The moral qualms come from the fact that today, they're discarded as a side effect of trying to help couples start a family; to bring a life into the world that will be cared for and nurtured, and to propagate our species.
If it is wrong to destroy embryos then what does it matter what the reason is? It isn't as if our species is in danger of extinction due to our low birth rate. People who want to have biological children want it. They don't need it to survive. How can the destruction of embryonic human beings be justified in order to give people want they merely want?
Furthermore, why would their wish for biological children take higher precedence than the saving of lives?
If the destruction of embryos is wrong, why does it matter whether it is done as a side effect of impregnating women or as a side effect of medical research? Either way there is a for-profit market generating embryos destined to be destroyed.
You know, I, personally would never go through what some would go through to have a child. My wife and I were trying to have a second child and we got to the point where insurance would not cover it. I said we can't go any further. While it saddens me a little, I stil have my son. I do not want her to risk her life trying fertility drugs and possibly have 3 or more kids to take care of. Don't get me wrong, I love kids and God gave me a wonderful child to love everyday, but I personally feel if God wants us to have another child it will happen.....the normal, old fashioned way.
Maybe God is trying to tell you to adopt.
Re:Podcasting is right up there with blog...
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Podcasting
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· Score: 1
Dude. Podcasting is not streaming audio. The whole point is that you (typically) download the whole podcast to your device. In those terms, podcasting is simpler than streaming audio. On the other hand, podcasts are syndicated, which makes them quite different from plain audio files (whether streamed or downloaded).
So, MS walks away with 60K in their pocket per year, which is not much but it is better than zero. They also get the priceless publicity of a high profile organization going F/OSS and giving up.
They have also set a precedent and established the true value of their software in observer's minds.
My question: How is this different from any other major technological advance? For goodness sake, there were backlashes against the railroad, against the first steam engines. More recently we have backlashes against cloning, and nuclear power.
Some technologies disturb people due to the so-called "yuck" factor. They feel that it will lead to unemployment, societal breakdown or moral decay. Other technologies are aguably so dangerous that they threaten the very existence of human life (as opposed to the stability of human society). Cloning and steam engines could never have been construed threaten human life. Nuclear power might have been so-construed before it was properly understood. Nanontechnology is also so-construed. There is a 98% chance that everything will work out alright and we won't destroy all life on earth. But the other 2% chance is worth some thought and discussion rather than knee-jerk reaction. University is exactly the right forum for having that discussion.
The faith that new technology could never endanger human society is, in my opinion, in the same class as the faith that God (or aliens or leprechauns) will protect us.
Re:When the UN adopts the first amendment...
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U.N. To Govern Internet?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Google success has nothing to do with Q4 2005's financal statement (it has enough short-term cash), and everything to do with keeping the talented engineers it hired and keeping them motivated to outperform MSFT in the long term.
Talented engineering is necessary but not even NEAR sufficient to build an actual business. As the Economist says: maybe those engineers will come up with a cure for the common cold. Or maybe they'll come up with reams and reams of perpetually-beta services that are really technically cool but make no revenue whatsoever. Google has translated cool technology into massive revenue at least twice so far: 1. with advertisments on the original search engine and 2. with contextual adwords in other people's pages. Is this really enough to prove a sustainable talent of being able to actually make money? I would say: not yet.
in a few years we'll hear about jobs moving from India to Ethiopia, because the Indians are too picky about things like "wanting food feed their children" and "reducing the work week to 80 hours" to be competitive in the global marketplace.
It is amazing to me that anyone would see a shift of jobs to Ethiopia as a bad thing.
The people of Ethiopia would be very grateful for those jobs and I personally would be very happy to see them have them. Furthermore, the mere act of moving the jobs to Ethiopia would require massive infrastructure projects that would improve the lives of all Indians. You can't run an IT shop without stable electricity and Internet access and once the generators and fibre optics are installed it is easy to sell excess to individuals.
There are a finite number of people in the world. If we iteratively enrich each society then eventually there will be nowhere else to go. I see this as a much, much better situation to be in than in one where competition is restricted, North Americans and Europeans are coddled and Ethiopians starve.
Look around you people: the Chinese and Indians have been massively enriched over the last twenty years with barely any effect on the North American standard of living. We aren't living through some kind of nightmare. Quite the opposite: we are living in a wonderfully democratizing transfer of power and the creation of new wealth and new consumers.
I frankly long for the day when Ethiopia and the Sudan can participate as India and China have. I look forward to seeing "made in the Congo" on my t-shirt.
People do not "believe" in Star Trek in the sense that they believe it is _true_. They understand it is fiction and represents one of an infinite number of possible futures. A religious person believes that their religion is _true_ and uniquely so.
If the Mac Mini did more damage to desktop Linux, imagine a cheaper version, with higher clock rates that can do everything a Linux desktop can, but has more software available to purchase for it, and of course has Office on it. Now if your average user only cares about 'how fast it is, what it can do, and how much it costs' and you see the Mac Mini doing damage, then what will one that hits all of the points that the average user cares about do to desktop Linux.
What makes you think that the Mac mini is going to get either noticably cheaper or noticably faster than it is today? The CPU is only a small part of the price of a low-end computer and the Mac mini is "fast enough" for the target audience already. It isn't as if Apple is going to put the fastest Intel CPUs in the minis. PCs have dipped below $300. I doubt Macs are going to follow no matter what CPU they use.
Science must never be politically incorrect. It should be the truth, nothing more and nothing less.
Fair enough.
If you start to use political correct terms you water down the meaning.
but theres no need to use incorrect terms (AKA African-American if you're not from Africa) to please some minority
Oh yeah, the term "black" was so much more accurate to use when describing the group of Americans with African ancestry. Or "negro": black in French or Spanish -- that's so much better!
Maybe then we can get past the "everyone is equal" and "anyone can achieve anything" crap which has been holding Americas schools back.
I have never met a single person who believes that everyone has exactly the same innate intelligence, musical ability, etc. Everyone knows that different people have different talent.
Some of us just will never be able to draw, and some of us will never be able to handle geometry. Accepting this is critical to helping kids achieve greatness.
Sorry, now you're the one spouting bullshit. Of course you may never be able to draw like Leonardo Da Vinci. But with time and effort you can learn to draw to some level better than you do today. Similarly, except for actually disabled children, anyone can learn some geometry. I don't think it is politically correct to point out that the human brain is specifically designed to allow people to acquire new skills and that neither drawing nor geometry are outside the normal range of learnability. Maybe you hate drawing, as I do, and therefore don't want to put in the effort to achieve even minimal skills. Or maybe your teacher taught it incorrectly (I'm told that there is a very good technique for teaching non-drawers to look beyond objects at shapes) but you could learn it if you felt it important.
I don't find the rest of your rant compelling at all. Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
I always wonder what the hell SMB is doing in all that time? And how does a computer programmer design a protocol that is so inefficient? Astonishing! Microsoft does some good stuff. And some bad stuff. But SMB takes the cake: it should get an award for poor protocol design! It is often pathetic even over LANs. In other words, it is poor even when used in exactly the configuration that they must have optimized for!
I suppose this vision could require a collapse of civilization such that humans actually had to fill all the various niches in the ecosystem, but given 10 million years, I'd say that is pretty likely. It would be pretty gruesome in the beginning, with canabilism and whatnot being fairly common, but after a few hundred millenia it should shake out to a variety of different predators and prey subspecies quite readily.
Society can re-assert itself in somewhere between 100 and 10,000 years, depending on how much technology is lost. Every time society asserts itself, speciation would be halted or reversed.
Your vision of the future makes no sense to me. People are constantly coming up with new uses for general purpose computers and these new uses are demonstrably popular with end-users. If you had "cherry picked" the apps in 1993, you would have missed the Internet. If you had done it in 1999, you would have missed Napster. If you did it in 2003, you would have missed iTunes. Today you might miss BitTorrent or Podcasting.
Maybe we will eventually reach a point where we can push the general purpose computing to a remote server but then you are talking about serious dependence on third parties and probably subscription fees (how else are you going to expect QOS). But "experts" have been predicting this "thin client" vision for years and I'm pretty skeptical.
Perhaps Jobs does not like Podcasting because people who listen to Podcasts listen more to talk (e.g. Quirks and Quarks, IT Conversations) and less to music. Furthermore, a device focused on podcast listening requires very little memory (you delete them after listening) and a very simple user interface (you're usually selecting from just a few "channels"). A podcast-oriented chip might add a few dollars to the price of a cell phone and would be as utilitarian as an FM radio (probably dominated by science shows and right wing nutjobs) rather than sexy like an iPod. For podcasting to be interesting to Jobs they would have to find a way to work in music, DRM and ITMS, as some here have proposed.
Employment at IBM is voluntary. The workers can quit the relationship whenever they want. Why shouldn't the employer be able to do the same? Sometimes very valuable employees take their ideas to other companies and compete directly with their old companies. That's hard-nosed business: more power to them. Why can't the company be hard-nosed too?
Because their corporate charter is a social contract, issued in the expectation of receiving some societal benefit, like employment for citizens.
Is IBM laying off everybody in Europe?
Not in Europe. They actually retained some ideals from the Enlightenment, beyond their immediate usefulness in fomenting rebellion. You know, things like human rights come before other considerations, like profits.
If a lifelong job with IBM is now a human right then where do I sign up? I'm not much for big companies but you can't beat the job security of an ethically mandated JOB FOR LIFE.
Finally, somebody with a little common sense! Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts? I surely don't. It's faster to skim through articles in a blog than to listen to some amateur whine about how he thinks Walmart is the ultimate evil in the world.
Please download a couple of episodes of Quirks and Quarks. Then some IT Conversations. Then you'll see how wrong you are. There are vast swathes of Radio that make much more sense as podcasts than as over-the-air radio (oops, you missed it, too bad!). That's why podcasting will be huge, not random ranters.
Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist but I think that your view of evolution is too boolean. It isn't just about selecting for obviously fatal flaws. It is about tiny statistical advantages. That's how, for example, a species can slowly evolve to be bigger, one millimeter at a time. It isn't that being a millimeter smaller will get you killed every time, but it might give you a slightly larger chance of getting killed. Similarly, the faulty liver won't get you killed every time, but if you happen to be away from a hospital or get a poor doctor or a nurse who doesn't steralize instruments or you miss a breeding opportunity because you are in the hospital or you are allergic to the drugs they give you or... there are many ways that this could lead to a statistically weakened position.
Re:Safari on Windows?
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Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 2, Informative
I wonder if that means they are looking to port Safari to Windows.
An engineer saying that they would be _open_ to making a component's development tree multiplatform is a huge stretch from a product manager having made a product management decision to take an application and port it to another operating system. I really don't see any correspondance between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
The moral qualms come from the fact that today, they're discarded as a side effect of trying to help couples start a family; to bring a life into the world that will be cared for and nurtured, and to propagate our species.
If it is wrong to destroy embryos then what does it matter what the reason is? It isn't as if our species is in danger of extinction due to our low birth rate. People who want to have biological children want it. They don't need it to survive. How can the destruction of embryonic human beings be justified in order to give people want they merely want?
Furthermore, why would their wish for biological children take higher precedence than the saving of lives?
If the destruction of embryos is wrong, why does it matter whether it is done as a side effect of impregnating women or as a side effect of medical research? Either way there is a for-profit market generating embryos destined to be destroyed.
You know, I, personally would never go through what some would go through to have a child. My wife and I were trying to have a second child and we got to the point where insurance would not cover it. I said we can't go any further. While it saddens me a little, I stil have my son. I do not want her to risk her life trying fertility drugs and possibly have 3 or more kids to take care of. Don't get me wrong, I love kids and God gave me a wonderful child to love everyday, but I personally feel if God wants us to have another child it will happen.....the normal, old fashioned way.
Maybe God is trying to tell you to adopt.
Dude. Podcasting is not streaming audio. The whole point is that you (typically) download the whole podcast to your device. In those terms, podcasting is simpler than streaming audio. On the other hand, podcasts are syndicated, which makes them quite different from plain audio files (whether streamed or downloaded).
They have also set a precedent and established the true value of their software in observer's minds.
A tecnnical overview for a web browser in ".doc" format. Oh, Microsoft, will ye never change? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=718E9B3A-64FE-4A4C-9DDF-57AF0472EAD2&displa ylang=en
My question: How is this different from any other major technological advance? For goodness sake, there were backlashes against the railroad, against the first steam engines. More recently we have backlashes against cloning, and nuclear power.
Some technologies disturb people due to the so-called "yuck" factor. They feel that it will lead to unemployment, societal breakdown or moral decay. Other technologies are aguably so dangerous that they threaten the very existence of human life (as opposed to the stability of human society). Cloning and steam engines could never have been construed threaten human life. Nuclear power might have been so-construed before it was properly understood. Nanontechnology is also so-construed. There is a 98% chance that everything will work out alright and we won't destroy all life on earth. But the other 2% chance is worth some thought and discussion rather than knee-jerk reaction. University is exactly the right forum for having that discussion.
The faith that new technology could never endanger human society is, in my opinion, in the same class as the faith that God (or aliens or leprechauns) will protect us.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Google success has nothing to do with Q4 2005's financal statement (it has enough short-term cash), and everything to do with keeping the talented engineers it hired and keeping them motivated to outperform MSFT in the long term.
Talented engineering is necessary but not even NEAR sufficient to build an actual business. As the Economist says: maybe those engineers will come up with a cure for the common cold. Or maybe they'll come up with reams and reams of perpetually-beta services that are really technically cool but make no revenue whatsoever. Google has translated cool technology into massive revenue at least twice so far: 1. with advertisments on the original search engine and 2. with contextual adwords in other people's pages. Is this really enough to prove a sustainable talent of being able to actually make money? I would say: not yet.
i>I don't know of any major corporation which has made significant donations back to the BSD core.
What about all of the companies that have contributed to Apache, which is licensed almost the same way that BSD is?
in a few years we'll hear about jobs moving from India to Ethiopia, because the Indians are too picky about things like "wanting food feed their children" and "reducing the work week to 80 hours" to be competitive in the global marketplace.
It is amazing to me that anyone would see a shift of jobs to Ethiopia as a bad thing.
The people of Ethiopia would be very grateful for those jobs and I personally would be very happy to see them have them. Furthermore, the mere act of moving the jobs to Ethiopia would require massive infrastructure projects that would improve the lives of all Indians. You can't run an IT shop without stable electricity and Internet access and once the generators and fibre optics are installed it is easy to sell excess to individuals.
There are a finite number of people in the world. If we iteratively enrich each society then eventually there will be nowhere else to go. I see this as a much, much better situation to be in than in one where competition is restricted, North Americans and Europeans are coddled and Ethiopians starve.
Look around you people: the Chinese and Indians have been massively enriched over the last twenty years with barely any effect on the North American standard of living. We aren't living through some kind of nightmare. Quite the opposite: we are living in a wonderfully democratizing transfer of power and the creation of new wealth and new consumers.
I frankly long for the day when Ethiopia and the Sudan can participate as India and China have. I look forward to seeing "made in the Congo" on my t-shirt.
People do not "believe" in Star Trek in the sense that they believe it is _true_. They understand it is fiction and represents one of an infinite number of possible futures. A religious person believes that their religion is _true_ and uniquely so.
If the Mac Mini did more damage to desktop Linux, imagine a cheaper version, with higher clock rates that can do everything a Linux desktop can, but has more software available to purchase for it, and of course has Office on it. Now if your average user only cares about 'how fast it is, what it can do, and how much it costs' and you see the Mac Mini doing damage, then what will one that hits all of the points that the average user cares about do to desktop Linux.
What makes you think that the Mac mini is going to get either noticably cheaper or noticably faster than it is today? The CPU is only a small part of the price of a low-end computer and the Mac mini is "fast enough" for the target audience already. It isn't as if Apple is going to put the fastest Intel CPUs in the minis. PCs have dipped below $300. I doubt Macs are going to follow no matter what CPU they use.
Science must never be politically incorrect. It should be the truth, nothing more and nothing less.
Fair enough.
If you start to use political correct terms you water down the meaning.
but theres no need to use incorrect terms (AKA African-American if you're not from Africa) to please some minority
Oh yeah, the term "black" was so much more accurate to use when describing the group of Americans with African ancestry. Or "negro": black in French or Spanish -- that's so much better!
Maybe then we can get past the "everyone is equal" and "anyone can achieve anything" crap which has been holding Americas schools back.
I have never met a single person who believes that everyone has exactly the same innate intelligence, musical ability, etc. Everyone knows that different people have different talent.
Some of us just will never be able to draw, and some of us will never be able to handle geometry. Accepting this is critical to helping kids achieve greatness.
Sorry, now you're the one spouting bullshit. Of course you may never be able to draw like Leonardo Da Vinci. But with time and effort you can learn to draw to some level better than you do today. Similarly, except for actually disabled children, anyone can learn some geometry. I don't think it is politically correct to point out that the human brain is specifically designed to allow people to acquire new skills and that neither drawing nor geometry are outside the normal range of learnability. Maybe you hate drawing, as I do, and therefore don't want to put in the effort to achieve even minimal skills. Or maybe your teacher taught it incorrectly (I'm told that there is a very good technique for teaching non-drawers to look beyond objects at shapes) but you could learn it if you felt it important.
I don't find the rest of your rant compelling at all. Most people who are depressed are so because of biochemical imbalances and not because their teachers overpraised them as children.
I always wonder what the hell SMB is doing in all that time? And how does a computer programmer design a protocol that is so inefficient? Astonishing! Microsoft does some good stuff. And some bad stuff. But SMB takes the cake: it should get an award for poor protocol design! It is often pathetic even over LANs. In other words, it is poor even when used in exactly the configuration that they must have optimized for!
I suppose this vision could require a collapse of civilization such that humans actually had to fill all the various niches in the ecosystem, but given 10 million years, I'd say that is pretty likely. It would be pretty gruesome in the beginning, with canabilism and whatnot being fairly common, but after a few hundred millenia it should shake out to a variety of different predators and prey subspecies quite readily.
Society can re-assert itself in somewhere between 100 and 10,000 years, depending on how much technology is lost. Every time society asserts itself, speciation would be halted or reversed.
Your vision of the future makes no sense to me. People are constantly coming up with new uses for general purpose computers and these new uses are demonstrably popular with end-users. If you had "cherry picked" the apps in 1993, you would have missed the Internet. If you had done it in 1999, you would have missed Napster. If you did it in 2003, you would have missed iTunes. Today you might miss BitTorrent or Podcasting.
Maybe we will eventually reach a point where we can push the general purpose computing to a remote server but then you are talking about serious dependence on third parties and probably subscription fees (how else are you going to expect QOS). But "experts" have been predicting this "thin client" vision for years and I'm pretty skeptical.
Mod parent up. +3 funny.
Perhaps Jobs does not like Podcasting because people who listen to Podcasts listen more to talk (e.g. Quirks and Quarks, IT Conversations) and less to music. Furthermore, a device focused on podcast listening requires very little memory (you delete them after listening) and a very simple user interface (you're usually selecting from just a few "channels"). A podcast-oriented chip might add a few dollars to the price of a cell phone and would be as utilitarian as an FM radio (probably dominated by science shows and right wing nutjobs) rather than sexy like an iPod. For podcasting to be interesting to Jobs they would have to find a way to work in music, DRM and ITMS, as some here have proposed.
Employment is NOT voluntary.
Employment at IBM is voluntary. The workers can quit the relationship whenever they want. Why shouldn't the employer be able to do the same? Sometimes very valuable employees take their ideas to other companies and compete directly with their old companies. That's hard-nosed business: more power to them. Why can't the company be hard-nosed too?
Because their corporate charter is a social contract, issued in the expectation of receiving some societal benefit, like employment for citizens.
Is IBM laying off everybody in Europe?
Not in Europe. They actually retained some ideals from the Enlightenment, beyond their immediate usefulness in fomenting rebellion. You know, things like human rights come before other considerations, like profits.
If a lifelong job with IBM is now a human right then where do I sign up? I'm not much for big companies but you can't beat the job security of an ethically mandated JOB FOR LIFE.
Finally, somebody with a little common sense! Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts? I surely don't. It's faster to skim through articles in a blog than to listen to some amateur whine about how he thinks Walmart is the ultimate evil in the world.
Please download a couple of episodes of Quirks and Quarks. Then some IT Conversations. Then you'll see how wrong you are. There are vast swathes of Radio that make much more sense as podcasts than as over-the-air radio (oops, you missed it, too bad!). That's why podcasting will be huge, not random ranters.
Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist but I think that your view of evolution is too boolean. It isn't just about selecting for obviously fatal flaws. It is about tiny statistical advantages. That's how, for example, a species can slowly evolve to be bigger, one millimeter at a time. It isn't that being a millimeter smaller will get you killed every time, but it might give you a slightly larger chance of getting killed. Similarly, the faulty liver won't get you killed every time, but if you happen to be away from a hospital or get a poor doctor or a nurse who doesn't steralize instruments or you miss a breeding opportunity because you are in the hospital or you are allergic to the drugs they give you or ... there are many ways that this could lead to a statistically weakened position.
I wonder if that means they are looking to port Safari to Windows.
An engineer saying that they would be _open_ to making a component's development tree multiplatform is a huge stretch from a product manager having made a product management decision to take an application and port it to another operating system. I really don't see any correspondance between the two.