They do this on slashdot all the time. I kept the original article on slashdot about the September 11 attacks up for a few days because it had changed so much. The original seemed to express more shock than the final version.
I wish it could do something for my grandfather's macular degeneration, but I have a feeling a bionic cure for that problem is going to be too far in the future to help.
Have you seen GNU Octave? It's not as featureful as the absolute latest version of Matlab, but it was more than sufficient for me for my neural networks class. In fact, I used it last night on my final exam.
If you know Perl (or want to learn), another alternative is the Perl PDL Perl Data Language module. I used that for a semester project, and it worked great.
I used Octave all semester for my neural networks class and did fine. Of course, when it came time to write my semester project, I chose to do it in Perl with PDL (Perl Data Language). My professor's response was, "There's no accounting for taste.":)
Oh, and I did all this on a blueberry ibook with Debian Linux.
Re:I was just reading this at the bookstore...
on
Agile Modeling
·
· Score: 2
I highly recommend the Personal Software Process from the Software Engineering Institute at CMU. PSP focuses on how you can improve your own process, which is fundamental no matter how many people you work with. I've been reading the two PSP intro books (one aimed at introductory programming students, one aimed at professionals) this year and have gotten a lot out of it. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of this implemented a little later this year. I don't work alone, but it's very close as we have very few people and projects rarely require more than one person.
Don't confuse PSP with the TSP also described on the site. TSP is aimed at teams. (And in some people's minds, PSP appears to exist only to support TSP.)
I had a professor named Piotr Gmytrasiewicz who once told us about research he was doing on this subject. It was always neat to be able to make statements like, "Emotions can be represented as an ordered quintuple."
Piotr's gone on to another university up north, according to my last web search.
I'd love to be sponsored on such a project. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone interested would want to pay my rates. Plus, once I was done, I'm not sure I could get my day job back.:)
But it's fun to dream. I've always wanted to try my hand at an emulator.
First, they tell us TLGAD before the show airs on the west coast, and then they tell us Scotty is comatose and not likely to recover, while the man is still conscious!
The Mac world had the same problem with the shift from System 6 to System 7. I was a die-hard System 6 user. As far as I'm concerned, it still represents the peak of the Classic Mac experience.
The initial System 7 was buggy and made some fundamental changes. Most of those changes were good, although about half of them took awhile to convince everyone. System 7 eventually stabilized and the last die-hards migrated. I lived.:) MacOS 8 and 9 made a lot of great innovations, but didn't change anything fundamentally with what System 7 was doing, and so there wasn't near as much of a shakeup with upgrades until OS X, which again is making fundamental changes.
The guy who runs apple.slashdot.org, pudge, aka Chris Nandor, is a die-hard OS9 user. I'm sure he'll continue to dredge up some stories involving it.
Pudge is a primary contributor to slash code, and an employee of OSDN. He runs use Perl;, a slash-based Perl discussion site, is the primary maintainer for MacPerl (perl for pre-OSX Macs) and develops slash code on Mac OS 9 with MacPerl. (!)
I admire your firm convictions and the stands you take on various issues. I also admire RedHat's stand on shipping (almost) exclusively free software. (For example, I think they didn't ship KDE for awhile when it was non-free, and they replaced Netscape with Mozilla as soon as they could. AFAIK, Netscape was the only non-free component of RedHat from 7.0 or earlier onward.)
My question is, do you feel that part of RedHat's commitment to free software is based on keeping you satisfied working with the company? Does a possibility of losing their biggest-name developer help to keep them from changing their model too drastically?
I use woody on my blueberry ibook, with good results. I'm a little peeved that I'm still running a 2.2.x kernel, though when I tried to compile my own 2.4.x I trashed everything. (Should have used the 2.4.x maintained by the PowerPC Linux porting guys.)
You don't send viruses out to stop hackers. You write a friggin' patch and call it Matrix v1.2. Realistically, the Matrix should be put off line, and fixed.
You've noticed the title of the next movie, right?
That's probably part of the reason, yes. That doesn't necessarily mean the microkernel selection was a bad choice or anything. The question is if the cost in time is made up in gains elsewhere (features, efficiency, maintenance, or something).
Actually, I believe the primary reason a microkernel architecture was chosen for GNU and HURD was because then a normal debugger could be used on the servers that compose the kernel.:)
If the GNU people say that, then why are they building a microkernel-based OS called HURD?
I know the community can't be completely represented with generalizations, but to take myself as an example, I haven't complained about any of the things you've mentioned. My only concern is licensing.
If Aqua's good (and I believe it is), we'll build one.
Something's starting to annoy me. When you submit an article and link to a page on another site, you don't have to put the name of the site in a hyperlink. Nearly every person here knows how to get to the main page for the site if they want to, and usually the main page isn't directly relevant to the story.
Someone may have mentioned this, but you read too much into what they guy said. He basically just said (in the original post) that these stem cells may not provide all the information that embryonic stem cells do. I believe what he was saying was, "Unfortunately, it looks likely that this great discovery is still not the great discovery that will allow us to research stem cells in a way that everyone agrees is right."
Mostly he was just letting us know that we may not have the solution we're looking for, yet. He said it was still important to collect totipotent and pluripotent stem cells, but he did not say whether it was important enough to justify the taking of an unborn human's life. I think he did a good job of acknowledging both sides in making his statement. (He recognizes why it is important to many people to protect the lives of embryos, although he unfortunately may not personally agree with that.)
Before you repond, check my posting history. I'm very definitely on the same side of this as you are. The sides here aren't really us and them, though; it's them and the unborn. We're just tbe people behind the government that's supposed to step in and preserve the rights of the nonaggressive unborn. My main point is that we can't just say, "Well, most of us think embryos aren't people, so let's legalize ending their lives and using them for any purpose." A majority cannot vote to take away the rights of the minority. (Well, as we've seen in history, they can, but I mean it's not right to do it.) You have to prove a murderer guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt before executing him; we should have to prove an embryo to be a non-person beyond a shadow of a doubt before depriving him of his life and other rights of personhood. And there's more than just a shadow of a doubt here!:) The jury is the entire citizenry, and we haven't come to a unanimous verdict. Without a unanimous verdict, there hasn't been due process, and we can't just declare the embryos to be non-people and deprive them of their lives. We have to take the only course of action that guaratees we don't make a mistake and unjustly take a life.
I wanted to wait till I had time to sufficiently comment on this. You've made some great points, and if you'll have the patience to read through this, I'll try to show you more of my point.
Wait long enough. That's exactly the point. The side I'm on says, "Wait." You haven't proved that embryo is not a person. How can you take its life unless you are certain you are not depriving a person of his or her life? You wouldn't drop poison in a water supply hoping you don't kill anyone; you avoid taking the potentially harmful action because it is wrong to put people at risk that way.
Here's two possible facts, with two possible responses on our part, for a total of four hypothetical situations:
Assume an embryo is a person, and assume we grant an embryo the same protections under the law that we grant to all other human beings. If this is the situation, we have taken no wrong actions. (One might say it's wrong to not use the embryo's stem cells to save lives, but we don't find any other case where it's considered wrong to not take a life to cure someone else's problem. I might donate my liver upon my death, but I'd like to keep it while I'm alive, and I'm not a criminal for doing so.)
#2: Assume an embryo is a person and we deny embryos the same protections under the law that we guarantee to other people. In this case we have done something wrong: we are killing people (embryos) without just cause. (In general, it is unjust to act as an aggressor against someone else who has been non-aggressive toward you.)
#3: Assume an embryo is not a person and we do not grant the rights to embryos that we grant to people under the law. In this case we have done nothing wrong because we have not taken the lives of people.
#4: Assume an embryo is not a person, but we grant embryos the rights that people have under the law. In this case, while our decision was groundless, we have done nothing wrong. Even though in this case the embryo is not a person, we are still not taking any lives.
Now, as you said, we cannot prove which of the possible facts is true: the embryo is or is not a person. We cannot control the facts, we can only control our actions. We must choose the action that guarantees we are doing nothing wrong. We must make sure we take no action that might result in the loss of life of a person.
The fact that some people think that an embryo is not a person is not a reason to declare the embryo not to be so. If the embryo is a person, then it is not a dispute between the two sides of this issue; it is a dispute between the defenseless, nonaggressive unborn person and the aggressors who would deprive this person of his life and rights under the law. As long as a chance remains that that embryo is a person, nobody can justly say that the law should not treat the embryo as a person. The majority should not be able to vote rights away from a minority, especially a defenseless and nonaggressive minority.
When we execute a criminal our law insists that the criminal must be proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Well, I say that if we are going to end the life of an embryo, we must prove it to be a non-person beyond a shadow of a doubt. The jury is the entire country, and we have not come to a unanimous verdict declaring the embryo to be a non-person. Thus, there can be no legal authority for depriving that person or possible person of its life.
Phew! Did you read all that? My thanks if you did. I'm not interested in forcing my belief system upon anyone (although as you can see, I sure like talking about it:) ). I am interested in making sure my government guarantees my rights and the rights of all those around me, including those who cannot speak for themselves.
Thanks for the talk. I've been just enraptured the last 24 hours or so as I've seen so many intelligent, civil discussions in this thread between people on both sides. Of course, I browse at 4+, so there's probably some less civil stuff down there I missed!:) Thanks for helping to keep it nice.
A great link someone else gave out was Libertarians for Life, which made an entirely non-religious case for protecting the unborn, much as I hope I have done here. I found the site echoed a lot of my thinking about how the law should work on this issue. I am not interested in using the government to force my beliefs on people, so my opinion on the legality of taking an embryo's life is not directly based on my religious beliefs. There are plenty of things I think are wrong that I would never ask the government to outlaw. In a nutshell my legal stance is based only on my belief of what a government should do, which is, that it should guarantee my rights extend as far as possible but stop at you.
There's a chance you might not agree with me, but I'll tell you what's in my mind so you can understand my thinking about this issue. I believe that throwing embryos away is murder. I recognize that that brings up a lot of unanswerable questions, such as, "What are we supposed to do with all those embryos? It would be impossible to bring all of them to maturity and have them born!" I have no answer for this, or probably any other questions this line of thinking brings up. I can only tell you how I see it at the moment.
All of my beliefs on this subject stem from my acceptance of an embryo as a human being. That is based on the embryos genetic identity as a human being. I am addressing how we should construct our laws as an honorable people, not religious questions of how should we live to please God and so on. Someone else on this thread posted a great link yesterday that makes an entirely non-religious case for accepting embryos as persons before the law, Libertarians for Life. I read parts of it today and found that it said a lot of things I already believed.
There are a lot of hard questions about this. The fact that we cannot answer all of these questions, or that some of the answers may be unpleasant, should not guide us as we make decisions that are right for everyone. I ask that we prove the embryo to not be a person beyond a shadow of a doubt before we deprive him of his rights before the law.
The violence at the end was rather strong. Personally I don't mind the violence as much as other reasons movies get strong ratings, but it might be a little much for a 4 year old.
Language was mostly okay. I didn't enjoy Peter's uncle using the word "ass"; I picture Ben Parker as a better man than that. As mentioned, Mary Jane shows quite a bit, but mostly just in that one scene.
I was going to paste that same quote in and substitute "Windows" for "Flash." It would be nice if Microsoft had to follow the same laws everyone else did, but in the end, I want free software to win on merits.
If they're already dead, no problem. Bush made that legal, remember. It's the living ones we want to protect.
I know, you were trying to contend that all the embryoes are basically already dead, but there is some disagreement on that. We insist on proving guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt before carrying out capital punishment on a murderer. Why shouldn't we insist on proving an embryo is not a human being beyond a shadow of a doubt before killing him or her? There is far more than just a shadow of doubt here.
It doesn't matter if you think rape or murder should be allowed. As long as a significant number of people consider an embryo to be a human being, you should consider becoming willing to step back and let that doubt guide our laws for the time being.
Awesome; thank you for sharing your unique viewpoint. I'm borderline libertarian, believe it or not. (Particularly on economic issues.) It's true that few people can be "pigeonholed" into convenient categories.
I'm afraid I don't know where the source for that figure is. I haven't heard it before.
While my overriding influences are religious, I think you'll find from the other comments I made today in this article that I advocate (mostly) secular reasons for protecting embryos. I believe the religion of the Bible has no effect if coerced, so I don't expect to use the government to enforce my religion on other people. On the other hand it just seems natural to me that one of the government's main roles is to protect us from each other -- and I include the unborn in that protection.
If your figure is true, it sounds like there is still a lot of good common ground to unite the American people on.
If the egg is never fertilized, we're okay. But then, you don't have an embryo, you have an egg.
I'm sure different people's opinions vary, and this is still rather vague, but where I draw the line is how many cromosomes does it have, and is it genetically a human being.
Of course, if you rip out the contents of an egg and put a cloned person in there, you're not really talking about an unfertilized egg anymore. Kind of like people born by C-section: were they really born?
Slashdot Mirror
They do this on slashdot all the time. I kept the original article on slashdot about the September 11 attacks up for a few days because it had changed so much. The original seemed to express more shock than the final version.
I wish it could do something for my grandfather's macular degeneration, but I have a feeling a bionic cure for that problem is going to be too far in the future to help.
Have you seen GNU Octave? It's not as featureful as the absolute latest version of Matlab, but it was more than sufficient for me for my neural networks class. In fact, I used it last night on my final exam.
If you know Perl (or want to learn), another alternative is the Perl PDL Perl Data Language module. I used that for a semester project, and it worked great.
I used Octave all semester for my neural networks class and did fine. Of course, when it came time to write my semester project, I chose to do it in Perl with PDL (Perl Data Language). My professor's response was, "There's no accounting for taste." :)
Oh, and I did all this on a blueberry ibook with Debian Linux.
I highly recommend the Personal Software Process from the Software Engineering Institute at CMU. PSP focuses on how you can improve your own process, which is fundamental no matter how many people you work with. I've been reading the two PSP intro books (one aimed at introductory programming students, one aimed at professionals) this year and have gotten a lot out of it. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of this implemented a little later this year. I don't work alone, but it's very close as we have very few people and projects rarely require more than one person.
Don't confuse PSP with the TSP also described on the site. TSP is aimed at teams. (And in some people's minds, PSP appears to exist only to support TSP.)
I had a professor named Piotr Gmytrasiewicz who once told us about research he was doing on this subject. It was always neat to be able to make statements like, "Emotions can be represented as an ordered quintuple."
Piotr's gone on to another university up north, according to my last web search.
I'd love to be sponsored on such a project. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone interested would want to pay my rates. Plus, once I was done, I'm not sure I could get my day job back. :)
But it's fun to dream. I've always wanted to try my hand at an emulator.
First, they tell us TLGAD before the show airs on the west coast, and then they tell us Scotty is comatose and not likely to recover, while the man is still conscious!
The Mac world had the same problem with the shift from System 6 to System 7. I was a die-hard System 6 user. As far as I'm concerned, it still represents the peak of the Classic Mac experience.
The initial System 7 was buggy and made some fundamental changes. Most of those changes were good, although about half of them took awhile to convince everyone. System 7 eventually stabilized and the last die-hards migrated. I lived. :) MacOS 8 and 9 made a lot of great innovations, but didn't change anything fundamentally with what System 7 was doing, and so there wasn't near as much of a shakeup with upgrades until OS X, which again is making fundamental changes.
The guy who runs apple.slashdot.org, pudge, aka Chris Nandor, is a die-hard OS9 user. I'm sure he'll continue to dredge up some stories involving it.
Pudge is a primary contributor to slash code, and an employee of OSDN. He runs use Perl;, a slash-based Perl discussion site, is the primary maintainer for MacPerl (perl for pre-OSX Macs) and develops slash code on Mac OS 9 with MacPerl. (!)
I admire your firm convictions and the stands you take on various issues. I also admire RedHat's stand on shipping (almost) exclusively free software. (For example, I think they didn't ship KDE for awhile when it was non-free, and they replaced Netscape with Mozilla as soon as they could. AFAIK, Netscape was the only non-free component of RedHat from 7.0 or earlier onward.)
My question is, do you feel that part of RedHat's commitment to free software is based on keeping you satisfied working with the company? Does a possibility of losing their biggest-name developer help to keep them from changing their model too drastically?
I use woody on my blueberry ibook, with good results. I'm a little peeved that I'm still running a 2.2.x kernel, though when I tried to compile my own 2.4.x I trashed everything. (Should have used the 2.4.x maintained by the PowerPC Linux porting guys.)
You don't send viruses out to stop hackers. You write a friggin' patch and call it Matrix v1.2. Realistically, the Matrix should be put off line, and fixed.
You've noticed the title of the next movie, right?
That's probably part of the reason, yes. That doesn't necessarily mean the microkernel selection was a bad choice or anything. The question is if the cost in time is made up in gains elsewhere (features, efficiency, maintenance, or something).
Actually, I believe the primary reason a microkernel architecture was chosen for GNU and HURD was because then a normal debugger could be used on the servers that compose the kernel. :)
Microkernels are so slooow.
If the GNU people say that, then why are they building a microkernel-based OS called HURD?
I know the community can't be completely represented with generalizations, but to take myself as an example, I haven't complained about any of the things you've mentioned. My only concern is licensing.
If Aqua's good (and I believe it is), we'll build one.
Something's starting to annoy me. When you submit an article and link to a page on another site, you don't have to put the name of the site in a hyperlink. Nearly every person here knows how to get to the main page for the site if they want to, and usually the main page isn't directly relevant to the story.
Sometimes it seems like people link for every word in the article and it's hard to figure out which link is the one with the story.
Drat, drat, drat, and double drat! I knew I was making a mistake when we left before they were over. It goes against my nature!
Speaking of which, did you hang around until the end of the Phantom Menace credits?
Someone may have mentioned this, but you read too much into what they guy said. He basically just said (in the original post) that these stem cells may not provide all the information that embryonic stem cells do. I believe what he was saying was, "Unfortunately, it looks likely that this great discovery is still not the great discovery that will allow us to research stem cells in a way that everyone agrees is right."
Mostly he was just letting us know that we may not have the solution we're looking for, yet. He said it was still important to collect totipotent and pluripotent stem cells, but he did not say whether it was important enough to justify the taking of an unborn human's life. I think he did a good job of acknowledging both sides in making his statement. (He recognizes why it is important to many people to protect the lives of embryos, although he unfortunately may not personally agree with that.)
Before you repond, check my posting history. I'm very definitely on the same side of this as you are. The sides here aren't really us and them, though; it's them and the unborn. We're just tbe people behind the government that's supposed to step in and preserve the rights of the nonaggressive unborn. My main point is that we can't just say, "Well, most of us think embryos aren't people, so let's legalize ending their lives and using them for any purpose." A majority cannot vote to take away the rights of the minority. (Well, as we've seen in history, they can, but I mean it's not right to do it.) You have to prove a murderer guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt before executing him; we should have to prove an embryo to be a non-person beyond a shadow of a doubt before depriving him of his life and other rights of personhood. And there's more than just a shadow of a doubt here! :) The jury is the entire citizenry, and we haven't come to a unanimous verdict. Without a unanimous verdict, there hasn't been due process, and we can't just declare the embryos to be non-people and deprive them of their lives. We have to take the only course of action that guaratees we don't make a mistake and unjustly take a life.
I wanted to wait till I had time to sufficiently comment on this. You've made some great points, and if you'll have the patience to read through this, I'll try to show you more of my point.
Wait long enough. That's exactly the point. The side I'm on says, "Wait." You haven't proved that embryo is not a person. How can you take its life unless you are certain you are not depriving a person of his or her life? You wouldn't drop poison in a water supply hoping you don't kill anyone; you avoid taking the potentially harmful action because it is wrong to put people at risk that way.
Here's two possible facts, with two possible responses on our part, for a total of four hypothetical situations:
Assume an embryo is a person, and assume we grant an embryo the same protections under the law that we grant to all other human beings. If this is the situation, we have taken no wrong actions. (One might say it's wrong to not use the embryo's stem cells to save lives, but we don't find any other case where it's considered wrong to not take a life to cure someone else's problem. I might donate my liver upon my death, but I'd like to keep it while I'm alive, and I'm not a criminal for doing so.)
#2: Assume an embryo is a person and we deny embryos the same protections under the law that we guarantee to other people. In this case we have done something wrong: we are killing people (embryos) without just cause. (In general, it is unjust to act as an aggressor against someone else who has been non-aggressive toward you.)
#3: Assume an embryo is not a person and we do not grant the rights to embryos that we grant to people under the law. In this case we have done nothing wrong because we have not taken the lives of people.
#4: Assume an embryo is not a person, but we grant embryos the rights that people have under the law. In this case, while our decision was groundless, we have done nothing wrong. Even though in this case the embryo is not a person, we are still not taking any lives.
Now, as you said, we cannot prove which of the possible facts is true: the embryo is or is not a person. We cannot control the facts, we can only control our actions. We must choose the action that guarantees we are doing nothing wrong. We must make sure we take no action that might result in the loss of life of a person.
The fact that some people think that an embryo is not a person is not a reason to declare the embryo not to be so. If the embryo is a person, then it is not a dispute between the two sides of this issue; it is a dispute between the defenseless, nonaggressive unborn person and the aggressors who would deprive this person of his life and rights under the law. As long as a chance remains that that embryo is a person, nobody can justly say that the law should not treat the embryo as a person. The majority should not be able to vote rights away from a minority, especially a defenseless and nonaggressive minority.
When we execute a criminal our law insists that the criminal must be proved guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Well, I say that if we are going to end the life of an embryo, we must prove it to be a non-person beyond a shadow of a doubt. The jury is the entire country, and we have not come to a unanimous verdict declaring the embryo to be a non-person. Thus, there can be no legal authority for depriving that person or possible person of its life.
Phew! Did you read all that? My thanks if you did. I'm not interested in forcing my belief system upon anyone (although as you can see, I sure like talking about it :) ). I am interested in making sure my government guarantees my rights and the rights of all those around me, including those who cannot speak for themselves.
Thanks for the talk. I've been just enraptured the last 24 hours or so as I've seen so many intelligent, civil discussions in this thread between people on both sides. Of course, I browse at 4+, so there's probably some less civil stuff down there I missed! :) Thanks for helping to keep it nice.
A great link someone else gave out was Libertarians for Life, which made an entirely non-religious case for protecting the unborn, much as I hope I have done here. I found the site echoed a lot of my thinking about how the law should work on this issue. I am not interested in using the government to force my beliefs on people, so my opinion on the legality of taking an embryo's life is not directly based on my religious beliefs. There are plenty of things I think are wrong that I would never ask the government to outlaw. In a nutshell my legal stance is based only on my belief of what a government should do, which is, that it should guarantee my rights extend as far as possible but stop at you.
There's a chance you might not agree with me, but I'll tell you what's in my mind so you can understand my thinking about this issue. I believe that throwing embryos away is murder. I recognize that that brings up a lot of unanswerable questions, such as, "What are we supposed to do with all those embryos? It would be impossible to bring all of them to maturity and have them born!" I have no answer for this, or probably any other questions this line of thinking brings up. I can only tell you how I see it at the moment.
All of my beliefs on this subject stem from my acceptance of an embryo as a human being. That is based on the embryos genetic identity as a human being. I am addressing how we should construct our laws as an honorable people, not religious questions of how should we live to please God and so on. Someone else on this thread posted a great link yesterday that makes an entirely non-religious case for accepting embryos as persons before the law, Libertarians for Life. I read parts of it today and found that it said a lot of things I already believed.
There are a lot of hard questions about this. The fact that we cannot answer all of these questions, or that some of the answers may be unpleasant, should not guide us as we make decisions that are right for everyone. I ask that we prove the embryo to not be a person beyond a shadow of a doubt before we deprive him of his rights before the law.
The violence at the end was rather strong. Personally I don't mind the violence as much as other reasons movies get strong ratings, but it might be a little much for a 4 year old.
Language was mostly okay. I didn't enjoy Peter's uncle using the word "ass"; I picture Ben Parker as a better man than that. As mentioned, Mary Jane shows quite a bit, but mostly just in that one scene.
I was going to paste that same quote in and substitute "Windows" for "Flash." It would be nice if Microsoft had to follow the same laws everyone else did, but in the end, I want free software to win on merits.
already-dead blob of cells
If they're already dead, no problem. Bush made that legal, remember. It's the living ones we want to protect.
I know, you were trying to contend that all the embryoes are basically already dead, but there is some disagreement on that. We insist on proving guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt before carrying out capital punishment on a murderer. Why shouldn't we insist on proving an embryo is not a human being beyond a shadow of a doubt before killing him or her? There is far more than just a shadow of doubt here.
It doesn't matter if you think rape or murder should be allowed. As long as a significant number of people consider an embryo to be a human being, you should consider becoming willing to step back and let that doubt guide our laws for the time being.
Awesome; thank you for sharing your unique viewpoint. I'm borderline libertarian, believe it or not. (Particularly on economic issues.) It's true that few people can be "pigeonholed" into convenient categories.
I'm afraid I don't know where the source for that figure is. I haven't heard it before.
While my overriding influences are religious, I think you'll find from the other comments I made today in this article that I advocate (mostly) secular reasons for protecting embryos. I believe the religion of the Bible has no effect if coerced, so I don't expect to use the government to enforce my religion on other people. On the other hand it just seems natural to me that one of the government's main roles is to protect us from each other -- and I include the unborn in that protection.
If your figure is true, it sounds like there is still a lot of good common ground to unite the American people on.
If the egg is never fertilized, we're okay. But then, you don't have an embryo, you have an egg.
I'm sure different people's opinions vary, and this is still rather vague, but where I draw the line is how many cromosomes does it have, and is it genetically a human being.
Of course, if you rip out the contents of an egg and put a cloned person in there, you're not really talking about an unfertilized egg anymore. Kind of like people born by C-section: were they really born?