You say other sites like Facebook as if it's a hypothetical. It's not. The difference is, in this case, the guy wasn't able to conceal his snooping, whereas with Facebook no one even knows if and how many times anything like this may have happened.
End of the day, you can't really complain about the state of the universe if there's no way to change it. What's GOOG supposed to do, encrypt all the data they keep in their own databases? How would they index stuff to support even the most basic user functionality, much less their business model?
It's naive to think you are uploading data to a company and no one in that company has access to it. It's also naive to think that any company of significant size doesn't have a few bad apples running around, even in the most sensitive areas, even with all of the care they could possibly take.
My understanding is that Rackspace can only be held responsible for content they host if they attempt to regulate it. If they didn't attempt to regulate it as they're doing here, they would have protection.
I could be wrong though...IANAL.
The reason I have that sig is to make the point that "shut up" is not an argument. It's this thing I sometimes do and it's gotten me in trouble before—usually when I overestimate my conversation partners—I say the opposite of what I mean, usually to be sarcastic or funny, sometimes both. It is confusing sometimes. If you investigate the way most people use sigs, though, I think you'll find that it is often where people put humorous or otherwise not-serious statements.
It's not about their policy toward hate speech. It's their definition of what hate speech is. I wouldn't want to deal with a company that, say, defines your last post as hate speech and squashes it.
It's fine to declare your right to control speech on your properties. It's still best to use a light touch in doing so, though.
That this fringe group's rights are being violated is not the problem, because their rights are not being violated here by Rackspace.
The problem is that Rackspace is essentially declaring here that they themselves do not support free speech, and they will apply their legal right to limit speech they don't like.
There's nothing illegal about it...but it also means that we probably shouldn't hold them up as a model and a paragon of virtue any more than we would do the same of the book burners.
"Above a certain threshold, money does not increase happiness" when distributed over a diverse population. The idiots become more miserable. The wise become happier. On balance, money does not increase happiness. The unstated and incorrect conclusion is to take that quite valid generalization and apply it to my situation. More money would most definitely increase my happiness and most people I came into contact with.
"Power and happiness are not one and the same." I'm not extending or otherwise commenting on this one because, well, it's exactly what I said in my post. So, yea.
These money/happiness studies are a stupid attempt to mollify stupid people into being happy with what they have. It's a diseased mindset perpetrated by the people that have a lot (and are smart enough to want to hang on to it) on the people that do not. It's no coincidence that the biggest tax-free fundraiser of all time has literally built its mantra around being grateful and satisfied with what you have...so much the easier to donate anything more that comes your way. (Yes, I'm talking about religion—see here.)
When will the authorities realize that this thing relies on inherent features of the Internet, and that it cannot be prevented by force without taking down the 'net itself?
Look, hypothetical authority figure, encryption and digital signing and all the technology and math and science and engineering in the world can only protect communications between two trusted endpoints. In this context, "trust" means that both parties are trusted to only share the transacted information in a manner both sides deem appropriate.
In the pair {music company, customer}, the customer is not a trusted endpoint. Any information sent to that person cannot in principle be protected. On the other hand, the endpoints {customer, everyone else} is by definition trusted because neither party cares what the other does with the information being transacted, so all actions are trusted.
Do you see the problem now? Can you understand why spending millions more of the public's money chasing this phantom is a fundamental misunderstanding of technology? There's two ways to deal with this. Governments and corporations can: (a) continue tending toward more and more extreme actions in a futile attempt to control the information until they slide all the way over the fascist system that would be required to actually work, (b) recognize that we live in a free society where people's right to exchange information is worth protecting in spite of the fact that it can be abused. In this battle, we have a basic human right on one side of freedom to exchange information, and right to intellectual property on the other.
The right to IP is not a fundamental human right! That's not to say it's not worth protecting at all, but not at the cost of something much more important!
Money translates directly into power of a certain kind. The kind of power that comes with money can most definitely increase happiness if used wisely. It can also increase misery; it depends completely upon how the owner directs it.
People who mindlessly verbally dump this old chestnut annoy me. In a working economy, most people get money by making other people happy. Think about it: most money gets made because the person paying benefits from the transaction...they're happier trading the cash for the good or service than keeping the cash.
Of course, this requires you spend your money only on things that you'd rather have than the cash. If you spend money without thinking carefully, you could end up buying things that make you miserable instead (heroin comes to mind).
So money doesn't buy happiness—you do, if you want to.
This is true...I don't really comment my code that much—well, internally anyway. I comment copiously on the API, and if the API is designed properly and dependencies managed well, you shouldn't need a lot of comments in the code itself aside from the tricky cases you mention (switch fall-thrus...if you're using switches, which you probably shouldn't be).
Yea...it's nothing compared to what Facebook has paid out in privacy settlements over the years, and even that is orders of magnitude less than those invasive ad companies that do profiling based on packet inspection. Remember all those stories on those big settlements?
Neither do I. Neither does anyone. Because they never happened.
If Flash apps don't include that feature now or any time in the somewhat recent past, that's no reason to hate on Flash. That's a reason to hate on the people developing for it.
It's nothing to do with Flash, then, it's just something that...always seems to happen with Flash apps?
...and what does Jobs have to do with Adobe Flash??? The problem is that when one vendor (Adobe, not Apple) controls the thing that renders web content, they determine what kind of web content can be rendered. Want to use an open source mp3 player on your site? Too bad, Adobe doesn't want DRM-protected content to play, so you have to use theirs available through Flash.
The web is open, it's meant to be open. It's not a good idea to invite a future where a significant proportion of the content is tied to one platform controlled by one vendor. Period.
Except, it's hard to know the difference between a dullard that tries really hard and a lazy person that could have done much better but chose not to. They both appear the same in every way on paper...
Support for deep linking was with AJAX since day 1. Not so for Flash...it was added later, which is why Flash apps have developed a rich tradition of not providing this capability while web 2.0 apps built with other technologies almost always do.
And I'd also prefer that a single company not dictate the language of web content, thanks.
Does anyone know the percentage of Harvard students that graduate cum laude? Magna cum laude? Summa cum laude?
(Hint: 50% graduate with these "rare" honors.)
Anyone care to guess what the average GPA is for a Harvard grad?
Why oh why did I have to go to school somewhere they didn't inflate grades? Studying makes college so much more challenging than it needs to be, apparently.
What browser are you using? I watched the Arcade Fire Chrome experiment [http://www.chromeexperiments.com/] and it was fast and generally rocked. Everything I've seen in HTML5 has been quite awesome so far, actually.
Flash, on the other hand, has always consistently sucked. Wait, scratch that, there is the one thing I know of that is just a great use of Flash. Really, it would convert anyone into a huge Flash believer if they saw it...I don't care who you are or how you're coming at it, once you saw this thing, you'd be forever convinced that Flash needs to be kept alive.
I'd link it here for people to go and check out, but I can't link you directly to the relevant part. It's just a shame that Flash was invented before they decided the web would be based on linking. Shame, that. You really would've liked to see this.
None of the situations you describe are, generally speaking, akin to abortion because they are all examples where a person's rights are infringed. Certainly, at some point during a pregnancy I too would consider the fetus to be human life worth protecting, after which it would necessarily become imbued with such rights.
But the status of a fetus as "life worth protecting" should not be legislated. It ought to be decided based upon an understanding based upon the most recent state of knowledge about the development of human life, which is not best left to politicians. We already use panels of experts that already make such decisions (as in the Terry Schiavo case, for example, where the hospital decided it was ethical to present the choice of whether or not to keep the patient on life support). Whatever problems exist in that system, it simply doesn't make sense to argue that politicians are somehow better able to make the call (and most likely not for everyone the same), which is why we don't allow politicians to pass laws about when life ends.
Abortion being a "personal" matter is a bullshit cop-out. In every society, the members get to collectively decide what is and is not acceptable. Privacy isn't a shield to protect wrongdoing.
So, according to your argument, if I choose not to "cop out" here and we agree that society dictates what's right and wrong by some decision process, then I can only infer that you agree with society's current decision, i.e., you're pro-choice?
This seems to me to contradict your own view which I had gathered was pretty obviously pro-life. You say privacy isn't a shield to protect wrongdoing. The fact that it is sometimes just that notwithstanding, I think we're in agreement wrt abortion. You still have all your work in front of you, however—at what point in development does it become a "wrongdoing"? That's the question before us, and this does nothing to address it.
I don't think society gets to decide each issue in its own little vacuum; such decisions have to be based upon reasoning that is internally consistent. To achieve such consistency we first decide on foundational principles; these are axiomatic. As our understanding advances, we are better able to make our system more internally consistent with those foundational principles. To be clear here, our choice of axiomatic principles is quite subjective, and we may find we have honest differences of opinion based on what principles we hold as foundational. I can respect such differences. I can't respect a difference that is simply based on shortcutting the process of reasoning from those principles forward.
Applied to this situation, I believe I am arguing for a position that recognizes the boundaries of our state of knowledge and makes allowances for the sake of ethics. We can safely say that not all human life is worth protecting (moles, cancer cells, etc) while some human life is worth protecting (people). The question is, at what point do a gamete pair -> zygote -> mass of tissue -> fetus -> baby become a person worth protecting? I think we ought to feel a compulsion to err on the side of protection where ignorance reigns...but, on the other hand, to pretend that a zygote is sentient, self-aware, thinking, feeling, capable of suffering, or has any quality different from a mole is feigning ignorance where none exists. There are certainly some features we would have to see before protection would be consistent with how we treat adults on life support, for example.
Perhaps you misunderstand their views.
Perhaps I understand the implications of those views better than the people that hold them...there's only one way to find out.
It's wrong to destroy a human organism that poses no immediate threat to your safety.
Generally speaking, I think we agree on this point. However, this does nothing to advance your view that a
I most definitely want an Internet kill switch, and I would love it if the USG did this for us. This kind of project is too big and too costly to get done any other way...it requires government to get involved, and if we're going to be able to shut down the entire web with a single event, it has to be done this way because of the distributed nature of the web and it's inherent design to route around damage. My only fear is that if the USG were to take this on as a task, they might not succeed on time and within budget, and we need it to succeed.
(By the way, just to be clear, I'm a terrorist...as are all of us here, right? Think how awesome it would be to get control of a single point of failure created for the web! Key step to turning converting North America into a caliphate am I right guys?)
The problem is unless you embed your payload of information steganographically in something that can't be easily auto-detected as encryption, encrypting on your own is a good way to get noticed.
Hmm...I can't see how this particular question is begged...it's the crack of 9:30a where I'm posting from though, so maybe I'm missing it...
I see how it raises the (probably rhetorical) question of "who cares?" but I don't see how it assumes the initial point in its premise. I'm not even sure what the premise being assumed is, exactly, much less how it's assumed. My head does hurt, though, and it's before coffee and a coworker just gave me an unprovoked angelfood muffin that's highly distracting.:-)
I don't agree with that. A baby is worth protecting because of what it is, not because of what it could be. I think we already agree that a newborn is worth protecting, while it is not sensible to apply the same level of protection to a sperm/egg pair. If your argument is based on the idea of potentiality, then you have to make explicit why in your view a sperm/egg pair is not worth protecting.
Before you think this is too ridiculous to consider, let us recall that there are (too many) people against birth control for essentially this reason, many of whom similarly regard "the sin of Onan" in the same way. So it is worth articulating a consistent argument lest you find yourself sliding off the deep end.
How does the science change anything? Just in case you're not sure what I'm referencing, the US Constitution originally valued a black person as 60% the worth of a white one. And I'm not sure how science can really inform us any differently. Even if the cause was culture or upbringing or "being not allowed to read under penalty of death", that value was still assessed.
The Three-fifths compromise was not a value judgment on the intrinsic worth of a black person vs. a white person; it was only about whether slaves should be counted for the purposes of establishing the number of representatives. The non-slaveholding states "valued" blacks at zero (they didn't want slaves to count at all towards population that determined representation), while the Southern states wanted slaves to count fully. The compromise was 3/5.
If we take this to mean what you apparently think it does, then you are essentially asserting that slaveholding states thought blacks were equal to whites (while holding them as slaves!), while northerners thought they had no value compared to whites, and James Madison thought it was something about which political compromises were meaningful. This is, of course, perfect nonsense; slaveholding Southerners did not judge blacks to be inherently equal to whites even though they were advocating that they be counted as a full person, and it's disrespectful to Madison's intellect to presume that he would've thought a vote could decide a philosophical question.
Scientific questions addressing the actual philosophical question of racial superiority persisted into the 20th Century, well after passage of the 14th Amendment that you prefer to continue bringing up as if it is the thing that settled this issue.
I'm unsure why you persist in bringing the 3/5 compromise into the discussion, though--it has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. Can we sally back toward the topic at hand and drop this irrelevant digression?
But they believe the issue is settled. And since science cannot inform us differently (see below), they're perfectly right to believe that.
Science can and does inform this issue just as it did the issue of racial superiority. If only you could define what quality of human life makes it worth protecting, science would have a lot to say. The problem here isn't with science, it's with your inability to articulate your thoughts about what, specifically, is worth protecting and what isn't.
Science really has made bad calls [in the past]...
This is the general form of the argument that creationists use to discount evolution theory. The fact is that it is a feature of scientific understanding to always advance. You seem to be saying here that, because it doesn't provide a perfect understanding of such matters right out of the gate, it's worthless? What alternative approach would serve us better?
What is the scientific test for sentience? Potential to become sentient?
This is the heart of my point: in bringing sentience into the discussion, you have introduced a quality in some life
REAL AMERICANS unfortunately have trouble finding the United States on a map, much less a famous landmark. Remember that famous botch job by the Miss America contestant? Because her answer was so stupid most people didn't notice that the question was: why can't 1 in 5 Americans find the US on the map? Yes, I'm an American. Yes, I'm embarrassed by that.
I know of no pro-life argument that considers a single cell human life worth protecting that isn't based purely on potentiality.
I have a hard time understanding why you feel so confident that your line (paraphrased as "physical mental infrastructure reaches X% complete") is correct. Well, actually, I understand why you're so confident - people are most confident where there is the least evidence. But I know of a lot of people who draw the line both earlier and later than that.
To address the last statement—the fact that there are people that have opinions on either side don't matter—their arguments do. (I'll deal with the earlier statements in this quoted section a bit further down.
Correct... nor do you find many people still willing to discuss if a black person is only worth 60% of a white one. Most people on the pro-life side consider the question settled.
Except...there's a small difference between the discussion about black people and this one. Scientifically, the question about skin color actually has been settled. A not-insignificant amount of work went into it, too, to show that race is a social and not a scientific distinction.
To behave as though an issue has been settled when the facts are not yet known to that degree is a rhetorical tactic, not a logical one.
And to some degree apportioning limited medical questions. But I don't think they should overstep their bounds, and when life begins is nowhere near a medical question.
Defining life and when it begins, if we consider it a question worth answering, is exclusively a question of science (unless you know of a way to investigate such questions in some other way?). It may not be completely confined to medicine, but there is certainly a huge amount of overlap in the field of medical science.
The disturbing thing here is that you apparently don't seem to think that studied experts have anything to contribute. We're a society of specialization, though...we rely on subject matter experts all the time. You're arguing against that for some reason here? Should we not listen to our nuclear engineers when designing a nuclear power plant? Should we not listen to our military tacticians in war? How do you suggest we deal with sticky issues if we don't go to the most trained people for their insight? (Is your stance one of anti-intellectualism?)
I think most people understand that a tumor is not a human being, nor will it ever become a distinct human being. Clearly people can lose cells and not lose their identity... and clearly there is no arbitrary number of cells that that can be. I'm sure my leg has more cells than a baby, for instance. Humans are more than the sum of their parts, and when that additional piece gets added is up for debate.
Ok, well good, then. We're on the same page about a tumor not being human life worth protecting. And we also agree that when human "that additional piece gets added" is also up for debate. I'm glad to see here that you're properly recognizing this issue is open to debate. (I do have to wonder, though: if you know this, what were you trying to say above when you made reference to the black people thing? Was your only point up above that some people think irrationally...?)
But to be more precise, when I talk about a human being, I mean a sentient entity or able to become a sentient entity.
So now all we need to figure out to know whether abortion is ok is: is the fetus sentient yet? If so, it's protected human life, if not, it can be treated as we would any other mass of tissue. So now the question turns to: what is the earliest part of pregnancy where we can say the fetus has a reasonable chance of becoming imbued with "sentience"? (What exactly do you mean by the t
Slashdot Mirror
You say other sites like Facebook as if it's a hypothetical. It's not. The difference is, in this case, the guy wasn't able to conceal his snooping, whereas with Facebook no one even knows if and how many times anything like this may have happened.
End of the day, you can't really complain about the state of the universe if there's no way to change it. What's GOOG supposed to do, encrypt all the data they keep in their own databases? How would they index stuff to support even the most basic user functionality, much less their business model?
It's naive to think you are uploading data to a company and no one in that company has access to it. It's also naive to think that any company of significant size doesn't have a few bad apples running around, even in the most sensitive areas, even with all of the care they could possibly take.
My understanding is that Rackspace can only be held responsible for content they host if they attempt to regulate it. If they didn't attempt to regulate it as they're doing here, they would have protection.
I could be wrong though...IANAL.
The reason I have that sig is to make the point that "shut up" is not an argument. It's this thing I sometimes do and it's gotten me in trouble before—usually when I overestimate my conversation partners—I say the opposite of what I mean, usually to be sarcastic or funny, sometimes both. It is confusing sometimes. If you investigate the way most people use sigs, though, I think you'll find that it is often where people put humorous or otherwise not-serious statements.
It's not about their policy toward hate speech. It's their definition of what hate speech is. I wouldn't want to deal with a company that, say, defines your last post as hate speech and squashes it.
It's fine to declare your right to control speech on your properties. It's still best to use a light touch in doing so, though.
Why do you think I'm only referring to unintended abuse? (I'm not.)
That this fringe group's rights are being violated is not the problem, because their rights are not being violated here by Rackspace.
The problem is that Rackspace is essentially declaring here that they themselves do not support free speech, and they will apply their legal right to limit speech they don't like.
There's nothing illegal about it...but it also means that we probably shouldn't hold them up as a model and a paragon of virtue any more than we would do the same of the book burners.
Oh boy. You accuse me of not reading something?
"Above a certain threshold, money does not increase happiness" when distributed over a diverse population. The idiots become more miserable. The wise become happier. On balance, money does not increase happiness. The unstated and incorrect conclusion is to take that quite valid generalization and apply it to my situation. More money would most definitely increase my happiness and most people I came into contact with.
"Power and happiness are not one and the same." I'm not extending or otherwise commenting on this one because, well, it's exactly what I said in my post. So, yea.
These money/happiness studies are a stupid attempt to mollify stupid people into being happy with what they have. It's a diseased mindset perpetrated by the people that have a lot (and are smart enough to want to hang on to it) on the people that do not. It's no coincidence that the biggest tax-free fundraiser of all time has literally built its mantra around being grateful and satisfied with what you have...so much the easier to donate anything more that comes your way. (Yes, I'm talking about religion—see here.)
When will the authorities realize that this thing relies on inherent features of the Internet, and that it cannot be prevented by force without taking down the 'net itself?
Look, hypothetical authority figure, encryption and digital signing and all the technology and math and science and engineering in the world can only protect communications between two trusted endpoints. In this context, "trust" means that both parties are trusted to only share the transacted information in a manner both sides deem appropriate.
In the pair {music company, customer}, the customer is not a trusted endpoint. Any information sent to that person cannot in principle be protected. On the other hand, the endpoints {customer, everyone else} is by definition trusted because neither party cares what the other does with the information being transacted, so all actions are trusted.
Do you see the problem now? Can you understand why spending millions more of the public's money chasing this phantom is a fundamental misunderstanding of technology? There's two ways to deal with this. Governments and corporations can: (a) continue tending toward more and more extreme actions in a futile attempt to control the information until they slide all the way over the fascist system that would be required to actually work, (b) recognize that we live in a free society where people's right to exchange information is worth protecting in spite of the fact that it can be abused. In this battle, we have a basic human right on one side of freedom to exchange information, and right to intellectual property on the other.
The right to IP is not a fundamental human right! That's not to say it's not worth protecting at all, but not at the cost of something much more important!
TFA is the dumbest thing ever.
Money translates directly into power of a certain kind. The kind of power that comes with money can most definitely increase happiness if used wisely. It can also increase misery; it depends completely upon how the owner directs it.
People who mindlessly verbally dump this old chestnut annoy me. In a working economy, most people get money by making other people happy. Think about it: most money gets made because the person paying benefits from the transaction...they're happier trading the cash for the good or service than keeping the cash.
Of course, this requires you spend your money only on things that you'd rather have than the cash. If you spend money without thinking carefully, you could end up buying things that make you miserable instead (heroin comes to mind).
So money doesn't buy happiness—you do, if you want to.
This is true...I don't really comment my code that much—well, internally anyway. I comment copiously on the API, and if the API is designed properly and dependencies managed well, you shouldn't need a lot of comments in the code itself aside from the tricky cases you mention (switch fall-thrus...if you're using switches, which you probably shouldn't be).
Yea...it's nothing compared to what Facebook has paid out in privacy settlements over the years, and even that is orders of magnitude less than those invasive ad companies that do profiling based on packet inspection. Remember all those stories on those big settlements?
Neither do I. Neither does anyone. Because they never happened.
It's nothing to do with Flash, then, it's just something that...always seems to happen with Flash apps?
...and what does Jobs have to do with Adobe Flash??? The problem is that when one vendor (Adobe, not Apple) controls the thing that renders web content, they determine what kind of web content can be rendered. Want to use an open source mp3 player on your site? Too bad, Adobe doesn't want DRM-protected content to play, so you have to use theirs available through Flash.
The web is open, it's meant to be open. It's not a good idea to invite a future where a significant proportion of the content is tied to one platform controlled by one vendor. Period.
Except, it's hard to know the difference between a dullard that tries really hard and a lazy person that could have done much better but chose not to. They both appear the same in every way on paper...
Support for deep linking was with AJAX since day 1. Not so for Flash...it was added later, which is why Flash apps have developed a rich tradition of not providing this capability while web 2.0 apps built with other technologies almost always do.
And I'd also prefer that a single company not dictate the language of web content, thanks.
Flash sucks.
Does anyone know the percentage of Harvard students that graduate cum laude? Magna cum laude? Summa cum laude?
(Hint: 50% graduate with these "rare" honors.)
Anyone care to guess what the average GPA is for a Harvard grad?
Why oh why did I have to go to school somewhere they didn't inflate grades? Studying makes college so much more challenging than it needs to be, apparently.
What browser are you using? I watched the Arcade Fire Chrome experiment [http://www.chromeexperiments.com/] and it was fast and generally rocked. Everything I've seen in HTML5 has been quite awesome so far, actually.
Flash, on the other hand, has always consistently sucked. Wait, scratch that, there is the one thing I know of that is just a great use of Flash. Really, it would convert anyone into a huge Flash believer if they saw it...I don't care who you are or how you're coming at it, once you saw this thing, you'd be forever convinced that Flash needs to be kept alive.
I'd link it here for people to go and check out, but I can't link you directly to the relevant part. It's just a shame that Flash was invented before they decided the web would be based on linking. Shame, that. You really would've liked to see this.
One flew east, and one flew west...
None of the situations you describe are, generally speaking, akin to abortion because they are all examples where a person's rights are infringed. Certainly, at some point during a pregnancy I too would consider the fetus to be human life worth protecting, after which it would necessarily become imbued with such rights.
But the status of a fetus as "life worth protecting" should not be legislated. It ought to be decided based upon an understanding based upon the most recent state of knowledge about the development of human life, which is not best left to politicians. We already use panels of experts that already make such decisions (as in the Terry Schiavo case, for example, where the hospital decided it was ethical to present the choice of whether or not to keep the patient on life support). Whatever problems exist in that system, it simply doesn't make sense to argue that politicians are somehow better able to make the call (and most likely not for everyone the same), which is why we don't allow politicians to pass laws about when life ends.
So, according to your argument, if I choose not to "cop out" here and we agree that society dictates what's right and wrong by some decision process, then I can only infer that you agree with society's current decision, i.e., you're pro-choice?
This seems to me to contradict your own view which I had gathered was pretty obviously pro-life. You say privacy isn't a shield to protect wrongdoing. The fact that it is sometimes just that notwithstanding, I think we're in agreement wrt abortion. You still have all your work in front of you, however—at what point in development does it become a "wrongdoing"? That's the question before us, and this does nothing to address it.
I don't think society gets to decide each issue in its own little vacuum; such decisions have to be based upon reasoning that is internally consistent. To achieve such consistency we first decide on foundational principles; these are axiomatic. As our understanding advances, we are better able to make our system more internally consistent with those foundational principles. To be clear here, our choice of axiomatic principles is quite subjective, and we may find we have honest differences of opinion based on what principles we hold as foundational. I can respect such differences. I can't respect a difference that is simply based on shortcutting the process of reasoning from those principles forward.
Applied to this situation, I believe I am arguing for a position that recognizes the boundaries of our state of knowledge and makes allowances for the sake of ethics. We can safely say that not all human life is worth protecting (moles, cancer cells, etc) while some human life is worth protecting (people). The question is, at what point do a gamete pair -> zygote -> mass of tissue -> fetus -> baby become a person worth protecting? I think we ought to feel a compulsion to err on the side of protection where ignorance reigns...but, on the other hand, to pretend that a zygote is sentient, self-aware, thinking, feeling, capable of suffering, or has any quality different from a mole is feigning ignorance where none exists. There are certainly some features we would have to see before protection would be consistent with how we treat adults on life support, for example.
Perhaps I understand the implications of those views better than the people that hold them...there's only one way to find out.
Generally speaking, I think we agree on this point. However, this does nothing to advance your view that a
I look forward to reading a scathing expose of the lobbyists responsible for this in tomorrow's—uhh...
Uhhhhhhh...
I most definitely want an Internet kill switch, and I would love it if the USG did this for us. This kind of project is too big and too costly to get done any other way...it requires government to get involved, and if we're going to be able to shut down the entire web with a single event, it has to be done this way because of the distributed nature of the web and it's inherent design to route around damage. My only fear is that if the USG were to take this on as a task, they might not succeed on time and within budget, and we need it to succeed.
(By the way, just to be clear, I'm a terrorist...as are all of us here, right? Think how awesome it would be to get control of a single point of failure created for the web! Key step to turning converting North America into a caliphate am I right guys?)
:-)
The problem is unless you embed your payload of information steganographically in something that can't be easily auto-detected as encryption, encrypting on your own is a good way to get noticed.
Hmm...I can't see how this particular question is begged...it's the crack of 9:30a where I'm posting from though, so maybe I'm missing it...
I see how it raises the (probably rhetorical) question of "who cares?" but I don't see how it assumes the initial point in its premise. I'm not even sure what the premise being assumed is, exactly, much less how it's assumed. My head does hurt, though, and it's before coffee and a coworker just gave me an unprovoked angelfood muffin that's highly distracting. :-)
I think yes, as is "begs the question"...
I don't agree with that. A baby is worth protecting because of what it is, not because of what it could be. I think we already agree that a newborn is worth protecting, while it is not sensible to apply the same level of protection to a sperm/egg pair. If your argument is based on the idea of potentiality, then you have to make explicit why in your view a sperm/egg pair is not worth protecting.
Before you think this is too ridiculous to consider, let us recall that there are (too many) people against birth control for essentially this reason, many of whom similarly regard "the sin of Onan" in the same way. So it is worth articulating a consistent argument lest you find yourself sliding off the deep end.
The Three-fifths compromise was not a value judgment on the intrinsic worth of a black person vs. a white person; it was only about whether slaves should be counted for the purposes of establishing the number of representatives. The non-slaveholding states "valued" blacks at zero (they didn't want slaves to count at all towards population that determined representation), while the Southern states wanted slaves to count fully. The compromise was 3/5.
If we take this to mean what you apparently think it does, then you are essentially asserting that slaveholding states thought blacks were equal to whites (while holding them as slaves!), while northerners thought they had no value compared to whites, and James Madison thought it was something about which political compromises were meaningful. This is, of course, perfect nonsense; slaveholding Southerners did not judge blacks to be inherently equal to whites even though they were advocating that they be counted as a full person, and it's disrespectful to Madison's intellect to presume that he would've thought a vote could decide a philosophical question.
Scientific questions addressing the actual philosophical question of racial superiority persisted into the 20th Century, well after passage of the 14th Amendment that you prefer to continue bringing up as if it is the thing that settled this issue.
I'm unsure why you persist in bringing the 3/5 compromise into the discussion, though--it has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. Can we sally back toward the topic at hand and drop this irrelevant digression?
Science can and does inform this issue just as it did the issue of racial superiority. If only you could define what quality of human life makes it worth protecting, science would have a lot to say. The problem here isn't with science, it's with your inability to articulate your thoughts about what, specifically, is worth protecting and what isn't.
This is the general form of the argument that creationists use to discount evolution theory. The fact is that it is a feature of scientific understanding to always advance. You seem to be saying here that, because it doesn't provide a perfect understanding of such matters right out of the gate, it's worthless? What alternative approach would serve us better?
This is the heart of my point: in bringing sentience into the discussion, you have introduced a quality in some life
REAL AMERICANS unfortunately have trouble finding the United States on a map, much less a famous landmark. Remember that famous botch job by the Miss America contestant? Because her answer was so stupid most people didn't notice that the question was: why can't 1 in 5 Americans find the US on the map? Yes, I'm an American. Yes, I'm embarrassed by that.
I know of no pro-life argument that considers a single cell human life worth protecting that isn't based purely on potentiality.
To address the last statement—the fact that there are people that have opinions on either side don't matter—their arguments do. (I'll deal with the earlier statements in this quoted section a bit further down.
Except...there's a small difference between the discussion about black people and this one. Scientifically, the question about skin color actually has been settled. A not-insignificant amount of work went into it, too, to show that race is a social and not a scientific distinction.
To behave as though an issue has been settled when the facts are not yet known to that degree is a rhetorical tactic, not a logical one.
Defining life and when it begins, if we consider it a question worth answering, is exclusively a question of science (unless you know of a way to investigate such questions in some other way?). It may not be completely confined to medicine, but there is certainly a huge amount of overlap in the field of medical science.
The disturbing thing here is that you apparently don't seem to think that studied experts have anything to contribute. We're a society of specialization, though...we rely on subject matter experts all the time. You're arguing against that for some reason here? Should we not listen to our nuclear engineers when designing a nuclear power plant? Should we not listen to our military tacticians in war? How do you suggest we deal with sticky issues if we don't go to the most trained people for their insight? (Is your stance one of anti-intellectualism?)
Ok, well good, then. We're on the same page about a tumor not being human life worth protecting. And we also agree that when human "that additional piece gets added" is also up for debate. I'm glad to see here that you're properly recognizing this issue is open to debate. (I do have to wonder, though: if you know this, what were you trying to say above when you made reference to the black people thing? Was your only point up above that some people think irrationally...?)
So now all we need to figure out to know whether abortion is ok is: is the fetus sentient yet? If so, it's protected human life, if not, it can be treated as we would any other mass of tissue. So now the question turns to: what is the earliest part of pregnancy where we can say the fetus has a reasonable chance of becoming imbued with "sentience"? (What exactly do you mean by the t