Sexual intercourse certainly does not result in procreation. Only sexual intercourse during a fertile period of time may result in procreation and then it is not a given. Having an embryo get to the point where it is a viable life which without external interference or external trauma will be born and have the opportunity to grow into an adult is tough enough... ask anyone who needs fertility treatments or someone who has had several miscarriages or stillbirths.
Contraception has nothing to do with sexual intercourse. You're thinking about abstinence. Contraception prevents unwanted fertilization, not having sex (the fundies would be all over it if it did;-p) Abstinence is an extreme form of contraception.
BTW I am a Catholic and I've had 3 children, 1 was stillborn at 22 weeks and had a heart attack at delivery - doctors said she could have survived but very unlikely, we tried anyways. I have some experience here for reference. 3 pregnancies in 3 years.. so fairly fertile I'd say. 2 very healthy children.
Being Catholic doesn't mean I agree with the Vatican on all issues, the same as being Christian doesn't mean I agree with every other Christian or being Republican doesn't mean i have to vote the party line (I voted Obama).
I draw the line when it's no longer my line to draw. When the embryo will become a child if allowed to survive.
OTOH when you're talking in vitro and you've got 10 embryos and only 1-2 get a shot I'm not concerned about the other 8, they are not viable outside the mother with current technology and "octo-mom"'s doctor should have his credentials pulled for allowing that situation to occur... a woman has 2 breasts. That means 2 children at a time. Triplets are an anomaly without in vitro. You want or are capable of caring for more kids - adopt, plenty of deserving orphans out there.
Oh he/she's not a bastard to our knowledge. Merely a hypocrite.
Re:One gene != one characteristic
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 1
uhmmm you've contradicted yourself. Either they are only screening embryos which already have the full genetic diversity of the parents or they're not. The only time this would become a problem is if we use a stud method of fertilization where a single sperm donator is used due to his 'superior' genetic qualities (or mother - though there are more limits on that scenario). Otherwise you're just substituting your own 'random' selection (as far as nature is concerned) of which embryo becomes an adult for nature's 'random' selection which is arbitrary but still a selection from an an exiting set of options where all choices meet the criteria for providing genetic diversity.
If two parents with blue eyes have a child they will have a blue eyed child. No option there. Brown eyed w/ blue allele w/ Brown eyed w/ blue allele.. you could have a blue eyed child or a brown eyed child.. your choice. Brown eyed full w/ brown eyed blue allele... sorry you still get a brown eyed child.
If all the people w/ potential for blue eyes chose blue eyes... they'd still be countered by all the people who did not have a choice.. so the mix is maintained.
Again it's only when you either insert a gene or choose a donated father/mother which will enable you to have the choice that it becomes an issue. Even then it's really just the inserted gene scenario where it starts to become a widespread problem... as it's then available to parents who otherwise could never have the option even with a stud father/mother.
How many generations until this type of screening is the default? Economies of scale my friend... the more people do it the better we get at it the cheaper it becomes. It would take a concerted effort to keep this capability OUT of the hands of the poor, in which case the burden on the wealthy becomes higher as they do in fact have to pay for the welfare of the poor. It makes much more economic sense to make all new children healthy and thereby relieve the burden on the few to provide for the many.
I would be more surprised if screening from a health point of view didn't become mandatory (ala Gattica) especially for those without adequate health insurance or prospects of such.
Re:Are you catholic?
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'll bite.
When is a thing more than a thing? Can I put you in a glass jar and consider you a thing? How about if I get enough people to agree with me that as you're stuck in a jar right now and can't participate in society... you're nothing more than a sac of water filled flesh? Sure if we let you out you might do something interesting but that's in the future and we're talking about right now. How do we know you'd turn into a human when we let you out? Are you even self-aware inside that jar... we can't hear you talking (it's cute how she moves her mouth like that as if she's talking) and all those convulsions you're making could just be automatic responses.
I'm not saying abortion is wrong, I'm just saying your logic is flawed and your self-deception is transparent. Abortion is stopping a process that would otherwise (in a typical scenario) end in a fully aware human being. That is a fact. If you want to delude yourself into thinking otherwise fine, just be 'self-aware' enough to know that it's just an excuse.
Abort a pregnancy because you are not prepared to raise the child. Abort because the child will be treated poorly by society... pick a reason, you'll need to live with it.
BTW I think contraception is definitely the way to go. Tens of thousands of eggs and billions of sperm are there explicitly to be lost to biology's natural processes. Contraception does nothing more than put those processes on a different schedule or manage how they express (ie: re-absorbed by the body).
Safari does have extensions... they call them plugins... though if you're on Windows I think you're out of luck.
Ad Blocking for you. There are 7 options in this list. Most are free, I see one commercial offering.
And of course you could always just use a hosts file and personal stylesheet to do the work yourself. If fact with the new support for CSS3 animations you could have some fun... make those ads do a dance before disappearing;-p
I was going to respond with a similar thought... this and other MMO simulations could be really really great for exploring how "humans" deal with new scenarios. You can't simulate people but you can simulate an environment and then put people in it.
That's not a bad idea.... everyone is ripping or copying media from their DVR/tuner to make available via Boxee anyways... why not just have those also go out on a P2P broadcast to other Boxee users... and download via Torrent. While at it... add in subscription to a particular show.... and channels/networks/genres to browse through. Even tagging would be nice.
Boxee supports RSS feeds with torrent links currently but you have to register them with the Boxee website... so it's a multi-step process. First go to a site like TVRSS create a search RSS feed, put it on Feedburner or similar, then login to Boxee and add it to your feeds list (or edit your feeds XML file directly), then browse via Boxee to your Video->Internet->RSS feeds, then select a feed, select a download, confirm download - wait.
Not exactly convenient until you get all your feeds set up. Once they are of course you can just do the last part, select a bunch of episodes in the morning, come home after work and enjoy that night.
Lower the price and more people will buy. Amazing. Do this with any form of entertainment where there are parallel revenue streams and everyone will win big.
Concerts... more people will go, more people will buy shirts, food, cds, and of course gas to get there.
Theatre - movies or plays, same as above (and really they should have shirts, games, DVDs etc available for purchase at both forms of entertainment - who wouldn't buy an XMen shirt with claw marks after watching the next Wolverine film?)
Sports - again, drop ticket price and people will go... and spend more on other things while there.
Keep the price of admission high and you get none of the ancillary spending, it's just too much initial expense when you know you'll have to spend money on the other stuff to actually have a good time.
With games and digital media it's a little less clear cut but still obviously a big win as you'll get way more legal consumers by lowering prices to an affordable range.
Toys are the same way. People will buy multiples products at the same total cost if you lower the individual price point. They feel like they're getting more bang for their buck while still spending more money than on one item. Margins may not be as high but overhead expenses drop as you are moving product more quickly and with less marketing, service, shelf space, etc.
You insensitive clod, I watch Hulu on my TV via Boxee... that's the whole point.
Fringe, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Psych, Monk, Burn Notice, Damages, Lie to Me.. all on Hulu - plus Nova, Nasa TV, the Daily Show, SNL - all on Hulu.
I don't have to pay an extra $50 / month for cable/sat - just my internet connection.
No it doesn't bring up a contact page, but scroll to the bottom and there's a little link "Didn't find what you wanted? Click here to let us know" which pops up a contact box.... use it to let them know how you feel.
Hulu without syndicated content from the networks is nothing but a video blog. Yes it's a very well designed video blog but it's true value is the ability to syndicate content and insert ads into the stream.
It's well known that sperm and eggs develop separately at the time of conception on... the DNA in sperm and eggs is not the same as that in the host body...
Which is to say that they could have genetically modified the host while neglecting to modify the sperm/eggs of the host and the offspring of the gen-modded mice would be 'normal' mice without the modifications at all.
18 months really isn't that long. It will go by in no time at all and you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. How many years have you paid a cable tax? I've been paying personally since 1998 and prior to that my family paid from `88 or so... that's ~20 years of cable tax. 1.5 years to get your ROI when you plan on having to pay cable tax for the next 3 years at least.
Get an Apple TV for $229 or a Mac mini for the same price already built into a sexy case... save yourself the trouble.
My ATV runs boxee great (no Netflix support due to their use of Silverlight as a media player - needs too much raw CPU)... but it gets Hulu, RSS torrents great, all other Boxee services and I've got a 1TB external attached where I store all my ripped DVDs and music collection. Add an antennae and HD OTA receiver - no more cable.
Total cost $429 (not counting my DSL fees... which are grandfathered in as a utility not an entertainment expense).
Any of the great LAMP books should have sections devoted to security. Each of the components has a part to play. The obvious vectors are PHP and MySQL so pay particular attention to those. If that's not enough, get a book for each... I'm certain there are "Security for MySQL" , etc.
They should all be available used on amazon for $10- $15 each... if $100 is out of your budget, then you'll need to start googling and doc diving.
Just an anecdotal counterpoint to an anecdotal point... I've had 2 Apple laptops in the last8 years. The first was a Powerbook G4 500mhz that lasted 4+ years and still works just fine... it was finally underpowered is all... and my current 1st Gen Macbook Pro which is on year 3.
I have had issues with batteries on the MacBook Pro, which seem to go through their charge cycle quota rather quickly (replaced under warranty of course) and it may have a problem with the power supply as an underlying issue to that... which is a legitimate problem but one I can live with.
Otherwise I am a very happy customer. I've got an iPhone which works great, a 30 in. Cinema Display which is awesome to behold and an AppleTV with Boxee installed and a 1TB external drive attached... which also works great.
SO I can't back up the claim of shitty hardware, sorry... just typical problems with many laptops out there (battery related), especially after 2+ years of service.
Microsoft should call this Windows Mid-Manager edition, since the only people using 3 apps are enterprise level office drones doing data entry via Excel or Word, Possibly Powerpoint. They are so locked down that they can't listen to music, or use IM or anything except the tools for their job. Even receptionists would balk at this... but the mid-manager's would be okay, they just want to go play golf anyways....
Unfortunately it would be an arms race of sorts, similar to virus definitions... requiring dom scripting to identify a particular class or id or attribute or some other unique element in the ad (possibly the image src which means it could piggy back on ad-blockers already in use)...
The idea is to use the DOM to walk back up from the unique Ad element to the containing div or divs, then turn them off or delete them.
Another way would be to identify the offending function in the script and set it to return false or something similar.
Someone could play around with greasemonkey or YUI anywhere and create a sample distribution...
I don't personally go to enough sites that do this to make the effort, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the class.
How much diet coke do you drink? I recently started having one 16 oz sweet soda ( I like Pepsi actually) a day which is a lot for me historically. I never understood how people could drink so much of the stuff...
I usually just have A coffee in the morning, water throughout the day, now a soda in the afternoon, and juice or water at night. I used to just drink coffee, water, juice and beer... cut back on the coffee and beer - added a soda.
Hear what you're saying about the corn syrup though... sugar based sodas are supposed to be way better tasting.
Are you saying that the US censorship laws are really a way to shore up the porn industry? (yes I said porn). As in, without all that repression on public media, porn would become less interesting because we'd all be desensitized to human nudity and sexual situations? Desensitized meaning it would become normal, rather than taboo.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexual intercourse certainly does not result in procreation. Only sexual intercourse during a fertile period of time may result in procreation and then it is not a given. Having an embryo get to the point where it is a viable life which without external interference or external trauma will be born and have the opportunity to grow into an adult is tough enough... ask anyone who needs fertility treatments or someone who has had several miscarriages or stillbirths.
Contraception has nothing to do with sexual intercourse. You're thinking about abstinence. Contraception prevents unwanted fertilization, not having sex (the fundies would be all over it if it did ;-p) Abstinence is an extreme form of contraception.
BTW I am a Catholic and I've had 3 children, 1 was stillborn at 22 weeks and had a heart attack at delivery - doctors said she could have survived but very unlikely, we tried anyways. I have some experience here for reference. 3 pregnancies in 3 years.. so fairly fertile I'd say. 2 very healthy children.
Being Catholic doesn't mean I agree with the Vatican on all issues, the same as being Christian doesn't mean I agree with every other Christian or being Republican doesn't mean i have to vote the party line (I voted Obama).
I draw the line when it's no longer my line to draw. When the embryo will become a child if allowed to survive.
OTOH when you're talking in vitro and you've got 10 embryos and only 1-2 get a shot I'm not concerned about the other 8, they are not viable outside the mother with current technology and "octo-mom"'s doctor should have his credentials pulled for allowing that situation to occur... a woman has 2 breasts. That means 2 children at a time. Triplets are an anomaly without in vitro. You want or are capable of caring for more kids - adopt, plenty of deserving orphans out there.
Oh he/she's not a bastard to our knowledge. Merely a hypocrite.
uhmmm you've contradicted yourself. Either they are only screening embryos which already have the full genetic diversity of the parents or they're not. The only time this would become a problem is if we use a stud method of fertilization where a single sperm donator is used due to his 'superior' genetic qualities (or mother - though there are more limits on that scenario). Otherwise you're just substituting your own 'random' selection (as far as nature is concerned) of which embryo becomes an adult for nature's 'random' selection which is arbitrary but still a selection from an an exiting set of options where all choices meet the criteria for providing genetic diversity.
If two parents with blue eyes have a child they will have a blue eyed child. No option there. Brown eyed w/ blue allele w/ Brown eyed w/ blue allele.. you could have a blue eyed child or a brown eyed child.. your choice. Brown eyed full w/ brown eyed blue allele... sorry you still get a brown eyed child.
If all the people w/ potential for blue eyes chose blue eyes... they'd still be countered by all the people who did not have a choice.. so the mix is maintained.
Again it's only when you either insert a gene or choose a donated father/mother which will enable you to have the choice that it becomes an issue. Even then it's really just the inserted gene scenario where it starts to become a widespread problem... as it's then available to parents who otherwise could never have the option even with a stud father/mother.
How many generations until this type of screening is the default? Economies of scale my friend... the more people do it the better we get at it the cheaper it becomes. It would take a concerted effort to keep this capability OUT of the hands of the poor, in which case the burden on the wealthy becomes higher as they do in fact have to pay for the welfare of the poor. It makes much more economic sense to make all new children healthy and thereby relieve the burden on the few to provide for the many.
I would be more surprised if screening from a health point of view didn't become mandatory (ala Gattica) especially for those without adequate health insurance or prospects of such.
I'll bite.
When is a thing more than a thing? Can I put you in a glass jar and consider you a thing? How about if I get enough people to agree with me that as you're stuck in a jar right now and can't participate in society... you're nothing more than a sac of water filled flesh? Sure if we let you out you might do something interesting but that's in the future and we're talking about right now. How do we know you'd turn into a human when we let you out? Are you even self-aware inside that jar... we can't hear you talking (it's cute how she moves her mouth like that as if she's talking) and all those convulsions you're making could just be automatic responses.
I'm not saying abortion is wrong, I'm just saying your logic is flawed and your self-deception is transparent. Abortion is stopping a process that would otherwise (in a typical scenario) end in a fully aware human being. That is a fact. If you want to delude yourself into thinking otherwise fine, just be 'self-aware' enough to know that it's just an excuse.
Abort a pregnancy because you are not prepared to raise the child. Abort because the child will be treated poorly by society... pick a reason, you'll need to live with it.
BTW I think contraception is definitely the way to go. Tens of thousands of eggs and billions of sperm are there explicitly to be lost to biology's natural processes. Contraception does nothing more than put those processes on a different schedule or manage how they express (ie: re-absorbed by the body).
Safari does have extensions... they call them plugins... though if you're on Windows I think you're out of luck.
Ad Blocking for you. There are 7 options in this list. Most are free, I see one commercial offering.
And of course you could always just use a hosts file and personal stylesheet to do the work yourself. If fact with the new support for CSS3 animations you could have some fun... make those ads do a dance before disappearing ;-p
I was going to respond with a similar thought... this and other MMO simulations could be really really great for exploring how "humans" deal with new scenarios. You can't simulate people but you can simulate an environment and then put people in it.
That's not a bad idea.... everyone is ripping or copying media from their DVR/tuner to make available via Boxee anyways... why not just have those also go out on a P2P broadcast to other Boxee users... and download via Torrent. While at it... add in subscription to a particular show.... and channels/networks/genres to browse through. Even tagging would be nice.
Boxee supports RSS feeds with torrent links currently but you have to register them with the Boxee website... so it's a multi-step process. First go to a site like TVRSS create a search RSS feed, put it on Feedburner or similar, then login to Boxee and add it to your feeds list (or edit your feeds XML file directly), then browse via Boxee to your Video->Internet->RSS feeds, then select a feed, select a download, confirm download - wait.
Not exactly convenient until you get all your feeds set up. Once they are of course you can just do the last part, select a bunch of episodes in the morning, come home after work and enjoy that night.
Lower the price and more people will buy. Amazing. Do this with any form of entertainment where there are parallel revenue streams and everyone will win big.
Concerts... more people will go, more people will buy shirts, food, cds, and of course gas to get there.
Theatre - movies or plays, same as above (and really they should have shirts, games, DVDs etc available for purchase at both forms of entertainment - who wouldn't buy an XMen shirt with claw marks after watching the next Wolverine film?)
Sports - again, drop ticket price and people will go... and spend more on other things while there.
Keep the price of admission high and you get none of the ancillary spending, it's just too much initial expense when you know you'll have to spend money on the other stuff to actually have a good time.
With games and digital media it's a little less clear cut but still obviously a big win as you'll get way more legal consumers by lowering prices to an affordable range.
Toys are the same way. People will buy multiples products at the same total cost if you lower the individual price point. They feel like they're getting more bang for their buck while still spending more money than on one item. Margins may not be as high but overhead expenses drop as you are moving product more quickly and with less marketing, service, shelf space, etc.
You insensitive clod, I watch Hulu on my TV via Boxee... that's the whole point.
Fringe, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Psych, Monk, Burn Notice, Damages, Lie to Me.. all on Hulu - plus Nova, Nasa TV, the Daily Show, SNL - all on Hulu.
I don't have to pay an extra $50 / month for cable/sat - just my internet connection.
http://www.hulu.com/videos/search?query=contact
No it doesn't bring up a contact page, but scroll to the bottom and there's a little link "Didn't find what you wanted? Click here to let us know" which pops up a contact box.... use it to let them know how you feel.
Hulu without syndicated content from the networks is nothing but a video blog. Yes it's a very well designed video blog but it's true value is the ability to syndicate content and insert ads into the stream.
Uh... half of the story is whether or not the freed up frequencies will be available for other uses on time...
It's well known that sperm and eggs develop separately at the time of conception on... the DNA in sperm and eggs is not the same as that in the host body...
Which is to say that they could have genetically modified the host while neglecting to modify the sperm/eggs of the host and the offspring of the gen-modded mice would be 'normal' mice without the modifications at all.
Go to the forums... public to view, registered to comment.
18 months really isn't that long. It will go by in no time at all and you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. How many years have you paid a cable tax? I've been paying personally since 1998 and prior to that my family paid from `88 or so... that's ~20 years of cable tax. 1.5 years to get your ROI when you plan on having to pay cable tax for the next 3 years at least.
Get an Apple TV for $229 or a Mac mini for the same price already built into a sexy case... save yourself the trouble.
My ATV runs boxee great (no Netflix support due to their use of Silverlight as a media player - needs too much raw CPU)... but it gets Hulu, RSS torrents great, all other Boxee services and I've got a 1TB external attached where I store all my ripped DVDs and music collection. Add an antennae and HD OTA receiver - no more cable.
Total cost $429 (not counting my DSL fees... which are grandfathered in as a utility not an entertainment expense).
Any of the great LAMP books should have sections devoted to security. Each of the components has a part to play. The obvious vectors are PHP and MySQL so pay particular attention to those. If that's not enough, get a book for each... I'm certain there are "Security for MySQL" , etc.
They should all be available used on amazon for $10- $15 each... if $100 is out of your budget, then you'll need to start googling and doc diving.
Just an anecdotal counterpoint to an anecdotal point... I've had 2 Apple laptops in the last8 years. The first was a Powerbook G4 500mhz that lasted 4+ years and still works just fine... it was finally underpowered is all... and my current 1st Gen Macbook Pro which is on year 3.
I have had issues with batteries on the MacBook Pro, which seem to go through their charge cycle quota rather quickly (replaced under warranty of course) and it may have a problem with the power supply as an underlying issue to that... which is a legitimate problem but one I can live with.
Otherwise I am a very happy customer. I've got an iPhone which works great, a 30 in. Cinema Display which is awesome to behold and an AppleTV with Boxee installed and a 1TB external drive attached... which also works great.
SO I can't back up the claim of shitty hardware, sorry... just typical problems with many laptops out there (battery related), especially after 2+ years of service.
Microsoft should call this Windows Mid-Manager edition, since the only people using 3 apps are enterprise level office drones doing data entry via Excel or Word, Possibly Powerpoint. They are so locked down that they can't listen to music, or use IM or anything except the tools for their job. Even receptionists would balk at this... but the mid-manager's would be okay, they just want to go play golf anyways....
*BSD for it's security.... he would use it under a special Batman Source Distribution *badump chhhh*
Unfortunately it would be an arms race of sorts, similar to virus definitions... requiring dom scripting to identify a particular class or id or attribute or some other unique element in the ad (possibly the image src which means it could piggy back on ad-blockers already in use)...
The idea is to use the DOM to walk back up from the unique Ad element to the containing div or divs, then turn them off or delete them.
Another way would be to identify the offending function in the script and set it to return false or something similar.
Someone could play around with greasemonkey or YUI anywhere and create a sample distribution...
I don't personally go to enough sites that do this to make the effort, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the class.
How much diet coke do you drink? I recently started having one 16 oz sweet soda ( I like Pepsi actually) a day which is a lot for me historically. I never understood how people could drink so much of the stuff...
I usually just have A coffee in the morning, water throughout the day, now a soda in the afternoon, and juice or water at night. I used to just drink coffee, water, juice and beer... cut back on the coffee and beer - added a soda.
Hear what you're saying about the corn syrup though... sugar based sodas are supposed to be way better tasting.
Are you saying that the US censorship laws are really a way to shore up the porn industry? (yes I said porn). As in, without all that repression on public media, porn would become less interesting because we'd all be desensitized to human nudity and sexual situations? Desensitized meaning it would become normal, rather than taboo.
Ogg is that Ogg... oggity ogg to ogg Ogg. Pirate? Ogg.