While abstinence certainly drop the chance of accidental pregnancy to near zero, it also drops you chances to scoring to absolute zero. For most sane humans, this side effect can include damage to normal social life. People who have tried abstinence as a form of birth control have reported depression, compulsive masturbation, a dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others, no significant others, and feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin.
There's this institution that solves all of the above, called Sacramental Marriage. You should check it out sometime.
I have found the best form of birth control is a combinatorial treatment that does NOT include abstinence. Liberal condom usage and/or birth control pills with abortions as a final backup has proven to be extremely effective to the point of rivaling abstinence. As an added bonus, these methods of birth control have been shown to have dramatically less side effects and result in far more play.
Only if you're lucky enough to avoid the 00 on the roulette wheel of life. Unlike Abstinence, none of your methods exceed 99% effective rate- even when used in combination. And their side effects are much worse than you've been told- hormonal birth control and abortions have been shown to cause death at about 3 times the rate of pregnancy, and the condoms available at Planned Parenthood and free on college campuses were shown by Consumer Reports to have a dismal 65% failure rate.
But then again, that's a matter of good sex ed, isn't it- as opposed to the crappy sex ed available in most public schools.
There are a variety of choices of birth control out there. Like any treatment plan where you have many options, I suggest giving them all a shot and deciding which one fits you the best. For catholic priests, the abstinence option has proven to be effective and provide minimal interference. For those of us who don't want kids yet don't feel like being 40 year old virgins, some of the other anti-pregnancy options might work better.
Marriage and actually having a kid being the most effective- as my original message pointed out:-)
I could've sworn they were fighting for the right to choose, not a systematic requirement that all pregnant women must abort.
Read the writings of Margaret Sanger, the creater of Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice movement, sometime. The whole idea was to encourage poor people to stop reproducing- eugenics.
Well, we are not colonizing distant lands with convicts any more, are we?
Personally, I know of a few NEAR lands that need colonizing- BLM lands in Nevada that could be used for this purpose- and it ties in to the Catholic Seamless Garment of Life movement in that research on embryos, abortion, and capital punishment are all equal sins under that argument (at least, if your society has the technology to prevent escapes from the super-jail-interal-exile thingy).
So you guys are stepping up and adopting all the unwanted babies? And you're working to reduce the social/societal consequences on young unwed mothers who carry children to term?
There are lots of us who are. However, I'd point out:
I'm pro-choice, but I do think there is a negative moral angle on abortion. I don't think any truly advanced society should have a place for abortion; education, contraception, and societal support for young mothers should completely remove the need for any such thing.
There are two situations where abortion would still be neccessary, in any caring society: Physical health of the mother (abortion, for instance, remains the *only* treatment available for ectopic pregnancy), and mental health of the mother (where, due to incest, rape, or mental retardation the mother is simply unable to do what it takes to carry a child to term). Maybe someday prenatal adoption will replaces even these two situations- but not yet, we're simply not that advanced medically.
But you know what? The same right wing that preaches so hard against abortion, also preaches against practical sex ed, available contraception for minors, and social services for unwed mothers...not to mention the moral stigma they attach to young unwed mothers.
Why would you need contraception if you had good sex ed and UDHR Article 26 rights for women and children? That's the sticking point for me. After all, the best birth control I know of is Abstinence- this from the father of a three year old that we made the mistake of not introducing to the crib before 3 months. We want another one of our own- but may end up adopting merely because sex becomes impossible if the little monkey wakes up and decides riding on your back is a fun idea.
American Right to Life, you're correct. Roman Catholic Seamless Garment of Life, well, that's a different animal.
Ok, so this actually does address the Pope's main concern, and reduces stem cell donation to no different than kidney donation. Thus, as a Roman Catholic, I'm ethically satisfied. But the science half is still dissatisfied: What, exactly, does this get us? As we've been arguing all along, unless by some chance you have an exact DNA, RNA, and Mitochondrial match with a living human being who has a disease, the embryonic stem cell is likely to turn into tissue rejection upon growing & implantation. Where Adult Stem Cells don't have that problem. And now that we've even got brain neuron regeneration from adult brain stem cells in the pipeline, exactly what is this discovery good for again?
The problem with this being that the theory starts with:
Assume the attacker knows a set of plaintext and ciphertext: P and C.
At which point, why bother continuing to work? You already know the Plaintext. Since just about any system I've ever heard of makes use of single-use keys, usually the idea in cryptography is that you have Ciphertext C and need to solve for plaintext P.
RTFA and RTFS yourself: Slashvertisement above says: Even better, it can be expanded through its mini-SD slot, and comes with an FM tuner., which is what I was complaining about. I'm sure someone will edit it, or maybe already has from your post (I'm behind a cacheing proxy), but TFA you're correct on, it says micro.
My point was more about going towards a media standard. But you're right- that's what SD (and other flash format) cards offer over USB- the ability to hide them inside a device, near seamlessly.
Which gives me the perfect place to point out that $1.3 billion for a relatively small merger means that companies now control sums of money that used to be governmental in nature; and thus, since money is power, have become de facto governments.
This is just to show the libertarians out there that free market does not neccessarily mean LESS government, only different government, for money is the ultimate power structure.
Darn- I was hoping to find an MP3 player that used the same format as my new cell phone. But microSD and miniSD are different card sizes. When will we standardize on a single USB interface memory card type? What's so hard about putting a miniUSB connector in instead of a card slot?
Based on Islamic sects, interpretations of the Koran, and the number of Islamic followers worldwide, approximately 10% of Islamic believers actually do hold to some form of "Convert or Die" theology (I would note also that a somewhat smaller, but close to similar, percentage of Christians also hold to such a theology; but we're talking Islamic terrorists not Christian ones at the moment, and very few Christian sects take the "Kingdom of God" literally where large percentages of Islamic sects look forward to the worldwide "Nation of Islam" as ushering in a golden age of peace and justice based on killing off anybody who doesn't agree). There are somwhere close to a billion "People of the Book" worldwide, and if the organizers of Islamic terrorism were perfect (they aren't), that's 10 million potential suicide bombers available to recruit. If each bomber, in addition to taking out himself takes out at least 12 infidels in the same incident, that's about twice as many as they need to completely convert or kill the entire population of the Planet Earth.
Now having exposed my mathematics- I still agree with you to some extent, for four reasons:
1. The three main sects preaching this consider each other to be infidels, so there's no real overall organization to the terrorism.
2. The grand majority of that 10 million are living in poverty, and will not even be able to afford the C4 to become a suicide bomber without help.
3. Recruitment seems to depend on the United States or Western Europe invading a country, and we're a bit overextended at the moment.
4. The number of terrorists with actual money or power or both is vanishingly small- because it takes an injustice to actually create an Islamic terrorist (can't be fighting for justice, Jihad, unless you've got an injustice to fight against!) and injustices just don't happen to rich people.
These 4 reasons are the ONLY thing preventing terrorism from becoming a big problem; and it wouldn't take very much to change any of them for either the worse or the better.
After several years of using electronic PDA's, for either of those solutions I'd be carrying around a stack of paper about 2 ft tall, by the time I transcribed my 2500 contact entries, e-mail, and ToDo information to 3x5 cards.
For me, the up and comer is the HTC Wizard, which you can't buy independantly, but has been rebranded by several cell phone companies as their own "exclusive" offering. A thumboard that doesn't cause carpal tunnel for my medium-sized hands is a grand start, the auto-switch between portait and landscape mode for keyboard and camera use, and the fact that I use Microsoft Office at work and home were big selling points; but Blackberry, Symbian, and PalmOS all have similar offerings in the converged-unit series, all in the $299-$499 price point range, which is afordable. In addition to that, the 5 fequency/protocol radio (IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, GMS, 802.11g) means that I'm in contact- which is something your paper system simply cannot do.
I don't sync with linux- and I have to agree, my T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard, basically the same thing as your Cingular 8125 with a slightly different ROM image and build of Windows Mobile 5) has, in less than 2 weeks, caused me to stop carrying my IPAQ, and sync calendars with both home and work, which is imensely valueable to me. In addition to that I've got the added bonus of advanced entertainment options (recorded TV shows, MP3s, and video games) on the train, plus massively superior typing ability to any PDA I've had since my first Windows CE 1.0 HPC.
Now having said that, I'd have to say Nokia's Symbian phone, or even a Blackberry, could effectively do the same for our college student in the article. Just be sure to get a model with a good thumboard of some sort that is comfortable for your hands. And by getting a good cellular provider plan, you'll avoid the $500 phone bill that nearly killed my college career as a long distance relationship melted down over the first Gulf War (she was for it, I saw other options).
Why not? IRL, we faced the horrific possibility of 10 million terrorists following a theology not unlike the Ori (Convert or Die) and we failed to do even enough mobilization to take over a country the size of California in 3 years, and another country the size of Oregon in 5 years was taken over, but is slowly returning to their previous government because we've been basically ignoring them.
What makes you think the fictional government would be any smarter? It's not 1941 anymore.
The TARDIS being bigger on the inside actually makes quite a bit of sense- it's hard Sci-Fi and part of the One Big Lie. The OBL in Dr. Who is that a race of TimeLords exist who are experts in multi-dimensional physics. If you're an expert in multidimensional physics, you're going to build your time machine to be small on the outside and big on the inside- because it makes the best use of materials in all dimensions.
At which point, it becomes little more than fantasy- unless it follows the One Big Lie rule (the difference between hard science fiction and soft science fiction: Hard Science fiction is only allowed to tell One Big Lie, and the rest of the story must stick to the realm of physical law as we know it at the time the story was written. Soft Science fiction may have many lies, but must explore some aspect of human interaction even if the entire cast is a bunch of aliens on a different planet- which means getting into socio-political or religious realms- SG1 is so successfull because it did and does both. Fantasy can tell as many lies as it likes and have no basis in reality whatsoever.)
I think that using MS Word is a pretty good way to check vocabulary that may be in the zeitgeist. Even abridged dictionaries are full of words that are virtually unused in our society... and from TFA, it appears their intention was to ensure whatever word they used didn't already have significant meaning in popular culture.
Hmm- now that would be an interesting new feature OpenOffice could put in to pull ahead- an optional internet enabled central custom spelling dictionary for people who are interested in spelling the way everybody else does instead of the "correct" way the dictionary makers force us to spell. Until it reaches that point, all going to a spelling checker for vocabulary will do is find what the programmers thought was important, rather than the users. Anybody should be able to contribute to this custom dictionary, quickly filling it with new words and new spellings of old words. Would be a very interesting experiment for some programmer with an English minor....
Have you missed the significance of the Ori with the fiction the Bush Administration has been telling us? The Ori aren't that different from the Islamic Fundamentalists- except of course their Allah really exists and is willing to share *just* enough power to make sure their followers succeed in their "convert or die" theology.
This makes the humans the United States Christians- following an apparently disinterested God (The Ancients)- fighting for the survival of that God even though that God is apparently not interested in his own survival.
Like any good science fiction, it's mirroring "reality"- if you buy into that whole al Qaida thing to begin with anyway. If you don't- well, let's face it, the Ori are about as interesting as the Islamofascists.....as in, an enemy that we can't even get worked up enough about to curb putting $3/gallon gasoline into our SUV tanks at $100 a fillup.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 1
Ah well, serves them right- their server melted down from the slashdotting.
Slashdot Mirror
While abstinence certainly drop the chance of accidental pregnancy to near zero, it also drops you chances to scoring to absolute zero. For most sane humans, this side effect can include damage to normal social life. People who have tried abstinence as a form of birth control have reported depression, compulsive masturbation, a dramatic increase in dull and/or fanatically religious significant others, no significant others, and feeling like a looser for being a 35 year old virgin.
:-)
There's this institution that solves all of the above, called Sacramental Marriage. You should check it out sometime.
I have found the best form of birth control is a combinatorial treatment that does NOT include abstinence. Liberal condom usage and/or birth control pills with abortions as a final backup has proven to be extremely effective to the point of rivaling abstinence. As an added bonus, these methods of birth control have been shown to have dramatically less side effects and result in far more play.
Only if you're lucky enough to avoid the 00 on the roulette wheel of life. Unlike Abstinence, none of your methods exceed 99% effective rate- even when used in combination. And their side effects are much worse than you've been told- hormonal birth control and abortions have been shown to cause death at about 3 times the rate of pregnancy, and the condoms available at Planned Parenthood and free on college campuses were shown by Consumer Reports to have a dismal 65% failure rate.
But then again, that's a matter of good sex ed, isn't it- as opposed to the crappy sex ed available in most public schools.
There are a variety of choices of birth control out there. Like any treatment plan where you have many options, I suggest giving them all a shot and deciding which one fits you the best. For catholic priests, the abstinence option has proven to be effective and provide minimal interference. For those of us who don't want kids yet don't feel like being 40 year old virgins, some of the other anti-pregnancy options might work better.
Marriage and actually having a kid being the most effective- as my original message pointed out
25% plurality, if you could get all Catholics to vote the same way- which is why the Constitution Party was created.
How is this any different than donating a kidney to save a reltive's life?
I could've sworn they were fighting for the right to choose, not a systematic requirement that all pregnant women must abort.
Read the writings of Margaret Sanger, the creater of Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice movement, sometime. The whole idea was to encourage poor people to stop reproducing- eugenics.
Well, we are not colonizing distant lands with convicts any more, are we?
Personally, I know of a few NEAR lands that need colonizing- BLM lands in Nevada that could be used for this purpose- and it ties in to the Catholic Seamless Garment of Life movement in that research on embryos, abortion, and capital punishment are all equal sins under that argument (at least, if your society has the technology to prevent escapes from the super-jail-interal-exile thingy).
So you guys are stepping up and adopting all the unwanted babies? And you're working to reduce the social/societal consequences on young unwed mothers who carry children to term?
There are lots of us who are. However, I'd point out:
I'm pro-choice, but I do think there is a negative moral angle on abortion. I don't think any truly advanced society should have a place for abortion; education, contraception, and societal support for young mothers should completely remove the need for any such thing.
There are two situations where abortion would still be neccessary, in any caring society: Physical health of the mother (abortion, for instance, remains the *only* treatment available for ectopic pregnancy), and mental health of the mother (where, due to incest, rape, or mental retardation the mother is simply unable to do what it takes to carry a child to term). Maybe someday prenatal adoption will replaces even these two situations- but not yet, we're simply not that advanced medically.
But you know what? The same right wing that preaches so hard against abortion, also preaches against practical sex ed, available contraception for minors, and social services for unwed mothers...not to mention the moral stigma they attach to young unwed mothers.
Why would you need contraception if you had good sex ed and UDHR Article 26 rights for women and children? That's the sticking point for me. After all, the best birth control I know of is Abstinence- this from the father of a three year old that we made the mistake of not introducing to the crib before 3 months. We want another one of our own- but may end up adopting merely because sex becomes impossible if the little monkey wakes up and decides riding on your back is a fun idea.
American Right to Life, you're correct. Roman Catholic Seamless Garment of Life, well, that's a different animal.
Ok, so this actually does address the Pope's main concern, and reduces stem cell donation to no different than kidney donation. Thus, as a Roman Catholic, I'm ethically satisfied. But the science half is still dissatisfied: What, exactly, does this get us? As we've been arguing all along, unless by some chance you have an exact DNA, RNA, and Mitochondrial match with a living human being who has a disease, the embryonic stem cell is likely to turn into tissue rejection upon growing & implantation. Where Adult Stem Cells don't have that problem. And now that we've even got brain neuron regeneration from adult brain stem cells in the pipeline, exactly what is this discovery good for again?
The problem with this being that the theory starts with: Assume the attacker knows a set of plaintext and ciphertext: P and C. At which point, why bother continuing to work? You already know the Plaintext. Since just about any system I've ever heard of makes use of single-use keys, usually the idea in cryptography is that you have Ciphertext C and need to solve for plaintext P.
RTFA and RTFS yourself: Slashvertisement above says: Even better, it can be expanded through its mini-SD slot, and comes with an FM tuner., which is what I was complaining about. I'm sure someone will edit it, or maybe already has from your post (I'm behind a cacheing proxy), but TFA you're correct on, it says micro.
My point was more about going towards a media standard. But you're right- that's what SD (and other flash format) cards offer over USB- the ability to hide them inside a device, near seamlessly.
Which gives me the perfect place to point out that $1.3 billion for a relatively small merger means that companies now control sums of money that used to be governmental in nature; and thus, since money is power, have become de facto governments.
This is just to show the libertarians out there that free market does not neccessarily mean LESS government, only different government, for money is the ultimate power structure.
Darn- I was hoping to find an MP3 player that used the same format as my new cell phone. But microSD and miniSD are different card sizes. When will we standardize on a single USB interface memory card type? What's so hard about putting a miniUSB connector in instead of a card slot?
Based on Islamic sects, interpretations of the Koran, and the number of Islamic followers worldwide, approximately 10% of Islamic believers actually do hold to some form of "Convert or Die" theology (I would note also that a somewhat smaller, but close to similar, percentage of Christians also hold to such a theology; but we're talking Islamic terrorists not Christian ones at the moment, and very few Christian sects take the "Kingdom of God" literally where large percentages of Islamic sects look forward to the worldwide "Nation of Islam" as ushering in a golden age of peace and justice based on killing off anybody who doesn't agree). There are somwhere close to a billion "People of the Book" worldwide, and if the organizers of Islamic terrorism were perfect (they aren't), that's 10 million potential suicide bombers available to recruit. If each bomber, in addition to taking out himself takes out at least 12 infidels in the same incident, that's about twice as many as they need to completely convert or kill the entire population of the Planet Earth.
Now having exposed my mathematics- I still agree with you to some extent, for four reasons:
1. The three main sects preaching this consider each other to be infidels, so there's no real overall organization to the terrorism.
2. The grand majority of that 10 million are living in poverty, and will not even be able to afford the C4 to become a suicide bomber without help.
3. Recruitment seems to depend on the United States or Western Europe invading a country, and we're a bit overextended at the moment.
4. The number of terrorists with actual money or power or both is vanishingly small- because it takes an injustice to actually create an Islamic terrorist (can't be fighting for justice, Jihad, unless you've got an injustice to fight against!) and injustices just don't happen to rich people.
These 4 reasons are the ONLY thing preventing terrorism from becoming a big problem; and it wouldn't take very much to change any of them for either the worse or the better.
After several years of using electronic PDA's, for either of those solutions I'd be carrying around a stack of paper about 2 ft tall, by the time I transcribed my 2500 contact entries, e-mail, and ToDo information to 3x5 cards.
For me, the up and comer is the HTC Wizard, which you can't buy independantly, but has been rebranded by several cell phone companies as their own "exclusive" offering. A thumboard that doesn't cause carpal tunnel for my medium-sized hands is a grand start, the auto-switch between portait and landscape mode for keyboard and camera use, and the fact that I use Microsoft Office at work and home were big selling points; but Blackberry, Symbian, and PalmOS all have similar offerings in the converged-unit series, all in the $299-$499 price point range, which is afordable. In addition to that, the 5 fequency/protocol radio (IR, Bluetooth, GPRS, GMS, 802.11g) means that I'm in contact- which is something your paper system simply cannot do.
I don't sync with linux- and I have to agree, my T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard, basically the same thing as your Cingular 8125 with a slightly different ROM image and build of Windows Mobile 5) has, in less than 2 weeks, caused me to stop carrying my IPAQ, and sync calendars with both home and work, which is imensely valueable to me. In addition to that I've got the added bonus of advanced entertainment options (recorded TV shows, MP3s, and video games) on the train, plus massively superior typing ability to any PDA I've had since my first Windows CE 1.0 HPC.
Now having said that, I'd have to say Nokia's Symbian phone, or even a Blackberry, could effectively do the same for our college student in the article. Just be sure to get a model with a good thumboard of some sort that is comfortable for your hands. And by getting a good cellular provider plan, you'll avoid the $500 phone bill that nearly killed my college career as a long distance relationship melted down over the first Gulf War (she was for it, I saw other options).
Now that they're owned by NBC, maybe they'll bring back Misfits of Science. Now that was good sci-fi comedy killed too early!
Given the latest story line, so does SG1
Why not? IRL, we faced the horrific possibility of 10 million terrorists following a theology not unlike the Ori (Convert or Die) and we failed to do even enough mobilization to take over a country the size of California in 3 years, and another country the size of Oregon in 5 years was taken over, but is slowly returning to their previous government because we've been basically ignoring them.
What makes you think the fictional government would be any smarter? It's not 1941 anymore.
The TARDIS being bigger on the inside actually makes quite a bit of sense- it's hard Sci-Fi and part of the One Big Lie. The OBL in Dr. Who is that a race of TimeLords exist who are experts in multi-dimensional physics. If you're an expert in multidimensional physics, you're going to build your time machine to be small on the outside and big on the inside- because it makes the best use of materials in all dimensions.
At which point, it becomes little more than fantasy- unless it follows the One Big Lie rule (the difference between hard science fiction and soft science fiction: Hard Science fiction is only allowed to tell One Big Lie, and the rest of the story must stick to the realm of physical law as we know it at the time the story was written. Soft Science fiction may have many lies, but must explore some aspect of human interaction even if the entire cast is a bunch of aliens on a different planet- which means getting into socio-political or religious realms- SG1 is so successfull because it did and does both. Fantasy can tell as many lies as it likes and have no basis in reality whatsoever.)
And Kryten was the robot on Red Dwarf. Chrichton was the human on Farscape. Different shows, but similar humor.
Being that our real world theocracies are monotheistic, there obviously wouldn't be a 1:1 ratio....Hmm- thought you do bring up some good points.
I think that using MS Word is a pretty good way to check vocabulary that may be in the zeitgeist. Even abridged dictionaries are full of words that are virtually unused in our society... and from TFA, it appears their intention was to ensure whatever word they used didn't already have significant meaning in popular culture.
Hmm- now that would be an interesting new feature OpenOffice could put in to pull ahead- an optional internet enabled central custom spelling dictionary for people who are interested in spelling the way everybody else does instead of the "correct" way the dictionary makers force us to spell. Until it reaches that point, all going to a spelling checker for vocabulary will do is find what the programmers thought was important, rather than the users. Anybody should be able to contribute to this custom dictionary, quickly filling it with new words and new spellings of old words. Would be a very interesting experiment for some programmer with an English minor....
Have you missed the significance of the Ori with the fiction the Bush Administration has been telling us? The Ori aren't that different from the Islamic Fundamentalists- except of course their Allah really exists and is willing to share *just* enough power to make sure their followers succeed in their "convert or die" theology.
This makes the humans the United States Christians- following an apparently disinterested God (The Ancients)- fighting for the survival of that God even though that God is apparently not interested in his own survival.
Like any good science fiction, it's mirroring "reality"- if you buy into that whole al Qaida thing to begin with anyway. If you don't- well, let's face it, the Ori are about as interesting as the Islamofascists.....as in, an enemy that we can't even get worked up enough about to curb putting $3/gallon gasoline into our SUV tanks at $100 a fillup.
Ah well, serves them right- their server melted down from the slashdotting.