up or shut up.
My my. Hostile, aren't we?
What evidence or analysis do you have that backs up your statement?
What statement in particular are you talking about? If you're referring to my statement about the corrupt French, Russians, or Chinese, please do us all a favor and read up on the fabled U.N. Oil For Food program. This is what we can look forward to if we abdicate our national responsibility to the U.N. as Kerry would have us do.
Senator Kerry has 3 purple hearts, a silver star and a bronze star.
Please remind me, is this war hero of yours, John Kerry, the same guy who can't decide if he's for the war on Iraq or against it? I quote: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Bush can't even account for his days at the Texas Air National Refuge for Rich Boys.
This is a non-issue, pathetic really. How about important issues?
Bush has since reversed himself and is in a much weaker negotiating position than Clinton left him with.
On Korea, I can't believe you would try to claim that Clinton's Korea policies were working. The minute after Clinton's administration made the agreement with the North Koreans, they started cheating on the agreement. We lost all credibility and face by this misguided attempt to appease the Kim regime.
I didn't actually hear what you think we should do about N. Korea...do you have a plan? I haven't heard one from Kerry either. Funny how that works.
Your inability to refute facts and analysis with any of your own just proves that you are as foolish as he is.
Again, why so hostile? And what's with the personal attacks? You don't even know me. Do you make it a habit to personally attack anyone who doesn't agree with your point of view?
Parroting the Faux News party line doesn't prove anything!
I don't watch Fox News. But as for you, parroting the NPR/NY Times party line doesn't prove anything to me, either!
Your belief that those of us that oppose this idiot Bush will cower, is ignorant. We won't cower from terrorist or Bush. We will take them both on and we will win.
I call B.S. Vote Democrat if you want to become a nation of thumb-twiddlers and hand-wringers. Vote for Bush if you want our nation to stick up for itself and not wait for the corrupt French, Russians, or Chinese to give us permission to actually do something about the Islamic militant threat.
Consider also their foreign policy which consists of dropping as many bombs as quickly as possible. In the short run, yes, it'll quiet the world. However, the damage done to the reputation of the US in the world will probably not be repaired in the next 2 decades.
As opposed to the Clinton era foreign policy, which was to pretend that lobbing a few cruise missiles now and then would "make America safer", when all it really did was embolden the Islamic militants by giving them the impression that the US is just a paper tiger? Is that what you would prefer--a US that cowers like the Spaniards or Filipinos? Because that's what you'll get if Kerry is elected.
You obviously feel pretty strongly about this, and there's probably little I can say that will change your mind. I doubt you really mean to come across as being such a hateful and intolerant person, but you might want to examine where all the anger you have is coming from, and ask yourself if you're truly happy with your life.
Half of you religious nuts believe it's questionable if clones have souls anyway right?
Who's a nut? You've got it all wrong. Most Christians (I don't know about other religions) who oppose cloning do so because in most cases, the proponents of cloning do not place any value on the life of the cloned individual. Christians believe that all people have a soul, including those created by cloning, and that's why efforts to create clones for harvesting (e.g., "therapeutic cloning") are so vigorously opposed.
The argument that we don't know how developed the child must be to survive outside he womb so we have to assume conception is ridiculous. We know fairly well how long, and we know that it's WAY after conception and far far closer to 9months. If you remove artificial means simulating some of the conditions of the womb and keeping the baby alive it's birth and sometimes not even then.
Actually, babies that are born as early as 19 weeks are sometimes saved. I personally know the parents of a baby who was born at 24 weeks and is doing fine today. Since full term is 39 weeks, you do the math.
As to the argument about "artificial means simulating some of the conditions of the womb and keeping the baby alive"...if you are contending that a baby is not human if any artificial means must be taken to keep it alive, then I suppose you would also (logically) have to deny the legal status of anyone who is supported by artificial means. This would include anyone who is on a ventilator, dialysis machine, pacemaker, etc.
You know, even healthy babies are totally dependent on their parents for food & water. In general, being dependent on others is really an integral part of being human, so arguments that deny a baby's humanity based on a perceived lack of independence don't really hold much weight, in my opinion.
I second this recommendation. This is exactly what I do for my home email server (on Roadrunner cable) and my church's email server (on Onvoy DSL). Both email servers are using QMail.
The only possible negative I see to relaying through your ISP's SMTP server is that it introduces another possible point of failure, but that seems to be an acceptable tradeoff.
This is a complete straw man argument, no one here was (seriously at least) arguing that one should bring a cell to term to harvest it
It's not really a straw man argument so much as it is an attempt to focus the discussion to what I believe is the central issue: whether or not an embryo is a human being who should enjoy life & liberty.
By presenting a case that nearly everyone will agree is unethical (the killing of a six year old child for its parts), the reader is forced to consider why they find this unethical. Most would agree it is unethical because the child is a human being and that murder is wrong. So then, why is it ok to kill the embryo? Either you believe that the embryo is non-human, so it's ok to kill it, or you believe that it's human, in which case killing it would be murder.
The cloning debate is in fact very similar to the abortion debate: all the arguments that people put forth about choice, unwanted children, rape, incest, etc. are actually distractions from the important question that must be answered: whether or not an embryo or fetus is human. Once that is determined, the argument is over.
Yes, the end result of the cloning process is supposed to be an organ like a heart or lung, but part of the process involves creating an embryo and extracting the needed stem cells from that embryo. The stem cells are then used, in theory, to create the organ. But the embryo does not survive this procedure. That's why many people find the whole process to be unethical.
Adult stem cell research also has a lot of promise, yet avoids the ethical problems inherent in embryonic stem cell research. In that case stem cells are extracted from adults without harming the subject.
No, it doesn't [beg the question]. Go back and study your logical fallacies.
Technically, you are right, it "raises the question", not "begs the question". But from what I understand, popular usage of "begs the question" now includes both circular argument (classical "begging the question") and raising the question, and so I think most people understand what is meant by the phrase.
See the Wikipedia article for more info. Specifically, the first paragraph, which reads: "Begging the question, in modern popular usage, is almost always synonymous with raising the question."
Ouch. But how is your attitude any different from mine? In other words, aren't you being just as pigheaded? Or do you always resort to name calling when you can't think of any good arguments?
Incorrect. Human life does not begin until the life is recognizable as a human. By definition. But not your definition.
Please enlighten me as to the source of your definition of human life. And how would one go about determining if life is "recognizable as human"?
Infants and fetuses that can not think for themselves and are not yet sentient and are not yet people. They don't reason, think, love, remember the past or look to the future or do anything else that we asociate with personhood.
So you would approve of killing infants, then? If not, why? Doesn't your logic lead to that conclusion?
No, I don't want to argue about evolution. But the phrase "designed by evolution" still seems strange. After all, how does design happen without a designer, which evolution specifically leaves out? Unless you're making an analogy to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand?
I think the reason many people, like myself, believe that human being begins at conception is because that is first point in time when you can point to something and say, "Look! Here is a person! This is when you or I began!" Everything genetically is present at that point, in the fertilized egg, to create the entire human body. The sperm or egg do not in themselves comprise a human being because they're only building blocks.
I certainly think it's reasonable to have doubts about this...after all, the human embryo is not very recognizable as a human being in its early stages. But I think that if you are willing to undertake a careful examination of the facts, if you have a genuine respect for human life, and if you are willing to take the cautious path, you might find yourself coming to the same conclusion as I have.
We can currently get human skin cells to grow in a lab but no one argues that they are human.: No, no one argues that they are human because the natural end result of skin cells growing is never a human being, but just a mass of skin. The end result of a fertilized egg growing, however, is a living breathing fully grown human being like you or me.
I have a real hard time with considering a group of 12 cells a 'human' any more than I would consider an unfertilized egg that gets flushed out with menstruation a human.: Why do you have a hard time with it? There is a fundamental difference between an unfertilized egg and a fertizilized egg.
Would you consider a chimpanzee nucleus in a human egg human? A human nucleus in a chimpanzee egg human? : The question would be, what would the end result be? Would you have a human being or a chimpanzee at the end? Once you've answered that (and I don't know enough to know the answer), you've determined what you will consider the fertilized egg.
In all these cases, it would seem to me that the consensus on the humanity of the embryo is uncertain at best: we cannot agree on whether or not the embryo is a human being. In that case, shouldn't we take the safest approach, which would be to err on the side of caution? Isn't that what we normally do in other areas of science or life in general?
For example, pretend that you are a hunter and you are out in the woods waiting for a deer to walk by. Say you see something moving in the woods a long distance off. Do you just assume that that something moving must be a deer and go ahead and shoot it? Or do you refrain from shooting until you are certain that it is a deer? I think it's obvious, you don't shoot until you are sure--you don't want to accidentally kill a fellow hunter by being too hasty. Why shouldn't we take the same approach in the debate over cloning?
"The newly made embryo is not, IMO, a person, because it cannot become one unless some very specific conditions are met.": By this argument, all embryos are non-persons, not just the cloned ones. Which is what I was trying to say: there is no practical difference between cloned embryos and those created the natural way.
But on the argument of whether or not the embryo actually is a person, why should the necessity of a specific environment for survival disqualify the embryo from inclusion in the human race? After all, we all are dependent on an oxygen atmosphere, water, food, etc.
So you're saying that your life and liberty are contingent on others wanting you to exist? If you are not wanted by anyone, then you are not human? Scary.
I guarantee you, if you learn that stem cell research could have saved the life of your dying child or your dying spouse, you would change your mind on this topic very quickly.: How can you be so sure of what I would do? My convictions in this area are strong. I would no sooner condone cloning to save my daughter or wife's lives than I would condone the killing of a fully grown man, woman, or child to save them.
There is an opportunity to save and enhance countless lives, but you say that because this is murder in your eyes (as I'm sure abortion is too), this ought to be illegal, and people ought to continue suffering.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying! I don't like to see anyone suffering, and I think we should do everything we can to stop disease and suffering, but we must not do so at the purposeful expense of others.
As an exercise, just imagine for a minute that everyone agreed that killing a human embryo was murder (I realize that this is not the consensus today, but just pretend it is for the sake of this thought experiment). In that case, would you still condone the killing, on the grounds that it was helping to relieve others' suffering?
If you would still agree to it, then you have a utilitarian worldview, one that says it's ok to sacrifice some people to save others (as long as the math works out), and you and I have very little in common philosophically.
If you would not agree to it, then you and I are not so far apart after all...we just have not yet come to agreement on the definition of human life.
And that's really the central issue in any of the issues like cloning, abortion, euthanasia: what is the definition of a human being?
Did you RTFA or just have a knee jerk reaction?: Yes I did read the article, but I was referring to the throwaway statement "Beneficial therapeutic cloning" from the next to last sentence of the story summary.
These were not even 'fertilized' cells... they were unfertilized eggs: If they were unfertilized, then how did they manage to grow them? I quote from the article:
"After being grown in culture for a few days, this clone can yield embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any of the body's tissues."
That sure sounds like a fertilized egg to me. I've never heard of an unfertilized egg growing, have you? Or look at it this way: if these "unfertilized eggs", as you call them, were to be implanted in a uterus, would they not grow and eventually be born as infants?
Besides, what's more reminiscent of Nazi policy: killing unthinking organic tissue, or stifling technology/science/culture?: What I find most reminiscent of Nazi policy is the deliberate dehumanization of an entire class of human beings (just as you have done with your use of the phrase "unthinking organic tissue") and then taking advantage of the dehumanized class for scientific gain.
Slashdot Mirror
But if I remember correctly, once the keyboard was pointed out to him, he was able to type quite rapidly. So I'm guessing that keyboards must still be used in the 23rd century.
As someone who's done a lot of canoeing (human-powered, not motorized), I wonder how stable the pictured solar powered canoe is. Those panels sticking up like they are look likely to cause the canoe to flip over if they were to catch a strong gust of wind.
I keep hearing this inane banter from the right day after day. Put up or shut up.
My my. Hostile, aren't we?
What evidence or analysis do you have that backs up your statement?
What statement in particular are you talking about? If you're referring to my statement about the corrupt French, Russians, or Chinese, please do us all a favor and read up on the fabled U.N. Oil For Food program. This is what we can look forward to if we abdicate our national responsibility to the U.N. as Kerry would have us do.
Senator Kerry has 3 purple hearts, a silver star and a bronze star.
Please remind me, is this war hero of yours, John Kerry, the same guy who can't decide if he's for the war on Iraq or against it? I quote: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Bush can't even account for his days at the Texas Air National Refuge for Rich Boys.
This is a non-issue, pathetic really. How about important issues?
Bush has since reversed himself and is in a much weaker negotiating position than Clinton left him with.
On Korea, I can't believe you would try to claim that Clinton's Korea policies were working. The minute after Clinton's administration made the agreement with the North Koreans, they started cheating on the agreement. We lost all credibility and face by this misguided attempt to appease the Kim regime.
I didn't actually hear what you think we should do about N. Korea...do you have a plan? I haven't heard one from Kerry either. Funny how that works.
Your inability to refute facts and analysis with any of your own just proves that you are as foolish as he is.
Again, why so hostile? And what's with the personal attacks? You don't even know me. Do you make it a habit to personally attack anyone who doesn't agree with your point of view?
Parroting the Faux News party line doesn't prove anything!
I don't watch Fox News. But as for you, parroting the NPR/NY Times party line doesn't prove anything to me, either!
Your belief that those of us that oppose this idiot Bush will cower, is ignorant. We won't cower from terrorist or Bush. We will take them both on and we will win.
I call B.S. Vote Democrat if you want to become a nation of thumb-twiddlers and hand-wringers. Vote for Bush if you want our nation to stick up for itself and not wait for the corrupt French, Russians, or Chinese to give us permission to actually do something about the Islamic militant threat.
Consider also their foreign policy which consists of dropping as many bombs as quickly as possible. In the short run, yes, it'll quiet the world. However, the damage done to the reputation of the US in the world will probably not be repaired in the next 2 decades.
As opposed to the Clinton era foreign policy, which was to pretend that lobbing a few cruise missiles now and then would "make America safer", when all it really did was embolden the Islamic militants by giving them the impression that the US is just a paper tiger? Is that what you would prefer--a US that cowers like the Spaniards or Filipinos? Because that's what you'll get if Kerry is elected.
You obviously feel pretty strongly about this, and there's probably little I can say that will change your mind. I doubt you really mean to come across as being such a hateful and intolerant person, but you might want to examine where all the anger you have is coming from, and ask yourself if you're truly happy with your life.
We all need a purpose in life...what is yours?
So you're saying that unless I accept anything and everything done by "science", I cannot accept any single thing? That's patently absurd!
If that's what you believe, it sounds like you have turned your back on traditional religion and instead joined a cult of science instead.
Half of you religious nuts believe it's questionable if clones have souls anyway right?
Who's a nut? You've got it all wrong. Most Christians (I don't know about other religions) who oppose cloning do so because in most cases, the proponents of cloning do not place any value on the life of the cloned individual. Christians believe that all people have a soul, including those created by cloning, and that's why efforts to create clones for harvesting (e.g., "therapeutic cloning") are so vigorously opposed.
The argument that we don't know how developed the child must be to survive outside he womb so we have to assume conception is ridiculous. We know fairly well how long, and we know that it's WAY after conception and far far closer to 9months. If you remove artificial means simulating some of the conditions of the womb and keeping the baby alive it's birth and sometimes not even then.
Actually, babies that are born as early as 19 weeks are sometimes saved. I personally know the parents of a baby who was born at 24 weeks and is doing fine today. Since full term is 39 weeks, you do the math.
As to the argument about "artificial means simulating some of the conditions of the womb and keeping the baby alive"...if you are contending that a baby is not human if any artificial means must be taken to keep it alive, then I suppose you would also (logically) have to deny the legal status of anyone who is supported by artificial means. This would include anyone who is on a ventilator, dialysis machine, pacemaker, etc.
You know, even healthy babies are totally dependent on their parents for food & water. In general, being dependent on others is really an integral part of being human, so arguments that deny a baby's humanity based on a perceived lack of independence don't really hold much weight, in my opinion.
Never underestimate the human capacity for greed.
I second this recommendation. This is exactly what I do for my home email server (on Roadrunner cable) and my church's email server (on Onvoy DSL). Both email servers are using QMail.
The only possible negative I see to relaying through your ISP's SMTP server is that it introduces another possible point of failure, but that seems to be an acceptable tradeoff.
This is a complete straw man argument, no one here was (seriously at least) arguing that one should bring a cell to term to harvest it
It's not really a straw man argument so much as it is an attempt to focus the discussion to what I believe is the central issue: whether or not an embryo is a human being who should enjoy life & liberty.
By presenting a case that nearly everyone will agree is unethical (the killing of a six year old child for its parts), the reader is forced to consider why they find this unethical. Most would agree it is unethical because the child is a human being and that murder is wrong. So then, why is it ok to kill the embryo? Either you believe that the embryo is non-human, so it's ok to kill it, or you believe that it's human, in which case killing it would be murder.
The cloning debate is in fact very similar to the abortion debate: all the arguments that people put forth about choice, unwanted children, rape, incest, etc. are actually distractions from the important question that must be answered: whether or not an embryo or fetus is human. Once that is determined, the argument is over.
Yes, the end result of the cloning process is supposed to be an organ like a heart or lung, but part of the process involves creating an embryo and extracting the needed stem cells from that embryo. The stem cells are then used, in theory, to create the organ. But the embryo does not survive this procedure. That's why many people find the whole process to be unethical.
Adult stem cell research also has a lot of promise, yet avoids the ethical problems inherent in embryonic stem cell research. In that case stem cells are extracted from adults without harming the subject.
This Wikipedia article might be instructive.
No, it doesn't [beg the question]. Go back and study your logical fallacies.
Technically, you are right, it "raises the question", not "begs the question". But from what I understand, popular usage of "begs the question" now includes both circular argument (classical "begging the question") and raising the question, and so I think most people understand what is meant by the phrase.
See the Wikipedia article for more info. Specifically, the first paragraph, which reads: "Begging the question, in modern popular usage, is almost always synonymous with raising the question."
pigheaded
Ouch. But how is your attitude any different from mine? In other words, aren't you being just as pigheaded? Or do you always resort to name calling when you can't think of any good arguments?
Incorrect. Human life does not begin until the life is recognizable as a human. By definition. But not your definition.
Please enlighten me as to the source of your definition of human life. And how would one go about determining if life is "recognizable as human"?
Infants and fetuses that can not think for themselves and are not yet sentient and are not yet people. They don't reason, think, love, remember the past or look to the future or do anything else that we asociate with personhood.
So you would approve of killing infants, then? If not, why? Doesn't your logic lead to that conclusion?
No, I don't want to argue about evolution. But the phrase "designed by evolution" still seems strange. After all, how does design happen without a designer, which evolution specifically leaves out? Unless you're making an analogy to Adam Smith's Invisible Hand?
I think the reason many people, like myself, believe that human being begins at conception is because that is first point in time when you can point to something and say, "Look! Here is a person! This is when you or I began!" Everything genetically is present at that point, in the fertilized egg, to create the entire human body. The sperm or egg do not in themselves comprise a human being because they're only building blocks.
I certainly think it's reasonable to have doubts about this...after all, the human embryo is not very recognizable as a human being in its early stages. But I think that if you are willing to undertake a careful examination of the facts, if you have a genuine respect for human life, and if you are willing to take the cautious path, you might find yourself coming to the same conclusion as I have.
"We were never designed by evolution to live as long as we do."
What on earth is "designed by evolution" supposed to mean?
We can currently get human skin cells to grow in a lab but no one argues that they are human.: No, no one argues that they are human because the natural end result of skin cells growing is never a human being, but just a mass of skin. The end result of a fertilized egg growing, however, is a living breathing fully grown human being like you or me.
I have a real hard time with considering a group of 12 cells a 'human' any more than I would consider an unfertilized egg that gets flushed out with menstruation a human.: Why do you have a hard time with it? There is a fundamental difference between an unfertilized egg and a fertizilized egg.
Would you consider a chimpanzee nucleus in a human egg human? A human nucleus in a chimpanzee egg human? : The question would be, what would the end result be? Would you have a human being or a chimpanzee at the end? Once you've answered that (and I don't know enough to know the answer), you've determined what you will consider the fertilized egg.
In all these cases, it would seem to me that the consensus on the humanity of the embryo is uncertain at best: we cannot agree on whether or not the embryo is a human being. In that case, shouldn't we take the safest approach, which would be to err on the side of caution? Isn't that what we normally do in other areas of science or life in general?
For example, pretend that you are a hunter and you are out in the woods waiting for a deer to walk by. Say you see something moving in the woods a long distance off. Do you just assume that that something moving must be a deer and go ahead and shoot it? Or do you refrain from shooting until you are certain that it is a deer? I think it's obvious, you don't shoot until you are sure--you don't want to accidentally kill a fellow hunter by being too hasty. Why shouldn't we take the same approach in the debate over cloning?
"The newly made embryo is not, IMO, a person, because it cannot become one unless some very specific conditions are met.": By this argument, all embryos are non-persons, not just the cloned ones. Which is what I was trying to say: there is no practical difference between cloned embryos and those created the natural way.
But on the argument of whether or not the embryo actually is a person, why should the necessity of a specific environment for survival disqualify the embryo from inclusion in the human race? After all, we all are dependent on an oxygen atmosphere, water, food, etc.
So you're saying that your life and liberty are contingent on others wanting you to exist? If you are not wanted by anyone, then you are not human? Scary.
I guarantee you, if you learn that stem cell research could have saved the life of your dying child or your dying spouse, you would change your mind on this topic very quickly.: How can you be so sure of what I would do? My convictions in this area are strong. I would no sooner condone cloning to save my daughter or wife's lives than I would condone the killing of a fully grown man, woman, or child to save them.
There is an opportunity to save and enhance countless lives, but you say that because this is murder in your eyes (as I'm sure abortion is too), this ought to be illegal, and people ought to continue suffering.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying! I don't like to see anyone suffering, and I think we should do everything we can to stop disease and suffering, but we must not do so at the purposeful expense of others.
As an exercise, just imagine for a minute that everyone agreed that killing a human embryo was murder (I realize that this is not the consensus today, but just pretend it is for the sake of this thought experiment). In that case, would you still condone the killing, on the grounds that it was helping to relieve others' suffering?
If you would still agree to it, then you have a utilitarian worldview, one that says it's ok to sacrifice some people to save others (as long as the math works out), and you and I have very little in common philosophically.
If you would not agree to it, then you and I are not so far apart after all...we just have not yet come to agreement on the definition of human life.
And that's really the central issue in any of the issues like cloning, abortion, euthanasia: what is the definition of a human being?
Did you RTFA or just have a knee jerk reaction?: Yes I did read the article, but I was referring to the throwaway statement "Beneficial therapeutic cloning" from the next to last sentence of the story summary.
These were not even 'fertilized' cells... they were unfertilized eggs: If they were unfertilized, then how did they manage to grow them? I quote from the article:
"After being grown in culture for a few days, this clone can yield embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any of the body's tissues."
That sure sounds like a fertilized egg to me. I've never heard of an unfertilized egg growing, have you? Or look at it this way: if these "unfertilized eggs", as you call them, were to be implanted in a uterus, would they not grow and eventually be born as infants?
Besides, what's more reminiscent of Nazi policy: killing unthinking organic tissue, or stifling technology/science/culture?: What I find most reminiscent of Nazi policy is the deliberate dehumanization of an entire class of human beings (just as you have done with your use of the phrase "unthinking organic tissue") and then taking advantage of the dehumanized class for scientific gain.