that after this film is released, no longer will we say that a creatively-bankrupt television or film series desperately atempting to salvage it's prestige with showy one-upmanship has "jumped the shark".
Why couldn't I say 11 9/16ths inches? 16ths are actualy more accurate than tenths. And yes, you can say that you can just to go hundredths, but you cant really eyeball hundredths, you can eyeball 16ths.
And if we divided centimetres into 16ths, I would agree with you.
Problem is, 1" = 2.54cm, so 1/16" is still bigger than 0.1cm (1mm) (1/16" = 1.58mm). Where exactly is the 'eyeballing' advantage?
The smallest units on my steel ruler are 0.5mm, which you can eyeball - using the logic above, these are still finer resolution than 1/32".
Now, if you're gonna tell me that you can eyeball 1/64", then you've got better eyesight than me.
How does Australia fit into it? We didn't formally adopt metric standards until about the same time as we adopted decimalised currency (late 1960's). Australia suffered very little wartime destruction of infrastructure. Post-WWII, we also moved into manufacturing (before and during the war, we were mostly primary production, with some manufacturing), building cars and such. Yet still, we didn't begin to formally implement metric until the late 1960's.
Within a decade, it was basically done - Australia was a metricated nation. Why? Because we had leaders who recognised the value of the metric system, and had the political will to make it happen - they laid down the law: "You will be metric, or else we'll send the boys round..." We had the same trading partners as the US, only we weren't in a position to be hard-assed about doing things 'our way' - our economy wasn't and isn't anything like the size of the US's.
Our trading partners were metric, so we accepted that we would benefit from being like them. The US being as economically powerful as it, it could afford to thumb their nose at the standards of others, and still does today.
I still regard this as the best explanation of the US reticence to adopt these standards across the board, though I think you make some excellent points. I certainly don't think my argument invalidates yours, but I think my points are worth reconciling.
I'm sure he's not an idiot - he'd probably sample the sound at an appropriate level of compression (which includes none at all), taking into account the age of the soundtrack and consequently the signal-to-noise ratio.
You say MS doesn't care about the ethical component, as if they're violating some trust. A corporation is by its nature amoral. It is supposed to be. Its one and only responsibility is to maximize value to shareholders.
Wrong. I'll repost someone else's evidence from lower down the page...
When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined corporations through charters -- the certificates of incorporation.
In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter. [www.ratical.org]
Corporations have an obligation to obey the law, to serve the common good, and do no harm. What they get in exchange for this is limited liability - what we get is honest moral companies, at least in principle.
If they violate their end of the bargain (which is far more than simply providing value for shareholders), I see no reason why we as a community should continue to extend to them the very great gift of limited liability. Every board member, every decision-maker, every shareholder should be held personally and financially responsible for their share of the damage once the decision to revoke a corporate charter has been taken.
April 1st was yesterday here in Australia, so I didn't immediately make the connection, but I spotted immediately how ludicrously fake that picture was.
Apple Cinema Display casing, eMac speakers, iSight camera, and G4 power button knocked together to look like a pretty lame tablet.
Tom Baker also played the doctor for the longest period from 1974 to 1981. Most of the others did a stretch of about 3-4 years.
If you want to be really anal, technically Sylvester McCoy is the longest serving Doctor, from 1987 to the TV movie in 1996. If Paul McGann films a regeneration scene, that should make him equal first, from 1996 to 2005.
Tom Baker is, of course, the longest continually-serving Doctor.
or me, the fabulous job by Paul McGann made up for it all.
Ahh well, least we got a Flash Movie with his voice that was pretty good.
I'm pretty sure that it was Richard E. Grant who did the voice in the 40th Anniversary Flash movie - there may well have been another animation I missed, of course.
Just a piece of trivia about Christopher Eccleston - he'll be the first actor to portray the Doctor born after the show commenced in November 1963.
Here in Australia, if you purchase property, that property is yours until you legally dispose of it. If someone steals it from you, and a person purchases those goods from the thief (or even further down the chain), you can seize those goods back without paying a penny, even if the purchaser bought them in good faith.
If you receive stolen goods unknowingly, you won't be charged, but there is no obligation for anyone to compensate you for those goods once they are returned to their rightful owner - legally, they were never yours to start with, so if you paid money for something from someone who had no right to dispose of it, tough shit.
I thought this was a feature of English common law that both we and the US inherited. This whole situation just seems insane to me. What is the legal position on this?
As much as I think that Neistat has been a bit of a jerk about the whole thing, he does at least now have the following on ipodsdirtysecret.com:
"After we finished production of the film, but not necessarily in response to it, Apple began offerring a battery replacement program for the ipod for a fee of $99 and an extended warranty for the ipod for $59.
We think Apple's new policy is fair. Our movie is a documentation of our experience."
Now all he would need to do is put this on the front page of his site, and not on a "More About iPod's Dirty Secret" link.
You bought a Mac, which also happened to come with a free included copy of iPhoto. The Mac would have cost the same if iPhoto hadn't been there. The iLife suite is something that Apple has, until now, very nicely, given away free (except iDVD) to all whether they were buying a new computer or already had a Mac.
I use a Mac, and my first reaction was to be peeved at having to buy any new version of the iLife apps I use. Almost immediately, however I realised a number of things.
1) My reaction was that of a spoiled child, who, accustomed to getting great things for free, is suddenly expected to pay for them.
2) US$49/AUS$79 isn't a bad price considering what you get, even if you don't use all the apps (I can't use iDVD, for instance).
Simple because a piece of free software doesn't work the way you expected it to work, shouldn't mean you get to gripe about having to shell out a fairly modest sum to get an improved version.
I don't want to sound like an Apple apologist - not everything they do is great, and I'd be the first to admit that I'd love to be able to keep getting these apps for free - but treating this like "paying $50 for a bug-fix" is a pretty glass-half-empty way of looking at this.
US$49 really *isn't* a bad price for what you get. If only other software vendors were so reasonable.
Nope, most people don't...
on
Upgrade Your eMac
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· Score: 3, Informative
This all goes back to the original Macintosh and Jobs thinking it was a piece of artwork that shouldn't be tampered with. Most people want a computer they can improve, much like people that mod and tune their cars.
I used to sell Macs, and I can tell you this: people who buy eMacs are generally not these sort of people. They might add some extra RAM (which they can do easily), but that's it. If you want an upgradeable machine, buy a G5. eMacs are there for people who want something that will work out of the box, and don't want to take up space with room (or money) for upgrading they will never use. I use an eMac myself for this very reason: cheap, relatively small footprint, and will do what I need for a few years yet.
I've lost track of the number of people I know with Windows towers that still have the exact same amount of empty space in them as the day they bought them, and they will stay that way until the day they are disposed of. They bought them, having been sold the "Well, you might want to upgrade..." line, but never do. Consequently, they end up with a computer that takes up 3 times more deskspace than it needs to, filled with expensive empty space (the hardware for those expansion slots isn't free).
Most people are not l33t b0xen hax0r5. Don't knock the all-in-ones; they fill an important computing niche.
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Was there any evidence then of the concomitant habitat loss that we see now? It says it right there in the abstract of the story: "Many of the unlucky species are being caught between the hammer of global warming and the anvil of habitation destruction."
The two events you quoted were less likely to produce extinctions, since at least then the animals could migrate to available suitable habitats that were appropriately warmer/cooler. The situation now is very different, with far fewer suitable habitats remaining. Habitat loss is in fact one of the biggest factors thratening species and precipitating extinctions - global climate change just makes it worse.
Basically, you overlooked the fact that the extinctions being discussed are not merely a function of global weather changes, but also a function of the razing of appropriate habitats to suit human needs. The two together could well produce the outcome being discussed.
So what's different about embryos/clones? In my opinion there is no difference - they're simply another group of powerless humans that can be exploited.
To clarify, the embryos that are being discussed in relation to this issue are, I believe, all less than 14 days old. The embryos in question are a tiny cluster of a few dozen (or hundred) cells smaller that a pinhead. I think that it's fair to say that such a cell cluster posesses no fundamental quality of human-ness, beyond the merely genetic. Since we regularly dispose of other viable human genetic material in greater quantity (e.g blood, semen, etc), it is, from my viewpoint at least, hard to argue that these stem cells are somehow more morally considerable.
However at some point the embryo becomes a human. No argument there I assume. [snip] When does that vital spark appear ?
The bottom line is, no-one knows. [snip] Therefore the only safe assumption is to assume that it's from the moment of conception.
We have a sense of those qualities of human-ness we value. There is, for one, the human cognitive state that we value above that of other lifeforms. Human foetuses do not generally display uniquely human brainwave patterns until approximately the end of the second trimester (by lucky hap, also the point at which Roe vs. Wade determined that abortion on demand becomes unavailable). Before the end of the second trimester they certainly look human, but then again so do corpses.
I think you have emotionally loaded your argument using terms like 'human being' and 'baby'. I reiterate that the cell clusters we are discussing have no remotely 'human' quality to them - they do not look human, they are not conscious or aware in any meaningful way. All they have is potential, in the same way that an unfertilised egg and a sperm cell do. Simply because we can not say with mathematical certainty the precise instant that a developing embryo/foetus becomes 'human' in a significant way, does not mean that we should rereat right back into "it's human at conception" - common sense tells us, when we look at a 14-day old embryo, that this clump of cells is not significantly human.
I'm going to anticipate the "it's a potential human!" argument now. In the same way that you would not permit a first year medical student (i.e. potential surgeon) to perform complex neurosurgery on you, neither should a potential human (which is what these embryos are) be regarded as an actual human.
In closing, I consider that the needs of actual realised humans are far more morally considerable than the needs of potential humans. If real, live, talking, breathing humans can possibly be helped by this technology, then I think our humanism demands that we make the attempt.
Anonymous voting in Australia...
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Cringley on E-voting
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· Score: 2, Informative
Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in when everyone was watching. I forget the country, but I'm sure there is a record somewhere because of how close the election was. Those two votes were counted in the Clinton column. So the public knows that this husband and wife, who were the only two absentee votes coming from that country, voted for Clinton. And if you watched the votes for other offices as the vote was registered (I didn't), you would have been able to ascertain who they cast their vote for other offices, such as Senator, etc.
See, now this kind of creeps me out. Here in Australia, when you send in an absentee vote, you have 2 envelopes. You put your vote (or votes, if you're electing for more than one House) into the first envelope. The only info on this envelope is your constituency(ies). You then place this envelope into another envelope that has your indentifying info so you can be marked off the electoral roll, and send it in.
The person who opens the outer envelope has absolutely nothing to do with the person who opens the second envelope. The first 'opener' just chucks the inner envelope into a big pile and marks your name off the roll. The box with all these non-identifiable envelopes then gets carted off to the tally room, to be opened and counted by someone who has no idea who cast your vote.
I might add that here in Australia, we have preferential voting (rather than first-past-the-post), we still use paper ballots, mark our vote in pencil, which is then counted by hand, and can still produce a reliable result by election night. It's virtually immune from many of the technical problems relating to power supply, data transfer, auditing, etc. that have been discussed in this thread, and it still works reliably and well. It might cost a little more to run over time (though not much more, by the sounds of it), but nobody ever said democracy was supposed to be cheap.
Plenty of big iron boxes like Crays and IBM are obviously more powerful machines. The ad contains a blatently FALSE sataement.
Apple never claimed the G5 to be the most powerful computer, they claimed it to be the most powerful personal computer, which is a big difference.
It also seem that the only way they managed to squash the "Fastest PC" claim was by comparing it to workstations, not equivalent out-of-the-box PCs. Just like you did.
This may be a little OT, but I'm seeing the Taxonomy Kings (and I speak as one myself, who has basically had to learn to get over it for the most part) going off about the difference between hackers and crackers.
Words are not defined by fiat, they are defined by usage. Also, different words have different meanings to different audiences in different contexts ("Fish" means very different things to an oceanographer and a chef; for a chef, it includes shellfish and crustaceans, for instance). I realise it can make debate difficult when the meaning of terms is not correctly understood, and needs to be precise, but sometimes you just need to let go and realise that a word is irrevocably lost to your ability to control its meaning. Even precise technical terms suffer shifts in meaning over time, and adjustments need to be made.
Since ordinary people have a clear idea of what is meant by hacker, and you clearly knew what was meant by it, since you all protested against it, maybe we should accept that the meaning of the word in common parlance has changed from what some nerd said it was 20 years ago.
Perhaps we should take the advice of the much quoted Mr. Montoya - "You keep-a using that word - I do not-a think it-a means what-a you think it means"
Political, because people are scared of nuclear energy. They get scared when a proposal for nuclear power comes to town. Never mind that coal, oil and natural gas power facilities have killed 10 to 100 times the people that nuclear power plants would ever kill. People don't protest coal plants the same way, they don't know the 'coal' symbol like they know the nuclear fallout symbol. There are no 'coal' weapons that obliterate people.
And it many ways, that fear is not unreasonable. Remember, when nuclear facilities/devices fail, they fail catastrophically, and it is a big fat mess. Coal and petroleum/gasoline facilities and devices are far easier to keep safe, and far less catastrophic when they do fail. Whatever the long term/short term benefit ratio is, people will, quite naturally, shy away from catastrophe.
A very good example of this is that way more people die in a year in the US from the flu than died in 9/11, but 9/11 was a catastrophe, so consequently attracts far more attention and government money than the humble flu, which is far more damaging in human terms. Go figure.
The inefficiency isn't in automobiles, as they are something like 30-50% efficient at retrieving the chemical-bond energy from gasoline.
That may well be the case, but how much of that is actually used to provide motive energy for the car and passenger? I understand that the estimates are that only about 20% of the energy in gasoline/petroleum provides motive power for the vehicle, the rest is lost as heat or unburnt fuel. Of that 20%, about 95% is used to move the car itself. So out of your original fuel load, only about 1% of its energy is used to actually move the car's passenger/s, which is the whole point of the automobile.
When you consider that the beige G3s are now around 5 years old, I don't actually think it's too bad that Apple are only now withdrawing support from a current operating system. It may not be unreasonable to expect that current or near-current G3 models would be supported for a similar timeframe.
Why would you want to try and run Panther on a 233-300 Mhz G3 machine anyway? I can't imagine the performance issues on that slow a processor would be worth it.
This same logic applies to the relationship between paper and trees. If we stopped making paper from trees, there would be fewer trees. Eighty-seven percent of the trees that are used for manufacturing paper are planted for that purpose. That implies that for every 13 trees "saved" by paper recycling, there will be 87 that never get planted. This is why, contrary to popular belief, both the amount of forest land and the number of trees in this country have been increasing for the last 50 years. Increased demand for paper has led to more, not fewer, trees.
Let's just examine their not-so-veiled assumption here: that Trees Are Good, Regardless. To some extent, trees are indeed good, but so is variety. Increasingly, when looking at plantation timber, you are looking at a plant monoculture. For example, here in Australia a huge percentage of our plantation timber is Pinus Radiata. I shudder to think of how many native varieties, or other valuable timbers (or indeed other kinds of plants and animals) have been displaced in order that we should have thousands of hectares of one non-native species of tree, because it grows easily, fairly quickly and is easy to harvest.
The quoted paragraph above made me immediately suspicious of the credentials of the organisation in question. Trees are good, but not when they are all the same Tree, a point carefully glossed over in the article.
If a mattress manufacturer developed a new very very soft matress and called themselves Micro-Soft Matresses they wouldn't get away with it.
IANAL, but some of the business-related law study I have done suggests that they would be able to get away with it.
In Australia, trademarks only apply within the industry in which they are registered; this is why Apple Computer could not challenge the validity of the trademarking of Apple International Motor Inn (as mentioned in the story) -- the rationale is that they are not competitors, and so their respective trademarks serve different markets and are not likely to cause conflict or confusion. So, a mattress manufacturer could register a trademark for Micro-Soft mattresses and reasonably and legally resist a challenge from The Beast.
In the case of Apple Communications vs. Apple Computers though, I would think that the potential for conflict was very clear (since they are operating in very closely related industries, at least in most people's minds) so trademarks would kick in at that point.
I block ads. I block them because, almost univerally, they are ads for products or services only available to people in North America (since, naturally, this is where the majority of the sites' audience is held to be). There seems little point me wasting my bandwidth here in Australia to view ads for things I couldn't purchase even if I wanted to.
They do make mention on their site of also blocking access to sites to users in countries outside of their target advertising zone:
With help (sic) of Anti-Theft you can also block visitors coming from certain countries from accessing your website, which can also be useful if you earn money from targeted advertising to a specific country.
Now, leaving aside for the moment arguments about thievery and technology propping up flawed business models, why can't they just label me as 'dirty foreigner' rather than 'dirty thief' when I visit their site, since they clearly have the technology to do so. Their advertising would be irrelevant to me anyway, so why should they bother serving their data to someone who cannot purchase the baubles they hock?
And also, if the service they offer is so valuable (also, apparently, not just to North Americans), why are they not offering it on a subscription model, rather than free supported by ads?
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
All of what you've said is true, but let's not forget one other very salient point: The Miller-Urey experiment took place over a period of days (or weeks; I forget which). The evolution of self-replicating RNA and DNA took place over a period of about 100 million years.
Let's not cane too hard on these experiments, simply because they couldn't reproduce in a few days what it took nature a hundred million years to do .
Slashdot Mirror
that after this film is released, no longer will we say that a creatively-bankrupt television or film series desperately atempting to salvage it's prestige with showy one-upmanship has "jumped the shark".
We will say that it has "surfed the lava".
Why couldn't I say 11 9/16ths inches? 16ths are actualy more accurate than tenths. And yes, you can say that you can just to go hundredths, but you cant really eyeball hundredths, you can eyeball 16ths.
And if we divided centimetres into 16ths, I would agree with you.
Problem is, 1" = 2.54cm, so 1/16" is still bigger than 0.1cm (1mm) (1/16" = 1.58mm). Where exactly is the 'eyeballing' advantage?
The smallest units on my steel ruler are 0.5mm, which you can eyeball - using the logic above, these are still finer resolution than 1/32".
Now, if you're gonna tell me that you can eyeball 1/64", then you've got better eyesight than me.
How does Australia fit into it? We didn't formally adopt metric standards until about the same time as we adopted decimalised currency (late 1960's). Australia suffered very little wartime destruction of infrastructure. Post-WWII, we also moved into manufacturing (before and during the war, we were mostly primary production, with some manufacturing), building cars and such. Yet still, we didn't begin to formally implement metric until the late 1960's.
Within a decade, it was basically done - Australia was a metricated nation. Why? Because we had leaders who recognised the value of the metric system, and had the political will to make it happen - they laid down the law: "You will be metric, or else we'll send the boys round..." We had the same trading partners as the US, only we weren't in a position to be hard-assed about doing things 'our way' - our economy wasn't and isn't anything like the size of the US's.
Our trading partners were metric, so we accepted that we would benefit from being like them. The US being as economically powerful as it, it could afford to thumb their nose at the standards of others, and still does today.
I still regard this as the best explanation of the US reticence to adopt these standards across the board, though I think you make some excellent points. I certainly don't think my argument invalidates yours, but I think my points are worth reconciling.
I'm sure he's not an idiot - he'd probably sample the sound at an appropriate level of compression (which includes none at all), taking into account the age of the soundtrack and consequently the signal-to-noise ratio.
Wrong. I'll repost someone else's evidence from lower down the page...
Corporations have an obligation to obey the law, to serve the common good, and do no harm. What they get in exchange for this is limited liability - what we get is honest moral companies, at least in principle.
If they violate their end of the bargain (which is far more than simply providing value for shareholders), I see no reason why we as a community should continue to extend to them the very great gift of limited liability. Every board member, every decision-maker, every shareholder should be held personally and financially responsible for their share of the damage once the decision to revoke a corporate charter has been taken.
April 1st was yesterday here in Australia, so I didn't immediately make the connection, but I spotted immediately how ludicrously fake that picture was.
Apple Cinema Display casing, eMac speakers, iSight camera, and G4 power button knocked together to look like a pretty lame tablet.
Tom Baker also played the doctor for the longest period from 1974 to 1981. Most of the others did a stretch of about 3-4 years.
If you want to be really anal, technically Sylvester McCoy is the longest serving Doctor, from 1987 to the TV movie in 1996. If Paul McGann films a regeneration scene, that should make him equal first, from 1996 to 2005.
Tom Baker is, of course, the longest continually-serving Doctor.
or me, the fabulous job by Paul McGann made up for it all.
Ahh well, least we got a Flash Movie with his voice that was pretty good.
I'm pretty sure that it was Richard E. Grant who did the voice in the 40th Anniversary Flash movie - there may well have been another animation I missed, of course.
Just a piece of trivia about Christopher Eccleston - he'll be the first actor to portray the Doctor born after the show commenced in November 1963.
Here in Australia, if you purchase property, that property is yours until you legally dispose of it. If someone steals it from you, and a person purchases those goods from the thief (or even further down the chain), you can seize those goods back without paying a penny, even if the purchaser bought them in good faith.
If you receive stolen goods unknowingly, you won't be charged, but there is no obligation for anyone to compensate you for those goods once they are returned to their rightful owner - legally, they were never yours to start with, so if you paid money for something from someone who had no right to dispose of it, tough shit.
I thought this was a feature of English common law that both we and the US inherited. This whole situation just seems insane to me. What is the legal position on this?
Now all he would need to do is put this on the front page of his site, and not on a "More About iPod's Dirty Secret" link.
Frankly, the current government has few qualms about ignoring international treaties when it suits their interests to do so...
You bought a Mac, which also happened to come with a free included copy of iPhoto. The Mac would have cost the same if iPhoto hadn't been there. The iLife suite is something that Apple has, until now, very nicely, given away free (except iDVD) to all whether they were buying a new computer or already had a Mac.
I use a Mac, and my first reaction was to be peeved at having to buy any new version of the iLife apps I use. Almost immediately, however I realised a number of things.
1) My reaction was that of a spoiled child, who, accustomed to getting great things for free, is suddenly expected to pay for them.
2) US$49/AUS$79 isn't a bad price considering what you get, even if you don't use all the apps (I can't use iDVD, for instance).
Simple because a piece of free software doesn't work the way you expected it to work, shouldn't mean you get to gripe about having to shell out a fairly modest sum to get an improved version.
I don't want to sound like an Apple apologist - not everything they do is great, and I'd be the first to admit that I'd love to be able to keep getting these apps for free - but treating this like "paying $50 for a bug-fix" is a pretty glass-half-empty way of looking at this.
US$49 really *isn't* a bad price for what you get. If only other software vendors were so reasonable.
This all goes back to the original Macintosh and Jobs thinking it was a piece of artwork that shouldn't be tampered with. Most people want a computer they can improve, much like people that mod and tune their cars.
I used to sell Macs, and I can tell you this: people who buy eMacs are generally not these sort of people. They might add some extra RAM (which they can do easily), but that's it. If you want an upgradeable machine, buy a G5. eMacs are there for people who want something that will work out of the box, and don't want to take up space with room (or money) for upgrading they will never use. I use an eMac myself for this very reason: cheap, relatively small footprint, and will do what I need for a few years yet.
I've lost track of the number of people I know with Windows towers that still have the exact same amount of empty space in them as the day they bought them, and they will stay that way until the day they are disposed of. They bought them, having been sold the "Well, you might want to upgrade..." line, but never do. Consequently, they end up with a computer that takes up 3 times more deskspace than it needs to, filled with expensive empty space (the hardware for those expansion slots isn't free).
Most people are not l33t b0xen hax0r5. Don't knock the all-in-ones; they fill an important computing niche.
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Climatic Optimum of the early middle ages when temperatures werre warmer by 3 to 6 degrees and Vikings established their flourishing colonies in Greenland?
Is there any evidence of mass extinctions in the Little Ice Age of 1645-1715 where temperatures were 2 to 4 degrees colder?
Was there any evidence then of the concomitant habitat loss that we see now? It says it right there in the abstract of the story: "Many of the unlucky species are being caught between the hammer of global warming and the anvil of habitation destruction."
The two events you quoted were less likely to produce extinctions, since at least then the animals could migrate to available suitable habitats that were appropriately warmer/cooler. The situation now is very different, with far fewer suitable habitats remaining. Habitat loss is in fact one of the biggest factors thratening species and precipitating extinctions - global climate change just makes it worse.
Basically, you overlooked the fact that the extinctions being discussed are not merely a function of global weather changes, but also a function of the razing of appropriate habitats to suit human needs. The two together could well produce the outcome being discussed.
So what's different about embryos/clones? In my opinion there is no difference - they're simply another group of powerless humans that can be exploited.
To clarify, the embryos that are being discussed in relation to this issue are, I believe, all less than 14 days old. The embryos in question are a tiny cluster of a few dozen (or hundred) cells smaller that a pinhead. I think that it's fair to say that such a cell cluster posesses no fundamental quality of human-ness, beyond the merely genetic. Since we regularly dispose of other viable human genetic material in greater quantity (e.g blood, semen, etc), it is, from my viewpoint at least, hard to argue that these stem cells are somehow more morally considerable.
However at some point the embryo becomes a human. No argument there I assume. [snip] When does that vital spark appear ?
The bottom line is, no-one knows. [snip] Therefore the only safe assumption is to assume that it's from the moment of conception.
We have a sense of those qualities of human-ness we value. There is, for one, the human cognitive state that we value above that of other lifeforms. Human foetuses do not generally display uniquely human brainwave patterns until approximately the end of the second trimester (by lucky hap, also the point at which Roe vs. Wade determined that abortion on demand becomes unavailable). Before the end of the second trimester they certainly look human, but then again so do corpses.
I think you have emotionally loaded your argument using terms like 'human being' and 'baby'. I reiterate that the cell clusters we are discussing have no remotely 'human' quality to them - they do not look human, they are not conscious or aware in any meaningful way. All they have is potential, in the same way that an unfertilised egg and a sperm cell do. Simply because we can not say with mathematical certainty the precise instant that a developing embryo/foetus becomes 'human' in a significant way, does not mean that we should rereat right back into "it's human at conception" - common sense tells us, when we look at a 14-day old embryo, that this clump of cells is not significantly human.
I'm going to anticipate the "it's a potential human!" argument now. In the same way that you would not permit a first year medical student (i.e. potential surgeon) to perform complex neurosurgery on you, neither should a potential human (which is what these embryos are) be regarded as an actual human.
In closing, I consider that the needs of actual realised humans are far more morally considerable than the needs of potential humans. If real, live, talking, breathing humans can possibly be helped by this technology, then I think our humanism demands that we make the attempt.
Remember the husband/wife absentee votes from two people in a foreign embassy in a small country? The husband was appointed by Clinton. The two votes came back, and were added in when everyone was watching. I forget the country, but I'm sure there is a record somewhere because of how close the election was. Those two votes were counted in the Clinton column. So the public knows that this husband and wife, who were the only two absentee votes coming from that country, voted for Clinton. And if you watched the votes for other offices as the vote was registered (I didn't), you would have been able to ascertain who they cast their vote for other offices, such as Senator, etc.
See, now this kind of creeps me out. Here in Australia, when you send in an absentee vote, you have 2 envelopes. You put your vote (or votes, if you're electing for more than one House) into the first envelope. The only info on this envelope is your constituency(ies). You then place this envelope into another envelope that has your indentifying info so you can be marked off the electoral roll, and send it in.
The person who opens the outer envelope has absolutely nothing to do with the person who opens the second envelope. The first 'opener' just chucks the inner envelope into a big pile and marks your name off the roll. The box with all these non-identifiable envelopes then gets carted off to the tally room, to be opened and counted by someone who has no idea who cast your vote.
I might add that here in Australia, we have preferential voting (rather than first-past-the-post), we still use paper ballots, mark our vote in pencil, which is then counted by hand, and can still produce a reliable result by election night. It's virtually immune from many of the technical problems relating to power supply, data transfer, auditing, etc. that have been discussed in this thread, and it still works reliably and well. It might cost a little more to run over time (though not much more, by the sounds of it), but nobody ever said democracy was supposed to be cheap.
Plenty of big iron boxes like Crays and IBM are obviously more powerful machines. The ad contains a blatently FALSE sataement.
Apple never claimed the G5 to be the most powerful computer, they claimed it to be the most powerful personal computer, which is a big difference.
It also seem that the only way they managed to squash the "Fastest PC" claim was by comparing it to workstations, not equivalent out-of-the-box PCs. Just like you did.
This may be a little OT, but I'm seeing the Taxonomy Kings (and I speak as one myself, who has basically had to learn to get over it for the most part) going off about the difference between hackers and crackers.
Words are not defined by fiat, they are defined by usage. Also, different words have different meanings to different audiences in different contexts ("Fish" means very different things to an oceanographer and a chef; for a chef, it includes shellfish and crustaceans, for instance). I realise it can make debate difficult when the meaning of terms is not correctly understood, and needs to be precise, but sometimes you just need to let go and realise that a word is irrevocably lost to your ability to control its meaning. Even precise technical terms suffer shifts in meaning over time, and adjustments need to be made.
Since ordinary people have a clear idea of what is meant by hacker, and you clearly knew what was meant by it, since you all protested against it, maybe we should accept that the meaning of the word in common parlance has changed from what some nerd said it was 20 years ago.
Perhaps we should take the advice of the much quoted Mr. Montoya - "You keep-a using that word - I do not-a think it-a means what-a you think it means"
Political, because people are scared of nuclear energy. They get scared when a proposal for nuclear power comes to town. Never mind that coal, oil and natural gas power facilities have killed 10 to 100 times the people that nuclear power plants would ever kill. People don't protest coal plants the same way, they don't know the 'coal' symbol like they know the nuclear fallout symbol. There are no 'coal' weapons that obliterate people.
And it many ways, that fear is not unreasonable. Remember, when nuclear facilities/devices fail, they fail catastrophically, and it is a big fat mess. Coal and petroleum/gasoline facilities and devices are far easier to keep safe, and far less catastrophic when they do fail. Whatever the long term/short term benefit ratio is, people will, quite naturally, shy away from catastrophe.
A very good example of this is that way more people die in a year in the US from the flu than died in 9/11, but 9/11 was a catastrophe, so consequently attracts far more attention and government money than the humble flu, which is far more damaging in human terms. Go figure.
The inefficiency isn't in automobiles, as they are something like 30-50% efficient at retrieving the chemical-bond energy from gasoline.
That may well be the case, but how much of that is actually used to provide motive energy for the car and passenger? I understand that the estimates are that only about 20% of the energy in gasoline/petroleum provides motive power for the vehicle, the rest is lost as heat or unburnt fuel. Of that 20%, about 95% is used to move the car itself. So out of your original fuel load, only about 1% of its energy is used to actually move the car's passenger/s, which is the whole point of the automobile.
Now let's talk about inefficient.
When you consider that the beige G3s are now around 5 years old, I don't actually think it's too bad that Apple are only now withdrawing support from a current operating system. It may not be unreasonable to expect that current or near-current G3 models would be supported for a similar timeframe.
Why would you want to try and run Panther on a 233-300 Mhz G3 machine anyway? I can't imagine the performance issues on that slow a processor would be worth it.
This same logic applies to the relationship between paper and trees. If we stopped making paper from trees, there would be fewer trees. Eighty-seven percent of the trees that are used for manufacturing paper are planted for that purpose. That implies that for every 13 trees "saved" by paper recycling, there will be 87 that never get planted. This is why, contrary to popular belief, both the amount of forest land and the number of trees in this country have been increasing for the last 50 years. Increased demand for paper has led to more, not fewer, trees.
Let's just examine their not-so-veiled assumption here: that Trees Are Good, Regardless. To some extent, trees are indeed good, but so is variety. Increasingly, when looking at plantation timber, you are looking at a plant monoculture. For example, here in Australia a huge percentage of our plantation timber is Pinus Radiata. I shudder to think of how many native varieties, or other valuable timbers (or indeed other kinds of plants and animals) have been displaced in order that we should have thousands of hectares of one non-native species of tree, because it grows easily, fairly quickly and is easy to harvest.
The quoted paragraph above made me immediately suspicious of the credentials of the organisation in question. Trees are good, but not when they are all the same Tree, a point carefully glossed over in the article.
If a mattress manufacturer developed a new very very soft matress and called themselves Micro-Soft Matresses they wouldn't get away with it.
IANAL, but some of the business-related law study I have done suggests that they would be able to get away with it.
In Australia, trademarks only apply within the industry in which they are registered; this is why Apple Computer could not challenge the validity of the trademarking of Apple International Motor Inn (as mentioned in the story) -- the rationale is that they are not competitors, and so their respective trademarks serve different markets and are not likely to cause conflict or confusion. So, a mattress manufacturer could register a trademark for Micro-Soft mattresses and reasonably and legally resist a challenge from The Beast.
In the case of Apple Communications vs. Apple Computers though, I would think that the potential for conflict was very clear (since they are operating in very closely related industries, at least in most people's minds) so trademarks would kick in at that point.
They do make mention on their site of also blocking access to sites to users in countries outside of their target advertising zone:
Now, leaving aside for the moment arguments about thievery and technology propping up flawed business models, why can't they just label me as 'dirty foreigner' rather than 'dirty thief' when I visit their site, since they clearly have the technology to do so. Their advertising would be irrelevant to me anyway, so why should they bother serving their data to someone who cannot purchase the baubles they hock?
And also, if the service they offer is so valuable (also, apparently, not just to North Americans), why are they not offering it on a subscription model, rather than free supported by ads?
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
All of what you've said is true, but let's not forget one other very salient point: The Miller-Urey experiment took place over a period of days (or weeks; I forget which). The evolution of self-replicating RNA and DNA took place over a period of about 100 million years.
Let's not cane too hard on these experiments, simply because they couldn't reproduce in a few days what it took nature a hundred million years to do .