Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
(ripped off from http://www.the-funneled-web.com/hawking.htm)
Oops - only after I posted, did I realize that a critical link was missing. The reason that the main post is interesting / scary is that the same experiments have been done including the IL-4 gene into human smallpox as well as mousepox. IL-4 enhanced smallpox has roughly the same lethal effect on humans as the mousepox does on mice in this experiment, and let me stress again, there is no vaccine for this genetically engineered virus.
Actually, this has been around for some time. The original Austrailian Jackson-Ramshaw IL-4 mousepox experiment was conducted in 2000, and published in the Journal of Virology in February 2001.
For a more comprehensive discusson of the IL-4 inclusion, and of the threat of Smallpox in general, The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston (the same guy who wrote The Hot Zone, and, yeah - gimme my Amazon $.50...) talks about the history of smallpox, it's spread and eventual U.N. "eradication" (essentially trusting governments like North Korea, Libya and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to voluntarily destroy their stocks - and explicitly trusting the Former Soviet Union Bioreperat and United States CDC to keep the Djin in the bottle) and the effect of adding the mouse gene. Essentially, it renders all of our existing smallpox vacines - themselves based on a 200 year old recipe - impotent.
"A vaccine resistant smallpox would be everyone's worst nightmare come true," Preston writes about midway through the work. "We could be left trying to fight a genetically engineered virus with a vaccine that had been invented in 1796."
According to merryprankster, "the research has drawn some condemnation as being dangerous and unnecessary" - actually, in September of 2000, objections were raised to publication of the Jackson-Ramshaw IL-4 mousepox experiment at all on the grounds that it is a blueprint for the biological equivalent of a nuclear bomb--a recipe for a possibly vaccine-proof engineered smallpox.
Not that I agree with you about the U.S. State Department, but would Amnesty International be any better? And trust me, the people in "the infamous camp X-ray" aren't there for violating copyrights.
Don't kid yourself that not being able to listen to your Backstreet Boys CD on your Windows box is the same. Of all the places to have to remind you, there aremanyalternatives.
Perfect Tommy: Emilio Lizardo. Wasn't he on TV once? Buckaroo Banzai: You're thinking of Mr. Wizard. Reno: Emilio Lizardo is a top scientist, dumbkopf. Perfect Tommy: So was Mr. Wizard.
From Woodstock drive on Route 212 east towards Saugerties.
At the intersection of Route 212 and Glasco Turnpike you will see an OPUS 40 sign. Turn RIGHT onto Glasco Turnpike.
Go 2.1 miles to the fork in the road. Turn LEFT onto Highwoods Road.
Go 0.1 mile. Turn LEFT onto Fite Road.
Go 0.2 miles to the entrance of OPUS 40.
So, it's about 5 miles away. (Hey, it's your joke.)
Seriously, though, how can you compare the composer of "The wind doth taste of bitter sweet/ Of jasper wine and sugar/ I bet it's blown through others' feet/ Like those of...Casper Weinberger." with a bird whose best quote is "'''''''''''"''"?
Don't you want people to be able to read that "No Tespassing" sign on your barbed wire fence.
And I'll take my point about spending on state-sponsored education as given.;^)
But seriously, folks, aren't there limits to what you want from the state? (Western and Northern Europeans need not respond here. Enjoy your "cradle to grave" welfare societies.*) Sure, pave the roads, and keep the bloodthirsty Canadians at bay; but, given the current state of the world economy, are you sure that you don't want to generate your own "barter notes your trade for food"? I usually use a Mastercard, anyway.
There are some things that I want a State to do: anything involving physical force (police, military), I'd be uncomfortable with in private hands (except for my own private army... bwah Ha ha!). But banks, stamps, mail, building hyperintelligent bending robots, going to the moon - why couldn't those be reasonably held outside of the public sector?
P.J. O'Rourke says it best in his article, "Would you kill your mother to pave I-95?", "The other secret to balancing the budget is to remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus, I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?""
Would you kill your mother for "mail... barter notes... people to be able to read... stamps to get money to pay for your tv set?" Would you?
* (okay, that was blatant flamebait, but please tell me if I'm wrong...)
"Paying back our debt" really means taking money from taxpayers and transfering it to the holders of government IOU's, called Treasury notes.
Yes, thus in effect "paying back" the holders of those notes, the nice people who loaned us money in exchange for those IOUs.
It goes deeper than that though, we also have to refrain from borrowing that same money back again (a problem that I blush to admit that I have with Citibank/VISA nearly every month) - which in turn means either fiscal responsibility ("Stop spending more than you take in.") or monetary insanity ("Hey, is that a printing press in the corner?").
Three seperate posts, saying in effect, "Who cares what we spend the money on, as long as the government spends, spends, SPENDS!"
I, personally, agree with the spirit of the first poster who reccomends that we "worry about the robots after we figure out how to pay back our debt." (Although, it does look like Krisp wants to spend money on state-sponsored "education" - you have to have gone through a US public school to appreciate the irony in that.) And that's currently modded funny?
...reality and math says that the Chinese will be better at it simply because they have more people and their people are willing to work for alot less money.
Because when you get right down to it, designing software is really no different from digging a hole.
Just like with the car industry, and all the other industries.
IMHO, the real reason behind this has nothing to do with anything as piddly as market share, etc. I think that the real rationale is to build a software "Great Wall" such that in the likely event of info-conflict, their systems wouldn't be vulnerable to son-of-msblaster, ilovemao, etc...
I think that you must be thinking of Quantum Gate: The Saga Begins... by HyperBole Studios. Essentially it boils down to Stargate SG-1 gone really bad. You go through this "quantum gate" to gather a mineral required to rescusitate Earth's ecology after... blah, blah... hostile aliens... blah, blah... we turn out to be the bad guys. If you're really interested in the story, there's actually a novelization available.
The "sequel that never happened" happened around 1995 and was called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II, it continued your adventures on the other side of the quantum gate. They actually released a soundtrack to this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Roger Ebert writes in his review of Love Actually this week:
"I once had ballpoints printed up with the message, No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough."
Hoooorrrraaaayyyy!
The RIAA is saved!
I hate you for making me say this:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight
(Gimme my Amazon 50 cents!)
Although, in pennance, I'd like to reccomend Flight Gear (and it's free!); also, Leo's Flight Sim works on the Pocket PC, and is also free.
maybe it sucked BECAUSE of the presence of wynona
No, no... she really stole the show!
No, really, she did!
Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a
public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
(ripped off from http://www.the-funneled-web.com/hawking.htm)
Oops - only after I posted, did I realize that a critical link was missing. The reason that the main post is interesting / scary is that the same experiments have been done including the IL-4 gene into human smallpox as well as mousepox. IL-4 enhanced smallpox has roughly the same lethal effect on humans as the mousepox does on mice in this experiment, and let me stress again, there is no vaccine for this genetically engineered virus.
Now, don't panic
Actually, this has been around for some time. The original Austrailian Jackson-Ramshaw IL-4 mousepox experiment was conducted in 2000, and published in the Journal of Virology in February 2001.
For a more comprehensive discusson of the IL-4 inclusion, and of the threat of Smallpox in general, The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston (the same guy who wrote The Hot Zone, and, yeah - gimme my Amazon $.50...) talks about the history of smallpox, it's spread and eventual U.N. "eradication" (essentially trusting governments like North Korea, Libya and Saddam Hussein's Iraq to voluntarily destroy their stocks - and explicitly trusting the Former Soviet Union Bioreperat and United States CDC to keep the Djin in the bottle) and the effect of adding the mouse gene. Essentially, it renders all of our existing smallpox vacines - themselves based on a 200 year old recipe - impotent.
"A vaccine resistant smallpox would be everyone's worst nightmare come true," Preston writes about midway through the work. "We could be left trying to fight a genetically engineered virus with a vaccine that had been invented in 1796."
According to merryprankster, "the research has drawn some condemnation as being dangerous and unnecessary" - actually, in September of 2000, objections were raised to publication of the Jackson-Ramshaw IL-4 mousepox experiment at all on the grounds that it is a blueprint for the biological equivalent of a nuclear bomb--a recipe for a possibly vaccine-proof engineered smallpox.
But don't panic.
Oops. I guess that if I'm going to be a complete perv, I'd better do it right.
Of course, I wonder what the U.N. has to say about Real Sheep, too.
Does a RealDoll count as a domesitc robot, then?
Not that I agree with you about the U.S. State Department, but would Amnesty International be any better? And trust me, the people in "the infamous camp X-ray" aren't there for violating copyrights.
Y'know, International Talk Like A Pirate Day was yesterday. (Well, last Friday...)
But, I admire your spirit. Parley!
Who do it with actual prisons.
Don't kid yourself that not being able to listen to your Backstreet Boys CD on your Windows box is the same. Of all the places to have to remind you, there are many alternatives.
(For now.)
The best part is that if you were a Slashdot subscriber, you could've seen this story early!
Seriously, though, how can you compare the composer of "The wind doth taste of bitter sweet/ Of jasper wine and sugar/ I bet it's blown through others' feet/ Like those of...Casper Weinberger." with a bird whose best quote is "'''''''''''"''"?
Also, Woodstock could fly, where Opus only "Wish[ed] for Wings That Work".
"The wind doth taste of bitter sweet
Like jasper wine and sugar
I bet it's blown through others' feet
Like those of...Casper Weinberger."
What rhymes with Rumsfield?
Windows and Linux users should click with button-1.
Now, I'm assuming that the buttons are labeled left-to-right... button zero, ah! Button one!
Wait. All I'm getting is context-sensitive help. Either you're counting from right-to-left, or...
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
And I'll take my point about spending on state-sponsored education as given.
But seriously, folks, aren't there limits to what you want from the state? (Western and Northern Europeans need not respond here. Enjoy your "cradle to grave" welfare societies.*) Sure, pave the roads, and keep the bloodthirsty Canadians at bay; but, given the current state of the world economy, are you sure that you don't want to generate your own "barter notes your trade for food"? I usually use a Mastercard, anyway.
There are some things that I want a State to do: anything involving physical force (police, military), I'd be uncomfortable with in private hands (except for my own private army... bwah Ha ha!). But banks, stamps, mail, building hyperintelligent bending robots, going to the moon - why couldn't those be reasonably held outside of the public sector?
P.J. O'Rourke says it best in his article, "Would you kill your mother to pave I-95?", "The other secret to balancing the budget is to remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes, you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus, I -- in my role as citizen and voter -- am going to shoot you -- in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck -- if you don't pay your share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?""
Would you kill your mother for "mail... barter notes
* (okay, that was blatant flamebait, but please tell me if I'm wrong...)
Yes, thus in effect "paying back" the holders of those notes, the nice people who loaned us money in exchange for those IOUs.
It goes deeper than that though, we also have to refrain from borrowing that same money back again (a problem that I blush to admit that I have with Citibank/VISA nearly every month) - which in turn means either fiscal responsibility ("Stop spending more than you take in.") or monetary insanity ("Hey, is that a printing press in the corner?").
Yes, then forget about the robots and colonize the moon or Mars.
Though lets start with a REAL space station first.
Actually, lets start with a more dependable heavy payload launch vehicle.
Three seperate posts, saying in effect, "Who cares what we spend the money on, as long as the government spends, spends, SPENDS!"
I, personally, agree with the spirit of the first poster who reccomends that we "worry about the robots after we figure out how to pay back our debt." (Although, it does look like Krisp wants to spend money on state-sponsored "education" - you have to have gone through a US public school to appreciate the irony in that.) And that's currently modded funny?
It's my money. Is it so wrong to let me keep it?
Riiiight. So, now my software, like my machinery and equipment, textiles and clothing, footwear, toys and sporting goods can be "Made in China (by political prisoners) " Because, of course, the PRC is all about "free as in freedom" software, and choice in every aspect of daily life.
IMHO, the real reason behind this has nothing to do with anything as piddly as market share, etc. I think that the real rationale is to build a software "Great Wall" such that in the likely event of info-conflict, their systems wouldn't be vulnerable to son-of-msblaster, ilovemao, etc...
No, but they are going after "Santa".
I think that you must be thinking of Quantum Gate: The Saga Begins... by HyperBole Studios. Essentially it boils down to Stargate SG-1 gone really bad. You go through this "quantum gate" to gather a mineral required to rescusitate Earth's ecology after... blah, blah... hostile aliens... blah, blah... we turn out to be the bad guys. If you're really interested in the story, there's actually a novelization available.
The "sequel that never happened" happened around 1995 and was called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II, it continued your adventures on the other side of the quantum gate. They actually released a soundtrack to this one.
I pity the fool who fails to properly guard his balls.
"lettre" is now a reserved copyright of DidNotUseThePreviewButton, Inc.