Commas aren't pauses though - they're used to separate items in a list and clauses in a sentence but, despite the fact that we would naturally pause in those places, they aren't really intended for use in every place where you would pause. I use them like that myself sometimes, but then occasionally it'll conflict with some other, more correct, use of a comma (and result in far too many commas in far too few words) and I'll realise that the 'pause' commas are extraneous.
Now living in fear of Muphry's Law striking me down - I've probably misused a comma somewhere in the past 3 lines.
Don't be silly, a million mechanised soldiers would be a massive manufacturing job.
So there'd be no need to have them "arise from the receding tide" - just include instructions in their code for invading China from its factories outwards.
The trilogy was originally conceived as The Matrix, 1 sequel to complete the story, and a prequel telling the story of the original human/machine war. Then they realised that the prequel wouldn't be able to have the same characters, so they stretched 1 film's worth of story out into two sequels and put some of the ideas for the prequel into The Animatrix.
Consequently a large part of the middle film is filler. It's well executed, visually impressive filler, but still filler. Just look over what actually happens, in terms of plot points rather than screen time, and it's really rather sparse. Take Reloaded and Revolutions, and a good editor... I'll bet you could cut together a damn fine Matrix sequel, so it's not that the sequels are bad, just that they're about two hours too long.
Mutations occurring outside of your reproductive cells have no effect on your children, since the genes being put into your gametes won't be changed, but as the article says
The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. Until now, retroviruses were the only viruses known to generate such endogenous copies in vertebrates. But Feschotte said that scientists have found that non-retroviral viruses called bornaviruses have been endogenized repeatedly in mammals throughout evolution.
Retroviruses, and apparently bornaviruses too, are able to insert themselves into the genome of your reproductive cells when they infect you, and hence get passed to your offspring. They may be a "brain virus" as well, but the important bit, for becoming part of the 8% of our DNA they're talking about here, is where they get themselves into the germ line.
I know with sheep (quite possibly trie of kangaroos too) the response to danger is to run in a straight line away from the threat, because turning would expose their flanks. If you've got a wolf on your tail (and you're a sheep) then your best bet is to keep it directly behind you, where it's got to try harder to jump onto your back. Turn, and it can jump and maybe get teeth or claws into your side.
Frustrating when they get startled by a car though - they just run straight down the road and stay in your way until the road bends. At that point the sheep continues running in a straight line, you follow the road, the sheep goes away thinking it's successfully evaded a predator (insomuch as a sheep can be said to think) and you go away cursing the stupidity of sheep. But it's actually a relatively smart thing to do as a general threat response, just mis-tuned for avoiding cars.
Alternative interpretation: There are a lot of people who, when rallied by a Facebook campaign, are willing to buy music online. But they're not doing that the rest of the time, so they must be FILTHY PIRATES.
Maybe her line of thought doesn't hinge on exactly what you're doing at the computer (work, fun, doesn't make a difference), just the fact that you are at the computer... and hence not doing something else enough.
What that something else is, I don't know. Like realityimpaired said, could be she wants more of your time spent on her, therefore less on the computer. Maybe you're getting fat and she wants some computer time traded for exercise time.
If she doesn't care what the difference is, explaining it to her won't make any difference (but will make you look like kind of a tool).
Also: Why use such a high-tech device, wen you can just apply a iodine solution to your skin? Kills everything. bacterial, viruses, funguses, parasites. Of course you can never put it in your mouth or something, because it can just as well kill you (or at least make you very sick). But for the skin, what reasons are there not to use it?
It stains skin yellow, it's a bit of an irritant, and a small amount will be absorbed into your blood stream. Not a problem if you just want to sterilise a wound the wrap a bandage over it, but for general use hand-washing... well, people will be more inclined to use it if it leaves their skin the same colour as they started with.
Hmm... maybe you could use the staining in a hospital to make it easy to see who's washed their hands...
Only matters if the "sterilised of all other life" environment is one that persists for long enough to be worth living in. You also have to consider exactly what would be necessary for an organism to survive this treatment, and how likely it is that such a thing exists anywhere, or would be able to develop by small, incremental, beneficial steps.
If you just sterilise for long enough to do surgery, then it goes back to non-sterile, and it's really hard to survive it, and it's rather hard to evolve resistance (all of which I suspect are true) then you're unlikely to see something arise to fill this particular niche.
Life can do amazing things when the circumstances are right, but I think this one might at least take a while to find a way around.
You get convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Someone else volunteers to be executed instead, while you walk free. The judge decides to allow this because he really just wants to execute someone, doesn't care who.
Is this justice? No - you weren't punished for your crime, an innocent was punished, and the judge in this case appears to have forgotten the point of the whole exercise in favour of absurd, undirected bloodlust. Justice isn't served by issuing a penalty, then letting it be exacted on someone unconnected to the crime
I also don't see how "accepting Jesus" is supposed to make you any more perfect - assuming human nature continues you'd still be just as flawed and sinful in the afterlife as you were in the first (and if I believed in heaven I wouldn't have it any other way - turning people "perfect" for the purpose of admitting them to heaven would be the ultimate denial of free will).
In the absence of evidence, not believing in things is always less silly than believing in them. We can't conclusively prove either side in many cases (pick your favourite example from unicorns, leprechauns, the yeti, Russel's teapot, the FSM etc etc) but we don't consider belief and non-belief equally sensible.
I haven't actually stated my beliefs in this discussion (you're right, I don't believe in a creator or a god of any kind, but that wasn't relevant or necessary to my point), my argument was solely against the idea of a god punishing everyone for their sins - for the god described by most religions, this doesn't make sense because omnipotence/omniscience implies the ability to choose from any set of events, which in turn (if there were such a creator) would mean that the events that end up happening are exactly what that creator wanted. So an omnimax creator punishing sins would essentially be punishing us for doing what he knew we would do, and decided to create the world such that we would do.
If your conception of god is different, then please feel free to disregard this argument, it has no bearing on your beliefs because you don't accept the premises that lead to a contradiction. Just don't expect me to play whack-a-mole with all possible ideas of god, I'll be here all year trying to prove a negative and we'll both go away unsatisfied with the result. I could attack things that seem fundamental to any possible idea of god, and show them to be in deep logical contradiction, but even then, you could believe that god can contain logical contradictions without problem, because he's just that wonderful.
The real problem underlying all the creator-related beliefs and other religious ideas is in the point I started this post with - we may not have evidence to prove that god doesn't exist, but that doesn't make it sensible to believe that he does. Everything else we observe in the world happens without any sign of divine intervention and can be explained by natural means, and we have no particular reason to suspect divine intervention in the origins of the universe, so inserting god into the theory makes no sense, even in the absence of further evidence.
As it happens, I'm fairly sure the further evidence is a little better than you think when it comes to deducing what the past was like, but the deductions do break down as you approach the very beginning because the physics of the situation would be unlike anything we have the data to describe, and philosophically speaking it's entirely possible that "before the universe" is about as sensible a notion as "north of the north pole".
So you're right - we don't know, maybe we can't know, maybe there's nothing to know. But we can do better than taking a guess and inserting supernatural silliness where it has no reason to be. (At the very least we can stop at not knowing without inventing a fiction, or maybe we can eventually gather the evidence required to settle the question).
or think courtroom justice: you were caught breaking a law, God is the judge... who is your advocate? If you accept Jesus as your advocate, he stands before the judge and says "he's guilty, but I volunteer to pay the penalty in his stead." The judge then metes out justice, but Jesus stands in your place, taking the punishment of death, while you remain free
This is scapegoating, not justice. If a human judge allowed the punishment of an innocent "in the stead" of a guilty party, we would not call him fair, just or wise. But your cosmic super-judge (who by any logic should be held to higher standards of ethical practice) can do exactly that?
The underlying message here is that your god is unable to forgive even the slightest transgression, has to demand mortal punishment, and yet isn't too picky about who exactly gets punished. Thinking a little further, surely an omniscient/potent creator knows exactly the consequences of his creation, and could hypothetically create a slightly different world, where the way things work out means that people sinned a little less. Then he wouldn't need to punish so much.
I want to lay this out in logical steps, to be sure I'm understood...
1. An omnipotent creator can create any one of the infinity of possible worlds.
2. In each possible creation, people would freely choose different actions (some moral, some immoral) over the course of time.
3. As there are infinitely many possibilities, every possible set of events and actions occurs in (at least) one possible world.
4. An omniscient creator knows exactly what choices will be made in each possible creation.
5. Following from 2 and 3, there is a possible world where everyone freely makes a good moral choice on each occasion.
6. Following from 4, an omniscient creator knows this hypothetical world exists, and (following from 1.) can create exactly that world - one where everyone would, of their own free will, act perfectly morally.
7. People do not act perfectly morally, of their own free will or otherwise.
Therefore 8. Our world was either not created by an omnipotent/scient creator, or possibly was created by such a being who does not want us to act morally.
Leibniz followed essentially this logic, and concluded that we must be in the best of all possible worlds (i.e. 3 is false, not all possibilities are actually possible, but we are in the best one that is possible). I see the same reasoning and take it as a reason to not believe in god. To relate it all back to the topic of cosmic justice, it either implies that there is no grand judge at the end of it all, or if there is... is it really fair to demand that we "get saved", when it was known to the judge in advance what our actions would be, and he selected those actions out of the myriad other possibilities?
Please don't take it as a slight against yourself, but as beliefs go that's a particularly unpleasant one. I'm sort of hoping that "According to the Christian beliefs I was taught growing up" implies that you've since changed what you believe, but I don't want to assume that.
From a pragmatic point of view, I suppose teaching that it's impossible to get yourself into heaven via your own good works, and only possible through believing what the church is teaching, is a good way to encourage strong belief. Not exactly a good way to encourage good behaviour though, when the 11th-hour repentance option is open.
I really doubt that could even come close to being the longest sentence ever posted on Slashdot, although it might possibly be the longest sentence put together without including any punctuation or obvious structure - the trick really to building an excessively, almost absurdly, long sentence is to first ensure that it contains plenty of subclauses to pad out the length, adding extra detail without becoming complete sentences in their own right, which allows you to keep adding words without bringing the sentence to an end, followed by the addition of plenty of un-necessary, redundant and absolutely preposterously worthless adjectives and further extra description, and then the final stage is to replace natural sentence breaks with connective words, commas and semi-colons to paper over the gaps between what would otherwise be separate sentences and keep the run-on flowing so that the sentence can just keep on growing and growing without any real limit or inhibition to further growth, save for the limiting factor of the author's patience with the endeavour.
I don't know how all the lefts/rights translate, what with how here in Britain we drive on the opposite side of the road (and accordingly have the driver's seat on the opposite side of the car) but the norm here is to have the indicators on the left, wipers on the right. I assumed the rationale was that the right hand would do most of the steering, left hand was for changing gear and indicating - the things that require you take a hand off the wheel. Wipers, used less often, can go the other side.
My car is reversed from the norm; indicators on the right, wipers on the left. Took a while to get used to, but now that I am used to it I'm just as messed up by a normal car as anyone else is by mine.
Taking a guess at which stick you meant was "the one on the left", I'd say my layout is a complete mirror of yours - driver on the opposite side, sticks reversed too, whereas a normal car here is more a translation than a reflection; sticks the same way around, but on the other side of the car. So the minor feat of flipping the indicators up/down with an outstretched finger while steering and changing gear at the same time would be possible in both of our cars, but not a normal British one.
So wait... this all means you mainly use your left hand to steer? Damn... that would mess with me. I seem to have developed right-handedness for steering, I guess because it's the stronger hand and gets used for steering all of the time (unlike my left which spends some time changing gear, some time just holding the wheel as a counterweight to my right) My left hand is only really good for holding the wheel steady, not steering like a competent driver.
I have spent far too much time thinking about this...
I think I remember hearing one possibility - that there could be a gene that increases the carrier's attraction to males. Not sure whether this was rumoured, theorised, demonstrated or proven (or any level of credibility in between) but such a gene could be an adaptive trait that would be selected for in females, that then also sometimes gets passed to a male child.
Would be vaguely similar to how the gene responsible for sickle cell anaemia isn't selected against - it's advantageous enough to those with a single copy of the gene to be a net benefit, despite the problems caused by having a second copy. An "attraction to males" gene could be naturally selected for in females enough to counterbalance the evolutionary disadvantage in homosexual males.
I'd find it hard to sympathise with the casino too, but you're still taking money away from someone without it being legal to do so. This would cause a small measure of harm to the owners of said casino; whether that harm is ethically tolerable or not is another question
In that case, you didn't steal their recipe; you copied it. If you had actually stolen the recipe (taken it away from them such that they no longer had it) then you'd be doing them very clear harm. As is, you made a copy of the recipe... which may well still be illegal under laws governing trade secrets or something similar, but isn't stealing.
Huh... suddenly I feel like I'm in the comments of a story about copyright infringement (another example of "illegal but not stealing").
Thinking back though, this is a case where the type of "theft" being discussed isn't really theft - theft of data can be damaging to a company without the original being removed. I suppose the key is that data theft isn't really stealing, even if it is illegal (it'd be covered by some other law). My comment about there being no victimless thefts didn't really take that into account; I was just thinking of actual theft involving real property.
Name a scenario where absolutely no-one is hurt by stealing. The meaning of the word implies that you've illegally taken something from someone else. They are now deprived of whatever it is that you took.
There might be cases where the damage is limited, or the benefit to others outweighs the damage (the classic "steal bread to feed your starving family" type of thing) but the word theft almost inherently contains the implication of ham to someone else or their interests.
Maybe I'm mistaken, and there can be a truly victimless theft, but I'm struggling to think of how that could come about.
I know there was one sandbox game (I don't remember which, it wasn't mine) where dropping from a great height with just the character killed you with falling damage, but dropping from a great height in a vehicle killed you by exploding the vehicle.
There was also a golf cart that, by virtue of being electric had the "explode on hard collision" thing turned off - it would have looked silly having a golf cart's electric motor catch fire and explode when you roughed the thing up too much.
The upshot of these two things was that you could climb to the top of the game's highest skyscraper, use a cheat to spawn a golf cart, then drop all the way back down to pavement level (in the golf cart) and climb out without a scratch on you.
I always forget how common automatics are in the US. Here in the UK they're the exception; the overwhelming majority of cars are manual transmission. I don't know how the statistics on road accidents compare between sides of the Atlantic, but it could make for an interesting read.
There would be other confounding factors though - being a smaller country means generally less travel on motorways, more travel through towns... plus you'll be hard pressed to find grid layouts in many cities here; it's all about roundabouts on this side of the Atlantic, which must make driving a somewhat different experience. Different cars too - smaller engines, smaller generally. I suspect our licensing may also be stricter; I know the pass rate is lower, and that we typically spend more time learning.
So yeah... there's quite a lot there to pick apart if you just wanted to compare manuals to automatics.
Slashdot Mirror
Commas aren't pauses though - they're used to separate items in a list and clauses in a sentence but, despite the fact that we would naturally pause in those places, they aren't really intended for use in every place where you would pause. I use them like that myself sometimes, but then occasionally it'll conflict with some other, more correct, use of a comma (and result in far too many commas in far too few words) and I'll realise that the 'pause' commas are extraneous.
Now living in fear of Muphry's Law striking me down - I've probably misused a comma somewhere in the past 3 lines.
Don't be silly, a million mechanised soldiers would be a massive manufacturing job.
So there'd be no need to have them "arise from the receding tide" - just include instructions in their code for invading China from its factories outwards.
The trilogy was originally conceived as The Matrix, 1 sequel to complete the story, and a prequel telling the story of the original human/machine war. Then they realised that the prequel wouldn't be able to have the same characters, so they stretched 1 film's worth of story out into two sequels and put some of the ideas for the prequel into The Animatrix.
Consequently a large part of the middle film is filler. It's well executed, visually impressive filler, but still filler. Just look over what actually happens, in terms of plot points rather than screen time, and it's really rather sparse. Take Reloaded and Revolutions, and a good editor... I'll bet you could cut together a damn fine Matrix sequel, so it's not that the sequels are bad, just that they're about two hours too long.
Mutations occurring outside of your reproductive cells have no effect on your children, since the genes being put into your gametes won't be changed, but as the article says
The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. Until now, retroviruses were the only viruses known to generate such endogenous copies in vertebrates. But Feschotte said that scientists have found that non-retroviral viruses called bornaviruses have been endogenized repeatedly in mammals throughout evolution.
Retroviruses, and apparently bornaviruses too, are able to insert themselves into the genome of your reproductive cells when they infect you, and hence get passed to your offspring. They may be a "brain virus" as well, but the important bit, for becoming part of the 8% of our DNA they're talking about here, is where they get themselves into the germ line.
I know with sheep (quite possibly trie of kangaroos too) the response to danger is to run in a straight line away from the threat, because turning would expose their flanks. If you've got a wolf on your tail (and you're a sheep) then your best bet is to keep it directly behind you, where it's got to try harder to jump onto your back. Turn, and it can jump and maybe get teeth or claws into your side.
Frustrating when they get startled by a car though - they just run straight down the road and stay in your way until the road bends. At that point the sheep continues running in a straight line, you follow the road, the sheep goes away thinking it's successfully evaded a predator (insomuch as a sheep can be said to think) and you go away cursing the stupidity of sheep. But it's actually a relatively smart thing to do as a general threat response, just mis-tuned for avoiding cars.
Let's not forget insightful-popular, insightful-contrarian and insightful-'said they expect to be downmodded'
Alternative interpretation: There are a lot of people who, when rallied by a Facebook campaign, are willing to buy music online. But they're not doing that the rest of the time, so they must be FILTHY PIRATES.
I hope they see it your way though.
Maybe her line of thought doesn't hinge on exactly what you're doing at the computer (work, fun, doesn't make a difference), just the fact that you are at the computer... and hence not doing something else enough.
What that something else is, I don't know. Like realityimpaired said, could be she wants more of your time spent on her, therefore less on the computer. Maybe you're getting fat and she wants some computer time traded for exercise time.
If she doesn't care what the difference is, explaining it to her won't make any difference (but will make you look like kind of a tool).
Also: Why use such a high-tech device, wen you can just apply a iodine solution to your skin? Kills everything. bacterial, viruses, funguses, parasites. Of course you can never put it in your mouth or something, because it can just as well kill you (or at least make you very sick). But for the skin, what reasons are there not to use it?
It stains skin yellow, it's a bit of an irritant, and a small amount will be absorbed into your blood stream. Not a problem if you just want to sterilise a wound the wrap a bandage over it, but for general use hand-washing... well, people will be more inclined to use it if it leaves their skin the same colour as they started with.
Hmm... maybe you could use the staining in a hospital to make it easy to see who's washed their hands...
Only matters if the "sterilised of all other life" environment is one that persists for long enough to be worth living in. You also have to consider exactly what would be necessary for an organism to survive this treatment, and how likely it is that such a thing exists anywhere, or would be able to develop by small, incremental, beneficial steps.
If you just sterilise for long enough to do surgery, then it goes back to non-sterile, and it's really hard to survive it, and it's rather hard to evolve resistance (all of which I suspect are true) then you're unlikely to see something arise to fill this particular niche.
Life can do amazing things when the circumstances are right, but I think this one might at least take a while to find a way around.
You get convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Someone else volunteers to be executed instead, while you walk free. The judge decides to allow this because he really just wants to execute someone, doesn't care who.
Is this justice? No - you weren't punished for your crime, an innocent was punished, and the judge in this case appears to have forgotten the point of the whole exercise in favour of absurd, undirected bloodlust. Justice isn't served by issuing a penalty, then letting it be exacted on someone unconnected to the crime
I also don't see how "accepting Jesus" is supposed to make you any more perfect - assuming human nature continues you'd still be just as flawed and sinful in the afterlife as you were in the first (and if I believed in heaven I wouldn't have it any other way - turning people "perfect" for the purpose of admitting them to heaven would be the ultimate denial of free will).
In the absence of evidence, not believing in things is always less silly than believing in them. We can't conclusively prove either side in many cases (pick your favourite example from unicorns, leprechauns, the yeti, Russel's teapot, the FSM etc etc) but we don't consider belief and non-belief equally sensible.
I haven't actually stated my beliefs in this discussion (you're right, I don't believe in a creator or a god of any kind, but that wasn't relevant or necessary to my point), my argument was solely against the idea of a god punishing everyone for their sins - for the god described by most religions, this doesn't make sense because omnipotence/omniscience implies the ability to choose from any set of events, which in turn (if there were such a creator) would mean that the events that end up happening are exactly what that creator wanted. So an omnimax creator punishing sins would essentially be punishing us for doing what he knew we would do, and decided to create the world such that we would do.
If your conception of god is different, then please feel free to disregard this argument, it has no bearing on your beliefs because you don't accept the premises that lead to a contradiction. Just don't expect me to play whack-a-mole with all possible ideas of god, I'll be here all year trying to prove a negative and we'll both go away unsatisfied with the result. I could attack things that seem fundamental to any possible idea of god, and show them to be in deep logical contradiction, but even then, you could believe that god can contain logical contradictions without problem, because he's just that wonderful.
The real problem underlying all the creator-related beliefs and other religious ideas is in the point I started this post with - we may not have evidence to prove that god doesn't exist, but that doesn't make it sensible to believe that he does. Everything else we observe in the world happens without any sign of divine intervention and can be explained by natural means, and we have no particular reason to suspect divine intervention in the origins of the universe, so inserting god into the theory makes no sense, even in the absence of further evidence.
As it happens, I'm fairly sure the further evidence is a little better than you think when it comes to deducing what the past was like, but the deductions do break down as you approach the very beginning because the physics of the situation would be unlike anything we have the data to describe, and philosophically speaking it's entirely possible that "before the universe" is about as sensible a notion as "north of the north pole".
So you're right - we don't know, maybe we can't know, maybe there's nothing to know. But we can do better than taking a guess and inserting supernatural silliness where it has no reason to be. (At the very least we can stop at not knowing without inventing a fiction, or maybe we can eventually gather the evidence required to settle the question).
or think courtroom justice: you were caught breaking a law, God is the judge... who is your advocate? If you accept Jesus as your advocate, he stands before the judge and says "he's guilty, but I volunteer to pay the penalty in his stead." The judge then metes out justice, but Jesus stands in your place, taking the punishment of death, while you remain free
This is scapegoating, not justice. If a human judge allowed the punishment of an innocent "in the stead" of a guilty party, we would not call him fair, just or wise. But your cosmic super-judge (who by any logic should be held to higher standards of ethical practice) can do exactly that?
The underlying message here is that your god is unable to forgive even the slightest transgression, has to demand mortal punishment, and yet isn't too picky about who exactly gets punished. Thinking a little further, surely an omniscient/potent creator knows exactly the consequences of his creation, and could hypothetically create a slightly different world, where the way things work out means that people sinned a little less. Then he wouldn't need to punish so much.
I want to lay this out in logical steps, to be sure I'm understood...
1. An omnipotent creator can create any one of the infinity of possible worlds.
2. In each possible creation, people would freely choose different actions (some moral, some immoral) over the course of time.
3. As there are infinitely many possibilities, every possible set of events and actions occurs in (at least) one possible world.
4. An omniscient creator knows exactly what choices will be made in each possible creation.
5. Following from 2 and 3, there is a possible world where everyone freely makes a good moral choice on each occasion.
6. Following from 4, an omniscient creator knows this hypothetical world exists, and (following from 1.) can create exactly that world - one where everyone would, of their own free will, act perfectly morally.
7. People do not act perfectly morally, of their own free will or otherwise.
Therefore 8. Our world was either not created by an omnipotent/scient creator, or possibly was created by such a being who does not want us to act morally.
Leibniz followed essentially this logic, and concluded that we must be in the best of all possible worlds (i.e. 3 is false, not all possibilities are actually possible, but we are in the best one that is possible). I see the same reasoning and take it as a reason to not believe in god. To relate it all back to the topic of cosmic justice, it either implies that there is no grand judge at the end of it all, or if there is... is it really fair to demand that we "get saved", when it was known to the judge in advance what our actions would be, and he selected those actions out of the myriad other possibilities?
Please don't take it as a slight against yourself, but as beliefs go that's a particularly unpleasant one. I'm sort of hoping that "According to the Christian beliefs I was taught growing up" implies that you've since changed what you believe, but I don't want to assume that.
From a pragmatic point of view, I suppose teaching that it's impossible to get yourself into heaven via your own good works, and only possible through believing what the church is teaching, is a good way to encourage strong belief. Not exactly a good way to encourage good behaviour though, when the 11th-hour repentance option is open.
I really doubt that could even come close to being the longest sentence ever posted on Slashdot, although it might possibly be the longest sentence put together without including any punctuation or obvious structure - the trick really to building an excessively, almost absurdly, long sentence is to first ensure that it contains plenty of subclauses to pad out the length, adding extra detail without becoming complete sentences in their own right, which allows you to keep adding words without bringing the sentence to an end, followed by the addition of plenty of un-necessary, redundant and absolutely preposterously worthless adjectives and further extra description, and then the final stage is to replace natural sentence breaks with connective words, commas and semi-colons to paper over the gaps between what would otherwise be separate sentences and keep the run-on flowing so that the sentence can just keep on growing and growing without any real limit or inhibition to further growth, save for the limiting factor of the author's patience with the endeavour.
I don't know how all the lefts/rights translate, what with how here in Britain we drive on the opposite side of the road (and accordingly have the driver's seat on the opposite side of the car) but the norm here is to have the indicators on the left, wipers on the right. I assumed the rationale was that the right hand would do most of the steering, left hand was for changing gear and indicating - the things that require you take a hand off the wheel. Wipers, used less often, can go the other side.
My car is reversed from the norm; indicators on the right, wipers on the left. Took a while to get used to, but now that I am used to it I'm just as messed up by a normal car as anyone else is by mine.
Taking a guess at which stick you meant was "the one on the left", I'd say my layout is a complete mirror of yours - driver on the opposite side, sticks reversed too, whereas a normal car here is more a translation than a reflection; sticks the same way around, but on the other side of the car. So the minor feat of flipping the indicators up/down with an outstretched finger while steering and changing gear at the same time would be possible in both of our cars, but not a normal British one.
So wait... this all means you mainly use your left hand to steer? Damn... that would mess with me. I seem to have developed right-handedness for steering, I guess because it's the stronger hand and gets used for steering all of the time (unlike my left which spends some time changing gear, some time just holding the wheel as a counterweight to my right) My left hand is only really good for holding the wheel steady, not steering like a competent driver.
I have spent far too much time thinking about this...
Pause frames in a simple list... is there nowhere those damnable pause frames won't go?
How exactly do 25 years pass without anyone noticing that a law, that's supposed to be official and in force, hasn't actually been enacted?
It's beyond a joke... although I'm sure there will be plenty of jokes.
I think I remember hearing one possibility - that there could be a gene that increases the carrier's attraction to males. Not sure whether this was rumoured, theorised, demonstrated or proven (or any level of credibility in between) but such a gene could be an adaptive trait that would be selected for in females, that then also sometimes gets passed to a male child.
Would be vaguely similar to how the gene responsible for sickle cell anaemia isn't selected against - it's advantageous enough to those with a single copy of the gene to be a net benefit, despite the problems caused by having a second copy. An "attraction to males" gene could be naturally selected for in females enough to counterbalance the evolutionary disadvantage in homosexual males.
I'd find it hard to sympathise with the casino too, but you're still taking money away from someone without it being legal to do so. This would cause a small measure of harm to the owners of said casino; whether that harm is ethically tolerable or not is another question
In that case, you didn't steal their recipe; you copied it. If you had actually stolen the recipe (taken it away from them such that they no longer had it) then you'd be doing them very clear harm. As is, you made a copy of the recipe... which may well still be illegal under laws governing trade secrets or something similar, but isn't stealing.
Huh... suddenly I feel like I'm in the comments of a story about copyright infringement (another example of "illegal but not stealing").
Thinking back though, this is a case where the type of "theft" being discussed isn't really theft - theft of data can be damaging to a company without the original being removed. I suppose the key is that data theft isn't really stealing, even if it is illegal (it'd be covered by some other law). My comment about there being no victimless thefts didn't really take that into account; I was just thinking of actual theft involving real property.
Name a scenario where absolutely no-one is hurt by stealing. The meaning of the word implies that you've illegally taken something from someone else. They are now deprived of whatever it is that you took.
There might be cases where the damage is limited, or the benefit to others outweighs the damage (the classic "steal bread to feed your starving family" type of thing) but the word theft almost inherently contains the implication of ham to someone else or their interests.
Maybe I'm mistaken, and there can be a truly victimless theft, but I'm struggling to think of how that could come about.
I think you meant to say "Furthermore, neither the word "they're" nor any of its homophones appear in your summary."
Zing!
I know there was one sandbox game (I don't remember which, it wasn't mine) where dropping from a great height with just the character killed you with falling damage, but dropping from a great height in a vehicle killed you by exploding the vehicle.
There was also a golf cart that, by virtue of being electric had the "explode on hard collision" thing turned off - it would have looked silly having a golf cart's electric motor catch fire and explode when you roughed the thing up too much.
The upshot of these two things was that you could climb to the top of the game's highest skyscraper, use a cheat to spawn a golf cart, then drop all the way back down to pavement level (in the golf cart) and climb out without a scratch on you.
I always forget how common automatics are in the US. Here in the UK they're the exception; the overwhelming majority of cars are manual transmission. I don't know how the statistics on road accidents compare between sides of the Atlantic, but it could make for an interesting read.
There would be other confounding factors though - being a smaller country means generally less travel on motorways, more travel through towns... plus you'll be hard pressed to find grid layouts in many cities here; it's all about roundabouts on this side of the Atlantic, which must make driving a somewhat different experience. Different cars too - smaller engines, smaller generally. I suspect our licensing may also be stricter; I know the pass rate is lower, and that we typically spend more time learning.
So yeah... there's quite a lot there to pick apart if you just wanted to compare manuals to automatics.