Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Doesn't matter (Score 1) 207

Not necessarily to contradict your point, but your analogy does not paint the picture that I interpreted from your second paragraph. Consider this;

I certainly would not want harm to befall my daughter, but like me, she still chose to be an organ donor. If the worst should happen, our loss might still bring a benefit to others. The pain aside, if she was killed in a say, a car accident, I would be fine allowing her organs to be taken to save someone else. As I'm sure the recipient might feel empathy for our loss, they would be happy to accept the life saving gift. Now say instead, they murdered her to take her organs to help the dying patient. Is it ok then?

Heartless as it may seem, this becomes a grey area. Because of course I'm opposed to the murder of my child, but I'm not opposed to organ donation. As I'm sure the recipient is happy to accept a donated organ, but a stolen via murder organ presents a dim light on it. Obviously if you are opposed to organ donors all together, this becomes a moot point; but if the act is just, then we are really talking about the circumstances involved.

Now I hope to never have to face this choice, but if the latter was true, would I still donate the organs? She is already dead, and any legal (or not) actions I take afterward will still not change that fact. So at what point is it a principle of ill gotten gains and as such ok to refuse the possibility to save someone's life? On the other hand knowing that in a way, I was supporting the "ends" of the horrid means, might not be a point I would be acceptable with. I'm sure the recipient might have to choose the line they are willing to live with as well.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, that the issues does not hinge on a didactic set of options. There is of complexity of issues that are involved when considering the morality of ESC. Most people are not going to agree to murder people who are already living their lives (children or not), but the potential for life is the gray area. I'm sure the main contention is at the point of where life begins, as such, it becomes "killing a cell" to "murdering a baby." As a meat eater might be picky as to what types of meat they eat, and what is involved before it's given to them; to a vegetarian, there is only one choice.

Supercomputing

Submission + - Intel Releases Superchip with 80 Cores!

Jason Jacobs writes: "Just when you thought Dual Core was cool Intel has decided to leap lightyears ahead in the CPU arena and will reveal details on Monday of a processor capable of more than a thousand billion calculations per second. Intel Corporation researchers have developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip not much larger than the size of a finger nail while using less electricity than most of today's home appliances. This is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed at delivering Teraflop — or trillions of calculations per second — performance for future PCs and servers. Technical details of the Teraflop research chip will be presented at the annual Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco. Intel Super CPU"
Censorship

Submission + - Eve-Online: Developers cheat in game to win!

An anonymous reader writes: Eve-Online, known as the largest space combat MMOG, finds itself on the verge of imploding due to in game cheating by Eve developers themselves. Recently one of the Eve developers came clean about spawning extremely rare items for the use of himself and his corp. His corporation "Band Of Brothers", has been using these items and exploiting other game bugs to gain a large advantage over paying customers. Instead of dealing with the problem, CCP the creators of Eve-Online move to sweep all thoughts of wrong doing under the carpet http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =423 and have been locking all forum posts on the topic and banning the same players that pay their wages. Where else but in Eve-Online can you pay for the privilege to be censored for reporting cheating by the developers themselves. Hopefully CCP will come to their senses to save a good game before far too many people cancel their accounts.
Communications

Submission + - Sign Language via Cell Phone

QuatumCrypto writes: "A project is underway at the University of Washington to enable real time sign language communication via the cell phone. Because of the low bandwidth wireless cell phone network, a new compression scheme is necessary to capture only the bare essential components of signing to minimize data transfer. Although txt messaging is a viable alternative for everyone, like speech, signing is much faster and convenient form of communication."
The Internet

Submission + - Net neutrality in Canada now in serious risk.

Oshawapilot writes: "A editorial piece in todays Toronto Star newspaper points towards some disturbing movements on the Net Neutrality front in Canada.

With a Minister Of Industry making such troubling statements as "[Maxime] Bernier believes that consumers are best served by giving the dominant telecom companies maximum regulatory freedom" along with several questionable decisions on the Internet front, one must wonder if this government minister either fails to grasp what he is dealing with, or is in the pockets of big-telecom in Canada.

With 84% of the internet connections in Canada being controlled by only a few companies, this should concern Canadians, and be a wakeup call to all those who concern themselves with Net Neutrality.

With some ISP's in Canada already subjecting their customers to content or application discrimination, is a full blown attack on Net Neutrality that far away on this side of the border?

Does the government care? Or even understand?"
OS X

The Prospects For Virtualizing OS X 344

seriouslywtf writes in with a look at the current state of the question: will people eventually be able to run Mac OS X in a virtual machine, either on the Mac or under Windows? Ars Technica has articles outlining the positions of two VM vendors, Parallels and VMWare. Both have told Ars unequivocally that they won't enable users to virtualize OS X until Apple explicitly gives them the thumbs up. First, Parallels: "'We won't enable this kind of functionality until Apple gives their blessing for a few reasons,' Rudolph told Ars. 'First, we're concerned about our users — we are never going to encourage illegal activity that could open our users up to compromised machines or any sort of legal action. This is the same reason why we always insist on using a fully-licensed, genuine copy of Windows in a virtual machine — it's safer, more stable, fully supported, and completely legal.'" And from VMWare: "'We're very interested in running Mac OS X in a virtual machine because it opens up a ton of interesting use cases, but until Apple changes its licensing policy, we prefer to not speculate about running Mac OS X in a virtualized environment,' Krishnamurti added."
Math

Submission + - Short proof of the four color theorem?

easyEmu writes: Today a mathematics paper http://arxiv.org/math.GM/0702261 claiming to be a short theoretic proof of the four color theorem appeared on the arxiv. Such papers appear on the arxiv about once every three months by non-mathematicians who are quacks. According to other papers under this latest author's name, Yanyou Qiao has collaborated with other mathematicians, one of whom I know is very respected in his field of research. Could this be the long awaited arrival of a simple proof, in this case eight pages, of the famous four color theorem, or simply another attempt with a fatal flaw?
Nintendo

Entire Twilight Princess Script Available Online 54

1up notes, briefly, an enormous present for any dedicated Zelda fan that hasn't been able to work through Twilight Princess yet. The extremely cogent 'Mgoblue201' has uploaded a massive text file to GameFAQs, with the entire script of the game available to read. The author means business: he has jotted down every line of dialogue in the game, including the ones where you as a player try to do something nonsensical, or when you do something out of the ordinary. Mgoblue also offers a good deal of interstitial text to connect the various scenes. Here is some of his work from the very first scene of the game: "FADO: Hey hey, where are you goin' without Epona? Hurry on up an' bring her with you, bud. [Link rushes through the shadowy coat of the forest, which parts ways to let in the path to the springs, where he finds Ilia bathing Epona in the eerie glow of the twilight]" At the end of the document he looks at some of the apparent inconsistencies between the Zelda games, and attempts to make sense of the fractured 'Hero of Time' timeline. If you want to find out how the game ends, or don't understand something you breezed past, Mgoblue has you covered.
Announcements

Submission + - call for help mapping game genre space

pointafew writes: Researchers at USC, Stanford, and Williams are using classical psychological and recent machine learning techniques to produce a mental map of game genres. Your expertise is needed to help assess the relative similarity of games, particularly for some of the less popular titles (the range of titles is expanding as more people add data).
The Media

Submission + - Yahoo! India steals content from blogs

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo! India, an Indian subsidiary of Yahoo! Corporation launched a new Malayalam (Indian Language) Portal recently. While browsing through the contents, couple of Malayalam bloggers were shocked to find their published content (blogs that were registered under Creative Common Licensing rights) were smoothly lifted and placed on Yahoo! India's portal. Obviously, the bloggers were never contacted before this violation. A Malayalam recipe blog by blogger 'Surgayathri' had to suffer the major violation even though her blog is registered under Creative Common License. Read more here: http://copyrightviolations.blogspot.com/
Software

Submission + - Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 5x coverage

An anonymous reader writes: This past weekend saw the fifth annual Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles. Press coverage was a little better this year than in previous years: LXer has day 1 and day 2 individual coverage; The Jem Report has a writeup on the women in open source mini-conference and a summary of the whole weekend; the Haiku guys wrote a brief commentary on their experiences at SCALE 5x, as did event speakers Celeste Lyn Paul and Dru Lavigne.
The Almighty Buck

California Balks At Internet Sales Tax 268

bob_calder writes "California has walked away from $2 billion a year in revenue by declining to get on board with a group working to standardize tax rates so a national tax on Internet sales could eventually be implemented by Congress. Supporters of the tax think they still have a chance in New York, Texas, and Florida. At the moment the largest states pursuing the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative are New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. California didn't want to give up its autonomy in setting taxes to a coalition of smaller states."
The Internet

Submission + - Groupthink in Digg: A Suggested Solution

Bob Caswell writes: "Think digg doesn't have a severe case of groupthink? And article on the subject, was 'groupthinked' (i.e. buried) off the home page within four minutes of having enough diggs to make it there. Bottom line: diggers don't like articles on digg and groupthink, even if offering a solution to the problem... http://www.computers.net/2007/02/groupthink_in_d.h tml"

Slashdot Top Deals

Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.

Working...