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Why is anyone buying when it is out of copyright in parts of Oceania?

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au...

It's "losers" not "lusers". Internet dictionaries are free.

You mean, like the Hacker's Dictionary? "Luser" is in there. Even with that spelling.

"Luser" is ancient late-70s/early 80s computer jargon, an insulting word for the computer users, a portmanteau of loser and user. (Not acknowledged in the jargon files, but it originally stems from an anti-drug ad from the late '70s that got played ad nauseum as a public-service announcement on the radio, with the refrain "users are losers and losers are users.")

Here's a blog post on the University of Adelaide's web site linking to the browserprint.info URL, if there's any doubt...

https://www.adelaide.edu.au/ne...

South Australia is very progressive on a lot of issues. In terms of a addressing baseload power issues SA has very high reserves of geo-thermal power in the form of Hot Dry Rock however the issue of funding the cable infrastructure to make that energy available as electricity has been something they have been trying to solve for a long time. From my understanding they want to establish alluminium smelters powered by geothermal energy to make it feasible.

You're probably right about them asking for problems by taking those risks however I think this is something they are aware of and endure as one of the issues they encounter in taking a leadership role.

More to the point,

1) Someone surrendered under an EAW, in order to be extradited to a third state, requires the consent of both states taking part in the EAW request, rather than just one. Being extradited under an EAW only further complicates any attempts at third party extradition.

2) Sweden is one of the few countries whose extradition treaty with the US flatly bans extradition for military or intelligence crimes, and has a consequence long been a place to where defectors and spies flee (the most famous being Edward Lee Howard, the greatest CIA defector during the Cold War period)

3) Sweden was so mad at the US extradition program ignoring their ban on use of their airspace for extradition flights that they caused a diplomatic rift with the US in 2006 by disguising their special forces soldiers as airport workers to sneak aboard a suspected extradition plane. And how do we know about this event? Why, Wikileaks of course!

4) Sweden has the world's strongest whistleblower protections, so the point where it's not even legal to look for the source of a leak, let alone prosecute them for it.

5) While no country's judicial system is completely devoid of controversial cases (Sweden included), as a whole Sweden has one of the world's highest rankings on judicial fairness according to the peer-reviewed World Justice Project. They actually use it as an example of fairness when discussing how other countries can improve.

6) Assange himself thought so much of Sweden that he was applying for a residence permit there and repeatedly called Sweden his "shield". Funny how Sweden instantly became evil US lackeys the instant he was investigated for rape, isn't it?

Corporations aren't people. You can realize this when you think that a corporation is not allowed the right to vote. Corporate personhood is just a legal shorthand for talking about the collective rights of the individuals that make up the corporation. The concept has been perverted by activists who hear the word 'personhood' and think they understand what it means without even bothering to read wikipedia. These are the people of which Churchill said, "the best argument against democracy is a 2 minute conversation with the typical voter." They can't think to educate themselves, they'd prefer to be outraged.

And when these people do educate themselves, they will find that "Persons also are divided by the law into either natural persons, or artificial. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us: artificial are such as created and devised by human laws for the purposed of society and government; which are called corporations or bodies politic." In other words, corporations have been people in the eyes of American law since before the revolution.

If you are truly curious, I'd suggest you read the 15th Chapter of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was going to quote parts, but honestly it would give too partial a picture. 7th Day Adventists are basically a resurgence of Nazarenes/Ebionites who were marginalized as heretics even before the great purges of the ecumenical councils.

"Marmosets are usually fed a basic commercial ration and provided with a variety of supplements such as fruit, vegetables, nuts, eggs, jelly, cheese, cat chow and yoghurt." - The common marmoset

From which of those do you suggest fat was removed in the 70 and "replaced with huge amounts of sugar"?

As soon as I heard of that instance of Amazon removing 1984 from Kindles

... That's what got me into what I call future-proofing my books. (Incidentally, 1984 is available fron the .au Gutenberg site, or in a more e-reader-friendly form here since it is only the US copyright pirates/trolls that have a problem with that.)

Although my Sony reader is "authorised" to accept Adept DRM epubs, I strip DRM from everything before importing it with Calibre.

Link to the source, not some asshole plagiarising it to get ad hits.

The "paraphrase" in the summary is so loose, I'm not sure it qualifies. What Fitzgerald actually wrote was

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

This comes from the third paragraph of the short story "The Rich Boy", which you can read online here:
The Rich Boy.

So what government types are compatible with libertarianism? All the libertarians on Slashdot seem to bash democracy (two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner - fucking wolves always vote lasagna).

Democracy - in its unperverted, non-ochlocratic form, is compatible with libertarianism. Or, to simplify for your benefit: "mob rule" is not legitimate democracy, "mob rule" is democracy collapsing under its own weight and turning into a many-headed tyranny. Any legitimate, lasting democracy requires the rule of law - that is, the fundamental acknowledgement & protection of minority rights from the "tyranny of the majority". Any society which says it's okay for the wolves to vote away the life of the sheep does not acknowledge the fundamental rights of its citizens, and does not acknowledge one of the fundamental guiding principles of most modern western democracies: that government exists to protect the rights of its citizens.

If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.

(Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy In America." Book 1, Chapter 15 - source)

If we can agree that an ochlocracy is a fundamentally immoral perversion of democracy, then I will happily stipulate that pretty much any other form of democracy *is* compatible with libertarianism.

You are stating that monarchy is incompatible with libertarianism, even if the "head of the government" has no power (theoretically infinite power, but no vetos in 300+ years (though that's second hand and not verified, but fits with the amount of power they currently wield).

Yes, I am stating that monarchy is incompatible with libertarianism. In the UK form, the monarch (currently Queen Elizabeth) is the head of state; the prime minister (currently David Cameron) is appointed by the monarch and serves as the head of the government. The monarch's powers are limited by both constitution and tradition, which is a fine and noble thing - but the monarchy is hereditary, which means it is unelected, unelectable, and completely outside of any democratic process expressing the will of the people. It is, therefore, incompatible with libertarianism. It doesn't matter if "no monarch has abused their power in hundreds of years" - any system which requires the recognition of a god-given and/or hereditary right to rule isn't compatible with classical liberal philosophy or its philosophical descendants, and libertarianism is most definitely one of those.

Go read up on the emergence of classical liberalism during the Age of Enlightenment. I bet you'll be absolutely SHOCKED at what you find there. Learn about how Enlightenment era philosophers rejected the divine right of kings, and hereditary privilege. About how they believed in negative rights (that is, restrictions on what other people & government are allowed to do to you), rather than positive rights (that is, the current "social liberal" concept that everybody has rights to be provided with things by their society).

If you're even remotely intellectually honest, you'll admit to yourself that you know nothing about these things if you're asking such obtuse questions, and need to remedy your ignorance through study and research. Once you've remedied that inadequacy, you may still have criticisms of liberal and libertarian philosophy, but at least they won't be these buffoonish misrepresentations and distortions, and

I will add a tidbit that I picked up last night shortly after I wrote the above. You mentioned that since the ground state (not your exact words) of the vacuum is "defined" to be 0, then the energy must be negative. I understand that logic. The problem is that the premise is incorrect. Planck's equations, as refined by Einstein et al. in 1913, show that in fact the vacuum energy of a quantum system must always be above its "potential well", or the theoretical zero state. Thus, "zero-point" energy is NOT "defined" to be zero, but in fact is always positive, and the Casimir effect then, even using your own framework, is not "negative energy". [Jane Q. Public]

If you really did "understand that logic" then you wouldn't have written all that nonsense about vectors. Instead, you'd have skipped immediately to this point, which now implicitly acknowledges that the Casimir vacuum has lower energy than the standard vacuum.

Remember that spacetime is curved near large masses, but ~flat far away from masses where only vacuum energy is present. This implies that vacuum energy exerts ~zero gravitational force, so its stress-energy tensor must be ~zero, so the standard vacuum has ~zero energy.

If you're interested in the details, John Baez summarizes several vacuum energy density calculations. A naive quantum field theory calculation yields a vacuum energy with a mass density of +10^96 kg/m^3, which would've ripped the universe apart [1] before galaxies could form. On the other hand, general relativity and observations of our nearly-flat universe place a more rigorous upper bound at +10^(-26) kg/m^3. It seems like [2] gravity renormalizes vacuum energy to zero, within about one part in 10^122. Even though renormalization was harshly criticized at first, it's necessary to explain why galaxies (and thus humans!) exist.

Here's another, purely quantum-based, argument [3] for renormalization:

"As there is no lower energy state than the ground state, there is no energy level transition available to release the ZPE. Therefore, it can be argued that hf/2 should be dropped before integration of the quantum expression. This procedure is an example of renormalization, which basically redefines the zero of energy." [Abbott et al. 1996]

Footnotes

[1] One might assume that a large positive vacuum energy would collapse the universe just like a large amount of positive mass-energy would. This doesn't happen because in general relativity gravity depends on energy and pressure. In natural units, vacuum energy has pressure equal and opposite to its energy density. Because the stress-energy tensor has three pressure terms (for x,y,z) and only one energy density term, the negative pressure of positive vacuum energy dominates, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. back

[2] It's also vaguely possible that zero point energy doesn't gravitate at all

http://www.mendeley.com/research/realtime-terahertz-color-scanner-moving-objects/
http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/37962/8/04chapter3.pdf I believe this references the L3 200 to 300 GHz ones (.2 teraherz)
Ours is a SMW passive that runs at 3 thz and is maintained by aligent. As I understand it is uncommon.

Can't decide if I agree or disagree. We are generally in the same insurance pools, it will generally save us money (and cut down on the societal awfulness of car crash deaths) if more people wore seat belts.

On the other hand, in the grand scheme of causes-and-numbers-of-death, it's just not that big a deal. The simple act of driving the car instead of walking, biking, or even just standing on a subway or bus (just plain sitting turns out to be bad for us) kills more people by far. One estimate of the risks and rewards of bicycling (crashes, vs health benefits) was 20 years of life gained for each year of life lost. Given that bicycles offer little protection from crashes other than their low speed, this suggests that lack of exercise is really bad for you, and that driving cars to excess is one reason for this lack. Another study found a 28% lower mortality rate for bicycle commuters even after adjusting for other cardiovascular risk factors.

Probably the best plan for saving lives would be mandatory helmet laws for car drivers and passengers. Head injuries from car crashes are a significant cause of death and disability, so this is not an outlandish thing to do. Australian researchers have even developed a prototype helmet for just this purpose that is less expensive and less cumbersome than your average motorcycle helmet. What makes this plan "best" is not that it is necessarily super-effective at reducing car deaths, but that encouraging just a fraction of car drivers to use some healthier form of transit will save many lives through their improved cardiovascular health (if we believe the 20:1 figure for bicycling rewards:risks, and assume that bicycles and cars have the same risk of crash death, diverting 5% to cycling would save about as many lives as are lost to car crashes in total. Similar ratios probably also apply for walking).

And yeah, I know this is an inflammatory proposal, that's why I included all the links to back up my argument.

Well, yeah... except that my objection to the post I was answering to was not against letting the bacteria do what they were pressured to do, but against tapping into it.

I can't imagine what connotation you are inferring for "tap" that would require I change my response. Taking bacteria cultures and dumping them on locations polluted by pesticides is "tapping" into their capabilities.

Like... potentially importing some bacteria strains into Australia because they aren't present there?.

You know, Australia's soil is quite particular - low concentration of phosphorus - so the native flora there adapted to the lack of it.
Hang on, aren't the pesticides mentioned by TFA in this class?

Way back when I had ADSL in australia as my internet traffic within the ISPs network didn't count to my quota. The ISP had a bunch of ftp mirrors, a bunch of game servers, and the subscribers ran a bunch of not legitimate at all P2P servers/clients that restricted to within the ISP IPs.

It had nothing to do with the ISP trying to leverage itself into having an edge over content providing competitors. That external traffic was a big part of their costs and so encouraging their users to use their mirrors and so on was good for them.

When I was at uni, AARNet traffic was cheaper than other national traffic which was cheaper than international traffic - in terms of what the university charged the department for their usage. I can't find any docs now of course, but a different university still has a slightly simpler but similar setup: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/its/quotas/internet/definition.html

Again that wasn't the university trying to get content providers to pay them or trying to give an edge to themselves. It was just a reflection of the costs.

Now the US has far lower costs to start with and maybe they are low enough that it really doesn't matter and comcast are just trying to benefit their other business arms. But without knowing some of the vague details I don't think you can just ignore the non-jerk potential reasons.

Everything, of course. Have you never read Alice in Wonderland?

‘If I’d been the whiting,’ said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, ‘I’d have said to the porpoise, “Keep back, please: we don’t want you with us!”’
‘They were obliged to have him with them,’ the Mock Turtle said: ‘no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.’
‘Wouldn’t it really?’ said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
‘Of course not,’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘why, if a fish came to me , and told me he was going a journey, I should say “With what porpoise?”’
‘Don’t you mean “purpose”?’ said Alice.
‘I mean what I say,’ the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone.

Why is suicide illegal? The good, if not exactly cheerful, Arthur Schopenhauer has the best stab at an answer I've been able to find.

"The extraordinary energy and zeal with which the clergy of monotheistic religions attack suicide is not supported either by any passages in the Bible or by any considerations of weight; so that it looks as though they must have some secret reason for their contention. May it not be this — that the voluntary surrender of life is a bad compliment for him who said that all things were very good ? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass optimism of these religions,— denouncing suicide to escape being denounced by it."

OK, I had a google and see what you mean. The press in North America tend to publicise a stupidly meaningless number of 40% of crashes being alcohol related. So ignore it. Most of what is in the papers is rubbish.

It does not matter how many deaths are alcohol-caused if the testing makes no difference.
Here is some real data on how many accidents were prevented by well-publicised random breath testing:
http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/T95/paper/s29p6.html

Do that nationally and thousands of families will be spared death and disability.

The details of the program at Adelaide are here. While as a EEE student I cannot speak for the sciences beyond first-year physics, most lecturers already provide sufficiently-detailed notes that textbooks are not necessary. I expect that, at least to start with, it will just be a matter of loading existing PDFs/slides/whatever that were either bought from the copy-shop or handed out during lectures.

The robots eventually fall in love. Sorry for the spoiler:) English version ... http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/ Czech one ... http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13083

The statistics show that tailgating doesn't kill. Following farther back and not having proper attention is much much more fatal. But don't let facts get in the way of your rants.

The one does not, I fear, preclude the other. Still, I'd like a link to those statistics? A short search only gave me articles that tailgating did indeed cause accidents (and thus "kills"). There is no doubt that inattention is a great killer, but tailgating is a stupid an unnecessary risk.. noone is getting along any father.

But keep in mind that everyone looking even remotely like a political activist was weeded out during Stalin's purges, and that memory was still very fresh in minds of the people during the whole Hungarian affair.

Not quite. The Russian people had no expectation of democracy, and a deeply ingrained fear and respect for authority. Before the communist revolution, they had czarism, the most absolute form of monarchy. Even today, Putin's regime tends to gravitate towards that.

USSR did fall eventually precisely because of the reasons you describe, but it took time.

No. The USSR fell eventually because the planned economy did not take the people into account. Just an example: you have a factory that makes locks, and you measure the output by weight, What do the people do? They make big fucking locks. Considering that there was no market for locks to warrant a whole factory, you can imagine how much good that did to the economy. Rinse and repeat for every area of production, and you wonder how this system lasted as long as it did.

It didn't. It was supported by a shadow economy of comparable size: the people recreated a whole quasi-capitalist system of favors, illegally of course. If you worked at a washing mashine factory, you "brought home" parts on a regular basis, and used those to fix washing mashines for a living. Sometimes you even used the tools at your workplace. The system worked because absolutely everyone was doing it.

I don't really think any of you "westerners" can truly understand this mentality without experiencing it, just like I'm having trouble understanding your obsession with contracts and paperwork.

P.S. Tax evasion is still a Hungarian national sport.

P.P.S.

Towards the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency, and continued strongly through the subsequent presidency of Ronald Reagan, the United States rejected disarmament and tried to restart the arms race through the production of new weapons and anti-weapons systems. The central part of this strategy was the Strategic Defense Initiative, a space based anti-ballistic missile system derided as "Star Wars" by its critics. During the second part of 1980s, the Soviet economy was teetering towards collapse and was unable to match American arms spending.

until recently and here they are showing off a spectacular solar power energy plant. I'm very impressed. I thought I would have heard about this on the ABC's Science Show. I haven't been this impressed since the development of the hotrocks project in Australia.

Instead of a decent book on "logic" how about "The Art of Controversy"

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/controversy/chapter3.html

Stratagem XVI.

Another trick is to use arguments ad hominem, or ex concessis When your opponent makes a proposition, you must try to see whether it is not in some way--if needs be, only apparently--inconsistent with some other proposition which he has made or admitted, or with the principles of a school or sect which he has commended and approved, or with the actions of those who support the sect, or else of those who give it only an apparent and spurious support, or with his own actions or want of action. For example, should he defend suicide, you may at once exclaim, "Why don't you hang yourself?" Should he maintain that Berlin is an unpleasant place to live in, you may say, "Why don't you leave by the first train?"

there! now you can read it too!

Ad hominem is not merely attacking the messenger, it is using a facet of the messenger to contradict the argument in the mind of the messenger.

Sam

Not only is it nicer looking than either SONY reader or Amazon Kindle, but the ebooks are free etexts and public domain etexts.

I'm not limiting experimental to table-top or to measurement. I am trying to emphasise the ability to 'hold everything else constant' as the defining feature of an "experimental science". Perhaps I should call it "experimental" and "observational" to emphasise the point that in "observational" science the scientist can't get in the process and control it, but must merely observe the outcomes and conduct inference from that. So I'm not making a theoretical vs experimental division.

Thus, in social science areas you can't normally control the whole process because of ethical or practical problems. Biological processes are sufficiently complicated that, while some experiments can be conducted, all variables can not be isolated and controlled so inference is thereby limited. At the other extreme would be a chemical reaction in a sealed chamber.

All science aims to be predictive - but the nature of the data available (or that can be collected) to make those predictions varies by the subject under examination.

(As for Biology - how about Mendel? But he did fudge his results.)

Finally someone with some sense! Although, don't fool yourself into thinking that illegal drugs impact driving as much or more than many prescription drugs people regularly drive on. The biggest problem is the rise in prescription drugs, and people who take them yet continue to drive a vehicle. Their driving skills are often far more impaired than the stoned driver, yet because they "have to" take drugs they continue to drive around all day under the influence. Especially people who are tired or use caffeine to stay awake so they can drive. They are the largest majority of the most impaired drivers on the road.

We need to throw all of these dangerous drivers in prison. There is no excuse for endangering human life. If they've got a serious medical condition that requires them to take drugs, then they should not be allowed to operate a motor vehicle. If they've worked all day and they're exhausted, then they definitely should not be operating a motor vehicle. Same goes if they're taking drugs(such as caffeine) to keep their body awake while their mind is actually exhausted.

We need to quit being hypocrites with this bullshit that just targets the people that nobody would ever defend. We need to step back and look at the real threat here. Vehicles are dangerous when used improperly. People should be well rested and free of any mind altering substances or distractions while driving. This isn't even taking into account all of the accidents caused by listening to music, talking to someone, or allowing their mind to wander while behind the wheel. Or even the accidents caused from inexperienced or poor driving. Those behaviors all need to be criminalized as well if we actually want to help people. Otherwise we're nothing more than hypocrites for throwing one person in jail while letting a far more dangerous criminal roam free.

There are dumbasses everywhere partaking in these reckless behaviors and endangering lives. If we want to save society from decay, we have to get rid of these problems before their actions end up killing another one of the few good citizens we have left in this country.

http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/t95/paper/s1p2.html
http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin/19990329a.asp
http://www.newstarget.com/004823.html

"Anonymity...merely serves to take all responsibility from the man who cannot stand by what he has said."

Anonymity - protection against the people who would kill or imprison you because they don't accept you have a right to disagree with them.

The two aren't contradictory or otherwise incompatible. Sometimes, a person cannot stand by what they have said because of the certainty of being knocked down by those with the authority (legitimate or not) to do so.

Much more often, however, one sees the sort of abuse of anonymity, practiced by cowards and enabled by those without the sense to distinguish between substantive and ungrounded criticisms, that Schopenhauer railed against in his polemic about literary criticism, Chapter 7 of "The Art of Literature." In that context, his quote seems perfectly fitting for a forum such as this.

"That is possible at present," replied Cyrus Harding, "but only a few months ago the wretched creature was a man like you and me. And who knows what will become of the survivor of us after a long solitude on this island? It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason, since you have found this poor creature in such a state!"

"But, captain," asked Herbert, "what leads you to think that the brutishness of the unfortunate man began only a few months back?" (emphasis mine)

Have you ever checked out a Barbie movie?

I'm a dad of a 6 year old girl, and I have to tell you- I'm surprised.

These Barbie movies are intensely moral, and advocate for girls to develop an interest in science, delight in learning, sacrifice, strive, and struggle courageously for what is right and true. By my read, it's all straight out of Aristotle. Check out the Amazon reviews, especially this one, if you're a guy.

I don't know what bizarre turn of fate made it such that great talent should go to work on Barbie movies, but I can't deny what I've clearly seen: They're good movies, with positive message, and I now have absolutely no qualms buying Barbie toys for my daughter.

I recognize this is an odd bit of news to hear, but there it is; I can't deny what my own two eyes have seen.

My Grandfather was an expert on concrete, especially pre-stressed concrete. One of his party tricks was to show off a piece of thin, flat concrete, slightly larger than a standard ruler, then bend it in an arc.

He'd created this by stretching a thin wire with weights along a form, then pouring the concrete. Once the concrete was set, he removed the weights, which caused the wire to shrink, compressing the concrete and rendering it much more flexible.

Admittedly, they're actually talking about a different technology in the article, but they make it sound like no-one's ever made bendable concrete before.

There's no rational basis for calling the actions or creations of human beings un-natural without recourse to superstition.

Want to try and define justice with the same restrictions? Euthyphro tried. By your logic, justice doesn't exist. If you're will to accept that, fine.

Also, my periodic table also has the word "natural" on it, referring to elements not occuring in nature. By your logic, my perdiodic table's is deistic or absurd.

Alternately, perhaps I can persuade you to use the term "man-made" instead. While crows use rocks and monkeys use sticks, there's no evidence that either of these specifically created tools to accomplish their tasks....

"He's written a good thing in that manuscript," Verhovensky went on. "He suggests a system of spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and it's his duty to inform against them. Every one belongs to all and all to every one. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. In extreme cases he advocates slander and murder, but the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized the power and been despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots and they've always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned--that's Shigalovism. Slaves are bound to be equal. There has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there is bound to be equality, and that's Shigalovism! Ha ha ha! Do you think it strange?

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky /d72p/chapter13.html

but the ability to respond quickly will lesson as they grow

`And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

`Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle: `nine the next, and so on.'

`What a curious plan!' exclaimed Alice.

`That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon remarked: `because they lessen from day to day.'

At what point does extracting money from Microsoft become state sponsored extortion? Is MS really that evil that they are breaking laws all over the world illegally using their defacto monopoly?

These regulations are called a social contract and every society makes their own. Read Rousseau for more details:

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/r/rousseau/je an_jacques/r864s/

So computer scientists rarely come up with applications that are appropriate for Quantum Computing. But that doesn't mean that these applications do not exist! Calculating protein folding and factoring large numbers are just two appropriate examples.

The best general purpose Quantum Computing algorithm is Lov Grover's database search algorithm. This can be applied to most problems, and is provably the most efficient implementation for many situations.

Hmmm. Wells' "Shape of things to come" would fit in, time wise. Is it geeky?

I'm not so brainy and am somewhat pissed at the moment, so I'll just say:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist. Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away-- Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle. Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart. 'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed, A lovely little thinker, But a bugger when he's pissed.

http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/guide/hum/philo sophy/philos_song.html

Fields stronger than 100,000 Gauss can levitate living things.

I've stuck the movie of the levitating frog up here

There have been many studies, but like geese, fish also take advantage of swimming in groups:

Scientists show how fish save energy by swimming in schools

And there have been many studies into dolphin and whale motion.

Hydrodynamic study into whale flippers

The use of rotary motors only seems to occur at the bacterial level (flagella bacteria)

I'm starting to think that Occam's razor is abused more often than it is used correctly.

Parent asserted;
Occam's Razor, which is a basic tenent of modern scientific thought says that the simplest explanation is the best.

This is an abuse of the version of Occham's Razor used in modern scientific thought, though an oft repeated misinterpretation.

A better way of phrasing the desire for elegance in modern science is; "Given two identically predictive models, choose the one which requires the fewest assumptions." Reducing the number of assumptions is not always the same as 'simplifying' the problem.

Also, remember that the purpose of science is to generate predictive value. If one of those models is more complex but also more predictive, then it is ALWAYS the better model, no matter how complex.

The original version of Occam's Razor, as correctly expressed in the Wiki article, is "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity" where 'necessity' equates to generating the maximum level of predictive value.

Check out the following link, which gives a better summation of the role of Occham's razor in science than the wiki article does.

http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~dkoks/Faq/Gene ral/occam.html

Heres some material you might find espcially releviant.

It should be noted that Orwell actually was a teacher for a number of years; So when he says things like -

There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. Second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection. And though some of them are better than others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is, that they have ultimately no purpose except to make money. Often, except that there is nothing illegal about them, they are started in exactly the same spirit as one would start a brothel or a bucket shop. Some snuffy little man of business (it is quite usual for these schools to be owned by people who don't teach themselves) says one morning to his wife:

'Emma, I got a notion! What you say to us two keeping school, eh? There's plenty of cash in a school, you know, and there ain't the same work in it as what there is in a shop or a pub. Besides, you don't risk nothing; no over'ead to worry about, 'cept jest your rent and few desks and a blackboard. But we'll do it in style. Get in one of these Oxford and Cambridge chaps as is out of a job and'll come cheap, and dress 'im up in a gown and--what do they call them little square 'ats with tassels on top? That 'ud fetch the parents, eh? You jest keep your eyes open and see if you can't pick on a good district where there's not too many on the same game already.'

He knows what he's talking about! And it gets worst from there.

Been there, done that.

Been there, done that.

I love the quote at the bottom of the page right now. I wonder if it is intentional:

Any excuse will serve a tyrant. -- Aesop

Of course, Aesop himself argued that it's better to keep corrupt tyrants in place:

"Aesop, defending before the assembly at Samos a popular leader who was being tried for his life, told this story: A fox, in crossing a river, was swept into a hole in the rocks; and, not being able to get out, suffered miseries for a long time through the swarms of fleas that fastened on her. A hedgehog, while roaming around, noticed the fox; and feeling sorry for her asked if he might remove the fleas. But the fox declined the offer; and when the hedgehog asked why, she replied, 'These fleas are by this time full of me and not sucking much blood; if you take them away, others will come with fresh appetites and drink up all the blood I have left.' 'So, men of Samos', said Aesop, 'my client will do you no further harm; he is wealthy already. But if you put him to death, others will come along who are not rich, and their peculations will empty your treasury completely.'"

Aristotle, Rhetoric ii, 20.

I prefer 1984 for inspiration myself - a sobering read given the wars, actual and planned, that we're living through.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery

1) You definitely wouldn't see single stars. We'd see only the integrated light from a whole population of stars.

2) The numbers are already done for us. From the paper: 'We conclude that there is no optical counterpart to VIRGOHI21 down to a B-band surface-brightness limit of 27.5 B mag/arcsec^2. This is less than 1 solar luminosity pc^-2, giving a maximum luminosity in stars of less than 10^8 solar luminosities if a diameter of 16 kpc is assumed.'

3) M31 isn't far away at all. In fact, its the closest large galaxy to the MW. HST can resolve individual stars there, allowing us to measure the brightnesses and construct helpful "colour-magnitude diagrams" for instance.

4) No. Read the paper. They argue that the low surface density of gas prevents fragmentation of hte gas, and hence stars not forming.

5) This is total crap.