Actually, I'm pretty sure that, across the 73 years worth of Batman comics, with multiple simultaneous series (currently, there's something like ten or so ongoing comics that Batman is either the sole focus of, or one of the major cast of*), incest and people being tortured for religious beliefs has come up at least as many times as it has in the bible, if not more. The main difference there, is that in Batman, those things are almost always depicted as something negative.
* - Batman, Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman: Arkham Unhinged, Batman Incorporated, Batman: No man's Land, Batman: The Streets of Gotham, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Batman Beyond, Justice League AND Justice League International, oh man, that's 12 just from the current month sales listing for DC, and I haven't even started on the Bat-spinoffs like Batgirl, Batwoman, Nightwing, Red Hood, Catwoman, and... Batman is being used by DC like Wolverine was being used by Marvel - he's everywhere, and apparently on or associated with every team. Poor guy needs a serious vacation.
History would indicate that the individuals I mentioned were in fact not good at computer science at all - they managed to get fired from so many of the "good computer jobs" in the city my University was in, that it became impossible to get a computer job in that city if you admitted to having a degree in computer science from that institution. Having been in the room with them while they cheated at exams, I can state very much that it wasn't so much regurgitation as much as reading their cheat notes (written in another language, once on the walls of the room and ignored by profs who couldn't accept people would be taking their courses for reasons other than loving the subject) and talking to each other during exams in another language (in that case ignored by a prof because 'in her culture it is wrong for a woman to correct a man on anything'. (And no, she is not still a prof, fortunately. And no, I don't understand why she wanted to be one to start with considering the responsibilities like 'grading'.)
In the case of someone who manages to somehow pull off A+ grades in a rigidly logical discipline, yet still claims to believe something completely pants-on-head retarded as the GP stated: "I dutifully read it and found it to be nonsensical and completely illogical. Yet he was firmly convinced this was the truth.", assuming he's either cheating or full of it when he claims to believe that (I also knew people who did that, their reason was "religious fanatic girls are the easiest to get into bed, as long as they think you're also super religious") is a logical conclusion. I suppose it's possible that he somehow managed to be mentally broken enough to be able to handle rigid logic dealing with class work, yet not be able to apply it even slightly elsewhere, but that's less probable. Even a stopped clock is only right twice a day if it's analog, so if someone tells you their clock is only right twice a day, is it more natural to think it's both analog and stopped, or to think it's running backwards?
I went to school for computer science, and a few of the people in my classes managed to get A+ marks while taking double course loads, and also NEVER TOUCHING A COMPUTER - your fellow student probably managed his grades the same way, by cheating.
Either that, or he was a great actor, and was pulling your leg.
ISO lost it's reputation and became known as I Sold Out.
Not only that, but soon after this outrageous manoeuvre, the vast majority of these new ISO members Microsoft had bought never showed up for another meeting - meetings requiring of course, a minimum percentage in attendance to actually approve anything, which then, due to the bulk of members having no interest in the committee except for casting their pro-MS vote in order to receive their bribes, did not have enough members present to actually do anything.
And this is the story of how Microsoft broke the ISO, so they could fake their way into government contracts by falsely claiming that their office software supported an ISO standard (which even Microsoft didn't actually support).
I would just like to point out that you actually have no idea how big the universe is.
It's not a matter of knowing how big it is, it's a matter of knowing how small it isn't.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams
So unvaccinated kids infect your vaccinated kids with diseases that they are supposed to be vaccinated?
The short answer: Yes.
The long answer involves two factors:
First, unvaccinated, disease-ridden older children who go near children too young to be vaccinated (or children who could not be vaccinated for health reasons such as a compromised immune system) cause those children too young to be vaccinated to become infected, and often to then die horrible painful deaths. This is the fault of the parents who refused to vaccinate their child, and said parents should be arrested and put on trial (and then imprisoned) for said death in the same way they would if they'd been planting random explosives around the suburbs and had blown the children up instead. The net result is the same, even if the explosions are slightly less painful.
Second, when a sufficient number of unvaccinated people become infected with a disease, this weird thing called "mutation" happens, and the vaccines become ineffective as the new strain created by irresponsible parents refusing to vaccinate their children then spreads unchecked. This is why the Flu vaccines that are available need to be re-done every single year, and while it's entirely possible for it to happen with even a single infected carrier, as more people become infected, it becomes more likely. Again, the parents responsible for this should be put on trial and imprisoned in exactly the same way they would had they used their own personal lab to cook up a bio-weapon and spread it around town to slaughter the neighbor's children.
Yes, it's true, you're totally free to go and build your own explosive devices*, or cook up designer virii** in the privacy of your own mad science lab, but it becomes illegal once you start spreading it around town where people will get hurt. The same thing should apply to deliberately allowing your children to go unvaccinated - if you are turning your children into a public health risk, you should be keeping them away from the public that you're risking.
* Technically this does require a license to work with explosives in some areas, but not all.
** This one however, there are currently no actual laws against that I am aware of. Yet. Most laws like that show up because someone, somewhere, demonstrated that it was necessary.
The "lead" antivaxers do benefit from it though - they sell books, get paid to make public appearances and speeches, get their egos stroked with the attention they crave, and the fraud who started the whole thing did it entirely for profit - he was at the time very much involved with development of a non-functional "alternative" to vaccination, and attempted to use the bad publicity he was creating for vaccines to promote his snake oil replacement.
Also, I'm not sure he qualifies as a billionaire, (possibly only a multi-millionaire) but Jim Carey was definitely eccentric, and was pushing funding into the movement while he was sleeping with the porn star who is it's main spokesperson.
That, combined with the general anti-science movement you mentioned earlier, which has taken up the cause with enthusiasm, for exactly the profitable reason you mention. It's kind of funny, in a sad way, that the people screaming "CONSPIRACY!!!!" the loudest here are the ones being manipulated for profit.
And the linked video on the Register article is some conspiracy theorist rambling about image filters and increasing the gain to see the "black spherical anomoly" (his spelling), and has nothing to do with triangles. The register article then goes off into wild theories about aliens, and gives misleading partial quotes from astronomers to make it seem as though they agree. The register article, which is linked in the summary as "takes the shape of a black triangle" has nothing to do with triangles.
Of course, the problem there is that the entries that search returns which actually contain a programming language at all are entirely done in python, so still no javascript.
Descendant born in 2003, will see ancestors 77th birthday?
No no no! The Ancestor is born in 2003. Since this already requires time travel, seeing their descendant's 77th birthday 26 years or so before they're born shouldn't be a problem.
And yet publishers still complain about used book stores, and accuse them of being thieves. I have also seen complaints from big publishers (and one really stupid author) about their books being found in public libraries depriving them of income.
Yeah, but the people who wrote the article were full of it, and demonstrably incorrect. Thus, science does already have the answer to the question of "Why don't people live past 114?" - the answer is "They do - here are some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Oldest_people_ever "
The actual research in question of course, was likely nothing even resembling this, but since it was filtered through the screen of low quality pseudo-science journalism that was more interested in getting web page hits than accurately reporting the state of scientific research on the matter. Once you've got a few good quotes to sling at the masses, who cares if it's accurate?
Well, considering the distance travelled per second, and the number of seconds warning that you would get that the light was going to turn red (nobody ever starts breaking until the light is orange!), to go from 34,000 miles per hour to a dead stop in about 12 seconds would require a total energy of... er... half a ton times... ouch. I think you're going to get a bit of a seat-belt rash from that one. Good thing they planned for a route with no traffic lights or stop signs. Hopefully they won't have a problem at the moose crossing.
Invisible things can't have a colour (in the visible spectrum).
Have you ever seen one? If not, how do you know it's not pink?
If it's a unicorn it has a corporeal existence that such that I can readily confirm it's presence in my room.
Don't be silly - it's not in your room, it's in mr_gorkajuice's room. Of course you can't confirm it's presence elsewhere. Besides, only the truly faithful can know the presence of the I.P.U.. Also, you're using the wrong definition of unicorn - you should be using this other one that I just made up, which doesn't include a corporeal presence.
Not being able to demonstrate something to be true doesn't make it false either (an apt point in this context).
True, but shifting goalposts means never being able to fully demonstrate it false either, as long as you are distracted from noticing that the conditions you need to disprove keep getting changed and made more vague. Instead, you can only continue to disprove every specific claim, until all that is left is a pointless vague bit of meaningless drivel, which is what always happens when attempts are made to discuss gods and religion in a rational context.
Actually, the I.P.U. is a very apt analogy for the thing he's trying to insist that we all somehow accept "might be possible" - internally inconsistent, logically flawed, lacking any evidence, often supported by nonsensical gibberish based on an inaccurate understanding of science, and making specific claims then claiming that that wasn't really what was meant are all hallmarks of theistic reasoning. Any time someone's trying to claim that their god is real because you can't prove otherwise, they're talking about the I.P.U. again - no matter what claim they make, they're always ready to either change it so that your demonstration of what they said being wrong no longer applies to what they claim they "really" said, or handwave it off as "you would see it if you had enough faith". If it makes no sense to claim to be agnostic to the I.P.U., then it also makes no sense to claim to be agnostic to any of the gods that have been put forth by the thousands of splinter sects of the Abrahamic faiths, any more than it makes sense to claim to be agnostic to Zeus or Odin. Zeus and Odin at least do not have to put up with constantly being re-defined by their followers to avoid the clutch of sceptics. Their religions may be dead, but at least they get to have some dignity, and be left as what they were.
As i said before, when someone makes a completely unconvincing argument about a fantastical claim, changes their story frequently, and fails on every specific claim they've ever made, "Oh, you may or may not be right! I don't know!" is not a rational response. It's either an idiot's response, or the response of someone who's just trying to get the crazy person to go away and pester someone else.
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
Funny, most atheists I've talked to would object most strongly to the idea that they lack the ability to have any moral beliefs or behavior. They would simply qualify it that they dont believe it to be informed by an absolute standard, but rather by society, or the good of the human race, or some other "horizontal" human construct.
Actually, the morals of Atheists (and most Theists) do no come from the doctrines of their Atheism, but from those human standards and constructs, which is where the actual morality of most Theists comes from as well. Since it's not their Atheism that provides them with morality, this means that Atheism has no moral component, and instead leaves that to the morality of the actual people themselves, who manage to not go on raping and killing sprees just fine without having someone dictating what is and isn't evil for them and threatening them with eternal torment for not following those rules.
Does this mean that you're agnostic to the invisible pink unicorn? After all, you have no evidence that it's not right there behind you, reading over your shoulder and counting down the seconds until it chews on your hair. (Invisibly and undetectably, except of course to the high priests of the I.P.U., who just KNOW when it's happened, and will share their knowedge with you for only $59.62!)
The logical position on any completely unsupported and unrealistic proposition that presents provably false claims as evidence is not "LOL! I Dunno!", it's "You're a looney."
Don't forget to point out that SOPA andACTA are not about combatting piracy.
They are about decreasing the cost and risk for the copyright holders. Using this legislation they can issue orders without any oversight or liability, and without any costs to them.
Find an analogy to that (you peddle X, but want to put the cost of peddling X on the general public via a 3rd party (ISP))
THIS! This exactly!
The whole point of SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, is that the corporations want to escape the last few shreds of oversight and responsibility they currently have to deal with under existing laws. These laws were NEVER about combatting piracy - they are entirely about making sure that the copyright industry companies don't have to worry about little things like actually telling the truth when they say they own the copyright for something and are shutting you down.
Under current laws, if you post a video of yourself doing something, like say, a college professor posting videos online of his lectures so that his students can view them, and the MPAA files a takedown notice claiming they own that video and the prof is a dirty stinking pirate for stealing it from them (even though it's a false accusation), the prof has (supposedly) the recourse that he can file a counter-notice, and have the videos restored, (note: this is an actual example from the real world - they really did this.) and then the MPAA would to take him to actual court to sue for damages (which they didn't, because they didn't have any evidence, and it was obvious that they didn't actually own the material) instead of just having him thrown in jail and his property seized without having to show any evidence that he actually did what they claim. Under the combination of SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, the MPAA would not have had to go through any legal procedures, or have any evidence that the prof's lectures belonged to them (which they didn't), but instead would be allowed to just say "BAD! YOU ARE THIEF!", and automatically be correct under the law, because they said so, and thus be allowed to take his domain, and shut him down with no recourse, no right to a trial, and no way to do anything about it.
Considering how little responsibility the MPAA and RIAA have demonstrated when applying the current copyright laws, is it any wonder that people who are paying attention don't trust them to behave with laws that take away what little responsibility and oversight they currently have?
Even worse, these laws are so poorly put together that any nutjob with a grudge can do the same thing to anyone they don't like, and have anything that person has put online shut down (the whole website), with little to no proof that their claims are true. Did you accidentally mention that you like eating bacon on your website? Look out - when the crazy person who has decided that all bacon-loving people are actually aliens trying to hypnotize the human race into complacency, they can fulfill their personal mission of silencing your bacon-promoting alien agenda by falsely using SOPA/PIPA/ACTA to shut down your website. Before you even know it has happened, you're gone, and if you are very lucky, you might even find out why, some day.
As for the self-replicating robot probes: Perhaps this is because by the time a civilization has enough know-how and spare resources to commit to such a project (we have most of the know-how, but not even close to enough spare resources at the moment, just like you said), the individuals in charge also realize that such probes would eventually return to the local system and consume it, thereby ending the possible descendents of the probe's creators. While it's true that many of our current political leaders are willfully committing long-term suicide on the planet in the name of short term profit, any group far-seeing enough to acknowledge that there might be something interesting out there worth sending probes to visit, will also be far-seeing enough to not want to kill their multi-generational descendents as a horde of galaxy-consuming probes with million-year bit decay descend upon another source of resources.
As for radio broadcasts, the problem is attenuation - unless you are a star, you typically don't have the power required to actually send out an omni-directional radio broadcast that will reach other star systems and still be possible to interpret. Directional radio signals and lasers are still massively expensive to get to a strength that would last - even the best tuned laser currently available on earth would be spread out to wash over our entire solar system if fired from the nearest other star, with a corresponding loss in signal strength. Even assuming you could get the strength and coherence needed to get the signal through, who says that they picked our star, out of hundreds of thousands of other candidates, to send their expensive pinpoint broadcast towards, and were we even listening in the right direction when it passed by?
I had a similar, if slightly less difficult situation with a former job - I was hired originally as a programmer, but my boss (who was also the entire rest of the IT department) quit after I'd been there a year, and I was handed all of his work (and none of his pay, of course). For the most part, I already knew where everything was and how to fix it if it broke, but every now and then, I'd get a call saying "Hey, the #### broke again, can you fix it?" and my response would be "We have a ####? Where is it, and why was I never told about this?" Fortunately, the management was understanding of the problems involved, and took me off programming duty for a month of "trace things out and figure out where everything is, and document it". They were actually great people to work with, but the pay was about half what I'm making now.
Eventually, I did the cable-tracing thing with the plant manager, and we found an old 386 with no monitor, and a hefty UPS stuck up in the ceiling of one of the hallways, hooked up to the network. We tried disconnecting it, and the whole network died. (ie: fileservers, application servers, databases, etc...) Fortunately, rebooting the netware server got things going again just fine, but we never managed to figure out what that machine was actually doing, because the hard drive was so corrupted that it wouldn't boot back up again when we got it to a monitor.
Not entropic compression algorithms, just chopping out large sections of code that didn't actually do anything but slow the whole system down. (Like the aforementioned subroutine that did iterative division, then restored the original value. )
To bring in an inappropriate slashdot car analogy, this is like taking a car, and reducing the weight of it by removing the family of African Elephants that were tap-dancing on the hood. The resulting mess was still broken, but much smaller than it was with the elephants still there.
They did - the product that was delivered was not nearly as "working" as was claimed, and the money was already paid before that was realized.
Finding another outsourcing company after you've already been dumb enough to hand over several hundred thousand dollars for a pile of garbage, that your company needs working in order to continue operating is not in the budget, especially considering how the last one went. The cost of hiring me to prop up the garbage while a replacement was built, plus the cost of their internal team actually doing the work, was less than the cost of outsourcing the code to begin with, and in the end they got a system that was much more stable, better documented, and simple to maintain and make modifications and updates to.
I should probably mention that the person who made the decision to outsource the programming despite having a team of programmers already in the local IT department was no longer with the company when I signed on as a temporary contractor, and it was their decision (and the probable kickback they received for making it) that caused them to no longer be with the company.
I once did some contract work for a place that made the mistake of outsourcing a major programming job. My job was to maintain the outsourced code, and keep it functioning (barely) while the internal programming team worked on building a complete replacement from scratch, at half the cost, with the actual system requirements being fulfilled. I spent four months fixing bugs in deliberately obfuscated perl code, at consultant rates, because none of the internal staff they had hired was either able to figure out perl code in general, or willing to even try to sort out that mess. The outsourced programmers in question had the dodgy business practice of deliberately making their code difficult to read, and only including comments like:
# 16426-b
The code in question contained wonderful constructs such as pointless loops where a value would be iteratively divided by the numbers from one through a thousand, then restored to it's original value without being used in the altered form. I started the project with about 6 million lines of perl code, and by the time it was over and the replacement was ready, tested, and brought online, there were only 2 million lines in the outsourced code, including about ten thousand lines of comment code that had been added while I was working on it. I hadn't even looked at about half of the remaining code.
After the initial work was done (poorly), the outsourced programming company announced that their code maintenance fees were being increased, thinking that their poor coding style had essentially locked the client in, and left them unable to get help elsewhere. The only staff member the company had who was willing to make the attempt unfortunately committed suicide after only a month of trying. (Personally, I believe it was unrelated, but the other programmers there claimed she was perfectly fine until she started working on that code... after two months of it I could see why they would think that.)
So yeah, in my experience, outsourcing programming does not save money - if the company I did that work for had just had their own people write the original code, they would have saved a massive amount of money.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm pretty sure that, across the 73 years worth of Batman comics, with multiple simultaneous series (currently, there's something like ten or so ongoing comics that Batman is either the sole focus of, or one of the major cast of*), incest and people being tortured for religious beliefs has come up at least as many times as it has in the bible, if not more. The main difference there, is that in Batman, those things are almost always depicted as something negative.
... Batman is being used by DC like Wolverine was being used by Marvel - he's everywhere, and apparently on or associated with every team. Poor guy needs a serious vacation.
* - Batman, Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman: Arkham Unhinged, Batman Incorporated, Batman: No man's Land, Batman: The Streets of Gotham, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Batman Beyond, Justice League AND Justice League International, oh man, that's 12 just from the current month sales listing for DC, and I haven't even started on the Bat-spinoffs like Batgirl, Batwoman, Nightwing, Red Hood, Catwoman, and
History would indicate that the individuals I mentioned were in fact not good at computer science at all - they managed to get fired from so many of the "good computer jobs" in the city my University was in, that it became impossible to get a computer job in that city if you admitted to having a degree in computer science from that institution. Having been in the room with them while they cheated at exams, I can state very much that it wasn't so much regurgitation as much as reading their cheat notes (written in another language, once on the walls of the room and ignored by profs who couldn't accept people would be taking their courses for reasons other than loving the subject) and talking to each other during exams in another language (in that case ignored by a prof because 'in her culture it is wrong for a woman to correct a man on anything'. (And no, she is not still a prof, fortunately. And no, I don't understand why she wanted to be one to start with considering the responsibilities like 'grading'.)
In the case of someone who manages to somehow pull off A+ grades in a rigidly logical discipline, yet still claims to believe something completely pants-on-head retarded as the GP stated: "I dutifully read it and found it to be nonsensical and completely illogical. Yet he was firmly convinced this was the truth.", assuming he's either cheating or full of it when he claims to believe that (I also knew people who did that, their reason was "religious fanatic girls are the easiest to get into bed, as long as they think you're also super religious") is a logical conclusion. I suppose it's possible that he somehow managed to be mentally broken enough to be able to handle rigid logic dealing with class work, yet not be able to apply it even slightly elsewhere, but that's less probable. Even a stopped clock is only right twice a day if it's analog, so if someone tells you their clock is only right twice a day, is it more natural to think it's both analog and stopped, or to think it's running backwards?
I went to school for computer science, and a few of the people in my classes managed to get A+ marks while taking double course loads, and also NEVER TOUCHING A COMPUTER - your fellow student probably managed his grades the same way, by cheating.
Either that, or he was a great actor, and was pulling your leg.
Soon after this outrageous manoeuvre,
ISO lost it's reputation and became known as I Sold Out.
Not only that, but soon after this outrageous manoeuvre, the vast majority of these new ISO members Microsoft had bought never showed up for another meeting - meetings requiring of course, a minimum percentage in attendance to actually approve anything, which then, due to the bulk of members having no interest in the committee except for casting their pro-MS vote in order to receive their bribes, did not have enough members present to actually do anything.
And this is the story of how Microsoft broke the ISO, so they could fake their way into government contracts by falsely claiming that their office software supported an ISO standard (which even Microsoft didn't actually support).
Until "Ztimulated" is a word, stop throwing a "z" in there, you fucking kumquat!
Sounds like something that would have been in a '90s Zima commercial. "Zima... Zo Ztimulating..." (Man that makes me feel old...)
I would just like to point out that you actually have no idea how big the universe is.
It's not a matter of knowing how big it is, it's a matter of knowing how small it isn't.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams
So unvaccinated kids infect your vaccinated kids with diseases that they are supposed to be vaccinated?
The short answer: Yes.
The long answer involves two factors:
First, unvaccinated, disease-ridden older children who go near children too young to be vaccinated (or children who could not be vaccinated for health reasons such as a compromised immune system) cause those children too young to be vaccinated to become infected, and often to then die horrible painful deaths. This is the fault of the parents who refused to vaccinate their child, and said parents should be arrested and put on trial (and then imprisoned) for said death in the same way they would if they'd been planting random explosives around the suburbs and had blown the children up instead. The net result is the same, even if the explosions are slightly less painful.
Second, when a sufficient number of unvaccinated people become infected with a disease, this weird thing called "mutation" happens, and the vaccines become ineffective as the new strain created by irresponsible parents refusing to vaccinate their children then spreads unchecked. This is why the Flu vaccines that are available need to be re-done every single year, and while it's entirely possible for it to happen with even a single infected carrier, as more people become infected, it becomes more likely. Again, the parents responsible for this should be put on trial and imprisoned in exactly the same way they would had they used their own personal lab to cook up a bio-weapon and spread it around town to slaughter the neighbor's children.
Yes, it's true, you're totally free to go and build your own explosive devices*, or cook up designer virii** in the privacy of your own mad science lab, but it becomes illegal once you start spreading it around town where people will get hurt. The same thing should apply to deliberately allowing your children to go unvaccinated - if you are turning your children into a public health risk, you should be keeping them away from the public that you're risking.
* Technically this does require a license to work with explosives in some areas, but not all.
** This one however, there are currently no actual laws against that I am aware of. Yet. Most laws like that show up because someone, somewhere, demonstrated that it was necessary.
The "lead" antivaxers do benefit from it though - they sell books, get paid to make public appearances and speeches, get their egos stroked with the attention they crave, and the fraud who started the whole thing did it entirely for profit - he was at the time very much involved with development of a non-functional "alternative" to vaccination, and attempted to use the bad publicity he was creating for vaccines to promote his snake oil replacement.
Also, I'm not sure he qualifies as a billionaire, (possibly only a multi-millionaire) but Jim Carey was definitely eccentric, and was pushing funding into the movement while he was sleeping with the porn star who is it's main spokesperson.
That, combined with the general anti-science movement you mentioned earlier, which has taken up the cause with enthusiasm, for exactly the profitable reason you mention. It's kind of funny, in a sad way, that the people screaming "CONSPIRACY!!!!" the loudest here are the ones being manipulated for profit.
And the linked video on the Register article is some conspiracy theorist rambling about image filters and increasing the gain to see the "black spherical anomoly" (his spelling), and has nothing to do with triangles. The register article then goes off into wild theories about aliens, and gives misleading partial quotes from astronomers to make it seem as though they agree. The register article, which is linked in the summary as "takes the shape of a black triangle" has nothing to do with triangles.
Of course, the problem there is that the entries that search returns which actually contain a programming language at all are entirely done in python, so still no javascript.
Descendant born in 2003, will see ancestors 77th birthday?
No no no! The Ancestor is born in 2003. Since this already requires time travel, seeing their descendant's 77th birthday 26 years or so before they're born shouldn't be a problem.
And yet publishers still complain about used book stores, and accuse them of being thieves. I have also seen complaints from big publishers (and one really stupid author) about their books being found in public libraries depriving them of income.
Yeah, but the people who wrote the article were full of it, and demonstrably incorrect. Thus, science does already have the answer to the question of "Why don't people live past 114?" - the answer is "They do - here are some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Oldest_people_ever "
The actual research in question of course, was likely nothing even resembling this, but since it was filtered through the screen of low quality pseudo-science journalism that was more interested in getting web page hits than accurately reporting the state of scientific research on the matter. Once you've got a few good quotes to sling at the masses, who cares if it's accurate?
Well, the last time I stopped when it was still orange, I got rear-ended (by an off-duty cop...) and the back end of my car broke. Does that count?
Otherwise I'll credit that one to lack of sleep. (Like the cop did.)
Well, considering the distance travelled per second, and the number of seconds warning that you would get that the light was going to turn red (nobody ever starts breaking until the light is orange!), to go from 34,000 miles per hour to a dead stop in about 12 seconds would require a total energy of ... er... half a ton times... ouch. I think you're going to get a bit of a seat-belt rash from that one. Good thing they planned for a route with no traffic lights or stop signs. Hopefully they won't have a problem at the moose crossing.
So Judaism is blasphemy?
According to the Catholic Church? Yes.
Invisible things can't have a colour (in the visible spectrum).
Have you ever seen one? If not, how do you know it's not pink?
If it's a unicorn it has a corporeal existence that such that I can readily confirm it's presence in my room.
Don't be silly - it's not in your room, it's in mr_gorkajuice's room. Of course you can't confirm it's presence elsewhere. Besides, only the truly faithful can know the presence of the I.P.U.. Also, you're using the wrong definition of unicorn - you should be using this other one that I just made up, which doesn't include a corporeal presence.
Not being able to demonstrate something to be true doesn't make it false either (an apt point in this context).
True, but shifting goalposts means never being able to fully demonstrate it false either, as long as you are distracted from noticing that the conditions you need to disprove keep getting changed and made more vague. Instead, you can only continue to disprove every specific claim, until all that is left is a pointless vague bit of meaningless drivel, which is what always happens when attempts are made to discuss gods and religion in a rational context.
Actually, the I.P.U. is a very apt analogy for the thing he's trying to insist that we all somehow accept "might be possible" - internally inconsistent, logically flawed, lacking any evidence, often supported by nonsensical gibberish based on an inaccurate understanding of science, and making specific claims then claiming that that wasn't really what was meant are all hallmarks of theistic reasoning. Any time someone's trying to claim that their god is real because you can't prove otherwise, they're talking about the I.P.U. again - no matter what claim they make, they're always ready to either change it so that your demonstration of what they said being wrong no longer applies to what they claim they "really" said, or handwave it off as "you would see it if you had enough faith". If it makes no sense to claim to be agnostic to the I.P.U., then it also makes no sense to claim to be agnostic to any of the gods that have been put forth by the thousands of splinter sects of the Abrahamic faiths, any more than it makes sense to claim to be agnostic to Zeus or Odin. Zeus and Odin at least do not have to put up with constantly being re-defined by their followers to avoid the clutch of sceptics. Their religions may be dead, but at least they get to have some dignity, and be left as what they were.
As i said before, when someone makes a completely unconvincing argument about a fantastical claim, changes their story frequently, and fails on every specific claim they've ever made, "Oh, you may or may not be right! I don't know!" is not a rational response. It's either an idiot's response, or the response of someone who's just trying to get the crazy person to go away and pester someone else.
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
Funny, most atheists I've talked to would object most strongly to the idea that they lack the ability to have any moral beliefs or behavior. They would simply qualify it that they dont believe it to be informed by an absolute standard, but rather by society, or the good of the human race, or some other "horizontal" human construct.
Actually, the morals of Atheists (and most Theists) do no come from the doctrines of their Atheism, but from those human standards and constructs, which is where the actual morality of most Theists comes from as well. Since it's not their Atheism that provides them with morality, this means that Atheism has no moral component, and instead leaves that to the morality of the actual people themselves, who manage to not go on raping and killing sprees just fine without having someone dictating what is and isn't evil for them and threatening them with eternal torment for not following those rules.
Does this mean that you're agnostic to the invisible pink unicorn? After all, you have no evidence that it's not right there behind you, reading over your shoulder and counting down the seconds until it chews on your hair. (Invisibly and undetectably, except of course to the high priests of the I.P.U., who just KNOW when it's happened, and will share their knowedge with you for only $59.62!)
The logical position on any completely unsupported and unrealistic proposition that presents provably false claims as evidence is not "LOL! I Dunno!", it's "You're a looney."
Don't forget to point out that SOPA andACTA are not about combatting piracy.
They are about decreasing the cost and risk for the copyright holders. Using this legislation they can issue orders without any oversight or liability, and without any costs to them.
Find an analogy to that (you peddle X, but want to put the cost of peddling X on the general public via a 3rd party (ISP))
THIS! This exactly!
The whole point of SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, is that the corporations want to escape the last few shreds of oversight and responsibility they currently have to deal with under existing laws. These laws were NEVER about combatting piracy - they are entirely about making sure that the copyright industry companies don't have to worry about little things like actually telling the truth when they say they own the copyright for something and are shutting you down.
Under current laws, if you post a video of yourself doing something, like say, a college professor posting videos online of his lectures so that his students can view them, and the MPAA files a takedown notice claiming they own that video and the prof is a dirty stinking pirate for stealing it from them (even though it's a false accusation), the prof has (supposedly) the recourse that he can file a counter-notice, and have the videos restored, (note: this is an actual example from the real world - they really did this.) and then the MPAA would to take him to actual court to sue for damages (which they didn't, because they didn't have any evidence, and it was obvious that they didn't actually own the material) instead of just having him thrown in jail and his property seized without having to show any evidence that he actually did what they claim. Under the combination of SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, the MPAA would not have had to go through any legal procedures, or have any evidence that the prof's lectures belonged to them (which they didn't), but instead would be allowed to just say "BAD! YOU ARE THIEF!", and automatically be correct under the law, because they said so, and thus be allowed to take his domain, and shut him down with no recourse, no right to a trial, and no way to do anything about it.
Considering how little responsibility the MPAA and RIAA have demonstrated when applying the current copyright laws, is it any wonder that people who are paying attention don't trust them to behave with laws that take away what little responsibility and oversight they currently have?
Even worse, these laws are so poorly put together that any nutjob with a grudge can do the same thing to anyone they don't like, and have anything that person has put online shut down (the whole website), with little to no proof that their claims are true. Did you accidentally mention that you like eating bacon on your website? Look out - when the crazy person who has decided that all bacon-loving people are actually aliens trying to hypnotize the human race into complacency, they can fulfill their personal mission of silencing your bacon-promoting alien agenda by falsely using SOPA/PIPA/ACTA to shut down your website. Before you even know it has happened, you're gone, and if you are very lucky, you might even find out why, some day.
As for the self-replicating robot probes:
Perhaps this is because by the time a civilization has enough know-how and spare resources to commit to such a project (we have most of the know-how, but not even close to enough spare resources at the moment, just like you said), the individuals in charge also realize that such probes would eventually return to the local system and consume it, thereby ending the possible descendents of the probe's creators. While it's true that many of our current political leaders are willfully committing long-term suicide on the planet in the name of short term profit, any group far-seeing enough to acknowledge that there might be something interesting out there worth sending probes to visit, will also be far-seeing enough to not want to kill their multi-generational descendents as a horde of galaxy-consuming probes with million-year bit decay descend upon another source of resources.
As for radio broadcasts, the problem is attenuation - unless you are a star, you typically don't have the power required to actually send out an omni-directional radio broadcast that will reach other star systems and still be possible to interpret. Directional radio signals and lasers are still massively expensive to get to a strength that would last - even the best tuned laser currently available on earth would be spread out to wash over our entire solar system if fired from the nearest other star, with a corresponding loss in signal strength. Even assuming you could get the strength and coherence needed to get the signal through, who says that they picked our star, out of hundreds of thousands of other candidates, to send their expensive pinpoint broadcast towards, and were we even listening in the right direction when it passed by?
I had a similar, if slightly less difficult situation with a former job - I was hired originally as a programmer, but my boss (who was also the entire rest of the IT department) quit after I'd been there a year, and I was handed all of his work (and none of his pay, of course). For the most part, I already knew where everything was and how to fix it if it broke, but every now and then, I'd get a call saying "Hey, the #### broke again, can you fix it?" and my response would be "We have a ####? Where is it, and why was I never told about this?" Fortunately, the management was understanding of the problems involved, and took me off programming duty for a month of "trace things out and figure out where everything is, and document it". They were actually great people to work with, but the pay was about half what I'm making now.
Eventually, I did the cable-tracing thing with the plant manager, and we found an old 386 with no monitor, and a hefty UPS stuck up in the ceiling of one of the hallways, hooked up to the network. We tried disconnecting it, and the whole network died. (ie: fileservers, application servers, databases, etc...) Fortunately, rebooting the netware server got things going again just fine, but we never managed to figure out what that machine was actually doing, because the hard drive was so corrupted that it wouldn't boot back up again when we got it to a monitor.
Not entropic compression algorithms, just chopping out large sections of code that didn't actually do anything but slow the whole system down. (Like the aforementioned subroutine that did iterative division, then restored the original value. )
To bring in an inappropriate slashdot car analogy, this is like taking a car, and reducing the weight of it by removing the family of African Elephants that were tap-dancing on the hood. The resulting mess was still broken, but much smaller than it was with the elephants still there.
They did - the product that was delivered was not nearly as "working" as was claimed, and the money was already paid before that was realized.
Finding another outsourcing company after you've already been dumb enough to hand over several hundred thousand dollars for a pile of garbage, that your company needs working in order to continue operating is not in the budget, especially considering how the last one went. The cost of hiring me to prop up the garbage while a replacement was built, plus the cost of their internal team actually doing the work, was less than the cost of outsourcing the code to begin with, and in the end they got a system that was much more stable, better documented, and simple to maintain and make modifications and updates to.
I should probably mention that the person who made the decision to outsource the programming despite having a team of programmers already in the local IT department was no longer with the company when I signed on as a temporary contractor, and it was their decision (and the probable kickback they received for making it) that caused them to no longer be with the company.
I once did some contract work for a place that made the mistake of outsourcing a major programming job. My job was to maintain the outsourced code, and keep it functioning (barely) while the internal programming team worked on building a complete replacement from scratch, at half the cost, with the actual system requirements being fulfilled. I spent four months fixing bugs in deliberately obfuscated perl code, at consultant rates, because none of the internal staff they had hired was either able to figure out perl code in general, or willing to even try to sort out that mess. The outsourced programmers in question had the dodgy business practice of deliberately making their code difficult to read, and only including comments like:
# 16426-b
The code in question contained wonderful constructs such as pointless loops where a value would be iteratively divided by the numbers from one through a thousand, then restored to it's original value without being used in the altered form. I started the project with about 6 million lines of perl code, and by the time it was over and the replacement was ready, tested, and brought online, there were only 2 million lines in the outsourced code, including about ten thousand lines of comment code that had been added while I was working on it. I hadn't even looked at about half of the remaining code.
After the initial work was done (poorly), the outsourced programming company announced that their code maintenance fees were being increased, thinking that their poor coding style had essentially locked the client in, and left them unable to get help elsewhere. The only staff member the company had who was willing to make the attempt unfortunately committed suicide after only a month of trying. (Personally, I believe it was unrelated, but the other programmers there claimed she was perfectly fine until she started working on that code... after two months of it I could see why they would think that.)
So yeah, in my experience, outsourcing programming does not save money - if the company I did that work for had just had their own people write the original code, they would have saved a massive amount of money.