Ordinary is the basics - food, shelter, whatever you'd do for a newborn or such. Extraordinary means is anything beyond that - artificial respiration, experimental treatments, etc.
So, is the placenta "ordinary", or is it "extraordinary"?
The human placenta has a much greater capability than artificial respiration or any sort of experimental treatment. Why should they consent in disconnecting a fully grown human being from a machine but not allow a single cell to be disconnected from its life support system?
Because despite it being slower, having longer queues, only being open at specific times and any money raised from that booth goes to "the man" - it's the legal route
Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?
After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.
All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.
I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?
Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.
The long tail doesn't threaten those at the top any more than it isolates those at the bottom. It only describes the shape of the market
But the shape of the market is exactly the point. In a competitive market profit margins are very thin and a relatively small difference may mean life or death to a company. In the entertainment industry we often see an effect where the biggest productions often seem to struggle to break even, while relatively small investments may bring huge profits.
Defining a "hit" as one of the top ten or top 1000 or any absolute number is stupid. It reminds me of a political joke in the Soviet Union, where the result of a race between two athletes, a Russian and an American, was reported in the press as "the Russian came in second while the American was next to the last". In electrical and electronics engineering threshold values are often defined as the point where the power is one half of the maximum, the so-called "-3 dB" points.
There are literal translations of the words yen, dollar, renminbi, ringgit, peso, and several other currencies, but you don't translate those, do you?
I don't know about yen, renmimbi, or ringgit, but which is the literal translation for "dollar"? AFAIK, the word comes from "joachinsthaler".
Besides, it's not uncommon to translate currency names. The pound for instance, is only called that in English, a Spanish speaking person will call it a "libra", a French calls it a "livre", etc.
I have never used P2P software for anything but downloading music or movies - and in spite of all it's other uses, don't know one person who uses any of them for much else
Many years ago my mom had a Renault Dauphine, a car with a 850cm3 engine and 23HP. That car could go up to more or less what's the legal speed limit on the highway, but no more than that.
Any car with a bigger engine should be banned, because I know of no one who has a more powerful car who hasn't used that power to break the legal speed limit.
If enough microwave radiation from the Sun got to the Earth to be comparable to a cell phone tower, you couldn't actually use a cell phone. Because the white noise from the sun would not only give the tower a crap signal-to-noise ratio, but would be hundreds of decibels stronger than the milliwatts emitted by the phone itself or received by it in some places.
Satellite microwave communications is subject to sun interference. Communications through a satellite are impossible when the sun, satellite, and earth station are in a straight line.
Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes?
It is unlikely that life began in those conditions. Life began in the most benign habitat that existed on Earth at the time and extremophiles evolved gradually to life in their current niches.
With Google The Evil (tm), you have no guarantee that they haven't stashed a "backup" somewhere in their dark recesses. You don't really take your stuff, you just make a copy.
No, you take out your stuff, they may keep a copy.
The leased apartment is a perfect analogy in this respect. No one can be sure that the landlord didn't use his master key when you were away and took pictures of all your stuff. Maybe he has his own apartment decorated exactly like yours.
But why should he? Unless you are a world-famous interior decorator, what reason would anyone have to copy your layout? Likewise, what incentive does Google have to keep copies of your data? They may keep information about you, for statistics, just like a marketing researcher may look into your trash can to see what products you buy, but that's not such a big deal.
I think people are too nervous about the assumed value of their on-line data. Think of how much data about you was public long before home computers existed. Your phone number and address are written in a book that's given for free to everyone who has a telephone. You carry a plate with a unique id code on the outside of your car. Every cheque you use to pay something has your signature and bank account number. All these items can and *have* been used by fraudsters in the past. Why should we get more nervous just because the data is in a digital format?
He didn't, to the contrary, patent them, prohibit replanting seeds in subsequent years, and so on.
True, but that was possible only because his work was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Ironically, the biggest "robber baron" the world ever saw started a philantropic foundation that made possible the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug.
...overpopulation. The Earth had certain checks and balances to keep us in line for a reason.
There are more human ways to control overpopulation. Limited food supplies is the way it works in nature, but we humans should use our intelligence.
Dr. Borlaug himself was aware of the overpopulation problem, but that's something for politicians and religious leaders to solve, a scientist should do his best to alleviate human suffering, even if it should create other problems.
Stock markets usually drop during the month of October. People in Europe and the US get back from their summer vacations and have to sell some stock in order to get their bank accounts in the black. This causes stock prices to fall in September, then people get worried and the general gloom of approaching winter does the rest during October.
1. once an effective way to control time travel is discovered, said method will be able to exist at all times.
Not in all the parallel universes. If you travel back in time and change one fact in the past, you'll create another universe where that event actually happened.
Perhaps one should use a ';' to end strings instead.
Seriously, I would say the problem is not C strings, but the CA *not* using C strings instead. If they properly recognized the null character as a string terminator, they wouldn't issue a certificate for paypal.com to badguy.com.
Armed with "old materials", forgers only have to focus on getting the technique, etc. right since there is no means to catch them technologically; for example, carbon dating and similar techniques will give the "right" results
Carbon dating any plastic material would probably result in a very old age. Carbon-14 is produced by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Any material that's produced from petroleum, such as plastics and solvents, is depleted of carbon-14, because it comes from oil that was buried for millions of years.
The same is true for coal. Mix rock coal in a black pigment that's normally made with charcoal and it will appear to be much older.
every locale has magic electricity faeries just waiting to produce low-carbon-footprint electricity
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
The problem with the large power grid is that power is generateed at a 60 Hz frequency. This corresponds to a 5000 km wavelength. A quarter wave line has a length of 1250 km (about 780 miles for the unit-challenged).
A quarter wavelength line has the property that a short circuit at one end appears as an open circuit at the other end and an open circuit appears at a short. This makes it very difficult to transmit 60 Hz power over a line of approximately that length, the line must be "impedance matched", by putting capacitors and/or inductors at several points along the line. Worse still, the line impedance varies with load, because when a higher current runs through the wires they heat up and, by dilation, lengthen and rest at a lower position, thereby increasing the capacitance to ground, which means those capacitors and inductors must be variable.
One solution is to use direct current, but that's as expensive or more than matching the impedance, although the grid becomes easier to stabilize when direct current is used.
All in all, any solution for making more electricity available is expensive. Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
Here were my answers: butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly, butterfly. Based on my answers, my analyst, Dr. Lector, said I was a tedious but promising candidate to be a murderous sociopath
I saw sexual organs, both male and female, in each card. They offered me a job in the clinic.
The test is, and always has been, pop-psychology nonsense
Well, that depends on what you call a "Rorschach test". Showing someone a bunch of inkspots and asking what they mean seems pretty much like "pop-psychology" to me. But that doesn't mean *anY* Rorschach test is bullshit.
For instance, ask someone: "How do you spell 'Rorschach'?"
If they do it correctly, you can say, with a high degree of confidence, that he or she has an excellent memory.
This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated.
The Python team should follow this philosophy, what I have seen of Python 3 fill me with WTF.
Get rid of the string formatting standard that everyone uses? WTF? What good is that, it only makes it harder to migrate from C. Get rid of functions like system and popen, replaced by a Popen function which needs six or seven arguments? Get rid of tuple arguments in functions? Get rid of functions that return lists? WTF? Where has the simplicity and ease of use gone?
I wish Guido van Rossum took a hint from Donald Ervin Knuth (a guy whose name is an anagram for "hunt, drink, and love" cannot be all bad...) and TeX and would create a traditional Python with all the excellent features the language had until version 2.5. My suggestion: call it version 2.718281828459045...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I suppose "the Fiat revolves around" means that a Fiat can run circles around a Nissan
So, is the placenta "ordinary", or is it "extraordinary"?
The human placenta has a much greater capability than artificial respiration or any sort of experimental treatment. Why should they consent in disconnecting a fully grown human being from a machine but not allow a single cell to be disconnected from its life support system?
Do you think reading news that someone paid for and is willing to give away for free is illegal?
After all, it's not as if this were something new, newspapers have been distributed for free before the internet existed. Even today, I get far more newsletters in my snail mailbox than I want to. Ad-based revenue did exist before the digital age.
All the propaganda you read about the "pirates" is just greed trying to appeal to your honesty.
I never paid for content, I paid for the convenience and the format. I have always been able to read the headlines for free at the newsstand, why should I pay to read the headlines at the internet? I listened to music for free on the radio, I only bought records that had some particular appeal for me, or to give as gifts. Why should I pay for mp3 music? I watched films for free on the TV but paid movie tickets to see the big screen, then why should I pay for a scrappy 700MB DVD rip?
Getting stuff from the internet is not unethical. I'm not consuming anything, I'm not using other people's paper, or ink, or vinyl, or theater seat. If the content creators are too stupid to find a lucrative means of revenue, it's their problem, I'm not taking anything away from them.
But the shape of the market is exactly the point. In a competitive market profit margins are very thin and a relatively small difference may mean life or death to a company. In the entertainment industry we often see an effect where the biggest productions often seem to struggle to break even, while relatively small investments may bring huge profits.
Defining a "hit" as one of the top ten or top 1000 or any absolute number is stupid. It reminds me of a political joke in the Soviet Union, where the result of a race between two athletes, a Russian and an American, was reported in the press as "the Russian came in second while the American was next to the last". In electrical and electronics engineering threshold values are often defined as the point where the power is one half of the maximum, the so-called "-3 dB" points.
I don't know about yen, renmimbi, or ringgit, but which is the literal translation for "dollar"? AFAIK, the word comes from "joachinsthaler".
Besides, it's not uncommon to translate currency names. The pound for instance, is only called that in English, a Spanish speaking person will call it a "libra", a French calls it a "livre", etc.
Nope. If you ban the stuff, all they need to do is to come up with something different that's not banned (yet).
If you don't ban the stuff the competition needs to come up with something *better*.
Many years ago my mom had a Renault Dauphine, a car with a 850cm3 engine and 23HP. That car could go up to more or less what's the legal speed limit on the highway, but no more than that.
Any car with a bigger engine should be banned, because I know of no one who has a more powerful car who hasn't used that power to break the legal speed limit.
Satellite microwave communications is subject to sun interference. Communications through a satellite are impossible when the sun, satellite, and earth station are in a straight line.
It is unlikely that life began in those conditions. Life began in the most benign habitat that existed on Earth at the time and extremophiles evolved gradually to life in their current niches.
No, you take out your stuff, they may keep a copy.
The leased apartment is a perfect analogy in this respect. No one can be sure that the landlord didn't use his master key when you were away and took pictures of all your stuff. Maybe he has his own apartment decorated exactly like yours.
But why should he? Unless you are a world-famous interior decorator, what reason would anyone have to copy your layout? Likewise, what incentive does Google have to keep copies of your data? They may keep information about you, for statistics, just like a marketing researcher may look into your trash can to see what products you buy, but that's not such a big deal.
I think people are too nervous about the assumed value of their on-line data. Think of how much data about you was public long before home computers existed. Your phone number and address are written in a book that's given for free to everyone who has a telephone. You carry a plate with a unique id code on the outside of your car. Every cheque you use to pay something has your signature and bank account number. All these items can and *have* been used by fraudsters in the past. Why should we get more nervous just because the data is in a digital format?
True, but that was possible only because his work was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Ironically, the biggest "robber baron" the world ever saw started a philantropic foundation that made possible the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug.
There are more human ways to control overpopulation. Limited food supplies is the way it works in nature, but we humans should use our intelligence.
Dr. Borlaug himself was aware of the overpopulation problem, but that's something for politicians and religious leaders to solve, a scientist should do his best to alleviate human suffering, even if it should create other problems.
Stock markets usually drop during the month of October. People in Europe and the US get back from their summer vacations and have to sell some stock in order to get their bank accounts in the black. This causes stock prices to fall in September, then people get worried and the general gloom of approaching winter does the rest during October.
You know, for some kind of consumers buzzwords help in sales.
In my experience, the fastest browser is the one that's running AdBlock, with flash, java, and javascript disabled.
Pics, or it didn't happen
Look at this
Wow, does this mean ASCII art too? Then I must admit I'm a sex offender! I have sometimes used the expression if (C==8) in my programs...
Not in all the parallel universes. If you travel back in time and change one fact in the past, you'll create another universe where that event actually happened.
Perhaps one should use a ';' to end strings instead.
Seriously, I would say the problem is not C strings, but the CA *not* using C strings instead. If they properly recognized the null character as a string terminator, they wouldn't issue a certificate for paypal.com to badguy.com.
Carbon dating any plastic material would probably result in a very old age. Carbon-14 is produced by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Any material that's produced from petroleum, such as plastics and solvents, is depleted of carbon-14, because it comes from oil that was buried for millions of years.
The same is true for coal. Mix rock coal in a black pigment that's normally made with charcoal and it will appear to be much older.
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
The problem with the large power grid is that power is generateed at a 60 Hz frequency. This corresponds to a 5000 km wavelength. A quarter wave line has a length of 1250 km (about 780 miles for the unit-challenged).
A quarter wavelength line has the property that a short circuit at one end appears as an open circuit at the other end and an open circuit appears at a short. This makes it very difficult to transmit 60 Hz power over a line of approximately that length, the line must be "impedance matched", by putting capacitors and/or inductors at several points along the line. Worse still, the line impedance varies with load, because when a higher current runs through the wires they heat up and, by dilation, lengthen and rest at a lower position, thereby increasing the capacitance to ground, which means those capacitors and inductors must be variable.
One solution is to use direct current, but that's as expensive or more than matching the impedance, although the grid becomes easier to stabilize when direct current is used.
All in all, any solution for making more electricity available is expensive. Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
I saw sexual organs, both male and female, in each card. They offered me a job in the clinic.
Well, that depends on what you call a "Rorschach test". Showing someone a bunch of inkspots and asking what they mean seems pretty much like "pop-psychology" to me. But that doesn't mean *anY* Rorschach test is bullshit.
For instance, ask someone: "How do you spell 'Rorschach'?"
If they do it correctly, you can say, with a high degree of confidence, that he or she has an excellent memory.
The Python team should follow this philosophy, what I have seen of Python 3 fill me with WTF.
Get rid of the string formatting standard that everyone uses? WTF? What good is that, it only makes it harder to migrate from C. Get rid of functions like system and popen, replaced by a Popen function which needs six or seven arguments? Get rid of tuple arguments in functions? Get rid of functions that return lists? WTF? Where has the simplicity and ease of use gone?
Why get rid of so many useful features, just for the sake of some computer "scientists" who, very obviously, have never done any professional programming? "The net result of the 3.0 generalizations is that Python 3.0 runs the pystone benchmark around 10% slower than Python 2.5." .
I wish Guido van Rossum took a hint from Donald Ervin Knuth (a guy whose name is an anagram for "hunt, drink, and love" cannot be all bad...) and TeX and would create a traditional Python with all the excellent features the language had until version 2.5. My suggestion: call it version 2.718281828459045...