"Marriage" is an act of the State. You receive a "license", and then others are forced by the State to provide certain privileges based upon that license.
Here in Massachusetts, part of the history that came out during the political process that led to legalized gay marriage was that, during various part of Massachusetts' history, Quaker and Jewish marriages were not legally recognized. There were even times when Catholic marriages weren't recognized. The above "privileges" argument applied to all of them, as well as to the gays. Most people here now think it was unfair to exclude Quakers, Jews, et al from the privileges of marriage. Is there any argument other than "My God doesn't approve of it" that says that the state shouldn't recognize all of these marriages?
Such laws are currently in effect in a lot of the world. Historically, it has always been common for states/nations to have an "established" state-supported religion, and it has been common for the law to only recognize marriages performed by the clergy of the state religion. But the fact that such discrimination is common doesn't make it right.
You may disagree that a fetus is a person, but you must acknowledge that if someone DOES believe a fetus is a person, then they are fully consistent, as a Conservative, in expecting law to protect that person's life from being taken by another, when they are innocent of breaking any law.
Indeed, but you do run into a few logical problems when you say that only people who call themselves "conservative" have the right to impose their beliefs about such things onto others who don't have the same beliefs. Why shouldn't the others be able to impose their beliefs on the "conservatives"?
Thus, there's a common principle in Jewish law that a fetus is "alive" 40 days after conception. Should Jews who believe this be allowed to impose their standard on others?
Of course, it's not clear what a "Yes" answer to this might mean. Would Jews be able to force an unmarried non-Jewish woman to have an abortion against her wishes? I sorta doubt that anyone would say "Yes" to this, not even a Conservative Jew.;-)
But the really fun answer to this issue is the scientific one, which deals with the claim that (human) life begins at conception. The historical name for this belief is "spontaneous generation", and it was convincingly disproved in the early 1800s, notably by Louis Pasteur, but also by others who tried variants on the same experiments, with the same results. The scientific answer to "When does life begin?" is simple: "It doesn't." At least for cellular life (ignoring viruses for now;-), it's firmly established that, although life may have arisen out of non-life early in the planet's history, this no longer happens. Life only continues as a branch from previous life.
In particular, it's quite true that a fertilized human ovum is a living human. It's a cell that is alive and contains only human DNA. But it's also true that the unfertilized ovum (and all those sperm cells) are alive and human.
So if you believe abortion to be murder, it makes just as much sense to consider engaging in abstinence to be murder. Both intentionally and knowingly cause the death of living humans, namely all those unfertilized ova. And sperm, too, of course; though it's not clear how one is expected to deal with the millions-to-one ration of sperm and ovum production in humans.
Anyway, from a scientific viewpoint, it's clear that the moment of fertilization is just as arbitrary a "start of life" as 40 days or first detectable heartbeat or any other proposed start time for "life". These are all basically religious criteria; they have no basis in actual fact (as determined by many scientific researchers).
This doesn't mean that we should ignore such cutoff points, though. It just means t
Easy. That's someone who builds furniture with an axe.
(Hey, you could have looked it up! I didn't need to, because I looked it up in the Jargon File years ago. So I suppose that makes me a language geek.;-)
While there are some exceptions, for the common good (such as not yelling "fire" in a crowded theater)
And whether the "common good" is actually "good" or not can be debated. There are people who disagree with that ban.
Well, I've actually seen a case of people yelling "Fire!" in a theater, and nobody got charged with any crime, although there was nothing burning and there were at least a few cops present.
The situation was a movie whose name I've forgotten, but it was a comedy. The Good Guy and the Bad Guy had been stalking each other for a while, and in one scene, GG got the drop on BG. As GG was aiming his pistol, several dozen people in the theater hollered out "Fire!". Then the whole audience broke up laughing, and we all missed the next couple lines of dialog.
On another occasion, there actually was a fire in the theater, a rather minor fire at the concession stand in the lobby. The movie stopped, the lights came on, and a guy standing on the little "stage" below the screen calmly asked everyone to exit by the side door. He did explain about the fire, but didn't at any time yell "Fire!" or anything else.
So my experience (2 anecdotes;-) says that we really need a new example. Shouting "Fire!" in a theater is now the rhetorical equivalent of "crying wolf", and no longer works in real life. For that matter, neither does "crying wolf", both because wolves are nearly extinct in most of the world, and because the few wolves that exist are generally extremely wary of humans, so they're no danger to us. But maybe "Wolves crying ``Human!'' would work."
I must be an ultra-conservative, because I want the government out of everything to do with personal choices and decisions that don't infringe upon my neighbors' rights....
Nah; that would make you either a libertarian or a liberal, who are the ones that think that we should have control over our own personal lives (as long as we don't harm others in the process). At least here in the US, "conservative" now means that the government stays out of economic issues (leaving the corporations free to police themselves), but monitors and controls our personal lives to the max. Oh, and the government also runs the military and polices the world, though there are some "conservatives" who approve of the ongoing process of handing that over to the corporate world.
You'll have problems finding many people who call themselves "conservative" and approve of things like gay marriage, abortion, or the worship of Pagan gods.;-)
On a side note, before there were prepaid debit cards, when we wanted "R" rated movies or cigarettes we just stole them. Kids will always find ways around age restrictions, sometimes what they do to get around the restrictions is worse than what's being restricted.
Another good point. It brings to mind the glaring "elephant in the room" example of this phenomenon: the humongous illegal-drug industry spawned by the anti-drug laws. I was about to include "in the US", but it's the same in most of the world.
Outlawing something that most people don't find wrong and part of the population wants is mostly a way to get such illegal activity. And once the illegal supply process has become a business, there's strong pressure from most of the political spectrum to not interfere with it by legalizing the material in question.
OTOH, the US did repeal Prohibition. And the Supreme Court has had the sense to apply the obvious reasoning to video games. Maybe there's hope yet that other such "moral" laws will be overturned. We just need, as in this case, some business interests to fund the legal appeals. The US government may not listen to its citizens, but it does listen to its businesses.
"Businesses need ActiveX for legacy piles of disgusting feces that has been rotting for years..."
There I fixed that for you.
Heh. If those feces have been rotting for years, they're no longer feces. They've turned into compost, which smells like rich topsoil, because that's what it is. It's now good, fertile material that supports growth.;-)
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
Only if they use your browser. And fact is, this tends to be yet another example of the old observation that within the business community, if it doesn't say "IBM" on the package, it's not a real computer product, it's a toy. In this case, of course, it's "once removed", since the approved busines browser is Internet Explorer, built by Microsoft. But IBM strongly endorses it, it's what comes on new IBM PCs, and it's The Browser to most business people. (Actually, to most businessmen, IT is "The Internet", but that's another topic.;-)
As a software developer, I've worked for a good number of companies where, when I ask people what they have at home, almost all say "a Mac". They joke about how their management follows the usual rule, and doesn't care how good those Macs might be. They're not from IBM/Microsoft, so they're just toys. They're OK for underlings at home, but not for serious businessmen. Apple seems to understand this as well as the Mozilla gang, and doesn't much try to break into an arena where they're disqualified from the start.
And, of course, most of those serious businessmen never actually touch a computer themselves. The ones who make the purchase decisions are too important for that. Typing has always been done by people you hire. So they mostly have no actual experience with abstruse tools like browsers, and have no way of judging which are best for their business. No matter how good Mozilla's products might be, that has little bearing on business purchases.
That's a bit of a bizarre measurement for river waters, no? Makes it sound at first glance that it's under 1,007 feet of water.
Yeah; my first thought was "WTF sort of measurement is that? Maybe I should rewrite it giving the elevation above the Moho." Anyone know offhand how deep that is below Omaha?
I've seen other uses of "height above sea level" for locations in the middle of a continent. I always wonder what they're trying to hide/distort/exaggerate with they do that. I tend to doubt that the writer's original sources used that base.
What most people don't realize is that that oft-quoted document isn't pseudo-Latin nonsense; it's in the little-known 6th-century east-Istrian dialect, and is an excerpt from a tale of kiddie porn. So anyone who has it on their disk is in violation of some serious anti-porn laws wherever you live. And ignorance is no excuse. If you even download it by accident, you're guilty of a crime that even the/. crowd finds abhorrent.
If I leave my front door open and someone comes in and takes my TV it's stealing.
True, but that's not a very good parallel in this case. Putting something online in a web directory is generally considered to mean that you're making it available to the public.
A better parallel might be if, the evening before your local garbage pickup, you put your TV out on your sidewalk or driveway, next to the street. Anyone would take this to mean "Take it; it's free". People routinely stop and drive off with such things, assuming that they're probably broken, but they plan to take them apart for the components. Most people would be surprised to hear that someone doing this had been arrested and charged with theft.
Another possible parallel is the way that, in a lot of countries, unknowingly taking a photo that includes military or police equipment or building can be illegal. This has been attempted in the US, too, but the courts have generally held that, unless there was a clearly-visible sign warning people away, taking such pictures is legal. You can't reasonably expect people to know what all the nondescript building in a scene are, after all.
There are quite a lot of other parallels that involve accessing things that are in a setting that's normally "public". I'm sure that others can list more such scenarios. And any "reasonable" requirement should at least say that accessing a random file that's being handed out by a web server is reasonable and legal. If it's not, there's an obvious counter-charge of "entrapment", which is all too easy for those in a position of authority to do to innocent bypassers.
Thanks God!!! From now on (and because of that), those moons do have some chances to develop life...
Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.
Or if the formation of life is somehow dependent on observation (via Heisenberg "uncertainty"). In which case moons of this type in our observable universe would indeed have increased in their chance of producing life.
Actually, you don't need Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; you just need some basic statistical knowledge.
A similar example from a few years back: There was a widely-echoed calculation by biologists that there was about a 50% probabability that there was a large mammal (for some definition of "large") that was still "unknown to science", i.e., not described in The Literature. Then in 1999 there was a printed report of new species of deer in Southeast Asia. When jounalists asked scientists if this meant that there were probably no new large mammals to be discovered, they were told that it actually increased the probable number of undocumented species.
The journalists were generally baffled by this. If you've found the last one, how does that mean that there are more? Where did they come from?
But, as anyone with a few basic statistics courses under their belt understood, the scientists were right. The 50% estimate was the probablility that there was one (or more) undocumented species, given the time series of recently-published new species descriptions. That series had been slowing down, and straightforward calculations predicted it would hit zero sometime in the next decade. But a new species changed the time series, and new calculations would take that into account. It moved the predicted zero crossing further into the future.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, there were a lot of jokes about a similar time-series calculation: If you looked at the time series of estimates of the size of the (dwarf) planet Pluto since its discovery in 1930, the prediction was that Pluto would disappear entirely sometime in the early 1990s. It didn't, of course, but that may have been due to the additional discovery that Pluto had somehow split into a pair of small planet(oid)s. This fissioning seems to have stopped the shrinkage, and Pluto is no longer predicted to disappear (except in the official list of planets).
There's a whole branch of statistics dealing with how you make good predictions based on the data that you have right now, and how you change your predictions as new data comes in. This is done a lot in research projects, to determine when they've collected enough data to say that it's not worthwhile to continue, because the numbers are significant enough to publish right now.
A really big gas giant (say, 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter) has an enormous gravity well, but we don't know if its magnetic field and radiation belts scale in the same proportion.
And the gas giants we have available would suggest that we not make guesses about magnetic-field strengths of gas giants until we have a lot more direct data. Jupiter's magnetic field is much stronger than Earth's; Saturn's is somewhat weaker. The mechanisms that produce these fields aren't understood very well. This gives a lot of latitude to science-fiction authors, but not much actual information about what might be out there in our real universe.
One thing we can probably safely predict is that any Earth-like satellite of a gas giant would probably have more tidal heating than Earth, giving it a warmer interior, and probably a stronger magnetic field than ours. But there's room for a lot of variation here, depending on distance from the primary and the age of the system. Just look at the variety in Jupiter's four planet-size satellites. Callisto's tidal heating seems to have a much smaller effect that Io's. So if we were to put Earth in Callisto's orbit, and move Jupiter to Earth's orbit, it wouldn't change much for our Earth. Well, except that that Earth would probably be tidally locked, giving it a day about 17 times longer than ours.
So is there any data on how likely this is? In our solar system, all seven of the planet-sized "moons" (Luna, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Triton) are tidally locked to their primary. Also, in the Pluto/Charon pair, each is tidally locked to the other. So our system doesn't lead us to expect that many Earth-size satellites of a gas giant would have a day different from their orbit around their primary. I'm sure that some astrophysicists could calculate the probabilities, but I haven't read that anyone has done so.
Not that it would matter all that much to any life on such a "moon". On the side facing the primary, there would be a solar eclipse of a few hours every day, but that wouldn't materially affect the supply of sunlight. And this is assuming that the orbit is approximately parallel to the system's ecliptic. If the gas giant's satellites are in a highly-inclined orbital plane (as with Uranus), there would be only a few eclipses per year, similar to what we see. But we expect that Uranus is an anomaly, and the norm will be that most orbits in any (single-star) system will be close to coplanar.
There have been a number of science-fiction novels written that include such systems. Anyone have a favorite?
What I stated was, "Capitalism is not 'designed' to make wealth trickle up." Would you care to explain why you believe that is not so, rather than just (in effect) crying "bullshit"?
It's simple really: Capitalism wasn't designed at all, in any meaningful sense of the term "design". The term "capitalism" was an invention of (mostly) 19th-century economic theorists, but they didn't invent the real-world system; they were only trying to describe it. It was built over centuries by millions of people, each with authority over only a tiny portion of the system, and nobody (not even monarchs) had the ability to impose anything remotely resembling a design.
Like all human social constructs, it is and always been a chaotic mess, poorly understood by its participants. The pretense that it's a system that had some design is nothing more than a political myth.
The "trickle up" theory has the same sort of problems, of course. It's an attempt to make sense of some of the observable results of the chaos. It's fairly well understood that our corporate and political leaders have strong personal motives to make the wealth trickle up to them, but this isn't proof of anything; it's merely a hypothetical explanation for part of the process. And it clearly wasn't designed into the system, simply because the capitalist system as a whole was never designed at all. Claiming that it was is simply silly.
Here in Massachusetts, we've been having fun watching the legal proceedings over a current case of "trickle up". If you're not familiar with it, google "Salvatore DiMasi". It's still among the top stories in the U.S. section of Google News, so you can find a thousand or so news reports if you start there. But it's merely one more documented example of how trickle-up works in the real world. In this case, the perps were prosecuted and have been convicted (but not yet sentenced, and there will be appeals). But it's hardly a secret that such "insider" activity is an important part of how our economic system actually works. I don't think anyone would claim to have "designed" this part of the system.
There have been plenty of explanations of how "true capitalism" inevitably shoots itself in the foot (to use another hoary cliche) unless an outside force (which we might as well call a government) imposes restrictions and regulations that maintain the system's stability.
Got any more standard fallacies you'd like to illustrate for us?;-)
If you want to see some good examples of what "human-level translation" might mean, look around on the engrish.com site, which shows you just how good humans can be at this task. Note that almost everything there is "official" in some sense, intended to inform the public of something; very few of the examples are intended to be funny.
There's also a good "Engrish" classification at failblog.org, if you want lots more examples from a different source.
The Language Log blog has lots of discussions of examples such as these, generally trying to answer the question "How did the translator go so wrong in this case?" You can learn a lot about the "gotchas" of human languages by reading these discussions.
So I'm not too impressed by yet another prediction of "human-level" machine translation. That's a pretty low hurdle to cross, if it means the level of accuracy that current human translators routinely consider good enough to put on signs, menus, etc. Yes, professional translators will generally do a lot better. But that's not what the summary or TFA predicts; they just predict an unspecified "human-level" capability, which would be satisfied by the examples in the above "Engrish" sites.
America has really gone downhill. The country that started the whole freedom thing never moved on.
In particular, the US is still stuck with that Constitution that forbids government to perform "unwarranted search and seizure", but permits such actions by private corporations, who can then sell the information to government agencies. Until the US learns to extend the constitutional freedoms to all organizations, this will continue to provide a workaround for the Constitution's limits on the government.
This is much of the motive behind the growing American push to hand over most government activities to private corporations. The people pushing for this know quite well what they're doing, and fully intend the corporate world to perform the monitor and control functions that are forbidden to the government.
I wonder if there's a name for this sort of political policy?;-)
We are not going to stop using gas or burning coal. Period. Even if we did, China is definitely not going to... ever.
Sure, we (and they) will, when the gas and coal supplies run out. We just don't know exactly when that will be. But we do know that we're mining the deposits and burning them several orders of magnitude faster than the planet can replenish them or clear the combustion products from the atmosphere.
We also don't know how much damage we'll have done to the ecosystem by then. We just have a general estimate of the nature of that damage.
Of course, since scientists can't specify the exact numbers for any of these quantities, the politicos can continue to pretend that nothing's happening and continue to collect their "campaign contributions" from the small number of people who are making huge short-term profits from the mining and burning of the fossil fuels.
... no one wants html5 apart from a small bunch of talentless creeps that want us all to return to the bad old days of "this website is best viewed with [insert browser here]"...
Not sure what you're getting at here. I've "converted" most of my web pages to HTML5, by replacing that old, crufty first line with "<!doctype html>", tested them against lots of browsers, and I've never found a problem.
Lest you think I'm just joking, well I am, obviously, but there's also a serious side to this. As far as I can tell, most of the supposed conversions to HTML5 consist of little more than rewriting the doctype line. Or adding it, in many cases. Then trusting the browsers to figure out how to handle each tag in the file.
And actually, I have found that my few pages that use <canvas> don't work too well in IE6. So far nobody has complained about that, perhaps because IE6 users don't look at those pages or can't figure out that something's missing. OTOH, I've found that my canvas tags seem to work ok in a number of browser versionss that supposedly don't support HTML5, which makes the situation even more murky. Maybe the browser makers really have all been upgrading to HTML5 all along, but don't want to admit it in public until it has become socially acceptable in the reactionary crowd. Or they are sneaking it in past their bosses' determination that HTML5 isn't needed.
Anyway, I've found that looking things up in the HMTL5 docs and using that sort of HTML seems to be a pretty good strategy. I've found that the results work, in some sense of "work", in all the browsers that I have available, including (to my surprise) the browsers on a number of smartphones.
Maybe this is the 90s speaking, though. The impetus to HTML5 did start way back then, and a lot of implementers took the approach of trying to accept any markup that was documented anywhere and do something sensible with it. So maybe it's not surprising that it seems to work better than one might expect.
I think HTML5 is sneaking in through the back door. Eventually people will discover that their sites have converted to HTML5 without anyone making an official decision to do so.
Nah; the reason they've been so secretive and even refuse to release photos is that just as the Navy SEALs broke into his bedroom, he was taken away by a host of angels who were singing in Arabic. His body isn't in the ocean; it's in heaven, being taken care of by his 72 virgins.
(Hey, it's as credible as those other similar stories from other religions.)
(And I'm sorta glad that I don't have to worry about a Disney lawsuit for posting the above.)
Well, the "live" link suddenly worked a while ago, after I'd been away from the screen for a while. I got the darkened moon (and 3 stars) on the screen then. Now, the left (east) edge of the moon is getting brighter.
The image does seem to jump around occasionally. A start that was at the right edge disappeared after one jump, then reappeared after the next. It's gone again now, and there don't seem to be any more stars visible. I'm guessing that the light level is being adjusted to match the moon's brightest areas, and we may see no more stars.
What I'm looking for is the flame wars over what effect this eclipse will have on global warming (oops, I mean climate change), whether Obama or Bush (or God) is responsible for the moon going dark, and the many other such threads that infest most discussions here.
Actually, I started with Firefox, which has AdblockPlus installed. I told it to enable everything for the http://www.youtube.com/google "site", which didn't change anything. Then I changed to Chrome, which as far as I can tell, doesn't do ad blocking (BICBW).
In any case, what does this have to do with my question, which is "How do I watch the eclipse"? Further poking around at various things on the page hasn't resulted in enlightenment. Or any change in behavior, for that matter.
It's not a pay service, it's an ad-supported service. I don't see what's wrong with that -...
Well, I do.;-) I decided to give it a try, and so far I've seen the dorky ad for their new image search feature over a dozen times, but so far no sign of any eclipse video. The bar at the top says it's "live from 11am to 3pm PDT", which started a few minutes ago, so I'm wondering if it's not working, or if I have to register for something to see it, or what. I firt tried it with firefox on this Macbook, then when that failed, switched to chrome, which behaves exactly the same way.
Anyone know what magic button you need to press to see the eclipse?
Yeah, I thought maybe I should maybe wait an hour or so, but then I'd miss the grand beginning. I suspect that big button in the middle with a check mark and a URL that starts with "http://www.youtul" might have something to do with it, but if it really is a button, it doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Somehow, I doubt that we've slashdotted google's server farm... '-)
... if I was a whistle blower I'd be inclined to avoid any corporate controlled entities to give my info to.
Some time back, I ran across some histories of the concept of "common carrier" that are probably applicable here. This concept has multiple, complex origins, but part of the story is apparently the common practice in early times of "killing the messenger" who brought news that the local prince didn't like.
This had some unpleasant side effects, of course. Once a prince got a reputation for killing messengers, couriers would take to opening his messages, reading them, and failing to deliver those that might endanger the messengers. This led to a lot of lost information. Or worse, the carrier would sell the messages' content to the prince's enemies.
Eventually, the story goes, some clever people worked out a solution, in the form of a contract between carrier C and prince P, saying that prince P agreed to not harm carrier C's messengers, and carrier C agreed to not open messages to or from prince P or sell copies to anyone. This later became part of the package of rights and protections covered by the phrase "common carrier", as well as part of the protections surrounding news reporting.
Needless to say, sometimes one party to such a contract would violate the terms, typically the prince, but also messengers seeing an opportunity for a quick profit on the side. But such violations soon became widely known, leading to loss of trust on the other side. In particular, a prince who harmed a messenger could expect to lose subsequent messages or suffer the consequences of the contents being known to his enemies. So the smart princes (and courier services run by smart businessmen) would prefer to uphold their part of the contract.
The same problem probably applies in the current topic. WSJ and AJ are acting on the basis of short-term profit that will be a problem in the long term. Rather than adopting a common-carrier/journalistic stance, they have openly stated that they will sell your information to the highest bidder. This will certainly come to the attention of the people with the most valuable information, who will quite sensibly be unwilling to trust WSJ or AJ with it, out of fear for their own safety.
This is pretty much the entire reasoning behind the journalistic history of keeping source identities secret. If you want to keep getting such insider information, you have to protect your sources from retribution. It's interesting that they'd actually write in their TOS small print that they won't protect their sources.
We can expect that the news will get out (as it has here) that these companies can't be trusted with any "dangerous" information.
Maybe this was their intention. They might have just decided that they didn't want to be bothered by people like whistleblowers, and chose this method of scaring off such troublemakers.
Slashdot Mirror
"Marriage" is an act of the State. You receive a "license", and then others are forced by the State to provide certain privileges based upon that license.
Here in Massachusetts, part of the history that came out during the political process that led to legalized gay marriage was that, during various part of Massachusetts' history, Quaker and Jewish marriages were not legally recognized. There were even times when Catholic marriages weren't recognized. The above "privileges" argument applied to all of them, as well as to the gays. Most people here now think it was unfair to exclude Quakers, Jews, et al from the privileges of marriage. Is there any argument other than "My God doesn't approve of it" that says that the state shouldn't recognize all of these marriages?
Such laws are currently in effect in a lot of the world. Historically, it has always been common for states/nations to have an "established" state-supported religion, and it has been common for the law to only recognize marriages performed by the clergy of the state religion. But the fact that such discrimination is common doesn't make it right.
You may disagree that a fetus is a person, but you must acknowledge that if someone DOES believe a fetus is a person, then they are fully consistent, as a Conservative, in expecting law to protect that person's life from being taken by another, when they are innocent of breaking any law.
Indeed, but you do run into a few logical problems when you say that only people who call themselves "conservative" have the right to impose their beliefs about such things onto others who don't have the same beliefs. Why shouldn't the others be able to impose their beliefs on the "conservatives"?
Thus, there's a common principle in Jewish law that a fetus is "alive" 40 days after conception. Should Jews who believe this be allowed to impose their standard on others?
Of course, it's not clear what a "Yes" answer to this might mean. Would Jews be able to force an unmarried non-Jewish woman to have an abortion against her wishes? I sorta doubt that anyone would say "Yes" to this, not even a Conservative Jew. ;-)
But the really fun answer to this issue is the scientific one, which deals with the claim that (human) life begins at conception. The historical name for this belief is "spontaneous generation", and it was convincingly disproved in the early 1800s, notably by Louis Pasteur, but also by others who tried variants on the same experiments, with the same results. The scientific answer to "When does life begin?" is simple: "It doesn't." At least for cellular life (ignoring viruses for now ;-), it's firmly established that, although life may have arisen out of non-life early in the planet's history, this no longer happens. Life only continues as a branch from previous life.
In particular, it's quite true that a fertilized human ovum is a living human. It's a cell that is alive and contains only human DNA. But it's also true that the unfertilized ovum (and all those sperm cells) are alive and human.
So if you believe abortion to be murder, it makes just as much sense to consider engaging in abstinence to be murder. Both intentionally and knowingly cause the death of living humans, namely all those unfertilized ova. And sperm, too, of course; though it's not clear how one is expected to deal with the millions-to-one ration of sperm and ovum production in humans.
Anyway, from a scientific viewpoint, it's clear that the moment of fertilization is just as arbitrary a "start of life" as 40 days or first detectable heartbeat or any other proposed start time for "life". These are all basically religious criteria; they have no basis in actual fact (as determined by many scientific researchers).
This doesn't mean that we should ignore such cutoff points, though. It just means t
Now tell us what a real hacker is!
Easy. That's someone who builds furniture with an axe.
(Hey, you could have looked it up! I didn't need to, because I looked it up in the Jargon File years ago. So I suppose that makes me a language geek. ;-)
While there are some exceptions, for the common good (such as not yelling "fire" in a crowded theater)
And whether the "common good" is actually "good" or not can be debated. There are people who disagree with that ban.
Well, I've actually seen a case of people yelling "Fire!" in a theater, and nobody got charged with any crime, although there was nothing burning and there were at least a few cops present.
The situation was a movie whose name I've forgotten, but it was a comedy. The Good Guy and the Bad Guy had been stalking each other for a while, and in one scene, GG got the drop on BG. As GG was aiming his pistol, several dozen people in the theater hollered out "Fire!". Then the whole audience broke up laughing, and we all missed the next couple lines of dialog.
On another occasion, there actually was a fire in the theater, a rather minor fire at the concession stand in the lobby. The movie stopped, the lights came on, and a guy standing on the little "stage" below the screen calmly asked everyone to exit by the side door. He did explain about the fire, but didn't at any time yell "Fire!" or anything else.
So my experience (2 anecdotes ;-) says that we really need a new example. Shouting "Fire!" in a theater is now the rhetorical equivalent of "crying wolf", and no longer works in real life. For that matter, neither does "crying wolf", both because wolves are nearly extinct in most of the world, and because the few wolves that exist are generally extremely wary of humans, so they're no danger to us. But maybe "Wolves crying ``Human!'' would work."
I must be an ultra-conservative, because I want the government out of everything to do with personal choices and decisions that don't infringe upon my neighbors' rights. ...
Nah; that would make you either a libertarian or a liberal, who are the ones that think that we should have control over our own personal lives (as long as we don't harm others in the process). At least here in the US, "conservative" now means that the government stays out of economic issues (leaving the corporations free to police themselves), but monitors and controls our personal lives to the max. Oh, and the government also runs the military and polices the world, though there are some "conservatives" who approve of the ongoing process of handing that over to the corporate world.
You'll have problems finding many people who call themselves "conservative" and approve of things like gay marriage, abortion, or the worship of Pagan gods. ;-)
On a side note, before there were prepaid debit cards, when we wanted "R" rated movies or cigarettes we just stole them. Kids will always find ways around age restrictions, sometimes what they do to get around the restrictions is worse than what's being restricted.
Another good point. It brings to mind the glaring "elephant in the room" example of this phenomenon: the humongous illegal-drug industry spawned by the anti-drug laws. I was about to include "in the US", but it's the same in most of the world.
Outlawing something that most people don't find wrong and part of the population wants is mostly a way to get such illegal activity. And once the illegal supply process has become a business, there's strong pressure from most of the political spectrum to not interfere with it by legalizing the material in question.
OTOH, the US did repeal Prohibition. And the Supreme Court has had the sense to apply the obvious reasoning to video games. Maybe there's hope yet that other such "moral" laws will be overturned. We just need, as in this case, some business interests to fund the legal appeals. The US government may not listen to its citizens, but it does listen to its businesses.
"Businesses need ActiveX for legacy piles of disgusting feces that has been rotting for years..." There I fixed that for you.
Heh. If those feces have been rotting for years, they're no longer feces. They've turned into compost, which smells like rich topsoil, because that's what it is. It's now good, fertile material that supports growth. ;-)
If you make the best browser available, you'll serve the needs of both businesses and individuals.
Only if they use your browser. And fact is, this tends to be yet another example of the old observation that within the business community, if it doesn't say "IBM" on the package, it's not a real computer product, it's a toy. In this case, of course, it's "once removed", since the approved busines browser is Internet Explorer, built by Microsoft. But IBM strongly endorses it, it's what comes on new IBM PCs, and it's The Browser to most business people. (Actually, to most businessmen, IT is "The Internet", but that's another topic. ;-)
As a software developer, I've worked for a good number of companies where, when I ask people what they have at home, almost all say "a Mac". They joke about how their management follows the usual rule, and doesn't care how good those Macs might be. They're not from IBM/Microsoft, so they're just toys. They're OK for underlings at home, but not for serious businessmen. Apple seems to understand this as well as the Mozilla gang, and doesn't much try to break into an arena where they're disqualified from the start.
And, of course, most of those serious businessmen never actually touch a computer themselves. The ones who make the purchase decisions are too important for that. Typing has always been done by people you hire. So they mostly have no actual experience with abstruse tools like browsers, and have no way of judging which are best for their business. No matter how good Mozilla's products might be, that has little bearing on business purchases.
That's a bit of a bizarre measurement for river waters, no? Makes it sound at first glance that it's under 1,007 feet of water.
Yeah; my first thought was "WTF sort of measurement is that? Maybe I should rewrite it giving the elevation above the Moho." Anyone know offhand how deep that is below Omaha?
I've seen other uses of "height above sea level" for locations in the middle of a continent. I always wonder what they're trying to hide/distort/exaggerate with they do that. I tend to doubt that the writer's original sources used that base.
What is this, offensive lorem ipsum?
What most people don't realize is that that oft-quoted document isn't pseudo-Latin nonsense; it's in the little-known 6th-century east-Istrian dialect, and is an excerpt from a tale of kiddie porn. So anyone who has it on their disk is in violation of some serious anti-porn laws wherever you live. And ignorance is no excuse. If you even download it by accident, you're guilty of a crime that even the /. crowd finds abhorrent.
If I leave my front door open and someone comes in and takes my TV it's stealing.
True, but that's not a very good parallel in this case. Putting something online in a web directory is generally considered to mean that you're making it available to the public.
A better parallel might be if, the evening before your local garbage pickup, you put your TV out on your sidewalk or driveway, next to the street. Anyone would take this to mean "Take it; it's free". People routinely stop and drive off with such things, assuming that they're probably broken, but they plan to take them apart for the components. Most people would be surprised to hear that someone doing this had been arrested and charged with theft.
Another possible parallel is the way that, in a lot of countries, unknowingly taking a photo that includes military or police equipment or building can be illegal. This has been attempted in the US, too, but the courts have generally held that, unless there was a clearly-visible sign warning people away, taking such pictures is legal. You can't reasonably expect people to know what all the nondescript building in a scene are, after all.
There are quite a lot of other parallels that involve accessing things that are in a setting that's normally "public". I'm sure that others can list more such scenarios. And any "reasonable" requirement should at least say that accessing a random file that's being handed out by a web server is reasonable and legal. If it's not, there's an obvious counter-charge of "entrapment", which is all too easy for those in a position of authority to do to innocent bypassers.
Thanks God!!! From now on (and because of that), those moons do have some chances to develop life...
Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.
Or if the formation of life is somehow dependent on observation (via Heisenberg "uncertainty"). In which case moons of this type in our observable universe would indeed have increased in their chance of producing life.
Actually, you don't need Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; you just need some basic statistical knowledge.
A similar example from a few years back: There was a widely-echoed calculation by biologists that there was about a 50% probabability that there was a large mammal (for some definition of "large") that was still "unknown to science", i.e., not described in The Literature. Then in 1999 there was a printed report of new species of deer in Southeast Asia. When jounalists asked scientists if this meant that there were probably no new large mammals to be discovered, they were told that it actually increased the probable number of undocumented species.
The journalists were generally baffled by this. If you've found the last one, how does that mean that there are more? Where did they come from?
But, as anyone with a few basic statistics courses under their belt understood, the scientists were right. The 50% estimate was the probablility that there was one (or more) undocumented species, given the time series of recently-published new species descriptions. That series had been slowing down, and straightforward calculations predicted it would hit zero sometime in the next decade. But a new species changed the time series, and new calculations would take that into account. It moved the predicted zero crossing further into the future.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, there were a lot of jokes about a similar time-series calculation: If you looked at the time series of estimates of the size of the (dwarf) planet Pluto since its discovery in 1930, the prediction was that Pluto would disappear entirely sometime in the early 1990s. It didn't, of course, but that may have been due to the additional discovery that Pluto had somehow split into a pair of small planet(oid)s. This fissioning seems to have stopped the shrinkage, and Pluto is no longer predicted to disappear (except in the official list of planets).
There's a whole branch of statistics dealing with how you make good predictions based on the data that you have right now, and how you change your predictions as new data comes in. This is done a lot in research projects, to determine when they've collected enough data to say that it's not worthwhile to continue, because the numbers are significant enough to publish right now.
A really big gas giant (say, 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter) has an enormous gravity well, but we don't know if its magnetic field and radiation belts scale in the same proportion.
And the gas giants we have available would suggest that we not make guesses about magnetic-field strengths of gas giants until we have a lot more direct data. Jupiter's magnetic field is much stronger than Earth's; Saturn's is somewhat weaker. The mechanisms that produce these fields aren't understood very well. This gives a lot of latitude to science-fiction authors, but not much actual information about what might be out there in our real universe.
One thing we can probably safely predict is that any Earth-like satellite of a gas giant would probably have more tidal heating than Earth, giving it a warmer interior, and probably a stronger magnetic field than ours. But there's room for a lot of variation here, depending on distance from the primary and the age of the system. Just look at the variety in Jupiter's four planet-size satellites. Callisto's tidal heating seems to have a much smaller effect that Io's. So if we were to put Earth in Callisto's orbit, and move Jupiter to Earth's orbit, it wouldn't change much for our Earth. Well, except that that Earth would probably be tidally locked, giving it a day about 17 times longer than ours.
Even if they are not tidally locked, ...
So is there any data on how likely this is? In our solar system, all seven of the planet-sized "moons" (Luna, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Triton) are tidally locked to their primary. Also, in the Pluto/Charon pair, each is tidally locked to the other. So our system doesn't lead us to expect that many Earth-size satellites of a gas giant would have a day different from their orbit around their primary. I'm sure that some astrophysicists could calculate the probabilities, but I haven't read that anyone has done so.
Not that it would matter all that much to any life on such a "moon". On the side facing the primary, there would be a solar eclipse of a few hours every day, but that wouldn't materially affect the supply of sunlight. And this is assuming that the orbit is approximately parallel to the system's ecliptic. If the gas giant's satellites are in a highly-inclined orbital plane (as with Uranus), there would be only a few eclipses per year, similar to what we see. But we expect that Uranus is an anomaly, and the norm will be that most orbits in any (single-star) system will be close to coplanar.
There have been a number of science-fiction novels written that include such systems. Anyone have a favorite?
What I stated was, "Capitalism is not 'designed' to make wealth trickle up." Would you care to explain why you believe that is not so, rather than just (in effect) crying "bullshit"?
It's simple really: Capitalism wasn't designed at all, in any meaningful sense of the term "design". The term "capitalism" was an invention of (mostly) 19th-century economic theorists, but they didn't invent the real-world system; they were only trying to describe it. It was built over centuries by millions of people, each with authority over only a tiny portion of the system, and nobody (not even monarchs) had the ability to impose anything remotely resembling a design.
Like all human social constructs, it is and always been a chaotic mess, poorly understood by its participants. The pretense that it's a system that had some design is nothing more than a political myth.
The "trickle up" theory has the same sort of problems, of course. It's an attempt to make sense of some of the observable results of the chaos. It's fairly well understood that our corporate and political leaders have strong personal motives to make the wealth trickle up to them, but this isn't proof of anything; it's merely a hypothetical explanation for part of the process. And it clearly wasn't designed into the system, simply because the capitalist system as a whole was never designed at all. Claiming that it was is simply silly.
Here in Massachusetts, we've been having fun watching the legal proceedings over a current case of "trickle up". If you're not familiar with it, google "Salvatore DiMasi". It's still among the top stories in the U.S. section of Google News, so you can find a thousand or so news reports if you start there. But it's merely one more documented example of how trickle-up works in the real world. In this case, the perps were prosecuted and have been convicted (but not yet sentenced, and there will be appeals). But it's hardly a secret that such "insider" activity is an important part of how our economic system actually works. I don't think anyone would claim to have "designed" this part of the system.
It is only capitalism as it is currently, that is to say, a grossly distorted and abused form of capitalism, that causes wealth to trickle up.
Ah, the good old "True Scotsman fallacy", in one of its canonical economic forms.
There have been plenty of explanations of how "true capitalism" inevitably shoots itself in the foot (to use another hoary cliche) unless an outside force (which we might as well call a government) imposes restrictions and regulations that maintain the system's stability.
Got any more standard fallacies you'd like to illustrate for us? ;-)
If you want to see some good examples of what "human-level translation" might mean, look around on the engrish.com site, which shows you just how good humans can be at this task. Note that almost everything there is "official" in some sense, intended to inform the public of something; very few of the examples are intended to be funny.
There's also a good "Engrish" classification at failblog.org, if you want lots more examples from a different source.
The Language Log blog has lots of discussions of examples such as these, generally trying to answer the question "How did the translator go so wrong in this case?" You can learn a lot about the "gotchas" of human languages by reading these discussions.
So I'm not too impressed by yet another prediction of "human-level" machine translation. That's a pretty low hurdle to cross, if it means the level of accuracy that current human translators routinely consider good enough to put on signs, menus, etc. Yes, professional translators will generally do a lot better. But that's not what the summary or TFA predicts; they just predict an unspecified "human-level" capability, which would be satisfied by the examples in the above "Engrish" sites.
America has really gone downhill. The country that started the whole freedom thing never moved on.
In particular, the US is still stuck with that Constitution that forbids government to perform "unwarranted search and seizure", but permits such actions by private corporations, who can then sell the information to government agencies. Until the US learns to extend the constitutional freedoms to all organizations, this will continue to provide a workaround for the Constitution's limits on the government.
This is much of the motive behind the growing American push to hand over most government activities to private corporations. The people pushing for this know quite well what they're doing, and fully intend the corporate world to perform the monitor and control functions that are forbidden to the government.
I wonder if there's a name for this sort of political policy? ;-)
We are not going to stop using gas or burning coal. Period. Even if we did, China is definitely not going to... ever.
Sure, we (and they) will, when the gas and coal supplies run out. We just don't know exactly when that will be. But we do know that we're mining the deposits and burning them several orders of magnitude faster than the planet can replenish them or clear the combustion products from the atmosphere.
We also don't know how much damage we'll have done to the ecosystem by then. We just have a general estimate of the nature of that damage.
Of course, since scientists can't specify the exact numbers for any of these quantities, the politicos can continue to pretend that nothing's happening and continue to collect their "campaign contributions" from the small number of people who are making huge short-term profits from the mining and burning of the fossil fuels.
... no one wants html5 apart from a small bunch of talentless creeps that want us all to return to the bad old days of "this website is best viewed with [insert browser here]" ...
Not sure what you're getting at here. I've "converted" most of my web pages to HTML5, by replacing that old, crufty first line with "<!doctype html>", tested them against lots of browsers, and I've never found a problem.
Lest you think I'm just joking, well I am, obviously, but there's also a serious side to this. As far as I can tell, most of the supposed conversions to HTML5 consist of little more than rewriting the doctype line. Or adding it, in many cases. Then trusting the browsers to figure out how to handle each tag in the file.
And actually, I have found that my few pages that use <canvas> don't work too well in IE6. So far nobody has complained about that, perhaps because IE6 users don't look at those pages or can't figure out that something's missing. OTOH, I've found that my canvas tags seem to work ok in a number of browser versionss that supposedly don't support HTML5, which makes the situation even more murky. Maybe the browser makers really have all been upgrading to HTML5 all along, but don't want to admit it in public until it has become socially acceptable in the reactionary crowd. Or they are sneaking it in past their bosses' determination that HTML5 isn't needed.
Anyway, I've found that looking things up in the HMTL5 docs and using that sort of HTML seems to be a pretty good strategy. I've found that the results work, in some sense of "work", in all the browsers that I have available, including (to my surprise) the browsers on a number of smartphones.
Maybe this is the 90s speaking, though. The impetus to HTML5 did start way back then, and a lot of implementers took the approach of trying to accept any markup that was documented anywhere and do something sensible with it. So maybe it's not surprising that it seems to work better than one might expect.
I think HTML5 is sneaking in through the back door. Eventually people will discover that their sites have converted to HTML5 without anyone making an official decision to do so.
Nah; the reason they've been so secretive and even refuse to release photos is that just as the Navy SEALs broke into his bedroom, he was taken away by a host of angels who were singing in Arabic. His body isn't in the ocean; it's in heaven, being taken care of by his 72 virgins.
(Hey, it's as credible as those other similar stories from other religions.)
(And I'm sorta glad that I don't have to worry about a Disney lawsuit for posting the above.)
Well, the "live" link suddenly worked a while ago, after I'd been away from the screen for a while. I got the darkened moon (and 3 stars) on the screen then. Now, the left (east) edge of the moon is getting brighter.
The image does seem to jump around occasionally. A start that was at the right edge disappeared after one jump, then reappeared after the next. It's gone again now, and there don't seem to be any more stars visible. I'm guessing that the light level is being adjusted to match the moon's brightest areas, and we may see no more stars.
"Google to initiate lunar eclipse"
What I'm looking for is the flame wars over what effect this eclipse will have on global warming (oops, I mean climate change), whether Obama or Bush (or God) is responsible for the moon going dark, and the many other such threads that infest most discussions here.
lrn2adblock
Can you do that with Chrome? ;-)
Actually, I started with Firefox, which has AdblockPlus installed. I told it to enable everything for the http://www.youtube.com/google "site", which didn't change anything. Then I changed to Chrome, which as far as I can tell, doesn't do ad blocking (BICBW).
In any case, what does this have to do with my question, which is "How do I watch the eclipse"? Further poking around at various things on the page hasn't resulted in enlightenment. Or any change in behavior, for that matter.
It's not a pay service, it's an ad-supported service. I don't see what's wrong with that - ...
Well, I do. ;-) I decided to give it a try, and so far I've seen the dorky ad for their new image search feature over a dozen times, but so far no sign of any eclipse video. The bar at the top says it's "live from 11am to 3pm PDT", which started a few minutes ago, so I'm wondering if it's not working, or if I have to register for something to see it, or what. I firt tried it with firefox on this Macbook, then when that failed, switched to chrome, which behaves exactly the same way.
Anyone know what magic button you need to press to see the eclipse?
Yeah, I thought maybe I should maybe wait an hour or so, but then I'd miss the grand beginning. I suspect that big button in the middle with a check mark and a URL that starts with "http://www.youtul" might have something to do with it, but if it really is a button, it doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Somehow, I doubt that we've slashdotted google's server farm ... '-)
... if I was a whistle blower I'd be inclined to avoid any corporate controlled entities to give my info to.
Some time back, I ran across some histories of the concept of "common carrier" that are probably applicable here. This concept has multiple, complex origins, but part of the story is apparently the common practice in early times of "killing the messenger" who brought news that the local prince didn't like.
This had some unpleasant side effects, of course. Once a prince got a reputation for killing messengers, couriers would take to opening his messages, reading them, and failing to deliver those that might endanger the messengers. This led to a lot of lost information. Or worse, the carrier would sell the messages' content to the prince's enemies.
Eventually, the story goes, some clever people worked out a solution, in the form of a contract between carrier C and prince P, saying that prince P agreed to not harm carrier C's messengers, and carrier C agreed to not open messages to or from prince P or sell copies to anyone. This later became part of the package of rights and protections covered by the phrase "common carrier", as well as part of the protections surrounding news reporting.
Needless to say, sometimes one party to such a contract would violate the terms, typically the prince, but also messengers seeing an opportunity for a quick profit on the side. But such violations soon became widely known, leading to loss of trust on the other side. In particular, a prince who harmed a messenger could expect to lose subsequent messages or suffer the consequences of the contents being known to his enemies. So the smart princes (and courier services run by smart businessmen) would prefer to uphold their part of the contract.
The same problem probably applies in the current topic. WSJ and AJ are acting on the basis of short-term profit that will be a problem in the long term. Rather than adopting a common-carrier/journalistic stance, they have openly stated that they will sell your information to the highest bidder. This will certainly come to the attention of the people with the most valuable information, who will quite sensibly be unwilling to trust WSJ or AJ with it, out of fear for their own safety.
This is pretty much the entire reasoning behind the journalistic history of keeping source identities secret. If you want to keep getting such insider information, you have to protect your sources from retribution. It's interesting that they'd actually write in their TOS small print that they won't protect their sources.
We can expect that the news will get out (as it has here) that these companies can't be trusted with any "dangerous" information.
Maybe this was their intention. They might have just decided that they didn't want to be bothered by people like whistleblowers, and chose this method of scaring off such troublemakers.