American blood calls from the ground,"What are you doing?" The blood of generations of American soldiers who died to create and maintain our freedoms calls to the government, "We were not afraid, why are you?" With the justification of saving the last American life, our government gathers to itself a huge chunk of our freedom, making us merely cells in a governmental system, no longer individual citizens with individual rights and freedoms to be respected. The government is showing contempt for and faithlessness to those who came before, who gave everything for us, that we may be free. I am not afraid of the terrorists, are you? I doubt so. But our weak and frightened representatives in a rapidly obsolescing system are afraid, or at least pretend to be in order to steal our freedom. The President makes his laying of wreaths disgusting and contemptible because it is mere show now, containing nothing of respect and due honor.
I suggest that states that do not want this national ID combine to tell the government loudly, "NO!". And if this national ID system goes through and citizens of resisting states are deprived access to federal buildings and airplanes, I suggest that Federal employees be denied access to state properties of all kinds, from buildings to parks. If they want a restricted access war of the states against the Federal government, they should get it. This must not obtain.
I say this from the city that raised the first flag of the American Revolution.
He knows the truth. But he's been so long in business he can no longer speak truth to the world. Business has been successfully driving down the cost of technology workers over the years, even causing a decline of engineering salaries for the first time in decades. Businessmen sit around lighting stogies with hundred dollar bills and pat each other on the back over how much they have driven down salaries and benefits for the "knowledge worker" in the high tech industries. But they forget that capitalism comes from human psychology. And if you don't properly recompense humans for their efforts, and they have the freedom to not participate, they won't. Tech is difficult. It is difficult to acquire the knowledge base for entry and it is difficult to perform. It requires constant upgrading of knowledge and skills. With regard to the decline of students in CS etc., the "clever" businessmen like Bill Gates reap what they sow.
Peter Drucker, the management guru, says the USA has passed from the manufacturing age into the age of the knowledge worker. Fine, but business seems to be attacking the knowledge worker base, attempting to drive it down to a minimum wage salary level where the baseline for employment is a minimum engineering degree. If you can flip burgers at McDonalds for low wages and think your own thoughts, or drive yourself crazy in tech for close to the same wages, what does he expect people to do? And what comes after the "knowledge worker" phase of the economy? Slave worker economy?
There seems to be a disturbing trend in ads to make children appear adult. I just saw a "cute" commercial in the USA which dressed children in adult business office attire and had them interact as if the boy were attracted to his office-mate little girl. The receptionist showed her subtle disbelief by rolling her eyes. Cute, but it touches on sexuality in a preliminary, exploratory way, as if those making it were interested in doing much more next time if this makes it past the public. I think we should stop it right here, now. We should be aware that the movie industry and the ad industry are not separated by some magic impenetrable barrier from the massive multi-billion dollar porn industry. Those working in both can, and do pass back and forth to make a living. We must be constantly vigilant for signs that lines are being crossed in the real world by those from an unacceptable moral viewpoint.
Mr. Blair, rights and freedoms cost, not just on the battlefields of our nations' wars, but in the daily lives of our citizens, and when we no longer have the strength to support our rights, when we become too cowardly to accept those costs, we can have no rights or freedoms.
How many British citizens are there today? And how many will there be over time? How many British citizens have died due to terrorism? A vanishingly small number in comparison. Rights and freedoms destroyed now from fear are deprived to all through time.
You may say that one life lost to terrorism is one too many. I say, no right or freedom can survive the save-the-last-life philosophy. A frenzied alteration of freedom and rights to save the last life or catch the last criminal will surely destroy those freedoms and rights, but it can never save every life, or destroy crime. Furthermore, the destruction of rights and freedoms by a government out of fear, frustration, or mere convenience is severely disrespectful of the those preceding generations who sacrificed so much personally to create those freedoms and rights. It proves a government faithless.
Mr. Blair, you disingenuously say that the information required for a national identification card is little more than that required for a department store card. Maybe true, but a department store does not have the force of a government behind its card. It has no police. It has no prisons. It has no chains. It has not the instruments of coercion, and correctly so. What a national ID card does is turn every citizen into a probable criminal who has to constantly present his "papers" to a representative of the government to prove he is not.
As an American citizen I'm concerned at what I've seen in recent years as a cowardly fear growing in Great Britain, a fear of your own rights and freedoms. I'm concerned because recently rights- and-freedoms-destroying mindsets are making their way across the Atlantic and infecting my own government. I know that government, naturally jealous of its citizens' rights and freedoms, constantly tries to gather them to itself, but, until recently, under cover of opposing terrorism, I've not seen so much success by government at doing so. A little "Battle of Britain" defiance of those who would steal freedoms would be much appreciated I think by many on this side of the Atlantic. We're watching.
I've been reading this "busythink" for decades now. Seems every generation has to do it all over again. End of all the analysis: We ain't goin nowhere. We are going to live our pathetic little species-life here. Period. Go make a peanut butter and and jelly sandwich. It'll do more for you. The universe is a barren womb.
We have a democratic moral imperative to expand democracy if the tools to do so exist. I applaud the British and Prime Minister Tony Blair for their polling website. The political ancestors who set up our democratic governments were geniuses, but we living today potentially have political geniuses too. We must evolve democratic governments in this time of technology or put the lie to the espoused foundational principles that empower them. You cannot support democracy while at the same time declaring the people to be a mindless mob deserving to be feared. You cannot have it both ways.
P.S. About ten or 15 years ago I wrote a Constitutional Amendment example for the US Constitution that empowered the US Congress to set up an electronic voting/polling system and tasking it with examining the state-of-the-art in technology every ten years to see if it could expand the influence of the people of the United States using developing technology. I did not set this up for publication as a letter to the editor, but I sent it to a national newspaper then as worthy of thought. I'm very happy to see some movement in this direction, but disappointed at the resistance there seems to be to any technological evolution of democracy in the United States.
P.P.S. As an American citizen, I'm more than a little tired of a Presidency that lives in a museum, and a Legislature that works in one. It indicates a love for the past that denies any need to develop into the future. Isn't it time we had our own buildings? Isn't it time to say thanks to the Greeks and Romans and move on? After all, we are entering a new Millennium. If we have a trillion dollars to go to worthless Mars and the Moon, I think we can justify some rebuilding, some updating instead. The people who lived 150 years ago are not our superiors and should not have the last say, architecturally, for this country for all time.
The gray-haired boys and girls of science are at it again, talking up the good, not presenting the bad or anything that opposes the science. So, two obvious points:
1. It is immoral to produce fuel from food. And the more fuel-from-food you call for, the more immoral you are, whether you are a President, or a country. We will NOT be able to produce both food and fuel no matter how hard they try to tell us we can. Linear projections of food output ignore the limitation of fixed water resources. Read "When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century," by Fred Pearce. The USA is exporting vast amounts of its ancient water resources already in the form of "virtual water" grain exports. The water tables in the West are alarmingly low in places. But that is also a problem worldwide. And this source of irrigation water does not replenish itself for thousands of years. In India, the cheap Japanese pumps that hit the market in the 70s allowed farmers to irrigate to the point that they are poisoning large areas of arable land with salt, taking that land out of food production. Like the buried hydrocarbon resources of the Earth, once ancient water is pumped up and used, it is gone. And there is also the problem of disappearing rivers, rivers who's water is being almost completely used right now for irrigation. There is no more water in these rivers to "fuel" increased production of food. The Russians have almost completely destroyed the Aral Sea since the 1960s, using its feeding rivers' water to irrigate crops. Food prices and fuel prices must not be placed in competition with each other for their common natural resource.
2. Who wants gasoline-tasting bread? It sounds funny, but it isn't. Yeast is ubiquitous. Unless they create this food-sourced, genetically-altered- yeast-produced "gasoline" in biosafety level 4 factories, these little buggers are going to get out into the environment and we can look forward to smelling the stink of gasoline in food and water. We'll long for the day when we "only" had gasoline from oil. Oh, I know, they'll say they can make it 100% safe.
Just cut a distro out of the herd, let someone sell it without source and call it "MYScreensOS 2.0" "the desktop Operating System alternative to Windows for the rebel in all of us." NEVER mention Linux or Unix in marketing. Of course, simplify it. Who says it has to have drivers for everything? Sell it with drivers for standard setups. Five printers; three scanners--who really cares? Select Gnome OR KDE, don't confuse the public with two. It isn't meant to be an enterprise solution. People do NOT want to make these decisions. Make them for them. Partner with equipment manufacturers. Point is, the greatest advantage of Linux--its free, open source requirement--is also its downfall as far as public awareness is concerned. That kills the possibility of it being a serious desktop OS for the masses. No commercials, no desire for it. No demand for it, no pressure on OEMs. Communism is relatively free of capitalistic energy, so is the Linux world. And that is a problem apparently.
1.) You have to keep tabs on changes in Swedish law, European Union law, and USA law if you are an American citizen or risk being exposed legally at any time. If a terrorist bomb goes off in downtown Sweden, forget it.
2.) The very use of this service could expose you to conviction. I read a case in the news in which a judge instructed a jury in a porn case that even though no incriminating files were found on the suspect's computer, the jury could take the mere PRESENCE of encryption software as an indication of guilt. I can see mere use of this service being considered incriminating by some idiot judges.
3.) It's on Slashdot for crying out loud. Do you actually think law and government security geeks are not going to find it a challenge to break it legislatively or technically? I'd feel better if it were a privacy service existing in the internet twilight.
4.) There's the paranoia factor. What makes you think it isn't a trap?
...that a company has "jumped the shark." Welcome to big-company-asshole land, Google.
Watch them sue grannies putting out newsletters to their grandchildren next. They can't stop this, but they sure can make themselves look old and curmudgeonly.
And, bluntly, stop female-izing science fiction. That just kills it. Sci-Fi is a male adolescent fantasy and trying to add a demographic is bean-counter ignorance of what fuels interest in sci-fi in the first place. While I'm at it: the Spiderman movie respected the male adolescent fantasy foundation of the story and succeeded wildly. The Daredevil movie did not, and failed miserably. Adolescent males do NOT have as a fantasy getting their asses kicked by a female. And while the girlfriend element is important in Superman, it cannot correctly be the focus of the storyline in the form of romance.
They put a weak, female-friendly commander, Scott Bakula, in command of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Enterprise. Huge error. Voyager? Captain Janeway? How PC. Give me a break. What moron came up with that? Mom flying the house. They either re-male Sci Fi or just log it out.
When it serves to highlight the affects of Parkinson's is celebrity campaigning really such a bad thing? The debate from there obviously devolves into wether or not it incites personal analysis or emotional manipulation in the common case of people, and I would hazard a guess that we stand inarguably on opposite sides there.
Yes, it is a bad thing because it emotionally skews investment in research. A mere 1% of people over 50 years of age get Parkinson's disease. Approximately 25% of people will get cancer over their lifetimes. Considering that research dollars are not infinite, where exactly do you think those dollars are going to come from? Congress is always happy to have tv face-time with the american people while listening to the latest celebrity-disease spokesperson. But where do the shifted dollars for that disease come from? They come out of cancer research or heart disease research. You can be sure it will not come out of pork projects or the Defense Department budget. And yes, we stand on opposite sides of the question. You are coming from emotion; I am coming from reason.
Please explain to me why the conception stage is the appropriate point to characterize a group of cells as a person instead of, for instance, the point where a child is no longer directly dependant on its mother for continued functioning.
I've explained it. At conception a unique human genetic combination (UHGC) comes into existence, with all its human potential of unique personality, talents, and physical expression. What makes yours superior to its? What gives your unique human genetic makeup the right to tear its apart for your purposes? Why are you superior? What gave one man the moral right to enslave another man in the past? And it WAS considered moral. It is the same argument.
Does that mean, however, that you do not support medical experimentation on corpses?
Come on, even corpses have more rights than you propose a UHGC has. One must get permission from the individual before death to use his corpse as a research resource. One must not desecrate a dead body. It has rights. Nobody asks the LIVING UHGC for permission before they tear it apart, nor do they feel it necessary. Incredible.
I never once stated that I believed stem cells will lead us to immortality, and frankly have no idea where you got that idea.
Really? I think you have to think more deeply, then, about what exactly they are promising you for your moral surrender, and what you are tacitly accepting.
Experimentation with fertilized eggs is entirely consistent with a moral viewpoint that human life starts at biological independance from any one individual.
And, obviously, I reject that "moral viewpoint" as immoral.
You don't seem to have the ability, desire, or both to understand someone else's moral systems.
This isn't about accepting culteral differences, or racial differences. This isn't about recognizing the moral equivalence of all "systems." This is about defining murder. And you define murder far too conveniently, too sloppily, for my liking.
At this level, the number of cells in immaterial, one cell, 150 cells, it's all the same. It is the unique human genetic combination that is the moral problem. What gives YOU--a unique human genetic combination--the right to tear apart another unique human genetic combination for your own survival? As for throwing embryos away, I've a problem with that. But the moral problem of tearing apart unique human genetic combinations for research purposes is orders of magnitude worse than simply throwing away embryos. And let's get something clear. You are not without moral boundaries in the subject. Your moral boundaries are just set further on. But you can be sure that there are people who do not accept even your moral boundaries in this subject. I suggest it is far better to draw the line hard and early here at the beginning of life than later, when we cannot differentiate between human beings and inanimate objects.
Straw Man : a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted.
I never said anything about solving all mankind's problems before going into space. I said education on earth is more important than sterile space programs. You just changed the discussion to suit yourself. But that happens a lot on Slashdot.
Can anyone argue logically on Slashdot? Can anyone stick to the line of thought?
Most people can identify with a celebrity more than a total stranger. To see a stranger twitching during an interview due to Parkinsons is tragic, but to see the same thing happen to someone with a recognizable face makes the issue slightly more personal. Obviously that it is happening to a celebrity does not make the issue more important, but it does cause us to examine our interests in the subject on a more personal level.
Obviously, and not to the point. The point is that it is an emotional manipulation, adds nothing to the moral debate, and such appeals can lead us to do things that are wrong.
It amazes me how people turn the simple discussion of waste into a deep discussion of morality. They overstate the importance of the subject. They dismiss the great potential benefits because of a selfish desire to impose their belief structure on a world that does not agree with them.
Simply an inhuman comment. Your ability to see people as research material is disturbing at the least. Why not sterilize and eat people instead of burying them? Use the wasted resources, according to your philosophy. "Soylent Green," here we come. As for the "potential benefits," you don't demand much in order to discard morality, do you? All you need is the pretty zirconia of potential immortality dangled before you by the scientific-industrial-complex. You don't seem to really have any moral boundaries. That is a problem of many people in this subject area, a kind of socially acceptable psychopathy. Considering the percentage of people willing to tear others apart for their own need, I have to wonder, is psychopathy the new normalcy?
The price tag for politicians' "pork" has grown so large that NASA may have to delay the new spaceships and rockets needed to replace the space shuttles, to be retired in 2010. Instead, NASA will pay for:
Construction or renovation of dozens of museums, planetariums and science labs for colleges.
Computers, classrooms and lab space for colleges and schools across the U.S.
It is an indication of how far wrong we are going with large science projects in space that we can define support for museums and college labs as "pork" and therefore waste. How can they honestly think that frog sex in space and the dynamics of a burning candle are more important than education here on Earth? How long are we going to accept that spewing our seed into barren space is the thing to do?
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to decide how the federal government spends its money.
Another fundamental error of thinking, the Federal Government HAS NO MONEY! There is NO "their money," no government money. The money is tax money, standard-of-living dollars ripped from American citizens by force of arms. Ask people to contribute out of their own pockets or weekly paychecks and see how much money the government comes up with for space.
It's just not possible anymore. I've been an adult in the pre-internet, pre-tech-explosion world and the post. And I'll tell you this: that world is gone, never to return. The outsider who has an overview is a thing of the past. The massive communications and tech explosion that started in the 70s and accelerated thereafter every year has added so many layers to the onion of life that no one can possibly pull it all together, even in the superficial sense of clever and entertaining social commentary. He won't understand enough to do so, and the audience is so fragmented now that he would be unintelligible to most if he could. The burden of knowledge needed to be "in the know," or "in on the joke" is just too great. In a world in which generationalism is dead due to the many different choices that can be made withing a group of people of the same age, how can you say any generally understandable truth about society or technology? Does such a thing exist any longer? I don't think so. Your truth and insight is not mine is not his. We live on our couple of thin layers of the onion of life now and feel fortunate if we can reasonably understand those.
Don't continue to look for some journalistic messiah to pop up to "make sense" of it all.
Slashdot Mirror
American blood calls from the ground,"What are you doing?" The blood of generations of American soldiers who died to create and maintain our freedoms calls to the government, "We were not afraid, why are you?" With the justification of saving the last American life, our government gathers to itself a huge chunk of our freedom, making us merely cells in a governmental system, no longer individual citizens with individual rights and freedoms to be respected. The government is showing contempt for and faithlessness to those who came before, who gave everything for us, that we may be free. I am not afraid of the terrorists, are you? I doubt so. But our weak and frightened representatives in a rapidly obsolescing system are afraid, or at least pretend to be in order to steal our freedom. The President makes his laying of wreaths disgusting and contemptible because it is mere show now, containing nothing of respect and due honor.
I suggest that states that do not want this national ID combine to tell the government loudly, "NO!". And if this national ID system goes through and citizens of resisting states are deprived access to federal buildings and airplanes, I suggest that Federal employees be denied access to state properties of all kinds, from buildings to parks. If they want a restricted access war of the states against the Federal government, they should get it. This must not obtain.
I say this from the city that raised the first flag of the American Revolution.
He knows the truth. But he's been so long in business he can no longer speak truth to the world. Business has been successfully driving down the cost of technology workers over the years, even causing a decline of engineering salaries for the first time in decades. Businessmen sit around lighting stogies with hundred dollar bills and pat each other on the back over how much they have driven down salaries and benefits for the "knowledge worker" in the high tech industries. But they forget that capitalism comes from human psychology. And if you don't properly recompense humans for their efforts, and they have the freedom to not participate, they won't. Tech is difficult. It is difficult to acquire the knowledge base for entry and it is difficult to perform. It requires constant upgrading of knowledge and skills. With regard to the decline of students in CS etc., the "clever" businessmen like Bill Gates reap what they sow.
Peter Drucker, the management guru, says the USA has passed from the manufacturing age into the age of the knowledge worker. Fine, but business seems to be attacking the knowledge worker base, attempting to drive it down to a minimum wage salary level where the baseline for employment is a minimum engineering degree. If you can flip burgers at McDonalds for low wages and think your own thoughts, or drive yourself crazy in tech for close to the same wages, what does he expect people to do? And what comes after the "knowledge worker" phase of the economy? Slave worker economy?
There seems to be a disturbing trend in ads to make children appear adult. I just saw a "cute" commercial in the USA which dressed children in adult business office attire and had them interact as if the boy were attracted to his office-mate little girl. The receptionist showed her subtle disbelief by rolling her eyes. Cute, but it touches on sexuality in a preliminary, exploratory way, as if those making it were interested in doing much more next time if this makes it past the public. I think we should stop it right here, now. We should be aware that the movie industry and the ad industry are not separated by some magic impenetrable barrier from the massive multi-billion dollar porn industry. Those working in both can, and do pass back and forth to make a living. We must be constantly vigilant for signs that lines are being crossed in the real world by those from an unacceptable moral viewpoint.
"Thou shall not kill." How many people kill? If your religion says not to break that window, you can be sure someone will.
Mr. Blair, rights and freedoms cost, not just on the battlefields of our nations' wars, but in the daily lives of our citizens, and when we no longer have the strength to support our rights, when we become too cowardly to accept those costs, we can have no rights or freedoms.
How many British citizens are there today? And how many will there be over time? How many British citizens have died due to terrorism? A vanishingly small number in comparison. Rights and freedoms destroyed now from fear are deprived to all through time.
You may say that one life lost to terrorism is one too many. I say, no right or freedom can survive the save-the-last-life philosophy. A frenzied alteration of freedom and rights to save the last life or catch the last criminal will surely destroy those freedoms and rights, but it can never save every life, or destroy crime. Furthermore, the destruction of rights and freedoms by a government out of fear, frustration, or mere convenience is severely disrespectful of the those preceding generations who sacrificed so much personally to create those freedoms and rights. It proves a government faithless.
Mr. Blair, you disingenuously say that the information required for a national identification card is little more than that required for a department store card. Maybe true, but a department store does not have the force of a government behind its card. It has no police. It has no prisons. It has no chains. It has not the instruments of coercion, and correctly so. What a national ID card does is turn every citizen into a probable criminal who has to constantly present his "papers" to a representative of the government to prove he is not.
As an American citizen I'm concerned at what I've seen in recent years as a cowardly fear growing in Great Britain, a fear of your own rights and freedoms. I'm concerned because recently rights- and-freedoms-destroying mindsets are making their way across the Atlantic and infecting my own government. I know that government, naturally jealous of its citizens' rights and freedoms, constantly tries to gather them to itself, but, until recently, under cover of opposing terrorism, I've not seen so much success by government at doing so. A little "Battle of Britain" defiance of those who would steal freedoms would be much appreciated I think by many on this side of the Atlantic. We're watching.
I've been reading this "busythink" for decades now. Seems every generation has to do it all over again. End of all the analysis: We ain't goin nowhere. We are going to live our pathetic little species-life here. Period. Go make a peanut butter and and jelly sandwich. It'll do more for you. The universe is a barren womb.
Are you kidding? The 25-year-old Masters of the Universe won't hire you. Period.
"2. it is almost impossible for genetically engineered microbes to compete with those found in the wild. "
"Almost impossible" isn't good enough. To rip off a movie line: "Life finds a way." If you want to take such risks, don't take them with my world.
We have a democratic moral imperative to expand democracy if the tools to do so exist. I applaud the British and Prime Minister Tony Blair for their polling website. The political ancestors who set up our democratic governments were geniuses, but we living today potentially have political geniuses too. We must evolve democratic governments in this time of technology or put the lie to the espoused foundational principles that empower them. You cannot support democracy while at the same time declaring the people to be a mindless mob deserving to be feared. You cannot have it both ways.
P.S. About ten or 15 years ago I wrote a Constitutional Amendment example for the US Constitution that empowered the US Congress to set up an electronic voting/polling system and tasking it with examining the state-of-the-art in technology every ten years to see if it could expand the influence of the people of the United States using developing technology. I did not set this up for publication as a letter to the editor, but I sent it to a national newspaper then as worthy of thought. I'm very happy to see some movement in this direction, but disappointed at the resistance there seems to be to any technological evolution of democracy in the United States.
P.P.S. As an American citizen, I'm more than a little tired of a Presidency that lives in a museum, and a Legislature that works in one. It indicates a love for the past that denies any need to develop into the future. Isn't it time we had our own buildings? Isn't it time to say thanks to the Greeks and Romans and move on? After all, we are entering a new Millennium. If we have a trillion dollars to go to worthless Mars and the Moon, I think we can justify some rebuilding, some updating instead. The people who lived 150 years ago are not our superiors and should not have the last say, architecturally, for this country for all time.
The gray-haired boys and girls of science are at it again, talking up the good, not presenting the bad or anything that opposes the science. So, two obvious points:
1. It is immoral to produce fuel from food. And the more fuel-from-food you call for, the more immoral you are, whether you are a President, or a country. We will NOT be able to produce both food and fuel no matter how hard they try to tell us we can. Linear projections of food output ignore the limitation of fixed water resources. Read "When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century," by Fred Pearce. The USA is exporting vast amounts of its ancient water resources already in the form of "virtual water" grain exports. The water tables in the West are alarmingly low in places. But that is also a problem worldwide. And this source of irrigation water does not replenish itself for thousands of years. In India, the cheap Japanese pumps that hit the market in the 70s allowed farmers to irrigate to the point that they are poisoning large areas of arable land with salt, taking that land out of food production. Like the buried hydrocarbon resources of the Earth, once ancient water is pumped up and used, it is gone. And there is also the problem of disappearing rivers, rivers who's water is being almost completely used right now for irrigation. There is no more water in these rivers to "fuel" increased production of food. The Russians have almost completely destroyed the Aral Sea since the 1960s, using its feeding rivers' water to irrigate crops. Food prices and fuel prices must not be placed in competition with each other for their common natural resource.
2. Who wants gasoline-tasting bread? It sounds funny, but it isn't. Yeast is ubiquitous. Unless they create this food-sourced, genetically-altered- yeast-produced "gasoline" in biosafety level 4 factories, these little buggers are going to get out into the environment and we can look forward to smelling the stink of gasoline in food and water. We'll long for the day when we "only" had gasoline from oil. Oh, I know, they'll say they can make it 100% safe.
The Trojan bacterium.
Just cut a distro out of the herd, let someone sell it without source and call it "MYScreensOS 2.0" "the desktop Operating System alternative to Windows for the rebel in all of us." NEVER mention Linux or Unix in marketing. Of course, simplify it. Who says it has to have drivers for everything? Sell it with drivers for standard setups. Five printers; three scanners--who really cares? Select Gnome OR KDE, don't confuse the public with two. It isn't meant to be an enterprise solution. People do NOT want to make these decisions. Make them for them. Partner with equipment manufacturers. Point is, the greatest advantage of Linux--its free, open source requirement--is also its downfall as far as public awareness is concerned. That kills the possibility of it being a serious desktop OS for the masses. No commercials, no desire for it. No demand for it, no pressure on OEMs. Communism is relatively free of capitalistic energy, so is the Linux world. And that is a problem apparently.
1.) You have to keep tabs on changes in Swedish law, European Union law, and USA law if you are an American citizen or risk being exposed legally at any time. If a terrorist bomb goes off in downtown Sweden, forget it.
2.) The very use of this service could expose you to conviction. I read a case in the news in which a judge instructed a jury in a porn case that even though no incriminating files were found on the suspect's computer, the jury could take the mere PRESENCE of encryption software as an indication of guilt. I can see mere use of this service being considered incriminating by some idiot judges.
3.) It's on Slashdot for crying out loud. Do you actually think law and government security geeks are not going to find it a challenge to break it legislatively or technically? I'd feel better if it were a privacy service existing in the internet twilight.
4.) There's the paranoia factor. What makes you think it isn't a trap?
Sounds like an argument for spreading nuclear was out as much as possible. Let's dump it in the oceans and drop it from airplanes to make it safe.
...that a company has "jumped the shark." Welcome to big-company-asshole land, Google.
Watch them sue grannies putting out newsletters to their grandchildren next. They can't stop this, but they sure can make themselves look old and curmudgeonly.
Entropy runs rampant.
It is 6 am. Do you know where your eight-tracks are?
And, bluntly, stop female-izing science fiction. That just kills it. Sci-Fi is a male adolescent fantasy and trying to add a demographic is bean-counter ignorance of what fuels interest in sci-fi in the first place. While I'm at it: the Spiderman movie respected the male adolescent fantasy foundation of the story and succeeded wildly. The Daredevil movie did not, and failed miserably. Adolescent males do NOT have as a fantasy getting their asses kicked by a female. And while the girlfriend element is important in Superman, it cannot correctly be the focus of the storyline in the form of romance.
They put a weak, female-friendly commander, Scott Bakula, in command of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Enterprise. Huge error. Voyager? Captain Janeway? How PC. Give me a break. What moron came up with that? Mom flying the house. They either re-male Sci Fi or just log it out.
Going to the moon is not "fundamental research." Been there, done that.
When it serves to highlight the affects of Parkinson's is celebrity campaigning really such a bad thing? The debate from there obviously devolves into wether or not it incites personal analysis or emotional manipulation in the common case of people, and I would hazard a guess that we stand inarguably on opposite sides there.
Yes, it is a bad thing because it emotionally skews investment in research. A mere 1% of people over 50 years of age get Parkinson's disease. Approximately 25% of people will get cancer over their lifetimes. Considering that research dollars are not infinite, where exactly do you think those dollars are going to come from? Congress is always happy to have tv face-time with the american people while listening to the latest celebrity-disease spokesperson. But where do the shifted dollars for that disease come from? They come out of cancer research or heart disease research. You can be sure it will not come out of pork projects or the Defense Department budget. And yes, we stand on opposite sides of the question. You are coming from emotion; I am coming from reason.
Please explain to me why the conception stage is the appropriate point to characterize a group of cells as a person instead of, for instance, the point where a child is no longer directly dependant on its mother for continued functioning.
I've explained it. At conception a unique human genetic combination (UHGC) comes into existence, with all its human potential of unique personality, talents, and physical expression. What makes yours superior to its? What gives your unique human genetic makeup the right to tear its apart for your purposes? Why are you superior? What gave one man the moral right to enslave another man in the past? And it WAS considered moral. It is the same argument.
Does that mean, however, that you do not support medical experimentation on corpses?
Come on, even corpses have more rights than you propose a UHGC has. One must get permission from the individual before death to use his corpse as a research resource. One must not desecrate a dead body. It has rights. Nobody asks the LIVING UHGC for permission before they tear it apart, nor do they feel it necessary. Incredible.
I never once stated that I believed stem cells will lead us to immortality, and frankly have no idea where you got that idea.
Really? I think you have to think more deeply, then, about what exactly they are promising you for your moral surrender, and what you are tacitly accepting.
Experimentation with fertilized eggs is entirely consistent with a moral viewpoint that human life starts at biological independance from any one individual.
And, obviously, I reject that "moral viewpoint" as immoral.
You don't seem to have the ability, desire, or both to understand someone else's moral systems.
This isn't about accepting culteral differences, or racial differences. This isn't about recognizing the moral equivalence of all "systems." This is about defining murder. And you define murder far too conveniently, too sloppily, for my liking.At this level, the number of cells in immaterial, one cell, 150 cells, it's all the same. It is the unique human genetic combination that is the moral problem. What gives YOU--a unique human genetic combination--the right to tear apart another unique human genetic combination for your own survival? As for throwing embryos away, I've a problem with that. But the moral problem of tearing apart unique human genetic combinations for research purposes is orders of magnitude worse than simply throwing away embryos. And let's get something clear. You are not without moral boundaries in the subject. Your moral boundaries are just set further on. But you can be sure that there are people who do not accept even your moral boundaries in this subject. I suggest it is far better to draw the line hard and early here at the beginning of life than later, when we cannot differentiate between human beings and inanimate objects.
All this has been addressed by the suppliers of Las Vegas casino slot machines. Why not just use them to build the machines?
Straw Man : a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted.
I never said anything about solving all mankind's problems before going into space. I said education on earth is more important than sterile space programs. You just changed the discussion to suit yourself. But that happens a lot on Slashdot.
Can anyone argue logically on Slashdot? Can anyone stick to the line of thought?
Most people can identify with a celebrity more than a total stranger. To see a stranger twitching during an interview due to Parkinsons is tragic, but to see the same thing happen to someone with a recognizable face makes the issue slightly more personal. Obviously that it is happening to a celebrity does not make the issue more important, but it does cause us to examine our interests in the subject on a more personal level.
Obviously, and not to the point. The point is that it is an emotional manipulation, adds nothing to the moral debate, and such appeals can lead us to do things that are wrong.
It amazes me how people turn the simple discussion of waste into a deep discussion of morality. They overstate the importance of the subject. They dismiss the great potential benefits because of a selfish desire to impose their belief structure on a world that does not agree with them.
Simply an inhuman comment. Your ability to see people as research material is disturbing at the least. Why not sterilize and eat people instead of burying them? Use the wasted resources, according to your philosophy. "Soylent Green," here we come. As for the "potential benefits," you don't demand much in order to discard morality, do you? All you need is the pretty zirconia of potential immortality dangled before you by the scientific-industrial-complex. You don't seem to really have any moral boundaries. That is a problem of many people in this subject area, a kind of socially acceptable psychopathy. Considering the percentage of people willing to tear others apart for their own need, I have to wonder, is psychopathy the new normalcy?
The price tag for politicians' "pork" has grown so large that NASA may have to delay the new spaceships and rockets needed to replace the space shuttles, to be retired in 2010. Instead, NASA will pay for:
Construction or renovation of dozens of museums, planetariums and science labs for colleges.
Computers, classrooms and lab space for colleges and schools across the U.S.
It is an indication of how far wrong we are going with large science projects in space that we can define support for museums and college labs as "pork" and therefore waste. How can they honestly think that frog sex in space and the dynamics of a burning candle are more important than education here on Earth? How long are we going to accept that spewing our seed into barren space is the thing to do?
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to decide how the federal government spends its money.
Another fundamental error of thinking, the Federal Government HAS NO MONEY! There is NO "their money," no government money. The money is tax money, standard-of-living dollars ripped from American citizens by force of arms. Ask people to contribute out of their own pockets or weekly paychecks and see how much money the government comes up with for space.It's just not possible anymore. I've been an adult in the pre-internet, pre-tech-explosion world and the post. And I'll tell you this: that world is gone, never to return. The outsider who has an overview is a thing of the past. The massive communications and tech explosion that started in the 70s and accelerated thereafter every year has added so many layers to the onion of life that no one can possibly pull it all together, even in the superficial sense of clever and entertaining social commentary. He won't understand enough to do so, and the audience is so fragmented now that he would be unintelligible to most if he could. The burden of knowledge needed to be "in the know," or "in on the joke" is just too great. In a world in which generationalism is dead due to the many different choices that can be made withing a group of people of the same age, how can you say any generally understandable truth about society or technology? Does such a thing exist any longer? I don't think so. Your truth and insight is not mine is not his. We live on our couple of thin layers of the onion of life now and feel fortunate if we can reasonably understand those.
Don't continue to look for some journalistic messiah to pop up to "make sense" of it all.