The Church's official doctrine statements are here.
These come from what is now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger. One of his official titles is "Grand Inquisitor", although he doesn't use it. His job is to find and stamp out deviations from approved doctrine.
5. Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person's formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church's teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.
6. When "these precautionary measures have not had their effect or in which they were not possible," and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, "the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it" (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Declaration "Holy Communion and Divorced, Civilly Remarried Catholics" [2002], nos. 3-4). This decision, properly speaking, is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgement on the person's subjective guilt, but rather is reacting to the person's public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin.
[N.B. A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.]
A typical comment on reverse mergers:
"It's a perfect setup for a 'pump and dump' stock scam. Take a stock that has been trading for pennies, merge it into a business that has at least the facade of respectability and a presence in a market that is perceived as hot, hype like hell, sell off as many of your shares as possible, and make a run for the border before the price drops like a rock. There have been enough of these to give the whole approach a dubious aura."
A reverse merger, unlike an initial public offering, doesn't raise any money for the company. It costs money, and at the end, you have a publicly traded stock nobody cares about. Which you then have to hype. So they are an inherently suspicious transaction.
Here's an example of a reverse merger involving a company claiming to be engaged in gold mining, biotech, and casino gambling. Reverse mergers tend to be at that level of flakeyness.
The BBC's director of New Media? The guy who tried to make the BBC a "portal"? The guy who introduced Fantasy Football and Pure Soap (both cancelled) to the BBC web site?
The X-Prize is something of a joke. After all, the goal is basically to do what the X-15 did. In 1963.
Suborbital flight isn't that useful, unless you're building an ICBM.
Going to low earth orbit, though, means something. That's useful.
Automated processing requires much cleaner data than you are likely to get from a multitude of sources that don't have to go through validation.
This is a well-explored area. Look into the history of SGML, or of EDI. Look at how hard it's been simply to get invoices and purchase orders into formats that work between companies. It not only takes standards bodies. It usually takes one dominant player who forces their suppliers to do it their way.
I just noticed that Keyhole recently censored the White House. A few months ago, you could see rooftop details. Now it's all a uniform brown. They also censored both Executive Office Buildings, overpainting them with a uniform green. The Capitol and the House and Senate Office Buildings have been blurred, in an ugly, pixilated way. Not the Supreme Court, though.
Or, for that matter, the Pentagon.
If you try GlobeExplorer, you get an uncensored image until the last two zoom levels. Then the White House turns brown.
The big problem with the so-called "semantic web" is that trying to taxonomize ideas doesn't work very well. Full-text search works much better.
In the beginning, we had library card catalogs, with their painful attempts to index and cross-reference books. That works well in some areas, typically ones where names of people are significant. Attempts to apply the same approaches to technical papers worked less well.
There's a very elaborate classification system for patents. When you had to look through patents on paper or microfilm, it was essential. Now that we have full text search, it's used less and less.
A modern example of this approach is the ACM Taxonomy, a structure into which all computer science can be fitted. (As an exercise, try to put the current Slashdot stories into that taxonomy.) Nobody actually uses that taxonomy to find anything.
As to data interchangability, that's a separate issue, and more of a standards one. The big problem for publicly available data is that the cost of encoding the data is borne by different people than those who benefit from the encoding.
Many companies don't like having all their product and pricing information easily searchable by price. (Froogle may change this, because Google has so much clout.)
I've spent some time dealing with public financial reporting. There's opposition to detailed disclosure in a standardized format. Many companies don't want their detailed information to be too easily analyzed.
Embarassing results show up.
The future is better search engines, not user-created indexing data. As we've painfully learned, a search engine must look at the same data a human reader would, or it will be lied to.
Lied to to the point of uselessness.
Uh, no. Radioactive materials are made by transmutation routinely. Some on purpose, some as waste products.
Plutonium is made by transmutation, and tons have been manufactured.
There's little if any natural plutonium left in the Earth. There was probably some when the planet formed, but it decayed billions of years ago. It's been over 100,000 half-lives of plutonum since the earth formed, after all.
Here are the sources anyone serious needs to know about.
Digi-Key and, to a lesser extent, Mouser. Digi-Key has become the standard source for electronic components. On-line order turnaround is really fast. Order today, receive tomorrow. Their web site has the data sheets for most of their parts, too.
Berg and Stock Drive Products. These are the standard sources for small gears, couplings, and other small moving parts.
Grainger and McMaster Carr Larger, general-purpose industrial products like pumps, valves, motors, and belting.
These books are always useful:
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. How to get stuff done with electronic parts. A bit dated, but very useful on the analog side.
Machinery's Handbook If you have any machine tools, you need this. If you have a mill, you probably have a copy already.
Everybody accepts credit cards now. There's no problem ordering from real suppliers.
Most of the "anonymous domain registration" schemes involve some dummy party actually being the domain owner. If you ever get into a dispute with that party, you have a problem.
Those "indemnification" clauses really matter in a situation like this. If someone goes after the dummy party, you'll end up paying their legal fees.
Operating a business anonymously is a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, including California.
It's not clear what happens if someone files a Whois Data Problem Report for your "anonymous" domain. But you probably won't like what happens.
If someone wants your domain, they could make a case under the UDRP that your registration was in bad faith.
Some spam filters may blacklist mail from, or mail that mentions, anonymous domains. It's like putting up a sign that says "I am a slimeball".
There are signs of a crackdown on anonymous business web sites. Microsoft is sueing "bullet proof web hosting" firms.
Abstract - The commercial feasibility of small scale solar ORC for distributed generation and CHP is
demonstrated. This has been achieved with an exergy analysis of over 150 commercially available solar
hot water collectors, a survey of candidate working fluids and by adapting rotary refrigeration
compressors to run in reverse direction as expanders/asynchronous generators. A computer code
combining the results of these sub-studies has demonstrated that self-stabilisation close to optimum
conditions for given irradiance may be possible without electronic feedback control.
The principle obstacles encountered included oil migration, face and tip sealing problems and
low expansion ratios.
"Commercial feasibility" is total bullshit. They haven't even built a prototype.
If you want solar powered water pumps, they're commercially available. A complete kit, including solar panels, is $1,697.
But they're not really cost-effective. Windmill pumps still outperform solar, and newer pumps will work at low wind speeds.
By carefully darkening the image and photographing the thing from angles that deemphasise the bulky earpieces. Oakley PR has been able to create the illusion that this isn't a piece of crap. Bring the images into a program that can lighten them up and you'll see how tacky this is.
It looks like the hearing aid glasses of the 1970. Except clunkier.
Integrating a wireless headset into sunglasses, so you could listen to music or talk on your cell phone, would be cool. Only one gadget to carry around, too.
Here are some videos from range-gated imagers. These are active devices which illuminate the scene with a laser pulse, then turn the imager on for only a few nanoseconds to cover the range of interest. These see through fog well, because you can gate out all the stuff nearer or further than the specified distance.
They're active devices, though, and the military prefers passives. Active sensors make you a target.
Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.
Yeah. A few years ago, the compiler guys from HP came over to Stanford to speak about Itanium compilers. They didn't have a clue how to solve the problems they faced.
I stopped the Microsoft world at Windows 2000. There's a lot to be said for Win2K. You run Win2K. XP runs you. There are enough companies staying on Win2K that support will continue for years to come.
What ComReg is really doing is telling eircom that they can't charge for dialer calls. But they can't order eircom to provide free service. So they told eircom to either block or not bill. Here's the actual directive:
The Commission for Communications Regulation directs that Providers of Publicly
Available Telephone Services shall no later 04 October 2004:
a) Suspend direct dial access to destinations listed in the attached Appendix B. The
Appendix will be reviewed on a regular basis by ComReg and the network
operators and amended appropriately in response to any significant changes to
problem destinations; and
b) permit direct dial access to specific telephone numbers located within the
destinations referred to in the attached Appendix B only at the request of a
subscriber and following the network operator having verified that the requested
telephone number is a legitimate service only or
c) As an alternative to only permitting direct dial access in accordance with
paragraph b), above, providers of publicly available telephone services can
choose to no longer charge any consumers for unauthorised call charges arising
from Autodiallers.
It's only for six months, until they figure out something better.
The problem is not that you can't do it. It's that the market is so dinky that tooling up to do it isn't worth it.
It should be feasible to make integrated silicon strain gauge/amplifier/interface chips, embed them in a flexible printed circuit, and laminate them into a skin-like laminate with appropriate tough, soft, and hard layers. But the processes involved are all high-volume ones - it's hard to do this economically in small volume. And there's no market for a process that turns out big rolls of this stuff.
There's a lot of stuff in robotics that's like that. Linear motors and laser scanners both cost about 20x what they should. because the volume is tiny. Even basic servomotos and servo amps cost 5x as much as they should, based on parts cost.
It's getting better, though. More and more parts needed in robotics are becoming off the shelf.
I run a DARPA Grand Challenge team, and over the last year, many of the components you need for that have become far more available.
Built a relay computer while in high school
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 1
That was a bad bug. It didn't cause system crashes. It caused missile misses. This bug was responsible for an interception failure which allowed an incoming Scud missile to hit a barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 people.
The radar and the guidance system had separate clocks, and they'd drift out of sync.
Proper starting. Automobile engines are started all wrong. Cranking, compression, fuel, and spark all start at the same time. Oil pressure comes later. As a result, half of engine wear occurs during start. Many big engines (locomotives, marine diesels, some big tractors) are started properly - oil pressure first, then a few turns with compression released to oil up the cylinders, and finally combustion starts. Wear is much reduced.
Once 42-volt electrical systems become popular, and valve control goes electrical, we may see electric booster oil pumps and valve actuators. Once you can crank the engine with compression off and oil pressure up, you need a much smaller starting motor. The starting motor and alternator can then be combined.
Cellular providers have had flat-rate long distance for a while now. That's what's really putting pressure on the wireline carriers. Now we're starting to see flat-rate long distance from the wireline carriers. Soon, at least for U.S. domestic calls, there will be no price advantage for voice over IP.
Internationally, though, voice is still a cash cow.
That may last a while longer.
Voice over IP is more of an advantage for companies with elaborate internal telecommunications infrastructures. The VoIP gear is cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you use C# without .NET or some replacement for it? Is it possible to use it with POSIX alone? Or perhaps with OpenGL?
Here's the official hard line:
6. When "these precautionary measures have not had their effect or in which they were not possible," and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, "the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it" (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Declaration "Holy Communion and Divorced, Civilly Remarried Catholics" [2002], nos. 3-4). This decision, properly speaking, is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgement on the person's subjective guilt, but rather is reacting to the person's public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin.
[N.B. A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.]
Any questions?
A typical comment on reverse mergers: "It's a perfect setup for a 'pump and dump' stock scam. Take a stock that has been trading for pennies, merge it into a business that has at least the facade of respectability and a presence in a market that is perceived as hot, hype like hell, sell off as many of your shares as possible, and make a run for the border before the price drops like a rock. There have been enough of these to give the whole approach a dubious aura."
A reverse merger, unlike an initial public offering, doesn't raise any money for the company. It costs money, and at the end, you have a publicly traded stock nobody cares about. Which you then have to hype. So they are an inherently suspicious transaction.
Here's an example of a reverse merger involving a company claiming to be engaged in gold mining, biotech, and casino gambling. Reverse mergers tend to be at that level of flakeyness.
The BBC's director of New Media? The guy who tried to make the BBC a "portal"? The guy who introduced Fantasy Football and Pure Soap (both cancelled) to the BBC web site?
Wait for more info. This is premature.
Going to low earth orbit, though, means something. That's useful.
This is a well-explored area. Look into the history of SGML, or of EDI. Look at how hard it's been simply to get invoices and purchase orders into formats that work between companies. It not only takes standards bodies. It usually takes one dominant player who forces their suppliers to do it their way.
If you try GlobeExplorer, you get an uncensored image until the last two zoom levels. Then the White House turns brown.
In the beginning, we had library card catalogs, with their painful attempts to index and cross-reference books. That works well in some areas, typically ones where names of people are significant. Attempts to apply the same approaches to technical papers worked less well.
There's a very elaborate classification system for patents. When you had to look through patents on paper or microfilm, it was essential. Now that we have full text search, it's used less and less.
A modern example of this approach is the ACM Taxonomy, a structure into which all computer science can be fitted. (As an exercise, try to put the current Slashdot stories into that taxonomy.) Nobody actually uses that taxonomy to find anything.
As to data interchangability, that's a separate issue, and more of a standards one. The big problem for publicly available data is that the cost of encoding the data is borne by different people than those who benefit from the encoding. Many companies don't like having all their product and pricing information easily searchable by price. (Froogle may change this, because Google has so much clout.)
I've spent some time dealing with public financial reporting. There's opposition to detailed disclosure in a standardized format. Many companies don't want their detailed information to be too easily analyzed. Embarassing results show up.
The future is better search engines, not user-created indexing data. As we've painfully learned, a search engine must look at the same data a human reader would, or it will be lied to. Lied to to the point of uselessness.
There's little if any natural plutonium left in the Earth. There was probably some when the planet formed, but it decayed billions of years ago. It's been over 100,000 half-lives of plutonum since the earth formed, after all.
These books are always useful:
Everybody accepts credit cards now. There's no problem ordering from real suppliers.
It's only embarassing if the monitors find corruption.
-
Abstract - The commercial feasibility of small scale solar ORC for distributed generation and CHP is
demonstrated. This has been achieved with an exergy analysis of over 150 commercially available solar
hot water collectors, a survey of candidate working fluids and by adapting rotary refrigeration
compressors to run in reverse direction as expanders/asynchronous generators. A computer code
combining the results of these sub-studies has demonstrated that self-stabilisation close to optimum
conditions for given irradiance may be possible without electronic feedback control.
The principle obstacles encountered included oil migration, face and tip sealing problems and
low expansion ratios.
"Commercial feasibility" is total bullshit. They haven't even built a prototype.If you want solar powered water pumps, they're commercially available. A complete kit, including solar panels, is $1,697. But they're not really cost-effective. Windmill pumps still outperform solar, and newer pumps will work at low wind speeds.
It looks like the hearing aid glasses of the 1970. Except clunkier.
Integrating a wireless headset into sunglasses, so you could listen to music or talk on your cell phone, would be cool. Only one gadget to carry around, too.
They're active devices, though, and the military prefers passives. Active sensors make you a target.
Yeah. A few years ago, the compiler guys from HP came over to Stanford to speak about Itanium compilers. They didn't have a clue how to solve the problems they faced.
The newer machines run QNX or Linux, anyway.
It's only for six months, until they figure out something better.
It should be feasible to make integrated silicon strain gauge/amplifier/interface chips, embed them in a flexible printed circuit, and laminate them into a skin-like laminate with appropriate tough, soft, and hard layers. But the processes involved are all high-volume ones - it's hard to do this economically in small volume. And there's no market for a process that turns out big rolls of this stuff.
There's a lot of stuff in robotics that's like that. Linear motors and laser scanners both cost about 20x what they should. because the volume is tiny. Even basic servomotos and servo amps cost 5x as much as they should, based on parts cost.
It's getting better, though. More and more parts needed in robotics are becoming off the shelf. I run a DARPA Grand Challenge team, and over the last year, many of the components you need for that have become far more available.
When I was in high school, we didn't have computers. So I build built one out of surplus telephone relays.
The radar and the guidance system had separate clocks, and they'd drift out of sync.
Here's a detailed analysis by the General Accounting Office.
Proper starting. Automobile engines are started all wrong. Cranking, compression, fuel, and spark all start at the same time. Oil pressure comes later. As a result, half of engine wear occurs during start. Many big engines (locomotives, marine diesels, some big tractors) are started properly - oil pressure first, then a few turns with compression released to oil up the cylinders, and finally combustion starts. Wear is much reduced.
Once 42-volt electrical systems become popular, and valve control goes electrical, we may see electric booster oil pumps and valve actuators. Once you can crank the engine with compression off and oil pressure up, you need a much smaller starting motor. The starting motor and alternator can then be combined.
Internationally, though, voice is still a cash cow. That may last a while longer.
Voice over IP is more of an advantage for companies with elaborate internal telecommunications infrastructures. The VoIP gear is cheaper.
The referenced site is unreadable because its ad server is overloaded. Now that's a denial of service attach.