I expect if you humans don't wipe each other out with your stupidity and wars, that the next 50 years will be quite an interesting time for science.

Well, obviously you aren't one of "us humans". On behalf of all of us mere humans, I apologize that you and your fellow supermen, our moral and intellectual betters, have to witness our incredible stupidity. We are grateful for your patience as we try to sort out our various problems. You, of course, are free from stupidity or error of any kind, and it would be our undeserved privilege if you would deign to drop but a few hints from your infinite well of knowledge upon us on the matter of how we are to make our science more interesting to you. Should we, perhaps, abandon all else and focus our energies and our limited minds in developing our replacements: artificial minds that would surpass us in intelligence, and be therefore more worthy of you time? Please tell us, oh master. Our primitive brains thirst for a glimpse of true infallibility!

Wait, you mean this book isn't satirical?

Well would you look at that. Radical environmentalism has gone full circle from wanting to give animals human rights to asking people to eat their own beloved pets. I loathe to see the day one of these people comes to power. Who knows when they'll start to take A Modest Proposal seriously. Save the Planet, Eat Your Children!

What you said makes absolutely no sense. How exactly does being part of a small list make you "ain't all that big"? How about, for example, a small list of billionaires, will you scoff at them, too?

If a language is being used for important things by big, credible, and important organizations, that fact is enough to refute the claim that "nothing important is done in Ruby or Python."

From Jonathan Coulton's song, "The Future Soon":

The people my actions are going to affect (both in the present and the future generations) will themselves die eventually. The whole universe will inevitably end with either heat death or a Big Crunch, rendering all personal actions futile. So, in a purely materialistic and cosmological point of view, do the effects of my actions really matter? No, it doesn't.

A Buddhist can look at pictures of decomposing remains and conclude that he must not be worldly. Yet he can also (if he chooses to) look a the same pictures and conclude that nothing hinders him from being worldly, for the worldly and the non-worldly alike will end up rotting in the end; one might as well do as he wishes, for everything is an illusion (ah, that inspired Buddhist phrase!).

For the record, I do not subscribe to the cynical philosophy I tried to illustrate in the above paragraphs. But given that we do not live in a perfect Christian society where such a philosophy would not exist, environmentalists will have to look for better arguments than "it's nice to be nice to other people" and "you can't take your SUV with you when you die". Because in a doomed, absurd, or illusory universe of atheists or Buddhists, "clinging to the first rationalization that allows people to keep doing what they want" is a perfectly rational thing to do.

Exactly. But just as desensitization to Action X does not make Action X less immoral, neither does it make Action X immoral. You consider cow-eating as equally monstrous as murder for your own reasons (which I'd charitably assume are not *purely* sentimental), reasons that may not apply to us.

Instead of appealing to sentimentalism, try to realize that this is matter of what people hold as sacred (e.g. human life and, in your case, farm animals) and what they do not (e.g. tasty, tasty pig and, in the case of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, humans), and realize that it will be impossible to change people's minds unless you understand where their priorities lie. In my case, as of this very minute, having a nice bacon cheeseburger is high on my priority list. See you guys later!

Question:

is zero part of the natural numbers?

Answer:

No. Zero is a dwarf number.

*rimshot*

Rights are given to individual humans, not to their component parts. The sperm and the egg that formed me didn't individually have rights in the same sense that my liver does not have rights. The fact that there was no individual living thing that could possibly be called *Me* until the moment of my conception invalidates your reasoning altogether.

The AC's point can be restated thus: There was a point in time where a living thing already existed with my DNA. It would grow and develop my nervous system and all my other organs. It would be born and be given my name. All evidence suggests that this newly-formed embryo was me and no one else. It wasn't my mother nor my father. It wasn't some subhuman Other. It was Me. If I have intrinsic human rights*, like the right to life, I must (by the definitions of intrinsic and human) have had those right for as long as I existed, i.e. since I was a mere human embryo.

--
*Reading the comments here, it would seem that the assumption of intrinsic human rights is not held by everyone on Slashdot. It seems for some of us human rights are not given to a human being unless some arbitrary requirement assigned by the Enlightened is accomplished, like being an Aryan, or something... oh wait, was that the Nazis? Sorry, I can't see clearly due to all the murdered subhuman punishments lying around.

...a world where garbage vaporizes can run amok, producing more energy than is put into them thereby destroying the universe. Screw your science, that's the world I want to live in.

But not for long, I take it?