True. My point, however, was that the aspect of their biology that is relevant---the reproductive system---is closer to mammals in its behavior than the reproductive systems of most other fish. Whether that particular system evolved separately in parallel or not is not really that relevant to my point, which was that their reproductive systems are more similar to mammals than most species that exhibit parthenogenesis.
Parthenogenesis has been observed in bony fish and other closer relatives as well. AFAIK, Mammals are the only class of animals where parthenogenesis has not been observed in nature. On the other hand, we believed that it did not occur in sharks until recently in large part because of lack of ability to keep sharks in captivity long enough to observe it, so it seems quite plausible that it occurs in some mammals as well, but it merely has not yet been observed. *shrugs*
Spraying most liquids would be a problem because it would freeze instantly on contact with the rarified martian atmosphere. Even pure ethanol would freeze at the coldest point in Martian winter. The liquid would need to survive a minimum temperature of -140C without freezing and must remain liquid without evaporating up to at least -5C or so even at 6 millibars of atmospheric pressure. That's really hard to achieve. Compressed air might be practical if the particles are not sufficiently charged that they stick to the panel too well, but liquid... just doesn't seem very practical to me.
Yeah. "That'll teach me to post so late at night," I say as I post two hours later than that.
That said, it isn't that implausible in mammals. The sharks in question are relatively neurologically complex as fish go, and at least some of the sharks that this virgin birth has been observed in do have placenta-based live births that are fairly similar to mammals (unlike most other fish live births that involve eggs growing inside).... Granted, they are still cold-blooded, have gills, and lack hair, but as fish go, in many ways, they are closer to mammals than most fish.:-)
How about the overhead projector roll system. On one edge of the panel, you put a a roll of clear plastic cellophane (or thicker plastic in all likelihood, but you get the idea). On the opposite edge, you attach the cellophane to a take-up roll. You place a track along the other two edges to hold the film against the panel's surface. When things get too dusty, you run the motors and expose a new section of the film.
Better yet, just include a couple of capacitors and a fine wire mesh on the surface of the panel. When it gets too dusty, bring the mesh up to a high voltage and hold it there for a while. Next, charge up the capacitors with a high voltage of the opposite polarity. Suddenly cut power to the mesh and dump the opposite charge into the mesh. The dust should jump off faster than a mortgage broker on the roof of an investment bank the day after Lehman Brothers went belly up.
That's why I explicitly limited my comments to people joining the church as adults. Clearly any church membership can be coercive for someone who is not yet an adult, depending on the parents. Everything is effectively coercive until you turn 18. That's part of the nature of childhood.
I have no idea if Scientology brainwashes their members. Only a member could answer that question; they aren't likely to talk about it, and statements made by ex-members have some degree of negative bias, so you can't completely trust their accuracy.
As for the implied question of whether Christianity is a cult, I would say it clearly is not. From my perspective, what delineates a brainwashed cult from a religion are two things: 1. whether or not the believers understand the true nature of the group's beliefs at the time that they join it, 2. whether the founders/leaders of the religion do so with intent to spread enlightenment or gain power for themselves, and 3. whether coercive force is used to force members into remaining faithful. If believers think that they are joining a group that believes one thing and eventually discover that the group believes something else entirely, to some degree, the years of indoctrination can make them then accept a belief that otherwise would have been unpalatable (e.g. discovering after ten years that the goal of the cult was really to commit mass suicide on New Years in 2013). Similarly, if the founders' purpose is to make money, to commit mass suicide, to dominate large groups of servile women, etc., that's cultist behavior. Finally, at least in modern polite society, if a religion uses the threat of violence, extortion, etc. to maintain its membership, that pretty clearly crosses a line into unacceptable behavior.
Those are the basics, and with the exception of a few small sectarian groups, Christianity teaches you all about the religion in a fairly compressed time frame when you join the religion (at least when you join as an adult; children's religious education is different by necessity), is mostly lead by people genuinely trying to encourage good behavior, and doesn't threaten people with death, lost jobs, etc. if they choose to join another religion or say bad things about the religion. Ergo, at least by my definition, Christian religions as a whole clearly don't brainwash their members and thus are not cultlike.
Note: "You've already won!" is a trademark of [insert company name here] and is not meant to state or imply that the reader has, in fact, won anything. More to the point, the mere fact that you clicked on this guarantees that you cannot possibly have won because you are a loser.
I do use parameterized SQL when it is convenient in the particular programming language I'm using. When it isn't, I'm religious about writing functions that do proper quoting of values and always using them for values that are not known to be numeric... in much the same way that I'm religious about casting numbers in PHP with (int) to ensure no non-numeric crap gets in where I'm expecting a number. Those are all fairly basic security measures that every PHP programmer should use with regularity.
I'm not talking about making changes to the SQL database to avoid fixing bugs or looking for bugs in my own code. Even if my code were known to be flawless and used only parameterized SQL, I would still want additional protection from these sorts of injection attacks at the database layer. Why? While the parameter hndling code might in theory be less likely to contain mistakes than hand-rolled code that does the same thing, if there were a bug in the shared code that does the quoting behind the scenes when inserting the parameters into the queries, it would be much more likely to get exploited because the same flaw would be shared across many more pieces of software, and so would be widely known (not to mention that it might be detectable with something as simple as a web server version string). As such, explicitly disallowing both "--" and ";" in queries would still be useful changes that would provide additional hardening even if nobody used any non-parameterized SQL at all.
Also, I didn't write every line of code that runs on my web server. There are third-party bits of code lurking. I try to keep them isolated into their own databases (with their own login credentials and locked down permissions) so that they can only harm themselves (and only to a limited degree), but that only limits the damage that they can cause, and not nearly as much as I'd like. Any extra layer of added security would be beneficial, IMHO.
The whole concept does sort of make sense. At a minimum, it seems clear that organisms have at least some limited ability to control their own gene expression. Were that not the case, we wouldn't have all these animals that suddenly begin to express male genes or female genes when the populations are too heavily weighted towards one gender (many slugs) or animals whose ovaries can produce eggs with a full set of chromosomes in the absence of males (whales) or....
So there's clearly some sort of feedback cycle that is controlled in some way, whether neurologically, hormonally, etc. that has an impact on gene expression. (Also, with the number of junk genes we have, changes in gene expression could have a pretty significant impact on the traits of an organism and its offspring even without taking mutation into account....)
It would not be that much of a stretch, then, to believe that a similar mechanism could allow an organism to control whether damaged genes are repaired or are allowed to remain (and potentially be expressed at some point).
Depends on how it is designed. Ideally, you'd put the most thermally sensitive parts (glass lenses and their mounts, etc.) in the core of the unit and/or design them to be able to be retracted into a central chamber. That way, you can keep those parts warm while letting everything else just freeze and thaw. That said, I can't imagine trying to design anything to handle temperatures as cold as we're talking about, so that might not be practical.... Perhaps a variable duty cycle circuit could be added to allow them to dial down the amount of power used by the resistance heaters to be just enough to keep temperatures out of the red (blue?) zone. That way, perhaps they could all manage to run off the solar panels directly even during the low-power periods. They may already be doing that, though. No idea.
You know, something just occurred to me. The biggest reason SQL injection attacks are so common is that SQL allows multiple commands per input line and allows you to comment out the rest of the line, neither of which is useful when called from a programming language (or really anywhere outside of dump/restore tools). If you built a custom SQL library that PHP/Perl/* linked into that would return an error and do nothing if it detects more than one command or a comment start character anywhere in a command, injection attacks would become dramatically harder, if not impossible. At best, an attacker would merely be able to change additional fields in a table that were not changed in the original query, a security flaw that is much less problematic than the more general case of injection attacks....
That's what never made sense to me. Seems like all it would take is a low voltage cutoff circuit that shuts off power to everything as long as the voltage is below a threshold voltage, and then when the power comes back on, it would boot back up. In fact, most modern battery technologies require such safety measures to prevent the battery charge from getting so low that the batteries won't take a charge (or the cells reverse polarity like NiCd batteries have a habit of doing). I guess there's still the issue of whether the batteries will fail to operate if they get too cold....
Journalists have an obligation to report facts. The fact was that Palin said the things she said; the news media gave similar coverage to Biden's screw-ups. As for not reporting those negatives about Obama that you mention, the "news" you mention about Obama and Ayers was almost entirely hearsay, and the "news" about Obama's view of the coal industry was a statement taken completely out of context and warped in such a way that its meaning was very nearly the OPPOSITE of what he actually said. Neither of those represents factual information that should be reported as fact.
That said, if you'd prefer, in the future, journalists could run stories that say "[Republican candidate] lied today. In a statement before [group of people], he/she erroneously claimed that [Democrat candidate] said [blah], when in fact, he/she said [blah]." If you'd like that sort of negative press every time a candidate lies, then it would make sense for journalists to report such crap.... Without such obvious boilerplate stating that the statement is untrue (both before and after the statement in question), journalists would be reporting things as fact that are not fact, at which point there would be no point in having journalists at all; their entire purpose for existence is to filter through the lies and political reality-twisting, then distill that down until everything presented is factual.
Needless to say, I don't think this is what you want. What you want is for your candidates lies to be represented equally often as your opponents' factual statements. Sorry, but the purpose of journalism is to neither engage in nor support mudslinging. Just the facts.
I tried that once. Unfortunately, in the distorted reality, I had three heads, so a bunch of military copters were swarming around me in just this side of a minute. I got out of that distorted reality pretty quickly, let me tell you....
Why not use filtration and/or sieving? Ethanol molecules should be much larger than water molecules.... I know we're talking about creating nanomaterials here, but surely somebody has tried it....:-)
Oddly enough, when I read the title "How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught", the first thing I thought was, "Does it involve explosions?".
The best way to cut in line without getting caught is to create a diversion, though I'll admit that explosions around a large crowd are probably not a good idea.... Controlled pyrotechnics, might do it, however, e.g. smoke bombs and/or carefully planted sparklers to make it look like an overhead electrical line is about to drop onto the crowd. A bunch of growling, barking dogs being chased down the street by their handlers might also do the trick. Other possibilities include a live bear, a cat fight between two hired actresses, or an alien spacecraft landing nearby... until somebody invents the SEP field, that is.
Of course, an ideal plan would include all of the above simultaneously. Sadly, if someone has time to plan such an elaborate diversion, he/she probably has time to get in line earlier, and as such, everything in this post is a terrible idea. Remember, kids, don't try this at home....
I never said I was boycotting them in perpetuity. That said, these aren't isolated problems. Three out of five Netgear switches died, three out of three Netgear FA101/FA102 cards died within a couple of years, etc. It takes three bad experiences with a company's product to earn do-not-buy status unless one of those bad experiences is really serious (the Belkin USB-serial adapter that was shorted from the factory and nearly killed my computer, for example).
At least in this DLink case, it's just a political do-not-buy, which might go away if/when they clean up their act. Their gear seems to be electrically mostly solid. That's why this bugs me so much. They were the only one that I hadn't had a long string of horrible hardware faults from.:-)
Wow. Recent Netgear switches I've bought were doing the whole 70% packet loss thing (of the five white Netgear hubs I've dealt with, three have been completely worthless; haven't tried the blue metal ones lately), and now DLink moves right along with them onto my do-not-buy list. Linksys (won't work reliably with upstream switches) and Belkin (Wi-Fi routers crash constantly when passing wireless traffic) are both so buggy (to the point of being unusable) that they've been on my do-not-buy list for years. I've just about run out of networking hardware manufacturers....
Why can't just ONE SINGLE networking product company make a pledge to stop cutting corners on quality and looking for ways to make a quick buck off their users and just deliver decent hardware!?!?!?!?!?! Don't ANY of these companies' management chains have the SLIGHTEST bit of fiscal common sense?
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Minus a few Jar Jar bits. Hmm. That actually sounds like an improvement....
True. My point, however, was that the aspect of their biology that is relevant---the reproductive system---is closer to mammals in its behavior than the reproductive systems of most other fish. Whether that particular system evolved separately in parallel or not is not really that relevant to my point, which was that their reproductive systems are more similar to mammals than most species that exhibit parthenogenesis.
Parthenogenesis has been observed in bony fish and other closer relatives as well. AFAIK, Mammals are the only class of animals where parthenogenesis has not been observed in nature. On the other hand, we believed that it did not occur in sharks until recently in large part because of lack of ability to keep sharks in captivity long enough to observe it, so it seems quite plausible that it occurs in some mammals as well, but it merely has not yet been observed. *shrugs*
Spraying most liquids would be a problem because it would freeze instantly on contact with the rarified martian atmosphere. Even pure ethanol would freeze at the coldest point in Martian winter. The liquid would need to survive a minimum temperature of -140C without freezing and must remain liquid without evaporating up to at least -5C or so even at 6 millibars of atmospheric pressure. That's really hard to achieve. Compressed air might be practical if the particles are not sufficiently charged that they stick to the panel too well, but liquid... just doesn't seem very practical to me.
Yeah. "That'll teach me to post so late at night," I say as I post two hours later than that.
That said, it isn't that implausible in mammals. The sharks in question are relatively neurologically complex as fish go, and at least some of the sharks that this virgin birth has been observed in do have placenta-based live births that are fairly similar to mammals (unlike most other fish live births that involve eggs growing inside).... Granted, they are still cold-blooded, have gills, and lack hair, but as fish go, in many ways, they are closer to mammals than most fish. :-)
How about the overhead projector roll system. On one edge of the panel, you put a a roll of clear plastic cellophane (or thicker plastic in all likelihood, but you get the idea). On the opposite edge, you attach the cellophane to a take-up roll. You place a track along the other two edges to hold the film against the panel's surface. When things get too dusty, you run the motors and expose a new section of the film.
Better yet, just include a couple of capacitors and a fine wire mesh on the surface of the panel. When it gets too dusty, bring the mesh up to a high voltage and hold it there for a while. Next, charge up the capacitors with a high voltage of the opposite polarity. Suddenly cut power to the mesh and dump the opposite charge into the mesh. The dust should jump off faster than a mortgage broker on the roof of an investment bank the day after Lehman Brothers went belly up.
Too soon?
That's why I explicitly limited my comments to people joining the church as adults. Clearly any church membership can be coercive for someone who is not yet an adult, depending on the parents. Everything is effectively coercive until you turn 18. That's part of the nature of childhood.
I have no idea if Scientology brainwashes their members. Only a member could answer that question; they aren't likely to talk about it, and statements made by ex-members have some degree of negative bias, so you can't completely trust their accuracy.
As for the implied question of whether Christianity is a cult, I would say it clearly is not. From my perspective, what delineates a brainwashed cult from a religion are two things: 1. whether or not the believers understand the true nature of the group's beliefs at the time that they join it, 2. whether the founders/leaders of the religion do so with intent to spread enlightenment or gain power for themselves, and 3. whether coercive force is used to force members into remaining faithful. If believers think that they are joining a group that believes one thing and eventually discover that the group believes something else entirely, to some degree, the years of indoctrination can make them then accept a belief that otherwise would have been unpalatable (e.g. discovering after ten years that the goal of the cult was really to commit mass suicide on New Years in 2013). Similarly, if the founders' purpose is to make money, to commit mass suicide, to dominate large groups of servile women, etc., that's cultist behavior. Finally, at least in modern polite society, if a religion uses the threat of violence, extortion, etc. to maintain its membership, that pretty clearly crosses a line into unacceptable behavior.
Those are the basics, and with the exception of a few small sectarian groups, Christianity teaches you all about the religion in a fairly compressed time frame when you join the religion (at least when you join as an adult; children's religious education is different by necessity), is mostly lead by people genuinely trying to encourage good behavior, and doesn't threaten people with death, lost jobs, etc. if they choose to join another religion or say bad things about the religion. Ergo, at least by my definition, Christian religions as a whole clearly don't brainwash their members and thus are not cultlike.
Or worse....
You've already won!(tm)
And then in the fine print:
Note: "You've already won!" is a trademark of [insert company name here] and is not meant to state or imply that the reader has, in fact, won anything. More to the point, the mere fact that you clicked on this guarantees that you cannot possibly have won because you are a loser.
Crap. I meant sharks.
I do use parameterized SQL when it is convenient in the particular programming language I'm using. When it isn't, I'm religious about writing functions that do proper quoting of values and always using them for values that are not known to be numeric... in much the same way that I'm religious about casting numbers in PHP with (int) to ensure no non-numeric crap gets in where I'm expecting a number. Those are all fairly basic security measures that every PHP programmer should use with regularity.
I'm not talking about making changes to the SQL database to avoid fixing bugs or looking for bugs in my own code. Even if my code were known to be flawless and used only parameterized SQL, I would still want additional protection from these sorts of injection attacks at the database layer. Why? While the parameter hndling code might in theory be less likely to contain mistakes than hand-rolled code that does the same thing, if there were a bug in the shared code that does the quoting behind the scenes when inserting the parameters into the queries, it would be much more likely to get exploited because the same flaw would be shared across many more pieces of software, and so would be widely known (not to mention that it might be detectable with something as simple as a web server version string). As such, explicitly disallowing both "--" and ";" in queries would still be useful changes that would provide additional hardening even if nobody used any non-parameterized SQL at all.
Also, I didn't write every line of code that runs on my web server. There are third-party bits of code lurking. I try to keep them isolated into their own databases (with their own login credentials and locked down permissions) so that they can only harm themselves (and only to a limited degree), but that only limits the damage that they can cause, and not nearly as much as I'd like. Any extra layer of added security would be beneficial, IMHO.
The whole concept does sort of make sense. At a minimum, it seems clear that organisms have at least some limited ability to control their own gene expression. Were that not the case, we wouldn't have all these animals that suddenly begin to express male genes or female genes when the populations are too heavily weighted towards one gender (many slugs) or animals whose ovaries can produce eggs with a full set of chromosomes in the absence of males (whales) or....
So there's clearly some sort of feedback cycle that is controlled in some way, whether neurologically, hormonally, etc. that has an impact on gene expression. (Also, with the number of junk genes we have, changes in gene expression could have a pretty significant impact on the traits of an organism and its offspring even without taking mutation into account....)
It would not be that much of a stretch, then, to believe that a similar mechanism could allow an organism to control whether damaged genes are repaired or are allowed to remain (and potentially be expressed at some point).
Depends on how it is designed. Ideally, you'd put the most thermally sensitive parts (glass lenses and their mounts, etc.) in the core of the unit and/or design them to be able to be retracted into a central chamber. That way, you can keep those parts warm while letting everything else just freeze and thaw. That said, I can't imagine trying to design anything to handle temperatures as cold as we're talking about, so that might not be practical.... Perhaps a variable duty cycle circuit could be added to allow them to dial down the amount of power used by the resistance heaters to be just enough to keep temperatures out of the red (blue?) zone. That way, perhaps they could all manage to run off the solar panels directly even during the low-power periods. They may already be doing that, though. No idea.
You know, something just occurred to me. The biggest reason SQL injection attacks are so common is that SQL allows multiple commands per input line and allows you to comment out the rest of the line, neither of which is useful when called from a programming language (or really anywhere outside of dump/restore tools). If you built a custom SQL library that PHP/Perl/* linked into that would return an error and do nothing if it detects more than one command or a comment start character anywhere in a command, injection attacks would become dramatically harder, if not impossible. At best, an attacker would merely be able to change additional fields in a table that were not changed in the original query, a security flaw that is much less problematic than the more general case of injection attacks....
That's what never made sense to me. Seems like all it would take is a low voltage cutoff circuit that shuts off power to everything as long as the voltage is below a threshold voltage, and then when the power comes back on, it would boot back up. In fact, most modern battery technologies require such safety measures to prevent the battery charge from getting so low that the batteries won't take a charge (or the cells reverse polarity like NiCd batteries have a habit of doing). I guess there's still the issue of whether the batteries will fail to operate if they get too cold....
Not to mention the open fire pit in the back room to keep warm when the HVAC folks forget to switch from A/C to heat....
Crap. Missing apostrophe. Last paragraph. "What you want is for your candidates' lies to be..." Gotta watch the typos.
Journalists have an obligation to report facts. The fact was that Palin said the things she said; the news media gave similar coverage to Biden's screw-ups. As for not reporting those negatives about Obama that you mention, the "news" you mention about Obama and Ayers was almost entirely hearsay, and the "news" about Obama's view of the coal industry was a statement taken completely out of context and warped in such a way that its meaning was very nearly the OPPOSITE of what he actually said. Neither of those represents factual information that should be reported as fact.
That said, if you'd prefer, in the future, journalists could run stories that say "[Republican candidate] lied today. In a statement before [group of people], he/she erroneously claimed that [Democrat candidate] said [blah], when in fact, he/she said [blah]." If you'd like that sort of negative press every time a candidate lies, then it would make sense for journalists to report such crap.... Without such obvious boilerplate stating that the statement is untrue (both before and after the statement in question), journalists would be reporting things as fact that are not fact, at which point there would be no point in having journalists at all; their entire purpose for existence is to filter through the lies and political reality-twisting, then distill that down until everything presented is factual.
Needless to say, I don't think this is what you want. What you want is for your candidates lies to be represented equally often as your opponents' factual statements. Sorry, but the purpose of journalism is to neither engage in nor support mudslinging. Just the facts.
I tried that once. Unfortunately, in the distorted reality, I had three heads, so a bunch of military copters were swarming around me in just this side of a minute. I got out of that distorted reality pretty quickly, let me tell you....
Why not use filtration and/or sieving? Ethanol molecules should be much larger than water molecules.... I know we're talking about creating nanomaterials here, but surely somebody has tried it.... :-)
Oddly enough, when I read the title "How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught", the first thing I thought was, "Does it involve explosions?".
The best way to cut in line without getting caught is to create a diversion, though I'll admit that explosions around a large crowd are probably not a good idea.... Controlled pyrotechnics, might do it, however, e.g. smoke bombs and/or carefully planted sparklers to make it look like an overhead electrical line is about to drop onto the crowd. A bunch of growling, barking dogs being chased down the street by their handlers might also do the trick. Other possibilities include a live bear, a cat fight between two hired actresses, or an alien spacecraft landing nearby... until somebody invents the SEP field, that is.
Of course, an ideal plan would include all of the above simultaneously. Sadly, if someone has time to plan such an elaborate diversion, he/she probably has time to get in line earlier, and as such, everything in this post is a terrible idea. Remember, kids, don't try this at home....
Don't forget "is".
I never said I was boycotting them in perpetuity. That said, these aren't isolated problems. Three out of five Netgear switches died, three out of three Netgear FA101/FA102 cards died within a couple of years, etc. It takes three bad experiences with a company's product to earn do-not-buy status unless one of those bad experiences is really serious (the Belkin USB-serial adapter that was shorted from the factory and nearly killed my computer, for example).
At least in this DLink case, it's just a political do-not-buy, which might go away if/when they clean up their act. Their gear seems to be electrically mostly solid. That's why this bugs me so much. They were the only one that I hadn't had a long string of horrible hardware faults from. :-)
That was my point. Everything seems to be genuinely crap these days.
...and only if you have it set to always prompt for a password and/or you just walked up to your desk after a nice long lunch.
Wow. Recent Netgear switches I've bought were doing the whole 70% packet loss thing (of the five white Netgear hubs I've dealt with, three have been completely worthless; haven't tried the blue metal ones lately), and now DLink moves right along with them onto my do-not-buy list. Linksys (won't work reliably with upstream switches) and Belkin (Wi-Fi routers crash constantly when passing wireless traffic) are both so buggy (to the point of being unusable) that they've been on my do-not-buy list for years. I've just about run out of networking hardware manufacturers....
Why can't just ONE SINGLE networking product company make a pledge to stop cutting corners on quality and looking for ways to make a quick buck off their users and just deliver decent hardware!?!?!?!?!?! Don't ANY of these companies' management chains have the SLIGHTEST bit of fiscal common sense?
Sheesh!