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How about the various form of twinning that occur, which in rare cases leads to one twin actually becoming part of the other, and needing to be removed so that the fully grown twin can live? That other twin (which cannot survive in any scenario) is human, and it is its own entity.

Here's another case: A woman who with a serious medical condition becomes pregnant. She cannot survive to bring the child to term, and the child will not survive. Can an abortion be performed then? Saving one life instead of killing both of them?

Also, keep in mind, especially in the second case, it is rarely a 100% certainty. There is always a small chance that both will live. Would you require that a woman with a 1% chance of surviving take that chance? Why is that your decision to make? Why is that anyone's choice but her own?

How about all of the embryos that for one reason or another are destroyed by the body itself? Should we be trying to protect those as well? Should we spend money on protecting the "unborn" instead of say, cancer research?

Those embryos are just as much "potential individuals" as all of the children that don't exist because not every fertile human is continually having sex.

I have a son who was born with birth defects that affected his brain in early development. I love my son dearly, and would gladly give my life to be able to go back and fix his problems so he doesn't have to go through life like that. The poor kids only 8 years old, but has been receiving 30 hours of special ed assistance for 5 years now and barely graduated 2nd grade. I would not wish that upon the most vile scum of the planet. Death would have been kinder.

The "right of the people" to keep murder weapons is archaic and backwards. We abolished slavery because it was unnecessary and wrong, and we should abolish gun ownership because it is unnecessary and wrong. Everyone likes to cite police response times as a factor in gun ownership but if the police did not have to worry about armed vigilante citizens they could go in with the knowledge that they are better-armed than whoever they might encounter and with no fear of being shot. Response times would improve and officer morale and safety would be increased a thousand times.

As far as I am concerned, there is no such thing as a legitimate gun trade.

An anonymous reader writes "HB407 in Utah would create a child-friendly designation for ISPs that block out a range of prohibited materials. Google, Yahoo, and others are fighting the bill, but Rep. Michael Morley says, 'I think it's a positive thing for those who are looking for a site that is dedicated to fighting pornography.'"

WASHINGTON, DC (N3) - American neo-Nazis gathered to celebrate and pray as yet another civil rights march descended on this ghetto-strewn city, home to the capitol of the United States, which still insists it is not a third world nation.

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Kadin2048 writes "According to an article on Wired's blog (via Schneier on Security), encrypted email provider Hushmail, of Vancouver, Canada, released 12 CDs of decrypted emails to authorities in response to a court order. The court order was a result of a U.S. investigation and a mutual assistance treaty between the U.S. and Canada. Although Hushmail uses OpenPGP and other strong cryptographic standards, they were able to turn over decrypted messages because one of their core products, a webmail system that does not require a Java applet on the client side, does its encryption on the server and requires a user to trust Hushmail with their decryption key's passphrase."

It all started when supporters of Intelligent Design tried to claim a religious precept should be held on the same level as a scientific theory when it comes to Evolution. From that, the Flying Spaghetti Monster was born, somewhat in jest but also to raise the point: There's no more scientific basis for intelligent design than there is for the idea an omniscient creature made of pasta created the universe.

Now, the existence of FSM will be debated, along with other religions, in a panel discussion titled, "Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody."

The panel will attempt to discuss religion in popular culture as well as answer several questions; What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?

For those in the area, the discussion will be held on Monday, November 19th in San Diego, California.

El Reg is reporting that Prince is still on the prowl, making the Internet safe from parodies of His Ridiculousness via DMCA takedown notices, now sanitizing the UK, where the DMCA has no legal basis. Guess he didn't like b3ta.com's contest to photoshop him as their "image challenge of the week".

Lawyers acting on behalf of Prince have sent out a flurry of US copyright infringement notifications to individual members of a popular UK website which encourages its community to create satirical images of well-known stars.

A number of users of b3ta.com have been slapped with DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notifications after posting images that poke fun at the pint-sized popstar's ongoing crusade to rid

the internet of unauthorised Prince material.

B3ta co-founder Rob Manuel told The Register that he was "surprised Prince's lawyers had bitten".

Someone should tell him that his 15 minutes of fame are long over (To put this into proper perspective, here's what Kevin Smith has to say about the guy)

We all know each iteration of Windows and Office demands more hardware than previous versions, and most of us are are familiar with Moore's Law, but how closely do Microsoft's increased demands match hardware improvements?

The guys at Xpnet research have charted the performance of each generation of Microsoft's OS and productivity suite against their hardware demands.

The results? It will be no surprise to anyone that hardware is not keeping up. Even on modern hardware, the Vista/Office 2007 combination is significantly more sluggish than its predecessors.

Medistem Laboratories, Inc. in collaboration with researchers from the University of Western Ontario, University of Alberta, and the Bio-Communications Research Institute, has published a paper describing a novel stem cell population derived from menstrual blood. The publication, entitled "Endometrial Regenerative Cells: A Novel Stem Cell Population" appeared in today's Journal of Translational Medicine.

"IBM's free Symphony desktop software has a good chance of becoming a hosted service that would challenge Google Apps, according to an IBM official.
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The suite, which let users create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, would eventually include live collaborative editing and online shared storage in the cloud, similar to the way Google positions its suite, Doug Heinzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration, said in an interview Nov. 9."

While some will be quick to wonder what this means for Google, here is more:

"For now, Heinzman said IBM isn't competing with Google Apps with Symphony because the company is not making money from it. Instead, Symphony, a core piece of IBM's Lotus collaboration software, is building volume. To date, some 250,000 users have downloaded the software on Microsoft (88 percent) and Linux (12 percent).

While IBM officials dislike the direct comparison, Heinzman's talk of cloud computing is another reason why it is hard not to compare Lotus Symphony desktop software, which users must currently download, to Google's Apps suite.

Both are free and both let users create documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

To put some distance between Symphony and Apps, Symphony beta 2 has been treated to the software developer's version of steroids and is 50 percent faster, thanks to a streamlining of the code. ...

Finally, Symphony will be released in 23 languages in the first quarter of 2008."

Further information at:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2214722,00.asp

Given that information, I can't help but wonder if IBM will this time around borrow more of what made Lotus SmartSuite an award-winner it its day, especially Lotus Approach. For an office suite to be well-rounded -- especially to small businesses on small budgets, and therefore out of reach of most of IBM's BUSINESS SALES PEOPLE -- end users need robust, but non-programmer's applications to just get work done. After all, SmartSuite, IIRC, was billed as "Lets You Get Work Done.", and other things, so any discerning home or small business users given the opportunity to compare, say, Base and Access to Lotus Approach would, IMNSHO, choose Approach. If Word Pro and Lotus Approach were supercharged with benefits of the past 5 years in various code (maybe sans too much heavy Java-Script or Java?), such as an ability to modify chart cell values by dragging chart elements (a feature in Excel), then 1-2-3 could have some teeth, too.

What SmartSuite apps have going for them is the SmartProperties in the "InfoBox". The box is non-modal, meaning that whether in 1-2-3, Approach, WordPro, Freelance Graphics, etc., the user has a WYSIWYG view of the worksheet, application or document in real time, without any bands of "XXXX" substituting for characters. Even in print preview mode, documents in Word Pro can be edited.

A further development in the leak of the Guantánamo Bay Camp Delta operations manual to the web is that shortly afterword Wikileaks.org became inaccessible. A blog report from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The man who once said, "there is no way that Vista will be a flop" has changed his mind and thinks M$ should abandon Vista.

Microsoft has extended the life of Windows XP because Vista has simply not shown any life in the market. We have to begin to ask ourselves if we are really looking at Windows Me/2007, destined to be a disdained flop. By all estimates the number of Vista installations hovers around the number of Macs in use.

Microsoft wants to be in the advertising business because Google is in the advertising business. Meanwhile, it can't do its real job. ... [M$ should] give up on the stupid variations and lower the price [Vista Ultimate, $99] ... scuttle the entire product ... Roll out Vista 2.0

I'm certainly not going to be a happy camper if I have to switch to a Mac or Linux system full-time, yet that is exactly where this scatterbrained company seems to be sending me.

Get yourself a Asus EEE a Dell GNU/Linux box or even a Mac, John, and join the free software party where everyone else is having fun and getting their work done.

oostevo writes "According to Wired, Hushmail, who claim that "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer" have given unencrypted email to investigators following a court order from a Canadian court in a steroid-related investigation.

In Hushmail's defense, however, it would seem that they were compelled to exploit a security vulnerability to steal user's passphrases and decrypt their mail. They also have been very frank in discussing the situation and their response [pdf link]."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai.html

An anonymous reader writes "Cosmos Magazine reports on a design for a lunar habitat that is 90 to 95 percent self-sufficient. The proposed habitat uses a closed-loop life support system that recycles and regenerates air, water, and food, reducing the need for costly supply trips. The north pole of the moon is chosen as a location because of its access to sunlight and useful resources. About 11 astronauts could live and work in the habitat for 2 to 3 years. The project would also help the environment on Earth with recycling and other sustainable practices." The designers say it could be 20 to 30 years before such a habitat could be up and running on the moon.