I like Nobel Prizes in Chem. They're usually actually important discoveries, as evidenced by the fact that chemists use them constantly two decades after their formulation. The literature-type prizes, I'm still not so sure about.
You're referring to civil disobedience. The thing you're quoting is referring to simple criminal activity. You can tell because of the phrase "don't have to follow the law", implying that you feel you should get away without a penalty just because you're in the right, or whatever. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, does precisely nothing unless its adherents pay the full legal penalty for their actions, as the massive amount of resources that a government must spend on enforcement is what actually drives the change in the lawbooks. So, if this were a case of civil disobedience, the tone wouldn't be 'oh, i should get off with a slap on the wrist, file-sharing isn't really that bad', it would be more like 'yeah, I shared (x gigs) of copyrighted material, listed here. Go ahead, fine me, you heartless bastards, I don't need to afford a mortgage anyhow'.
Basically it's the 'whiny bitches don't inspire massive amounts of people to enact social change' principle. People like Ghandi, who cooperate fully with the authorities, even to the extent of aiding their own prosecution by admitting their disobedience up front, are another matter entirely, and frankly are quite absent from this whole file-sharing situation. Being a Martyr is expensive, and thus they don't pop up generally unless there's REAL opression going on.
Except that the tech to produce usable metals has been restricted to.00001% of the population for most of human history, and almost all human societies have relied on metallurgy to some degree, but the blacksmiths, while a few steps up the social ladder, have never been equal to kings or priests. Dependence on technology does not equate to an irrational reverence for those trained to work it, and my guess is that it never will.
No one outside the field has ever known shit about metallurgical techniques. This goes back to... about 4000, 5000 BC or so, if I'm remembering the most recent archeological estimates right.
All of the stuff you name is ridiculously simple to understand from a practical standpoint just by looking at the device. Show me someone who can extract copper and tin from ore and treat them properly into a hardened alloy just from seeing a chunk of bronze and I'll eat my hat. And don't even get me started on iron. Even your engineering professionals (the ones not actually working in metallurgy) from the last century or two who use(d) steels all the time couldn't tell you how the stuff is made or what exactly the difference between two alloys is, beyond listed things like hardness and euler's ratio. It's all delegated to 'materials science' departments now.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you computer sciency types don't know how to refine silicon either.
And others of us paid attention to our mothers when they told us never to say anything to someone you would regret the whole world finding out, so we could give a damn about wether the FBI, CIA, al Quaeda, Bush, Bush senior, Christina Aguilera, Christopher Walken, George Lucas, or Richard Nixon is listening in.
Seriously. If you're going to communicate information, expect people to recieve it, even if they aren't the ones you were making eye contact with at the moment. That's why our language is aerially or electromagnetically transmitted, and not composed of a pattern of wrist-squeezes. I guess there's an exception in the case of intellectual property/constructive conspiracy, but most people around here don't want those around either.
No, it was pretty much God who brought destruction down upon those people.
I mean, I'm assuming if you saw a guy walk up and stab another guy 7 times in the face, you wouldn't say 'man, that idiot, why is he stabbing himself in the face (by not having an iron sheet between himself and the knife)?' So stop doing the same thing here just because you think everything about religion is supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Also, I'd like to reiterate something I've said to several people since the hurricane: It's one thing to joke, but if you actually can't see why it was necessary to build parts of New Orleans below sea level, then you need to get a refund on your lobotomy, because the doctor obviously cut out the bit that lets your mind work. You might want to get the 'not reducing lengthy and complex scientific analyses to oversimplifications so extreme they don't mean anything anymore' put back in, too, as evidenced by your global warming comment.
True, you found the artificial womb loophole that would allow even a zygote to attain person status. I would go with the activation of the senses and the analytical processes, personally. The ability to acquire data and interpret it is what makes a person whatever he is, really.
Actually, the reason that suicide is illegal in the US has little to do with morality, and much to do with preventing people from defrauding life-insurance companies (i.e. it was the best way to deal with an economic concern at the time). And people that are actually considered 'children' are not allowed to be soldiers, here or anywhere else. In fact, even where it's allowed (say, Palestine), becoming a soldier pretty much voids your child license, as it were. In this light, your statement about IEDs is entirely incorrect.
Also, it's not considered 'a crime', it's considered 'immoral'. A crime is very specifically an action committed in violation of a state or federal law. Sorry to nitpick (wait, no, I'm not) but the distinction between morality and law is quite important aroudn here, as, our government structure being above all things practical, the two often diverge widely. The general perception, and what usually actually happens, is that laws are considered enforceable and necessary to enforce, while morals are not. In the US, anyhow. i wouldn't know about the general attitude in the Netherlands.
Also, I'd like to note that sperm and egg donation is completely voluntary, and follow the obeservation with a query as to what planet you live on, because it sounds restful to be that far from reality all the time.
It grows, has the potential to reproduce(species requirement), posesses a metabolism, responds to some stimuli, and posesses mecahnisms for controlled (internal) motion. Yup, that would be life.
Of course, I'm assuming you want to be consistent in your definitions: i.e. that, using the biological sciences consensus of what constitutes an 'embryo', you'd also use the same consensus definition of life.
Actually, its just the potential moral value = actual moral value argument that's invalid. The "all organisms with complete human genomes have souls (usually, one soul per genome, thus excluding dead skin cells, etc, separated from the largest mass posessing the unique genome)" + "things with souls have moral value" => "Embryos have moral value" is entirely valid, since embryos are organisms with a complete human genome. It's perfectly rational.
The simple "embryos have no inherent moral value" is not itself a rational statement, but an assertion devoid of logic. To demonstrate rationality, you have to demonstrate a chain of causality from base assertions to a nontrivial solution. In this case the extent of the logic is "non-conscious things have no moral value" + "embryos aren't conscious" => "embryos have no moral value". The rest of the grandparent is a series of strawmen, which are fine for making points but don't actually support the main point in any way.
When it all comes down to it, the two assertions in question are equally valid. They are both one step removed from the base assertions, and the base assertions both consist of an arbitrary statement of an ill-defined term (consciousness and soul) and an arbitrary, unsupportable assertion as to the moral value of said term (soul = good, consciousness = good). Careful definition can swing science into the favor of the consciousness decision, but careful definition can do the same for the soul argument. Even then, science cannot by its nature make moral commands, so wether the people involved are scientific or not is irrelevant.
So, in conclusion, your point on the 'scientificness' of the debaters involved is irrelevant, and both of your examples exhibit roughly equivalent rationality. Rebuttal complete.
Actually, I can come up with pretty good analogies to electrical engineering systems using heat transfer, etc. Just because basing an information transfer system on heat and mass flow is ridiculously impractical doesn't mean it can't be properly modelled. And I write perfectly good code from basic principles in mathematical logic, thanks. I just look up the syntax in a code manual (or, better yet, google) and I can do all the same stuff in a programming language I had never heard of before (well, except obscure things like memory management, which some languages don't seem to support at all). So I'd say the guy is pretty much correct in principle. in practice, of course, we have specialists because doing things from first principles and analogies to other systems takes bloody forever, and sometimes things need to get done before the sun novas and kills us all.
That's complete bullshit. The average should be where the professor designs the average to be, so he can tell by the deviation from expectation wether he needs to slow the class down and explain in more detail or speed up and let people follow. An average around 50% gives a nice wide spread which is easily interpreted, and so most professors design their test around that.
Tests aren't designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, they're designed to tell the prof how you're doing. If a single person makes a perfect or near-perfect score on an exam, the exam wasn't hard enough, because it has failed to accurately categorize that person by not extending far enough upward to find their mark.
Courses I took as an Engineering major that were unrelated to my curriculum: Philosophy (upper division) Abstract Mathematics (Specifically complex analisys) Quantum Mechanics (Yeah, I have weird hobbies) Practical Theater Modern Dance
And that's just picked from three arbitrary semesters. What's this about me being screwed now?
Oh, and I seem to recall Dr. Asimov deciding one day that he didnt' want to be a chemist and switching to a career in writing. It's honestly not that hard to do something else with an engineering degree, most jobs just require a degree, period, not one specifically related to the job itself. I actually know a lot of people that went to law school on a B.S. in engineering. All of them got admitted to the law school they wanted. What's that, our school's prelaw program only has a 50% acceptance rate at first-choice schools? BWAHAHAHAHAAH
That really depends. Try something like Chemical engineering. Even the managers know they basically can't fire you, cause they'll never find another ChemE.
No, you'll be laid off by a business major. I had two business major roommates as an undergrad, and I got less sleep than them, but only barely. Their major can get pretty intense at times.
Your high school tests were basically a boolean test (to measure wether or not you had duly noted the material, or, to be more cynical, to test wether or not you could read and were less than half deaf). High schools have set curricula. College courses are designed by the professors teaching them, and thus the feedback required is actual, you know, data. Thus they're designed to average around 50%, so the shape of the resulting curve can actually tell the professor how he needs to modify the class, not just "Doh, students fail. make it better" or "Ok, that's good enough". College courses have the option of speeding up if the class is more than usually masterful, but a high-school style test would never tell a professor if that was the case.
I'm sorry that the resulting lack of a warm, fuzzy feeling looking at your test scores puts you off, but that's life for you.
"engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence"
So is the profession of engineering. The patience to test every bit of your work for flaws is infinitely more important than being able to do long division in your head or recite the U.S. Presidents in backwards alphabetical order by middle name.
Let's not. Students don't need to be inspired, they need to be competent. As fond as I am of Bill Nye, my boring analysis professor has been way the hell more helpful in teaching me to solve problems. Anyone that needs to be inspired to do their job needs to switch majors anyhow.
Um... no. Professors in my department generally design their test to have an average of about 50%, and a standard deviation in the range of 10-15%. Walking out of a class with a 45% average and a B or C just means you have a typically hardass professor, not even an exceptionally bastardly one. Getting 90% or higher on anything but a homework assignment in an engineering class means you've either found your specialty or your instructor is slacking off. It pretty much NEVER means you're recieving an exceptional education in the class, and is generally a good indicator of the opposite.
It'll likely be weighed against future assets (it can't be required from the mother because of the ruling in this case). And since you can't waive court-ordered debts by filing bankrupcy, this will make life... interesting once said 13-year-old girl starts filing paychecks.
Well, the difference is that the turning points of WW2 actually hinged on american deployments (and, in Europe, British intelligence and Germany's lack of effective intelligence) whereas slavery was an institution picked up from association with european governments that used the practice, in turn picked up from the african natives that needed something to do with their captives. If we're going to take credit for something bad, it needs to be something bad that we were mostly responsible for. Like keeping certain dictators in power that should have just been allowed to die, for instance.
That's not quite true. American support just didn't take the form of military presence until Japan decided to bomb us. Before that, we used the normal technique of throwing military supplies at our European allies and cutting off supplies to the axis, especially Japan, which relied especially on our steel shipments before we cut them off. The fact that we've always been very reluctant to actually send troops into combat on a large scale for extended periods doesn't mean we don't make more subtle jabs here and there. And it's obviously effective, look how many ridiculously evil dictators we've kept in power in relatively inoffensive countries for half a century. While our judgement sometimes falls short, our support is far from being insignificant even when our army is not directly involved.
The US isn't a democracy. It's a republic. This was a conscious decision on our part stemming from our desire to protect individuals rather than simply let the will of the majority run over the other 49.9999%. So, yeah, not a democracy and actually rather glad of it. The more democratic we get (i.e. the more shit gets passed into law without protest form the supreme court because a large majority supports it) the less I like our system.
Slashdot Mirror
I like Nobel Prizes in Chem. They're usually actually important discoveries, as evidenced by the fact that chemists use them constantly two decades after their formulation. The literature-type prizes, I'm still not so sure about.
You're referring to civil disobedience. The thing you're quoting is referring to simple criminal activity. You can tell because of the phrase "don't have to follow the law", implying that you feel you should get away without a penalty just because you're in the right, or whatever. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, does precisely nothing unless its adherents pay the full legal penalty for their actions, as the massive amount of resources that a government must spend on enforcement is what actually drives the change in the lawbooks. So, if this were a case of civil disobedience, the tone wouldn't be 'oh, i should get off with a slap on the wrist, file-sharing isn't really that bad', it would be more like 'yeah, I shared (x gigs) of copyrighted material, listed here. Go ahead, fine me, you heartless bastards, I don't need to afford a mortgage anyhow'.
Basically it's the 'whiny bitches don't inspire massive amounts of people to enact social change' principle. People like Ghandi, who cooperate fully with the authorities, even to the extent of aiding their own prosecution by admitting their disobedience up front, are another matter entirely, and frankly are quite absent from this whole file-sharing situation. Being a Martyr is expensive, and thus they don't pop up generally unless there's REAL opression going on.
Except that the tech to produce usable metals has been restricted to .00001% of the population for most of human history, and almost all human societies have relied on metallurgy to some degree, but the blacksmiths, while a few steps up the social ladder, have never been equal to kings or priests. Dependence on technology does not equate to an irrational reverence for those trained to work it, and my guess is that it never will.
No one outside the field has ever known shit about metallurgical techniques. This goes back to... about 4000, 5000 BC or so, if I'm remembering the most recent archeological estimates right.
All of the stuff you name is ridiculously simple to understand from a practical standpoint just by looking at the device. Show me someone who can extract copper and tin from ore and treat them properly into a hardened alloy just from seeing a chunk of bronze and I'll eat my hat. And don't even get me started on iron. Even your engineering professionals (the ones not actually working in metallurgy) from the last century or two who use(d) steels all the time couldn't tell you how the stuff is made or what exactly the difference between two alloys is, beyond listed things like hardness and euler's ratio. It's all delegated to 'materials science' departments now.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you computer sciency types don't know how to refine silicon either.
And others of us paid attention to our mothers when they told us never to say anything to someone you would regret the whole world finding out, so we could give a damn about wether the FBI, CIA, al Quaeda, Bush, Bush senior, Christina Aguilera, Christopher Walken, George Lucas, or Richard Nixon is listening in.
Seriously. If you're going to communicate information, expect people to recieve it, even if they aren't the ones you were making eye contact with at the moment. That's why our language is aerially or electromagnetically transmitted, and not composed of a pattern of wrist-squeezes. I guess there's an exception in the case of intellectual property/constructive conspiracy, but most people around here don't want those around either.
No, it was pretty much God who brought destruction down upon those people.
I mean, I'm assuming if you saw a guy walk up and stab another guy 7 times in the face, you wouldn't say 'man, that idiot, why is he stabbing himself in the face (by not having an iron sheet between himself and the knife)?' So stop doing the same thing here just because you think everything about religion is supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Also, I'd like to reiterate something I've said to several people since the hurricane: It's one thing to joke, but if you actually can't see why it was necessary to build parts of New Orleans below sea level, then you need to get a refund on your lobotomy, because the doctor obviously cut out the bit that lets your mind work. You might want to get the 'not reducing lengthy and complex scientific analyses to oversimplifications so extreme they don't mean anything anymore' put back in, too, as evidenced by your global warming comment.
True, you found the artificial womb loophole that would allow even a zygote to attain person status. I would go with the activation of the senses and the analytical processes, personally. The ability to acquire data and interpret it is what makes a person whatever he is, really.
Actually, the reason that suicide is illegal in the US has little to do with morality, and much to do with preventing people from defrauding life-insurance companies (i.e. it was the best way to deal with an economic concern at the time). And people that are actually considered 'children' are not allowed to be soldiers, here or anywhere else. In fact, even where it's allowed (say, Palestine), becoming a soldier pretty much voids your child license, as it were. In this light, your statement about IEDs is entirely incorrect.
Also, it's not considered 'a crime', it's considered 'immoral'. A crime is very specifically an action committed in violation of a state or federal law. Sorry to nitpick (wait, no, I'm not) but the distinction between morality and law is quite important aroudn here, as, our government structure being above all things practical, the two often diverge widely. The general perception, and what usually actually happens, is that laws are considered enforceable and necessary to enforce, while morals are not. In the US, anyhow. i wouldn't know about the general attitude in the Netherlands.
Also, I'd like to note that sperm and egg donation is completely voluntary, and follow the obeservation with a query as to what planet you live on, because it sounds restful to be that far from reality all the time.
It grows, has the potential to reproduce(species requirement), posesses a metabolism, responds to some stimuli, and posesses mecahnisms for controlled (internal) motion. Yup, that would be life.
Of course, I'm assuming you want to be consistent in your definitions: i.e. that, using the biological sciences consensus of what constitutes an 'embryo', you'd also use the same consensus definition of life.
Actually, its just the potential moral value = actual moral value argument that's invalid. The "all organisms with complete human genomes have souls (usually, one soul per genome, thus excluding dead skin cells, etc, separated from the largest mass posessing the unique genome)" + "things with souls have moral value" => "Embryos have moral value" is entirely valid, since embryos are organisms with a complete human genome. It's perfectly rational.
The simple "embryos have no inherent moral value" is not itself a rational statement, but an assertion devoid of logic. To demonstrate rationality, you have to demonstrate a chain of causality from base assertions to a nontrivial solution. In this case the extent of the logic is "non-conscious things have no moral value" + "embryos aren't conscious" => "embryos have no moral value". The rest of the grandparent is a series of strawmen, which are fine for making points but don't actually support the main point in any way.
When it all comes down to it, the two assertions in question are equally valid. They are both one step removed from the base assertions, and the base assertions both consist of an arbitrary statement of an ill-defined term (consciousness and soul) and an arbitrary, unsupportable assertion as to the moral value of said term (soul = good, consciousness = good). Careful definition can swing science into the favor of the consciousness decision, but careful definition can do the same for the soul argument. Even then, science cannot by its nature make moral commands, so wether the people involved are scientific or not is irrelevant.
So, in conclusion, your point on the 'scientificness' of the debaters involved is irrelevant, and both of your examples exhibit roughly equivalent rationality. Rebuttal complete.
Actually, I can come up with pretty good analogies to electrical engineering systems using heat transfer, etc. Just because basing an information transfer system on heat and mass flow is ridiculously impractical doesn't mean it can't be properly modelled. And I write perfectly good code from basic principles in mathematical logic, thanks. I just look up the syntax in a code manual (or, better yet, google) and I can do all the same stuff in a programming language I had never heard of before (well, except obscure things like memory management, which some languages don't seem to support at all). So I'd say the guy is pretty much correct in principle. in practice, of course, we have specialists because doing things from first principles and analogies to other systems takes bloody forever, and sometimes things need to get done before the sun novas and kills us all.
That's complete bullshit. The average should be where the professor designs the average to be, so he can tell by the deviation from expectation wether he needs to slow the class down and explain in more detail or speed up and let people follow. An average around 50% gives a nice wide spread which is easily interpreted, and so most professors design their test around that.
Tests aren't designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, they're designed to tell the prof how you're doing. If a single person makes a perfect or near-perfect score on an exam, the exam wasn't hard enough, because it has failed to accurately categorize that person by not extending far enough upward to find their mark.
Courses I took as an Engineering major that were unrelated to my curriculum:
Philosophy (upper division)
Abstract Mathematics (Specifically complex analisys)
Quantum Mechanics (Yeah, I have weird hobbies)
Practical Theater
Modern Dance
And that's just picked from three arbitrary semesters. What's this about me being screwed now?
Oh, and I seem to recall Dr. Asimov deciding one day that he didnt' want to be a chemist and switching to a career in writing. It's honestly not that hard to do something else with an engineering degree, most jobs just require a degree, period, not one specifically related to the job itself. I actually know a lot of people that went to law school on a B.S. in engineering. All of them got admitted to the law school they wanted. What's that, our school's prelaw program only has a 50% acceptance rate at first-choice schools? BWAHAHAHAHAAH
That really depends. Try something like Chemical engineering. Even the managers know they basically can't fire you, cause they'll never find another ChemE.
No, you'll be laid off by a business major. I had two business major roommates as an undergrad, and I got less sleep than them, but only barely. Their major can get pretty intense at times.
Your high school tests were basically a boolean test (to measure wether or not you had duly noted the material, or, to be more cynical, to test wether or not you could read and were less than half deaf). High schools have set curricula. College courses are designed by the professors teaching them, and thus the feedback required is actual, you know, data. Thus they're designed to average around 50%, so the shape of the resulting curve can actually tell the professor how he needs to modify the class, not just "Doh, students fail. make it better" or "Ok, that's good enough". College courses have the option of speeding up if the class is more than usually masterful, but a high-school style test would never tell a professor if that was the case.
I'm sorry that the resulting lack of a warm, fuzzy feeling looking at your test scores puts you off, but that's life for you.
"engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence"
So is the profession of engineering. The patience to test every bit of your work for flaws is infinitely more important than being able to do long division in your head or recite the U.S. Presidents in backwards alphabetical order by middle name.
Let's not. Students don't need to be inspired, they need to be competent. As fond as I am of Bill Nye, my boring analysis professor has been way the hell more helpful in teaching me to solve problems. Anyone that needs to be inspired to do their job needs to switch majors anyhow.
Um... no. Professors in my department generally design their test to have an average of about 50%, and a standard deviation in the range of 10-15%. Walking out of a class with a 45% average and a B or C just means you have a typically hardass professor, not even an exceptionally bastardly one. Getting 90% or higher on anything but a homework assignment in an engineering class means you've either found your specialty or your instructor is slacking off. It pretty much NEVER means you're recieving an exceptional education in the class, and is generally a good indicator of the opposite.
1789
No, this is spider-man we're talking about, not Dragonball. Spider-man is always strong just _before_ he gets his ass kicked.
It'll likely be weighed against future assets (it can't be required from the mother because of the ruling in this case). And since you can't waive court-ordered debts by filing bankrupcy, this will make life... interesting once said 13-year-old girl starts filing paychecks.
Well, the difference is that the turning points of WW2 actually hinged on american deployments (and, in Europe, British intelligence and Germany's lack of effective intelligence) whereas slavery was an institution picked up from association with european governments that used the practice, in turn picked up from the african natives that needed something to do with their captives. If we're going to take credit for something bad, it needs to be something bad that we were mostly responsible for. Like keeping certain dictators in power that should have just been allowed to die, for instance.
That's not quite true. American support just didn't take the form of military presence until Japan decided to bomb us. Before that, we used the normal technique of throwing military supplies at our European allies and cutting off supplies to the axis, especially Japan, which relied especially on our steel shipments before we cut them off. The fact that we've always been very reluctant to actually send troops into combat on a large scale for extended periods doesn't mean we don't make more subtle jabs here and there. And it's obviously effective, look how many ridiculously evil dictators we've kept in power in relatively inoffensive countries for half a century. While our judgement sometimes falls short, our support is far from being insignificant even when our army is not directly involved.
The US isn't a democracy. It's a republic. This was a conscious decision on our part stemming from our desire to protect individuals rather than simply let the will of the majority run over the other 49.9999%. So, yeah, not a democracy and actually rather glad of it. The more democratic we get (i.e. the more shit gets passed into law without protest form the supreme court because a large majority supports it) the less I like our system.