Ro V Wade doesn't need to be overturned it needs to be expanded to include unfit parents. Impossible to pass though since most of Congress would face retro active abortion. Given some of the people successfully breeding one has to question whether Darwin was right.
Oh, I know! Let's play Eugenics! It's a wonderful game - you invent a reality in which people like you are the best, and condemn every other group to dwindle to nothing based on your invented criteria of fitness.
Freaking Nazi. Musings like yours fleshed out into action plans have caused some of the worst atrocities in history. It disturbs me to see so much of this on Slashdot. Is it just teen angst, or something more sinister?
(By the way, I didn't lose because I brought up Hitler. Godwin won because you forced his hand.)
I'd rather see the scene where a young Ensign Akbar struggles to succinctly describe a confining or undesirable circumstance from which escape or relief is difficult.
Our most comparable law is McCain-Feingold, which had more Democrat support than Republican. Rush Limbaugh, of all people, predicted it would be used to stifle political speech.
Oh, well. It wouldn't have been modded funny if you'd said "Democrats," because most people here are completely ignorant of politics. They only know "Republicans = Bad, Democrats = Good."
Indeed, it really is quite obvious. I mean, look at the recent and ongoing Iraq war. 95% of the European, Canadian, Australian, etc., citizens saw it for the sham that it was, even if their respective governments did not (or chose not to).
If 95% of Australian people "saw it for the sham that it was," how did John Howard get reelected? Mind-control waves?
Right. Yes. And that doesn't strike you in any way as hypocritical? "It's OK for ME to do, but not for YOU? So I'll sign this treaty and keep you to it, but not myself?".
Mental exersize; replace "The US government" with "The Kremlin", and see how you feel about it. Then, with "Osama Bin Laden". See how that works?
Both your indefensible grammar and mealy-brained ideas put you at about - oh, age 18 or so. Right?
The US government is NOT the Kremlin, nor is it Osama bin Laden. We're quite certain that the US - both because of international and internal pressures (the latter especially) - won't use WMDs except as a defense. We're also certain of that about Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain, etc., etc. Having them is mostly posturing, actually. Never discount a show of force as a means of diffusing a situation.
(Thought experiment: In how many instances can merely showing a gun save your life?)
It's the internal pressures against using WMDs that count the most. Democratically-elected governments have tremendous internal pressures against it. You'd have to get the entire population mighty worked up to get them to want to drop a nuke on anybody, and it could almost never happen without popular support.
Osama bin Laden has no such pressures, and neither did the Kremlin. That's the qualitative difference that you've either conveniently forgotten or never learned.
All governments, countries, and organizations are not morally equal. Keeping WMDs out of the hands of unstable and undemocratic governments is only hypocritical if you disregard that.
{magazine} {country} is running a story on running {app} on {platform}. For those that don't know, {app} is a {category} used to {verb} your {noun}. Finally, {platform} users have a {adjective} approach to their {noun}.
That would be teh BESTE APRIL FOOL'S JOKE EVAR. And link to Google searches - for "app," "platform," "category," "verb," and "noun."
That'd be WAY too clever for Slashdot - but I can dream, can't I?
That attitude will certainly win you some friends.
That will remove results from Live Journal and Blogspot. Keep adding -URL:blogURL to get rid of more blogs.
That's fine...until the list of domains gets so long I need to cut-and-paste it from a file every time I want non-blog results. Even better would be if Google added "-blog" as a search option. Presumably, they know where the blogs are, so they can keep them out of the results.
I dunno - this might work. I can imagine Larry Ellison walking around saying, "Why, Accent, you sure are a thick Germanic thing!" and then "Danke! Ich ben einer burly!"
No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
Funny enough, that's usually what happens, since most people in distress either can't swim or have a medical problem that prevents them from doing so.
The non-swimmers are the most interesting. In lifeguard training, we watched a video of swimmers in distress taken at a water park. It turns out that something like 1/3 of the people who go there can't swim, and they still use the big slides that dump you into six feet of water! Lifeguards were making more than ten saves every day...so it was a perfect place to get video.
You'd be surprised how quiet they are. They're not bothered to scream or shout - they're mostly trying to breathe. They move very little, splash very little, kick straight down, do dumb, ineffective things with their arms.... The quiet, animalistic panic just before drowning is a little eerie to watch.
If someone is treading water and shouting "HELP!" he's probably fine, in other words. For the moment, anyway.
Any lifeguard worth his salt would be watching young people in the deep end, especially those underwater. The lifeguard on duty may have been doing that, in fact, and would have just waited longer than the Poseidon system did. The article doesn't say whether the lifeguard was tracking the girl already.
Okay, let's settle this like men! If my GRE score was higher than yours, then I'm smarter than you are, and you lose!
Is it clear why that style of argumentation is invalid? I rest my case.
The article is gone, but I've got a crazy fascination with fixing people's dumb ideas. It's amazing you'd post something like this after your original.
I didn't say the GRE was an indication of intelligence. (It is, very roughly - especially considering different types of intelligence - but that's beside the point.) I said it was a measure of how well you fit in. It measures, like you said, your similarity to the test makers.
If you score higher on the GRE than I do, it probably means you fit in a graduate program better than I do. You are more similar to the test makers than I am, who are post-graduates and professors, who probably had to pass the GRE or something like it themselves. It's self-reinforcing at this point. People with intelligence in the same areas as those already past the program tend to get in.
That's fine if you're reasonably sure they're "smart" people by whatever definition of "smart" you personally use.
However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
You said yourself how they're significant:
What the tests actually measure is a kind of similarity metric between the testees and the authors' of the test.
In this regard, tests like the GRE give you very significant information. They answer the question "Do you fit in?"
We can rightly call the study "garbage" that uses a similarity metric like IQ to measure intelligence. Dismissing all standardized testing, as you already (inadvertently) showed, isn't so smart.
I suspect that there may have been a few pro-choice people who are as you said they are, but I suspect it's a small minority.
It's the leadership of the pro-choice movement - I'm not kidding. These are the same people who declared that killing nearly-born babies would "weaken Roe v. Wade."
The `left' says there is no moral question?
Nearly every lefty I've had a conversation with says there's no moral question. Seriously.
> > Boom, and you'll have both stored energy and air to inhale.
>Actualy that should read: >"...and you'll have stored energy or air to inhale." For each H2, O2 pair that you create you can either recombine for electrical energy, or let your body use the O2. Unless you have a way to fuse the H2 that's left over into He. Though if at any point anything really does go "Boom" you've got other problems.:-)
I was going to mod you down, but I couldn't find "-1 Pedantic" or "-1 Insufferable Know-It-All" in the drop-down.
Honestly, did you really think he was talking about breaking down only two water molecules? There's more than that, you know - and if you use more, you can have both stored energy and air to inhale!
The "Boom" thing was amusing, though. Keep it up, and eventually you can quit your day job.
The problem is the ENTIRE BOOK is in an archaic Queen's English. The author does a very good job with the language and descriptions and dialog to transport the reader to Napoleonic-era England. The problem is, once there my mind kept screaming "GET ME THE HELL OUT!"
I don't get why authors feel the need to do this. Part of their job - and SF authors should understand this intricately - is to translate language from their chosen milieu into OUR language. Importing bits of it wholesale for the prose itself makes for a pain-in-the-butt reading experience.
I never got through "Moon Is Harsh Mistress" for the same reason. Icky, difficult prose kept ejecting me right out of the story.
The pressures of publication and of obtaining money for grants often press on one's sense of ethics, and most scientists are faced at some point with making the choice of personal sacrifice for the sake of science on one hand, or personal gain on the other. My scientist protagonist would struggle with that choice......and bore everyone to death. Good thing you don't write screenplays.:P
Not only that, but most people don't understand that writing fiction is a craft that has to be honed. You can't just sit in front of your computer and type out some fiction and expect people to like it. There's a process, and specific ways of getting through to people to harness their emotions and draw them into a story.
It turns out it's a lot like programming - except you're trying to make humans happy with what you want to express rather than a compiler. It also takes the same amount of work to make something good.
I agree that the scientists already had creativity - otherwise they wouldn't be scientists, they'd be accountants. This program is a way to teach them the craft of writing so they'll be able to either write original screenplays or better advise the screenplay writers we've already got.
In fact, the penalty for dieing before getting to know Jesus is an eternity in hell. Yup, Christians believe that a good God sends innocent babies (unborn or not) to burn in fire for all time.
It's exactly things like this that make me NOT a mainstream Christian. I subscribe to a philosophy in which God really is as merciful as he's cracked up to be.
Futhermore, let's suppose that your just a half-ass kind of Christian and believe that such unborn souls go to heaven. Well, then, aren't we doing them a great big favour by killing them before they live long enough to get tempted by those evil evil dinosaur bones and neo-darwinists?
Only if you believe life has no other purpose than to sort people into Heaven/Hell buckets. That's not in my philosophy, and I don't believe Christianity addresses it at all.
Quoting myself, for fun and profit, and to stick it in the face of some idiot moderators:
"Indeed. And those Christians also claim to believe in original sin... in which case, that child is no more innocent than the murderer.... God forbid that anyone actually suggest that to one of them, though... unless you own an asbestos suit and tie."
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
To the GP: thanks for being honest - I tip my hat.
How in the HELL is this worthy of -1, OFFTOPIC?? The original article brought up abortion vs. death penalty, NOT ME.
If this isn't evidence of anti-Christian bias on Slashdot, I haven't got a clue what is. While you're fixing it, you moderators who haven't gone off the deep end of hatred for anything Christian, you can mod up the parent post as well.
To my responders who say original sin is worthy of the death penalty: death - EVENTUALLY, but not the death penalty, which ends your life prematurely. I'm up to speed. It's you guys who forgot that, according to Christian theology, life is granted to us as a chance to change ourselves and become perfect through Christ. Taking life prematurely is certainly much more a penalty than dying eventually.
Indeed. And those Christians also claim to believe in original sin... in which case, that child is no more innocent than the murderer.... God forbid that anyone actually suggest that to one of them, though... unless you own an asbestos suit and tie.
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
To the GP: thanks for being honest - I tip my hat.
Okay, so some ACs have already pointed out the alternate translation of "Thou shalt not murder." "Thou shalt not kill" - interpreting "kill" in the absolute sense - makes no sense at all. The same God commanded his people to kill in certain situations.
Nice try, though.
What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
Some things that make great personal policy make horrible public policy. Think hard, and you'll see that this may be one of them - that sometimes, it's permissible to defend.
I mean, who claims that "consider the lillies of the field, etc., etc." - basically, don't work for your food, because God will look after you - makes good economic policy? Ludicrous.
This is quite a topic amongst Christians. Which commandments (and advice) given in the scriptures are good public policy, and which are only good personal policy? Which set you push for public policy determines whether you're a "conservative" or "liberal" Christian, for the most part.
Slashdot Mirror
Ro V Wade doesn't need to be overturned it needs to be expanded to include unfit parents. Impossible to pass though since most of Congress would face retro active abortion. Given some of the people successfully breeding one has to question whether Darwin was right.
Oh, I know! Let's play Eugenics! It's a wonderful game - you invent a reality in which people like you are the best, and condemn every other group to dwindle to nothing based on your invented criteria of fitness.
Freaking Nazi. Musings like yours fleshed out into action plans have caused some of the worst atrocities in history. It disturbs me to see so much of this on Slashdot. Is it just teen angst, or something more sinister?
(By the way, I didn't lose because I brought up Hitler. Godwin won because you forced his hand.)
I'd rather see the scene where a young Ensign Akbar struggles to succinctly describe a confining or undesirable circumstance from which escape or relief is difficult.
For you unfortunate slow people:
IT'S A TRAP!
The Republicans are running China!
Er?
Our most comparable law is McCain-Feingold, which had more Democrat support than Republican. Rush Limbaugh, of all people, predicted it would be used to stifle political speech.
Oh, well. It wouldn't have been modded funny if you'd said "Democrats," because most people here are completely ignorant of politics. They only know "Republicans = Bad, Democrats = Good."
Indeed, it really is quite obvious. I mean, look at the recent and ongoing Iraq war. 95% of the European, Canadian, Australian, etc., citizens saw it for the sham that it was, even if their respective governments did not (or chose not to).
If 95% of Australian people "saw it for the sham that it was," how did John Howard get reelected? Mind-control waves?
Break out the tin-foil hats!
Right. Yes. And that doesn't strike you in any way as hypocritical? "It's OK for ME to do, but not for YOU? So I'll sign this treaty and keep you to it, but not myself?".
Mental exersize; replace "The US government" with "The Kremlin", and see how you feel about it. Then, with "Osama Bin Laden". See how that works?
Both your indefensible grammar and mealy-brained ideas put you at about - oh, age 18 or so. Right?
The US government is NOT the Kremlin, nor is it Osama bin Laden. We're quite certain that the US - both because of international and internal pressures (the latter especially) - won't use WMDs except as a defense. We're also certain of that about Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain, etc., etc. Having them is mostly posturing, actually. Never discount a show of force as a means of diffusing a situation.
(Thought experiment: In how many instances can merely showing a gun save your life?)
It's the internal pressures against using WMDs that count the most. Democratically-elected governments have tremendous internal pressures against it. You'd have to get the entire population mighty worked up to get them to want to drop a nuke on anybody, and it could almost never happen without popular support.
Osama bin Laden has no such pressures, and neither did the Kremlin. That's the qualitative difference that you've either conveniently forgotten or never learned.
All governments, countries, and organizations are not morally equal. Keeping WMDs out of the hands of unstable and undemocratic governments is only hypocritical if you disregard that.
{magazine} {country} is running a story on running {app} on {platform}. For those that don't know, {app} is a {category} used to {verb} your {noun}. Finally, {platform} users have a {adjective} approach to their {noun}.
That would be teh BESTE APRIL FOOL'S JOKE EVAR. And link to Google searches - for "app," "platform," "category," "verb," and "noun."
That'd be WAY too clever for Slashdot - but I can dream, can't I?
Learn how to search properly then.
That attitude will certainly win you some friends.
That will remove results from Live Journal and Blogspot. Keep adding -URL:blogURL to get rid of more blogs.
That's fine...until the list of domains gets so long I need to cut-and-paste it from a file every time I want non-blog results. Even better would be if Google added "-blog" as a search option. Presumably, they know where the blogs are, so they can keep them out of the results.
"To compliment his German accent,"
Now where are the language lawyers of slashdot?
I dunno - this might work. I can imagine Larry Ellison walking around saying, "Why, Accent, you sure are a thick Germanic thing!" and then "Danke! Ich ben einer burly!"
He's weird enough.
No scream, no splashing or struggling, just girl jumps in and doesn't come up out of the water.
Funny enough, that's usually what happens, since most people in distress either can't swim or have a medical problem that prevents them from doing so.
The non-swimmers are the most interesting. In lifeguard training, we watched a video of swimmers in distress taken at a water park. It turns out that something like 1/3 of the people who go there can't swim, and they still use the big slides that dump you into six feet of water! Lifeguards were making more than ten saves every day...so it was a perfect place to get video.
You'd be surprised how quiet they are. They're not bothered to scream or shout - they're mostly trying to breathe. They move very little, splash very little, kick straight down, do dumb, ineffective things with their arms.... The quiet, animalistic panic just before drowning is a little eerie to watch.
If someone is treading water and shouting "HELP!" he's probably fine, in other words. For the moment, anyway.
Any lifeguard worth his salt would be watching young people in the deep end, especially those underwater. The lifeguard on duty may have been doing that, in fact, and would have just waited longer than the Poseidon system did. The article doesn't say whether the lifeguard was tracking the girl already.
Okay, let's settle this like men! If my GRE score was higher than yours, then I'm smarter than you are, and you lose!
Is it clear why that style of argumentation is invalid? I rest my case.
The article is gone, but I've got a crazy fascination with fixing people's dumb ideas. It's amazing you'd post something like this after your original.
I didn't say the GRE was an indication of intelligence. (It is, very roughly - especially considering different types of intelligence - but that's beside the point.) I said it was a measure of how well you fit in. It measures, like you said, your similarity to the test makers.
If you score higher on the GRE than I do, it probably means you fit in a graduate program better than I do. You are more similar to the test makers than I am, who are post-graduates and professors, who probably had to pass the GRE or something like it themselves. It's self-reinforcing at this point. People with intelligence in the same areas as those already past the program tend to get in.
That's fine if you're reasonably sure they're "smart" people by whatever definition of "smart" you personally use.
However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
You said yourself how they're significant:
What the tests actually measure is a kind of similarity metric between the testees and the authors' of the test.
In this regard, tests like the GRE give you very significant information. They answer the question "Do you fit in?"
We can rightly call the study "garbage" that uses a similarity metric like IQ to measure intelligence. Dismissing all standardized testing, as you already (inadvertently) showed, isn't so smart.
So if I rub tinfoil together moths will fall from the sky...
Yep. And if you bang a couple of sticks together while hiking, it keeps away the mountain lions.
I suspect that there may have been a few pro-choice people who are as you said they are, but I suspect it's a small minority.
It's the leadership of the pro-choice movement - I'm not kidding. These are the same people who declared that killing nearly-born babies would "weaken Roe v. Wade."
The `left' says there is no moral question?
Nearly every lefty I've had a conversation with says there's no moral question. Seriously.
>Dip your balls in cold water
No, thank you, we're British.
That's right. British people dip them in tea.
> > Boom, and you'll have both stored energy and air to inhale.
:-)
>Actualy that should read:
>"...and you'll have stored energy or air to inhale." For each H2, O2 pair that you create you can either recombine for electrical energy, or let your body use the O2. Unless you have a way to fuse the H2 that's left over into He. Though if at any point anything really does go "Boom" you've got other problems.
I was going to mod you down, but I couldn't find "-1 Pedantic" or "-1 Insufferable Know-It-All" in the drop-down.
Honestly, did you really think he was talking about breaking down only two water molecules? There's more than that, you know - and if you use more, you can have both stored energy and air to inhale!
The "Boom" thing was amusing, though. Keep it up, and eventually you can quit your day job.
I shake my bottom at your lower Slashdot ID.
Your sig just gained you a fan.
The problem is the ENTIRE BOOK is in an archaic Queen's English. The author does a very good job with the language and descriptions and dialog to transport the reader to Napoleonic-era England. The problem is, once there my mind kept screaming "GET ME THE HELL OUT!"
I don't get why authors feel the need to do this. Part of their job - and SF authors should understand this intricately - is to translate language from their chosen milieu into OUR language. Importing bits of it wholesale for the prose itself makes for a pain-in-the-butt reading experience.
I never got through "Moon Is Harsh Mistress" for the same reason. Icky, difficult prose kept ejecting me right out of the story.
The pressures of publication and of obtaining money for grants often press on one's sense of ethics, and most scientists are faced at some point with making the choice of personal sacrifice for the sake of science on one hand, or personal gain on the other. My scientist protagonist would struggle with that choice... ...and bore everyone to death. Good thing you don't write screenplays. :P
Not only that, but most people don't understand that writing fiction is a craft that has to be honed. You can't just sit in front of your computer and type out some fiction and expect people to like it. There's a process, and specific ways of getting through to people to harness their emotions and draw them into a story.
It turns out it's a lot like programming - except you're trying to make humans happy with what you want to express rather than a compiler. It also takes the same amount of work to make something good.
I agree that the scientists already had creativity - otherwise they wouldn't be scientists, they'd be accountants. This program is a way to teach them the craft of writing so they'll be able to either write original screenplays or better advise the screenplay writers we've already got.
In fact, the penalty for dieing before getting to know Jesus is an eternity in hell.
Yup, Christians believe that a good God sends innocent babies (unborn or not) to burn in fire for all time.
It's exactly things like this that make me NOT a mainstream Christian. I subscribe to a philosophy in which God really is as merciful as he's cracked up to be.
Futhermore, let's suppose that your just a half-ass kind of Christian and believe that such unborn souls go to heaven. Well, then, aren't we doing them a great big favour by killing them before they live long enough to get tempted by those evil evil dinosaur bones and neo-darwinists?
Only if you believe life has no other purpose than to sort people into Heaven/Hell buckets. That's not in my philosophy, and I don't believe Christianity addresses it at all.
Quoting myself, for fun and profit, and to stick it in the face of some idiot moderators:
"Indeed. And those Christians also claim to believe in original sin... in which case, that child is no more innocent than the murderer.... God forbid that anyone actually suggest that to one of them, though... unless you own an asbestos suit and tie."
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
To the GP: thanks for being honest - I tip my hat.
How in the HELL is this worthy of -1, OFFTOPIC?? The original article brought up abortion vs. death penalty, NOT ME.
If this isn't evidence of anti-Christian bias on Slashdot, I haven't got a clue what is. While you're fixing it, you moderators who haven't gone off the deep end of hatred for anything Christian, you can mod up the parent post as well.
To my responders who say original sin is worthy of the death penalty: death - EVENTUALLY, but not the death penalty, which ends your life prematurely. I'm up to speed. It's you guys who forgot that, according to Christian theology, life is granted to us as a chance to change ourselves and become perfect through Christ. Taking life prematurely is certainly much more a penalty than dying eventually.
Indeed. And those Christians also claim to believe in original sin... in which case, that child is no more innocent than the murderer.... God forbid that anyone actually suggest that to one of them, though... unless you own an asbestos suit and tie.
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
To the GP: thanks for being honest - I tip my hat.
The ONE guy with mod points decides to spend one on modding this guy offtopic. Wow.
You're not delusional. I'm seeing it too.
Of course, that might mean nothing at all.
I think the reason nobody's above 3 is that hardly anybody has mod points. Just from poking around, I'd say it looks like it's maybe one person.
Okay, so some ACs have already pointed out the alternate translation of "Thou shalt not murder." "Thou shalt not kill" - interpreting "kill" in the absolute sense - makes no sense at all. The same God commanded his people to kill in certain situations.
Nice try, though.
What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
Some things that make great personal policy make horrible public policy. Think hard, and you'll see that this may be one of them - that sometimes, it's permissible to defend.
I mean, who claims that "consider the lillies of the field, etc., etc." - basically, don't work for your food, because God will look after you - makes good economic policy? Ludicrous.
This is quite a topic amongst Christians. Which commandments (and advice) given in the scriptures are good public policy, and which are only good personal policy? Which set you push for public policy determines whether you're a "conservative" or "liberal" Christian, for the most part.