That's a practical response. You needn't - and shouldn't - stoop to his level by exposing information that might subject him to harm. But you surely want to protect yourself. You might let the landlord know as well - his/her property may be in danger and he/she might wish to put up a security camera.
If I may inject a personal note, I do believe in God. But I don't believe He created an existance so simple that anything we don't understand must have His hand directly involved.
A fair and underrated point. After all, this is what the people who created modern science believed. In fact they thought, very seriously, than understanding the details of God's creation brought them closer to God.
I also find this to be a convincing approach, within a Christian, science-neutral viewpoint, to be a convicing reason that Christians should believe in evolution.
Which god is more powerful, more awesome, more amazing? The one who just made some animals the way they are (and oddly put bones of some other non-existent creatures in the earth just to "test our faith"), or the one who made a unviverse with rules that made animals make themselves and make themselves ever more complex until they became us? Clearly, it's the latter. The former is OK if you still believe in Santa Claus, and rather pathetic otherwise. The latter is pretty amazing by any measure. I find it indistinguishable from science, assuming both views are filled with wonder that our world is as it is... and when you consider that science concerns itself with the how, and not the why.
like, if all i cared about was reproducing cool audio software, i wouldn't say *nothing* was going on, but rather that XXN0YXX was lacking development momentum.
as for me, i like amarok. screw itunes, love ya xmms, but bye, and the featureset for 1.4.2 is actually better than any other alternative, period.
and since i listen to music ALL day while working, this is not a minor thing for me... it's great.
And that applies to spam filtering techniques as well - it's like anti-biotics. For serious stuff, a spread attack is a good idea.
I've found that using RBLs, SpamAssassin, and Bayesian filters prevents 99.5% of spam with essentially no false positives. And that means, by my day-to-day experience with addresses spammed for a full 10 years now, that instead of getting 100 spam and one real mail, I get 1 real mail, and once every could of days a spam that gets through.
Except for earlier this year. The RBLs went a little nuts, probably in response to some spam onslaught, and generated a few false positives.
No. Not ever. Not when they are Iraqis. Not when they are Israelis. Not when they are Lebanese of any religion or political stripe. Not when their moms are crackheads. Not when they are in foster care. Not even when they are 12 year olds ripping off car stereos in my neighborhood.
What's your point, asshole?
You know what else I don't like? When the U.S. turns chicken because of a handful of losers with box cutters and pipe bombs and turns its back on our proud heritage of freedom in order to act as much as possible like a Soviet Bloc police state, even while we have overwhelming evidence that freedom is being traded not for security, not for safety, not for democracy across the world, but for torture, for imprisonment without trial or legal recourse, for 50 more years of death squads and semi-compliant dictators, for the feds stealing 100,000,000 nail clippers, for the destruction of the Constitution, for the abandonment of the rule of law, and for, as Burroughs so memorably put it, "a nation of finks".
That's what I don't like. So fuck you, and here's hoping you win a Darwin award in the near future, for the sake of the human race.
No, it's not. Subjective means they mange to see results that aren't there by semi-consciously massaging the data and/or observations.
The first guys trying to build planes failed because their materials were too heavy, or too weak, or their designs did not create consistent lift. That doesn't mean that flight is impossible or that their broken limbs were subjective.
OTOH, guys making perpetual motion machines are subjective and/or frauds. Sounds like this guy's in this category.
OTOH, some kind of tabletop fusion might be part of the alien technology we've reverse engineered, and for the sake of keeping the aliens under wraps until we can build space fighters to defend against them, the black helicopter crowd is keeping tabletop fusion under the table.
Or, these experiments are full of shit. Too early to say.
You must have some weird version or configuration of Amarok. It does warn you before any file deletion, advising that its permanent.
I do understand your conservative outlook, but Amarok finally got me to ditch XMMS - partly because the current version, 1.4, can be used to reorganize the files exactly as you'd like. And you can control when it does this.
Frankly, I find Amarok to be like iTunes, only better. Yeah, musicbrainz and lyrics aren't that useful when you are looking at really obscure stuff - but the interface never gets in the way. Those are extra features i can ignore if thye are not useful....
Suppose Kenneth Lay faked his death - even with the money they lawyers will squeeze back from his estate, he'll never have to work again and can live rather well anyplace on earth, because he almost assuredly has some packed away somewhere safe.
Meanwhile, the thousands of people he screwed out of jobs and pensions plans while playing funny money games may have to take jobs at Walmart to keep from eating cat food in their "retirement" - or, if Social Security is privatized, becoming homeless due to yet more Ken Lays robbing the private funds set up in its place.
A lawyer I know who has represented white collar criminals confirms that many of them truly think "if I do five years in jail and come out set for life, good for me." Meanwhile, minor pot dealers fill our prisons for a "crime" that hurts no one.
Excuse me for thinking it's time to bring back the guillotine and right the scales of justice.
Bullshit - there is tons of evidence of travel all over the ancient world. Tribes we know about in historical times travelled hundreds and even thousands of miles during times of conquest.
Bullshit - you must have failed high school biology. The term "hybrid vigor" refers to the improved freedom from genetic disease among those very distantly related. That's because recessive genes in one population collide often in decendants, creating unusual genetic diseases - this is a known fact in areas with long-term inbred aristocracies - see European monarchs. It's a known fact among populations with a long history of limited genetic transfer - as you wrongly suppose to be true of the human race as a whole; see Ashkhenazi Jews and various neurologic diseases. Damn, even anyone involved in animal breeding knows this - it's why most purebreds don't live very long and why breeds that become very popular very quickly can be "overbred".
Besides, if you were correct, then the best genetic result would be to fuck your sister. And every population on the planet knows that incest is a bad idea, even if they don't know why. Except, apparently, in your family.
Shit, you have to be dumb as a rock to believe what you wrote. Try to get your family tree to fork a little more often.
There's a pro-global warming crowd? I doubt it. Even the people who doubt global warming agree - except the complete Creationist, Flat-Earth asswipes - that relatively moderate changes in global temperature can have unpredictable and - for humans - catastrophic changes in regional climates.
So I think you have to retract that "pro-global warming" bit, because the only people in favor of global warming are, ironically, those who deny it exists.
Oh, I'm sure I've got MRSA on me somewhere. My preemie daughter tested for it while in the NICU and was in an isolated part of the NICU (with a few other positives) for 4 months. She continued to test positive for it periodically. Despite gowning up and washing hands, I'm sure some transferred to me. It's just part of the ecosystem that is me now.
one would hope they'd fix this in the beta period - but i wouldn't count on it.
and for the small orgs that i service, we have enough with these issues as it is - most people STILL don't get the concept of 'you downloaded your mail from here, so it isn't visible there' with plain old POP3.
and the other growth point is definitely retention. while i don't have to do retention for anyone at the moment, if i do, i'd want IMAP. and for myriad practical reasons, i don't see that happening on gmail.
Even though you're basically right, I still don't get it. Exactly how is a list of search terms supposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of filters? That seems to be a major element of logic missing in this absurd excercise.
Let's reframe this in McCarthyite terms; the feds want borrowing statistics frome very podunk library in the land so they can tell how often Mao's Little Red Book is checked out, so they can tell how seriously the Commie infestation is, and where in America they should focus their purges.
Doesn't tell you squat about the intent behind the statistic, for one thing. For another, they are getting a lot more data than they need for their stated purpose (which is odious in the first place); why?
Wouldn't the more effective statistic be to just splatter some dirty search words across search engines, collect thousands of URLs, and see how many are blocked by various filters? And if the feds aren't on some insane, underhanded kind of fishing expedition, why on earth wouldn't they restrict their request to data on sexually-related search terms?
This whole thing stinks to high heaven. It does smell like a big ole wedge issue being ginned up for the fall elections. But the data request is so odd in the first place I have to wonder if there isn't some other game afoot.
You may have been the first to say it, you may not be the last, but you sure are right. Oracle must become a services company if they are to stay "in the game". And that means being able to deliver solutions targeted more precisely to more markets - it means having an in-house toolkit that runs small and fast, among other things. And Berkeley DB fits that niche.
Now as a fan of Berkeley db stuff, my only hope is that they basically fund the key developers as an in-house department supporting an OSS. And actually it's in their best interests to do so; look at SleepyCat's big enterprise customers and
I don't expect much to change regarding the OSS software available; SleepyCat has already made a good niche between a machine-local OSS engine and multi-machine transactional-safe hoohaa. If you can do with the former, you aren't worth squeezing as a customer; if you need the latter, you like the wide acceptance and stability of the former and will happily pay for the extra "enterprise" features or licensing of the OSS code.
And that is why Oracle bought them - OSS with customers, plus proven low-overhead, high-performance technology that can get Oracle-branded software into, say, a TV-top DVR, or an iPod-type device (hey, what kind of DBs actually back iPods?). So, yes, vertically-integrated stacks, and their own codebase being "wazoolah", it's nice to have Berkeley DB to fill the "small overhead, tiny-to-enormous dataset, bare-metal programming" slot in their toolkit.
On first look, this is a victory for proving the potential financial viability of OSS approaches. And against a giant like Oracle, that means something.
just because a trait exists doesn't mean that it has an evolutionary advantage. it just means that nothing has selected against it (say, blue eyes).
just becuase a trait has no immediate evolutionary advantage (e.g. acquiring stem cells from pregnancy) doesn't mean it has no advantage.
fucking duh.
there is zero contradiction between the trait (pregnancies, even unsucessful ones, improving the mother's health), and an evolutionary advantage. in fact, you'd have to be a fucking retard not to see that there is a strong correlation: chicks who fuck and conceive are more likely to have kids. and if chicks who fuck, conceive, and don't birth, are more likely to live longer, then they are more likely to fuck and conceive again, and therefore more likley to have offspring (who will probably inherit these traits and therefore have a confirmed evolutionary advantage).
lesson: right wingers think that you have some kind of advantage marrying chicks who don't fuck or conceive. sorry for them. maybe that's why they have so much energy to focus on other people's reproductive behavior; if they focused on their own, they'd be extinct.
man the wingnut trolls are all over these days. too fucking much foundation money paying for undergrad "interns" to splatter total horseshit around. please, folks, study and understand evolution. or go live in a fucking cave. your choice.
Oh, you mean Haleigh's brain had atrophied to 50% of its previous volume before a miraculous recovery? Or did you mean that Terry Schiavo would have recovered eventually, in contradiction to all human knowledge and science? Or are you just pulling shit out of your ass?
Of course, since you are a troll, perhaps the part of YOUR brain that atrophied is exactly the part that you would need to understand what I'm saying.
You see, even if you did disable hotlinking to images, someone could just as easy post a link to a picture on another server naming it other then WMF. And say check out this cool picture. Granted the user has to click on the link then, but tell me most users don't do that anyway?
Certainly it's not efficient to check all the time in advance - or else, the only plausible strategy is to cache - that way you can guarantee the content being delivered. Now what precautions are reasonable?
Also, what about javascript? All the script has to do is call for the image to be loaded, not even displayed. The problem is much larger then just stopping sites from hotlinking images.
Right. It's not always about the content of the images. Sometimes the means of loading the images are, on their own, offensive.
Your question is that it's a liability, I would say no. You didn't host nor did your site/staff post malicious WMF. But could your reputation suffer, of course.
It comes down to this; if someone can display a picture on your page, what they display can make you look bad. They don't even need to do something illegal. And that can cost you, whether or not there is any legal liability involved.
Re:Patents In and Of Themselves Are Not Evil
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
You got that right. As a novice programmer in 1997, I implemented in far less than a week, with a slightly more experienced colleague, "one-click purchase". I'd never heard of one-click shopping on Amazon or anywhere else - but the fact that we were able to do this so quickly, without a single post-graduate degree or equivalent study betwen us, shows that it's not an idea that should be patentable. It is obvious.
But we didn't deploy the service - we were concerned about too many accidental orders - and of course we wouldn't show up as prior art even if we actually beat Amazon to the punch. Software patents - the vast majority of them - are business process patents, and are thus bullshit. They are anti-capitalistic, anti-inventor, and pro-statist bootlicker. They are pro-monopolist and pro-extortionist.
I've been saying for years that the patent system is broken. For years people have regarded this statement as if I'd espoused communism. Funny that the hard core capitalists are now coming around to my point of view well in advance of the general public.
I'm a dad of triplet girls born at 24 weeks. All together they weighed less than 3 1/2 lbs. The smallest one did not survive, but the other two did, and they're doing great at nearly 2 years (20 mo adjusted), though they spent 4 months and 8 months in the NICU.
More accurate scanning without having to leave the NICU means that parents can have more information about their children when making life or death decisions. Parents do need advice from doctors, and there is such a thing as care that is decidedly "futile", to use a term of art. But better information permits doctors and parents to make better decisions about whether there is a life to save (ultimately parents have to make the decision about whether a life is "worth saving", and if you aren't that parent, you simply don't know).
Better information means untold dollars saved, untold anguish to the parents spared, and precious lives saved that might otherwise be seen as hopeless cases. When it comes to the ethics and morality of end-of-life decisions, it's clear that only the uninvolved and the completely insane can hold absolutist positions (witness Terry Schiavo); the rest of us realize that some relative certainty, clouded by difficult decisions and incomplete knowledge, with lots of forgiveness and sympathy, is often the best that we can achieve. Only the radically evil can insist that more information is anything but an outright blessing.
I've always found this to be true. Anyone wonder why pre-electronic typists don't seem to have reported RSI? Because they needed more force to strike the keys, and held their hands above the keyboard. No question, the continuous pressure on the underside of the wrist is the culprit.
And the mouse is the worst, because I always end up resting my wrist on the table.
Nor had the heart and feet of a velociraptor's prey left at the foot-end of his bed after every other part of the victim was eaten )emboweled or disemboweled).
Slashdot Mirror
That's a practical response. You needn't - and shouldn't - stoop to his level by exposing information that might subject him to harm. But you surely want to protect yourself. You might let the landlord know as well - his/her property may be in danger and he/she might wish to put up a security camera.
A fair and underrated point. After all, this is what the people who created modern science believed. In fact they thought, very seriously, than understanding the details of God's creation brought them closer to God.
I also find this to be a convincing approach, within a Christian, science-neutral viewpoint, to be a convicing reason that Christians should believe in evolution.
Which god is more powerful, more awesome, more amazing? The one who just made some animals the way they are (and oddly put bones of some other non-existent creatures in the earth just to "test our faith"), or the one who made a unviverse with rules that made animals make themselves and make themselves ever more complex until they became us? Clearly, it's the latter. The former is OK if you still believe in Santa Claus, and rather pathetic otherwise. The latter is pretty amazing by any measure. I find it indistinguishable from science, assuming both views are filled with wonder that our world is as it is... and when you consider that science concerns itself with the how, and not the why.
like, if all i cared about was reproducing cool audio software, i wouldn't say *nothing* was going on, but rather that XXN0YXX was lacking development momentum.
as for me, i like amarok. screw itunes, love ya xmms, but bye, and the featureset for 1.4.2 is actually better than any other alternative, period.
and since i listen to music ALL day while working, this is not a minor thing for me... it's great.
god bless amarok and all who sail with it.
Excellent point.
And that applies to spam filtering techniques as well - it's like anti-biotics. For serious stuff, a spread attack is a good idea.
I've found that using RBLs, SpamAssassin, and Bayesian filters prevents 99.5% of spam with essentially no false positives. And that means, by my day-to-day experience with addresses spammed for a full 10 years now, that instead of getting 100 spam and one real mail, I get 1 real mail, and once every could of days a spam that gets through.
Except for earlier this year. The RBLs went a little nuts, probably in response to some spam onslaught, and generated a few false positives.
Mod. Parent. Up.
Though I would substitute "ephemeral" for "deliberately vague and open-ended".
No. Not ever. Not when they are Iraqis. Not when they are Israelis. Not when they are Lebanese of any religion or political stripe. Not when their moms are crackheads. Not when they are in foster care. Not even when they are 12 year olds ripping off car stereos in my neighborhood.
What's your point, asshole?
You know what else I don't like? When the U.S. turns chicken because of a handful of losers with box cutters and pipe bombs and turns its back on our proud heritage of freedom in order to act as much as possible like a Soviet Bloc police state, even while we have overwhelming evidence that freedom is being traded not for security, not for safety, not for democracy across the world, but for torture, for imprisonment without trial or legal recourse, for 50 more years of death squads and semi-compliant dictators, for the feds stealing 100,000,000 nail clippers, for the destruction of the Constitution, for the abandonment of the rule of law, and for, as Burroughs so memorably put it, "a nation of finks".
That's what I don't like. So fuck you, and here's hoping you win a Darwin award in the near future, for the sake of the human race.
No, it's not. Subjective means they mange to see results that aren't there by semi-consciously massaging the data and/or observations.
The first guys trying to build planes failed because their materials were too heavy, or too weak, or their designs did not create consistent lift. That doesn't mean that flight is impossible or that their broken limbs were subjective.
OTOH, guys making perpetual motion machines are subjective and/or frauds. Sounds like this guy's in this category.
OTOH, some kind of tabletop fusion might be part of the alien technology we've reverse engineered, and for the sake of keeping the aliens under wraps until we can build space fighters to defend against them, the black helicopter crowd is keeping tabletop fusion under the table.
Or, these experiments are full of shit. Too early to say.
You must have some weird version or configuration of Amarok. It does warn you before any file deletion, advising that its permanent.
I do understand your conservative outlook, but Amarok finally got me to ditch XMMS - partly because the current version, 1.4, can be used to reorganize the files exactly as you'd like. And you can control when it does this.
Frankly, I find Amarok to be like iTunes, only better. Yeah, musicbrainz and lyrics aren't that useful when you are looking at really obscure stuff - but the interface never gets in the way. Those are extra features i can ignore if thye are not useful....
Boo fucking hoo.
Suppose Kenneth Lay faked his death - even with the money they lawyers will squeeze back from his estate, he'll never have to work again and can live rather well anyplace on earth, because he almost assuredly has some packed away somewhere safe.
Meanwhile, the thousands of people he screwed out of jobs and pensions plans while playing funny money games may have to take jobs at Walmart to keep from eating cat food in their "retirement" - or, if Social Security is privatized, becoming homeless due to yet more Ken Lays robbing the private funds set up in its place.
A lawyer I know who has represented white collar criminals confirms that many of them truly think "if I do five years in jail and come out set for life, good for me." Meanwhile, minor pot dealers fill our prisons for a "crime" that hurts no one.
Excuse me for thinking it's time to bring back the guillotine and right the scales of justice.
They almost never are.
Bullshit - there is tons of evidence of travel all over the ancient world. Tribes we know about in historical times travelled hundreds and even thousands of miles during times of conquest.
Bullshit - you must have failed high school biology. The term "hybrid vigor" refers to the improved freedom from genetic disease among those very distantly related. That's because recessive genes in one population collide often in decendants, creating unusual genetic diseases - this is a known fact in areas with long-term inbred aristocracies - see European monarchs. It's a known fact among populations with a long history of limited genetic transfer - as you wrongly suppose to be true of the human race as a whole; see Ashkhenazi Jews and various neurologic diseases. Damn, even anyone involved in animal breeding knows this - it's why most purebreds don't live very long and why breeds that become very popular very quickly can be "overbred".
Besides, if you were correct, then the best genetic result would be to fuck your sister. And every population on the planet knows that incest is a bad idea, even if they don't know why. Except, apparently, in your family.
Shit, you have to be dumb as a rock to believe what you wrote. Try to get your family tree to fork a little more often.
So I think you have to retract that "pro-global warming" bit, because the only people in favor of global warming are, ironically, those who deny it exists.
Oh, I'm sure I've got MRSA on me somewhere. My preemie daughter tested for it while in the NICU and was in an isolated part of the NICU (with a few other positives) for 4 months. She continued to test positive for it periodically. Despite gowning up and washing hands, I'm sure some transferred to me. It's just part of the ecosystem that is me now.
what about the dvorak keyboard?
one would hope they'd fix this in the beta period - but i wouldn't count on it.
and for the small orgs that i service, we have enough with these issues as it is - most people STILL don't get the concept of 'you downloaded your mail from here, so it isn't visible there' with plain old POP3.
and the other growth point is definitely retention. while i don't have to do retention for anyone at the moment, if i do, i'd want IMAP. and for myriad practical reasons, i don't see that happening on gmail.
Even though you're basically right, I still don't get it. Exactly how is a list of search terms supposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of filters? That seems to be a major element of logic missing in this absurd excercise.
Let's reframe this in McCarthyite terms; the feds want borrowing statistics frome very podunk library in the land so they can tell how often Mao's Little Red Book is checked out, so they can tell how seriously the Commie infestation is, and where in America they should focus their purges.
Doesn't tell you squat about the intent behind the statistic, for one thing. For another, they are getting a lot more data than they need for their stated purpose (which is odious in the first place); why?
Wouldn't the more effective statistic be to just splatter some dirty search words across search engines, collect thousands of URLs, and see how many are blocked by various filters? And if the feds aren't on some insane, underhanded kind of fishing expedition, why on earth wouldn't they restrict their request to data on sexually-related search terms?
This whole thing stinks to high heaven. It does smell like a big ole wedge issue being ginned up for the fall elections. But the data request is so odd in the first place I have to wonder if there isn't some other game afoot.
You may have been the first to say it, you may not be the last, but you sure are right. Oracle must become a services company if they are to stay "in the game". And that means being able to deliver solutions targeted more precisely to more markets - it means having an in-house toolkit that runs small and fast, among other things. And Berkeley DB fits that niche. Now as a fan of Berkeley db stuff, my only hope is that they basically fund the key developers as an in-house department supporting an OSS. And actually it's in their best interests to do so; look at SleepyCat's big enterprise customers and I don't expect much to change regarding the OSS software available; SleepyCat has already made a good niche between a machine-local OSS engine and multi-machine transactional-safe hoohaa. If you can do with the former, you aren't worth squeezing as a customer; if you need the latter, you like the wide acceptance and stability of the former and will happily pay for the extra "enterprise" features or licensing of the OSS code. And that is why Oracle bought them - OSS with customers, plus proven low-overhead, high-performance technology that can get Oracle-branded software into, say, a TV-top DVR, or an iPod-type device (hey, what kind of DBs actually back iPods?). So, yes, vertically-integrated stacks, and their own codebase being "wazoolah", it's nice to have Berkeley DB to fill the "small overhead, tiny-to-enormous dataset, bare-metal programming" slot in their toolkit. On first look, this is a victory for proving the potential financial viability of OSS approaches. And against a giant like Oracle, that means something.
fucking duh. there is zero contradiction between the trait (pregnancies, even unsucessful ones, improving the mother's health), and an evolutionary advantage. in fact, you'd have to be a fucking retard not to see that there is a strong correlation: chicks who fuck and conceive are more likely to have kids. and if chicks who fuck, conceive, and don't birth, are more likely to live longer, then they are more likely to fuck and conceive again, and therefore more likley to have offspring (who will probably inherit these traits and therefore have a confirmed evolutionary advantage).
lesson: right wingers think that you have some kind of advantage marrying chicks who don't fuck or conceive. sorry for them. maybe that's why they have so much energy to focus on other people's reproductive behavior; if they focused on their own, they'd be extinct.
man the wingnut trolls are all over these days. too fucking much foundation money paying for undergrad "interns" to splatter total horseshit around. please, folks, study and understand evolution. or go live in a fucking cave. your choice.
Oh, you mean Haleigh's brain had atrophied to 50% of its previous volume before a miraculous recovery? Or did you mean that Terry Schiavo would have recovered eventually, in contradiction to all human knowledge and science? Or are you just pulling shit out of your ass? Of course, since you are a troll, perhaps the part of YOUR brain that atrophied is exactly the part that you would need to understand what I'm saying.
damn, if i had mod points, i'd give that +10 underrated. t'old diagonal argument.
You got that right. As a novice programmer in 1997, I implemented in far less than a week, with a slightly more experienced colleague, "one-click purchase". I'd never heard of one-click shopping on Amazon or anywhere else - but the fact that we were able to do this so quickly, without a single post-graduate degree or equivalent study betwen us, shows that it's not an idea that should be patentable. It is obvious.
But we didn't deploy the service - we were concerned about too many accidental orders - and of course we wouldn't show up as prior art even if we actually beat Amazon to the punch. Software patents - the vast majority of them - are business process patents, and are thus bullshit. They are anti-capitalistic, anti-inventor, and pro-statist bootlicker. They are pro-monopolist and pro-extortionist.
I've been saying for years that the patent system is broken. For years people have regarded this statement as if I'd espoused communism. Funny that the hard core capitalists are now coming around to my point of view well in advance of the general public.
I'm a dad of triplet girls born at 24 weeks. All together they weighed less than 3 1/2 lbs. The smallest one did not survive, but the other two did, and they're doing great at nearly 2 years (20 mo adjusted), though they spent 4 months and 8 months in the NICU.
More accurate scanning without having to leave the NICU means that parents can have more information about their children when making life or death decisions. Parents do need advice from doctors, and there is such a thing as care that is decidedly "futile", to use a term of art. But better information permits doctors and parents to make better decisions about whether there is a life to save (ultimately parents have to make the decision about whether a life is "worth saving", and if you aren't that parent, you simply don't know).
Better information means untold dollars saved, untold anguish to the parents spared, and precious lives saved that might otherwise be seen as hopeless cases. When it comes to the ethics and morality of end-of-life decisions, it's clear that only the uninvolved and the completely insane can hold absolutist positions (witness Terry Schiavo); the rest of us realize that some relative certainty, clouded by difficult decisions and incomplete knowledge, with lots of forgiveness and sympathy, is often the best that we can achieve. Only the radically evil can insist that more information is anything but an outright blessing.
I've always found this to be true. Anyone wonder why pre-electronic typists don't seem to have reported RSI? Because they needed more force to strike the keys, and held their hands above the keyboard. No question, the continuous pressure on the underside of the wrist is the culprit.
And the mouse is the worst, because I always end up resting my wrist on the table.
Nor had the heart and feet of a velociraptor's prey left at the foot-end of his bed after every other part of the victim was eaten )emboweled or disemboweled).