NEWS: topics to ponder

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 18:32:06 MDT


Boy, if one doesn't look at the news for a day or two, you can
find all sorts of things going on...

Asteroids passing within 120,000 km:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/1916206

Stanislaw Lem's "Memiors Found in a Bathtub":
http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/152210

Digital cameras in your cell phone:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/1222243

Robots escaping from labs -- captured in parking lot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/20/0226250

Supreme Court Bars Executing the Mentally Retarded
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/national/20CND-DEAT.html
[or "mentally retarded" are not human !?!]
(Raises some very interesting issues -- you can put down
a dog that kills a human but you can put down a "sub"-human
human that kills a human...) [Don't crucify me on the
PC perspectives -- I'm simply raising the point for
consideration since the boundaries in the future may
become much less clear than we think they are now.]

There are some more things, like the EU looks to be banning
the sales of cosmetics that are tested on animals -- seems
to raise an interesting problem -- aren't humans animals?
If you can't test them on animals and you can't test them
on humans, *how* do you test such products?

Oh well, back to the salt mines.
Robert



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