This whole stem cell fiasco has been a hammer to pound President Bush on the head, and I think every sane human out there has seen it for what it is
Yes Bush is being hammered on this issue, and rightfully so IMHO. I do not think that is the purpose of the issue, though. This is a complicated issue with many diverse opinions. Implying that only the people who agree with you are sane is an example of why we aren't finding a common ground. Leave the rhetoric out of it, please.
Let's stop politicizing science and just approach it with objectivity and skepticism for once, folks.
Agreed. Unfortunately, the issue is considered a moral issue for many, which makes it both a) political b) impossible to keep objective. By its very nature it is a subjective debate. Remember that it was President Bush who first politicized the issue on a national level by banning federal funding of new fetal stem cell lines. It was brilliant political strategy. It is a polarizing issue and one that plays to the neo-cons political strengths.
And please, when science starts stretching the bounds of morality, let's make the right decision to limit science and not limit morality.
That should be the whole point of the debate. Science has always stretched the boundaries of morality. Usually there is a furor, then acceptance, then a moving on to the next boundary. Ask Galileo, Darwin, etc. What scares many of us,is that many sincere people think of morality as an Absolute delivered from on high, and not a growing and changing societal standard.
That's what makes us different from the research that German and Japanese scientists did in WWII.
Congratulations, you have just activated Godwin's Law. You lose.
To make the Electoral college work as designed, we should only list the names of the Electoral College candidates on the ballot, and not the presidential candidates. We should be voting for representation, not for a candidate.
You just keep up this sue-happy asshat behaviour and you can count on a grass roots ground swell that'll have the congress winding that ol' copyright clock back to 17 years where it belongs!
Uh, did you pay attention to what happened on Tuesday? If there is a grass roots ground swell, it is likely to be in support of increased punishment for the so-called thieves, and not to take the term of copyright back to where it belongs.
And I see what you're trying to do there. But I think it is possibly to demonstrate significant differences between interracial heterosexual marriage and gay marriages. The reproduction argument, for one.
Again, I think we should allow gay marriage, but as a member of an interracial marriage I am a little yucked by your comparison.
I'm glad someone saw my point. Sorry to hear I yucked you out with my example though. It was meant to provoke thought in people, unlike you, who don't support marriage or civil unions between homosexual couples.
The interracial marriage substitute leapt to mind when reading Chemisor's comments, simply because my next door neighbors have a interracial marriage and they have tremendous intolerance issues in our neighborhood. I suppose I could have used some other example, but that situation is directly analogous to the debate on homosexual marriage rights. Sorry it yucked you out, but I was trying to point out why Chemisor's comments are not valid nor compelling to many like myself.
Concerning gay marriage and reproduction: A few years ago my wife and I attended a group orientation for people attempting to have children via Invitro Fertilization (sadly our last failed attempt to have a child together after 6 years of trying, but that is another story). In a group of about 30 couples, the majority were married heterosexual couples. There were a two unmarried heterosexual couples, one single heterosexual woman, and one homosexual female couple. Out of curiousity after the class, I asked the nurse-teacher if they had ever had any male-male couples using a surrogate mother. The nurse indicated they averaged about 2 per year at their hospital, out of over 1000 procedures every year.
Now my question to you is, what exactly is the reproductive difference between straight couples who need technological assistance to have children together and the homosexual couples, who also need technological assistance to have children together? Should childless hetero couples be denied the legal benefits of marriage? If not, then why should the homosexual couples be denied the same protections and privaleges? The only meaningful answer I have found is the one that Chemisor gave: it violates many people's moral beliefs. Homosexual marriages would have strongly violated my moral beliefs 20 years ago. It does not now, because I value stable family relationships, with children or without, gay or straight. I believe strongly in Family Values, but my concept of family is much more inclusive than the norm.
This exchange is a great example of how people's moral beliefs affect their views. Let me demonstrate why the poster advocating gay marrage feels morally outraged by your position. I have changed some key phrases (the ones in all caps) in the post to illustrate. I translated it to a similar debate Americans had in pre-1960s America:
> The government allows RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES to have sex (in privacy like > everyone else). Do you prefer the government outlaw that?
Not necessarily. But I don't want them to legalize it either by publicly endorsing RACIALLY MIXED marriage.
> So you would like to stop RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES from being TOGETHER and acting accordingly?
I would like to rid them of the delusion that what they do is normal and acceptable. A drug user knows he's wrong to do what he does. However he tries to rationalize his habit, he will never try to publicly announce it and he will not be proud of it. Likewise, RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES should know that they are in the wrong and correct that wrong, either by therapy, or by abstinence.
> I guess you still haven't answered my question > as to how a RACIALLY MIXED marriage negatively affects you
But I have! I said it did not. But the thing is, if I am faced with a casting a vote for or against it, I have no doubt that I will vote against it. For me to do otherwise would be moral hypocrisy and I would be overwhelmed with guilt for allowing sanctioned SINNING into my world. Just as you are guilty of manslaughter if you allow a man to die by refusing some to take some simple action that would have prevented it, likewise you are guilty of a moral crime if you fail to refuse sanction to that which you consider immoral. I can not prevent the government from giving sanction to RACIAL MIXING if the majority votes for it, but if the government has the courtesy of asking for my opinion before enacting such legislation, I am certainly going to provide it.
> If a RACIALLY MIXED couple living right next door to you married, > how will your lifestyle be changed as a result of that marriage?
It will not change one bit. But I am a homebody; I don't even remember who my neighbours are. Someone who likes socializing with his neighbours would be affected more.
You feel moral outrage about gays activities and don't want the govenment to endorce it. The other guy feels just as much outrage about government sanctioned discrimination.
Not really the same. I may not want to vote For anyone, but I may vehemently want to vote Against a candidate. My ballot may consist of a single Nay against a single candidate. Basically its a "I don't care who gets elected, as long as it isn't this guy" vote.
I would rather see the ability to vote For or Against each candidate. Subtract each candidate's 'Nay' votes from their 'Yea' votes. The one with the highest remainder of 'Yea' votes wins.
It would be a much more volatile voting situation. I have not done the analysis, but I suspect close two party races like the current Bush v Kerry race would likely result in a 3rd party candidate winning.
You can normalize this volatility by eliminating party primaries. Each party might endorse their favorite candidate, but could not stop others from their party from running too. You might get 4 democrats, 2 republicans, and assorted other candidates. The (yea - nay) math assures that unacceptable candidates will not be elected, and that the Least Objectionable candidate is elected.
I would prefer this to the current system mostly because: 1) it gives every voter a voice on every candidate. 2) Elected officials can rarely lay claim to a 'mandate' when they win. Receiving 55 million yea votes means very little when 54.9 million opposed your election.
This has been posted many times before whenever any big businesses use their power to 'enforce' their profits on an unwilling public:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped,or turned back, for their private benefit. - Robert Heinlein, 'Life-Line'
We need to keep repeating this to everyone we can. Its a truth that needs 100 million repetitions.
Equip the iPod with WiFi, marry with a sprinkling of Airport Express units around the house and you shall have music wherever you go. I guess the power drain could be an issue, but I'd buy it.
Instead, build Airport Express into the iPod dock. You lose the 'streaming from your pocket' potential but you get some features to compensate: - Airport LAN connection on your 'puter via USB2.0 or Firewire - No power drain issues while streaming music. Both Airport & iPod get power from the dock. - Ability have two seperate streams running to two different Airport Express units by running one stream off of the iPod and the other off of iTunes on the 'puter. Since Airport Express is 54Mbps (802.11g), it should be able to handle two simultaneous audio streams.
"We're so new to the game," said Dr. Joanna
Wood, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine and a member of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston.
You have to love a universe where someone named Dr. Wood is studying isolation and sex in space.
Every interview I've read with him gives the impression that Linus has no plan to achieve world domination, or even knock Microsoft down in the marketplace. He's just an engineer who's trying to make the best operating system he can.
No plan for world domination? Wants to use his skills and influence to make better tools for us all? Sounds like a heck of an agenda to me.
Funny how its the left who continually bitch about being "censored," yet they're quite willing to squelch anyone else's speech who they consider apostate.
You misspelled a word. It should be spelled 'thugs', not 'left'. They come in all flavors: 'left', 'right', 'communist', 'fascist', 'patriots', 'democrats', 'republicans', 'greens', etc.
Please don't buy into the whole 'left - right' dichotomy, it just encourages a dangerous simplicity of attitude in politics. If politicos can continue to paint people with broad negative labels and condemn them with straw-man arguments and ad-hominem attacks then we will continue down this wide road of political madness we are on now.
The extensive use of modern marketing (eg creative lying) techniques has hi-jacked political discourse and turned it into the capitalist version of '1984'.
Whatever your beliefs, I suggest you visit spinsanity.com. Its your best innoculation against US political spin from ALL sides. In particular, check out their topics section.
ITER is a tokamak design. For the last 50 years commercial fusion and particularly tokamak fusion has been '20 years away'. At this point it seems to be getting worse. From the ITER FAQ on the link you provided:
ITER is not an electric power producing reactor. In some respects, like plasma size, ITER is like a prototype power reactor, but in others it is far away. That's why the first commercial implementation of fusion has to remain
around 2050. There is still lots more engineering to do to make the device reliable and economically competetive.
My congratulations to the ITER team. They just pushed out the standard '20 years from commercial fusion' to 50 years. Quite an achievement.
Will giving them more money make it happen faster? Almost certainly not given the past history of research on this fusion technique. ITER compares themselves to the Space Station on their web site. An apt and telling analogy. Both are useless dead ends and sinkholes for research money spent better elsewhere.
Tokamak based fusion designs are a big expensive boondoggle. They don't eliminate radioactive wastes (radioactive lithium isotopes anyone?), researchers have always argued that they will hit or exceed break-even 'when we build a bigger machine', and they are being researched by people who are more interested in writing journal articles and getting tenure than making it work commercially (ask them what their ratio of physicists to engineers on project is).
If ITER hits or exceeds break-even, then kudos to them. I'm sure the someone will get a Nobel out of it. But make no mistake, it will not bring us substantially closer to the GOAL of fusion energy: cheap renewable and environmentally friendly power for everyone.
We might get it with other techniques, and perhaps we will get it with something other than fusion. I'm rooting for someone cracking the fusion problems, but I'm betting it won't be the tokamak crowd.
First, grab your pre-order box quick and get registered. You will get a nice 'prestige power' that only pre-orders get. Basically it is Sprint with cool graphics. The graphic is different depending on which store you buy your pre-order from. I got mine at Best Buy and all my characters have this cool multiple ring/ripple effect trailing them when they run.
The pre-order box does contain a CD. It does not contain the game, though. The preorder CD installs a registration program and a nice little Macromedia-esque intro to the game. If you follow their instructions correctly, at the end you will be pre-registered for the game. Write down your login name and password. You get a different username for the beta bulletin boards than for your game login, so write down both and both passwords. Otherwise you might not be able to log in later. It is a little awkward and confusing.
After an indeterminate amount of time, you should get a letter from NCSoft saying that you can download the Beta Client installer. Its a bit over 1GB, so plan for a long night if you are running dialup.
Once the beta is installed, run the Update application. It will ask for your login name and password and then will download all the current patches. Once that is done, it throws you into the game login. Once in, then you get to spend a bit of time creating a character. Its fun, but time consuming. Be VERY careful what you name the character in your first slot. That is the ONLY name that is guarenteed reserved. When the game goes live, you don't get to keep your Beta characters, but you do get to keep the name in the first slot.
Its a great game and I am already addicted. Its got the ease of play of a traditional MMORPG, and is a fast-paced combat oriented. The missions are well thought out and fun. Getin a big group at any level and you will have a great time blowing up, frying, whacking, pounding, freezing, and otherwise causing big hurt on Bad Guys.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Its been a while since my college spanish.
Don't forget Enigma, GA. Also Raton, NM. Raton is spanish for 'Rat'.
Unfortunately B&B have Dark Followers (like the Voyager script writers) who will emerge from the shadows and lay waste to unprotected storylines.
This whole stem cell fiasco has been a hammer to pound President Bush on the head, and I think every sane human out there has seen it for what it is
Yes Bush is being hammered on this issue, and rightfully so IMHO. I do not think that is the purpose of the issue, though. This is a complicated issue with many diverse opinions. Implying that only the people who agree with you are sane is an example of why we aren't finding a common ground. Leave the rhetoric out of it, please.
Let's stop politicizing science and just approach it with objectivity and skepticism for once, folks.
Agreed. Unfortunately, the issue is considered a moral issue for many, which makes it both a) political b) impossible to keep objective. By its very nature it is a subjective debate. Remember that it was President Bush who first politicized the issue on a national level by banning federal funding of new fetal stem cell lines. It was brilliant political strategy. It is a polarizing issue and one that plays to the neo-cons political strengths.
And please, when science starts stretching the bounds of morality, let's make the right decision to limit science and not limit morality.
That should be the whole point of the debate. Science has always stretched the boundaries of morality. Usually there is a furor, then acceptance, then a moving on to the next boundary. Ask Galileo, Darwin, etc. What scares many of us,is that many sincere people think of morality as an Absolute delivered from on high, and not a growing and changing societal standard.
That's what makes us different from the research that German and Japanese scientists did in WWII.
Congratulations, you have just activated Godwin's Law. You lose.
I.V.
No plag on fay, er flag on play. It is a fully legal Spoonerism
First down and 5 puns to First Post.
- I.V.
I nominate:
"The one week in 2004 that passed without Micro$oft having to issue a security update".
Sorry, wrong department. You want 'Myths and Fantasies'. Down the hall and to the left.
The New Meme reply:
In China, Cowboy Neal clones are always positive
here
- I.V.
To make the Electoral college work as designed, we should only list the names of the Electoral College candidates on the ballot, and not the presidential candidates. We should be voting for representation, not for a candidate.
-I.V.
You just keep up this sue-happy asshat behaviour and you can count on a grass roots ground swell that'll have the congress winding that ol' copyright clock back to 17 years where it belongs!
Uh, did you pay attention to what happened on Tuesday? If there is a grass roots ground swell, it is likely to be in support of increased punishment for the so-called thieves, and not to take the term of copyright back to where it belongs.
- I.V.
And I see what you're trying to do there. But I think it is possibly to demonstrate significant differences between interracial heterosexual marriage and gay marriages. The reproduction argument, for one.
Again, I think we should allow gay marriage, but as a member of an interracial marriage I am a little yucked by your comparison.
I'm glad someone saw my point. Sorry to hear I yucked you out with my example though. It was meant to provoke thought in people, unlike you, who don't support marriage or civil unions between homosexual couples.
The interracial marriage substitute leapt to mind when reading Chemisor's comments, simply because my next door neighbors have a interracial marriage and they have tremendous intolerance issues in our neighborhood. I suppose I could have used some other example, but that situation is directly analogous to the debate on homosexual marriage rights. Sorry it yucked you out, but I was trying to point out why Chemisor's comments are not valid nor compelling to many like myself.
Concerning gay marriage and reproduction: A few years ago my wife and I attended a group orientation for people attempting to have children via Invitro Fertilization (sadly our last failed attempt to have a child together after 6 years of trying, but that is another story). In a group of about 30 couples, the majority were married heterosexual couples. There were a two unmarried heterosexual couples, one single heterosexual woman, and one homosexual female couple. Out of curiousity after the class, I asked the nurse-teacher if they had ever had any male-male couples using a surrogate mother. The nurse indicated they averaged about 2 per year at their hospital, out of over 1000 procedures every year.
Now my question to you is, what exactly is the reproductive difference between straight couples who need technological assistance to have children together and the homosexual couples, who also need technological assistance to have children together? Should childless hetero couples be denied the legal benefits of marriage? If not, then why should the homosexual couples be denied the same protections and privaleges? The only meaningful answer I have found is the one that Chemisor gave: it violates many people's moral beliefs. Homosexual marriages would have strongly violated my moral beliefs 20 years ago. It does not now, because I value stable family relationships, with children or without, gay or straight. I believe strongly in Family Values, but my concept of family is much more inclusive than the norm.
Cheers,
I.V.
This exchange is a great example of how people's moral beliefs affect their views. Let me demonstrate why the poster advocating gay marrage feels morally outraged by your position. I have changed some key phrases (the ones in all caps) in the post to illustrate. I translated it to a similar debate Americans had in pre-1960s America:
> The government allows RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES to have sex (in privacy like
> everyone else). Do you prefer the government outlaw that?
Not necessarily. But I don't want them to legalize it either by publicly endorsing RACIALLY MIXED marriage.
> So you would like to stop RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES from being TOGETHER and acting accordingly?
I would like to rid them of the delusion that what they do is normal and acceptable. A drug user knows he's wrong to do what he does. However he tries to rationalize his habit, he will never try to publicly announce it and he will not be proud of it. Likewise, RACIALLY MIXED COUPLES should know that they are in the wrong and correct that wrong, either by therapy, or by abstinence.
> I guess you still haven't answered my question
> as to how a RACIALLY MIXED marriage negatively affects you
But I have! I said it did not. But the thing is, if I am faced with a casting a vote for or against it, I have no doubt that I will vote against it. For me to do otherwise would be moral hypocrisy and I would be overwhelmed with guilt for allowing sanctioned SINNING into my world. Just as you are guilty of manslaughter if you allow a man to die by refusing some to take some simple action that would have prevented it, likewise you are guilty of a moral crime if you fail to refuse sanction to that which you consider immoral. I can not prevent the government from giving sanction to RACIAL MIXING if the majority votes for it, but if the government has the courtesy of asking for my opinion before enacting such legislation, I am certainly going to provide it.
> If a RACIALLY MIXED couple living right next door to you married,
> how will your lifestyle be changed as a result of that marriage?
It will not change one bit. But I am a homebody; I don't even remember who my neighbours are. Someone who likes socializing with his neighbours would be affected more.
You feel moral outrage about gays activities and don't want the govenment to endorce it. The other guy feels just as much outrage about government sanctioned discrimination.
-I.V.
Not really the same. I may not want to vote For anyone, but I may vehemently want to vote Against a candidate. My ballot may consist of a single Nay against a single candidate. Basically its a "I don't care who gets elected, as long as it isn't this guy" vote.
I would rather see the ability to vote For or Against each candidate. Subtract each candidate's 'Nay' votes from their 'Yea' votes. The one with the highest remainder of 'Yea' votes wins.
It would be a much more volatile voting situation. I have not done the analysis, but I suspect close two party races like the current Bush v Kerry race would likely result in a 3rd party candidate winning.
You can normalize this volatility by eliminating party primaries. Each party might endorse their favorite candidate, but could not stop others from their party from running too. You might get 4 democrats, 2 republicans, and assorted other candidates. The (yea - nay) math assures that unacceptable candidates will not be elected, and that the Least Objectionable candidate is elected.
I would prefer this to the current system mostly because:
1) it gives every voter a voice on every candidate.
2) Elected officials can rarely lay claim to a 'mandate' when they win. Receiving 55 million yea votes means very little when 54.9 million opposed your election.
- I.V.
We need to keep repeating this to everyone we can. Its a truth that needs 100 million repetitions.
-I.V.
Equip the iPod with WiFi, marry with a sprinkling of Airport Express units around the house and you shall have music wherever you go. I guess the power drain could be an issue, but I'd buy it.
Instead, build Airport Express into the iPod dock. You lose the 'streaming from your pocket' potential but you get some features to compensate:
- Airport LAN connection on your 'puter via USB2.0 or Firewire
- No power drain issues while streaming music. Both Airport & iPod get power from the dock.
- Ability have two seperate streams running to two different Airport Express units by running one stream off of the iPod and the other off of iTunes on the 'puter. Since Airport Express is 54Mbps (802.11g), it should be able to handle two simultaneous audio streams.
- I.V.
Originally:
"You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take" -- Wayne Gretzky
Nice one. My compliments. How about:
"Never tell me the odds." -- Han Solo
Cheers,
I.V.
It is great to see people and respected institutions standing up and saying this is wrong, a betrayal of our rights-- but can they make a difference?
If people try, maybe.
If people don't try, never.
I.V.
You have to love a universe where someone named Dr. Wood is studying isolation and sex in space.
I.V.
Every interview I've read with him gives the impression that Linus has no plan to achieve world domination, or even knock Microsoft down in the marketplace. He's just an engineer who's trying to make the best operating system he can.
No plan for world domination? Wants to use his skills and influence to make better tools for us all? Sounds like a heck of an agenda to me.
In the Marvel superhero universe, the guy with elastic powers is called 'Mr. Fantastic'. His base of operations: a giant skyscraper.
Erotic symbolism in comic books? Nah....
I never have mod points when I need them. Somebody please mod this guy up as "+1 Informative".
Funny how its the left who continually bitch about being "censored," yet they're quite willing to squelch anyone else's speech who they consider apostate.
You misspelled a word. It should be spelled 'thugs', not 'left'. They come in all flavors: 'left', 'right', 'communist', 'fascist', 'patriots', 'democrats', 'republicans', 'greens', etc.
Please don't buy into the whole 'left - right' dichotomy, it just encourages a dangerous simplicity of attitude in politics. If politicos can continue to paint people with broad negative labels and condemn them with straw-man arguments and ad-hominem attacks then we will continue down this wide road of political madness we are on now.
The extensive use of modern marketing (eg creative lying) techniques has hi-jacked political discourse and turned it into the capitalist version of '1984'.
Whatever your beliefs, I suggest you visit spinsanity.com. Its your best innoculation against US political spin from ALL sides. In particular, check out their topics section.
Cheers,
I.V.
My congratulations to the ITER team. They just pushed out the standard '20 years from commercial fusion' to 50 years. Quite an achievement.
Will giving them more money make it happen faster? Almost certainly not given the past history of research on this fusion technique. ITER compares themselves to the Space Station on their web site. An apt and telling analogy. Both are useless dead ends and sinkholes for research money spent better elsewhere.
Tokamak based fusion designs are a big expensive boondoggle. They don't eliminate radioactive wastes (radioactive lithium isotopes anyone?), researchers have always argued that they will hit or exceed break-even 'when we build a bigger machine', and they are being researched by people who are more interested in writing journal articles and getting tenure than making it work commercially (ask them what their ratio of physicists to engineers on project is).
If ITER hits or exceeds break-even, then kudos to them. I'm sure the someone will get a Nobel out of it. But make no mistake, it will not bring us substantially closer to the GOAL of fusion energy: cheap renewable and environmentally friendly power for everyone.
We might get it with other techniques, and perhaps we will get it with something other than fusion. I'm rooting for someone cracking the fusion problems, but I'm betting it won't be the tokamak crowd.
I.V.
First, grab your pre-order box quick and get registered. You will get a nice 'prestige power' that only pre-orders get. Basically it is Sprint with cool graphics. The graphic is different depending on which store you buy your pre-order from. I got mine at Best Buy and all my characters have this cool multiple ring/ripple effect trailing them when they run.
The pre-order box does contain a CD. It does not contain the game, though. The preorder CD installs a registration program and a nice little Macromedia-esque intro to the game. If you follow their instructions correctly, at the end you will be pre-registered for the game. Write down your login name and password. You get a different username for the beta bulletin boards than for your game login, so write down both and both passwords. Otherwise you might not be able to log in later. It is a little awkward and confusing.
After an indeterminate amount of time, you should get a letter from NCSoft saying that you can download the Beta Client installer. Its a bit over 1GB, so plan for a long night if you are running dialup.
Once the beta is installed, run the Update application. It will ask for your login name and password and then will download all the current patches. Once that is done, it throws you into the game login. Once in, then you get to spend a bit of time creating a character. Its fun, but time consuming. Be VERY careful what you name the character in your first slot. That is the ONLY name that is guarenteed reserved. When the game goes live, you don't get to keep your Beta characters, but you do get to keep the name in the first slot.
Its a great game and I am already addicted. Its got the ease of play of a traditional MMORPG, and is a fast-paced combat oriented. The missions are well thought out and fun. Getin a big group at any level and you will have a great time blowing up, frying, whacking, pounding, freezing, and otherwise causing big hurt on Bad Guys.
Cheers,
I.V.