Not really...
For example, When Chrysler and Dailmer merged, did they drop redudant lines, and stop production of cars that compete with our products of the new merged company? You bet.
Second, MS did not purchase this other maker to "stop them from making producting for a competing operating system". Clearly, MS purchased them for their head-start on MS's own platform. It actually does make a difference.
Third and finally, one thing to note is that when the DOJ's consent decree with MS expires it will no longer be assumed that MS is a monopoly to the DOJ, meaning anything that requires that for a basis will have to be litigated from scratch, with MS being proven a monpoly in desktop OS's. With the state of the market it will prove prodigiously hard to prove that: between Linux and Mac Windows pretty clearly does not have a monopoly.
Do we have to keep repeating the untrue assertion that Microsoft is using the BSD TCP/IP stack in NT.
Did Microsoft have a BSD derived TCP/IP stack in NT? Yes, during the NT 3.1 days. Not any more. Gah!
It was, and continues to be, based on the BSD implementation (as are most implementations of any TCP stack; it's almost a reference implementation).
It's not like they copied tcp.c and ip.c into the windows codebase or anything.
It's a question of your goals. Many of the people pushing the GPL have three major things going on, (1) they want to promote the software, and GPL is good at that; many hands = quality, quantity, etc; (2) they want to promote a political and/or social philosophy and force down the costs of computing, software, and business; and (3) they want to take down Microsoft, and if possible, be famous doing it.
Which are all fine, valid goals. Great. Good for them. Happy for them.
The BSD people have a different goal. They want to write software that is suitable for a specific goal within certain parameters. And they want that code to actually be used as widely as possible. It's not about ego (Theo not withstanding), it's not about credit, it's not about changing the status of things, it's about doing something specific. And at the end of the day that's what the BSD style license is great for. Microsoft based their NT stack on BSD code. It's not about ego - it's about the fact that millions of users are using a much better TCP stack that is designed and produced to a much higher standard than was in place before. The people who wrote that stack aren't out bragging, they know that the work they did has advanced their goal of the Internet using quality software implementations.
GPL loves, go for it. Do #1, #2, and #3. But don't be pissed about the BSD people. They aren't much interested in #2 or #3, and that's good not just for GPL or BSD or Unix people, but for *everyone*.
I've been considering going to a whitelist only system.. Everyone I know gets on a whitelist, and my personal website/webpage will have a CAPTCHA and a way to suggest your name onto my whitelist.
Pratical for me? Yes, but I wonder how well it would apply to other users.
AOL actually does a good job filtering SPAM. I can't imagine AOL being used to send any significant amount of SPAM at this point, and it does a fine job of filtering incoming SPAM.
Bullshit. Support contracts are huge profit centers for most software companies.
Not the Applecare or MS Support costs that were mentioned above. I've discovered a bug in SQL Server 2000 before, and the call would have cost me $295 (had it not been waived). Fixing that bug I am sure took more than a few minutes, meaning they would have "lost money" on that $295 deal.
Charge for a support contract, that's what everyone does already. You want MS to fix something after your 90 days, you pay. You want Apple to fix something after your 90 days, you pay - its called Applecare.
Not if it's a bug, you don't. If it's a bug, there is no charge for MS or Apple. None.
And the costs of the support don't come close to covering a big bug fix or rush patch job.
Invalid concept; presupposes false economy. The time spent on the fixes is time that would have been spent in the first place by the engineers had they done a proper job.
No, you are wrong here. Fixing a bug after the fact, engineering a patch, testing, etc is more time expensive then doing it right in the first place. This is a lost opportunity.
Perhaps they were top-flight engineers who, like all humans, made an honest mistake. Perhaps they were top-flight engineers who were being pressured by senior management to, "get something out the door making money now and worry about the details later." Whatever the reason for the bug, it's engineering time that is inextricably part of the product, whether you choose to "spend" it or not.
It doesn't matter the reason. It matters the cost. The claim was the there are no additional costs for software after it ships - just distribution. Which is false. Even if you have the best staff, with all the time and resources, you will have either (1) miscellanous bugs, or (2) unpaid demands made by customers and agreed to over the heads of engineers. It happens all the time. But either way it's time spent, and therefore, opportunity lost.
Whatever the reason for the bug, it's engineering time that is inextricably part of the product, whether you choose to "spend" it or not.
I guess i am missing your argument. I am saying this costs money, after the initial development. It's a cost, after the product has shipped. Are arguing that?
I'm sure your point of view makes perfect sense from a business/accounting/shareholder standpoint. But from the perspective of an engineer, or even simple human decency, it stinks.
Maybe I missed something.
I suggest maybe you spend some time in the trenches of the software industry. You statement is laughable on it's face.
]additional[/i] software sales is if they sold the software for less than the price of delivery
Wrong, just plain wrong.
Software today has a cost that grows with each copy sold. Software today is virtually never "done".
Prime example: you have 100 users of a software package, and you sell it. A user finds a security bug. You fix it in a few days, test it, and e-mail the users the fix. Problem solved. No extra cost.
Now, you have 8 million users. A user find a security bug. You fix it in a few days, and 8 million users download it from your site. The patch is only 250K, small by most standards, that's a big chunk of bandwidth. You are obligated to support that patch. It breaks some stuff. Your phone lines are jammed. People are pissed. But still, it cost you nothing other than a few bucks in bandwidth and maybe a little goodwill.
Wrong in both cases. In both cases the person doing the fixes lost the opportunity to do other work. The time spent on the fixes is lost forever to the engineers. If it is a really significant bug it could take dozens or a hundred people to prepare the fix - from programmers to testers to QA to legal to webmasters to documentation experts to channel partners to vendors to hardware suppliers to PR. All of which has a significant and non-trivial cost. Meanwhile, while your users are calling support - even if rare - your phone people are denied the opportunity to help another user which has a ral cost.
"Pure profit minus distribution" may have been true when software was updated once every 2 years, if that. But today, between bugfixes, securtiy updates, feature "fixes", etc software is not "done". It is very much an ongoing effort.
Funny you should mention DDT... I can't quite make our your point.
Nanotech and nanomachines an have awesome properties and show huge potentional, however, the non-thinking super-critically charged activist landscape may end up damaging the long-term prospects of the technology.
DDT is, incidentally, a great example of what can happen when an issue becomes super heated. Without a doubt, DDT saved well-over 500 million lives in the 20th century.
A combination of cases of dramatic overuse (hundreds or thousands the recommended dosage) and widespread misinterpretation of solid scientific findings led to DDT being banned in the US, and to this day, it being fought in 3rd world nations by enviornmentalists and other activist groups.
Once people started singing songs about DDT being about stopping spots on apples and killing all the birds and the bees, the fight was over. By reasonable standards the dramatic health benefits of DDT far outweigh potential health side-effects, percieved or real (A good article here).
Anyways, if what happens to DDT happens to nanotech, we'll likely never get to see the potential of the science explored. Caution is called for, but the rate things are going it'll be outright banned within the decade.
That's for damn sure..
Xerox makes commerical printers that can easily print 180ppm, and other manufacturers do roll-feed printers that can produce sheets far faster than that.. depending on the models and whatnot you'd be looking at somewhere around 15-20k sheets/hr, or, 250 ppm.
That's your complete speculation, with no basis in established fact.
Let's say you have 100,000 users, and 1300 are lost. You can't just go back to the previous backup and overwrite any of the password changes, profile changes, etc that 100,000 users may have made in the last, say, 8 hrs. It would be very, very disruptive. So you have to first find just the deleted accounts, pull those from the backup, and then restore just those. Depending on your system/platform/application, that may not be possible. So okay, you write a script to insert the users back into the system. Great. But chances are some stuff is lost: passwords, password history, etc. Now you have to hand hold 1300 users resetting passwords, etc. And maybe that links to hundreds of different systems across the network. You really have no idea.
It could be a 5 minute deal, or it could take some skilled programmers days or weeks to properly fix. It all depends on many thousands of variables.
Just saying "go back to tape!" isn't always a viable option.
It's a volume game. You can't exist has a company selling CPUs in tiny volumes. Yield problems are a major concern in most fabs - you can't just make 1000 cores, you know? Fabricating a CPU uses dozens of machines in many many steps.
The thing that jobs is really saying is that he has no faith in the future of the POWER line, but he does have faith in the future of the x86 line. The P4 has many design limitations, but it hasn't maxed out it's design yet, which is a big fear for some regarding the POWER line.
The physical location shouldn't matter one whit... under Winnt\profiles, Windows\Desktop, or C:\Docu...\%username%, the path of any given file isn't really all that relevant to how the file is used, is it?
You are extremely naive. You probably haven't had sex yet, but I'd say you are in need of a good near-pregnancy scare or two. Even the most careful people have them now and then. It certainly makes you think about what you would do.
If you noticed, I started the thread. I have a daughter due in 4 weeks, who may have Downs, and the doctors have repeadetly urged us to terminate.
You're nuts if you can't differentiate between destroying a ball of tissue the size of a marble and killing fully-developed beings
The point is determining when that ball of tissue the size of a marble is a person is not an easy business.
Judging from the actual numbers, it looks to me like the majority (54%) of abortions are performed prior to 8 weeks of gestation, and especially before 10 weeks (77%).
First off, weeks of gestation is not what most people refer to as the age of the baby. When a doctor tells you how you are "8 weeks pregnant", he means that the fetal age is 6 weeks. This does have an affect on stats, as you can imagine.
Second off, I should have been more clear. I am talking, specifically in this thread, about terminations for reasons of defect. I understand that most abortions of unwanted pregnancies end very early, as you have noted. I am specifically referring to cases when a disability is warned of late, 18, 20, 22 weeks, etc and a decision is made then. These are almost always later than the first trimester due to the limits of technology and the fact that fetus is not developed enough to recognize a defect (or the defect hasn't formed yet).
I am not calling you or anyone a fascist baby killer.
I am saying three specific things:
1. People having unwanted babies aborted make me sad.
2. People aborting babies because they are less than perfect makes me sad.
3. It is a clear and slipperly slope when you start trying to draw an abitrary line of when it's okay to terminate. When exactly does that life become too human to terminate? You'd be fine with 20 weeks, as you mention. That's very odd. It's almost as if something magical happens between 19 weeks 5 days and 20 weeks. If it is compassionate to allow a person who is 19 6/7 weeks pregnant to terminate, is not cruel to deny another person the right to terminate only one day later?
Video gaming is a huge industry, bigger than music, bigger than movies, bigger than cellphones.
Freaking huge. Gigantic. Teens, young adults, adults dumping - THROWING - disposable income at the latest, the greatest, the trendy, the hip, the best.
It's too big for the major players to f*$@ up. If a minor player tries to get these patent stuff racheted up the big boys will crush them - and crush them fast and/or acquire them.
That's true, it is a co-equal thing. The point being though, it is entirely possible that a commerical company could siphon support from your project while providing little or no return value.
It'd be very possible for them to make only minor changes, and provide a patch and a copy of your sources, and be in full compliance with the GPL. Then they go on and add some other components that are not GPL - probably minor - and all of the sudden you are working on features for free while they are writing a nice fancy users manual, sales literature, fancy website, etc.
I think the point is that some developers may feel cheated if someone comes along after you've been working on something for 5 years, re-package it, re-brand it, and sell it - with source of course - and make a pile of money. Especially if that "competes" with donationware style proft stream for the developers.
I can imagine how pissed I'd be if I were up all night coding a release, and then, suddenly, my commerical counterpart announces a new build, new features, and and an upgrade fee the next day!
but that's a purely subjective thing, but for a long time up until the mid 1800's, the rule of thumb was that it was ok if it was before the baby's kick could be felt. That seems not unreasonable to me.
That's not surprising since it's so largely uninformed. Fetal brain development is continuous throughout pregnancy, but development slows drastically between 20 weeks and birth. From about then, development is no longer huge and massive, it is identical to the brain development of a newborn - same rate, growth, etc. Many fetuses are not mobile and active enough to kick until well towards the end of the second trimester, 24 or 26 or even 28 weeks (though some as early as 18 weeks!).
The point being, the brain difference between a 24 week fetus and a 38 week fetus is very small if even measurable. The cranial dimensions are larger, but not the brain mass.
Scientifically, there is no difference in terms between the mental status of a 24 week fetus and a 1 month newborn. There is no new capability added, or instinct added.
The point, then, is that if you allow termination at 28 weeks - which is allowed now - then why not at 1 month after birth?
What is the point of having children, and really anything else we do here if it is not to make every effort to maximize our long-term survival and prosperity as a species?
If you think that people have children to ensure the long term prosperity as a species, you are out of touch.
There are very, very, very few people who worry about the long term prosperity of the "species" and/or race. That line of thinking has always ended up with eugenics.
There is also plenty of evidence that a large part of the pregnancy the fetus could hardly be called a sentient being, but merely a chemical reaction which will result in one.
The thing is, you never know when that point is. Babies as young as 25 weeks premature have survived to be healthy adults outside after care and treatment in the NICU. That is far earlier than most terminations!
Unwanted pregnancy sucks, but it's not the end of the world. A culture that values only the convience of now, and the "benefit of the species", is very likely going to be a very unpleasant place to live long term. Compassion is a very valuable force in society, which pays more than it costs.
The imperial Roman culture of the Augustian age would have suited you well. Unwanted babies were exposed on the hillside, and left to the animals and/or elements. The unwashed, incapable, incapacitated, and criminals were put to the sword very regurarly, sometimes for amusement purposes. Powerful men had abortions by having thier pregnant lovers tossed down the palace steps into the ocean. It was a society that was very concerned about family lines, about having perfect hiers, about having the species continue. But, it was savage and harsh and cruel.
Go ahead and make your life harder if you want. I can make the same judgement on you that you make on society: shedding ancient religious guidelines is a major evolutionary step (9.9 times out of 10, relgion is behind people who value life too greatly).
You have really mistaken my position. Re-read my post, and find the mention of God, or respect for life, or religion. It's not there.
I stand by my claim that society has devolved when we would systematically eliminate the non-perfect class of people simply because they are trouble to the rest of society.
Down's is by far not the most devastating genetic disease out there
Absolutely. I am not suggesting it is. I was specifically responding to the bit about Downs in the original message. It's not the end of the world as far as disabilities goes.
There IS a quantifiable difference between minor imperfections and major disabilities.
The point is, politics and legalities aside, there are a substantial number of women having abortions purely for (a) superficial or (b) lifestyle reasons. They place no weight whatsoever on anything but themselves.
But I suspect that thirty years from now, when your daughter is an adult who still requires full time care, you may be more receptive to other people's point of view.
Time will tell, and I can't say anymore than you can. But I stand by my original point as a more educated than average lay person. A culture which values convience and comfort so highly as to disregard those we should be extra dilgent in caring for makes me very sad, and we should work to avoid it. There is, very seriously, a slope of depravity that really can accelerate into outright degeneracy.
Slashdot Mirror
That's untrue!
It will stop SPAM that is from a forged sender, which is a non-trivial amount.
Meaning, I can't send you a message purporting to be from billgates@microsoft.com, which is how things are right now.
Look over your SPAM headers, and you'll see, most of the return-addresses do not match the machine that relayed the message.
Not really...
For example, When Chrysler and Dailmer merged, did they drop redudant lines, and stop production of cars that compete with our products of the new merged company? You bet.
Second, MS did not purchase this other maker to "stop them from making producting for a competing operating system". Clearly, MS purchased them for their head-start on MS's own platform. It actually does make a difference.
Third and finally, one thing to note is that when the DOJ's consent decree with MS expires it will no longer be assumed that MS is a monopoly to the DOJ, meaning anything that requires that for a basis will have to be litigated from scratch, with MS being proven a monpoly in desktop OS's. With the state of the market it will prove prodigiously hard to prove that: between Linux and Mac Windows pretty clearly does not have a monopoly.
Do we have to keep repeating the untrue assertion that Microsoft is using the BSD TCP/IP stack in NT. Did Microsoft have a BSD derived TCP/IP stack in NT? Yes, during the NT 3.1 days. Not any more. Gah!
It was, and continues to be, based on the BSD implementation (as are most implementations of any TCP stack; it's almost a reference implementation).
It's not like they copied tcp.c and ip.c into the windows codebase or anything.
It's a question of your goals. Many of the people pushing the GPL have three major things going on, (1) they want to promote the software, and GPL is good at that; many hands = quality, quantity, etc; (2) they want to promote a political and/or social philosophy and force down the costs of computing, software, and business; and (3) they want to take down Microsoft, and if possible, be famous doing it.
Which are all fine, valid goals. Great. Good for them. Happy for them.
The BSD people have a different goal. They want to write software that is suitable for a specific goal within certain parameters. And they want that code to actually be used as widely as possible. It's not about ego (Theo not withstanding), it's not about credit, it's not about changing the status of things, it's about doing something specific. And at the end of the day that's what the BSD style license is great for. Microsoft based their NT stack on BSD code. It's not about ego - it's about the fact that millions of users are using a much better TCP stack that is designed and produced to a much higher standard than was in place before. The people who wrote that stack aren't out bragging, they know that the work they did has advanced their goal of the Internet using quality software implementations.
GPL loves, go for it. Do #1, #2, and #3. But don't be pissed about the BSD people. They aren't much interested in #2 or #3, and that's good not just for GPL or BSD or Unix people, but for *everyone*.
I've been considering going to a whitelist only system.. Everyone I know gets on a whitelist, and my personal website/webpage will have a CAPTCHA and a way to suggest your name onto my whitelist.
Pratical for me? Yes, but I wonder how well it would apply to other users.
AOL actually does a good job filtering SPAM. I can't imagine AOL being used to send any significant amount of SPAM at this point, and it does a fine job of filtering incoming SPAM.
The technology you describe is basically Really Unsimple Syndication, where as RSS is really simple.
RSS is great because it's simple. It sucks under load, but the uses are myraid.
Bullshit. Support contracts are huge profit centers for most software companies.
Not the Applecare or MS Support costs that were mentioned above. I've discovered a bug in SQL Server 2000 before, and the call would have cost me $295 (had it not been waived). Fixing that bug I am sure took more than a few minutes, meaning they would have "lost money" on that $295 deal.
You have a real potty mouth.
Charge for a support contract, that's what everyone does already. You want MS to fix something after your 90 days, you pay. You want Apple to fix something after your 90 days, you pay - its called Applecare.
Not if it's a bug, you don't. If it's a bug, there is no charge for MS or Apple. None.
And the costs of the support don't come close to covering a big bug fix or rush patch job.
Invalid concept; presupposes false economy. The time spent on the fixes is time that would have been spent in the first place by the engineers had they done a proper job.
No, you are wrong here. Fixing a bug after the fact, engineering a patch, testing, etc is more time expensive then doing it right in the first place. This is a lost opportunity.
Perhaps they were top-flight engineers who, like all humans, made an honest mistake. Perhaps they were top-flight engineers who were being pressured by senior management to, "get something out the door making money now and worry about the details later." Whatever the reason for the bug, it's engineering time that is inextricably part of the product, whether you choose to "spend" it or not.
It doesn't matter the reason. It matters the cost. The claim was the there are no additional costs for software after it ships - just distribution. Which is false. Even if you have the best staff, with all the time and resources, you will have either (1) miscellanous bugs, or (2) unpaid demands made by customers and agreed to over the heads of engineers. It happens all the time. But either way it's time spent, and therefore, opportunity lost.
Whatever the reason for the bug, it's engineering time that is inextricably part of the product, whether you choose to "spend" it or not.
I guess i am missing your argument. I am saying this costs money, after the initial development. It's a cost, after the product has shipped. Are arguing that?
I'm sure your point of view makes perfect sense from a business/accounting/shareholder standpoint. But from the perspective of an engineer, or even simple human decency, it stinks.
Maybe I missed something.
I suggest maybe you spend some time in the trenches of the software industry. You statement is laughable on it's face.
]additional[/i] software sales is if they sold the software for less than the price of delivery
Wrong, just plain wrong.
Software today has a cost that grows with each copy sold. Software today is virtually never "done".
Prime example: you have 100 users of a software package, and you sell it. A user finds a security bug. You fix it in a few days, test it, and e-mail the users the fix. Problem solved. No extra cost. Now, you have 8 million users. A user find a security bug. You fix it in a few days, and 8 million users download it from your site. The patch is only 250K, small by most standards, that's a big chunk of bandwidth. You are obligated to support that patch. It breaks some stuff. Your phone lines are jammed. People are pissed. But still, it cost you nothing other than a few bucks in bandwidth and maybe a little goodwill.
Wrong in both cases. In both cases the person doing the fixes lost the opportunity to do other work. The time spent on the fixes is lost forever to the engineers. If it is a really significant bug it could take dozens or a hundred people to prepare the fix - from programmers to testers to QA to legal to webmasters to documentation experts to channel partners to vendors to hardware suppliers to PR. All of which has a significant and non-trivial cost. Meanwhile, while your users are calling support - even if rare - your phone people are denied the opportunity to help another user which has a ral cost.
"Pure profit minus distribution" may have been true when software was updated once every 2 years, if that. But today, between bugfixes, securtiy updates, feature "fixes", etc software is not "done". It is very much an ongoing effort.
Funny you should mention DDT... I can't quite make our your point.
Nanotech and nanomachines an have awesome properties and show huge potentional, however, the non-thinking super-critically charged activist landscape may end up damaging the long-term prospects of the technology.
DDT is, incidentally, a great example of what can happen when an issue becomes super heated. Without a doubt, DDT saved well-over 500 million lives in the 20th century.
A combination of cases of dramatic overuse (hundreds or thousands the recommended dosage) and widespread misinterpretation of solid scientific findings led to DDT being banned in the US, and to this day, it being fought in 3rd world nations by enviornmentalists and other activist groups.
Once people started singing songs about DDT being about stopping spots on apples and killing all the birds and the bees, the fight was over.
By reasonable standards the dramatic health benefits of DDT far outweigh potential health side-effects, percieved or real (A good article here).
Anyways, if what happens to DDT happens to nanotech, we'll likely never get to see the potential of the science explored. Caution is called for, but the rate things are going it'll be outright banned within the decade.
That's for damn sure.. Xerox makes commerical printers that can easily print 180ppm, and other manufacturers do roll-feed printers that can produce sheets far faster than that.. depending on the models and whatnot you'd be looking at somewhere around 15-20k sheets/hr, or, 250 ppm.
That's your complete speculation, with no basis in established fact.
Let's say you have 100,000 users, and 1300 are lost. You can't just go back to the previous backup and overwrite any of the password changes, profile changes, etc that 100,000 users may have made in the last, say, 8 hrs. It would be very, very disruptive. So you have to first find just the deleted accounts, pull those from the backup, and then restore just those. Depending on your system/platform/application, that may not be possible. So okay, you write a script to insert the users back into the system. Great. But chances are some stuff is lost: passwords, password history, etc. Now you have to hand hold 1300 users resetting passwords, etc. And maybe that links to hundreds of different systems across the network. You really have no idea.
It could be a 5 minute deal, or it could take some skilled programmers days or weeks to properly fix. It all depends on many thousands of variables.
Just saying "go back to tape!" isn't always a viable option.
About CPUS..
It's a volume game. You can't exist has a company selling CPUs in tiny volumes. Yield problems are a major concern in most fabs - you can't just make 1000 cores, you know? Fabricating a CPU uses dozens of machines in many many steps.
The thing that jobs is really saying is that he has no faith in the future of the POWER line, but he does have faith in the future of the x86 line. The P4 has many design limitations, but it hasn't maxed out it's design yet, which is a big fear for some regarding the POWER line.
The physical location shouldn't matter one whit... under Winnt\profiles, Windows\Desktop, or C:\Docu...\%username%, the path of any given file isn't really all that relevant to how the file is used, is it?
You are extremely naive. You probably haven't had sex yet, but I'd say you are in need of a good near-pregnancy scare or two. Even the most careful people have them now and then. It certainly makes you think about what you would do.
If you noticed, I started the thread. I have a daughter due in 4 weeks, who may have Downs, and the doctors have repeadetly urged us to terminate.
You're nuts if you can't differentiate between destroying a ball of tissue the size of a marble and killing fully-developed beings
The point is determining when that ball of tissue the size of a marble is a person is not an easy business.
Judging from the actual numbers, it looks to me like the majority (54%) of abortions are performed prior to 8 weeks of gestation, and especially before 10 weeks (77%).
First off, weeks of gestation is not what most people refer to as the age of the baby. When a doctor tells you how you are "8 weeks pregnant", he means that the fetal age is 6 weeks. This does have an affect on stats, as you can imagine.
Second off, I should have been more clear. I am talking, specifically in this thread, about terminations for reasons of defect. I understand that most abortions of unwanted pregnancies end very early, as you have noted. I am specifically referring to cases when a disability is warned of late, 18, 20, 22 weeks, etc and a decision is made then. These are almost always later than the first trimester due to the limits of technology and the fact that fetus is not developed enough to recognize a defect (or the defect hasn't formed yet).
I am not calling you or anyone a fascist baby killer.
I am saying three specific things:
1. People having unwanted babies aborted make me sad.
2. People aborting babies because they are less than perfect makes me sad.
3. It is a clear and slipperly slope when you start trying to draw an abitrary line of when it's okay to terminate. When exactly does that life become too human to terminate? You'd be fine with 20 weeks, as you mention. That's very odd. It's almost as if something magical happens between 19 weeks 5 days and 20 weeks. If it is compassionate to allow a person who is 19 6/7 weeks pregnant to terminate, is not cruel to deny another person the right to terminate only one day later?
All of the major vendors provide significant value-added including packaging, documentation, download facilities, and/or support.
Video gaming is a huge industry, bigger than music, bigger than movies, bigger than cellphones.
Freaking huge. Gigantic. Teens, young adults, adults dumping - THROWING - disposable income at the latest, the greatest, the trendy, the hip, the best.
It's too big for the major players to f*$@ up. If a minor player tries to get these patent stuff racheted up the big boys will crush them - and crush them fast and/or acquire them.
That's true, it is a co-equal thing. The point being though, it is entirely possible that a commerical company could siphon support from your project while providing little or no return value.
It'd be very possible for them to make only minor changes, and provide a patch and a copy of your sources, and be in full compliance with the GPL. Then they go on and add some other components that are not GPL - probably minor - and all of the sudden you are working on features for free while they are writing a nice fancy users manual, sales literature, fancy website, etc.
I think the point is that some developers may feel cheated if someone comes along after you've been working on something for 5 years, re-package it, re-brand it, and sell it - with source of course - and make a pile of money. Especially if that "competes" with donationware style proft stream for the developers.
I can imagine how pissed I'd be if I were up all night coding a release, and then, suddenly, my commerical counterpart announces a new build, new features, and and an upgrade fee the next day!
but that's a purely subjective thing, but for a long time up until the mid 1800's, the rule of thumb was that it was ok if it was before the baby's kick could be felt. That seems not unreasonable to me.
That's not surprising since it's so largely uninformed. Fetal brain development is continuous throughout pregnancy, but development slows drastically between 20 weeks and birth. From about then, development is no longer huge and massive, it is identical to the brain development of a newborn - same rate, growth, etc. Many fetuses are not mobile and active enough to kick until well towards the end of the second trimester, 24 or 26 or even 28 weeks (though some as early as 18 weeks!).
The point being, the brain difference between a 24 week fetus and a 38 week fetus is very small if even measurable. The cranial dimensions are larger, but not the brain mass.
Scientifically, there is no difference in terms between the mental status of a 24 week fetus and a 1 month newborn. There is no new capability added, or instinct added.
The point, then, is that if you allow termination at 28 weeks - which is allowed now - then why not at 1 month after birth?
What is the point of having children, and really anything else we do here if it is not to make every effort to maximize our long-term survival and prosperity as a species?
If you think that people have children to ensure the long term prosperity as a species, you are out of touch.
There are very, very, very few people who worry about the long term prosperity of the "species" and/or race. That line of thinking has always ended up with eugenics.
There is also plenty of evidence that a large part of the pregnancy the fetus could hardly be called a sentient being, but merely a chemical reaction which will result in one.
The thing is, you never know when that point is. Babies as young as 25 weeks premature have survived to be healthy adults outside after care and treatment in the NICU. That is far earlier than most terminations!
Unwanted pregnancy sucks, but it's not the end of the world. A culture that values only the convience of now, and the "benefit of the species", is very likely going to be a very unpleasant place to live long term. Compassion is a very valuable force in society, which pays more than it costs.
The imperial Roman culture of the Augustian age would have suited you well. Unwanted babies were exposed on the hillside, and left to the animals and/or elements. The unwashed, incapable, incapacitated, and criminals were put to the sword very regurarly, sometimes for amusement purposes. Powerful men had abortions by having thier pregnant lovers tossed down the palace steps into the ocean. It was a society that was very concerned about family lines, about having perfect hiers, about having the species continue. But, it was savage and harsh and cruel.
Go ahead and make your life harder if you want. I can make the same judgement on you that you make on society: shedding ancient religious guidelines is a major evolutionary step (9.9 times out of 10, relgion is behind people who value life too greatly).
You have really mistaken my position. Re-read my post, and find the mention of God, or respect for life, or religion. It's not there.
I stand by my claim that society has devolved when we would systematically eliminate the non-perfect class of people simply because they are trouble to the rest of society.
Thanks for the response.
Down's is by far not the most devastating genetic disease out there
Absolutely. I am not suggesting it is. I was specifically responding to the bit about Downs in the original message. It's not the end of the world as far as disabilities goes.
There IS a quantifiable difference between minor imperfections and major disabilities.
The point is, politics and legalities aside, there are a substantial number of women having abortions purely for (a) superficial or (b) lifestyle reasons. They place no weight whatsoever on anything but themselves.
But I suspect that thirty years from now, when your daughter is an adult who still requires full time care, you may be more receptive to other people's point of view.
Time will tell, and I can't say anymore than you can. But I stand by my original point as a more educated than average lay person. A culture which values convience and comfort so highly as to disregard those we should be extra dilgent in caring for makes me very sad, and we should work to avoid it. There is, very seriously, a slope of depravity that really can accelerate into outright degeneracy.