That'd actually be pretty cool. Crash your car and have to call the police, then phone up your Geiko representative to come down and check your car out to see if he'll total it. Then when the ambulance shows up they cart you off to the hospital where the car simulation turns into a medical simulation for 3 *real* weeks. When they discharge you it then turns into an insurance simulation where you have to fight with your insurance company to get your car fixed or written off. Then car buying simulation kicks into effect!
You forgot the part where you do something tedious for hours on end in order to get the money needed to buy what you want.
Oh wait, they have those games already. They are called MMORPGs. *ducks*
You can't live by axioms alone. Thou shalt not bear false witness, sayeth God. But would you then turn Anne Frank over to the authorities when the Gestapo comes knocking? Thou shalt keep the Sabbath. A hungry baby knows nothing of why you won't buy milk on Saturday.
Sartre gets to the heart of the axiom problem. There are simply too many variables to declare some certain action (a categorical imperative) to be the Right Thing. You eventually get to the point where you are now, confused about how to proceed.
It sounds like you are assuming that not turning over Anne Frank to the Gestapo is the Right Thing, even if it means breaking a religious commandment. It sounds like you are also assuming that feeding a hungry baby is the Right Thing, even if it assumes breaking another religious commandment.
Now, personally, I wouldn't turn people over to the Gestapo, and I'd feed a starving baby, but that's my personal philosophy. My morals are based on my experience and what world I want to live in. I don't want to be dragged out of my house by the secret police for who I am, therefore, in my personal philosophy, I consider ratting out your neighbors based on race to be a bad thing. But I'll admit that my philosophy can be considered extremely self-serving.
But perhaps you can live by simple, unbreakable commandments. And perhaps that is the Right Thing to do, and it leads to Goodness. I don't agree, but 'Right Thing' and 'Good' tend to be rather subjective when it comes to definitions.
PS: Who are you replying to? You mention God, but I see no parent poster mentioning God or religion...
Imagine when someone makes a virus/spyware/malware/whatever that runs as a process with the sole intent of appearing to be a bot to WoW. It most certainly would not be the first time someone did something for the sole purpose of being malicious and causing innocent web users/gamers harm.
There's a better motivation than harm for making a virus that spreads around a WoW bot -- money.
If there would be enough false positives to break WoW bot-detection program, someone who used the same bot to farm & make money would be less detectable.
So maybe I'm making a mistake with this, but I'm an Asian Languages and Literatures major. Korea, China, and Japan all use the same kanji. They call them different things, and they all have alternate written languages, but if you can read Chinese, you can read Japanese.
My understanding of it is that there is a common subset of symbols used in both Chinese and Japanese. There are also symbols in Japanese that are not in Chinese (kokuji), and symbols with different meaning in Japanese (kokkun). (I wouldn't be surprised if the reverse was true.) There are also some symbols that have changed slightly when they came from China to Japan -- for example, the glyph for 'bone' has changed slightly. And sometimes Japanese and Chinese use entirely different symbols -- 'one' is different between Chinese and Japanese. Unicode "solves" this by relying on the user to have the correct font to display the symbols they are used to.
In addition, there are 'kana' in Japanese, which could be considered the Japanese alphabet (I'm probably oversimplifying). These are decended from the Chinese symbols, but they are massively simplified. These aren't part of the Chinese language, and I suspect that someone who reads Chinese would be utterly puzzled when attempting to read Japanese kana. (Kana has two forms as well -- katakana and hiragana.)
But Korea doesn't use Hanja (Chinese characters) that much anymore. Korea (South Korea, that is) uses its own alphabet called Hangul.
*queue 'the more you know' music*
PS: Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an expert.
Sovreign Immunity
I laugh at your naivete
You can't sue the State unless they let you
I've sued a state university (successfully!) before.
It is possible. I didn't even have a lawyer.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In many respects I agree, Kyoto is NOT the answer. However, the answer will almost certainly cause a major change in our economy and definition of prosperity. The world cannot sustain 3 ton SUVs, Airbus jumbo jets, and lavish cruise ship vacations forever. We all want our children to live a better life than we do today, but in order for this to happen we need to redefine what 'better' means. If we continue to equate 'a better life' with 'having more stuff', then frankly the environment is doomed.
Bullshit.
Why can't the world sustain 3 ton SUVs, Airbus Jumbo jets, and lavish cruise ship vacations forever? (I'm defining forever as a few billion years, btw. After that, the sun goes kinda goofy, and there'll probably be a few problems with making jumbo jets fly and cruise ships cruise on what's left of earth.)
Transition the economy over to an electric energy base (with artificial fuels as an energy store) and create the electricity with nuclear power. To begin with, we'd use nuclear fission (and make a cavern under the American southwest radioactive for awhile). In the future, we can move the electricity production off planet, and beam the energy down.
As far as Japanese go, there are very usable technologies that allow to type in kanji. Using a standard latin keyboard. It works pretty well, and i'm not sure what other languages have such options available, but since most of Asia uses the same kanji system I'm pretty sure that at least Asia has viable typing options.
I must have missed where Japan conquered 51%+ of the area east of the Ural mountains.
AFAIK (and I'm not an expert), China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam used very similar writing system decended from Chinese Hanji characters. Vietnam and Korea (South Korea at least) later adopted other alphabets. So really, only China and Japan commonly use Hanji/Kanji, and even then, the CJK unification of hanji/hanja/kanji characters really annoyed a few purists when similar hanji/hanja/kanji were merged in unicode.
So, other than hanji/kanji, there is hangul (S. Korea), hana/kana (Japan -- yes, they have more than one writing system!), the Thai alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet (former USSR), the Arabic alphabet (Middle East), Hebrew (Israel), the Brahmic scripts (India) and the Georgian alphabet. (And this is just off the top of my head, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few more writing systems in use in Asia!).
And then, just to confuse the problem, there are the various forms of encoding. Admittedly, unicode would probably be one of the better methods, but there are a lot of pre-unicode encodings in common use.
When you expand the problem to be worldwide, there's also the Ethiopian and Greek alphabets that are used in their respective regions. There's also a ton of latin-based alphabets, which introduces many more characters than are currently used in the DNS system. (Including characters that look a lot like existing characters!)
And then you have the problem of alphabets used only by very small groups, such as Cherokee (Oh, I'm going to get flamed!). There are very few people who can write in Cherokee, but does that mean that the Cherokee language shouldn't be part of the DNS system?
So we have the global warming research crowd which lives and dies by the research grant, and we have the anti-global warming crowd which lives and dies by funding.
And there's the global warming mitigation crowd who wants to create fame or money solving the problem.
The ability to regenerate limbs is a great advantage. Why would birds and mammals have lost this ability via evolution?
In coding, each feature has a cost associated with it. Nothing is free. A feature will result in the combination of one or more of the following: more design/coding time, higher memory use, more CPU use, a higher chance of bugs, etc.
Evolution is the same.
For some creatures, the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages.
For other creatures, the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. For many creatures, perhaps regenerating the limb isn't that useful -- the biology of the animal might mean that the loss of a limb is general fatal due to blood loss or infection (assuming the animal survives the accident/attack, which may be unlikely).
In addition, just because a feature may be a net advantage for a creature doesn't mean that it will magically appear. Genetic mutation is a crapshoot. Regeneration might have been perfected after the split from the decendents of other animals. Or perhaps the common ancestor of (say) salamanders and mammals was capable of generation, but after the split happened, regeneration had too high of a cost for the line that lead to mammals, and the genetic code was lost or adapted for some feature that was more useful.
For all the engineers here: why would you want to build a cable tens of thousands of miles long out of currently UNAVAILABLE materials (unobtanium) to slowly ratchet up one payload at a time? It's a horrid idea, and it STILL takes just as much actual energy to put anything in orbit...just it does so pathetically slowly.
Who said there was going to be one payload at a time?
Imagine, if you will, a space elevator that is designed with two paths -- one for capsules going up, and one for capsules going down. That way, capsules can be queued, with one capsule being "launched" every X minutes or so.
As a bonus, the decending capsules will be liberating potential energy. Some designs call for the decending capsules to partially power the acending capsules.
People should have demanded Manhattan Project style investment into nuclear fusion after the last energy crisis. We'll have another chance soon.
Nuclear fusion also results in radioactive waste.
Sure, often the products of nuclear fusion aren't radioactive (for the most part), but there structure tends to get a good dose of radioactivity.
The true solution would be a population that is educated about nuclear power, radiation and risk.
Maybe people will wise up if energy prices start to rise. There are seeds of change planted -- part of the environmentalist movement is pro-nuclear, for example, for obvious reasons.
Your taxes are not lower. The Bush administration has failed to cut spending to pay their tax cuts and in fact has dramatically increased spending. Thus the present value of taxes you will pay over your lifetime has risen under the Bush administration since the 100s of billions of dollars of debt the Bush administration has run up will have to be paid from future taxes. You are not paying these taxes this year but you will have to pay them in the future. Ask any economist and they will tell that lowering taxes without cutting spending is an increase and not a reduction in your lifetime tax payments.
Bush has essentially given you a loan which will have to be paid back (with interest) by higher taxes in the future.
You are making several assumptions:
Overall taxable income remains constant, and the percentage of taxable income remains constant.
Current spending will not result in savings in the future.
While I'm not a fan of Bush, I'm also not a fan of simplistic views of the federal budget.
Federal spending can be good for the population or bad for the population. Perhaps the US shouldn't have been so obsessed about a balanced budget in the 90s -- a little bit more spent on capturing a certain dingbat in the 90s could have saved us the cost of an expensive war today!
Strike 1. You don't understand how the refereed astronomical journals work. I pay THEM $110 per page so that they will publish my paper; they do not pay me.
I'll publish your paper for $109. You'll even save $1.;)
Commercially, the greater susceptability to disease doesn't seem to be a show stopper when it comes to horticulture. It has additional problems, but it also has some very good benefits.
For slashdotter's information, the different varieties of potatoes, bananas and grapes often are genetic clones.
As for infectability, if you want to point fingers, point one at modern factory farming. The conditions the animals are kept in encourage the transmission of disease.
The first generation or two of immigrants (legal and illegal) tend to have a high birthrate. Then, after they've been corrupted by American culture, the birthrate falls drastically.
An NPG demographic analysis of age distribution, fertility, and mortality data shows that if there had been no immigration to the U.S. since 1990, the population in 2000 would have been 262 million - 19 million less than the 281 million counted. Thus, post-1990 immigrants and their children accounted for 61 percent of population growth during the last decade.
I've often wondered, given the massive amounts of research going into power distribution systems these days, why this energy can't be used in some way. Nuclear reactors, after all, work by heating water. If you could preheat the water using the recently-produced waste, you wouldn't need to drive the main reactor quite so high.
IIRC, there's a Chinese project to use the waste heat from the cooling ponds for heating and desalination.
In most industrialized countries and especially in the US, obesity is strongly correlated with low income. Since there is also a strong link between low income and low IQ scores, there may be no causal relationship at all between obesity and a lowered IQ.
I think that your explanation is likely the primary cause, but I do wonder if there could also be a direct link between obesity and low IQ.
The brain is another organ in the body, and it requires oxygen and nutrients. If the arteries are clogged and the lung capacity is lowered due to obesity and the health problems that result from it, wouldn't the brain also be effected?
IQ is unpopular because it is mostly in-born, inheritable, and unevenly distributed. There is a sort of unfairness that goes against Western ideals. The idea that anybody can pull themself up out of poverty, that every child has a chance to succeed intellectually, is threatened by this. Part of the reaction is to deny IQ, and part of the reaction is to de-emphasize scientific endeavors and thinking.
If IQ is mostly in-born and inheritable, how would you explain the Flynn effect of rising average IQ?
I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the really nasty waste tends to be really nasty for short periods of time -- years or decades. Radioactivity is energy, and materials that are highly radioactive are releasing a lot of energy at a rate it cannot sustain for a long period of time.
The low-level radiation tends to last for a lot longer, since it releases less energy.
A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
This is also why nuclear power plants have cooling pools for nuclear waste -- for the first few years, the waste produces enough heat (energy) and radioactivity to make moving and storing much more difficult.
*cues "the more you know" music*
Btw, many nuclear wastes tend to be heavy metals, and thus are prone to causing heavy metal poisoning. But this seems to be often (purposely?) overlooked, since opponents of nuclear power seem to focus on the much more "scary" radioactivy, and proponents don't want to mention more downsides of nuclear power.
And the fact that he had books on how law enforcement handles homicide investigations?
He had one book, according to the news story that I read.
Awhile back, there was a pair of books concerning the aftermath of a murder from a law enforcement/legal perspective (_How_To_Solve_A_Murder_ and _How_To_Try_A_Murder_) that ended up on my Barnes & Nobels bargain rack. I picked up the latter since it was only a few bucks.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only geek that did so.
To play devil's advocate some more, lets consider the blood splatters found in the house and car. Why both locations? It would be interesting to know where the blood was found and how much there was.
As for "hiding" the car, well, it was Hans. Perhaps he was pissed at the police for wasting their time when his wife was missing by investigating him. His refusal to help them could be interpretted as "hiding" the auto.
But I don't have a good explanation for the missing passenger seat. (Hey, I was playing devil's advocate, not acting as Hans's lawyer.) If the prosecution can show that the passenger seat went missing at about the time of Nina's disappearance, that's going to be pretty damaging to his case.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the part where you do something tedious for hours on end in order to get the money needed to buy what you want.
Oh wait, they have those games already. They are called MMORPGs. *ducks*
It sounds like you are assuming that not turning over Anne Frank to the Gestapo is the Right Thing, even if it means breaking a religious commandment. It sounds like you are also assuming that feeding a hungry baby is the Right Thing, even if it assumes breaking another religious commandment.
Now, personally, I wouldn't turn people over to the Gestapo, and I'd feed a starving baby, but that's my personal philosophy. My morals are based on my experience and what world I want to live in. I don't want to be dragged out of my house by the secret police for who I am, therefore, in my personal philosophy, I consider ratting out your neighbors based on race to be a bad thing. But I'll admit that my philosophy can be considered extremely self-serving.
But perhaps you can live by simple, unbreakable commandments. And perhaps that is the Right Thing to do, and it leads to Goodness. I don't agree, but 'Right Thing' and 'Good' tend to be rather subjective when it comes to definitions.
PS: Who are you replying to? You mention God, but I see no parent poster mentioning God or religion...
There's a better motivation than harm for making a virus that spreads around a WoW bot -- money.
If there would be enough false positives to break WoW bot-detection program, someone who used the same bot to farm & make money would be less detectable.
My understanding of it is that there is a common subset of symbols used in both Chinese and Japanese. There are also symbols in Japanese that are not in Chinese (kokuji), and symbols with different meaning in Japanese (kokkun). (I wouldn't be surprised if the reverse was true.) There are also some symbols that have changed slightly when they came from China to Japan -- for example, the glyph for 'bone' has changed slightly. And sometimes Japanese and Chinese use entirely different symbols -- 'one' is different between Chinese and Japanese. Unicode "solves" this by relying on the user to have the correct font to display the symbols they are used to.
In addition, there are 'kana' in Japanese, which could be considered the Japanese alphabet (I'm probably oversimplifying). These are decended from the Chinese symbols, but they are massively simplified. These aren't part of the Chinese language, and I suspect that someone who reads Chinese would be utterly puzzled when attempting to read Japanese kana. (Kana has two forms as well -- katakana and hiragana.)
But Korea doesn't use Hanja (Chinese characters) that much anymore. Korea (South Korea, that is) uses its own alphabet called Hangul.
*queue 'the more you know' music*
PS: Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an expert.
I've sued a state university (successfully!) before.
It is possible. I didn't even have a lawyer.
Bullshit.
Why can't the world sustain 3 ton SUVs, Airbus Jumbo jets, and lavish cruise ship vacations forever? (I'm defining forever as a few billion years, btw. After that, the sun goes kinda goofy, and there'll probably be a few problems with making jumbo jets fly and cruise ships cruise on what's left of earth.)
Transition the economy over to an electric energy base (with artificial fuels as an energy store) and create the electricity with nuclear power. To begin with, we'd use nuclear fission (and make a cavern under the American southwest radioactive for awhile). In the future, we can move the electricity production off planet, and beam the energy down.
I must have missed where Japan conquered 51%+ of the area east of the Ural mountains.
AFAIK (and I'm not an expert), China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam used very similar writing system decended from Chinese Hanji characters. Vietnam and Korea (South Korea at least) later adopted other alphabets. So really, only China and Japan commonly use Hanji/Kanji, and even then, the CJK unification of hanji/hanja/kanji characters really annoyed a few purists when similar hanji/hanja/kanji were merged in unicode.
So, other than hanji/kanji, there is hangul (S. Korea), hana/kana (Japan -- yes, they have more than one writing system!), the Thai alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet (former USSR), the Arabic alphabet (Middle East), Hebrew (Israel), the Brahmic scripts (India) and the Georgian alphabet. (And this is just off the top of my head, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few more writing systems in use in Asia!).
And then, just to confuse the problem, there are the various forms of encoding. Admittedly, unicode would probably be one of the better methods, but there are a lot of pre-unicode encodings in common use.
When you expand the problem to be worldwide, there's also the Ethiopian and Greek alphabets that are used in their respective regions. There's also a ton of latin-based alphabets, which introduces many more characters than are currently used in the DNS system. (Including characters that look a lot like existing characters!)
And then you have the problem of alphabets used only by very small groups, such as Cherokee (Oh, I'm going to get flamed!). There are very few people who can write in Cherokee, but does that mean that the Cherokee language shouldn't be part of the DNS system?
Now, can you see why this is a mess?
So we have the global warming research crowd which lives and dies by the research grant, and we have the anti-global warming crowd which lives and dies by funding.
And there's the global warming mitigation crowd who wants to create fame or money solving the problem.
In coding, each feature has a cost associated with it. Nothing is free. A feature will result in the combination of one or more of the following: more design/coding time, higher memory use, more CPU use, a higher chance of bugs, etc.
Evolution is the same.
For some creatures, the advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages.
For other creatures, the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. For many creatures, perhaps regenerating the limb isn't that useful -- the biology of the animal might mean that the loss of a limb is general fatal due to blood loss or infection (assuming the animal survives the accident/attack, which may be unlikely).
In addition, just because a feature may be a net advantage for a creature doesn't mean that it will magically appear. Genetic mutation is a crapshoot. Regeneration might have been perfected after the split from the decendents of other animals. Or perhaps the common ancestor of (say) salamanders and mammals was capable of generation, but after the split happened, regeneration had too high of a cost for the line that lead to mammals, and the genetic code was lost or adapted for some feature that was more useful.
I hope that explanation helps.
Who said there was going to be one payload at a time?
Imagine, if you will, a space elevator that is designed with two paths -- one for capsules going up, and one for capsules going down. That way, capsules can be queued, with one capsule being "launched" every X minutes or so.
As a bonus, the decending capsules will be liberating potential energy. Some designs call for the decending capsules to partially power the acending capsules.
Nuclear fusion also results in radioactive waste.
Sure, often the products of nuclear fusion aren't radioactive (for the most part), but there structure tends to get a good dose of radioactivity.
The true solution would be a population that is educated about nuclear power, radiation and risk.
Maybe people will wise up if energy prices start to rise. There are seeds of change planted -- part of the environmentalist movement is pro-nuclear, for example, for obvious reasons.
You seek experience, wisdom and a strong constitution.
You are making several assumptions:
While I'm not a fan of Bush, I'm also not a fan of simplistic views of the federal budget.
Federal spending can be good for the population or bad for the population. Perhaps the US shouldn't have been so obsessed about a balanced budget in the 90s -- a little bit more spent on capturing a certain dingbat in the 90s could have saved us the cost of an expensive war today!
I'll publish your paper for $109. You'll even save $1. ;)
Eric Flint's 1632 series has the first book downloadable for free.
It worked for me -- I picked up the sequal when I was at the bookstore. I probably wouldn't have bought it otherwise.
I don't think he'll give you more sex, but you could always ask.
Commercially, the greater susceptability to disease doesn't seem to be a show stopper when it comes to horticulture. It has additional problems, but it also has some very good benefits.
For slashdotter's information, the different varieties of potatoes, bananas and grapes often are genetic clones.
As for infectability, if you want to point fingers, point one at modern factory farming. The conditions the animals are kept in encourage the transmission of disease.
The first generation or two of immigrants (legal and illegal) tend to have a high birthrate. Then, after they've been corrupted by American culture, the birthrate falls drastically.
-- SourceIIRC, there's a Chinese project to use the waste heat from the cooling ponds for heating and desalination.
I think that your explanation is likely the primary cause, but I do wonder if there could also be a direct link between obesity and low IQ.
The brain is another organ in the body, and it requires oxygen and nutrients. If the arteries are clogged and the lung capacity is lowered due to obesity and the health problems that result from it, wouldn't the brain also be effected?
If IQ is mostly in-born and inheritable, how would you explain the Flynn effect of rising average IQ?
I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the really nasty waste tends to be really nasty for short periods of time -- years or decades. Radioactivity is energy, and materials that are highly radioactive are releasing a lot of energy at a rate it cannot sustain for a long period of time.
The low-level radiation tends to last for a lot longer, since it releases less energy.
A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
This is also why nuclear power plants have cooling pools for nuclear waste -- for the first few years, the waste produces enough heat (energy) and radioactivity to make moving and storing much more difficult.
*cues "the more you know" music*
Btw, many nuclear wastes tend to be heavy metals, and thus are prone to causing heavy metal poisoning. But this seems to be often (purposely?) overlooked, since opponents of nuclear power seem to focus on the much more "scary" radioactivy, and proponents don't want to mention more downsides of nuclear power.
The list of skills is more beneficial when the hiring process is composed of non-technical people.
Technical people will look at the resume and (hopefully) look at the experience to see what skills the potential employee has.
Non-technical people will look at the skill list and check off skills they believe they need.
Wordpress has a plugin that uses some vim magic to syntax highlight code.
It may be computationally expensive (I dunno), but there's always the wordpress caching plugin as well. ;)
He had one book, according to the news story that I read.
Awhile back, there was a pair of books concerning the aftermath of a murder from a law enforcement/legal perspective (_How_To_Solve_A_Murder_ and _How_To_Try_A_Murder_) that ended up on my Barnes & Nobels bargain rack. I picked up the latter since it was only a few bucks.
I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only geek that did so.
To play devil's advocate some more, lets consider the blood splatters found in the house and car. Why both locations? It would be interesting to know where the blood was found and how much there was.
As for "hiding" the car, well, it was Hans. Perhaps he was pissed at the police for wasting their time when his wife was missing by investigating him. His refusal to help them could be interpretted as "hiding" the auto.
But I don't have a good explanation for the missing passenger seat. (Hey, I was playing devil's advocate, not acting as Hans's lawyer.) If the prosecution can show that the passenger seat went missing at about the time of Nina's disappearance, that's going to be pretty damaging to his case.