Could this be why you're having trouble keeping a girlfriend?
If you can't define a clear, definable and measurable event, then you're relying on "statistical personhood"
Shifting to serious answers, one would be to err on the side of caution.
Another would be: the potential abortee starts out as a fertilised egg with perhaps zero rights and ends as a human being with full rights. You seem to be assuming that there's a moment in-between where it quantum jumps from one to the other but it probably makes more sense to assume it's continuous. In which case somewhere in-between it has the rights of, for instance, a dog. In that case we might only be committing mild violations of rights, though rather more often. People tend to be uncomfortable with seeing personhood as continuous, though.
Caveat: I am biologically incapable of requiring an abortion.
Since when evolution guarantees an optimal anatomical structure?
Evolution is pretty good at finding local hilltops. It may have trouble figuring out it needs to get off this hill to reach a higher one over there. The short term advantage for whales, when they first went aquatic, was probably to reduce their hair. They've climbed that hill to nakedness and now they can't see their way to a skin covered in spider hair.
If the whale body is "good enough" to survive and reproduce under the environmental conditions whales tend to live in
This is a bad interpretation of Darwinism. Under natural conditions there were always some whales under stress and dying for one reason or another, otherwise the whale population would increase until there were. If better skin would have saved the dying whales then evolution would have selected for better skin. Which I'm sure it did, even if it didn't achieve perfect skin, what they have now is obviously better than the average artiodactyl's.
then why they should have evolved the same microscopic hairs that we see in spiders?
Good question. One answer is that I'm not sure what effect little hairs would have on whales. They're so big that they're obviously way into the high Reynolds number regime where pressure drag dominates over skin friction. In that environment it's not always intuitive what you want your skin to be like. Sometimes you want laminar flow, sometimes turbulent, etc..
The more likely answer is that whales have only been in the water for a few tens of millions of years, and they're big so that's probably only a few million generations. Before that their ancestors were using hair for very different purposes and when the whales went into the water evolution picked the low-hanging fruit by getting rid of their hair altogether. If evolution had looked ahead and thought, "I'll keep this and try to make it low-drag," they might be better off, but evolution doesn't look ahead or think.
Whales haven't come up with anything new and clever in the skin department but that's not hugely surprising. Give them time and perhaps they will but it probably won't be homologous to hair.
The article doesn't give a lot of details but Bishop's blog says:
"being compensated by I-O Data" as part of the deal.
Part of the deal? That doesn't tell us anything. For all we know Microsoft said, "Look, pretend you're paying us for this, it'll make us look good and we'll make it worth your while by cutting you a good deal on the rest of the agreement," and I-O Data shrugged and said fine. No need to assume extortion: this whole story might just be Microsoft marketing puffery.
If I understand TFA correctly, he's pulled references to internet filtering from his website. He's done it through a script, rather than by completely deleting the reference, which suggests to me this is meant to be a temporary change. Maybe the internet filtering pages need some work and he doesn't want to display them at the moment.
But I can't see any way it's morally worse than, say, deleting the internet filtering link altogether. In fact, it doesn't seem to be evil at all. So what's the fuss?
weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market. Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market
In other words it's saying that a preference for free software is a distortion of the free market that's relevant to import-export (because the competing non-free software would quite likely come from the US). It's an awful big stretch from there to claiming it's a barrier to trade, which is really what they need to be able to legitimately complain about it, but still their argument makes slightly more sense than it's been credited with by TFA.
Dude, that's not the way to think. You've got to get in the habit that when you look at your system monitor and see "7.4GB used" you think, "Wow, I am such a power user. This $hit hot machine is just barely keeping up with my requirements." If that doesn't make you feel good then you're beyond help.
Perhaps you visit some web sites about knives, which are fairly innocuous objects today. Then one day a knife you happen to have viewed on line is used in a terrorist act. The authorities force Google to hand over a list of everybody who viewed that particular knife and you are now the subject of an intense investigation. Had you known the knife would be a terrorist weapon you not have visited the site, but it's too late now.
I'd like to think if I'd known the knife was going to be used for terrorism I'd have warned the authorities.
Seriously though, the assumption here is that the authorities are inclined to grab/harrass innocent people on flimsy grounds because the authorities are desperate/stupid. That may be true from time to time, though I'd hope the problem would fade as the authorities got used to the strengths and limitations of the method.
Regardless, if they're desperate/stupid they're going to grab someone on some grounds. They may grab a different person from the one they otherwise would, but there's no particular reason to think they're more or less likely to grab you. The general privacy loss is as likely to save you as to put you in danger. So privacy becomes at most an issue of selfish practicality, not public good.
Or, perhaps you look at some porn one day. [...]
Same argument: employers making stupid decisions. Regardless, I'm as likely to get a job someone else missed as I am to miss out on a job I otherwise would have got. So privacy might be something I personally want, but it's general deterioration wouldn't be a cause for anger.
I [...] drive "company" cars. Company provides my cell phone and cell card
An interesting solution: protect your privacy from the universe by signing up with a single corporation and trusting it to protect your personal details. The privacy equivalent of a gated community.
The amount of the deposit was hundred of dollars - it was justified as the price of the phone + a year's "average use".
The price of the phone, at least, seems a perfectly reasonable amount for a deposit. After all, if you walk off with it they'll have a good deal of trouble getting it back.
It's not even a small, select list. It's the ultra-wealthy
It's the successful and private who have the most to lose from loss of privacy. So if you're concerned about wealthy elites then perhaps the elimination of privacy is desirable.
Exactly, the economic growth in the USA over the past 30 years has almost exclusively benefited the top few percent.
On the other hand, sooner or later the morlock classes will get around to using their democratic dominance to plunder the wealthy, whether that's by the gentle mechanism of progressive taxation or by electing a Hugo Chavez lookalike.
When they do, all this economic growth at the top means there'll be more of it. So in fact the last thirty years may have done nothing for present and recent past workers but plenty for their children.
We're now adding that [a billion people] in less than 20 years but we are NOT adding enough land to take care of that increase.
This would be a real problem if we currently produced as much food as we could each year. In fact, however, we only produce as much food as people are willing to buy, which roughly translates to as much as people want to eat. We could produce a good deal more food if we wanted to, by putting more land, capital, energy and/or labour into agriculture at the expense of other things, and we're only talking about increases of less than 1% of global product. So the population increase won't can't cause starvation unless it can chew up all that margin, which isn't likely.
The scarier possibility is that something happens to suddenly decrease our food supply, and there isn't time to increase production before things collapse. Something like a clathrate gun, a runaway disease in wheat/rice/maize, a supervolcano or some worldwide social disorder.
I agree corrupt, and would agree authoritarian. But "totalitarian" means that the government tries to run everything. That arguably used to be true of China, in the days of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, but hasn't been true since Deng's reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s.
If the mainstream of communism was Marxism-Leninism, where Marxism means (economic) totalitarianism and Leninism means authoritarianism, then China is still Leninist but has ditched the Marxist bit. This contrasts with Gorbachev, who tried to dump Marxism (via perestroika) and Leninism (via glasnost) simultaneously. Russia's subsequent prostration, and China's rise, have almost certainly been received by the Chinese leadership as proof they made the right call.
The excerpt you quote is accurate but given its length can't help leaving things out. QCL had won a legal battle at the time. The environmentalist opposition planned/hoped to restart the struggle - it was a drawn-out affair with multiple hearings and appeals. The explosion occurred during one of the pauses, essentially QCL taking advantage of being the winner of the immediately previous round. Killing the ghost bats made it harder/impossible for the environmentalists to argue a conservation issue.
I'm not out to disprove your point
Well, that's fair, because I wasn't out to disprove the point of the parent of my post either.
There has, to my knowledge, never been a platform or group of any appreciable size or influence that really wanted, as an end, to mess up the environment.
Depends on your definition of "messed up": some people might admire the crystal clarity of a lifeless acidified lake, for instance.
Also, I don't know of a body that sees environmental destruction as a strategic objective, but it's been done for tactical reasons occasionally. Back in the 1980s Queensland Cement Limited wanted to mine limestone from Yessabah Caves, New South Wales. There was a legal disagreement related to the endangered ghost bat, which bred there. QCL detonated explosives in the relevant cavern, killing the bats and neutralising the issue. This is all by memory so confirm before you stake your life on it.
Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.
Someone doesn't understand evolution. The line above shows they imagine that nature tries to make things come out well, whereas in fact nature doesn't care if things come out well because nature isn't a person. What really happens is that the most efficient way to pass on your genes is to make equal parental investment in boys and girls. Genes that do this get passed on, genes that don't die out, so the ones we see around us are the ones that do. I'm a little surprised the ratio is as big as 106:100, though.
I thought it was a short o sound, like got without the t. If they pronounced it like westerners they'd write it gou, or go with a macron (line) over the o.
The amazing thing about this story is that nobody seems amazed. People are calmly explaining why Dr Swift's proposal was a poor one and should be discontinued.
I can see where you're coming from here. On the other hand, after the peroxide goes in you may find people have to repeat themselves when they talk to you, so no, not really. In any case, curing redundancy and redundancy would be
Slashdot Mirror
conception is [...] fairly instantaneous
Could this be why you're having trouble keeping a girlfriend?
If you can't define a clear, definable and measurable event, then you're relying on "statistical personhood"
Shifting to serious answers, one would be to err on the side of caution.
Another would be: the potential abortee starts out as a fertilised egg with perhaps zero rights and ends as a human being with full rights. You seem to be assuming that there's a moment in-between where it quantum jumps from one to the other but it probably makes more sense to assume it's continuous. In which case somewhere in-between it has the rights of, for instance, a dog. In that case we might only be committing mild violations of rights, though rather more often. People tend to be uncomfortable with seeing personhood as continuous, though.
Caveat: I am biologically incapable of requiring an abortion.
Since when evolution guarantees an optimal anatomical structure?
Evolution is pretty good at finding local hilltops. It may have trouble figuring out it needs to get off this hill to reach a higher one over there. The short term advantage for whales, when they first went aquatic, was probably to reduce their hair. They've climbed that hill to nakedness and now they can't see their way to a skin covered in spider hair.
If the whale body is "good enough" to survive and reproduce under the environmental conditions whales tend to live in
This is a bad interpretation of Darwinism. Under natural conditions there were always some whales under stress and dying for one reason or another, otherwise the whale population would increase until there were. If better skin would have saved the dying whales then evolution would have selected for better skin. Which I'm sure it did, even if it didn't achieve perfect skin, what they have now is obviously better than the average artiodactyl's.
then why they should have evolved the same microscopic hairs that we see in spiders?
Good question. One answer is that I'm not sure what effect little hairs would have on whales. They're so big that they're obviously way into the high Reynolds number regime where pressure drag dominates over skin friction. In that environment it's not always intuitive what you want your skin to be like. Sometimes you want laminar flow, sometimes turbulent, etc..
The more likely answer is that whales have only been in the water for a few tens of millions of years, and they're big so that's probably only a few million generations. Before that their ancestors were using hair for very different purposes and when the whales went into the water evolution picked the low-hanging fruit by getting rid of their hair altogether. If evolution had looked ahead and thought, "I'll keep this and try to make it low-drag," they might be better off, but evolution doesn't look ahead or think.
Whales haven't come up with anything new and clever in the skin department but that's not hugely surprising. Give them time and perhaps they will but it probably won't be homologous to hair.
The article doesn't give a lot of details but Bishop's blog says:
"being compensated by I-O Data" as part of the deal.
Part of the deal? That doesn't tell us anything. For all we know Microsoft said, "Look, pretend you're paying us for this, it'll make us look good and we'll make it worth your while by cutting you a good deal on the rest of the agreement," and I-O Data shrugged and said fine. No need to assume extortion: this whole story might just be Microsoft marketing puffery.
Also, if you type "google" into google, you can break the internet so don't do it, even as a joke.
Like Java?
I'd love some, and thanks for offering.
If I understand TFA correctly, he's pulled references to internet filtering from his website. He's done it through a script, rather than by completely deleting the reference, which suggests to me this is meant to be a temporary change. Maybe the internet filtering pages need some work and he doesn't want to display them at the moment. But I can't see any way it's morally worse than, say, deleting the internet filtering link altogether. In fact, it doesn't seem to be evil at all. So what's the fuss?
The IIPA writes:
weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market. Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market
In other words it's saying that a preference for free software is a distortion of the free market that's relevant to import-export (because the competing non-free software would quite likely come from the US). It's an awful big stretch from there to claiming it's a barrier to trade, which is really what they need to be able to legitimately complain about it, but still their argument makes slightly more sense than it's been credited with by TFA.
Dude, that's not the way to think. You've got to get in the habit that when you look at your system monitor and see "7.4GB used" you think, "Wow, I am such a power user. This $hit hot machine is just barely keeping up with my requirements." If that doesn't make you feel good then you're beyond help.
Perhaps you visit some web sites about knives, which are fairly innocuous objects today. Then one day a knife you happen to have viewed on line is used in a terrorist act. The authorities force Google to hand over a list of everybody who viewed that particular knife and you are now the subject of an intense investigation. Had you known the knife would be a terrorist weapon you not have visited the site, but it's too late now.
I'd like to think if I'd known the knife was going to be used for terrorism I'd have warned the authorities.
Seriously though, the assumption here is that the authorities are inclined to grab/harrass innocent people on flimsy grounds because the authorities are desperate/stupid. That may be true from time to time, though I'd hope the problem would fade as the authorities got used to the strengths and limitations of the method.
Regardless, if they're desperate/stupid they're going to grab someone on some grounds. They may grab a different person from the one they otherwise would, but there's no particular reason to think they're more or less likely to grab you. The general privacy loss is as likely to save you as to put you in danger. So privacy becomes at most an issue of selfish practicality, not public good.
Or, perhaps you look at some porn one day. [...]
Same argument: employers making stupid decisions. Regardless, I'm as likely to get a job someone else missed as I am to miss out on a job I otherwise would have got. So privacy might be something I personally want, but it's general deterioration wouldn't be a cause for anger.
I [...] drive "company" cars. Company provides my cell phone and cell card
An interesting solution: protect your privacy from the universe by signing up with a single corporation and trusting it to protect your personal details. The privacy equivalent of a gated community.
The amount of the deposit was hundred of dollars - it was justified as the price of the phone + a year's "average use".
The price of the phone, at least, seems a perfectly reasonable amount for a deposit. After all, if you walk off with it they'll have a good deal of trouble getting it back.
It's not even a small, select list. It's the ultra-wealthy
It's the successful and private who have the most to lose from loss of privacy. So if you're concerned about wealthy elites then perhaps the elimination of privacy is desirable.
Exactly, the economic growth in the USA over the past 30 years has almost exclusively benefited the top few percent.
On the other hand, sooner or later the morlock classes will get around to using their democratic dominance to plunder the wealthy, whether that's by the gentle mechanism of progressive taxation or by electing a Hugo Chavez lookalike.
When they do, all this economic growth at the top means there'll be more of it. So in fact the last thirty years may have done nothing for present and recent past workers but plenty for their children.
there are [...] as many people in England (not the whole UK, just England) as there were people 2000 years ago
This can't be right: the Roman Empire had almost that many people.
We're now adding that [a billion people] in less than 20 years but we are NOT adding enough land to take care of that increase.
This would be a real problem if we currently produced as much food as we could each year. In fact, however, we only produce as much food as people are willing to buy, which roughly translates to as much as people want to eat. We could produce a good deal more food if we wanted to, by putting more land, capital, energy and/or labour into agriculture at the expense of other things, and we're only talking about increases of less than 1% of global product. So the population increase won't can't cause starvation unless it can chew up all that margin, which isn't likely.
The scarier possibility is that something happens to suddenly decrease our food supply, and there isn't time to increase production before things collapse. Something like a clathrate gun, a runaway disease in wheat/rice/maize, a supervolcano or some worldwide social disorder.
If the entire population of the world went vegan, we'd survive for about a decade.
If we all went vegan, and were very careless about securing a supply of B12, we might survive for only a few years.
the corrupt and totalitarian Chinese Government
I agree corrupt, and would agree authoritarian. But "totalitarian" means that the government tries to run everything. That arguably used to be true of China, in the days of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, but hasn't been true since Deng's reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s.
If the mainstream of communism was Marxism-Leninism, where Marxism means (economic) totalitarianism and Leninism means authoritarianism, then China is still Leninist but has ditched the Marxist bit. This contrasts with Gorbachev, who tried to dump Marxism (via perestroika) and Leninism (via glasnost) simultaneously. Russia's subsequent prostration, and China's rise, have almost certainly been received by the Chinese leadership as proof they made the right call.
The excerpt you quote is accurate but given its length can't help leaving things out. QCL had won a legal battle at the time. The environmentalist opposition planned/hoped to restart the struggle - it was a drawn-out affair with multiple hearings and appeals. The explosion occurred during one of the pauses, essentially QCL taking advantage of being the winner of the immediately previous round. Killing the ghost bats made it harder/impossible for the environmentalists to argue a conservation issue.
Well, that's fair, because I wasn't out to disprove the point of the parent of my post either.
Depends on your definition of "messed up": some people might admire the crystal clarity of a lifeless acidified lake, for instance.
Also, I don't know of a body that sees environmental destruction as a strategic objective, but it's been done for tactical reasons occasionally. Back in the 1980s Queensland Cement Limited wanted to mine limestone from Yessabah Caves, New South Wales. There was a legal disagreement related to the endangered ghost bat, which bred there. QCL detonated explosives in the relevant cavern, killing the bats and neutralising the issue. This is all by memory so confirm before you stake your life on it.
Perhaps the "seven feet" derives from a photo like this.
Someone doesn't understand evolution. The line above shows they imagine that nature tries to make things come out well, whereas in fact nature doesn't care if things come out well because nature isn't a person. What really happens is that the most efficient way to pass on your genes is to make equal parental investment in boys and girls. Genes that do this get passed on, genes that don't die out, so the ones we see around us are the ones that do. I'm a little surprised the ratio is as big as 106:100, though.
Go originated in China, but is played in Japan.
And the strongest country in the world today is Korea.
It's also played by geeky people all around the world, of course.
I thought it was a short o sound, like got without the t. If they pronounced it like westerners they'd write it gou, or go with a macron (line) over the o.
The amazing thing about this story is that nobody seems amazed. People are calmly explaining why Dr Swift's proposal was a poor one and should be discontinued.
I can see where you're coming from here. On the other hand, after the peroxide goes in you may find people have to repeat themselves when they talk to you, so no, not really. In any case, curing redundancy and redundancy would be