Further, slippery slopes work both ways; in your case, would you be willing to charge a woman with unintentional or negligent homicide because she miscarried?
I forget which, but one state passed a law to that effect this year: that a formerly pregnant woman can be charged with a crime if she knowingly takes actions which lead to a miscarriage.
(I am explicitly not taking the position that this is a good idea.)
I agree with you, except I don't think the law is inconsistent The law has always differentiated, essentially, between what you can do with your stuff vs. what you can do with somebody else's stuff.
I can spank my kids; I can't spank your kids. I can bust my own window and enter my house (if I've locked myself out somehow and really need to get in immediately badly enough); I can't do that to your house.
Similarly, a pregnant woman can decide she wants (or needs for medical reasons, etc.) her fetus out, but the law says it's not okay if someone forces that on her.
would people callously say "an embryo isn't human"
It may be callous, but the truth usually is.
The great and terrible thing about science is that it's like a friend that's so honest, it will tell you things you'd rather not know. The friend who will tell you that your spouse is cheating, that you do look fat in that dress, that your kid is ugly? That's science. It shows you the world that is, not the world that you wish for.
In any case, choosing child traits is an ethical and practical issue for discussion, but I see it as being a separate discussion than whether or not abortion is ever okay.
And it's completely, utterly futile. Can anyone name a filibuster that failed because they simply couldn't find anyone to talk anymore?
Mostly, it doesn't work out that way -- instead, they just don't filibuster at all.
I can't, offhand, point to a filibuster that failed because no one wanted to talk anymore. I can, on the other hand, point to the frequency of filibuster use's meteoric rise in the post-actually-standing-up-and-talking era. Correlation doesn't equal causation; nonetheless, here there is causation.
If it's that you don't believe an Embryo is a person, then I have to ask where it is that YOU draw the line, because right now no one has agreed on it.
I think birth is a pretty reasonable place to draw the line legally, given that most modern laws implicitly roll with that. For example, the date on which it's legal for you to drink isn't based on when you were concieved, when you entered the second trimester, etc. It's based on when you were born.
Unless, of course, you aren't going to live up to the rest of what being Amish entails, in which case you're committing fraud rather than having discovered a clever loophole.
If you never post again, I'll assume you've decided to give up electricity and go through with it.:)
If they have the votes to filibuster, why waste everyone's time by making them go up there and read the telephone book?
Basically, because you have to stick your neck out more to actually filibuster vs. to refuse to vote for cloture.
Physically, because there is at least a little bit of an endurance trial to get up there and speak, and politically, because now there's video of you personally as a specific senator A) being so against the passage of a specific bill that you would rather read the telephone book for hours than allow a vote on it and B) being so against the passage of a specific bill you would rather make sure that the Senate could do nothing rather than vote on it.
Now, maybe Bill X is very unpopular in your specific state even if it enjoys support elsewhere. In that case you're still good to filibuster. In a lot of other cases, you're taking a much bigger political risk than is currently necessary as part of a filibuster threat.
No, what these people are saying is that "obey the laws we agree with, disobey the laws we don't agree with".
Nope. What I'm saying is, in any system of laws, there are usually ways to obey the letter of a law while violating its spirit. These loopholes are, in many cases, eventually closed.
If we accept that, for example, many people don't pay as much in taxes as the spirit of the law says that they should by finding ways to get deductions or shelter income -- all things allowed within the letter of the law -- why couldn't we also accept that scientists might obey the letter of a law preventing them from doing research while violating the hell out of the spirit of it?
I'm sorry if my position is too nuanced or irreducible to a false dichotomy for you, but, there it is.
Why must your beliefs mandate that another individual fund (via mandatory taxation) research they view as fundamentally unethical?
I think the answer has to simply be: that's where we've chosen to draw the line in our Constitution.
That is to say, we've set it up so that (in theory), the majority doesn't get to take your individual rights away, but they do get to decide what we collectively spend money on. (And in that context, I don't consider anyone to have a right to not have their tax dollars spent on something the majority agrees with, excepting, of course, when it abridges another individual right.)
Overall I think that strikes a pretty good compromise between a government that can't do anything (even when it should) and a government that can do too much. It's not perfect, but it beats any alternative we've tried so far.
The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."
What if the scientists just charge for the research, but present an itemized bill that throws in the embryo destruction for free?
I'm mostly kidding, but isn't there some decent way to weasel around this?
I don't think it's forgetting so much as that's just they roll.
Some companies are purely hostile to open source (e.g. cancer-era Microsoft.)
Some companies will use open source projects when it helps them, but aren't going to contribute a ton of value back. (Most companies fall into this bin, including modern Microsoft, Apple, etc. And yes, I'm aware of the crap they've open sourced -- I consider it to amount to not a lot of value, you may disagree.)
Some companies have a business model based on contributing a lot of source to the community. There aren't a lot of these, and when there are, they usually have a business model involving making most of their money on services relating to the product they're creating or selling you a non-free fork or variant of said product.
All that being said, I'm not sure what you're hoping for. MS has transitioned from a 1 to a 2, and doesn't have the kind of business model that would make it as a 3, so that's probably about as far as it goes.
I'm about 10 years in (professionally) and still enjoying it.
Granted, I tend to have roles more now where I have some analysis or other non-pure-coding tasks mixed in. I still spend most of my time writing code, but it's not 100% as it was when I was fresh out of school.
I agree with you that most good programmers don't make good managers or salespeople. However:
The "alternatives" toward which a programmer is supposed to steer according to TFA are plain stupid and slightly offending by assuming that becoming a manager or a Sales ~person~ is a move "UP". How the fuck is your programmer background going to help with those?
A manager or sales person who both is legitimately suited for their job and is technical is a godsend, because they tend to be much less likely to promise their superiors and/or clients the impossible or impractical. They also tend to be better at "selling" the decisions that the development team has made and their tradeoffs.
are concepts that newbies assume can be handled by an API, or automatically garbage-collected...
To be fair, for all practical purposes on many (not all) projects, they not only can be, but probably should be. Your primary focus is on the business or application logic and not on optimization or memory management -- unless it matters, and often it doesn't. For example, I have a sense of how to design a project and write code that supports a high degree of scalability and high availability of services -- but that's been relevant on only a small fraction of the projects I've worked. Wasting time building heavy scalability (for example) into a piece of software that would for certain only ever be used by one person or a handful of people at a time would not be the hallmark of a good programmer.
(Though I agree you can get into trouble if you don't have any sense of when it isn't true that you can let these things slide.)
SQL injection, while yes clearly a bad security problem, is pretty fixable. By fixable, I mean it generally would take a non-ridiculous amount of time to analyze the code/procedures for a project and eliminate SQL injection problems.
Major architectural or technology decisions really are not fixable on anything near the same scale of effort. These are the big mistakes that new developers make wrong (if they are allowed to make them) much more often than experienced developers.
I suspect you don't do a lot of Big Business work. Internal systems for Fortune 500 companies, stuff like that.
The choices there are basically Java or.NET. It's not that people aren't choosing PHP for those kinds of projects, it's that it's never even seriously considered.
Granted, there are a lot of other markets or segments where other technologies are reigning or ascendant. In that space, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, slippery slopes work both ways; in your case, would you be willing to charge a woman with unintentional or negligent homicide because she miscarried?
I forget which, but one state passed a law to that effect this year: that a formerly pregnant woman can be charged with a crime if she knowingly takes actions which lead to a miscarriage.
(I am explicitly not taking the position that this is a good idea.)
I agree with you, except I don't think the law is inconsistent The law has always differentiated, essentially, between what you can do with your stuff vs. what you can do with somebody else's stuff.
I can spank my kids; I can't spank your kids. I can bust my own window and enter my house (if I've locked myself out somehow and really need to get in immediately badly enough); I can't do that to your house.
Similarly, a pregnant woman can decide she wants (or needs for medical reasons, etc.) her fetus out, but the law says it's not okay if someone forces that on her.
if the embryo has no part in the decision it's just murder.
PETA posters notwithstanding, I don't consider killing nonsentient creatures murder.
would people callously say "an embryo isn't human"
It may be callous, but the truth usually is.
The great and terrible thing about science is that it's like a friend that's so honest, it will tell you things you'd rather not know. The friend who will tell you that your spouse is cheating, that you do look fat in that dress, that your kid is ugly? That's science. It shows you the world that is, not the world that you wish for.
In any case, choosing child traits is an ethical and practical issue for discussion, but I see it as being a separate discussion than whether or not abortion is ever okay.
Just for the record, the bold tag is not cruise control for awesome.
You have to use the caps lock for that.
There is no "unless".
If I say I'm Amish, who is the government to say otherwise?
You are mistaken. For this purpose, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is specific.
Here's one article including details of the bit of the law about how you'd get your exemption.
And it's completely, utterly futile. Can anyone name a filibuster that failed because they simply couldn't find anyone to talk anymore?
Mostly, it doesn't work out that way -- instead, they just don't filibuster at all.
I can't, offhand, point to a filibuster that failed because no one wanted to talk anymore. I can, on the other hand, point to the frequency of filibuster use's meteoric rise in the post-actually-standing-up-and-talking era. Correlation doesn't equal causation; nonetheless, here there is causation.
... except that everyone who owns an XBox is a potential customer for XBox live.
XBox sales don't need to increase or even maintain for the installed base of the system to be increasing.
In a sense your physics is right but your math, or at least your applied math, is bad.
If it's that you don't believe an Embryo is a person, then I have to ask where it is that YOU draw the line, because right now no one has agreed on it.
I think birth is a pretty reasonable place to draw the line legally, given that most modern laws implicitly roll with that. For example, the date on which it's legal for you to drink isn't based on when you were concieved, when you entered the second trimester, etc. It's based on when you were born.
I'm all for that.
Unless, of course, you aren't going to live up to the rest of what being Amish entails, in which case you're committing fraud rather than having discovered a clever loophole.
If you never post again, I'll assume you've decided to give up electricity and go through with it. :)
If they have the votes to filibuster, why waste everyone's time by making them go up there and read the telephone book?
Basically, because you have to stick your neck out more to actually filibuster vs. to refuse to vote for cloture.
Physically, because there is at least a little bit of an endurance trial to get up there and speak, and politically, because now there's video of you personally as a specific senator A) being so against the passage of a specific bill that you would rather read the telephone book for hours than allow a vote on it and B) being so against the passage of a specific bill you would rather make sure that the Senate could do nothing rather than vote on it.
Now, maybe Bill X is very unpopular in your specific state even if it enjoys support elsewhere. In that case you're still good to filibuster. In a lot of other cases, you're taking a much bigger political risk than is currently necessary as part of a filibuster threat.
No, what these people are saying is that "obey the laws we agree with, disobey the laws we don't agree with".
Nope. What I'm saying is, in any system of laws, there are usually ways to obey the letter of a law while violating its spirit. These loopholes are, in many cases, eventually closed.
If we accept that, for example, many people don't pay as much in taxes as the spirit of the law says that they should by finding ways to get deductions or shelter income -- all things allowed within the letter of the law -- why couldn't we also accept that scientists might obey the letter of a law preventing them from doing research while violating the hell out of the spirit of it?
I'm sorry if my position is too nuanced or irreducible to a false dichotomy for you, but, there it is.
An additional unfortunate detail is that the Democrats are completely spineless
So what you're saying is... the real question is whether or not embryonic stem cell research can regenerate a missing spine? :)
Why must your beliefs mandate that another individual fund (via mandatory taxation) research they view as fundamentally unethical?
I think the answer has to simply be: that's where we've chosen to draw the line in our Constitution.
That is to say, we've set it up so that (in theory), the majority doesn't get to take your individual rights away, but they do get to decide what we collectively spend money on. (And in that context, I don't consider anyone to have a right to not have their tax dollars spent on something the majority agrees with, excepting, of course, when it abridges another individual right.)
Overall I think that strikes a pretty good compromise between a government that can't do anything (even when it should) and a government that can do too much. It's not perfect, but it beats any alternative we've tried so far.
There shouldn't be a need to weasel around this.
I totally agree, but yet, here we are.
It just seems like, if people can find loopholes in the laws to do bad things, surely they can find one to try to cure diseases. (Up to a point.)
The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."
What if the scientists just charge for the research, but present an itemized bill that throws in the embryo destruction for free?
I'm mostly kidding, but isn't there some decent way to weasel around this?
I don't think it's forgetting so much as that's just they roll.
Some companies are purely hostile to open source (e.g. cancer-era Microsoft.)
Some companies will use open source projects when it helps them, but aren't going to contribute a ton of value back. (Most companies fall into this bin, including modern Microsoft, Apple, etc. And yes, I'm aware of the crap they've open sourced -- I consider it to amount to not a lot of value, you may disagree.)
Some companies have a business model based on contributing a lot of source to the community. There aren't a lot of these, and when there are, they usually have a business model involving making most of their money on services relating to the product they're creating or selling you a non-free fork or variant of said product.
All that being said, I'm not sure what you're hoping for. MS has transitioned from a 1 to a 2, and doesn't have the kind of business model that would make it as a 3, so that's probably about as far as it goes.
I'm about 10 years in (professionally) and still enjoying it.
Granted, I tend to have roles more now where I have some analysis or other non-pure-coding tasks mixed in. I still spend most of my time writing code, but it's not 100% as it was when I was fresh out of school.
I agree with you that most good programmers don't make good managers or salespeople. However:
The "alternatives" toward which a programmer is supposed to steer according to TFA are plain stupid and slightly offending by assuming that becoming a manager or a Sales ~person~ is a move "UP". How the fuck is your programmer background going to help with those?
A manager or sales person who both is legitimately suited for their job and is technical is a godsend, because they tend to be much less likely to promise their superiors and/or clients the impossible or impractical. They also tend to be better at "selling" the decisions that the development team has made and their tradeoffs.
are concepts that newbies assume can be handled by an API, or automatically garbage-collected...
To be fair, for all practical purposes on many (not all) projects, they not only can be, but probably should be. Your primary focus is on the business or application logic and not on optimization or memory management -- unless it matters, and often it doesn't. For example, I have a sense of how to design a project and write code that supports a high degree of scalability and high availability of services -- but that's been relevant on only a small fraction of the projects I've worked. Wasting time building heavy scalability (for example) into a piece of software that would for certain only ever be used by one person or a handful of people at a time would not be the hallmark of a good programmer.
(Though I agree you can get into trouble if you don't have any sense of when it isn't true that you can let these things slide.)
On the other hand:
SQL injection, while yes clearly a bad security problem, is pretty fixable. By fixable, I mean it generally would take a non-ridiculous amount of time to analyze the code/procedures for a project and eliminate SQL injection problems.
Major architectural or technology decisions really are not fixable on anything near the same scale of effort. These are the big mistakes that new developers make wrong (if they are allowed to make them) much more often than experienced developers.
Except it's not all of a sudden.
You may have missed the last few years of relevant stories.
I suspect you don't do a lot of Big Business work. Internal systems for Fortune 500 companies, stuff like that.
The choices there are basically Java or .NET. It's not that people aren't choosing PHP for those kinds of projects, it's that it's never even seriously considered.
Granted, there are a lot of other markets or segments where other technologies are reigning or ascendant. In that space, not so much.
Right. Except I'm saying it's not that.
... or he still owns a boatload of Microsoft stock and didn't want to essentially sue himself?
I mean, there are simpler evil explanations than your convoluted evil explanation.