Encouraged by the very civil conversation in my previous post, here's another thing that's been puzzling me.
When a couple has a baby, they refer to it as "our child". This seems like almost too obvious a point to make. The law recognises that it's their joint responsibility - to take one example, if there's a custody battle, both parents are potential custodians.
Yet a pro-choice supporter argues for "a woman's right to choose", thereby excluding the contributor of 50% of the genetic material from the decision. So in their thinking, at some point between conception and birth, control of the child has passed from being exclusively the mother's to being both parents'.
My questions are: when does that happen? And why?
Maybe the analogy is inexact but if control of something of value passes from one person to another, it must be either as the result of a payment, or as a free gift.
It seems to me that once conception has happened, the father has done all that he's ever going to do in terms of contributing to the creation of what may eventually be called "their baby". The mother hosts the sperm and egg, carries the foetus to term and gives birth in pain. The father does nothing else until that point (if, for the sake of argument, you leave out the giving of moral support and shopping for food cravings :-).
So I can't see any extra contribution that he makes, in pro-life thinking, to turn the child from something under the mother's control (the foetus) to something under their joint control (a born baby). So it's not the result of a payment.
Yet it's not also a free gift, because if it were, it could also be not given - and yet the law does not allow mothers to say to fathers, upon the birth of a child, "Sorry, I'm keeping this one for myself, and you have no redress". (Or does it?)
Surely, therefore, the father's interest in the result of their union is as strong at conception as it is just after birth, and should be recognised as such? So abortion should be a joint decision, and pro-choice advocates should be arguing for "the mother's and father's right to choose"?
(For the sake of argument, let's look at the principle, and leave aside the practical matter of what would happen if they disagreed.)
I just attended a demonstration in London to mark the 40th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, which made abortion legal in the UK. While there, the following genuine question occurred to me, as I've never seen the issue addressed in these terms. As most of the people I know are against abortion, I don't have anyone to help me answer it, so I'm hoping that people reading this can.
Everyone involved in the debate, on either side, was a foetus once. So, if you are someone who believes that abortion should be solely a woman's free choice, would you have supported your mother's right to terminate you?
If yes, isn't that a scary thought?
If no, isn't your position inconsistent?
Thanks to anyone who can help me here. Let's keep it civil, people.
According to HP (via O'Reilly Radar), "Web pages comprise 48% of printouts on home printers; word processing documents run a distant second - the reverse of just a few years ago".
Do we have anyone whose responsibility is printing? I seem to recall we didn't for ages, and it was considered "here be dragons" code... It's not great in Firefox 2; I don't know if it's better in 3. <blog style="asa">What are people's experiences of Firefox printing, on branch and trunk?</blog>
Milestone bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 400,000 was filed on 2007-10-16 at 05:38 ZST by long-time Mozilla contributor 'timeless'. Again. Of all the entrants in the 400,000 bug sweepstake, the person who guessed closest was Christian Schmidt, who guessed 2007-10-17 20:45 - over a period of nearly 6 months, he was only 1 day, 15 hours, 7 minutes out!
The runners-up were Wil Clouser (2 days, 8 hours, 22 minutes out) and Rob Marshall (2 days, 20 hours, 20 minutes out).
There were 47 entries. Of those, one person sent in an entry "2001-01-01 01:23:45 bugzilla-id@example.com", and three people entered dates only a few days in the future! Christian's entry was chronologically number 28; so there were about even numbers of people over and under-estimating.
I haven't got my act together to sort out the swag yet; I'll do that ASAP.
Lastly, because someone always gets this wrong: there is no correlation between the number of bugs in your bug system and the bugginess of your current product. If that were true, then every product we've ever made would have been getting steadily buggier since its inception, which is clearly nonsense. The number of bugs in a bug system is a function of the amount of time it's been running (9 years), the number of products tracked (currently 5 major ones, with many other smaller ones and components), and the size, vibrancy and tenacity of the bug-filing community. So, everyone who's ever filed a useful bug should give themselves a pat on the back.
I was helping a friend with a PowerPoint presentation the other day, and his embedded sounds just absolutely refused to play. No feedback or error messages, just failure. He needed it ASAP, and asked me to look at it. I tested the sound system - first by using the Control Panel, which worked, and then by trying to play an MP3 in Windows Media Player 11. It popped up a dialog telling me that I needed to confirm I had genuine Windows before it would play anything. Fortunately, we did have an available Internet connection, so could go through the process - but what would have happened if we hadn't?
Yet another case of the "advantage" in Genuine Advantage not being the advantage of the user.