Eh. I don't complain because I want something for free, I complain because the new content isn't as much fun as the old content. In a 40-man raid, things go south, but you rally, show some skills, and pull it off. In the new 10-mans, if you sneeze at the wrong time, you're screwed. You have to farm far more potions for the 10-mans, but the repair bill is no better. Your character build is 100% stock, with no room for anything other than the absolute best raid build.
It's just tedious. And for what? Gear? Why not just do the equally tedious pvp until you get equivalent gear? And, when you've put forth the obscene effort, and maxed out your character, finished raiding all the new content, then they release Lich King, and your crazy epics are replaced by green quest drops.
Agreed. The 10 man raids were supposed to be more accessible, but the individual fights require so much coordination and such a precise group, that there is NO WAY to do anything like a casual run. You have to have a bunch of geared, committed, badasses, and that leaves even MORE people out in the cold, because there is no incentive to get more than the minimum group.
Used to be the super elite raid guilds limited their membership to 40. Now it's 25, because who needs more?
It's bullshit. You can't "absorb" radiation...It doesn't even make sense. You can filter radioactive isotopes out of air or water(1), using a filter of some kind. It doesn't make the filter radioactive(2) and it doesn't make the isotopes filtered out un-radioactive.
1) Assuming that the air/water are not themselves radioactive isotopes (e.g. HT, HTO).
2) The filter can become radioactive if it's bombarded with enough crap to change its atoms to radioactive isotopes. This is pretty unlikely, and would involve a front seat on some seriously high energy reactions...It is not something that would happen just from filtration.
D2O, isn't radioactive, but HTO (Tritium Oxide) is a beta emitter. Tritium is H-3 (Deuterium is H-2); hydrogen with 2 extra neutrons. Half life of about 12 years. It's used to boost the yield on nukes, so it does get made a bit.
Oxygen has 2 isotopes, but I don't think either of them are radioactive, or otherwise very interesting.
This element has been discovered countless times before. It's common name is "Bullshitium" and it's used in turning lead to gold, eating up radiation, and can be used in pollution-less power plants.
There is only one way to "absorb" radiation, and everything does it already. Step outside and you're absorbing radiation.
Now, if there are radioactive particulates suspended in your water, you can filter those out with any sufficiently fine-grained filter. This is the most common form of radioactive water pollution.
Following that you have Tritium Oxide (HTO), which is a water-like substance made with H-3 isotopes (T). It's basically impossible to separate HTO from H20. It reacts no differently than plain old H or H-2(D), it just happens to have a few extra neutrons, and be a beta emmitter.
The tendency to emit radiation is completely irrelevant in terms of chemical reactions (unless you're using it as a catalyst); if your radioactive isotope is slutty with its electrons, then you can maybe dump something reactive into the solution for it to bind itself to, but in this case that's not going to happen...If it was easy to break H2 (or HT in this case) off of O, we'd all be driving Hydrogen cars.
So in short, either you can filter it out, or there is crap that you can do about it, because emmitting radiation isn't a property that can be used to bind anything...That's like saying you've found a mineral that will bind to a lightbulb.
Because as I recall, Beowulf killed Grendel's mother. During the whole story of Beowulf, he is never defeated, though he does die of his wounds after defeating the dragon.
Designers nowadays are more inclined to stick to the tried-and-true methods instead of trying something completely new and refreshing. That's always been the case; there is only ever one original, everything after is a copy. Blizzard, for all their successes, has never done anything original. It's true, if you think about their successes. Diablo? No way. Warcraft? Uh-uh. WoW? Nope. Every single one of those games is a refinement of other games in the genre, and they refine like masters.
WoW is popular because it is (so far) the best of the traditional sword and sorcery MMOs (insert various disagreements from various fans of various other MMOs). Eve is a totally different animal, and it is stable and popular in its niche.
The grind is easy as long as there is progression. You get that sense of satisfaction, that drug high, or whatever you want to call it.
The problem is when you hit a point where there isn't anything else you can do that's not going to require near-infinite grinding for tiny incremental rewards. That's basically a description of WoW's end game. In BC they released a bunch of 5 and 10 man content as a bid to make it more small group friendly. IMHO this was amazingly stupid, and I'll tell you why.
Pre-BC if you were in a decent guild that raided 40 man content, you could get into a raid, even if your gear wasn't super elite. There was no need to interminably run 5 and 10 man content until your gear was as good as it gets for that level, because with a larger group, you could afford more slack. This meant less drag in the end game, because you could skip over content that had loot that you were going to quickly replace.
Fast forward to BC. They added tons and tons of 5 man content, and, having done this, they then geared the 10+ man content toward people who had completely exhausted the 5 man content, and in order to exhaust the 5 man content you had to run it to DEATH; running the lesser 5 man stuff until you got enough faction to run the heroic 5 man stuff, until you got the gear to run the 10 man stuff. Not that much different from pre-BC, except that now, there is no room for slack in the raid content, so everyone runs eternal 5 mans.
Gone are the days when you could be a raid guild that had a mix of members...Now it's all hardcore, all the time, because the time commitment is absolutely obscene in order to get anywhere. Skill? Who cares about skill? Just play and play and play.
At that point, there ceases to be anything for me in the game. I refuse to spend time for no better reason than just spending time, getting gear whose only point is to be replaced.
Every time someone says, "Well, WoW sucks, and Eve rules" I tune out the rest of it. It's like comparing pocky to tuna fish...They're the same class of thing ("Things you eat") but anyone making the comparison isn't saying anything meaningful because they're so wildly different.
Don't do it in SQL. That would be silly. Do it in your programming logic.
I'd be interested if you would have another way to do it in the database. Myself, I'd create an entirely new employee record for bob, and have a single field referencing his previous employee entry. There would be no reason to carry over all the previous bob data if bob was re-hired for some vastly different position...It's no longer an apples to apples comparison, because as you cogently pointed out, the data are wildly disparate.
And there is obviously no way of preventing someone with access from inserting any row they like...Same with any other database. That's what the audit information is for. With any other method, you're going to have a much much narrower audit history. If you create a new entry for every salary change, rather than updating an old entry, then you have an extremely detailed history of every change, and every user who made that change. If you were trying to catch fraud, that would be an invaluable tool. It would also be very easy to use pure SQL to catch records that changed too often, or records that changed by too large an amount.
There is still file access overhead because it's two dimensional...The index may store the offsets, but you're going to have to parse them to get to that field before you can start returning elements. A column style database is effectively one dimensional...The only records in the file belong to the field you're looking for.
More significantly, it's one data type per file, so you can use the most effective compression for that particular data type, rather than having to use a type that suits a non-homogenous row database.
One of the most common things I see in a database is people trying to store data in such a way that they never have to put multiple joins in their queries. For example, a single record with all of Bob's information that has to be updated every time something about Bob changes, and then maybe copied, whole cloth, to a "history" table so they they can query that history table directly if they need Bob's record for the year 2005.
Well, kinda, but you're still storing the original table, so while the index speeds stuff up, you're still left with the original bloated table hanging around backstage.
Column-style databases offer some of the advantages of an index, but without the storage-inefficient back end.
Not sure how that follows...The column style database would be functionally identical to the row style database, only you'd have column proliferation instead of row expansion.
The easiest way to deal with proliferating events is to create a very simple table that has a timestamp, your basic audit information (user who made the change, change the terminal was made from, etc), and the change itself.
So say Bob makes 50,000 dollars. This entry was put in the table when he was hired and contains bob's employee record id, bob's salary, the date, and the audit crap. That's it. Then when bob gets a raise to 55,000 there is another simple entry, id, salary, date, audit crap. Etc, etc. All your data is there, you can easily retrieve the history, you know when the changes were made and by whom.
It's all about normalization. Why put in two date fields if you don't have to? Two records, each with one date, will give you all the info you need, simplify your queries, whiten your teeth, etc. Whenever you have an event driven model, just throw the event, in the simplest possible form, in a table. If your tables start proliferating out of control, check your normalization and make sure you're not duplicating data across multiple tables. If that's not the problem, try to refine the scope of your database. If it's doing too many things, then try to break things out by their relevance.
Column stores are great (better than a row store) if you're just reading tons of data, but they're much more costly than a row store if you're writing tons of data.
Therefore, pick your method depending on your needs. Are you storing massive amounts of data? Column stores are probably not for you...Your application will run better on a row store, because writing to a row store is a simple matter of adding one more record to the file, whereas writing to a column store is often a matter of writing a record to many files...Obviously more costly.
On the other hand, are you dealing with a relatively static dataset, where you have far more reads than writes? Then a row store isn't the best bet, and you should try a column store. A query on a row store has to query entire rows, which means you'll often end up hitting fields you don't give a damn about while looking for the specific fields you want to return. With column stores, you can ignore any columns that aren't referenced in your query...Additionally, your data is homogenous in a column store, so you lose overhead attached to having to deal with different datatypes and can choose the best data compression by field rather than by data block.
Why do people insist that one size really does fit all?
But if you don't challenge the connection, people will assume it's true, because you're not denying it with a denial they wouldn't believe anyway.
Sigh. People are dumb, and the worst part of it is, it's hardwired.
When you're born you start developing conceptual frameworks. It's all trial and error stuff. It's how you learn to balance, talk, everything. You learn to put discrete objects into categorical groups...The ability to make a forest from trees, for an example, rather than being stuck narrowly trying to understand every tree without being able to abstract the group to a whole (like computers are just barely moving beyond).
We build up these categories for everything. Everything. And that's where it all goes to hell. Stereotypes, prejudice, and crap like this were your brain just dumps the information in a bin without accurately processing it, because it appealed to some subconscious framework that you originally developed when you were 8.
Screw Lindy...When denied a permit for a transatlantic flight because your hand-built airplane (cost 900 dollars) is deemed unflyable, make the flight anyway, and then claim you got "lost."
The guy made the flight with a couple of candy bars and a bottle of water, and a fuel leak inside the cockpit which he knew about before he left, but didn't fix because he didn't want to miss his flight window.
It's that fine line between bravery and stupidity; he lived, so he was brave.
Oh please. Journalists may not usually be scientists, but they're not retarded either. Tell 'em it runs on fairy farts and they're going to go ask someone else, and that someone else may know damn well what it runs on...There are a lot of scientists out there who won't think Orion-esque rockets to be such a good idea.
Then you get to find out what a media gangbang is all about, because the percentage that actually bought the fairy fart line is going to crucify you for making them look stupid, and it'll snowball as the joe-sixpacks of the world figure out you were going to launch nukes into orbit.
Well I don't think "adopt" is an appropriate term...If I was a sperm donor, no one would be "adopting" my sperm...It's a donation, like a blood, kidney, or bone marrow donation.
That being said, I'd have no problem donating an embryo. The problem is, the number of embryo's created every year far outstrips the demand. My example of 9 extra embryos is reasonable. Some people have even more created, especially if they're trying to select around a hereditary condition or something.
So, for every couple who goes in to have an embryo fertilized and implanted, you'd need (conservatively) a half dozen women who were completely infertile and wanted a donated embryo about whose respective donors she knew nothing about. Yeesh.
So pretty quickly you end up back in the same position...You have an ever-increasing store of frozen embryos that no one wants to implant, and that are forbidden from being used in potentially life-saving research.
So they get thrown away, like garbage.
I'm a blood donor. If someone wanted it, I'd donate stem cells, bone marrow, or even some sperm cells. I'm an organ donor...If someone has a use for my parts after I die, so be it. I'd far rather they be used than wasted. The same is true of extra embryos; if they had been made, I'd prefer to see them go to some good, rather than end up in the trash.
Nah, I just think you're full of it. Explain to me the world in which sperm and egg combined outside of a hospitable environment would ever grow into anything. Seriously. I honestly want to know how you think that's possible.
The truth of it is, that sperm + egg - womb = nothing. It's a pile of potentially useful genetic material. Stick it in a womb for a few months, then you have a potential human being. If it survives to leave the womb, then you have an actual human being.
This is the only practical way of measuring the process...Anything else brings with it a host of rights violations which you cannot even begin to imagine, and an absolute legal nightmare. Not that I expect you, of course, to care about the way the world actually works...The inflammatory nature of your rhetoric shows your lack of concern for such niceties.
The way copyright works is you offer up a certain number of reproductions and a list of formats to which you are granting the rights for publishing...e.g You sell the first and second printing rights to a company, and they have to come and renegotiate if they want to do a third printing. Now, you can give up all your rights...This is not uncommon, especially these days, but the writer in question specifically states that he maintains the copyright on his work.
Now, either he's mistaken, and there is nothing he can do about it, or he does still own the copyright, and is absolutely entitled to his share of the profits.
So, for example, if I go in with my wife, and they harvest my sperm and her eggs, and fertilize 10 or so eggs (common practice) and we end up only needing one fertilized egg to be implanted and the other 9 stay on a freezer shelf for a few years before they are routinely discarded, does that make the person who discarded them a mass murderer?
By your example, yes. It is often these embryo's which are almost always destroyed, that could be used for stem cell research...It's not all about abortion. Not even close.
There is a lot more to it than simply (sperm + egg) = person. I'd think even a 4 year old would understand that.
I'm sure they think that the inordinate burden of, you know, putting it on a website, justifies charging everyone 50 bucks to read it.
What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article? I'm no lawyer, but I know enough to know that it is wildly illegal to make money off of someone else's copyrighted works without their permission. Time for a nice lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh. I don't complain because I want something for free, I complain because the new content isn't as much fun as the old content. In a 40-man raid, things go south, but you rally, show some skills, and pull it off. In the new 10-mans, if you sneeze at the wrong time, you're screwed. You have to farm far more potions for the 10-mans, but the repair bill is no better. Your character build is 100% stock, with no room for anything other than the absolute best raid build.
It's just tedious. And for what? Gear? Why not just do the equally tedious pvp until you get equivalent gear? And, when you've put forth the obscene effort, and maxed out your character, finished raiding all the new content, then they release Lich King, and your crazy epics are replaced by green quest drops.
What a fricking rat race.
Agreed. The 10 man raids were supposed to be more accessible, but the individual fights require so much coordination and such a precise group, that there is NO WAY to do anything like a casual run. You have to have a bunch of geared, committed, badasses, and that leaves even MORE people out in the cold, because there is no incentive to get more than the minimum group.
Used to be the super elite raid guilds limited their membership to 40. Now it's 25, because who needs more?
Jesus, if you haven't read it after 1250 years, you're going to have to live with the spoilers!
It's bullshit. You can't "absorb" radiation...It doesn't even make sense. You can filter radioactive isotopes out of air or water(1), using a filter of some kind. It doesn't make the filter radioactive(2) and it doesn't make the isotopes filtered out un-radioactive.
1) Assuming that the air/water are not themselves radioactive isotopes (e.g. HT, HTO).
2) The filter can become radioactive if it's bombarded with enough crap to change its atoms to radioactive isotopes. This is pretty unlikely, and would involve a front seat on some seriously high energy reactions...It is not something that would happen just from filtration.
D2O, isn't radioactive, but HTO (Tritium Oxide) is a beta emitter. Tritium is H-3 (Deuterium is H-2); hydrogen with 2 extra neutrons. Half life of about 12 years. It's used to boost the yield on nukes, so it does get made a bit.
Oxygen has 2 isotopes, but I don't think either of them are radioactive, or otherwise very interesting.
This element has been discovered countless times before. It's common name is "Bullshitium" and it's used in turning lead to gold, eating up radiation, and can be used in pollution-less power plants.
There is only one way to "absorb" radiation, and everything does it already. Step outside and you're absorbing radiation.
Now, if there are radioactive particulates suspended in your water, you can filter those out with any sufficiently fine-grained filter. This is the most common form of radioactive water pollution.
Following that you have Tritium Oxide (HTO), which is a water-like substance made with H-3 isotopes (T). It's basically impossible to separate HTO from H20. It reacts no differently than plain old H or H-2(D), it just happens to have a few extra neutrons, and be a beta emmitter.
The tendency to emit radiation is completely irrelevant in terms of chemical reactions (unless you're using it as a catalyst); if your radioactive isotope is slutty with its electrons, then you can maybe dump something reactive into the solution for it to bind itself to, but in this case that's not going to happen...If it was easy to break H2 (or HT in this case) off of O, we'd all be driving Hydrogen cars.
So in short, either you can filter it out, or there is crap that you can do about it, because emmitting radiation isn't a property that can be used to bind anything...That's like saying you've found a mineral that will bind to a lightbulb.
Chat log of remote surgery:
Surgeon(India): "We are beginning lateral incision now"
Nurse(Atlanta): "Oops, looks like you nicked the bracheal artery, would you like me to clamp?"
Surgeon(India): "..."
Nurse(Atlanta): "Doctor we should really cla...Oh my god! Stop cutting!"
Surgeon(India): "..."
Nurse(Atlanta): "Aaaa! There's blood everywhere!"
Surgeon(India): "Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag."
Remote surgery is well and good, but you do surgery from the other side of the planet and you're chancing SERIOUS problems.
Because as I recall, Beowulf killed Grendel's mother. During the whole story of Beowulf, he is never defeated, though he does die of his wounds after defeating the dragon.
WoW is popular because it is (so far) the best of the traditional sword and sorcery MMOs (insert various disagreements from various fans of various other MMOs). Eve is a totally different animal, and it is stable and popular in its niche.
The grind is easy as long as there is progression. You get that sense of satisfaction, that drug high, or whatever you want to call it.
The problem is when you hit a point where there isn't anything else you can do that's not going to require near-infinite grinding for tiny incremental rewards. That's basically a description of WoW's end game. In BC they released a bunch of 5 and 10 man content as a bid to make it more small group friendly. IMHO this was amazingly stupid, and I'll tell you why.
Pre-BC if you were in a decent guild that raided 40 man content, you could get into a raid, even if your gear wasn't super elite. There was no need to interminably run 5 and 10 man content until your gear was as good as it gets for that level, because with a larger group, you could afford more slack. This meant less drag in the end game, because you could skip over content that had loot that you were going to quickly replace.
Fast forward to BC. They added tons and tons of 5 man content, and, having done this, they then geared the 10+ man content toward people who had completely exhausted the 5 man content, and in order to exhaust the 5 man content you had to run it to DEATH; running the lesser 5 man stuff until you got enough faction to run the heroic 5 man stuff, until you got the gear to run the 10 man stuff. Not that much different from pre-BC, except that now, there is no room for slack in the raid content, so everyone runs eternal 5 mans.
Gone are the days when you could be a raid guild that had a mix of members...Now it's all hardcore, all the time, because the time commitment is absolutely obscene in order to get anywhere. Skill? Who cares about skill? Just play and play and play.
At that point, there ceases to be anything for me in the game. I refuse to spend time for no better reason than just spending time, getting gear whose only point is to be replaced.
Every time someone says, "Well, WoW sucks, and Eve rules" I tune out the rest of it. It's like comparing pocky to tuna fish...They're the same class of thing ("Things you eat") but anyone making the comparison isn't saying anything meaningful because they're so wildly different.
Don't do it in SQL. That would be silly. Do it in your programming logic.
I'd be interested if you would have another way to do it in the database. Myself, I'd create an entirely new employee record for bob, and have a single field referencing his previous employee entry. There would be no reason to carry over all the previous bob data if bob was re-hired for some vastly different position...It's no longer an apples to apples comparison, because as you cogently pointed out, the data are wildly disparate.
And there is obviously no way of preventing someone with access from inserting any row they like...Same with any other database. That's what the audit information is for. With any other method, you're going to have a much much narrower audit history. If you create a new entry for every salary change, rather than updating an old entry, then you have an extremely detailed history of every change, and every user who made that change. If you were trying to catch fraud, that would be an invaluable tool. It would also be very easy to use pure SQL to catch records that changed too often, or records that changed by too large an amount.
There is still file access overhead because it's two dimensional...The index may store the offsets, but you're going to have to parse them to get to that field before you can start returning elements. A column style database is effectively one dimensional...The only records in the file belong to the field you're looking for.
More significantly, it's one data type per file, so you can use the most effective compression for that particular data type, rather than having to use a type that suits a non-homogenous row database.
One of the most common things I see in a database is people trying to store data in such a way that they never have to put multiple joins in their queries. For example, a single record with all of Bob's information that has to be updated every time something about Bob changes, and then maybe copied, whole cloth, to a "history" table so they they can query that history table directly if they need Bob's record for the year 2005.
Just a mess, and incredibly inefficient.
Well, kinda, but you're still storing the original table, so while the index speeds stuff up, you're still left with the original bloated table hanging around backstage.
Column-style databases offer some of the advantages of an index, but without the storage-inefficient back end.
Not sure how that follows...The column style database would be functionally identical to the row style database, only you'd have column proliferation instead of row expansion.
The easiest way to deal with proliferating events is to create a very simple table that has a timestamp, your basic audit information (user who made the change, change the terminal was made from, etc), and the change itself.
So say Bob makes 50,000 dollars. This entry was put in the table when he was hired and contains bob's employee record id, bob's salary, the date, and the audit crap. That's it. Then when bob gets a raise to 55,000 there is another simple entry, id, salary, date, audit crap. Etc, etc. All your data is there, you can easily retrieve the history, you know when the changes were made and by whom.
It's all about normalization. Why put in two date fields if you don't have to? Two records, each with one date, will give you all the info you need, simplify your queries, whiten your teeth, etc. Whenever you have an event driven model, just throw the event, in the simplest possible form, in a table. If your tables start proliferating out of control, check your normalization and make sure you're not duplicating data across multiple tables. If that's not the problem, try to refine the scope of your database. If it's doing too many things, then try to break things out by their relevance.
Column stores are great (better than a row store) if you're just reading tons of data, but they're much more costly than a row store if you're writing tons of data.
Therefore, pick your method depending on your needs. Are you storing massive amounts of data? Column stores are probably not for you...Your application will run better on a row store, because writing to a row store is a simple matter of adding one more record to the file, whereas writing to a column store is often a matter of writing a record to many files...Obviously more costly.
On the other hand, are you dealing with a relatively static dataset, where you have far more reads than writes? Then a row store isn't the best bet, and you should try a column store. A query on a row store has to query entire rows, which means you'll often end up hitting fields you don't give a damn about while looking for the specific fields you want to return. With column stores, you can ignore any columns that aren't referenced in your query...Additionally, your data is homogenous in a column store, so you lose overhead attached to having to deal with different datatypes and can choose the best data compression by field rather than by data block.
Why do people insist that one size really does fit all?
But if you don't challenge the connection, people will assume it's true, because you're not denying it with a denial they wouldn't believe anyway.
Sigh. People are dumb, and the worst part of it is, it's hardwired.
When you're born you start developing conceptual frameworks. It's all trial and error stuff. It's how you learn to balance, talk, everything. You learn to put discrete objects into categorical groups...The ability to make a forest from trees, for an example, rather than being stuck narrowly trying to understand every tree without being able to abstract the group to a whole (like computers are just barely moving beyond).
We build up these categories for everything. Everything. And that's where it all goes to hell. Stereotypes, prejudice, and crap like this were your brain just dumps the information in a bin without accurately processing it, because it appealed to some subconscious framework that you originally developed when you were 8.
Screw Lindy...When denied a permit for a transatlantic flight because your hand-built airplane (cost 900 dollars) is deemed unflyable, make the flight anyway, and then claim you got "lost."
The guy made the flight with a couple of candy bars and a bottle of water, and a fuel leak inside the cockpit which he knew about before he left, but didn't fix because he didn't want to miss his flight window.
It's that fine line between bravery and stupidity; he lived, so he was brave.
Oh please. Journalists may not usually be scientists, but they're not retarded either. Tell 'em it runs on fairy farts and they're going to go ask someone else, and that someone else may know damn well what it runs on...There are a lot of scientists out there who won't think Orion-esque rockets to be such a good idea.
Then you get to find out what a media gangbang is all about, because the percentage that actually bought the fairy fart line is going to crucify you for making them look stupid, and it'll snowball as the joe-sixpacks of the world figure out you were going to launch nukes into orbit.
Well I don't think "adopt" is an appropriate term...If I was a sperm donor, no one would be "adopting" my sperm...It's a donation, like a blood, kidney, or bone marrow donation.
That being said, I'd have no problem donating an embryo. The problem is, the number of embryo's created every year far outstrips the demand. My example of 9 extra embryos is reasonable. Some people have even more created, especially if they're trying to select around a hereditary condition or something.
So, for every couple who goes in to have an embryo fertilized and implanted, you'd need (conservatively) a half dozen women who were completely infertile and wanted a donated embryo about whose respective donors she knew nothing about. Yeesh.
So pretty quickly you end up back in the same position...You have an ever-increasing store of frozen embryos that no one wants to implant, and that are forbidden from being used in potentially life-saving research.
So they get thrown away, like garbage.
I'm a blood donor. If someone wanted it, I'd donate stem cells, bone marrow, or even some sperm cells. I'm an organ donor...If someone has a use for my parts after I die, so be it. I'd far rather they be used than wasted. The same is true of extra embryos; if they had been made, I'd prefer to see them go to some good, rather than end up in the trash.
Nah, I just think you're full of it. Explain to me the world in which sperm and egg combined outside of a hospitable environment would ever grow into anything. Seriously. I honestly want to know how you think that's possible.
The truth of it is, that sperm + egg - womb = nothing. It's a pile of potentially useful genetic material. Stick it in a womb for a few months, then you have a potential human being. If it survives to leave the womb, then you have an actual human being.
This is the only practical way of measuring the process...Anything else brings with it a host of rights violations which you cannot even begin to imagine, and an absolute legal nightmare. Not that I expect you, of course, to care about the way the world actually works...The inflammatory nature of your rhetoric shows your lack of concern for such niceties.
The way copyright works is you offer up a certain number of reproductions and a list of formats to which you are granting the rights for publishing...e.g You sell the first and second printing rights to a company, and they have to come and renegotiate if they want to do a third printing. Now, you can give up all your rights...This is not uncommon, especially these days, but the writer in question specifically states that he maintains the copyright on his work.
Now, either he's mistaken, and there is nothing he can do about it, or he does still own the copyright, and is absolutely entitled to his share of the profits.
So, for example, if I go in with my wife, and they harvest my sperm and her eggs, and fertilize 10 or so eggs (common practice) and we end up only needing one fertilized egg to be implanted and the other 9 stay on a freezer shelf for a few years before they are routinely discarded, does that make the person who discarded them a mass murderer?
By your example, yes. It is often these embryo's which are almost always destroyed, that could be used for stem cell research...It's not all about abortion. Not even close.
There is a lot more to it than simply (sperm + egg) = person. I'd think even a 4 year old would understand that.
I'm sure they think that the inordinate burden of, you know, putting it on a website, justifies charging everyone 50 bucks to read it.
What really begs the question is, where the hell does that money go, if not to the author of the article? I'm no lawyer, but I know enough to know that it is wildly illegal to make money off of someone else's copyrighted works without their permission. Time for a nice lawsuit.