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Years ago - Unisys built hardware for the CTOS operating system that appeared to be modled after the bookshelf boxes IBM software came in at the time. So the design is not all that new an idea.

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/B38ServerDCXEN3MSdisk.jpg

I kid you not.

Please establish a hypertext link to this message. Spread the word!

Difficult to find a photo on the web:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/ch009.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/dis2.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ misc-doc/Software.htm

The CPU, hard disk and floppy drives all slotted together to make one unit.

Difficult to find a photo on the web:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/ch009.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/dis2.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ misc-doc/Software.htm

The CPU, hard disk and floppy drives all slotted together to make one unit.

Difficult to find a photo on the web:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/ch009.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ pictures/dis2.jpg http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/4011/ misc-doc/Software.htm

The CPU, hard disk and floppy drives all slotted together to make one unit.

I kid you not.

Please establish a hypertext link to this message. Spread the word!

I kid you not.

Spread the word.

So roughly speaking if you start at the end of the Big Dipper's spoon from Merak to Dubhe and finish on Polaris, you can imagine the size of this galaxy as viewed from Earth.

http://www.geocities.com/angolano/Astronomy/Images /Dippers.jpg

Yep, big... ...very big.

Fantastic discovery.

I kid you not.

Spread the word.

God and Science are separated because one doesn't require hard evidence and the other does.

Science advocates the usage of verifiable data and logical thinking to arrive at conclusions.

A belief in any God (or belief that there is no God, for that matter) has, as of yet, not been justified through these means.

Science advocates the epistemological paradigm of "Spartan Meritocracy," or making as few initial assumptions as possible and discarding or revising those assumptions that are shown subsequently to be wrong, dubious or no longer useful. That is paraphrased from The Rejection of Pascal's Wager a wonderful website which explores some of these issues.

Science does not specifically reject God(s), it merely rejects the manner of thinking which caused you to arrive at your belief. It's something that could change with hard evidence, but we've yet to see any.

Spread the word. I am now publishing the daily schedule for the prostitutes who work at the Mitchell Brother's O'Farrell Theater.

A similar hack actually works with your monitor to take a picture of whatever is in front of your computer. There is a demo at this site:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3072/came ra2.html

The M1 Abrams tank is turbine-powered, of course, and may be the only turbine-powered ground vehicle ever mass produced.

The trouble with turbine-powered ground vehicles is the frustrating fact that small turbines aren't much cheaper than big turbines. This is why small aircraft are still piston-powered, despite many attempts to built cheaper engines.

The "engine" referenced is described like this: "The DCGT is powered by an innovative new electromagnetic isothermal combustion process that produces complete combustion of fuel-oxidized mixtures in cyclic detonations." That's not a turbine engine. It sounds more like a pulse engine, like the V1 buzz bomb, with a turbine on the exhaust.

In the episode where Bender becomes a wrestler (Raging Bender), they go to a movie and are making snide remarks when an annoyed Crow T. Robot from MST3K tells them "Don't talk during the movie" .

The only MST reference I've ever seen on TV...outside of MST3K....The Master approves...

"I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Microsoft" --The Wicked Witch of the West

And, she was the one that composed the famous song: Follow the yellow iMac road, from which a song about bricks was parodied.

This reminds me of a series of books by the Dutch writer Felix Thijssen (Siro's Island) where he describes a secret group using flying saucers whose propulsion is based on the theories of the german scientist Burkhard Heim.

I never knew Heim actually existed and has even published such theories!

Check e.g. http://www.geocities.com/felixthijssen (it's in Dutch, sorry).

Editors often fuck up stories left and right. Here is an article on drinking games for which I was interviewed (back when I ran the 'net's largest drinking games website) and which shows the editorial markings. Only one quote from me went into the article, and then they proceeded to botch my job title. WTF is an "Administrator"? They deliberately edited the guy's article to change the entire feel from hopeful and whimsical to condemnatory.

Frank Piasecki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Piasecki

discarded this and related assisted-lift ideas twenty years ago. He knows more about helicopters than most of these companies have forgotten.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piasecki_Helicopter

http://www.geocities.com/tacticalstudiesgroup/pias eckivtdp.htm

In fact, you should check out this design for a $100 dollar STM. Build it yourself, and watch the atoms on your tabletop. Quite cool http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/Project.html

"Robert Birge (Syracuse University) who studies the storage of data in proteins, estimated in 1996 that the memory capacity of the brain was between one and ten terabytes, with a most likely value of 3 terabytes. Such estimates are generally based on counting neurons and assuming each neuron holds 1 bit. Bear in mind that the brain has better algorithms for compressing certain types of information than computers do."

"The human brain contains about 50 billion to 200 billion neurons (nobody knows how many for sure), each of which interfaces with 1,000 to 100,000 other neurons through 100 trillion (10 14) to 10 quadrillion (10 16) synaptic junctions. Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly activated. If we assume that the firing threshold at each synapse can assume 256 distinguishable levels, and if we suppose that there are 20,000 shared synapses per neuron (10,000 per neuron), then the total information storage capacity of the synapses in the cortex would be of the order of 500 to 1,000 terabytes. (Of course, if the brain's storage of information takes place at a molecular level, then I would be afraid to hazard a guess regarding how many bytes can be stored in the brain. One estimate has placed it at about 3.6 X 10 19 bytes.)"

Both from Google Answers

(E.g. early Australians were H. erectus; later they had mixed erectus and sap. characteristics; eventually the erectus features faded and vanished, leaving pure H. sap.)

Your argument would be stronger if there were any non-controversial evidence for H. erectus in Australia:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/kowswamp.html

But I take that to be an unfortunately-choosen hypothetical example, rather than an actual error.

Your position is not entirely-dissimilar to the old The Multiregional Evolution Model: http://www.geocities.com/palaeoanthropology/Herect us.html

Gene complexes hardly ever travel without organisms wrapped around them, so what you seem to be arguing for is a specific mechanism for multi-regional evolution. It isn't impossible, but whatever happened is radically under-determined by the data, and it is very likely that we are quite wrong about at least some major components of any story we tell about human evolution.

For example, it is virtually certain that H. sapiens evolved much earlier than the earliest currently-known examples, simply because the sampling rate due to fossilazation and discovery is so fantastically low. The sum total of H. sapiens fossils antedating 10000 years ago is only a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands or more inviduals who lived over the early history of our species. The odds of us just happening to have found a skeleton from the very earliest period, when the smallest numbers of individuals would be around, is very unlikely.

Indeed, the apparent concordance between the current "earliest human skeleton" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/0502 23122209.htm) and the most-likely genetic date based on mitocondrial DNA is so improbable as to be disturbing.

I am therefore betting we will eventually find that H. sapiens evolved much earlier, but went through a genetic bottleneck 200,000 years ago, giving us our most recent common ancestor. Such bottlenecks can be seen in a lot of North American fauna, where you frequently see populations that can be traced back to a single, small, non-diverse population 10,000 years ago that was in a geographically-restricted range due to the last ice age.

Not 100% sure of the source of this website, as I'm also not sure of your sources. But this is interesting if true:

http://www.geocities.com/chiniquy/Hitler.html

"And most christians do interpet Genesis literally."

Quoting from one of the pages noted below, the global percentages for Catholics and Protestants are as follows:
  * Catholic & Near Catholic (Catholic, Orthodox, High Church Anglican) - 65%
  * Protestant (Protestant, Independent, Low Church Anglican) - 38%

Even the Catholics on their own would disprove your misinformed view on literal interpretation of Genesis.

http://www.geocities.com/richleebruce/churchstat.h tml
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.ht ml

//joykey.cpp
#include <windows.h>

struct keys {
signed char left;
signed char right;
signed char up;
signed char down;
signed char attack[6];
keys() {memset(this, 0, sizeof(keys));}
keys(signed char a, signed char b, signed char c, signed char d,
signed char e, signed char f, signed char g, signed char h,
signed char i, signed char j) {
left = a; right = b; up = c; down = d;
attack[0] = e; attack[1] = f; attack[2] = g;
attack[3] = h; attack[4] = i; attack[5] = j;
}
keys(JOYINFO& joy) {
left = (joy.wXpos == 0);
right = (joy.wXpos == 65535);
up = (joy.wYpos == 0);
down = (joy.wYpos == 65535);
attack[3] = (joy.wButtons & 1)&&1;
attack[4] = (joy.wButtons & 2)&&1;
attack[5] = (joy.wButtons & 4)&&1;
attack[0] = (joy.wButtons & 8)&&1;
attack[1] = (joy.wButtons & 16)&&1;
attack[2] = (joy.wButtons & 32)&&1;
}
keys operator-(const keys& k) const {
keys x(left-k.left, right-k.right, up-k.up, down-k.down,
attack[0]-k.attack[0], attack[1]-k.attack[1],
attack[2]-k.attack[2], attack[3]-k.attack[3],
attack[4]-k.attack[4], attack[5]-k.attack[5]
);
return x;
}
keys& operator=(const keys& other) {
memcpy(this, &other, sizeof(keys));
return *this;
}
};

inline void send(char key, bool down) {
keybd_event(key, 0, (down?0:KEYEVENTF_KEYUP), 0);
}

void update(const keys& k) {
if (k.left) send('A', k.left ==1);
if (k.right) send('D', k.right ==1);
if (k.up) send('W', k.up ==1);
if (k.down) send('S', k.down ==1);
if (k.attack[0]) send('F', k.attack[0]==1);
if (k.attack[1]) send('G', k.attack[1]==1);
if (k.attack[2]) send('H', k.attack[2]==1);
if (k.attack[3]) send('V', k.attack[3]==1);
if (k.attack[4]) send('B', k.attack[4]==1);
if (k.attack[5]) send('N', k.attack[5]==1);
}

int main() {
JOYINFO joy;
keys old;
while (1) {
joyGetPos(0, &joy);

is RSS really important enough to put into the OS?
Sure it is.
I have the following RSS feeds for Firefox in my Knoppix remaster:
BBC News
Yahoo News
Slashdot
Google News
ABC News
FOXNews
Linux Today
Rapidweather Blog
I have just the one blog, mine. While I view a web page, I can quickly drop down the various stories from these feeds by just waving my mouse cursor across them. If I do see something I might want to read, I click on it. I get a lot of news scanned for interesting stories quickly with those seven feeds. The Rapidweather Blog RSS feed is there for others to check out, I already know what's there ;-)
I'd put more RSS feeds there, but I need the browser to fit 800x600 as well as 1024x768.
Oh, wait. Here's an interesting story now:
Disneyland Christmas Tree Catches Fire.

• English Puritanism was probably the most extreme manifestation of the Protestant reaction against the Roman Church. Exodus 20:4 could be taken to indicate that God does not want to be worshiped the way pagans worship their gods -- with idolatry such as Christmas trees and Nativity Scenes (much less revelry, drinking and gluttony). Oliver Cromwell campaigned against the heathen practices of feasting, decorating and singing, which he felt desecrated the spirit of Christ. Christmas was called such names as "the Papist's Massing Day" and "Old Heathen Feasting Day". The very word Christmas was viewed as taking the Lord's name in vain. Cromwell's government abolished English Christmas celebration by an act of Parliament in 1647, and the ban was not lifted until Cromwell lost power in 1660. But the tradition of caroling at Christmastime did not resume again in England until the 1800s

There's a case made that the practice of wassailing was intentionally shifted from the practice of charitable gift-giving to drunken adult Christmas revelers to instead gift children, reinforcing a victorian stereotype of "worthy" poor, of which Tiny Tim is an archetypical:

• The face of Christmas was to be deeply affected by the classic novel our family read every year: A Christmas Carol written by Charles Dickens in 1843. It was a sobering lesson to the middle class on charity and its message dealt with the spirit of Christmas as a benevolent holiday of giving, caring, and spending time with family and friends. It helped to clearly define and establish what Christmas was really all about. The Industrial Revolution had left little place for the doting of children, but in large part due to Dicken's powerful prose, Christmas was increasingly seen as an opportunity to devote attention to one's children: to lavish them with gifts and pay them special attention. Christmas became a time of joyful celebration.

While that's a bit of a reach, it's fairly well agreed that the practice of gift giving at Christmas was certainly not as popular as it is today:

• Gift-giving at Christmastime was rare in Europe or America prior to the 19th century. The first advertisements for Christmas gifts in the United States were primarily for children's books. In the 19th century gifts tended to be made by the giver and were practical (eg, mittens or food), but modern gifts tend to be more frivolous, fun or luxurious. Half of the year's sale of diamonds, furs and luxury watches happen in December. SCROOGE (Society to Curtail Ridiculous, Outrageous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges) is attempting to promote the giving of smoke alarms, first aid kits and other practical gifts. The Christmas Resistance Movement is dedicated to opposing the "holiday hysteria" of "compulsory consumption".

So the weight of evidence as Christmas gift giving (as we think of it) being a recent invention is on the original poster's side.

Excellent! Here are more GREAT ones:

Uranus Jokes

If job security for existing MS programmers is an issue, just given them all a yearly decreasing proportion of their current salaries for the next 5 years: 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% -- and during that time let them find financing to compete.

TapeCutter (624760) said:

"So what would it take to get the current mob to answer questions under oath?"

I seriously doubt that. I have an increasing suspicion that BushCo (and other places) is full of psychopaths like those described here: http://www.psychopath-research.com/ or here:
http://www.geocities.com/lycium7/

And not just in the whitehouse, either:
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_11 240.shtml

The prognosis is not good if this is the case. Google it up and read about it. It is scarey to say the least.

"Point taken on the sacking and stupid perjury. I thought impeachment was an auto-sacking (forced election). At the time of the blow job scandal I was distracted by my wife leaving to give someone else a blow job."

Was her name Monica by any chance? ;-)

As per the subject, fruits have a lot less sugar than you think.

The problem is that the average American eats a lot more sugar than they used to. Americans eat an estimated 20-34 teaspoons of added sugar in the food and drink every day. While you probably shouldn't be chugging apple juice all day, it would be a far sight better for you than chugging Coke all day. However, there's no need to avoid whole fruits whatsoever. Go wild.

You want to get in a huff about something? Do some research on the 16th amendment and discover that it was never ratified.

Actually do some research and see that this argument has lost a serious number of court cases.

I don't have time to read through the actual source but here are some links:
link1
link2

While working with the corporate software process group at SAIC (I was managing the automated ordnance inspection software department at the time) it became apparent to me that most of the software process is reducable to a human-mediated build/compilation process where the "source" language is the formalism used for specification. Since the highest level language for specification is predication (largely of pre and post conditions of the system's operations) it became apparent that predicate calculus tools -- not necessarily direct execution thereof -- could be very important for automating large portions of the software process.

Since Rails isn't high enough level, its specification language is inadequate and the resulting code generated must be edited directly. But it is a step in the right direction.

I'm sorry, but I have to call you out on this.

I don't know what kind of "flack jacket" you're talking about that's comprised of "rticulated ceramic/steel plates with a touch of Kevlar fabric to hold it together" but it's nothing that I've ever seen. And a flak jacket from the Korean war, that was rated to stop a .50 BMG? That's ridiculous. There isn't any type of personal body armor that will stop a 50-cal, even today (unless you consider an armored vehicle a form of personal body armor).

I'll refer you over to the Body Armor page at Globalsecurity.org. "The [pre-Interceptor] "flak jacket," constructed of ballistic nylon, provided protection primarily from munitions fragments and was ineffective against most pistol and rifle threats. These vests also were very cumbersome and bulky and were restricted primarily to military use." This adequately describes the vests used up through Vietnam and which were even issued during the onset of the current war in Iraq. On the Interceptor system, which is current issue, "The outer tactical vest consists of a Kevlar weave that's very fine and will stop 9mm pistol rounds. Webbing on the front and back of the vest permits attaching such equipment as grenades, walkie-talkies and pistols. The Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) is made of a boron carbide ceramic with a spectra shield backing that's an extremely hard material. It stops, shatters and catches any fragments up to a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second."

The old, Vietnam-era vest would not stop a 7.62mm rifle round. Whether it would stop a 9mm handgun round I'm not sure, but there are plenty of reports of guys being killed by being shot through the flak vest. It was never intended to stop aimed rifle fire. And it certainly wasn't made from hinged solid plate! Here's a page with a photo. It was made primarily of nylon.

That the new armor system -- with plates -- can reliably stop rifle rounds is a big deal. It was not true before; I do not believe there was a personal armoring system available to the average troops in any war before this one, that would stop bullets. The WWII, Korea, and Vietnam "flak jackets" were exactly that -- to stop flak, that is, fragments produced by things exploding.

You are also mistaken about the 5.56mm round. It does too have a steel penetrator. Nonwithstanding my personal experience (fire one through several layers of 1/4" mild steel plate separated by a few inches and you can see the copper jacket and lead surround strip off, and the steel core continue), there are an abundance of references on the net. The current issue is called the M885 Ball round, it is a 62 grain bullet with a full copper jacket and lead surrounding a cylindrical steel core. It's commonly referred to as "Green tip" because the tips of the bullets are painted green to differentiate them from the older, solid-lead M193 round, which has no coloring on the tips.

You can get quite an argument going with people familiar with terminal ballistics by asking about whether the wound profile of the new M855 bullets (they're quite a bit messier than the old solid lead ones) are due to the bullets 'tumbling,' or breaking apart on impact, but it's quite well known that they have a steel penetrator, and that this was introduced principally to defeat new types of body armor. The Russians have a comparable cartridge, for similar reasons. (Best reference: http://matrix.dumpshock.com/raygun/basics/pmrb.htm l)

Also read:
http://www.geocities.com/odjobman/r1r42.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib

lost only gives you a few mysteries at a time, and always wraps up a few before delivering the next batch

Excuse me? here is a list of questions which remained unanswered at the end of season 1 of Lost. How many of them have been answered so far in season 2? Two, perhaps three. And the answer to "What's inside the hatch?" is "Many additional mysteries!" Mysteries such as "What's the answer to that snowman riddle?", "Why do those numbers need typing every 108 minutes?", "Why 108 minutes?", "Who is the Dharma Initiative?", "What's under all that concrete?" and so on and so on and so on.

Lost is absolutely infuriating for anybody who is actually trying to find the answers to mysteries.

http://www.geocities.com/ri0n/ars_nsa_article.html

And thus the "just a theory" defense is trotted out once more. When scientists use the word "theory" it's in a very different sense from the way non-scientists use it. Google "just a theory" and you'll come up with many explanations, including this one.

Your links are fucked. Hint: you don't type the domain shit in []'s. That's added by slashcode automatically (or not, as the user's preferences dictates.) Line breaks would be a good thing to have too, otherwise your text just looks like a jumbled mass of crap.

http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dvo rak_powerbook.jpg
http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software .asp?id=94
http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html

He knows when your are sleeping,
He knows when you're on the can,
He'll hunt you down and blast your ass from here to Pakistan.
You better not breathe, you better not move,
You're better off dead, I'm telling you, dude.
Santa Claus is gunning you down!

I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm. As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants. If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits: * 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...) * the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty) * as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg [geocities.com]) As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94 [sil.org]). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it. In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html [vt.edu]); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking. Hope this helps. Jon

As to the curve towards the end of the rail, as I said, (again I know it's a really bad idea to reference to games when you are trying to get people to take you seriously, but games are the only place I have seen creative enough to display anything like it). BTW as I said before, I have seen the rail design in Namco's Ace Combat 5 (the space-port facility you protect during the cargo launch, but its a rocket sled, not rail-gun) and in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 8 (the Lunar Gate, where they send you into space, and what they launched the Ragnarok from)

BTW: The part about embedding/tunneling part of the rail into a mountain side is a great idea, really efficient (that way you dont have to build a huge super-structure to support the rail at the launching end)

here's a pic I made real quick to show you (i'm no good at ASCII pix) http://www.geocities.com/xtecha_omega/mass-driver_ rail.gif

And to reinforce what I stated before, yes, it would be economical (more so than just the Shuttle, which has only one use, to send people to space), the nuclear power plant could sell power to cities that need it (except for when you need it to launch cargo from the rail)

As to the curve towards the end of the rail, as I said, (again I know it's a really bad idea to reference to games when you are trying to get people to take you seriously, but games are the only place I have seen creative enough to display anything like it). BTW as I said before, I have seen the rail design in Namco's Ace Combat 5 (the space-port facility you protect during the cargo launch, but its a rocket sled, not rail-gun) and in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 8 (the Lunar Gate, where they send you into space, and what they launched the Ragnarok from)

BTW: The part about embedding/tunneling part of the rail into a mountain side is a great idea, really efficient (that way you dont have to build a huge super-structure to support the rail at the launching end)

here's a pic I made real quick to show you (i'm no good at ASCII pix) http://www.geocities.com/xtecha_omega/mass-driver_ rail.gif

And to reinforce what I stated before, yes, it would be economical (more so than just the Shuttle, which has only one use, to send people to space), the nuclear power plant could sell power to cities that need it (except for when you need it to launch cargo from the rail)

What about realsheep? http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palace/6314/

I think you only have a vauge clue what you are talking about, let alone understand what I have been saying.

You appear to be arguing that humans and chimps are significantly more violent and cruel than other animals, and hold up the concept of war as evidence of your claim.

Bzzzzt, I'm sorry, I am arguing that humans and chimps evolved a survival strategy that we call war. This strategy is significantly different to other animals and is what I called "violence". Perhaps I confused you when I defined war as "violence" to distigush the behaviour from the background gnash of tooth and claw? What really pisses me off is you have managed to take your confusion, mix it with some personal baggage and project a whole heap of words and thoughts on to me that are simply not there. Did I say anything about cruelty? Did I bring up lions and cartoon characters? Where did I make any type of moral judgement or quantitative comaprison on any species (including humans)?

War has always been a part of us and I belive it is an evelotionary trait unique to great apes. War is not just lion behaviour with more technology. I also happen to agree with the other poster who said something like we also have an "equally great capacity for peace". This does not deny the "selfish gene" theory, what it says is that for most species, when it comes to killing their own kind, it is a "selfish and lazy gene" at work.

Personally I think the selfish gene theory is often used by arseholes to justify being an arsehole, it's a peversion of a great theory, like eugenics is a peversion of genetics. They (unlike Dawkins) say nothing about co-operation. eg: The mitochondrial symbiosis at the heart of all multi-cellular life. The mitochondria genes are being selfish, co-operative and are certainly succesfull?

Compared to humans, the their [octopi] intellect is a flickering candleflame compared to the nuclear brightness of humanity. Even the most moronic human far outstrips the capabilities of an octopus.

When working on human problems I would have to agree (except for independently discovering how to open a screw top jar). But when applied to survival problems humans look more like a flash in the pan. Ant colonies with millions of individuals can rebuild an "ant city" in under a week. Does this mean our species is smarter or dumber or does it simply mean humans define intelligence so that our species is at the pinicale of evolution. When you think about how other organisims, (particularly something as alien as an octopus), might percive the world you might realise that it does not make much sense to compare human and octopi IQ results.

"Internet routers, like ants, are unintelligent and follow a set of mindless rules."

"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes." - Chapt 1, The selfish gene.

Argue with that book and then we can talk about cognition as an emergent behaviour of simple physical rules. In the meantime stop putting words in my mouth, I did not say ants are intelligent ( to start with, they physically do not have a brain). Human brains are an intricately woven blob of neurons that individually follow a set of mindless rules. Both the ant and the neuron have evolved to co-operate, co-operation on the "mindless" level emerges as intelligent behavior on the "mindfull" level. Given that you have a hard time understanding me, what hope has a human got of seeing the world through the eye of an octupus.

But just because these rules are effective, doesn't mean intelligence is at play.

Yes, you have demonstrated that.

Actually, we are closer to this than you may think. I have (at home, unfortunately, so I can't provide a cite or reference right now) an issue of Life magazine from not too many years ago (meaning, I don't know how research has progressed since then) which had a photo of a baby goat (IIRC) in an artificial "womb" which was developed by a researcher in Japan.

Without having the magazine in front of me, I can't give much more information. The best I can do (with the power of google) is this link, which states:

In 2002, a team at Cornell University used cells from a human uterus to grow an artificial womb. When a fertilized human egg was introduced, it implanted itself in the uterus wall as in a natural pregnancy. After six days of gestation, the experiment was halted due solely to legal constraints.

Meanwhile, half-a-world away, Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University in Japan has been removing fetuses from goats and keeping them alive for weeks in clear plastic tanks of amniotic fluid with machine-driven 'umbilical cords'.

I included the first part just to let you know how far we have come, and the second part is likely the researcher I am thinking of in Japan, and from which the image in Life magazine came from, most likely (the description above is accurate for the picture that was shown - I remember the image looking like a largish clear-acrylic tank, like a fish tank, filled with a thick fluid in which the unborn goat was immersed with a number of tubes sticking out of it).

Now - notice the name of the HTML page in that link I supplied. If you do some googling on "artificial wombs", you are going to stumble across an interesting topic, something that it seems has a lot of people up in arms (or at least wondering about it all), but hasn't yet hit the public as to the implications. As with anything of this nature, it has to do with the abortion debate. I am not wanting to start a flamewar, but the idea of a working artificial womb (for humans) brings up a number of interesting possibilities...

First off, if you have such a device, the life and health of prematurely born babies could possibly be made a lot better with such a device, vs the mechanical incubators and other methods we currently have. What possibilities an artificial womb could open up for such uses are anybody's guess.

But think about this: if an artificial womb can keep a baby which was "born" premature alive, what implications does this have on the abortion debate/issue? If instead of aborting a fetus and terminating its life, it could be put into an artificial womb, instead...

Or, if instead of procreating the "normal" way, one used "harvested" eggs and sperm to create an in-vitro embryo (or blastocyst) and "implanted" that into the artificial womb to be brought to term in that manner...

What implications does this have on society? What about the state (what if the state/society allowed "abortions" in which the fetus was transferred to these devices to come to term - would the state become the "parent", if the mother or parents didn't want it)?

The questions are numerous, and these are only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, just like every other "big question" that we should ALL be paying attention to RIGHT NOW, working together to solve the moral, legal, and ethical dillemas, we are instead ignoring it. Right now, the debate seems to be going on in "fringe groups", most likely with religious connotations. This may "explode" on us in the very near future. It would be nice if we were all prepared ahead, but unfortunately history has shown we never want to think that far in the future, especially on subjects such as this...

I can see it now. The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner in VR than interact with a real person.

If only more people had watched Futurama...

Narrator: [in movie] Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to ... tragedy.

[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]

Billy: [in movie] Neat-o! A Marilyn Monroe-bot!

Monroe-bot: [in movie] Ooh! You're a real dreamboat, (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen.

Narrator: [in movie] Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next.

[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom where he kisses the Monroe-bot. His mother walks through the door.]

Billy's Mom: [in movie] Billy, do you want to walk your dog?

Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Mom. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.

[Enter his dad.]

Billy's Dad: [in movie] Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?

Billy: [in movie] No thanks, Dad. I'd rather make out with my Monroe-bot.

[The girl from the cafe, Mavis, walks in.]

Mavis: [in movie] Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.

Billy: [in movie] Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out.

Narrator: [in movie] Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily, Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route. Then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance to perform the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots, why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty football field.] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand drifts across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of human and robot couples making out on beds.] They're trapped! Trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex ... and sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?

[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but still with his Monroe-bot and still making out with her.]

Billy: [in movie] Farewell!

[He dies.]

Narrator: [in movie] The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [A fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with laser shots.]

Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't date robots!

This seems like a perfect opportunity to state my misheard lyrics to the song Full Metal Jackoff by Jello Biafra & DOA.

It is only the lyrics at the end that I misunderstood, and considering how the album begins, might be considered understandable. I thought they were chanting:

"Always more credit, you'll get Great Stuff!"

But they were really chanting:

"Ollie for president, he'll get things done!!!"

It is a great song, and a great album, and it is not owned by the RIAA:

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/2503 /lyrics02.html?200513#fullmetal

British astronauts (well, Helen Sharman and some close calls)

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/6 133/astronauts.html

The issue is of Shylock and antisemitism is dicussed at more length than I am willing to read right now at this site. A more concise summary of Shylock is over yonder.

No, no, Mr. Sparkle-O http://www.geocities.com/chuckhoyt/mrsparkle.html is even better! "I'm disrespectful to bad web design! Can you see I am serious?"