The weird thing about this is that I worked for HP as an employee of a contracting company (Spherion) for about six or eight months a few years ago. This was just before the merger with Compaq was consumated internally (with the merging of seperate IT systems and all that entailed). At least in my position, there was a *very* clear distinction between HP and Non-HP employees. Heck, my HP email address wasn't even "username@hp.com" it was "username@non-hp.com" (or perhaps "username@non.hp.com", I don't precicely recall now). I was paid by Speherion, I was an employee of Spherion, I got benefits through Spherion, but on my resume I list "Hewlett Packard" as my employee for that period because I don't have to explain to a prospective employee who HP is.:-) But we were even required to put in our email signatures that we were a Non-HP Contract Employee. However, right after they merged email systems with Compaq (which took place one night and was surprisingly fast and issue free from my user perspective, despite it all being Exchange servers) they dropped the non-hp email addresses for some reason.
Gee, I have some more hairs here we could split if you want to?
You're just deliberately being a dick now, which is where pretty much every debate on/. ends up eventually, so let's just do this.
Read this and let's agree to disagree. As it turns out, we're both using somewhat skewed definitions. However, it supports my central argument that agnosticism is not an alternative between theism and atheism. By that page, I'm an agnostic atheist--I lack a belief in a god or gods because of a lack of evidence. What are you? Again atheism is NOT a belief. It's a *lack* of belief. "There is no justification for a belief in God, therefore, I do not believe in God." It doesn't pre-suppose that an atheist would never convert to theism if evidence were offered for the belief. It simply means that because there is no evidence for the belief, the atheist does not hold that belief. You are in fact an atheist if you do not actively believe in a god or gods.
I have heard this quip before, but you are mis-using it when applying it to scientific and critical thinking. The original quote is making reference to people who will BELIEVE anything. Scientists must consider all possibilities until proven wrong.
No. See, you're the one misunderstanding now. That is not at all what a scientist does. A scientist does not accept all possibilities until the day when one is "proven" to be correct. A scientist accepts only those possibilities that are falsifiable and subject to the scientific method. If a hypothesis is not testable, it's no better than random guesswork, and therefore not worthy of consideration.
Just about any "why" or "how" question I pose to you could be answered with the phrase "aliens did it." "Why is the sky blue?" "Aliens did it." "How does the hummingbird fly?" "Aliens did it." "Why does life exist?" "Aliens did it." Many of those statements could be tested by, for instance, showing that nitrogen in the atmosphere actually makes the sky blue and not aliens. However, many statements like that could NOT be tested. That does not make "Aliens did it" a valid hypothesis for that phenomenon, though. You can choose to believe it anyway, or you can do what a scientist would do, and demand further proof before you would believe it. That does not mean you would withhold judgement on that hypothesis--it means you would reject it until such time as some sort of evidence makes the statement more likely than any of the millions of other random statements that could be made about the phenomenon, or until such time as some means of testing the statement presents itself.
For someone to see a lack of evidence and firmly come down against something is just as bad as firmly coming down in favor of it. This is why people often call Atheism a religion.
Again, you're not talking about real atheism. So-called "strong" atehism is what you're talking about--a flat out denial of god, a statement such as "God does not exist because there is no evidence for God." This is not what any thoughtful atheist says, however. A thoughtful atheist merely says "There is no justification for a belief in God, therefore, I do not believe in God." Belief without evidence is faith. Belief in the face of counter-evidence is blind faith. DIS-belief without evidence is being rational, however. If my pencil disappears from my desk while I'm in the bathroom, I can come up with several hypotheses to explain that. I can hypothesize that I misplaced the pencil and only think it is missing. I can hypothesize that one of my coworkers took it. I can also hypothesize that "Aliens did it". Two of these are rational, testable hypotheses. One of them is irrational and basically untestable (even if I leave out another pencil as bait and use a video camera to try to catch the aliens in the act, I can still claim "Well, aliens took the FIRST one!" if I in fact catch a coworker stealing the 'bait' pencil from my desk.) Choosing to believe that all three are equally likely is foolish.
It's a question of testability. Sure, you can have the belief that some being created life. But you can't test it. There are no predictions your hypothesis makes than can be tested. So it's no better than saying that everything sprung from nothing to as-is five minutes ago. You can say it, you can think it, but there's no way to put it to the test, which is the foundation of science. There is no evidence that points towards a creator. You can choose to believe in one, as many do, or you can choose not to believe in one, as I and many others do. But what's the point of saying you choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in something like that?
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that?
Not crazy at all, it is the foundation of science and critical thinking.
No, actually, it's not. Having an open mind is one thing, having a mind so open your brain falls out is quite another. Being able to distinguish between BS and honest hypothesis is part of critical thinking. If someone told you there were invisible pink elephants in his back yard, you would keep an open mind about that and not think that maybe your buddy had flipped his lid? Even after going out and pointing out to your buddy that these elephants left no tracks, dung, or anything else behind to show their presence, or that you could walk over every inch of his back yard and not run into one, you would still choose not to disbelieve him if he insisted they existed and were there? Seriously? That's not science or critical thinking, that's just being foolish.
The thing is, agnosticism is actually the most unsupportable "belief" of the bunch. If there is evidence for something, then belief in its existence is justified. If there is no evidence for something, belief in its existence is unjustified. It doesn't mean that it absolutely does not exist, any more than real atheism means "God does not exist". It means that since belief in God is unjustified because of a lack of evidence, I do not believe in God. Real atheists do not say "God does not exist". Real atheists say "I do not believe in God because there is no evidence for His existence." There's a huge difference.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that? Do you also choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in invisible pink elephants? There's no evidence for them either, but if someone told you they existed, would you keep an open mind about that? A person of faith believes despite lack of evidence, or even in the face of evidence to the contrary. An agnostic, however, sees the lack of evidence and yet continues to hedge his bets. Why?
The real question still is, does it have the equivalent of TiVo's "Season Pass" feature? For me, that's the killer app of TiVo. I will not buy a DVR that does not offer something similar.
There have actually been studies done that show that smiling can actually *make* you happier, not just be a reflection of your happiness. In typical/. fashion, I can provide no references to this. But I read it. Somewhere. Possibly in a magazine!
Then what fucking good are they? I have a VCR that can just record stuff at a certain time if I want to manually do all that crap myself every damn time.
The one thing I want to know is, do other PVRs have TiVo's "Season Pass" feature, or something similar? If so, I won't miss TiVo that much, as long as DirecTV hooks me up with something similar when/if they dump it.
Wow, this is great. An article gets posted about the objectification of women in games. Naturally it's written by a woman. So the slashbots find her website. And her pictures. And proceed to objectify her.
Multiple times I or someone in my family have had this kind of thing work out for us. My personal example was this time I got stuck in touchtone menu hell when I tried to call my bank about my account. I couldn't find the proper menu item to press, and kept going in circles. I also couldn't find the option where you talk to a real human. Eventually, I got so frustrated I shouted "All I fucking want to do is inquire about the payoff amount of my loan!" or something like that. Within five seconds, a polite human popped on the line and routed me properly (turned out it was my fault, I'd called the wrong damn number anyway).
My mother had a similar experience, where she was stuck in the menus, couldn't find the right option, and just yelled something of a generally disgruntled nature into the phone, and got a human to pick up right after that.
Try it for yourself next time you get stuck in those endless phone menus. The funny thing is, usually I prefer to navigate the menus if they're clear and my query (like my loan balance question) can probably be handled without human interaction. But some companies have the absolute worst menu systems in place, and navigating them can be hell.
Bleh. Xenocide and Children are really one book, split in two because his publisher was either afraid to market it as one long book or wished to get more sales by splitting it into two.
And, they both sucked nuts. There's not a single person in either book who can make a simple decision without agonizing about it for pages and pages. It's boring and awful.
MY recommendation to any new reader is to read Game and Speaker and pretend like nothing else exists. I haven't read the Shadow series yet, so no comment on those.
Dioxins are also largely man-made, and they are widely believed to cause cancer. "If dioxins are man-made, we would have found a cure for the cancer they cause by now" is not a logical truth.
It's also completely irrelevant to the argument. Dioxins may be completely man-made, but the disease of Cancer isn't. Man-made toxins can cause otherwise naturally occuring diseases. That says nothing about our ability to cure these otherwise naturally occuring diseases.
The argument that was being made was that if we had made the disease itself (or in this case, more specifically, the virus that causes the disease) we'd be able to cure it. I personally don't believe this is true--it seems to me that it'd be trivial to engineer a disease that you wouldn't immediately know how to cure. In fact, every reason I can think of for engineering a fatal disease like AIDS would necessarily cause me to also want to make it very hard to cure. That doesn't, however, make your example of Dioxins causing cancer any less bogus.
Step 1: Install Ubuntu Step 2:... There is no step 2!
I have a netgear wireless card in my laptop. Not only did Ubuntu detect it during the install, it asked me if I wanted to use it or my wired card as eth0 (I chose the wireless) and used it to download all the updated packages after it did the base install from CD. That's something that no other version of Linux has ever done on that laptop.
I'm not going to harrass my clients to start running half a dozen programs just to remove spyware and it's a pretty rare thing to come across a piece of spyware, even a humble cookie, that both of those two miss.
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that there's plenty of fairly common cases where both of those apps fail to detect/remove certain pieces of spyware.
That's not been my experience in Colorado (specifically, Denver area). I got hit in the big collapse and lost my job on the last day of November, 2001. I was out of work until middle of March 2002, when I got a short term contract position. I was able to transition to a full time position with another company before the end of that contract, and have been there ever since. Just recently, I decided to test the waters again, and found to my surprise and delight that I got much more action this time around than I did the last time I was looking, by several orders of magnitude. In 2002, I would go for days without seeing a job posted on the job boards worth applying for, and I might go weeks between calls from recruiters/HR wonks. Now, it seems like every day or two a new job gets posted that looks good to me, and I get at least one call a week from recruiters looking to place me (recruiters that have actual positions they're recruiting for, even!) Some weeks, I get calls almost daily. A lot of this is for short term (3-6 month) work, but at least I no longer fear being laid off, because I'm fairly certain I won't have to sit on the couch for very long before I can pick up another position.
Caveat: I'm not a software engineer. Like the grandparent, I'm a UNIX sysadmin with about ten years experience.
Where do you get this from? I, for one, absolutely would advocate jail for dotors and women who knowingly performed/recieved abortions of viable human babies. I think a lot if not most of the hardcore anti-abortion types (of which I am *not* one, as I fully believe there is some point during a pregnancy before which destroying the fetus is *not* murder, but simply an elective medical procedure--it's just that nobody seems to know exactly when that *is*) would agree with this as well. It seems like you're patting yourself on the back for finding a logical flaw in an argument that doesn't even exist.
If you kill a baby a second after it is born, you get charged with murder. I think if you do the same thing a second *before* the baby is born, you should also be charged with murder. A lot of other people would agree with me. So take your strawman elsewhere, thanks.
This has nothing to do with state ownership of anything. It has everything to do with protecting the rights of people, which is precicely what governments are supposed to do.
*If* an unborn fetus represents a human life, then the mother has no right to kill it, regardless of whether or not it currently resides in her uterus. This doesn't mean the state owns her reproductive organs any more than it means the state owns my house because it won't allow me to kill people living inside it.
Again, this has nothing to do with state ownership of anything. It has to do with protecting people's rights. I have a right to free speech, but I am not alowed unlimited exercise of that right if it infringes on the rights of others. I can't, for instance, incite people to riot and claim to be protected under free speech. Similarly, a woman has a right to choose which medical procedures are performed on her body, up until the point where such procedures would be harmful to another person, such as the unborn person she is carrying in her womb.
BTW, abortion during the third trimester is *not* illegal in all states. It's a state-by-state thing, and I believe something like 40 states and DC have outlawed it. But not all states have, and there is no federal law against it either. So the fact remains that in some places in the US, it's completely legal to kill an unborn child one day before it would have naturally been born, but not legal to kill it one day after it has been born.
Of course, this entire debate hinges on when life begins, and the fact is we don't know for sure. Religious people will tell you it begins at conception. More scientifically minded people will usually say it begins sometime after conception but before birth. Heck, some places in China, it's legal to kill a child up to three days after birth. But my point is, *if* the unborn fetus in a woman's uterus represents a viable human life, then the woman has absolutely no right to an abortion. If it does not, then she can do what she wants. But saying that protecting the rights of people is somehow akin to the state owning parts of a woman's body is ludicrous.
Suicide is one thing. Homocide is another. Suicide assumes the person doing the killing is also the person being killed, and is consenting to be killed. Homocide assumes the person being killed is NOT the person doing the killing, and is NOT consenting to be killed.
Abortion is akin to one of these, and it's not suicide. It may *not* be homocide in many cases, but in many cases, it almost certainly *is*. That makes it wrong, and *should*, at least in those cases, make it illegal.
What the FUCK are you talking about? Do you seriously believe what you just wrote?
First of all, forcing a woman to have an abortion is NOTHING AT ALL like preventing a woman from having one. That's like saying forcing me to take poison is the same as preventing me from taking it. In one scenario, I end up dead. In the other, I don't. It's the same with the abortion question. In one scenario, the fetus ends up dead. In the other, it doesn't.
You can talk about "reproductive rights" and "choice" all you want, but the fact remains that at some point during a pregnancy, the unborn fetus becomes a viable human being. After that point, abortion becomes equivalent to murder. Religions people say that point is conception, which is why they're against all abortions. Non-religious people are unsure, which is why a lot of non-religious people are still against abortion--because they don't know when the act of abortion becomes murder, so they decide to err on the side of caution and prevent all abortions.
A woman's ownership of her uterus and her ability to make choices about what goes on inside it is the same as my ability to make choices about what goes on inside my house. I'm not alowed to kill someone just because they're inside my house, and a woman should not be alowed to kill an unborn human child just because it's inside her uterus. Currently, life is defined as beginning at birth, and so unborn fetuses have no rights under the Constitution, which is why abortion can be legal. However, many people feel this should be changed, and that unborn, viable babies should be given the same rights as equivalent babies who happen to have squeezed through the birth canal already.
Damn. And to think, just a few posts up someone was crowing about how the average/. reader has higher than average intellect and critical thinking skills. Christ.
Slashdot Mirror
The weird thing about this is that I worked for HP as an employee of a contracting company (Spherion) for about six or eight months a few years ago. This was just before the merger with Compaq was consumated internally (with the merging of seperate IT systems and all that entailed). At least in my position, there was a *very* clear distinction between HP and Non-HP employees. Heck, my HP email address wasn't even "username@hp.com" it was "username@non-hp.com" (or perhaps "username@non.hp.com", I don't precicely recall now). I was paid by Speherion, I was an employee of Spherion, I got benefits through Spherion, but on my resume I list "Hewlett Packard" as my employee for that period because I don't have to explain to a prospective employee who HP is. :-) But we were even required to put in our email signatures that we were a Non-HP Contract Employee. However, right after they merged email systems with Compaq (which took place one night and was surprisingly fast and issue free from my user perspective, despite it all being Exchange servers) they dropped the non-hp email addresses for some reason.
-- Dave
You're just deliberately being a dick now, which is where pretty much every debate on /. ends up eventually, so let's just do this.
Read this and let's agree to disagree. As it turns out, we're both using somewhat skewed definitions. However, it supports my central argument that agnosticism is not an alternative between theism and atheism. By that page, I'm an agnostic atheist--I lack a belief in a god or gods because of a lack of evidence. What are you? Again atheism is NOT a belief. It's a *lack* of belief. "There is no justification for a belief in God, therefore, I do not believe in God." It doesn't pre-suppose that an atheist would never convert to theism if evidence were offered for the belief. It simply means that because there is no evidence for the belief, the atheist does not hold that belief. You are in fact an atheist if you do not actively believe in a god or gods.
-- Dave
No. See, you're the one misunderstanding now. That is not at all what a scientist does. A scientist does not accept all possibilities until the day when one is "proven" to be correct. A scientist accepts only those possibilities that are falsifiable and subject to the scientific method. If a hypothesis is not testable, it's no better than random guesswork, and therefore not worthy of consideration.
Just about any "why" or "how" question I pose to you could be answered with the phrase "aliens did it." "Why is the sky blue?" "Aliens did it." "How does the hummingbird fly?" "Aliens did it." "Why does life exist?" "Aliens did it." Many of those statements could be tested by, for instance, showing that nitrogen in the atmosphere actually makes the sky blue and not aliens. However, many statements like that could NOT be tested. That does not make "Aliens did it" a valid hypothesis for that phenomenon, though. You can choose to believe it anyway, or you can do what a scientist would do, and demand further proof before you would believe it. That does not mean you would withhold judgement on that hypothesis--it means you would reject it until such time as some sort of evidence makes the statement more likely than any of the millions of other random statements that could be made about the phenomenon, or until such time as some means of testing the statement presents itself.
For someone to see a lack of evidence and firmly come down against something is just as bad as firmly coming down in favor of it. This is why people often call Atheism a religion.
Again, you're not talking about real atheism. So-called "strong" atehism is what you're talking about--a flat out denial of god, a statement such as "God does not exist because there is no evidence for God." This is not what any thoughtful atheist says, however. A thoughtful atheist merely says "There is no justification for a belief in God, therefore, I do not believe in God." Belief without evidence is faith. Belief in the face of counter-evidence is blind faith. DIS-belief without evidence is being rational, however. If my pencil disappears from my desk while I'm in the bathroom, I can come up with several hypotheses to explain that. I can hypothesize that I misplaced the pencil and only think it is missing. I can hypothesize that one of my coworkers took it. I can also hypothesize that "Aliens did it". Two of these are rational, testable hypotheses. One of them is irrational and basically untestable (even if I leave out another pencil as bait and use a video camera to try to catch the aliens in the act, I can still claim "Well, aliens took the FIRST one!" if I in fact catch a coworker stealing the 'bait' pencil from my desk.) Choosing to believe that all three are equally likely is foolish.
-- Dave
It's a question of testability. Sure, you can have the belief that some being created life. But you can't test it. There are no predictions your hypothesis makes than can be tested. So it's no better than saying that everything sprung from nothing to as-is five minutes ago. You can say it, you can think it, but there's no way to put it to the test, which is the foundation of science. There is no evidence that points towards a creator. You can choose to believe in one, as many do, or you can choose not to believe in one, as I and many others do. But what's the point of saying you choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in something like that?
-- Dave
Not crazy at all, it is the foundation of science and critical thinking.
No, actually, it's not. Having an open mind is one thing, having a mind so open your brain falls out is quite another. Being able to distinguish between BS and honest hypothesis is part of critical thinking. If someone told you there were invisible pink elephants in his back yard, you would keep an open mind about that and not think that maybe your buddy had flipped his lid? Even after going out and pointing out to your buddy that these elephants left no tracks, dung, or anything else behind to show their presence, or that you could walk over every inch of his back yard and not run into one, you would still choose not to disbelieve him if he insisted they existed and were there? Seriously? That's not science or critical thinking, that's just being foolish.
-- Dave
The thing is, agnosticism is actually the most unsupportable "belief" of the bunch. If there is evidence for something, then belief in its existence is justified. If there is no evidence for something, belief in its existence is unjustified. It doesn't mean that it absolutely does not exist, any more than real atheism means "God does not exist". It means that since belief in God is unjustified because of a lack of evidence, I do not believe in God. Real atheists do not say "God does not exist". Real atheists say "I do not believe in God because there is no evidence for His existence." There's a huge difference.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that? Do you also choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in invisible pink elephants? There's no evidence for them either, but if someone told you they existed, would you keep an open mind about that? A person of faith believes despite lack of evidence, or even in the face of evidence to the contrary. An agnostic, however, sees the lack of evidence and yet continues to hedge his bets. Why?
-- Dave
The real question still is, does it have the equivalent of TiVo's "Season Pass" feature? For me, that's the killer app of TiVo. I will not buy a DVR that does not offer something similar.
-- Dave
It can if their proxy automatically routes you to an IP address whenever you start making HTTP requests.
-- Dave
There have actually been studies done that show that smiling can actually *make* you happier, not just be a reflection of your happiness. In typical /. fashion, I can provide no references to this. But I read it. Somewhere. Possibly in a magazine!
-- Dave
Then what fucking good are they? I have a VCR that can just record stuff at a certain time if I want to manually do all that crap myself every damn time.
-- Dave
The one thing I want to know is, do other PVRs have TiVo's "Season Pass" feature, or something similar? If so, I won't miss TiVo that much, as long as DirecTV hooks me up with something similar when/if they dump it.
-- Dave
Wow, this is great. An article gets posted about the objectification of women in games. Naturally it's written by a woman. So the slashbots find her website. And her pictures. And proceed to objectify her.
Tell me again why games objectify women...?
-- Dave
Most do. It's called a mute button.
-- Dave
Multiple times I or someone in my family have had this kind of thing work out for us. My personal example was this time I got stuck in touchtone menu hell when I tried to call my bank about my account. I couldn't find the proper menu item to press, and kept going in circles. I also couldn't find the option where you talk to a real human. Eventually, I got so frustrated I shouted "All I fucking want to do is inquire about the payoff amount of my loan!" or something like that. Within five seconds, a polite human popped on the line and routed me properly (turned out it was my fault, I'd called the wrong damn number anyway).
My mother had a similar experience, where she was stuck in the menus, couldn't find the right option, and just yelled something of a generally disgruntled nature into the phone, and got a human to pick up right after that.
Try it for yourself next time you get stuck in those endless phone menus. The funny thing is, usually I prefer to navigate the menus if they're clear and my query (like my loan balance question) can probably be handled without human interaction. But some companies have the absolute worst menu systems in place, and navigating them can be hell.
-- Dave
Bleh. Xenocide and Children are really one book, split in two because his publisher was either afraid to market it as one long book or wished to get more sales by splitting it into two.
And, they both sucked nuts. There's not a single person in either book who can make a simple decision without agonizing about it for pages and pages. It's boring and awful.
MY recommendation to any new reader is to read Game and Speaker and pretend like nothing else exists. I haven't read the Shadow series yet, so no comment on those.
-- Dave
It's also completely irrelevant to the argument. Dioxins may be completely man-made, but the disease of Cancer isn't. Man-made toxins can cause otherwise naturally occuring diseases. That says nothing about our ability to cure these otherwise naturally occuring diseases.
The argument that was being made was that if we had made the disease itself (or in this case, more specifically, the virus that causes the disease) we'd be able to cure it. I personally don't believe this is true--it seems to me that it'd be trivial to engineer a disease that you wouldn't immediately know how to cure. In fact, every reason I can think of for engineering a fatal disease like AIDS would necessarily cause me to also want to make it very hard to cure. That doesn't, however, make your example of Dioxins causing cancer any less bogus.
-- Dave
Step 1: Install Ubuntu ... There is no step 2!
Step 2:
I have a netgear wireless card in my laptop. Not only did Ubuntu detect it during the install, it asked me if I wanted to use it or my wired card as eth0 (I chose the wireless) and used it to download all the updated packages after it did the base install from CD. That's something that no other version of Linux has ever done on that laptop.
-- Dave
Believe it. The Scouring of the Shire scenes weren't even shot, so there's no way they're in the EE.
-- Dave
Actually, if you RTFA, you'll see that there's plenty of fairly common cases where both of those apps fail to detect/remove certain pieces of spyware.
-- Dave
Show me how Linux can do any of what you claim a "secure" OS should be able to do.
-- Dave
That's not been my experience in Colorado (specifically, Denver area). I got hit in the big collapse and lost my job on the last day of November, 2001. I was out of work until middle of March 2002, when I got a short term contract position. I was able to transition to a full time position with another company before the end of that contract, and have been there ever since. Just recently, I decided to test the waters again, and found to my surprise and delight that I got much more action this time around than I did the last time I was looking, by several orders of magnitude. In 2002, I would go for days without seeing a job posted on the job boards worth applying for, and I might go weeks between calls from recruiters/HR wonks. Now, it seems like every day or two a new job gets posted that looks good to me, and I get at least one call a week from recruiters looking to place me (recruiters that have actual positions they're recruiting for, even!) Some weeks, I get calls almost daily. A lot of this is for short term (3-6 month) work, but at least I no longer fear being laid off, because I'm fairly certain I won't have to sit on the couch for very long before I can pick up another position.
Caveat: I'm not a software engineer. Like the grandparent, I'm a UNIX sysadmin with about ten years experience.
-- Dave
Where do you get this from? I, for one, absolutely would advocate jail for dotors and women who knowingly performed/recieved abortions of viable human babies. I think a lot if not most of the hardcore anti-abortion types (of which I am *not* one, as I fully believe there is some point during a pregnancy before which destroying the fetus is *not* murder, but simply an elective medical procedure--it's just that nobody seems to know exactly when that *is*) would agree with this as well. It seems like you're patting yourself on the back for finding a logical flaw in an argument that doesn't even exist.
If you kill a baby a second after it is born, you get charged with murder. I think if you do the same thing a second *before* the baby is born, you should also be charged with murder. A lot of other people would agree with me. So take your strawman elsewhere, thanks.
-- Dave
This has nothing to do with state ownership of anything. It has everything to do with protecting the rights of people, which is precicely what governments are supposed to do.
*If* an unborn fetus represents a human life, then the mother has no right to kill it, regardless of whether or not it currently resides in her uterus. This doesn't mean the state owns her reproductive organs any more than it means the state owns my house because it won't allow me to kill people living inside it.
Again, this has nothing to do with state ownership of anything. It has to do with protecting people's rights. I have a right to free speech, but I am not alowed unlimited exercise of that right if it infringes on the rights of others. I can't, for instance, incite people to riot and claim to be protected under free speech. Similarly, a woman has a right to choose which medical procedures are performed on her body, up until the point where such procedures would be harmful to another person, such as the unborn person she is carrying in her womb.
BTW, abortion during the third trimester is *not* illegal in all states. It's a state-by-state thing, and I believe something like 40 states and DC have outlawed it. But not all states have, and there is no federal law against it either. So the fact remains that in some places in the US, it's completely legal to kill an unborn child one day before it would have naturally been born, but not legal to kill it one day after it has been born.
Of course, this entire debate hinges on when life begins, and the fact is we don't know for sure. Religious people will tell you it begins at conception. More scientifically minded people will usually say it begins sometime after conception but before birth. Heck, some places in China, it's legal to kill a child up to three days after birth. But my point is, *if* the unborn fetus in a woman's uterus represents a viable human life, then the woman has absolutely no right to an abortion. If it does not, then she can do what she wants. But saying that protecting the rights of people is somehow akin to the state owning parts of a woman's body is ludicrous.
-- Dave
Suicide is one thing. Homocide is another. Suicide assumes the person doing the killing is also the person being killed, and is consenting to be killed. Homocide assumes the person being killed is NOT the person doing the killing, and is NOT consenting to be killed.
Abortion is akin to one of these, and it's not suicide. It may *not* be homocide in many cases, but in many cases, it almost certainly *is*. That makes it wrong, and *should*, at least in those cases, make it illegal.
-- Dave
What the FUCK are you talking about? Do you seriously believe what you just wrote?
/. reader has higher than average intellect and critical thinking skills. Christ.
First of all, forcing a woman to have an abortion is NOTHING AT ALL like preventing a woman from having one. That's like saying forcing me to take poison is the same as preventing me from taking it. In one scenario, I end up dead. In the other, I don't. It's the same with the abortion question. In one scenario, the fetus ends up dead. In the other, it doesn't.
You can talk about "reproductive rights" and "choice" all you want, but the fact remains that at some point during a pregnancy, the unborn fetus becomes a viable human being. After that point, abortion becomes equivalent to murder. Religions people say that point is conception, which is why they're against all abortions. Non-religious people are unsure, which is why a lot of non-religious people are still against abortion--because they don't know when the act of abortion becomes murder, so they decide to err on the side of caution and prevent all abortions.
A woman's ownership of her uterus and her ability to make choices about what goes on inside it is the same as my ability to make choices about what goes on inside my house. I'm not alowed to kill someone just because they're inside my house, and a woman should not be alowed to kill an unborn human child just because it's inside her uterus. Currently, life is defined as beginning at birth, and so unborn fetuses have no rights under the Constitution, which is why abortion can be legal. However, many people feel this should be changed, and that unborn, viable babies should be given the same rights as equivalent babies who happen to have squeezed through the birth canal already.
Damn. And to think, just a few posts up someone was crowing about how the average
-- Dave