different materials. even if i drop my shoulder and plow into your head, it's going to be a damn sight less intense than getting hit with a metal helmet or the rigid guards. the weight's significant, but the materials are more important.
but adding the battle armor makes the game more spectacular for the TV-watching audience. all that metal and banging gets people excited. which is good for the business. which is why the paychecks are 7-figures in the first place.
that's a good point. baseball, however, is intended differently. baseball is a game to play on a lazy sunday. it's about a day in the park. it's supposed to be slow and laid back. so, yeah, the stats for baseball are much worse, but at least it's honest about what it is. american football plays itself up as a big action game despite the facts.
also, note that baseball is largely derived from (simplified from, and thank god; i can understand baseball) cricket, where it's mostly okay for the pitcher (or whatever he's called) to try to peg the batter (or whatever he's called), and he's expected to get the heck out of the way; none of this pansy "free base" thing.
but how the heck did i get an "insightful" on this?
i'm entirely willing to say that the folks in question - folks like Bush - aren't true Christians, at least in most senses of the word (that is, the original one for sure, and most modern ones). you're misusing the "True Scotsman" fallacy, too. the reason that's a logical fallacy, and not a valid arguing tactic, in the canonical example is that the speaker (who claims no true scotsman would like grits or whatever) can neither give a coherent definition of the term or show how the behavior he's disqualifying the subject for relates to any extant definition. i'll happily dispel each of these.
Christian, in the original sense, meant one who followes the teachings of Christ; this remains the most significant use of the term today (although it's been muddied some after the Protestant Reformation, who started conflating that idea with the idea of the primacy of belief). one who does not strive to follow those teachings is not a Christian. being a Christian does not mean we succeed at following those teachings; in fact, it's expected that we will often fail. but it does mean we're trying.
i'm willing to argue that Bush is not truly a Christian. i base this on his actions. his consistent undercutting of funding for social services, wholesale shutdown of many programs, his arrogance are all counter to one who is trying to follow Christ's teachings. and that's before we get into his responsibility for over a hundred thousand deaths in Iraq, his consistent lies about it, his fear-mongering over "terrorism" for political gain. his environmental policy pretty much indicates that he's willfully neglecting the Christian call to stewardship, and his "right to life" stance is clearly not based on a Christian concept of sanctity of life when it's divorced from the influence that has on the death penalty or care for the poor and persecuted throughout the world (the Catholic Church, for all it's many problems, is at least consistent on this point). and, perhaps most directly contradictory, his use of religion as a political tool. Christ told his followers to go pray in closets so as not to let their spiritual life become something to boast about, unlike what Christ called "the hypocrites". few people fit that bill better than Bush does.
and yes, this is me judging Bush in a way that the Bible probably tells me not to. i can't, after all, see what's in his heart. but Paul tells us that "faith without action is dead". and this man has done nothing to exhibit Christian faith. no, he's using this as a tool for personal gain.
i will, however, agree that i'm very sick of Christians who tolerate this nonsense. this is not a simple disagreement in interpretation. these people are perverting the name and teachings of Christ. and they need to be stopped.
never mind the fact that you're right. American Football's a fun game - i used to play it after church on sundays with my mates at the school next door - but a sport? please. i've timed games to compare time spent doing something vs. time spent doing nothing; the ratio in the last two superbowls, supposedly the hight of the season, was about 1:7.5. that's just lame.
and you're going to get all the guys talking about how (american) football players are so much larger and how hard the impact is. please. the injuries are largely because of the armor (added weight), not in spite of it. it may by physically challenging, but then so is pushing cars through swamps or having someone throw bricks at you. those aren't sports either. rugby detractors need to go watch serious rugby. those guys just tear each other apart! and women's rugby isn't exactly a lady's game, either. fun stuff.
American Football could've been an awesome sport if it hadn't changed the way it's played for television and sensationalism. the game that's played on school rec lots is still a great game.
and i love the fact that half your mods are insightful/informative.
it is not a false distinction, although it may well be an archaic one. the problem is that the distinction relies on the classical meaning of democracy, not the modern one. the classical definition of democracy is not simply "people vote", which seems to be the modern definition (which isn't necessarily the same as "direct democracy", but it's close), but rather that people are making all, substantially all, or at least all of a certain type of law. the Roman republic was horridly inefficient because it was also a democracy: the senate couldn't pass most types of laws, "the people" had to. having elected the senators wasn't enough.
the biggest risk of a democracy is that there's nothing to prevent it from degenerating into mob rule (except its own weight as it grows, which prevents it from doing pretty much anything). the US founding fathers explicitly wrote against democracy as a form of government in the classical sense. by way of contrast, where democracy puts the will of the people at the center of the government, the thing from which all governmental power derives, a republic puts the rule of law in the center of the government, and all else derives from that. in the US, we've a Republic because all governmental power derives from the Constitution (the most significant bit of brilliance therein being the fact that it contains a way to change even the fundamentals).
under the modern definition of democracy, the two concepts (republic, democracy) are more or less orthogonal, and can work quite well together.
A great example of this are so-called "hate crimes". I mean, holy crap, crimes against anyone are "hate crimes". Are the "thought police" going to divine what's in someone's brain when they commit these crimes? It's that way today.
hate crimes, as the law terms it today, are worse than "normal" crimes. hate crimes aren't just about the act, but additionally feed on and reinforce the social structures that create the hated groups in the first place. they also have a very different repeat-offense rate than "one-off" crimes, and it's therefor important for the law to treat them differently.
Having to "not offend" someone by not using the politically correct term for something they might say is another example of this. I'm not talking about using derogatory terms against someone...that IS offensive.
and who decides which is which? when i was little, i remember it being a very big deal knowing what the "right" thing to call various people was. black? african-american? i've since stopped worrying about that (i decided on "black" when i realized some of my "peers" in high school were saying "african-american" when they weren't talking about Americans, because they didn't know any other acceptable term), but i know some folks who (in private conversation only) call them niggers. they think it's... i don't know, funny or something. i think it's disgusting and wrong, and tell them so. but they say it's "okay" because "they" (black people) say it, everyone's desensitized to it, blah blah blah. i think they're full of crap and they're just justifying mild racism. but what absolute gauge can we use to determine who's right? and what about gay/queer/fag/whatever for homosexuals? or asians, or italians, or latinos. i'm not disputing that sometimes people get out of control (i've been criticized for for describing people as "black" and for describing adult females generally as "women"), just pointing out that it is a much trickier issue than simply saying "just don't use 'obviously' offensive works" covers.
the whole PC-backlash thing is, in my estimation, mostly initiated by (which is not to say this applies to most of the people who follow it) people who can't be bothered thinking about what impact things they say might have on other people, or simply don't care. i'm with Atom on this one:
and you'll go wah wah wah you're so PC
and i will say hey wait
my my my how have the table turns
to be a fucking prick is a desirable trait
--If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock
in high school, i noticed a friend of mine wrote her a's like a typewriter - with the curly thing on top - rather than sorta an o with a tail. this was pretty distinctive and looked neat when she did it. so i started, too. i then redid my entire handwriting, trying to simplify the letters. so no my p's, b's, d's, &c. don't have risers which are distinct from the loop - it's just one stroke. now only f and k (and t and x if i'm being neat) involve lifting the pen mid letter. the simplified writing makes the letters pretty easily distinguishable for me (except q, which is a problem) and quite distinctive looking, but it doesn't quite look like the same alphabet to most other people.
i get comments on how distinctive it is, but i'm not sure they're compliments. and "clear" is seldom used to describe it.
anyone know if intentionally, consciously revamping your handwriting buggers the theory behind handwriting analysis (questions of its initial validity aside)?
I'm more than old enough, so here's how it was, in brief: AT&T fought the monopoly battle in court for almost ten years, lost in '84, then was broken up into multiple geographical companies, AT&T for long distance only, and Bell Labs became Lucent Technologies.
i'm not really old enough for the first round of AT&T break-up, but was for the second - voluntary - one. your history is a bit off. which is understandable: AT&T has an amazingly long and complicated history regarding antitrust action. to summarize:
in 1984 AT&T and the federal government entered into (yet another) "consent decree" in which they spun off their local carriers in exchange for allowing them to continue their long-distance monopoly and (very importantly) release themselves from an earlier consent decree which, effectively, barred them from making money on this little invention called the "transistor". Bell Labs remained the R&D division of AT&T for the next 12 years until 1996, when AT&T spun out Lucent Technologies to include Bell Labs and all their hardware manufacturing (and, incidentally, spun out NCR at the same time).
the history around AT&T with antitrust is really interesting, actually. it's fun to look back at things like the 1950's-era one and decide whether basically giving away their potential monopoly on the transistor was worth maintaining their monopoly on phone service, or whether it was the 1984 or the 1996 break-up that crushed Bell Labs (at least for the time being; i'm still hopeful for a revival with the current new leadership). but that's just for Bell System history geeks.
Several times, in nicer office buildings, I've found myself locked out of offices where I should be allowed......Sometimes I've found it easier to just pop the drop ceiling out, and climb over the wall too, assuming there is no firewall between point A and point B. Usually inside offices don't have them.
i used to work for a particular Beleaguered Telecom Company. we had machines in a machine room which required a secret code to enter, and a second code to get to the back half of the machine room. my machines were in the front half; a guy i knew had machines in the back half. i was working late one night when he called me and said his machines had crashed, could i go restart them please. i walk over to the machine room, realize i don't have the code to the back room, and start looking for something to climb on to get over the wall (drop ceiling). while doing so, a security guard came over. the conversation went like this:
security guard: "um, hi. what are you doing?" me: "oh, a co-worker asked me to restart his machines in there. i don't have the code to the back half, so i'm trying to climb over the wall." [pause...] security guard:" would you like me to go get a ladder?"
he then went to get the ladder and held it for me while i climbed over, and then went away to put it back while i poked around in the back room. forget the fact that i wasn't supposed to be in the back room - he never even asked to see my ID for the building (which is good, since, contrary to company policy, it was on my desk in another section of the building).
humans are almost always the weak link in any security scheme.
SOx is horribly aspecific, and boils down to "you'd better be doing the right thing".
not even. the point of SOx isn't to get a company to do "the right thing", and it makes no particular effort to define what "the right thing" is. instead, it really boils down to "whatever you're doing, the guy at the top has to know about it." it's okay for your procedures to be pretty much crap (within a pretty limited set of guidelines) as long as it's documented crap and the boss has signed off on it (so they can put him in jail when badness ensues).
i'm not going to defend "podcast" - i very much wish the term which became dominant for this thing wasn't a walking (er, whatever) advertisement. however...
a "podcast" is not an "audio download". or rather, that's only part of it. it's also important that it be potentially time-shifted, (at least sorta) subscription based, and automated downloads.
now my real questions is: what do we do when they get it wrong? they've defined it as explicitly being music; i'm subscribed to several podcasts, and only one has anything to do with music.
i should also point out that the unilateral action behind their introduction of XMLHTTP (like their earlier HTML extensions) lead to (or at the very least contributed strongly to) the emergence of multiple, incompatible implementations in various browsers which persists today.
the point/problem isn't that Microsoft never has good ideas. XMLHTTP is at least clever (i'm skeptical of the value of cramming all this into HTML/HTTP, but that's an independent discussion), and Microsoft Research has lots of really good minds and puts out some very interesting papers. the problem is in how they get those ideas out to people. they don't care about interoperability and go out of their way to undermine it. look into what they did with their IE badging and developer program trying to get MS-specific HTML extensions onto every web page possible. it wasn't just about getting new ideas out there, but rather about getting people dependent on their software, even for the pre-existing ideas.
i have no idea what MS's intentions are here; perhaps their RSS stuff is genuinely useful (i'm a comparatively late arrival into the world of RSS, so will reserve judgement), but their history around these extensions is good justification for being skeptical of their goals.
You're modded down because you're an obvious troll, and ignorant and wrong to boot. Apple's given a lot back to the open source community. there's absolutely no reason why you should get to decide the form in which they give back. Apple got an open source core for their OS, and had given back substantial patches and improvements to the same; they got the KHTML rendering engine, and have given back substantial improvements to the same, including those that got Konquerer to be the second browser (after Safari) to be Acid2 compliant. if you don't like the nature of their contributions, or if you're one of those zealots who believe they're somehow obligated to give things away to a community who don't contribute any revenue, that's fine, but don't pretend Apple's not giving back. that's just dishonest.
calling your definition crap was overly harsh, and just not civil. i'm not normally quite such a jerk, even online; i appreciate you not getting steamed over it. now on with it:
1) "Sperm, egg, and people with XXY, X, XYY, or XXX genetic makeup are all genetically human." why? chromosome count is a pretty standard method in definitions i've heard before. i'll agree that sperm and eggs are not lifeforms/organisms; good point.
2) i'll agree identical twins aren't a problem given a re-reading of your sig (i'd previously parsed it as (genetically human && genetically distinct && functioning organism) whereas i think you mean it as ((genetically human && genetically distinct && functioning ) organism); simple english ambiguity). conjoined twins are still a problem. i think cognitive function and personality distinctness are the logical constraints, although they're difficult to know for some time, and it's slightly trick to exclude things like MPD or get into minimum cognitive function levels, which is a scary place to be.
3) i'm not convinced you're right here in all cases. given, for example, one of the fundamental functions of an organism is turning food into energy, would someone who's body has stopped doing that (which would obviously cause them to die pretty soon if uncorrected) stop being human with the onset of the disease (rather than with death)? clearly these are fringe cases again, and i wasn't intending to lump all degenerative or autoimmune diseases in with each other, but illnesses where the body is literally attacking itself make definitions of "function" tricky.
i don't have a better definition. my initial reaction was based on an (apparently inappropriate) assumption that, given the definition's placement in your sig and how that space is most commonly used, you were dogmatically putting it forward as a settled fact; your willingness to discuss the matter and admit flaws says pretty loudly that i was off the mark on that one.
i don't normally respond to sigs, but i'm making an exception here. your definition of "human being" is, um, crap. please now define: "genetically human" in a way that includes, minimally, xxy folks and doesn't include eggs and sperm; "genetically distinct" in a way which, minimally, doesn't have identical or conjoined twins being one person (or not a person); and "functioning organism" in a way that doesn't exclude people with auto-imune disorders or degenerative illnesses.
i don't have a definition i'm perfectly happy with, but it's a harder question than one-line definitions allow for.
well, first of all the communists did most of the fighting and dying against the Nazis in WWII. without the Russians on our side, it's pretty likely the Germans would've taken Europe, including GB, before the U.S. made any difference at all. also note that America's attempts to "beat up" the communists seldom went well: witness the Korean and Vietnam wars. we "beat" (or rather outlasted) the Russian communists almost explicitly by not trying to beat them up, combined with Reagan actually softening his rhetoric and actions as the Soviet Union was decaying, encouraging an easy transition rather than a violent one. and finally, it's very hard to lump in WWII with other legitimate examples of American imperialism since, well, we weren't doing any empire building (unlike with our very dirty history in the middle east and south america).
Dell was only right in the sense that if he were running apple, the best anyone could hope for would be for him to shut down the company and call it a day. but that's not because there was any fundamental reason for that. rather, it's because Dell only knows how to run one kind of business, and Apple ain't it. the fact that Jobs, and even Amelio before him, did much better than Dell thought he could simply reflects the fact that the former two have broader and deeper vision (or, most charitably, a type of vision more compatible with Apple as a company) than Dell does.
i feel sorry for you. no, really. that must be awful, having all that SGI hardware around. in fact, at great personal sacrifice, i'd be willing to take it all off your hands. no, no charge. see, i'm better than a therapist! just trying to look out for you.
lemme know where i can pick the hardware up from.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
different materials. even if i drop my shoulder and plow into your head, it's going to be a damn sight less intense than getting hit with a metal helmet or the rigid guards. the weight's significant, but the materials are more important.
but adding the battle armor makes the game more spectacular for the TV-watching audience. all that metal and banging gets people excited. which is good for the business. which is why the paychecks are 7-figures in the first place.
that's a good point. baseball, however, is intended differently. baseball is a game to play on a lazy sunday. it's about a day in the park. it's supposed to be slow and laid back. so, yeah, the stats for baseball are much worse, but at least it's honest about what it is. american football plays itself up as a big action game despite the facts.
also, note that baseball is largely derived from (simplified from, and thank god; i can understand baseball) cricket, where it's mostly okay for the pitcher (or whatever he's called) to try to peg the batter (or whatever he's called), and he's expected to get the heck out of the way; none of this pansy "free base" thing.
but how the heck did i get an "insightful" on this?
i got your "stronger feelings" right here.
i'm entirely willing to say that the folks in question - folks like Bush - aren't true Christians, at least in most senses of the word (that is, the original one for sure, and most modern ones). you're misusing the "True Scotsman" fallacy, too. the reason that's a logical fallacy, and not a valid arguing tactic, in the canonical example is that the speaker (who claims no true scotsman would like grits or whatever) can neither give a coherent definition of the term or show how the behavior he's disqualifying the subject for relates to any extant definition. i'll happily dispel each of these.
Christian, in the original sense, meant one who followes the teachings of Christ; this remains the most significant use of the term today (although it's been muddied some after the Protestant Reformation, who started conflating that idea with the idea of the primacy of belief). one who does not strive to follow those teachings is not a Christian. being a Christian does not mean we succeed at following those teachings; in fact, it's expected that we will often fail. but it does mean we're trying.
i'm willing to argue that Bush is not truly a Christian. i base this on his actions. his consistent undercutting of funding for social services, wholesale shutdown of many programs, his arrogance are all counter to one who is trying to follow Christ's teachings. and that's before we get into his responsibility for over a hundred thousand deaths in Iraq, his consistent lies about it, his fear-mongering over "terrorism" for political gain. his environmental policy pretty much indicates that he's willfully neglecting the Christian call to stewardship, and his "right to life" stance is clearly not based on a Christian concept of sanctity of life when it's divorced from the influence that has on the death penalty or care for the poor and persecuted throughout the world (the Catholic Church, for all it's many problems, is at least consistent on this point). and, perhaps most directly contradictory, his use of religion as a political tool. Christ told his followers to go pray in closets so as not to let their spiritual life become something to boast about, unlike what Christ called "the hypocrites". few people fit that bill better than Bush does.
and yes, this is me judging Bush in a way that the Bible probably tells me not to. i can't, after all, see what's in his heart. but Paul tells us that "faith without action is dead". and this man has done nothing to exhibit Christian faith. no, he's using this as a tool for personal gain.
i will, however, agree that i'm very sick of Christians who tolerate this nonsense. this is not a simple disagreement in interpretation. these people are perverting the name and teachings of Christ. and they need to be stopped.
oh, you're just asking for it, aren't you? :-)
never mind the fact that you're right. American Football's a fun game - i used to play it after church on sundays with my mates at the school next door - but a sport? please. i've timed games to compare time spent doing something vs. time spent doing nothing; the ratio in the last two superbowls, supposedly the hight of the season, was about 1:7.5. that's just lame.
and you're going to get all the guys talking about how (american) football players are so much larger and how hard the impact is. please. the injuries are largely because of the armor (added weight), not in spite of it. it may by physically challenging, but then so is pushing cars through swamps or having someone throw bricks at you. those aren't sports either. rugby detractors need to go watch serious rugby. those guys just tear each other apart! and women's rugby isn't exactly a lady's game, either. fun stuff.
American Football could've been an awesome sport if it hadn't changed the way it's played for television and sensationalism. the game that's played on school rec lots is still a great game.
and i love the fact that half your mods are insightful/informative.
'course, i still can't follow cricket.
it is not a false distinction, although it may well be an archaic one. the problem is that the distinction relies on the classical meaning of democracy, not the modern one. the classical definition of democracy is not simply "people vote", which seems to be the modern definition (which isn't necessarily the same as "direct democracy", but it's close), but rather that people are making all, substantially all, or at least all of a certain type of law. the Roman republic was horridly inefficient because it was also a democracy: the senate couldn't pass most types of laws, "the people" had to. having elected the senators wasn't enough.
the biggest risk of a democracy is that there's nothing to prevent it from degenerating into mob rule (except its own weight as it grows, which prevents it from doing pretty much anything). the US founding fathers explicitly wrote against democracy as a form of government in the classical sense. by way of contrast, where democracy puts the will of the people at the center of the government, the thing from which all governmental power derives, a republic puts the rule of law in the center of the government, and all else derives from that. in the US, we've a Republic because all governmental power derives from the Constitution (the most significant bit of brilliance therein being the fact that it contains a way to change even the fundamentals).
under the modern definition of democracy, the two concepts (republic, democracy) are more or less orthogonal, and can work quite well together.
the whole PC-backlash thing is, in my estimation, mostly initiated by (which is not to say this applies to most of the people who follow it) people who can't be bothered thinking about what impact things they say might have on other people, or simply don't care. i'm with Atom on this one:--If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock
and here i thought steampunk was set in the past. or is this the opposite of steampunk? somebody go find Gibson, we need a new genre name.
in high school, i noticed a friend of mine wrote her a's like a typewriter - with the curly thing on top - rather than sorta an o with a tail. this was pretty distinctive and looked neat when she did it. so i started, too. i then redid my entire handwriting, trying to simplify the letters. so no my p's, b's, d's, &c. don't have risers which are distinct from the loop - it's just one stroke. now only f and k (and t and x if i'm being neat) involve lifting the pen mid letter. the simplified writing makes the letters pretty easily distinguishable for me (except q, which is a problem) and quite distinctive looking, but it doesn't quite look like the same alphabet to most other people.
i get comments on how distinctive it is, but i'm not sure they're compliments. and "clear" is seldom used to describe it.
anyone know if intentionally, consciously revamping your handwriting buggers the theory behind handwriting analysis (questions of its initial validity aside)?
in 1984 AT&T and the federal government entered into (yet another) "consent decree" in which they spun off their local carriers in exchange for allowing them to continue their long-distance monopoly and (very importantly) release themselves from an earlier consent decree which, effectively, barred them from making money on this little invention called the "transistor". Bell Labs remained the R&D division of AT&T for the next 12 years until 1996, when AT&T spun out Lucent Technologies to include Bell Labs and all their hardware manufacturing (and, incidentally, spun out NCR at the same time).
the history around AT&T with antitrust is really interesting, actually. it's fun to look back at things like the 1950's-era one and decide whether basically giving away their potential monopoly on the transistor was worth maintaining their monopoly on phone service, or whether it was the 1984 or the 1996 break-up that crushed Bell Labs (at least for the time being; i'm still hopeful for a revival with the current new leadership). but that's just for Bell System history geeks.
of course, by then Kansas will be an island... :-)
security guard: "um, hi. what are you doing?"
me: "oh, a co-worker asked me to restart his machines in there. i don't have the code to the back half, so i'm trying to climb over the wall."
[pause...]
security guard:" would you like me to go get a ladder?"
he then went to get the ladder and held it for me while i climbed over, and then went away to put it back while i poked around in the back room. forget the fact that i wasn't supposed to be in the back room - he never even asked to see my ID for the building (which is good, since, contrary to company policy, it was on my desk in another section of the building).
humans are almost always the weak link in any security scheme.
i'm not going to defend "podcast" - i very much wish the term which became dominant for this thing wasn't a walking (er, whatever) advertisement. however...
a "podcast" is not an "audio download". or rather, that's only part of it. it's also important that it be potentially time-shifted, (at least sorta) subscription based, and automated downloads.
now my real questions is: what do we do when they get it wrong? they've defined it as explicitly being music; i'm subscribed to several podcasts, and only one has anything to do with music.
i should also point out that the unilateral action behind their introduction of XMLHTTP (like their earlier HTML extensions) lead to (or at the very least contributed strongly to) the emergence of multiple, incompatible implementations in various browsers which persists today.
the point/problem isn't that Microsoft never has good ideas. XMLHTTP is at least clever (i'm skeptical of the value of cramming all this into HTML/HTTP, but that's an independent discussion), and Microsoft Research has lots of really good minds and puts out some very interesting papers. the problem is in how they get those ideas out to people. they don't care about interoperability and go out of their way to undermine it. look into what they did with their IE badging and developer program trying to get MS-specific HTML extensions onto every web page possible. it wasn't just about getting new ideas out there, but rather about getting people dependent on their software, even for the pre-existing ideas.
i have no idea what MS's intentions are here; perhaps their RSS stuff is genuinely useful (i'm a comparatively late arrival into the world of RSS, so will reserve judgement), but their history around these extensions is good justification for being skeptical of their goals.
You're modded down because you're an obvious troll, and ignorant and wrong to boot. Apple's given a lot back to the open source community. there's absolutely no reason why you should get to decide the form in which they give back. Apple got an open source core for their OS, and had given back substantial patches and improvements to the same; they got the KHTML rendering engine, and have given back substantial improvements to the same, including those that got Konquerer to be the second browser (after Safari) to be Acid2 compliant. if you don't like the nature of their contributions, or if you're one of those zealots who believe they're somehow obligated to give things away to a community who don't contribute any revenue, that's fine, but don't pretend Apple's not giving back. that's just dishonest.
calling your definition crap was overly harsh, and just not civil. i'm not normally quite such a jerk, even online; i appreciate you not getting steamed over it. now on with it:
1) "Sperm, egg, and people with XXY, X, XYY, or XXX genetic makeup are all genetically human." why? chromosome count is a pretty standard method in definitions i've heard before. i'll agree that sperm and eggs are not lifeforms/organisms; good point.
2) i'll agree identical twins aren't a problem given a re-reading of your sig (i'd previously parsed it as (genetically human && genetically distinct && functioning organism) whereas i think you mean it as ((genetically human && genetically distinct && functioning ) organism); simple english ambiguity). conjoined twins are still a problem. i think cognitive function and personality distinctness are the logical constraints, although they're difficult to know for some time, and it's slightly trick to exclude things like MPD or get into minimum cognitive function levels, which is a scary place to be.
3) i'm not convinced you're right here in all cases. given, for example, one of the fundamental functions of an organism is turning food into energy, would someone who's body has stopped doing that (which would obviously cause them to die pretty soon if uncorrected) stop being human with the onset of the disease (rather than with death)? clearly these are fringe cases again, and i wasn't intending to lump all degenerative or autoimmune diseases in with each other, but illnesses where the body is literally attacking itself make definitions of "function" tricky.
i don't have a better definition. my initial reaction was based on an (apparently inappropriate) assumption that, given the definition's placement in your sig and how that space is most commonly used, you were dogmatically putting it forward as a settled fact; your willingness to discuss the matter and admit flaws says pretty loudly that i was off the mark on that one.
i don't normally respond to sigs, but i'm making an exception here. your definition of "human being" is, um, crap. please now define: "genetically human" in a way that includes, minimally, xxy folks and doesn't include eggs and sperm; "genetically distinct" in a way which, minimally, doesn't have identical or conjoined twins being one person (or not a person); and "functioning organism" in a way that doesn't exclude people with auto-imune disorders or degenerative illnesses.
i don't have a definition i'm perfectly happy with, but it's a harder question than one-line definitions allow for.
well, first of all the communists did most of the fighting and dying against the Nazis in WWII. without the Russians on our side, it's pretty likely the Germans would've taken Europe, including GB, before the U.S. made any difference at all. also note that America's attempts to "beat up" the communists seldom went well: witness the Korean and Vietnam wars. we "beat" (or rather outlasted) the Russian communists almost explicitly by not trying to beat them up, combined with Reagan actually softening his rhetoric and actions as the Soviet Union was decaying, encouraging an easy transition rather than a violent one. and finally, it's very hard to lump in WWII with other legitimate examples of American imperialism since, well, we weren't doing any empire building (unlike with our very dirty history in the middle east and south america).
Dell was only right in the sense that if he were running apple, the best anyone could hope for would be for him to shut down the company and call it a day. but that's not because there was any fundamental reason for that. rather, it's because Dell only knows how to run one kind of business, and Apple ain't it. the fact that Jobs, and even Amelio before him, did much better than Dell thought he could simply reflects the fact that the former two have broader and deeper vision (or, most charitably, a type of vision more compatible with Apple as a company) than Dell does.
i feel sorry for you. no, really. that must be awful, having all that SGI hardware around. in fact, at great personal sacrifice, i'd be willing to take it all off your hands. no, no charge. see, i'm better than a therapist! just trying to look out for you.
:-)
lemme know where i can pick the hardware up from.