E. coli K12 and E. coli 0157:H7 for example. They're the same SPECIES.
Just a question. I'm not a biologist. Doesn't this make the "classification of all things" sort of inadequate, since it apparently can't classify all things?
I thought that species couldn't be divided in any scientifically meaningful way, but the fact that these have separate names, "K12" and "0157:H7", suggest that there is a quantifiable difference between these organisms.
Please don't use the same word to refer to robbery and murder on the high seas, and copyright violation. It's not just inaccurate, it's stupid.
Just because Richard Stallman says so doesn't make it so. I am in fact certain that I've seen the term piracy used in a very old (on the order of 100-200 years ago) transcript to describe illegal copying. Can't find a link right now, however.
In any case, using the term "Piracy" thus isn't particularly new, and it's certainly not confusing anyone.
Well, I have to congratulate you. *That* one I have never heard. And perhaps for good reason -- if the mother dies then the child will also, so it's not an eithor/or question, it's a one/both question.
Do you have any idea how fringe a case we are talking about here? If you were to take the number of abortions that are performed because there is some real danger to the mother and divide it by the number of total abortions, you would have a result which is basically zero.
We are never going to be on the same page about the edge cases if we don't have some agreement about the general case. If you are talking about removing a malignant tumor and I am talking about murdering an child then we have no absolutely no common ground on which to discuss such edge cases.
Alright. This is becoming excedingly tiresome. Not only is the entire thread off-topic, but it's not ever going to accomplish anything.
You didn't bring up any point I've never thought about. That was the meaning of the sarcasm. Of course I've thought about those things and much more.
To your first point: What is the unborn child guilty of that he deserves to die? If nothing, then he is "innocent." Rape, incest, failed birth control, whatever -- none of that has any bearing on whether the fetus is a living person.
To your second point: No, I don't include Quality in my definition of Life. Who are you or I to determine that someone else will have a quality of life so low that they should be put to death?
Like I said, the only relevant point is whether the unborn child is a living person. If it is then we reach certain inescapable conclusions. If not then we reach other conclusions.
Recall the post I was originally replying to. The poster asked how it is possible to be simultaneously pro-life and pro-gun, as if that were somehow impossible. I was actually going for a semi-humorous response. I unwittingly let loose that I believe that an unborn child is alive and now I'm locked in a mortal struggle about abortion.
I never changed the subject. Your post neither asked me to explain why I thought that nor did it do anything to refute it. All you did was bring up objections to the pro-life position that were unrelated to my argument for it.
It always comes to this, doesn't it? Is that the best argument the pro-choice crowd has?
Wouldn't that be self-defense? I have honestly never heard anyone actually argue that a woman should be disallowed an abortion if her life is in danger.
At not one point in this thread have I made ane statement about religion nor have I argued that there ought to be a law.
And nobody has asked me to explain why I believe that a fetus is a living human. I have merely made the statement that I do. You have likewise not explained, in a logical manner, your apparent belief that a fetus is not a living human. Shall I conclude that you are unable to do so?
And I'd rather people have their own homemade guns than a semiautomatic
Making guns, even semi-automatic (or even full-automatic), is not rocket science. Simple mechanical engineering and fabrication is all that is necessary.
I hope you can make bullets in that garage as well.
I bet you don't. Knowledge of how to make gun powder is the most difficult task here. This knowledge is fairly common.
For the record: I don't manufacture guns nor amunition. I'm merely saying that it is not only not difficult, but relatively easy compared to, say, getting my sprinklers working correctly.
I just don't believe that introducing bigger and badder weapons into a confrontation makes things safer.
And I just don't believe that my opponent having bigger and badder weapons than me makes me any safer.
There are bad people out there. There always will be. But for the most part they are cowards who wouldn't pick a fair fight if they had the choice. Threat of a forceful defence is a fantastic deterrent.
some people do owe their lives to owning a gun. Many also owe their deaths to it
The error of your bias is clearly revealed in this statement. In fact, some people owe their deaths to owning a gun, but many owe their lives to it. (Including the founding fathers of our country, who were intimate with the idea that the first thing an oppressive government wants to do is takes its citizen's ability of self-defense away.)
Once again you have failed to deal with my objection to abortion. The vast majority in the pro-life camp will not be dissuaded by redirection of the argument. As long as we believe that the fetus is a living human, the question of how inconvenienced the mother is will not matter much to us.
<keanu reeves>Whoa!</keanu reeves> You're right! I've never considered these questions. Wow. Thank you for turning me from my false ways!
Too bad your entire line of argument was completely irrelevant. Read my post. I merely stated that I believe that a fetus is a living human, and that, as a general rule, we ought not go killing them. Nowhere did I bring up any relativistic moral arguments about the mother's rights or innocence.
If you would like to make any headway in convincing me that abortion is acceptable then your line of argumentation should be directly aimed at convincing me that a an unborn child is not, in fact, a living human.
and what give you the right to force these beliefs on other people?
Where do you gather that my being pro-life forces you to believe anything? I can believe whatever I want about unborn children and it doesn't force you or anybody else to agree.
you also believe that a personal relationship with god is a necessary part of being a good person
Where in my post did I mention anything about God? Surely you don't think that believing unborn children are living humans doesn't predicate upon believing in God?
but we don't have laws requiring people to go to church.
And that's a good thing! Right? We agree, I think.
someone else's sin doesn't effect you.
I'm not sure that this is absolutely true, in the general sense. But now we are wondering even farther off-topic.
do you know of anyone who has defended themselves with a gun?
Yes, I do.
I would prefer to live in a world without guns, wouldn't you?
Please tell me that you realize that is naive. Guns exist. They are not terribly complicated to create. I could manufacture one in my garage more simply than I could manufacture a moderately complicated go-cart. Guns are not going away.
the fact is that this country has an outrageous amount of violence involving guns compared to anywhere else in the world.
First off, thats just plain baloney. Anywhere else in the world?!? In any case, I'm not arguing that criminals ought to be allowed to own and use guns in the execution of crimes. I'm arguing that they do despite any laws that may be levied against them. Since this is a fact, why should I, a law-abiding citizen, have more laws levied against me (more laws that criminals will ignore) so that I am helpless against the bad guys? At the very least it levels the playing field between me and the one who doesn't care for the law.
We can start by not owning them ourselves.
We could, I suppose. But that wouldn't solve any real problems. The very people we need to protect ourselves from don't care a lick about lawful ownership or use of guns. But the certainly do care that the person they are attempting to rob or burglarize might have one. And they are pretty unlikely to attempt the crime when they have strong suspicion that this is the case.
Now, can you explain to me how a political party can be both pro-LIFE and pro-GUN?
Is that a trick question? Because the tone of your post suggests that it would be very difficult to do.
It should be completely obvious to the most casual observer that abortions are never performed with a gun. Therefore, my belief that an unborn child is a living human which is endowed with a number of inalienable rights has no relation at all to my belief that each of us should be able to effectively defend ourselves from those threatening our lives and that of our families. Except, possibly, that both of these positions are based on the idea that innocent life should be preserved.
Now, I can't think of many benefits in owning a thermonuclear device. So I sort of agree with you there, except that I don't think the laws against owning them have anything at all to do with what the owner might do to himself. The risk is that mishandling (or malicious) use of such a device could adversely effect a very large number of others. One could argue the same of guns, but let's be fair: The scale of potential risk is just not comparable. We could cook up a lot of weapons out of things in our own homes, but none of them approach nuclear fusion in terms of destructive power. That's a lot of risk for something that I can't even think of a reason to own. Maybe one could put it in his sitting room and use it as a conversation starter.
To the contrary, gun ownership has a number of benefits, both recreational and practical. You would likely disagree, but I would argue that these benefits outweigh the risks.
It is perhaps notable that regions with relatively higher legal gun ownership often enjoy relatively lower crime rates. I realize that this fact does not necessarily prove causality, but I find it compelling nonetheless. And I find it comforting that fetuses in these places are being made safe because their parents have guns to use in their defense against the advancing hordes.
What it needs is a mechanism for providing an interface to reassemble the sub-features back into the one-step feature you can find in other interfaces.
Much of that 10 or 15 years that MS may have taken to get their desktop stable and usable might be due to hardware capable of driving the current version of the desktop not existing when they were developing Windows 3.1
Are you claiming that making software that doesn't crash or leak memory, is more difficult to do on older hardware?
Use my digital camera that isn't supported by Linux.
I'd be willing to bet that your digital camera isn't supported by Windows, either. More likely, the manufacturer of your digital camera supports Windows and not Linux.
I know that the apparent result as far as the end-user is concerned is the same. But there is a technical difference there.
Actually, in languages that don't support exceptions (like C), goto is about the easiest way to jump to the cleanup code at the end of a function. The alternative is ugly deep nested if's or something like:
void example() { while (1) {/* not really a loop */ if (error) break; do_something(); if (error) break; do_something_else(); break; } perform_cleanup_here(); return; }
While I agree that your post is offtopic (as is this one -- come on, moderators... Bring it on!), I must say that it's a very insightful offtopic post.
Congratulations. Not much on Slashdot impresses me anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude. It's "losely." Get it right.
Just a question. I'm not a biologist. Doesn't this make the "classification of all things" sort of inadequate, since it apparently can't classify all things?
I thought that species couldn't be divided in any scientifically meaningful way, but the fact that these have separate names, "K12" and "0157:H7", suggest that there is a quantifiable difference between these organisms.
Can I quote you?
Just because Richard Stallman says so doesn't make it so. I am in fact certain that I've seen the term piracy used in a very old (on the order of 100-200 years ago) transcript to describe illegal copying. Can't find a link right now, however.
In any case, using the term "Piracy" thus isn't particularly new, and it's certainly not confusing anyone.
Do you have any idea how fringe a case we are talking about here? If you were to take the number of abortions that are performed because there is some real danger to the mother and divide it by the number of total abortions, you would have a result which is basically zero.
We are never going to be on the same page about the edge cases if we don't have some agreement about the general case. If you are talking about removing a malignant tumor and I am talking about murdering an child then we have no absolutely no common ground on which to discuss such edge cases.
You didn't bring up any point I've never thought about. That was the meaning of the sarcasm. Of course I've thought about those things and much more.
To your first point: What is the unborn child guilty of that he deserves to die? If nothing, then he is "innocent." Rape, incest, failed birth control, whatever -- none of that has any bearing on whether the fetus is a living person.
To your second point: No, I don't include Quality in my definition of Life. Who are you or I to determine that someone else will have a quality of life so low that they should be put to death?
Like I said, the only relevant point is whether the unborn child is a living person. If it is then we reach certain inescapable conclusions. If not then we reach other conclusions.
Recall the post I was originally replying to. The poster asked how it is possible to be simultaneously pro-life and pro-gun, as if that were somehow impossible. I was actually going for a semi-humorous response. I unwittingly let loose that I believe that an unborn child is alive and now I'm locked in a mortal struggle about abortion.
I never changed the subject. Your post neither asked me to explain why I thought that nor did it do anything to refute it. All you did was bring up objections to the pro-life position that were unrelated to my argument for it.
Wouldn't that be self-defense? I have honestly never heard anyone actually argue that a woman should be disallowed an abortion if her life is in danger.
And nobody has asked me to explain why I believe that a fetus is a living human. I have merely made the statement that I do. You have likewise not explained, in a logical manner, your apparent belief that a fetus is not a living human. Shall I conclude that you are unable to do so?
Making guns, even semi-automatic (or even full-automatic), is not rocket science. Simple mechanical engineering and fabrication is all that is necessary.
I hope you can make bullets in that garage as well.
I bet you don't. Knowledge of how to make gun powder is the most difficult task here. This knowledge is fairly common.
For the record: I don't manufacture guns nor amunition. I'm merely saying that it is not only not difficult, but relatively easy compared to, say, getting my sprinklers working correctly.
I just don't believe that introducing bigger and badder weapons into a confrontation makes things safer.
And I just don't believe that my opponent having bigger and badder weapons than me makes me any safer.
There are bad people out there. There always will be. But for the most part they are cowards who wouldn't pick a fair fight if they had the choice. Threat of a forceful defence is a fantastic deterrent.
some people do owe their lives to owning a gun. Many also owe their deaths to it
The error of your bias is clearly revealed in this statement. In fact, some people owe their deaths to owning a gun, but many owe their lives to it. (Including the founding fathers of our country, who were intimate with the idea that the first thing an oppressive government wants to do is takes its citizen's ability of self-defense away.)
Once again you have failed to deal with my objection to abortion. The vast majority in the pro-life camp will not be dissuaded by redirection of the argument. As long as we believe that the fetus is a living human, the question of how inconvenienced the mother is will not matter much to us.
<keanu reeves>Whoa!</keanu reeves> You're right! I've never considered these questions. Wow. Thank you for turning me from my false ways!
Too bad your entire line of argument was completely irrelevant. Read my post. I merely stated that I believe that a fetus is a living human, and that, as a general rule, we ought not go killing them. Nowhere did I bring up any relativistic moral arguments about the mother's rights or innocence.
If you would like to make any headway in convincing me that abortion is acceptable then your line of argumentation should be directly aimed at convincing me that a an unborn child is not, in fact, a living human.
Where do you gather that my being pro-life forces you to believe anything? I can believe whatever I want about unborn children and it doesn't force you or anybody else to agree.
you also believe that a personal relationship with god is a necessary part of being a good person
Where in my post did I mention anything about God? Surely you don't think that believing unborn children are living humans doesn't predicate upon believing in God?
but we don't have laws requiring people to go to church.
And that's a good thing! Right? We agree, I think.
someone else's sin doesn't effect you.
I'm not sure that this is absolutely true, in the general sense. But now we are wondering even farther off-topic.
do you know of anyone who has defended themselves with a gun?
Yes, I do.
I would prefer to live in a world without guns, wouldn't you?
Please tell me that you realize that is naive. Guns exist. They are not terribly complicated to create. I could manufacture one in my garage more simply than I could manufacture a moderately complicated go-cart. Guns are not going away.
the fact is that this country has an outrageous amount of violence involving guns compared to anywhere else in the world.
First off, thats just plain baloney. Anywhere else in the world?!? In any case, I'm not arguing that criminals ought to be allowed to own and use guns in the execution of crimes. I'm arguing that they do despite any laws that may be levied against them. Since this is a fact, why should I, a law-abiding citizen, have more laws levied against me (more laws that criminals will ignore) so that I am helpless against the bad guys? At the very least it levels the playing field between me and the one who doesn't care for the law.
We can start by not owning them ourselves.
We could, I suppose. But that wouldn't solve any real problems. The very people we need to protect ourselves from don't care a lick about lawful ownership or use of guns. But the certainly do care that the person they are attempting to rob or burglarize might have one. And they are pretty unlikely to attempt the crime when they have strong suspicion that this is the case.
This is why I use Evolution and configure it to not load images off the net. That and I really don't care to see it.
Thank you for taking the one statement in my post that was obviously tongue-in-cheek and basing your entire rebuttal on it.
Is that a trick question? Because the tone of your post suggests that it would be very difficult to do.
It should be completely obvious to the most casual observer that abortions are never performed with a gun. Therefore, my belief that an unborn child is a living human which is endowed with a number of inalienable rights has no relation at all to my belief that each of us should be able to effectively defend ourselves from those threatening our lives and that of our families. Except, possibly, that both of these positions are based on the idea that innocent life should be preserved.
Now, I can't think of many benefits in owning a thermonuclear device. So I sort of agree with you there, except that I don't think the laws against owning them have anything at all to do with what the owner might do to himself. The risk is that mishandling (or malicious) use of such a device could adversely effect a very large number of others. One could argue the same of guns, but let's be fair: The scale of potential risk is just not comparable. We could cook up a lot of weapons out of things in our own homes, but none of them approach nuclear fusion in terms of destructive power. That's a lot of risk for something that I can't even think of a reason to own. Maybe one could put it in his sitting room and use it as a conversation starter.
To the contrary, gun ownership has a number of benefits, both recreational and practical. You would likely disagree, but I would argue that these benefits outweigh the risks.
It is perhaps notable that regions with relatively higher legal gun ownership often enjoy relatively lower crime rates. I realize that this fact does not necessarily prove causality, but I find it compelling nonetheless. And I find it comforting that fetuses in these places are being made safe because their parents have guns to use in their defense against the advancing hordes.
I'm torn... Insightful or Funny?
Scripting?
(That's not the best GIMP-script tutorial I've seen, just the first one that Google returned on "gimp script tutorial".)
I'm bookmarking your post, not because I agree with you, but because it will make a great sig in five years when it doesn't happen.
Are you claiming that making software that doesn't crash or leak memory, is more difficult to do on older hardware?
I'd be willing to bet that your digital camera isn't supported by Windows, either. More likely, the manufacturer of your digital camera supports Windows and not Linux.
I know that the apparent result as far as the end-user is concerned is the same. But there is a technical difference there.
Actually, in languages that don't support exceptions (like C), goto is about the easiest way to jump to the cleanup code at the end of a function. The alternative is ugly deep nested if's or something like:
/* not really a loop */
void example() {
while (1) {
if (error) break;
do_something();
if (error) break;
do_something_else();
break;
}
perform_cleanup_here();
return;
}
which isn't any easier to follow than goto.
How would something get "sucked" into a windmill?
Congratulations. Not much on Slashdot impresses me anymore.
At first I didn't understand just what you were trying to accomplish. Then I suddenly got it. I laughed. Thanks.
This is all speculation until such a suit is filed, though.
Speculation on Slashdot? Say it aint so!