... that it's immoral to cut off bits of infant's bodies to protect them against a disease that could be more effectively prevented by using condoms. What's next - will we start cutting off the breasts of infant girls? After all, it's even more effective against breast cancer than circumcision is against HIV.
If grown men want to get circumcised to help prevent STDs, that's their right (although they should understand they'd be better off with a condom). But doing so to infant boys, who can't consent to the procedure, is barbaric.
I'm only mildly interested in the question of marijuana legalization, but it seems to me that the parent is correct - the gov't IS ignoring the legalization issue raised in the open government forum. What's flamebait about that?
there is the life of the embryos created in vitro , each of which should be treated with the respect due a human being , because each has every potential that every human being had
We can clone mammals. By your logic, every scrap of tissue that ever gets separated from my body should be treated with the respect due a human being, because each cell has every potential that I had as an ovum. That point of view is, quite frankly, nutty.
Yawn, bringing up medical procedures and drugs is a straw man here. The issue the crazy religious folk have with this is one of life. When you administer the TB drug, you are not stopping life. When you fail to implant a fertilized egg, that is a life that was created that will never become a human being.
I've got news for you. There are plenty of crazy religious folk who do reject life-saving drugs, even for their kids. Just a few weeks ago, some crazy religious woman from Minnesota essentially kidnapped her own child in the face of a court order to treat him for some form of lymphoma. She preferred prayer and herbs. Ultimately, she was not able to continue to stay on the run and turned herself and the child into authorities. Doctors estimated that he had probably a 90% chance of survival (for some standard period of time), but only on the order of 15% on the mother's preferred regimen.
Also, -1; Slippery Slope Argument. It's ridiculous to say that allowing abortions for literally brainless fetuses is morally the same as murdering fully competent adults, or that the first inevitably leads to the second. I'm not sure who thinks this is "insightful".
Even if all the fertility clinics in the world produced nothing but blonde haired, blue eyed children, the impact on our genetic diversity would be... approximately zero. There are way, way, more kids being born the old fashioned way, and the randomness of these combinations is going to swamp the uniformity of the others.
Look, I tend to agree that "nurture" is more important... but the final paragraph of the Wikipedia article indicates that 1) the research was not peer reviewed or published anywhere, 2) the researchers were fired by their institution for some ethical lapse, and 3) some of their peers doubt the study was even DONE. This doesn't exactly bolster your argument. Better citations, please.
Once a human sperm penetrates a human ova and they combine DNA they become a gamete. That is a human being.
No, in fact, that is a cell. A single fertilized ovum is no more a human being than any of the cells in my body - after, we can clone now, meaning that any cell is a potential human being, right? So when I cut my finger and a drop of blood falls on the floor, should I be calling the coroner?
... over this issue. We're not talking about selectively breeding every baby on earth. Even if every fertility clinic on the planet began offering this service, and every one of their clients took them up on it, you'd have, what, several hundred babies a year born this way? They'd be swamped by the enormous number born the old fashioned way. While I do think there are ethical issues to be considered before we go blindly making a bunch of designer babies, worrying about the end of evolution on a species-wide basis is a little over the top.
When you sell them for more than the face value, you get taxed on what you sold them for. Which is what the people in this article did. This is pretty clearly tax evasion.
If I don't sell, however... its just face value, right?
Per the fine article, they did sell. They took the gold coins and immediately turned them around for their value as precious metal (or as collector's items, but either way it's the same). They made substantially more than the face value. Accordingly, they owe tax on the actual value.
Your example is interesting, but it's not the situation actually being discussed here.
There's a difference between anonymous threats to random posters on the internet, and anonymous threats directed at jurors in a criminal trial. Obviously, threats to jurors have the possibility of subverting the criminal justice system... which is a pretty big deal. I think the owners of the board ought to cough up the names.
What are you going to mine in space that you can't get more cheaply on earth? Asteroids, the moon, etc, are made of iron, nickel and silicates. So is the earth.
"Robotic mining"? Well, then we only have to figure out how to build robotic miners. And ore processors. And transportation back to the earth (that doesn't burn up the cargo). And get all that into space for less cost than we can just dig up the same thing on earth.
Yes, the bottom line is that getting to space is really, REALLY expensive. Which in turn means that exploiting resources up there is almost certainly not going to be economically feasible for the foreseeable future.
I have found keeping my left pinky held on the shift key while I type with all my other fingers works great
Third most commonly used letter in the English language: "a". Which you can't type if your left pinky is stuck on the "shift" key. And typing ANY letter with your left hand is more difficult if your pinky is stuck on "shift". A similar problem occurs if you try to use your right hand. The US Navy style manual requires ship names to be in all caps... go ahead, try typing "USS PORTLAND" with your method. Or "USS SAN ANTONIO". I just did, and it slowed me way down and introduced a bunch of mistakes.
I also question the assertion that those of us who need CapsLock represent "a tiny minority" of use cases. You got examples from both the legal and defense industries... which employ lots of people between them. I contend that the pool of people NOT preferring CapsLock is far smaller.
Finally, while it would be possible to move CapsLock off the keyboard and into, say, the font menus of various applications, this would still be a serious slowdown for those of us who need to intersperse upper and lowercase passages. Similarly, moving the CapsLock key would be a big pain for the huge "installed base" consisting of those of us WHO ALREADY KNOW HOW TO TYPE! I can touch type on the actual typewriter keyboard, but when I have to interact with the various control keys, I have to stop typing and look.
The real evidence is that in every region of the country, Ahmedinajad won by about the same percentage, in spite of the fact that his support was known to be relatively strong in rural areas, and very weak in urban areas. Also, candidates from certain ethnic groups received much, much lower support than they ever had in the past, even in their home territories. But it had to be this way... too many votes for minor candidates could have drained off sufficient support from Ahmedinajad to force a runoff, which the powers-that-be couldn't tolerate.
Geez, the plan has a lot of underpants gnomes style "???" about it.
1. Get China to bring NK to heel. A transition from the cult-of-Kim to a dictatorship-by-committee (like in Myanmar) maybe just enough of a change to make the regime's external stance less volatile. How much leverage we have with China to force this is questionable.
No, it's really not questionable... we have essentially no leverage with them. "Get China to bring them to heel"? How? If we could do this, we'd have already done it. And the idea of threatening "surgical strikes" against NK is too obviously not credible - the NKs would promptly begin raining destruction on South Korea, which is an outcome everyone knows we can't stomach.
At the same time, get the 1st world nuclear powers to establish a "civilian nuclear power" board (perhaps under IAEA aegis)
What you're talking about here is already the mission of the IAEA. Perhaps it needs more funding to provide technical assistance to developing peaceful nuclear power, but "encouraging peaceful nuclear power", and "discouraging nuclear weapon proliferation" is explicitly the mission of the IAEA.
Get serious with nuclear disarmament. Western powers just cannot claim the moral high-ground while adding to their stockpiles.
Which western powers are adding to their stockpiles? The US is up against the START II limits, and has proposed further reductions. I don't believe the Brits and French are adding warheads either.
Enable automatic sanctions if a country refuses 2 (above) and begins a weapons capable nuclear power cycle.
Sanctions have a pretty poor record of convincing countries to do anything. Of note, Cuba has been under sanctions for, what, 50 years, and have done exactly nothing about getting out from under them. Iraq was under very severe sanctions between 1991 and 2003, and again, did virtually nothing to comply with terms for ending them. North Korea has been under varying levels of sanction for years over their nuclear program, and they feel free to start or restart their program more or less whenever it suits them. Sanctions are vastly overrated as a tool for getting a regime to do what you want.
The bottom line here is that nuclear weapon proliferation is an extremely complex and difficult subject, and (not to make fun of you) unlikely to be solved with quick four-point plans you can list in a Slashdot post.
Let me guess... you're not actually a member of the military, and by "we" you mean "some other poor sap". Sure, why not. We only spent a trillion freakin' dollars on Iraq, and got thousands of our people killed... and put the new government firmly under control of... yes, Iran. And Iran only has like 6x the population of Iraq, so sure... why don't "we" go right ahead and invade there too? And we can just sort of conquer the entire rest of the "radical Islamic Middle East" as a sort of sideline.
The capacity for some folks to advocate for spending other people's money, and getting other people killed, for the sake of feeling more manly, never ceases to amaze me.
The paparazzi are taking pictures of celebrities, and these photos are "news". You don't need a model release to publish the picture of a famous person in a newspaper. You need a model release to publish the picture of an otherwise not-famous person in an advertisement.
... you have to type a lot of acronyms (and not in TeX, either). Also, strength has nothing to do with the use of CapsLock... the point is having to avoid constantly shifting from the left Shift key to the right Shift key as you type a passage in all caps.
You can have my CAPSLOCK key when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!
The point is acquisition of resources and raw materials from off-planet sources. Whether it is Helium-3 from the surface of the Moon, hydrocarbons from Jupiter, or metals from asteroids the key is that we need stuff. Stuff to make other things with.
Geez, it's like talking to a wall. 1) We have absolutely no use for Helium-3, and won't until we get fusion figured out (always 20 years away).
2) It will never, ever be more economical to go to Jupiter to get energy than it will to produce it from solar, etc, right here. 3) Asteroids are made out of nickel, iron, and silicates. So is the earth. It will never, ever be more economical to get these materials from space when we already have them here. You talk about how it's not economical to recycle some metals. So, hauling tons of material from space is going to be cheap? Give me a break.
Yes, having colonies in space would be cool. What it won't be is cost-effective, and that means it's probably not going to happen.
There was never any chance Bush's plan would go forward no matter who was in office. We've sucked up so much money between pointless land wars in Asia and bailing out the financial sector that there's simply no discretionary money left, and the Bush plan was unbelievably expensive. Now if we were to cut our bloated defense budget (do we really need to spend as much as everyone else on earth... combined?), there might be some room for space exploration. But as it is, we continue to just burn money on more defense capability than we need.
Given that I'm more interested in acquiring actual knowledge about Mars than I am with sending humans into space for the sake of doing it, color me onboard with robotic exploration of the planet.
Then again, I'm also totally onboard with the concept that Iraq was a much bigger waste of money than a manned space program, so there you are.
Slashdot Mirror
... that it's immoral to cut off bits of infant's bodies to protect them against a disease that could be more effectively prevented by using condoms. What's next - will we start cutting off the breasts of infant girls? After all, it's even more effective against breast cancer than circumcision is against HIV.
If grown men want to get circumcised to help prevent STDs, that's their right (although they should understand they'd be better off with a condom). But doing so to infant boys, who can't consent to the procedure, is barbaric.
I'm only mildly interested in the question of marijuana legalization, but it seems to me that the parent is correct - the gov't IS ignoring the legalization issue raised in the open government forum. What's flamebait about that?
We can clone mammals. By your logic, every scrap of tissue that ever gets separated from my body should be treated with the respect due a human being, because each cell has every potential that I had as an ovum. That point of view is, quite frankly, nutty.
Embryos != humans.
I've got news for you. There are plenty of crazy religious folk who do reject life-saving drugs, even for their kids. Just a few weeks ago, some crazy religious woman from Minnesota essentially kidnapped her own child in the face of a court order to treat him for some form of lymphoma. She preferred prayer and herbs. Ultimately, she was not able to continue to stay on the run and turned herself and the child into authorities. Doctors estimated that he had probably a 90% chance of survival (for some standard period of time), but only on the order of 15% on the mother's preferred regimen.
Also, -1; Slippery Slope Argument. It's ridiculous to say that allowing abortions for literally brainless fetuses is morally the same as murdering fully competent adults, or that the first inevitably leads to the second. I'm not sure who thinks this is "insightful".
Even if all the fertility clinics in the world produced nothing but blonde haired, blue eyed children, the impact on our genetic diversity would be... approximately zero. There are way, way, more kids being born the old fashioned way, and the randomness of these combinations is going to swamp the uniformity of the others.
Look, I tend to agree that "nurture" is more important... but the final paragraph of the Wikipedia article indicates that 1) the research was not peer reviewed or published anywhere, 2) the researchers were fired by their institution for some ethical lapse, and 3) some of their peers doubt the study was even DONE. This doesn't exactly bolster your argument. Better citations, please.
... on Slashdot in, well, hours.
No, in fact, that is a cell. A single fertilized ovum is no more a human being than any of the cells in my body - after, we can clone now, meaning that any cell is a potential human being, right? So when I cut my finger and a drop of blood falls on the floor, should I be calling the coroner?
... over this issue. We're not talking about selectively breeding every baby on earth. Even if every fertility clinic on the planet began offering this service, and every one of their clients took them up on it, you'd have, what, several hundred babies a year born this way? They'd be swamped by the enormous number born the old fashioned way. While I do think there are ethical issues to be considered before we go blindly making a bunch of designer babies, worrying about the end of evolution on a species-wide basis is a little over the top.
When you sell them for more than the face value, you get taxed on what you sold them for. Which is what the people in this article did. This is pretty clearly tax evasion.
Per the fine article, they did sell. They took the gold coins and immediately turned them around for their value as precious metal (or as collector's items, but either way it's the same). They made substantially more than the face value. Accordingly, they owe tax on the actual value.
Your example is interesting, but it's not the situation actually being discussed here.
There's a difference between anonymous threats to random posters on the internet, and anonymous threats directed at jurors in a criminal trial. Obviously, threats to jurors have the possibility of subverting the criminal justice system... which is a pretty big deal. I think the owners of the board ought to cough up the names.
Geez, here we go again.
Yes, the bottom line is that getting to space is really, REALLY expensive. Which in turn means that exploiting resources up there is almost certainly not going to be economically feasible for the foreseeable future.
But it doesn't change the fact that I don't want a web SERVER built into my web BROWSER. I'll get Apache separately, thanks.
Third most commonly used letter in the English language: "a". Which you can't type if your left pinky is stuck on the "shift" key. And typing ANY letter with your left hand is more difficult if your pinky is stuck on "shift". A similar problem occurs if you try to use your right hand. The US Navy style manual requires ship names to be in all caps... go ahead, try typing "USS PORTLAND" with your method. Or "USS SAN ANTONIO". I just did, and it slowed me way down and introduced a bunch of mistakes.
I also question the assertion that those of us who need CapsLock represent "a tiny minority" of use cases. You got examples from both the legal and defense industries... which employ lots of people between them. I contend that the pool of people NOT preferring CapsLock is far smaller.
Finally, while it would be possible to move CapsLock off the keyboard and into, say, the font menus of various applications, this would still be a serious slowdown for those of us who need to intersperse upper and lowercase passages. Similarly, moving the CapsLock key would be a big pain for the huge "installed base" consisting of those of us WHO ALREADY KNOW HOW TO TYPE! I can touch type on the actual typewriter keyboard, but when I have to interact with the various control keys, I have to stop typing and look.
The real evidence is that in every region of the country, Ahmedinajad won by about the same percentage, in spite of the fact that his support was known to be relatively strong in rural areas, and very weak in urban areas. Also, candidates from certain ethnic groups received much, much lower support than they ever had in the past, even in their home territories. But it had to be this way... too many votes for minor candidates could have drained off sufficient support from Ahmedinajad to force a runoff, which the powers-that-be couldn't tolerate.
Geez, the plan has a lot of underpants gnomes style "???" about it.
No, it's really not questionable... we have essentially no leverage with them. "Get China to bring them to heel"? How? If we could do this, we'd have already done it. And the idea of threatening "surgical strikes" against NK is too obviously not credible - the NKs would promptly begin raining destruction on South Korea, which is an outcome everyone knows we can't stomach.
What you're talking about here is already the mission of the IAEA. Perhaps it needs more funding to provide technical assistance to developing peaceful nuclear power, but "encouraging peaceful nuclear power", and "discouraging nuclear weapon proliferation" is explicitly the mission of the IAEA.
Which western powers are adding to their stockpiles? The US is up against the START II limits, and has proposed further reductions. I don't believe the Brits and French are adding warheads either.
Sanctions have a pretty poor record of convincing countries to do anything. Of note, Cuba has been under sanctions for, what, 50 years, and have done exactly nothing about getting out from under them. Iraq was under very severe sanctions between 1991 and 2003, and again, did virtually nothing to comply with terms for ending them. North Korea has been under varying levels of sanction for years over their nuclear program, and they feel free to start or restart their program more or less whenever it suits them. Sanctions are vastly overrated as a tool for getting a regime to do what you want.
The bottom line here is that nuclear weapon proliferation is an extremely complex and difficult subject, and (not to make fun of you) unlikely to be solved with quick four-point plans you can list in a Slashdot post.
Let me guess... you're not actually a member of the military, and by "we" you mean "some other poor sap". Sure, why not. We only spent a trillion freakin' dollars on Iraq, and got thousands of our people killed... and put the new government firmly under control of... yes, Iran. And Iran only has like 6x the population of Iraq, so sure... why don't "we" go right ahead and invade there too? And we can just sort of conquer the entire rest of the "radical Islamic Middle East" as a sort of sideline.
The capacity for some folks to advocate for spending other people's money, and getting other people killed, for the sake of feeling more manly, never ceases to amaze me.
Why did slashdot decide to stop giving karma for "funny"? GP is a prime example of why that policy distorts the rating system.
The paparazzi are taking pictures of celebrities, and these photos are "news". You don't need a model release to publish the picture of a famous person in a newspaper. You need a model release to publish the picture of an otherwise not-famous person in an advertisement.
... you have to type a lot of acronyms (and not in TeX, either). Also, strength has nothing to do with the use of CapsLock... the point is having to avoid constantly shifting from the left Shift key to the right Shift key as you type a passage in all caps.
You can have my CAPSLOCK key when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!
GROUPS 10... A34T2 42Y89 LE53R GBN12 9054E L3L0B M788Z 963YK 31M11 F44BN
END TRANSMISSION
Geez, it's like talking to a wall. 1) We have absolutely no use for Helium-3, and won't until we get fusion figured out (always 20 years away). 2) It will never, ever be more economical to go to Jupiter to get energy than it will to produce it from solar, etc, right here. 3) Asteroids are made out of nickel, iron, and silicates. So is the earth. It will never, ever be more economical to get these materials from space when we already have them here. You talk about how it's not economical to recycle some metals. So, hauling tons of material from space is going to be cheap? Give me a break.
Yes, having colonies in space would be cool. What it won't be is cost-effective, and that means it's probably not going to happen.
There was never any chance Bush's plan would go forward no matter who was in office. We've sucked up so much money between pointless land wars in Asia and bailing out the financial sector that there's simply no discretionary money left, and the Bush plan was unbelievably expensive. Now if we were to cut our bloated defense budget (do we really need to spend as much as everyone else on earth... combined?), there might be some room for space exploration. But as it is, we continue to just burn money on more defense capability than we need.
Given that I'm more interested in acquiring actual knowledge about Mars than I am with sending humans into space for the sake of doing it, color me onboard with robotic exploration of the planet.
Then again, I'm also totally onboard with the concept that Iraq was a much bigger waste of money than a manned space program, so there you are.
Getting a helium miner to Jupiter and getting it back to earth would be rather prohibitively expensive.