There are many forms of life that have nothing to do with conception (ask any amoeba).
Life has existed in a continuum for something like 2 billion years.
The fusion of a sperm (a living thing) and an egg (a living thing) is not the start of new life, it is the start of a new individual. It appears you don't have much respect for individuals since you think it's acceptable for you to tell a woman what to do with herself.
Here's a car analogy: At what point does a collection of parts on an assembly line become an automobile? Can't name an exact point? That's because it's a process, just as egg + sperm -> embryo -> fetus -> newborn is a process
Because many decisions are based on the law in this matter, the law that identifies when a new person (human being) comes into existence should be reasonable, in accordance with reality, based upon sound definitions, and allow determination of facts based on easy observations. The fundamental definition of a person (human being) is an independent rational animal, with each of those 3 words clarified for use in legal and utilitarian contexts (for instance, rational refers not to the ability to spout syllogisms, but to having a rational faculty consistent with age and experience.) Until birth, a fetus is not independent, thus not a person, and thus has no rights; however the potential of the fetus and the responsibility of the woman makes the restriction (not prohibition) of late-term abortion a reasonable thing.
As noted above, the attempt to pinpoint the start of life is based on a false assumption. Identifying a start to personhood is not a scientific endeavor (and it's dishonest to claim otherwise), it is a legal and political one.
Oh sure, doing a clean (upgrade) install is a breeze... until I find an important piece of software is not included in the new version of the distro, and the available binaries are incompatible with new libraries. And the source code won't compile because the the libraries have changed and so have the header files. And the Makefiles refer to stuff that doesn't exist any more. And the paths in the Makefile are obsolete.
Then multiply that by ten for other essential programs, some of which can never be made to run again.
From wikipedia: Gulf by the 1980s had been suffering the effects of mediocre management for many years. It merged with Std. Oil of California (Chevron), and some assets were sold to British Petroleum and Cumberland Farms. Gulf Oil Limited Partnership now owns the rights to the brand name in the North America, and operates a distribution network in the northeast. Cumberland Farms owns 2/3 of GOLP. Gulf Oil International, owned by the Hinduja Group of the UK, uses the Gulf brand in Europe.
We are eventually going to have to remove CO2 from the air
You can't be that stupid, that has to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the ignorant. CO2 is constantly removed from the atmosphere. There's a certain amount of elasticity to the comparative rates of CO2 generation and removal, but to a first order approximation, if all man-made CO2 generation (not including breathing) stopped, the atmospheric levels of CO2 would return to pre-industrial levels fairly quickly (a small number of years) by natural processes. Anything people could do would be insignificant by comparison.
Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out. Except for places like Niagara Falls that tap the rainfall of a substantial portion of the continent, multiyear droughts are a weakness for hydro.
For a 1 MW omnidirectional broadcast TV signal, the receiving antenna would have to be have to be a perfectly aligned directional antenna at least 2e-10 radians across. That's 300 miles at 1 light-year. (Warning, that's very sloppily approximated.)
Conclusion: Nothing is going to see broadcast video from Earth beyond a small fraction of a light year. For signal intercept to happen at hundreds of light years, both sending and receiving antennas have to be very narrow beam and aimed at each other.
The legality of observing people while they are in public does have limitations. There are laws against stalking. Stalking consists in law of two parts, following someone and threatening him. Whether continuously following someone and recording his every action is abusive enough to be considered a threat by itself is an open question.
The primary source of a right to privacy is the right to property. You own your house, by right you control what is acceptable there (limited to not violating the rights of others.) WalMart owns its stores, and (I presume) prohibits people from photographing people in bathrooms and dressing rooms.
A secondary source of a right to privacy has evolved from case law, which has developed alongside the "reasonable expectation" idea. The problem with "reasonable expectation" is that it's hard to quantify without a long list of examples or some explicit underlying principle.
Some states have "paparazzi" laws that have to do with abusive photography in public places. These might be stretched to prohibit surveillance in public places without warrant, or (better) new laws should be considered to limit the practice.
Consider also that there are many open places where continuous recording via CCTV is a good thing: 24 hour gas stations in bad neighborhoods where carjacking is a risk, streets around schools, government offices and military installations where kidnapping and firebombs or RPGs are not unreasonable expectations, etc.
I don't like widespread use of government cameras, and hidden government cameras without warrant seem to me to be a real abuse. Legislation needs to catch up to technology, and it needs to be clearly grounded in human rights.
The issue is more complicated than that. Defects in our legal system make liability for harm claimed to be caused by vaccines intolerable. By tying the government into vaccine production, the gov't can cover costs or outright forbid vaccine lawsuits.
Many disease research charities are founded and partly funded by relatives or the spouse of a victim. They advertise and hold fundraisers to obtain more money; much of the money comes from ordinary people and mid-sized businesses. More money is always useful, but many charities don't urgently need big-money donors.
No one who truly cares about other people is rich at that level.
I don't have much good to say about Bill Gates, but some of his charitable contributions are substantial.
Knowledge of the law is not possible. Laws are being written faster than anyone can read them, now that the edicts of regulatory agencies have the force of law.
This whole issue is bogus. Search for this item on Amazon; look at the details. It's handled and shipped by one of Amazon's partner companies, not shipped by Amazon. How is this Amazon's fault? Is Amazon supposed to police every mom-and-pop that is essentially using Amazon as its marketplace?
the inept employee is largely a symptom of wage inequality.
You can't be that stupid. - oh, wait, this is slashdot.
If a person is paid the same whether he does a good job or bad, why should he go to the extra trouble to do a good job?
And we'll never, ever see any government censoring the internet - except China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia, Burma, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Turkey,...
He was a crypto-fascist at heart, and would have been right at home in today's American Tea Party. He would denounce them for their racist and sexist morality...
You've swallowed the mainstream media story on the Tea Party hook, line, and sinker. There is no more decent group of similar size in the world.
People are living beings, and require things to continue living. Other things make life less painful or more pleasant. In the context of human life, those things have inherent value.
Money is traded for value created, it is a representation of the moral virtue of production. If you give the first X persons seats instead of the trading seats for money, you are not rewarding moral action: your system is morally inferior.
Ever been to a live concert with a small audience - say 50 people? If you'd trade that for being in the audience in a 60,000 seat stadium, or even worse in a VR audience, you have values very different than mine.
Each step you take to remove yourself from the real world weakens your ability to handle the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument is superficial and dishonest.
There are many forms of life that have nothing to do with conception (ask any amoeba).
Life has existed in a continuum for something like 2 billion years.
The fusion of a sperm (a living thing) and an egg (a living thing) is not the start of new life, it is the start of a new individual. It appears you don't have much respect for individuals since you think it's acceptable for you to tell a woman what to do with herself.
Here's a car analogy: At what point does a collection of parts on an assembly line become an automobile? Can't name an exact point? That's because it's a process, just as egg + sperm -> embryo -> fetus -> newborn is a process
Because many decisions are based on the law in this matter, the law that identifies when a new person (human being) comes into existence should be reasonable, in accordance with reality, based upon sound definitions, and allow determination of facts based on easy observations. The fundamental definition of a person (human being) is an independent rational animal, with each of those 3 words clarified for use in legal and utilitarian contexts (for instance, rational refers not to the ability to spout syllogisms, but to having a rational faculty consistent with age and experience.) Until birth, a fetus is not independent, thus not a person, and thus has no rights; however the potential of the fetus and the responsibility of the woman makes the restriction (not prohibition) of late-term abortion a reasonable thing.
As noted above, the attempt to pinpoint the start of life is based on a false assumption. Identifying a start to personhood is not a scientific endeavor (and it's dishonest to claim otherwise), it is a legal and political one.
The Democratic party was founded in 1828 to preserve and promote race-based chattel slavery. It remains the party of slavery to this very day.
Oh sure, doing a clean (upgrade) install is a breeze ... until I find an important piece of software is not included in the new version of the distro, and the available binaries are incompatible with new libraries. And the source code won't compile because the the libraries have changed and so have the header files. And the Makefiles refer to stuff that doesn't exist any more. And the paths in the Makefile are obsolete.
Then multiply that by ten for other essential programs, some of which can never be made to run again.
A breeze.
From wikipedia: Gulf by the 1980s had been suffering the effects of mediocre management for many years. It merged with Std. Oil of California (Chevron), and some assets were sold to British Petroleum and Cumberland Farms. Gulf Oil Limited Partnership now owns the rights to the brand name in the North America, and operates a distribution network in the northeast. Cumberland Farms owns 2/3 of GOLP. Gulf Oil International, owned by the Hinduja Group of the UK, uses the Gulf brand in Europe.
Whose death?
You can't be that stupid, that has to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the ignorant. CO2 is constantly removed from the atmosphere. There's a certain amount of elasticity to the comparative rates of CO2 generation and removal, but to a first order approximation, if all man-made CO2 generation (not including breathing) stopped, the atmospheric levels of CO2 would return to pre-industrial levels fairly quickly (a small number of years) by natural processes. Anything people could do would be insignificant by comparison.
Economically feasible hydro is pretty much tapped out. Except for places like Niagara Falls that tap the rainfall of a substantial portion of the continent, multiyear droughts are a weakness for hydro.
AMD is losing a half billion dollars a year. It's a miracle their creditors don't shut them down.
For a 1 MW omnidirectional broadcast TV signal, the receiving antenna would have to be have to be a perfectly aligned directional antenna at least 2e-10 radians across. That's 300 miles at 1 light-year. (Warning, that's very sloppily approximated.)
Conclusion: Nothing is going to see broadcast video from Earth beyond a small fraction of a light year. For signal intercept to happen at hundreds of light years, both sending and receiving antennas have to be very narrow beam and aimed at each other.
The legality of observing people while they are in public does have limitations. There are laws against stalking. Stalking consists in law of two parts, following someone and threatening him. Whether continuously following someone and recording his every action is abusive enough to be considered a threat by itself is an open question.
The primary source of a right to privacy is the right to property. You own your house, by right you control what is acceptable there (limited to not violating the rights of others.) WalMart owns its stores, and (I presume) prohibits people from photographing people in bathrooms and dressing rooms.
A secondary source of a right to privacy has evolved from case law, which has developed alongside the "reasonable expectation" idea. The problem with "reasonable expectation" is that it's hard to quantify without a long list of examples or some explicit underlying principle.
Some states have "paparazzi" laws that have to do with abusive photography in public places. These might be stretched to prohibit surveillance in public places without warrant, or (better) new laws should be considered to limit the practice.
Consider also that there are many open places where continuous recording via CCTV is a good thing: 24 hour gas stations in bad neighborhoods where carjacking is a risk, streets around schools, government offices and military installations where kidnapping and firebombs or RPGs are not unreasonable expectations, etc.
I don't like widespread use of government cameras, and hidden government cameras without warrant seem to me to be a real abuse. Legislation needs to catch up to technology, and it needs to be clearly grounded in human rights.
The issue is more complicated than that. Defects in our legal system make liability for harm claimed to be caused by vaccines intolerable. By tying the government into vaccine production, the gov't can cover costs or outright forbid vaccine lawsuits.
I don't have much good to say about Bill Gates, but some of his charitable contributions are substantial.
This year’s daily publication of the federal government’s rules, proposed rules and notices amounted to 81,611 pages. http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/264456-2015-was-record-year-for-federal-regulation-group-says
Read that carefully, that's over 80,000 pages per day.
This whole issue is bogus. Search for this item on Amazon; look at the details. It's handled and shipped by one of Amazon's partner companies, not shipped by Amazon. How is this Amazon's fault? Is Amazon supposed to police every mom-and-pop that is essentially using Amazon as its marketplace?
You can't be that stupid. - oh, wait, this is slashdot.
If a person is paid the same whether he does a good job or bad, why should he go to the extra trouble to do a good job?
And we'll never, ever see any government censoring the internet - except China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia, Burma, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Turkey, ...
You've swallowed the mainstream media story on the Tea Party hook, line, and sinker. There is no more decent group of similar size in the world.
Oh Gawd, the horrific image that creates: Lorne Greene, fresh from the Ponderosa, wandering like a lost cowboy in the pathetic Battlestar Galactica.
How would it not work well for civil wars? Both combatants die; problem solved.
You're a criminal as soon as you commit a crime. Conviction is the step legally required for the government to punish you for your crime.
"Innocent" and "legally innocent" are two different and decreasingly related concepts.
People are living beings, and require things to continue living. Other things make life less painful or more pleasant. In the context of human life, those things have inherent value.
Why should I meet with you, when I can just have you killed and deal with your replicated self at home where it's convenient to me?
Money is traded for value created, it is a representation of the moral virtue of production. If you give the first X persons seats instead of the trading seats for money, you are not rewarding moral action: your system is morally inferior.
Ever been to a live concert with a small audience - say 50 people? If you'd trade that for being in the audience in a 60,000 seat stadium, or even worse in a VR audience, you have values very different than mine.
Each step you take to remove yourself from the real world weakens your ability to handle the real world.