What, after TWO (count 'em) unbelievably bloody wars, you think the nature of Europe just changed overnight? All the ancient hatred "just went away"? Come on.
And yes, much of the reason was to hold back the Soviets, but make no mistake that there was an undercurrent of making damn sure Europe didn't screw up the world again.
Look at the countries that make up the EU. They don't want to start anything anywhere. They are far more diplomatic about dealing with the middle east than the US is. I doubt they will be invaded and I don't see them causing World War III either. Took a major chill pill after World War II. They are on break, and don't even get me started on the French.
More like they were castrated after WW/II by American Troops being stationed throughout Europe to prevent them from starting yet another war. There is no question WW/III would have happened if the United States hadn't taken over nearly all the military operations in Europe.
They are diplomatic because that's all the power they have at this point. This is a double-edged sword; Europe is now nearly powerless to start another war, but they're also close to useless when it comes to helping out when military action is really needed.
(Some younger Europeans will probably be peeved about this post, but they really need to read their own unbelievably bloodthirsty history)
Just to add a bit of personal experience, which I forgot to mention...
I had a case, just in the past year, where files I was saving were getting corrupted. Naturally, I assumed it was the hard disk, controller, motherboard, etc, etc. Turns out it was a bad memory card. It was only bad enough to occasionally cause the system to crash, maybe once a week (which I chalked up to a crappy video driver), but it was apparently just in the right place to hose the disk buffers. Fortunately, I didn't lose anything vital, but it made me glad I use online Internet backups. (Actually, I use TWO online backup solutions, that's how paranoid I am these days)
get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue.
RAID is not a substitute for backups!
All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one.
Crucial corollaries:
1) All file systems, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will be propagated to your RAID array.
AND: 2) All RAID controllers, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will hose your RAID array.
And let's not get into fires, theft, lightning / voltage spikes...
They find the idea of a middle- to upper-class person riding a bus (let alone walking or riding a bike) baffling.
Riding a bus is a totally different activity than walking or riding a bike. The latter two I can choose to do for exercise and I still have freedom of travel, as well as being able to choose to be alone or not. Just because someone would never ride a bus doesn't mean they'd never walk or ride a bike.
Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
How does more assurance of your data integrity obviate the need for backups? In other words, how does your behavior change even with those assurances?
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
Yeah, it'd be nice not to have hard drive failures, but don't blame the drive manufacturers for your lack of backups. There is no data solution so good that it doesn't need redundancy in some manner.
I am amazed that you missed out public transport. One day, the people of the USA are going to have to get used to sitting next to strangers again.:)
To hell with that. The "freedom to travel" is one of the most important freedoms to me. Not to mention I consider my time extremely valuable. I would take public transportation if it was more efficient than the alternatives (New York City is one of the few places in the country where that's true), but I'll sacrifice a hell of a lot of other things before I waste my life sitting in a bus for hours just to go across town.
I've wondered about this: In looking at my dog, who just had his 14th birthday, he shows all the signs of old age -- arthritis, gray hair, hearing loss, etc. Why do some mammals age faster than others? Why are human bodies just getting started at 18 years old, and that's getting to the outer range for dogs? This seems like a fundamental question of this subject.
Be glad about it. Don't idiotically overstate your case by throwing around terms like "overwhelming."
Sorry, but I can only assume you haven't seen the list of evidence, and read Reiser's (literally) insane explanations. It's the murder equivalent of a cookie missing from the cookie jar and your five year old son saying he didn't do it while crumbs are all over his face. Technically, yes, the evidence is circumstantial, and yes, we don't have the body of the cookie, but it doesn't take a mind reader to know that a burgler probably didn't sneak in to eat the cookie.
I like the analogy another poster made: if this had been Bill Gates and Melinda was missing, most Slashdotters would've convicted him instantly based on the evidence we had.
I fail to understand why there shouldn't be rights that protect free speech in companies.
You have a company. You hire a salesman to go out and demonstrate your product. The salesman offends your customers by constantly telling crude sex jokes to them, while he shows your product. Is it his right to say whatever he wants? After all, it's free speech and legal.
You own a preschool. The teacher tells the kids all about her sexual exploits the night before. Is it her right to do that? It's free speech, after all.
Seriously -- is there anyone other than this AP reporter who really believes their constitutional right to free speech applies to other people's private web sites? Are there people really this ignorant that don't understand the whole point of the Constitution is to limit *government* power to oppress speech?
Given this AP's reporter's surprise, I would assume that the AP's web site will allow me to post anything I want there, otherwise they're suppressing my "free speech rights".
Egg on our face for assuming innocence until guilt had been proven?
No, egg on your face for stubbornly clinging to innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, just because he was a programming geek. And guilt is rarely "proven", the standard is "proven beyond a reasonable doubt" (And NOT "proven beyond all doubt").
You are there to represent the people and your country.
That's correct.
If you find yourself having to subvert the will of your public...
This is where you go off the rails. The job of a politician is NOT -- repeat, NOT -- to implement the "will of the people". That's because they can't. Everyone has a different opinion on what should be done. For example, you think your opinion on filesharing should supersede everyone else's. Believe it or not, a LOT of people think sharing copyrighted material should be illegal (probably even a majority).
A politician's job, in theory (rarely in reality), is to totally ignore what the idiotic public thinks they want. He/she's job is to study each issue in more detail than the public has time for, and to vote in the *best interests* of the public. This may or may not match what public opinion polls say.
Imagine what preloading FireFox could do to the brand-differentiation of Dell or HP.
I'm imagining a big white cloud of nothing. Who buys their computer based on what browser is preloaded? Should the computer manufacturers scream in their ads about it? Is that really going to convince the masses to buy Brand X over Brand Y even beyond price, memory, disk space, etc?
They can't (honestly) tout security, considering IE is just as secure as Firefox these days. IE has tabs, which was Firefox's only useful feature to the masses. It seems to be slightly faster than IE these days, but not so much that you'd notice (and sometimes I notice IE is faster, and yes, I use both regularly).
And then remember that Firefox has been horribly broken prior to version 3 as far as memory usage. Fortunately, that seems to be (FINALLY) fixed, at least for me (knock on wood).
OEMs are in business to make money. Everything that is changed about a computer configuration adds a certain number of support headaches. If Firefox offers no clear, compelling advantages to average users, and everyone who wants it can download it for free instantly upon opening the box, why would they increase their support costs?
I've never really understood the problem with creating a more stringent definition of the kilogram.
Others have pointed out that they are doing more or less what you advocate, but let me address the more general issue.
Remember that the definitions for the fundamental units are intended, above all, to be *practical*. In other words, the goal is to make the definition as easy as possible for a competent scientist/engineer anywhere in the world to reproduce in order to calibrate some instrument. All the fundamental units have been defined this way, except one: the kilogram.
There are numerous ways they could define a kilogram, but they all suffer either from the non-portability problem (e.g., using a unique artifact, which no one has access to), or the expensive, difficult device problem. Counting the number of atoms in a perfect sphere is not exactly a simple engineering problem. But it's the best anyone has come up with so far.
We allow devices to be used that we absolutely KNOW will kill hundreds of thousands of random people every year. They're so dangerous that if you accidentally twitch your hand, it's entirely possible you will die and take other people with you. They're called cars.
Hell, using your BBQ slightly increases the risk of a random person getting lung cancer from the fumes.
Everything we do creates some amount of risk. Not to say we shouldn't work to minimize the risk, but it's absurd to worry about this level of statistical significance. Unfortunately, Mr. Dyson dramatically overestimates the public's understanding of risk and probability. He thought he was reassuring people, but most people have the same reaction as you, "OH NOOOOS, SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE????"
If some one is told they are as perfect as they can be 'engineered' to be, how complacent will one become?
I often tell my kids that they're the best "boy and girl" in the entire world (fortunately, I only have one of each.:) ). As far as they know, they're perfectly engineered, with no defects (as far as I know, too, actually).
But being defect-free doesn't pay the bills and doesn't put food on the table. They still need to go to school, learn, cruise through what they're good at, struggle at what they're not-so-good at, figure out the opposite sex (lord knows that's a challenge for nearly everyone), and decide what to do for a career.
The only cases I can think of where complacency is bred is for people with tremendous natural talent. They know what they're good at, they can do it effortlessly, and thus don't feel a need to work hard. So I suppose you might have a point if we were breeding kids with, say, incredible music talent. But I don't see how being defect-free is going to breed complacency.
And even for these future kids to whom we give some sort of gift, we're faced with the same issues that all gifted kids face, and that is instilling a work ethic into them and not just coasting on their gifts. I just don't see a case where it's *better* for a kid to be intentionally handicapped if we have the choice.
Of course, in a future world where every kid is engineered to be gifted, all it does is raise the average. The kids still have to compete with each other in the world.:)
Eggs and sperm are different. No matter what a man does, he can only turn so much sperm into babies. A woman has an opportunity to turn approximately 20 eggs into babies.
I don't get your point. Why does the quantity matter? And men can certainly produce more related children than a woman. Anyway, the point is that both a sperm and an egg are required to activate their functions. Either one by itself does not have the potential to grow into a mature adult human being. But once combined, the machinery is activated to create a unique individual.
If I am reading you correctly, at the moment of conception, you believe that the cell has moral rights to the woman's body, and I find that fascinating.
That's exactly right. Think about it this way, from the point of view of the lifetime of a human. A human starts as a cell connected to a host. Nine months later it sheds the host (from the point of view of the fetus) and gets its resources externally. About 4-6 months later, the brain develops sentience (note that a newborn is NOT sentient, unlike what most people believe). 18 years later, the body reaches maturity, after which it lives until it expires.
The host phase of a human life is a natural part of the lifecycle. That's how the whole mechanism works. Therefore, a human life has a natural right to its host. Just like you have a natural right to your body, because it keeps your brain alive. The fetus also has a natural right to its host, because it requires the host to keep *it* alive.
I realize that society doesn't typically see the process like this, but I believe this is the most scientific, rational way to view life and natural rights. Either all humans have rights or no humans have rights. And a fetus is just as human, just as DNA-unique, as an 80 year old person, an unsentient newborn, a black slave, a gay person, a severely retarded child or any other human that we recognize as having civil rights.
There are also plenty of mildly 'defective' kids driven to work harder to over come adversity, and about the same amount of perfectly capable but lazy kids.
What's your point? That given the choice, we should intentionally produce kids with defects so they can overcome that adversity? I think life is hard enough. Everyone has adversities to overcome, even without physical or mental issues.
That is, what's the difference between an unfertilized egg and a freshly fertilized egg? They both have the potential to grow into a genetically unique individual, the one just involves a single extra step.
Um, it might be time to take a biology class. An unfertilized egg does not have a unique set of DNA capable of growing into a mature adult human being. A fertilized egg creates an entirely separate individual, unique from the parents. You'll also note that sperm does not have the capability to grow into a mature adult human being either, before you pull out that old (and totally wrong) nonsense about male masturbation killing millions of children everyday.
I don't think men should have any business telling a women what to do with their bodies, certainly not based on faith either.
Being an atheist, I have no problem forcing woman to carry children to term and not killing them. I believe in the natural rights of every genetically unique individual no matter what stage of life, and an embryo has a natural joint ownership of the mother's body. (In the case of the mother's life in danger, then I support abortion, because the embryo is, in essence, "breaking the contract" of using the jointly owned body).
That said, I don't see how the government could possibly define what is and isn't acceptable. The perfect example are the deaf people who want to select deaf children. It's monstrous, but I don't know how we would draw the line. Maybe intentionally selecting defects would outlawed, but other than that, anything goes.
I have ADHD (known to run in my family), dyslexia, weak ligaments, a predisposition to addictive substances and I'm damn smart. Would I have been your kid?
You phrase that as if the choice is between smart and not smart.
If you had two eggs in front of you, and you wanted one child, and one egg is ADHD, dyslexic, weak, addictive and smart, and the other is healthy, strong (both mentally and physically) and is equivalently smart, which would you choose? Everyone would pick the second egg, unless you had mental issues with wanting a defective kid that resembled yourself (like those idiot deaf people who want deaf kids).
In fact, the second kid would probably be effectively smarter, since it didn't have all that baggage slowing him/her down.
And no, you don't have to be defective to be smart. There are plenty of smart people who are socially well adjusted.
Slashdot Mirror
"No question"? Really? [citation needed].
What, after TWO (count 'em) unbelievably bloody wars, you think the nature of Europe just changed overnight? All the ancient hatred "just went away"? Come on.
And yes, much of the reason was to hold back the Soviets, but make no mistake that there was an undercurrent of making damn sure Europe didn't screw up the world again.
Look at the countries that make up the EU. They don't want to start anything anywhere. They are far more diplomatic about dealing with the middle east than the US is. I doubt they will be invaded and I don't see them causing World War III either. Took a major chill pill after World War II. They are on break, and don't even get me started on the French.
More like they were castrated after WW/II by American Troops being stationed throughout Europe to prevent them from starting yet another war. There is no question WW/III would have happened if the United States hadn't taken over nearly all the military operations in Europe.
They are diplomatic because that's all the power they have at this point. This is a double-edged sword; Europe is now nearly powerless to start another war, but they're also close to useless when it comes to helping out when military action is really needed.
(Some younger Europeans will probably be peeved about this post, but they really need to read their own unbelievably bloodthirsty history)
Just to add a bit of personal experience, which I forgot to mention...
I had a case, just in the past year, where files I was saving were getting corrupted. Naturally, I assumed it was the hard disk, controller, motherboard, etc, etc. Turns out it was a bad memory card. It was only bad enough to occasionally cause the system to crash, maybe once a week (which I chalked up to a crappy video driver), but it was apparently just in the right place to hose the disk buffers. Fortunately, I didn't lose anything vital, but it made me glad I use online Internet backups. (Actually, I use TWO online backup solutions, that's how paranoid I am these days)
get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue.
RAID is not a substitute for backups!
All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one.
Crucial corollaries:
1) All file systems, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will be propagated to your RAID array.
AND: 2) All RAID controllers, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will hose your RAID array.
And let's not get into fires, theft, lightning / voltage spikes ...
They find the idea of a middle- to upper-class person riding a bus (let alone walking or riding a bike) baffling.
Riding a bus is a totally different activity than walking or riding a bike. The latter two I can choose to do for exercise and I still have freedom of travel, as well as being able to choose to be alone or not. Just because someone would never ride a bus doesn't mean they'd never walk or ride a bike.
Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
How does more assurance of your data integrity obviate the need for backups? In other words, how does your behavior change even with those assurances?
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
Yeah, it'd be nice not to have hard drive failures, but don't blame the drive manufacturers for your lack of backups. There is no data solution so good that it doesn't need redundancy in some manner.
I am amazed that you missed out public transport. One day, the people of the USA are going to have to get used to sitting next to strangers again. :)
To hell with that. The "freedom to travel" is one of the most important freedoms to me. Not to mention I consider my time extremely valuable. I would take public transportation if it was more efficient than the alternatives (New York City is one of the few places in the country where that's true), but I'll sacrifice a hell of a lot of other things before I waste my life sitting in a bus for hours just to go across town.
I've wondered about this: In looking at my dog, who just had his 14th birthday, he shows all the signs of old age -- arthritis, gray hair, hearing loss, etc. Why do some mammals age faster than others? Why are human bodies just getting started at 18 years old, and that's getting to the outer range for dogs? This seems like a fundamental question of this subject.
Be glad about it. Don't idiotically overstate your case by throwing around terms like "overwhelming."
Sorry, but I can only assume you haven't seen the list of evidence, and read Reiser's (literally) insane explanations. It's the murder equivalent of a cookie missing from the cookie jar and your five year old son saying he didn't do it while crumbs are all over his face. Technically, yes, the evidence is circumstantial, and yes, we don't have the body of the cookie, but it doesn't take a mind reader to know that a burgler probably didn't sneak in to eat the cookie.
I like the analogy another poster made: if this had been Bill Gates and Melinda was missing, most Slashdotters would've convicted him instantly based on the evidence we had.
I fail to understand why there shouldn't be rights that protect free speech in companies.
You have a company. You hire a salesman to go out and demonstrate your product. The salesman offends your customers by constantly telling crude sex jokes to them, while he shows your product. Is it his right to say whatever he wants? After all, it's free speech and legal.
You own a preschool. The teacher tells the kids all about her sexual exploits the night before. Is it her right to do that? It's free speech, after all.
Seriously -- is there anyone other than this AP reporter who really believes their constitutional right to free speech applies to other people's private web sites? Are there people really this ignorant that don't understand the whole point of the Constitution is to limit *government* power to oppress speech?
Given this AP's reporter's surprise, I would assume that the AP's web site will allow me to post anything I want there, otherwise they're suppressing my "free speech rights".
To anyone who seriously believe's google's protocol is an order of magnitude faster than XML, I have two words for you: No.
You're right -- if it's less than two orders of magnitude faster, I would be very surprised.
Pilots don't need weapons [...]They have the plane !
Yeah, clearly it's better to take out all the passengers along with the terrorists, rather than give the pilot a standard weapon.
Sheesh.
Egg on our face for assuming innocence until guilt had been proven?
No, egg on your face for stubbornly clinging to innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, just because he was a programming geek. And guilt is rarely "proven", the standard is "proven beyond a reasonable doubt" (And NOT "proven beyond all doubt").
If there were ever to be a law against free speech, this would be it, because I don't want to listen to what this thing has to say. I value silence.
You already have this. The right to free speech is NOT the right to be heard by everyone, despite what a lot of people think.
You are there to represent the people and your country.
That's correct.
If you find yourself having to subvert the will of your public...
This is where you go off the rails. The job of a politician is NOT -- repeat, NOT -- to implement the "will of the people". That's because they can't. Everyone has a different opinion on what should be done. For example, you think your opinion on filesharing should supersede everyone else's. Believe it or not, a LOT of people think sharing copyrighted material should be illegal (probably even a majority).
A politician's job, in theory (rarely in reality), is to totally ignore what the idiotic public thinks they want. He/she's job is to study each issue in more detail than the public has time for, and to vote in the *best interests* of the public. This may or may not match what public opinion polls say.
Imagine what preloading FireFox could do to the brand-differentiation of Dell or HP.
I'm imagining a big white cloud of nothing. Who buys their computer based on what browser is preloaded? Should the computer manufacturers scream in their ads about it? Is that really going to convince the masses to buy Brand X over Brand Y even beyond price, memory, disk space, etc?
They can't (honestly) tout security, considering IE is just as secure as Firefox these days. IE has tabs, which was Firefox's only useful feature to the masses. It seems to be slightly faster than IE these days, but not so much that you'd notice (and sometimes I notice IE is faster, and yes, I use both regularly).
And then remember that Firefox has been horribly broken prior to version 3 as far as memory usage. Fortunately, that seems to be (FINALLY) fixed, at least for me (knock on wood).
OEMs are in business to make money. Everything that is changed about a computer configuration adds a certain number of support headaches. If Firefox offers no clear, compelling advantages to average users, and everyone who wants it can download it for free instantly upon opening the box, why would they increase their support costs?
I've never really understood the problem with creating a more stringent definition of the kilogram.
Others have pointed out that they are doing more or less what you advocate, but let me address the more general issue.
Remember that the definitions for the fundamental units are intended, above all, to be *practical*. In other words, the goal is to make the definition as easy as possible for a competent scientist/engineer anywhere in the world to reproduce in order to calibrate some instrument. All the fundamental units have been defined this way, except one: the kilogram.
There are numerous ways they could define a kilogram, but they all suffer either from the non-portability problem (e.g., using a unique artifact, which no one has access to), or the expensive, difficult device problem. Counting the number of atoms in a perfect sphere is not exactly a simple engineering problem. But it's the best anyone has come up with so far.
We allow devices to be used that we absolutely KNOW will kill hundreds of thousands of random people every year. They're so dangerous that if you accidentally twitch your hand, it's entirely possible you will die and take other people with you. They're called cars.
Hell, using your BBQ slightly increases the risk of a random person getting lung cancer from the fumes.
Everything we do creates some amount of risk. Not to say we shouldn't work to minimize the risk, but it's absurd to worry about this level of statistical significance. Unfortunately, Mr. Dyson dramatically overestimates the public's understanding of risk and probability. He thought he was reassuring people, but most people have the same reaction as you, "OH NOOOOS, SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE????"
If some one is told they are as perfect as they can be 'engineered' to be, how complacent will one become?
I often tell my kids that they're the best "boy and girl" in the entire world (fortunately, I only have one of each. :) ). As far as they know, they're perfectly engineered, with no defects (as far as I know, too, actually).
But being defect-free doesn't pay the bills and doesn't put food on the table. They still need to go to school, learn, cruise through what they're good at, struggle at what they're not-so-good at, figure out the opposite sex (lord knows that's a challenge for nearly everyone), and decide what to do for a career.
The only cases I can think of where complacency is bred is for people with tremendous natural talent. They know what they're good at, they can do it effortlessly, and thus don't feel a need to work hard. So I suppose you might have a point if we were breeding kids with, say, incredible music talent. But I don't see how being defect-free is going to breed complacency.
And even for these future kids to whom we give some sort of gift, we're faced with the same issues that all gifted kids face, and that is instilling a work ethic into them and not just coasting on their gifts. I just don't see a case where it's *better* for a kid to be intentionally handicapped if we have the choice.
Of course, in a future world where every kid is engineered to be gifted, all it does is raise the average. The kids still have to compete with each other in the world. :)
Eggs and sperm are different. No matter what a man does, he can only turn so much sperm into babies. A woman has an opportunity to turn approximately 20 eggs into babies.
I don't get your point. Why does the quantity matter? And men can certainly produce more related children than a woman. Anyway, the point is that both a sperm and an egg are required to activate their functions. Either one by itself does not have the potential to grow into a mature adult human being. But once combined, the machinery is activated to create a unique individual.
If I am reading you correctly, at the moment of conception, you believe that the cell has moral rights to the woman's body, and I find that fascinating.
That's exactly right. Think about it this way, from the point of view of the lifetime of a human. A human starts as a cell connected to a host. Nine months later it sheds the host (from the point of view of the fetus) and gets its resources externally. About 4-6 months later, the brain develops sentience (note that a newborn is NOT sentient, unlike what most people believe). 18 years later, the body reaches maturity, after which it lives until it expires.
The host phase of a human life is a natural part of the lifecycle. That's how the whole mechanism works. Therefore, a human life has a natural right to its host. Just like you have a natural right to your body, because it keeps your brain alive. The fetus also has a natural right to its host, because it requires the host to keep *it* alive.
I realize that society doesn't typically see the process like this, but I believe this is the most scientific, rational way to view life and natural rights. Either all humans have rights or no humans have rights. And a fetus is just as human, just as DNA-unique, as an 80 year old person, an unsentient newborn, a black slave, a gay person, a severely retarded child or any other human that we recognize as having civil rights.
There are also plenty of mildly 'defective' kids driven to work harder to over come adversity, and about the same amount of perfectly capable but lazy kids.
What's your point? That given the choice, we should intentionally produce kids with defects so they can overcome that adversity? I think life is hard enough. Everyone has adversities to overcome, even without physical or mental issues.
That is, what's the difference between an unfertilized egg and a freshly fertilized egg? They both have the potential to grow into a genetically unique individual, the one just involves a single extra step.
Um, it might be time to take a biology class. An unfertilized egg does not have a unique set of DNA capable of growing into a mature adult human being. A fertilized egg creates an entirely separate individual, unique from the parents. You'll also note that sperm does not have the capability to grow into a mature adult human being either, before you pull out that old (and totally wrong) nonsense about male masturbation killing millions of children everyday.
I don't think men should have any business telling a women what to do with their bodies, certainly not based on faith either.
Being an atheist, I have no problem forcing woman to carry children to term and not killing them. I believe in the natural rights of every genetically unique individual no matter what stage of life, and an embryo has a natural joint ownership of the mother's body. (In the case of the mother's life in danger, then I support abortion, because the embryo is, in essence, "breaking the contract" of using the jointly owned body).
That said, I don't see how the government could possibly define what is and isn't acceptable. The perfect example are the deaf people who want to select deaf children. It's monstrous, but I don't know how we would draw the line. Maybe intentionally selecting defects would outlawed, but other than that, anything goes.
I have ADHD (known to run in my family), dyslexia, weak ligaments, a predisposition to addictive substances and I'm damn smart. Would I have been your kid?
You phrase that as if the choice is between smart and not smart.
If you had two eggs in front of you, and you wanted one child, and one egg is ADHD, dyslexic, weak, addictive and smart, and the other is healthy, strong (both mentally and physically) and is equivalently smart, which would you choose? Everyone would pick the second egg, unless you had mental issues with wanting a defective kid that resembled yourself (like those idiot deaf people who want deaf kids).
In fact, the second kid would probably be effectively smarter, since it didn't have all that baggage slowing him/her down.
And no, you don't have to be defective to be smart. There are plenty of smart people who are socially well adjusted.