In his first comment Rockoon said: "This is what the left does. They de-humanize that which they want to restrict, steal, or deny rights to."

Note the last option can only really refer to fetuses and embryos.

I wasn't aware Rockoon was making a species argument and if so, it was completely irrelevant to the abortion sub-debate anyway.

Nope, you completely misread the thread. I already stated that wasn't my personal opinion.

Pace SuricouRaven's post, they'd have to be less intellectual than a tortoise.

There are probably a whole family of mites in my eyebrows that are ahead of even a one month old baby, never mind a 19 week fetus.

There is no scientific argument against abortion @19 weeks. Such arguments are faith-based -- that there is a soul and that abortion is the deprivation of life of that soul.

I have respect for that argument. I don't have respect for pseudoscientific arguments that a 19 week old fetus should have the same rights as a child.

Nope, I said nothing about anyone but Rockoon. Indeed, your other mistaken assumption is the same one he made: that by "human" I meant belonging to the species homo sapiens. I was actually talking more about the common understanding of human as 'being a person'.

BTW, a human corpse is another example of the species homo sapiens.

You seem pretty anti-abortionist. The article is telling me not to bother talking rationally with you.

True enough, pace Levitt & Dubner.

It would be a brave anthropologist who tried to figure out what traits were more likely to survive the 'threat' of abortion.

We're not talking about my belief system, we're talking about "scientific doctrine", or as I interpret it, scientific populism.

Also, severely mentally handicapped are perhaps 2 orders of magnitude ahead of 19 week old fetuses in terms of recognisable intelligence.

For what it's worth, I'm a centrist in my country (UK).

Science says fetuses don't have the brain capacity or structure to be even vaguely human until 20 weeks or so. Whether this is true or not is another matter.

Really?

That's just an indication of how much further we are from inner peace.

You're right, of course.

I was thinking the outside is more predictable, particularly if you keep opening the oven or someone invents a reliable monitor.

The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.

Likewise, hobs should have thermostats and work according to temperature rather than fixed power.

These things may well exist.

A smoke detector would be nice too but is unlikely to be reliable.

There are old Opera users who agree with your opinion. From what I can see, most don't. Then there's the vast majority of the potential market who don't.

You won't agree with this but with the limited resources from Opera Software and the web again diverging from WWW standards, there was no real alternative.

What all the moaning is about is the slow pace of development. Time lacking features (O15+) goes slower than time where those features were introduced (O10-O12).

What I greatly regret is the end of work on the Presto version of Opera Mobile. Having a tabbed browser that would run in 128MB is a great boon on mobile devices.

Willingness to employ sock/meat puppets seems to be the main one.

... Charles Farr is the worst. Maybe even worse than Blair.

He is the main driving force behind the Snooping Charter, both under Brown.. and resurrected under the Coalition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Remember, these were the powers he was pushing for whilst the NSA was reading our FB accounts and email, had compromised elliptic curve cryptography etc. GCHQ was recording our phone calls and even webcam images.