The 2008 Republican Platform calls for a ban on all embryonic stem-cell research, public or private.
Now, to the extent that John McCain is against that position, well, he's running for president. Politicians running for office say lots of things, and sometimes they do those things. But as it stands now, the official Republican platform includes a total ban on any and all embryonic stem-cell research.
I'm going to assume that you misunderstood my point, since you seem to be arguing in good faith. The embryos in question are leftovers from in vitro fertilization. There's no brain stem, no heart, no pain receptors, merely identifiable cell division--that's the whole point of stem cells. They come from blastocysts with approximately 50-150 cells total. Because they haven't turned into any recognizable human cell, they're useful as blank slate cells.
That's what makes the right's opposition to stem cell research understandable from a perspective of pure principle, but absurd in practical terms. There's no possibility at all of causing any sensation in the embryos in question, since they're composed entirely of stem cells. Any embryo developed to the point where it was remotely possible to sense something is far past the point of being useful for stem cell research.
The intention here is take blastocysts that are human only insofar as they could theoretically become humans, that would be thrown away as waste, and use them for research to benefit humanity. Let me repeat: There is zero possibility of causing any sense of harm, pain, or indignity to the embryo at this stage. And the RNC wants to ban that.
the humane thing is to kill them as soon as possible.
I don't get people like you. "Humane" is a meaningless term when we're talking about an embryo, with no capacity to feel or be aware of its fate. It's like talking about being humane to a piece of fruit. I understand, and in a limited sense agree with the principled stand that an embryo is a human being for all moral purposes regarding life and death, but it makes zero sense to care, in a pragmatic way, about whether an embryo dies because the test tube is flushed or it becomes a stem cell line. Killing it quickly or slowly has no relevance at all to the embryo, given that it will not develop into a person.
The national GOP just approved a plank in their platform that bans all embryonic stem cell research, publicly funded or privately funded. A private lab using discarded implantation embryos would be illegal if McCain and the Congressional GOP pass a law implementing that plank.
The editorial page of the WaPo has been the unofficial spokesman for the Bush administration from the start. WaPo is to the right what the NYT is to the left.
Between less than two years as governor of a low population state (after being mayor of a town of 8,000), and twelve years in the Illinois/U.S. Senates, I'll take the Senator for having experience that matters more in Washington. Obama knows how to actually pass legislation in Congress. Palin will find Washington a bit different than Anchorage.
Hell, you want to compare executive experience? Obama built a campaign machine from scratch that defeated the Clintons and the Democratic Party's establishment over eighteen months. That's an accomplishment in itself that qualifies him.
Now we know that you're not interested in facts or the truth or anything like that.
He's passed the Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation, and the Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill, among others. He was the point man on an ethics reform bill in the Senate that the Washington Post (no friend to Democrats) called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." I won't bore you with the exhaustive list, but will note that he's been in the U.S. Senate since he was sworn in on January 2005--that's three years, not five months. Here's the list of U.S. Senate legislation he's sponsored. 143 days is a reality-challenged freeper talking point with no basis in reality.
even though he hasn't done anything but blow smoke up everyone's ass
How are you keeping an open mind when you haven't even bothered to check his legislative record? He's gotten major bills passed with his name on them in the U.S. Senate (e.g., the Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill). It's not the longest record in Washington but it's not the shortest either.
Clinton supporters didn't rally to her because she has ovaries, they rallied to her because they believe she's a great candidate with ovaries. If you ask a Clinton supporter why they think she should be president, they'll say she's smart, hard-working, knowledgeable, etc. The historic first of a female president definitely matters to them, but they'd be insulted if you suggested that was the only reason they were supporting her.
Against that, Palin is poor bait for PUMAs who still don't like Obama. Offering a governor of less than two years experience of a state with a smaller population than Austin, TX as an alternative to Hillary is checking the 'has ovaries' box while missing the 'great candidate' part. I would think that most Clinton supporters would be insulted by the comparison.
I hear crickets from the Dems with respect to Rep William Jefferson (of New Orleans) and the $100K found in his freezer, etc...
When the story broke, he was stripped of all committee assignments and asked to resign, which he refused to do. What more do you want, Nancy Pelosi to spike him in the eye with a high heel?
McCain very effectively put the experience issue to rest by picking Palin, which makes you wonder what the last month of crap from him and his surrogates was about. Obama as celebrity? Palin has actually won beauty contests. Obama passes legislation with his name on it in the U.S. Senate; Palin governs a state with less population than Austin, TX. Palin is also a creationist, arguing for equal time in science class.
Magoo very effectively hijacked the media cycle with this choice, but one wonders why he didn't choose from a legion of much more qualified, experienced, effective female Republicans.
The people who make MMRPGs want everyone who even tries the game to become addicted. Is that a true statement or not?
Yes, it's a true statement, but you leave out an important qualification, namely that the addiction they're trying to trigger is almost always short-term, measurable in months. In other words, the addiction is no more dangerous than the 40-60 hours you might spend playing Tom Clancy's latest FPS.
We've been trained by the hysteria of the war on drugs to regard addiction like it's quicksand: something from which you almost never escape. In point of fact, even drug addiction follows a somewhat predictable cycle that has a statistically clear endpoint (sometimes death, but more often than is acknowledged by the media or law enforcement, sometimes simply quitting).
Talk of addictive MMOs reminds me of the cult scare of the 80s: lots of huffing and puffing about addiction mechanisms that trap people, but little recognition that such addictions are almost always short-term. WoW's average player lifespan is around three months; similarly, cults like Hare Krishnas and Scientologists have average memberships lasting a couple years at most. Some last much longer, of course, but most drop it after a short period once the basic addiction mechanism starts failing--witness the number of ex-WoW players talking about how the grind is boring.
With improved power efficiency in chips lowering the heat generated, and better fans and case designs, we're already at the ideal place of a serious desktop computer being silent and cool-running.
Recently I've built two computers following Ars Technica's guide for the Hot Rod. There's no noise at all in a quiet room, and when I periodically check on the temperature, it's lower than older computers--typically 30-35 degrees on the CPU, when older computers are in the 40-50 range. That's with four fans, three of which are stock: the stock 120mm case fan (Antec Solo), a special heat sink for the CPU with a 120mm fan, the PSU's 120mm fan, and whatever is on the graphics card.
There are optimizations available at runtime that can be done with JITted code on the fly, at a cost of memory spent on runtime analysis.
In a sense, natively compiled C code isn't as fast as it could be since it will always be compiled to a more generic architecture than it actually runs on. It can't take advantage of (or avoid) the particular circumstances of the when and where of the code as it's actually run.
What your quick analysis (and the witness's comment) miss is that the lens in question was a 14mm prime, a super-wide-angle lens. It's about two inches long and wide--meaning it looks like the furthest thing from a zoom lens, or a long lens meant for getting close up shots.
An intelligent guard would have 1) known this, or 2) looked at the photographs on the camera, and seen that these were wide-angle crowd shots, not cleavage-stalking nn pr0n. Had an intelligent guard handled the situation, a publicity seeking ZOMGOppression! dick like Thomas Hart wouldn't have had an excuse for another round of "the man is keeping me down!"
1. Hart was using a 14mm prime lens, an ultra-wide lens incapable of zooming in on anything. In order to photograph a woman's cleavage, the camera would have to be right in front of her chin, looking down (and then, the 14mm lens would still make her décolletage look like a hilly landscape).
2. The museum that tossed Hart out had one month previously rescinded their policy on disallowing cameras in the gallery. Hart spoke to a member of the museum staff by phone prior to his visit to verify that it wouldn't cause any trouble for him to photograph wide-angle crowd shots.
So, in this case, the guard (actually, director of guest services backed up by two guards) was pretty much completely in the wrong, both technically with regards to what Hart was doing and was capable of doing, and administratively, insofar as Hart was well within the museum's policies.
Comparing it to Othello is like comparing chess to checkers. There's a resemblance, but Go has far more complex gameplay, mainly because the maneuvering to surround an enemy formation is far more complex. In fact, it's somewhat rare to see large captures in competently played games. Like chess, a well played game tends to sit somewhere around a stalemate, with some small advantage proving decisive at the end.
Let's see if I can give an example. I place a stone. You place a stone next to mine. I place a stone next to mine, increasing the size of my formation and the number of intersections you have to occupy to surround me. As you place stones along the line I create, trying to surround me, I manage to enclose a single, empty intersection with my stones on its four neighbour intersections. Now you can't place a stone in that clear intersection because it's immediately captured, unless doing so captures my entire formation (i.e., is the last stone in your formation surrounding mine). That's called an eye. If I manage to create two eyes in my formation, it's uncapturable because you can never place a stone in an eye that immediately captures my formation. Creating formations with two eyes is a central longer term strategy in Go.
Now, of course, while you're trying to surround me, I'm trying to surround you, so we're not just laying stones in a line like Tron's light cycles in a race to the wall. Where Chess has well defined openings, Go has well defined 'battles', where you and I place stones in a small area trying to win that section. That's the back and forth of Go. It resembles Othello insofar as one tries to create stable, un(capture|flip)able groups, but the depth of strategy makes the comparison superficial at best.
The history of computer chess is the history of building brute force engines and then refining them by identifying where processing power is successful at winning. Brute force allows you to look at a lot of moves, but how the programs scores the outcomes of those moves as desirable is a different matter that has nothing to do with processing power (e.g., scoring for area of control).
What humans seem to do well is radically pruning the search tree to the small number of viable lines of play, and spending our limited processing power analyzing those in depth. Once you've got a computer searching a large search space in depth, you can work on pruning it by teaching it to recognize useless lines.
In standard form, it's played on a 19x19 board. There are two players, black and white, who each have a large number of stones--small round markers in their color. They take turns placing stones on the intersections of the lines, anywhere on the board. If one player's stones surround another player's stones, the surrounded stones are 'captured' and removed (the basic case of this is that, for a black stone on an intersection, it's surrounded if there are white stones on the immediate neighbour intersections in each cardinal direction--larger groups are surrounded in the same way). At the end, there are no more intersections where a player can place a live stone (i.e., one that is not immediately subject to capture for being surrounded), and the players count the number of live stones of their color on the board; whoever has more live stones, wins.
Handicaps, as mentioned above, are a number of stones already placed on the board at the beginning of the game.
Strategy involves building up formations of stones that cannot be captured. The complexity of it comes from the fact that there are so many different places to put a stone, in so many different sequences--the search space is phenomenally large. Like chess, there are accepted opening strategies and miniature battles that are frequently seen, but overall a game of go is much more varied and fluid.
I don't understand why data like this was on a laptop in the first place. Encrypted or not, it seems problematic to have copies of databases floating around, flying with executives, packaged up neatly in a form that makes it easy to steal (i.e., a freakin' laptop).
What am I missing that I don't get why this database was allowed off the core server that hosts it? Simply from a data integrity standpoint it seems like a bad idea to let multiple copies move around.
Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally. What came out during the earlier revelations was the company handed over email that they decrypted on their servers, but couldn't do so for the applet based encryption. They said up front that the applet was far more secure.
Usually credentials are a sign of some expertise, but that wasn't my point. I was observing that Wikipedia suffers from a lack of expertise because the only requirement for editing an article is the willingness to edit it, not some demonstrable expertise in the subject matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my source. It says, in part:
Now, to the extent that John McCain is against that position, well, he's running for president. Politicians running for office say lots of things, and sometimes they do those things. But as it stands now, the official Republican platform includes a total ban on any and all embryonic stem-cell research.
I'm going to assume that you misunderstood my point, since you seem to be arguing in good faith. The embryos in question are leftovers from in vitro fertilization. There's no brain stem, no heart, no pain receptors, merely identifiable cell division--that's the whole point of stem cells. They come from blastocysts with approximately 50-150 cells total. Because they haven't turned into any recognizable human cell, they're useful as blank slate cells.
That's what makes the right's opposition to stem cell research understandable from a perspective of pure principle, but absurd in practical terms. There's no possibility at all of causing any sensation in the embryos in question, since they're composed entirely of stem cells. Any embryo developed to the point where it was remotely possible to sense something is far past the point of being useful for stem cell research.
The intention here is take blastocysts that are human only insofar as they could theoretically become humans, that would be thrown away as waste, and use them for research to benefit humanity. Let me repeat: There is zero possibility of causing any sense of harm, pain, or indignity to the embryo at this stage. And the RNC wants to ban that.
the humane thing is to kill them as soon as possible.
I don't get people like you. "Humane" is a meaningless term when we're talking about an embryo, with no capacity to feel or be aware of its fate. It's like talking about being humane to a piece of fruit. I understand, and in a limited sense agree with the principled stand that an embryo is a human being for all moral purposes regarding life and death, but it makes zero sense to care, in a pragmatic way, about whether an embryo dies because the test tube is flushed or it becomes a stem cell line. Killing it quickly or slowly has no relevance at all to the embryo, given that it will not develop into a person.
The national GOP just approved a plank in their platform that bans all embryonic stem cell research, publicly funded or privately funded. A private lab using discarded implantation embryos would be illegal if McCain and the Congressional GOP pass a law implementing that plank.
The editorial page of the WaPo has been the unofficial spokesman for the Bush administration from the start. WaPo is to the right what the NYT is to the left.
Between less than two years as governor of a low population state (after being mayor of a town of 8,000), and twelve years in the Illinois/U.S. Senates, I'll take the Senator for having experience that matters more in Washington. Obama knows how to actually pass legislation in Congress. Palin will find Washington a bit different than Anchorage.
Hell, you want to compare executive experience? Obama built a campaign machine from scratch that defeated the Clintons and the Democratic Party's establishment over eighteen months. That's an accomplishment in itself that qualifies him.
Now we know that you're not interested in facts or the truth or anything like that.
He's passed the Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation, and the Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill, among others. He was the point man on an ethics reform bill in the Senate that the Washington Post (no friend to Democrats) called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." I won't bore you with the exhaustive list, but will note that he's been in the U.S. Senate since he was sworn in on January 2005--that's three years, not five months. Here's the list of U.S. Senate legislation he's sponsored. 143 days is a reality-challenged freeper talking point with no basis in reality.
How are you keeping an open mind when you haven't even bothered to check his legislative record? He's gotten major bills passed with his name on them in the U.S. Senate (e.g., the Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill). It's not the longest record in Washington but it's not the shortest either.
Clinton supporters didn't rally to her because she has ovaries, they rallied to her because they believe she's a great candidate with ovaries. If you ask a Clinton supporter why they think she should be president, they'll say she's smart, hard-working, knowledgeable, etc. The historic first of a female president definitely matters to them, but they'd be insulted if you suggested that was the only reason they were supporting her.
Against that, Palin is poor bait for PUMAs who still don't like Obama. Offering a governor of less than two years experience of a state with a smaller population than Austin, TX as an alternative to Hillary is checking the 'has ovaries' box while missing the 'great candidate' part. I would think that most Clinton supporters would be insulted by the comparison.
When the story broke, he was stripped of all committee assignments and asked to resign, which he refused to do. What more do you want, Nancy Pelosi to spike him in the eye with a high heel?
McCain very effectively put the experience issue to rest by picking Palin, which makes you wonder what the last month of crap from him and his surrogates was about. Obama as celebrity? Palin has actually won beauty contests. Obama passes legislation with his name on it in the U.S. Senate; Palin governs a state with less population than Austin, TX. Palin is also a creationist, arguing for equal time in science class.
Magoo very effectively hijacked the media cycle with this choice, but one wonders why he didn't choose from a legion of much more qualified, experienced, effective female Republicans.
Yes, it's a true statement, but you leave out an important qualification, namely that the addiction they're trying to trigger is almost always short-term, measurable in months. In other words, the addiction is no more dangerous than the 40-60 hours you might spend playing Tom Clancy's latest FPS.
We've been trained by the hysteria of the war on drugs to regard addiction like it's quicksand: something from which you almost never escape. In point of fact, even drug addiction follows a somewhat predictable cycle that has a statistically clear endpoint (sometimes death, but more often than is acknowledged by the media or law enforcement, sometimes simply quitting).
Talk of addictive MMOs reminds me of the cult scare of the 80s: lots of huffing and puffing about addiction mechanisms that trap people, but little recognition that such addictions are almost always short-term. WoW's average player lifespan is around three months; similarly, cults like Hare Krishnas and Scientologists have average memberships lasting a couple years at most. Some last much longer, of course, but most drop it after a short period once the basic addiction mechanism starts failing--witness the number of ex-WoW players talking about how the grind is boring.
With improved power efficiency in chips lowering the heat generated, and better fans and case designs, we're already at the ideal place of a serious desktop computer being silent and cool-running.
Recently I've built two computers following Ars Technica's guide for the Hot Rod. There's no noise at all in a quiet room, and when I periodically check on the temperature, it's lower than older computers--typically 30-35 degrees on the CPU, when older computers are in the 40-50 range. That's with four fans, three of which are stock: the stock 120mm case fan (Antec Solo), a special heat sink for the CPU with a 120mm fan, the PSU's 120mm fan, and whatever is on the graphics card.
There are optimizations available at runtime that can be done with JITted code on the fly, at a cost of memory spent on runtime analysis.
In a sense, natively compiled C code isn't as fast as it could be since it will always be compiled to a more generic architecture than it actually runs on. It can't take advantage of (or avoid) the particular circumstances of the when and where of the code as it's actually run.
What your quick analysis (and the witness's comment) miss is that the lens in question was a 14mm prime, a super-wide-angle lens. It's about two inches long and wide--meaning it looks like the furthest thing from a zoom lens, or a long lens meant for getting close up shots.
An intelligent guard would have 1) known this, or 2) looked at the photographs on the camera, and seen that these were wide-angle crowd shots, not cleavage-stalking nn pr0n. Had an intelligent guard handled the situation, a publicity seeking ZOMGOppression! dick like Thomas Hart wouldn't have had an excuse for another round of "the man is keeping me down!"
SFMOMA rescinded that policy a month earlier, something Hart confirmed personally prior to his visit.
Two problems with your analysis:
1. Hart was using a 14mm prime lens, an ultra-wide lens incapable of zooming in on anything. In order to photograph a woman's cleavage, the camera would have to be right in front of her chin, looking down (and then, the 14mm lens would still make her décolletage look like a hilly landscape).
2. The museum that tossed Hart out had one month previously rescinded their policy on disallowing cameras in the gallery. Hart spoke to a member of the museum staff by phone prior to his visit to verify that it wouldn't cause any trouble for him to photograph wide-angle crowd shots.
So, in this case, the guard (actually, director of guest services backed up by two guards) was pretty much completely in the wrong, both technically with regards to what Hart was doing and was capable of doing, and administratively, insofar as Hart was well within the museum's policies.
Comparing it to Othello is like comparing chess to checkers. There's a resemblance, but Go has far more complex gameplay, mainly because the maneuvering to surround an enemy formation is far more complex. In fact, it's somewhat rare to see large captures in competently played games. Like chess, a well played game tends to sit somewhere around a stalemate, with some small advantage proving decisive at the end.
Let's see if I can give an example. I place a stone. You place a stone next to mine. I place a stone next to mine, increasing the size of my formation and the number of intersections you have to occupy to surround me. As you place stones along the line I create, trying to surround me, I manage to enclose a single, empty intersection with my stones on its four neighbour intersections. Now you can't place a stone in that clear intersection because it's immediately captured, unless doing so captures my entire formation (i.e., is the last stone in your formation surrounding mine). That's called an eye. If I manage to create two eyes in my formation, it's uncapturable because you can never place a stone in an eye that immediately captures my formation. Creating formations with two eyes is a central longer term strategy in Go.
Now, of course, while you're trying to surround me, I'm trying to surround you, so we're not just laying stones in a line like Tron's light cycles in a race to the wall. Where Chess has well defined openings, Go has well defined 'battles', where you and I place stones in a small area trying to win that section. That's the back and forth of Go. It resembles Othello insofar as one tries to create stable, un(capture|flip)able groups, but the depth of strategy makes the comparison superficial at best.
The history of computer chess is the history of building brute force engines and then refining them by identifying where processing power is successful at winning. Brute force allows you to look at a lot of moves, but how the programs scores the outcomes of those moves as desirable is a different matter that has nothing to do with processing power (e.g., scoring for area of control).
What humans seem to do well is radically pruning the search tree to the small number of viable lines of play, and spending our limited processing power analyzing those in depth. Once you've got a computer searching a large search space in depth, you can work on pruning it by teaching it to recognize useless lines.
It's very simple, and very interesting.
In standard form, it's played on a 19x19 board. There are two players, black and white, who each have a large number of stones--small round markers in their color. They take turns placing stones on the intersections of the lines, anywhere on the board. If one player's stones surround another player's stones, the surrounded stones are 'captured' and removed (the basic case of this is that, for a black stone on an intersection, it's surrounded if there are white stones on the immediate neighbour intersections in each cardinal direction--larger groups are surrounded in the same way). At the end, there are no more intersections where a player can place a live stone (i.e., one that is not immediately subject to capture for being surrounded), and the players count the number of live stones of their color on the board; whoever has more live stones, wins.
Handicaps, as mentioned above, are a number of stones already placed on the board at the beginning of the game.
Strategy involves building up formations of stones that cannot be captured. The complexity of it comes from the fact that there are so many different places to put a stone, in so many different sequences--the search space is phenomenally large. Like chess, there are accepted opening strategies and miniature battles that are frequently seen, but overall a game of go is much more varied and fluid.
I don't understand why data like this was on a laptop in the first place. Encrypted or not, it seems problematic to have copies of databases floating around, flying with executives, packaged up neatly in a form that makes it easy to steal (i.e., a freakin' laptop).
What am I missing that I don't get why this database was allowed off the core server that hosts it? Simply from a data integrity standpoint it seems like a bad idea to let multiple copies move around.
Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally. What came out during the earlier revelations was the company handed over email that they decrypted on their servers, but couldn't do so for the applet based encryption. They said up front that the applet was far more secure.
How could this possibly have been marked 'troll'?
Usually credentials are a sign of some expertise, but that wasn't my point. I was observing that Wikipedia suffers from a lack of expertise because the only requirement for editing an article is the willingness to edit it, not some demonstrable expertise in the subject matter.