Life begins at conception. Over 1/3 of all pregnancies end in miscarriage (medically: spontaneous abortion). Do we outlaw miscarriages?
Quite many humans die from illnesses. So if you outlaw murder, you also have to outlaw illnesses?
Viability begins at 22 weeks. Any fetus cannot survive outside of the womb before then. For me, that's the cut off. Once the fetus can survive on it's own, it is it's own person.
What about people in intensive care? They obviously cannot survive on their own. So is it OK to kill them? What if a working artificial womb gets invented and built? Then a fetus could survive outside of the womb much earlier; possibly from day one. But how could the existence or nonexistence of an invention determine if a fetus is its own person?
That said I firmly believe that the rights of the woman supersede any supposed rights of the fetus up to birth. Once the baby is outside it's mother's body it has full rights.
OK, so you say that after 22 weeks, the fetus is its own person, but still effectively doesn't have any rights. Doesn't seem very consistent. Why should the rights of someone depend on where he currently is?
The example you gave is a case where a very important right of the woman was affected: Her health. However the rule as you formulated it would apply to any right. Basically you would allow the mother to kill her baby a few days before birth (and yes, at that time it already and very clearly is a baby) just because she feels like that.
We definitely need a general rule about when a collection of human of cells is to be considered a human. But all your rules are quite arbitrary, and where you gave arguments, they are quite weak.
One possibility would be to use the brain as criterion. After all, our personality mostly resides in our brain; so one could say it's the brain which makes us human. It's also consistent with the rule that you're dead when your brain has stopped working. And while there are people with damaged or malfunctioning brains, there are no people without any brain, because you cannot live without it. Since embryos don't have a brain, embryonic stem cells would then be without ethical problems.
If you think researchers should not care about ethical concerns, you surely wouldn't mind if some researcher uses you for a lethal experiment which advances science, right?
Killing skin cells very definitely is killing life, too. However, killing a fly also is killing life (and very clearly so), yet few people have any ethical problems to do so. The special point with human embryos is that they would normally develop into a complete human if no one interfered. And since most people agree that killing humans is evil, there's the problem of when exactly the collection of cells starts to be a human. Different people give different answers to this. If you consider the embryo as a human, then taking it apart to experiment with its cells is evil. If you consider the embryo as just a collection of human cells, experimenting with embryonic cells isn't any more problematic than experimenting with blood cells or skin cells.
Another interesting thought: What if the embryonic stem cells wouldn't be taken from aborted embryos, but taken from embryos created with in-vitro fertilization, and the rest of the embryo was then implanted to grow to a full human (and let's assume that there are no negative effects of this for the human grown from the embryo). Would that now be ethical (because, after all, there was no killing of an embryo involved, just taking away a single cell) or not (because the removed cell in principle would have the potential to grow into a twin of the original embryo, even if that twin wouldn't have existed if the cell had been left in the embryo to begin with).
If I understand it correctly, strictly speaking it's not even reprogramming; each cell already contains the genetic program of the complete organism. What they managed is to activate the parts belonging to another cell type instead of the parts belonging to the current cell types, thus changing the cell into another cell type. Think of rebooting a dual-boot computer to the other OS: Both OSs were already on the hard disk; it was just that only one was active.
1) The "freedom" you're spouting off about is only valuable to a consumer if they have the technical expertise to take advantage of it. 90+% of people do not, and of the maybe 10% who do, a vanishingly small number of them actually care to spend their days hacking devices that already work.
Few people actually want to speak up in public. So obviously there's not much value in free speech. Right? And even if only 0,1% of all people take advantage of the ability to hack away themselves, that doesn't mean that other people don't have any advantage. I have written not a single line of the Linux kernel, and yet the mere fact that the Linux kernel exists has given me an advantage. And it gives an advantage to any Windows user to, as soon as he surfs the web.
2) You're lazy. If there was truly a vast demand for a "free" version of this product, you'd go into business and make a mint for yourself producing it. But you know in your hearts that what you're demanding is for - at best - a small niche / hobbyist market, so you take the safe route and bitch about Apple instead.
Sure, because it's so easy to get into every market where something bad happens... yes, any self-respecting person should be able, at the same time, to mass-produce and sell computers, printers, smart phones and gaming consoles, write all sorts of software, write books, music and web sites and produce movies,... and obviously everyone has the necessary money to start such a business.
You know there's a total order on the reals, right? You just can't write it down.
It took me a while until I noticed that you referred to my sig: The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers. You should explicitly write if you refer to a sig (and also quote it, because sigs may change).
Well, yes, I do know that there's a total order on the reals. But that's unrelated to the fact that they are uncountable (i.e. there's no bijection between the real numbers and the natural numbers).
Except in a few circumstances migration is not part of their lifestyle, but they have a tremendous latent capacity to migrate, probably greater and certainly more flexible than any land animal.
I'm pretty sure the rats are much better than the humans in that respect.
Good news! We should soon be able to prove to everyone that you are correct. From the Wikipedia article on the Yellowstone Caldera, "The three super eruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago". If the trend continues, the next eruption is about due.
The positron is a point, and therefore even smaller than a micro black hole, and yet electron and positron can annihilate (and if you argue that the positron is actually described by a probability density itself, well, the same has to be true for a micro black hole). To really know what happens with a micro black hole, one would need to know at least particle physics in curved spacetime, which I don't (actually one would need quantum gravity, but no one knows that yet:-)). However, around the black hole, there's more space than would fit in an Euclidean space, therefore I'd expect the electron probability density at the black hole to be even higher than for a charged nucleus. But that's just a guess based on my knowledge about GR and flat-space QM.
ack... I know I shouldn't be doing this but : “Prayer is stronger than radiation”... why... would... anyone... say... this ?
So a wrongly applied prayer can do more harm than wrongly applied radiation? And yet we let millions of undereducated people pray! Imagine the damage this may do! Probably all the problems in this world come from incompetent prayers! We really should strictly forbid any praying by anyone who did not get a praying diploma!
Not true either. At the energies the LHC will collide, not the protons collide, but the constituent quarks and gluons. In fact, when producing very massive objects, it will be the quarks constituting the proton, the so-called valence quarks, that interact; gluons and the so-called sea-quarks are extremely unlikely to reach those energies. So you would end up with some fractional charge. A detail, maybe, but as an LHC physicist, I like things correct:-).
But given the strong force/QCD confinement, I'd guess that a black hole formed from two quarks would quickly absorb at least a third quark and get color-neutral.
The comparison to the helium atom is wrong too: helium ions, stripped of their electrons, exert quite an electrical pull on their surroundings. But usually they very quickly recombine into neutral helium atoms.
A black hole of charge +2 would exert the exact same electrical pull. And therefore it's quite likely that, given the chance, it would also very quickly "recombine" by catching two electrons. However, since the electron's probability density for the Helium ground state is maximal inside the core (which in the "black hole helium" case would be the black hole), the "black hole helium" would not be stable, but quickly "decay" into a larger electrically neutral black hole (similar to how electron and positron form a hydrogen-like state (positronium), but ultimately electron and positron anihilate). All that of course assuming that the black hole doesn't already evaporate before this happens.
Imagine the force being dependent on the frame of reference...
It is. To see that it has to be, just calculate any scenario where electromagnetic forces are involved (for example, the attraction of two electrons, once in rest, and once flying at large velocity perpendicular to the line connecting them; don't forget to take into account the magnetic field).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd suggest using neurons. As added bonus, turning them into neurons is trivial: Just apply the identity transformation. :-)
Quite many humans die from illnesses. So if you outlaw murder, you also have to outlaw illnesses?
What about people in intensive care? They obviously cannot survive on their own. So is it OK to kill them?
What if a working artificial womb gets invented and built? Then a fetus could survive outside of the womb much earlier; possibly from day one. But how could the existence or nonexistence of an invention determine if a fetus is its own person?
OK, so you say that after 22 weeks, the fetus is its own person, but still effectively doesn't have any rights. Doesn't seem very consistent. Why should the rights of someone depend on where he currently is?
The example you gave is a case where a very important right of the woman was affected: Her health. However the rule as you formulated it would apply to any right. Basically you would allow the mother to kill her baby a few days before birth (and yes, at that time it already and very clearly is a baby) just because she feels like that.
We definitely need a general rule about when a collection of human of cells is to be considered a human. But all your rules are quite arbitrary, and where you gave arguments, they are quite weak.
One possibility would be to use the brain as criterion. After all, our personality mostly resides in our brain; so one could say it's the brain which makes us human. It's also consistent with the rule that you're dead when your brain has stopped working. And while there are people with damaged or malfunctioning brains, there are no people without any brain, because you cannot live without it. Since embryos don't have a brain, embryonic stem cells would then be without ethical problems.
It's because of ethical concerns.
If you think researchers should not care about ethical concerns, you surely wouldn't mind if some researcher uses you for a lethal experiment which advances science, right?
Killing skin cells very definitely is killing life, too. However, killing a fly also is killing life (and very clearly so), yet few people have any ethical problems to do so. The special point with human embryos is that they would normally develop into a complete human if no one interfered. And since most people agree that killing humans is evil, there's the problem of when exactly the collection of cells starts to be a human. Different people give different answers to this. If you consider the embryo as a human, then taking it apart to experiment with its cells is evil. If you consider the embryo as just a collection of human cells, experimenting with embryonic cells isn't any more problematic than experimenting with blood cells or skin cells.
Another interesting thought: What if the embryonic stem cells wouldn't be taken from aborted embryos, but taken from embryos created with in-vitro fertilization, and the rest of the embryo was then implanted to grow to a full human (and let's assume that there are no negative effects of this for the human grown from the embryo). Would that now be ethical (because, after all, there was no killing of an embryo involved, just taking away a single cell) or not (because the removed cell in principle would have the potential to grow into a twin of the original embryo, even if that twin wouldn't have existed if the cell had been left in the embryo to begin with).
No, we are speaking of living things. Dead stem cells are useless. However we speak of living things which would be killed otherwise.
If I understand it correctly, strictly speaking it's not even reprogramming; each cell already contains the genetic program of the complete organism. What they managed is to activate the parts belonging to another cell type instead of the parts belonging to the current cell types, thus changing the cell into another cell type. Think of rebooting a dual-boot computer to the other OS: Both OSs were already on the hard disk; it was just that only one was active.
Few people actually want to speak up in public. So obviously there's not much value in free speech. Right?
And even if only 0,1% of all people take advantage of the ability to hack away themselves, that doesn't mean that other people don't have any advantage. I have written not a single line of the Linux kernel, and yet the mere fact that the Linux kernel exists has given me an advantage. And it gives an advantage to any Windows user to, as soon as he surfs the web.
Sure, because it's so easy to get into every market where something bad happens ... yes, any self-respecting person should be able, at the same time, to mass-produce and sell computers, printers, smart phones and gaming consoles, write all sorts of software, write books, music and web sites and produce movies, ... and obviously everyone has the necessary money to start such a business.
Fossil solar nuclear power, of course.
You know there's a total order on the reals, right? You just can't write it down.
It took me a while until I noticed that you referred to my sig:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You should explicitly write if you refer to a sig (and also quote it, because sigs may change).
Well, yes, I do know that there's a total order on the reals. But that's unrelated to the fact that they are uncountable (i.e. there's no bijection between the real numbers and the natural numbers).
To provoke a comment which asks why the headline doesn't list Firefox.
Maybe those researchers could also make an effectively perfect Slashdot story filter.
More importantly, gene patents existed back then. Most humans were forbidden to express some of their important genes due to patent issues.
Coal is nothing but stored nuclear power from the sun!
I'm pretty sure the rats are much better than the humans in that respect.
The B Ark, to be exact.
Well, maybe with yet another near extinction event, we get more intelligent. Let's start the nuclear warheads! :-)
Good news! We should soon be able to prove to everyone that you are correct. From the Wikipedia article on the Yellowstone Caldera, "The three super eruptions occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago". If the trend continues, the next eruption is about due.
Yes, 640k years should be enough for anyone.
Well, they hope that all their bloat is reduced through Lorentz contraction if they just develop fast enough.
The positron is a point, and therefore even smaller than a micro black hole, and yet electron and positron can annihilate (and if you argue that the positron is actually described by a probability density itself, well, the same has to be true for a micro black hole). To really know what happens with a micro black hole, one would need to know at least particle physics in curved spacetime, which I don't (actually one would need quantum gravity, but no one knows that yet :-)). However, around the black hole, there's more space than would fit in an Euclidean space, therefore I'd expect the electron probability density at the black hole to be even higher than for a charged nucleus. But that's just a guess based on my knowledge about GR and flat-space QM.
So a wrongly applied prayer can do more harm than wrongly applied radiation? And yet we let millions of undereducated people pray! Imagine the damage this may do! Probably all the problems in this world come from incompetent prayers! We really should strictly forbid any praying by anyone who did not get a praying diploma!
Code monkeys. So any error in software would be simian error.
After all, his first words were: "Let there be light." And a lamp is a light-making device.
The real numbers contain the transcendental numbers. However, everything transcendental is irrational.
You mean they hugged incorrectly?
But given the strong force/QCD confinement, I'd guess that a black hole formed from two quarks would quickly absorb at least a third quark and get color-neutral.
A black hole of charge +2 would exert the exact same electrical pull. And therefore it's quite likely that, given the chance, it would also very quickly "recombine" by catching two electrons. However, since the electron's probability density for the Helium ground state is maximal inside the core (which in the "black hole helium" case would be the black hole), the "black hole helium" would not be stable, but quickly "decay" into a larger electrically neutral black hole (similar to how electron and positron form a hydrogen-like state (positronium), but ultimately electron and positron anihilate). All that of course assuming that the black hole doesn't already evaporate before this happens.
It is. To see that it has to be, just calculate any scenario where electromagnetic forces are involved (for example, the attraction of two electrons, once in rest, and once flying at large velocity perpendicular to the line connecting them; don't forget to take into account the magnetic field).