"Manage?" Meaning what, exactly? The entity that "manages" it effectively does control it. They control whether or not it's operated transparently, as it already is. If countries (as in the EU) that have strict speech-limiting codes start to have a hand in "managing" the internet, we're going to see the management impact on what is, currently, working just fine. Would you really like to see Chinese-style "management" of information starting to have an impact on your own web surfing and DNS look-ups? No? Then don't give management (and thus, control) of DNS to an entity (the UN) that considers the Chinese government's free speech policies to be as valid as an open society's, like the US.
so while it can say, for example "You may not invade Iraq, we're still pursuing diplomatic channels!" it can't really force anybody to halt an invasion.
Or, it can say, "You signed surrender terms after you last invaded a country, and those terms included full disclosure about where all of your WMDs are, and that you won't do things like shoot at no-fly-zone-patroling aircraft. And since we have unanimous UN voting on the sanctions that you're violating (and on the regime-ending consequences of those continual violations), evidence of untold billions in corruption in the program that's supposed to feed your people even as you violate the sanctions, we're going to have to make you go away before you ship any more of your WMDs to Syria and elsewhere. Of course, the two countries that have the most people profiting from your corruption of the oil-for-food program are also the two countries saying they'll veto any use of force to remove you, we have to consider that an insurmountable conflict of interest on the parts of those taking the bribes. And, since you continue to shoot at air patrols, deliver embarassingly amateur and obviously fabricated BS about your disposition of WMDs that inspectors have personally seen in huge stockpiles, well, we can't really complain when the country that contributes the most cash, personnel, and material to the UN gets tired of the politcal stonewalling from sanction-profiteering colluders and simply acts to remove a mass-murdering, neighbor-invading, weapons-smuggling, village-gassing, terrorist-harboring/funding, Stalin-fan-club-member, punk like Saddam from power." That would be the other thing that could be said.
Re:I think you misunderstand the concern
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Ask The Mythbusters
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They're also worried about interference with the person-to-person communications. Let's say someone gives the all-clear, and then another person on a two-way attempts to alert the team about a little old lady that's just wandered into the area? If their comms can't be trusted, it erodes the overall safety of the site. The detonation stuff, these days, is all digitally coded so that even a signal on the same frequeny shouldn't be able to set off charges any more than it can guess the MAC address on a WiFi. Of course, even very long odds are something to think about when you're working with high explosives.
And all you'll get paid for telling a business that they can trust their daily operations, payroll, inventory, messaging, and public web presence to a machine you found on the street, running software that no one in the office knows how to maintain is... $0.00.
NONE of my server 2003 Cds, not even the enterprise edition comes with an SQL server
Well, then it's a good thing I didn't say that, huh? When you buy the SBS product from MS, the OS, SQL, Exchange, and numerous other apps are shipping in the shrinkwrap. It's on multiple CDs because that's too much stuff to put on a single CD. The install, though, is customized to do the whole thing as one process. Or, you can just buy the server from Dell (or a jillion other integrators) with the SBS suite already installed from a single install image.
Of course you're not going to find something with SQL Server's horsepower bundled in with any of the distros you mentioned. There's a reason that MySQL isn't generally compared to MS SQL or Oracle, etc. They're not in the same class. I don't think you'll find something as ready-to-go as SharePoint, either - all of those things come with significant support resources, multi-language material, etc. Exchange alone (with the full OWA) is a beefy install. I don't think that this discussion is really about how many disks the install spans, is it? I actually find it ironic that people are (mistakenly) complaining about how incomplete a product like SBS is, when in the next thread, we'll be talking about how MS shouldn't be allowed to make their products so complete. Bullhockey indeed.
This would be insightful if things like this weren't in the shrink-wrap from Microsoft. You know, the OS, a complete web server, mail platform, fax handling, SQL server, firewalling, collaboration suite, and remote access/routing tools all in a single install. Most small businesses that do set up MS-based server solutions go exactly this route and save themselves a lot of trouble and money. And yes, you can pretty much secure and patch all of it with a couple of mouseclicks as needed, or let it happen automatically. Most actual business settings, though, start to require an admin (or rent-an-admin) with enough brains to know when/why/how to perform some of those tasks so as to not disrupt business. But don't assume that all you can get on a CD from MS is an O/S - it's just not like that, and hasn't been for years. They were providing "SBS" packages/installs back with good old NT, and it's been getting better and easier to deal with ever since. It's pretty much just-add-water (um, consulting/training for end users) at this point.
This kind of smart thinking is why we have a patent system. The patent system was not designed to protect business methods, such as completing a sale using n clicks instead of n+1.
But you are going to run into the inevitable trolling twit who will complain that this is just a way of "collecting and recording light with a new twist, and no one can own that, man!" Any second now, just wait.
This is an example of "Free Trade" and "Free Markets" in action!
No, this is exactly not an example of free trade. Fraud is not a component of free trade. A market economy depends on the customer's ability to actually get what's purchased. Scam artists like the Chinese company in question are parasitically abusing a free market's expectation of consistency and reliability in a brand (Intel, in this case), and the only people who call such BS examples of a free market are those who don't want a free market.
it sure shows one of the limitations of outsourcing to the cheapest source
No, this is not the cheapest source. It's a person lying about being the cheapest source. That doesn't show the limitation of bidding out your purchases, it shows the problems inherent in dealing with "businesses" in a country that, at the highest levels, encourages rampant copyright/brand scams.
You get what you pay for!
No, you get what's delivered to you. If what's delivered is fake, then you did not get what you paid for. In most western countries, one of the things we do pay for is a law enforcement framework that doesn't much put up with the fraudulent sales of such items. Since that's not being paid for in China, people doing business there frequently get exactly what's not being paid for.
I wonder who will be checking the authenticity of those upcoming Olympic medals?
You believe that a blastocyst in a dish is less human than a blastocyst in a womb.
Not at all. A blastocyst is a blastocyst regardless of where it is. A blastocyst embedded in the womb has a chance of developing into an embryo which has a chance - with enough differntiation and sophistication - at becoming a human fetus. A blastocyst in a dish so far (since we don't have effective artificial wombs) requires implantation so that it can develop, eventually, just like its more naturally fertalized counterparts. But it doesn't matter, because neither group of a dozen cells has in any way manifested itself as anything other than a dozen undifferentiated cells. That's not a human being - it's just something without which (at the moment) you can't make a human being. Prior to cloning of mammals, you couldn't make them without a sperm and an egg, either - but now you just need part of an egg, and the DNA from a good, workable cell. Those are building blocks, just like the blastocyst is a building block. A dozen cinderblocks in a row may be sitting there in accordance with a larger blueprint, but they're not a house. Yet.
A skin cell culture cannot of it's own volition become an adult human being
By which you mean that a blastocyst can by its own choice and action, do so?
Volition: noun.
1 : an act of making a choice or decision; also : a choice or decision made
2 : the power of choosing or determining : WILL
By what mechanism - in real, biological terms - are those 12 cells harboring the ability to sort through options and willfully act? Careful, your magical thinking is starting to show here, even in just your choice of words.
So, you take an egg, and artificially (outside the body) fertilize it with sperm, producing - after a few divisions, a blastocyst. That blastocyst cannot exist without the scientific process that just caused it to exist. Now, you take an egg, use DNA from a skin cell (replacing the egg's DNA - the only DNA in play, now, is that from the skin cell), re-set to the stem state, provoke division, and you've got (after the same number of divisions) another blastocyst which is indistinguishable from another of more convetional origins. This is the current/near-term state of things. The use of the convenient egg container (with its signaling mechanisms) can probably be dispensed with over time. Of course, neither the inserted-DNA version, nor the more "traditional" (um, if you can call a decade or two long enough to call anything traditional) IVF version have any prospect of eventually giving rise to an embryo without more medical support. But once they're latched into a receptive womb, you can start the embryonic clock ticking.
Which one is not human?
are a human being in the blastocyst stage of development and will become an adult human being if all conditions are ideal
Then by that standard, the egg and sperm of two people sitting across the table from each other are just as human - those two people are carrying around untold numbers of other humans, they just happen to be that very fragile "unfertilized" stage of development. They need the right circumstances to be present, but the potential is there - all of the ingredients are already ready to go. No science needed, just some candlelight (or too much beer, etc). If you consider 12 cells a person, then of course you consider that single fertalized egg a person. Of course, there's always the odds that the egg won't survive its first division. Just like there's always the odds that the sperm and egg won't fertilize successfully - but there's the material, the circumstances, and (usually) the will for them to be in the same place at the same time.
I don't consider a sperm and egg, a hundredth of a millimeter apart from one another, to be a human - just the building blocks. Hours later - when those building blocks have interacted and begun to divide into a dozen identical, undifferentiated other building blocks, you're
I'm really not sure why you're going to such lengths to pretend that we're not talking about cells in a dish. IVF leftovers cannot proceed past whatever state they're in without technical intervention. They can't leap out of the dish and find a womb, they can't flip the switch on an incubator, etc. In most cases, they're simply going to be discarded, regardless. You can impact their fate by throwing them away, by putting them in a freezer indefinitely, or by putting them to good use in some way (say, as part of a theraputic program, etc).
Cells that are about to be destroyed anyway are, well, done for. Regardless. There is no future for those 12 cells. Unless you use them for something constructive. Either way, they're not going to be put into a situation that would ever form an embryo, period.
At that stage, and under those circumstances, you've got the same potential for an eventual human as you would with a skin cell culture. Call that comparison a straw man if you're not equipped to spot (or in your case, willing to admit) the parallels, but those twelve cells have every bit the future (or not) as a human as any twelve skin cells.
Just because we could learn rapidly if we experiment directly upon adult human beings (say death row prisoners or someone who is contemplating suicide), doesn't mean we should.
Do you even smell the irony of lecturing someone else about using a straw man? An adult human is a human being. Twelve cells are not, and in the case we're talking about will never be, ever. The two people who produced a batch of blastocysts have already got the baby that the considerable intervention of science and investment in their time and resources was to produce, and the lab leftovers are just that - no more morally relevent in one dish than the sperm and eggs are when sitting three inches apart in two dishes. Of course, you can invest meaning in those cells by dedicating yourself to actually hatching them further into an embryo, and down the road - it things work out right - an infant. Or, you could take the useful blank-slate qualities of those cells, and use them to perhaps put a broken family back together after a car accident, or allow a grandfather's failing mind to get those precious few more years of lucidity so that he can enjoy and be a positive influence on an actual, billions-of-cells, brought-into-the-world, got-a-nervous-system, beloved new baby.
Or, we can just throw the dish out, as usually happens. You're awfully quiet about that. Why? Is that outcome so much more preferable to you than the prospect of improving lives (such as those of, say, sick newborns)?
based upon whether an X or Y carrying sperm has fertilized the egg
I'm using "she" as it is properly used - as a pronoun (as opposed to "it" or "they" since we're referring to a dozen cells in a dish). Of course the assembled DNA is the blueprint for a male or a female. But there's no "she" there, in that there's no anyone there yet.
Are you implying that the attaching is done by some third party?
No, I'm making the distinction between the nature of the interaction between the blastocyst and the uterine wall, and the implication that "she" is "doing" something - an implication designed to bolster the notion that there's this tiny little person cooperating in the reproductive process. There's no structure in the blastocyst capable forming the notion of an action, and no mechanism capable of carrying one out. Using language like "she does this" is highly misleading, and I'm calling you on it, that's all.
Yet we are not talking about ultimate origins of the matter we are talking about the origins of the individual human being.
Sorry, you can't separate the two. The same laws of physics govern ashes and cellular mechanics. If you're comfortable with the source of the underlying matter being non-supernatural, and then you should be comfortable with the normal behavior of that matter simply being what it is, and not assigning it a personality or meaning before it has the physical properties that support such sophistication.
Cells from my body will not develop on their own into another individual human being. On the other hand a blastocyst will.
One more time: you're looking through a microscope at a doezen cells sitting in a dish. Walk away, go to lunch, maybe dinner, too. That cluster of cells is not going to do anything on its own. It wouldn't even exist but for highly sophisticated processes and technology. It won't exist beyond that state without more of the same. Left alone, no nerves will grow, no movement will occur, noone can possibly be there to talk about.
So long as she is able to attach to a uterus (artificial or natural once the technology allows) so that she may obtain the nutrients she needs to continue growing.
Thank you for re-making my point. Once the technology allows, those millions of skin cells will have every bit the prospects of becoming an embryo as the refridgerated IVF leftovers. Since neither can possibly become an embryo without science doing its work, they will have exactly the same potential and moral value. If you really are willing to change your moral judgement on one versus the other based on just how far along the technology is, then you've got some pretty slippery underlying values. Not too many years ago, IVF wasn't around to produce any children. Some are probably now reading slashdot. Will children derived from other cells have less value to you? You might as well sort it out now, because it's coming. And once it's here, you won't have the luxury of telling me I'm ridiculous for comparing one potential source of an embryo to another in order to reinforce your notion that 11 more cells than one skin cell in a dish makes a human being.
Neither makes one. Not without technology. In the presence of technology, both will be indistinguishable, and you'll have to face the music: either 12 cells isn't a person, or one cell is. And then every time you shave it will be a moral dilemma. That dilemma is, of course, eliminated by thinking more rationally about where, in those twelve cells, there is or is not yet an actual human.
People made music for centuries before it could be recorded
People also died from infections because of a splinter in their finger before we had anti-biotics. Neither could people Surf Ye Olde Web from Their Horseless Carriages. The market, our culture, and the circumstances are not what they were 200 or 20 years ago.
Personally, I'm glad that creative artists can work for years to produce huge pieces of work. The world would be a poorer place without Peter Jackson, for example. But Peter Jackson sure as hell couldn't have raised the money to employ thousands of people to produce his LOTR films without some expectation of actually making money through large scale sales. The same can be said of studio recordings involving performers that can't usually get together, etc.
The vast majority of music today doesn't earn the person who wrote or performed it a dime.
That's because the vast majority of music is made by people who don't have a big enough audience to earn them any money (beyond bar gigs). But there are thousands and thousands of career musicians who do live off of there work, including studio recordings. Not every musician deserves to be a pro - just like not every programmer, author, animator, or cab driver does.
If you just raise prices that's not letting the market decide
Sure it is. The market then decides if your raised prices are worth it, and they'll go to other download services or retail mechanisms... or the artists/labels on the high end of the online prices scale will bitch about the lower sales numbers, and the prices will drift down to reflect it. Raised prices in a market are never demanded, they're tested.
The funny thing is that the usual arguers on both sides of this issue will think you're talking about the other side. People who produce and distribute the product are eternally interested in remaining profitable as the do so, and the people who want popular music seem to eternally want their entertainment for free. At the intersection is (supposed to be) a market economy. But a lot of people on the consuming end seem to have lost touch with the general notion of "the person selling it is asking more than I want to pay, so I'll buy something cheaper, instead" and have shifted to "so I'll rip it off, instead" without any sense whatsover of causality (when it comes to the consequences).
You suggest that my referring to a blastocyst as the collection of cells that it is, is somehow "dehumanizing." I find that complaint to be a hollow one, and your inability to recognize a casually lyrical reference to the nature of chemistry to be in indication of your less-than-well-roundedness.
The entire point of this thread is to refute the notion that moving away from the use of embryonic stem cells (say, those that are salvaged from about-to-be-destroyed IVF leftovers) will somehow make the stem cell "issues" go away. My point is that those people that are willing to project an irrationally rich personhood onto a blastocyst made up of a dozen cells are going to find other things to gripe about, too. Talk about psuedo-science! Looking at a dozen IVF-created cells through a microscope, and investing in the contents of that nerve-less cluster the features of a baby... well, that's just mystical claptrap.
Oh, and since you're bringing up the issue of who does, and does not know what they're talking about... a word about "red herrings" and the concept of misdirection.
The term goes way back to the training of fox hounds in Britain. In order to test a young pup's nose (specifically, his tracking ability), hound handlers would tie a fish (usually, a herring) to a string and drag it along the ground in a course. The scent of the fish would be completely new to the puppy's surroundings, and an inquisitive, nasally-superior hound puppy would quickly set to following the trail. His vigor, and length of attention span, were solid early indicators of the dog's eventual utility in tracking game in the field.
Once the pup had gotten older, fox scent was used for the same purpose - and the pup was expected to follow that trail without fail. As a serious test, the fox scent trail would be crossed with the dragged scent of a herring (red, because it was dried/cured) to see if the familiar scent of that distraction would divert the hound from his real objective. The hounds that fall for the red herring's trail are the inferior hunters.
If I had wanted to distract my own thread from what I was talking about, I'd have done so more purposefully, believe me. Pointing out that the electro-chemical processes that are the foundation of all biological activity are not in any way magically "human" is no red herring. It's the whole point.
Only so long as that human in the blastocyst stage of development is frozen!
Or not, through the technical work of highly skilled bio-science folks, with expensive equipment and facilities, handled in a very particular way. Frozen, not-frozen - really doesn't matter, because at that moment, only the positive action of the scientists/doctors involved (and of course, a ready and waiting woman with a health uterous and lots of other conditions being just so) will make that anything beyond the group of cells that it is. Period.
It just so happens that the only way she is able to get the nutrient's she needs is by attaching to the lining of a womb.
Let's see... "she" is not a she (yet). There's no tissue differentiation yet. The cells are identical. There's a repository of DNA which will express itself, down the road, as a "she," but none of that is even close to happening yet.
You also use the phrase "by attaching," which (not very subtly) implies volition on the part of the blastocyst. There is not mechanism present for any act on the part of those dozen cells, certainly not with the sense of purpose that you imply. There is simply low-level cellular activity, and no complexity at that stage for anything other than the surrounding cirumstances to dictate what comes (or does not) next.
This is all a part of the cycle of the development of a human being.
So is solar fusion. But I assign no personality traits or volition to the rest of the stuff that's central to that process, and at stage where we're not even yet talking about an embryo, we're in the same boat. I'm always amazed at how willing people are to try to bolster their position about the value of human life by labeling a blastocyst a person. If I can use the DNA from any cell in your body to produce an organism - a clone of you - then are destroying millions of humans with each scratched itch? If not now, will you be when it's just as easy to produce an embryo from a skin cell as it is from an IVF blastocyst? You cheapen what it is to be an aware, living, breathing human when you see humanity in every cell.
You'll forgive me if I don't find that whoever last posted a their opinion on Wikipedia (and hasn't yet been overwritten by someone else) doesn't have what I'd call any real authority on anything. I could go there right now and change the definition of "lifeform" to be "Anything that's not made of Playdough."
Never the less, a blastocyst (feel free to look that one up on Wikipedia - hopefully it doesn't currently read, "a type of peanut butter sandwich," though it might) sitting in a petri dish isn't going anywhere, organism-wise, except into the trash unless someone does something constructive with it (like, scientically intercedes and implants it in the hope of creating a viable embryo... or, rather than wasting it, using it for the dozen stem cells that it actually is).
Were I to live in a country that was undemocratic and were I content with that and your country were to "free" me and my countrymen, I'd consider your country an invader and enemy whom I'd fight, for which I'd likely be killed by your country.
But would you still feel that way if people living in your undemocratic country actively trained and financed people to kill people in my country? If you would be happy to live in a country where you had no voice, but watched your countrymen attack another country - can you really say that you consider the response anything but self defense? I think you're being hypocritical, here: you consider societies that organize around strength (rather then votes) to be equally valid. Meaning, you're OK with a country that's run by whoever can secure the power to do so. But you're not OK when another group of people use their own strength to respond to an attack from the people that you consider (by exercisizing their own violence locally) to be your legitimate rulers?
since one can never know what is "right"
Ah, now we get to the bottom of it, and to your fundamental hypocrisy. You say that one can never know what is right, but you're stating what is wrong. How do you derive that capacity? One can use simple reason to come up with a rational framework for human society, and a representative, minimally-governed, free-market structure is the natural outcome. No bibles needed, to know that using violence against someone is only rational in heading off or responding to the use of violence by that person. A government that derives its power through force (rather than democracy) - the type which you consider equally valid - cannot, rationally, be supported. Simple logic illustrates the unsustainability of a structure that enslaves its productive citizens through force. That's objectively true, and if you're uncomfortable looking into the light and seeing that, it's because your world view is built on mixed premises and built-in contradictions that you're uncomfortable facing. Some of these truths (to quote some great men) are self-evident. Self defense in face of someone who, deriving his murderous creed from a mystical myth, seeks to kill you - there's no need for the UN to give permission.
A "collection of cells" that all of humanity that exists now or has ever existed was once? What praytell is it, if it is not human, a magical womb spirit? Oh wait, it is considered human by any embryologist in the world you are just trying to dehumanize it.
Not only is it just a collection of cells, it's really just a collection of various elements doing a tiny electical dance. You know, heavier elements that were formed deep in stars through fusion. Really, just a rattling collection of subatomic particles, buzzing along with each other, strong and weak nuclear forces producing some really cool results. There - that dehumanized enough for you? You're completely missing the point. There's nothing less amazing and thrilling and delightful about a functioning human (or cockroach) just because, early in the game, it takes a blastocystic collection of stem cells to keep the ball rolling.
Personally, I think that it cheapens humanity to pretend that something without a nervous system is just as human as one that's posting such nonsense to slashdot. The potential for a human, as seen in those 12 cells, is a beautiful thing. The fact that we can produce families through IVF for those that are having trouble getting pregnant - that's great. The fact that we produce quite a few tiny collections of stem cells in the process, and just throw them out once a pregnancy has taken - that's just a waste. Those stem cells are incredibly helpful in research, and towards the practices that can (as an example) make life for a developed, breathing, thinking - but perhaps congenitally damaged - full term baby more fulfilling. Or, that might give that baby back it's mom, if mom slipped and broke her neck the first day home from the maternity ward.
Or, we could just throw those unused IVF cells away. Or, are you really arguing against IVF, here? Because if you are, say so (and be sure to say it to the families that wouldn't exist without that procedure - you do consider the living, breathing children conceived that way to be human, don't you?).
But, my fingernail clippings also have human DNA. A lot of things have to line up right for human DNA to give you an actual human.
the "it doesn't look like me, so its not a person arguement"
A collection of dividing stem cells in a petri dish, salvaged from an IVF procedure rather than simply being discarded, is sitting there under a microscope. You're looking at them. There are 12 cells. Under absolutely no circumstances outside of substantial human intervention with sophisticated science (and a fair amount of cash) and a lot of subsequent nurturing, will those 12 cells ever approach being an embryo, let alone a human. You've no doubt killed mosquitos with vastly more advanced nervous systems (well, since there is no nervous system in those 12 cells, even that's not a fair comparison).
If a collection of DNA is, to you, human, then you're killing millions of people every time you scrub your face in the shower. All of those skin cells! Surely you don't assign humanity to each scrap of your own DNA that could, with the right technology, be used to create an embryo? Because we're pretty close to that, even with something like your skin cells. DNA is not a developed organism. It's a blueprint.
Let's be honest. The whole stem-cell debate is merely a veiled front for the larger fight over abortion.
I would contend that the more we know (and can demonstrate) about what's cooking, and when, in the development of a zygote, blastocyst, etc., the more we deflate some of the fuss about the abortion issue in the first place. It's important, I think, to make sure that those who assign humanity to, say, 16 cells (or to a dividing line of them derived therefrom) really have to come out and admit that it's a mystical, rather than medical position to take. It just sheds some purer light on the discussion (or, fight, as you rightly describe it).
I challenge you to give a definition of when something starts to be 'human' that isn't completely arbitrary
It can be very hard to look at a complex organism and say, "that's human, or is about to be," but it's not hard at all to say what is not. A collection of cells that has no functioning higher nervous system is not human. A collection of cells that has no interconnected, differentiated neural tissue at all is absolutely not human (yet). Zygotes, blastocysts, etc., while eventually capable of developing into an embryo and a fetus, are not humans, and have no platform upon which - at that point - to hang "human-ness."
I realize that's more a description of what is not yet human, rather than an answer to your "when is it human" question. I don't need to sweat pinning down that moment, because I know that a dozen dividing cells are way, way on the non-human side of that transition, regardless of when I would identify it in a given fetus.
The parent post is a thinly-veiled anti-religion troll, not insightful.
No, my post was a specific response to samzenpus's posting of rubberbando's summary, which offered some conjecture about the breakthrough in question perhaps getting rid of the stem cell controversy. Absent a discussion of the religious posture (of attributing humanity to a couple of dozen cells), there would be no controversy.
If a method for procuring stem cells could be found that didn't require the deaths of fetuses, I'd be fine with that
I'm guessing that you don't consider abortion to be something that, absent research into or the use of stem cells, would never again happen. Research in that area doesn't require abortion, it salvages some potential meaning from that which would happen anyway. It will probably become a moot issue sooner than later anyway, except for those that seek/manufacture controversy in any subtle bio-manipulation (and hence my original comment).
The more you understand the universe, the more wonderful it seems.
We can definitely agree on that.
I don't see how knowing the mechanics of cells creates an argument for atheism, as you seem to imply.
Woops! On that we can definitely disagree.
I have a problem with using fetuses for stem cell research, and none whatsoever with this.
I'm glad you make the general distinction between the discussed procedure and other methods. But I hope you can also make the distinction between a collection of dividing cells in a dish and a human being. I'll stop here, because we might as well just play a recording.
Slashdot Mirror
UN didn't want to control but to manage the 'net.
"Manage?" Meaning what, exactly? The entity that "manages" it effectively does control it. They control whether or not it's operated transparently, as it already is. If countries (as in the EU) that have strict speech-limiting codes start to have a hand in "managing" the internet, we're going to see the management impact on what is, currently, working just fine. Would you really like to see Chinese-style "management" of information starting to have an impact on your own web surfing and DNS look-ups? No? Then don't give management (and thus, control) of DNS to an entity (the UN) that considers the Chinese government's free speech policies to be as valid as an open society's, like the US.
so while it can say, for example "You may not invade Iraq, we're still pursuing diplomatic channels!" it can't really force anybody to halt an invasion.
Or, it can say, "You signed surrender terms after you last invaded a country, and those terms included full disclosure about where all of your WMDs are, and that you won't do things like shoot at no-fly-zone-patroling aircraft. And since we have unanimous UN voting on the sanctions that you're violating (and on the regime-ending consequences of those continual violations), evidence of untold billions in corruption in the program that's supposed to feed your people even as you violate the sanctions, we're going to have to make you go away before you ship any more of your WMDs to Syria and elsewhere. Of course, the two countries that have the most people profiting from your corruption of the oil-for-food program are also the two countries saying they'll veto any use of force to remove you, we have to consider that an insurmountable conflict of interest on the parts of those taking the bribes. And, since you continue to shoot at air patrols, deliver embarassingly amateur and obviously fabricated BS about your disposition of WMDs that inspectors have personally seen in huge stockpiles, well, we can't really complain when the country that contributes the most cash, personnel, and material to the UN gets tired of the politcal stonewalling from sanction-profiteering colluders and simply acts to remove a mass-murdering, neighbor-invading, weapons-smuggling, village-gassing, terrorist-harboring/funding, Stalin-fan-club-member, punk like Saddam from power." That would be the other thing that could be said.
They're also worried about interference with the person-to-person communications. Let's say someone gives the all-clear, and then another person on a two-way attempts to alert the team about a little old lady that's just wandered into the area? If their comms can't be trusted, it erodes the overall safety of the site. The detonation stuff, these days, is all digitally coded so that even a signal on the same frequeny shouldn't be able to set off charges any more than it can guess the MAC address on a WiFi. Of course, even very long odds are something to think about when you're working with high explosives.
And all you'll get paid for telling a business that they can trust their daily operations, payroll, inventory, messaging, and public web presence to a machine you found on the street, running software that no one in the office knows how to maintain is... $0.00.
NONE of my server 2003 Cds, not even the enterprise edition comes with an SQL server
Well, then it's a good thing I didn't say that, huh? When you buy the SBS product from MS, the OS, SQL, Exchange, and numerous other apps are shipping in the shrinkwrap. It's on multiple CDs because that's too much stuff to put on a single CD. The install, though, is customized to do the whole thing as one process. Or, you can just buy the server from Dell (or a jillion other integrators) with the SBS suite already installed from a single install image.
Of course you're not going to find something with SQL Server's horsepower bundled in with any of the distros you mentioned. There's a reason that MySQL isn't generally compared to MS SQL or Oracle, etc. They're not in the same class. I don't think you'll find something as ready-to-go as SharePoint, either - all of those things come with significant support resources, multi-language material, etc. Exchange alone (with the full OWA) is a beefy install. I don't think that this discussion is really about how many disks the install spans, is it? I actually find it ironic that people are (mistakenly) complaining about how incomplete a product like SBS is, when in the next thread, we'll be talking about how MS shouldn't be allowed to make their products so complete. Bullhockey indeed.
Microsoft provides you nothing with windows
This would be insightful if things like this weren't in the shrink-wrap from Microsoft. You know, the OS, a complete web server, mail platform, fax handling, SQL server, firewalling, collaboration suite, and remote access/routing tools all in a single install. Most small businesses that do set up MS-based server solutions go exactly this route and save themselves a lot of trouble and money. And yes, you can pretty much secure and patch all of it with a couple of mouseclicks as needed, or let it happen automatically. Most actual business settings, though, start to require an admin (or rent-an-admin) with enough brains to know when/why/how to perform some of those tasks so as to not disrupt business. But don't assume that all you can get on a CD from MS is an O/S - it's just not like that, and hasn't been for years. They were providing "SBS" packages/installs back with good old NT, and it's been getting better and easier to deal with ever since. It's pretty much just-add-water (um, consulting/training for end users) at this point.
This kind of smart thinking is why we have a patent system. The patent system was not designed to protect business methods, such as completing a sale using n clicks instead of n+1.
But you are going to run into the inevitable trolling twit who will complain that this is just a way of "collecting and recording light with a new twist, and no one can own that, man!" Any second now, just wait.
This is an example of "Free Trade" and "Free Markets" in action!
No, this is exactly not an example of free trade. Fraud is not a component of free trade. A market economy depends on the customer's ability to actually get what's purchased. Scam artists like the Chinese company in question are parasitically abusing a free market's expectation of consistency and reliability in a brand (Intel, in this case), and the only people who call such BS examples of a free market are those who don't want a free market.
it sure shows one of the limitations of outsourcing to the cheapest source
No, this is not the cheapest source. It's a person lying about being the cheapest source. That doesn't show the limitation of bidding out your purchases, it shows the problems inherent in dealing with "businesses" in a country that, at the highest levels, encourages rampant copyright/brand scams.
You get what you pay for!
No, you get what's delivered to you. If what's delivered is fake, then you did not get what you paid for. In most western countries, one of the things we do pay for is a law enforcement framework that doesn't much put up with the fraudulent sales of such items. Since that's not being paid for in China, people doing business there frequently get exactly what's not being paid for.
I wonder who will be checking the authenticity of those upcoming Olympic medals?
You believe that a blastocyst in a dish is less human than a blastocyst in a womb.
Not at all. A blastocyst is a blastocyst regardless of where it is. A blastocyst embedded in the womb has a chance of developing into an embryo which has a chance - with enough differntiation and sophistication - at becoming a human fetus. A blastocyst in a dish so far (since we don't have effective artificial wombs) requires implantation so that it can develop, eventually, just like its more naturally fertalized counterparts. But it doesn't matter, because neither group of a dozen cells has in any way manifested itself as anything other than a dozen undifferentiated cells. That's not a human being - it's just something without which (at the moment) you can't make a human being. Prior to cloning of mammals, you couldn't make them without a sperm and an egg, either - but now you just need part of an egg, and the DNA from a good, workable cell. Those are building blocks, just like the blastocyst is a building block. A dozen cinderblocks in a row may be sitting there in accordance with a larger blueprint, but they're not a house. Yet.
A skin cell culture cannot of it's own volition become an adult human being
By which you mean that a blastocyst can by its own choice and action, do so?
Volition: noun.
1 : an act of making a choice or decision; also : a choice or decision made
2 : the power of choosing or determining : WILL
By what mechanism - in real, biological terms - are those 12 cells harboring the ability to sort through options and willfully act? Careful, your magical thinking is starting to show here, even in just your choice of words.
So, you take an egg, and artificially (outside the body) fertilize it with sperm, producing - after a few divisions, a blastocyst. That blastocyst cannot exist without the scientific process that just caused it to exist. Now, you take an egg, use DNA from a skin cell (replacing the egg's DNA - the only DNA in play, now, is that from the skin cell), re-set to the stem state, provoke division, and you've got (after the same number of divisions) another blastocyst which is indistinguishable from another of more convetional origins. This is the current/near-term state of things. The use of the convenient egg container (with its signaling mechanisms) can probably be dispensed with over time. Of course, neither the inserted-DNA version, nor the more "traditional" (um, if you can call a decade or two long enough to call anything traditional) IVF version have any prospect of eventually giving rise to an embryo without more medical support. But once they're latched into a receptive womb, you can start the embryonic clock ticking.
Which one is not human?
are a human being in the blastocyst stage of development and will become an adult human being if all conditions are ideal
Then by that standard, the egg and sperm of two people sitting across the table from each other are just as human - those two people are carrying around untold numbers of other humans, they just happen to be that very fragile "unfertilized" stage of development. They need the right circumstances to be present, but the potential is there - all of the ingredients are already ready to go. No science needed, just some candlelight (or too much beer, etc). If you consider 12 cells a person, then of course you consider that single fertalized egg a person. Of course, there's always the odds that the egg won't survive its first division. Just like there's always the odds that the sperm and egg won't fertilize successfully - but there's the material, the circumstances, and (usually) the will for them to be in the same place at the same time.
I don't consider a sperm and egg, a hundredth of a millimeter apart from one another, to be a human - just the building blocks. Hours later - when those building blocks have interacted and begun to divide into a dozen identical, undifferentiated other building blocks, you're
I'm really not sure why you're going to such lengths to pretend that we're not talking about cells in a dish. IVF leftovers cannot proceed past whatever state they're in without technical intervention. They can't leap out of the dish and find a womb, they can't flip the switch on an incubator, etc. In most cases, they're simply going to be discarded, regardless. You can impact their fate by throwing them away, by putting them in a freezer indefinitely, or by putting them to good use in some way (say, as part of a theraputic program, etc).
Cells that are about to be destroyed anyway are, well, done for. Regardless. There is no future for those 12 cells. Unless you use them for something constructive. Either way, they're not going to be put into a situation that would ever form an embryo, period.
At that stage, and under those circumstances, you've got the same potential for an eventual human as you would with a skin cell culture. Call that comparison a straw man if you're not equipped to spot (or in your case, willing to admit) the parallels, but those twelve cells have every bit the future (or not) as a human as any twelve skin cells.
Just because we could learn rapidly if we experiment directly upon adult human beings (say death row prisoners or someone who is contemplating suicide), doesn't mean we should.
Do you even smell the irony of lecturing someone else about using a straw man? An adult human is a human being. Twelve cells are not, and in the case we're talking about will never be, ever. The two people who produced a batch of blastocysts have already got the baby that the considerable intervention of science and investment in their time and resources was to produce, and the lab leftovers are just that - no more morally relevent in one dish than the sperm and eggs are when sitting three inches apart in two dishes. Of course, you can invest meaning in those cells by dedicating yourself to actually hatching them further into an embryo, and down the road - it things work out right - an infant. Or, you could take the useful blank-slate qualities of those cells, and use them to perhaps put a broken family back together after a car accident, or allow a grandfather's failing mind to get those precious few more years of lucidity so that he can enjoy and be a positive influence on an actual, billions-of-cells, brought-into-the-world, got-a-nervous-system, beloved new baby.
Or, we can just throw the dish out, as usually happens. You're awfully quiet about that. Why? Is that outcome so much more preferable to you than the prospect of improving lives (such as those of, say, sick newborns)?
based upon whether an X or Y carrying sperm has fertilized the egg
I'm using "she" as it is properly used - as a pronoun (as opposed to "it" or "they" since we're referring to a dozen cells in a dish). Of course the assembled DNA is the blueprint for a male or a female. But there's no "she" there, in that there's no anyone there yet.
Are you implying that the attaching is done by some third party?
No, I'm making the distinction between the nature of the interaction between the blastocyst and the uterine wall, and the implication that "she" is "doing" something - an implication designed to bolster the notion that there's this tiny little person cooperating in the reproductive process. There's no structure in the blastocyst capable forming the notion of an action, and no mechanism capable of carrying one out. Using language like "she does this" is highly misleading, and I'm calling you on it, that's all.
Yet we are not talking about ultimate origins of the matter we are talking about the origins of the individual human being.
Sorry, you can't separate the two. The same laws of physics govern ashes and cellular mechanics. If you're comfortable with the source of the underlying matter being non-supernatural, and then you should be comfortable with the normal behavior of that matter simply being what it is, and not assigning it a personality or meaning before it has the physical properties that support such sophistication.
Cells from my body will not develop on their own into another individual human being. On the other hand a blastocyst will.
One more time: you're looking through a microscope at a doezen cells sitting in a dish. Walk away, go to lunch, maybe dinner, too. That cluster of cells is not going to do anything on its own. It wouldn't even exist but for highly sophisticated processes and technology. It won't exist beyond that state without more of the same. Left alone, no nerves will grow, no movement will occur, noone can possibly be there to talk about.
So long as she is able to attach to a uterus (artificial or natural once the technology allows) so that she may obtain the nutrients she needs to continue growing.
Thank you for re-making my point. Once the technology allows, those millions of skin cells will have every bit the prospects of becoming an embryo as the refridgerated IVF leftovers. Since neither can possibly become an embryo without science doing its work, they will have exactly the same potential and moral value. If you really are willing to change your moral judgement on one versus the other based on just how far along the technology is, then you've got some pretty slippery underlying values. Not too many years ago, IVF wasn't around to produce any children. Some are probably now reading slashdot. Will children derived from other cells have less value to you? You might as well sort it out now, because it's coming. And once it's here, you won't have the luxury of telling me I'm ridiculous for comparing one potential source of an embryo to another in order to reinforce your notion that 11 more cells than one skin cell in a dish makes a human being.
Neither makes one. Not without technology. In the presence of technology, both will be indistinguishable, and you'll have to face the music: either 12 cells isn't a person, or one cell is. And then every time you shave it will be a moral dilemma. That dilemma is, of course, eliminated by thinking more rationally about where, in those twelve cells, there is or is not yet an actual human.
People made music for centuries before it could be recorded
People also died from infections because of a splinter in their finger before we had anti-biotics. Neither could people Surf Ye Olde Web from Their Horseless Carriages. The market, our culture, and the circumstances are not what they were 200 or 20 years ago.
Personally, I'm glad that creative artists can work for years to produce huge pieces of work. The world would be a poorer place without Peter Jackson, for example. But Peter Jackson sure as hell couldn't have raised the money to employ thousands of people to produce his LOTR films without some expectation of actually making money through large scale sales. The same can be said of studio recordings involving performers that can't usually get together, etc.
The vast majority of music today doesn't earn the person who wrote or performed it a dime.
That's because the vast majority of music is made by people who don't have a big enough audience to earn them any money (beyond bar gigs). But there are thousands and thousands of career musicians who do live off of there work, including studio recordings. Not every musician deserves to be a pro - just like not every programmer, author, animator, or cab driver does.
If you just raise prices that's not letting the market decide
Sure it is. The market then decides if your raised prices are worth it, and they'll go to other download services or retail mechanisms... or the artists/labels on the high end of the online prices scale will bitch about the lower sales numbers, and the prices will drift down to reflect it. Raised prices in a market are never demanded, they're tested.
Greed is eternal
The funny thing is that the usual arguers on both sides of this issue will think you're talking about the other side. People who produce and distribute the product are eternally interested in remaining profitable as the do so, and the people who want popular music seem to eternally want their entertainment for free. At the intersection is (supposed to be) a market economy. But a lot of people on the consuming end seem to have lost touch with the general notion of "the person selling it is asking more than I want to pay, so I'll buy something cheaper, instead" and have shifted to "so I'll rip it off, instead" without any sense whatsover of causality (when it comes to the consequences).
You suggest that my referring to a blastocyst as the collection of cells that it is, is somehow "dehumanizing." I find that complaint to be a hollow one, and your inability to recognize a casually lyrical reference to the nature of chemistry to be in indication of your less-than-well-roundedness.
The entire point of this thread is to refute the notion that moving away from the use of embryonic stem cells (say, those that are salvaged from about-to-be-destroyed IVF leftovers) will somehow make the stem cell "issues" go away. My point is that those people that are willing to project an irrationally rich personhood onto a blastocyst made up of a dozen cells are going to find other things to gripe about, too. Talk about psuedo-science! Looking at a dozen IVF-created cells through a microscope, and investing in the contents of that nerve-less cluster the features of a baby... well, that's just mystical claptrap.
Oh, and since you're bringing up the issue of who does, and does not know what they're talking about... a word about "red herrings" and the concept of misdirection.
The term goes way back to the training of fox hounds in Britain. In order to test a young pup's nose (specifically, his tracking ability), hound handlers would tie a fish (usually, a herring) to a string and drag it along the ground in a course. The scent of the fish would be completely new to the puppy's surroundings, and an inquisitive, nasally-superior hound puppy would quickly set to following the trail. His vigor, and length of attention span, were solid early indicators of the dog's eventual utility in tracking game in the field.
Once the pup had gotten older, fox scent was used for the same purpose - and the pup was expected to follow that trail without fail. As a serious test, the fox scent trail would be crossed with the dragged scent of a herring (red, because it was dried/cured) to see if the familiar scent of that distraction would divert the hound from his real objective. The hounds that fall for the red herring's trail are the inferior hunters.
If I had wanted to distract my own thread from what I was talking about, I'd have done so more purposefully, believe me. Pointing out that the electro-chemical processes that are the foundation of all biological activity are not in any way magically "human" is no red herring. It's the whole point.
Only so long as that human in the blastocyst stage of development is frozen!
Or not, through the technical work of highly skilled bio-science folks, with expensive equipment and facilities, handled in a very particular way. Frozen, not-frozen - really doesn't matter, because at that moment, only the positive action of the scientists/doctors involved (and of course, a ready and waiting woman with a health uterous and lots of other conditions being just so) will make that anything beyond the group of cells that it is. Period.
It just so happens that the only way she is able to get the nutrient's she needs is by attaching to the lining of a womb.
Let's see... "she" is not a she (yet). There's no tissue differentiation yet. The cells are identical. There's a repository of DNA which will express itself, down the road, as a "she," but none of that is even close to happening yet.
You also use the phrase "by attaching," which (not very subtly) implies volition on the part of the blastocyst. There is not mechanism present for any act on the part of those dozen cells, certainly not with the sense of purpose that you imply. There is simply low-level cellular activity, and no complexity at that stage for anything other than the surrounding cirumstances to dictate what comes (or does not) next.
This is all a part of the cycle of the development of a human being.
So is solar fusion. But I assign no personality traits or volition to the rest of the stuff that's central to that process, and at stage where we're not even yet talking about an embryo, we're in the same boat. I'm always amazed at how willing people are to try to bolster their position about the value of human life by labeling a blastocyst a person. If I can use the DNA from any cell in your body to produce an organism - a clone of you - then are destroying millions of humans with each scratched itch? If not now, will you be when it's just as easy to produce an embryo from a skin cell as it is from an IVF blastocyst? You cheapen what it is to be an aware, living, breathing human when you see humanity in every cell.
You'll forgive me if I don't find that whoever last posted a their opinion on Wikipedia (and hasn't yet been overwritten by someone else) doesn't have what I'd call any real authority on anything. I could go there right now and change the definition of "lifeform" to be "Anything that's not made of Playdough."
Never the less, a blastocyst (feel free to look that one up on Wikipedia - hopefully it doesn't currently read, "a type of peanut butter sandwich," though it might) sitting in a petri dish isn't going anywhere, organism-wise, except into the trash unless someone does something constructive with it (like, scientically intercedes and implants it in the hope of creating a viable embryo... or, rather than wasting it, using it for the dozen stem cells that it actually is).
Were I to live in a country that was undemocratic and were I content with that and your country were to "free" me and my countrymen, I'd consider your country an invader and enemy whom I'd fight, for which I'd likely be killed by your country.
But would you still feel that way if people living in your undemocratic country actively trained and financed people to kill people in my country? If you would be happy to live in a country where you had no voice, but watched your countrymen attack another country - can you really say that you consider the response anything but self defense? I think you're being hypocritical, here: you consider societies that organize around strength (rather then votes) to be equally valid. Meaning, you're OK with a country that's run by whoever can secure the power to do so. But you're not OK when another group of people use their own strength to respond to an attack from the people that you consider (by exercisizing their own violence locally) to be your legitimate rulers?
since one can never know what is "right"
Ah, now we get to the bottom of it, and to your fundamental hypocrisy. You say that one can never know what is right, but you're stating what is wrong. How do you derive that capacity? One can use simple reason to come up with a rational framework for human society, and a representative, minimally-governed, free-market structure is the natural outcome. No bibles needed, to know that using violence against someone is only rational in heading off or responding to the use of violence by that person. A government that derives its power through force (rather than democracy) - the type which you consider equally valid - cannot, rationally, be supported. Simple logic illustrates the unsustainability of a structure that enslaves its productive citizens through force. That's objectively true, and if you're uncomfortable looking into the light and seeing that, it's because your world view is built on mixed premises and built-in contradictions that you're uncomfortable facing. Some of these truths (to quote some great men) are self-evident. Self defense in face of someone who, deriving his murderous creed from a mystical myth, seeks to kill you - there's no need for the UN to give permission.
A "collection of cells" that all of humanity that exists now or has ever existed was once? What praytell is it, if it is not human, a magical womb spirit? Oh wait, it is considered human by any embryologist in the world you are just trying to dehumanize it.
Not only is it just a collection of cells, it's really just a collection of various elements doing a tiny electical dance. You know, heavier elements that were formed deep in stars through fusion. Really, just a rattling collection of subatomic particles, buzzing along with each other, strong and weak nuclear forces producing some really cool results. There - that dehumanized enough for you? You're completely missing the point. There's nothing less amazing and thrilling and delightful about a functioning human (or cockroach) just because, early in the game, it takes a blastocystic collection of stem cells to keep the ball rolling.
Personally, I think that it cheapens humanity to pretend that something without a nervous system is just as human as one that's posting such nonsense to slashdot. The potential for a human, as seen in those 12 cells, is a beautiful thing. The fact that we can produce families through IVF for those that are having trouble getting pregnant - that's great. The fact that we produce quite a few tiny collections of stem cells in the process, and just throw them out once a pregnancy has taken - that's just a waste. Those stem cells are incredibly helpful in research, and towards the practices that can (as an example) make life for a developed, breathing, thinking - but perhaps congenitally damaged - full term baby more fulfilling. Or, that might give that baby back it's mom, if mom slipped and broke her neck the first day home from the maternity ward.
Or, we could just throw those unused IVF cells away. Or, are you really arguing against IVF, here? Because if you are, say so (and be sure to say it to the families that wouldn't exist without that procedure - you do consider the living, breathing children conceived that way to be human, don't you?).
Even if that collection of cells has human DNA?
But, my fingernail clippings also have human DNA. A lot of things have to line up right for human DNA to give you an actual human.
the "it doesn't look like me, so its not a person arguement"
A collection of dividing stem cells in a petri dish, salvaged from an IVF procedure rather than simply being discarded, is sitting there under a microscope. You're looking at them. There are 12 cells. Under absolutely no circumstances outside of substantial human intervention with sophisticated science (and a fair amount of cash) and a lot of subsequent nurturing, will those 12 cells ever approach being an embryo, let alone a human. You've no doubt killed mosquitos with vastly more advanced nervous systems (well, since there is no nervous system in those 12 cells, even that's not a fair comparison).
If a collection of DNA is, to you, human, then you're killing millions of people every time you scrub your face in the shower. All of those skin cells! Surely you don't assign humanity to each scrap of your own DNA that could, with the right technology, be used to create an embryo? Because we're pretty close to that, even with something like your skin cells. DNA is not a developed organism. It's a blueprint.
Oh sure, use a good analogy. You do realize that you may actually damage slashdot that way, don't you? Be careful, man!
Let's be honest. The whole stem-cell debate is merely a veiled front for the larger fight over abortion.
I would contend that the more we know (and can demonstrate) about what's cooking, and when, in the development of a zygote, blastocyst, etc., the more we deflate some of the fuss about the abortion issue in the first place. It's important, I think, to make sure that those who assign humanity to, say, 16 cells (or to a dividing line of them derived therefrom) really have to come out and admit that it's a mystical, rather than medical position to take. It just sheds some purer light on the discussion (or, fight, as you rightly describe it).
I challenge you to give a definition of when something starts to be 'human' that isn't completely arbitrary
It can be very hard to look at a complex organism and say, "that's human, or is about to be," but it's not hard at all to say what is not. A collection of cells that has no functioning higher nervous system is not human. A collection of cells that has no interconnected, differentiated neural tissue at all is absolutely not human (yet). Zygotes, blastocysts, etc., while eventually capable of developing into an embryo and a fetus, are not humans, and have no platform upon which - at that point - to hang "human-ness."
I realize that's more a description of what is not yet human, rather than an answer to your "when is it human" question. I don't need to sweat pinning down that moment, because I know that a dozen dividing cells are way, way on the non-human side of that transition, regardless of when I would identify it in a given fetus.
The parent post is a thinly-veiled anti-religion troll, not insightful.
No, my post was a specific response to samzenpus's posting of rubberbando's summary, which offered some conjecture about the breakthrough in question perhaps getting rid of the stem cell controversy. Absent a discussion of the religious posture (of attributing humanity to a couple of dozen cells), there would be no controversy.
If a method for procuring stem cells could be found that didn't require the deaths of fetuses, I'd be fine with that
I'm guessing that you don't consider abortion to be something that, absent research into or the use of stem cells, would never again happen. Research in that area doesn't require abortion, it salvages some potential meaning from that which would happen anyway. It will probably become a moot issue sooner than later anyway, except for those that seek/manufacture controversy in any subtle bio-manipulation (and hence my original comment).
The more you understand the universe, the more wonderful it seems.
We can definitely agree on that.
I don't see how knowing the mechanics of cells creates an argument for atheism, as you seem to imply.
Woops! On that we can definitely disagree.
I have a problem with using fetuses for stem cell research, and none whatsoever with this.
I'm glad you make the general distinction between the discussed procedure and other methods. But I hope you can also make the distinction between a collection of dividing cells in a dish and a human being. I'll stop here, because we might as well just play a recording.