Yes, the level of scholarship you're after determines how fra back you should go, but if you are a student, it is not only not generally necessary, but often difficult to track down original sources. If a book or paper is not available at your library, or if you don't have the time to read 15 different papers on a topic for a small report, you are out of luck.
And if you cite the source without reading it (which is what I think was implied in ggp), that seems every so slightly unethical.
Because if you were using the wiki and not the sources that the wiki cites, it would be slightly unethicacl to say otherwise. And if you didn't use the original sources, how do you know which facts came from which source? Most likely, not all the sources are original anyways, but books or articles with their own references. Should you trace everything back to the original?
Oops, I crossed your post with another post and thought I saw trolls where you said goblins. I appologize.
The goblins are money grubbers, yes, as they are neutral players who are trying to profit from both sides of the conflict, and yes, they clearly are midgets, but the jump from that to jews is still a bit of a streach. Also, being the neutral race, there is very little deomizing of them. My sentiment still remains that your accusation of racism is more offensive than how the race is depicted.
While I haven't played a horde character past level 20 (but do have 2 60 alliance characters), I don't recall anywhere trolls being depicted as money grubbing. They also, while perhaps having bad posture, are not midgets. Moreover, their accent is something caribbean.
I don't know how you saw the jews in the trolls. I can only surmise that you looked at the noses, said "That is a jewish looking nose, those filty, money grubbing midget trolls deserve my hatred" and filled in the rest for yourself. As a jew, I find the fact that you found a clear link between the trolls and the jews offensive. I am not, however, offended by the trolls.
Yes, there are a lot of similarities between thee Taurens and the Native Americans, but they are depicted in a fairly positive light. There is a big difference between making a fictional race similar to a non-fictional one and being racist.
There is a grave danger in throwing around loaded terms like racist or pedophile or terrorist. You first have the horrible knee jerk reactions of people who won't stop to see that the term might be misapplied, but if it is done enough, it changes the meaning of the word into something less meaningful.
You make it sound like I'm not glad to hear that the next incarnation of Debian stable is coming out. I had just been hearing about it for so long that I was shocked. I mean, if it is really happening, why can't my other perenial vaporware products be too? Moreover, why can't I display my shock with a (cliched) comment?
You can figure that comments like that are either going to be modded funny, redundent, or troll, and browsing with funny -6 will save you from having to read comments here (and everywhere) that aren't interesting or insightful for the most part.
That said, I appologize. It was not my intent to thoroughly annoy anybody.
However, if you want to use someone's GPL'd code in your product without consulting with them, the only safe and legal way to do it is to release under the GPL.
Of course, this ammounts to saying "It is free, but you can't just take it and do whatever," and I think that is perfectly reasonable. Calling it viral is propganda at best. I think the point is that it is less free (or differently free) than an MIT/BSD liscense.
Personally, I like the LGPL more, but the liscense you chose should be for its merits and not for what other people falsely claim about it.
"What does ActiveX do that XPCOM and Java are incapable of performing?"
ActiveX runs things that were previously designed to run via ActiveX. The question is akin to "Why use windows over linux?" There are many ActiveX controls already written that cannot or will not be rerwritten that people depend on, and unless someone takes the time and money to make clones for the controls, people will continue using the pltforms thtat the controls tie them to.
There are good reasons for people to replace ActiveX with something else, but there are also good reasons for users to continue using the programs that support their controls. Inertia is a powerful thing.
The score breakdown is: Engineering Eval:
Carl Hayden: 53.17
MIT: 44.67 Tech Report:
Carl Hayden: 20.25
MIT: 17 Team Display:
Carl Hayden: 13.5
MIT: 8 Mission Task:
Carl Hayden: 32
MIT: 48 Total:
Carl Hayden: 118.92
MIT: 117.67
While MIT lost by a hair, at the mission task, they scored 50% more points. The majority of the points for the competition were *not* based on the ability of the robot to accomplish its goal, and the Carl Hayden robot was not just a better robot. It would be nice to say "Simplicity is always better" but it would seem, in this case, that simplicity only gains you points in the things that do not matter in the end. Unless you are in management.
There have been recent, successful (i.e. highly reporoducible, statistically significant) experiments with cold fusion, or at least with something that doesn't seem explained by other known science. I know people at MIT who are currently working on cold fusion research, and apparnelty there are at least two commercial ventures that are underway to make products out of some of this research. However, nothing is going to be released till people are damned sure this is the real thinng, because the social and political risks are too big if it isn't.
The probleme with cold fusion is not that it doesn't work (which it may or may not, as I haven't actually looked at the research), but that because of the bad science that has been done on cold fusion, there aren't many reputable scientists working on it. Of course, 90% of the crap you read might be completely irreproducible, so if you were to try to just look into the field you'd find a lot of crackpots and poor results. However, you should not confuse what you will most likely find with what you might find.
Of course, on the other hand, if the results that people are finding really are examples of workinig cold fusion, the experiments should be at a level that cannot be ignored very soon. It follows that *if* this is the real thing, we will know soon, and if it is not, we will know that the current batch of research isn't fruitful. I trust my friends, so I think there is something to look forward to, but its really hard to say what will happen. Its imporant that we have people working on this kind of research, though, because the benefits will far outweight the costs if things do prove fruitful. The trick is keeping it in the realm of science.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Actually, if what I've been told is correct, voltaire never said anything like that. Instead, some woman whose name escapes me claimed that it was the kind of thing he would say, and then everybody has misattributed the quote to him since.
If you've ever seen the quote, "I don't like what you have to say, but I'll defend dto the death your right to misattribute it to me," now you know what that is a reference to.
"and the silly square bulge in your pants that doesn't look so natural to the cashier"
Its a medical condition, you insensitive clod, and I'll thank you not to stare. This is why I have to spend so much time on the internet downloading...tv shows.
Speaking as an MIT student, I think that there are two sides to the coin. On one hand, if you don't have a large enough bag of tricks, your creativity might not be enough to help you solve a problem in a reasonable time frame. On the other hand, if you don't have creativity, you won't be able to soslve the problems tht your tricks don't cover, and you might not see how to apply the tricks you have anyway.
Unfortunately, creativity is not something that can be easily taught, and the creative people will remain creative unless they have are told that different but correct solutions are wrong.
However, this still leaves two options for teaching creative people: you can focus on methods and hope that their creativity allows them to apply and expand them, or you can teach them background and hope that they either can make a contribution to theory or can manage when they get to problems they weren't taught.
I'm fortunate to be a mathematician, so I don't get too bogged down in methods, but I've taken enough engineering related courses to know that some people teach more "how" than "why". Does this kill people's creativity? To the extent that people will take the path of least resistance and do what they know when they can, yes, but I think that they still have paralells to draw when they hit brick walls. On the other hand, people who were more free might have a better understanding of what is going on, but if they can't do the integrals that they have to do, their creativity has failed them.
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Yes, if you give someone a hammer they might try to treat everything as a nail, but if you only give someone the tools to make new tools, there are many things they will do slower, and still some things not at all. Which is better depends on what you are doing. If you are tasked with building a good engineer, though, you have a better chance of making him good enough if you give him enough tools to do what he needs to do.
I say to them, alright, you donate the same percentage of your wealth to the poor.
The problem with this is that unless you make above a certain amount of money, giving away a substantial amount of your money very significantly impacts your standard of living.
Certain things cost fixed amounts of money. If you have a family of 5, I imagine that food costs will probably be more than $10,000 a year. Throw in the cost of gas to drive to work, school supplies, housing costs, and some other things, and perhaps $50,000 is enough to support a family. But cut that in half, and suddenly it isn't nearly enough.
If you have 40 billion dollars, you can easily give away half of it and still have more than enough to live like a king until you die. There is only so much that one can spend without being completely wasteful, and anything over that is useless except for making more money.
However, there are even limits to how much of that extra money that you can really use for direct investment, and so if you continue to make more than you spend, why not use it for charaity? Not only do you get great publicity and the feeling that you're doing something good for someone else, but you get devotees saying "If he's so bad, you contibute to charity the same way," confusing the issue.
The issue of good and evil is never so clear cut as it is in the movies. He might not kill people, but the actions of Microsoft and Gates have been more than a bit shady, especially considering their place in the market. The good that one is capable of does not cancel out the bat they are capable of, it merely adds more to the story.
I'm not so sure that would have been against the spirit of the GPL. The GPL use copyright to say "Normally, you couldn't do anything to distribute this, but I'm letting you, as long as you keep things free in some specific sense of the word."
I think that claiming ownership of the protocol and then saying that the protocol was liscensed freely for use in GPL'd programs would be exactly in the spirit of the GPL. The GPL is all about using the power that you have to keep things open.
Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?
You seem to be taking the position that cooperating with something that is evil makes you evil. Consider the alternative, though. If google didn't make a censored version, either people would be given a bubnch of dead links when they clicked on links to things that were censored, or they would not have google news at all.
If google gives the people all the information they'd actually be able to access, is that more evil than withdrawing completely and giving them nothing? Do no evil is not fight all evil. Do no evil is not do everything as good as possible everywhere.
If aid workers came into a war torn country and one of the armies said "we will give you access to treat people in zone A, but not zone B," would it be more evil for the aid workers to treat the people in zone A or to leave because compromising would be evil?
Not fighting is not the same as agreeing with, and giving people a free service seem to me to be better than not giving them a free service. Indeed, I think what they've done is the best that they can do considering the fight they would have otherwise. Is it the best possible thing for everyone? Perhaps not. Is it the bests feasable thing for everyone for the moment? I believe it is.
The world isn't black and white. But apparently there are two groups of people, those who can grasp this concept and those who cant.
I mean, linking to "wrong" as an example for wrong is slightly odd, so maybe he was going to definitions, in a sense?
Of course, I took your view at first, but I read the entry and couldn't find anything that was hugely inaccurate (like a statement that fox news is biased, although I do think one of the things they mentioned blurred the distinction between Fox News and the local news on a Fox affiliate station).
If it was intended as humor, then, hehe, and if not, then I agree with you.
What about Donatello, though? Oh, the painters! And here I was thinking that you were refering to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as famous left handed people. I'm sure glad we cleared that up.
I don't know if this is quite what you meant, but this story was about a device that allowed you to gain or regain senses by putting a pad in your mouth. While you can recieve the signals to other parts of the body, they found that the tounge was the most receptive.
It isn't entirely input from a computer, but I don't see why the signals couldn't be generated artificially and sent to a device like this.
You can say "clearly this is a dupe," without adding anything else if it is a dupe of something that has beeen on the front page in the last 48 hours. However, beyond that, you really should add a link of some sort.
It's not that I don't believe you, but since neither google nor slashdot's search came up with anything that resembles a dupe (that I could find), I'm a bit skeptical. Maybe you weren't reading slashdot? Maybe you were reading the samba forums?
So for all of you still reading, if you're going to post "dupe" on something that isn't an obvious dupe, provide a link.
While this was perhaps a decent accomplishment, you shouldn't try to milk it with respect to the weather. While it did snow, it was only barely heavy enough for there to actually be snow the next day, and it was barely below freezing. In fact, the snow was alternating between snow and sleetish rainy cold annoying preccipitation.
So mad props, but if we were at the same MIT, the weather didn't really figure into the accomplishment:-)
Of course, had there been heavy winds, and there weren't, then you could talk...
"Even if it's a stinkin' embryo, thousands of years of observation STRONGLY suggests that, left unharmed, it's going to become a human being"
I think that all depends on your definition of unharmed. If anything that leads to its death is considered harm, then yes, a human embryo will become a human if unharmed. However, it requires much more than a lack of harm to survive. It requires the mother's body to provide a huge level of support. If you remove the embryo from the body, it will die. If the body does not have the right conditions (failure of hormones to change correctly, etc), the embryo will die. If you remove the embryo from the body manually (but do not harm the embryo itself), it will die. I have heard it estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of pregnencies end in miscarriage before people even realize they are pregnent. That would mean that, if things are left to their natural course and you don't do anything to the embryo, it most likely won't become a human.
"Seriously, it's a self-defeating argument- they're trying to protect their daughters, yet some of those potential daughters won't be around to enjoy that protection."
Women have, what, about 400 eggs? By not raping women as soon as they are fertile, by not removing their eggs and ensuring they are all fertalized, potential human lives are destroyed. If not doing all we can to preserve all potential human life is a sin, and you aren't impregnating as many people as possible, then you are living in sin too.
Going through pregnency is more than just sitting idley by, and doing nothing will lead to "harm" for the embryo. Should we all be requiredd to nurse all potential life, as not doing so is akin to murder?
Nah, doesn't look like you've oversimplified anything important. I suppose I could nitpick that the definition you give is a bit bad, as I would have gone for "an object similar to a curve, surface, or solid, except possibly in higher dimensions."
I should probably have added that stokes requires a manifold with boundary (which is implicit in the fact that I take the boundry of the manifold), and that manifolds do not neccesarily have to have boundaries.
Another small place where you have possibly oversimplified is that you can't always do an inside integral or a boundary integral. A boundary integral cannot be converted to an inside integral if there isn't some thing that you have a boundary of for which your form is defined (as an example, xdy-ydx/x^2+y^2 and a circle around the origin). Also, an inside integral cannot be converted to a boundary integral if you are not integrating a form which is the dereivative of another (an exact form).
However, special cases where things don't hold only detract from a good explanation, so I shouldn't have brought it up. If you change always to "almost always" I will be happy!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the level of scholarship you're after determines how fra back you should go, but if you are a student, it is not only not generally necessary, but often difficult to track down original sources. If a book or paper is not available at your library, or if you don't have the time to read 15 different papers on a topic for a small report, you are out of luck.
And if you cite the source without reading it (which is what I think was implied in ggp), that seems every so slightly unethical.
Because if you were using the wiki and not the sources that the wiki cites, it would be slightly unethicacl to say otherwise. And if you didn't use the original sources, how do you know which facts came from which source? Most likely, not all the sources are original anyways, but books or articles with their own references. Should you trace everything back to the original?
Oops, I crossed your post with another post and thought I saw trolls where you said goblins. I appologize.
The goblins are money grubbers, yes, as they are neutral players who are trying to profit from both sides of the conflict, and yes, they clearly are midgets, but the jump from that to jews is still a bit of a streach. Also, being the neutral race, there is very little deomizing of them. My sentiment still remains that your accusation of racism is more offensive than how the race is depicted.
While I haven't played a horde character past level 20 (but do have 2 60 alliance characters), I don't recall anywhere trolls being depicted as money grubbing. They also, while perhaps having bad posture, are not midgets. Moreover, their accent is something caribbean.
I don't know how you saw the jews in the trolls. I can only surmise that you looked at the noses, said "That is a jewish looking nose, those filty, money grubbing midget trolls deserve my hatred" and filled in the rest for yourself. As a jew, I find the fact that you found a clear link between the trolls and the jews offensive. I am not, however, offended by the trolls.
Yes, there are a lot of similarities between thee Taurens and the Native Americans, but they are depicted in a fairly positive light. There is a big difference between making a fictional race similar to a non-fictional one and being racist.
There is a grave danger in throwing around loaded terms like racist or pedophile or terrorist. You first have the horrible knee jerk reactions of people who won't stop to see that the term might be misapplied, but if it is done enough, it changes the meaning of the word into something less meaningful.
You make it sound like I'm not glad to hear that the next incarnation of Debian stable is coming out. I had just been hearing about it for so long that I was shocked. I mean, if it is really happening, why can't my other perenial vaporware products be too? Moreover, why can't I display my shock with a (cliched) comment?
You can figure that comments like that are either going to be modded funny, redundent, or troll, and browsing with funny -6 will save you from having to read comments here (and everywhere) that aren't interesting or insightful for the most part.
That said, I appologize. It was not my intent to thoroughly annoy anybody.
Does this mean thaat Duke Nukem Forever is coming out soon too? Or just that hell has frozen over?
I might watch too much of The Simpsons.
Given that the joke was only used on the simpsons once, I think the more reasonable explanation is that you read too much slashdot!
However, if you want to use someone's GPL'd code in your product without consulting with them, the only safe and legal way to do it is to release under the GPL.
Of course, this ammounts to saying "It is free, but you can't just take it and do whatever," and I think that is perfectly reasonable. Calling it viral is propganda at best. I think the point is that it is less free (or differently free) than an MIT/BSD liscense.
Personally, I like the LGPL more, but the liscense you chose should be for its merits and not for what other people falsely claim about it.
"What does ActiveX do that XPCOM and Java are incapable of performing?"
ActiveX runs things that were previously designed to run via ActiveX. The question is akin to "Why use windows over linux?" There are many ActiveX controls already written that cannot or will not be rerwritten that people depend on, and unless someone takes the time and money to make clones for the controls, people will continue using the pltforms thtat the controls tie them to.
There are good reasons for people to replace ActiveX with something else, but there are also good reasons for users to continue using the programs that support their controls. Inertia is a powerful thing.
The score breakdown is:
Engineering Eval:
Carl Hayden: 53.17
MIT: 44.67
Tech Report:
Carl Hayden: 20.25
MIT: 17
Team Display:
Carl Hayden: 13.5
MIT: 8
Mission Task:
Carl Hayden: 32
MIT: 48
Total:
Carl Hayden: 118.92
MIT: 117.67
While MIT lost by a hair, at the mission task, they scored 50% more points. The majority of the points for the competition were *not* based on the ability of the robot to accomplish its goal, and the Carl Hayden robot was not just a better robot. It would be nice to say "Simplicity is always better" but it would seem, in this case, that simplicity only gains you points in the things that do not matter in the end. Unless you are in management.
There have been recent, successful (i.e. highly reporoducible, statistically significant) experiments with cold fusion, or at least with something that doesn't seem explained by other known science. I know people at MIT who are currently working on cold fusion research, and apparnelty there are at least two commercial ventures that are underway to make products out of some of this research. However, nothing is going to be released till people are damned sure this is the real thinng, because the social and political risks are too big if it isn't.
The probleme with cold fusion is not that it doesn't work (which it may or may not, as I haven't actually looked at the research), but that because of the bad science that has been done on cold fusion, there aren't many reputable scientists working on it. Of course, 90% of the crap you read might be completely irreproducible, so if you were to try to just look into the field you'd find a lot of crackpots and poor results. However, you should not confuse what you will most likely find with what you might find.
Of course, on the other hand, if the results that people are finding really are examples of workinig cold fusion, the experiments should be at a level that cannot be ignored very soon. It follows that *if* this is the real thing, we will know soon, and if it is not, we will know that the current batch of research isn't fruitful. I trust my friends, so I think there is something to look forward to, but its really hard to say what will happen. Its imporant that we have people working on this kind of research, though, because the benefits will far outweight the costs if things do prove fruitful. The trick is keeping it in the realm of science.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Actually, if what I've been told is correct, voltaire never said anything like that. Instead, some woman whose name escapes me claimed that it was the kind of thing he would say, and then everybody has misattributed the quote to him since.
If you've ever seen the quote, "I don't like what you have to say, but I'll defend dto the death your right to misattribute it to me," now you know what that is a reference to.
"and the silly square bulge in your pants that doesn't look so natural to the cashier"
Its a medical condition, you insensitive clod, and I'll thank you not to stare. This is why I have to spend so much time on the internet downloading...tv shows.
Speaking as an MIT student, I think that there are two sides to the coin. On one hand, if you don't have a large enough bag of tricks, your creativity might not be enough to help you solve a problem in a reasonable time frame. On the other hand, if you don't have creativity, you won't be able to soslve the problems tht your tricks don't cover, and you might not see how to apply the tricks you have anyway.
Unfortunately, creativity is not something that can be easily taught, and the creative people will remain creative unless they have are told that different but correct solutions are wrong.
However, this still leaves two options for teaching creative people: you can focus on methods and hope that their creativity allows them to apply and expand them, or you can teach them background and hope that they either can make a contribution to theory or can manage when they get to problems they weren't taught.
I'm fortunate to be a mathematician, so I don't get too bogged down in methods, but I've taken enough engineering related courses to know that some people teach more "how" than "why". Does this kill people's creativity? To the extent that people will take the path of least resistance and do what they know when they can, yes, but I think that they still have paralells to draw when they hit brick walls. On the other hand, people who were more free might have a better understanding of what is going on, but if they can't do the integrals that they have to do, their creativity has failed them.
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Yes, if you give someone a hammer they might try to treat everything as a nail, but if you only give someone the tools to make new tools, there are many things they will do slower, and still some things not at all. Which is better depends on what you are doing. If you are tasked with building a good engineer, though, you have a better chance of making him good enough if you give him enough tools to do what he needs to do.
I say to them, alright, you donate the same percentage of your wealth to the poor.
The problem with this is that unless you make above a certain amount of money, giving away a substantial amount of your money very significantly impacts your standard of living.
Certain things cost fixed amounts of money. If you have a family of 5, I imagine that food costs will probably be more than $10,000 a year. Throw in the cost of gas to drive to work, school supplies, housing costs, and some other things, and perhaps $50,000 is enough to support a family. But cut that in half, and suddenly it isn't nearly enough.
If you have 40 billion dollars, you can easily give away half of it and still have more than enough to live like a king until you die. There is only so much that one can spend without being completely wasteful, and anything over that is useless except for making more money.
However, there are even limits to how much of that extra money that you can really use for direct investment, and so if you continue to make more than you spend, why not use it for charaity? Not only do you get great publicity and the feeling that you're doing something good for someone else, but you get devotees saying "If he's so bad, you contibute to charity the same way," confusing the issue.
The issue of good and evil is never so clear cut as it is in the movies. He might not kill people, but the actions of Microsoft and Gates have been more than a bit shady, especially considering their place in the market. The good that one is capable of does not cancel out the bat they are capable of, it merely adds more to the story.
I'm not so sure that would have been against the spirit of the GPL. The GPL use copyright to say "Normally, you couldn't do anything to distribute this, but I'm letting you, as long as you keep things free in some specific sense of the word."
I think that claiming ownership of the protocol and then saying that the protocol was liscensed freely for use in GPL'd programs would be exactly in the spirit of the GPL. The GPL is all about using the power that you have to keep things open.
Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?
You seem to be taking the position that cooperating with something that is evil makes you evil. Consider the alternative, though. If google didn't make a censored version, either people would be given a bubnch of dead links when they clicked on links to things that were censored, or they would not have google news at all.
If google gives the people all the information they'd actually be able to access, is that more evil than withdrawing completely and giving them nothing? Do no evil is not fight all evil. Do no evil is not do everything as good as possible everywhere.
If aid workers came into a war torn country and one of the armies said "we will give you access to treat people in zone A, but not zone B," would it be more evil for the aid workers to treat the people in zone A or to leave because compromising would be evil?
Not fighting is not the same as agreeing with, and giving people a free service seem to me to be better than not giving them a free service. Indeed, I think what they've done is the best that they can do considering the fight they would have otherwise. Is it the best possible thing for everyone? Perhaps not. Is it the bests feasable thing for everyone for the moment? I believe it is.
The world isn't black and white. But apparently there are two groups of people, those who can grasp this concept and those who cant.
I mean, linking to "wrong" as an example for wrong is slightly odd, so maybe he was going to definitions, in a sense?
Of course, I took your view at first, but I read the entry and couldn't find anything that was hugely inaccurate (like a statement that fox news is biased, although I do think one of the things they mentioned blurred the distinction between Fox News and the local news on a Fox affiliate station).
If it was intended as humor, then, hehe, and if not, then I agree with you.
Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo (The painters)
What about Donatello, though? Oh, the painters! And here I was thinking that you were refering to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as famous left handed people. I'm sure glad we cleared that up.
I don't know if this is quite what you meant, but this story was about a device that allowed you to gain or regain senses by putting a pad in your mouth. While you can recieve the signals to other parts of the body, they found that the tounge was the most receptive.
It isn't entirely input from a computer, but I don't see why the signals couldn't be generated artificially and sent to a device like this.
You can say "clearly this is a dupe," without adding anything else if it is a dupe of something that has beeen on the front page in the last 48 hours. However, beyond that, you really should add a link of some sort.
It's not that I don't believe you, but since neither google nor slashdot's search came up with anything that resembles a dupe (that I could find), I'm a bit skeptical. Maybe you weren't reading slashdot? Maybe you were reading the samba forums?
So for all of you still reading, if you're going to post "dupe" on something that isn't an obvious dupe, provide a link.
While this was perhaps a decent accomplishment, you shouldn't try to milk it with respect to the weather. While it did snow, it was only barely heavy enough for there to actually be snow the next day, and it was barely below freezing. In fact, the snow was alternating between snow and sleetish rainy cold annoying preccipitation.
:-)
So mad props, but if we were at the same MIT, the weather didn't really figure into the accomplishment
Of course, had there been heavy winds, and there weren't, then you could talk...
"Even if it's a stinkin' embryo, thousands of years of observation STRONGLY suggests that, left unharmed, it's going to become a human being"
I think that all depends on your definition of unharmed. If anything that leads to its death is considered harm, then yes, a human embryo will become a human if unharmed. However, it requires much more than a lack of harm to survive. It requires the mother's body to provide a huge level of support. If you remove the embryo from the body, it will die. If the body does not have the right conditions (failure of hormones to change correctly, etc), the embryo will die. If you remove the embryo from the body manually (but do not harm the embryo itself), it will die. I have heard it estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of pregnencies end in miscarriage before people even realize they are pregnent. That would mean that, if things are left to their natural course and you don't do anything to the embryo, it most likely won't become a human.
"Seriously, it's a self-defeating argument- they're trying to protect their daughters, yet some of those potential daughters won't be around to enjoy that protection."
Women have, what, about 400 eggs? By not raping women as soon as they are fertile, by not removing their eggs and ensuring they are all fertalized, potential human lives are destroyed. If not doing all we can to preserve all potential human life is a sin, and you aren't impregnating as many people as possible, then you are living in sin too.
Going through pregnency is more than just sitting idley by, and doing nothing will lead to "harm" for the embryo. Should we all be requiredd to nurse all potential life, as not doing so is akin to murder?
Nah, doesn't look like you've oversimplified anything important. I suppose I could nitpick that the definition you give is a bit bad, as I would have gone for "an object similar to a curve, surface, or solid, except possibly in higher dimensions."
I should probably have added that stokes requires a manifold with boundary (which is implicit in the fact that I take the boundry of the manifold), and that manifolds do not neccesarily have to have boundaries.
Another small place where you have possibly oversimplified is that you can't always do an inside integral or a boundary integral. A boundary integral cannot be converted to an inside integral if there isn't some thing that you have a boundary of for which your form is defined (as an example, xdy-ydx/x^2+y^2 and a circle around the origin). Also, an inside integral cannot be converted to a boundary integral if you are not integrating a form which is the dereivative of another (an exact form).
However, special cases where things don't hold only detract from a good explanation, so I shouldn't have brought it up. If you change always to "almost always" I will be happy!
The integral of a differential form on the boundry of a manifold is equal to the integral of the exterior derivative on the manifold itself.
S_{dM)w=S_(M)dw
An important special case is the fundamental theorem of calculus. Not only is this a beautiful looking theorem, but important too.
Other special cases are the classical forms of green's theorem, stoke's theorem, and the divergence theorem.
I dunno if its my favorite equation, but its up there.