Mr. Nador [sic] can't even be bothered to answer questions himself
Yes he can. But, he was in Chicago this morning, in Madison by midday, in Milwaukee this afternoon. Tomorrow noon he is in Seattle, and in Denver at night, to depart for LA for the next day.
What is he doing all over the country? Talking to people, and answering questions. If you go to one of his events you might be able to ask him your question. Nobody will screen you or anything-- you can just go up to the mic and ask him.
I went to one of his events last week, so I saw this first hand.
While the spoken form of Norwegian doesn't sound a lot like English, the similarities in the written form are uncanny, far closer than French is.
NOOO!!!
Repeat with me this basic point from any Linguistics 101 course: the spoken form of a language is basic (save for dead languages or sign languages). The fact that the orthographies are similar can only prove this indirectly at best.
I'm not saying that by simply voting we can fix the way government currently runs. But it IS one of the things you have to do if you want change.
No. There are many ways to bring about change.
Doing it by electing executive and legislative officials onto whom you discharge your power to make political decisions, and will be pressured by very powerful economic entities into doing things *their* way, is just one way, and IMHO, a very poor one.
this is a problem with the US political system, there is no way for the people to recall a candidate that has violated his mandate.
Sure there is -- it's called checks and balances. If the president changes his stance on everything he got voted for, there's no reason for Congress to let him get away with any of it (it'll make them look good to stand up for the little guy).
I was under the assumption that Congress != the people. Anyway, the [eople can't recall their "representatives" either.
The heart of the problem is that people discharge their political will onto functionaries.
I looked more carefully through the site you link. Though I'm very familiar with the arguments against electioneering, I certainly can't take seriously a site which proclaims the "dollar vote" as "An Alternative Form of Voting". So those with more money have a right to decide for those with less? By that logic, we should just officially hand over the government to GE and the other multinationals, for them to regulate as they see fit.
My point comes into effect when somebody implies that society at large benefits from their "solving" a certain "problem". In this case, it is the "problem" of not having a certain library in a game console. This guy said explicityly that by writing a non-free program, he'd make people more "free". So the criticism applies-- he's claiming to be doing more than benefitting himself.
Voting does not give you a voice. It silences you for 4 years. You don't get any more input into the process of who runs the country for those 4 years.
I should have made it clear that this was not meant as a statement about voting in general, but about the US electionary process (or that of many other "democracies"). Of course, given a suitable political framework, voting *does* give you a voice. But without political institutions in which you can truly participate, it is just held against you. "Oh, the people voted for me, I have their trust, so they essentially agree on me on how to run the country, no matter if I make 'minor' revisions to what I promised in my campaign."
But if you are in fact a citizen of the United States, then it's people just like you that have helped to get us into the predicament we are in today. If you aren't vocal, if you don't let government know what you think and want and if you don't vote, then you turn into a society of the governed.
Voting does not give you a voice. It silences you for 4 years. You don't get any more input into the process of who runs the country for those 4 years.
There are many ways of being politically vocal. And most of them don't involve voting for corporate-sponsored candidates.
Yeah, I know all the arguments. But there is something to be said for voting for 3rd candidates who you just *know* won't win as to help crash the bipartite stronghold on power, and have similar stands to you, *while* building alternate, participatory political structures.
Simply, in the US, voting for a 3rd party is politically more visible. But it is still one thing to vote for a 3rd party, and another to believe that the party would solve the country's problems.
As for myself, I'm still undecided as to whether not to vote, or vote Nader. Both actions have their particular strong points, but it's simply a tough choice, the way I see it.
But I prefer "Gore in four years, after realizing he could've won had he been more like Nader" to "Gore now".
But the minute he's won, he doesn't have to play at being Nader, or anything else. Hell, the minute he's won, he can in practice reverse his stand on anything.
For that matter, so can Nader, or anybody-- this is a problem with the US political system, there is no way for the people to recall a candidate that has violated his mandate.
Let's get real. Electioneering, making a vote every couple of years, won't solve any problems by itself. The illusion that you can cause things to get better by just voting every 4 years for a guy who will wield enormous power in an office in Washington, or that such a person will actually "represent" you, or live up to their mandate with no mechanism present to enforce it, is just that, an illusion. In reality, the political system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, putting grassroots participation at its center, and cutting off the corrupting influence of corporate power.
Voting for "the lesser of two evils" *never* works. It has an atrocious track record. It simply gives a political mandate to a bunch of crooks who are going to screw you over.
To vote for somebody you *know* is a corporate drone who will support measures you don't only gives them more power. The right answer to this is *not* to vote for a "relatively benign" corporate drone, but to *organize politically* from a grassroots level and create an alternative. The most important thing one can do for this to happen is to work outside electionary politics at a grassroots level; voting for Nader, or any other candidate, is a very small part of this whole process.
Since when is solving a problem not a step forward? If a problem arised and was solved successfully, that, to me is a step forward, regardless of the application or method.
The other poster gave a quite succint analogy to refute you, but I feel I will be more explicit.
"Problems" are not objective things "out there" in the world. We define what is a "problem" and what is not, according to our values.
What RMS was referring to is the typical engineering attitude of looking at how to get from A to B, without stopping to think whether we should actually get to B-- maybe C and D are better than B, or even A may be better! For Tyberghein, the problem is getting his libraries to run on the PS2. For RMS, fixating on this is missing the forest for the trees-- there are bigger problems out there, which merit more attention, and this "solution" may actually be perjudicial in the bigger picture.
What RMS points out, anyway, is the typical error of the technologist mindset-- thinking that solving technical problems in and of itself is a worthy pursuit that benefits society. This is simply not true.
The problem had nothing to do with the fact this guy was running linux. The problem was that your firewall was either not installed, not running, or not set up properly.
There is no firewall here at all. This is a university, and all systems are out in the open.
If installing OS's at your site is a security risk then I would see why the IT people responsible for network security allowed anyone access to that machine at all. There might be good reasons to prohibit but this is not one of them.
First of all, there is no prohibition here on running anything-- my department's policy is that if you want to run a unix-like system, you should tell us, so we can help you run it securely (essentially, as few daemons as possible, and no cleartext-password services, no ftp of any kind, secure daemons like qmail or other djb stuff, etc.).
Exploitable unix systems are a risk, firewall or not. An insider could still break into a box.
The IT people are responsible for network security. Given that Linux boxes nowadays are rooted left and right, some random guy (with a bit less than half a clue) installing Linux without authorization may well open up a security hole and compromise the network.
In my department we allow Linux systems, but people who intend to install it must notify a computing committee, and they are expected to run only ssh, and possibly smtp and a small, secure, non-cgi capable httpd like djb's publicfile (intended to serve a Java ssh client or test pages, not as a production server). We had a box rooted before this went into place; the user of the box was running an old version of Redhat, and the box was running a buggy, absolutely unneeded amd daemon. The attacker transferred a rootkit and a sniffer using ftp-- the ftp daemon had not been used for anything else in that box, ever...
Save for a few exceptions. Boris Vian. Edith Piaf. A few things by Brassens.
Face it. The same way horrendous cooking is the complement to good music in English culture, horrendous music is the complement to good cooking for the French.
French Canadian rock, well, that's a whole different story. Hmmm. Gotta go listen to my Plume, Les Colocs, and Les Cowboys Fringants records.
So a new colony of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers is established, but they don't know how to build their nests right. They build friggin cirucular holes in the trees instead of rectangular holes. And the song they sing is all wrong. Man, that would suck.
First of all, you provide a very optimistic example.
Second, birds and mammals are very different creatures. The gaur is a mammal-- it has a much larger brain volume, and a correspondingly higher potential for learned behavior.
And anyway, your point does not in any way contradict any of what I said. You don't "restore" a species when you insert clones of it in a different environment, since a species occurs in a particular environment. You end up with something different.
Even if you considered a case like this to be something worthwhile to do, you'd delude yourself if you thought you had reproduced the exact same thing that had disappeared.
It is very different for a stray bird to wander into a new environment than for us to put it there. The first case does not involve any ethics-- it is simply something that happened, without our intervention. The second involves our agency in an essential manner, which is why ethics becomes very relevant.
I saw "we" simply because i truly did mean we as in mankind. Don't start witht the petty "you can't speak for me" BS. I know that. So does every intelligent reader. That's a given. I don't know where you took rhetoric classes, but I've never taken one, and using we was simply what came out of my head, not some planned out "trick."
Which means that you have internalized the propaganda.
I am sure they want to do some research on their own, thats what companies do! So RedHat or MS do soemthing cool and demo it at InterOp or something, do we (there's that we again!) automatically view their motives as sinister simply becvause they can benefit from it? Thats a bit simplsitic don't you think? Why shoudn't they pick a endangered species?
Where did I say they had "sinister motives"? I just said they were giving the impression of doing something which, in reality, is patently hopeless and useless, in the hopes of looking good while they were at it. Pure PR.
By that logic, we shouldn't have endangered species lists or protection laws, either; if the little critters can't handle us strip-malling their habitat, it's their own damn fault.
Nothing in what I said implies any of this. If you claim to have "logic" on your side, produce an argument.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't cause extinction at all. In the real world, we do what we can. It would be much better if we had had the foresight to stop destroying the gaur before the last one died. Since we didn't, we do the next best thing, which (I would assume) would include restoring their habitat to the best of our ability, giving the resurrected species places to live in the wild.
And you totally ignore my point. When it's gone, it'se gone. You can't recreate the gaur's environment at all, because the gaur's environment had gaurs and/or their ancestors bearing, feeding and caring for their young. If you "succeed", you'll get something that's not the same. You're introducing a species, not reinstanting one.
And, in any case, we're talking about one concrete action: a company is making a cow give birth to a gaur clone, nothing more. If this were accompanied with some serious attempt at recreating the natural environment of the gaur (which I still would oppose), we'd have one thing. But nothing of the sort is going on. It's just a publicity stunt by a corporation that wants to appear "ecologically friendly"; it is absolutely unviable, but is packaged to promote their products and research, in particular, to distract attention from the dangers genetic engineering involves, not to mention the sheer unnecessity and utter greed driving it.
It would be much better if we had had the foresight to stop destroying the gaur before the last one died. Since we didn't, we do the next best thing, which (I would assume) would include restoring their habitat to the best of our ability, giving the resurrected species places to live in the wild.
RevAaron and mine's argument is that the "next-best thing" is not doable. You can do something which, if you don't think about it, seems like you did that, but you really can't do it. Species don't exist in a vacuum; they're not just gene pools, they arise naturally in a very specific, irreproducible context. Once the species is gone, it's gone.
Sure, it isn't perfect. Neither is medicine. Do you think surgery is a bad thing because it doesn't always work and causes problems of its own? Or medicines - are they bad because of their side effects?
Strawman argument, wherein you try to paint me as a Luddite. Still, I can answer in the following way: suppose that by means of free, universal preventive care, we could stop a huge number of infections that nowadays kill people, using a minimum of medicine, with only mild side effects.
What would be the ethical thing to do, in a world where many people died from disease? To concentrate your resources on developing further and further advanced treatments for advanced illneses, or to provide the preventive care that would minimize it?
Of course, this is not a hypothetical example.
Should cancer victims be left to die, or should we give them highly unnatural and uncomfortable treatments in the hope that we can return them to some semblance of their former selves?
Apart from the fact that here you attempt to make me look like somebody who could potentially be responsible for the premature death of cancer patients, it's ironic you pick the example of cancer. Cancer is so widespread today precisely because of our advanced medicine, and the many carcinogens we release into the environment.
The inflammatory aspects were that it blamed all of the readers (assuming they're all human) for the extinction of animals and then questioned their attempts to rectify the situation, while ignoring the other benefits of genetic research.
You use a strawman argument to justify your ad hominem attack? Gee.
Point out where the original poster "blames all the readers". He put the cause on "civilization" (and he enclosed it on quotes). It is one thing to claim that each human being is directly and individually resposible for X, and another to claim that the modes in which our species is organized is responsible for X (in the latter case, each individual is responsible indirectly at the most).
And as for your "ignoring the other benefits of genetic research", this article is about a specific application of genetic research, and the poster was discussing that application in particular. Nothing he said has any obvious implications on any other application of genetic engineering.
Please do us all a favor. Go to your user preferences, and choose "Not willing to moderate", and stop rationalizing your impulses to mod down somebody just because you disagree with them.
We are doing to it to correct (at least TRY to) a past error.
First of all, are you a representative of Advanced Cell Technologies, Inc.?
No? Then why do you say "we"?
This is a common rhetorical device in propaganda, referring to one's ideas, plans, interests, etc., as "ours". For example, in the US, corporate interests have been presented as "our" interests. (If you complain that you meant "we" as in "mankind", the reply is that you don't represent humanity either.)
So, leaving your petty rhetorical trick aside, I think it is fair to ask: what is this company's interest in doing this? My guess is that they are doing research they want to do anyway, and picked the endangered-species thing purely as a form of PR.
Elsewhere in this thread, konstant replies: "Haven't you ever wanted a second chance after you made an idiotic mistake? This is one way of mankind making good on incredible errors after the fact." netstorm2000 says: "We are doing to it to correct (at least TRY to) a past error."
Can't they get it? When a species is extinct, it is GONE. Period. The species itself was an essential part of the environment ito which it was adapted. Period. You can't bring that back at all.
Kudos to you and Black Parrot who get it. This is just a further example of the arrogance of non-sustainable "modern" "civilization" and its "we are the masters of nature" attitude.
I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that.
Whatever the answer is here, the fact remains that we are now conscious participants in environmental change, which brings along ethical considerations that weren't in the picture ever before.
To counter your point, I think one can evidence that "modern" "civilization" *is* threatening to make far more species extinct than anything ever before, if it hasn't already. My examples have mostly to do with agriculture, e.g. the push to use a few varieties of high-yield cash crops attacks, to the detriment of local varieties, threatens local crops.
Essentially, our species consciously understands and manipulates the environment in ways that go very far beyond any other species ever has. At least this point is undeniable and decisive here.
I do have moderator points today, but I couldn't find an appropriate way to moderate your inflammatory, shortsighted post. Any negative way I moderated it would not explain the reasons that I have for believing your post should be moderated down.
You show yourself to be a bad moderator . What was "inflammatory" from that post, apart from the fact that the you disagree with it?
People like you, with your "troll == disagrees with me" attitude is why this place has gone to hell.
Actually, I could win this one; I seem to remember that magenta syringe did a pretty lame version of the "Slashdot is suing me!" troll, which fooled about three people:)
Which is certainly does not redeem it from the "drink Steinlager" spam (ugh, lager, might as well drink water; give me ALE!!!). Or the MDMA crap.
PBG guy was actually funny, until I noticed he had posted more than one post, which made the joke get old already. That took all of one minute.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes he can. But, he was in Chicago this morning, in Madison by midday, in Milwaukee this afternoon. Tomorrow noon he is in Seattle, and in Denver at night, to depart for LA for the next day.
What is he doing all over the country? Talking to people, and answering questions. If you go to one of his events you might be able to ask him your question. Nobody will screen you or anything-- you can just go up to the mic and ask him.
I went to one of his events last week, so I saw this first hand.
NOOO!!!
Repeat with me this basic point from any Linguistics 101 course: the spoken form of a language is basic (save for dead languages or sign languages). The fact that the orthographies are similar can only prove this indirectly at best.
No. There are many ways to bring about change.
Doing it by electing executive and legislative officials onto whom you discharge your power to make political decisions, and will be pressured by very powerful economic entities into doing things *their* way, is just one way, and IMHO, a very poor one.
Sure there is -- it's called checks and balances. If the president changes his stance on everything he got voted for, there's no reason for Congress to let him get away with any of it (it'll make them look good to stand up for the little guy).
I was under the assumption that Congress != the people. Anyway, the [eople can't recall their "representatives" either.
The heart of the problem is that people discharge their political will onto functionaries.
I looked more carefully through the site you link. Though I'm very familiar with the arguments against electioneering, I certainly can't take seriously a site which proclaims the "dollar vote" as "An Alternative Form of Voting". So those with more money have a right to decide for those with less? By that logic, we should just officially hand over the government to GE and the other multinationals, for them to regulate as they see fit.
My point comes into effect when somebody implies that society at large benefits from their "solving" a certain "problem". In this case, it is the "problem" of not having a certain library in a game console. This guy said explicityly that by writing a non-free program, he'd make people more "free". So the criticism applies-- he's claiming to be doing more than benefitting himself.
I should have made it clear that this was not meant as a statement about voting in general, but about the US electionary process (or that of many other "democracies"). Of course, given a suitable political framework, voting *does* give you a voice. But without political institutions in which you can truly participate, it is just held against you. "Oh, the people voted for me, I have their trust, so they essentially agree on me on how to run the country, no matter if I make 'minor' revisions to what I promised in my campaign."
Voting does not give you a voice. It silences you for 4 years. You don't get any more input into the process of who runs the country for those 4 years.
There are many ways of being politically vocal. And most of them don't involve voting for corporate-sponsored candidates.
Yeah, I know all the arguments. But there is something to be said for voting for 3rd candidates who you just *know* won't win as to help crash the bipartite stronghold on power, and have similar stands to you, *while* building alternate, participatory political structures.
Simply, in the US, voting for a 3rd party is politically more visible. But it is still one thing to vote for a 3rd party, and another to believe that the party would solve the country's problems.
As for myself, I'm still undecided as to whether not to vote, or vote Nader. Both actions have their particular strong points, but it's simply a tough choice, the way I see it.
But the minute he's won, he doesn't have to play at being Nader, or anything else. Hell, the minute he's won, he can in practice reverse his stand on anything.
For that matter, so can Nader, or anybody-- this is a problem with the US political system, there is no way for the people to recall a candidate that has violated his mandate.
Let's get real. Electioneering, making a vote every couple of years, won't solve any problems by itself. The illusion that you can cause things to get better by just voting every 4 years for a guy who will wield enormous power in an office in Washington, or that such a person will actually "represent" you, or live up to their mandate with no mechanism present to enforce it, is just that, an illusion. In reality, the political system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, putting grassroots participation at its center, and cutting off the corrupting influence of corporate power.
To vote for somebody you *know* is a corporate drone who will support measures you don't only gives them more power. The right answer to this is *not* to vote for a "relatively benign" corporate drone, but to *organize politically* from a grassroots level and create an alternative. The most important thing one can do for this to happen is to work outside electionary politics at a grassroots level; voting for Nader, or any other candidate, is a very small part of this whole process.
The other poster gave a quite succint analogy to refute you, but I feel I will be more explicit.
"Problems" are not objective things "out there" in the world. We define what is a "problem" and what is not, according to our values.
What RMS was referring to is the typical engineering attitude of looking at how to get from A to B, without stopping to think whether we should actually get to B-- maybe C and D are better than B, or even A may be better! For Tyberghein, the problem is getting his libraries to run on the PS2. For RMS, fixating on this is missing the forest for the trees-- there are bigger problems out there, which merit more attention, and this "solution" may actually be perjudicial in the bigger picture.
What RMS points out, anyway, is the typical error of the technologist mindset-- thinking that solving technical problems in and of itself is a worthy pursuit that benefits society. This is simply not true.
There is no firewall here at all. This is a university, and all systems are out in the open.
If installing OS's at your site is a security risk then I would see why the IT people responsible for network security allowed anyone access to that machine at all. There might be good reasons to prohibit but this is not one of them.
First of all, there is no prohibition here on running anything-- my department's policy is that if you want to run a unix-like system, you should tell us, so we can help you run it securely (essentially, as few daemons as possible, and no cleartext-password services, no ftp of any kind, secure daemons like qmail or other djb stuff, etc.).
Exploitable unix systems are a risk, firewall or not. An insider could still break into a box.
In my department we allow Linux systems, but people who intend to install it must notify a computing committee, and they are expected to run only ssh, and possibly smtp and a small, secure, non-cgi capable httpd like djb's publicfile (intended to serve a Java ssh client or test pages, not as a production server). We had a box rooted before this went into place; the user of the box was running an old version of Redhat, and the box was running a buggy, absolutely unneeded amd daemon. The attacker transferred a rootkit and a sniffer using ftp-- the ftp daemon had not been used for anything else in that box, ever...
Face it. The same way horrendous cooking is the complement to good music in English culture, horrendous music is the complement to good cooking for the French.
French Canadian rock, well, that's a whole different story. Hmmm. Gotta go listen to my Plume, Les Colocs, and Les Cowboys Fringants records.
First of all, you provide a very optimistic example.
Second, birds and mammals are very different creatures. The gaur is a mammal-- it has a much larger brain volume, and a correspondingly higher potential for learned behavior.
And anyway, your point does not in any way contradict any of what I said. You don't "restore" a species when you insert clones of it in a different environment, since a species occurs in a particular environment. You end up with something different.
Even if you considered a case like this to be something worthwhile to do, you'd delude yourself if you thought you had reproduced the exact same thing that had disappeared.
It is very different for a stray bird to wander into a new environment than for us to put it there. The first case does not involve any ethics-- it is simply something that happened, without our intervention. The second involves our agency in an essential manner, which is why ethics becomes very relevant.
Which means that you have internalized the propaganda.
I am sure they want to do some research on their own, thats what companies do! So RedHat or MS do soemthing cool and demo it at InterOp or something, do we (there's that we again!) automatically view their motives as sinister simply becvause they can benefit from it? Thats a bit simplsitic don't you think? Why shoudn't they pick a endangered species?
Where did I say they had "sinister motives"? I just said they were giving the impression of doing something which, in reality, is patently hopeless and useless, in the hopes of looking good while they were at it. Pure PR.
Nothing in what I said implies any of this. If you claim to have "logic" on your side, produce an argument. In an ideal world, we wouldn't cause extinction at all. In the real world, we do what we can. It would be much better if we had had the foresight to stop destroying the gaur before the last one died. Since we didn't, we do the next best thing, which (I would assume) would include restoring their habitat to the best of our ability, giving the resurrected species places to live in the wild.
And you totally ignore my point. When it's gone, it'se gone. You can't recreate the gaur's environment at all, because the gaur's environment had gaurs and/or their ancestors bearing, feeding and caring for their young. If you "succeed", you'll get something that's not the same. You're introducing a species, not reinstanting one.
And, in any case, we're talking about one concrete action: a company is making a cow give birth to a gaur clone, nothing more. If this were accompanied with some serious attempt at recreating the natural environment of the gaur (which I still would oppose), we'd have one thing. But nothing of the sort is going on. It's just a publicity stunt by a corporation that wants to appear "ecologically friendly"; it is absolutely unviable, but is packaged to promote their products and research, in particular, to distract attention from the dangers genetic engineering involves, not to mention the sheer unnecessity and utter greed driving it.
It would be much better if we had had the foresight to stop destroying the gaur before the last one died. Since we didn't, we do the next best thing, which (I would assume) would include restoring their habitat to the best of our ability, giving the resurrected species places to live in the wild.
RevAaron and mine's argument is that the "next-best thing" is not doable. You can do something which, if you don't think about it, seems like you did that, but you really can't do it. Species don't exist in a vacuum; they're not just gene pools, they arise naturally in a very specific, irreproducible context. Once the species is gone, it's gone.
Sure, it isn't perfect. Neither is medicine. Do you think surgery is a bad thing because it doesn't always work and causes problems of its own? Or medicines - are they bad because of their side effects?
Strawman argument, wherein you try to paint me as a Luddite. Still, I can answer in the following way: suppose that by means of free, universal preventive care, we could stop a huge number of infections that nowadays kill people, using a minimum of medicine, with only mild side effects.
What would be the ethical thing to do, in a world where many people died from disease? To concentrate your resources on developing further and further advanced treatments for advanced illneses, or to provide the preventive care that would minimize it?
Of course, this is not a hypothetical example.
Should cancer victims be left to die, or should we give them highly unnatural and uncomfortable treatments in the hope that we can return them to some semblance of their former selves?
Apart from the fact that here you attempt to make me look like somebody who could potentially be responsible for the premature death of cancer patients, it's ironic you pick the example of cancer. Cancer is so widespread today precisely because of our advanced medicine, and the many carcinogens we release into the environment.
You use a strawman argument to justify your ad hominem attack? Gee.
Point out where the original poster "blames all the readers". He put the cause on "civilization" (and he enclosed it on quotes). It is one thing to claim that each human being is directly and individually resposible for X, and another to claim that the modes in which our species is organized is responsible for X (in the latter case, each individual is responsible indirectly at the most).
And as for your "ignoring the other benefits of genetic research", this article is about a specific application of genetic research, and the poster was discussing that application in particular. Nothing he said has any obvious implications on any other application of genetic engineering.
Please do us all a favor. Go to your user preferences, and choose "Not willing to moderate", and stop rationalizing your impulses to mod down somebody just because you disagree with them.
First of all, are you a representative of Advanced Cell Technologies, Inc.?
No? Then why do you say "we"?
This is a common rhetorical device in propaganda, referring to one's ideas, plans, interests, etc., as "ours". For example, in the US, corporate interests have been presented as "our" interests. (If you complain that you meant "we" as in "mankind", the reply is that you don't represent humanity either.)
So, leaving your petty rhetorical trick aside, I think it is fair to ask: what is this company's interest in doing this? My guess is that they are doing research they want to do anyway, and picked the endangered-species thing purely as a form of PR.
Can't they get it? When a species is extinct, it is GONE. Period. The species itself was an essential part of the environment ito which it was adapted. Period. You can't bring that back at all.
Kudos to you and Black Parrot who get it. This is just a further example of the arrogance of non-sustainable "modern" "civilization" and its "we are the masters of nature" attitude.
Whatever the answer is here, the fact remains that we are now conscious participants in environmental change, which brings along ethical considerations that weren't in the picture ever before.
To counter your point, I think one can evidence that "modern" "civilization" *is* threatening to make far more species extinct than anything ever before, if it hasn't already. My examples have mostly to do with agriculture, e.g. the push to use a few varieties of high-yield cash crops attacks, to the detriment of local varieties, threatens local crops.
Essentially, our species consciously understands and manipulates the environment in ways that go very far beyond any other species ever has. At least this point is undeniable and decisive here.
I do have moderator points today, but I couldn't find an appropriate way to moderate your inflammatory, shortsighted post. Any negative way I moderated it would not explain the reasons that I have for believing your post should be moderated down.
You show yourself to be a bad moderator . What was "inflammatory" from that post, apart from the fact that the you disagree with it?
People like you, with your "troll == disagrees with me" attitude is why this place has gone to hell.
Which is certainly does not redeem it from the "drink Steinlager" spam (ugh, lager, might as well drink water; give me ALE!!!). Or the MDMA crap.
PBG guy was actually funny, until I noticed he had posted more than one post, which made the joke get old already. That took all of one minute.
Happily, a good number of the /. crew seems to have much more of a clue than you do.
In any case, go through the DB, and look at the following two groups of accounts:
Group 1: Magenta syringe, Penis Bird Man, Vladinator.
Group 2: Jon Erikson, streetlawyer, vertical-limit.
Please point at examples of spam from the second group, and/or examples of genuine trolls in the first one.
You simply don't know what you're talking about, don't you?