I googled around earlier to try to determine whether these are VeriSign VIP devices. If so, that'd be great -- they'd interoperate with PayPal and eBay and VeriSign's OpenID provider and anyone else who either supports OpenID or signs up for VeriSign's program.
Making tech-happy people carry around more than one OTP device would be a real shame, so I'll be disappointed if more word on these comes out and it turns out that they don't interoperate.
A fetus/unborn child is NOT a tumor and it's not YOUR body as it has a body of its own.
Even if I grant that it has a body of its own (though at the point we're talking about for embryo selection, calling a few hundred cells a "body" is pretty questionable), I don't see why that gives me an obligation to play host.
(That said, if we're talking moral obligations, I personally have nothing against infanticide prior to development of language; I don't generally argue that position in public given its popularity, but convincing me to go from my present stance to protecting a collection of cells dependent on an unwilling host... well, it's not likely to happen).
A fetus/unborn child is NOT a tumor and it's not YOUR body as it has a body of its own.
Elsewhere, another poster argued that a tapeworm is likewise divisible from my own body. Why should the embryo be treated with any more respect than the tapeworm?
My point is that the timescale itself is critical. A guest given five seconds to vacate my property is not offending, while a guest who takes five months is.
Individual, existing as a distinct entity, being an individual or existing as an indivisible whole. An embryo is a distinct and unique entity. The fact that it is currently dependent on another is irrelevant.
I looked up the definition just as you did. If an embryo is distinct and divisible from its mother, why do you object so much to dividing them? As I said -- if it's an individual, let it be an individual. If it can't be divided -- and you insist they must not -- then how is it "divisible"?
Fair enough, just give it a few more months. [...] If you invited someone into your house and killed them because they were trespassing and didn't leave fast enough, that would be murder. Pregnancy is no different.
If I invite someone into my house, but then ask them to leave, consenting to leave -- but only in a few months -- doesn't hold water. In this case, however, there isn't even a "someone" to be concerned with.
Yes, lets keep changing the definition of human until your argument holds water.
Where, upstream in this thread, did I accept any other definition of "individual"? Go on, I'm waiting.
Good point -- if we're going for a stable definition, better to keep technology out of it; formula out, wet-nurses in. WORKSFORME.
A bit more seriously -- if we want to keep technology in, then we get into the line as to just where a duty of care exists. A doctor running triage is not charged with murder for deciding that scarce resources are better spent on someone else, and the family of a vegetable on life support can decide to pull the plug. It's not murder to fail to provide non-emergency but critical medical services on account of inability to pay. Even if an embryo were human, how is terminating a pregnancy [by withdrawing resources previously allocated thereto] differentiated from all of these cases, in which declining to provide critical medical services is acceptable?
Early abortion techniques simply cause the mother's body to decline to provide services to the fetus, doing nothing beyond that to kill it directly, so the comparisons are apt.
The force of law moves both ways. Either I force you to live in a world where you can't control your own body, or you force me to live in a world where murder is endorsed by law.
There's a fundamental disconnect here -- the same error made by folks who complain that allowing gay marriage will somehow undermine the sanctity of their own relationships: What the law allows me to do in no way impacts what you and yours must do. How does living in a world "where murder is endorsed by law" harm you, if you and yours (like any other family) are able to opt out?
And there is no one point where a developing embryo obviously changes nature - no one second you can point to and say that there is a fundamental difference before it, and after it - except perhaps conception.
But that's a fallacy (though it's been too long since I took formal logic to remember the name): Just because the exact point at which a line is crossed can't be pinpointed doesn't mean that there isn't a line, or that it isn't crossed, or that things which are clearly on one side or another of the uncertainly positioned line can't be identified as being on whichever side they're at. Something made up of only hundreds of cells clearly isn't capable of human consciousness, even if you disagree with my definition of where to draw the line; why can we not at least agree there and allow fertility-clinic embryo selection?
Further, there is a clear line that's crossed at birth: The umbilical cord is cut; the entity ceases operating off the life support provided by another body and begins independent function -- hardly a nonevent.
I err on the side of caution. I would rather risk restricting the freedom of one human - who, in the majority of cases (not all, but the majority) is in the situation as a result of their own actions - than killing another human, just to simplify the life of another.
"Simplify the life", eh? The religious right (forgive me for the presumption) speaks of the importance of a traditional, stable two-parent family structure, but then acts to remove any ability to control whether children are brought into environments lacking any hallmark of this stability.
Being able to have children when one is ready to have children is good for the child as well.
If you know the interpretation of my words you formed can't be serious, perhaps you should look for a different one -- like figuring out why those things are so unlike.
Hint: Assault is nonconsensual, so third-party intervention is welcome. In the event that I'm undergoing a medical procedure I consented to, on the other hand, the everyone-not-involved-should-mind-their-own-business rule elaborated by the grandparent applies.
Ok, so it's not blood, but without feeding off a mother's milk the baby's not going to last long either.[...]
Untrue; post-birth, alternative forms of nourishment are possible. It doesn't need to be the mother's milk, and in the absence of a third-party wet nurse, baby formula or equivalent will sustain life. Thus, the relationship between infant and mother is unlike that between fetus and mother-to-be.
Sorry, but I don't find "birth" a convincing demarkation point between human and non-human.
As long as it's a question of personal findings and positions, we have no quarrel; it is only when you seek to use force of law to push your positions on others that I take issue.
Being unable to survive without de minimis shelter and being unable to survive without feeding off an unwilling third party's bloodstream are entirely different things.
So, if a cop sees someone beating the shit out of you, should he mind his own business? Wait, before you answer, that cop is part of the government and is "not involved" in your ass getting kicked. Should he mind his own business. Of course not!
Let's say that instead of someone beating the shit out of me, they're coming at me with a knife -- except that they're a surgeon performing a medical procedure I opted into. Is it still the police officer's job to "protect" me from something I'm doing by choice?
IMHO, if a DNA test says its human, then it's human and religion has nothing to do with it. No one should be allowed to kill or experiment on him/her without his/her permission.
So it should be illegal for me to get a tumor cut out of me -- because a DNA test would show that it's human?
If one is testing for compatibility, one wants to be damned sure that something one says is compatible with a given browser is in fact compatible with that browser. Telling your coworkers that you gave something a thumbs-up because you tested with something else which supposedly implements an equivalent specification is a good way to lose any and all credibility when a corner case is hit.
Since when did adults playing counter-strike get more mature then children?
I don't play Counterstrike -- but back when I played Tribes and Team Fortress (and today, when I play TF2), the adults tend to be fairly mature.
I'm not in favor of a ban for a single-word outburst, particularly when that outburst is well-deserved. That said, I completely understand (and support) servers having policies against excessive and unnecessary language, presuming that enforcement is done with reason in mind.
You forgot about harsh language. I used to play Counter-Strike and it always tickled me when I came across a server that had banned cussing. I just have a lot of trouble understanding that logic
The other reply is entirely right: It's not about protecting the children; it's about being protected from the children. Being able to play with a bunch of adults is fun. Being endlessly cussed at by 12-year-olds while trying to play a game isn't.
You haven't RTFA'd, then; it explicitly discusses how the armed forces are in increasing need of men who think and take initiative on their own, and has adjusted its training towards that end.
This claim that people need to "turn off their critical thinking skills" to be willing to risk their lives for a cause they genuinely believe in makes a mockery of genuine heroes and martyrs everywhere, military or otherwise. You should be ashamed.
The very same people bitching about "crotch-fruit" will be the ones complaining about lack of quality people in 20 years.
Yes, but it'll be Someone Else's Problem because we refused to contribute to it!:)
Seriously, though -- I'd be a bad parent. I've lived with people with kids (very good parents, thankfully, and more than able to compensate for my influence), and did the indulgent-uncle thing, overlooking when they were misbehaving (inclusive of cases when that clearly wasn't the right thing to do) and responding to their requests when such wasn't warranted. I don't have the discipline or the temperament to be a good parent -- and between my wife and I, we've got a significant set of genetics best not passed along. Finally, much of my life outside work is disorderly as it is. If I can't manage a household without children, how could I reasonably believe that a household with children would be any more tractable?
I interact closely on a regular basis with adults whose lives are significantly dysfunctional in a manner directly traceable to poor parenting [though admittedly more severe than the combination of overindulgence and neglect I'd expect from myself], so the long-term effects of such are extremely visible; we'll stick to our professions and leave the child-rearing to folks better qualified, thankyouverymuch... and I'd appreciate it if you acknowledged the legitimacy of our choice.
Those of us who bitch about "crotch-fruit" aren't all trying to ditch our responsibility to be part of the solution; some of us are fully aware that however good our intentions may be, we likely would end up a part of the problem.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's a research subject in and of itself -- certainly not something I'm qualified to speak on. It's an interesting thought experiment, though, to ponder whether it would be any different with a full-wall telescreen between each side (with an extremely high-quality video feed) and a table adjoining. Not being able to hug or shake hands or pass the turkey would be an adjustment -- but perhaps an acceptable one; I suppose one could try to determine, given such a setup, how much people would be willing to pay (or be inconvenienced) for physical presence after having enough time with such an arrangement for both sides to become accustomed to it.
It might also be interesting to compare reactions between telepresence and physical presence separated by a wall with a (unopenable) window having the same dimensions as the telepresence screen; an experiment of that sort might help to isolate the aspect of telepresence which is less palatable (ie. 2D screen / mic-and-speakers vs. direct vision and actual voice, or the opportunity for physical contact).
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...actually, there's a different way to interpret that: If I actually were a bigshot, the business cost of my unavailability (on account of increased travel times) would be amplified, making my unavailability more, rather than less, unpalatable.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why use it at all? I've yet to run into a situation where videoconferencing is appropriate but a phone call (possibly coupled with out-of-band data exchange) won't do.
The thing is, there are cases where neither videoconferencing nor a phone call is a substitute for direct interaction. Visiting the family for a holiday and sharing meals with them is an entirely different experience than making a phone call; claiming that telepresence as currently implemented is an adequate substitute for physical presence is clearly bogus.
Likewise, if you're about to claim that watching an A/V feed is an adequate substitute for attending a professional conference, I suggest that you're missing a very large part of the point of being present for such events.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I value my work more than I value visiting extended family, so I'm not deeply unhappy with that outcome; I just don't think that "well, high-speed travel is now completely unavailable, deal with it" is a reasonable position at this point. We might get there eventually, but that hasn't happened yet.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Time is money.
Taking that much travel time would mean I would be unable to travel to visit my family or convince my employer to send me to a conference... simply because the lost income (for myself or my employer) corresponding with the travel costs in question would be too great to justify the expense.
You say "obsessed with productivity"; I say "rational".
TIFF for faxes was the best of bad choices. There are better options these days.
How are those options better? How is TIFF bad?
TIFF has direct support for the compression and image formats used by fax machines over the wire, so there's no transcoding needed to write a TIFF of an incoming fax (and an outgoing fax can be preprocessed for sending while keeping it in TIFF). Tools that you and I already have installed (ie. tiffinfo) can provide caller ID and other useful metadata. There's a complete toolchain built around TIFF. It works. Tell me what's broken, and then we can start to talk about doing the work to rebuild that toolchain against something else that fixes the problems.
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I googled around earlier to try to determine whether these are VeriSign VIP devices. If so, that'd be great -- they'd interoperate with PayPal and eBay and VeriSign's OpenID provider and anyone else who either supports OpenID or signs up for VeriSign's program.
Making tech-happy people carry around more than one OTP device would be a real shame, so I'll be disappointed if more word on these comes out and it turns out that they don't interoperate.
Even if I grant that it has a body of its own (though at the point we're talking about for embryo selection, calling a few hundred cells a "body" is pretty questionable), I don't see why that gives me an obligation to play host.
(That said, if we're talking moral obligations, I personally have nothing against infanticide prior to development of language; I don't generally argue that position in public given its popularity, but convincing me to go from my present stance to protecting a collection of cells dependent on an unwilling host... well, it's not likely to happen).
Elsewhere, another poster argued that a tapeworm is likewise divisible from my own body. Why should the embryo be treated with any more respect than the tapeworm?
My point is that the timescale itself is critical. A guest given five seconds to vacate my property is not offending, while a guest who takes five months is.
I looked up the definition just as you did. If an embryo is distinct and divisible from its mother, why do you object so much to dividing them? As I said -- if it's an individual, let it be an individual. If it can't be divided -- and you insist they must not -- then how is it "divisible"?
If I invite someone into my house, but then ask them to leave, consenting to leave -- but only in a few months -- doesn't hold water. In this case, however, there isn't even a "someone" to be concerned with.
Where, upstream in this thread, did I accept any other definition of "individual"? Go on, I'm waiting.
Good point -- if we're going for a stable definition, better to keep technology out of it; formula out, wet-nurses in. WORKSFORME.
A bit more seriously -- if we want to keep technology in, then we get into the line as to just where a duty of care exists. A doctor running triage is not charged with murder for deciding that scarce resources are better spent on someone else, and the family of a vegetable on life support can decide to pull the plug. It's not murder to fail to provide non-emergency but critical medical services on account of inability to pay. Even if an embryo were human, how is terminating a pregnancy [by withdrawing resources previously allocated thereto] differentiated from all of these cases, in which declining to provide critical medical services is acceptable?
Early abortion techniques simply cause the mother's body to decline to provide services to the fetus, doing nothing beyond that to kill it directly, so the comparisons are apt.
There's a fundamental disconnect here -- the same error made by folks who complain that allowing gay marriage will somehow undermine the sanctity of their own relationships: What the law allows me to do in no way impacts what you and yours must do. How does living in a world "where murder is endorsed by law" harm you, if you and yours (like any other family) are able to opt out?
But that's a fallacy (though it's been too long since I took formal logic to remember the name): Just because the exact point at which a line is crossed can't be pinpointed doesn't mean that there isn't a line, or that it isn't crossed, or that things which are clearly on one side or another of the uncertainly positioned line can't be identified as being on whichever side they're at. Something made up of only hundreds of cells clearly isn't capable of human consciousness, even if you disagree with my definition of where to draw the line; why can we not at least agree there and allow fertility-clinic embryo selection?
Further, there is a clear line that's crossed at birth: The umbilical cord is cut; the entity ceases operating off the life support provided by another body and begins independent function -- hardly a nonevent.
"Simplify the life", eh? The religious right (forgive me for the presumption) speaks of the importance of a traditional, stable two-parent family structure, but then acts to remove any ability to control whether children are brought into environments lacking any hallmark of this stability.
Being able to have children when one is ready to have children is good for the child as well.
If you know the interpretation of my words you formed can't be serious, perhaps you should look for a different one -- like figuring out why those things are so unlike.
Hint: Assault is nonconsensual, so third-party intervention is welcome. In the event that I'm undergoing a medical procedure I consented to, on the other hand, the everyone-not-involved-should-mind-their-own-business rule elaborated by the grandparent applies.
Neither did the tumor.
Untrue; post-birth, alternative forms of nourishment are possible. It doesn't need to be the mother's milk, and in the absence of a third-party wet nurse, baby formula or equivalent will sustain life. Thus, the relationship between infant and mother is unlike that between fetus and mother-to-be.
As long as it's a question of personal findings and positions, we have no quarrel; it is only when you seek to use force of law to push your positions on others that I take issue.
Being unable to survive without de minimis shelter and being unable to survive without feeding off an unwilling third party's bloodstream are entirely different things.
Is it an "individual"? Then separate it from its unwilling host -- let it be truly an individual -- and let it live, or not, on its own.
An "individual" not only has a beating heart and brain activity, but is able to survive without feeding off the bloodstream of another.
Let's say that instead of someone beating the shit out of me, they're coming at me with a knife -- except that they're a surgeon performing a medical procedure I opted into. Is it still the police officer's job to "protect" me from something I'm doing by choice?
So it should be illegal for me to get a tumor cut out of me -- because a DNA test would show that it's human?
Yes.
If one is testing for compatibility, one wants to be damned sure that something one says is compatible with a given browser is in fact compatible with that browser. Telling your coworkers that you gave something a thumbs-up because you tested with something else which supposedly implements an equivalent specification is a good way to lose any and all credibility when a corner case is hit.
Why not upgrade to FF3 for your primary browser, and use a portable version of FF2 for testing?
I don't play Counterstrike -- but back when I played Tribes and Team Fortress (and today, when I play TF2), the adults tend to be fairly mature.
I'm not in favor of a ban for a single-word outburst, particularly when that outburst is well-deserved. That said, I completely understand (and support) servers having policies against excessive and unnecessary language, presuming that enforcement is done with reason in mind.
You haven't RTFA'd, then; it explicitly discusses how the armed forces are in increasing need of men who think and take initiative on their own, and has adjusted its training towards that end.
This claim that people need to "turn off their critical thinking skills" to be willing to risk their lives for a cause they genuinely believe in makes a mockery of genuine heroes and martyrs everywhere, military or otherwise. You should be ashamed.
Yes, but it'll be Someone Else's Problem because we refused to contribute to it! :)
Seriously, though -- I'd be a bad parent. I've lived with people with kids (very good parents, thankfully, and more than able to compensate for my influence), and did the indulgent-uncle thing, overlooking when they were misbehaving (inclusive of cases when that clearly wasn't the right thing to do) and responding to their requests when such wasn't warranted. I don't have the discipline or the temperament to be a good parent -- and between my wife and I, we've got a significant set of genetics best not passed along. Finally, much of my life outside work is disorderly as it is. If I can't manage a household without children, how could I reasonably believe that a household with children would be any more tractable?
I interact closely on a regular basis with adults whose lives are significantly dysfunctional in a manner directly traceable to poor parenting [though admittedly more severe than the combination of overindulgence and neglect I'd expect from myself], so the long-term effects of such are extremely visible; we'll stick to our professions and leave the child-rearing to folks better qualified, thankyouverymuch... and I'd appreciate it if you acknowledged the legitimacy of our choice.
Those of us who bitch about "crotch-fruit" aren't all trying to ditch our responsibility to be part of the solution; some of us are fully aware that however good our intentions may be, we likely would end up a part of the problem.
That's a research subject in and of itself -- certainly not something I'm qualified to speak on. It's an interesting thought experiment, though, to ponder whether it would be any different with a full-wall telescreen between each side (with an extremely high-quality video feed) and a table adjoining. Not being able to hug or shake hands or pass the turkey would be an adjustment -- but perhaps an acceptable one; I suppose one could try to determine, given such a setup, how much people would be willing to pay (or be inconvenienced) for physical presence after having enough time with such an arrangement for both sides to become accustomed to it.
It might also be interesting to compare reactions between telepresence and physical presence separated by a wall with a (unopenable) window having the same dimensions as the telepresence screen; an experiment of that sort might help to isolate the aspect of telepresence which is less palatable (ie. 2D screen / mic-and-speakers vs. direct vision and actual voice, or the opportunity for physical contact).
...actually, there's a different way to interpret that: If I actually were a bigshot, the business cost of my unavailability (on account of increased travel times) would be amplified, making my unavailability more, rather than less, unpalatable.
Who said I thought I was a big shot?
Why use it at all? I've yet to run into a situation where videoconferencing is appropriate but a phone call (possibly coupled with out-of-band data exchange) won't do.
The thing is, there are cases where neither videoconferencing nor a phone call is a substitute for direct interaction. Visiting the family for a holiday and sharing meals with them is an entirely different experience than making a phone call; claiming that telepresence as currently implemented is an adequate substitute for physical presence is clearly bogus.
Likewise, if you're about to claim that watching an A/V feed is an adequate substitute for attending a professional conference, I suggest that you're missing a very large part of the point of being present for such events.
I value my work more than I value visiting extended family, so I'm not deeply unhappy with that outcome; I just don't think that "well, high-speed travel is now completely unavailable, deal with it" is a reasonable position at this point. We might get there eventually, but that hasn't happened yet.
Time is money.
Taking that much travel time would mean I would be unable to travel to visit my family or convince my employer to send me to a conference... simply because the lost income (for myself or my employer) corresponding with the travel costs in question would be too great to justify the expense.
You say "obsessed with productivity"; I say "rational".
How are those options better? How is TIFF bad?
TIFF has direct support for the compression and image formats used by fax machines over the wire, so there's no transcoding needed to write a TIFF of an incoming fax (and an outgoing fax can be preprocessed for sending while keeping it in TIFF). Tools that you and I already have installed (ie. tiffinfo) can provide caller ID and other useful metadata. There's a complete toolchain built around TIFF. It works. Tell me what's broken, and then we can start to talk about doing the work to rebuild that toolchain against something else that fixes the problems.