You say (heavily paraphrased) that if I took a set of data and rearranged them according to some mathematical transform that reveals a previously obscured relationship (a principal components analysis for example), that this is creativity.
Only if you define human creativity as a mathematical tranform, which it very well may be (albeit an enormously complex one). But that's why I brought in the question of knowledge and context. Put it this way: why is so much art dependent on culture? It's because much of art is based on cultural reference and it's represent a facet of the culture.
You can't know the artist's intent -- you are not him/her, and it is impossible that such intent is unambiguously contained within the visual work itself.
Clearly you can't always know the artist's intent. But if you define art as anything that moves you or that you like, then anything can be art and the whole meaning of the word art degenerates into nothing. You can find beauty in random patterns, but is that art? Or maybe it's "art", but not "creative art".
I might even say that the difference between good art and bad art is how well the artist is able to convey the intent of the art. Of course, there is whole sub-class of artist who thinks he/she has failed if anyone actually gets the point.:)
I submit that creative art is taking an aspect of the world, and representing it in an unusual way in order to faciliate discovery of that aspect's "true nature" in the context of the world.
Given that (possibly incomplete, but work with me...) definition, this program cannot be considered creative. I think to truly be creative, you have to have a knowledgebase of the world in order to understand why a particular piece of art works in the broader view of the world.
Take Picasso's famous disfigured subjects, with eyes and ears all over the place. Sure, you could have written a program to move eyes all over the place, but that's not what makes it art. The artist's intent is an integral part of what makes great art great.
Until solve the grand "context problem", you can't have creativity.
Somehow, getting more for your money is bad for the consumer.
Guess what? Many cars come "bundled" with car stereos. You can't get the car for less money if you don't want the stereo. Guess what else? That stereo was probably built by the car manufacturer under a different name.
Yet, somehow aftermarket car stereo manufacturers manage to survive. I don't here them whining about "monopolistic" policies of the car manufacturers, even that clearly costs them huge amounts of market.
Deal with it. Getting more applications for your money instead of less is a good thing.
Please, if you've only read the books, or haven't read them at all, find the radio shows. Maybe it's because I started with the radio shows, but the books just aren't the same. Yes, the jokes are still funny, but the voices really brought them to life.
I tried searching Amazon, but unforunately they don't seem to be available on CD. I actually have MP3s of all the radio shows, which I would really like to make available, but don't have the bandwidth to handle the onslaught.
Seems a little tasteless to offer up bootlet recordings of the man's material considering the circumstances, and especially when he was very anti-Napster, but I think these deserve a wide a dissemination as possible. Don't let them die! If someone else has the recordings and the bandwidth, offer them up!
Coincidently, I had the unfortunately "pleasure" of looking at the mod_perl source code yesterday in order to figure out something I'm working on. What a piece of garbage! There are almost zero comments throughout the code. It was incredibly frustrating.
And what's amazing is that this isn't isolated. Way too much OSS software is like this. I might even say the majority of it.
What is wrong with these people? Why aren't they embarrased about releasing code that is so badly documented? I would *never* in a million years release code in that condition that someone else would see.
I see this as one of the biggest flaws in OSS development. A lot of it is developed by rank amateurs that should not be allowed near a computer. I would really like to see some professional standards written up. Maybe people would ignore them, but at least we would have something we could beat them over the head with and say "you should be using this."
Sorry for the rant, but I wasted *so* much time yesterday on that pile of crap.
Who has a shallower grip on reality... OS/2 advocates or Amiga advocates?
[shaking cane] Dang it, you kids don't know what you're missing! There ain't nuthin' that can touch (OS/2, AmigaOS), even today! (OS/2, AmigaOS) has [feature], [feature] and [feature], which these newfangled operating systems haven't gotten right yet! If it wasn't for (IBM/Commodore's) incompetence, and Microsoft's conspiracy, we would be 20 years farther ahead than we are now, instead of stuck with technology that is STILL behind what we were running years ago!
What activities would help "the masses" get their hands on the technology?
I have a different question for you: Why do you care? Whether a laptop uses a TM chip or Intel or AMD is totally invisible. The only question is performance versus battery life versus cost.
Given that no one seems to be interested in using TM's chip so far, there must be valid reasons. One is that the performance seems to be much worse that the competitors. And two is that the processor is only a minor source of battery drain.
So why are you so interested in demanding that manufacturers supply with apparently inferior technology?
This is not to say, by the way, that TM's chip may not find uses in applications that are more interested in heat dissipation than performance.
Oh good... lets generalize all 20 somethings. You stupid fuck. All 20 somethings aren't fucking inept idiot "skateboarder looking rejects." Some of us are capable, proven leaders.
Yeah, this post really shows what a "proven leader" you are. LOL.
Not to say that there aren't some 20 somethings who aren't lame pretenders, but here's a hint: if you find yourself defensive about that characterization, then you ARE a pretender. Someone who isn't a pretender would know it's true in the vast majority of cases.
Twenty-something managers definitely deserve a lot of blame, but to be honest, good managers of any kind are hard to find.
I was involved in a dot-com startup. We raised 4.5 million in the first round. We decided to hire a 40-something CEO, figuring that he very successfully ran a multi-thousand person corporation that went public, so he must have done something right.
What a disappointment. The biggest problem was that he was extremely intimidated by "the New Economy" and bought into every dot-com cliche you could imagine. Spend money as fast possible. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you grow. I was the CTO, and tried to bring some sanity to the process, but was overruled. I eventually left the company.
Later, they raised another $15 million. The guy hired to replace me was, quite frankly, one of the stupidest, most irritating people I have ever met. However, he could butt kiss like you wouldn't believe. He would spew techno-babble that would never fail to impress my "grayhair" CEO. Eventually, only an uprising by the programmers got rid of him (they threatened to walk out, en masse, if they didn't get rid of him). One catty comment: the ugliness of his personality was exceeded only by the ugliness of his appearance. He was truly offensive in every possible way. There aren't many people that I truly hate (even people that have screwed me in the past), but this guy I truly despised.
Anyway, the irony is that it really was a great idea, but it would take careful execution to make it happen.
There were SO many other stupid things they did. Long term office space lease (although, they at least didn't get the most expensive they could get). HUGE Oracle/Exodus contract that was 10 times more power than what they needed. On and on.
This was late 1999. They have pissed away 17 million of the 19.5 million they raised in about 2 years. They finally fired the CEO. However, the VCs hired another guy for, I believe, $350K/year. My partner (who was still there at the time) absolutely hated the guy, and thought he was completely useless. My partner was fired.
My lessons? NEVER use other people's money. You very, very rarely need it. Trust your instincts. Be frugal, and slow steady growth wins the race.
I found the article funny because the documents were so heavily censored - the FBI gets to eavesdrop on the public, but not vice-versa.
No, michael, the FBI gets to eavesdrop on suspected criminals with the proper orders from a judge.
And yes, michael, you do NOT get to eavesdrop on the FBI. Or do you think anyone should be able to find out the list of people in the Witness Protection Program? Or the list of undercover FBI agents?
Sometimes I simply can't believe the things that Slashdot editors write.
Ever heard of compact flourescent lights? Might more efficient, and last around 5 times longer.
cars you bought for a lifetime,
Cars last probably 3 times longer than they did 30 years ago, and get twice the mileage. I guess the Oil Company monopoly wasn't able to suppress the technology.
software for life
You do have software for life. No one is forcing you to upgrade. It's absurd to say that only file formats have changed. If you think Word/2000 has nothing that Word 5.1 had, you obviously haven't used both of them.
Until we can divorce the pursuit of capital from advances in science, we are doomed to have any advance kepted restained by the barriers of the a accumulation of that wealth.
You know, you're right. The government should pick which technologies are the best using a panel of experts, and then finance the winner. That would be much more efficient than having all these competing companies duplicating effort. Then the workers could just do their best work without having to worry about bosses looking over their shoulders and worrying about the "bottom line". Hey, it worked for the Soviet Union! Well, it would have worked, if those pesky capitalists hadn't destroyed the Soviet Union before it could really get started.
from what I've read on Slashdot, I'm not the only one thinking about them.
I know, it's pretty frightening. But don't worry; that's primarily a symptom of the youth of Slashdot. When you get older, usually these thoughts die in the realm of reality.
Damn straight! Originally, one of the meanings of "hacker" was "someone who breaks into computers". The Jargon File (which I'm too lazy to link to) claims that this sense is "deprecated", but I don't recognize ESR's -- or anyone's -- authority to do so.
One of the meanings of "hacker" is breaking into computers. Get over it.
It is completely impossible with any computer which can be simulated on a turing machine.
Intractable or impossible? It doesn't seem like it should be impossible. If I take every combination of instructions (say, of a certain length), can I prove whether a particular combination was functionally equivalent to the source code? If so, I should be able to measure the running time for each one.
Actually, maybe I see where you are going. Since the halting theorem states that we can't tell whether a particular program terminates, therefore we can't tell whether one particular program is functionally equivalent to another program. Right or wrong?
Maybe another tack... I wonder if it is possible to generate all transformations from one set of instructions to another. You don't necessarily need to know whether it halts in order to do a transformation (which is basically what a compiler does now). Is it possible to generate all *possible* transformations?
One could argue that Unix has set computing back 30 years, as well.
I like Unix, but freely admit there are quite a few warts. I'm curious... what is the particular wart that you feel "sets computing back 30 years"? Surely not monolithic kernels!
Stripping out the virtual machine was an advance that set computing back about thirty years.
Come on! Do you really think Unix would have gotten off the ground if it was not only written in a high-level language, which was a performance penalty compared to the conventional wisdom of writing in assembly, but also used a virtual machine?? I'm sorry, but operating systems should not be written to use a virtual machine, especially on a PDP-11.
And no, Java has not proven that virtual machines are viable. In my experience, Java is on the average 10-100 times slower than C. Yes, you can create toy benchmarks that show comparable performance, but for real applications (an XML parser comes to mind, which is my particular headache) performance sucks. And always will. And yes, I used Sun's latest JDK.
You're joking, right? C is the old, mean, sunuvabitch granddad horse that might not be as flashy as these younguns running around, but can still kick their ass when it's time to get some work done.
C is still the high-level language that produces the fastest code.*
*Except for FORTRAN, which still kicks C's ass on numerical applications because of the "pointer problem", and yes C++ can produce code as fast as C, but it's much more difficult due to the complexity of the language. Of course, compilers still don't produce code as good as hand-coded assembly language and please don't quote me the "myth of the magic compiler" that is supposed to produce code better than humans because you can always code whatever tricks humans would do into the compiler, blah, blah. That's total crap. Compilers produce crappy assembly language. The problem is that no one cares anymore. I've never seen a proof, but I suspect the perfect optimizing compiler is a travelling salesman-class problem. Does anyone have any proofs of my suspicions? Oh well, enough of this digression.:)
...my being offended by you, telling me I have no right to do what I want with my own body, equate to mental illness?
It's not the being offended (although it's silly to be offended by an opinion), it's the dragging of rape and molestation into the subject. That's the sign of someone who has way too many issues. Be that as it may...
we've had the right to determine what happens to our bodies.
Wrong; society tells people what to do with their bodies all the time. You can't use your body to kill someone. You can't prostitute yourself. You can't drink and drive. You can't take certain drugs. Some of those you may not agree with, but there is no question that society can tell you what you can do with your body. Bottom line, you can't use your body to cause harm to others.
What are extenuating circumstances?
I don't pretend to have the answer to what should happen in every case, for example, where do you draw the line when you have a severely deformed fetus. But it's irrational and illogical to argue that because 0.1% of births have moral issues surrounding them, therefore we should allow abortion on demand in all cases. Do you think a woman should be able to abort a fetus one day before delivery?
The church has only gotten around to apologizing for Galileo...
Only fanatics invoke the church on this issue -- on either side. Religion has nothing to do with whether it's ethical to destroy a human being at whatever stage of development.
Let me repeat this just to make it clear to you... my womb, my choice... period.
Funny, a few hundred years ago they used the same arguments to justify slavery. "If you don't like it, then don't own slaves. It's none of your business to interfere with my choice. Who are you to force your views on me?"
It's my body, and your opinions add up to just about a tinkers damn.
At this point in history, you are correct. It used to be the same case for slavery, but eventually society evolved to where we protected all human beings, not just the ones with the power and control.
Either human life is valuable or it is not. If it is valuable, then it shouldn't matter what stage of development a human happens to be in. Note, by the way, that a newborn baby's brain has not developed at birth, and is totally non-sentient. Should we allow post-birth abortions? Why not? Why shouldn't a woman have the choice as to whether they want their own children in the world or not?
What I find most fascinating about people like you is that you have absolutely no sympathy for life. I mean it's nine crummy months! You would rather see a human life destroyed rather than a women being inconvenienced for nine months. It's just incredible to me.
I'll just address one point in your previous post: if my child were going to be aborted, and I would have the chance to take over the carrying of the fetus, I would do it in a microsecond without hesitation. Ironically, one of the famous feminist cliches is totally wrong: if men bore children, abortion wouldn't even be a consideration. Can you imagine the uproar if an evil, mean man decided to abort a woman's child?? It would never happen.
Your ignorant world view makes no allowance for rape. For child molestation.
You have serious psychological issues. That's all I will say. Your post has so little do with what I've said that I simply stunned and unable to respond.
No, it's a stupid concern. Do you think they're using a 100 watt laser or something? To use your analogy, if a headphone company asked you try out some revolutionary new headphones, would the first thought that would come to your mind be "Who was the brave soul who first agreed to that insanity?" Do you really think that there would have been some great risk of the first person to try them having their ears blown out?
Slashdot Mirror
You say (heavily paraphrased) that if I took a set of data and rearranged them according to some mathematical transform that reveals a previously obscured relationship (a principal components analysis for example), that this is creativity.
Only if you define human creativity as a mathematical tranform, which it very well may be (albeit an enormously complex one). But that's why I brought in the question of knowledge and context. Put it this way: why is so much art dependent on culture? It's because much of art is based on cultural reference and it's represent a facet of the culture.
--
You can't know the artist's intent -- you are not him/her, and it is impossible that such intent is unambiguously contained within the visual work itself.
Clearly you can't always know the artist's intent. But if you define art as anything that moves you or that you like, then anything can be art and the whole meaning of the word art degenerates into nothing. You can find beauty in random patterns, but is that art? Or maybe it's "art", but not "creative art".
I might even say that the difference between good art and bad art is how well the artist is able to convey the intent of the art. Of course, there is whole sub-class of artist who thinks he/she has failed if anyone actually gets the point. :)
--
I submit that creative art is taking an aspect of the world, and representing it in an unusual way in order to faciliate discovery of that aspect's "true nature" in the context of the world.
Given that (possibly incomplete, but work with me...) definition, this program cannot be considered creative. I think to truly be creative, you have to have a knowledgebase of the world in order to understand why a particular piece of art works in the broader view of the world.
Take Picasso's famous disfigured subjects, with eyes and ears all over the place. Sure, you could have written a program to move eyes all over the place, but that's not what makes it art. The artist's intent is an integral part of what makes great art great.
Until solve the grand "context problem", you can't have creativity.
--
Somehow, getting more for your money is bad for the consumer.
Guess what? Many cars come "bundled" with car stereos. You can't get the car for less money if you don't want the stereo. Guess what else? That stereo was probably built by the car manufacturer under a different name.
Yet, somehow aftermarket car stereo manufacturers manage to survive. I don't here them whining about "monopolistic" policies of the car manufacturers, even that clearly costs them huge amounts of market.
Deal with it. Getting more applications for your money instead of less is a good thing.
--
Please, if you've only read the books, or haven't read them at all, find the radio shows. Maybe it's because I started with the radio shows, but the books just aren't the same. Yes, the jokes are still funny, but the voices really brought them to life.
I tried searching Amazon, but unforunately they don't seem to be available on CD. I actually have MP3s of all the radio shows, which I would really like to make available, but don't have the bandwidth to handle the onslaught.
Seems a little tasteless to offer up bootlet recordings of the man's material considering the circumstances, and especially when he was very anti-Napster, but I think these deserve a wide a dissemination as possible. Don't let them die! If someone else has the recordings and the bandwidth, offer them up!
--
Coincidently, I had the unfortunately "pleasure" of looking at the mod_perl source code yesterday in order to figure out something I'm working on. What a piece of garbage! There are almost zero comments throughout the code. It was incredibly frustrating.
And what's amazing is that this isn't isolated. Way too much OSS software is like this. I might even say the majority of it.
What is wrong with these people? Why aren't they embarrased about releasing code that is so badly documented? I would *never* in a million years release code in that condition that someone else would see.
I see this as one of the biggest flaws in OSS development. A lot of it is developed by rank amateurs that should not be allowed near a computer. I would really like to see some professional standards written up. Maybe people would ignore them, but at least we would have something we could beat them over the head with and say "you should be using this."
Sorry for the rant, but I wasted *so* much time yesterday on that pile of crap.
--
Well, I was trying to stick to cold, dead operating systems. BeOS is dead, but the body hasn't grown cold yet. :)
--
Who has a shallower grip on reality... OS/2 advocates or Amiga advocates?
[shaking cane] Dang it, you kids don't know what you're missing! There ain't nuthin' that can touch (OS/2, AmigaOS), even today! (OS/2, AmigaOS) has [feature], [feature] and [feature], which these newfangled operating systems haven't gotten right yet! If it wasn't for (IBM/Commodore's) incompetence, and Microsoft's conspiracy, we would be 20 years farther ahead than we are now, instead of stuck with technology that is STILL behind what we were running years ago!
Dang it, where's my geritol....
--
What activities would help "the masses" get their hands on the technology?
I have a different question for you: Why do you care? Whether a laptop uses a TM chip or Intel or AMD is totally invisible. The only question is performance versus battery life versus cost.
Given that no one seems to be interested in using TM's chip so far, there must be valid reasons. One is that the performance seems to be much worse that the competitors. And two is that the processor is only a minor source of battery drain.
So why are you so interested in demanding that manufacturers supply with apparently inferior technology?
This is not to say, by the way, that TM's chip may not find uses in applications that are more interested in heat dissipation than performance.
--
Oh good... lets generalize all 20 somethings. You stupid fuck. All 20 somethings aren't fucking inept idiot "skateboarder looking rejects." Some of us are capable, proven leaders.
Yeah, this post really shows what a "proven leader" you are. LOL.
Not to say that there aren't some 20 somethings who aren't lame pretenders, but here's a hint: if you find yourself defensive about that characterization, then you ARE a pretender. Someone who isn't a pretender would know it's true in the vast majority of cases.
--
Twenty-something managers definitely deserve a lot of blame, but to be honest, good managers of any kind are hard to find.
I was involved in a dot-com startup. We raised 4.5 million in the first round. We decided to hire a 40-something CEO, figuring that he very successfully ran a multi-thousand person corporation that went public, so he must have done something right.
What a disappointment. The biggest problem was that he was extremely intimidated by "the New Economy" and bought into every dot-com cliche you could imagine. Spend money as fast possible. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you grow. I was the CTO, and tried to bring some sanity to the process, but was overruled. I eventually left the company.
Later, they raised another $15 million. The guy hired to replace me was, quite frankly, one of the stupidest, most irritating people I have ever met. However, he could butt kiss like you wouldn't believe. He would spew techno-babble that would never fail to impress my "grayhair" CEO. Eventually, only an uprising by the programmers got rid of him (they threatened to walk out, en masse, if they didn't get rid of him). One catty comment: the ugliness of his personality was exceeded only by the ugliness of his appearance. He was truly offensive in every possible way. There aren't many people that I truly hate (even people that have screwed me in the past), but this guy I truly despised.
Anyway, the irony is that it really was a great idea, but it would take careful execution to make it happen.
There were SO many other stupid things they did. Long term office space lease (although, they at least didn't get the most expensive they could get). HUGE Oracle/Exodus contract that was 10 times more power than what they needed. On and on.
This was late 1999. They have pissed away 17 million of the 19.5 million they raised in about 2 years. They finally fired the CEO. However, the VCs hired another guy for, I believe, $350K/year. My partner (who was still there at the time) absolutely hated the guy, and thought he was completely useless. My partner was fired.
My lessons? NEVER use other people's money. You very, very rarely need it. Trust your instincts. Be frugal, and slow steady growth wins the race.
--
That's incredible, yet totally believable based on Sims's historical idiocy on Slashdot. I think that deserves wider viewing.
--
I found the article funny because the documents were so heavily censored - the FBI gets to eavesdrop on the public, but not vice-versa.
No, michael, the FBI gets to eavesdrop on suspected criminals with the proper orders from a judge.
And yes, michael, you do NOT get to eavesdrop on the FBI. Or do you think anyone should be able to find out the list of people in the Witness Protection Program? Or the list of undercover FBI agents?
Sometimes I simply can't believe the things that Slashdot editors write.
--
have light bulbs that laster for 30 years,
Ever heard of compact flourescent lights? Might more efficient, and last around 5 times longer.
cars you bought for a lifetime,
Cars last probably 3 times longer than they did 30 years ago, and get twice the mileage. I guess the Oil Company monopoly wasn't able to suppress the technology.
software for life
You do have software for life. No one is forcing you to upgrade. It's absurd to say that only file formats have changed. If you think Word/2000 has nothing that Word 5.1 had, you obviously haven't used both of them.
Until we can divorce the pursuit of capital from advances in science, we are doomed to have any advance kepted restained by the barriers of the a accumulation of that wealth.
You know, you're right. The government should pick which technologies are the best using a panel of experts, and then finance the winner. That would be much more efficient than having all these competing companies duplicating effort. Then the workers could just do their best work without having to worry about bosses looking over their shoulders and worrying about the "bottom line". Hey, it worked for the Soviet Union! Well, it would have worked, if those pesky capitalists hadn't destroyed the Soviet Union before it could really get started.
from what I've read on Slashdot, I'm not the only one thinking about them.
I know, it's pretty frightening. But don't worry; that's primarily a symptom of the youth of Slashdot. When you get older, usually these thoughts die in the realm of reality.
--
Damn straight! Originally, one of the meanings of "hacker" was "someone who breaks into computers". The Jargon File (which I'm too lazy to link to) claims that this sense is "deprecated", but I don't recognize ESR's -- or anyone's -- authority to do so.
One of the meanings of "hacker" is breaking into computers. Get over it.
--
It is completely impossible with any computer which can be simulated on a turing machine.
Intractable or impossible? It doesn't seem like it should be impossible. If I take every combination of instructions (say, of a certain length), can I prove whether a particular combination was functionally equivalent to the source code? If so, I should be able to measure the running time for each one.
Actually, maybe I see where you are going. Since the halting theorem states that we can't tell whether a particular program terminates, therefore we can't tell whether one particular program is functionally equivalent to another program. Right or wrong?
Maybe another tack... I wonder if it is possible to generate all transformations from one set of instructions to another. You don't necessarily need to know whether it halts in order to do a transformation (which is basically what a compiler does now). Is it possible to generate all *possible* transformations?
--
One could argue that Unix has set computing back 30 years, as well.
I like Unix, but freely admit there are quite a few warts. I'm curious ... what is the particular wart that you feel "sets computing back 30 years"? Surely not monolithic kernels!
--
Stripping out the virtual machine was an advance that set computing back about thirty years.
Come on! Do you really think Unix would have gotten off the ground if it was not only written in a high-level language, which was a performance penalty compared to the conventional wisdom of writing in assembly, but also used a virtual machine?? I'm sorry, but operating systems should not be written to use a virtual machine, especially on a PDP-11.
And no, Java has not proven that virtual machines are viable. In my experience, Java is on the average 10-100 times slower than C. Yes, you can create toy benchmarks that show comparable performance, but for real applications (an XML parser comes to mind, which is my particular headache) performance sucks. And always will. And yes, I used Sun's latest JDK.
--
Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie created C (at least according to my books).
No, Kernighan just wrote the book. Ritchie created the language. I'm not absolutely sure about Thompson.
--
When developers (Pike + friends) needed an efficient, processor-independent language for systems programming, they created C.
Just for the record, C was created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. Primarily Ritchie, I believe.
--
The retarded horse with a gimpy leg.
You're joking, right? C is the old, mean, sunuvabitch granddad horse that might not be as flashy as these younguns running around, but can still kick their ass when it's time to get some work done.
C is still the high-level language that produces the fastest code.*
*Except for FORTRAN, which still kicks C's ass on numerical applications because of the "pointer problem", and yes C++ can produce code as fast as C, but it's much more difficult due to the complexity of the language. Of course, compilers still don't produce code as good as hand-coded assembly language and please don't quote me the "myth of the magic compiler" that is supposed to produce code better than humans because you can always code whatever tricks humans would do into the compiler, blah, blah. That's total crap. Compilers produce crappy assembly language. The problem is that no one cares anymore. I've never seen a proof, but I suspect the perfect optimizing compiler is a travelling salesman-class problem. Does anyone have any proofs of my suspicions? Oh well, enough of this digression. :)
--
It's not the being offended (although it's silly to be offended by an opinion), it's the dragging of rape and molestation into the subject. That's the sign of someone who has way too many issues. Be that as it may...
we've had the right to determine what happens to our bodies.
Wrong; society tells people what to do with their bodies all the time. You can't use your body to kill someone. You can't prostitute yourself. You can't drink and drive. You can't take certain drugs. Some of those you may not agree with, but there is no question that society can tell you what you can do with your body. Bottom line, you can't use your body to cause harm to others.
What are extenuating circumstances?
I don't pretend to have the answer to what should happen in every case, for example, where do you draw the line when you have a severely deformed fetus. But it's irrational and illogical to argue that because 0.1% of births have moral issues surrounding them, therefore we should allow abortion on demand in all cases. Do you think a woman should be able to abort a fetus one day before delivery?
The church has only gotten around to apologizing for Galileo...
Only fanatics invoke the church on this issue -- on either side. Religion has nothing to do with whether it's ethical to destroy a human being at whatever stage of development.
Let me repeat this just to make it clear to you... my womb, my choice... period.
Funny, a few hundred years ago they used the same arguments to justify slavery. "If you don't like it, then don't own slaves. It's none of your business to interfere with my choice. Who are you to force your views on me?"
It's my body, and your opinions add up to just about a tinkers damn.
At this point in history, you are correct. It used to be the same case for slavery, but eventually society evolved to where we protected all human beings, not just the ones with the power and control.
Either human life is valuable or it is not. If it is valuable, then it shouldn't matter what stage of development a human happens to be in. Note, by the way, that a newborn baby's brain has not developed at birth, and is totally non-sentient. Should we allow post-birth abortions? Why not? Why shouldn't a woman have the choice as to whether they want their own children in the world or not?
What I find most fascinating about people like you is that you have absolutely no sympathy for life. I mean it's nine crummy months! You would rather see a human life destroyed rather than a women being inconvenienced for nine months. It's just incredible to me.
I'll just address one point in your previous post: if my child were going to be aborted, and I would have the chance to take over the carrying of the fetus, I would do it in a microsecond without hesitation. Ironically, one of the famous feminist cliches is totally wrong: if men bore children, abortion wouldn't even be a consideration. Can you imagine the uproar if an evil, mean man decided to abort a woman's child?? It would never happen.
--
Your ignorant world view makes no allowance for rape. For child molestation.
You have serious psychological issues. That's all I will say. Your post has so little do with what I've said that I simply stunned and unable to respond.
--
Just like you and the tapeworm own your body.
Last I checked, tapeworms aren't involved in human reproduction.
--
it's a worthwhile concern, and you're not funny.
No, it's a stupid concern. Do you think they're using a 100 watt laser or something? To use your analogy, if a headphone company asked you try out some revolutionary new headphones, would the first thought that would come to your mind be "Who was the brave soul who first agreed to that insanity?" Do you really think that there would have been some great risk of the first person to try them having their ears blown out?
--