And my point is that no modern species would look at all the way it looks if it weren't the product of evolution. Likewise, an i7 wouldn't behave the way it does if it weren't the product of an unbroken chain of evolution from the 8086.
Nobody would create x86 in its current form from scratch, today. Actually look at the x86 instruction set. It includes instructions for dealing with ISA devices, systems with less than a megabyte of RAM, and non-ASCII character sets. (Not Unicode mind; we're talking EBCDIC)
It would have been hard for you to pick an example from computing that more undermined what I'm guessing is your position.;)
But back on point, yes, I'm contending that if you tried to examine a biological system today without the understanding that it is the result of an evolutionary process, you wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails out of it. Evolution is absolutely fundamental to modern understanding of biology.
On what basis do you expect that the legal definition of life be a scientific, concrete and discrete one? I agree that all the arguments you lay out here form a solid case that "point of conception" is much easier to determine with precision and without ambiguity, but I didn't see any argument that this means it's the _correct_ threshold to define legal personhood.
Ultimately, we're talking about at what point a clump of cells growing inside a woman's body acquires a right to exist which _supersedes_ that woman's rights to sovereignty over her body. I don't see any reason to expect that the answer to that question will be precise or easily determined.
When all the costs of bringing your product to market are front-loaded, and all the revenue then comes from enforcing artificial scarcity of reproducing the finished product, you're in a very different world from selling manufactured goods. Same thing comes up with pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's certainly an interesting problem.
I agree fully that Android as it's being distributed isn't as open as it ought to be. However, it's still more open than iPhone in at least one non-trivial way:
Do you have any evidence that current trends will continue?
Do you have any evidence they won't? We can play hot-potato with the burden of proof all day if you want.
All I'm proposing is, we know Earth as it exists today does a good job supporting a few billion homo sapiens. We don't know, if we warm it up 5% or cool it down 5% if it will continue to be able to support us. We have no other place within reach if Earth goes tango-uniform as a livable habitat, and we are the only complex, intelligent life in local space and, for all we know for sure, anywhere.
Based on that, I'll go out on a limb and say it's worth throwing our collective intelligences and riches behind the problem of keeping the Earth pretty close to where it is today climatically. I believe this goal is more important than, for instance, the difference in profit margin for a coal-fired power plant operator to install or not install emission control systems.
What part of my proposal, specifically, do you disagree with?
Re:Come on. Stop with the bullshit and be hoenst.
on
Climategate's Final Days
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
Great! Somebody needs to. That said, it seems like you're coming from a libertarian/laissez-faire capitalism viewpoint, but you have some problem with Al Gore investing in and profiting from companies that are moving the ball forward on sustainable technology? I'm a left liberal (shocking, I know) and I don't see a bit of a problem with Al Gore or anybody else profiting by supporting businesses that serve such an enormous benefit to society.
You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public.
I expressed myself very poorly if I left anyone with the impression that I support or advocate lying to the public. I want to see the true, unvarnished results of all climate studies become common knowledge so we can all make educated policy/electoral decisions.
> The fact is we don't know enough, the climate is a very chaotic system.
Exactly my point. We don't know enough to predict what will happen to this tiny sliver of habitat we have if it gets a little bit warmer or a little bit cooler. The only thing we know is that the way it is now can keep a few billion of us alive. The totality of my proposition is that we should be trying to keep it as much the way it is as possible.
> Would you like to be the first to fall on your sword to save the earth?
My wife and I have made the conscious decision not to reproduce, and concern about the carrying capacity of the planet was not a minor factor in that decision. (That and I am a cancer survivor, and don't want to produce any lymphoma-prone offspring.)
Re:Come on. Stop with the bullshit and be hoenst.
on
Climategate's Final Days
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
People on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is).
I'm not as interested in that question, frankly. The way I look at it is this: every single homo sapien that lives or has ever lived has been on this one planet. As far as we've been able to tell, homo sapiens is the only "intelligent" life that's ever evolved anywhere, certainly in local space. I'm of the mind that that's fairly important and worth preserving. And this planet is the only one we know of that can support homo sapien life on some of it's surface some of the time, and even then we're on a climactic knife-edge. A little bit of change in any direction and we have reasonable concerns that the whole semi-stable equilibrium we're in will skew off wildly. It looks like that's what happened on Mars, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here.
Taking all that in mind, until we have a way to live and thrive off-planet, we absolutely have to do what we can to keep this planet healthy, where healthy is defined as "able to support a large human population". If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us.
Well, your affinity for some clumps of undifferentiated cells may well have contributed to the continued suffering or death of countless real, living, breathing, actualized human beings with self awareness, names, and families who'll mourn them. Can you not see the imbalance in that decision?
A former coworker of mine is named "Hyun O". He was the only person in the company not to follow the first initial, last name standard for his email address. =)
This is why we have a media and a government, and why it's such a big problem that the media and government we have are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the exact corporate creeps they're supposed to be keeping an eye on for us.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
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· Score: 1
> It doesn't matter how bad we are, as long as you are worse.
Two parties should be enough for anyone!
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> If you had $300 million, i'd rather it go to one individual where $100m was being taxed back, than say 30,000 individuals that are living in a low income tax bracket where their taxation rate is minimal.
I can think of at least 30,000 people in that equation who'd disagree with you.
Slashdot Mirror
And my point is that no modern species would look at all the way it looks if it weren't the product of evolution. Likewise, an i7 wouldn't behave the way it does if it weren't the product of an unbroken chain of evolution from the 8086.
Nobody would create x86 in its current form from scratch, today. Actually look at the x86 instruction set. It includes instructions for dealing with ISA devices, systems with less than a megabyte of RAM, and non-ASCII character sets. (Not Unicode mind; we're talking EBCDIC)
It would have been hard for you to pick an example from computing that more undermined what I'm guessing is your position. ;)
But back on point, yes, I'm contending that if you tried to examine a biological system today without the understanding that it is the result of an evolutionary process, you wouldn't be able to make heads nor tails out of it. Evolution is absolutely fundamental to modern understanding of biology.
On what basis do you expect that the legal definition of life be a scientific, concrete and discrete one? I agree that all the arguments you lay out here form a solid case that "point of conception" is much easier to determine with precision and without ambiguity, but I didn't see any argument that this means it's the _correct_ threshold to define legal personhood.
Ultimately, we're talking about at what point a clump of cells growing inside a woman's body acquires a right to exist which _supersedes_ that woman's rights to sovereignty over her body. I don't see any reason to expect that the answer to that question will be precise or easily determined.
> Is "modern biology" is premised on evolution? If evolution isn't the way things came about, all of modern biology falls apart?
Correct.
Are you a time-traveller from the past?
Yes, just like everyone (and everything) else.
It's actually closer than it looks like from their website, per some recent activity on the mailing list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg05749.html
While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible
to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or
loses power. This will be fixed when the fsck tool is ready.
And
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg05882.html
We're still actively developing (btrfsck). I don't have a release date planned
yet but we should have betas coming out over the next few months.
Note both threads are from the last two weeks. Things are still happening rapidly; just not, for whatever reason, on the project web site.
When all the costs of bringing your product to market are front-loaded, and all the revenue then comes from enforcing artificial scarcity of reproducing the finished product, you're in a very different world from selling manufactured goods. Same thing comes up with pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's certainly an interesting problem.
Is it just me, or does "software giant" sound like a monster that should be in Kingdom of Loathing ?
Perhaps, in the same sense that "improved the reliability of the rear differential" means nothing to 99%+ of automobile owners.
Oh crap, did I just make a car analogy?
I agree fully that Android as it's being distributed isn't as open as it ought to be. However, it's still more open than iPhone in at least one non-trivial way:
http://android.git.kernel.org/
Try religion! They pick an answer and stick with it, no matter what new and contradictory facts come to light.
In Asia, there isn't even a single piece of Graffiti in the darkest corner of the subways.
Can't speak for Asia generally, but observe these pics from my 2007 visit to Taiwan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cathychang/sets/72157603572831113/
Do you have any evidence that current trends will continue?
Do you have any evidence they won't? We can play hot-potato with the burden of proof all day if you want.
All I'm proposing is, we know Earth as it exists today does a good job supporting a few billion homo sapiens. We don't know, if we warm it up 5% or cool it down 5% if it will continue to be able to support us. We have no other place within reach if Earth goes tango-uniform as a livable habitat, and we are the only complex, intelligent life in local space and, for all we know for sure, anywhere.
Based on that, I'll go out on a limb and say it's worth throwing our collective intelligences and riches behind the problem of keeping the Earth pretty close to where it is today climatically. I believe this goal is more important than, for instance, the difference in profit margin for a coal-fired power plant operator to install or not install emission control systems.
What part of my proposal, specifically, do you disagree with?
It is well known that Al gore has invested in carbon credit and other green-energy related companies.
Great! Somebody needs to. That said, it seems like you're coming from a libertarian/laissez-faire capitalism viewpoint, but you have some problem with Al Gore investing in and profiting from companies that are moving the ball forward on sustainable technology? I'm a left liberal (shocking, I know) and I don't see a bit of a problem with Al Gore or anybody else profiting by supporting businesses that serve such an enormous benefit to society.
You want to help the environment at all costs. Even if it means lying to the public.
I expressed myself very poorly if I left anyone with the impression that I support or advocate lying to the public. I want to see the true, unvarnished results of all climate studies become common knowledge so we can all make educated policy/electoral decisions.
> The fact is we don't know enough, the climate is a very chaotic system.
Exactly my point. We don't know enough to predict what will happen to this tiny sliver of habitat we have if it gets a little bit warmer or a little bit cooler. The only thing we know is that the way it is now can keep a few billion of us alive. The totality of my proposition is that we should be trying to keep it as much the way it is as possible.
> Would you like to be the first to fall on your sword to save the earth?
My wife and I have made the conscious decision not to reproduce, and concern about the carrying capacity of the planet was not a minor factor in that decision. (That and I am a cancer survivor, and don't want to produce any lymphoma-prone offspring.)
People on the right (not necessarily applying that label to you, mind) seem really hung up on the question of whether human action is causing global warming (those that are able to get past arguing over whether it's even happening, that is).
I'm not as interested in that question, frankly. The way I look at it is this: every single homo sapien that lives or has ever lived has been on this one planet. As far as we've been able to tell, homo sapiens is the only "intelligent" life that's ever evolved anywhere, certainly in local space. I'm of the mind that that's fairly important and worth preserving. And this planet is the only one we know of that can support homo sapien life on some of it's surface some of the time, and even then we're on a climactic knife-edge. A little bit of change in any direction and we have reasonable concerns that the whole semi-stable equilibrium we're in will skew off wildly. It looks like that's what happened on Mars, and there's no reason to assume it can't happen here.
Taking all that in mind, until we have a way to live and thrive off-planet, we absolutely have to do what we can to keep this planet healthy, where healthy is defined as "able to support a large human population". If Earth winds up looking like Mars, knowing the planet is just going through a normal geological cycle that we didn't cause is not much comfort. Not that there will be any complex life anywhere in the Sol system to mourn us.
In that case they're _really_ in trouble.
Yeah, you have to credit a troll who gets you to click a link you _expect_ to be goatse.
Well, your affinity for some clumps of undifferentiated cells may well have contributed to the continued suffering or death of countless real, living, breathing, actualized human beings with self awareness, names, and families who'll mourn them. Can you not see the imbalance in that decision?
> 8) Some people's name is only a single letter.
A former coworker of mine is named "Hyun O". He was the only person in the company not to follow the first initial, last name standard for his email address. =)
"Twit" works well also.
This is why we have a media and a government, and why it's such a big problem that the media and government we have are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the exact corporate creeps they're supposed to be keeping an eye on for us.
> It doesn't matter how bad we are, as long as you are worse.
Two parties should be enough for anyone!
> If you had $300 million, i'd rather it go to one individual where $100m was being taxed back, than say 30,000 individuals that are living in a low income tax bracket where their taxation rate is minimal.
I can think of at least 30,000 people in that equation who'd disagree with you.
> Offenses that used to be punishable by stoning, now only land you in rehab.
True, but that's not due to a softening of hearts in the Puritan movement, but a steady waning of their influence.
As Christopher Hitchens says, never forget how these people behaved back when they had enough power to do whatever they wanted.