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What I like about this tech is that you can skip the step of creating the embryo. You have to have sperm and egg to create an embryo, no? That seems that that could be a road block from a technical standpoint for some - getting genetically compatible sperm and egg - or doesn't that matter?

..

On a side note, I'm worried that these policies will become stricter come November when the Tea Party looks likely to make significant inroads in Congress.

People are hypocrites. Wait until they're sick - then they'll be running all over the World in their Medicare paid scooters trying techniques to save their old fat asses - including new born baby soup if they have to - with their Social Security money.

People love forcing others to live up to their ideals but when it comes to themselves, well, all bets are off - like these pro-lifers who get abortions.

Anyone can file a lawsuit, that's how the legal system works. Anyone can "lash out" at anyone for saying anything, that doesn't mean anyone is infringing on first amendment rights. I could reply to every one of your comments with point by point rebuttals, but you'd still be able to make your comments.

All men are created equal, and should have equal protection, and the "activists" are only fighting back against prejudice and homophobia.

First we said all men are created equal, except the black ones.
Then we said all men are created equal, and that excludes women.
Now we say all men are created equal, unless they fall in love with someone intolerant people find objectionable.

None of this has ever made any sense, especially when you consider that straight people are trying to make being gay illegal. Should I stop people from cross-dressing, especially those crazy women who dress like men to get an unfair advantage in the workplace? Yeah that doesn't make sense. Should I try to change your behaviour because you're not a Pastafarian? That doesn't make sense either. You wear far too much red and it makes me think you're a communist, so stop wearing red, right? I can picket abortion clinics but then still have a right to have an abortion if I think it's the right thing to do.

If you're going to say it's unnatural, then you have to admit that God made a mistake. Because most gay people face piles of intolerance and would not in most cases choose that lifestyle.

If you're going to say it's against the Bible, you better check what you're wearing and make sure your wife was a virgin when you married, because the Bible says things about both of those too.

If you're an athiest homophobe, realize that natural selection will take care of the problem so why fight it.

Remember when you wrote "History has shown that misinformed stupid people are the most dangerous force on earth" ? Maybe you should read up a little on the other side. Or maybe you took a break from serious replies and decided to troll, but someone is going to agree with you and I thought I'd step out first.

It was called Doctor PC Junior: http://mypage.direct.ca/c/ccovell/dev1.html

was just about to say that, but you beat me to the bunch!

Not only that, but Helium-3 is insanely expensive, i did some speculative maths a few years back, would it be profitable to mine helium-3 on moon and ship it back to earth, if there would be demand, can't remember exact results, but it had very real chances of being profitable.

http://www.direct.ca/trinity/helium3.htm
"Helium-3 (He3) a rare particle on Earth but abundant on the Moons lunar surface (He3 is required for a fusion reactant - safe nuclear energy) has an energy value in today's dollars is $5.7 million per kilogram when compared to the value and energy potential of oil."

and as it seems someone else was aswell interested on that question.

"At $40,000 to $60,000 per kilo for transporting materials from Earth to the Moon, it is not cost effective to go to the Moon even for pure gold (Au), at today's price of $15,500 per kilogram. He3 equivalent energy value in todayâ(TM)s dollars is $5.7 Million per kilogram making this venture for the He3 fusion reactant worth the effort and cost. "

So, assume total costs rise even 10 times that upto, $600,000USD it would be real dead simple maths to go for that venture or not to go for that venture.

Now, who has the dough to kickstart this operation? ;)

The proof is Christ, a living being who lived here 2000 years ago. Whose humble life changed the course of human history(and the Roman empire). No it isn't logical that a cell can be created by chance. If you believe so I would add you have no idea what you are talking about. http://www.direct.ca/trinity/crutches.html You can attempt to insult me but you still have no proof whatsoever. If it is science you must have some... By the way, what is hilarious is the downmodding to hide my post. Ben Stein's movie is about silencing people with whom you disagree.

Pi in the Bible As the article states, the Egyptians and others already had fairly accurate approximations of PI long before this passage was written.

We don't count?. I vote for pro-life candidates quite a bit. I have actively campaigned for some of them sometimes and even suggested directions for policy. They don't listen most of the time but I do it. I would say that I am more politically active then most religious pro-lifers. I do this is for more reasons then just being pro-life but that has a minuscule amount to do with the reasoning.

I think your support for abortion has more to do with your animosity for religion then anything.

But being a slut is only a definition and a matter of perception. Who cares what another person calls you? They don't hold any more power over your life then the power you let them have. And your seem to be letting them have quite a bit of power and then resenting it.

I also never understood why pro-abortion calls itself pro-choice. Pro choice would indicate that there is a choice but when people choose life they seem to be kicked out of the group.

I do however have a problem with killing unborn children as a form of birth control and encouraging sex in children not capable of making an informed adult decisions. Neither should be happening. It does nothing to further the womans development and does nothing but make abortions happen or kids ruin their futures.

Lots of people where I live got their wells positioned using a dowser by the name of Marcel Triau (who was kind of a local legend). He used to use a chain, of all things, and swing it to and fro, and where he said dig, you'd better dig (as far as the story goes). When you got the well digger there, some would try to move it (easier access for the truck, or what have you), and those that did would have a hard time of it, and invariably have to go to where Triau pointed out. Many other weird capabilities were attributed to him, which seem in some ways fantastical. I tried googling him, and only found an article on a "french coil" method of pest control for trees - http://mypage.direct.ca/j/jliving/pen06.htm (also one tiny mention in a local newspaper). Seems weird.

Funny thing is, he mentions magnetism as one possibility for why it works, and disavows any scientific knowledge on his part on why things work, but that they just "do". From the article: "Because we cannot scientifically define and analyze these laws many people disbelieve them. However, nature is full of mystery and even the working of our own bodies is not fully understood." Perhaps his "abilities" were actually derived from some form of this magnetic sense, which allowed him to sense differences in magnetic fields, from which he could learn which "feelings" meant water, using the chain as an antenna.

Interesting, I think, though I know that most Slashdotters are not subsribers to "dowsing" and have pointed out a study or two in the past showing dowsers to only have a random shot at finding things. But I personally feel that all sorts of stuff that is claimed, but unexplained and therefore disregarded, has been established as having merit using scientific principles.

Or maybe he was just lucky.

Vidar

Thanks for the reply. I agree with your views about sex ed and picking gun control over abortion. But I believe women should have the legal choice to have or not to have an abortion. Ultimately it is the woman's decision and a very difficult decision at that.

When you get a chance give The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion: When the Anti-Choice Choose a read. It is a collection of anecdotes from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe.

I mean, star trek is cool and everything, but until we're close to being able to teraform other planets, it's not going to be terribly useful to send people to live in space.

Please, don't insult me with your Star Trek comments.

There are TONS of resources out there for the taking, resources that would make expensive technology inexpensive.

the problem is preventing us from turning earth into a rock. How about we focus on that instead of being in such a hurry to leave it.

Are you only capable of doing one thing in your life? I'm all for making things better here but don't act like we have to choose between the two.

It pissed me off when I saw that GWB was giving the oil industry HUGE tax breaks while cutting alternative energy research.

I totally agree, I am not a democrap or republicrap, and I think we have many options we could
pursue to use clean energy .

Foremost among these is bio-diesel from Algae .

        * Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
        * Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
        * Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
        * Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
        * Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
        * Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)

This could get us out of the middle east for good, and I am all for that, though it may be too late.

The amount of money we send the middle east every 10 years would more than pay for a total
conversion to alternative energy here in the US .

Yes, I said total .

Up to 150 billion USD a year, over 10 years, 1.5 trillion USD we could do geothermal, wind, solar,
biofuels, and fund robotic mining of HE3 on the moon .

For the "save the moon crowd" China already plans to do this, good luck convinving them to stop.

The University of wisconsin has a "working" helium-3 fusion reactor .

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/Research/iec.html

http://www.direct.ca/trinity/helium3.htm

We can end one huge stream of money leaving US soil for good .

With total energy independence we can work on making the US independent on other fronts as well .

The potential good this can do the world as a whole, we can split the cost "evenly"
with the EU, and other nations that see the cost benefit of shared costs .

Ex-MislTech

Say it again, y'all!
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it aga...

Er... *heh*
Dammit, make me feel old, why don't you?...

(Not to mention curmudgeonly---need I mention the economic benefits from the spin-offs of NASA's last lunar program, or the potential for a quantum leap forward in our space program based on building from low-gravity-well lunar-sourced materials, or how this is a stepping stone to the resource-rich asteroid belt, or how the tectonically-stable, light-shielded dark side of the moon would be a spectacular place for large telescopes capable of doing research that no Earth-based 'scope could hope to, or...

There are good reasons to do this; it's just not clear whether there are good reasons to do this quickly.)

Cole Porter
Birds do it, bees do it

The aliens are inside the number! Didn't think of looking there , did you?!!! Yeesh!

A company once sold an NES clone with a disk drive, called Doctor PC Jr. It had BASIC, Logo, and a word processor, and it could also run Famicom (Asian NES) games.

Let me first say that you absolutely have a brain, unlike a whole lot of the Chicagoans I left behind. :)

I'm a native south-sider and spent a good deal of time living in the Lakeview area (about 4 miles north of downtown) in my adulthood. "Ah ain't one o' dem suburban-people!" :) I also spent a fair amount of time *outside* Chicago on the East Coast, and I currently live on the West Coast. I've got a taste for some different professional and intellectual climates.

I don't count the south/west sides-- different dynamic altogether, as you alluded to-- my comments were actually based on my experiences as a member of the labor pool, as a Northsider, and (six years later) as a visitor. Blue collar town stuck with white collar jobs, still acting like a bunch of (sterotypical) steel and millworkers in terms of how they treat those around them. Pretty sad to see, actually, very sad. :(

Up on the North side, I found thinking to be more... advanced (cough) but there was still a distinct marriage to the status quo that puts a whammy on any real intellectual movement. When I finally started asking around, before leaving, people in a *number* of professions all told me the same thing: East Coast, smart but a bit uptight and conservative. West Coast, smart and laid back. Midwest, freaked out by anything new and by the time they finally accepted something "new" it was passe in the rest of the US. Chi was no exception.

IT is about innovation. Chicago is about things that are already there, and they hate innovation (enjoy the link). So I left.

And strangely enough, I found plenty of (Chicago-food-missing) ex-Chicagoans saying the same thing. I'm clearly not alone in my observations.

The item I mentioned about the prewired building was actually from some rather ridiculous speech that Daley gave... it's so far back that I haven't been able to Google it, but at the time it was so obnoxious that I showed it to quite a few of my hi-tech associates out here (Portland OR). They all just shook their heads in shame. I figured I had to let some other people read it to be sure I wasn't losing my mind and mistranslating...!

I'll concede that there are areas where the people are nastier than in Chicago. But note that I never said Chicago was *the* nastiest, just that it's one of the top nasties (heh). It definitely has some good company, and some places just might devour Chitown outright.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that there's more going in IT space there than before... maybe they can civilize the place. :)

Here are some links that you may find helpful and/or interesting:

The JoyRider Virtual Flyer

Homebrew Flight Sim Cockpit

Full Motion Flight Simulation Platform

Homemade Flight Simulator

3 Axis Flight Simulator

Also, look for something called the "Rock-N-Ride" - it was a commercial low-cost motion platform, that interfaced to a serial port and used a airbrush compressor for power. It wasn't cheap, but it was cheaper than a real 3 axis platform. I have also seen real 3 axis platforms sold on eBay, but be prepared for hydraulic behemoths (in weight, if not size) that will set you back some.

Now, granted, none of these sites will probably answer your question about what to do in regards to all of the lights, switches, etc. For that, I would suggest looking into PIC or BASIC Stamp interfacing over a "single-wire" serial interface or similar. You could probably also do it with logic circuits and shift register-based systems (to effect a parallel to serial to parallel interface), or use a MAX232 for comm. There is also a guy out there that sells an ethernet -> uPU interface (people have used it to hook old C64's to ethernet, etc).

You could also hook up to the joystick port - in theory you could hook resistors up to get input from both axis's, a different resistor per switch, two joysticks - plus all of the buttons - that is a lot of buttons!

There is also the possibility of using the joystick port as a MIDI port, and comm'ing over that. Also, look up joystick info, there is a method of toggling a bit or so on the joystick port to actually gain a certain low-speed output over the joystick port to allow you to "clock" data from the port - supposedly some "digital" joysticks have done this.

There is always USB - check out Nuts and Volts magazine - there have been articles in the past on the chipsets, etc needed to interface using USB.

I hope this helps...

Your problem has probably been solved, as there's a somewhat decent sized following of people who build their own flight sim cockpits, and I think I even saw one mech cockpit.

Build Your Own Cockpit

That has a few links. Plenty more can be found with simple google searching. I had this idea a few months ago, and like any idea I have, I checked to see if it was done already, and sure enough ;)

As for LCD screens, they've got that stuff figured out. Check it out, you won't be let down.

The fact that living "fossils" have pretty much no change says something important.

It does indeed. It shows that a species may be able to fill it's ecological niche so well as to prevent competition significant enough to make it change. Evolutionary theory doesn't state that species will change at some rate over time but that they change in response to selective pressure. There are other examples of "living fossils" amongst certain species of sharks. The explanation is that they haven't had to change in order to survive so they haven't. At least beyond the standard genetic drift. There are small differences. The presumed extinction was ~70 million years ago, btw.
We are the same the whole world over. Where is the evolution in progress?

We lack the isolation we once did in order to speciate and our brains have allowed us to relieve ourselves of many if not most of the selective pressures faced by our ancient ancestors. Now let there be a world war that sends us back to the stone age and have 9/10'ths of the world's population die and you might see some movement. But maybe not even then. It could be the mere existence of our higher reasoning allows us to alleviate the majority of the selective pressures on our species. I predict we'll be evolving ourselves with genetic engineering long before we significantly change due to 'mere' genetic drift.

How is that possible if recessive traits don't express themselves until the point when a host of harmful mutations have the chance to express themselves?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Why does the expression of a recessive have to wait for a mutation? If the recessive exists in population it just has to wait for two organisms with the same recessive to breed.

I'm sorry, have you looked at all the date samples done by creation scientists (sent off to official, well respected laboratories for testing) and the samples show wildly innacurate dates? I have read many examples of this.

Care to share a few? Something other than this one?

As for using outdated arguments, from what I can see creationists have rejected the idea of the speed of light slowing.

Those were just a few of many and not all creationists have given up the changing speed of light argument. Many Young-Earth Creationists still cling to it in some form or fashion.

I don't know what the moon dust argument is, could you please tell me? I think I can guess.

That the cosmic dust accumulation on the moon should have built up into a layer 20 feet deep (or whatever) if the moon were really 5 billion years old. Long and short, the calculation was based on erroneous suppositions.

Creationists are nowhere near as bad as evolutionary textbooks publishing information long ago demonstrated to be false or a hoax. The peppermoths is a great example.

I beg to differ. Creationists are called to the carpet on a daily basis for some of the things they try to get away with. Peppermoths should have only ever been used as an example of natural selection. If there ever was a textbook that said it was proof of macroevolution, it was wrong. All 3 textbooks I've seen and all I've ever heard of use it as an example of natural selection. Unless you can come up with scores more examples, you don't have a leg to stand on by saying creationists are nowhere near as bad.

If you'd like some reading material, check some of these out. A couple of visits to the ICR museum and some of the inaccuracies and falsehoods contained therein. Take a look at the Creation Research Society's creed that members must adhere to. A list of "distortions" of truth by ICR founder Duane Gish.

I am going along, aren't I? :)
Btw, Kent Hovind still sports the light speed decay theory. You might want to check out Answers in Genesis and TrueOrigins and see if you can spot more errors on your own ... I'd help but it's really getting late and it's not as fun as it was when I started ... :)

I have seen no empirical evidence whatsoever, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed scientific journal, which supports any detail of the 'creation of the world' as described in the bible.

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article *"Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps" to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn't want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn't even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions. Thus, most creationist researchers realize it is simply a waste of time to send journal editors openly creationist articles. To say that a "slight bias" exists on the part of journal editors would be an understatement.

Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.

URL: http://mypage.direct.ca/c/crm114/dallas.html

I believe this to be a tolerably accurate summary of the issues in that case.

His homepage is http://www.ender.com/~icee/.

He dated a girl who later committed suicide, partly due to his idiocy.

He used to hang out on EFNet #depression.

For more on the Lord of the Rings movie, go here.