There might be no objective reason not to have them, but it seems a bit sketchy (to say the least) from an ethical point of view to consciously create a person (and by this I don't mean genetically modifying an embryo, but going further and implanting it and it being carried to term and born) that would spend the rest of his or her life as a lab rat, not find an adequate place in society, etc etc.
Whilst what you say makes sense, I think the above poster confused human with person. Of course an embryo is human - a person, not so sure (personally I would say no).
And though a lot of people try to center the debate around abortion on personhood of the embryo / fetus, they miss the point. It is about bodily autonomy, about whether the state can force gestation on a woman, and about granting rights to a subset of humans which no one else has - the right to make use of another's organs.
I personally see no problem to "killing" these embryos.
Yet I would never claim that they are not human or alive. Their DNA is human, therefore they are human (modified, but still). A bunch of self-replicating cells is alive if said cells are alive and replicating.
Viable is a different thing. And it is also pretty obvious that those embryos are in no viable if they stay in their cozy petri dish.
As I've said, I personally see no problem with this; but if you do, maybe take it up with fertility clinics which follow the same type of procedures (minus the modifying part) with IVF and oftentimes have a surplus of embryos which are not implanted. And then it depends on the local legislation as to what is done with them - but implantation and carrying them to term is not.
It would be interesting to see people's views on said modifications, specially for an ethical point of view. Also, what safeguards are in place to ensure they are not implanted, as the scientists claim.
Not really going into the argument itself or answering the question that was posted - but autonomous it is not.
Show me a zygote / embryo / fetus created in a lab that can survive by itself.
No, he wasn't approved to use the two venues. This is largely a matter of resource scheduling at most Universities. It's not an attempt from on-high at silencing people. He was invited by two student groups to give a lecture (so a lot of people wanted to hear him talk). Generally professors or instructors don't need "permission" to lecture.
You're wrong there. From what I've read from his blog; he booked a first venue for the talk and it was approved, but the day before he was told that it suddenly wasn't available, and there was no other place he could book, so a student booked another venue in the Student Hall (and there were no problems when booking it, since it was a student who booked it), only to be told on the actual day of the talk that he couldn't give it there. As for the third venue he mentions....I can't remember right now, and I really don't feel like rereading his blog:)
But it is true, in Spain. At least with current laws; just as long as you are not obtaining profits from those downloads, P2P is absolutely legal at the moment.
Is this the first time Apple releases software that works on Windows? If it is, it seems like they are doing the smart thing in order to gain switchers. Now the question is wether we'll eventually see Mac OS X for x86...........
Okey, so if it was already there then forget about the copying thing and lets ask ourselves: what's with marketing supposedly new features that are already present in your OS?
As previously discussed, Apple is doing this with some of those 200 "new" features that can be found in Tiger; and MS also does it.
Should KDE (or Gnome or whatever) announce such innovative features (just pick a bunch of features that have been there for a while, are usually not available with default settings in most distros, or are somewhat "obscure" and only known to power users) in their next release? That would certainly make the list of "new features" grow significantly for each release:-P
Probably not, but this problem and the way to achieve the magical tour have been going around for quite a few centuries, with some of the brightest minds trying to work on it. So even if it doesn't have practical applications it's still important.
It may be one man, one vote, but that man is the picture of a dead president printed on green paper, and the more of them you have, the more votes you have.
He's the man, he has the vote!
Re:Justifying costs isn't strange, is it?
on
Open Source in Oregon
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What's so srtange about having to justify paying for something, it being software or something else?
Well, nobody pays for their M$ software anymore, everyone has a friend who has a friend who can burn him/her the latest Windows/Office/etc; I guess it is no longer considered normal to pay sw licences where applicable. Oh, wait, nevermind, that's not legal...
For other ignorant readers like myself who read the above comment and either didn't know what those changes meant or started wondering whether his/her own systems were secure enough:
Also, if someone decides to translate a GFDL'd document, they are not allowed to translate the invariant section, so they have a 400 page book in spanish with 12 pages of some silly language that the readership cannot understand stuck at the back.
I'm probably mixing things up, but I got the impression that as long as it ended up saying the same thing you could translate the invariant section.
The reason I think that is has to do with the answer the FSF gave to questions on PHP-Nuke's licence, which though it is GPL, forbids people from modifying a copyright notice which is supposed to appear at the bottom on a nuke site. The FSF said that id the author said you couldn't modify it you couldn't erase it, but that it was OK to translate it if the meaning didn't change. So I guess the same should aply to these invariant sections.
Europe has the potential to be a world power... as soon as we stop quarelling and dissing each other; and as soon as there's a real sense of unity - when I can say I'm European before saying I'm Spanish. So, apparantly, that won't happen in the near future.:)
Something like that; but I know a Deb Developer who makes unofficial packages for qmail and keeps them up do date, and I got qmail from. But of course, till I read your answer and actually started googling a little bit I had no idea - I though it was part of Debian (I originally had this guy's mirror in my sources.list for other packages).
Ok, some of this didn't make any sense, my fault for not previewing - ingnore the "(or which some people, a lot of which hang out on Slashdot:))". Now that I see I don't even know what it was supossed to mean!
What does this have to do with the fact that they've stopped using Word? I'm not saying that the Chinese government is great, far from it, but I think you are mixing things up and maybe missing the point.
The fact that you (and a lot of people, myself included) don't agree with what's going on in China doesn't mean that we can't recognize when it does something right, which I think is the aim of the article.
As I far as I can see, it is always a good thing when governments, no matter what country or political system, begin considering alternatives to M$, and even better when they actually decide to adopt them because they've seen how it can be "better" (lots of reasons for that which I'm sure have been posted on Slashdot thousands of times, so I'm not going to go into that).
This is even more significant when we're talking about one of the most important countries in Asia, and that this only shows a trend amongst siginficative countries and cities which are beginning to seriously consider OSS.
OTOH, China's government is repressive and dicatorial, which is certainly no good thing; but that doesn't mean that they can't do something right (or which some people, a lot of which hang out on Slashdot:)) and get recognition for it.
All I hope is that more countries/governments start getting the message and move away from the "M$ is our salvation" dogma that is so common amongst not so technical people.
That sounds good, but how far out of date is stable? Do your lab users get annoyed with running old software? I'm especially thinking of browsers, where there's a strong incentive to run the newest. Can you use apt-get to install a package that's not in stable? Or would it break due to dependencies?
Of course you can, and it is one of the nicest things about Debian. All you need is a little preferences file stating what other releases you might want to download.deb's from and the appropiate source lines. After that apt-get install package will install from stable as usual, but if you wanted that package from unstable you'd only have to do apt-get install package/unstable and that's it!
Occasionally you'll run into a few dependencies (not dependency hell, but maybe one or two packages need to be from unstable as well); in that case all you need to do is add them to the original apt-get line specifying that they have to be from unstable as well.
It might sound a little complicated at first but it's really very easy and makes Debian much more versatile. And it means that you can have stable packages and new ones at the same time.
Realistically, how do you run an up-to-date Mozilla/Galeon/whatever on Debian?
Same as above, or if you think that even the unstable mozilla is a little old for you all you have to do is get another source for your mozilla packages and add it to sources.list. This, for example, is what most people who wanted to try KDE3 before it was even included in unstable but couldn't be bothered to compile did.
I have run into the situation with Debian of a package being upgraded and breaking things.
On stable? That should never happen on stable.
That happened to me! It was qmail and I don't even know why it stopped working after upgrading though I guess it was somehow my fault, but just in case it happens again I've put qmail on hold and won't upgrade it as long as it works fine the way it is:)
Do you think anyone will notice, or care for that matter?
Well, isn't the last Microsoft virus supposed to "attack" windowsupdate.com tomorrow? That might be an explanation as to why they are changing this - they obviously don't trust their own users to keep their systems patched and/or behing firewalls... oh, wait, maybe they don't trust their own systems and sysadmins to be able to deal with it!
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what Purgatory is for?
Shame you posted as an AC. Insighful indeed, wish I could mod you up.
There might be no objective reason not to have them, but it seems a bit sketchy (to say the least) from an ethical point of view to consciously create a person (and by this I don't mean genetically modifying an embryo, but going further and implanting it and it being carried to term and born) that would spend the rest of his or her life as a lab rat, not find an adequate place in society, etc etc.
Whilst what you say makes sense, I think the above poster confused human with person. Of course an embryo is human - a person, not so sure (personally I would say no).
And though a lot of people try to center the debate around abortion on personhood of the embryo / fetus, they miss the point. It is about bodily autonomy, about whether the state can force gestation on a woman, and about granting rights to a subset of humans which no one else has - the right to make use of another's organs.
I personally see no problem to "killing" these embryos.
Yet I would never claim that they are not human or alive. Their DNA is human, therefore they are human (modified, but still). A bunch of self-replicating cells is alive if said cells are alive and replicating.
Viable is a different thing. And it is also pretty obvious that those embryos are in no viable if they stay in their cozy petri dish.
As I've said, I personally see no problem with this; but if you do, maybe take it up with fertility clinics which follow the same type of procedures (minus the modifying part) with IVF and oftentimes have a surplus of embryos which are not implanted. And then it depends on the local legislation as to what is done with them - but implantation and carrying them to term is not.
It would be interesting to see people's views on said modifications, specially for an ethical point of view. Also, what safeguards are in place to ensure they are not implanted, as the scientists claim.
Not really going into the argument itself or answering the question that was posted - but autonomous it is not. Show me a zygote / embryo / fetus created in a lab that can survive by itself.
No, he wasn't approved to use the two venues. This is largely a matter of resource scheduling at most Universities. It's not an attempt from on-high at silencing people. He was invited by two student groups to give a lecture (so a lot of people wanted to hear him talk). Generally professors or instructors don't need "permission" to lecture.
:)
You're wrong there. From what I've read from his blog; he booked a first venue for the talk and it was approved, but the day before he was told that it suddenly wasn't available, and there was no other place he could book, so a student booked another venue in the Student Hall (and there were no problems when booking it, since it was a student who booked it), only to be told on the actual day of the talk that he couldn't give it there. As for the third venue he mentions....I can't remember right now, and I really don't feel like rereading his blog
But it is true, in Spain. At least with current laws; just as long as you are not obtaining profits from those downloads, P2P is absolutely legal at the moment.
Yes, I was forgetting about them :)
But what I meant was that this seems to be different since it is something that is apparently more tightly tied in to how the OS work, IMHO.
Is this the first time Apple releases software that works on Windows? If it is, it seems like they are doing the smart thing in order to gain switchers. Now the question is wether we'll eventually see Mac OS X for x86...........
Okey, so if it was already there then forget about the copying thing and lets ask ourselves: what's with marketing supposedly new features that are already present in your OS?
:-P
As previously discussed, Apple is doing this with some of those 200 "new" features that can be found in Tiger; and MS also does it.
Should KDE (or Gnome or whatever) announce such innovative features (just pick a bunch of features that have been there for a while, are usually not available with default settings in most distros, or are somewhat "obscure" and only known to power users) in their next release? That would certainly make the list of "new features" grow significantly for each release
Probably not, but this problem and the way to achieve the magical tour have been going around for quite a few centuries, with some of the brightest minds trying to work on it. So even if it doesn't have practical applications it's still important.
One Man, One Vote...
It may be one man, one vote, but that man is the picture of a dead president printed on green paper, and the more of them you have, the more votes you have.
He's the man, he has the vote!
What's so srtange about having to justify paying for something, it being software or something else?
Well, nobody pays for their M$ software anymore, everyone has a friend who has a friend who can burn him/her the latest Windows/Office/etc; I guess it is no longer considered normal to pay sw licences where applicable. Oh, wait, nevermind, that's not legal...
>
I thought semen was odourless?
Think again. OTOH, pizza & sweat are definetly _not_ odourless.
OMG
:)
For other ignorant readers like myself who read the above comment and either didn't know what those changes meant or started wondering whether his/her own systems were secure enough:
Securing Debian
Also, if someone decides to translate a GFDL'd document, they are not allowed to translate the invariant section, so they have a 400 page book in spanish with 12 pages of some silly language that the readership cannot understand stuck at the back.
I'm probably mixing things up, but I got the impression that as long as it ended up saying the same thing you could translate the invariant section.
The reason I think that is has to do with the answer the FSF gave to questions on PHP-Nuke's licence, which though it is GPL, forbids people from modifying a copyright notice which is supposed to appear at the bottom on a nuke site. The FSF said that id the author said you couldn't modify it you couldn't erase it, but that it was OK to translate it if the meaning didn't change. So I guess the same should aply to these invariant sections.
Europe is a world power?
:)
Europe has the potential to be a world power... as soon as we stop quarelling and dissing each other; and as soon as there's a real sense of unity - when I can say I'm European before saying I'm Spanish. So, apparantly, that won't happen in the near future.
Something like that; but I know a Deb Developer who makes unofficial packages for qmail and keeps them up do date, and I got qmail from. But of course, till I read your answer and actually started googling a little bit I had no idea - I though it was part of Debian (I originally had this guy's mirror in my sources.list for other packages).
Ok, some of this didn't make any sense, my fault for not previewing - ingnore the "(or which some people, a lot of which hang out on Slashdot :))". Now that I see I don't even know what it was supossed to mean!
What does this have to do with the fact that they've stopped using Word? I'm not saying that the Chinese government is great, far from it, but I think you are mixing things up and maybe missing the point.
:)) and get recognition for it.
The fact that you (and a lot of people, myself included) don't agree with what's going on in China doesn't mean that we can't recognize when it does something right, which I think is the aim of the article.
As I far as I can see, it is always a good thing when governments, no matter what country or political system, begin considering alternatives to M$, and even better when they actually decide to adopt them because they've seen how it can be "better" (lots of reasons for that which I'm sure have been posted on Slashdot thousands of times, so I'm not going to go into that).
This is even more significant when we're talking about one of the most important countries in Asia, and that this only shows a trend amongst siginficative countries and cities which are beginning to seriously consider OSS.
OTOH, China's government is repressive and dicatorial, which is certainly no good thing; but that doesn't mean that they can't do something right (or which some people, a lot of which hang out on Slashdot
All I hope is that more countries/governments start getting the message and move away from the "M$ is our salvation" dogma that is so common amongst not so technical people.
That sounds good, but how far out of date is stable? Do your lab users get annoyed with running old software? I'm especially thinking of browsers, where there's a strong incentive to run the newest. Can you use apt-get to install a package that's not in stable? Or would it break due to dependencies?
.deb's from and the appropiate source lines. After that apt-get install package will install from stable as usual, but if you wanted that package from unstable you'd only have to do apt-get install package/unstable and that's it!
Of course you can, and it is one of the nicest things about Debian. All you need is a little preferences file stating what other releases you might want to download
Occasionally you'll run into a few dependencies (not dependency hell, but maybe one or two packages need to be from unstable as well); in that case all you need to do is add them to the original apt-get line specifying that they have to be from unstable as well.
It might sound a little complicated at first but it's really very easy and makes Debian much more versatile. And it means that you can have stable packages and new ones at the same time.
Realistically, how do you run an up-to-date Mozilla/Galeon/whatever on Debian?
Same as above, or if you think that even the unstable mozilla is a little old for you all you have to do is get another source for your mozilla packages and add it to sources.list. This, for example, is what most people who wanted to try KDE3 before it was even included in unstable but couldn't be bothered to compile did.
I have run into the situation with Debian of a package being upgraded and breaking things.
:)
On stable? That should never happen on stable.
That happened to me! It was qmail and I don't even know why it stopped working after upgrading though I guess it was somehow my fault, but just in case it happens again I've put qmail on hold and won't upgrade it as long as it works fine the way it is
Do you think anyone will notice, or care for that matter?
... oh, wait, maybe they don't trust their own systems and sysadmins to be able to deal with it!
Well, isn't the last Microsoft virus supposed to "attack" windowsupdate.com tomorrow? That might be an explanation as to why they are changing this - they obviously don't trust their own users to keep their systems patched and/or behing firewalls