Interesting. I don't think anyone could scrape together the kind of silicon necessary to simulate 700T voters, but a good attempt could be made by simulating them very slowly. Imagine your home computer (but with arbitrarily large storage capacity) simulating a day in the life of one AI. It wouldn't be done for a few thousand years.
Why would a computer ignore its programming so that it could do something not in its programming? Come to think of it, how would it do this?
This is a terrible criterion, because if you make the appropriate substitutions, human beings cannot show that they fulfill it.
Our "programming" is defined by the inputs and outputs of our individual neural connections, and the behavior of those neurons is clearly the cause of our exhibited behavior. So in order to show that you were sentient, you would have to demonstrate that, while your neurons have voted for a turkey club sandwich, the real you is ignoring the input from your brain and wanting to order spaghetti.
Summary: If your brain isn't what's doing the thinking, then what is?
Let me offer an alternative perspective. Let's say that you're a parent, and I'm a game retailer. There is nothing I can tell you about (for example) GTA:San Andreas that would ever entice you to purchase the game for your kids. Come to think of it, there's little I could tell you about any game this side of "Math Blaster 2005" that would entice you to buy it for your kids.
So marketing to you would be a bad idea. Far better to market to your nine year old, telling him how cool GTA is, and how you get to commit random mayhem. Nine year old's reaction? Cool!
I can sympathize. Still, as a parent, you've got a lot on your plate and raising a youngun is a messy, complicated affair. You have to choose your battles, and once an advertiser has convinced the kid that game X is really cool, and the kid starts nagging, a woefully uninformed parent is likely to give in.
This law seems like a reasonable idea to me, though my brain short circuits at the idea of making violations of a "voluntary ratings system" punishable by law. But if it helps good parents to control their kids' media consumption, and forces bad parents to involve themselves in the purchase of questionable games (to the extent of, you know, actually looking at the box rather than just giving the kids the money), then maybe there's something valuable here.
The view I don't understand, even though it appears to be the majority view, is how this law undermines parental authority while allowing a business to sell violent games to your kid directly somehow empowers that authority.
In closing: If you think your kid is ready for BMXXX, buy him BMXXX.
If a student has successfully completed the prerequisites for the course and is putting his/her best efforts into the class, there should be a very high probability that the student should be able to master the skills being taught.
If there isn't such a likelihood, then either the prerequisites were inadequate or the class isn't being run in a satisfactory manner.
Which do you find more likely? An entire class fails because:
A) All thirty/fifty/ninety students lacked the intelligence and motivation to learn and demonstrate even the marginal understanding necessary to deserve a C.
B) The teacher had unreasonable expectations for the class.
I've never been in a clas where there weren't at least a handful of people busting their butts to learn the material (or at least create the illusion of having learned the material). If nobody is doing the assignments, the teacher needs to figure out why. Then, if it becomes clear that it's really not beyond the capacities of the class, then warn the students that the F's will fall like a warm summer rain.
It's possible to have an entire class that understands what is expected, is capable of performing, and just doesn't care. But when an entire class fails, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the teacher is the probable source of the failure.
The vast majority of people will always be spectators in the political scene. Aside from voting every four years, they don't organize their lives in a way that promotes their political beliefs. Most people think sweatshops are a bad thing, but how many of us take the time to figure out which companies to support in order to improve the standards of living for laborers? Most of us are against corporate welfare, but few people have any ideas about which companies are getting it or which politicians are voting for it.
So the major battles get fought between the few politically active people and those interests which happen to have enough money to pay people to promote them. So far, money seems to be winning hands down.
I keep hoping that average people will start to sit up and take notice.
Please try following the thrust of the conversation before making accusations like that. He wasn't equating the downloaders to the anti-apartheid movement. He was citing the case of Nelson Mandela in response to the blanket statement that laws should always be obeyed.
Man, we all need to get over ourselves. You, me, the guy in the chicken suit over there, all of us. I'm going outside to play.
That will certainly be one of its effects. But in turn, the increased push towards outsourcing is going to generate a serious backlash against corporations who feel no obligations or loyalty towards anyone but their own shareholders.
If the excesses of the last couple of decades have shown us anything, it's that corporations need to be reined in. Right now, the average CEO makes 500x the salary of his* company's average worker, many corporations can bypass billions in federal taxes simply by setting up a P.O. box in the Cayman Islands, and a few million in properly placed campaign contributions can lead to favorable legislation worth tens of billions.
In short, fueling the business case to outsource also fuels the business case for shoving all these executives out the airlock.
Hmm. Can't take the karma hit? Start posting anonymously.
After ignoring those things which are simple restatements of earlier claims and gratuitous insults, there are only two things in your response that even remotely warrant a rebuttal.
First, the claim that I'm the one who doesn't understand what sexism is. What part of "punch her in the face", or "Don't you get it? You scare your husband away, you whiney broom" was I supposed to interpret as gender neutral? You assumed that EA_spouse was a woman, someone called you on it, and now instead of admitting you made an unwarranted assumption, you try and pretend you never made the assumption.
The other thing I would like to address is your belief that, because it happens frequently, threats of violence are harmless so long as they occur over the Internet. Now, I've never once seen an actual threat against the safety of the President on Slashdot, because most everyone here knows that making such a threat is just begging for a Secret Service visit. If you find a threat against POTUS as egregious as the one you made, I guarantee you that pointing it out to the SS will get the author in deep trouble.
Whatever the medium, whoever the target, such threats are wrong. Not just impolite. Not just counterproductive. They are morally reprehensible. If you make such a threat, even in jest, it's a form of intimidation, and you're probably doing it because you're not smart enough to present your position reasonably.
In closing, please tell me your first name so that I can tell you how gay it is, and show me some examples of your web design work so I can give them -5 fish.
It's not that your opinion itself wasn't "Slashdot-appropriate." Plenty of people have taken the position that EA employees are paid according to supply and demand. Plenty of people have said that they should switch jobs if they don't like their current employment. But they're not getting modded down.
Your post was modded down because......it's that your post was gratuitously insulting to anyone who disagreed with you....it makes a threat of physical violence against the author of the original EA_spouse post....it's sexist as hell....it appears designed to provoke emotional responses rather than constructive argument.
Also, about the 'provoke a response' thing. How is that bad? I can't think of a single statement, oral or written in the history of mankind that wasn't tailored to 'provoke a response'.
Dumbest. Argument. Ever. The fact that you try to use it shows that you're either continuing to troll or honestly don't grasp the distinction between encouraging thought and inciting emotional outbursts.
Hint: All communications are designed to provoke response. Not all communications are designed to provoke the same response, and not all responses are equally useful or worthwhile.
I think it's overreaching to blame the design of their splash screen design contest page for any reputation problems. But there has to be a better way of running this contest.
Seriously, thin the herd down to the top 50 or so. What's the point of even having a splash screen if looking at it makes you hesitant to open the application?
When I'm wearing cutoffs and a wifebeater in the mid-winter Yukon, along with all the people who got drowned or roasted out of their housing down south, I'll take great comfort in the fact that we haven't done anything to harm our geological infrastructure.
China has been reducing its overall emissions even as it grows. Further, when its economy grows large enough, it will be upgraded to Annex 1 status, which would mean that it would have to deal with the same regulations the U.S. would have. At the current rate, I believe that will happen around 2015.
But I'm with you all the way on the nuclear power.
I think the scientific consensus of 2004 is a titch more trustworthy than the scientific consensus of the 15th century. Don't you?
You're conflating the claim "sometimes scientists are wrong" -- which everyone agrees with -- with "because scientists agree on X, X must be wrong." We've gotten a good deal better at discerning fact from error over the last five hundred years. So despite whatever fuzzy-headed egalitarianism allows you to think scientists don't know any more than anybody else, I think we can put a fair amount of trust in their methods.
Really? The article itself is worded quite ambiguously. Is it saying that the effect on the overall climate would be the same as removing 33M cars from the road? Or simply the effect on methane emissions? Since cars produce vastly more CO2 than methane, the distinction could be important, and judging by the size of the program ($10M/year) the likelihood of this program making a huge dent in overall greenhouse gases seems unlikely at best.
In short, I'm not convinced that this program is substantial, or that it will have much effect beyond giving this administration an eco-friendly whitewash.
While I don't think this story has any merit, your disbelief in the ability to program vote fraud is unwarranted.
You say that it's logistically impossible because there is no way of knowing which candidate will be which. Even if this was true, a corrupted voting machine in the right precinct could still swing an election.
Assume the existence of a corrupt machine that randomly (and I mean completely randomly) swapped one vote in ten from one candidate to another. Now, say that we place the machine in a heavily Bush-leaning county, where he is expected to get 80% of the vote.
Ten thousand votes are cast. Of the ten thousand, 8000 should be for Bush, 1000 should go to Kerry, and 1000 should go to Nader (just to make the math easy). But 800 Bush votes are randomly given to Kerry and Nader, while 100 Kerry votes and 100 Nader votes are divided between the other two candidates.
Conclusion: If you know that a precinct leans heavily in favor of the candidate you despise, you can program a machine "generically".
Further complaints: The VB script was just to demonstrate an example, and wasn't intended to run on the end systems. According to the claim, the end program was supposed to be portable (which I find odd, since I was under the impression that all the voting machines were Windows boxen).
Regarding your claims of "liberal media bias", I would point out that it was perfectly obvious that Fox News was out to defeat Kerry. Just one of the litany of examples: in the runup to the first debate, no other news organization was interested in the fact that John Kerry got a manicure prior to the debate. But Fox News managed to mention it on five separate occasions in their run-up to the debate itself.
You can disagree, but I see the ABC memo as not comparable to the FOX memos that were prominently displayed in "Outfoxed." The difference is, the memo is right. If Kerry distorts his record in Vietnam, and Bush distorts his reasons for dragging us into a new Vietnam, the latter should be much more relevant to the way we vote, and artificially making the two sides look equal in their distortions gives Bush an unfair advantage.
Say you're reporting on some scientific controversy. 99% of scientists studying the issue (say, evolution) say evolution is sound science, while 1% (all of whom graduated from Bob Jones University) discount the idea. There is no "balance" in giving equal time to both sides.
Not the same situation, but I think anyone should agree that there are times when a misguided sense of fairness only distorts news coverage.
I think the problem is, Rather checked the memos with the White House first. It sounds like he was working under the assumption that, if the information contained therein just didn't jibe with the facts, they would warn him against using them.
The fact that the White House did nothing prior to the story would indicate that they either had no knowledge that discredited the memos, or that they knew the memos were fraudulent and were waiting for the story to run so they could ruin Dan Rather and get the spotlight on the documents themselves and off Bush's military record.
The dollar is falling. If Bush succeeds in privatizing social security, it will require going a couple trillion further into debt, and the dollar will fall still further.
Your "lesson on tax cuts" is both apocryphal and idiotic. First, when a tax cut is given to those who have the least, each dollar is more valuable (more likely to be spent on necessities) than if the same tax cut is given to those who pay the most. Second, it's inappropriate to describe those earning the least as "paying nothing" because the (non-PhD-holding) author has ignored payroll deductions. Finally, those who "paid nothing" are actually worse off than before the tax cut, because of corresponding cuts in government services to the poor.
Let's face it. The rich loved the tax cuts. The rest of us were hypnotized by a $300 check.
For a nice counter to this absurd analogy, find a copy of Al Frankin's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". It has an illustrative dialogue between an imagined wealthy lawyer who made out like a bandit on Bush's tax cut, and a waitress whose small tax break was swamped by cuts in government services.
Regarding your barb towards the McCain-Feingold bill, why should having more money give you more control over the political process? Didn't we do away with that sort of thing in the 1800's?
It's fine that so many kids just out of college are willing to put in absurd hours because they don't know any better. But by the time they actually figure out how to do their job well (and it will be a few years), they might have pesky distractions like families, hobbies, etc.
The wizened old geezer of thirty is going to have a certain level of comprehension that he lacked when he was twenty-four and fresh out of college. But the management, in its infinite wisdom, only looks at the hours put in, and figures that if they won't put in the same number of hours as the college grad, then it would be inefficient not to replace the geezer with the grad. Hence, the geezer's choice is between massive overwork his entire career, and taking his hard-won knowledge and exiting the industry.
Hell, unionization would be a huge service to the game industry, but they're too focused on crunching out the next Mary Kate and Ashley crapware on an unrealistic deadline to notice.
I remember an interesting story in Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Martians" that was autobiographical in nature, where he talked about the book, complaining about how he was very much past ready for it to be done.
In "The Salmon of Doubt," Douglas Adams talked about the weird sort of things he would do in order to avoid sitting down and actually writing.
Neither of them are the sort of people whom I would say "shouldn't be in the field of writing."
As an interesting aside, I'm writing this solely to avoid finishing up my homework for my programming languages class.
Over 50%? I don't believe that for a second, so please, back this up with a real poll. Depending on what sort of question is asked, most anyone could be construed as being against abortion.
Another problem, you ignored the fact that promoting stem cell research isn't going to significantly increase the number of abortions being performed. Not one single additional abortion has to be performed in order to enable this life-saving research.
Finally, you fail to distinguish the utility of embryonic cells vs. the cells harvested from umbilical cords. The latter are useful, but have already gone through some cell differentiation, and are therefore poor substitutes for many sorts of research.
It seems like you didn't even read what you're responding to.
What are these "ethical issues" precisely? Millions of abortions happen every year. Abortion is legal, the American people by and large don't want it outlawed, so this fact isn't going to change anytime soon. The only question is, do we want to throw all these possibly life-saving cells in a dumpster, or perform the research that could improve the quality of life for millions?
Supporting stem cell research isn't going to increase the number of abortions. I really don't believe that a woman trying to decide whether to have an abortion is going to make stem cells a factor. But to assuage the fears of those who really think that, I would have suggested the following, more limited injunctions:
1) Research groups wouldn't be allowed to give money, goods, or services to abortion providers in exchange for access to fetuses.
2) Family planning providers would be forbidden from mentioning stem cell harvesting in their literature.
This sort of research has only been going on for a few years. It is far too soon to say that cord blood cells are "good enough" for most research. It's absolutely certain that they won't be able to tell us everything we need to know about cell differentiation.
As the article says, the cells harvested from cord blood have already achieved limited differentiation, and are therefore more limited in the kinds of cells they can become. So not only are they useless for some kinds of research, they also provide less insight into how differentiation happens.
Yes, it's great that they work, but don't get your hopes up in thinking that they're an ideal replacement for embryonic cells.
I fully disagree. The more difficult we make it to do embryonic cell research in the U.S., the more willing the experts in the field will be to flee for some country where their research is supported.
The fact that it was done without U.S. federal funding doesn't mean it wasn't done without government support. The fact that cord blood cells were used in the ultimate treatment doesn't mean that research on embryonic cells wasn't helpful in guiding the search for that cure.
In short, this development--in absence of further information--bolsters none of the claims you make. The ban on federal funding really does hinder vital research, and it does so in absence of any clearly articulated moral justification for doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. I don't think anyone could scrape together the kind of silicon necessary to simulate 700T voters, but a good attempt could be made by simulating them very slowly. Imagine your home computer (but with arbitrarily large storage capacity) simulating a day in the life of one AI. It wouldn't be done for a few thousand years.
What would the legal status of that AI be?
Why would a computer ignore its programming so that it could do something not in its programming? Come to think of it, how would it do this?
This is a terrible criterion, because if you make the appropriate substitutions, human beings cannot show that they fulfill it.
Our "programming" is defined by the inputs and outputs of our individual neural connections, and the behavior of those neurons is clearly the cause of our exhibited behavior. So in order to show that you were sentient, you would have to demonstrate that, while your neurons have voted for a turkey club sandwich, the real you is ignoring the input from your brain and wanting to order spaghetti.
Summary: If your brain isn't what's doing the thinking, then what is?
Let me offer an alternative perspective. Let's say that you're a parent, and I'm a game retailer. There is nothing I can tell you about (for example) GTA:San Andreas that would ever entice you to purchase the game for your kids. Come to think of it, there's little I could tell you about any game this side of "Math Blaster 2005" that would entice you to buy it for your kids.
So marketing to you would be a bad idea. Far better to market to your nine year old, telling him how cool GTA is, and how you get to commit random mayhem. Nine year old's reaction? Cool!
I can sympathize. Still, as a parent, you've got a lot on your plate and raising a youngun is a messy, complicated affair. You have to choose your battles, and once an advertiser has convinced the kid that game X is really cool, and the kid starts nagging, a woefully uninformed parent is likely to give in.
This law seems like a reasonable idea to me, though my brain short circuits at the idea of making violations of a "voluntary ratings system" punishable by law. But if it helps good parents to control their kids' media consumption, and forces bad parents to involve themselves in the purchase of questionable games (to the extent of, you know, actually looking at the box rather than just giving the kids the money), then maybe there's something valuable here.
The view I don't understand, even though it appears to be the majority view, is how this law undermines parental authority while allowing a business to sell violent games to your kid directly somehow empowers that authority.
In closing: If you think your kid is ready for BMXXX, buy him BMXXX.
True, but not really relevant.
If a student has successfully completed the prerequisites for the course and is putting his/her best efforts into the class, there should be a very high probability that the student should be able to master the skills being taught.
If there isn't such a likelihood, then either the prerequisites were inadequate or the class isn't being run in a satisfactory manner.
I don't buy it.
Which do you find more likely? An entire class fails because:
A) All thirty/fifty/ninety students lacked the intelligence and motivation to learn and demonstrate even the marginal understanding necessary to deserve a C.
B) The teacher had unreasonable expectations for the class.
I've never been in a clas where there weren't at least a handful of people busting their butts to learn the material (or at least create the illusion of having learned the material). If nobody is doing the assignments, the teacher needs to figure out why. Then, if it becomes clear that it's really not beyond the capacities of the class, then warn the students that the F's will fall like a warm summer rain.
It's possible to have an entire class that understands what is expected, is capable of performing, and just doesn't care. But when an entire class fails, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the teacher is the probable source of the failure.
God, I wish I knew. People can be such sheep.
The vast majority of people will always be spectators in the political scene. Aside from voting every four years, they don't organize their lives in a way that promotes their political beliefs. Most people think sweatshops are a bad thing, but how many of us take the time to figure out which companies to support in order to improve the standards of living for laborers? Most of us are against corporate welfare, but few people have any ideas about which companies are getting it or which politicians are voting for it.
So the major battles get fought between the few politically active people and those interests which happen to have enough money to pay people to promote them. So far, money seems to be winning hands down.
I keep hoping that average people will start to sit up and take notice.
Please try following the thrust of the conversation before making accusations like that. He wasn't equating the downloaders to the anti-apartheid movement. He was citing the case of Nelson Mandela in response to the blanket statement that laws should always be obeyed.
Man, we all need to get over ourselves. You, me, the guy in the chicken suit over there, all of us. I'm going outside to play.
That will certainly be one of its effects. But in turn, the increased push towards outsourcing is going to generate a serious backlash against corporations who feel no obligations or loyalty towards anyone but their own shareholders.
If the excesses of the last couple of decades have shown us anything, it's that corporations need to be reined in. Right now, the average CEO makes 500x the salary of his* company's average worker, many corporations can bypass billions in federal taxes simply by setting up a P.O. box in the Cayman Islands, and a few million in properly placed campaign contributions can lead to favorable legislation worth tens of billions.
In short, fueling the business case to outsource also fuels the business case for shoving all these executives out the airlock.
Hmm. Can't take the karma hit? Start posting anonymously.
After ignoring those things which are simple restatements of earlier claims and gratuitous insults, there are only two things in your response that even remotely warrant a rebuttal.
First, the claim that I'm the one who doesn't understand what sexism is. What part of "punch her in the face", or "Don't you get it? You scare your husband away, you whiney broom" was I supposed to interpret as gender neutral? You assumed that EA_spouse was a woman, someone called you on it, and now instead of admitting you made an unwarranted assumption, you try and pretend you never made the assumption.
The other thing I would like to address is your belief that, because it happens frequently, threats of violence are harmless so long as they occur over the Internet. Now, I've never once seen an actual threat against the safety of the President on Slashdot, because most everyone here knows that making such a threat is just begging for a Secret Service visit. If you find a threat against POTUS as egregious as the one you made, I guarantee you that pointing it out to the SS will get the author in deep trouble.
Whatever the medium, whoever the target, such threats are wrong. Not just impolite. Not just counterproductive. They are morally reprehensible. If you make such a threat, even in jest, it's a form of intimidation, and you're probably doing it because you're not smart enough to present your position reasonably.
In closing, please tell me your first name so that I can tell you how gay it is, and show me some examples of your web design work so I can give them -5 fish.
It's not that your opinion itself wasn't "Slashdot-appropriate." Plenty of people have taken the position that EA employees are paid according to supply and demand. Plenty of people have said that they should switch jobs if they don't like their current employment. But they're not getting modded down.
Your post was modded down because...
Dumbest. Argument. Ever. The fact that you try to use it shows that you're either continuing to troll or honestly don't grasp the distinction between encouraging thought and inciting emotional outbursts.
Hint: All communications are designed to provoke response. Not all communications are designed to provoke the same response, and not all responses are equally useful or worthwhile.
I think it's overreaching to blame the design of their splash screen design contest page for any reputation problems. But there has to be a better way of running this contest.
For example, couldn't they at least remove the ones that gratuitously court lawsuits, are totally irrelevant, divisive, or just too ugly for words?
Seriously, thin the herd down to the top 50 or so. What's the point of even having a splash screen if looking at it makes you hesitant to open the application?
When I'm wearing cutoffs and a wifebeater in the mid-winter Yukon, along with all the people who got drowned or roasted out of their housing down south, I'll take great comfort in the fact that we haven't done anything to harm our geological infrastructure.
China has been reducing its overall emissions even as it grows. Further, when its economy grows large enough, it will be upgraded to Annex 1 status, which would mean that it would have to deal with the same regulations the U.S. would have. At the current rate, I believe that will happen around 2015.
But I'm with you all the way on the nuclear power.
I think the scientific consensus of 2004 is a titch more trustworthy than the scientific consensus of the 15th century. Don't you?
You're conflating the claim "sometimes scientists are wrong" -- which everyone agrees with -- with "because scientists agree on X, X must be wrong." We've gotten a good deal better at discerning fact from error over the last five hundred years. So despite whatever fuzzy-headed egalitarianism allows you to think scientists don't know any more than anybody else, I think we can put a fair amount of trust in their methods.
Really? The article itself is worded quite ambiguously. Is it saying that the effect on the overall climate would be the same as removing 33M cars from the road? Or simply the effect on methane emissions? Since cars produce vastly more CO2 than methane, the distinction could be important, and judging by the size of the program ($10M/year) the likelihood of this program making a huge dent in overall greenhouse gases seems unlikely at best.
In short, I'm not convinced that this program is substantial, or that it will have much effect beyond giving this administration an eco-friendly whitewash.
While I don't think this story has any merit, your disbelief in the ability to program vote fraud is unwarranted.
You say that it's logistically impossible because there is no way of knowing which candidate will be which. Even if this was true, a corrupted voting machine in the right precinct could still swing an election.
Assume the existence of a corrupt machine that randomly (and I mean completely randomly) swapped one vote in ten from one candidate to another. Now, say that we place the machine in a heavily Bush-leaning county, where he is expected to get 80% of the vote.
Ten thousand votes are cast. Of the ten thousand, 8000 should be for Bush, 1000 should go to Kerry, and 1000 should go to Nader (just to make the math easy). But 800 Bush votes are randomly given to Kerry and Nader, while 100 Kerry votes and 100 Nader votes are divided between the other two candidates.
Grand total: Bush 7200 + 50 + 50 = 7300. Kerry 1000 + 400 + 50 = 1450. Nader 1000 + 400 + 50.
Conclusion: If you know that a precinct leans heavily in favor of the candidate you despise, you can program a machine "generically".
Further complaints: The VB script was just to demonstrate an example, and wasn't intended to run on the end systems. According to the claim, the end program was supposed to be portable (which I find odd, since I was under the impression that all the voting machines were Windows boxen).
Regarding your claims of "liberal media bias", I would point out that it was perfectly obvious that Fox News was out to defeat Kerry. Just one of the litany of examples: in the runup to the first debate, no other news organization was interested in the fact that John Kerry got a manicure prior to the debate. But Fox News managed to mention it on five separate occasions in their run-up to the debate itself.
You can disagree, but I see the ABC memo as not comparable to the FOX memos that were prominently displayed in "Outfoxed." The difference is, the memo is right. If Kerry distorts his record in Vietnam, and Bush distorts his reasons for dragging us into a new Vietnam, the latter should be much more relevant to the way we vote, and artificially making the two sides look equal in their distortions gives Bush an unfair advantage.
Say you're reporting on some scientific controversy. 99% of scientists studying the issue (say, evolution) say evolution is sound science, while 1% (all of whom graduated from Bob Jones University) discount the idea. There is no "balance" in giving equal time to both sides.
Not the same situation, but I think anyone should agree that there are times when a misguided sense of fairness only distorts news coverage.
I think the problem is, Rather checked the memos with the White House first. It sounds like he was working under the assumption that, if the information contained therein just didn't jibe with the facts, they would warn him against using them.
The fact that the White House did nothing prior to the story would indicate that they either had no knowledge that discredited the memos, or that they knew the memos were fraudulent and were waiting for the story to run so they could ruin Dan Rather and get the spotlight on the documents themselves and off Bush's military record.
The dollar is falling. If Bush succeeds in privatizing social security, it will require going a couple trillion further into debt, and the dollar will fall still further.
Your "lesson on tax cuts" is both apocryphal and idiotic. First, when a tax cut is given to those who have the least, each dollar is more valuable (more likely to be spent on necessities) than if the same tax cut is given to those who pay the most. Second, it's inappropriate to describe those earning the least as "paying nothing" because the (non-PhD-holding) author has ignored payroll deductions. Finally, those who "paid nothing" are actually worse off than before the tax cut, because of corresponding cuts in government services to the poor.
Let's face it. The rich loved the tax cuts. The rest of us were hypnotized by a $300 check.
For a nice counter to this absurd analogy, find a copy of Al Frankin's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". It has an illustrative dialogue between an imagined wealthy lawyer who made out like a bandit on Bush's tax cut, and a waitress whose small tax break was swamped by cuts in government services.
Regarding your barb towards the McCain-Feingold bill, why should having more money give you more control over the political process? Didn't we do away with that sort of thing in the 1800's?
So? Seriously, why should that matter?
It's fine that so many kids just out of college are willing to put in absurd hours because they don't know any better. But by the time they actually figure out how to do their job well (and it will be a few years), they might have pesky distractions like families, hobbies, etc.
The wizened old geezer of thirty is going to have a certain level of comprehension that he lacked when he was twenty-four and fresh out of college. But the management, in its infinite wisdom, only looks at the hours put in, and figures that if they won't put in the same number of hours as the college grad, then it would be inefficient not to replace the geezer with the grad. Hence, the geezer's choice is between massive overwork his entire career, and taking his hard-won knowledge and exiting the industry.
Hell, unionization would be a huge service to the game industry, but they're too focused on crunching out the next Mary Kate and Ashley crapware on an unrealistic deadline to notice.
Okay, that was funnier before Acclaim went under.
This phrase is usually preceded by, "No! This cannot be!" and followed by a scream of pain and an explosion.
I read it somewhere. It must be true.
's not like that.
I remember an interesting story in Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Martians" that was autobiographical in nature, where he talked about the book, complaining about how he was very much past ready for it to be done.
In "The Salmon of Doubt," Douglas Adams talked about the weird sort of things he would do in order to avoid sitting down and actually writing.
Neither of them are the sort of people whom I would say "shouldn't be in the field of writing."
As an interesting aside, I'm writing this solely to avoid finishing up my homework for my programming languages class.
Over 50%? I don't believe that for a second, so please, back this up with a real poll. Depending on what sort of question is asked, most anyone could be construed as being against abortion.
Another problem, you ignored the fact that promoting stem cell research isn't going to significantly increase the number of abortions being performed. Not one single additional abortion has to be performed in order to enable this life-saving research.
Finally, you fail to distinguish the utility of embryonic cells vs. the cells harvested from umbilical cords. The latter are useful, but have already gone through some cell differentiation, and are therefore poor substitutes for many sorts of research.
It seems like you didn't even read what you're responding to.
What are these "ethical issues" precisely? Millions of abortions happen every year. Abortion is legal, the American people by and large don't want it outlawed, so this fact isn't going to change anytime soon. The only question is, do we want to throw all these possibly life-saving cells in a dumpster, or perform the research that could improve the quality of life for millions?
Supporting stem cell research isn't going to increase the number of abortions. I really don't believe that a woman trying to decide whether to have an abortion is going to make stem cells a factor. But to assuage the fears of those who really think that, I would have suggested the following, more limited injunctions:
1) Research groups wouldn't be allowed to give money, goods, or services to abortion providers in exchange for access to fetuses.
2) Family planning providers would be forbidden from mentioning stem cell harvesting in their literature.
This sort of research has only been going on for a few years. It is far too soon to say that cord blood cells are "good enough" for most research. It's absolutely certain that they won't be able to tell us everything we need to know about cell differentiation.
As the article says, the cells harvested from cord blood have already achieved limited differentiation, and are therefore more limited in the kinds of cells they can become. So not only are they useless for some kinds of research, they also provide less insight into how differentiation happens.
Yes, it's great that they work, but don't get your hopes up in thinking that they're an ideal replacement for embryonic cells.
I fully disagree. The more difficult we make it to do embryonic cell research in the U.S., the more willing the experts in the field will be to flee for some country where their research is supported.
The fact that it was done without U.S. federal funding doesn't mean it wasn't done without government support. The fact that cord blood cells were used in the ultimate treatment doesn't mean that research on embryonic cells wasn't helpful in guiding the search for that cure.
In short, this development--in absence of further information--bolsters none of the claims you make. The ban on federal funding really does hinder vital research, and it does so in absence of any clearly articulated moral justification for doing so.