This raises an interesting question: At what threshold does the probability of a fetus having conscious thought or surviving create a burden to protect it's potential to think or survive?
For the Catholic Church, the threshold is even before conception. For many, the threshold is during birth. For others, there is no threshold. Which leads to the next question, at what point does assaulting a human life's potential become a crime? Most protestants would say after conception, which I think is the least reasonable answer. By least reasonable I mean protecting life before it exists is completely unreasonable and protecting life in later phases is most reasonable.
For Christians having salvation is different than having a human nature. It is an orthodox belief that some humans will not enter Heaven. It is rather unorthodox to consider excommunicate or non-catholics inhuman. In addition, child baptism seems to have been made a practice due to high infant mortality as a way to provide assurance to parents that their children will be in Heaven. Lastly, the reason for not naming children is more related to decreasing emotional attachment before a child is likely to survive. It does not mean that they didn't consider the child human.
Sure, but a weeks worth of uncertainty might be enough. All I'm getting at is that whether or not people celebrate birthdays or conception days is not grounds to ethically argue whether or not an embryo is a human. Ask a mother who wanted a baby and had a miscarriage if her embryo or fetus was a human. Even better, ask any parent of a child who is prematurely born if their child is a human. (Unable to survive without artificial aid.) What about caesarean section? Such children are technically not born since they did not pass through a vagina... are they human? I think that these questions, while emotional and subjective, are a much more objective test than what day a persons life is celebrated.
My question is at what point does a embryo or fetus become a human? Is it really morally satisfying to say a fetus suddenly becomes a human once it's outside of it's mother? Is probability of survival really morally satisfying manner of deciding what is and is not human?
From the article:
The pope singled out as "new problems" the freezing of embryos, selecting which embryos should be implanted after testing them for defects, research on embryonic stem cells and attempts at human cloning.
He is addressing many "problems," including the one I mentioned.
He might mean humanity as a whole rather than an individual human. It's a somewhat abstract and foreign concept to most Americans(Mostly Christian protestant or post-Christian protestant). I think a crime against humanity doesn't imply that the victims are only those directly harmed by the crime, but humanity as a whole. So, it calls all of humanity to respond to the crime. Catholicism is, by definition, not individualistic. So the pope is in essence trying to act as a voice of caution in the human conscience.
I think his concern is that certain humans are being selected to die while others are being selected to live depending on their genetics. This is nearly identical to being opposed to genetic-screening during job interviews if you believe that a human embryo is a human life, except on even more ruthless terms(life and death). In other words genetic pre-screening during the interview for a 'job' as someones child.
I am not Catholic, but I can see why he is concerned.
"The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world."
Not to mention, those are the three graduate subjects that are most useful. I honestly can't say I've seen a whole lot of international students studying liberal arts degrees. So the mindset might simply be that people from developing countries want get a more practical degree. They are often times depending on the support of their families, who will provide strong financial pressure to get a "respectable" degree.
Also, I think it's not too surprising the most useless unscientific science(psychology) is pointing a finger at the useful degrees and saying, "Terrorists!" Without further consideration of the factors involved.
Just a note, I think there is a great deal of confusion about what a watt is. "The watt (symbol: W) is the SI derived unit of power, equal to one joule of energy per second.... Power and energy are frequently confused in the general media, for instance when a device is said to be rated at "100 watts per hour", which does not make any sense since a watt is a rate of doing work or using energy of 1 joule of energy per second. As a rate itself, a watt does not need to be followed by a time designation, unless one is talking about a change in power over time, analogous to an acceleration or deceleration.
Because a joule as a quantity of energy does not have a readily imagined size to the layperson, the non-SI unit watt-hour, often in its multiples such the kilowatt-hour or higher prefixes, is frequently used as a unit of energy, especially by energy-supply companies (electricity and natural gas suppliers) which often quote charges by the kilowatt-hour. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy equivalent to a power of 1 kilowatt running for 1 hour:
It would be nice, but unlikely. Sometimes companies don't know when old source is going to come in handy. Once it's "opened" they can't close it again. Where I work, sometimes, every now and then, when conditions are just right, when the planets align, we get to sell some software we haven't touched or sold or even thought about in 15 years for a pretty decent price. Admittedly though it may take us a while to find the code and some code is never found.
It's called Alpha testing in this case. It's good marketing on their part to say, "We're so sure our software is good we use our pre-Beta software in a production environment." Never mind the fact that they have Server 2003 waiting ready to take over when their 2008 server horks itself.
I know how to make most everything work on OSX and *nix where the average person would most decidedly not.
But I've found that my girlfriend, an average user, is remarkably adept at learning computer skills and is able to search for, understand and follow howto guides from the internet. She really isn't what one would consider "computer savvy" in that she never went obsesso over computers, but she's learned how to work with them as she used them since her late teens(she's 25 now). Now, I'm not just bragging about my girlfriend, but rather that there is an increasing trend of average users who are effortlessly bridging the gap between hacker-types and illiterates. Prometheus is coming.
Just a thought, but I wonder if it could be possible that humans are genetically disposed to loving cannabis? It has been a commonly used plant for a long, long time. The seeds have been used as food and seem to have the perfect balance of essential fats. Now it seems we've discovered it suppresses certain forms of common cancer. Certainly, there are people who abuse themselves with it, but maybe we want them to. In my experience, the people who overuse pot are the same people who have trouble restraining many of their impulses. One of my room mates seemed to actually became a human when he was high... otherwise he was intolerable. By taking these people's pot away, we don't make them better people, just angrier.
Another thing to note is that, while cannabis is illegal now, if we are genetically disposed to love it, cannabis will win the legal battle eventually no matter what the logic for it's legalization is. People legalize things they love and suppress the things they hate ignoring all logic in the process. You can't fight your nature.:)
I don't consider wright and wrong to be dependent on how many people agree with me, I make my own decisions and stand by them. Others use examples to justify their beliefs.
Another name for this kind of character trait is stubborn and in the negative sense. Seriously, if you find yourself in a vast minority you ought to at least take a second look at the evidence(examples) for your stance. The source shouldn't matter, so long as the evidence is true.
My guess about the lightweight skeleton is that perhaps it was mostly cartilage. Another article states that it was a very fast growing animal. Perhaps due to the speed of growth it needed a very flexible skeleton to accommodate uneven growth. My guess is that they will eventually find an older one with more substantial bones.
Perhaps this one's bone structure is not standard as well. Raditaion poisoning from near surface uranium? Malnutrition? Some kind of acid maybe thinned the bones? Osteoporosis(Maybe it's an old one)?
Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't mind dupes. Most(as in 9/10ths) of the time I've missed the first article and if I've read the story before I just skip it. In addition, I don't pay for Slashdot. I'm so cheap I even block the ads using AdBlock+ so that I don't even have to think about not paying money to someone. So give the admins a break guys...
"While there is no way that Vista will be a flop, since all new computers will come with Vista pre-installed..." (http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kind-impact-vista-operating-system/story.aspx?guid=%7B2F0874F5-2584-49A5-8321-DAD679BB0FF5%7D)
By definition, electrocution means death. It is one of those misused words of the English language.
What's a better word that leaves no ambiguity? Shock, needs to be specified and the wording will be awkward as it sounds odd to say he will be "electrically shocked," or could experience "electric shock." The etymology of the word from dictionary.com says is came from "electric" + "(exec)ution." It's clever, because it provided nearly an instantaneous and seamless integration into the English language since execution already has it's conjugates defined. However, I have not seen anyone who complains about the misuse of "electrocution" providing a clever, easy to say, quickly understandable alternative. So, please, find or invent a word that is more suitable than electrocution.
Here are my alternatives:
Electrinjury: Electric shock resulting in injury.
Electeleportation: Electric shock resulting in teleportation.
Electrouch: Electric shock resulting in an "ouchie."
is insightful? The grand-parent didn't say anything about open-source or proprietary software. Essentially all he said was that, "Steam sucks and I was pretty sure it would from the beginning. I am so smart! La la la la!" So I'm just confused how the parent's comment relevant.
I think perhaps though, that great art, especially literature as one of the replies suggested, is a lot more difficult that something like engineering specifically because it is subjective. I am an engineer. I have a B.S. degree from Purdue in Computer Engineering. So you bet I value the logical and concrete, but it seems that in times of great intellectual progress art has always flourished. I believe it's a kind of byproduct of a well thinking society.
Also, I might note that I did not specify painting as the metric for judging art. I specified art as a metric for judging the intellectual state of a society or culture. Certainly, computer artwork or sculpture could be considered. I think however, literature might be the easiest field of artwork to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about your butterflies, but my butterfly emits light! Take that you insensitive clod!
This raises an interesting question: At what threshold does the probability of a fetus having conscious thought or surviving create a burden to protect it's potential to think or survive?
For the Catholic Church, the threshold is even before conception. For many, the threshold is during birth. For others, there is no threshold. Which leads to the next question, at what point does assaulting a human life's potential become a crime? Most protestants would say after conception, which I think is the least reasonable answer. By least reasonable I mean protecting life before it exists is completely unreasonable and protecting life in later phases is most reasonable.
For Christians having salvation is different than having a human nature. It is an orthodox belief that some humans will not enter Heaven. It is rather unorthodox to consider excommunicate or non-catholics inhuman. In addition, child baptism seems to have been made a practice due to high infant mortality as a way to provide assurance to parents that their children will be in Heaven. Lastly, the reason for not naming children is more related to decreasing emotional attachment before a child is likely to survive. It does not mean that they didn't consider the child human.
Sure, but a weeks worth of uncertainty might be enough. All I'm getting at is that whether or not people celebrate birthdays or conception days is not grounds to ethically argue whether or not an embryo is a human. Ask a mother who wanted a baby and had a miscarriage if her embryo or fetus was a human. Even better, ask any parent of a child who is prematurely born if their child is a human. (Unable to survive without artificial aid.) What about caesarean section? Such children are technically not born since they did not pass through a vagina... are they human? I think that these questions, while emotional and subjective, are a much more objective test than what day a persons life is celebrated.
My question is at what point does a embryo or fetus become a human? Is it really morally satisfying to say a fetus suddenly becomes a human once it's outside of it's mother? Is probability of survival really morally satisfying manner of deciding what is and is not human?
From the article:
The pope singled out as "new problems" the freezing of embryos, selecting which embryos should be implanted after testing them for defects, research on embryonic stem cells and attempts at human cloning.
He is addressing many "problems," including the one I mentioned.
Because a persons date of conception is usually very uncertain?
He might mean humanity as a whole rather than an individual human. It's a somewhat abstract and foreign concept to most Americans(Mostly Christian protestant or post-Christian protestant). I think a crime against humanity doesn't imply that the victims are only those directly harmed by the crime, but humanity as a whole. So, it calls all of humanity to respond to the crime. Catholicism is, by definition, not individualistic. So the pope is in essence trying to act as a voice of caution in the human conscience.
I think his concern is that certain humans are being selected to die while others are being selected to live depending on their genetics. This is nearly identical to being opposed to genetic-screening during job interviews if you believe that a human embryo is a human life, except on even more ruthless terms(life and death). In other words genetic pre-screening during the interview for a 'job' as someones child.
I am not Catholic, but I can see why he is concerned.
"The authors have found that graduates in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world."
Not to mention, those are the three graduate subjects that are most useful. I honestly can't say I've seen a whole lot of international students studying liberal arts degrees. So the mindset might simply be that people from developing countries want get a more practical degree. They are often times depending on the support of their families, who will provide strong financial pressure to get a "respectable" degree.
Also, I think it's not too surprising the most useless unscientific science(psychology) is pointing a finger at the useful degrees and saying, "Terrorists!" Without further consideration of the factors involved.
Now you can post-humously!
Just a note, I think there is a great deal of confusion about what a watt is. "The watt (symbol: W) is the SI derived unit of power, equal to one joule of energy per second. ... Power and energy are frequently confused in the general media, for instance when a device is said to be rated at "100 watts per hour", which does not make any sense since a watt is a rate of doing work or using energy of 1 joule of energy per second. As a rate itself, a watt does not need to be followed by a time designation, unless one is talking about a change in power over time, analogous to an acceleration or deceleration.
Because a joule as a quantity of energy does not have a readily imagined size to the layperson, the non-SI unit watt-hour, often in its multiples such the kilowatt-hour or higher prefixes, is frequently used as a unit of energy, especially by energy-supply companies (electricity and natural gas suppliers) which often quote charges by the kilowatt-hour. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy equivalent to a power of 1 kilowatt running for 1 hour:
(1 kWh)(1000 W/kW)(3600 s/h) = 3,600,000 Ws = 3,600,000 J = 3.6 MJ." (wikipedia.org: Watt)
It would be nice, but unlikely. Sometimes companies don't know when old source is going to come in handy. Once it's "opened" they can't close it again. Where I work, sometimes, every now and then, when conditions are just right, when the planets align, we get to sell some software we haven't touched or sold or even thought about in 15 years for a pretty decent price. Admittedly though it may take us a while to find the code and some code is never found.
It's called Alpha testing in this case. It's good marketing on their part to say, "We're so sure our software is good we use our pre-Beta software in a production environment." Never mind the fact that they have Server 2003 waiting ready to take over when their 2008 server horks itself.
I know how to make most everything work on OSX and *nix where the average person would most decidedly not.
But I've found that my girlfriend, an average user, is remarkably adept at learning computer skills and is able to search for, understand and follow howto guides from the internet. She really isn't what one would consider "computer savvy" in that she never went obsesso over computers, but she's learned how to work with them as she used them since her late teens(she's 25 now). Now, I'm not just bragging about my girlfriend, but rather that there is an increasing trend of average users who are effortlessly bridging the gap between hacker-types and illiterates. Prometheus is coming.
Just a thought, but I wonder if it could be possible that humans are genetically disposed to loving cannabis? It has been a commonly used plant for a long, long time. The seeds have been used as food and seem to have the perfect balance of essential fats. Now it seems we've discovered it suppresses certain forms of common cancer. Certainly, there are people who abuse themselves with it, but maybe we want them to. In my experience, the people who overuse pot are the same people who have trouble restraining many of their impulses. One of my room mates seemed to actually became a human when he was high... otherwise he was intolerable. By taking these people's pot away, we don't make them better people, just angrier.
Another thing to note is that, while cannabis is illegal now, if we are genetically disposed to love it, cannabis will win the legal battle eventually no matter what the logic for it's legalization is. People legalize things they love and suppress the things they hate ignoring all logic in the process. You can't fight your nature. :)
I don't consider wright and wrong to be dependent on how many people agree with me, I make my own decisions and stand by them. Others use examples to justify their beliefs.
Another name for this kind of character trait is stubborn and in the negative sense. Seriously, if you find yourself in a vast minority you ought to at least take a second look at the evidence(examples) for your stance. The source shouldn't matter, so long as the evidence is true.
My guess about the lightweight skeleton is that perhaps it was mostly cartilage. Another article states that it was a very fast growing animal. Perhaps due to the speed of growth it needed a very flexible skeleton to accommodate uneven growth. My guess is that they will eventually find an older one with more substantial bones.
Perhaps this one's bone structure is not standard as well. Raditaion poisoning from near surface uranium? Malnutrition? Some kind of acid maybe thinned the bones? Osteoporosis(Maybe it's an old one)?
Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't mind dupes. Most(as in 9/10ths) of the time I've missed the first article and if I've read the story before I just skip it. In addition, I don't pay for Slashdot. I'm so cheap I even block the ads using AdBlock+ so that I don't even have to think about not paying money to someone. So give the admins a break guys...
Willing to die to vote is a more dramatic way of saying, "willing to RISK death to vote."
I am a pygmy you insensitive clod! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy Maybe you mean a moral midget instead?
"While there is no way that Vista will be a flop, since all new computers will come with Vista pre-installed..." (http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kind-impact-vista-operating-system/story.aspx?guid=%7B2F0874F5-2584-49A5-8321-DAD679BB0FF5%7D)
By definition, electrocution means death. It is one of those misused words of the English language.
What's a better word that leaves no ambiguity? Shock, needs to be specified and the wording will be awkward as it sounds odd to say he will be "electrically shocked," or could experience "electric shock." The etymology of the word from dictionary.com says is came from "electric" + "(exec)ution." It's clever, because it provided nearly an instantaneous and seamless integration into the English language since execution already has it's conjugates defined. However, I have not seen anyone who complains about the misuse of "electrocution" providing a clever, easy to say, quickly understandable alternative. So, please, find or invent a word that is more suitable than electrocution.
Here are my alternatives:
Electrinjury: Electric shock resulting in injury.
Electeleportation: Electric shock resulting in teleportation.
Electrouch: Electric shock resulting in an "ouchie."
He is.
is insightful? The grand-parent didn't say anything about open-source or proprietary software. Essentially all he said was that, "Steam sucks and I was pretty sure it would from the beginning. I am so smart! La la la la!" So I'm just confused how the parent's comment relevant.
I think an equation to determine the gas mileage of a Ford Taurus at 65000 feet might look something like this:
(65000/5280)/(gallons in tank) = X(MPG)
I think perhaps though, that great art, especially literature as one of the replies suggested, is a lot more difficult that something like engineering specifically because it is subjective. I am an engineer. I have a B.S. degree from Purdue in Computer Engineering. So you bet I value the logical and concrete, but it seems that in times of great intellectual progress art has always flourished. I believe it's a kind of byproduct of a well thinking society.
Also, I might note that I did not specify painting as the metric for judging art. I specified art as a metric for judging the intellectual state of a society or culture. Certainly, computer artwork or sculpture could be considered. I think however, literature might be the easiest field of artwork to use.