So, when did you become a person? If not by cell 100, then when? 1,000? 1,000,000? I mean, it had to happen sometime.
I'm extremely leery of extending full human rights to a newly-fertilized egg, or a group a a hundred cells. On the other hand, a baby that can survive with some help, even if extremely premature, is certainly more of a person than a blastocyst (at least in my conception).
I'm not entirely sure when personhood starts. It does have to happen at some point, but I'd be more inclined to think that it happens little by little, step by step. As the embryo develops toward maturity and eventual birth, so would its rights and protections develop from practically nothing to full human rights.
Unfortunately the polarization that surround so many arguments of this type prevents consensus on a stepwise definition of "personhood". I'm certain that it's this same polarization that prevents us from moving forward in so many debates in society today.
See, the problem with your argument based on the picture that you're referencing is that the picture is most definitely not "A few hundred cells". It's more like a hundred billion. (Assuming 50 trillion cells in a 150 pound adult, or an average of 333 billion cells per pound of human tissue).
I think most people would agree that: A hundred billion cells = maybe a person. A few hundred cells = definitely not.
And this makes them any less valuable because? The skin cells I shed are dead and were only a temporary part of my being. Designed, implemented and affected to live for some amount of time die and be removed. This is very much different from a child who needs to move 6 inches to be given actual legal rights in this country.
Actually, in some sense, one could argue that the skin cells you shed are much more valuable than a clump of ~75 undifferentiated fetal cells.
After all, your skin cells have served a purpose. They have acted as a barrier to prevent diseases and other chemical and environmental agents from infecting your body, they have acted to help regulate various other functions necessary to your survival. They have proven themselves to be viable, and have served to continue your survival.
Those skin cells, as part of your person, had all the legal rights that you did.
Your "brothers and sisters" were no doubt harvested and preserved with a significant amount of help from the medical professional establishment.
But wait! Your skin cells still contain a complete copy of your genotype, and with various heroic medical contrivances, I could conceivably cause another 'you' to be grown from them. (Don't believe it's possible? That's what they first said about IVF. Wait 20 years.)
So it's entirely possible for one to argue that your shed skin cells are just as valuable as a blastula.
No, it doesn't. That's a picture of a later-stage embryo. A tiny blastocyst of a few hundred cells, as would be frozen in a test tube, looks like this on day 5 of development.
However, you still fail to explain, or argue in any fashion why stem cells must be taken when other sources are abundant and being discovered regularly.
The term 'stem cells' refers to a whole range of massively differentiable types of cells. Don't you think that it is at least plausible that there are certain types of cells that exist in an undifferentiated embryo, and nowhere else?
It's arguments like yours that would go so far as to seek to prevent us from finding out.
I had an anatomy and physiology professor who taught a lecture about the "little tumors" that become children. If a fertilized egg happens to end up somewhere other than the uterus (well, even there actually) it behaves very much like a tumor. Outside the uterus the resulting angiogenesis can be a big problem.
I remember hearing something like this too, actually. You've got a mass of undifferentiated cells programmed to use all available nutrients and grow like crazy. At some level, that does sound a lot like a tumor. This uterus obviously has a mitigating and formative effect, with various control mechanisms, etc.
Its really more like Usenet, except you have to physically go to where each newsgroup is instead of them coming to you. And like Usenet, if this type of thing ever became truly public I bet it would be vandalized by spammers and idiots and rendered practically unusable.
In one of my classes, the group I was in did a project on this type of technology. We came up with the idea of different channels, some public, some private, and optional 'exclusion zones' where messages could either be only posted by authorized users, or could be censored by those with admin access to the zone.
An exclusion zone could be something like a person's private property, their own house and yard, so that not everyone could leave messages littering up their front yard. In some municipalities, the residents could decide to extend the exclusion zones to the residential streets.
Couple this technology to a pair of glasses that can overlay images on the world, and some optical recognition device for tracking the user's hands, and suddenly the possibilities become much huger...
Imagine walking into a restaurant, sitting down, and having a 3-D virtual menu materialize on the table before you. You could reach out and turn the pages with your hand. See something you like? Reach out and touch it. A high-res 3-d animated image of the food appears, as well as nutritional information, allergy warnings, etc.
Location based + 3-d glasses... The list goes on and on....
...if you had the plugin, you could place a post-it style note onto web pages you visited. And people who had the same plugin could see it when they visited it......but I still wonder what the name of the software was, who was the person who came up with it, and what happened to it.
I remember this too, and I think that I had it installed at one point. The first name that came to mind is Alexa Internet, and I believe that some versions of their tool bar had the feature that you remember... although I could be completely wrong. It's my best guess, though, I suppose. They are now owned by amazon.com.
If you want to keep control of 'your'character, the solution is still simple. Create a third online character, give the third character all the virtual money, send the codes for the third character via registered post.
This may require a new subscription to whatever game you happen to be playing, but in the grand scheme of things the cost for one month's subscription is peanuts compared to $3000.
Big deal. This kind of thing is already in place on the 407 ETR highway in Ontario, Canada.... but you can get speeding tickets based on how long you went through two toll points
AFAIK, this is complete nonsense. The 407 is a privately-controlled toll highway (paid for by taxpayers and then leased out to a private company for a sickeningly low fee). The co. that controls the 407 pays the public police force to do enforcement on the highway. Part of the 407's attraction is that the police that patrol it don't seem to be nearly as interested in speeders as they are on the major public routes.
It would completely kill business if the controlling company started handing out speeding tickets.
It is interesting to note that while Babbage had tried to realize the difference engine #1 and the analytical engine in metal, he had not ever tried to have the difference engine #2 built.
From the link: "Modern techniques were used in the manufacture of repeat parts but care was taken to restrict limits of precision to those achievable by Babbage."
My strategy is to buy stuff that's a year or two old. That way I pay about 1/4th the price and can afford to get a stinker or two for every gem I find.
I do this too... it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and there are a lot more online review/opinions that you can use to read up before purchase.
Just scored a copy of Grim Fandango at radio shack for $10. Took a chance on it... turns out that is an EXTREMELY engrossing, well-written, well-produced game. If I had know it really was this good I would have paid the full price when it first came out.
You're absolutely right - expectations of today's games are getting completely insane.
Didja see the new lens-flare algorithms? They're 16% more realistic than anything ever seen before. (Requirements: Dual P4, 300 gigs available on HD, 2 gigs RAM, etc...)
Whoop-de-doo. Good games don't need stuff like this, and that's something that I'm afraid the game industry is losing sight of. As games get more expensive and cost-intensive to produce, are we headed for another video game industry crash like in the early 80s? The answer, of course, is a definite maybe.
0.1kg yeast, 4l water, 1kg sugar. One apple or a potato, or some grain or rice or whatever fruit you want. Mash the fruit. Mix the ingredients. Leave in a warm place for 3-4 days. Heat to about 70C, cool the fumes. You get about 1l of around 50% pure ethanol. 7.1 Calories (kilocalories) per gram of pure ethanol will give you 3550Kcal for your work. You burn less than 500Kcal doing this all.
More energy was almost certiainly used up in the production of your brew than can be obtained through burning. You have to take into account all the energy used in the system.
The energy to: -refine, package & ship the yeast (industrial fuel costs) -refine, package & ship the sugar (industrial fuel, plus energy to create pesticides) -grow & ship the apple/potato (industrial fuel, plus energy to create pesticides) -the energy used in mashing/mixing, if you're using an electrical food processor -the energy to heat the mix to 70C -the energy in any gasoline that you burned driving around to collect the ingredients -the energy used to create said gasoline -the energy used in the creation of the equipment that you're using, divided by its expected lifetime.
So you almost certainly used up far more than you produced
Of course there is some irony in the fact that some of the best areas for growing sugarcane are also some of the poorest.
Irony? Try, "luckily"... this just means that the land can be had cheap, or the people can be employed cheap, and either way it's more money to their community AND a lower cost of production. Which of course means that the ethanol will be cheaper in the end, meaning lower prices to the consumer.
Hopefully, this will raise the locals out of poverty. If some of the richest areas were best for growing sugar cane, no one would ever be able to afford to grow the stuff in the first place.
NO, stupid. It is not a misspelling of "their" as "their" and "there" are both properly spelled there. The problem is that they missused their words by confusing two homophones. As an English, History AND Computer Geek, I look down on you, AC.
I hereby decree that from now on all instances of the word in question will be spelt as "Thare". That ought to clear things up considerably.
Not during the Dominion War. The Romulans and the Klingons were Federation allies
Klingons yes, but the romulans didn't start out that way. They signed a treaty with the founders, and Sisko & Garak had to create a false holo-record and assassinate the romulan senator Vreenak (sp?) before the romulans came on board with the federation.
That was my favourite episode. It's not like I have the whole series memorized or anything.:P
> Yup. It is also legal to carry around the tools needed to commit rape. Only raping is illegal.
>> No, you don't understand. It is specifically legal in Canada to allow someone to make copies of your CD's, as long as they, however temporarily, have your original in hand.
>>> Sorry, I don't get it - what is it that I don't understand?
You're comparing completely legal fair-use copying of CDs with rape, an extremely vile and degrading act. I think it's pretty obvious what you don't understand. To everyone but you, at least.
Right now I plan on going to a college that is either in New England, New York, or south east Canada.
South? We don't have that. We have a west, an east, and a far north.
In any case, if you're considering schools in Canada, I highly suggest that you take a look at the Maclean's Canadian University Ranking, if you haven't already.
If you're looking out east (and I mean east of Ontario), I've heard nothing but good things about Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Plus, you can see the school ring from a mile away, you'll never have trouble identifying fellow alumni. (It has a big black 'X' on it)
In Ontario, U of Toronto is good for just about everything, and is in a huge city, whereas Guelph has one of the best bio/chem programs going, and a laid back complete-university-town feel to it.
Alternate suggestion: University of British Columbia on the west coast. You have to go all the way to the west end of the country, but some of the bonuses included with this school are good weather, good weed, easy access to world-class skiing, and a topless beach.
Speaking of topless, in Ontario bare female breasts are perfectly legal. I can tell you from experience that this facet of the law is often incorporated into frosh week activities.
Slashdot Mirror
So, when did you become a person? If not by cell 100, then when? 1,000? 1,000,000? I mean, it had to happen sometime.
I'm extremely leery of extending full human rights to a newly-fertilized egg, or a group a a hundred cells. On the other hand, a baby that can survive with some help, even if extremely premature, is certainly more of a person than a blastocyst (at least in my conception).
I'm not entirely sure when personhood starts. It does have to happen at some point, but I'd be more inclined to think that it happens little by little, step by step. As the embryo develops toward maturity and eventual birth, so would its rights and protections develop from practically nothing to full human rights.
Unfortunately the polarization that surround so many arguments of this type prevents consensus on a stepwise definition of "personhood". I'm certain that it's this same polarization that prevents us from moving forward in so many debates in society today.
See, the problem with your argument based on the picture that you're referencing is that the picture is most definitely not "A few hundred cells". It's more like a hundred billion. (Assuming 50 trillion cells in a 150 pound adult, or an average of 333 billion cells per pound of human tissue).
I think most people would agree that:
A hundred billion cells = maybe a person.
A few hundred cells = definitely not.
And this makes them any less valuable because?
The skin cells I shed are dead and were only a temporary part of my being. Designed, implemented and affected to live for some amount of time die and be removed. This is very much different from a child who needs to move 6 inches to be given actual legal rights in this country.
Actually, in some sense, one could argue that the skin cells you shed are much more valuable than a clump of ~75 undifferentiated fetal cells.
After all, your skin cells have served a purpose. They have acted as a barrier to prevent diseases and other chemical and environmental agents from infecting your body, they have acted to help regulate various other functions necessary to your survival. They have proven themselves to be viable, and have served to continue your survival.
Those skin cells, as part of your person, had all the legal rights that you did.
Your "brothers and sisters" were no doubt harvested and preserved with a significant amount of help from the medical professional establishment.
But wait! Your skin cells still contain a complete copy of your genotype, and with various heroic medical contrivances, I could conceivably cause another 'you' to be grown from them. (Don't believe it's possible? That's what they first said about IVF. Wait 20 years.)
So it's entirely possible for one to argue that your shed skin cells are just as valuable as a blastula.
>A tiny clump of a few hundred cells does not a person make.
>Actually, it does.
No, it doesn't.
That's a picture of a later-stage embryo. A tiny blastocyst of a few hundred cells, as would be frozen in a test tube, looks like this on day 5 of development.
However, you still fail to explain, or argue in any fashion why stem cells must be taken when other sources are abundant and being discovered regularly.
The term 'stem cells' refers to a whole range of massively differentiable types of cells. Don't you think that it is at least plausible that there are certain types of cells that exist in an undifferentiated embryo, and nowhere else?
It's arguments like yours that would go so far as to seek to prevent us from finding out.
Life is life. People are people. I personally was a bit upset when I found out I had 12 brothers and sisters sitting around frozen.
People are people. Babies are people.
A tiny clump of a few hundred cells does not a person make.
You (just like everyone else) probably shed more skin cells in a day than the total combined mass of your "brothers and sisters", as you call them.
I had an anatomy and physiology professor who taught a lecture about the "little tumors" that become children. If a fertilized egg happens to end up somewhere other than the uterus (well, even there actually) it behaves very much like a tumor. Outside the uterus the resulting angiogenesis can be a big problem.
I remember hearing something like this too, actually. You've got a mass of undifferentiated cells programmed to use all available nutrients and grow like crazy. At some level, that does sound a lot like a tumor. This uterus obviously has a mitigating and formative effect, with various control mechanisms, etc.
Its really more like Usenet, except you have to physically go to where each newsgroup is instead of them coming to you. And like Usenet, if this type of thing ever became truly public I bet it would be vandalized by spammers and idiots and rendered practically unusable.
In one of my classes, the group I was in did a project on this type of technology. We came up with the idea of different channels, some public, some private, and optional 'exclusion zones' where messages could either be only posted by authorized users, or could be censored by those with admin access to the zone.
An exclusion zone could be something like a person's private property, their own house and yard, so that not everyone could leave messages littering up their front yard. In some municipalities, the residents could decide to extend the exclusion zones to the residential streets.
Couple this technology to a pair of glasses that can overlay images on the world, and some optical recognition device for tracking the user's hands, and suddenly the possibilities become much huger...
Imagine walking into a restaurant, sitting down, and having a 3-D virtual menu materialize on the table before you. You could reach out and turn the pages with your hand. See something you like? Reach out and touch it. A high-res 3-d animated image of the food appears, as well as nutritional information, allergy warnings, etc.
Location based + 3-d glasses... The list goes on and on....
...if you had the plugin, you could place a post-it style note onto web pages you visited. And people who had the same plugin could see it when they visited it... ...but I still wonder what the name of the software was, who was the person who came up with it, and what happened to it.
I remember this too, and I think that I had it installed at one point. The first name that came to mind is Alexa Internet, and I believe that some versions of their tool bar had the feature that you remember... although I could be completely wrong. It's my best guess, though, I suppose. They are now owned by amazon.com.
Unless he's changed the link, that is.
If you want to keep control of 'your'character, the solution is still simple. Create a third online character, give the third character all the virtual money, send the codes for the third character via registered post.
This may require a new subscription to whatever game you happen to be playing, but in the grand scheme of things the cost for one month's subscription is peanuts compared to $3000.
Big deal. This kind of thing is already in place on the 407 ETR highway in Ontario, Canada. ... but you can get speeding tickets based on how long you went through two toll points
AFAIK, this is complete nonsense. The 407 is a privately-controlled toll highway (paid for by taxpayers and then leased out to a private company for a sickeningly low fee). The co. that controls the 407 pays the public police force to do enforcement on the highway. Part of the 407's attraction is that the police that patrol it don't seem to be nearly as interested in speeders as they are on the major public routes.
It would completely kill business if the controlling company started handing out speeding tickets.
Actually, the Difference Engine #2 was built by the Science Museum in the UK and completed in 1991 to mark the bicentennial of Babbage's birth.
It is interesting to note that while Babbage had tried to realize the difference engine #1 and the analytical engine in metal, he had not ever tried to have the difference engine #2 built.
From the link: "Modern techniques were used in the manufacture of repeat parts but care was taken to restrict limits of precision to those achievable by Babbage."
My strategy is to buy stuff that's a year or two old. That way I pay about 1/4th the price and can afford to get a stinker or two for every gem I find.
I do this too... it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and there are a lot more online review/opinions that you can use to read up before purchase.
Just scored a copy of Grim Fandango at radio shack for $10. Took a chance on it... turns out that is an EXTREMELY engrossing, well-written, well-produced game. If I had know it really was this good I would have paid the full price when it first came out.
Any chance this can be included in DOOM3?
You're absolutely right - expectations of today's games are getting completely insane.
Didja see the new lens-flare algorithms? They're 16% more realistic than anything ever seen before. (Requirements: Dual P4, 300 gigs available on HD, 2 gigs RAM, etc...)
Whoop-de-doo. Good games don't need stuff like this, and that's something that I'm afraid the game industry is losing sight of. As games get more expensive and cost-intensive to produce, are we headed for another video game industry crash like in the early 80s? The answer, of course, is a definite maybe.
How big would the ark have to be in order to house 2 of every species of living creature on the planet?
...oh wait...
Approximately 1.21 Jigawatts, and just as believable.
0.1kg yeast, 4l water, 1kg sugar. One apple or a potato, or some grain or rice or whatever fruit you want. Mash the fruit. Mix the ingredients. Leave in a warm place for 3-4 days. Heat to about 70C, cool the fumes. You get about 1l of around 50% pure ethanol. 7.1 Calories (kilocalories) per gram of pure ethanol will give you 3550Kcal for your work. You burn less than 500Kcal doing this all.
More energy was almost certiainly used up in the production of your brew than can be obtained through burning. You have to take into account all the energy used in the system.
The energy to:
-refine, package & ship the yeast (industrial fuel costs)
-refine, package & ship the sugar (industrial fuel, plus energy to create pesticides)
-grow & ship the apple/potato (industrial fuel, plus energy to create pesticides)
-the energy used in mashing/mixing, if you're using an electrical food processor
-the energy to heat the mix to 70C
-the energy in any gasoline that you burned driving around to collect the ingredients
-the energy used to create said gasoline
-the energy used in the creation of the equipment that you're using, divided by its expected lifetime.
So you almost certainly used up far more than you produced
Of course there is some irony in the fact that some of the best areas for growing sugarcane are also some of the poorest.
Irony? Try, "luckily"... this just means that the land can be had cheap, or the people can be employed cheap, and either way it's more money to their community AND a lower cost of production. Which of course means that the ethanol will be cheaper in the end, meaning lower prices to the consumer.
Hopefully, this will raise the locals out of poverty. If some of the richest areas were best for growing sugar cane, no one would ever be able to afford to grow the stuff in the first place.
>>We don't have the right to distributed pirated works online.
>You do in Canada.
If we have rights to them, they're not pirated, now are they?
NO, stupid. It is not a misspelling of "their" as "their" and "there" are both properly spelled there. The problem is that they missused their words by confusing two homophones. As an English, History AND Computer Geek, I look down on you, AC.
I hereby decree that from now on all instances of the word in question will be spelt as "Thare".
That ought to clear things up considerably.
I just read an article about it a couple of days ago
You wouldn't happen to have a link for that, would you?
And as for the DVDs, yes, would that I could afford them. I suppose in a few years I'll be buying the set off ebay for twice it's original price.
Not during the Dominion War. The Romulans and the Klingons were Federation allies
:P
Klingons yes, but the romulans didn't start out that way. They signed a treaty with the founders, and Sisko & Garak had to create a false holo-record and assassinate the romulan senator Vreenak (sp?) before the romulans came on board with the federation.
That was my favourite episode. It's not like I have the whole series memorized or anything.
> Yup. It is also legal to carry around the tools needed to commit rape. Only raping is illegal.
>> No, you don't understand. It is specifically legal in Canada to allow someone to make copies of your CD's, as long as they, however temporarily, have your original in hand.
>>> Sorry, I don't get it - what is it that I don't understand?
You're comparing completely legal fair-use copying of CDs with rape, an extremely vile and degrading act. I think it's pretty obvious what you don't understand. To everyone but you, at least.
Right now I plan on going to a college that is either in New England, New York, or south east Canada.
South? We don't have that. We have a west, an east, and a far north.
In any case, if you're considering schools in Canada, I highly suggest that you take a look at the Maclean's Canadian University Ranking, if you haven't already.
If you're looking out east (and I mean east of Ontario), I've heard nothing but good things about Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. Plus, you can see the school ring from a mile away, you'll never have trouble identifying fellow alumni. (It has a big black 'X' on it)
In Ontario, U of Toronto is good for just about everything, and is in a huge city, whereas Guelph has one of the best bio/chem programs going, and a laid back complete-university-town feel to it.
Alternate suggestion: University of British Columbia on the west coast. You have to go all the way to the west end of the country, but some of the bonuses included with this school are good weather, good weed, easy access to world-class skiing, and a topless beach.
Speaking of topless, in Ontario bare female breasts are perfectly legal. I can tell you from experience that this facet of the law is often incorporated into frosh week activities.
Good Luck!
Just a little heads-up... your post is quoted in the Toronto Star.
Have a look
(and no, I don't work for them)