Wait a minute, wouldn't you only have to prove that you are not likely the offender, not that some particular person else is? For instance, wouldn't being a 72 year old grandmother who regularly had numerious neighborhood kids over be a defense, even if you couldn't say "this particular kid probably did it"? I think any reasonable jury would agree to that. Perhaps leaving your WEP open isn't enough, but making sure that people more likely than you use it is.
Except that if you tried to do that, all corporations would simply up and reincorporate somewhere with less restrictive rules. And no one would want to invest in those American companies which do remain because good citizens simply can't compete with ruthless bastards. It would work only you had one set of rules for the entire world. It's not like we actually manufacture much here anymore, all those companies only stay because we have some of the most non-restrictive and capital friendly laws in the world, and a history of putting American business interests above, well, pretty much everything.
You've obviously never tried to get a paper through the peer review process. Believe me, 6 months is way too short, a year at a minimum. It really does take that long to publish in the scientific community.
Certainlly not criminal. I don't know about Austrailia, but in America all copyright is civil. My poiint is that in above example, party A (original copyrighters of code) must be the ones to sue party b or c. And party A by their lack of even piping up even a little bit about the license right over the past 15 years has shown that they believe B and C have the right to redistribute code under propriaritary liscense. You, or anyone else, cannot sue anyone at all, no matter what interpretation of the liscense is fronted. Only the original copyright holders can sue.
IANAL, but one thing I think everyone is forgetting here is that only parties with standing can sue in this instance. Basically, even if the perverted logic of this interpretation has legal merit (which as a non-lawyer I stand moot on) you have to be the damaged party in order to sue. ie, the original copyright holder. Since it's pretty clear that the original copyright holders thought they were liscencing code that could be reproduced in closed source form, it is highly unlikely that anyone with standing would ever sue.
What's wrong with showing a film that has an opinion? Students are exposed to works of literature all the time, which are unashamedly opinionated and partisan. Should we prevent them from reading Shakespeare because his work wasn't "Fair and Balanced"?
The solution is not to ban books and films - but to teach students critical thinking, and media analysis skills. Such classes in media literacy and criticism are standard practice in many schools around the world. Why are they so unpopular in the US? Is it because we want people to consume media at face value to perpetuate the media consumption empires? Or is it because we want students to uncritically believe everything that the administration says on TV?
Sheltering students from the real world of opinions in the media is not a smart move. And on the scale of "propaganda," An Inconvenient Truth is pretty mild stuff. Sure it has opinion, and it also has science. But it's pretty clear that the opinion is opinion. Kids probably get worse propaganda from the dairy industry in their nutrition/home economics classes. Or from the IT industry in computer classes.
But why ban this, instead of having a healthy debate about it?
This is one of those posts that really pisses me off because it purports to support a point while in fact subtly and unconciously undercutting it. Very little, if any, of Gore's movie is opinion. There is fact and there is conjecture and there is a bit of theory, but no opinion. And saying that we should "have a healthy depate about it" is like poisoning your bread. Why don't we have a healthy debate about the moon landing while we're at it. We could teach that on one side people believe that we landed on the moon and on the other side some people believe that it was faked as part of a government coverup. Why don't we invite the flat earth society in on geography class? That might be a useful contraversy for them to know about. We could have health classes that teach that some people believe that you need three well balanced meals a day and some people believe that you can live on nothing but air (http://www.breatharian.com/). The problem with "having a healthy debate" is that it presupposes that both sides of the debate are reasonable and well supported positions to adopt.
Actually, I think it does, technichly. Just because Microsoft probably hasn't specifically trademarked the name "WindowsButfucker" that doesn't give me the right to invent an anal reeming device and call it the "WindowsButfucker 2.0". Everyone associates the "i-" label with Apple.
You do have a point. I expect sony to drop the prices on their own (BMG) movie set for BR later this year if sales do not pick up. They've already shown their willingness to pour money down a barrel to win this thing and now they're commited. They can't loose this an remain a dominant player in the consumer electronics field. I suspect that they bought BMG for the sole purpose of ensuring that there is no repeat of Betamax. Now we get to see if they can swing it. Personally, I am predicting that sony will nominally win the format war and remain slightly dominant (in terms of sales) in the console wars, though they will loose groun, but new direct download technology, VR, and the Wii 2.0 will trump them before either makes a profit.
If GGP can't come up with a less inflamatory comparison than the Third Reich then the phoenomena he is addressing is not a trend, it's an anomoly. If he can come up with a less inflamatory comparison then he should use it to avoid the appearance of an appeal to emotion. The thing about goodwin's law is that, while it looks amusing it is actually a very apt tool. If you compare someone or something to Hitler, the Nazis, or the Hollicast then you are not making a logical argument, you are making an appeal to emotion.
Actually, Sony's strategy is fairly clever. I'm not sure it will work, but it is clever. The way I see it is thus:
1)Microsoft gives you the option of adding on HD-DVD for more money. Most people are probably fine paying less and not getting HD. Soney doesn't give you that option. You want a PS3? You get a BR player.
2)Since they have one anyway (wanted or not) PS3 owners buy BR disks rather than conventional DVDs (after all, they paid for it, why not use it).
3)Forced early adoption of BR by gamers raises BR disk sales relative to DVD and HD. DVD distro companies notice this and release their stocks on BR to catch the wave.
4)Once all the major MP lables are releasing on BR (wheather they are also releasing on HD or not) Soney can de facto win the forman war simply by refusing to offer BMG movies on HD. Why would anyone buy an HD player when 25% of the movies out there will never be released on it?
5)The HD movie adopters (videophiles) buy BR, and since the PS3 is as cheap as any BR player, why not get a PS3 and have the extra functionality?
6)PS3 sales boost, drawing in more exclusive games.
Of course, all of this depends on sony selling enough PS3s in the early market to influence BR disk sales significantly. Early indicators are that they are not succeeding at this, but time will tell.
Godwin's law, this thread is officially over and Jack Thompson wins. I don't like it any more than you do, but the slashdot croud can always be counted on to resort to emotional rhetoric ASAP.
I think the general legal principle is that when someone is incapable of expressing consent there is someone else appointed who can give consent for them. Generally, organs cannot be harvested without consent because we assume that the person was capable of giving consent and chose not to. Embryos, not being things which are capable of consent, are generally not used without the consent of the next most interested parties, the genetic progenaters, who are (fairly reasonably, I think) empowered to give consent on behalf of the embryo since it was never in a situation where it was able to. That all seems pretty reasonable to me.
The form of the chair does not survive the chair being thrown into the fire. At least not according to Aristotle, Plato might disagree. If you want to say that the soul can exist independent of the body then you have to allow that it could exist independent of the body and be inside a cow. After all, what's the difference between the soul just floating there and the soul floating around inside a cow? And I don't know about you, but my cat seems to have a fair amount of free choice. When I call her, sometimes she chooses to come and sometimes she doesn't.
Homeostasis is an extremely material thing. And fairly well studied. It's primary actors are enzymes which break down high energy molecules, store that energy in other molecules, and then use that energy to build and repair other molecules which maintains the internal order. Saying that you can't find homeostasis in a chicken is like saying you can't find the flight in a duck. It's not a noun, it's a verb. It's what living things do that dead things don't. And we can watch cells do it in the lab. You seem to be saying that the soul takes energy from the environment and uses that energy to repair the cell, but I'm pretty sure we found what does that and it's mostly proteins.
Don't get me wrong, adult stem cells do have plenty of uses. And yes, under certain circumstances they will adopt the characteristics of tissue they are placed near. That's how our body replaces damaged tissue. But most adult stem cells have only a few types of tissue they can become. To the best of my knowledge (and yes, I am a biologist) there is no adult stem cell that can turn in to all the various types of tissue in the typical organ. Perhaps you have a reference I havn't seen, I am not a stem cell expert. There is this guy who claims to be able to turn adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells, but other researchers have had difficulty replicating his results.
By the way, An alleal is a variant of a gene, I think you mean that adult stem cells have shorter telomeres, which is true.
I'm not sure I've seen one that has satisfied me as being rationally derived from biology in some way.
With good reason. From a biological perspective, life doesn't "begin", it just continues. All life descends from other life, egg and sperm are alive, so its incorrect to even say that life begins at conception. But life isn't really the issue, "personhood" is the issue. What, in our conciet, do we consider to be the defining quality that makes us people as opposed to animals (which we generally have no problem killing)? I think many people would say it is our capacity for free will. That's why I would say that life begins with the first breath, as it is the first independent act of free will that anyone ever takes. When you choose to live or die, even it you are helped along in the decision by a sharp slap to the tush.
8 week old embryos are not used in stem cell research. In fact, at 8 weeks they aren't even technically embryos. embryos with usable stem cells are a day old, maybe two, and they look like a very, very tiny basketball. They have a couple hundred cells, none of which could be remotely classified as a tissue, neural or otherwise. And fingers do have neural tissue, thats how you can move them and feel with them.
Excellent point, except that a pre-3 month embryo will continue to grow and be self sustaining eventually. A finger will not. Besides, under your logic, if someone loses a finger, what do we save, the finger or the rest of the carcass?
So it sounds to me like you want to draw the line at "possesses human dna and will continue to grow and be self sustaining eventually". I should point out that there are some alzeheimer's patients and coma victems who would not pass this test. I should also point out that frozen embryos do not pass this test as they are not in an environment where they are capable of growth.
Errr...so how do you know what "shape" a soul is other than by looking at the body? If a human soul was in a cows body, how could you tell? Maybe cows don't bury their dead because their lack of thumbs makes holding the shovle kind of difficult. Besids which, not all people act the same either, are you saying that the ones who don't bury their dead or plan for their child's future don't have souls?
There is already a stem cell treatment in testing that involves using embryonic stem cells to regrow damaged spinal tissue in parapalegics. It works in rats and is being tested in humans. To my knowledge there have been no rejection problems. Also, adult humans don't have any stem cells that are capable of growing in to fully functional organs (with the exception of blood and skin, if you consider those organs). The level of pluripotency required to create that many cell types with that level of organizational complexity is not known to exist in any adult stem cell. On the other hand, it would be fairly easy to genetically modify an embryonic stem cell line to express your own cell surface proteins, thus avoiding potential rejection problems.
I'm going to assume that you're talking about physical laws rather than legislative ones. Your definition of human seems to be cultural rather than biological. I think that the Gparent used "human organism" in the sense of "member of the species Homo sapien". Someone raised by wolves would still be, biologically speaking, human. Wheather or not you want to extend so called "human rights" to such a creature is a value judgement, not a scientific one.
On the issue that an embryo is a human being, Human tissue cultures are generally not considered human despite the fact that they have a distinctly human genetic structure. Would you extend human rights to tissue cultures? Speaking as a biologist, in order to be a member of a particular species requires more than just the right genes, it also requires the proper organizational structure. Does an embryo have the proper organizational structure to be considered functionally human? It probably depends on the stage of development.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute, wouldn't you only have to prove that you are not likely the offender, not that some particular person else is? For instance, wouldn't being a 72 year old grandmother who regularly had numerious neighborhood kids over be a defense, even if you couldn't say "this particular kid probably did it"? I think any reasonable jury would agree to that. Perhaps leaving your WEP open isn't enough, but making sure that people more likely than you use it is.
Except that if you tried to do that, all corporations would simply up and reincorporate somewhere with less restrictive rules. And no one would want to invest in those American companies which do remain because good citizens simply can't compete with ruthless bastards. It would work only you had one set of rules for the entire world. It's not like we actually manufacture much here anymore, all those companies only stay because we have some of the most non-restrictive and capital friendly laws in the world, and a history of putting American business interests above, well, pretty much everything.
Nope, read your EULA. Microsoft has the right to audit at your expense at any time.
You've obviously never tried to get a paper through the peer review process. Believe me, 6 months is way too short, a year at a minimum. It really does take that long to publish in the scientific community.
Certainlly not criminal. I don't know about Austrailia, but in America all copyright is civil. My poiint is that in above example, party A (original copyrighters of code) must be the ones to sue party b or c. And party A by their lack of even piping up even a little bit about the license right over the past 15 years has shown that they believe B and C have the right to redistribute code under propriaritary liscense. You, or anyone else, cannot sue anyone at all, no matter what interpretation of the liscense is fronted. Only the original copyright holders can sue.
IANAL, but one thing I think everyone is forgetting here is that only parties with standing can sue in this instance. Basically, even if the perverted logic of this interpretation has legal merit (which as a non-lawyer I stand moot on) you have to be the damaged party in order to sue. ie, the original copyright holder. Since it's pretty clear that the original copyright holders thought they were liscencing code that could be reproduced in closed source form, it is highly unlikely that anyone with standing would ever sue.
Actually, I think it does, technichly. Just because Microsoft probably hasn't specifically trademarked the name "WindowsButfucker" that doesn't give me the right to invent an anal reeming device and call it the "WindowsButfucker 2.0". Everyone associates the "i-" label with Apple.
You do have a point. I expect sony to drop the prices on their own (BMG) movie set for BR later this year if sales do not pick up. They've already shown their willingness to pour money down a barrel to win this thing and now they're commited. They can't loose this an remain a dominant player in the consumer electronics field. I suspect that they bought BMG for the sole purpose of ensuring that there is no repeat of Betamax. Now we get to see if they can swing it. Personally, I am predicting that sony will nominally win the format war and remain slightly dominant (in terms of sales) in the console wars, though they will loose groun, but new direct download technology, VR, and the Wii 2.0 will trump them before either makes a profit.
If GGP can't come up with a less inflamatory comparison than the Third Reich then the phoenomena he is addressing is not a trend, it's an anomoly. If he can come up with a less inflamatory comparison then he should use it to avoid the appearance of an appeal to emotion. The thing about goodwin's law is that, while it looks amusing it is actually a very apt tool. If you compare someone or something to Hitler, the Nazis, or the Hollicast then you are not making a logical argument, you are making an appeal to emotion.
Actually, Sony's strategy is fairly clever. I'm not sure it will work, but it is clever. The way I see it is thus:
1)Microsoft gives you the option of adding on HD-DVD for more money. Most people are probably fine paying less and not getting HD. Soney doesn't give you that option. You want a PS3? You get a BR player.
2)Since they have one anyway (wanted or not) PS3 owners buy BR disks rather than conventional DVDs (after all, they paid for it, why not use it).
3)Forced early adoption of BR by gamers raises BR disk sales relative to DVD and HD. DVD distro companies notice this and release their stocks on BR to catch the wave.
4)Once all the major MP lables are releasing on BR (wheather they are also releasing on HD or not) Soney can de facto win the forman war simply by refusing to offer BMG movies on HD. Why would anyone buy an HD player when 25% of the movies out there will never be released on it?
5)The HD movie adopters (videophiles) buy BR, and since the PS3 is as cheap as any BR player, why not get a PS3 and have the extra functionality?
6)PS3 sales boost, drawing in more exclusive games.
Of course, all of this depends on sony selling enough PS3s in the early market to influence BR disk sales significantly. Early indicators are that they are not succeeding at this, but time will tell.
Godwin's law, this thread is officially over and Jack Thompson wins. I don't like it any more than you do, but the slashdot croud can always be counted on to resort to emotional rhetoric ASAP.
I think the general legal principle is that when someone is incapable of expressing consent there is someone else appointed who can give consent for them. Generally, organs cannot be harvested without consent because we assume that the person was capable of giving consent and chose not to. Embryos, not being things which are capable of consent, are generally not used without the consent of the next most interested parties, the genetic progenaters, who are (fairly reasonably, I think) empowered to give consent on behalf of the embryo since it was never in a situation where it was able to. That all seems pretty reasonable to me.
The form of the chair does not survive the chair being thrown into the fire. At least not according to Aristotle, Plato might disagree. If you want to say that the soul can exist independent of the body then you have to allow that it could exist independent of the body and be inside a cow. After all, what's the difference between the soul just floating there and the soul floating around inside a cow? And I don't know about you, but my cat seems to have a fair amount of free choice. When I call her, sometimes she chooses to come and sometimes she doesn't.
Homeostasis is an extremely material thing. And fairly well studied. It's primary actors are enzymes which break down high energy molecules, store that energy in other molecules, and then use that energy to build and repair other molecules which maintains the internal order. Saying that you can't find homeostasis in a chicken is like saying you can't find the flight in a duck. It's not a noun, it's a verb. It's what living things do that dead things don't. And we can watch cells do it in the lab. You seem to be saying that the soul takes energy from the environment and uses that energy to repair the cell, but I'm pretty sure we found what does that and it's mostly proteins.
Don't get me wrong, adult stem cells do have plenty of uses. And yes, under certain circumstances they will adopt the characteristics of tissue they are placed near. That's how our body replaces damaged tissue. But most adult stem cells have only a few types of tissue they can become. To the best of my knowledge (and yes, I am a biologist) there is no adult stem cell that can turn in to all the various types of tissue in the typical organ. Perhaps you have a reference I havn't seen, I am not a stem cell expert. There is this guy who claims to be able to turn adult stem cells into embryonic stem cells, but other researchers have had difficulty replicating his results. By the way, An alleal is a variant of a gene, I think you mean that adult stem cells have shorter telomeres, which is true.
8 week old embryos are not used in stem cell research. In fact, at 8 weeks they aren't even technically embryos. embryos with usable stem cells are a day old, maybe two, and they look like a very, very tiny basketball. They have a couple hundred cells, none of which could be remotely classified as a tissue, neural or otherwise. And fingers do have neural tissue, thats how you can move them and feel with them.
Errr...so how do you know what "shape" a soul is other than by looking at the body? If a human soul was in a cows body, how could you tell? Maybe cows don't bury their dead because their lack of thumbs makes holding the shovle kind of difficult. Besids which, not all people act the same either, are you saying that the ones who don't bury their dead or plan for their child's future don't have souls?
There is already a stem cell treatment in testing that involves using embryonic stem cells to regrow damaged spinal tissue in parapalegics. It works in rats and is being tested in humans. To my knowledge there have been no rejection problems. Also, adult humans don't have any stem cells that are capable of growing in to fully functional organs (with the exception of blood and skin, if you consider those organs). The level of pluripotency required to create that many cell types with that level of organizational complexity is not known to exist in any adult stem cell. On the other hand, it would be fairly easy to genetically modify an embryonic stem cell line to express your own cell surface proteins, thus avoiding potential rejection problems.
I'm going to assume that you're talking about physical laws rather than legislative ones. Your definition of human seems to be cultural rather than biological. I think that the Gparent used "human organism" in the sense of "member of the species Homo sapien". Someone raised by wolves would still be, biologically speaking, human. Wheather or not you want to extend so called "human rights" to such a creature is a value judgement, not a scientific one.
On the issue that an embryo is a human being, Human tissue cultures are generally not considered human despite the fact that they have a distinctly human genetic structure. Would you extend human rights to tissue cultures? Speaking as a biologist, in order to be a member of a particular species requires more than just the right genes, it also requires the proper organizational structure. Does an embryo have the proper organizational structure to be considered functionally human? It probably depends on the stage of development.