Yes, I'm aware of that type of thing, but didn't want to complicate the issue. I had a cat that was a full-bred Bengal, which is a breed of cat created by crossing housecats with the Asian Leopard. Only a fraction of the females produced by such a cross are fertile, and none of the males. If you continue to cross the fertile offspring with housecats, you eventually get fully fertile cats, such as the one I had.
However, since you can't continue to crossbreed those half-breeds with each other (they're all female), it is easy to draw the line and say that they are, for all practical purposes, unable to crossbreed. So if we want to be painstakingly precise, your implied statement is correct -- to be more precise, we would have to give a definition based on some threshold of probability of producing fertile offspring, perhaps with some variable thrown in to account for the complication of producing fertile offspring of only a certain gender, maybe even something that takes into account the probably fertility of the next-generation offspring. I don't think the exceptions invalidate the general rule, though.
and help cut back on the rate dumbasses die...don't even try to defend these morons, [...] they were all dumbasses plain and simple and the world is a better place now that they are gone.
You're missing something here -- as you yourself pointed out, sometimes the dumbasses go out and kill someone else. If possible and reasonable, efforts should be made to reduce the situation that leads to such stupidity. You can't just say "oh well, let the dumbasses do whatever they want, the world's better off this way".
[...] will dramatically increase your risk of having an accident, as surely as driving while drunk, tired or stoned.
Actually, from what I've read, although marijuana does indeed impair certain motor skills critical to driving, it does not significantly contribute to risk of having an accident (at least among those not new to marijuana use). This seems to be primarily for two reasons:
People high on marijuana generally have a good awareness of the extent of their impairment, and take measures to compensate (as opposed to alcohol use -- alcohol impairs higher-level cognitive processes, resulting in those drunk people who are often convinced they're perfectly in control).
Marijuana apparently makes driving *seem* more dangerous than it is, for instance by making drivers feel like they are going faster than they are. So, people high on marijuana typically reduce their speed even farther than they believe they have.
Being high and drunk at the same time, however, has been shown to be much worse than the sum of the effects of the two drugs alone.
You know what else would create more jobs and thus help the economy? Ban machines that twist rope together. Now it has to be done by hand, so voila! More jobs! The point? Just because something creates more jobs doesn't mean it's good. That sort of logic had the loom banned in England shortly after it was invented to protect jobs.
While it's true that eliminating the flow of free (pirated) software into those countries would probably create the possibility of jobs in those countries, many of those jobs would duplicate work already done somewhere else to produce similar software. On the other hand, free and cheap resources are also known to boost economies and keep them going strong (we all know how much the US economy would suffer if the price of gasoline doubled), so eliminating that cheap/free resource of pirated software would have some harmful effects too, even aside from my earlier esoteric argument. I'm sure eliminating software piracy in those countries would also result in a lot more money going to US and other foreign software companies, which becomes a drain on that economy... So I don't know that I believe it would help anywhere near as much as the BSA claims (not that they have any reason to be realistically conservative, of course).
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Yes, I'm aware of that type of thing, but didn't want to complicate the issue. I had a cat that was a full-bred Bengal, which is a breed of cat created by crossing housecats with the Asian Leopard. Only a fraction of the females produced by such a cross are fertile, and none of the males. If you continue to cross the fertile offspring with housecats, you eventually get fully fertile cats, such as the one I had.
However, since you can't continue to crossbreed those half-breeds with each other (they're all female), it is easy to draw the line and say that they are, for all practical purposes, unable to crossbreed. So if we want to be painstakingly precise, your implied statement is correct -- to be more precise, we would have to give a definition based on some threshold of probability of producing fertile offspring, perhaps with some variable thrown in to account for the complication of producing fertile offspring of only a certain gender, maybe even something that takes into account the probably fertility of the next-generation offspring. I don't think the exceptions invalidate the general rule, though.
I believe "viable" in this context means "able to reproduce". I also believe ligers are not fertile, so they are not viable.
You're missing something here -- as you yourself pointed out, sometimes the dumbasses go out and kill someone else. If possible and reasonable, efforts should be made to reduce the situation that leads to such stupidity. You can't just say "oh well, let the dumbasses do whatever they want, the world's better off this way".
Being high and drunk at the same time, however, has been shown to be much worse than the sum of the effects of the two drugs alone.
http://www.fcda.org/driving.htm
http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_dr
You know what else would create more jobs and thus help the economy? Ban machines that twist rope together. Now it has to be done by hand, so voila! More jobs! The point? Just because something creates more jobs doesn't mean it's good. That sort of logic had the loom banned in England shortly after it was invented to protect jobs.
While it's true that eliminating the flow of free (pirated) software into those countries would probably create the possibility of jobs in those countries, many of those jobs would duplicate work already done somewhere else to produce similar software. On the other hand, free and cheap resources are also known to boost economies and keep them going strong (we all know how much the US economy would suffer if the price of gasoline doubled), so eliminating that cheap/free resource of pirated software would have some harmful effects too, even aside from my earlier esoteric argument. I'm sure eliminating software piracy in those countries would also result in a lot more money going to US and other foreign software companies, which becomes a drain on that economy... So I don't know that I believe it would help anywhere near as much as the BSA claims (not that they have any reason to be realistically conservative, of course).