Your figure is quite wrong. According to People Daily. The military budget for 2002 is around 166.2 billion yuan, while their estimated GDP for 2002 is around 10.217 trillion yuan. Therefore China only spends around 1.62% GDP on military.
Actually your figure is quite wrong. It is the officially anounced figure, but that it is not an accurate measure of how much China is actually spending on its military forces. Estimates of actual spending vary from about 3.5% to 5% of GDP.
I once read that the biggest problem the US had with Communism was that it provided a framework for modernization within a generation. Given that very few outside the US believe anymore that they (the US) give a crap about human rights, and the relatively rapid rise of China as a world power (economically, technologically, militarily),I wonder how much of that is true.
China was economically stagnant until the communist party abandoned pure communism and adopted capitalism in some of the costal regions of the country. In the interior, where the economic system is still largely communist the population is barely better off than it was in the 19th century.
You don't need any conspiracy theories to explain why the US opposed communism. The real problems that the US had with communism are quite easy to identify:
(1) Communists tend to commit mass murder whenever they get the chance (in the case of China the various purges and mass starvation campaigns killed off between 45 and 103 million people - i.e. roughly 3 to 7 times the number that died in the holocaust).
(2) Communists tend to persecute the religious (that's about 90% of the population in the US).
(3) Communists have at various times threatened to destroy the United States, and have actually destroyed a number of other democracies (most of them have of course revived after the collapse of Communism).
Communism provides a framework for killing a lot of people and constructing an industrialized economy that does not work. That is not "modernization", it is a sad parody of modernization.
That is a system of political organisation, not a system of economic organisation, and in fact the Imperial system existed for only part of China's history. Before that it was Feudal.
...And everyone was encouraged to become civil servants...
No, only a tiny fraction of the population were ever encouraged to become civil servants.
...merchants were frowned upon...
But very common - far more common than civil servants. China had a well developed money economy long before most of Europe, and was one end of one of the oldest and most important trade routes to ever exist (the silk road).
and resources were aggresively micromanaged by local magnates
But they were generally not owned by the state.
Expressing excessive emotion, or religious conviction beyond societial norms was consider immoral.
But the social norms did require *a lot* of religious activity. Even today almost every home in China has a shrine - and that in a country where everyone is supposed to be an atheist. The norms against expressing emotion were hardly unique to China either. Ancient Rome, and Modern Britan had similar norms that were just as strong.
Huh, sounds pretty socialist to me.
If China was socialist then so was most of the world up until the 17th century.
China has always been crowded, and always been centrally administered/socialist, since 1500BCE and earlier. It's the only way they have managed to survive.
(1) England (and some other parts of Europe in fact) has a higher population density than China.
(2) India has many of the same population and economic problems that China has but has never* managed to produce starvation on the same scale that the chinese communists have.
(3) China was never even remotely socialist before the communists took over.
China claims it is, so of course a map put out by them shows they own Taiwan.
Officially the Taiwanese also regard Taiwan as part of China. Currently maps in Taiwan show mainland China as belonging to the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) rather than the People's Republic of China (Communist China). Perhaps this is the only case in history when a smaller, weaker, democratic nation has laid claim to owning a larger more powerful totalitarian state, and survived long enough to publish maps that record their audacity.
I have a friend who wanted to try linux but had to give up because he couldn't get a dual boot working with Windows XP. He isn't clueless about computers, but he didn't have the time to find out how to get it all working.
I still find that the main problem(*) I have with using Linux is the need to switch back to Windows when I want to play a game.
(*) Actually this is a pseudo problem because it is also the reason why I have actually been getting some work done after switching to Linux.
You need to rethink the math. Some of the cases where rulings are inconsistent with the law are cases where the rulings are consistemnt with justice (i.e. judges ignore the law in order to achieve a just result).
Your math only works if you think that any ruling which is contrary to law is necessarily unjust. That would be hard for you to maintain given that you think that the law is often contray to justice.
Wouldn't it benefit the OSS more to not talk about the SCO debacle and let the lawsuits fad into obscurity than give them the attention they are so desperate to get?
A basic principle in US election campaigns is that negative advertising cannot be left unanswered. You might think that the best way to deal with negative acusations is to ignore them and let them fade into obscurity, but this only works in certain circumstances. If your acuser lacks all credibility then you can do this, but if your acuser has any credibility at all then you have to answer the acusations (and quickly) because they will quickly take hold in public opinion unless there is a competing position available.
Something similar is at work here. SCO is trying pump up its share price by creating an impression in the mind of the public (at least in the share buying part of the public) that SCO has a good shot at winning big in court. If they succeed then the flip side will be that the public will expect OSS companies like RedHat to lose big, and the share prices of those OSS companies will decline. The only way for OSS companies to defend their share price is to get a comnpeting story out there before public opinion sets.
I should note that IBM is in a different position. IBM is big enough and SCO is small enough that IBM can afford to shrug off this kind of story. No one thinks that IBM will die if OSS tanks.
Only by treating all software as "expression" can software patents be considered to interfere.
All software is legally treated as expression. That's why you can copyright software. If you can show that software is not expression then you can avoid Salin's free speech argument, but you would also have shown that software can not be copyrighted, because copyright protects only expression.
But the same things holds if we start by assuming that all physical objects are expression. Someone who wants to copy the design of a new OLED could then clam that existing patents are "interfereing with free expression."
In the case of software there is a pretty good argument to be made for the claim that it is all expression. Software gets written, and it can be read, just like a novel or a textbook. On the other hand most inventions do not resemble typical forms of expression at all, and do not appear to be attepts to "say something".
More importantly, even in those cases where inventions do happen to express something they are seldom self-referential in the sense that the idea expressed is idea put into practice by the invention itself. As a result, a patent only prevents others from practicing an invention, not from expressing whatever it is that the invention expresses. The situation is quite different in the case of software. The idea expressed by software, and the idea put into useful practice by software, are one in the same. Every expression of that idea would be an instance of the invention. Thus a patent on a software invention would make it impossible for anyone to express that particular idea.
In any case you can not have it both ways. If software does not express then it should not be subject to copyright. If it does express then it should not be subject to patent.
I am not exactly persuaded by Salin's argument against software patents as such, but I think he has one half of a very compelling legal argument against the permissibility of allowing both software copyrights and software patents.
In the past a number of attempts have been made to challenge copyright restrictions on the basis that they violate the first ammendment. The Supreme Court has almost always held that copyright does not limit free expression because of the built in limitations in copyright law, and because copyright protects only expressions and not ideas. Copyright does not limit what you can say, it just limits how you can say it (i.e. you can not say it by copying the way that someone else said it).
Now personaly I think the biggest problem with Salin's argument is really the claim that software is a type of expression. However, if software is not a type of expression then it should not be covered by copyright. To be covered by copyright a particular piece of code must be saying something. But then the if it were also covered by patent then that would prevent anyone from saying the same thing in any other way. Which would infringe of freedom of expression.
In short, either software patents infringe on free expression, or software is not eligible for copyright protection.
Copyrights do not stop anyone from writing new software that is functionally equivalent to old software, but patents do protect against this. So, for example, copyright allows people to write open equivalents of closed software (although in practice this is often difficult), while software patents would make this illegal.
Salin's free speech argument depends only on the claim that software is expression. You have shown that writing software may involve invention as well as expression, but that does nothing to undermine Salin's argument. Consider the example that he gives of patenting plot devices or narrative structures. If one can patent "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back" then one then one can prevent anyone else from producing a new expression that employs this old narrative structure. Salin's point here is not that there is nothing to patent, but that such a patent would interfere with free expression.
On the other hand people who drink coffee are much less likely to commit suicide. If you avoid all the unhealthy pleasures in life then your body might wind up in better shape, but you will wish you were dead.
China could deter directly US (haven't they had ICBM capability since 70's, like India).
India has only been developing medium range missles since the 80's. They still don't have ICBM's yet. China had some ICBM's (old Russian tech), but they were too inacurate and unreliable to make a credible threat. Which is why they have recently used the technology developed through their own space program to build a whole new generation of ICBM's.
or say we nuke Tokyo
Yeah, I'm sure that would really terrify the Americans. Not. Take note of how the Japanese responded to the recent threats form N. Korea (they are considering the development of their own nuclear weapons, and have already said that they will pre-emptively attack N. Korea if they think an attack is likely).
China is pretty much as close to India as Pakistan.
Better check a map. Beijing and Shanghai are a lot further away than any part of Pakistan. The distance from Calcutta to Beijing for example is 3270km. India does not yet have a missile with that sort of range, but they are working on one (the Agni III).
Israel has enemies near and far, which is why they'd run out of bombs...
Which is why nuclear weapons are so useful. You don't need all that many to discourage your enemies.
China wants only to reach Taiwan. No ICBM race there.
Wrong. They want to be able to deter the US from involvement in any future conflict with Taiwan. Which is why they already have ICBM's that can hit the US.
India wants only to reach Pakistan. No race there either.
Wrong again. They want to be able to balance China - the other country that they have had military conflicts with in recent history, and the country that is their competitor for regional hegemony.
Israel has so much foes just around the corner that trebuchet will suffice.
Also wrong. Israel has enemies and potential enemies as far west as the west coast of Africa and as far east as China and Indonesia. The muslim world covers a very large area.
Brazil? What would they hurl in the ICBM nose cone at... Albania?
Finnaly right. Brazil has no need for anything more than medium range missiles, and not much use for those.
...or does that just apply to law enforcement agencies?
Yes, and in any case it wouldn't be a good example of entrapment. In order to qualify as entrapment it has to be the case that the defendant would not have committed the crime in question if not for some sort of enticement or encouragement on the part of a law enforcement officer. There is no encouragement to pirate software here.
War sucks, but in order for it to have any legitamcy whatsoever, then lives must be at risk. If lives aren't at risk then wars become too easy to start.
Very eager to sacrifice other people's lives aren't you? Join the Marines first, then tell us all about how important it is to put lives at risk when we go to war.
Tax rates in the EU are a lot higher than in the US. The total tax burden in most EU countries is also much higher. In the US the various levels of govenment (i.e. everything from federal to local), spend about 30% of GDP. In the EU it is typically somewhere between 40% and 50%. You can see the latest OECD figures here.
Unemployment is also not 'very high', as you suggest.
But is is consistently much higher than the US. Even at its peak the unemployment rate in the US was much lower than the rates in most EU countries. Historically the rates in EU countries like France and Germany have been about double the rate in the US, and even now the US rate is much lower. If you take a look at the standardised rates published by the OECD then the US was at about 6% in '02, while many EU countries were at about 9% (France, Germany, Italy, Spain). The rate in the UK was closer to the US rate.
I'd suggest taking a look at the US' rapidly rising unemployment rate, a value that shows no signs of declining
I suggest you take a look here, where you will find the following claim:
The unemployment rate was 6.2 percent in July; the number of unemployed persons was 9.1 million. Both measures edged down over the month...
So in addition to a larger GDP, and per capita disposable income, the US also has far lower tax rates, and a far lower unemployment. Over the last ten years or so the US growth rate has also been much higher than in the EU, so the differences are likely to increase not decrease.
but they're so small that they are statistically insignificant, aren't they?
No, because the numbers given are not statistical estimates based on a sample. Measures of statistical significance only apply to results that are obtained by sampling a population and then using statistical methods to draw conclusions about the population as a whole. In this case the figures are based on the total sales reported by various companies. No sampling was involved.
Of course you might argue that 0.1% of a given market is insignificant rather than statistically insignificant (i.e. the differnece doesn't matter much rather than there is no difference as far as we can tell).
"Wealth" is actually how much stuff there is around. Technically, the only things that increase wealth are manufacturing and agriculture.
Readers should note that most economists would reject this claim out of hand. If wealth is defined in this way then there is no reason why we should care about wealth, or about how much of it there is. What we should care about is value because "value is the worth people assign to things". In other words when you decide what to do, to make, to buy, or what policy to persue, it is always the relative values of the courses of action available to you that you are interested in, not some nonsense about how much "stuff" will result.
Most economists would regard wealth as anything that people are willing to pay for.
I've noticed that these bioethics departments are cropping up at universities all over the place but is this the type of material they're working on?
This sort of thing is just one of the many topics that bioethicists get involved in. If you want to get some idea of what bioethicists do you could take a look at this short introduction to bioethics, or take a look through some recent issues of the American Journal of Bioethics.
What these bioethics departments should be doing is trying to convince people that stem cell research is one of our best chances at curing many diseases. That's a much more important goal...
Bioethics is an accademic discipline and, as such, their primary task is find the truth, not to engage in advocacy.
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Your figure is quite wrong. According to People Daily. The military budget for 2002 is around 166.2 billion yuan, while their estimated GDP for 2002 is around 10.217 trillion yuan. Therefore China only spends around 1.62% GDP on military.
Actually your figure is quite wrong. It is the officially anounced figure, but that it is not an accurate measure of how much China is actually spending on its military forces. Estimates of actual spending vary from about 3.5% to 5% of GDP.
I once read that the biggest problem the US had with Communism was that it provided a framework for modernization within a generation. Given that very few outside the US believe anymore that they (the US) give a crap about human rights, and the relatively rapid rise of China as a world power (economically, technologically, militarily),I wonder how much of that is true.
China was economically stagnant until the communist party abandoned pure communism and adopted capitalism in some of the costal regions of the country. In the interior, where the economic system is still largely communist the population is barely better off than it was in the 19th century.
You don't need any conspiracy theories to explain why the US opposed communism. The real problems that the US had with communism are quite easy to identify:
(1) Communists tend to commit mass murder whenever they get the chance (in the case of China the various purges and mass starvation campaigns killed off between 45 and 103 million people - i.e. roughly 3 to 7 times the number that died in the holocaust).
(2) Communists tend to persecute the religious (that's about 90% of the population in the US).
(3) Communists have at various times threatened to destroy the United States, and have actually destroyed a number of other democracies (most of them have of course revived after the collapse of Communism).
Communism provides a framework for killing a lot of people and constructing an industrialized economy that does not work. That is not "modernization", it is a sad parody of modernization.
That is a system of political organisation, not a system of economic organisation, and in fact the Imperial system existed for only part of China's history. Before that it was Feudal.
No, only a tiny fraction of the population were ever encouraged to become civil servants.
But very common - far more common than civil servants. China had a well developed money economy long before most of Europe, and was one end of one of the oldest and most important trade routes to ever exist (the silk road).
and resources were aggresively micromanaged by local magnates
But they were generally not owned by the state.
Expressing excessive emotion, or religious conviction beyond societial norms was consider immoral.
But the social norms did require *a lot* of religious activity. Even today almost every home in China has a shrine - and that in a country where everyone is supposed to be an atheist. The norms against expressing emotion were hardly unique to China either. Ancient Rome, and Modern Britan had similar norms that were just as strong.
Huh, sounds pretty socialist to me.
If China was socialist then so was most of the world up until the 17th century.
China has always been crowded, and always been centrally administered/socialist, since 1500BCE and earlier. It's the only way they have managed to survive.
(1) England (and some other parts of Europe in fact) has a higher population density than China.
(2) India has many of the same population and economic problems that China has but has never* managed to produce starvation on the same scale that the chinese communists have.
(3) China was never even remotely socialist before the communists took over.
China claims it is, so of course a map put out by them shows they own Taiwan.
Officially the Taiwanese also regard Taiwan as part of China. Currently maps in Taiwan show mainland China as belonging to the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) rather than the People's Republic of China (Communist China). Perhaps this is the only case in history when a smaller, weaker, democratic nation has laid claim to owning a larger more powerful totalitarian state, and survived long enough to publish maps that record their audacity.
I have a friend who wanted to try linux but had to give up because he couldn't get a dual boot working with Windows XP. He isn't clueless about computers, but he didn't have the time to find out how to get it all working.
I still find that the main problem(*) I have with using Linux is the need to switch back to Windows when I want to play a game.
(*) Actually this is a pseudo problem because it is also the reason why I have actually been getting some work done after switching to Linux.
Trademarks don't expire after a set period of time (although they can be lost in various ways).
The NYT isn't what it used to be. Which is good because they used to screw up much bigger stories than this one.
You need to rethink the math. Some of the cases where rulings are inconsistent with the law are cases where the rulings are consistemnt with justice (i.e. judges ignore the law in order to achieve a just result).
Your math only works if you think that any ruling which is contrary to law is necessarily unjust. That would be hard for you to maintain given that you think that the law is often contray to justice.
Wouldn't it benefit the OSS more to not talk about the SCO debacle and let the lawsuits fad into obscurity than give them the attention they are so desperate to get?
A basic principle in US election campaigns is that negative advertising cannot be left unanswered. You might think that the best way to deal with negative acusations is to ignore them and let them fade into obscurity, but this only works in certain circumstances. If your acuser lacks all credibility then you can do this, but if your acuser has any credibility at all then you have to answer the acusations (and quickly) because they will quickly take hold in public opinion unless there is a competing position available.
Something similar is at work here. SCO is trying pump up its share price by creating an impression in the mind of the public (at least in the share buying part of the public) that SCO has a good shot at winning big in court. If they succeed then the flip side will be that the public will expect OSS companies like RedHat to lose big, and the share prices of those OSS companies will decline. The only way for OSS companies to defend their share price is to get a comnpeting story out there before public opinion sets.
I should note that IBM is in a different position. IBM is big enough and SCO is small enough that IBM can afford to shrug off this kind of story. No one thinks that IBM will die if OSS tanks.
Only by treating all software as "expression" can software patents be considered to interfere.
All software is legally treated as expression. That's why you can copyright software. If you can show that software is not expression then you can avoid Salin's free speech argument, but you would also have shown that software can not be copyrighted, because copyright protects only expression.
But the same things holds if we start by assuming that all physical objects are expression. Someone who wants to copy the design of a new OLED could then clam that existing patents are "interfereing with free expression."
In the case of software there is a pretty good argument to be made for the claim that it is all expression. Software gets written, and it can be read, just like a novel or a textbook. On the other hand most inventions do not resemble typical forms of expression at all, and do not appear to be attepts to "say something".
More importantly, even in those cases where inventions do happen to express something they are seldom self-referential in the sense that the idea expressed is idea put into practice by the invention itself. As a result, a patent only prevents others from practicing an invention, not from expressing whatever it is that the invention expresses. The situation is quite different in the case of software. The idea expressed by software, and the idea put into useful practice by software, are one in the same. Every expression of that idea would be an instance of the invention. Thus a patent on a software invention would make it impossible for anyone to express that particular idea.
In any case you can not have it both ways. If software does not express then it should not be subject to copyright. If it does express then it should not be subject to patent.
I am not exactly persuaded by Salin's argument against software patents as such, but I think he has one half of a very compelling legal argument against the permissibility of allowing both software copyrights and software patents.
In the past a number of attempts have been made to challenge copyright restrictions on the basis that they violate the first ammendment. The Supreme Court has almost always held that copyright does not limit free expression because of the built in limitations in copyright law, and because copyright protects only expressions and not ideas. Copyright does not limit what you can say, it just limits how you can say it (i.e. you can not say it by copying the way that someone else said it).
Now personaly I think the biggest problem with Salin's argument is really the claim that software is a type of expression. However, if software is not a type of expression then it should not be covered by copyright. To be covered by copyright a particular piece of code must be saying something. But then the if it were also covered by patent then that would prevent anyone from saying the same thing in any other way. Which would infringe of freedom of expression.
In short, either software patents infringe on free expression, or software is not eligible for copyright protection.
What's the big deal?
Copyrights do not stop anyone from writing new software that is functionally equivalent to old software, but patents do protect against this. So, for example, copyright allows people to write open equivalents of closed software (although in practice this is often difficult), while software patents would make this illegal.
Salin's free speech argument depends only on the claim that software is expression. You have shown that writing software may involve invention as well as expression, but that does nothing to undermine Salin's argument. Consider the example that he gives of patenting plot devices or narrative structures. If one can patent "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back" then one then one can prevent anyone else from producing a new expression that employs this old narrative structure. Salin's point here is not that there is nothing to patent, but that such a patent would interfere with free expression.
On the other hand people who drink coffee are much less likely to commit suicide. If you avoid all the unhealthy pleasures in life then your body might wind up in better shape, but you will wish you were dead.
China could deter directly US (haven't they had ICBM capability since 70's, like India).
India has only been developing medium range missles since the 80's. They still don't have ICBM's yet. China had some ICBM's (old Russian tech), but they were too inacurate and unreliable to make a credible threat. Which is why they have recently used the technology developed through their own space program to build a whole new generation of ICBM's.
or say we nuke Tokyo
Yeah, I'm sure that would really terrify the Americans. Not. Take note of how the Japanese responded to the recent threats form N. Korea (they are considering the development of their own nuclear weapons, and have already said that they will pre-emptively attack N. Korea if they think an attack is likely).
China is pretty much as close to India as Pakistan.
Better check a map. Beijing and Shanghai are a lot further away than any part of Pakistan. The distance from Calcutta to Beijing for example is 3270km. India does not yet have a missile with that sort of range, but they are working on one (the Agni III).
Israel has enemies near and far, which is why they'd run out of bombs...
Which is why nuclear weapons are so useful. You don't need all that many to discourage your enemies.
China wants only to reach Taiwan. No ICBM race there.
... Albania?
Wrong. They want to be able to deter the US from involvement in any future conflict with Taiwan. Which is why they already have ICBM's that can hit the US.
India wants only to reach Pakistan. No race there either.
Wrong again. They want to be able to balance China - the other country that they have had military conflicts with in recent history, and the country that is their competitor for regional hegemony.
Israel has so much foes just around the corner that trebuchet will suffice.
Also wrong. Israel has enemies and potential enemies as far west as the west coast of Africa and as far east as China and Indonesia. The muslim world covers a very large area.
Brazil? What would they hurl in the ICBM nose cone at
Finnaly right. Brazil has no need for anything more than medium range missiles, and not much use for those.
...or does that just apply to law enforcement agencies?
Yes, and in any case it wouldn't be a good example of entrapment. In order to qualify as entrapment it has to be the case that the defendant would not have committed the crime in question if not for some sort of enticement or encouragement on the part of a law enforcement officer. There is no encouragement to pirate software here.
...unless you count the millions who have died from starvation, or the hundreds of thousands who have been murdered by more direct means. War is hell, but in many parts of the world peace is worse.
War sucks, but in order for it to have any legitamcy whatsoever, then lives must be at risk. If lives aren't at risk then wars become too easy to start.
Very eager to sacrifice other people's lives aren't you? Join the Marines first, then tell us all about how important it is to put lives at risk when we go to war.
Some wondered aloud what, exactly, such a creature would be if it were transferred to a womb to develop to term.
Some actually turned out ok, others not so well.
Tax rates in the EU are not 'very high'...
Tax rates in the EU are a lot higher than in the US. The total tax burden in most EU countries is also much higher. In the US the various levels of govenment (i.e. everything from federal to local), spend about 30% of GDP. In the EU it is typically somewhere between 40% and 50%. You can see the latest OECD figures here.
Unemployment is also not 'very high', as you suggest.
But is is consistently much higher than the US. Even at its peak the unemployment rate in the US was much lower than the rates in most EU countries. Historically the rates in EU countries like France and Germany have been about double the rate in the US, and even now the US rate is much lower. If you take a look at the standardised rates published by the OECD then the US was at about 6% in '02, while many EU countries were at about 9% (France, Germany, Italy, Spain). The rate in the UK was closer to the US rate.
I'd suggest taking a look at the US' rapidly rising unemployment rate, a value that shows no signs of declining
I suggest you take a look here, where you will find the following claim:
The unemployment rate was 6.2 percent in July; the number of unemployed
persons was 9.1 million. Both measures edged down over the month...
So in addition to a larger GDP, and per capita disposable income, the US also has far lower tax rates, and a far lower unemployment. Over the last ten years or so the US growth rate has also been much higher than in the EU, so the differences are likely to increase not decrease.
but they're so small that they are statistically insignificant, aren't they?
No, because the numbers given are not statistical estimates based on a sample. Measures of statistical significance only apply to results that are obtained by sampling a population and then using statistical methods to draw conclusions about the population as a whole. In this case the figures are based on the total sales reported by various companies. No sampling was involved.
Of course you might argue that 0.1% of a given market is insignificant rather than statistically insignificant (i.e. the differnece doesn't matter much rather than there is no difference as far as we can tell).
"Wealth" is actually how much stuff there is around. Technically, the only things that increase wealth are manufacturing and agriculture.
Readers should note that most economists would reject this claim out of hand. If wealth is defined in this way then there is no reason why we should care about wealth, or about how much of it there is. What we should care about is value because "value is the worth people assign to things". In other words when you decide what to do, to make, to buy, or what policy to persue, it is always the relative values of the courses of action available to you that you are interested in, not some nonsense about how much "stuff" will result.
Most economists would regard wealth as anything that people are willing to pay for.
I've noticed that these bioethics departments are cropping up at universities all over the place but is this the type of material they're working on?
This sort of thing is just one of the many topics that bioethicists get involved in. If you want to get some idea of what bioethicists do you could take a look at this short introduction to bioethics, or take a look through some recent issues of the American Journal of Bioethics.
What these bioethics departments should be doing is trying to convince people that stem cell research is one of our best chances at curing many diseases. That's a much more important goal...
Bioethics is an accademic discipline and, as such, their primary task is find the truth, not to engage in advocacy.