When I'm at the command line, it doesn't matter a whole lot, but I find that the key bindings in Windows and Linux are pretty awful - too much is overloaded on the control key. This is because I use emacs as an editor, don't like to mouse to find things, and don't like taking my hands off the home row to fiddle with arrow keys. The fact that Windows uses the control key for a menu shortcut key isn't a big surprise, but the fact that Gnome uses it also was a real disappointment to me the first time I tried it. KDE seems more flexible, but basically similar.
MacOS X does a lot of really nice, small things. For example, say you're mousing around in the finder looking for a file, and then you want to access it from the command line. How do you get the path out to the shell? Easy, just drag the file onto the terminal window in which you need the filename, and bam, it types the filename in for you. You want to look at your current shell directory in the finder? No problem, type "open.".
I find developing Mac GUI apps a total pain in the neck because they make you do all the development in a weird, counter-intuitive GUI of their own, and because they have a weird, counter-intuitive memory allocation strategy in their Cocoa development environment, but for regular geek work, you really can't beat Mac OS X. And I suspect GUI development is much harder on Windows - I'm about to find out as I port my latest Cocoa app to Windows. Sigh.
Have you used the latest MS Office for Mac? What about Abiword? I've found that MS Office is pretty good these days, and Abiword is doing well also. Pages (the Apple WYSIWYG text editor) is also good, but I've had a lot of problems with font substitution thus far - the Mac doesn't seem to come with Palatino. But I'm not really a power user for this particular app.
What's your experience with Gnumeric? At first blush it looks pretty sweet, and also seems like it would be pretty easy to port to Cocoa. But since I haven't done the port yet, I haven't really tried to use it much.
We have a Samsung 2151N, which is a networked laser printer. I think it was under $500. Works like a champ, does duplex, I can print to it over the wireless network. Life is good. It has a built-in Postscript language emulator, which makes interfacing with real computers a breeze. A friend has an older Samsung that doesn't have duplex or networking, and it's printing like a champ - she printed about 500 pages on it yesterday.
Having said that, I had exactly the same experience with the HP1100A. HP eventually released a fix for it, which they shipped to me for free, and a friend of mine is still using that HP1100A on a very regular basis - she's using Windows printer sharing to print from her Mac, and she prints in quantity with no jams. It took HP a year or two to come out with the kit, which was a real bummer, and I have to say I didn't expect it to work, but it turns out that it did.
Unfortunately, they're not offering it anymore.:'(
I can say for sure that the DHCP server *has* been audited, by several different groups. Chances are the other utilities have been as well. So really your question should be, "is FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD running the version that's got the fixes from the audit."
Personally, I've always run NetBSD, I like the pkgsrc collection, use it on MacOS X as well as NetBSD, and would rather fight than switch. Whether it's actually better is something that in all likelihood none of us can answer, because we all have our favorite, and that's the one we use, and the reason it's our favorite is probably that it's what we're used to.
The reason NetBSD is my favorite is mostly that I like my fellow NetBSD geeks and would rather discuss issues that come up with them than with the Free- or OpenBSD guys, again not because the FreeBSD guys are less fun to talk to in theory, but simply because I don't know them very well.
Having said that, what drew me to NetBSD in the first place, many years ago, _was_ the focus on portability.
The second coming of Christ comes when you die, so it's not something I'd be in a rush to have happen. I don't know why more people don't realize this - it's extremely clear in the text in Matthew.
There are plenty of people to love in the world. Think outside the box.
If a cure for senescence were found, I have no idea what it would do to the world. People write science fiction to explore the possibilities, which is cool, but the only way we'll ever know is to find out by trying it.
One thing a cure for senescence would do that would probably be _very_ useful would be to get people in power to start taking the state of environment in the year 2100 a little more seriously. Right now, they're all scheduled to be dead in 20 years, so even if they care, they only care in the abstract.
Looking back on my nerd roots at that time, I looked a lot worse. The thing that strikes me about those pictures is how much he's aged (no surprise, but it's still striking). Time waits for no man (women either).
Or is the fact that some asshole who flashed a woman in a coffee shop got nabbed because of the GPS in his snowplow *not* a good argument against allowing GPS tracking evidence to be used by police?
Yup. It also provides for the potential that Palm could sell its very nice UI into some existing markets where people are already making Linux palmtops and phones. But they'd better bring back Graffiti 1!:')
Is it possible that the power controller is locked up in some weird way? Try taking the battery out and leaving it unplugged for a day or two, and see if that clears anything up. I _think_ these systems no longer have a separate battery for their CMOS RAM, because, well, CMOS RAM is obsolete - so you shouldn't need to go hunting for that. But based on what you're saying this sounds at first blush like a chip in a bad state, not a chip that's fried.
A hero is someone who goes out of their way, at their own cost, to do something that benefits the greater good. Someone who runs into a burning building to pull people out, at great personal risk, is a hero. Someone who chooses to lower his or her standard of living so that he or she can produce and give away his or her work (god *damn*, we need a gender-neutral personal pronoun), with the intention that in so doing he or she is making the world a better place is also a hero.
To me, the common element is that one values the benefit of others as much as one values one's own benefit. So for example, we would all run out of a fire that is burning to avoid being burned. A hero recognizes that the person who cannot run out of the fire is the same, and runs *into* the fire to pull that person out.
Heroes aren't people who are looking for recognition, or trying to do anything dramatic. They are people who simply see the good of others as equal to their own good, and act that way. They start food banks instead of going out looking for a corporate lifestyle that will buy them the Maserati they've always wanted (heroes want Maseratis too, I'm sure, but it's not a priority). They go to work providing medical care for people who can't afford to pay, when they could have a job at a prestigious medical center in New York and live in a high-rise with easy access to off-broadway shows. They walk into a classroom in a bad neighborhood in the Bronx and try to help students who need them, when they could have taught downtown.
I don't think it's fair to say that everyone who works on Open Source software is a hero. I got paid to hack on the ISC DHCP server - no heroism there. In my book, RMS is a hero, not just because of the FSF, but because of what he taught me, without asking anything in return. I've met other heroes who develop free software, but you're right that they're not as many as the ones who just seem like good folks that I'm glad to know.
The problem is that some people are bothered when other people are free to make choices that they don't agree with.
As long as you keep framing the problem that way, you're going to keep seeing people like Bush get elected. There is a reason why people vote the way they do. Treating it as a vast ignorant conspiracy is not going to get you what you want.
This is very frustrating for me to talk about because I am kind of in the middle - I voted for Kerry, but it was despite his position on embryonic stem cell research. I am quite unhappy with the results of the election.
The problem is that the people that I consider on the right side of most issues - the progressives - have this mental block that prevents them from seeing their opponents as anything other than some kind of vast conspiracy to do wrong in the world. As long as this view persists, we will keep winding up with political leaders that nobody, not the progressives, and not the "conservatives," really like.
This isn't really a debate about politics, but I mention it here because I suspect one subtext of a lot of what's being said here is that Kerry was in favor of embryonic stem cell research and Bush was against.
To speak to your other point:
And how is effectively banning a promising line of research going to help?
It's what's happened. Maybe the research will be done elsewhere; if so, you have no real reason to complain - the treatment will work for you whether it's done in Amsterdam or New York. However, if you really want to see stem cell research done in the U.S., then your path forward has to be based on how things actually are right now, not how you think they should be.
You're absolutely right; that is how many, many people think about this issue. What I'm trying to do, though, is to change minds and force thought on the matter. True, it's hard, but it isn't futile. Part of what drives the opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that certain groups of people have very effectively distilled the issue into a simple, easy-to-digest format that goes down easy and doesn't give you gas.
So what you're saying is that there is a large group of people who simply don't understand where you're coming from, and if you could just somehow explain to them where you're coming from, you would be able to convince them that your way of doing things is best.
The problem with this position is that it starts out from the assumption that they are wrong. But you don't have any proof that their position is wrong. What you have is a lack of proof that their position is right. This lack of proof isn't proof that they're wrong. You're certain that they are wrong because their beliefs conflict with your beliefs - you find their position inconsistent with a scientific worldview, so it must be wrong.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with them because they're obviously wrong, but you can't go toe to toe with someone in a debate if you don't have any way to prove that that person's position is wrong.
I will take this one step further. People want refuge. Life is harsh. Death is a reality. Most people are raised with some kind of refuge - a way to think about their situation that gives them comfort, and, they hope, actual protection from the suffering of this vale of tears. The dominant refuge in the U.S. is Christianity. Even those of us who were raised athiest, as I was, hold to a value system that's largely Christian in its basis, with a lot of bizarre Protestant guilt thrown in for seasoning.
I would go so far as to say that most people who take refuge in Christianity don't know why. They don't have a logical basis for thinking that it will protect them. They've just been told that it will protect them since they were old enough to speak, both by their parents and by their friends, and by society at large. So the refuge they have is weak, because it is based in tradition, not logic.
When you engage in debate with someone like this, they aren't going to play fair with you. They aren't even going to listen to you if what you have to say conflicts with what they believe, because in order to accept your worldview, they have to accept that they are going to die, and that that will be their extinction, not just a transition. Whether this is true or not is immaterial for your purposes; you simply can't win a debate with someone like that by telling them about the scientific worldview. As far as they are concerned, the scientific worldview sucks compared to theirs, because its essence is a complete lack of refuge. If you could get them to listen, it would benefit them, either by showing them that they need to strengthen their refuge (that is, find reasons why they have refuge, as opposed to just blind faith) or by showing them that they are wrong. But they aren't going to listen to you, so this benefit is purely hypothetical.
Then there's the people like me, who have refuge that's based on logic. I'm always interested in debating about stuff like this, because if you can pick a hole in my way of thinking, that either shows me that I'm mistaken, or shows me where my refuge is weak, both of which benefit me. So you can debate with me, but unless I am actually wrong and you can prove it, that's not going to get you anywhere. You should debate with people like me, though, because it benefits you, too - it helps you to understand how to talk to people who don't share your belief system but who are nevertheless rational. You don't have to accept my worldview to debate me, because I'm willing to have a real debate with you.
And finally there are people who really aren't taking refuge in this stuff, but
Er, stem cells are more likely to *cause* cancer than prevent it. But be that as it may, what you are saying makes sense, but it doesn't change the situation.
The reason I made the statement I did, to which you responded, was to point out that there are considerations here which really do matter to real people who vote. The ethical distinction you are making between embryos that would be destroyed and embryos that would not be destroyed doesn't matter to them, because they believe that destroying _any_ embryo means ending the life of a sentient being. Sentient beings die all the time, but for those who believe that their ethics affect their future existence, there is a huge distinction between taking ownership of the death of a sentient being and the fact that the being has died, or is going to die. That is, if you kill the being, it's your problem; if I kill the being, or benefit from its death, it's my problem.
People tend to divide things up into three categories: 1. Things that are how they should be. 2. Things that are not how they should be. 3. Things for which there is no way that they should be. Only the third category of things actually exists. When we try to base our actions on how things should be, as opposed to how they actually are, we undercut the effectiveness of what we do.
So if I believe that sentience arises from complexity, and I hold that this believe is inherently true, and I refuse to accept that not everyone holds this same belief, then my actions will be undercut by the fact that I am acting contrary to how things actually are - in fact, it is not true that everyone holds this belief. It doesn't matter whether they *should* hold this belief or not - they do not hold it. If I want to act effectively, my actions have to be based on an understanding that not everybody holds the same beliefs that I do.
There are lots of ways to use this. You can try to convince the people who disagree with you that they are wrong (but try effectively - no amount lecturing will convince them, so you will have to debate them on their terms). You can ignore them and do what you want despite what they think (and accept that the context in which you can do this is to some extent dictated by their beliefs). Or you can weigh the costs and decide that doing things their way will get you to your goal more quickly than doing things your way, and therefore do things their way, even though you believe their way is wrong.
Any of these three methods will work much better than simply insisting that you are right and acting as if, since everybody *should* agree with you, they do agree with you.
BTW, why do you think I'm spending all this time arguing this point? It's not because I'm on one side or the other of the current debate. It's because most of our public discourse right now is of the form "you should believe X, and you don't, so you suck and I will ignore you." This creates an absolutely tremendous amount of friction, and this friction is, IMHO, sapping our strength as a society; preventing us from making the world a better place.
If you're in Denver and you want to get to Salt Lake City, you don't get pissed off at the mountain passes between the two cities - the mountain passes don't care what you think. You suck it up and cross them. The situation here is no different.
You can call people who disagree with you luddites all you want, but rather than changing their minds, all this does is make them stop listening to you. Which would be okay, except that they're in the way of you getting what you want, so making them stop listening to you seems counterproductive at best (I'm trying to be polite here).
In practice, people who believe that life begins at conception _also_ want stem cell therapy. They just don't want it to be the result of the use of embryonic tissue. And these people are a huge percentage of all citizens of the U.S. and Europe. The don't want to opt out of being cured of paralysis; rather, they want to be sure that when they are treated for paralysis, the treatment is one that does not violate their ethical standards.
So if what you want is usable stem cell therapy, you have two choices. You can call the people you disagree with names, which accomplishes nothing, or you can stop trying to fight a losing battle and get on with what matters, which is the actual research.
Since we now have some concrete evidence that therapeutic treatments based on non-embryonic tissue are possible, it seems like insisting on winning this argument, using tactics that clearly don't work, serves only one purpose: to prevent or cripple ongoing stem cell research efforts.
Labs end up having to spend a surprising and frustrating amount of time and money simply to meet the ever-growing list of compliance demands for federal funding.
That sucks.
Second, the stem cells in question are coming from discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization clinics which are already slated for destruction. To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root
I can understand why you feel that way, but it's hardly that cut-and-dried. You feel that way because you believe that sentience is essentially mechanical - that it arises from the body. From this point of view, there is obviously a time when sentience begins, and it seems impossible that it should be so early as the moment of conception. This is a perfectly valid position that matches currently known facts, and there's nothing wrong with you holding it.
However, this is not everybody's view on how this works. A lot of people hold the view that sentience is essentially other than mechanical - that it does not arise from the body, but rather is connected to the body at the moment the body comes into existence, and then loses that connection when the body dies.
You can say that people who believe this are deluded, because there is no evidence to support their belief. In point of fact, though, there's no "scientific" evidence, in the form of an experiment, that would falsify either hypothesis.
So for people who hold your viewpoint, there's no ethical dilemma here - obviously embryonic stem cells are fine to use for research.
For people who do not hold your viewpoint, knowing whether or not a treatment is based on research done on embryonic or fetal stem cells is quite important, regardless of whether the embryo in question would have been taken to term or not. It means they are profiting from the death of a sentient being if they accept a treatment that did come from embryonic/fetal stem cell research.
So while I understand that this seems like a simple cut-and-dried ethical issue to you, there really is a good reason (that is, a reason they find compelling) for other people to hold a different ethical position.
If you want to write down a convincing argument, argue using reason, not your own prejudices. "Comrade?" Give me a break. The fact is that Verizon has a monopoly, which they have because they were granted it by the government. Does the municipal WiFi project compete unfairly? We can't tell. It's hopeless to try to sort it out at this late date.
What we can tell is that Verizon is doing a *terrible* job of providing broadband to its customers. My father has been waiting for broadband from Verizon forever, and he's never going to get it, because it's not "cost effective." Meanwhile, I've done live internet broadcasts from a mud-walled hut twenty minutes outside of a town of 300, two hours from Tucson, over a DSL line that's costing $70/month.
I don't have anything against Verizon, but if they can't deliver the kind of service that's being proposed here at a competitive rate, I'm just not able to work up any sympathy. They are asking for a government-granted right to cherry-pick the most lucrative customers in the Philadelphia area. I don't see any reason why the legislature should have granted it to them, and I'm sorry to see that it did.
Your talk of "Comrade" and "it is not the job of government to blah blah blah" is just noise. Thank you for playing.
It sounds like you have bad RAM. Every time I've run into instability problems on the Mac it's been because of bad RAM. If the RAM is okay, the thing never crashes.
The javascript hack sounds like fun, but realistically the users you're talking about that would *be able* to do what you suggest represent maybe one hundredth of a percent of the user population, so even if you tried telling them their mail had almost rejected, it wouldn't work. Chances are it'd be dumped by their spam filter anyway.:'/
The real problem here is not header forging.
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Beat Spam Using Hashcash
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's that in order for this to be useful, it has to be widely implemented. Anybody who sends a lot of legitimate email (e.g., hotmail) is going to need to buy a lot more CPU. So it's not going to get widely implemented. So it won't help. Sorry.:'(
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When I'm at the command line, it doesn't matter a whole lot, but I find that the key bindings in Windows and Linux are pretty awful - too much is overloaded on the control key. This is because I use emacs as an editor, don't like to mouse to find things, and don't like taking my hands off the home row to fiddle with arrow keys. The fact that Windows uses the control key for a menu shortcut key isn't a big surprise, but the fact that Gnome uses it also was a real disappointment to me the first time I tried it. KDE seems more flexible, but basically similar.
.".
MacOS X does a lot of really nice, small things. For example, say you're mousing around in the finder looking for a file, and then you want to access it from the command line. How do you get the path out to the shell? Easy, just drag the file onto the terminal window in which you need the filename, and bam, it types the filename in for you. You want to look at your current shell directory in the finder? No problem, type "open
I find developing Mac GUI apps a total pain in the neck because they make you do all the development in a weird, counter-intuitive GUI of their own, and because they have a weird, counter-intuitive memory allocation strategy in their Cocoa development environment, but for regular geek work, you really can't beat Mac OS X. And I suspect GUI development is much harder on Windows - I'm about to find out as I port my latest Cocoa app to Windows. Sigh.
Have you used the latest MS Office for Mac? What about Abiword? I've found that MS Office is pretty good these days, and Abiword is doing well also. Pages (the Apple WYSIWYG text editor) is also good, but I've had a lot of problems with font substitution thus far - the Mac doesn't seem to come with Palatino. But I'm not really a power user for this particular app.
What's your experience with Gnumeric? At first blush it looks pretty sweet, and also seems like it would be pretty easy to port to Cocoa. But since I haven't done the port yet, I haven't really tried to use it much.
It's early days, so you'd need to be a little smart about it, but it might be worth a shot. http://www.hula-project.org/Hula_Server
We have a Samsung 2151N, which is a networked laser printer. I think it was under $500. Works like a champ, does duplex, I can print to it over the wireless network. Life is good. It has a built-in Postscript language emulator, which makes interfacing with real computers a breeze. A friend has an older Samsung that doesn't have duplex or networking, and it's printing like a champ - she printed about 500 pages on it yesterday.
:'(
Having said that, I had exactly the same experience with the HP1100A. HP eventually released a fix for it, which they shipped to me for free, and a friend of mine is still using that HP1100A on a very regular basis - she's using Windows printer sharing to print from her Mac, and she prints in quantity with no jams. It took HP a year or two to come out with the kit, which was a real bummer, and I have to say I didn't expect it to work, but it turns out that it did.
Unfortunately, they're not offering it anymore.
I can say for sure that the DHCP server *has* been audited, by several different groups. Chances are the other utilities have been as well. So really your question should be, "is FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD running the version that's got the fixes from the audit."
Personally, I've always run NetBSD, I like the pkgsrc collection, use it on MacOS X as well as NetBSD, and would rather fight than switch. Whether it's actually better is something that in all likelihood none of us can answer, because we all have our favorite, and that's the one we use, and the reason it's our favorite is probably that it's what we're used to.
The reason NetBSD is my favorite is mostly that I like my fellow NetBSD geeks and would rather discuss issues that come up with them than with the Free- or OpenBSD guys, again not because the FreeBSD guys are less fun to talk to in theory, but simply because I don't know them very well.
Having said that, what drew me to NetBSD in the first place, many years ago, _was_ the focus on portability.
The second coming of Christ comes when you die, so it's not something I'd be in a rush to have happen. I don't know why more people don't realize this - it's extremely clear in the text in Matthew.
Who wants to live forever, when love must die?
There are plenty of people to love in the world. Think outside the box.
If a cure for senescence were found, I have no idea what it would do to the world. People write science fiction to explore the possibilities, which is cool, but the only way we'll ever know is to find out by trying it.
One thing a cure for senescence would do that would probably be _very_ useful would be to get people in power to start taking the state of environment in the year 2100 a little more seriously. Right now, they're all scheduled to be dead in 20 years, so even if they care, they only care in the abstract.
Looking back on my nerd roots at that time, I looked a lot worse. The thing that strikes me about those pictures is how much he's aged (no surprise, but it's still striking). Time waits for no man (women either).
Or is the fact that some asshole who flashed a woman in a coffee shop got nabbed because of the GPS in his snowplow *not* a good argument against allowing GPS tracking evidence to be used by police?
Actually, F/OSS calls to Microsoft are a huge win for them, since they charge something like $195 for a tech support incident.
1. Port F/OSS apps to Windows, badly.
2. Answer support calls.
3. $$$
(See, no ??? entry in the list. This is a bulletproof business plan!)
It seems to have a good collection of words, but no indication of noun gender. Am I missing something?
Yup. It also provides for the potential that Palm could sell its very nice UI into some existing markets where people are already making Linux palmtops and phones. But they'd better bring back Graffiti 1! :')
Yeah, I mean CMOS volatile RAM as a way to store BIOS parameters. Of course CMOS RAM isn't obsolete in general. It's all about context, man!
Is it possible that the power controller is locked up in some weird way? Try taking the battery out and leaving it unplugged for a day or two, and see if that clears anything up. I _think_ these systems no longer have a separate battery for their CMOS RAM, because, well, CMOS RAM is obsolete - so you shouldn't need to go hunting for that. But based on what you're saying this sounds at first blush like a chip in a bad state, not a chip that's fried.
A hero is someone who goes out of their way, at their own cost, to do something that benefits the greater good. Someone who runs into a burning building to pull people out, at great personal risk, is a hero. Someone who chooses to lower his or her standard of living so that he or she can produce and give away his or her work (god *damn*, we need a gender-neutral personal pronoun), with the intention that in so doing he or she is making the world a better place is also a hero.
To me, the common element is that one values the benefit of others as much as one values one's own benefit. So for example, we would all run out of a fire that is burning to avoid being burned. A hero recognizes that the person who cannot run out of the fire is the same, and runs *into* the fire to pull that person out.
Heroes aren't people who are looking for recognition, or trying to do anything dramatic. They are people who simply see the good of others as equal to their own good, and act that way. They start food banks instead of going out looking for a corporate lifestyle that will buy them the Maserati they've always wanted (heroes want Maseratis too, I'm sure, but it's not a priority). They go to work providing medical care for people who can't afford to pay, when they could have a job at a prestigious medical center in New York and live in a high-rise with easy access to off-broadway shows. They walk into a classroom in a bad neighborhood in the Bronx and try to help students who need them, when they could have taught downtown.
I don't think it's fair to say that everyone who works on Open Source software is a hero. I got paid to hack on the ISC DHCP server - no heroism there. In my book, RMS is a hero, not just because of the FSF, but because of what he taught me, without asking anything in return. I've met other heroes who develop free software, but you're right that they're not as many as the ones who just seem like good folks that I'm glad to know.
The problem is that some people are bothered when other people are free to make choices that they don't agree with.
As long as you keep framing the problem that way, you're going to keep seeing people like Bush get elected. There is a reason why people vote the way they do. Treating it as a vast ignorant conspiracy is not going to get you what you want.
This is very frustrating for me to talk about because I am kind of in the middle - I voted for Kerry, but it was despite his position on embryonic stem cell research. I am quite unhappy with the results of the election.
The problem is that the people that I consider on the right side of most issues - the progressives - have this mental block that prevents them from seeing their opponents as anything other than some kind of vast conspiracy to do wrong in the world. As long as this view persists, we will keep winding up with political leaders that nobody, not the progressives, and not the "conservatives," really like.
This isn't really a debate about politics, but I mention it here because I suspect one subtext of a lot of what's being said here is that Kerry was in favor of embryonic stem cell research and Bush was against.
To speak to your other point:
And how is effectively banning a promising line of research going to help?
It's what's happened. Maybe the research will be done elsewhere; if so, you have no real reason to complain - the treatment will work for you whether it's done in Amsterdam or New York. However, if you really want to see stem cell research done in the U.S., then your path forward has to be based on how things actually are right now, not how you think they should be.
You're absolutely right; that is how many, many people think about this issue. What I'm trying to do, though, is to change minds and force thought on the matter. True, it's hard, but it isn't futile. Part of what drives the opposition to embryonic stem cell research is that certain groups of people have very effectively distilled the issue into a simple, easy-to-digest format that goes down easy and doesn't give you gas.
So what you're saying is that there is a large group of people who simply don't understand where you're coming from, and if you could just somehow explain to them where you're coming from, you would be able to convince them that your way of doing things is best.
The problem with this position is that it starts out from the assumption that they are wrong. But you don't have any proof that their position is wrong. What you have is a lack of proof that their position is right. This lack of proof isn't proof that they're wrong. You're certain that they are wrong because their beliefs conflict with your beliefs - you find their position inconsistent with a scientific worldview, so it must be wrong.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with them because they're obviously wrong, but you can't go toe to toe with someone in a debate if you don't have any way to prove that that person's position is wrong.
I will take this one step further. People want refuge. Life is harsh. Death is a reality. Most people are raised with some kind of refuge - a way to think about their situation that gives them comfort, and, they hope, actual protection from the suffering of this vale of tears. The dominant refuge in the U.S. is Christianity. Even those of us who were raised athiest, as I was, hold to a value system that's largely Christian in its basis, with a lot of bizarre Protestant guilt thrown in for seasoning.
I would go so far as to say that most people who take refuge in Christianity don't know why. They don't have a logical basis for thinking that it will protect them. They've just been told that it will protect them since they were old enough to speak, both by their parents and by their friends, and by society at large. So the refuge they have is weak, because it is based in tradition, not logic.
When you engage in debate with someone like this, they aren't going to play fair with you. They aren't even going to listen to you if what you have to say conflicts with what they believe, because in order to accept your worldview, they have to accept that they are going to die, and that that will be their extinction, not just a transition. Whether this is true or not is immaterial for your purposes; you simply can't win a debate with someone like that by telling them about the scientific worldview. As far as they are concerned, the scientific worldview sucks compared to theirs, because its essence is a complete lack of refuge. If you could get them to listen, it would benefit them, either by showing them that they need to strengthen their refuge (that is, find reasons why they have refuge, as opposed to just blind faith) or by showing them that they are wrong. But they aren't going to listen to you, so this benefit is purely hypothetical.
Then there's the people like me, who have refuge that's based on logic. I'm always interested in debating about stuff like this, because if you can pick a hole in my way of thinking, that either shows me that I'm mistaken, or shows me where my refuge is weak, both of which benefit me. So you can debate with me, but unless I am actually wrong and you can prove it, that's not going to get you anywhere. You should debate with people like me, though, because it benefits you, too - it helps you to understand how to talk to people who don't share your belief system but who are nevertheless rational. You don't have to accept my worldview to debate me, because I'm willing to have a real debate with you.
And finally there are people who really aren't taking refuge in this stuff, but
Er, stem cells are more likely to *cause* cancer than prevent it. But be that as it may, what you are saying makes sense, but it doesn't change the situation.
The reason I made the statement I did, to which you responded, was to point out that there are considerations here which really do matter to real people who vote. The ethical distinction you are making between embryos that would be destroyed and embryos that would not be destroyed doesn't matter to them, because they believe that destroying _any_ embryo means ending the life of a sentient being. Sentient beings die all the time, but for those who believe that their ethics affect their future existence, there is a huge distinction between taking ownership of the death of a sentient being and the fact that the being has died, or is going to die. That is, if you kill the being, it's your problem; if I kill the being, or benefit from its death, it's my problem.
People tend to divide things up into three categories: 1. Things that are how they should be. 2. Things that are not how they should be. 3. Things for which there is no way that they should be. Only the third category of things actually exists. When we try to base our actions on how things should be, as opposed to how they actually are, we undercut the effectiveness of what we do.
So if I believe that sentience arises from complexity, and I hold that this believe is inherently true, and I refuse to accept that not everyone holds this same belief, then my actions will be undercut by the fact that I am acting contrary to how things actually are - in fact, it is not true that everyone holds this belief. It doesn't matter whether they *should* hold this belief or not - they do not hold it. If I want to act effectively, my actions have to be based on an understanding that not everybody holds the same beliefs that I do.
There are lots of ways to use this. You can try to convince the people who disagree with you that they are wrong (but try effectively - no amount lecturing will convince them, so you will have to debate them on their terms). You can ignore them and do what you want despite what they think (and accept that the context in which you can do this is to some extent dictated by their beliefs). Or you can weigh the costs and decide that doing things their way will get you to your goal more quickly than doing things your way, and therefore do things their way, even though you believe their way is wrong.
Any of these three methods will work much better than simply insisting that you are right and acting as if, since everybody *should* agree with you, they do agree with you.
BTW, why do you think I'm spending all this time arguing this point? It's not because I'm on one side or the other of the current debate. It's because most of our public discourse right now is of the form "you should believe X, and you don't, so you suck and I will ignore you." This creates an absolutely tremendous amount of friction, and this friction is, IMHO, sapping our strength as a society; preventing us from making the world a better place.
If you're in Denver and you want to get to Salt Lake City, you don't get pissed off at the mountain passes between the two cities - the mountain passes don't care what you think. You suck it up and cross them. The situation here is no different.
You can call people who disagree with you luddites all you want, but rather than changing their minds, all this does is make them stop listening to you. Which would be okay, except that they're in the way of you getting what you want, so making them stop listening to you seems counterproductive at best (I'm trying to be polite here).
In practice, people who believe that life begins at conception _also_ want stem cell therapy. They just don't want it to be the result of the use of embryonic tissue. And these people are a huge percentage of all citizens of the U.S. and Europe. The don't want to opt out of being cured of paralysis; rather, they want to be sure that when they are treated for paralysis, the treatment is one that does not violate their ethical standards.
So if what you want is usable stem cell therapy, you have two choices. You can call the people you disagree with names, which accomplishes nothing, or you can stop trying to fight a losing battle and get on with what matters, which is the actual research.
Since we now have some concrete evidence that therapeutic treatments based on non-embryonic tissue are possible, it seems like insisting on winning this argument, using tactics that clearly don't work, serves only one purpose: to prevent or cripple ongoing stem cell research efforts.
Labs end up having to spend a surprising and frustrating amount of time and money simply to meet the ever-growing list of compliance demands for federal funding.
That sucks.
Second, the stem cells in question are coming from discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization clinics which are already slated for destruction. To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root
I can understand why you feel that way, but it's hardly that cut-and-dried. You feel that way because you believe that sentience is essentially mechanical - that it arises from the body. From this point of view, there is obviously a time when sentience begins, and it seems impossible that it should be so early as the moment of conception. This is a perfectly valid position that matches currently known facts, and there's nothing wrong with you holding it.
However, this is not everybody's view on how this works. A lot of people hold the view that sentience is essentially other than mechanical - that it does not arise from the body, but rather is connected to the body at the moment the body comes into existence, and then loses that connection when the body dies.
You can say that people who believe this are deluded, because there is no evidence to support their belief. In point of fact, though, there's no "scientific" evidence, in the form of an experiment, that would falsify either hypothesis.
So for people who hold your viewpoint, there's no ethical dilemma here - obviously embryonic stem cells are fine to use for research.
For people who do not hold your viewpoint, knowing whether or not a treatment is based on research done on embryonic or fetal stem cells is quite important, regardless of whether the embryo in question would have been taken to term or not. It means they are profiting from the death of a sentient being if they accept a treatment that did come from embryonic/fetal stem cell research.
So while I understand that this seems like a simple cut-and-dried ethical issue to you, there really is a good reason (that is, a reason they find compelling) for other people to hold a different ethical position.
They already have. (1/2 :')
You have to understand
If you want to write down a convincing argument, argue using reason, not your own prejudices. "Comrade?" Give me a break. The fact is that Verizon has a monopoly, which they have because they were granted it by the government. Does the municipal WiFi project compete unfairly? We can't tell. It's hopeless to try to sort it out at this late date.
What we can tell is that Verizon is doing a *terrible* job of providing broadband to its customers. My father has been waiting for broadband from Verizon forever, and he's never going to get it, because it's not "cost effective." Meanwhile, I've done live internet broadcasts from a mud-walled hut twenty minutes outside of a town of 300, two hours from Tucson, over a DSL line that's costing $70/month.
I don't have anything against Verizon, but if they can't deliver the kind of service that's being proposed here at a competitive rate, I'm just not able to work up any sympathy. They are asking for a government-granted right to cherry-pick the most lucrative customers in the Philadelphia area. I don't see any reason why the legislature should have granted it to them, and I'm sorry to see that it did.
Your talk of "Comrade" and "it is not the job of government to blah blah blah" is just noise. Thank you for playing.
It sounds like you have bad RAM. Every time I've run into instability problems on the Mac it's been because of bad RAM. If the RAM is okay, the thing never crashes.
The javascript hack sounds like fun, but realistically the users you're talking about that would *be able* to do what you suggest represent maybe one hundredth of a percent of the user population, so even if you tried telling them their mail had almost rejected, it wouldn't work. Chances are it'd be dumped by their spam filter anyway. :'/
It's that in order for this to be useful, it has to be widely implemented. Anybody who sends a lot of legitimate email (e.g., hotmail) is going to need to buy a lot more CPU. So it's not going to get widely implemented. So it won't help. Sorry. :'(
No, I'd say your "Dharma group" is really rolling in it.
Would that it were so.