None of what you just wrote has anything to do with the stupidity that you previously wrote: At least those used so far. I hope it never moves beyond that.
35 years ago, truck bombs went beyond just fear. Suicide vests... 25 years ago? Bombs in British postal boxes 40+ years ago.
Whatever you want to call them - do you think that they would not be entitled to, at the minimum, a right to life to the same degree as humans (i.e. killing them should be treated as murder)?
Only if they can fight for them. "Our Creator" didn't endow man with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: men fought other men for those rights.
"Wait!!", you say. "Babies and Down's Syndrome people, and people in iron lungs can't fight. They must not be human, either!!" To that I reply, "They came from humans, so must be humans."
but not all humans have 23 chromosomes
You ignored the other differences.
Down syndrome
Interestingly -- and off topic -- males with DS have never been known to reproduce, and only 1/6 to 1/3 of DS females are fertile.
Ultimately, all this is just accumulated mutations and selection of them over the course of that 6 million years of divergence.
Why stop at six million? Why not regress back to 90 Mya and the first placental mammals? Or even further to the probainognathians, cynodonts, synapsids, amniotes, chordata, animalia, eukaryotes, bacteria, all the way back to the Last Universal Ancestor? Call everything human.
If you could incrementally edit a chimp's genome to make it human, at which point during the process is it "human enough"?
I don't know that.
But we do know that if it comes from the joining of male & female DNA, then it's human. And that's Good Enough.
The primary difference is that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than do other great apes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and other great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes.... There are nine other major chromosomal differences between chimpanzees and humans: chromosome segment inversions on human chromosomes 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6âmillion years. The chimpanzee MSY contains twice as many massive palindromes as the human MSY, yet it has lost large fractions of the MSY protein-coding genes and gene families present in the last common ancestor.
You can't boil the argument down without agreeing on what the argument is about.
Anyone intelligent enough to post on/. is intelligent enough to know that half the DNA isn't enough. (It's also why the Roman Catholic "every sperm is sacred" doctrine is so silly.)
And it's a valid question to ask whether they should have the same rights as a self-aware human being.
Quoting "The Interpersonal World of the Infant", 1985, p. 165: Prior to the age of eighteen months, infants do not seem to know that what they are seeing in a mirror is their own reflection. After eighteen months, they do.
Thus, if self-awareness is the measure of humanity/personhood, it's just as ok to "put down" an eighteen month old human as it is to kill an unwanted dog.
you're not basing your definition of rights on whether someone is a person or not. You're basing it on whether they're human or not
I fail to see the difference between the two. The Wikipedia article just demonstrates a bunch of philosophical BS.
don't see why this is, in principle, any better than denying on a scattering of other genetic markers that correspond to dark skin etc.
Where did I indicate such a thing???
Biology is irrelevant here
It is relevant, because with it you boil the argument down to objective facts instead of philosophical and socio-political arguments.
laws prohibiting abortion force those who are not to bow to my beliefs and surrender their own.
And what about my belief that stupid people should be shot hit the head?
If you say something about my freedom stopping at his nose, then I remind you that the baby's right to live stops at the aborter's saline injection, scraping blade, etc.
We, as humans dealing with other humans, assume that they will act with a modicum of sense. But there are a jillion leeches out there who don't, so it's no one's fault but ours for saying (you are) welcome to the food in my kitchen instead of the just-as-friendly you're welcome to a meal in my kitchen.
And businesses love screwing people over with fine print, so they deserve every bit of screwing over that they get from non-existent fine print.
Slashdot Mirror
So there's only terrorism and WMDs?
None of what you just wrote has anything to do with the stupidity that you previously wrote: At least those used so far. I hope it never moves beyond that.
35 years ago, truck bombs went beyond just fear. Suicide vests... 25 years ago? Bombs in British postal boxes 40+ years ago.
So, like, every terrorist weapon?
That's the most ignorant thing I've read this month (and there's a lot of ignorance on YT).
At least those used so far.
Suicide vests and truck bombs (which actually kill and maim people) spring instantly to mind.
A fear weapon aimed at panicky fools and the media that preys on and inflames their ignorance with hysterical half-truths.
Therefore, we should chisel all data onto stone tablets!!
Way to leap to wholly unwarranted conclusions, Gerry!!!
As long as our descendants have the high technology to read it!!!
I did watch them. Four and a half minutes, and nothing about the UI.
"redesigned user interface for improved ease of use"?
If it went "ribbon", that'll suck rocks.
Nitrogen ices at these temperatures, while crystalline, have rather low viscosity.
So the nitrogen doesn't form one huge crystal?
If you put weight on them, they slowly diffuse around it until the object either sinks or is buoyantly balanced out.
No jagged edges to interlock?
NASA used the term "float"
Thanks.
because the water ice is less dense than the ice dominated by nitrogen
Ice -- whether water or nitrogen -- is solid. Thus, there is no displacement of nitrogen ice by water ice. Ergo, no floating.
Another example might be a block of ice sitting on a bar of lead. It's not displacing any lead, so it's not floating.
WTF???
I can imagine them slowly sliding downhill, but "blastingnews" seems to not know what "float" means.
You forgot the Dystopian future.
A more pertinent question is, "Who -- besides dweebs -- says the ever-looming cyberpunk future is in close proximity?"
This is a perfect example of "[citation needed]".
Milk -- in the US, at least -- is Vitamin D enriched.
Whatever you want to call them - do you think that they would not be entitled to, at the minimum, a right to life to the same degree as humans (i.e. killing them should be treated as murder)?
Only if they can fight for them. "Our Creator" didn't endow man with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: men fought other men for those rights.
"Wait!!", you say. "Babies and Down's Syndrome people, and people in iron lungs can't fight. They must not be human, either!!" To that I reply, "They came from humans, so must be humans."
but not all humans have 23 chromosomes
You ignored the other differences.
Down syndrome
Interestingly -- and off topic -- males with DS have never been known to reproduce, and only 1/6 to 1/3 of DS females are fertile.
Ultimately, all this is just accumulated mutations and selection of them over the course of that 6 million years of divergence.
Why stop at six million? Why not regress back to 90 Mya and the first placental mammals? Or even further to the probainognathians, cynodonts, synapsids, amniotes, chordata, animalia, eukaryotes, bacteria, all the way back to the Last Universal Ancestor? Call everything human.
If you could incrementally edit a chimp's genome to make it human, at which point during the process is it "human enough"?
I don't know that.
But we do know that if it comes from the joining of male & female DNA, then it's human. And that's Good Enough.
surely you can imagine a hypothetical non-human person, even under whatever subjective definition you subscribe to?
No, I can't.
suppose we do determine that dolphins are "intelligent enough" ... would that not make them persons?
No. It would make them sentient dolphins, not "non-human people".
you'll have to show a difference in quality rather than quantity of differences
Easy peasy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee_genome_project
The primary difference is that humans have one fewer pair of chromosomes than do other great apes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and other great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes. ... There are nine other major chromosomal differences between chimpanzees and humans: chromosome segment inversions on human chromosomes 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08700.html
we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6âmillion years. The chimpanzee MSY contains twice as many massive palindromes as the human MSY, yet it has lost large fractions of the MSY protein-coding genes and gene families present in the last common ancestor.
You can't boil the argument down without agreeing on what the argument is about.
That's for sure... :)
Why not the egg? Why not before?
Anyone intelligent enough to post on /. is intelligent enough to know that half the DNA isn't enough. (It's also why the Roman Catholic "every sperm is sacred" doctrine is so silly.)
And it's a valid question to ask whether they should have the same rights as a self-aware human being.
Quoting "The Interpersonal World of the Infant", 1985, p. 165: Prior to the age of eighteen months, infants do not seem to know that what they are seeing in a mirror is their own reflection. After eighteen months, they do.
Thus, if self-awareness is the measure of humanity/personhood, it's just as ok to "put down" an eighteen month old human as it is to kill an unwanted dog.
you're not basing your definition of rights on whether someone is a person or not. You're basing it on whether they're human or not
I fail to see the difference between the two. The Wikipedia article just demonstrates a bunch of philosophical BS.
don't see why this is, in principle, any better than denying on a scattering of other genetic markers that correspond to dark skin etc.
Where did I indicate such a thing???
Biology is irrelevant here
It is relevant, because with it you boil the argument down to objective facts instead of philosophical and socio-political arguments.
So self-awareness, and brain in general, is not required to be a person?
Excellent question!
Answer, part #1: Because the the human brain develops naturally from that zygote.
Answer, part #2: Babies with severe microcephaly have no self-awareness, but are still humans.
why don't they get all the same rights that a person should?
Just because they have a wrong DNA?
Because their DNA is not human. Even when it functions properly, it doesn't produce the panoply of features required for humanness.
Does it also apply to humans with "the wrong DNA" (e.g. not sufficiently white)?
Only for people without a competent understanding of biology.
(Carl Sagan should have stuck to astronomy.)
I'm in the zygote camp of personhood, since it's when your own unique DNA starts the self-sustaining processes which is "life".
That is an Authoritarian viewpoint.
No. The Authoritarian viewpoint would be that stupid people must be shot hit the head.
if the state incubated the fetus
That's not very Libertarian. In fact, it's downright Brave New World.
laws prohibiting abortion force those who are not to bow to my beliefs and surrender their own.
And what about my belief that stupid people should be shot hit the head?
If you say something about my freedom stopping at his nose, then I remind you that the baby's right to live stops at the aborter's saline injection, scraping blade, etc.
We, as humans dealing with other humans, assume that they will act with a modicum of sense. But there are a jillion leeches out there who don't, so it's no one's fault but ours for saying (you are) welcome to the food in my kitchen instead of the just-as-friendly you're welcome to a meal in my kitchen.
And businesses love screwing people over with fine print, so they deserve every bit of screwing over that they get from non-existent fine print.
If I told my friend they were welcome to the food in my kitchen, that would obviously mean they were welcome to cook themselves a meal at my house
No, it's not obvious.
not that they were welcome to take all my food instead of buying their own groceries.
That's exactly what (you are) welcome to the food in my kitchen means.
There are earthquakes in the ocean, and anchors cut cables on a distressingly regular basis.
International Waters are 12 miles, not 3/5 of a mile.