I think you left out the Greeks - one of the greatest cultures in history as regards science, mathematics and literature. Oh wait. They placed almost no value on abstinence, and (to take one example) gay sex was considered a universally acceptable form of recreation. The Romans didn't have much to do with abstinence pre-Christianity, either.
Argue that abstinence is laudable if you will (IMO it isn't, it's just a lifestyle choice like any other), but please don't try to equate it with greatness and nobility throughout history.
BTW: I am in complete disagreement with the grandparent's argument that age of consent laws should be abolished - I just felt I had to correct your point.
You really can't tell the difference between the examples you just gave and the Stella case? That's scary.
Grandparent: I think there's a reasonable expectation that spilled coffee won't cause third-degree burns, requiring third-degree burneight days of hospitalization and two years of treatment.
When you spill a cup of coffee on yourself, your expectation as a logical human being is that you will spend the next few minutes swearing, spend the rest of the day with stained trousers, and spend the rest of the week with a painful red spot on your groin. You therefore treat the cup with some caution, but not too much. You do not believe you are in real danger. If you spill the coffee, you shrug, well aware that you weren't treating it with caution, commence swearing and go on with your life. You do not expect that you will end up with a third-degree burn in five seconds. In case you were unaware of this (and I really think you must be to consider it in any way normal or sane), this is what someone with third-degree burns looks like. I urge you to look. It is not a patch of redness. It will not go away in a few days. No-one in their right mind would believe a cup of coffee could do that to someone.
There is a huge difference between someone making a foolish decision and suffering the consequences they should have expected (redness, irritation, ruined trousers) and someone making a foolish decision and suffering consequences they could not have expected (third-degree burns, skin grafts, medical treatment costing $11,000). Someone who knows they are running the risk of ruined trousers acts very differently to someone who knows they are running the risk of burning their crotch to the point of annihilation. I would cheerfully take a chance on the former (as, I suspect, would you), but never the latter. In other words, Stella was not simply a moron, but a rational person who took a calculated risk and found that the stakes were far, far higher than she had any reason to expect.
If someone takes a risk, and the consequences are not what a reasonable person would expect, and someone is at fault (as MacDonald's was at fault - they'd settled hundreds of cases for burns out of court before, so they knew there was a problem, and the coffee was well over the state-mandated maximum safe temperature), then that someone should pay. Just as if an advertisement informs you that a practice is safe, knowing that it carries a high risk of death, the advertiser is partially at fault if you die due to the practice (e.g. tobacco ads while the health risks of smoking were still under dispute).
Just a note: If MacDonald's had placed warning labels on the cups saying "WARNING: COFFEE MAY CAUSE THIRD-DEGREE BURNS", I would be siding with you. Unfortunately, they said "WARNING: COFFEE IS HOT" or words to that effect, which is simply an obvious truism - not a warning of some abnormal danger.
Now, your examples of frivolous lawsuits and why I would be against them:
I think there's a reasonable expectation that car manufacturers should put coffee holders in convenient locations so that I don't decide to place hot coffee between my legs. Blame Ford.
Wrong! If Ford places the coffee holder in an inconvenient location, it's your fault if you decide not to use it. You were under no false impressions as to the risks you were taking - you knew damn well that you might spill the coffee over yourself. Ford just makes shoddy cars. They might be partially to blame if, for example, the coffee holder snapped and poured coffee all over you.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that a cigarette lighter will not set fire to my hair which hangs in my face as I light my cigarette. Blame Bic.
Now that's just bullshit. As you yourself indicate, any reasonable person would think there was a high probability of your hair catching fire. Not the case with the coffee.
It depends what you mean by "proven". The scientific method can't technically prove anything. However, it can give overwhelming evidence in favour of something. For example, we have no proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. What we do have is enough evidence to convince any sane person. This preponderance of evidence is often referred to as a "proof". Another example: suppose a man is on trial for murder. Seventeen people say they saw him do it, the police have a bloody knife covered in his fingerprints, and the first words out of his mouth when he was arrested were "I'm glad I killed the bastard". Again, technically, we have no proof that he was the murderer. The witnesses could be lying, someone else could have used the knife to murder the victim while wearing gloves, and the "bastard" he was referring to may have been an irritating housefly. But can you see why, in the absence of other evidence, we may colloquially refer to this as a "proof" in the interests of clear communication?
As I understand it, the Theory of Evolution has been "proven" at about that level of certainty. The problem with the statement that creationists want teachers to read (that it hasn't been 'proven') is that it implies that alternative theories (e.g. creationism) have a non-negligible chance of being true, and that evolution has substantially less scientific evidence than, for example, gravity. This would be utterly false, regardless of whether you believe there is philosophical evidence for creationism. We should not endeavour to teach our children massive falsehoods, either explicitly or implicitly, so your statement fails.
I would, however, welcome a separate mention on the curriculum of the philosophy of science - the differences between the reasons for accepting a scientific theorem and the reasons for accepting a logical proof, details of the scientific method and so on and so forth. As long as it is made clear that these issues affect the whole of science, and that students may reject individual theories on the basis that they "haven't been proved" only by rejecting the whole of science, then I feel children can only benefit from exposure to them.
Correction - they can't legally install DRM without your permission. Unfortunately, this is irrelevant, because they do it anyway. IIRC, Sony's MediaMax DRM installed regardless of whether the user accepted or declined the EULA, and there was some other piece of DRM whose name I can't recall that got installed on autorun without the user's consent.
And they only need implicit consent. Very implicit. That's why the Sony rootkit was (arguably) technically legal - there was a clause in the EULA saying "We may install other software on your PC" or some such.
Most virus scanners are not outrageous bloatware. Norton is an exception to this rule. Most virus scanners do not nag you if you ask them not to. Norton is an exception to this rule. Most virus scanners may be uninstalled quickly and easily, leaving no traces behind in the registry. Norton is a serious exception to this rule. Most virus scanners have automatic daily updates, significantly reducing the impact of zero-day vulnerabilities. Norton is an exception to this rule. In short, most virus scanners do not suck donkey cock. Norton is an exception to this rule. Norton is also totally inept at actually detecting viruses. And it costs lots of money.
Seriously, try any other virus scanner. Try AVG (what I use when I boot to Windows), try Avast, try AntiVir, try anything. All the programs I listed above are totally free for personal use, with free updates. Get away from Norton, and I guarantee your views on virus scanners will change. You can have a reasonable protection against zero-day exploits without massive slowdowns and nagging.
I suppose the question isn't really of whether we must attribute any value to the potential for sentience - it's how much value we may attribute. I don't think we can consider a foetus as directly equivalent to a baby, on the grounds that we will eventually become corpses, and treating a human as being directly equivalent to a corpse would obviously be wrong! So the real question becomes: do we place enough value on the potential for sentience to ignore the possible death of an actual sentience? Carrying a pregnancy to term is still far riskier than an abortion. My instinctive reaction would be to say that the preservation of the established sentience must take priority. We would throw away a thousand acorns rather than cut down an ancient oak.
I also think this is the sort of question where logical arguments don't really work - we can't exactly derive a numerical value for this sort of thing! I think we might end up agreeing to differ on this one...
I would argue that preventing fertilization is not equivalent to actively terminating a fertilized egg from growing. One is letting nature take it's course; the other is to actively prevent nature from taking its course. (Note that this argument borders on the religious; if there is no purpose to nature, then who cares?) One objection might be that medicine prevents nature from taking its course; so why not forbid medicine? And I have to fall back on what I think is self-evident, that life is better than death. The direction in which we turn the arrow is important.
You've anticipated my main objection!:-) I don't agree that nature is in itself a viable source of morality, simply because nature shows no compassion, and (as you would probably agree) I would consider compassion to be one of the most important defining traits of a moral being. Exactly as you say, medicine prevents nature from taking its course. While I would agree that life is 'self-evidently' better than death, nature would disagree. You can't logically both attach importance to nature's wishes simply because they are nature's wishes and say that life should be preserved and compassion is good. I think the only way the two actions can be morally different is if we go back to commission versus omission again.
It's late (UK). Me sleep now.
I hold that it's a better abstraction because it takes all of the properties of the embryo into account, not one arbitrary one.
But the only property my abstraction fails to take into account is the potential for sentience, which is still under debate as an important property. So we're right back to this.
<i>I dispute the equivalence of the unfertilized egg to that of the fertilized egg.</i>
And why do you dispute that? They do both have the potential to become a full human being. The only difference is that the unfertilised egg requires a little help to make it sentient, and the thrust of my argument is that withholding the help needed to turn the unfertilised egg into a sentient being is equivalent to actively preventing a fertilised egg from turning into a sentient being.
The only things that separate a dead human from a living human are a lack of sentience, and 'minor' things like cell damage and so on
I would argue that this isn't the correct abstraction. The better abstraction is the direction of life's "arrow". Unless you're God or Dr. Frankenstein, the flight of the arrow has ended and it cannot be reversed. This is not true for the embryo; the direction of it's arrow is toward life and sentience. It is therefore not our place to stop it.
Two points:
Firstly, why is this a better abstraction? I don't quite understand. I'm sure it's my fault rather than yours, but could you clarify? Thanks.
Secondly, as an abstraction, it relies on the idea that the embryo's potential to become sentient (the fact that the 'arrow' is in motion) is important, and so my second argument (quoted below) attacks it.
Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy
Might as well focus on stopping masturbation, too, since it's a waste of perfectly good semen (and kittens!). Are you sure you want to take this position? Your argument leads to the notion that nature itself is a tragedy.
That's why I was talking about it being an 'argument from consequences'. I KNOW the argument leads to stupid conclusions (i.e. abstinence and masturbation are evil), and I don't agree with those conclusions, but by putting forward the argument I show that either the conclusions are correct (which neither of us believes), or one of the axioms is incorrect (which I do believe). More specifically, the argument falls over if we assume that something that will become sentient is of vastly inferior value to something that is sentient, because then refraining from sex and having abortions are then both equally inoffensive. I believe that, so I don't have to accept the silly conclusion I brought out. You don't believe that, so you either have to accept the silly conclusion, accept my point, dispute one of the other axioms or find a weakness in the argument itself. It's sort of like proof by contradiction in maths if you're familiar with that, only less so because the contradiction is intuitive rather than logical. Here's the full argument again:
The second argument is more interesting. I know I'm arguing from consequences, but this is the best I can do. In the same way, a woman's egg has the potential for sentience. If a woman chooses to abstain from sex and artificial insemination, therefore, she is destroying that potential (as the egg is destroyed in the woman's period). If we grant that allowing something to happen passively is equivalent or almost equivalent to directly causing it to happen*, this is equally wrong, morally, to her having an abortion. Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy.
So while I do believe it is equally 'wrong' for a woman to refrain from sex as it is for her to have an early abortion, this belief is sane because I believe neither of them are wrong.
Are there any Jesuit readers who would like to comment on the intricacies of "sins of commission and sins of omission"?
I'd be interested as well - it's an area I don't know much about.
Here's where your argument fails. Why is sentience the measure of the value of a human being? You've just injected your own personal view into the argument under the guise of science. But not only does science say no such thing, science can not validly say such a thing. Science deals with "is"; it is wholly incapable of dealing with "ought". Value judgments are not under the purview of science.
So why is something that, by your own words, "will become sentient if allowed to grow", of no value to you?
Ah, I apologise for my earlier vehemence - I understood your argument as being equivalent to most peoples' arguments against abortion, that blastocysts and embryos possess an immortal soul and are thus inviolable, or similarly theological arguments. This is an altogether different kettle of fish - I still believe it's incorrect and will argue as such, but you aren't advocating laws based exclusively on religion.
You put forward two main arguments:
1) Sentience is not the measure of the value of a human being.
2) The fact that something is almost certain to become sentient is in itself a measure of value on a similar level to sentience.
The first argument. You are correct in saying that I assumed that sentience was the measure of a being's value without reference to science without making that explicitly clear, for which I apologise. My reasoning follows. A dead human is inferior in value to a living human. The only things that separate a dead human from a living human are a lack of sentience, and 'minor' things like cell damage and so on (ignoring religious postulates, like the existence of a soul). It makes sense to call sentience the key factor here, as every other difference could theoretically be repaired. Therefore, if there is a distinction between living and dead matter, it must be in that which cannot be repaired with matter alone - sentience. There is also an emotional appeal to the idea, which I admit - we feel intuitively that someone's personality is more important than their cell structure! If there is no difference between living and dead matter and sentience has no value, of course, the question of whether abortion (or even murder) is wrong has no meaning. You can see why I assume there's a difference...
The second argument is more interesting. I know I'm arguing from consequences, but this is the best I can do. In the same way, a woman's egg has the potential for sentience. If a woman chooses to abstain from sex and artificial insemination, therefore, she is destroying that potential (as the egg is destroyed in the woman's period). If we grant that allowing something to happen passively is equivalent or almost equivalent to directly causing it to happen*, this is equally wrong, morally, to her having an abortion. Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy.
* This is, of course, the weak point of the argument! I would consider the two equivalent (ceteris paribus), as illustrated by the following two scenarios:
- Firstly, two chemical plant workers are working on a catwalk above a large vat of acid. The first worker pushes the second worker into the vat, and the second worker dies.
- Secondly, the same two workers are working above the same vat of acid. The second worker slips on the catwalk through his own clumsiness, but manages to catch hold of the railing. He hangs there, shouting for help, while the first worker calmly watches and eats his lunch, making no move to help him. After five minutes, the second worker falls in and dies.
World War I, Germany was using a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. After they sank the Lusitania (a US passenger ship) in 1915, the US threatened to enter the war if they didn't stop. They stopped. In 1917, they started again, so America attacked. World War I as a whole was a pointless, bloody massacre, but America at least had a good reason to get involved.
World War II - the fact that it wouldn't have happened without World War I is irrelevant to the discussion. The point is that America was right to get involved in it when it did happen. And without even looking into whether the government orchestrated the Pearl Harbour attack (which seems highly unlikely) - are you really saying your country should have let Hitler take Europe? That a 'right-thinking' Republican candidate would not have taken the country into war? That seems to me like a viewpoint you should rethink.
No idea about the other wars, just setting a couple of facts straight.
[Someone else said:] If you think a blastocyst or an embryo is actually equivalent to a full human life, you really should re-examine some facts. [You disagreed]
I will live under the U. S. Constitution; I will not submit to Sharia law.
It is an objective scientific fact that an embryo or a blastocyst has no neural structure. It is not sentient. It will become sentient if allowed to grow, but it is not sentient, and that means it is not equivalent in value to a full human being. If you believe it is, that is therefore a wholly religious belief. If you believe that that belief should be enshrined in law, then you are no better than the radical Islamists you oppose. You say you will not submit to Sharia law - don't you realise that everyone else feels the same way about fundamentalist "Christian" law? You both want to punish other people for acting against your beliefs. The fact that you believe your belief is right is no excuse, and no comfort for the rest of us.
You missed a factor. Most mainstream Linux users get all their software from repositories to avoid the hassles of dependencies and manual compiling. If anyone tried adding malware to any of the big repositories, it probably wouldn't be accepted. If by some fluke it was, it wouldn't stay in for longer than a couple of hours. That means instead of clicking the big friendly "Add New Application" button, our more stupid users would have to either edit their repositories list to get themselves precompiled binaries or compile the malware themselves. Frankly, if they're dumb enough to install malware in the first place, they're going to be too dumb to do that.
Wait, so the prosecutor (i.e. the guy who's paid to keep the case going) won't drop the case? MY GOD, YOU'RE RIGHT! The feminists are taking over! Run for your lives!
Fair enough - if you thought you'd included a reference, I withdraw my comment. I agree that there are some topics that can't be explained fully or accurately in a few paragraphs - I just thought it arrogant for you to refuse to give any reference on those grounds alone!
I'll have a look at Mere Christianity - I'd heard the title, but never actually read it.
Of course. And you cannot possibly hope to link to them, either, or give any indication of where to find them. You can't just say "An explanation exists" - you do actually have to give some indication of what that explanation is. Otherwise people will start laughing at you and you won't understand why.
So in that case, why didn't they tell Spybot about this when they asked? Symantec had a week to tell Spybot wtf was going on, and from TFA they agreed that a week was a reasonable time frame. They still failed to produce any evidence for Spybot's role in corrupting the images.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that in some cases there would be no other choice but to publish an incompatibility, but I find the fact that they haven't produced any evidence very suspicious. Especially when the majority of Ghost-users on here are saying that they've had no problems.
Look mate, when your free speech causes more direct harm than it prevents, it can morally (not sure and don't care about legally in America) no longer be justified. You are not morally justified in shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a joke. You are not morally justified in knowingly giving bad legal or medical advice to take someone down a peg. And you are not morally justified in wasting millions of people's time and money (bandwidth is not free) to sell your lousy, stinking product!
Disclaimer here: I believe in evolution, I'm just somewhat curious and badly educated on the subject (GCSE biology sucks). Please explain rather than flaming.
If mutation is such a negligible factor, then how do two members of a species vary to the point at which they can no longer interbreed and become members of two different species? It seems a stretch to indicate variance alone. And how did such a wide variance in the number of chromosomes of different species arise without mutation?
If said ad is of the type that disrupts my browsing experience (e.g. pop-ups, those evil bastards of Flash ads, etc.), then I spend more time looking for a replacement because I want to punish that kind of anti-social behaviour.
And as for finding a competitor... Hello? Google? The company this article is about?! Failing that, we have word-of-mouth, non-obtrusive ads, magazine articles (if we're talking about an emerging trend or something), and independent reviews.
I'd guess he's talking more about the stereotypical US high school culture, wherein the jocks are looked on as gods and the nerds are considered an underclass. Of course, as a UK student I have no idea whether or not this is actually accurate - feel free to ignore me if it isn't.
And the guy did say "Encourage, but do not force." I don't think the rant was about encouraging a sense of balance between physical and mental abilities - rather, valuing physical abilities over mental ablilities.
Talk about taking a quote out of context. I was saying that, in a setting where submissions are expected to be factual, anonymity is counterproductive.
In most cases, I would agree with you - but I believe Wikipedia constitutes an exception. A fairly substantial part of Wikipedia's fact-checking comes from people who are just reading an article and notice something wrong - this especially holds true in the case of typos and obvious vandalism. These people will be more motivated to fix the error if it takes (best-case scenario) twenty seconds to click "Edit this page" and fix the problem than if there's a five-minute registration process to go through. Furthermore, I'm guessing that a decent proportion of Wikipedia's larger contributors started as impulse typo-fixers.
So, in other words, if anonymous access is disabled, then Wikipedia loses quite a lot of its casual fact-checkers, and its contributor growth rate gets cut severely. Since the only negative consequence of anonymous contribution is occasional vandalism, and since this consequence will become less severe as the user base grows (more people checking recent changes and so on), it's best to keep anonymous contribution going - especially as Wikipedia is intended to be a tool for casual research or a starting point for more serious research rather than an authoritative source.
All of the above is conjecture, but it seems to make sense - let me know if you have any contradictory stats.
Nor did I. I was talking about your claims about all "fundamental" Christians, as defined by the great-great-grandparent you were responding to - that is, Christians who hold a given set of beliefs, including the literal truth of the bible. More specifically, 'fundamental beliefs' does not equal 'intolerance'. The intolerant bastards taking up so much press time in America are fundamentalists of a sort (although they neglect a few key passages about loving your enemies and the like), but not all fundamentalists are intolerant bastards.
Grandparent more-or-less reproduced here:
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as an atheist.
There are two entirely separate beliefs here. The first is that the Bible is literally true - literalism. While I obviously believe that this is incorrect, it is nevertheless harmless in itself. The second belief is the belief that all non-Christians must be purged from the land - intolerance. This is the bad one. The two beliefs do not overlap at any point. I've met literalists who are very tolerant of other views and prepared to hold a rational debate, and I've met atheists who are absolute sodding nutters.
Saying that all Christians who take the Bible literally endorse the likes of George Bush and Jack Chick in any way, shape or form is directly equivalent to saying that all atheists endorse Stalin's views on religion. Intolerance does not follow from belief.
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I think you left out the Greeks - one of the greatest cultures in history as regards science, mathematics and literature. Oh wait. They placed almost no value on abstinence, and (to take one example) gay sex was considered a universally acceptable form of recreation. The Romans didn't have much to do with abstinence pre-Christianity, either.
Argue that abstinence is laudable if you will (IMO it isn't, it's just a lifestyle choice like any other), but please don't try to equate it with greatness and nobility throughout history.
BTW: I am in complete disagreement with the grandparent's argument that age of consent laws should be abolished - I just felt I had to correct your point.
You really can't tell the difference between the examples you just gave and the Stella case? That's scary.
Grandparent: I think there's a reasonable expectation that spilled coffee won't cause third-degree burns, requiring third-degree burneight days of hospitalization and two years of treatment.
When you spill a cup of coffee on yourself, your expectation as a logical human being is that you will spend the next few minutes swearing, spend the rest of the day with stained trousers, and spend the rest of the week with a painful red spot on your groin. You therefore treat the cup with some caution, but not too much. You do not believe you are in real danger. If you spill the coffee, you shrug, well aware that you weren't treating it with caution, commence swearing and go on with your life. You do not expect that you will end up with a third-degree burn in five seconds. In case you were unaware of this (and I really think you must be to consider it in any way normal or sane), this is what someone with third-degree burns looks like. I urge you to look. It is not a patch of redness. It will not go away in a few days. No-one in their right mind would believe a cup of coffee could do that to someone.
There is a huge difference between someone making a foolish decision and suffering the consequences they should have expected (redness, irritation, ruined trousers) and someone making a foolish decision and suffering consequences they could not have expected (third-degree burns, skin grafts, medical treatment costing $11,000). Someone who knows they are running the risk of ruined trousers acts very differently to someone who knows they are running the risk of burning their crotch to the point of annihilation. I would cheerfully take a chance on the former (as, I suspect, would you), but never the latter. In other words, Stella was not simply a moron, but a rational person who took a calculated risk and found that the stakes were far, far higher than she had any reason to expect.
If someone takes a risk, and the consequences are not what a reasonable person would expect, and someone is at fault (as MacDonald's was at fault - they'd settled hundreds of cases for burns out of court before, so they knew there was a problem, and the coffee was well over the state-mandated maximum safe temperature), then that someone should pay. Just as if an advertisement informs you that a practice is safe, knowing that it carries a high risk of death, the advertiser is partially at fault if you die due to the practice (e.g. tobacco ads while the health risks of smoking were still under dispute).
Just a note: If MacDonald's had placed warning labels on the cups saying "WARNING: COFFEE MAY CAUSE THIRD-DEGREE BURNS", I would be siding with you. Unfortunately, they said "WARNING: COFFEE IS HOT" or words to that effect, which is simply an obvious truism - not a warning of some abnormal danger. Now, your examples of frivolous lawsuits and why I would be against them:
I think there's a reasonable expectation that car manufacturers should put coffee holders in convenient locations so that I don't decide to place hot coffee between my legs. Blame Ford.
Wrong! If Ford places the coffee holder in an inconvenient location, it's your fault if you decide not to use it. You were under no false impressions as to the risks you were taking - you knew damn well that you might spill the coffee over yourself. Ford just makes shoddy cars. They might be partially to blame if, for example, the coffee holder snapped and poured coffee all over you.
I think there's a reasonable expectation that a cigarette lighter will not set fire to my hair which hangs in my face as I light my cigarette. Blame Bic.
Now that's just bullshit. As you yourself indicate, any reasonable person would think there was a high probability of your hair catching fire. Not the case with the coffee.
It depends what you mean by "proven". The scientific method can't technically prove anything. However, it can give overwhelming evidence in favour of something. For example, we have no proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. What we do have is enough evidence to convince any sane person. This preponderance of evidence is often referred to as a "proof". Another example: suppose a man is on trial for murder. Seventeen people say they saw him do it, the police have a bloody knife covered in his fingerprints, and the first words out of his mouth when he was arrested were "I'm glad I killed the bastard". Again, technically, we have no proof that he was the murderer. The witnesses could be lying, someone else could have used the knife to murder the victim while wearing gloves, and the "bastard" he was referring to may have been an irritating housefly. But can you see why, in the absence of other evidence, we may colloquially refer to this as a "proof" in the interests of clear communication?
As I understand it, the Theory of Evolution has been "proven" at about that level of certainty. The problem with the statement that creationists want teachers to read (that it hasn't been 'proven') is that it implies that alternative theories (e.g. creationism) have a non-negligible chance of being true, and that evolution has substantially less scientific evidence than, for example, gravity. This would be utterly false, regardless of whether you believe there is philosophical evidence for creationism. We should not endeavour to teach our children massive falsehoods, either explicitly or implicitly, so your statement fails.
I would, however, welcome a separate mention on the curriculum of the philosophy of science - the differences between the reasons for accepting a scientific theorem and the reasons for accepting a logical proof, details of the scientific method and so on and so forth. As long as it is made clear that these issues affect the whole of science, and that students may reject individual theories on the basis that they "haven't been proved" only by rejecting the whole of science, then I feel children can only benefit from exposure to them.
I'm pretty sure they weren't called imaginary numbers because they were useless - they were invented to solve the general cubic equation!
Correction - they can't legally install DRM without your permission. Unfortunately, this is irrelevant, because they do it anyway. IIRC, Sony's MediaMax DRM installed regardless of whether the user accepted or declined the EULA, and there was some other piece of DRM whose name I can't recall that got installed on autorun without the user's consent. And they only need implicit consent. Very implicit. That's why the Sony rootkit was (arguably) technically legal - there was a clause in the EULA saying "We may install other software on your PC" or some such.
It all becomes clear...
Most virus scanners are not outrageous bloatware. Norton is an exception to this rule. Most virus scanners do not nag you if you ask them not to. Norton is an exception to this rule. Most virus scanners may be uninstalled quickly and easily, leaving no traces behind in the registry. Norton is a serious exception to this rule. Most virus scanners have automatic daily updates, significantly reducing the impact of zero-day vulnerabilities. Norton is an exception to this rule. In short, most virus scanners do not suck donkey cock. Norton is an exception to this rule. Norton is also totally inept at actually detecting viruses. And it costs lots of money.
Seriously, try any other virus scanner. Try AVG (what I use when I boot to Windows), try Avast, try AntiVir, try anything. All the programs I listed above are totally free for personal use, with free updates. Get away from Norton, and I guarantee your views on virus scanners will change. You can have a reasonable protection against zero-day exploits without massive slowdowns and nagging.
Hope that helps!
Actually, checking, it was a UK ship full of civilians (not troops), including quite a few American ones - hence America's reaction. Details here.
I suppose the question isn't really of whether we must attribute any value to the potential for sentience - it's how much value we may attribute. I don't think we can consider a foetus as directly equivalent to a baby, on the grounds that we will eventually become corpses, and treating a human as being directly equivalent to a corpse would obviously be wrong! So the real question becomes: do we place enough value on the potential for sentience to ignore the possible death of an actual sentience? Carrying a pregnancy to term is still far riskier than an abortion. My instinctive reaction would be to say that the preservation of the established sentience must take priority. We would throw away a thousand acorns rather than cut down an ancient oak. I also think this is the sort of question where logical arguments don't really work - we can't exactly derive a numerical value for this sort of thing! I think we might end up agreeing to differ on this one... I would argue that preventing fertilization is not equivalent to actively terminating a fertilized egg from growing. One is letting nature take it's course; the other is to actively prevent nature from taking its course. (Note that this argument borders on the religious; if there is no purpose to nature, then who cares?) One objection might be that medicine prevents nature from taking its course; so why not forbid medicine? And I have to fall back on what I think is self-evident, that life is better than death. The direction in which we turn the arrow is important. You've anticipated my main objection! :-) I don't agree that nature is in itself a viable source of morality, simply because nature shows no compassion, and (as you would probably agree) I would consider compassion to be one of the most important defining traits of a moral being. Exactly as you say, medicine prevents nature from taking its course. While I would agree that life is 'self-evidently' better than death, nature would disagree. You can't logically both attach importance to nature's wishes simply because they are nature's wishes and say that life should be preserved and compassion is good. I think the only way the two actions can be morally different is if we go back to commission versus omission again.
It's late (UK). Me sleep now.
I hold that it's a better abstraction because it takes all of the properties of the embryo into account, not one arbitrary one.
But the only property my abstraction fails to take into account is the potential for sentience, which is still under debate as an important property. So we're right back to this.
<i>I dispute the equivalence of the unfertilized egg to that of the fertilized egg.</i>
And why do you dispute that? They do both have the potential to become a full human being. The only difference is that the unfertilised egg requires a little help to make it sentient, and the thrust of my argument is that withholding the help needed to turn the unfertilised egg into a sentient being is equivalent to actively preventing a fertilised egg from turning into a sentient being.
The only things that separate a dead human from a living human are a lack of sentience, and 'minor' things like cell damage and so on
I would argue that this isn't the correct abstraction. The better abstraction is the direction of life's "arrow". Unless you're God or Dr. Frankenstein, the flight of the arrow has ended and it cannot be reversed. This is not true for the embryo; the direction of it's arrow is toward life and sentience. It is therefore not our place to stop it.
Two points:
Firstly, why is this a better abstraction? I don't quite understand. I'm sure it's my fault rather than yours, but could you clarify? Thanks.
Secondly, as an abstraction, it relies on the idea that the embryo's potential to become sentient (the fact that the 'arrow' is in motion) is important, and so my second argument (quoted below) attacks it.
Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy
Might as well focus on stopping masturbation, too, since it's a waste of perfectly good semen (and kittens!). Are you sure you want to take this position? Your argument leads to the notion that nature itself is a tragedy.
That's why I was talking about it being an 'argument from consequences'. I KNOW the argument leads to stupid conclusions (i.e. abstinence and masturbation are evil), and I don't agree with those conclusions, but by putting forward the argument I show that either the conclusions are correct (which neither of us believes), or one of the axioms is incorrect (which I do believe). More specifically, the argument falls over if we assume that something that will become sentient is of vastly inferior value to something that is sentient, because then refraining from sex and having abortions are then both equally inoffensive. I believe that, so I don't have to accept the silly conclusion I brought out. You don't believe that, so you either have to accept the silly conclusion, accept my point, dispute one of the other axioms or find a weakness in the argument itself. It's sort of like proof by contradiction in maths if you're familiar with that, only less so because the contradiction is intuitive rather than logical. Here's the full argument again:
The second argument is more interesting. I know I'm arguing from consequences, but this is the best I can do. In the same way, a woman's egg has the potential for sentience. If a woman chooses to abstain from sex and artificial insemination, therefore, she is destroying that potential (as the egg is destroyed in the woman's period). If we grant that allowing something to happen passively is equivalent or almost equivalent to directly causing it to happen*, this is equally wrong, morally, to her having an abortion. Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy.
So while I do believe it is equally 'wrong' for a woman to refrain from sex as it is for her to have an early abortion, this belief is sane because I believe neither of them are wrong.
Are there any Jesuit readers who would like to comment on the intricacies of "sins of commission and sins of omission"?
I'd be interested as well - it's an area I don't know much about.
So why is something that, by your own words, "will become sentient if allowed to grow", of no value to you?
Ah, I apologise for my earlier vehemence - I understood your argument as being equivalent to most peoples' arguments against abortion, that blastocysts and embryos possess an immortal soul and are thus inviolable, or similarly theological arguments. This is an altogether different kettle of fish - I still believe it's incorrect and will argue as such, but you aren't advocating laws based exclusively on religion.
You put forward two main arguments:
1) Sentience is not the measure of the value of a human being.
2) The fact that something is almost certain to become sentient is in itself a measure of value on a similar level to sentience.
The first argument. You are correct in saying that I assumed that sentience was the measure of a being's value without reference to science without making that explicitly clear, for which I apologise. My reasoning follows. A dead human is inferior in value to a living human. The only things that separate a dead human from a living human are a lack of sentience, and 'minor' things like cell damage and so on (ignoring religious postulates, like the existence of a soul). It makes sense to call sentience the key factor here, as every other difference could theoretically be repaired. Therefore, if there is a distinction between living and dead matter, it must be in that which cannot be repaired with matter alone - sentience. There is also an emotional appeal to the idea, which I admit - we feel intuitively that someone's personality is more important than their cell structure! If there is no difference between living and dead matter and sentience has no value, of course, the question of whether abortion (or even murder) is wrong has no meaning. You can see why I assume there's a difference...
The second argument is more interesting. I know I'm arguing from consequences, but this is the best I can do. In the same way, a woman's egg has the potential for sentience. If a woman chooses to abstain from sex and artificial insemination, therefore, she is destroying that potential (as the egg is destroyed in the woman's period). If we grant that allowing something to happen passively is equivalent or almost equivalent to directly causing it to happen*, this is equally wrong, morally, to her having an abortion. Since the number of women out there having periods is far greater than the number of women having abortions, you should therefore focus your energies on preventing this tragedy.
* This is, of course, the weak point of the argument! I would consider the two equivalent (ceteris paribus), as illustrated by the following two scenarios:
- Firstly, two chemical plant workers are working on a catwalk above a large vat of acid. The first worker pushes the second worker into the vat, and the second worker dies.
- Secondly, the same two workers are working above the same vat of acid. The second worker slips on the catwalk through his own clumsiness, but manages to catch hold of the railing. He hangs there, shouting for help, while the first worker calmly watches and eats his lunch, making no move to help him. After five minutes, the second worker falls in and dies.
World War I, Germany was using a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. After they sank the Lusitania (a US passenger ship) in 1915, the US threatened to enter the war if they didn't stop. They stopped. In 1917, they started again, so America attacked. World War I as a whole was a pointless, bloody massacre, but America at least had a good reason to get involved. World War II - the fact that it wouldn't have happened without World War I is irrelevant to the discussion. The point is that America was right to get involved in it when it did happen. And without even looking into whether the government orchestrated the Pearl Harbour attack (which seems highly unlikely) - are you really saying your country should have let Hitler take Europe? That a 'right-thinking' Republican candidate would not have taken the country into war? That seems to me like a viewpoint you should rethink. No idea about the other wars, just setting a couple of facts straight.
Give me a... pro-life candidate.
[Someone else said:] If you think a blastocyst or an embryo is actually equivalent to a full human life, you really should re-examine some facts. [You disagreed]
I will live under the U. S. Constitution; I will not submit to Sharia law.
It is an objective scientific fact that an embryo or a blastocyst has no neural structure. It is not sentient. It will become sentient if allowed to grow, but it is not sentient, and that means it is not equivalent in value to a full human being. If you believe it is, that is therefore a wholly religious belief. If you believe that that belief should be enshrined in law, then you are no better than the radical Islamists you oppose. You say you will not submit to Sharia law - don't you realise that everyone else feels the same way about fundamentalist "Christian" law? You both want to punish other people for acting against your beliefs. The fact that you believe your belief is right is no excuse, and no comfort for the rest of us.
You missed a factor. Most mainstream Linux users get all their software from repositories to avoid the hassles of dependencies and manual compiling. If anyone tried adding malware to any of the big repositories, it probably wouldn't be accepted. If by some fluke it was, it wouldn't stay in for longer than a couple of hours. That means instead of clicking the big friendly "Add New Application" button, our more stupid users would have to either edit their repositories list to get themselves precompiled binaries or compile the malware themselves. Frankly, if they're dumb enough to install malware in the first place, they're going to be too dumb to do that.
Wait, so the prosecutor (i.e. the guy who's paid to keep the case going) won't drop the case? MY GOD, YOU'RE RIGHT! The feminists are taking over! Run for your lives!
I do, I just tend to ignore usernames! :-) Ah, well.
Fair enough - if you thought you'd included a reference, I withdraw my comment. I agree that there are some topics that can't be explained fully or accurately in a few paragraphs - I just thought it arrogant for you to refuse to give any reference on those grounds alone!
I'll have a look at Mere Christianity - I'd heard the title, but never actually read it.
Of course. And you cannot possibly hope to link to them, either, or give any indication of where to find them. You can't just say "An explanation exists" - you do actually have to give some indication of what that explanation is. Otherwise people will start laughing at you and you won't understand why.
I see what you're saying, and I agree that in some cases there would be no other choice but to publish an incompatibility, but I find the fact that they haven't produced any evidence very suspicious. Especially when the majority of Ghost-users on here are saying that they've had no problems.
Look mate, when your free speech causes more direct harm than it prevents, it can morally (not sure and don't care about legally in America) no longer be justified. You are not morally justified in shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a joke. You are not morally justified in knowingly giving bad legal or medical advice to take someone down a peg. And you are not morally justified in wasting millions of people's time and money (bandwidth is not free) to sell your lousy, stinking product!
If mutation is such a negligible factor, then how do two members of a species vary to the point at which they can no longer interbreed and become members of two different species? It seems a stretch to indicate variance alone. And how did such a wide variance in the number of chromosomes of different species arise without mutation?
And as for finding a competitor... Hello? Google? The company this article is about?! Failing that, we have word-of-mouth, non-obtrusive ads, magazine articles (if we're talking about an emerging trend or something), and independent reviews.
And the guy did say "Encourage, but do not force." I don't think the rant was about encouraging a sense of balance between physical and mental abilities - rather, valuing physical abilities over mental ablilities.
In most cases, I would agree with you - but I believe Wikipedia constitutes an exception. A fairly substantial part of Wikipedia's fact-checking comes from people who are just reading an article and notice something wrong - this especially holds true in the case of typos and obvious vandalism. These people will be more motivated to fix the error if it takes (best-case scenario) twenty seconds to click "Edit this page" and fix the problem than if there's a five-minute registration process to go through. Furthermore, I'm guessing that a decent proportion of Wikipedia's larger contributors started as impulse typo-fixers.
So, in other words, if anonymous access is disabled, then Wikipedia loses quite a lot of its casual fact-checkers, and its contributor growth rate gets cut severely. Since the only negative consequence of anonymous contribution is occasional vandalism, and since this consequence will become less severe as the user base grows (more people checking recent changes and so on), it's best to keep anonymous contribution going - especially as Wikipedia is intended to be a tool for casual research or a starting point for more serious research rather than an authoritative source.
All of the above is conjecture, but it seems to make sense - let me know if you have any contradictory stats.
Grandparent more-or-less reproduced here:
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as an atheist.
There are two entirely separate beliefs here. The first is that the Bible is literally true - literalism. While I obviously believe that this is incorrect, it is nevertheless harmless in itself. The second belief is the belief that all non-Christians must be purged from the land - intolerance. This is the bad one. The two beliefs do not overlap at any point. I've met literalists who are very tolerant of other views and prepared to hold a rational debate, and I've met atheists who are absolute sodding nutters.
Saying that all Christians who take the Bible literally endorse the likes of George Bush and Jack Chick in any way, shape or form is directly equivalent to saying that all atheists endorse Stalin's views on religion. Intolerance does not follow from belief.