If those tiny hairs were moving just as much or more, the noise would be *louder*, not quieter. The noise-cancelling headphones by definition are finding a way to make sure those little hairs move *less*.
Or take the other approach and think about how waves work. Cancelling out a wave means it doesn't exist anymore in the overlap area, not that the original wave and the "cancelling" wave are still both there, and somehow coexisting without affecting each other. A wave that meets with a perfect cancellation is a flat line. An imperfect but "good-enough" cancellation (like I'm guessing you'll get with these kinds of headphones) leaves you with a mostly flat line.
Where did you read that noise-cancellation headphones can't protect your hearing?
[For the record, they probably aren't ideal for that purpose -- because a really loud noise could probably overwhelm them, and perhaps even just because if you like your music really loud, they obviously aren't going to stop *that* damage... but I'm guessing in an environment of very loud but consistent noise they could technically do the trick. Anything I'm missing?]
The funny thing about this -- have you ever tried actually saying "sacre bleu" to a French person? I have a French sister-in-law, so this came up at some point.
Chances are they've never heard the phrase in their lives. Apparently "sacre bleu" (sacred blue, if you can't figure that out) is an obscure religious-themed swear they used to use in Quebec. And only in Quebec, and only a long time ago.
Somehow it got into the American public consciousness and was associated with the French....
I would imagine that for now, especially, candidates will be only people who have already tried other reconstructive options, and found them totally unacceptable, and who have had time to think about the decision.
But even 10 years down the line, I don't think this kind of surgery is an option right after a serious face injury.
With transplants of donated skin, it's particularly difficult to stop rejection, and so recipients are going to have to deal with hardcore immunosuppression drugs. But if you have a large external wound, shutting down your immune system isn't the greatest idea.
So if you're a serious burn victim, you would probably have to wait for quite a while -- i.e., it wouldn't actually help to replace destroyed skin with foreign tissue immediately, because that means you'd have to shut down the body's immune system right when it's at its most vulnerable to infection because of those wounds.
Seems like common sense to me... any doctors in the house want to clarify?
They on the other hand, remember themselves as something different than what they look like after the operation, thereby the change of face would make them feel that they have lost some of their identity.
Your argument doesn't make any sense to me. They don't have the option of a complete restoration of the original face, and that's the only option that would be free of psychological complications. Remember that they are choosing between:
1) a vastly different "face", covered in scar tissue and missing large pieces, or
2) a somewhat different face, with some scar tissue and different freckles, etc., but likely much more recognizable as the original person due to the constant underlying bone structure. And certainly much more recognizable as a normal human face.
Are you seriously saying (1) is a better option? That you'd be more horrified when you woke up every morning with slightly differently-shaped lips, as opposed to waking up with no lips at all?
He started out in the first person, thinking "I'm disease-free!". But then the doctor told him in the second person, "nope, you've got HIV." Finally, the news tells us in the third person, "well, he doesn't have HIV now...".
Obviously, we've got a lot left to learn about how HIV is transmitted from person to person. At least he's not as tense now as he was in the past.
[wait, are you laughing with me or laughing at me?]
Hi -- comments are closed in the "Start of Life" discussion; if you're interested in continuing the conversation, feel free to drop me an email. slashdot@my domain name.com
My own basis for doing so is that any other line assigns the quality "human" to an organism based on either (a) utility -- that is, a definition based on a particular theory of ethics, or (b) location of the organism relative to some other organism. The first is abhorrent; the second is ad hoc. The only scientific way to procede that makes sense to me is, Species? Human. Living in a biological sense? Check. Living human being = person.
I could point out corner cases that your definition includes, but this discussion is getting off-track by focussing on the definition of "human". It's not actually useful to say "all humans should have equal human rights" -- which sounds reasonable -- then decide that a scientific definition of the word human must include X, Y, & Z, and assume that our original statement must true for those. The original statement (and the gut emotional response to it) is based on a commonly used, non-scientific, fuzzy word. When you say "human" as in, "draw me a picture of 5 humans and 2 canines in a room", what would you draw? When we hear the word in "the Chinese are violating basic human rights", we think of fully functional, living adults, not even children.
The reason human rights exist in the first place is because we, adults, know or can imagine what it is like to suffer pain and humiliation, to have our freedom of movement restricted unjustly or our bodies violated, etc., and we feel empathy for other beings like us who are undergoing these things. It's simply not logical that we can extend this empathy to a single-celled, newly fertilized egg. The fact that fertilization provides a convenient starting point to affix your definition of human doesn't change that at all -- the real argument isn't about a word definition, it's about whether a mother can choose to abort a newly fertilized egg.
On the other hand, look at the woman in this situation, who suffers unquestionably. It's not like carrying around a backpack for 9 months than taking it off, after all. Pregnancy means serious hormonal and physical changes (some irreversible). It means a risk of required surgery or death even if the health of the mother is otherwise perfect. Even if she plans to give up the child up for adoption, that doesn't help with post-partum depression. It doesn't help with the trauma of giving birth (one occasional "side-effect" of giving birth is diagnosable Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome).
We owe our wives and mothers a huge debt for undergoing what they do, and most of the time they suffer it willingly, to create a child that they are capable of caring for (or helping to care for), that they will be able to keep safe, that is wanted.
But who are the women that you would deny abortions? Imagine being forced to go through this when you're a sophomore in high school (say, 14 years old) because you made a stupid, 90-second mistake after a senior's party you got invited to. Or suppose you're 29, but living with an husband who is already sexually abusing your 3-year-old, and you really, really don't want to bring another child into the house. Do you think it feels "inconvenient" for these woman, feeling the fetus growing inside them? Do you think their lives go back to normal nine months later?
Suppose you have no medical insurance and dropped out of high school, and have finally managed to get a job that's over minimum wage, when you find out a condom must have leaked. Think you'll be able to keep the job when you have to leave for a month? Think the boyfriend will stick around? Think you'll be able to avoid bankruptcy?
One might argue that the embryo is non-detachable from her particular mother, but this fares no better. If in the year 2050 it became possible to transplant embryos from one womb to another, or to a special incubator, then the embryo *would* be able to survive without attachment to a particular woman. If detachability is the criterion for humanity, then embryos would suddenly become human in 2050 -- an odd result, indeed.
musictheory.net is a good one; I'd also like to toss my site out there, emusictheory.com -- also pretty popular for free (non-OSS) interactive music theory drills.
I was saying, there's an underlying conflict here, between two artificially extended concepts of human rights.
Reality is that all humans are technically not equal in their "value" to the rest of the species -- contrast, say, Jonas Salk with a junior academic lecturer who never discovered anything of note -- but this "value" is impossible to calculate (and Salk was inspired to pursue his vaccines after flaws in a boring lecture got him thinking - how does that count?), AND people who presume to make these judgments (e.g., Hitler) have had a huge cost on humanity. As a result, we try on principle to protect human rights equally for all people, not based on their current perceived "value". We try to grant human rights on an all-or-nothing basis, and to use an inclusive definition.
One of the most basic of these human rights is integrity of person. Medical experiments on unwilling participants are bad (no matter what the potential or proven gain to humanity!); forced servitude is bad; arbitrary imprisonment is bad, any physical attack on another person is bad (only outweighed by your own rights, if you are protecting yourself).
Right-to-life advocates push the all-or-nothing line of humanity out to include the unborn, back to the moment of egg fertilization. Some also want the definition to include brain-dead adults. The problem with the embryo situation is that it's not yet an independant organism -- it's attached to the mother and cannot survive separate from her. Her right to control her own body is irreconcilably in conflict with the newly granted right of the fetus to its life.
It's true that extending human rights in the past (to black slaves in America, etc. etc.) has been a very good thing. These were groups of people that were suffering & dying because of particularly false values assigned to them. It doesn't hold true that all extensions of human rights are good, though. In forcing a woman to carry a newly fertilized egg (keeping this simple...), we are extending human rights to something that is not suffering whatsoever, at the direct cost of an unquestionably rights-endowed person who does suffer because of this choice.
1) Is the violinist situation exactly parallel to pregnancy? Obviously not, but we can make it closer -- let's say for the sake of argument that you and the violinist randomly met at a bar the night before, and the "attached violinist" question came up after about 6 beers (this represents about how logical human thinking is when the hormones are going full blast). "Well, I *am* a famous violinist! But I'll bet you'd cut me free and leave me to die..." says the violinist, laughing.
"No way, you're great!" you cry out. "I'll save you! Letsh shake on it."
Can you change you mind later? I don't think this really changes the situation. Your attachment is an ongoing thing, a new sacrifice every day. You have the right to stop providing that service. If you signed a contract or something like that, the law might come into it around that -- but a broken condom is not a contract of any kind.
2) Does the violinist have a moral obligation to allow you to detach? No -- but the demands the violinist can morally make end where your basic right to not have your body violated begin. Don't forget that you are risking your own life (it's not just an inconvenience) to help the violinist. Should the law be allowed to force you to do that? It's not just about morality (which gives us conflicting answers, and is always specific to the case -- suppose keeping you attached prevented you from finishing work on a cancer cure?), it's also about what power we can safely give to the law. Would a law allow the non-famous, wanna-be violinist also to attach himself to you the day after the famous one is cured?
3)...is it truly correct that control over the body for nine months trumps being *killed*? It's not just control, it's also a risk of physical damage and death... but I still think that legally, a person should be able to control how their body is used in almost all cases.
4)...what if the violinist were your own child? Would your moral obligations change then? Again, it's not about your personal moral obligations, it's about what the law can/should enforce. Most mothers would donate a kidney, bone marrow, etc. for their child, and many people expect this response. But the mothers are not legally obliged to. [This topic probably deserves more discussion than I'm giving it here...]
This is also a good time to point out the limits of the attached violinist comparison. A newly fertilized egg is not a child. It has far less function than some adults who are legally dead. It has the potential to become what we think of as a person, if all goes well, and an embryo may have huge value to its parents for this reason... but it has no value to itself. It won't suffer if its rights are denied -- any legal protection it gains at this point must be based on the rights of its parents. We're in a grayer area as the fetus develops, but I'm arguing for now against people who feel all abortions (no matter how early) should be illegal.
I don't know the figures here, but it's not as simple as "dying earlier". Frankly, it seems like dying of lung or mouth cancer is a very expensive and drawn-out way to go (never mind painful.. but we're talking costs to society here). All that chemo and/or radiation therapy plus possibly multiple surgeries are not cheap at all. Remissions, relapses... it can go on for a long time before you actually die.
There's also all of the intervening years, when the smoker in their 20s, 30s & 40s has been sick much more of the year, missing work and eating up insurance premiums with more bronchitis, pneumonia, flu, etc. etc..
Living a healthy life then dying of a stroke on the other hand... that's how I want to go. Uncle Sam agrees.
I think right now, though, once you're over 65 the leading cause of death is heart disease, followed by cancer and stroke. What's the comparitive cost of dying of each of these? I think cancer would be the worst; heart surgery of course is expensive, but only applies to the people who survive the heart attack and can be helped by a bypass, etc..
I wish I had the time to really dig into this... anyway, I'll try to sum up. My general thought is that this kind of extreme would fail for the same reasons that communism (in a way, the other extreme on the same scale) doesn't work. It doesn't account for human nature. I don't want to live in an economy where nothing is left to chance, where there's no possibility of "striking it rich". That chance is a huge factor driving entrepreneurs (including me).
But the other extreme is just as guilty of ignoring human nature. In your system, once people are rich enough to pay for their *own* services, won't opt to support the rest of the village. Some will worry about what the general populace are thinking of them... but wealth is a great insulator, and most likely they will live with the other incredibly rich people in a gated community (cf India, again).
Mostly, I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Government causes problems X Y Z, so get rid of all government and leave no one to maintain basic human rights? That's not the only option. And government isn't a simple, single entity that works like a lightswitch.
For any of these examples -- if a fee is collected from the entire community, um.. isn't that involuntary taxes? And would the leading fire department *really* agree to special interactive agreements with their up-and-coming competition if the other alternative was their monopoly? After all, who's going to prosecute them for abusing their monopoly powers?
And frankly, there's a pretty big difference between communities I've seen in, say, India where low-income people subsist off of private charity (this is called "begging"; surviving on welfare while looking for a job is not an option) and any community I'd like to live in.
Look, someone has to pay for the basic services that everyone needs (but not everyone can pay for). A capitalist economy tends to unfairly make the rich richer and the poor poorer (I say unfairly because wealth does not correlate well with a person's actual intelligence and work -- is Gates 1000 times smarter than his basic engineers?). It's also true that as a person gains more and more wealth, it's less and less valuable to them. If Gates misplaced 100K it wouldn't affect him in any way, while it could change the life completely of that entry-level engineer (or heck, someone actually poor and unemployed).
But the fact remains that the rich feel entitled even to inherited wealth that hasn't cost them a drop of sweat.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
It's obvious that our current governments are not ideal. There's waste and inefficiencies, and there are some "leeches" on the system who have no interest in contributing to the common good. But how in the world are you going to fix these things by letting the wealthy "opt out" of supporting the current system?
Do you really want to live in a place where if your house is burning, you can't call the fire department unless you've got the $2K to pay for the service? Suppose your neighbor's house is burning, and he can't pay the fee. Is the whole block going to go because of that?
Next suppose the average low-income family can't afford the busing fees (or road charges) and high school prices to send their kid to school.
Does this still sound like a good idea to you?
Suppose you can't call the police (sorry, private security service) when your house is robbed and your daughter raped because, golly, they took all your money, and the cost of arresting the guy and housing him in prison is *way* out of your price range even before the robbery. Actually, your best bet is to just try to hire a hitman to kill the guy, because he probably can't afford to jail you, either.
Golly, sign me up.
Seriously, government does not always run smoothly or efficiently, but I'm not hearing anything helpful at all in what you're saying.
Understood. Good discussion -- my viewpoint and ideas are much more defined now than what I started! If you want to pick it up later for blog fodder, whatever, you can email me at slashdot@[see domain name above].
This is right on target. Change of ownership doesn't mean the new owners can keep the lucrative long-term contracts they like but toss the warrantee ones they don't want -- it's still the same company.
New acronym, by the way: TIS, TTAL (this is/., talk to a lawyer)... but common sense is certainly on your side. Also see poster a few posts up who talks about small claims court -- I'll be willing to bet that you'll never even need to sue, because they probably just have a POLICY now where they don't honor warrantees until they get that "I'm suing" notification letter.
Sucks, but some companies pull stuff like this to save some money.
I'm glad that you enjoy the conversation. I appreciate your reply as well. It's rare not to have people demonizing each other.
I'm sure you find watching politicians debate as infuriating as I do, then?:)
Anyway, it's pretty clear our main difference here is the definition of "human". Your airlock examples, etc., are still built on the assumption that an embryo is a viable human. Let's just talk about a newly fertilized egg, since that's where we differ the most. You are arguing that a fertilized egg is just as "human" and worthy of protection and as (in your examples) adult slaves, Jewish people, the elderly, etc.. I'm arguing that a definition of "human" must be based on more than genetics -- including at an extreme minimum things like nervous/circulatory systems of some kind.
Your definition is handy in that it completely avoids the gray areas. You're saying basically that anything with human DNA and any living cells is "human" and has equal rights. I think we *have* to get into the blurry areas to some degree, because the distance from a fertilized egg or a headless body kept "alive" on machines, to what most of us think of as a "person" is just too great for us to start impinging on the rights of normal people on behalf of these extreme examples, organisms that cannot possibly suffer or even feel unappreciated. It's not just "inconvenience"; forcing a mother to carry a fetus to term and deliver it means forcing her to risk death and serious health complications.
I still wouldn't do away with the idea of "human" as a single concept (in spite of the reality of varying levels of functioning, etc.), but all previous human rights struggles have been about the rights of organisms that function at least at the level of a housefly, for instance. A newly fertilized egg does not. Human rights advocacy has always been about fighting for people's rights to not be held in slavery, not be tortured or cruelly punished or arbitrarily arrested or searched, freedom of expression and assembly, equal pay for equal work, freedom of thought and religion, of movement, etc.. Freedom of life, liberty, and security of person. These things don't apply to a fertilized egg, though (except "life", which could apply to bacteria as well). It cannot suffer from any kind of discrimination. These rights do apply to women, though -- for example, her right to security of person is violated when she's forced to host and deliver a fetus against her will.
Assuming you disagree about the "humanity" of the zygote... I still think you would at least feel that we should possibly focus our attention first on human rights violations against thinking, breathing humans (such as the Guantanemo Bay detainees, or the myriad humans rights violations happening all over the world from condoned rapes in Pakistan to "disappeared" intellectuals in China) as a much higher priority than early abortions in particular. I.e., let's first try to save the victims that actually suffer before trying to save the far fringe of the questionably human (only human according to a very broad definition). Thoughts?
I should point out that I do not think a fetus has the same negligible "value" as any random bundle of cells. A fetus *should* have legal protection, but based on the *mother's* rights. In most cases the parents and family invest a huge amount of emotional value in it -- I do lean in favor of harsher penalties for people who kill a pregnant woman, just because the suffering of the father and family is much more severe because of the potential human that was destroyed. But my reasoning is based on the actual suffering of the adults and their rights, not any rights of the embryo. I also think castrating a man is a worse crime than cutting off a finger, for similar reasons.
Other comments: Your arguments about supposedly soon-to-exist engineered subhumans, and sliding backwards into legal exclusions for "partial humans" or humans who are less human than others sound like
What I don't understand is exactly what advantage is Java providing on the server-side. Do you really need cross-platform bytecode at that level?
Actually, yes -- the cross-platform ability is extremely useful. Speaking personally: the two biggest projects I have worked on, both for one client, are deployed (production) on a IBM iSeries server (these used to be called AS/400s -- using the OS/400 operating system), and a Solaris server respectively. Both web apps are built on the same code base, and we developed and tested them on Windows 2000 workstations (XP, now, plus I am starting to do more and more development in RedHat Fedora).
Can you imagine if I needed my own iSeries at home to run a test server here? Those things aren't cheap. Also, because the client has more in-house iSeries experience, we're going to be moving the Solaris webapp to an iSeries as well at some point -- and guess what? The Java code doesn't need any changes whatsoever; it's only the database SQL that will need to be migrated (DB2 UDB to DB2400 SQL isn't consistent).
When I'm starting new projects, I can get people started on architecture and writing code in most cases *without* finalizing the eventual platform, and without getting access to the big hardware yet. You aren't locking yourself into anything from the beginning -- this is actually a pretty serious power to have. It also allows me to run side by side performance testing on servers to see the *real* differences in capabilities; this is HUGE because the folks selling the big iron suddenly are a commodity, not an unquestioned master in a domain with benefits we can't actually measure usefully.
Just my 2 cents -- I'm sure some people wouldn't actually care (e.g., "my webhost only runs RedHat, so that's all I need to care about"), but gotcha-free cross-platform code is a big deal.
Right, it's Sun's "responsibility", and of course if the verifier falls down they will get all the bad press -- but they are giving the rest of us the *chance*, if we want it, to contribute to the security of an essential part of the JVM (because we're the ones who'll be vulnerable if there's a flaw!), PLUS to find out if their new verifier is going to play nicely with the myriad 3rd party tools that manipulate and generate Java bytecode.
There are tons of alternative compilers out there that turn various languages into Java classfiles. Then there are all of the tools that alter classfiles to add in AOP, or to optimize filesize, or to obfuscate the code against decompilers, etc. etc..
Obviously Sun isn't going to test all of these, though, for example, some of the obfuscators have historically depended on the specific implementation of the verifier (and NOT the classfile spec) to make tweaks that would break popular decompilers.
See the reasoning now? Personally I think they should put a bounty on it to recognize the value they're getting out of it (and to help folks justify the time they'd cracking it...) but it's silly to say they shouldn't even have made the offer.
We all seem to understand that when we're talking about adults
This is an essential point. I was starting to counter your "bum" example with the addition of the conceit that this bum was not sleeping, but surviving on your blood ("but I'll die if you don't let me feed for the next... 9 months!") when I realized that's a dead end in more way than one.
We *aren't* dealing with an independant adult, or even an independant *organism*. A fetus is not a bum, and it is not sitting in a steakhouse with you. The mother can't just say to the zygote "look, I won't hurt you, but let's just go our separate ways". We are dealing with what is initially a single cell, that is gradually going to resemble a human infant more and more until (finally) it is developed enough that it can survive independantly, at which point the mother's body will hopefully force it out of her at the right time and without complications.
Do you see how this is so complex? Suppose you could perform an abortion by teleporting the fetus out of the womb without otherwise harming it in any way. Okay, so the mother isn't "killing" it, she's just no longer allowing it access to her body (but of course it will die, because it cannot survive as an independant organism). I'm obviously playing with semantics here to make a point -- do you think she might have this right?
This is the real root of the pro-choice argument for me -- that her right to control her body trumps the right of the potential human growing inside her to control her body.
Personally... if my wife got pregnant right now (and we aren't planning on having a child yet!), we would not abort it. I don't think of a fetus as "just a random bundle of cells", etc. -- but if my wife changed her mind and decided to have an abortion I don't think the courts should be able to override that decision and force her to endure the 9 months, massive hormone changes, physical risks and side-effects, PPD, etc. etc. on behalf of the fetus.
[Thanks for replying -- I'm finding this a very interesting conversation!]
No. In fact, most abortion laws that are drafted do have exceptions for life-threatening instances. They still get struck down though.
Partly this is because "life-threatening instances" are very difficult to quantify. Beyond the super-clear-cut cases where the mother is *already* at the brink of death and needs immediate surgery that would kill the fetus, it's generally impossible to know exactly what will happen if the fetus is carried to term. It's also worth pointing out that *any* childbirth carries a risk of fatal complications, even for a healthy young mother. So is every abortion justified based on this?
The question is is abortion to be treated as simply another form of birth control? No, the question is what laws we can make. We can't control how people *think* about something -- though from what I understand an abortion for the vast majority of women is extremely unpleasant (mentally and physically) and not undertaken lightly. The extreme cases of women who have serial abortions are just that, rare and extreme cases (usually brought up to make a point that wouldn't hold true for the average woman deciding on an abortion).
Yes, because a) most likely, the woman willing engaged in an act that involved the possibility of putting that "curled-up totally-aware *adult* inside her" and b) if she did so unwilling, that "curled-up totally-aware *adult* inside her" was not responsible for the initial infringement of her rights. Now, if society denies her the legal right to kill that person, society also has an obligation to provide support for her so that the obligation is as light as possible.
Are you sure? I'm risking making this invented situation too wacky here, but let's assume that this little adult has a fatal heart condition, and they can be kept alive only by hooking their aorta directly into yours for a year or so while a perfect donor heart is found (hopefully). You agree, but after 3 months your spouse has left you, you're feeling sick all the time, the bedsores are driving you nuts, and you decide you can't do it. Can you get out of it now? The surgery to unhook you would kill him; can you do it legally? I'd suggest that you can -- after all, you were only hooked up in the first place out of your (extreme) generosity. You should be able to stop him from continued use of your body.
Your twins example is also not parallel with abortion. With abortion, you're talking about preventing the woman from doing something. With the twins, you're talking about forcing the twins to do something.
Sure; so suppose you were both in a car accident, and when you woke up the doctors had saved his life by connecting you, and filtering his blood using your kidneys. Unhook and kill him. Same? Different?
Obviously there's no *real* parallel to the unborn fetus situation... it just doesn't happen. Personally, I get jumpy about late-in-term abortions -- when the fetus has a functioning brain, nerves, lungs, etc.. (though I don't know what kind of laws I'd be comfortable with) -- but for early abortions I think the mother should have the right to decide based on her own morals, faith, situation, risks, etc. etc..
For the sake of argument, justify that statement. (1) If the zygote is alive, why should it not receive equal protections? (2) If, somehow, you managed to imbed an already born person into the body of another person, would that person lose the claim to equal protections?
I'm not the GP poster, but here are some thoughts on this (#2 is especially interesting to me):
1) We don't afford equal protection to all living things. Only "humans", and a zygote with no brainstem yet, etc. doesn't fit into that category in everyone's book. The definition is complicated, because it's not consistent with mental development, etc -- i.e., the average guinea pig has more brain function than some people with severe brain damage or serious genetic defects... but it's very hard to pin this one down. "Potential human" as a concept is just as fraught.
2) You're forgetting that two people's rights are involved here, and the fact that one of the people would be totally and parasitically dependant on the other. If I woke up one morning and a psycho missing some essential organ had wired himself to me so that he'd *die* if we separated him, I definitely *do* *not* think his right to live would trump my right to live free of him. Think about it. Cut the sucker free; it's not my problem.
So how does the law work on related questions? Suppose you had identical twins who hated each other, and one would die without a kidney but the other refused to give it. Obviously there's a huge moral question here, but could the twin be legally FORCED to undergo the operation and give up a kidney? I have a feeling that the answer here is "no", but I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
If those tiny hairs were moving just as much or more, the noise would be *louder*, not quieter. The noise-cancelling headphones by definition are finding a way to make sure those little hairs move *less*.
Or take the other approach and think about how waves work. Cancelling out a wave means it doesn't exist anymore in the overlap area, not that the original wave and the "cancelling" wave are still both there, and somehow coexisting without affecting each other. A wave that meets with a perfect cancellation is a flat line. An imperfect but "good-enough" cancellation (like I'm guessing you'll get with these kinds of headphones) leaves you with a mostly flat line.
Where did you read that noise-cancellation headphones can't protect your hearing?
[For the record, they probably aren't ideal for that purpose -- because a really loud noise could probably overwhelm them, and perhaps even just because if you like your music really loud, they obviously aren't going to stop *that* damage... but I'm guessing in an environment of very loud but consistent noise they could technically do the trick. Anything I'm missing?]
The funny thing about this -- have you ever tried actually saying "sacre bleu" to a French person? I have a French sister-in-law, so this came up at some point.
Chances are they've never heard the phrase in their lives. Apparently "sacre bleu" (sacred blue, if you can't figure that out) is an obscure religious-themed swear they used to use in Quebec. And only in Quebec, and only a long time ago.
Somehow it got into the American public consciousness and was associated with the French....
I would imagine that for now, especially, candidates will be only people who have already tried other reconstructive options, and found them totally unacceptable, and who have had time to think about the decision.
But even 10 years down the line, I don't think this kind of surgery is an option right after a serious face injury.
With transplants of donated skin, it's particularly difficult to stop rejection, and so recipients are going to have to deal with hardcore immunosuppression drugs. But if you have a large external wound, shutting down your immune system isn't the greatest idea.
So if you're a serious burn victim, you would probably have to wait for quite a while -- i.e., it wouldn't actually help to replace destroyed skin with foreign tissue immediately, because that means you'd have to shut down the body's immune system right when it's at its most vulnerable to infection because of those wounds.
Seems like common sense to me... any doctors in the house want to clarify?
They on the other hand, remember themselves as something different than what they look like after the operation, thereby the change of face would make them feel that they have lost some of their identity.
Your argument doesn't make any sense to me. They don't have the option of a complete restoration of the original face, and that's the only option that would be free of psychological complications. Remember that they are choosing between:
1) a vastly different "face", covered in scar tissue and missing large pieces, or
2) a somewhat different face, with some scar tissue and different freckles, etc., but likely much more recognizable as the original person due to the constant underlying bone structure. And certainly much more recognizable as a normal human face.
Are you seriously saying (1) is a better option? That you'd be more horrified when you woke up every morning with slightly differently-shaped lips, as opposed to waking up with no lips at all?
There's the simple numeric answer, of course... I prefer: "Well, if I taught just one more person, we'd all be deaf."
Heh, heh.
"There are 10 types of people in this world - those who understand binary and those that don't."
/. sig... but it keeps coming back.
Fortunately this is no longer the most popular
Here's a less-known, related riddle, though:
If only you and dead people understand hex, how many people understand hex?
Almost as good as the splash screen when Windows 2000 starts - ever noticed where it says "Built on NT Technology"?
Ah, yes. Of course, back in the day when they first built NT, that startup screen said "Built on New NT Technology".
Whereas on XP startup they have to say "Built on Old NT Technology".
Come on, it's not that complicated:
He started out in the first person, thinking "I'm disease-free!". But then the doctor told him in the second person, "nope, you've got HIV." Finally, the news tells us in the third person, "well, he doesn't have HIV now...".
Obviously, we've got a lot left to learn about how HIV is transmitted from person to person. At least he's not as tense now as he was in the past.
[wait, are you laughing with me or laughing at me?]
Hi -- comments are closed in the "Start of Life" discussion; if you're interested in continuing the conversation, feel free to drop me an email. slashdot@my domain name.com
Cheers,
Rob
My own basis for doing so is that any other line assigns the quality "human" to an organism based on either (a) utility -- that is, a definition based on a particular theory of ethics, or (b) location of the organism relative to some other organism. The first is abhorrent; the second is ad hoc. The only scientific way to procede that makes sense to me is, Species? Human. Living in a biological sense? Check. Living human being = person.
I could point out corner cases that your definition includes, but this discussion is getting off-track by focussing on the definition of "human". It's not actually useful to say "all humans should have equal human rights" -- which sounds reasonable -- then decide that a scientific definition of the word human must include X, Y, & Z, and assume that our original statement must true for those. The original statement (and the gut emotional response to it) is based on a commonly used, non-scientific, fuzzy word. When you say "human" as in, "draw me a picture of 5 humans and 2 canines in a room", what would you draw? When we hear the word in "the Chinese are violating basic human rights", we think of fully functional, living adults, not even children.
The reason human rights exist in the first place is because we, adults, know or can imagine what it is like to suffer pain and humiliation, to have our freedom of movement restricted unjustly or our bodies violated, etc., and we feel empathy for other beings like us who are undergoing these things. It's simply not logical that we can extend this empathy to a single-celled, newly fertilized egg. The fact that fertilization provides a convenient starting point to affix your definition of human doesn't change that at all -- the real argument isn't about a word definition, it's about whether a mother can choose to abort a newly fertilized egg.
On the other hand, look at the woman in this situation, who suffers unquestionably. It's not like carrying around a backpack for 9 months than taking it off, after all. Pregnancy means serious hormonal and physical changes (some irreversible). It means a risk of required surgery or death even if the health of the mother is otherwise perfect. Even if she plans to give up the child up for adoption, that doesn't help with post-partum depression. It doesn't help with the trauma of giving birth (one occasional "side-effect" of giving birth is diagnosable Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome).
We owe our wives and mothers a huge debt for undergoing what they do, and most of the time they suffer it willingly, to create a child that they are capable of caring for (or helping to care for), that they will be able to keep safe, that is wanted.
But who are the women that you would deny abortions? Imagine being forced to go through this when you're a sophomore in high school (say, 14 years old) because you made a stupid, 90-second mistake after a senior's party you got invited to. Or suppose you're 29, but living with an husband who is already sexually abusing your 3-year-old, and you really, really don't want to bring another child into the house. Do you think it feels "inconvenient" for these woman, feeling the fetus growing inside them? Do you think their lives go back to normal nine months later?
Suppose you have no medical insurance and dropped out of high school, and have finally managed to get a job that's over minimum wage, when you find out a condom must have leaked. Think you'll be able to keep the job when you have to leave for a month? Think the boyfriend will stick around? Think you'll be able to avoid bankruptcy?
One might argue that the embryo is non-detachable from her particular mother, but this fares no better. If in the year 2050 it became possible to transplant embryos from one womb to another, or to a special incubator, then the embryo *would* be able to survive without attachment to a particular woman. If detachability is the criterion for humanity, then embryos would suddenly become human in 2050 -- an odd result, indeed.
Music Theory (free, not oss): http://www.musictheory.net/
musictheory.net is a good one; I'd also like to toss my site out there, emusictheory.com -- also pretty popular for free (non-OSS) interactive music theory drills.
BTW -- musictheory.net uses Flash; emusictheory.com uses Java applets.
[wow; so rare I get to actually make a plug somewhat on topic!]
Oops, tried to preview above and hit submit....
I was saying, there's an underlying conflict here, between two artificially extended concepts of human rights.
Reality is that all humans are technically not equal in their "value" to the rest of the species -- contrast, say, Jonas Salk with a junior academic lecturer who never discovered anything of note -- but this "value" is impossible to calculate (and Salk was inspired to pursue his vaccines after flaws in a boring lecture got him thinking - how does that count?), AND people who presume to make these judgments (e.g., Hitler) have had a huge cost on humanity. As a result, we try on principle to protect human rights equally for all people, not based on their current perceived "value". We try to grant human rights on an all-or-nothing basis, and to use an inclusive definition.
One of the most basic of these human rights is integrity of person. Medical experiments on unwilling participants are bad (no matter what the potential or proven gain to humanity!); forced servitude is bad; arbitrary imprisonment is bad, any physical attack on another person is bad (only outweighed by your own rights, if you are protecting yourself).
Right-to-life advocates push the all-or-nothing line of humanity out to include the unborn, back to the moment of egg fertilization. Some also want the definition to include brain-dead adults. The problem with the embryo situation is that it's not yet an independant organism -- it's attached to the mother and cannot survive separate from her. Her right to control her own body is irreconcilably in conflict with the newly granted right of the fetus to its life.
It's true that extending human rights in the past (to black slaves in America, etc. etc.) has been a very good thing. These were groups of people that were suffering & dying because of particularly false values assigned to them. It doesn't hold true that all extensions of human rights are good, though. In forcing a woman to carry a newly fertilized egg (keeping this simple...), we are extending human rights to something that is not suffering whatsoever, at the direct cost of an unquestionably rights-endowed person who does suffer because of this choice.
1) Is the violinist situation exactly parallel to pregnancy?
...is it truly correct that control over the body for nine months trumps being *killed*? It's not just control, it's also a risk of physical damage and death... but I still think that legally, a person should be able to control how their body is used in almost all cases.
...what if the violinist were your own child? Would your moral obligations change then? Again, it's not about your personal moral obligations, it's about what the law can/should enforce. Most mothers would donate a kidney, bone marrow, etc. for their child, and many people expect this response. But the mothers are not legally obliged to. [This topic probably deserves more discussion than I'm giving it here...]
Obviously not, but we can make it closer -- let's say for the sake of argument that you and the violinist randomly met at a bar the night before, and the "attached violinist" question came up after about 6 beers (this represents about how logical human thinking is when the hormones are going full blast). "Well, I *am* a famous violinist! But I'll bet you'd cut me free and leave me to die..." says the violinist, laughing.
"No way, you're great!" you cry out. "I'll save you! Letsh shake on it."
Can you change you mind later? I don't think this really changes the situation. Your attachment is an ongoing thing, a new sacrifice every day. You have the right to stop providing that service. If you signed a contract or something like that, the law might come into it around that -- but a broken condom is not a contract of any kind.
2) Does the violinist have a moral obligation to allow you to detach? No -- but the demands the violinist can morally make end where your basic right to not have your body violated begin. Don't forget that you are risking your own life (it's not just an inconvenience) to help the violinist. Should the law be allowed to force you to do that? It's not just about morality (which gives us conflicting answers, and is always specific to the case -- suppose keeping you attached prevented you from finishing work on a cancer cure?), it's also about what power we can safely give to the law. Would a law allow the non-famous, wanna-be violinist also to attach himself to you the day after the famous one is cured?
3)
4)
This is also a good time to point out the limits of the attached violinist comparison. A newly fertilized egg is not a child. It has far less function than some adults who are legally dead. It has the potential to become what we think of as a person, if all goes well, and an embryo may have huge value to its parents for this reason... but it has no value to itself. It won't suffer if its rights are denied -- any legal protection it gains at this point must be based on the rights of its parents. We're in a grayer area as the fetus develops, but I'm arguing for now against people who feel all abortions (no matter how early) should be illegal.
The underlying conflict here that I see is that
I don't know the figures here, but it's not as simple as "dying earlier". Frankly, it seems like dying of lung or mouth cancer is a very expensive and drawn-out way to go (never mind painful.. but we're talking costs to society here). All that chemo and/or radiation therapy plus possibly multiple surgeries are not cheap at all. Remissions, relapses... it can go on for a long time before you actually die.
There's also all of the intervening years, when the smoker in their 20s, 30s & 40s has been sick much more of the year, missing work and eating up insurance premiums with more bronchitis, pneumonia, flu, etc. etc..
Living a healthy life then dying of a stroke on the other hand... that's how I want to go. Uncle Sam agrees.
I think right now, though, once you're over 65 the leading cause of death is heart disease, followed by cancer and stroke. What's the comparitive cost of dying of each of these? I think cancer would be the worst; heart surgery of course is expensive, but only applies to the people who survive the heart attack and can be helped by a bypass, etc..
I wish I had the time to really dig into this... anyway, I'll try to sum up. My general thought is that this kind of extreme would fail for the same reasons that communism (in a way, the other extreme on the same scale) doesn't work. It doesn't account for human nature. I don't want to live in an economy where nothing is left to chance, where there's no possibility of "striking it rich". That chance is a huge factor driving entrepreneurs (including me).
But the other extreme is just as guilty of ignoring human nature. In your system, once people are rich enough to pay for their *own* services, won't opt to support the rest of the village. Some will worry about what the general populace are thinking of them... but wealth is a great insulator, and most likely they will live with the other incredibly rich people in a gated community (cf India, again).
Mostly, I think you're oversimplifying the situation. Government causes problems X Y Z, so get rid of all government and leave no one to maintain basic human rights? That's not the only option. And government isn't a simple, single entity that works like a lightswitch.
For any of these examples -- if a fee is collected from the entire community, um.. isn't that involuntary taxes? And would the leading fire department *really* agree to special interactive agreements with their up-and-coming competition if the other alternative was their monopoly? After all, who's going to prosecute them for abusing their monopoly powers?
And frankly, there's a pretty big difference between communities I've seen in, say, India where low-income people subsist off of private charity (this is called "begging"; surviving on welfare while looking for a job is not an option) and any community I'd like to live in.
Look, someone has to pay for the basic services that everyone needs (but not everyone can pay for). A capitalist economy tends to unfairly make the rich richer and the poor poorer (I say unfairly because wealth does not correlate well with a person's actual intelligence and work -- is Gates 1000 times smarter than his basic engineers?). It's also true that as a person gains more and more wealth, it's less and less valuable to them. If Gates misplaced 100K it wouldn't affect him in any way, while it could change the life completely of that entry-level engineer (or heck, someone actually poor and unemployed).
But the fact remains that the rich feel entitled even to inherited wealth that hasn't cost them a drop of sweat.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
It's obvious that our current governments are not ideal. There's waste and inefficiencies, and there are some "leeches" on the system who have no interest in contributing to the common good. But how in the world are you going to fix these things by letting the wealthy "opt out" of supporting the current system?
Do you really want to live in a place where if your house is burning, you can't call the fire department unless you've got the $2K to pay for the service? Suppose your neighbor's house is burning, and he can't pay the fee. Is the whole block going to go because of that?
Next suppose the average low-income family can't afford the busing fees (or road charges) and high school prices to send their kid to school.
Does this still sound like a good idea to you?
Suppose you can't call the police (sorry, private security service) when your house is robbed and your daughter raped because, golly, they took all your money, and the cost of arresting the guy and housing him in prison is *way* out of your price range even before the robbery. Actually, your best bet is to just try to hire a hitman to kill the guy, because he probably can't afford to jail you, either.
Golly, sign me up.
Seriously, government does not always run smoothly or efficiently, but I'm not hearing anything helpful at all in what you're saying.
Understood. Good discussion -- my viewpoint and ideas are much more defined now than what I started! If you want to pick it up later for blog fodder, whatever, you can email me at slashdot@[see domain name above].
-Rob
This is right on target. Change of ownership doesn't mean the new owners can keep the lucrative long-term contracts they like but toss the warrantee ones they don't want -- it's still the same company.
/., talk to a lawyer)... but common sense is certainly on your side. Also see poster a few posts up who talks about small claims court -- I'll be willing to bet that you'll never even need to sue, because they probably just have a POLICY now where they don't honor warrantees until they get that "I'm suing" notification letter.
New acronym, by the way: TIS, TTAL (this is
Sucks, but some companies pull stuff like this to save some money.
I'm glad that you enjoy the conversation. I appreciate your reply as well. It's rare not to have people demonizing each other.
:)
I'm sure you find watching politicians debate as infuriating as I do, then?
Anyway, it's pretty clear our main difference here is the definition of "human". Your airlock examples, etc., are still built on the assumption that an embryo is a viable human. Let's just talk about a newly fertilized egg, since that's where we differ the most. You are arguing that a fertilized egg is just as "human" and worthy of protection and as (in your examples) adult slaves, Jewish people, the elderly, etc.. I'm arguing that a definition of "human" must be based on more than genetics -- including at an extreme minimum things like nervous/circulatory systems of some kind.
Your definition is handy in that it completely avoids the gray areas. You're saying basically that anything with human DNA and any living cells is "human" and has equal rights. I think we *have* to get into the blurry areas to some degree, because the distance from a fertilized egg or a headless body kept "alive" on machines, to what most of us think of as a "person" is just too great for us to start impinging on the rights of normal people on behalf of these extreme examples, organisms that cannot possibly suffer or even feel unappreciated. It's not just "inconvenience"; forcing a mother to carry a fetus to term and deliver it means forcing her to risk death and serious health complications.
I still wouldn't do away with the idea of "human" as a single concept (in spite of the reality of varying levels of functioning, etc.), but all previous human rights struggles have been about the rights of organisms that function at least at the level of a housefly, for instance. A newly fertilized egg does not. Human rights advocacy has always been about fighting for people's rights to not be held in slavery, not be tortured or cruelly punished or arbitrarily arrested or searched, freedom of expression and assembly, equal pay for equal work, freedom of thought and religion, of movement, etc.. Freedom of life, liberty, and security of person. These things don't apply to a fertilized egg, though (except "life", which could apply to bacteria as well). It cannot suffer from any kind of discrimination. These rights do apply to women, though -- for example, her right to security of person is violated when she's forced to host and deliver a fetus against her will.
Assuming you disagree about the "humanity" of the zygote... I still think you would at least feel that we should possibly focus our attention first on human rights violations against thinking, breathing humans (such as the Guantanemo Bay detainees, or the myriad humans rights violations happening all over the world from condoned rapes in Pakistan to "disappeared" intellectuals in China) as a much higher priority than early abortions in particular. I.e., let's first try to save the victims that actually suffer before trying to save the far fringe of the questionably human (only human according to a very broad definition). Thoughts?
I should point out that I do not think a fetus has the same negligible "value" as any random bundle of cells. A fetus *should* have legal protection, but based on the *mother's* rights. In most cases the parents and family invest a huge amount of emotional value in it -- I do lean in favor of harsher penalties for people who kill a pregnant woman, just because the suffering of the father and family is much more severe because of the potential human that was destroyed. But my reasoning is based on the actual suffering of the adults and their rights, not any rights of the embryo. I also think castrating a man is a worse crime than cutting off a finger, for similar reasons.
Other comments:
Your arguments about supposedly soon-to-exist engineered subhumans, and sliding backwards into legal exclusions for "partial humans" or humans who are less human than others sound like
What I don't understand is exactly what advantage is Java providing on the server-side. Do you really need cross-platform bytecode at that level?
Actually, yes -- the cross-platform ability is extremely useful. Speaking personally: the two biggest projects I have worked on, both for one client, are deployed (production) on a IBM iSeries server (these used to be called AS/400s -- using the OS/400 operating system), and a Solaris server respectively. Both web apps are built on the same code base, and we developed and tested them on Windows 2000 workstations (XP, now, plus I am starting to do more and more development in RedHat Fedora).
Can you imagine if I needed my own iSeries at home to run a test server here? Those things aren't cheap. Also, because the client has more in-house iSeries experience, we're going to be moving the Solaris webapp to an iSeries as well at some point -- and guess what? The Java code doesn't need any changes whatsoever; it's only the database SQL that will need to be migrated (DB2 UDB to DB2400 SQL isn't consistent).
When I'm starting new projects, I can get people started on architecture and writing code in most cases *without* finalizing the eventual platform, and without getting access to the big hardware yet. You aren't locking yourself into anything from the beginning -- this is actually a pretty serious power to have. It also allows me to run side by side performance testing on servers to see the *real* differences in capabilities; this is HUGE because the folks selling the big iron suddenly are a commodity, not an unquestioned master in a domain with benefits we can't actually measure usefully.
Just my 2 cents -- I'm sure some people wouldn't actually care (e.g., "my webhost only runs RedHat, so that's all I need to care about"), but gotcha-free cross-platform code is a big deal.
Right, it's Sun's "responsibility", and of course if the verifier falls down they will get all the bad press -- but they are giving the rest of us the *chance*, if we want it, to contribute to the security of an essential part of the JVM (because we're the ones who'll be vulnerable if there's a flaw!), PLUS to find out if their new verifier is going to play nicely with the myriad 3rd party tools that manipulate and generate Java bytecode.
There are tons of alternative compilers out there that turn various languages into Java classfiles. Then there are all of the tools that alter classfiles to add in AOP, or to optimize filesize, or to obfuscate the code against decompilers, etc. etc..
Obviously Sun isn't going to test all of these, though, for example, some of the obfuscators have historically depended on the specific implementation of the verifier (and NOT the classfile spec) to make tweaks that would break popular decompilers.
See the reasoning now? Personally I think they should put a bounty on it to recognize the value they're getting out of it (and to help folks justify the time they'd cracking it...) but it's silly to say they shouldn't even have made the offer.
We all seem to understand that when we're talking about adults
This is an essential point. I was starting to counter your "bum" example with the addition of the conceit that this bum was not sleeping, but surviving on your blood ("but I'll die if you don't let me feed for the next... 9 months!") when I realized that's a dead end in more way than one.
We *aren't* dealing with an independant adult, or even an independant *organism*. A fetus is not a bum, and it is not sitting in a steakhouse with you. The mother can't just say to the zygote "look, I won't hurt you, but let's just go our separate ways". We are dealing with what is initially a single cell, that is gradually going to resemble a human infant more and more until (finally) it is developed enough that it can survive independantly, at which point the mother's body will hopefully force it out of her at the right time and without complications.
Do you see how this is so complex? Suppose you could perform an abortion by teleporting the fetus out of the womb without otherwise harming it in any way. Okay, so the mother isn't "killing" it, she's just no longer allowing it access to her body (but of course it will die, because it cannot survive as an independant organism). I'm obviously playing with semantics here to make a point -- do you think she might have this right?
This is the real root of the pro-choice argument for me -- that her right to control her body trumps the right of the potential human growing inside her to control her body.
Personally... if my wife got pregnant right now (and we aren't planning on having a child yet!), we would not abort it. I don't think of a fetus as "just a random bundle of cells", etc. -- but if my wife changed her mind and decided to have an abortion I don't think the courts should be able to override that decision and force her to endure the 9 months, massive hormone changes, physical risks and side-effects, PPD, etc. etc. on behalf of the fetus.
[Thanks for replying -- I'm finding this a very interesting conversation!]
No. In fact, most abortion laws that are drafted do have exceptions for life-threatening instances. They still get struck down though.
Partly this is because "life-threatening instances" are very difficult to quantify. Beyond the super-clear-cut cases where the mother is *already* at the brink of death and needs immediate surgery that would kill the fetus, it's generally impossible to know exactly what will happen if the fetus is carried to term. It's also worth pointing out that *any* childbirth carries a risk of fatal complications, even for a healthy young mother. So is every abortion justified based on this?
The question is is abortion to be treated as simply another form of birth control? No, the question is what laws we can make. We can't control how people *think* about something -- though from what I understand an abortion for the vast majority of women is extremely unpleasant (mentally and physically) and not undertaken lightly. The extreme cases of women who have serial abortions are just that, rare and extreme cases (usually brought up to make a point that wouldn't hold true for the average woman deciding on an abortion).
Yes, because a) most likely, the woman willing engaged in an act that involved the possibility of putting that "curled-up totally-aware *adult* inside her" and b) if she did so unwilling, that "curled-up totally-aware *adult* inside her" was not responsible for the initial infringement of her rights. Now, if society denies her the legal right to kill that person, society also has an obligation to provide support for her so that the obligation is as light as possible.
Are you sure? I'm risking making this invented situation too wacky here, but let's assume that this little adult has a fatal heart condition, and they can be kept alive only by hooking their aorta directly into yours for a year or so while a perfect donor heart is found (hopefully). You agree, but after 3 months your spouse has left you, you're feeling sick all the time, the bedsores are driving you nuts, and you decide you can't do it. Can you get out of it now? The surgery to unhook you would kill him; can you do it legally? I'd suggest that you can -- after all, you were only hooked up in the first place out of your (extreme) generosity. You should be able to stop him from continued use of your body.
Your twins example is also not parallel with abortion. With abortion, you're talking about preventing the woman from doing something. With the twins, you're talking about forcing the twins to do something.
Sure; so suppose you were both in a car accident, and when you woke up the doctors had saved his life by connecting you, and filtering his blood using your kidneys. Unhook and kill him. Same? Different?
Obviously there's no *real* parallel to the unborn fetus situation... it just doesn't happen. Personally, I get jumpy about late-in-term abortions -- when the fetus has a functioning brain, nerves, lungs, etc.. (though I don't know what kind of laws I'd be comfortable with) -- but for early abortions I think the mother should have the right to decide based on her own morals, faith, situation, risks, etc. etc..
For the sake of argument, justify that statement. (1) If the zygote is alive, why should it not receive equal protections?
(2) If, somehow, you managed to imbed an already born person into the body of another person, would that person lose the claim to equal protections?
I'm not the GP poster, but here are some thoughts on this (#2 is especially interesting to me):
1) We don't afford equal protection to all living things. Only "humans", and a zygote with no brainstem yet, etc. doesn't fit into that category in everyone's book. The definition is complicated, because it's not consistent with mental development, etc -- i.e., the average guinea pig has more brain function than some people with severe brain damage or serious genetic defects... but it's very hard to pin this one down. "Potential human" as a concept is just as fraught.
2) You're forgetting that two people's rights are involved here, and the fact that one of the people would be totally and parasitically dependant on the other. If I woke up one morning and a psycho missing some essential organ had wired himself to me so that he'd *die* if we separated him, I definitely *do* *not* think his right to live would trump my right to live free of him. Think about it. Cut the sucker free; it's not my problem.
So how does the law work on related questions? Suppose you had identical twins who hated each other, and one would die without a kidney but the other refused to give it. Obviously there's a huge moral question here, but could the twin be legally FORCED to undergo the operation and give up a kidney? I have a feeling that the answer here is "no", but I don't know.
Really, really interesting stuff.