When drawing blood and getting covered in fecal matter is involved, I think it's not to be thought of as just "an alternative".

But that's me.

OK

No, and I gave you a fully rational explanation that, for all I harbor precisely 0 respect for BHO, the overarching concern is to restore the rule of law, not further debase it by answering Obama evil with Obama evil. Perhaps you've forgotten that, or aren't interested in rational discourse.

You can characterize behavior as cowardly, e.g. letting me under fire die. See "Saving Private Ryan".

By what unpartisan source, pray?

I think you misread my wholly sarcastic lifting of Jessup.

You really cannot procreate via sodomy. I'm not sure how you find this undeniable fact an object of fear any more than, say, sunrise.

I have no degree, but in 35 years I've never had to be selected from a pool of candidates. What's it like to have to compete for a job?

I worked my way through college at the school, building exotic computer systems for grad student research projects. I noticed one day that I was learning a lot more in the job than in the classes.

Now, 30 year later, and after 20 years in industry, I work at the same university, building electronics for telescopes. I suppose I could have gotten further with a degree, but not much further. At my performance reviews, I ask my boss to please not promote me to management.

It's NOT the kind of scooter you're talking about, like a Razer scooter or similar which don't put a big box right between your legs. That's what I meant, and I think it was pretty damned obvious.

Of course it's a scooter, technically, but it's not a scooter LIKE most scooters on the street today, okay? The box between the legs is a safety issue if you want to "step off and run" like you suggested.

Further, neither OP or TFA say how fast it is. The electric scooter I had went significantly faster than most people can just "step off and run". If this one goes that fast then good luck "stepping off and running" at 15 mph or more with a big box between your legs.

I think you just like arguing with me.

He started up the company about the time when jobs for web developers were pretty hard to come by. Almost anybody would have worked for him.

People went there because they were tired of MySpace and thought Facebook was somehow better.

There have been an awful lot of insane tech valuations in the last 10 or 15 years. It's hardly unique to Facebook.

That's all very noble and intellectual, but the simple fact is that in the real world, we all value different things to different extents. Money is the concrete, quantified representation of that value that we as a society have chosen to standardise.

You say that we don't want to be raising our children on stories full of sex and violence, and yet as you say yourself, sex and violence sell, so evidently lots of people do value those stories even if you don't or they're not valued as children's entertainment. In any case, I doubt most parents I know are planning to keep their kids safe from the evil that is Harry Potter as they grow up, and there's plenty of violence in those books.

I'm afraid you are imagining an idealised, deeply cultural world that doesn't exist even though you'd like it to, and then you are assigning the blame for its non-existence to the presence of mere economic niceties rather than the more fundamental cause, which is that the human condition just isn't as nice as you'd like it to be.

A genetic mutation resulting in illness is not a "genetic illness" unless the gene's host survives to reproduce. It doesn't require that the parents each pass on a recessive trait to activate the disease in the offspring, cosmic rays can cause it.

Perhaps you would be happier were I to use the terminology "previously non-heritable genetic disorder that is now heritable and incorporated into the human gene pool in general as a result of preventing the death of the host".

That seems a bit of semantic hair splitting, but the point is we routinely engage in technological intervention into these cases today, such as the SIRT1 gene that JDRF funded the discovery of, and which, prior to insulin treatment for T1D, would not have survived into a second generation, and was therefore a self-limiting mutation.

The argument isn't whether we are going to extend human life or not, or whether the resulting extensions are "natural" or not in terms of the population, and speaking to Travis Mansbridge's argument, it's too damn late to make that argument: we've already thrown a stick in the spokes of that wheel, and now it's only a matter of how many sticks and how many wheels, not a matter of "if we can".

I couldn't agree more. This is the thing that always winds me up about people who suggest that there is no evidence that copyright is working and the only way we can possibly tell if we'd do better without it is to completely scrap it and see what happens. If there are all these viable alternative models that are so much more promising as incentives to create and share new work, why aren't people already using them?

I think you are confusing "recessive genes", which I never specifically mentioned, with "unfavorably mutated genes".

How about a single gene mutation which would normally result in the child dying, but for which treatment exists, and which is now retained and propagated in the gene pool? For example, the mutations to the gene RNU4ATAC responsible for microcephalic osteodysplastic primoridal dwarfism type 1 (MOPD1).

Or how about the SIRT1 mutation, also a single gene mutation, which results in type 1 diabetes? Without treatment, this mutation, which can occur naturally, would ordinarily result in the death of the individual, rather than being passed on to future generations (given that dead individuals have a hard time breeding).

The fact is, we have already passed the point where technological intervention has disabled the feedback mechanism of death in multiple cases where a gene mutation would not be retained in the overall gene pool.

All we are arguing about now is how far we allow these efforts to go in preventing death, and not whether or not these efforts are effective, since they demonstrably are.

Yeah. With a 96% vote. Nothing fishy about that... not at all...

I understand what you are saying, and I don't disagree with you. But they still did do the animation, the soundtrack, etc. Lots of movies are made about "true stories" or not-so-true stories and legends and myths. They're still movies, and they still required artistic input to make them.

Like the recent adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing". I thought it was pretty inventive, even if the story has already been told a few million times.

If that's the best you've go then we're in a pretty good position really. If you've got to go digging that far back then you aren't terribly good at finding our faults. That much is certain.