Yah, and in order to fix it they've added even more mechanical complexity to it - now you can raise and lower the + part of it, making it either a disk or a plus.
So instead of Microsoft sticking to one thing and making it work well, they let the user pick between two half-assed solutions! Hooray!
No, sorry. We're not talking about crack whores here. We're talking about things that average women actually do.
Smoking tobacco is correlated with an increased risk of miscarriage - both when the mother or the father smoke. Antidepressants can lead to spontaneous abortion. 1.5 hours per week of exercise was correlated with approximately a 10% higher chance of miscarriage, and 7 hours of exercise per week increased the chance by 200%.
Are you willing to say that we should ban pregnant women from doing those things? After all, the end result of their actions is exactly what you are saying is unethical - namely, the chance that we'll toss a fetus down the toilet. That is the logical result of your position, after all; if it's unethical for IVF clinics to destroy extra embryos, why is it ethical for women to take actions that result in a higher chance of their embryos being destroyed? The end result is the same, the only difference is the probabilities involved (and after all, IVF clinics don't always have extra embryos).
Why is it that you assume the ground on which you stand is so firm? It seems to me that you are the one whose ideals would lead to slippage - I'm saying that people should be free to do what they want with their own genetic material; you're saying that you should get to say what people do with their genes and genetic material, just because it's "ethical".
If other people do not understand your ideas, whose fault is it - the other people for not understanding your ideas, or you for making your ideas unclear?
I mean, when you responded to my post you just made some vague noises about not doing something we'll regret, asked some relatively meaningless questions, and included an insipid quote from Jurassic Park (of all things). Whose fault is it, exactly, that we didn't immediately leap to the conclusion that you hold the (relatively extreme) view that modern in-vitro fertilization should be banned?
Further, slippery slopes work both ways; in your case, would you be willing to charge a woman with unintentional or negligent homicide because she miscarried? Would you be willing to mandate that all women do whatever it takes in order to ensure that they carry their babies to term, including doing things like banning the use of cigarettes and alcohol and heavy exercise by pregnant women? Because that's where your position, that life begins at conception, leads.
Are you against IVF clinics? Because if so then your position is consistent. If not, you are inconsistent - IVFs are already destroying embryos all the time, and you are not against them, despite being against stem cell research for the same reason.
(of course that won't happen anytime soon, since there are no treatments derived from embryonic stem cell research despite lavish funding of it by the state of California and several other states and municipalities).
A bit of history: the laser was first theorized in 1917, by Albert Einstein. In 1947 Lamb and Retherford demonstrated the first actual laser. The first practical use of lasers that most people are aware of was the CD-Rom drive; the Yellow Book standards that described CDs were published in 1985. That's what, 68 years from theory to practice?
For comparison, research into stem cells started in the 1960s. You're complaining that no treatments have been derived from it yet? Despite the fact that biological research is far trickier than physics? Despite the fact that the funding for stem cell research in the United States has all but dried up?
Seriously, it's like some people don't understand self-fulfilling prophecies. If you stop funding stem cell research and focus on other things, of course you're not going to get results out of stem cell research.
Once we start "breeding human beings to be used for spare parts and then discarded as trash", I'll be right there next to you in objecting.
However, what we're doing is not that in the slightest. Right now we're just doing research on embryos that would have otherwise been thrown out (eg, extra fertilized eggs from fertility clinics - those get tossed right in the "biohazard" bin once you tell the doctor you're sure you don't want any more children, or unfertilized eggs that are about to expire).
Totally agree with you there - especially since the "benefits" of the United States military are going to be an entire generation of pissed-off Muslims, a once-great country with crumbling infrastructure*, and an influx of disabled, crippled, and otherwise unable-to-work veterans whose needs aren't going to be properly taken care of because we just won't be able to afford it (yes the VA system is one of the best medical systems around - but how long do you think that's going to last when we start running in to the real cost of putting off infrastructure maintenance?)
You can have the military. Please.
*What, did you think that all those shiny guns, Humvees and bombers were free? We're paying for them instead of paying to make sure our grandchildren will have working pipes and usable bridges.
That's actually kinda what they were doing beforehand - here's how P.Z. Myers summed it up:
The Dickey-Wicker amendment is a relic of Gingrich-era scientific obstructionism. It prohibits the funding of research in which human embryos are created or destroyed; the Clinton administration developed a rather dodgy line of reasoning to get around it by arguing that human stem cells were not human embryos, therefore research on cells could be funded. Which is entirely true, but it's shaky because the intent of the legislators was to kill human embryonic stem cell research entirely, and taking advantage of the inability of Republican congressman to draft a scientifically complete description of the work they were prohibiting isn't exactly fair.
The judge has just ruled that no, the intent of the law is to prohibit stem cell research, so you can't get around it just because the Republicans who crafted the legislation didn't know what the heck they were talking about. If only domain knowledge were an actual requirement.
Do you know what embryos we're talking about here? They're little clumps of cells that were going to be flushed down the toilet anyway.
Seriously, do you not get that? Here's a little sketch of where they come from: a couple of rich people walk in the door of a fertility clinic and say "doctor, we can has babiez?", the doctor is like "sure, let me do science to you", science is done to them, the couple say "okay no more babiez", and the doctor says "well now what do I do with all these extra fertilized eggs? do I give them to researchers for to science them, or do I throw them away?" and the parents are like "sure whatever, we has babiez to deal with now".
You're saying that they must be destroyed without science being done. Everyone else is saying do science and then destroy them.
Do you not see where there's no difference in eventual outcomes? Do you not see where this is a tremendous waste of potential?
Seriously - just look at Asian manga and anime. People who haven't seen it have a hard time imagining that cartoons could be deep or serious; they're just for kids, right? Surely it's totally okay to take my little children to see Princess Mononoke? Akira's gotta be a kid's cartoon, right? Neon Genesis Evangelion is just big giant mecha beating each other up, isn't it?
This weird idea that cartoons and drawings are for kids has set us back quite a bit. It's one of the few reasons why I'm okay with this modern habit of turning comic book series into movies; if the Watchmen movie gets at least one person to read the actual Watchmen comics, it was totally worth it.
Hah, there would be if it was nVidia instead of AMD - after all, nVidia's the company that disabled features on their own card when they detected that it was running in tandem with an ATI card.
You might say that it was a precautionary measure, but by all accounts the hacked drivers that didn't care if there was an ATI card in the machine had no problems - and generally, if the user is technically minded enough to have two GPUs in their computer, they'd be aware of the fact that they're doing something slightly funky by putting two different vendor's cards in there.
a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs
What. To avoid roadside bombs, we're making Humvees that can fly automatically.
Tomorrow's news: in order to prevent heat stroke in our soldiers, the Pentagon has begun selecting companies to build a satellite that will block out the sun.
MS came along a little later, made a player with access to their own (incompatible) music store, threw in a WiFi radio that was only useful for sharing songs with nearby Zune users (but you could only listen to the shared song 3 times), but not for syncing with your computer which is the more obvious application for such a device, and packaged it in a shit-brown case, and everyone laughed.
Hah! It was worse than that! You could only listen to a shared song three times, or within five days. I was a Microsoft intern the summer they gave all the interns 30 GB Zunes; one of the other interns decided to share a song with me, but I didn't listen to it right then. A week later I was kind of bored and thought "hey, that guy sent me a song, I should listen to it" - except I couldn't, because the song had expired and was gone from the Zune. As far as I could tell, there wasn't even a record of which songs had been shared with me so I couldn't even look it up on YouTube or anything.
And this is why Apple doesn't have any built-in song sharing stuff on the iPods with wifi - the music cartels will basically force you to restrict the sharing to the point where it's useless like this. After all, I'm sure Microsoft didn't choose to impose such dracionian limits on something stupid like sharing songs; the RIAA probably said "we'll sue you if you don't include these restrictions"
No, they're saying they won't charge you for it. They haven't relented on their basic position.
This is like Microsoft saying "If you save a document in the Word format, we own a bit of it and you owe us money if you distribute it widely enough".
Then people say "Um that's stupid, I'm not paying you money for something I made incidentally using your technology"
Then (and this is where we are now) Microsoft comes back and says "Well okay, you won't have to pay us for it as only as you're not making money off of the document, but we still own a bit of the document."
The important part here isn't the royalty charge, it's the initial claim that they can charge a royalty to the end user in the first place. They haven't relinquished that position at all, they've just said "we can do it, but we're nice so we won't".
Honestly, in this case, fear mongering is better than just taking it - I mean, it's nearly impossible to make a home video without creating something that MPEG LA thinks you should pay them for.
Fable and Shadow of the Colossus are both very weird, off-beat games funded by massive conglomerates and both great games.
You're... you're comparing Fable to Shadow of the Colossus? And you call yourself an indie game dev?
Seriously, what the fuck? Fable was an absolutely bog-standard RPG with real-time combat (if you could call it combat). There was nothing innovative in it - if you'd made the main character an elf it would have passed for an extra-bland off-label Legend of Zelda game. There was nothing weird, off-beat, innovative or otherwise interesting in the thing; the whole game was a very short exercise in playing it safe. Heck, when I'd finally found a good place to level up (after about 12 hours) I realized that I was 90% of the way through the game! That's not a full game, that's an extended demo.
Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, had all of those attributes you ascribe to it - but describing it in the same breath as Fable? I have to question your judgment there.
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Yah, and in order to fix it they've added even more mechanical complexity to it - now you can raise and lower the + part of it, making it either a disk or a plus.
So instead of Microsoft sticking to one thing and making it work well, they let the user pick between two half-assed solutions! Hooray!
There, fixed that for you. I'm certain that bad Powerpoint presentations will still be creating tons of space debris after we're all dead.
That idea will work perfectly as soon as you figure out how we're going to be able to hear space debris buzz.
Or did you think that guy's laser detected mosquitoes with magic?
No, sorry. We're not talking about crack whores here. We're talking about things that average women actually do.
Smoking tobacco is correlated with an increased risk of miscarriage - both when the mother or the father smoke. Antidepressants can lead to spontaneous abortion. 1.5 hours per week of exercise was correlated with approximately a 10% higher chance of miscarriage, and 7 hours of exercise per week increased the chance by 200%.
Are you willing to say that we should ban pregnant women from doing those things? After all, the end result of their actions is exactly what you are saying is unethical - namely, the chance that we'll toss a fetus down the toilet. That is the logical result of your position, after all; if it's unethical for IVF clinics to destroy extra embryos, why is it ethical for women to take actions that result in a higher chance of their embryos being destroyed? The end result is the same, the only difference is the probabilities involved (and after all, IVF clinics don't always have extra embryos).
Why is it that you assume the ground on which you stand is so firm? It seems to me that you are the one whose ideals would lead to slippage - I'm saying that people should be free to do what they want with their own genetic material; you're saying that you should get to say what people do with their genes and genetic material, just because it's "ethical".
And occasionally the same file if you open and close it. What the hell, Microsoft? You still can't create a stable file format?
If other people do not understand your ideas, whose fault is it - the other people for not understanding your ideas, or you for making your ideas unclear?
I mean, when you responded to my post you just made some vague noises about not doing something we'll regret, asked some relatively meaningless questions, and included an insipid quote from Jurassic Park (of all things). Whose fault is it, exactly, that we didn't immediately leap to the conclusion that you hold the (relatively extreme) view that modern in-vitro fertilization should be banned?
Further, slippery slopes work both ways; in your case, would you be willing to charge a woman with unintentional or negligent homicide because she miscarried? Would you be willing to mandate that all women do whatever it takes in order to ensure that they carry their babies to term, including doing things like banning the use of cigarettes and alcohol and heavy exercise by pregnant women? Because that's where your position, that life begins at conception, leads.
Are you against IVF clinics? Because if so then your position is consistent. If not, you are inconsistent - IVFs are already destroying embryos all the time, and you are not against them, despite being against stem cell research for the same reason.
A bit of history: the laser was first theorized in 1917, by Albert Einstein. In 1947 Lamb and Retherford demonstrated the first actual laser. The first practical use of lasers that most people are aware of was the CD-Rom drive; the Yellow Book standards that described CDs were published in 1985. That's what, 68 years from theory to practice?
For comparison, research into stem cells started in the 1960s. You're complaining that no treatments have been derived from it yet? Despite the fact that biological research is far trickier than physics? Despite the fact that the funding for stem cell research in the United States has all but dried up?
Seriously, it's like some people don't understand self-fulfilling prophecies. If you stop funding stem cell research and focus on other things, of course you're not going to get results out of stem cell research.
Once we start "breeding human beings to be used for spare parts and then discarded as trash", I'll be right there next to you in objecting.
However, what we're doing is not that in the slightest. Right now we're just doing research on embryos that would have otherwise been thrown out (eg, extra fertilized eggs from fertility clinics - those get tossed right in the "biohazard" bin once you tell the doctor you're sure you don't want any more children, or unfertilized eggs that are about to expire).
Totally agree with you there - especially since the "benefits" of the United States military are going to be an entire generation of pissed-off Muslims, a once-great country with crumbling infrastructure*, and an influx of disabled, crippled, and otherwise unable-to-work veterans whose needs aren't going to be properly taken care of because we just won't be able to afford it (yes the VA system is one of the best medical systems around - but how long do you think that's going to last when we start running in to the real cost of putting off infrastructure maintenance?)
You can have the military. Please.
*What, did you think that all those shiny guns, Humvees and bombers were free? We're paying for them instead of paying to make sure our grandchildren will have working pipes and usable bridges.
That's actually kinda what they were doing beforehand - here's how P.Z. Myers summed it up:
The judge has just ruled that no, the intent of the law is to prohibit stem cell research, so you can't get around it just because the Republicans who crafted the legislation didn't know what the heck they were talking about. If only domain knowledge were an actual requirement.
Do you know what embryos we're talking about here? They're little clumps of cells that were going to be flushed down the toilet anyway.
Seriously, do you not get that? Here's a little sketch of where they come from: a couple of rich people walk in the door of a fertility clinic and say "doctor, we can has babiez?", the doctor is like "sure, let me do science to you", science is done to them, the couple say "okay no more babiez", and the doctor says "well now what do I do with all these extra fertilized eggs? do I give them to researchers for to science them, or do I throw them away?" and the parents are like "sure whatever, we has babiez to deal with now".
You're saying that they must be destroyed without science being done. Everyone else is saying do science and then destroy them.
Do you not see where there's no difference in eventual outcomes? Do you not see where this is a tremendous waste of potential?
Seriously - just look at Asian manga and anime. People who haven't seen it have a hard time imagining that cartoons could be deep or serious; they're just for kids, right? Surely it's totally okay to take my little children to see Princess Mononoke? Akira's gotta be a kid's cartoon, right? Neon Genesis Evangelion is just big giant mecha beating each other up, isn't it?
This weird idea that cartoons and drawings are for kids has set us back quite a bit. It's one of the few reasons why I'm okay with this modern habit of turning comic book series into movies; if the Watchmen movie gets at least one person to read the actual Watchmen comics, it was totally worth it.
Hah, there would be if it was nVidia instead of AMD - after all, nVidia's the company that disabled features on their own card when they detected that it was running in tandem with an ATI card.
You might say that it was a precautionary measure, but by all accounts the hacked drivers that didn't care if there was an ATI card in the machine had no problems - and generally, if the user is technically minded enough to have two GPUs in their computer, they'd be aware of the fact that they're doing something slightly funky by putting two different vendor's cards in there.
I have excellent Slashdot karma, does that count?
What. To avoid roadside bombs, we're making Humvees that can fly automatically.
Tomorrow's news: in order to prevent heat stroke in our soldiers, the Pentagon has begun selecting companies to build a satellite that will block out the sun.
Look, I really don't want to know what the Gimp does on the weekends. Just keep that to yourself!
Hah! It was worse than that! You could only listen to a shared song three times, or within five days. I was a Microsoft intern the summer they gave all the interns 30 GB Zunes; one of the other interns decided to share a song with me, but I didn't listen to it right then. A week later I was kind of bored and thought "hey, that guy sent me a song, I should listen to it" - except I couldn't, because the song had expired and was gone from the Zune. As far as I could tell, there wasn't even a record of which songs had been shared with me so I couldn't even look it up on YouTube or anything.
And this is why Apple doesn't have any built-in song sharing stuff on the iPods with wifi - the music cartels will basically force you to restrict the sharing to the point where it's useless like this. After all, I'm sure Microsoft didn't choose to impose such dracionian limits on something stupid like sharing songs; the RIAA probably said "we'll sue you if you don't include these restrictions"
No, they're saying they won't charge you for it. They haven't relented on their basic position.
This is like Microsoft saying "If you save a document in the Word format, we own a bit of it and you owe us money if you distribute it widely enough".
Then people say "Um that's stupid, I'm not paying you money for something I made incidentally using your technology"
Then (and this is where we are now) Microsoft comes back and says "Well okay, you won't have to pay us for it as only as you're not making money off of the document, but we still own a bit of the document."
The important part here isn't the royalty charge, it's the initial claim that they can charge a royalty to the end user in the first place. They haven't relinquished that position at all, they've just said "we can do it, but we're nice so we won't".
Honestly, in this case, fear mongering is better than just taking it - I mean, it's nearly impossible to make a home video without creating something that MPEG LA thinks you should pay them for.
I'm sure what they mean to say is "it'll be royalty free forever or until we change our minds, whichever comes first".
They killed Hitler though, so it was all good.
Damn, I thought your link was going to be to one of those cheap hyperspace bridges you were talking about.
What a letdown.
You're... you're comparing Fable to Shadow of the Colossus? And you call yourself an indie game dev?
Seriously, what the fuck? Fable was an absolutely bog-standard RPG with real-time combat (if you could call it combat). There was nothing innovative in it - if you'd made the main character an elf it would have passed for an extra-bland off-label Legend of Zelda game. There was nothing weird, off-beat, innovative or otherwise interesting in the thing; the whole game was a very short exercise in playing it safe. Heck, when I'd finally found a good place to level up (after about 12 hours) I realized that I was 90% of the way through the game! That's not a full game, that's an extended demo.
Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, had all of those attributes you ascribe to it - but describing it in the same breath as Fable? I have to question your judgment there.
Is that font illegible to anyone else? I had to turn Readability on, it was so bad. Who the heck thought it was a good idea?