We're spending money we don't have, we're doing it faster and faster with every passing year, and we don't have a single plan in place to reverse this trend. We need to do something about this.
I'll admit that it's not specific to the NASA funding, but it's still perfectly relevant. I am suggesting that NASA--along with everything else--should have the belt tightened considerably, that we should increase taxes and that we should start living within our means. As it stands today, we're living a lifestyle we simply cannot afford. It isn't sustainable, and it will come back to bite us in the ass.
I'm not the least bit happy about what I'm proposing, but I'd really rather deal with it now than wait for it to become a disaster.
It isn't that we want to cut NASA's funding; rather, we want people to face up to the reality of our fiscal situation. Yes, there are better programs to cut, but each and every one of them has a champion in a position of power who says the exact same thing--that program X is simply too essential to the future of our nation to cut.
The current economic plan is to borrow heavily and cut federal income (taxes). Unless I've missed something on page A19, there's nothing in the works for actually paying back our debts. The current administration sincerely believes that "deficits don't matter". They've repeatedly said that the budget will be balanced again in a matter of years, but they've shown absolutely nothing--neither research nor policy--that backs up that assertion. There's this dangerous, pervasive sense that nothing terribly bad can really happen to us, because We're America, Dammit.
Which would you pick--fully funding NASA until the government collapses under its own weight in twenty years, or tightening the belt now and maintaining research for years to come? (Not that we really have a choice at this point, but still...)
...seriously, has anybody looked at the nation's credit card bill lately? We can't afford this. As much as it pains me to say it, we simply can't afford to spend this money. I want a well-funded NASA, but I want a sensible federal budget first.
To continue beating a dead horse, how exactly are we going to go about paying our debts? Are we just assuming we're going to have another decade like the nineties any day now? Are we just assuming that the rest of the world will happily keep throwing money at us for as long as we want them to? Hell, does anybody even care that we're flinging ourselves into insolvency? Does anybody even bother trying to comprehend what the consequences will be when China decides to quit investing in us? Does it strike anybody that China might, y'know, have ulterior motives?
Of course they could do better. They could dress Nobuyuki Idei up in a clown suit and send him to your door, arms overflowing with yet-to-be-released blockbuster titles. They could do even better than that--hell, why not have him fix dinner for you and clean house for you while he's there?
Instead, all they're doing is giving away free copies of your choice of a number of damn good games. What's more, they're taking your word on it--none of this "send in three UPCs, a screenshot, and the liver of a griffin" crap.
Seriously, what would make you happy? Is a genuine apology and a we'll-take-your-word-for-it offer of a free game really too cheap for you?
On a final note, if your game data really has that much value, you should be backing it up. Y'know, like you back up all your important data. They give you two memory card slots to make it virtually dummy-proof, for crying out loud. (...or is your game save data really not all that important?)
Hey, I shouldn't have jumped down your throat. Long day...
I'd love to see a return to an individualistic "true" free market, but I simply don't believe that it's a tenable goal. For one, too many people simply cannot be bothered to participate in a true free market. Paradoxically, we're too content a nation for such a thing to work. Second, there are plenty of checks on our government other than elections. That a part of our society is working to remove these checks in the name of consolidating power is disturbing to me, but the checks do still exist. It is far from a perfect system, but it works well overall.
I think that government is still where our best hope lies, and I think that it's more beneficial to us in the long run to work to improve and refine government--rather than shift power back towards the private sector.
Of course, IMO restitution (derived from real property rights) is the most proactive solution possible.
How? Restitution is by its very definition a giving back of something. It is a response. It is a reaction to an event. There's nothing preventive about restitution.
Violent crime stems less from gun rights and more from poverty and social inequity. The trouble with deterrence is that it relies on a potential offender rationalizing a situation and acting logically. Why the hell do people still try to rob banks? Armed guards, advanced security systems, cameras everywhere--the very concept of even trying defies all logic! Even so much as try, and you'll rot in prison for years! What level of deterrence is necessary to stop people from trying to rob banks? What makes you think that a person who'd honestly consider robbing a damned bank this day and age would even think twice about snatching a purse or jacking a car, guns-a-plenty or not?
You're assuming that people running government are unselfish altruists working only for the common good.
No. I'm not. I'm not some naive, starry-eyed idjit who thinks that sunflowers and goodness will sprout from our asses if we eradicate capitalism. Grant me the teensiest modicum of respect, here.
Rather, I think that government is more likely to harbor and foster individuals who care about the common good than private enterprise. I think that government, on balance, is better at serving the public good than is private enterprise.
The root of the problem is human greed; that's something that is always going to be there, and there will always be somebody willing to risk breaking the rules for their own personal gain. What I do believe is that we stand a better chance of keeping greed in check by vesting power in an institution that is ostensibly there to serve the greater good of the people. I do not think that an institution which exists to foster financial gain can do as well at this.
I'm not saying that people running governments are angels. You damn well know that, and it's insulting that you'd assume my position on this issue is rooted in such a flighty, mindless assertion as that.
Good government takes pains to balance power and rein in those who try to exercise too much of it. Good industry does no such thing; left to its own devices, industry rewards success with even more success, and leaves no real reason or incentive to share or yield power once it is gained.
It is in our nature to covet power. The more power we receive, the more power we desire, and the more things we're willing to do to attain such power.
Punishment is reactive. Even if Union Carbide, the Indian Government, and other responsible parties were fully and fairly punished for the Bhopal Disaster, what good is that to the thousands who died a screaming, burning, hemorrhaging death enveloped in a toxic cloud?
Regulation is proactive. With effectively enforced regulations, the need for punishment approaches zero--as the disasters rooted in negligence don't happen in the first place.
Which strikes you as better--a system that responds to atrocity with justice, or a system that prevents atrocity through vigilance?
What color is the sky in your world, my good man--black, or white?
That government is not the perfect solution does not mean it isn't better.
A well-run corporation makes money for its investors. A well-run government guards the welfare of its citizens. Tell me, which entity is more likely to take steps to protect the residents of a shanty-town in the shadow of a factory--the entity whose primary concern is making money, or the entity whose primary concern is guarding the welfare of the people?
Fortunately, corporate ethics have progressed in leaps and bounds in the past twenty years. Today, the world can sleep soundly knowing that increasingly de-regulated industries have learned their lessons and would never risk innocent lives in the name of saving a buck.
Without the monumental advances in overcoming human nature since these dark times, we wouldn't even be considering shifting regulatory responsibility from the government to the private sector. Yea, we are truly blessed to live in such an enlightened age.
...so next time somebody talks to you about phasing out cumbersome government regulatory systems, remember: we are no longer the savage brutes we were in 1984. The corporations of the world understand now that there are more important things than the bottom line. They would never, ever, ever sacrifice the safety of the community to further their own economic gains...
No, he's saying that on whatever scale he's using, the game is good enough to merit a "10". There's no rule saying that "10" has to mean "perfection".
When one uses a 10-point scale, it's safe to assume that a score of 10 means "there is no way this could be any better". The scale ends at 10, after all. True, there's nothing that says 10 must be a perfect score, but it kinda defeats the purpose of giving something a quantitative score if the scale has arbitrary endpoints. What do you do if an update makes WoW even better? Do the inane "This one goes to eleven" schtick?
If "10" doesn't equate to "can't get any better", there's little point in giving it a number grade. You might as well get surreal.
"...on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being 'angular', 5 being 'effervescent', and 10 being 'receptive', how would you rate this game?"
I learn fun new stuff, I get to take things at my own pace, I get fun email from other people, and I make enough to cover my car payment. Best of all, it feeds my megalomania.
Er, stem cells are more likely to *cause* cancer than prevent it.
True today, but this has little bearing on the value of researching them, especially if we can unlock the secret of what triggers the cancer response over the generation of healthy adult stem cells.
The ethical distinction you are making between embryos that would be destroyed and embryos that would not be destroyed doesn't matter to them, because they believe that destroying _any_ embryo means ending the life of a sentient being. Sentient beings die all the time, but for those who believe that their ethics affect their future existence, there is a huge distinction between taking ownership of the death of a sentient being and the fact that the being has died, or is going to die. That is, if you kill the being, it's your problem; if I kill the being, or benefit from its death, it's my problem.
You're absolutely right; that is how many, many people think about this issue. What I'm trying to do, though, is to change minds and force thought on the matter. True, it's hard, but it isn't futile. Part of what drives the opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that certain groups of people have very effectively distilled the issue into a simple, easy-to-digest format that goes down easy and doesn't give you gas. I'm trying to shake that back up--to muddy those waters that should never have been made clear--and force people to think beyond their own spheres of comfort. Do this often enough and persistently enough, and there's a chance we can re-inject some of the complexity that is so essential to arriving at a sound resolution of this issue. To this end, I'm not strong enough butt heads directly with the masters who whip up these false dichotomies--rather, this kind of situation calls for an end run of the artificial discourse. Call it guerilla discussion.
In short, I'm trying to change public discourse, one person at a time. Sure, it's a shitty and often hopeless job, but unless somebody does it, we're fucked as a thinking society. Part of my strategy is to simply skirt the talking points and introduce angles for which people haven't been indoctrinated one way or the other. Overall, it is effective; all it takes is a shadow of a doubt to get people really thinking about something, and I've managed to force a good number of people to at least back their EZ-Dose Talking Points with facts and reasoning--which I count as a victory, even if I haven't changed their conclusion.
When we try to base our actions on how things should be, as opposed to how they actually are, we undercut the effectiveness of what we do.
I disagree. The biggest reason things "are" as they are is that a small, dedicated group of people based their actions on how they thought things should be.
If you're in Denver and you want to get to Salt Lake City, you don't get pissed off at the mountain passes between the two cities - the mountain passes don't care what you think. You suck it up and cross them. The situation here is no different.
Absolutely right. What you do instead is work hard and toil for years, build roads, build tunnels, build machines to clear three feet of snow in an hour, build aircraft to fly above that pass. One day, you realize that the mountain pass is no longer an issue, and you move on to the next challenge. I'm toiling to make this particular debate irrelevant. It's hard, thankless work, but at some point, the combined forces of science and persuasion will render this hot potato as irrelevant as the debate over which celestial body is at the center of the universe--so long as enough of us keep working at it. The more of us out there, the sooner we can move on to the next pass.
The point of stem cell research in general is to develop a method of regenerating damaged tissues.
That is the point of applied stem cell research. That is decidedly not the point of pure stem cell research. The point of pure stem cell research is to further our understanding of how the human body works, plain and simple. Through understanding comes insight, and through insight comes discovery.
Pure research is every bit as essential as applied research. They each inform and promote the other, and both methods have yielded phenomenal historical milestones.
So you see, I don't buy that "embreyonic stem cell research is more promising," at all. Not "amazingly," not "slightly," not "to an insignificant but existant degree." I have valid reasons for these beliefs, and I hope you now understand them.
Adult stem cells are amazing things, but each and every one of them is derived from the embryonic stem cell. Thus, while full understanding of the adult stem cell would be amazing, full understanding of the embryonic stem cell would be even more amazing. It's like the difference between understanding the molecule versus understanding the atom; the closer you can get to the root of something, the more complete your knowledge of that thing will be. I readily agree that embryonic stem cell research introduces some very serious ethical considerations that are absent from adult stem cell research, but this in and of itself does not lessen the potential impact of embryonic stem cell research. The ethics of a particular type of research and the potential of a particular type of research are two separate things.
Finally, if you don't buy that embryonic stem cell research is more promising than adult stem cell research, how do you explain the fact that large numbers of research scientists are so keen to research embryonic stem cells, even though such research forces them to grapple with such difficult ethical questions? Why on earth would they put themselves through this hell if they believed that adult stem cell research was equally or more promising? Are you willing to trust their scientific opinion over than your own on this matter?
I'm not a biologist, but I'm going to guess that since embreyonic stem cells are totipotent and regrow entire bodies, that they "try" (*cough*) to regrow something other than just surorunding tissue (when they actually graft), and thus simply turn into blobs of useless, random tissue (tumors).
"I'm not an auto mechanic, but I'm going to guess that your car won't start because the tires are flat." You're right--you're no biologist, and neither am I. I am, however, married to one, and I can assure you that the particulars of this kind of research are so complex and esoteric that it'd make your brain want to leap out of your skull and cower in the corner. There is absolutely nothing simple about this kind of research. It takes years of study to even begin to understand the research we're doing today.
That said, even if your armchair pontification were accurate, it would simply drive even more research--for example, can we trick the stem cells into believing they're in a different environment? How would we go about doing that? What mechanisms are involved in determining whether this stem cell differentiates into bone marrow versus "blobs of useless, random tissue (tumors)"? Research tends to create more questions than they answer, and researchers rarely stand up and say, "well, that's the end of it, then!"
Embryonic stem cell research is amazingly promising, more so than adult stem cell research. The biggest reason we haven't had a slew of embryonic stem cell results is that the research is still in its infancy. Another big reason is that a lab that gets any kind of federal funding (read: most labs) is under a pretty strict set of regulations as to what they can and can't use in their research.
Seriously--hardcore embryonic stem cell research has been around for less than a decade. Even the leading researchers in the field will be quick to tell you that we're only just beginning to understand what goes on in an embryonic stem cell. It's barely underway. We're just beginning to understand some of the mechanisms involved. Don't be so glib in dismissing the potential of this research; people far more qualified than you or I are extremely excited by the potential benefits of this type of research.
Certainly the practices of different IVF clinics vary, but that doesn't change the underlying issue. A ceremonial disposal doesn't make the embryo any less dead. At root, the scientific community is not at fault in this matter. They're simply looking to put doomed embryos to use for the good of humankind. True, I should have differentiated between the freezing of embryos and the destruction of embryos, but again, this is a technicality--the people creating and discarding the embryos are the IVF clinics, not the cancer researchers.
As for government involvement in science, well, that's a matter of difference of opinion. I believe that goverment exists to serve the people of a nation and that private industry exists to serve diverse subsets thereof--and that the two are perfectly compatible with each other. I firmly believe that there is an important role for government in the pursuit of science, just as I believe that there's an important role for government in defending our nation and meting out justice. Simply because you could fill a governmental void with private industry doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
You're arguing a point I'm not making, though--my point is that the embryos in question are going to be destroyed regardless of whether or not we use them for research. These embryos are done for, plain and simple.
If the argument against using these embryos in research is an ethical one, it strikes me that the target should be the people who are actually responsible for killing the embryos, not the people who want to use these doomed embryos to try and improve humankind's lot.
I don't see the ethics of "what is a human" as cut-and-dried by any stretch of the imagination. That said, if given a choice between throwing an embryo into the rubbish bin or using it in scientific research, I see little question as to which option is better. This does not mean I relish the destruction of embryos. This means simply that I'd much rather use embryos in an effort to cure cancer than simply throw those embryos away.
And even better, by use of umbilical cord stem cells. Results without the ethical issues.
...true, but umbilical stem cells are technically "adult" stem cells. While they're very useful, they're not the same as embryonic stem cells, which are undifferentiated--that is, they haven't yet been told what type of cell to grow into. Embryonic stem cells are the common source for every single cell in your body--they're the very root of cell development. Adult stem cells, on the other hand, have already been locked into a particular development path, and can only produce certain types of cells.
Adult stem cells are useful, true--but embryonic stem cells hold even more potential, which is why the scientific community is so keen to work with the embryonic variety.
That's true, but make no mistake that Bush's policies have done more to hinder progress than accelerate it.
For starters, it's a bureaucratic nightmare for labs--if so much as a single "bad" sample makes its way into an experiment, they can lose all government funding in a heartbeat. Labs end up having to spend a surprising and frustrating amount of time and money simply to meet the ever-growing list of compliance demands for federal funding. Angling for private funding is all well and good, but there's a severe lack of funding for pure science; corporate sponsors are far more interested in applied science. Applied science is important, but pure science is equally important and would suffer badly if it weren't for federal funding.
Second, the stem cells in question are coming from discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization clinics which are already slated for destruction. To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root--if the issue at hand is the destruction of a human life, they should be fighting just as hard to outlaw the practice of freezing embryos in the first place. That they're attacking the scientific link in this chain suggests that they're more against using these wasted embryos for scientific study (which, for various banal reasons, is seen as the arch-enemy of religion by many,) than they are upset about the wasting of embryos in the first place.
It's a shame that the debate such that the scientific community is being made out to be the villian here. The real villian is the IVF industry; science is simply stepping in and trying to conduct incredibly promising research with something that'd otherwise be flushed down the drain without so much as a second thought.
You make a great point, but I'd love to see a different approach to this sort of "suspense building". Instead of having a limited battery on these things, why not have equipment failure, instead? Hell, build it into the standard weapons, make some pieces of equipment more reliable than others. Your Desert Eagle? Unstoppable, never fails ya. The "Reason" minigun prototype? They mean it when they say "not for use in the field"!
A well-scripted equipment failure strikes me as a far more effective suspense-builder than "your battery is low". Heck, have the flashlight start misbehaving five levels before the major event--plant that worry early!
...lemme get this straight--you need to worry about how long your flashlight batteries last?
I mean, you've got this freakin' gun that can telekinetically heft and fling oil drums over great distances, but you've still gotta worry about flashlight batteries?
"Good news, Gordon! We've managed to create a palm-sized supergrenade that rends the fabric of space and time in a ten-foot radius! We've also developed a personal digital assistant that can run for over fifteen minutes on a single charge!"
So what's to stop people tampering with the batteries and make them look better than they are before handing them over?
...how 'bout reasonably intelligent product design? How would you go about tampering with an output-only embedded system buried inside a 1/4" sealed molded plastic casing?
One can imagine designing a battery pack that's far tricker to mess with than, say, an odometer. What's to stop people from tampering with their odometers before selling their cars?
Dijkstra's point isn't so much about talking to the people around you as it is about being able to think and write well. It's about rigorous thought and careful work.
Think of it this way: a person who is lazy with the distinction between "their", "there" and "they're" is also likely to be prone to such coding annoyances as off-by-one errors and assignment vs. test for equality errors. A person who doesn't put a tab at the beginning of a paragraph and two spaces between sentences is less likely to keep his code well-laid out and properly indented. A person who writes run-on sentences is more likely to cram too much logic into a single IF statement.
A strong command of one's native tongue is indicative of the type of rigorous, careful thought process one needs to become a great programmer.
Everyone understood the point of the post, and that is what matters.
...and you call yourself a geek!
If I handed you a sort algorithm that worked in 2^n time, would you be cool with that? Would you say, "Hey, it sorts, and that's what matters!"?
Whatever happened to the geeky ideal of self-improvement? Whatever happened to striving for perfection in what you do? When did it become "geeky" to put up with a job done half-assedly?
As a geek, it chafes me to see Slashdot run like a hobbyist's spare-time project years after it vaulted to the forefront of the geek news world. Real Geeks wouldn't abide by such a slipshod operation. Real Geeks would lick it up, shake it, wrinkle their nose, and set about fixing the damned problems--instead of embracing said problems as some bizzarely endearing and inescapable quirk of 'being a geek'.
Slashdot Mirror
We're spending money we don't have, we're doing it faster and faster with every passing year, and we don't have a single plan in place to reverse this trend. We need to do something about this.
I'll admit that it's not specific to the NASA funding, but it's still perfectly relevant. I am suggesting that NASA--along with everything else--should have the belt tightened considerably, that we should increase taxes and that we should start living within our means. As it stands today, we're living a lifestyle we simply cannot afford. It isn't sustainable, and it will come back to bite us in the ass.
I'm not the least bit happy about what I'm proposing, but I'd really rather deal with it now than wait for it to become a disaster.
The current economic plan is to borrow heavily and cut federal income (taxes). Unless I've missed something on page A19, there's nothing in the works for actually paying back our debts. The current administration sincerely believes that "deficits don't matter". They've repeatedly said that the budget will be balanced again in a matter of years, but they've shown absolutely nothing--neither research nor policy--that backs up that assertion. There's this dangerous, pervasive sense that nothing terribly bad can really happen to us, because We're America, Dammit.
Which would you pick--fully funding NASA until the government collapses under its own weight in twenty years, or tightening the belt now and maintaining research for years to come? (Not that we really have a choice at this point, but still...)
To continue beating a dead horse, how exactly are we going to go about paying our debts? Are we just assuming we're going to have another decade like the nineties any day now? Are we just assuming that the rest of the world will happily keep throwing money at us for as long as we want them to? Hell, does anybody even care that we're flinging ourselves into insolvency? Does anybody even bother trying to comprehend what the consequences will be when China decides to quit investing in us? Does it strike anybody that China might, y'know, have ulterior motives?
Instead, all they're doing is giving away free copies of your choice of a number of damn good games. What's more, they're taking your word on it--none of this "send in three UPCs, a screenshot, and the liver of a griffin" crap. Seriously, what would make you happy? Is a genuine apology and a we'll-take-your-word-for-it offer of a free game really too cheap for you?
On a final note, if your game data really has that much value, you should be backing it up. Y'know, like you back up all your important data. They give you two memory card slots to make it virtually dummy-proof, for crying out loud. (...or is your game save data really not all that important?)
I'd love to see a return to an individualistic "true" free market, but I simply don't believe that it's a tenable goal. For one, too many people simply cannot be bothered to participate in a true free market. Paradoxically, we're too content a nation for such a thing to work. Second, there are plenty of checks on our government other than elections. That a part of our society is working to remove these checks in the name of consolidating power is disturbing to me, but the checks do still exist. It is far from a perfect system, but it works well overall.
I think that government is still where our best hope lies, and I think that it's more beneficial to us in the long run to work to improve and refine government--rather than shift power back towards the private sector.
How? Restitution is by its very definition a giving back of something. It is a response. It is a reaction to an event. There's nothing preventive about restitution.
Violent crime stems less from gun rights and more from poverty and social inequity. The trouble with deterrence is that it relies on a potential offender rationalizing a situation and acting logically. Why the hell do people still try to rob banks? Armed guards, advanced security systems, cameras everywhere--the very concept of even trying defies all logic! Even so much as try, and you'll rot in prison for years! What level of deterrence is necessary to stop people from trying to rob banks? What makes you think that a person who'd honestly consider robbing a damned bank this day and age would even think twice about snatching a purse or jacking a car, guns-a-plenty or not?
No. I'm not. I'm not some naive, starry-eyed idjit who thinks that sunflowers and goodness will sprout from our asses if we eradicate capitalism. Grant me the teensiest modicum of respect, here.
Rather, I think that government is more likely to harbor and foster individuals who care about the common good than private enterprise. I think that government, on balance, is better at serving the public good than is private enterprise.
The root of the problem is human greed; that's something that is always going to be there, and there will always be somebody willing to risk breaking the rules for their own personal gain. What I do believe is that we stand a better chance of keeping greed in check by vesting power in an institution that is ostensibly there to serve the greater good of the people. I do not think that an institution which exists to foster financial gain can do as well at this.
I'm not saying that people running governments are angels. You damn well know that, and it's insulting that you'd assume my position on this issue is rooted in such a flighty, mindless assertion as that.
Good government takes pains to balance power and rein in those who try to exercise too much of it. Good industry does no such thing; left to its own devices, industry rewards success with even more success, and leaves no real reason or incentive to share or yield power once it is gained.
It is in our nature to covet power. The more power we receive, the more power we desire, and the more things we're willing to do to attain such power.
Regulation is proactive. With effectively enforced regulations, the need for punishment approaches zero--as the disasters rooted in negligence don't happen in the first place.
Which strikes you as better--a system that responds to atrocity with justice, or a system that prevents atrocity through vigilance?
That government is not the perfect solution does not mean it isn't better.
A well-run corporation makes money for its investors. A well-run government guards the welfare of its citizens. Tell me, which entity is more likely to take steps to protect the residents of a shanty-town in the shadow of a factory--the entity whose primary concern is making money, or the entity whose primary concern is guarding the welfare of the people?
Without the monumental advances in overcoming human nature since these dark times, we wouldn't even be considering shifting regulatory responsibility from the government to the private sector. Yea, we are truly blessed to live in such an enlightened age.
fnord
When one uses a 10-point scale, it's safe to assume that a score of 10 means "there is no way this could be any better". The scale ends at 10, after all. True, there's nothing that says 10 must be a perfect score, but it kinda defeats the purpose of giving something a quantitative score if the scale has arbitrary endpoints. What do you do if an update makes WoW even better? Do the inane "This one goes to eleven" schtick?
If "10" doesn't equate to "can't get any better", there's little point in giving it a number grade. You might as well get surreal. "...on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being 'angular', 5 being 'effervescent', and 10 being 'receptive', how would you rate this game?"
I learn fun new stuff, I get to take things at my own pace, I get fun email from other people, and I make enough to cover my car payment. Best of all, it feeds my megalomania.
True today, but this has little bearing on the value of researching them, especially if we can unlock the secret of what triggers the cancer response over the generation of healthy adult stem cells.
The ethical distinction you are making between embryos that would be destroyed and embryos that would not be destroyed doesn't matter to them, because they believe that destroying _any_ embryo means ending the life of a sentient being. Sentient beings die all the time, but for those who believe that their ethics affect their future existence, there is a huge distinction between taking ownership of the death of a sentient being and the fact that the being has died, or is going to die. That is, if you kill the being, it's your problem; if I kill the being, or benefit from its death, it's my problem.
You're absolutely right; that is how many, many people think about this issue. What I'm trying to do, though, is to change minds and force thought on the matter. True, it's hard, but it isn't futile. Part of what drives the opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that certain groups of people have very effectively distilled the issue into a simple, easy-to-digest format that goes down easy and doesn't give you gas. I'm trying to shake that back up--to muddy those waters that should never have been made clear--and force people to think beyond their own spheres of comfort. Do this often enough and persistently enough, and there's a chance we can re-inject some of the complexity that is so essential to arriving at a sound resolution of this issue. To this end, I'm not strong enough butt heads directly with the masters who whip up these false dichotomies--rather, this kind of situation calls for an end run of the artificial discourse. Call it guerilla discussion.
In short, I'm trying to change public discourse, one person at a time. Sure, it's a shitty and often hopeless job, but unless somebody does it, we're fucked as a thinking society. Part of my strategy is to simply skirt the talking points and introduce angles for which people haven't been indoctrinated one way or the other. Overall, it is effective; all it takes is a shadow of a doubt to get people really thinking about something, and I've managed to force a good number of people to at least back their EZ-Dose Talking Points with facts and reasoning--which I count as a victory, even if I haven't changed their conclusion.
When we try to base our actions on how things should be, as opposed to how they actually are, we undercut the effectiveness of what we do.
I disagree. The biggest reason things "are" as they are is that a small, dedicated group of people based their actions on how they thought things should be.
If you're in Denver and you want to get to Salt Lake City, you don't get pissed off at the mountain passes between the two cities - the mountain passes don't care what you think. You suck it up and cross them. The situation here is no different.
Absolutely right. What you do instead is work hard and toil for years, build roads, build tunnels, build machines to clear three feet of snow in an hour, build aircraft to fly above that pass. One day, you realize that the mountain pass is no longer an issue, and you move on to the next challenge. I'm toiling to make this particular debate irrelevant. It's hard, thankless work, but at some point, the combined forces of science and persuasion will render this hot potato as irrelevant as the debate over which celestial body is at the center of the universe--so long as enough of us keep working at it. The more of us out there, the sooner we can move on to the next pass.
That is the point of applied stem cell research. That is decidedly not the point of pure stem cell research. The point of pure stem cell research is to further our understanding of how the human body works, plain and simple. Through understanding comes insight, and through insight comes discovery.
Pure research is every bit as essential as applied research. They each inform and promote the other, and both methods have yielded phenomenal historical milestones.
So you see, I don't buy that "embreyonic stem cell research is more promising," at all. Not "amazingly," not "slightly," not "to an insignificant but existant degree." I have valid reasons for these beliefs, and I hope you now understand them.
Adult stem cells are amazing things, but each and every one of them is derived from the embryonic stem cell. Thus, while full understanding of the adult stem cell would be amazing, full understanding of the embryonic stem cell would be even more amazing. It's like the difference between understanding the molecule versus understanding the atom; the closer you can get to the root of something, the more complete your knowledge of that thing will be. I readily agree that embryonic stem cell research introduces some very serious ethical considerations that are absent from adult stem cell research, but this in and of itself does not lessen the potential impact of embryonic stem cell research. The ethics of a particular type of research and the potential of a particular type of research are two separate things.
Finally, if you don't buy that embryonic stem cell research is more promising than adult stem cell research, how do you explain the fact that large numbers of research scientists are so keen to research embryonic stem cells, even though such research forces them to grapple with such difficult ethical questions? Why on earth would they put themselves through this hell if they believed that adult stem cell research was equally or more promising? Are you willing to trust their scientific opinion over than your own on this matter?
"I'm not an auto mechanic, but I'm going to guess that your car won't start because the tires are flat." You're right--you're no biologist, and neither am I. I am, however, married to one, and I can assure you that the particulars of this kind of research are so complex and esoteric that it'd make your brain want to leap out of your skull and cower in the corner. There is absolutely nothing simple about this kind of research. It takes years of study to even begin to understand the research we're doing today.
That said, even if your armchair pontification were accurate, it would simply drive even more research--for example, can we trick the stem cells into believing they're in a different environment? How would we go about doing that? What mechanisms are involved in determining whether this stem cell differentiates into bone marrow versus "blobs of useless, random tissue (tumors)"? Research tends to create more questions than they answer, and researchers rarely stand up and say, "well, that's the end of it, then!"
Embryonic stem cell research is amazingly promising, more so than adult stem cell research. The biggest reason we haven't had a slew of embryonic stem cell results is that the research is still in its infancy. Another big reason is that a lab that gets any kind of federal funding (read: most labs) is under a pretty strict set of regulations as to what they can and can't use in their research.
Seriously--hardcore embryonic stem cell research has been around for less than a decade. Even the leading researchers in the field will be quick to tell you that we're only just beginning to understand what goes on in an embryonic stem cell. It's barely underway. We're just beginning to understand some of the mechanisms involved. Don't be so glib in dismissing the potential of this research; people far more qualified than you or I are extremely excited by the potential benefits of this type of research.
As for government involvement in science, well, that's a matter of difference of opinion. I believe that goverment exists to serve the people of a nation and that private industry exists to serve diverse subsets thereof--and that the two are perfectly compatible with each other. I firmly believe that there is an important role for government in the pursuit of science, just as I believe that there's an important role for government in defending our nation and meting out justice. Simply because you could fill a governmental void with private industry doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
If the argument against using these embryos in research is an ethical one, it strikes me that the target should be the people who are actually responsible for killing the embryos, not the people who want to use these doomed embryos to try and improve humankind's lot.
I don't see the ethics of "what is a human" as cut-and-dried by any stretch of the imagination. That said, if given a choice between throwing an embryo into the rubbish bin or using it in scientific research, I see little question as to which option is better. This does not mean I relish the destruction of embryos. This means simply that I'd much rather use embryos in an effort to cure cancer than simply throw those embryos away.
Adult stem cells are useful, true--but embryonic stem cells hold even more potential, which is why the scientific community is so keen to work with the embryonic variety.
For starters, it's a bureaucratic nightmare for labs--if so much as a single "bad" sample makes its way into an experiment, they can lose all government funding in a heartbeat. Labs end up having to spend a surprising and frustrating amount of time and money simply to meet the ever-growing list of compliance demands for federal funding. Angling for private funding is all well and good, but there's a severe lack of funding for pure science; corporate sponsors are far more interested in applied science. Applied science is important, but pure science is equally important and would suffer badly if it weren't for federal funding.
Second, the stem cells in question are coming from discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization clinics which are already slated for destruction. To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root--if the issue at hand is the destruction of a human life, they should be fighting just as hard to outlaw the practice of freezing embryos in the first place. That they're attacking the scientific link in this chain suggests that they're more against using these wasted embryos for scientific study (which, for various banal reasons, is seen as the arch-enemy of religion by many,) than they are upset about the wasting of embryos in the first place.
It's a shame that the debate such that the scientific community is being made out to be the villian here. The real villian is the IVF industry; science is simply stepping in and trying to conduct incredibly promising research with something that'd otherwise be flushed down the drain without so much as a second thought.
A well-scripted equipment failure strikes me as a far more effective suspense-builder than "your battery is low". Heck, have the flashlight start misbehaving five levels before the major event--plant that worry early!
I mean, you've got this freakin' gun that can telekinetically heft and fling oil drums over great distances, but you've still gotta worry about flashlight batteries?
"Good news, Gordon! We've managed to create a palm-sized supergrenade that rends the fabric of space and time in a ten-foot radius! We've also developed a personal digital assistant that can run for over fifteen minutes on a single charge!"
One can imagine designing a battery pack that's far tricker to mess with than, say, an odometer. What's to stop people from tampering with their odometers before selling their cars?
Heh--without a doubt. Working in a second language can be hell--especially when things don't go according to plan...
Think of it this way: a person who is lazy with the distinction between "their", "there" and "they're" is also likely to be prone to such coding annoyances as off-by-one errors and assignment vs. test for equality errors. A person who doesn't put a tab at the beginning of a paragraph and two spaces between sentences is less likely to keep his code well-laid out and properly indented. A person who writes run-on sentences is more likely to cram too much logic into a single IF statement.
A strong command of one's native tongue is indicative of the type of rigorous, careful thought process one needs to become a great programmer.
If I handed you a sort algorithm that worked in 2^n time, would you be cool with that? Would you say, "Hey, it sorts, and that's what matters!"?
Whatever happened to the geeky ideal of self-improvement? Whatever happened to striving for perfection in what you do? When did it become "geeky" to put up with a job done half-assedly?
As a geek, it chafes me to see Slashdot run like a hobbyist's spare-time project years after it vaulted to the forefront of the geek news world. Real Geeks wouldn't abide by such a slipshod operation. Real Geeks would lick it up, shake it, wrinkle their nose, and set about fixing the damned problems--instead of embracing said problems as some bizzarely endearing and inescapable quirk of 'being a geek'.