What's the distance between an embryonic stem cell and a zygote? If we can push the development back in time from skin cell -> stem cell, can we push it back from skin cell -> zygote? And if we can, what are the moral implications of destroying that zygote?
Take a look at the wikipedia page on Ahmadinejad and Israel. He's pretty nuts and definitely wants to get rid of Israel. I don't see a quote about genocide though, just wants to get rid of the state; weird comments about the holocaust and 9/11.
I really, really wish what you wrote were true, but I think it's likely wishful thinking. The value of those bits and bytes cannot be simply ignored without it seriously screwing up a capitalist system. If the global system ever figures out that the IOUs the US has been writing are not worth anything, it could cause a worldwide depression. Maybe the US and Europe would fare better in the long term, but it will be very ugly for many years.
Do you have any reasoned analyses that indicate that your post is realistic? I'd like to read them, if only to raise my spirits.
This is a great strategy for getting the public (largely ignorant of science in general; a huge percentage cannot explain why we have seasons) for getting behind exploration. We can say 'we're looking for life, we've got lots of clues!' and then use the money to go do the science we should be doing.
Because the sensors that are used to study the volcanoes can say a great deal about our technical capabilities and limitations? Just a possibility, no idea if this is accurate.
Then you're an idiot. A person != a pet. I know that this is difficult for people who don't have children to understand, PETA definitely doesn't understand, but there is a difference between humans and dogs / cats. And I say this as a parent and a pet owner (of both a cat and a dog).
I know that you are attached to your pet, and I'm emotionally attached to my pets, but they are property. They can be bought and sold. They can be used for food and clothing. The laws are right to separate the way they are considered from humans. Injuring a pet, or killing it, is a criminal offense, either cruelty or deprivation of property. It's not murder, kidnapping, or torture.
Who gets to decide when the walls are see-through? I hate it when I want to rest and the guy controlling the window screen has it open so that the sun is shining directly in my eyes. I'm guessing that the pilot will do exactly what they do now, which is to wait until after takeoff, we've all settled in, and people are drifting off to sleep, and then decide to make the walls transparent and spend 10 minutes explaining crap we already know through a horrendous, screechy speaker at rock concert volumes. Do they take a frigging class in how to be annoying?
Here's a great idea for improving air travel: make the seats comfortable! It should take them about 40 years to do it, but it will be nice when they do.
Let's just state the plain, obvious, unpopular truth:
Why do you think Vietnam/Iraq became such nightmares?
every time an invading soldier hurts his toe on a wooden splinter (or worse), you pick out 100 Iraqi's from whatever family is rumored to have something to do with the attack, and include their neighbors for good measure. You shoot them one by one in the town square, or alternatively slowly cut their throats (as the enemy does).
Did this work for the Soviets in Afghanistan? No, of course not. It didn't work for the Germans in France either. More importantly, it will never work unless you keep a large military force in the country forever. The United States does not want to keep a large military force in the country forever. It wants a stable, relatively free country, since that seems to work out best for everyone, the US included. Barring that, the US wants a stable, unfree but not threatening country.
Insurgencies don't work the way that you seem to think. You cannot kill your way out of them, since as you kill people, you make more insurgents. The improvements in Iraq came because we were more careful, not more indiscriminate, in who we killed, while attending to the social and cultural factors that could make the country more stable and non-threatening (cf. Petraeus). Afghanistan is even worse because it's not really a country so much as a collection of tribes and warlords and an arbitrary boundary.
There have been some interesting developments in VMs, automated deployment, managing the systems, network virtualization, etc. that make the whole process much easier. Just read up on Eucalyptus.
The problem is that Oracle is dedicated to the MS model of breaking open source. Take a look at what they have done to the license for Sun Grid Engine. The previous version was 6.2u5 and was open source. The latest is not, in 6.2u6 they have added the following license terms: "You may evaluate the software internally for a period of 90 days from your first use.". The bastards have taken a very useful cloud tool and broken it. See the links here
OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times.
In my field (visual object recognition), open source is the edge of innovation. Everybody in academia puts their software out there. It's mostly poorly written Matlab, but it's there. Does that count as OSS? The commercial interests take it and turn it into commercial products, and sometimes an open source project uses it too.
Actually, I'm driving onto a military base, and it's pretty much out in the middle of nowhere. And it's not my building, and have absolutely no control over whether or not they will let me plug in. Which is the point: you don't have a guarantee of a charger at the far end.
Can you guarantee that I will be able to plug in someplace else? For how long will I be able to charge and at what rate?
Part of the societal changes is that chargers will become available in a wider range of locations, but for now, no.
Oy. That's not the point, and I assume that you know it. bananaendian claims that the law of thermodynamics prevents the FT process from being an energy source; I don't believe him.
You take 10 tons of coal, you put it through the process, and you end up with X barrels of oil replacement (with much of the coal spent powering the process). The question is, how many barrels of oil replacement did it take to get that 10 tons of coal. If it takes more than X barrels of oil to run the equipment getting the coal, then it cannot be an oil replacement source. But, is that true?
Oh, yeah, back to the topic at hand... So, tell me... why aren't we using electric vehicles?
Range. See the reviews of the Tesla for an example. 5 or 10 years from now, it won't be a problem, both because of changes in technology and because of societal changes of people having electric vehicles. But, for now, range is a killer. I have to drive once a week about 40 miles each way, with no guarantee of a charger at the far end. So, I can't do it. I'd love to get a Nissan Leaf, but it's '100 mile' distance is likely not going to be 80 real miles in real conditions. But, still, I'm waiting....
And the laws of thermodynamics would like to hit you over the head. Not an energy source, won't scale, etc. etc. been there, argued that...
Can you please provide a citation for this? I know that the process is uneconomical (which is why we're not doing it). However, I have never heard that it is energy negative. Are you really saying that it takes more energy to do the Fischer–Tropsch process than we get out of it? If it is not, then at some point (i.e. very high prices for oil), it becomes profitable.
I disagree. There are lots of side stories, back stories, etc. Eddie's back story does not need to be fully told in the movies, but would be fine in a series. A series of stories set in Roland's world, adventures of the gunslingers, the battles between Flagg's army and the gunslingers, training of the gunslingers, etc. would be interesting in their own right. The connection to the movies would not be direct storyline, but filling in the rich world that King has envisioned.
I'm not sure what the author's wishes really are. I can't say that I trust what they write at the end of a book, telling you not to read the rest of it, when they went ahead and wrote the extra bit. If they didn't want us to read it, then he should not have written it. So, either it's a ploy or he's undecided about it himself.
The first book is great though it has a different feel from a standard King book. The rest are good, but uneven in their own way. After a while, they get downright weird. The best parts are when Roland (and the other travellers) are in his world. When he spends too much time in other places, it just doesn't work for me. The ending (or endings?) are good, and it wraps up the story IMHO, YMMV.
I agree that a little known actor would be good; I also think that such an actor is more likely to take the role, since it is a multi-year, multi-outlet commitment to the part. I also pray that they do not try to soften the character or pick someone who is at all soft and fuzzy.
On the other hand, as long as Shia LaBeouf stays the fuck away from the movie, I'll be happy.
Kind of comes with the territory, doesn't it? Anyone with the balls and motivation to pull this kind of thing off in an effective way on the world stage isn't going to be a small-time whistle blower with a small-time ego or a small-time sense of risk-taking. Anybody with this kind of drive and motivation will seem like a megalomaniac to the sheeple.
Maybe I'm not seeing it, but John Young doesn't seem like that. Who's he? You're not familiar with his name? It's not splashed all over the place, and he doesn't give press conferences and sleep with the fawning interns? No, but his web site (Cryptome) has done more good than I think Wikileaks has.
Removing the names of innocent people (Afghans) would be nice.
In theory, 'responsible' news agencies should get the documents, try to make sure that they are not going to get innocent people killed, and publish as much as possible. I don't think that Wikileaks has a clue about how to do that, so they release everything.
And Assange is an ego-manic of the first order. I think that releasing the documents to Cryptome is a better way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but Paint.net doesn't suck too bad. It's a much better Paint, and it's free.
Theoretically, I would think so.
What's the distance between an embryonic stem cell and a zygote? If we can push the development back in time from skin cell -> stem cell, can we push it back from skin cell -> zygote? And if we can, what are the moral implications of destroying that zygote?
Um....not that I'm a scholar in the Koran, but 5:90-91 seems to indicate that you should not drink alcohol.
Take a look at the wikipedia page on Ahmadinejad and Israel. He's pretty nuts and definitely wants to get rid of Israel. I don't see a quote about genocide though, just wants to get rid of the state; weird comments about the holocaust and 9/11.
I really, really wish what you wrote were true, but I think it's likely wishful thinking. The value of those bits and bytes cannot be simply ignored without it seriously screwing up a capitalist system. If the global system ever figures out that the IOUs the US has been writing are not worth anything, it could cause a worldwide depression. Maybe the US and Europe would fare better in the long term, but it will be very ugly for many years.
Do you have any reasoned analyses that indicate that your post is realistic? I'd like to read them, if only to raise my spirits.
This is a great strategy for getting the public (largely ignorant of science in general; a huge percentage cannot explain why we have seasons) for getting behind exploration. We can say 'we're looking for life, we've got lots of clues!' and then use the money to go do the science we should be doing.
Well done, NASA PR department!
Because the sensors that are used to study the volcanoes can say a great deal about our technical capabilities and limitations? Just a possibility, no idea if this is accurate.
Then you're an idiot. A person != a pet. I know that this is difficult for people who don't have children to understand, PETA definitely doesn't understand, but there is a difference between humans and dogs / cats. And I say this as a parent and a pet owner (of both a cat and a dog).
I know that you are attached to your pet, and I'm emotionally attached to my pets, but they are property. They can be bought and sold. They can be used for food and clothing. The laws are right to separate the way they are considered from humans. Injuring a pet, or killing it, is a criminal offense, either cruelty or deprivation of property. It's not murder, kidnapping, or torture.
Who gets to decide when the walls are see-through? I hate it when I want to rest and the guy controlling the window screen has it open so that the sun is shining directly in my eyes. I'm guessing that the pilot will do exactly what they do now, which is to wait until after takeoff, we've all settled in, and people are drifting off to sleep, and then decide to make the walls transparent and spend 10 minutes explaining crap we already know through a horrendous, screechy speaker at rock concert volumes. Do they take a frigging class in how to be annoying?
Here's a great idea for improving air travel: make the seats comfortable! It should take them about 40 years to do it, but it will be nice when they do.
Let's just state the plain, obvious, unpopular truth :
Why do you think Vietnam/Iraq became such nightmares?
every time an invading soldier hurts his toe on a wooden splinter (or worse), you pick out 100 Iraqi's from whatever family is rumored to have something to do with the attack, and include their neighbors for good measure. You shoot them one by one in the town square, or alternatively slowly cut their throats (as the enemy does).
Did this work for the Soviets in Afghanistan? No, of course not. It didn't work for the Germans in France either. More importantly, it will never work unless you keep a large military force in the country forever. The United States does not want to keep a large military force in the country forever. It wants a stable, relatively free country, since that seems to work out best for everyone, the US included. Barring that, the US wants a stable, unfree but not threatening country.
Insurgencies don't work the way that you seem to think. You cannot kill your way out of them, since as you kill people, you make more insurgents. The improvements in Iraq came because we were more careful, not more indiscriminate, in who we killed, while attending to the social and cultural factors that could make the country more stable and non-threatening (cf. Petraeus). Afghanistan is even worse because it's not really a country so much as a collection of tribes and warlords and an arbitrary boundary.
There have been some interesting developments in VMs, automated deployment, managing the systems, network virtualization, etc. that make the whole process much easier. Just read up on Eucalyptus.
The problem is that Oracle is dedicated to the MS model of breaking open source. Take a look at what they have done to the license for Sun Grid Engine. The previous version was 6.2u5 and was open source. The latest is not, in 6.2u6 they have added the following license terms: "You may evaluate the software internally for a period of 90 days from your first use.". The bastards have taken a very useful cloud tool and broken it. See the links here
False positives would be no big deal if you've got enough laser sources - its not going to hurt to "blind" a false positive reflection.
Unless it's my eye!
OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times.
In my field (visual object recognition), open source is the edge of innovation. Everybody in academia puts their software out there. It's mostly poorly written Matlab, but it's there. Does that count as OSS? The commercial interests take it and turn it into commercial products, and sometimes an open source project uses it too.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Möbius pancakes!
Actually, I'm driving onto a military base, and it's pretty much out in the middle of nowhere. And it's not my building, and have absolutely no control over whether or not they will let me plug in. Which is the point: you don't have a guarantee of a charger at the far end.
Can you guarantee that I will be able to plug in someplace else? For how long will I be able to charge and at what rate?
Part of the societal changes is that chargers will become available in a wider range of locations, but for now, no.
Oy. That's not the point, and I assume that you know it. bananaendian claims that the law of thermodynamics prevents the FT process from being an energy source; I don't believe him.
You take 10 tons of coal, you put it through the process, and you end up with X barrels of oil replacement (with much of the coal spent powering the process). The question is, how many barrels of oil replacement did it take to get that 10 tons of coal. If it takes more than X barrels of oil to run the equipment getting the coal, then it cannot be an oil replacement source. But, is that true?
Oh, yeah, back to the topic at hand... So, tell me... why aren't we using electric vehicles?
Range. See the reviews of the Tesla for an example. 5 or 10 years from now, it won't be a problem, both because of changes in technology and because of societal changes of people having electric vehicles. But, for now, range is a killer. I have to drive once a week about 40 miles each way, with no guarantee of a charger at the far end. So, I can't do it. I'd love to get a Nissan Leaf, but it's '100 mile' distance is likely not going to be 80 real miles in real conditions. But, still, I'm waiting....
The 1920s would like to have a talk with you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
And the laws of thermodynamics would like to hit you over the head. Not an energy source, won't scale, etc. etc. been there, argued that...
Can you please provide a citation for this? I know that the process is uneconomical (which is why we're not doing it). However, I have never heard that it is energy negative. Are you really saying that it takes more energy to do the Fischer–Tropsch process than we get out of it? If it is not, then at some point (i.e. very high prices for oil), it becomes profitable.
I disagree. There are lots of side stories, back stories, etc. Eddie's back story does not need to be fully told in the movies, but would be fine in a series. A series of stories set in Roland's world, adventures of the gunslingers, the battles between Flagg's army and the gunslingers, training of the gunslingers, etc. would be interesting in their own right. The connection to the movies would not be direct storyline, but filling in the rich world that King has envisioned.
I'm not sure what the author's wishes really are. I can't say that I trust what they write at the end of a book, telling you not to read the rest of it, when they went ahead and wrote the extra bit. If they didn't want us to read it, then he should not have written it. So, either it's a ploy or he's undecided about it himself.
The first book is great though it has a different feel from a standard King book. The rest are good, but uneven in their own way. After a while, they get downright weird. The best parts are when Roland (and the other travellers) are in his world. When he spends too much time in other places, it just doesn't work for me. The ending (or endings?) are good, and it wraps up the story IMHO, YMMV.
I agree that a little known actor would be good; I also think that such an actor is more likely to take the role, since it is a multi-year, multi-outlet commitment to the part. I also pray that they do not try to soften the character or pick someone who is at all soft and fuzzy.
On the other hand, as long as Shia LaBeouf stays the fuck away from the movie, I'll be happy.
Kind of comes with the territory, doesn't it? Anyone with the balls and motivation to pull this kind of thing off in an effective way on the world stage isn't going to be a small-time whistle blower with a small-time ego or a small-time sense of risk-taking. Anybody with this kind of drive and motivation will seem like a megalomaniac to the sheeple.
Maybe I'm not seeing it, but John Young doesn't seem like that. Who's he? You're not familiar with his name? It's not splashed all over the place, and he doesn't give press conferences and sleep with the fawning interns? No, but his web site (Cryptome) has done more good than I think Wikileaks has.
Removing the names of innocent people (Afghans) would be nice.
In theory, 'responsible' news agencies should get the documents, try to make sure that they are not going to get innocent people killed, and publish as much as possible. I don't think that Wikileaks has a clue about how to do that, so they release everything.
And Assange is an ego-manic of the first order. I think that releasing the documents to Cryptome is a better way to do it.
They are discussed here.
I won't argue that there are not more Muslim terrorists, but Christian terrorist definitely exist.