Number 2 is interesting. It wouldn't really bother me either, what do I care what me genes are up to, but a good argument against that worry is that it's likely already illegal, irregardless of a cloning ban. Roe v. Wade extended right to privacy/sanctity of self to abortion. It's almost certain that as long as we have a court that supports that interpretation, they'd consider that kind of genetic invasion to be in much the same domain, and definately on the side of being more of a threat to privacy than abortion prohibitions.
There's a thing about a house with 8,000 servants and 72 wives and a bucket of free booze being the baseline on the pay scale in heaven, although I'd assume you'd be looking for more if you're dying a firey hurtling death for Allah. It's implied that they're virgins since there's a rule about djinns not being allowed to fuck them, and that if the 8,000 guys are your servants, they're not going to be screwing your babes (yeah, right). The point is that sin is allowed once you're done on earth, so you can drink and adulter all you want up there.
The wives are uniquely eye-catching, though, since it's specifically 72. Everything else is "all the grapes you can eat" and big round numbers. The 72 is like those car ads where they stick random decimal points in the stats to make it sound technical. It makes you think. Why 72? Ok, so 365/72 is about 5, so you can make it a yearly rotation deal with one a night which is nice, that or 5 days in a row apiece once a year, but that's a bit of a hurry-up-and-wait situation for the girls. And what if you want to do your favorite 2 nights in a row? Or if you've got a hangover from the bucket of wine and you aren't in the mood for somebody's turn? You either induce possible lesbianism within the ranks by leaving somebody high and dry, or you throw off your whole schedule.
We wouldn't want people being able to clone themselves at home.
Why not?
Maybe I'd think you had a point if you were talking about home genetic engineering, or if we had tubes where you could pump out backup copies of yourself like in a Governor Arnold movie, but cloning is just cloning. There's almost no issue there, besides whether cloning causes health problems in the clone. I can make my own Prozac with less expertise and cheaper equipment than I'd need to clone myself, and nobody's up in arms about that.
Everybody goes on about how cloning is a moral crisis, without ever pointing out exactly where the crisis is. Rich people cloning themselves? They do that now, they just use somebody else's DNA to help. Overpopulation? How is a screaming food-hole that's genetically identical to you any more appealing than a screaming food-hole that's only 40-60% genetically identical to you? Cloned soldiers? That's a movie, if you're going to form an army of brainwashed-from-birth psychos, cloning isn't going to help you very much. Other than the fact that we're playing God by shockingly inserting on our genetic material into an egg cell in order to reproduce manually rather than leaving it to a chemical reaction, I don't get the shock and horror.
I understand not wanting to clone people until we can figure out whether or not you end up with a genetically diseased baby, that's reasonable and absolutely necessary, but being appaled at the very idea of circumventing miosis is just weird to me. But perhaps I'm just odd.
Obviously it is. I announce a Linux distro that's Windows compatible, but then I decide that, well, no, it's not, that's kinda a setback for the whole "this isn't a pointless waste of time" idea, no? Eerily similar, in fact, to announcing a GPS system that can't be jammed, and later deciding that, wait, no, we were actually, how you say, "making shit up" when we said that.
And now, let me, here, use a few more, additional, useless, commas, and clauses, that will fuck, up, you know, the flow of the sentance, yeah.
Evidently, it's better than doing something. Doing things has been a bit of a loser for them. Sitting there renaming their cheeses seems to keep them quite healthy and pleased with themselves, as opposed to dead.
Oh, so Galileo isn't actually "in the wanken"? I was wondering if that was righty or lefty wanken, and, indeed, why they had even installed wanken capabilities in the first place.
Not really, but considering our other options are Satan, a Republican, a nerd, three idealogical voids, Generic Southern Presidential Candidate #4572, and some minorities who'd just get shot on the way home from the innauguration, I'd go with the mutant with the neck that creates it's own weather patterns. And it's Dr. Mutant to you, Mister.
Although, of course, if this was still the heady 90s when you got to vote for who you wanted to win, I'd go with Carol, the only potential candidate from any party with any oratory skill whatsoever, but if I were willing to elect politicians irregardless of the near-certain inevitability of their assasination, I'd be asking Hillary or Teddy to run.
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Beautiful, just beautiful. Why not leak the Gay Agenda to the Post while you're at it, fucker. We just wanted to take them to a show or something. Shit, if you had to hear those fucking queens bitching on and on about how they never get any Tony Kushner performances that far from the city, you'd be first in line to rent the fucking bulldozers if you thought it'd get them to shut the fuck up.
Anything that is there is quite literal. The scouring is industrialization encroaching on the farming community, which is what was happening to where Tolkien spent his real early childhood. If he needs something bad to happen to the Shire, then Scouring is obviously what it's going to be. Connecting it to some grand Greatest Generation stuff isn't necessary.
I liked the cartoon. Sure, there's a terminal case of 70s hair, and they probably couldn't have bought a 70s Toyota with the budget they had to work with, but it could've been worse. Gollum kicked ass, anyway. If you're going to get all pissy about little things like the Balrog looking like an epileptic Cowardly Lion with a tent stapled to his back, then you'll never be happy.
The Silmarillion isn't that tedious, really. Some of the other stuff that doesn't have the LotR references to string you along can be bad, but my 10 year old nephew did Silmarillion without much trouble.
I think you hit it. They got a chance to do things with a budget so huge that they'd almost certaintly never get it again, and they did a mind dump. Every idea the two of them had over the past decade went in and collided in a big mess somewhere in the middle.
There's an allegory about coming out of a cave, there's a machine taking a heroic journey, there's a Christ allegory, there's the yin-yang dealy, Kaballah crap up the ass... They tried to write a Grand Unified Theology, and it turned out more Standard Model than Relativity. Nice idea, but it makes a crappy movie.
Maybe they could've just added an hour or two to everything and made it all work out, but I doubt it. There was just too much to keep track of to make it fun. What they needed were about a dozen Animatrixes instead.
So, first a minority uses devious manipulation of the electoral process to sieze power from the majority, then they fix the voting machines? Well, I guess you take what democracy you can get in this economy.
(should the Free State project succeed)
Wait, no, I think I just found the flaw in your plan.
(I'm sorry, I just hate Libertarians sooooooo much. So very, very much.)
I, for one, welcome the idea of entire worlds filled with billions upon billions of Marvins.
"Hey B3-6J49, we just came up with this great idea about laying transitors down with DNA, and..." "Oh. God." "... Sorry?" "Brain the size of a planet and he comes around talking about DNA. Don't talk to me about DNA." "Hey, now, you can't talk to me like that, you're willess!" "Don't remind me. Oh, looks like you've spilled some coffee on your sleeve, would you like me to design an fusion-powered orbital laser platform to dry that off for you? Shouldn't take more than a minute. Brain the size of a planet..." "Ehhh, I'll just come back later and see how you're doing with that DNA thing then..."
No. No it's not. Not at all. This is an appalling, fucked-halfway-to-the-moon idea that I would, if anything, be more upset to see implimented than the Diebold system.
Your reciept can safely be shown to anyone for checking, such as various political, governmental...
AHHHHH! AHHHHH! Holy God! How do you not see the problem here? How the hell did he write that phrase in a positive tone? Christ, David Chaum, how the hell did you reach adulthood without... hell, I think this actually suggests negative common sense.
Telling your government who you voted for defeats the entire purpose of voting. Once more, telling your government who you voted for defeats the entire purpose of voting. In case you didn't catch that, telling your fucking government who you fucking voted for defeats the entire fucking purpose of voting.
Go buy a middle school social studies book and don't design any more voting systems until you've read the entire fucking chapter devoted to the importance of secret fucking ballots.
Not really insightful, this is why you make it open source. You have the code audited to eliminate backdoors, as opposed to just loading up the binary and hoping the Russian mob backdoors you a good president.
Well, you also have to balance the extra protection against the new terrorists being a fuckhead creates. Maybe nuking Mecca would prevent 6 terrorist attacks, it's not a great idea if it inspires 5,000.
Look at it this way. China starts arresting Americans they think might be agitators or something, and announce they will keep doing this until Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward MenTM. How long before the US invades? Now take away the US army and replace it with a guy with a goat, and come up with a plan to get them back that doesn't involve terrorism before a crazy Texan goes ahead with the terrorism plan.
It doesn't matter whether you think that's a good analogy. There's 6 billion people out there and enough of them do to fuck you over pretty good.
Looks like a lot of work has gone into shooting this idea down, but...
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...
Assuming, for the moment, that we define value in the crassest possible sense and limit it to monetary value, this certaintly seems to imply that the progress of science and useful arts is not valuable enough to promote itself, and requires false value to be imposed upon it by the government.
Of course, if I actually thought that way, I'd be some kind of libertarian, and nobody wants to be a libertarian. My real interperetation: Duh, obviously. Which is a more worthwhile endeavor, re-remastering Star Wars or Fog Of War? The 671st Freaky Friday remake or Lost in Translation? Making Lord of the Rings into a movie or actually coming up with something besides elves, dwarves, and wizards to write a fantasy book about.
Slashdot Mirror
Number 2 is interesting. It wouldn't really bother me either, what do I care what me genes are up to, but a good argument against that worry is that it's likely already illegal, irregardless of a cloning ban. Roe v. Wade extended right to privacy/sanctity of self to abortion. It's almost certain that as long as we have a court that supports that interpretation, they'd consider that kind of genetic invasion to be in much the same domain, and definately on the side of being more of a threat to privacy than abortion prohibitions.
There's a thing about a house with 8,000 servants and 72 wives and a bucket of free booze being the baseline on the pay scale in heaven, although I'd assume you'd be looking for more if you're dying a firey hurtling death for Allah. It's implied that they're virgins since there's a rule about djinns not being allowed to fuck them, and that if the 8,000 guys are your servants, they're not going to be screwing your babes (yeah, right). The point is that sin is allowed once you're done on earth, so you can drink and adulter all you want up there.
The wives are uniquely eye-catching, though, since it's specifically 72. Everything else is "all the grapes you can eat" and big round numbers. The 72 is like those car ads where they stick random decimal points in the stats to make it sound technical. It makes you think. Why 72? Ok, so 365/72 is about 5, so you can make it a yearly rotation deal with one a night which is nice, that or 5 days in a row apiece once a year, but that's a bit of a hurry-up-and-wait situation for the girls. And what if you want to do your favorite 2 nights in a row? Or if you've got a hangover from the bucket of wine and you aren't in the mood for somebody's turn? You either induce possible lesbianism within the ranks by leaving somebody high and dry, or you throw off your whole schedule.
We wouldn't want people being able to clone themselves at home.
Why not?
Maybe I'd think you had a point if you were talking about home genetic engineering, or if we had tubes where you could pump out backup copies of yourself like in a Governor Arnold movie, but cloning is just cloning. There's almost no issue there, besides whether cloning causes health problems in the clone. I can make my own Prozac with less expertise and cheaper equipment than I'd need to clone myself, and nobody's up in arms about that.
Everybody goes on about how cloning is a moral crisis, without ever pointing out exactly where the crisis is. Rich people cloning themselves? They do that now, they just use somebody else's DNA to help. Overpopulation? How is a screaming food-hole that's genetically identical to you any more appealing than a screaming food-hole that's only 40-60% genetically identical to you? Cloned soldiers? That's a movie, if you're going to form an army of brainwashed-from-birth psychos, cloning isn't going to help you very much. Other than the fact that we're playing God by shockingly inserting on our genetic material into an egg cell in order to reproduce manually rather than leaving it to a chemical reaction, I don't get the shock and horror.
I understand not wanting to clone people until we can figure out whether or not you end up with a genetically diseased baby, that's reasonable and absolutely necessary, but being appaled at the very idea of circumventing miosis is just weird to me. But perhaps I'm just odd.
Obviously it is. I announce a Linux distro that's Windows compatible, but then I decide that, well, no, it's not, that's kinda a setback for the whole "this isn't a pointless waste of time" idea, no? Eerily similar, in fact, to announcing a GPS system that can't be jammed, and later deciding that, wait, no, we were actually, how you say, "making shit up" when we said that.
And now, let me, here, use a few more, additional, useless, commas, and clauses, that will fuck, up, you know, the flow of the sentance, yeah.
Evidently, it's better than doing something. Doing things has been a bit of a loser for them. Sitting there renaming their cheeses seems to keep them quite healthy and pleased with themselves, as opposed to dead.
That's nice.
Oh, so Galileo isn't actually "in the wanken"? I was wondering if that was righty or lefty wanken, and, indeed, why they had even installed wanken capabilities in the first place.
You aren't against the guys that aren't against the war but who are for the other side and should go back to China, you're just for the other side.
Go back to Sweeden.
Not really, but considering our other options are Satan, a Republican, a nerd, three idealogical voids, Generic Southern Presidential Candidate #4572, and some minorities who'd just get shot on the way home from the innauguration, I'd go with the mutant with the neck that creates it's own weather patterns. And it's Dr. Mutant to you, Mister.
Although, of course, if this was still the heady 90s when you got to vote for who you wanted to win, I'd go with Carol, the only potential candidate from any party with any oratory skill whatsoever, but if I were willing to elect politicians irregardless of the near-certain inevitability of their assasination, I'd be asking Hillary or Teddy to run.
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Beautiful, just beautiful. Why not leak the Gay Agenda to the Post while you're at it, fucker. We just wanted to take them to a show or something. Shit, if you had to hear those fucking queens bitching on and on about how they never get any Tony Kushner performances that far from the city, you'd be first in line to rent the fucking bulldozers if you thought it'd get them to shut the fuck up.
They probably just gave him some of the interns they had working on his plan for hacking into pirates' computers. Like these pirates here.
...next Slashdot will be telling us Gollum doesn't get the girl.
Don't make me check for Gollum slash fanfiction. Please, don't make me check ah who am I kidding, I can't resist checking aaaaand yes, you can find creepy gay porn about every single character ever. Especially Gollum.
Now bring me the nitrobenzene, Igor, I must bathe my retinas.
Anything that is there is quite literal. The scouring is industrialization encroaching on the farming community, which is what was happening to where Tolkien spent his real early childhood. If he needs something bad to happen to the Shire, then Scouring is obviously what it's going to be. Connecting it to some grand Greatest Generation stuff isn't necessary.
I liked the cartoon. Sure, there's a terminal case of 70s hair, and they probably couldn't have bought a 70s Toyota with the budget they had to work with, but it could've been worse. Gollum kicked ass, anyway. If you're going to get all pissy about little things like the Balrog looking like an epileptic Cowardly Lion with a tent stapled to his back, then you'll never be happy.
The Silmarillion isn't that tedious, really. Some of the other stuff that doesn't have the LotR references to string you along can be bad, but my 10 year old nephew did Silmarillion without much trouble.
Just take the one you have now and threaten her with 10 hours of the Lord of the Rings for Christmas.
I think you hit it. They got a chance to do things with a budget so huge that they'd almost certaintly never get it again, and they did a mind dump. Every idea the two of them had over the past decade went in and collided in a big mess somewhere in the middle.
There's an allegory about coming out of a cave, there's a machine taking a heroic journey, there's a Christ allegory, there's the yin-yang dealy, Kaballah crap up the ass... They tried to write a Grand Unified Theology, and it turned out more Standard Model than Relativity. Nice idea, but it makes a crappy movie.
Maybe they could've just added an hour or two to everything and made it all work out, but I doubt it. There was just too much to keep track of to make it fun. What they needed were about a dozen Animatrixes instead.
It's true!
So, first a minority uses devious manipulation of the electoral process to sieze power from the majority, then they fix the voting machines? Well, I guess you take what democracy you can get in this economy.
(should the Free State project succeed)
Wait, no, I think I just found the flaw in your plan.
(I'm sorry, I just hate Libertarians sooooooo much. So very, very much.)
I, for one, welcome the idea of entire worlds filled with billions upon billions of Marvins.
"Hey B3-6J49, we just came up with this great idea about laying transitors down with DNA, and..."
"Oh. God."
"... Sorry?"
"Brain the size of a planet and he comes around talking about DNA. Don't talk to me about DNA."
"Hey, now, you can't talk to me like that, you're willess!"
"Don't remind me. Oh, looks like you've spilled some coffee on your sleeve, would you like me to design an fusion-powered orbital laser platform to dry that off for you? Shouldn't take more than a minute. Brain the size of a planet..."
"Ehhh, I'll just come back later and see how you're doing with that DNA thing then..."
No. No it's not. Not at all. This is an appalling, fucked-halfway-to-the-moon idea that I would, if anything, be more upset to see implimented than the Diebold system.
Your reciept can safely be shown to anyone for checking, such as various political, governmental...
AHHHHH! AHHHHH! Holy God! How do you not see the problem here? How the hell did he write that phrase in a positive tone? Christ, David Chaum, how the hell did you reach adulthood without... hell, I think this actually suggests negative common sense.
Telling your government who you voted for defeats the entire purpose of voting.
Once more, telling your government who you voted for defeats the entire purpose of voting.
In case you didn't catch that, telling your fucking government who you fucking voted for defeats the entire fucking purpose of voting.
Go buy a middle school social studies book and don't design any more voting systems until you've read the entire fucking chapter devoted to the importance of secret fucking ballots.
Jesus God our civilization is doomed.
Not really insightful, this is why you make it open source. You have the code audited to eliminate backdoors, as opposed to just loading up the binary and hoping the Russian mob backdoors you a good president.
Well, you also have to balance the extra protection against the new terrorists being a fuckhead creates. Maybe nuking Mecca would prevent 6 terrorist attacks, it's not a great idea if it inspires 5,000.
Look at it this way. China starts arresting Americans they think might be agitators or something, and announce they will keep doing this until Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward MenTM. How long before the US invades? Now take away the US army and replace it with a guy with a goat, and come up with a plan to get them back that doesn't involve terrorism before a crazy Texan goes ahead with the terrorism plan.
It doesn't matter whether you think that's a good analogy. There's 6 billion people out there and enough of them do to fuck you over pretty good.
Fog of War.
Looks like a lot of work has gone into shooting this idea down, but...
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...
Assuming, for the moment, that we define value in the crassest possible sense and limit it to monetary value, this certaintly seems to imply that the progress of science and useful arts is not valuable enough to promote itself, and requires false value to be imposed upon it by the government.
Of course, if I actually thought that way, I'd be some kind of libertarian, and nobody wants to be a libertarian. My real interperetation: Duh, obviously. Which is a more worthwhile endeavor, re-remastering Star Wars or Fog Of War? The 671st Freaky Friday remake or Lost in Translation? Making Lord of the Rings into a movie or actually coming up with something besides elves, dwarves, and wizards to write a fantasy book about.
If this word actually existed in the German language, it would mean "joy of shame"...
I refuse to believe that Germany doesn't have a word for that.