According to TFA, TPB removed the torrent. From what I can tell, this was a clever gambit by the developer to get them to do exactly that. So he got what he wanted, in the end.
I'm not trying to convince anyone. I'm giving you an explanation of why we shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket. Mass extinctions have happened before, and there's no reason (unless you're a flat-earther, I guess) to believe that they won't happen again. The Earth has seen literally millions of species go extinct over the course if its existence. There's no reason at all to believe it won't be our turn, eventually. But the more spread out we are to other planets in this solar system, and eventually, others, the longer we preserve ourselves (until, of course, the whole universe ends).
The Earth's ecosystem can survive anything. Life itself is hard to kill off. But human life wouldn't be quite as hard to kill. If a huge dinosaur extinction-size asteroid were to hit the Earth, some species would survive (e.g., the small mammals that survived the last time), but we'd be toast.
Human beings need the ability to leave Earth eventually, because eventually, Earth will be uninhabitable. It might be tomorrow, 5 years from now, or 650 million years from now, but something will happen which reboots Earth (at the very least). The only real question is whether it will happen on a timescale that allows some survivors to escape.
I didn't say that they weren't humans. It means it isn't aware that you're killing it.
Why would being unaware that you're killing it matter? You wouldn't say it's okay to kill someone in their sleep, or while they're unconscious.
The leech comment was obviously meant to remark on the fact that until the fetus is out of the body, it's just leeching off of the mother. Once it's out of the mothers body, the mother has the option of giving it away. At this point, its pretty much aware of its own existence and it isn't really forcefully leeching off of someones body. It's the choice of the women to be able to get an abortion.
The fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother, but that doesn't make it a parasite. Parasites a) originate outside the host, and b) are of another species. The fetus is merely dependent on the mother. It's not an invader.
You almost always (except in the cases of rape or incest) have a choice as to whether or not you bring a child into the world. You can not engage in sex, or you can use protection to minimize the risk of pregnancy, and take your chances. If we agree that fetuses are human, how is killing a human that a) committed no crime, and b) isn't responsible for being in the position they're in, okay?
The child in my example and the fetus are just at two different stages of development. In fact, depending on how old the child is, it might not have the self-awareness of an adult chimp. Also, the fetus' lack of awareness is temporary. The fact that it's not conscious doesn't mean it's not human.
Also, newborn babies (and, actually, for several years afterward) get their nourishment directly from their mothers (in the natural state, anyway). All human children are leeches until they can feed themselves. It's one of the mammalian traits. Newborn monkeys don't climb on their own into trees to gather their own food. The only difference with a fetus is that it's internal, rather than external.
People tell themselves stories in order to do what they think they have to do, but you shouldn't be confused: Having cognitive or perceptual abilities lower than what we see walking around us every day doesn't mean that fetuses aren't humans.
Thinking about it, the analogy is faulty in at least one respect: In the case of the sperm, there is no child. So it would be more akin to not seeing a commercial featuring a woman in Africa, and because you don't see the commercial, the woman dies, and never gets the chance to conceive a child with her new husband.
I was just trying to say that, potentially, sperm could contribute to the creation of a human. If it's okay to basically waste the sperm, they why do some people have such objections to abortion? It isn't even aware of its own existence and can hardly be called anything but a potential human.
You might have misunderstood what I was agreeing with you on. I agree that there's no point in not using embryonic stem cells, even if it destroys the embryo, if the embryo is just going to be thawed (i.e., killed) anyway.
The reason sperm is different from an embryo is that the embryo is a distinct human (genetically), while the sperm cell is just a cell from a different human, who isn't killed if you waste the sperm.
Abortion is different, because there, you're dealing with a distinct human that you're ending the life of.
As I said, everything you do, other than having sex, prevents sperm from fertilizing an egg (and sex is by no means a sure method there, either).
Think of it as active vs. passive. Let's say there's a poor child in Africa who you can donate money to, and that will save the child's life. But you don't see the commercial that would tell you about the child, and because the child doesn't get the money, the child dies. Now, suppose you do see the commercial. You fly to Africa, take out a shotgun, and blow the child's head clean off it's shoulders.
That's pretty much the difference we're talking about.
The sperm cell has a chance to contribute to the creation of a human being. You aren't even giving that potential human being a chance by masturbating. Also, these embryo have almost zero chance of actually growing. They'll just go to waste if they aren't used, so they might as well be used for something useful. I don't see the problem with funding it at all. It's not as if they're forcefully taking them directly from pregnant women.
Okay, well, I think you're combining two separate issues here.
On the issue of frozen embryos, I actually agree with you. If you're not going to implant them anyway, not using them for something just compounds the tragedy. If they're going to die anyway, they might as well die for something useful. I really don't see a rational objection to that.
Now, on the issue of sperm, it's quite a different story. Everything you do, other than having sex or *cough* collecting it *cough*, means sperm goes to waste. The same argument that goes for masturbation goes for sleeping, eating, or playing with your PS3.
Yet, given the right circumstances, they still have a chance to become a human.
No, they don't. That's the point. A sperm cell contributes DNA to an egg. After that point, the sperm no longer exists. The sperm contributes to an embryo, but it never becomes an embryo. The embryo is a human. That's the difference. A trigger isn't a gun, and a piece of bread isn't a sandwich.
If you want to say that masturbation prevents that sperm from contributing to new life, that would be accurate (assuming you weren't going to preserve the sperm somehow) but that's not the same thing as killing anything. It doesn't have the same implications at all. Using your argument, any time you're not having sex, you're "killing" someone.
Sperm doesn't exist yet? What? Why? If given the right conditions, it could turn into a real human being. I thought you cared?
Again, sperm isn't a distinct being. Except for its ability to contribute its DNA, by itself, it's not really different from a skin cell.
To put this another way: If you castrate a man, you can't be said to have committed genocide, because a) no human has died, only cells have, and b) Of the millions of sperm cells involved, maybe one or two even would've had the opportunity to fertilize an egg.
Actually, the more I read the article, the more it seems to me that this isn't about replacing OS X. The idea of the patent seems to be changing the UI of OS X to make touch easier. Check out this paragraph:
Then to switch to a touch-based input, you'll change the orientation of the iMac's display so as to make touching the screen easier and more natural. For example, to enter touch input, you'll want to pull the iMac's screen closer to you while pushing the display screen down flat as if you were going to read a book, states the patent. In this orientation you'll be able to select a corresponding UI which should translate to using iOS. In fact, the transition is really an automated process.
(Emphasis added)
That sounds to me like it's just the interface that's changing. It's not some magical hybrid.
Oh, it doesn't have rights? Well, then I guess you have no objection to abortions. You should make yourself more clear. If it doesn't have rights, it doesn't matter what a woman does to it.
Under current U.S. law, it has no rights. That's an objective statement of fact. That has nothing to do with my opinion on abortion. Pro-life people don't deny that Roe v. Wade is on the books, just like abolitionists before the Civil War didn't deny that slavery was legal. Saying someone should have a right and that they do is a very different thing.
If a woman who doesn't/want/ to have a baby has a miscarriage, I would not classify that as a tragedy. If she does, then it might be an emotional thing for her and her husband, and I'd feel sorry for them, but it's nowhere near the level of someone dying.
The difference is the emotional attachment. Clearly, you're going to have a different emotional reaction if someone you've known for 3 years dies, as opposed to someone you've only known for a short time. (And, of course, in the case of a fetus, you haven't talked with them or had tactile contact.) But the emotional toll it takes is completely unrelated to whether or not a living human has died.
If a zygote doesn't implant, it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one around. It's quite like that because it's a non-sentient entity dying with no impact on anything whatsoever. The woman didn't know she was pregnant, so no emotional trouble for her. And a brainless clump of cells can't think and can't feel pain, so its death is about the same as the death of a tree. Oh, except we can't even get anything useful like wood out of it. So it's more like the death of a blade of grass. Well, a cute bunny might eat that so, no, let me think.
I've got it! It's like the crushing of the world's smallest violin!
If no one knows about it, it doesn't take an emotional toll on anyone. You're quite right about that. The rest of it, though, is hogwash. Is the death of someone who's fallen into a coma (which satisfies everything you said but being a clump of cells) a sad thing, even if no one knows that person personally? You might not get all weepy about it, if it's someone you don't know, but it's still something of a tragedy.
As I've said somewhere else in this discussion, I'm handicapped. I've seen more than my share of people who were non-communicative and possibly not "sentient" in the way you're using the term (e.g., they show no reaction to pain, they don't have awareness, etc.) It's a dangerous precedent to set to say, "It's not conscious, so it's not human."
Incidentally, that's another difference between abortion and your zygote: AFAIK, by the time a woman is aware that she's pregnant and thus, able to have an abortion, there are a hell of a lot more than 20 cells involved (with the exception, of course, of the "morning after" pill).
---linuxrocks123
P.S.: Don't take any of this personally. I'm in a sarcastic mood and Slashdot is a great place to vent. And I think you're so wrong, and, well: http://xkcd.com/386/
Don't worry about it.:) Sorry about the "run along" crack before. I didn't respond to the sarcasm as calmly as I should've. It's a little bit of an emotional subject for me because of my circumstances, and I got carried away.
Okay, you're saying a clump of 20 cells is a human life? It has rights? Well, guess what, about 25% of fertilized embryos end up not implanting in the uterus, and they (obviously) are expelled from the body and die.
First off, I didn't say it had rights. Currently, it has no rights under U.S. law.
Secondly, a pregnancy that does not result in a baby after 9 months is not the same thing as an abortion, which is a deliberate act. If a woman miscarries, I would hope we could agree that that's a tragedy. But a miscarriage, or a failure of an egg to implant, is not an abortion. Certainly, if there was a way to ensure that the egg implanted, women who were trying to have babies would want to do it. And, just like in your search and rescue example, if you were called upon to save a fertilized egg that hadn't implanted, I would think it should be done, but you don't go out and try to save people you don't know are in danger. And I certainly can't see a moral obligation to do so. To my knowledge, search and rescue crews only go out when they know there's someone specific out there to rescue. They don't just spend all their time searching the entire country hoping to find someone in danger (which, if they did, of course they would).
Not all pregnancies are guaranteed to be successful, either.
No, but at least a fertilized egg is itself genetically a distinct human. Sperm cells are haploid cells. And the success or failure of a pregnancy doesn't alter the fact that there was a distinct being (whether it's conscious or not) there. Have you ever known a woman who's miscarried? In my experience, they grieve for the fetus. It's not just, "Oh, well. Back to the drawing board...". (I'm not suggesting that the grief is like that of losing a child that's already been born. Obviously, the emotional attachment there is much greater.)
You don't necessarily hold it. Often times my iPad sits on the table or on my lap (many of the cases fold up to hold the screen at a bit of an angle), while I use it.
I don't think the idea here is to replace an iPad, it's just to give you another option. Anyways, making the iMac display be detachable doesn't make much sense in that A)they're pretty big/heavy, and B)they don't have a battery in them.
The laptop/detachable tablet makes more sense, but the connecting mechanism just seems like a huge potential point of failure to me. I know they exist, but have never used one, so I could be wrong.
Good point about the size of the screen. I hadn't taken that into account.
That's interesting that you don't hold your iPad a lot of the time. Most of the time I see it being used, someone's holding it. I still think the distance involved is different, but I can see your point. Maybe I'm not thinking about it right. The other thing is I've always thought of touch as something useful in portable devices, rather than desktops, where you've already got very mature interfaces that work well. Just seems weird to me, sitting in front of a keyboard and mouse and reaching out to touch a screen anyway...
Seriously? It was pretty obvious what I was talking about. Or should have been. Masturbation almost has zero chance of conceiving a child. While, obviously, the sperm cell by itself can't become a child, by masturbating, you're basically ensuring it never even has a chance of uniting with an egg, which could be considered wasteful. You're not even giving it a chance.
I knew you were talking about masturbation. Your premise is faulty, though. Sperm by itself does nothing. You're not "killing" anything by wasting sperm. In fact, the overwhelming majority of sperm you release when having intercourse isn't useful for anything. Only one sperm, hitting only one egg, does the trick. (Of course you might get lucky and get fraternal twins, but that's just a bonus.) The distinction between a sperm and a zygote, in terms of life potential, is non-trivial. Under natural circumstances, a given sperm cell's chances of contributing to new life is rather low.
And you could really argue they "had a say" if they weren't educated (oftentimes thanks to conservative abstinence-only no-contraceptive education policies, like the federal policies Bush Jr. and co. backed) and thought simply pulling out was a proper contraceptive?
Yeah. Actually, you could. As long as you give kids accurate information about what causes pregnancy, you gave them the tools to not get pregnant...So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants, that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences. So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants,
And that "keep it in your pants" philosophy of sex education is why abstinence-only education is a statistical failure; many states outright rejected it during Bush Jr.'s time despicte having to turn down federal funding in the process. "Accurate information" about what rcauses pregnancy entails exactly what one has to do to not get pregnant, and these education policies do not provide that information. HAll those kids who were told to "just keep it in their pants" are going to fuck anyway, especially in urban centers full of poor people, because the urges of puberty effortlessly surmounts abstinence education. Tell people not to fuck and they'll do it anyway. Pretending they'll keep to themselves when told is an absolute denial of human nature, and the statistics are there to prove it.
It's not a matter of statistics. It's a matter of a) biology, b) mechanics, and c) chemistry. Materials sometimes fail, and contraceptives are not 100% effective. If you engage in penis to vagina sex, and you both have health sex organs, you run the risk of getting pregnant. If you don't do that, you don't.
that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences.
"live with the consequences"? According to who, God? Whose god? And what gives society the right to mandate this for any woman (especially when women are underrepresented in the political world)? Moralizing about punishment and proper consequences puts the cart before the horse.
This is why I brought up the Civil War. One of the lessons of that conflict is that you don't get to say, (in my best Cartman voice) "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home!" every time a vote doesn't go your way. If the votes are there (for a new piece of legislation, or for a constitutional amendment, if necessary), then the votes are there. End of story. That's how it works. One way or the other, the majority gets their way -- either by enacting a law within the confines of the Constitution, or by changing the Constitution, if necessary.
And then, if the thing's not aborted, the kid's going to be born to parents that didn't want it. And that's fair to the kid? You could argue never having been born is more fair if the resultant person's completely unwanted.
You could argue that, but you probably shouldn't. Lots of people are raised (or not raised) by incompetent, unloving parents, and they do fine. If someone acts like a sociopathic asshole later in life, it's because of how they responded to the hand they were dealt.
"Doing fine" how so? Where abortion's arguably the most needed (poor inner-city people, oftentimes teenagers, who couldn't support a kid if they had one, and don't know much about what it takes to avoid conception because of bad education), those unwanted kids don't do just fine, at leasto insofar as they go on to make the same mistakes their par
Okay, thanks. I sit corrected. It appears that this is a civil thing anyway, so there's not an allegation (that I know of) that a law has been broken, per se.
Normal people dont give a crap about Unix shells or even having admin access to their own box if it means they can run their chat programs and Arsebook. Really, there is no benifit to OSX for the end user and Apple knows this.
Then why even make iMacs and PowerBooks (or whatever Apple's calling their laptops now)? If that's really the case, Jobs should save Apple boatloads of cash and just churn out iPads, iPods, and iPhones.
But I don't believe that. I think there are still people who use Apple products who are over the age of 21 and have jobs, and want to use Apple computers on those jobs. That requires, at a minimum, being able to install the applications (not "apps(TM)) you choose, and having access to the file system. Maybe I'm just delusional, but I can't see Apple simply ceding that market to Microsoft and Linux.
Now, iPad with full OS X, that's something I would actually pay money for. But as it is I don't need a locked, limited use device that doesn't even expose the concept of file system to the user. I can tolerate that on my iPhone, it's primarily a phone after all.
Precisely. As another poster said, the iMac's screen is too big to be carried around like a tablet, but the iPad itself running OS X would be something to see. To be honest, that's what I thought the iPad was going to be when I found out it was coming, before the big reveal. I mean, yeah, it's a big hit, and they sold 4 million of the things, but let's be honest: There's a good chance Apple could sell 4 million $500 sock puppets if they slapped Apple logos on them and had Jobs talk them up for an hour.
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According to TFA, TPB removed the torrent. From what I can tell, this was a clever gambit by the developer to get them to do exactly that. So he got what he wanted, in the end.
I'm not trying to convince anyone. I'm giving you an explanation of why we shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket. Mass extinctions have happened before, and there's no reason (unless you're a flat-earther, I guess) to believe that they won't happen again. The Earth has seen literally millions of species go extinct over the course if its existence. There's no reason at all to believe it won't be our turn, eventually. But the more spread out we are to other planets in this solar system, and eventually, others, the longer we preserve ourselves (until, of course, the whole universe ends).
The Earth's ecosystem can survive anything. Life itself is hard to kill off. But human life wouldn't be quite as hard to kill. If a huge dinosaur extinction-size asteroid were to hit the Earth, some species would survive (e.g., the small mammals that survived the last time), but we'd be toast.
Human beings need the ability to leave Earth eventually, because eventually, Earth will be uninhabitable. It might be tomorrow, 5 years from now, or 650 million years from now, but something will happen which reboots Earth (at the very least). The only real question is whether it will happen on a timescale that allows some survivors to escape.
The funny thing is, the developer got them to take the torrent down by asking them to keep it up/. :)
I didn't say that they weren't humans. It means it isn't aware that you're killing it.
Why would being unaware that you're killing it matter? You wouldn't say it's okay to kill someone in their sleep, or while they're unconscious.
The leech comment was obviously meant to remark on the fact that until the fetus is out of the body, it's just leeching off of the mother. Once it's out of the mothers body, the mother has the option of giving it away. At this point, its pretty much aware of its own existence and it isn't really forcefully leeching off of someones body. It's the choice of the women to be able to get an abortion.
The fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother, but that doesn't make it a parasite. Parasites a) originate outside the host, and b) are of another species. The fetus is merely dependent on the mother. It's not an invader.
You almost always (except in the cases of rape or incest) have a choice as to whether or not you bring a child into the world. You can not engage in sex, or you can use protection to minimize the risk of pregnancy, and take your chances. If we agree that fetuses are human, how is killing a human that a) committed no crime, and b) isn't responsible for being in the position they're in, okay?
The child in my example and the fetus are just at two different stages of development. In fact, depending on how old the child is, it might not have the self-awareness of an adult chimp. Also, the fetus' lack of awareness is temporary. The fact that it's not conscious doesn't mean it's not human.
Also, newborn babies (and, actually, for several years afterward) get their nourishment directly from their mothers (in the natural state, anyway). All human children are leeches until they can feed themselves. It's one of the mammalian traits. Newborn monkeys don't climb on their own into trees to gather their own food. The only difference with a fetus is that it's internal, rather than external.
People tell themselves stories in order to do what they think they have to do, but you shouldn't be confused: Having cognitive or perceptual abilities lower than what we see walking around us every day doesn't mean that fetuses aren't humans.
Thinking about it, the analogy is faulty in at least one respect: In the case of the sperm, there is no child. So it would be more akin to not seeing a commercial featuring a woman in Africa, and because you don't see the commercial, the woman dies, and never gets the chance to conceive a child with her new husband.
"I actually agree with you" Oh.
I was just trying to say that, potentially, sperm could contribute to the creation of a human. If it's okay to basically waste the sperm, they why do some people have such objections to abortion? It isn't even aware of its own existence and can hardly be called anything but a potential human.
You might have misunderstood what I was agreeing with you on. I agree that there's no point in not using embryonic stem cells, even if it destroys the embryo, if the embryo is just going to be thawed (i.e., killed) anyway.
The reason sperm is different from an embryo is that the embryo is a distinct human (genetically), while the sperm cell is just a cell from a different human, who isn't killed if you waste the sperm.
Abortion is different, because there, you're dealing with a distinct human that you're ending the life of.
As I said, everything you do, other than having sex, prevents sperm from fertilizing an egg (and sex is by no means a sure method there, either).
Think of it as active vs. passive. Let's say there's a poor child in Africa who you can donate money to, and that will save the child's life. But you don't see the commercial that would tell you about the child, and because the child doesn't get the money, the child dies. Now, suppose you do see the commercial. You fly to Africa, take out a shotgun, and blow the child's head clean off it's shoulders.
That's pretty much the difference we're talking about.
The sperm cell has a chance to contribute to the creation of a human being. You aren't even giving that potential human being a chance by masturbating. Also, these embryo have almost zero chance of actually growing. They'll just go to waste if they aren't used, so they might as well be used for something useful. I don't see the problem with funding it at all. It's not as if they're forcefully taking them directly from pregnant women.
Okay, well, I think you're combining two separate issues here.
On the issue of frozen embryos, I actually agree with you. If you're not going to implant them anyway, not using them for something just compounds the tragedy. If they're going to die anyway, they might as well die for something useful. I really don't see a rational objection to that.
Now, on the issue of sperm, it's quite a different story. Everything you do, other than having sex or *cough* collecting it *cough*, means sperm goes to waste. The same argument that goes for masturbation goes for sleeping, eating, or playing with your PS3.
Yet, given the right circumstances, they still have a chance to become a human.
No, they don't. That's the point. A sperm cell contributes DNA to an egg. After that point, the sperm no longer exists. The sperm contributes to an embryo, but it never becomes an embryo. The embryo is a human. That's the difference. A trigger isn't a gun, and a piece of bread isn't a sandwich.
If you want to say that masturbation prevents that sperm from contributing to new life, that would be accurate (assuming you weren't going to preserve the sperm somehow) but that's not the same thing as killing anything. It doesn't have the same implications at all. Using your argument, any time you're not having sex, you're "killing" someone.
Sperm doesn't exist yet? What? Why? If given the right conditions, it could turn into a real human being. I thought you cared?
Again, sperm isn't a distinct being. Except for its ability to contribute its DNA, by itself, it's not really different from a skin cell.
To put this another way: If you castrate a man, you can't be said to have committed genocide, because a) no human has died, only cells have, and b) Of the millions of sperm cells involved, maybe one or two even would've had the opportunity to fertilize an egg.
Actually, the more I read the article, the more it seems to me that this isn't about replacing OS X. The idea of the patent seems to be changing the UI of OS X to make touch easier. Check out this paragraph:
Then to switch to a touch-based input, you'll change the orientation of the iMac's display so as to make touching the screen easier and more natural. For example, to enter touch input, you'll want to pull the iMac's screen closer to you while pushing the display screen down flat as if you were going to read a book, states the patent. In this orientation you'll be able to select a corresponding UI which should translate to using iOS. In fact, the transition is really an automated process.
(Emphasis added)
That sounds to me like it's just the interface that's changing. It's not some magical hybrid.
It's not possible to murder something that doesn't exist yet. You can consider sperm a condiment, if you want to, but that doesn't change what it is.
Oh, it doesn't have rights? Well, then I guess you have no objection to abortions. You should make yourself more clear. If it doesn't have rights, it doesn't matter what a woman does to it.
Under current U.S. law, it has no rights. That's an objective statement of fact. That has nothing to do with my opinion on abortion. Pro-life people don't deny that Roe v. Wade is on the books, just like abolitionists before the Civil War didn't deny that slavery was legal. Saying someone should have a right and that they do is a very different thing.
If a woman who doesn't /want/ to have a baby has a miscarriage, I would not classify that as a tragedy. If she does, then it might be an emotional thing for her and her husband, and I'd feel sorry for them, but it's nowhere near the level of someone dying.
The difference is the emotional attachment. Clearly, you're going to have a different emotional reaction if someone you've known for 3 years dies, as opposed to someone you've only known for a short time. (And, of course, in the case of a fetus, you haven't talked with them or had tactile contact.) But the emotional toll it takes is completely unrelated to whether or not a living human has died.
If a zygote doesn't implant, it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one around. It's quite like that because it's a non-sentient entity dying with no impact on anything whatsoever. The woman didn't know she was pregnant, so no emotional trouble for her. And a brainless clump of cells can't think and can't feel pain, so its death is about the same as the death of a tree. Oh, except we can't even get anything useful like wood out of it. So it's more like the death of a blade of grass. Well, a cute bunny might eat that so, no, let me think.
I've got it! It's like the crushing of the world's smallest violin!
If no one knows about it, it doesn't take an emotional toll on anyone. You're quite right about that. The rest of it, though, is hogwash. Is the death of someone who's fallen into a coma (which satisfies everything you said but being a clump of cells) a sad thing, even if no one knows that person personally? You might not get all weepy about it, if it's someone you don't know, but it's still something of a tragedy.
As I've said somewhere else in this discussion, I'm handicapped. I've seen more than my share of people who were non-communicative and possibly not "sentient" in the way you're using the term (e.g., they show no reaction to pain, they don't have awareness, etc.) It's a dangerous precedent to set to say, "It's not conscious, so it's not human."
Incidentally, that's another difference between abortion and your zygote: AFAIK, by the time a woman is aware that she's pregnant and thus, able to have an abortion, there are a hell of a lot more than 20 cells involved (with the exception, of course, of the "morning after" pill).
---linuxrocks123
P.S.: Don't take any of this personally. I'm in a sarcastic mood and Slashdot is a great place to vent. And I think you're so wrong, and, well: http://xkcd.com/386/
Don't worry about it. :) Sorry about the "run along" crack before. I didn't respond to the sarcasm as calmly as I should've. It's a little bit of an emotional subject for me because of my circumstances, and I got carried away.
Okay, you're saying a clump of 20 cells is a human life? It has rights? Well, guess what, about 25% of fertilized embryos end up not implanting in the uterus, and they (obviously) are expelled from the body and die.
First off, I didn't say it had rights. Currently, it has no rights under U.S. law.
Secondly, a pregnancy that does not result in a baby after 9 months is not the same thing as an abortion, which is a deliberate act. If a woman miscarries, I would hope we could agree that that's a tragedy. But a miscarriage, or a failure of an egg to implant, is not an abortion. Certainly, if there was a way to ensure that the egg implanted, women who were trying to have babies would want to do it. And, just like in your search and rescue example, if you were called upon to save a fertilized egg that hadn't implanted, I would think it should be done, but you don't go out and try to save people you don't know are in danger. And I certainly can't see a moral obligation to do so. To my knowledge, search and rescue crews only go out when they know there's someone specific out there to rescue. They don't just spend all their time searching the entire country hoping to find someone in danger (which, if they did, of course they would).
Now, run along and play. Adults are talking.
Not all pregnancies are guaranteed to be successful, either.
No, but at least a fertilized egg is itself genetically a distinct human. Sperm cells are haploid cells. And the success or failure of a pregnancy doesn't alter the fact that there was a distinct being (whether it's conscious or not) there. Have you ever known a woman who's miscarried? In my experience, they grieve for the fetus. It's not just, "Oh, well. Back to the drawing board...". (I'm not suggesting that the grief is like that of losing a child that's already been born. Obviously, the emotional attachment there is much greater.)
Probably, it's just where he thinks he'll have the best chance...
You don't necessarily hold it. Often times my iPad sits on the table or on my lap (many of the cases fold up to hold the screen at a bit of an angle), while I use it.
I don't think the idea here is to replace an iPad, it's just to give you another option. Anyways, making the iMac display be detachable doesn't make much sense in that A)they're pretty big/heavy, and B)they don't have a battery in them.
The laptop/detachable tablet makes more sense, but the connecting mechanism just seems like a huge potential point of failure to me. I know they exist, but have never used one, so I could be wrong.
Good point about the size of the screen. I hadn't taken that into account.
That's interesting that you don't hold your iPad a lot of the time. Most of the time I see it being used, someone's holding it. I still think the distance involved is different, but I can see your point. Maybe I'm not thinking about it right. The other thing is I've always thought of touch as something useful in portable devices, rather than desktops, where you've already got very mature interfaces that work well. Just seems weird to me, sitting in front of a keyboard and mouse and reaching out to touch a screen anyway...
Seriously? It was pretty obvious what I was talking about. Or should have been. Masturbation almost has zero chance of conceiving a child. While, obviously, the sperm cell by itself can't become a child, by masturbating, you're basically ensuring it never even has a chance of uniting with an egg, which could be considered wasteful. You're not even giving it a chance.
I knew you were talking about masturbation. Your premise is faulty, though. Sperm by itself does nothing. You're not "killing" anything by wasting sperm. In fact, the overwhelming majority of sperm you release when having intercourse isn't useful for anything. Only one sperm, hitting only one egg, does the trick. (Of course you might get lucky and get fraternal twins, but that's just a bonus.) The distinction between a sperm and a zygote, in terms of life potential, is non-trivial. Under natural circumstances, a given sperm cell's chances of contributing to new life is rather low.
Thanks. Good points, all. :)
And you could really argue they "had a say" if they weren't educated (oftentimes thanks to conservative abstinence-only no-contraceptive education policies, like the federal policies Bush Jr. and co. backed) and thought simply pulling out was a proper contraceptive?
Yeah. Actually, you could. As long as you give kids accurate information about what causes pregnancy, you gave them the tools to not get pregnant...So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants, that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences. So yeah, if you were told, "Keep it in your pants, and you won't get pregnant", and you decided not to keep it in your pants,
And that "keep it in your pants" philosophy of sex education is why abstinence-only education is a statistical failure; many states outright rejected it during Bush Jr.'s time despicte having to turn down federal funding in the process. "Accurate information" about what rcauses pregnancy entails exactly what one has to do to not get pregnant, and these education policies do not provide that information. HAll those kids who were told to "just keep it in their pants" are going to fuck anyway, especially in urban centers full of poor people, because the urges of puberty effortlessly surmounts abstinence education. Tell people not to fuck and they'll do it anyway. Pretending they'll keep to themselves when told is an absolute denial of human nature, and the statistics are there to prove it.
It's not a matter of statistics. It's a matter of a) biology, b) mechanics, and c) chemistry. Materials sometimes fail, and contraceptives are not 100% effective. If you engage in penis to vagina sex, and you both have health sex organs, you run the risk of getting pregnant. If you don't do that, you don't.
that's the choice you made, and you have to live with the consequences.
"live with the consequences"? According to who, God? Whose god? And what gives society the right to mandate this for any woman (especially when women are underrepresented in the political world)? Moralizing about punishment and proper consequences puts the cart before the horse.
This is why I brought up the Civil War. One of the lessons of that conflict is that you don't get to say, (in my best Cartman voice) "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home!" every time a vote doesn't go your way. If the votes are there (for a new piece of legislation, or for a constitutional amendment, if necessary), then the votes are there. End of story. That's how it works. One way or the other, the majority gets their way -- either by enacting a law within the confines of the Constitution, or by changing the Constitution, if necessary.
And then, if the thing's not aborted, the kid's going to be born to parents that didn't want it. And that's fair to the kid? You could argue never having been born is more fair if the resultant person's completely unwanted.
You could argue that, but you probably shouldn't. Lots of people are raised (or not raised) by incompetent, unloving parents, and they do fine. If someone acts like a sociopathic asshole later in life, it's because of how they responded to the hand they were dealt.
"Doing fine" how so? Where abortion's arguably the most needed (poor inner-city people, oftentimes teenagers, who couldn't support a kid if they had one, and don't know much about what it takes to avoid conception because of bad education), those unwanted kids don't do just fine, at leasto insofar as they go on to make the same mistakes their par
Okay, thanks. I sit corrected. It appears that this is a civil thing anyway, so there's not an allegation (that I know of) that a law has been broken, per se.
Slashdot is not comprised of normal people.
Yeah, you got that right! ;)
Normal people dont give a crap about Unix shells or even having admin access to their own box if it means they can run their chat programs and Arsebook. Really, there is no benifit to OSX for the end user and Apple knows this.
Then why even make iMacs and PowerBooks (or whatever Apple's calling their laptops now)? If that's really the case, Jobs should save Apple boatloads of cash and just churn out iPads, iPods, and iPhones.
But I don't believe that. I think there are still people who use Apple products who are over the age of 21 and have jobs, and want to use Apple computers on those jobs. That requires, at a minimum, being able to install the applications (not "apps(TM)) you choose, and having access to the file system. Maybe I'm just delusional, but I can't see Apple simply ceding that market to Microsoft and Linux.
Now, iPad with full OS X, that's something I would actually pay money for. But as it is I don't need a locked, limited use device that doesn't even expose the concept of file system to the user. I can tolerate that on my iPhone, it's primarily a phone after all.
Precisely. As another poster said, the iMac's screen is too big to be carried around like a tablet, but the iPad itself running OS X would be something to see. To be honest, that's what I thought the iPad was going to be when I found out it was coming, before the big reveal. I mean, yeah, it's a big hit, and they sold 4 million of the things, but let's be honest: There's a good chance Apple could sell 4 million $500 sock puppets if they slapped Apple logos on them and had Jobs talk them up for an hour.