Aileron

I'd kill the clone if anybody cloned me.

I don't get why homosexuality compaires with race but not with polygamy. I mean, both gay marriage and polygamy involve marriage by definition, racial rights do not. Gay marriage and polygamy are actions that are practiced, race is just genetics. Gays and polygamists are both considered to be dissidents, and while many races were victoms of a cornucopia of cruelties, no one ever really considered them dissidents. The ONLY comparison between gays and races, is something that is forced by liberals, who assume that gays are the next civil rights movement. The arguement requires the homosexual movement to be successfull in the future. Your justification of gay marriage involves compairing it to civil rights movements, but instead of proving that homosexuals are in fact a civil rights movement, you assume it and assert it, using the !@#$%^&*umtion that it will one day be justified to justify it. In the black civil rights movement, whites never gave blacks any rights. The blacks fought tooth and nail and in the end took the rights they deserved. They fought society until society gave in. Gays on the other hand don't take nearly the same approach. While you might see an occasional homosexual protest, the gay movement is mostly composed of misguided straight people who pity gays. Not only that, but instead of creating their own movement, they follow in the wake of the true civil rights movements, and only make moves that were done before in other movements so as to make it easier. Blacks and women deserve rights because they are storng enough to take them. Gays are not.

Well, lets put homosexuals aside for a moment. We have people out in Utah who want to marry ten wives, but polyphany is illegal. When is Utah going to respect a man's right to mentally abuse and marry 15 seperate teenage girls? Why should we accept homosexuality and not polyphany?

I know...its weird...every time one of these people get on my case, I must create a post about, even though I know they are whiny noobs. The only sucky part is that when you try to argue back, they end up challenging you to a duel, which is exactly what they want because that forces you to play their tactics.

erm...try to keep religion out of these forums plz...its the only issue that can piss people off faster than politics.

....I didn't say these things weren't addressed...most of the time they are. All I'm !@#$%^&*erting is that lameness is behavior like that, as opposed to vulching or using a burst in a tight space.

I say lameness exists, but is overused by players with huge egos who couldn't find someone to duel with so they go to pub expecting everyone else to duel. Lameness exists however, because there are some things some players do that is downright despicable, should be illegal, and usually are...some examples: Turning on anti-warp in the center of a flagging zone so that the other team can't attach Using the ball to kill somebody who is afk in a safety zone teamkilling intentionally for w/l ratio Staying in a safety zone, and using either a friend on a smurf name or a second computer, piloting a second ship that would fly to the safe and let the other player kill him. Basically, things like that are lame. Everything else is fair game.

yeah, that's kinda the idea...hence, I can't get rid of the rock that easily

Well, as someone pointed out recently, there hasn't been much in the way of subspace politics in a while. So, I'll start this thread and see what happens... What is your opinion on lameness? What is it? How horrible is it to you? etc.

First off, the way cloning works requires that we destroy an existing egg, so cloners sacrifice a new combination for an existing one. There is no advantage to having two of the same person when you could have two completely seperate people. Also, though this may be a technical issue at the moment, your age is a part of your DNA, due to errors occuring when your DNA spliting off to make proteins, then reforming again. Repeat 90 billion times and errors start popping up. The clone, will start off with DNA that is the same age as the donor. Thus, if you clone a 40 year old man, the clone will be biologically 58 when he reaches 18. Its just a useless science.

Don't get me wrong, I'd say the cause of reducing pollution worldwide is its own justification regardless. However, the prospect of creating yet another international body that isn't accountable to anybody literally scares me.

Monte, no way in heck... Genetic manipulation will just make domesticated animals slower, stupider, more docile, and bigger. Generally, the more profitable the animal, the less capable it is of survivng in the wild. A genetically manipulated cow in the wild will likely get killed FASTER than a regular cow. Take the example of a stairwell. No matter how many floors you go down, you won't reach the roof. Genetic manipulation will simply take animals in the opposite direction they need to go to survive in the wild and take over ecosystems.

Sigh... The problem with the Kyoto treaty is that member nations give economic strings to some international body. The name of the package says pollution controll, and that is a very pretty !@#$%^&*le, but Kyoto is really about economic controll. It would make every nation have to make their economy jump through hoops for yet another corrupt international body that will invariently be dominated by somebody. What if out of a combination of pity and benefit of doubt that North Korea was elected head of this thing? They would threaten to make the industrial emmissions requirement .0000001% for any nation that didn't give them a billion dollars per year and turn a blind eye to however many nukes they were making. What if two nations had invented two seperate devices that limited pollution, which one would be implimented? Why, the one whose nation had power in Kyoto and forced everyone else to buy their patron machinery. Imagine if Kyoto were in place during Operation Iraqi Freedom. If Europe ran the organization in charge of enforcing Kyoto, they could have and would have given the US tighter restrictions and severly hurt the US economy for a difference of opinion. If instead the US was the dominant force of Kyoto, we could have forced France to join the war by giving them tighter pollution controlls if they didn't. We have too many means of economic control as it is...we don't need another one.

BTW, the rock is cursed.

*Moderator warning: Try to avoid the personal insults and respect the difference of opinion. This isn't the lounge.* Dav, communicating via internet and pointing out how humans have supposedly destroyed our environment contradicts itself. Tarzan might be able to pull an arguement on those lines, but... Genetic manipulation is about manipulating nature, which really isn't wrong, people and even animals have to do it to survive. Genetic manipulation of near extinct species doesn't really make sense...you can't manipulate nature to preserve it. Genetic manipulation of domesticates is acceptible. The species that we farm today are already unnatural from thousands of years of breeding. Non-genetically manipulated corn is just as unnatrual as genetically manipulated stuff. That case with the seed being spread on a farmer's field and the gene owner suing him for it isn't really a genetic issue. It is due to a fault in either our legal system for creating the injustice or our media for presenting only part of the information to the public. The question of gene ownership is a legal and economic issue. The lawyers and accountants will probably find a way to screw everyone else, so it doesn't matter what should be done.

.......

Hey, genetic manipulation has its benefits too...how many of you eat food? If you have ever eaten something in your life, you have probably eaten a plant or animal that several millenia ago was bred and manipulated from varities found in nature. I mean, just look at a modern cow or sheep and ask yourself if such an animal would survive in nature. They would most certainly not, the species were manipulated over the centuries to what they are today. Look at an ear of corn and see how the seeds stay on the cob rather than fall on the ground and scatter...that's a product of genetic tampering folks. The "tragic unforseen and irreversible consequences" of this manipulation has brought mankind out of the paleolithic era. If it wasn't for manipulating life, its likely none of us would even be around today. Breeding humans is wrong, but breeding plants and animals has always been regarded as acceptible. Since the genetic manipulation is very similar to breeding, I'd say it should follow the same guidlines, don't map the human genome, but feel free to do whatever you want to the plants and animals.

We are trying to avoid loss of life here, not responsibility. Its better that 9 people die on our watch then to have 10 people die on Hussein's. Our notion of self-righteousness will just have to suffer. I doubt that the short term casualties were higher for the war than would have been otherwise. Keep in mind that the kurds were fighting their rebellion the whole time with only slight support from foreigners. In any case, the long term casualties are going to be much lower. The current insurgency will eventually die down within a few years, but if we left him alone Hussein would have been around for decades, and after that we would have had his sons taking over...one of whom mind you took random people of the street and had them tortured to death for his own sadistic amusement. You are right in that we should have went in long ago, but we can't change the past. Bush couldn't turn the clock back a few decades and remove the Baathist regime in the 80s, and if sooner is better in this case, then while the 2000s wasn't the best time, its better than the 2020s or 2040s.

okay, its a wierd indestructible black rock that I can't seem to get rid of, and if its stolen, it just rematerialises back in my pocket.

You just did! You rationalized away the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Hussein's regime!

I was commenting upon the comments made, not the ship which makes sense to be bigger anyways. One last item to add to my inventory: Strange black rock

Yes, action should be held off as the last resort, but we were beyond that point. Hussein frankly could not bend as far as we needed him to.

But after WWII was over it shifted back into the immoral status. So, really its one constant view...city bombing is immoral, only excusable if you are caught in a really really ugly war. I mean, in WWII, nobody cared if their actions were moral, they just wanted their country to be around tomorrrow. Really though, morality doesn't change, just our view of it. If between now and the time this science is perfected our view of this issue changes, we should let whoever is around at that time decide. We have moral issues of our time to work out...let our children solve the moral issues of their time.

That's not really an important point given his objectives. He just wanted to show that appeasement in and of itself is wrong. Besides, the US was involved before the declaration of war. Americans unofficially fought in the civil war in Spain and gave allies lots of weapons. That Iraq was contained is a rationalization. It still requires that we turn a blind eye to the atrocities that occured inside the Iraq border.

Actually, one can trust both scientists and government with this. They were trusted with the atomic bomb and for what its worth the world is still in one piece. What you meant to say was the corporations and very rich people can't be trusted with this technology. Market forces are usually stronger than regulations...people might do illegal things for money, but nobody will do something that is both immoral in their eyes and causes them to lose money. The only problem is that there are few ways to controll market forces.