Slashdot Mirror

> 1) Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history.

Bullshit. Did you completely fail British history ???

* Political Philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) (British) ; On Liberty is summarized by this On Liberty of Thought and Discussion essay:

Mill laid out his argument for freedom of expression in the second section of On Liberty ('liberty of thought and discussion'). The core of his argument is that censorship prevents us from correcting errors by critical discussion. If a forbidden opinion is true,we lose the opportunity to learn of its truth. If a forbidden opinion is false, we lose the opportunity to remind ourselves why it is false.

* C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) (British) Chronological Snobbery

Lewis defines this chronological snobbery as âoethe uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.â Lewis eventually came to understand the need to ask further questions such as: Why did this idea go out of date? Was it ever refuted? If so, by whom, where, and how conclusively? In other words, you need to determine if an old idea is false before you reject it; we would not want to say that everything believed in an ancient culture was false. Which things are false -- and why -- and which things remain true?

> We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely.

There IS no line. Either you censor or you don't. PERIOD.

Grow the fuck up, put your big boy pants on and learn that not everyone will agree with what you say. And thats OK. Because the opposite, censorship, is FAR, FAR, worse.

--
"Only Cowards Censor"

Here is the EU data on the pesticide.

Some highlights: It is an insecticide, so it should not really surprise that it kills bees. The toxitity to honey bees is well known (LD50 = 0.004 ug/bee, which the document interpret as "high" risk). And it is approved for use in most EU countries, including Italy and Germany.

Plastic is made from hydrocarbons, just hydrogen and carbon.

http://www.ider.herts.ac.uk/school/courseware/materials/plastics/polymer.html

There are

And bacteria which feed on propane and butane

There is even the bacterium Bacillus cereus DQ01, which has evolved the ability to feed on the hydrocarbon n-hexadecane.

Here goes some pics of the robot from their website: University of Hertfordshire

The university where I studied has created plagiarism detection software for this reason, which is called Ferret.

I've often wondered: Why don't they just leave the foam on the tanks, and also coat the whole shuttle in foam to protect it from the bits that fall off?

I have sketched some concept drawings for my design. With my modifications, the shuttle would look a little like this.

Went to see Vint Cert at this event on monday: http://www.feis.herts.ac.uk/cs40/public/index.htm
Interesting event - nothing that I hadn't heard in interview or read on the web but fun to see live.
If a new he was recruiting I would have taken my CV along!

The University of Hertfordshire - I was at Wall Hall. It's not a great "university" - not just my opinion - 2 people I know involved with it slate it more than I do. http://www.herts.ac.uk/

While the rest of the globe celebrates the World Year of Physics, the UK has declared 2005 Einstein Year, why us and not his native Germany I don't know.

A somewhat bizarre range of events are and have taken place, from a hands-on lab in a lorry to an experiment looking for ghosts, to a poetry competition about time, space and energy.

Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Cl érel de (1805-59), French political writer and statesman, whose work on the United States political system became a classic.

Tocqueville was born July 29, 1805, in Verneuil, and studied law in Paris. With the French publicist Gustave Auguste de Beaumont de la Bonninière, he went abroad in 1831 to study the penal system in the U.S. The two men reported their findings in Du syst ème p énitentiaire aux États-Unis et son application en France (The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, 1832). After returning to France in 1832, Tocqueville wrote his most famous work, Democracy in America (2 vol., 1835-40; trans., 4 vol., 1835-40). One of the earliest and most profound studies of American life, it concerns the legislative and administrative systems in the U.S. and the influence of social and political institutions on the habits and manners of the people. Tocqueville maintains in this work that the full development of democracy occurred in the U.S. because conditions there best permitted the diffusion of European social ideas. He was highly critical of certain aspects of American democracy. For example, he believed that public opinion tended toward tyranny and that majority rule could be as oppressive as the rule of a despot.

As a member of the French Chamber of Deputies (1839-48), Tocqueville advocated a number of reforms, including the decentralization of government and an independent judiciary. He became vice president of the National Assembly in 1849 and for part of that year was minister of foreign affairs. After opposing the 1851 coup d'état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, later French emperor as Napoleon III, Tocqueville retired from political life. He died on April 16, 1859, in Cannes.

Tocqueville's major works offer a penetrating analysis of the principal political and social ideas of his period. His main emphasis was the evolutionary developments underlying all changes in society. His second most important work, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856; trans. 1856), which he left unfinished at his death, interprets the French Revolution as having been the result of gradual changes in the structure of government and in political attitudes toward equality and freedom. Among his other writings is Recollections (1893; trans. 1896). An English translation of his notebooks for the period 1833-35 was published as Journeys to England and Ireland (1970).

Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" addresses this puzzle with cellular automata.

Cellular automata are exactly what this problem is asking about! A CA is a bunch of FSMs hooked together. More precisely, a quick Googling says:

On a regular lattice (repeated structure of points have the same kind of neighborhood) one puts a finite-state machine at each point. The input to the machine is the states of all machines in its neighborhood. The behaviour is to change its state based in a determined way, as a function of the states of its neighbors and its own state. The states of all machines in the lattice are updated synchronously (simultaneously).

Lola Cañamero's Emotion Page

Steve Allen's Home Page