It's 3%. The other poster was guessing it was less than 10%, which is true, and the 0% of federal money is also true--abortion services are funded out of general fundraising, not federal money. Of course, you're right that federal funding keeping the lights on allows spending money on abortion services that would otherwise be used to keep the lights on. The Hyde amendment is a cosmetic solution that involves shifting money from the left pocket to the right pocket. So let's go with 3%.
why not spin off their abortion services to a separate company?
Because then they'd have far less money to provide those services because they'd require a completely separate network of offices and staff and whatnot. They couldn't share PP offices because then you'd make the same argument about how federal dollars are, in fact, funding abortion by allowing abortion services to offload expenses.
Better yet, why not fund a separate organization that performs all the PP services sans the abortions?
Why should we when PP does a pretty good job offering the battery of medical care that's difficult to get otherwise? To prevent abortions from being available?
Also, you completely ignored the fact that Planned Parenthood gets tax payer dollars and then turns around and gives to support political candidates, who then fund PP, who then supports political candidates.... You're OK with that?
Sure I'm okay with it. An organization has to survive in order to carry out its mission, and as is plain, politicians are happy to use PP as a football in their caged deathmatch. It would be negligent not to address the political side of their existence. Perhaps if ACORN had spent a bit more on lobbying, they wouldn't have been so vulnerable to a mendacious hatchet job by a propagandist willing to tell bald-faced lies with edited video.
Is it any surprise that its the Democrats wanting to defend their funding?
No. Democrats believe in the mission that PP pursues. I note from your link that the amounts they donated are trivial both in terms of the candidate's overall campaign money and the overall budget of PP (which is around $1 billion per year).
I mean, seriously: You think that $5,000 buys a Congressman these days?
No, they mean general health services for women like cancer screening, birth control and information on/treatment for STDs. Less than 3% of Planned Parenthood's budget goes to abortion services, which includes counseling sessions about abortion that involve laying out a woman's other choices like adoption. When you attack PP, 97% of your attack is against run-of-the-mill medical care being made available to women who have difficulty getting it otherwise.
There's a basic, qualitative difference between faith and belief in science. Faith is, by definition, unconditional belief. To have your faith tested is to be given a reason to doubt your faith; to pass that test is to retain your faith despite good cause to abandon it. The core of faithful belief is wilful choice to believe, irrespective of the evidence for or against it.
Scientific belief, for both scientists and lay persons, is ideally 100% conditional. It is totally dependent upon the evidence, and if the evidence changes, so should the belief. That lay persons believe scientists when they say "it's quantum mechanics", without understanding but just trusting scientists, that doesn't make it faith because if tomorrow the scientists say "whoops, it's string theory", then people would say "okay, now it's string theory." Crucially, no one would be lauded for scientific thought if they held onto that belief in quantum mechanics despite the scientific world moving on to something else.
That faithful people dabble in proofs of God's existence, and scientists are frequently dogmatic about their pet theories, demonstrates only that humans are fallible, and neither perfectly faithful or perfectly rational.
If I'm paying the hosting company to maintain backups, then that's my backup plan, and it's not unreasonable for a small business to rely on it if IT isn't a major part of their business. If they had 300GBs of storage in use, then they had a serious account that almost certainly included guarantees of regular backups. The ISPs admission that their backup system failed says as much.
Yes, just as you have been taken care of your entire life by other people's money. By growing up in America, you were born into tremendously beneficial circumstances that were built with the blood and sweat and money of those who came before you. You were immunized thanks to public health programs and dollars spent on research into disease. You never worried that the food you were eating was contaminated with mercury. You were paid in dollars guaranteed to have value by the government. You never worried about being press-ganged into slavery or military service. You were born into a first world country paid for by everyone else, and enjoyed an unparalleled standard of living in a secure democracy.
Unless of course you're one of those rare libertarians who were born alone, on a deserted island, and reinvented and rebuilt the civilization that gives you the leisure time and technology to bitch on the Internet about how a self-made man such as yourself is having his money appropriated to help the less fortunate.
And it strikes you as remotely plausible that one of these newfangled "boteu"s could sail right up to the coast of Japan and open fire without, I don't know, attracting some attention and a retaliatory response by, say, the U.S., or the Japanese Navy that's been patrolling the coasts looking for survivors floating on roofs?
The reactors were written off by the second day of the crisis. Even if it hadn't gotten worse from that point, the costs to restart reactors that were slated to be decommissioned within the next months or years were too high. Everything since that has been about winding down the reactor with minimal radiation leakage.
You can blame TEPCO for a lot of bad acts prior to the crisis, but from the minute the crisis hit, they've done about as well as a group of nuclear engineers could do.
Please describe such an incompatibility, because I'm pretty sceptical. I've developed big apps, I've worked the way I describe, and I've never had such a bug cause me trouble.
Reread the part of my answer where I mention a test environment that is identical to the production environment, right down to the hardware. You don't rely upon the developer's thinkpad to be sufficiently close to the production environment to count as a test environment, you have an actual test or staging environment and unit tests that fully exercise the code to expose those differences.
And if you're developing on a Mac, you don't rely on the Apple provided binaries, you compile your own versions that are identical to what's in production.
So what if it's different from the production environment?
No matter what, his dev box will be different from the production environment, unless he's going to stand in front of a rackmount in the server room. For web development, it's sufficient to be running the same versions of the same software. He's not going to load test on his box--that's going to happen in the test environment, which is identical down to the hardware. He's not going to assume that his unit tests that complete 100% on his dev box will complete 100% in production--that's what the test environment is for. And if he does find a rare, kernel level difference between his dev env and the test env, he can debug it in a virtual machine if he's not allowed to in the test environment.
One of the stupidest things he says is "You can't possibly expect software packages to behave similarly across MacOS X and Linux, which is probably your production environment." Of course you can! For 99.99% of cases, the logical execution on both will be identical. If I put PostgreSQL 9.0.1 on my Mac, I sure as hell expect it to behave "similarly" as it would on Linux--and on Windows, for that matter. Where there are kernel level differences, there are likely hardware differences too, so a dev box running the same version of Linux won't be that big an advantage anyway, and any such differences should be caught in a test environment anyway.
One can legitimately prefer Linux to Mac for just about anything, but his arguments for rejecting Mac are moronic.
Stop trying to force society to accept it, and change any law that favors married couples to favor any adults in a committed relationship, be it homosexual, heterosexual, or even non-sexual.
No one wants to legislate how you feel about homosexuality, just like no one wants to legislate your feelings on an ethnicity different from yours. You have every right to be totally racist if you want.
What you can't automatically have is society backing up your feelings with laws. Back when anti-miscegenation laws prevented inter-racial couples from marrying, there was widespread support for them. They were overturned because we recognized that even widespread feelings of discrimination don't justify continuing with a historically well-regarded injustice.
Homosexuals don't really care if you like them or not. They care if you prevent them from doing what, in their terms, everyone else is free to do. Forcing acceptance of gay marriage isn't about you. It's not about getting you to feel like they're not second class citizens. It's about them being allowed to marry each other. It doesn't hurt you to allow them to marry; it only hurts them, and your feelings of disgust don't justify that.
if two heterosexual guys want to share an apartment, shouldn't they have the same rights as a gay couple? Not giving them the same rights would be... sexual discrimination.
No, not in any meaningful sense of the term "sexual discrimination".
But perhaps you mean something like "what if two heterosexual males got married for the tax breaks?" Well, so what? What stops a man and a woman getting married for the tax breaks, even though they're only platonic friends? Does the government insist on a videotape of them consumating the relationship to prove that they're not somehow exploiting the institution for personal gain? No, because honestly, it's not a real problem. It's probably happened somewhere and will happen again, but it simply doesn't matter enough to bother with. Same thing if gay marriage were allowed.
The GP is referring to a recent nationwide study that found support for full gay marriage to be at 53%--a clear majority.
Nature (and God) made us to be one way and one way only
Clearly not, or homosexuality wouldn't exist in the animal kingdom or amongst humans in anything like the numbers we see.
I am totally sick and tired of those that say that moral absolutes are intolerance
They are "intolerance" (in the bad sense of being bigoted, not the good sense of "I'm intolerant of rape") when they're contrary to reality. Homosexuality is widespread amongst humans, and by an overwhelming majority is reported to be essential, not a "choice". People who are gay virtually always say that they're simply that way, not that they decided to be that way--any more than you could decide to be gay. Could you decide not to be heterosexual? I don't mean decide to have gay sex, I mean could you decide to feel romantic attraction to someone of the same sex?
I am not a bigot or a "homophobe".
Yes, you are. The fact that you have strong convictions behind your bigotry makes it no less bigoted.
I pity you. In fifty years we'll look back on you the way we now look back on people who fought to preserve anti-miscegenation laws: at best misguided and trapped in your particular perspective, unable to consider what's blindingly obvious to the rest of us.
We don't want to stifle differing opinions, but we also don't want to waste our time, or the classroom's time, or the legislature's time, on opinions that have no merit within the field in which they're trying to get a hearing. We know that creationism is (scientifically) empty. It's been fought over repeatedly and the creationists lost. The fact that ID "scientists" don't give up implies no obligation on our part to continue humoring them.
There's a reason that the thousands of pages on the web proposing alternative Grand Unifying Theories of physics don't get airtime in reputable science journals: Because they're wrong, and they're obviously wrong, and taking the time to smack down the lunatics out of some misguided sense of a fairness doctrine, would leave no time for doing real science.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't come up with the idea. They said themselves that friendster already existed at the time. Their angle was making it exclusive to Harvard.
It's 3%. The other poster was guessing it was less than 10%, which is true, and the 0% of federal money is also true--abortion services are funded out of general fundraising, not federal money. Of course, you're right that federal funding keeping the lights on allows spending money on abortion services that would otherwise be used to keep the lights on. The Hyde amendment is a cosmetic solution that involves shifting money from the left pocket to the right pocket. So let's go with 3%.
Because then they'd have far less money to provide those services because they'd require a completely separate network of offices and staff and whatnot. They couldn't share PP offices because then you'd make the same argument about how federal dollars are, in fact, funding abortion by allowing abortion services to offload expenses.
Why should we when PP does a pretty good job offering the battery of medical care that's difficult to get otherwise? To prevent abortions from being available?
Sure I'm okay with it. An organization has to survive in order to carry out its mission, and as is plain, politicians are happy to use PP as a football in their caged deathmatch. It would be negligent not to address the political side of their existence. Perhaps if ACORN had spent a bit more on lobbying, they wouldn't have been so vulnerable to a mendacious hatchet job by a propagandist willing to tell bald-faced lies with edited video.
No. Democrats believe in the mission that PP pursues. I note from your link that the amounts they donated are trivial both in terms of the candidate's overall campaign money and the overall budget of PP (which is around $1 billion per year).
I mean, seriously: You think that $5,000 buys a Congressman these days?
No, they mean general health services for women like cancer screening, birth control and information on/treatment for STDs. Less than 3% of Planned Parenthood's budget goes to abortion services, which includes counseling sessions about abortion that involve laying out a woman's other choices like adoption. When you attack PP, 97% of your attack is against run-of-the-mill medical care being made available to women who have difficulty getting it otherwise.
There's a basic, qualitative difference between faith and belief in science. Faith is, by definition, unconditional belief. To have your faith tested is to be given a reason to doubt your faith; to pass that test is to retain your faith despite good cause to abandon it. The core of faithful belief is wilful choice to believe, irrespective of the evidence for or against it.
Scientific belief, for both scientists and lay persons, is ideally 100% conditional. It is totally dependent upon the evidence, and if the evidence changes, so should the belief. That lay persons believe scientists when they say "it's quantum mechanics", without understanding but just trusting scientists, that doesn't make it faith because if tomorrow the scientists say "whoops, it's string theory", then people would say "okay, now it's string theory." Crucially, no one would be lauded for scientific thought if they held onto that belief in quantum mechanics despite the scientific world moving on to something else.
That faithful people dabble in proofs of God's existence, and scientists are frequently dogmatic about their pet theories, demonstrates only that humans are fallible, and neither perfectly faithful or perfectly rational.
An anecdote is not even data, let alone proof. And a hypothetical anecdote is even less.
Every time a Republican candidate talks about small government, do you get a little buzz in your head, like something short circuiting?
My wire-clothes-hanger closet computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than yours. I just need seed funding to commercialize it.
... after retrieving it from the spam folder, no less.
"Goddammit, there's gotta be pics of Anna Kournikova one of these times..."
If I'm paying the hosting company to maintain backups, then that's my backup plan, and it's not unreasonable for a small business to rely on it if IT isn't a major part of their business. If they had 300GBs of storage in use, then they had a serious account that almost certainly included guarantees of regular backups. The ISPs admission that their backup system failed says as much.
Yes, just as you have been taken care of your entire life by other people's money. By growing up in America, you were born into tremendously beneficial circumstances that were built with the blood and sweat and money of those who came before you. You were immunized thanks to public health programs and dollars spent on research into disease. You never worried that the food you were eating was contaminated with mercury. You were paid in dollars guaranteed to have value by the government. You never worried about being press-ganged into slavery or military service. You were born into a first world country paid for by everyone else, and enjoyed an unparalleled standard of living in a secure democracy.
Unless of course you're one of those rare libertarians who were born alone, on a deserted island, and reinvented and rebuilt the civilization that gives you the leisure time and technology to bitch on the Internet about how a self-made man such as yourself is having his money appropriated to help the less fortunate.
[citation needed]
You're reading /. and you need a citation for this?
And it strikes you as remotely plausible that one of these newfangled "boteu"s could sail right up to the coast of Japan and open fire without, I don't know, attracting some attention and a retaliatory response by, say, the U.S., or the Japanese Navy that's been patrolling the coasts looking for survivors floating on roofs?
How could North Korea get light artillery within range of Fukushima? And what could they gain besides a nuclear barrage of Pyongyang?
The reactors were written off by the second day of the crisis. Even if it hadn't gotten worse from that point, the costs to restart reactors that were slated to be decommissioned within the next months or years were too high. Everything since that has been about winding down the reactor with minimal radiation leakage.
You can blame TEPCO for a lot of bad acts prior to the crisis, but from the minute the crisis hit, they've done about as well as a group of nuclear engineers could do.
I'm just curious what the nub of the issue was. A library function returned different results depending on the OS?
Please describe such an incompatibility, because I'm pretty sceptical. I've developed big apps, I've worked the way I describe, and I've never had such a bug cause me trouble.
Reread the part of my answer where I mention a test environment that is identical to the production environment, right down to the hardware. You don't rely upon the developer's thinkpad to be sufficiently close to the production environment to count as a test environment, you have an actual test or staging environment and unit tests that fully exercise the code to expose those differences.
And if you're developing on a Mac, you don't rely on the Apple provided binaries, you compile your own versions that are identical to what's in production.
That's how big apps get developed.
So what if it's different from the production environment?
No matter what, his dev box will be different from the production environment, unless he's going to stand in front of a rackmount in the server room. For web development, it's sufficient to be running the same versions of the same software. He's not going to load test on his box--that's going to happen in the test environment, which is identical down to the hardware. He's not going to assume that his unit tests that complete 100% on his dev box will complete 100% in production--that's what the test environment is for. And if he does find a rare, kernel level difference between his dev env and the test env, he can debug it in a virtual machine if he's not allowed to in the test environment.
One of the stupidest things he says is "You can't possibly expect software packages to behave similarly across MacOS X and Linux, which is probably your production environment." Of course you can! For 99.99% of cases, the logical execution on both will be identical. If I put PostgreSQL 9.0.1 on my Mac, I sure as hell expect it to behave "similarly" as it would on Linux--and on Windows, for that matter. Where there are kernel level differences, there are likely hardware differences too, so a dev box running the same version of Linux won't be that big an advantage anyway, and any such differences should be caught in a test environment anyway.
One can legitimately prefer Linux to Mac for just about anything, but his arguments for rejecting Mac are moronic.
Another web developer with an impressive c.v. that I can safely ignore since he sacrifices thoughtfulness for bile on his blog.
No one wants to legislate how you feel about homosexuality, just like no one wants to legislate your feelings on an ethnicity different from yours. You have every right to be totally racist if you want.
What you can't automatically have is society backing up your feelings with laws. Back when anti-miscegenation laws prevented inter-racial couples from marrying, there was widespread support for them. They were overturned because we recognized that even widespread feelings of discrimination don't justify continuing with a historically well-regarded injustice.
Homosexuals don't really care if you like them or not. They care if you prevent them from doing what, in their terms, everyone else is free to do. Forcing acceptance of gay marriage isn't about you. It's not about getting you to feel like they're not second class citizens. It's about them being allowed to marry each other. It doesn't hurt you to allow them to marry; it only hurts them, and your feelings of disgust don't justify that.
No, not in any meaningful sense of the term "sexual discrimination".
But perhaps you mean something like "what if two heterosexual males got married for the tax breaks?" Well, so what? What stops a man and a woman getting married for the tax breaks, even though they're only platonic friends? Does the government insist on a videotape of them consumating the relationship to prove that they're not somehow exploiting the institution for personal gain? No, because honestly, it's not a real problem. It's probably happened somewhere and will happen again, but it simply doesn't matter enough to bother with. Same thing if gay marriage were allowed.
It's not censorship when a private company does it. You don't have a right to have your app in the app store.
The GP is referring to a recent nationwide study that found support for full gay marriage to be at 53%--a clear majority.
Clearly not, or homosexuality wouldn't exist in the animal kingdom or amongst humans in anything like the numbers we see.
They are "intolerance" (in the bad sense of being bigoted, not the good sense of "I'm intolerant of rape") when they're contrary to reality. Homosexuality is widespread amongst humans, and by an overwhelming majority is reported to be essential, not a "choice". People who are gay virtually always say that they're simply that way, not that they decided to be that way--any more than you could decide to be gay. Could you decide not to be heterosexual? I don't mean decide to have gay sex, I mean could you decide to feel romantic attraction to someone of the same sex?
Yes, you are. The fact that you have strong convictions behind your bigotry makes it no less bigoted.
I pity you. In fifty years we'll look back on you the way we now look back on people who fought to preserve anti-miscegenation laws: at best misguided and trapped in your particular perspective, unable to consider what's blindingly obvious to the rest of us.
*ahem* The correct phrase is "man and Jesus-horses".
You having a right to say something does not imply an obligation on my part to give you office space, or a roomful of students to say it to.
We don't want to stifle differing opinions, but we also don't want to waste our time, or the classroom's time, or the legislature's time, on opinions that have no merit within the field in which they're trying to get a hearing. We know that creationism is (scientifically) empty. It's been fought over repeatedly and the creationists lost. The fact that ID "scientists" don't give up implies no obligation on our part to continue humoring them.
There's a reason that the thousands of pages on the web proposing alternative Grand Unifying Theories of physics don't get airtime in reputable science journals: Because they're wrong, and they're obviously wrong, and taking the time to smack down the lunatics out of some misguided sense of a fairness doctrine, would leave no time for doing real science.