You can't differentiate fetus from new born or infant for any definition of moral agent and therefore person.
Of course you can differentiate, what you can't do is tell precisely in practice when an embryo crosses that definitional line from blob of cells through fetus into (in your words) moral agent. So I can say that I believe 24 weeks is too late for abortion, and that 4 weeks is definitely okay but inbetween gets tricky depending on your definition of "moral agent". Of course religious folk who believe that "moral agency" begins at conception due to the existence of a a "soul" are begging the question since they assume that moral agency is a property of something that isn't physically detectable in even an adult human. I have great sympathy for those who believe that abortion is murder, it must be awful to believe that. However if it wasn't for religion there could be a useful ongoing debate in society about what constitutes humanness and the obligations that might put on a pregnant woman. There might also be far more done to help women avoid being pregnant in the first place. Imagine a world in which medical science makes it impossible for a woman to be pregnant against her conscious sound informed will. Might not society's expectation of her attitude towards abortion be stricter than I think it should be today? However to move towards such a world requires acknowledging pregnancy avoidance as a legitimate goal of sexually active women and of their right to be sexually active in the first place! Also a debate about humanness might also inform the debate about death and what it is to say that "a person is dead", something that is also not universally agreed upon.
May I bedevil your deviling and counter that if precognition was a randomly distributed skill then would we not see some using it for venal purposes? And if it were learnable surely everyone would have a go in which case the above, it's not as if all the sociopaths that ruin our society are unskilled or not dedicated.
In fact I posit that it is that very "spiritualness" of esp. claimants and the other less evidentiary based ideas that often accompany "spiritualness", that rather gives the game away credibility wise. However that might make me judgmental or elitist so I'll stop now before the pyramid power people come to get me:)
There are over 6 billion people in the world sir, it would be amazing if there wasn't anyone who had had this experience. The fact that you know someone for whom this has happened demonstrates nothing, can you vouch that she has never ever said "don't go" any other time and nothing untoward taken place? Given that your grandmother thought she was psychic would she have noticed if she had "a feeling" and nothing happened? How often did she have "feelings"? As a parent I've had "feelings" quite a few times but nothing ever happened, of course if i had a "feeling" every day then some of them would have correlated with incidents that occurred, who has a life without incident?
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but this is possibly the most common fallacy of belief regarding "precog". Lets face it, if it were real we would have noticed all the rich and successful people who got that way being precog, there would be government departments staffed by precogs predicting plane crashes, stock market crashes, crimes, weather, asteroids, etc. It's like aliens, who only ever visit when no-one else is watching:)
I am far, far more worried about drivers who are at fault in a death without even being drunk.
indeed, if the fault can still be shown but surely the point is that without proof of drunkenness there is the possibility of "no fault" most societies take being drunk behind the wheel as proof of fault no matter what the actual circumstances of the incident. so: passing the test = accident failing the test = your fault even where everything else is equal, how logical and/or just this is, is a different debate:)
it isolated and emasculated the platform in one easy step.
when the gpl was first applied to the linux kernel it was still a hobby project, to compare linux today to linux then is hardly to see an "emasculated" linux, whether on the server or desktop, you might think that if linux had a different license it would rule the world - mwahaha:) and perhaps it might've; but that doesn't mean it hasn't achieved much under the gpl, even if quite a lot of computer users don't know of it. popularity is not equivalent to achievment.
One side promotes the idea that there has been a massive global conspiracy by scientists, across a number of disciplines and organizations, lasting over decades, to lie about a central scientific result in their field. There is no sensible organizational backing or motivation to this.
and remember, not only is this conspiracy world wide, decades old and involves thousands of people, not a single one of the conspirators has come forward and confessed to the conspiracy, shown the 'false science', revealed the secret funding, named the other conspirators. apparently scientists, scientists! are better at keeping secrets than any governmental secret agency in the history of the world, ever!:)
We could also abolish commercial copyright but keep the artist's right to attribution. That way, an artist whose work was used in a successful remix would get free advertising out of it.
Precisely what is needed in a modern system and why trademarks cause much less fuss than other so called 'ip'. Because the issue there is honesty, not money. It would involve trusting people to see that 'harry bowler' is attributed to jk rowling even though the 'author' is http://slashdot.org/~asdbffg and decide to only get a version put out by rowling herself. If people don't want to do that then the cultural importance of harry potter/bowler is probably not that great.
There would still be lawsuits that cover the same ground as copyright suits though, if http://slashdot.org/~asdbffg copies the text of a potter book and doesn't attribute it to rowling then rowling would have to sue to show that she originated the work and that would be similar to showing that a work is a derivative copy, however since a simple "portions of this work were inspired by / copied from j.k. rowling" gets you a free pass to use the harry potter text any way you like i'd have no time for anyone who still couldn't do that, culturally important mashup or not
slightly off topic: there's literally thousands of contributors and many of them can't be contacted (it's part of why the kernel can't be changed to GPLv3;
this bothers me, not that i think the linux kernel should move to gplv3 today but who knows what the copyright regime will be in a few decades. i don't realistically expect mickey mouse to suffer any great reverses and instead i think it has to be assumed (without giving up the good fight) that things will only get worse. in fact i'd expect to see proposed legislation by copyright lobbyists deliberately designed to fuck with free software. and zeus forbid if orphan software code gets treated the way some want orphan books to be treated. therefore it would be nice if someone could (may not be physically possible) invest the time and money to track down all the rights holders and see about getting permission such that if in the future the linux kernel would benefit from gplv(N>3) then it could do so
in the uk unions contribute to political parties using funds from members given to the union specifically for that purpose. all union members have the right to pay union dues without funding a party. thus means that all the contributions to parties comes from people who made the decision to give that money for that purpose. similarly, if one donates to the eff one knows what the money is used for the problem with corporations is that in general, they make their money - lots of it - from consumers who have no conception of and are not asked the opinion of what the profits made by the corporation are used for. and since no corporation tells people at the point of sale what the profits of that sale are spent on, i, as a purchaser have incomplete information with which to choose who to purchase from the other problem with corporations is that in society as currently structured we need them to exist; else i can't go shopping, purchase items and have my life, whereas i don't need the eff unless i want there to be one, i also don't need the political fund of my union unless i want there to be one. when most of the big corporations appear to act with a similar ideology on politics, lobbying, rights of individuals etc. i can't stop using corporations. if i don't like eff, union political fund, amnesty, tea party, i just don't give them money!
Or requiring that you answer one of a limited number of fixed "security questions".
who cares what the question is, just put in an unguessable answer that you make up, that way no amount of personal knowledge about you can give it away
your criticism of 'lefties' for what they didn't actually do immediately after sep 11 2001 rings especially hollow given that 'righties' did do what is described i.e. grab more power and control over peoples lives, using the 'war on terror' as an excuse,
What I'd wonder is, when you exclude names that contain an obscenity or otherwise objectionable word in any of the world's several thousand languages, how many possible names are left?
indeed, for example, anything with the word "belgium" in would be right out!
She's a piss-poor candidate to make a sympathy case for anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
indeed she is a 'poor' candidate for sympathy, which is why it is important to show why the damages awarded against her are so egregious, win that moral argument in her case and it's basically won for all related cases - that's not to say legal forces will go along with moral ones of course!
I couldn't think up a long prayer so I prayed,"God, I hope everything is cool", in less than a second, without knowing my prayer, my coauthor IMed me,"Everything is cool".
- C'mon - only those who wish to be obtuse about electronic freedom can't admit that this is clearly infringement.
No, I beg to differ, just because it's obvious that they are using the construction book because humans are good at patterns and won't need it explaining what kind of things teachbook offers, does not mean there is an infringement. Trademarks are about identity, not inventing things. Facebook can't claim to have invented the social online, friends, friends of friends stuff and they aren't claiming they have. Will anyone think teachbook is associated with facebook? IMHO not likely, that same human ability with language and what Douglas Hofstadter called 'slipping' will actually cause others to go "oh, how clever, they're copying facebook! but it's for teachers/teaching!". The only thing that would alter this would be if facebook already had a pattern/habit of book sites that it also owned and that fact widely known, in which case perhaps teachbook could be assumed to be yet another facebook 'book' site. However, I don't believe there are such facebook sister sites.
It is possible you object to teachbook copying the idea of a 'facebook' for teachers, that you believe facebook have some natural right/interest in such. That would be a totally separate issue and I may be wrong so I won't get into it:)
In short, I believe we are watching yet another attempt at a form of cultural impoverishment, preventing a simple, inoffensive play on words adding to the sum of human experience. Granted, a tiny addition in the Whole Sort Of General Mishmash, but of a type we would all be worse off for if none such were allowed us by corporate diktat.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't differentiate fetus from new born or infant for any definition of moral agent and therefore person.
Of course you can differentiate, what you can't do is tell precisely in practice when an embryo crosses that definitional line from blob of cells through fetus into (in your words) moral agent. So I can say that I believe 24 weeks is too late for abortion, and that 4 weeks is definitely okay but inbetween gets tricky depending on your definition of "moral agent". Of course religious folk who believe that "moral agency" begins at conception due to the existence of a a "soul" are begging the question since they assume that moral agency is a property of something that isn't physically detectable in even an adult human. I have great sympathy for those who believe that abortion is murder, it must be awful to believe that. However if it wasn't for religion there could be a useful ongoing debate in society about what constitutes humanness and the obligations that might put on a pregnant woman. There might also be far more done to help women avoid being pregnant in the first place. Imagine a world in which medical science makes it impossible for a woman to be pregnant against her conscious sound informed will. Might not society's expectation of her attitude towards abortion be stricter than I think it should be today? However to move towards such a world requires acknowledging pregnancy avoidance as a legitimate goal of sexually active women and of their right to be sexually active in the first place!
Also a debate about humanness might also inform the debate about death and what it is to say that "a person is dead", something that is also not universally agreed upon.
snake
I think you might like this Mitchell and Webb sketch if you don't already know of it :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU
snake
May I bedevil your deviling and counter that if precognition was a randomly distributed skill then would we not see some using it for venal purposes? And if it were learnable surely everyone would have a go in which case the above, it's not as if all the sociopaths that ruin our society are unskilled or not dedicated.
In fact I posit that it is that very "spiritualness" of esp. claimants and the other less evidentiary based ideas that often accompany "spiritualness", that rather gives the game away credibility wise. However that might make me judgmental or elitist so I'll stop now before the pyramid power people come to get me :)
snake
There are over 6 billion people in the world sir, it would be amazing if there wasn't anyone who had had this experience. The fact that you know someone for whom this has happened demonstrates nothing, can you vouch that she has never ever said "don't go" any other time and nothing untoward taken place? Given that your grandmother thought she was psychic would she have noticed if she had "a feeling" and nothing happened?
How often did she have "feelings"? As a parent I've had "feelings" quite a few times but nothing ever happened, of course if i had a "feeling" every day then some of them would have correlated with incidents that occurred, who has a life without incident?
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but this is possibly the most common fallacy of belief regarding "precog". Lets face it, if it were real we would have noticed all the rich and successful people who got that way being precog, there would be government departments staffed by precogs predicting plane crashes, stock market crashes, crimes, weather, asteroids, etc. It's like aliens, who only ever visit when no-one else is watching :)
snake
I am far, far more worried about drivers who are at fault in a death without even being drunk.
indeed, if the fault can still be shown but surely the point is that without proof of drunkenness there is the possibility of "no fault" :)
most societies take being drunk behind the wheel as proof of fault no matter what the actual circumstances of the incident.
so:
passing the test = accident
failing the test = your fault
even where everything else is equal, how logical and/or just this is, is a different debate
it isolated and emasculated the platform in one easy step.
when the gpl was first applied to the linux kernel it was still a hobby project, :) and perhaps it might've; but that doesn't mean it hasn't achieved much under the gpl, even if quite a lot of computer users don't know of it. popularity is not equivalent to achievment.
to compare linux today to linux then is hardly to see an "emasculated" linux, whether on the server or desktop, you might think that if linux had a different license it would rule the world - mwahaha
snake
One side promotes the idea that there has been a massive global conspiracy by scientists, across a number of disciplines and organizations, lasting over decades, to lie about a central scientific result in their field. There is no sensible organizational backing or motivation to this.
and remember, not only is this conspiracy world wide, decades old and involves thousands of people, not a single one of the conspirators has come forward and confessed to the conspiracy, shown the 'false science', revealed the secret funding, named the other conspirators. apparently scientists, scientists! are better at keeping secrets than any governmental secret agency in the history of the world, ever! :)
snake
We could also abolish commercial copyright but keep the artist's right to attribution. That way, an artist whose work was used in a successful remix would get free advertising out of it.
Precisely what is needed in a modern system and why trademarks cause much less fuss than other so called 'ip'. Because the issue there is honesty, not money. It would involve trusting people to see that 'harry bowler' is attributed to jk rowling even though the 'author' is http://slashdot.org/~asdbffg and decide to only get a version put out by rowling herself. If people don't want to do that then the cultural importance of harry potter/bowler is probably not that great.
There would still be lawsuits that cover the same ground as copyright suits though, if http://slashdot.org/~asdbffg copies the text of a potter book and doesn't attribute it to rowling then rowling would have to sue to show that she originated the work and that would be similar to showing that a work is a derivative copy, however since a simple "portions of this work were inspired by / copied from j.k. rowling" gets you a free pass to use the harry potter text any way you like i'd have no time for anyone who still couldn't do that, culturally important mashup or not
snake
slightly off topic:
there's literally thousands of contributors and many of them can't be contacted (it's part of why the kernel can't be changed to GPLv3;
this bothers me, not that i think the linux kernel should move to gplv3 today but who knows what the copyright regime will be in a few decades.
i don't realistically expect mickey mouse to suffer any great reverses and instead i think it has to be assumed (without giving up the good fight) that things will only get worse. in fact i'd expect to see proposed legislation by copyright lobbyists deliberately designed to fuck with free software. and zeus forbid if orphan software code gets treated the way some want orphan books to be treated.
therefore it would be nice if someone could (may not be physically possible) invest the time and money to track down all the rights holders and see about getting permission such that if in the future the linux kernel would benefit from gplv(N>3) then it could do so
snake
Everyone else believes it is symbolic.
oh, it's a 'symbolic' eating of god / jesus
well that's ok then, not weird at all,
i symbolically eat people all the time.
perfectly normal
Other than to be like England (i.e., the Mac),
Excellent! then Wales must be linux, cwl :)
Poor Scotland though, they must be Plan 9 or something.
in the uk unions contribute to political parties using funds from members given to the union specifically for that purpose. all union members have the right to pay union dues without funding a party. thus means that all the contributions to parties comes from people who made the decision to give that money for that purpose. similarly, if one donates to the eff one knows what the money is used for
the problem with corporations is that in general, they make their money - lots of it - from consumers who have no conception of and are not asked the opinion of what the profits made by the corporation are used for. and since no corporation tells people at the point of sale what the profits of that sale are spent on, i, as a purchaser have incomplete information with which to choose who to purchase from
the other problem with corporations is that in society as currently structured we need them to exist; else i can't go shopping, purchase items and have my life, whereas i don't need the eff unless i want there to be one, i also don't need the political fund of my union unless i want there to be one. when most of the big corporations appear to act with a similar ideology on politics, lobbying, rights of individuals etc. i can't stop using corporations. if i don't like eff, union political fund, amnesty, tea party, i just don't give them money!
snake
wait until they invented the telegraph?
i had to wait until horses evolved!
Or requiring that you answer one of a limited number of fixed "security questions".
who cares what the question is, just put in an unguessable answer that you make up, that way no amount of personal knowledge about you can give it away
snake
The device was called, oddly, Earth.
Oh, what a dull name!
...in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
your criticism of 'lefties' for what they didn't actually do immediately after sep 11 2001 rings especially hollow given that 'righties' did do what is described i.e. grab more power and control over peoples lives, using the 'war on terror' as an excuse,
Fucking moon... how did it get there?
What I'd wonder is, when you exclude names that contain an obscenity or otherwise objectionable word in any of the world's several thousand languages, how many possible names are left?
indeed, for example, anything with the word "belgium" in would be right out!
She's a piss-poor candidate to make a sympathy case for anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
indeed she is a 'poor' candidate for sympathy, which is why it is important to show why the damages awarded against her are so egregious, win that moral argument in her case and it's basically won for all related cases - that's not to say legal forces will go along with moral ones of course!
snake
Yeah, I've found medical stuff on the side of the road, like being in an FPS.
but did walking over it automatically fix you up?
oblig.
"There is another theory which says that this has already happened."
I couldn't think up a long prayer so I prayed,"God, I hope everything is cool", in less than a second, without knowing my prayer, my coauthor IMed me,"Everything is cool".
so your coauthor is god?
i can see that coming in handy!
bugger!
for the phrase 'construction book' read:
[some_thing_to_do_with_us]book
snake
- C'mon - only those who wish to be obtuse about electronic freedom can't admit that this is clearly infringement.
No, I beg to differ, just because it's obvious that they are using the construction book because humans are good at patterns and won't need it explaining what kind of things teachbook offers, does not mean there is an infringement.
Trademarks are about identity, not inventing things. Facebook can't claim to have invented the social online, friends, friends of friends stuff and they aren't claiming they have. Will anyone think teachbook is associated with facebook? IMHO not likely, that same human ability with language and what Douglas Hofstadter called 'slipping' will actually cause others to go "oh, how clever, they're copying facebook! but it's for teachers/teaching!". The only thing that would alter this would be if facebook already had a pattern/habit of book sites that it also owned and that fact widely known, in which case perhaps teachbook could be assumed to be yet another facebook 'book' site. However, I don't believe there are such facebook sister sites.
It is possible you object to teachbook copying the idea of a 'facebook' for teachers, that you believe facebook have some natural right/interest in such. That would be a totally separate issue and I may be wrong so I won't get into it :)
In short, I believe we are watching yet another attempt at a form of cultural impoverishment, preventing a simple, inoffensive play on words adding to the sum of human experience. Granted, a tiny addition in the Whole Sort Of General Mishmash, but of a type we would all be worse off for if none such were allowed us by corporate diktat.
snake