What you're describing is a race to the bottom. If it really worked that way, we wouldn't have the vaguest concept of morals left by now. Or any human beings left, for that matter. You basically posit two possible types of society: one that's aggressive and conquers, or one that's not aggressive and is conquered. It's actually possible for a society to peaceful, not go around conquering everyone, but still be ready to defend itself. I don't think the GPs solutions are particularly likely to work, but the point about the extremely questionable ethics of pretty much all protagonists in popular media these days is pretty spot on.
He's right that dead code can exist that a compiler cannot detect. That's pretty irrelevant in the real world where the majority of "dead" code (specifically, the kind TFA was talking about) is trivial to detect because it's never called by anything. That's what I meant by "truly ""dead"" code" in my original post, as opposed to the conditionally dead code he was talking about. Essentially, he's not right at all because you can't call the code he's talking about "dead code" because, according to the halting problem, whether it's dead or not is theoretically un-knowable. There's code you can tell is unreachable, which you can call "dead code", and code that you can't tell is unreachable, which you can't call "dead code" unless you find a way to determine if it's unreachable or not, at which point you can add that technique to a compiler.
Had a typo in the first line, where I wrote "constitutional" instead of "unconstitutional", but it should have been clear from the rest of my post that I didn't agree with the GP and that I don't think that simple plurality voting represents the will of the people in a general election with three or more candidates. Simple plurality is the perfect system when there are exactly two choices, such as when voting yay or nay on a particular measure. It's really the only practical method in that case. Simple minded thinking that, since it works so well for those kinds of votes that it should work well in all cases is part of what leads to the mess that is the US electoral system. If you want a real democracy, you have to allow for more than two choices. For more than two choices, to have a completely fair election, you really need a multi-pass system, at the very least, you need one of the better working single-pass systems.
That's not how the halting problem works. The halting problem is about whether you can create an algorithm to take an arbitrary algorithm and a set of inputs and determine, in all cases, if the algorithm will ever halt. We are pretty much dead certain that you can't do that. That doesn't mean that you can't create an algorithm that will take an arbitrary algorithm and a set of inputs (or the set of all possible inputs) and determine, in _some_ cases, if the algorithm will ever halt. The halting problem does say that there are cases where you won't be able to determine whether or not an object is ever used, but it certainly doesn't say that there are no cases where you can. For objects that are never used, regardless of input, it's not even a remotely intractable problem to construct a tree to determine if it is called or used by any other objects and if those objects are called or used, etc. There's a boatload of special cases where it's trivial to tell if parts of some algorithm will ever be reached.
Because he made a change to the generator that may have seriously altered its performance after looking at some vents, concluding they weren't needed based on only considering their airflow characteristics, but not other important characteristics. This is a very good point. Sometimes you don't remove old stuff not only because it's extra work for no real benefit, but also because your understanding of the entire system may not be an absolute, end to end one.
The quoted section in the summary asks if we could imagine this in other engineering disciplines. As the rest of the summary points out, it happens all the time in microchips. It also happens a lot in civil engineering, including bridge building. Removing things takes work. Unless there's work to be saved by doing it, or some way to profit from selling what's removed as scrap or it's a safety issue to leave it most engineers won't remove old parts of a structure. Consider underground pipes. How often are they removed when they're replaced? If the new ones are being laid down where the old ones went, they'll be replaced. Otherwise, 90% of the time they'll just leave the old ones there. Same goes for just about everything. Old installations of any kind are full of stuff that no longer serves any purpose. Brackets and supports for heavy equipment that isn't used anymore, old wiring and panels, concrete slabs that something mystery object used to sit on, etc. When was the last time you saw anyone take away some 30 ton piece of equipment then pay more money to have the floor where it used to sit un-reinforced? Now, sometimes they do. Usually it's when the place is being sold and the new owners are re-modelling. Other times the owners do decide to do a major cleanup. That's exactly what's being done here with libreoffice. Makes it no different than any other engineering discipline then.
Incidentally, if it's truly "dead" code, then it shouldn't actually be compiled, so it's not like the bridge engineer left in a bunch of extra girders, it's more like he's keeping addendum 6-c to revision 12b of the plans for section 3 in the same file cabinet as revision 13 rather than shifting it to a storage box and warehousing it.
So, to be clear, a man/woman in a mutual relationship with a man/woman 1 day from the statutory age where it would be legal for them to have sex who has sex, without any force involved deserves *death*, no exceptions, no appeal. Meanwhile, 5 miles from where the crime was committed, across a state line, a couple with the exact same ages could have sex and it's perfectly legal. Do you understand why this bothers people? The fact that the exact same actions can either be completely ok (well, maybe not to busybodies), or worthy of a death sentence based on arbitrary local age standards. It certainly breaks the illusion that the law is just and fair.
Anyway that's virtually irrelevant to my point. In the scenario I mentioned, the older partner might be amorally preying on the younger partners youth and inexperience. That happens a lot virtually regardless of the younger partners age. It certainly happens a lot to sheltered teenagers 18 and older when they go off to college. If the younger partner is in love with the older partner, regardless of whether the older partner is actually in love too or is a predatory monster, it's going to seriously mess them up if the older partner is gruesomely murdered because they had sex.
Seriously. I just get so sick of all these super judgemental people who don't care about details, they just want to jump straight to the gruesome fatal vengeance. They're living in a fantasy world where that solves everything and any other solution is a weakness that just makes things worse. They don't care about the morality of the situation, they just want to judge harshly and take what they see as heroic action against the "scum". Often these same people also want to commit genocide on 50% of the worlds population or more based on things like their religious affiliation or because they're "stealing" jobs, etc. It's pretty sick.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but different methods of voting aren't in any way constitutional. Simple plurality voting, which is used in all US States is the absolute perfect method for representing the will of an electorate when there are 0, 1, or 2 choices. For 3 choices and above, it's the worst method. This is a self-evident fact to anyone who has actually studied the issue. That simple plurality method is not specified anywhere in the constitution for the general public, only for the electoral college. The constitution basically says that, for the presidential election, the electoral college members cast their lots for the candidate they choose (the constitution doesn't guarantee that they can't just pick whoever they like, although some states have laws requiring it) and that the candidate who gets the majority wins the election. For House and Senate (since the 17th amendment at least), the constitution says that the members will be elected by "the people". Aside from that, there are parts of the constitution specifying that women and minorities get to vote as well and establishing the minimum voting age as 18 (States can constitutionally allow people younger than 18 to vote, but they can't withhold the vote from anyone 18 or older on the grounds of age). I think there's some bits in there about poll taxes and so forth as well. There is however, absolutely nothing saying how elections are to be carried out. Maybe the writers thought there was only one way. In any case, constitutionally, the States can conduct elections in any way that meets the requirement that Congressmen are elected by the people and for the President, they can appoint Electors any way they feel like. That's right, constitutionally, the States don't even have to hold popular elections to appoint their Electors. That falls to state law.
Wierd. I tested the link. Just tried it again and it's working. It should be http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-07/homemade-open-source-scanning-tunneling-electron-microscope
What if it were statutory rape? I don't know how old your daughter is, but let's say at some point in time either the future or the past she has or had sex with an over age boyfriend (for whatever the statutory age and close in age exemptions happen to be in your jurisdiction). Would you gruesomely murder the raping boyfriend then? If she's in love with the guy, how is that humane to your daughter? He would still be just as guilty under the law as someone who raped an adult woman by force. Quite possible more guilty. He'd be considered a pedophile in prison, so would probably get less humane treatment from simple-minded, vengeance-oriented prisoners and staff even than someone who'd forcibly raped an adult even if there were only a matter of months making it illegal.
For that matter, regardless of the exact nature of the rape, even if it were forcible, are you sure your wife and daughter are in line with your thinking? They might, for example, not want horrible, violent vengeance meted out regardless of the crime, so murder still might not be humane to them. Plus, there's the matter of how they'd feel about you knowing for dead certain that you're capable of gruesome murder. The theory of the brave protector being willing to do anything might seem romantic in theory. In practice, they might end up terrified of you every time you lose your temper. Also, however much you might fantasize about righteously murdering someone, the reality is that it would probably leave you psychologically scarred, possibly with some form of PTSD. That kind of damage to you might very well also make your family miserable.
That's a ridiculous statement. That might work for some things, but not others, and sometimes you can be easily mislead about intent by really small errors. What if you're trying to program some sort of complex biology formula. Do you really expect everyone who ever reviews the code to be able to just look at it and tell both what it's supposed to do and if there are any errors just based on the names of the objects? Putting that kind of information in the comments is a solid engineering practice. You can also have that information in accompanying documentation, but you should still have comments to at least provide a reference to the documentation.
You can make one now if you like. There's an article here about someone working on an open source kit, but it also mentions other places that will sell you a kit to build your own.
There isn't just one theoretical limit. There are lots of theoretical limits. Some of those theoretical limits people are more sure of than others, but dozens or even hundreds of theoretical limits have been broken through already in computer engineering and in data storage specifically. Then the theories have to change. There were plenty of people who theorized that Charles Babbage's Difference Engine could never work. They might not have been very good theories, but many people still accepted them until the actual construction of a full working version disproved those theories.
But parasites, even internal ones that rely on the environment of their host bodies to reproduce, take in food and process it into new parasites internally. For a virus, everything that could be considered a life process is outsourced to the host. A virus, at least by a classical textbook understanding (although I distrust those because they're always oversimplified), doesn't have any life processes of its own. It doesn't aquire food or process it to grow/heal/regenerate, or to make more viruses. It doesn't process energy to move itself around (although, this is one of those oversimplified things, since viruses do have all kinds of adaptations for making use of their environment to get to where they need to go) or for anything really. It's basically just floating around, lifeless until it's attached itself to the DNA of a living cell, at which point it hijacks the cells own life processes to make copies of itself.
Of course, that said, viruses, or at least virus-like entities almost certainly predate actual cellular life. It's hard to say exactly how they existed and replicated at that time. With mechanisms that are unnecessary today because of their parasitic existence probably. It's likely that once more complex life came along, they couldn't compete on gathering the resources to survive, but they could still "live" a zero-energy "lifestyle" between parasitic reproductions. For all we know, there could actually be thriving populations of virus-like organisms out there that gather resources to reproduce themselves and fully meet pretty much all the definitions of life, but it's unlikely we'd even notice them if they don't infect cells and that's what would draw our attention to them in the first place
All that said, I'm not sure that I buy that viruses aren't alive. Or rather, I don't buy that there's such a bright line between alive and not alive. If a person dies. We can usually be very clear on whether or not they're dead if their heart has been stopped for an hour or so. But, at that point, provided the death didn't come from something extraordinary, pretty much every single cell in the person's body is still alive. The biotech industry makes a lot of use of CHO cells, which are a strain of chinese hamster ovary cells which self replicate indefinitely. The original hamster is long dead, but cells derived from it live on as a single celled organism that can survive on its own in the right environmental niche (admittedly that environmental niche pretty much needs to be a sterile, nutrient filled bioreactor built by humans). Some vertebrates regularly survive being frozen completely solid, with all life processes stopping, and then they thaw and are alive again. Basically, the whole life thing is a lot more complicated than alive/not alive and viruses really fall a lot more into the life category than the unalive category.
The problem is the way that the election is conducted. The simple plurality voting system used is perfect for selecting between exactly two options and the worst possible system when there's more than two. All of the single pass systems are imperfect and have paradoxes like the spoiler effect, but they're much less pronounced, so every single one of them is better than the system that's used. Then there are the two pass systems.
The thing is, the Republicans and the Democrats realise perfectly well that the single pass simple plurality election system is completely broken. Rather than use their joint monopoly on government to fix the problem for everyone, they just fix it for themselves. That's why they game the system by having their own party primaries. Think about that. If the system weren't broken, then all Democratic and Republican candidates could participate in the general election and it would perform the same function as the primaries. They don't do it that way.
Wow. Such vitriol for me for pointing out the flaw in the system. I didn't say that it was my personal philosophy, just that the ways the rules are set up turns the election into that sort of multi-player game. The fundamental problem is that the consequence of people of conscience voting for the candidate they want is likely to be that the candidate who is _least_ like that candidate winning rather than their candidate or any candidate like them. Essentially, it gives all the power in the election to those who group together to game the vote. You can pour scorn on those who don't fearlessly vote their conscience regardless of consequences, personally, I prefer to pour scorn on the broken system of voting that forces people to choose between their conscience and unintended consequences. The simple fact is that there are other ways to conduct an election which much better reflect the will of the voters.
The thing is, if it isn't absolutely impossible, then there's a 100% growth opportunity within that niche. Overall though, I do think that governments are a basic requirement for getting this done since corporations are too risk averse.
Temperature is virtually meaningless in a near vacuum. The temperature of the ground might be an issue, but frozen ground can be found in a lot of places.
Sadly, thanks to the paradoxical voting system the US uses where each person gets one vote to cast in favor of one candidate in a one-pass election, there's this thing called the Spoiler Effect. Basically it's what leads to "a vote for Nader, is a vote for Bush" being essentially true. It forces people to game their vote rather than casting it where their true preferences lie and, although it doesn't make upsets impossible, it creates a very strong attractor towards a two party system.
Did she go out of her way to make herself look suspicious in every possible way, or did the prosecution go out of the way to make it look like she was going out of her way to make herself look suspicious. Her 'confession' to the Italian authorities had all the hallmarks of a coerced confession. Her 'accusation' initially of a man has all the hallmarks of coercion as well. Apparently, the interrogators played the old "imagine he did this, and describe how he would have done it" ploy for that one. People go on about all kinds of ridiculous claims she supposedly made, but they neglect the critical point that most of these would have been in response to questions from interrogators who are trying to make her look as bad as possible. It's pretty standard practice for interrogators, after wearing down the subject and leading them around in circles until they're dizzy and breaking down their sense of reality, they introduce hypotheticals as truth (essentially, they lie about what they found at the crime scene) and demand that the subject explain them.
The simple fact that they prosecuted and convicted one guy of the murder under one theory of how it happened and then convicted two other people of the murder under another theory of how it happened and joined the two theories together with spit and baling wire should be enough for anyone to realize that something wasn't quite right with the conviction. The thing that really bothers me about it, is that everyone knows who Amanda Knox is, but not who Raffaele Sollecito is. He's her boyfriend who went through the same nightmare she did. Now, in a way he's very lucky since without her, it's probably no-one would have given his conviction a second look. On the other hand, he might never have been pursued for this in the first place if they hadn't decided to go after her.
Am I alone in wondering why they're using rags on the inside of fuel lines in the first place? Wouldn't you think they've be using some sort of more specialized tool? A pipe cleaner maybe? I just get this image of an aerospace engineer jabbing a rag down the line on the end of a bit of straightened out coathanger wire.
How would Antarctica be more comparable? Antarctica is a lot more hostile to someone operating in a spacesuit than Mars is. Sure, the temperatures on Mars can get both colder and warmer than Antarctica, but since the atmosphere is virtually non-existent compared to ours, much less insulation is required. The wind gusts you get on Mars might be able to reach very high speeds, but how do you compare high wind speeds in an almost vacuum to high wind speeds on Earth? What Martian conditions would require the environment of Antarctica to simulate?
I'm curious about that 3 tons of food per astronaut per year figure. That's over 8 kilograms of food per person, per day, so clearly that doesn't include just food, but is probably food plus water, plus clothing, plus cleaning and medical supplies, etc. In other words, all supplies required to maintain personnel rather than other equipment and experiments. What I'm curious about is where you get that figure, and does it have a breakdown? Does it include supplies for providing oxygen as well, or is that separate. I'm actually very curious about what things are on the list of supplies, but I've never found a good breakdown before. It seems like they think that no-one would be interested, or they treat it as secret information.
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What you're describing is a race to the bottom. If it really worked that way, we wouldn't have the vaguest concept of morals left by now. Or any human beings left, for that matter. You basically posit two possible types of society: one that's aggressive and conquers, or one that's not aggressive and is conquered. It's actually possible for a society to peaceful, not go around conquering everyone, but still be ready to defend itself. I don't think the GPs solutions are particularly likely to work, but the point about the extremely questionable ethics of pretty much all protagonists in popular media these days is pretty spot on.
He's right that dead code can exist that a compiler cannot detect. That's pretty irrelevant in the real world where the majority of "dead" code (specifically, the kind TFA was talking about) is trivial to detect because it's never called by anything. That's what I meant by "truly ""dead"" code" in my original post, as opposed to the conditionally dead code he was talking about. Essentially, he's not right at all because you can't call the code he's talking about "dead code" because, according to the halting problem, whether it's dead or not is theoretically un-knowable. There's code you can tell is unreachable, which you can call "dead code", and code that you can't tell is unreachable, which you can't call "dead code" unless you find a way to determine if it's unreachable or not, at which point you can add that technique to a compiler.
Had a typo in the first line, where I wrote "constitutional" instead of "unconstitutional", but it should have been clear from the rest of my post that I didn't agree with the GP and that I don't think that simple plurality voting represents the will of the people in a general election with three or more candidates. Simple plurality is the perfect system when there are exactly two choices, such as when voting yay or nay on a particular measure. It's really the only practical method in that case. Simple minded thinking that, since it works so well for those kinds of votes that it should work well in all cases is part of what leads to the mess that is the US electoral system. If you want a real democracy, you have to allow for more than two choices. For more than two choices, to have a completely fair election, you really need a multi-pass system, at the very least, you need one of the better working single-pass systems.
Were you replying to me or the GP? I did have a typo in my first line. Wrote "constitutional" instead of "unconstitutional".
For a chem lab, good chance it's a halon system. If that goes off, you might be better off taking your chances with the fire.
That's not how the halting problem works. The halting problem is about whether you can create an algorithm to take an arbitrary algorithm and a set of inputs and determine, in all cases, if the algorithm will ever halt. We are pretty much dead certain that you can't do that. That doesn't mean that you can't create an algorithm that will take an arbitrary algorithm and a set of inputs (or the set of all possible inputs) and determine, in _some_ cases, if the algorithm will ever halt. The halting problem does say that there are cases where you won't be able to determine whether or not an object is ever used, but it certainly doesn't say that there are no cases where you can. For objects that are never used, regardless of input, it's not even a remotely intractable problem to construct a tree to determine if it is called or used by any other objects and if those objects are called or used, etc. There's a boatload of special cases where it's trivial to tell if parts of some algorithm will ever be reached.
Because he made a change to the generator that may have seriously altered its performance after looking at some vents, concluding they weren't needed based on only considering their airflow characteristics, but not other important characteristics. This is a very good point. Sometimes you don't remove old stuff not only because it's extra work for no real benefit, but also because your understanding of the entire system may not be an absolute, end to end one.
The quoted section in the summary asks if we could imagine this in other engineering disciplines. As the rest of the summary points out, it happens all the time in microchips. It also happens a lot in civil engineering, including bridge building. Removing things takes work. Unless there's work to be saved by doing it, or some way to profit from selling what's removed as scrap or it's a safety issue to leave it most engineers won't remove old parts of a structure. Consider underground pipes. How often are they removed when they're replaced? If the new ones are being laid down where the old ones went, they'll be replaced. Otherwise, 90% of the time they'll just leave the old ones there. Same goes for just about everything. Old installations of any kind are full of stuff that no longer serves any purpose. Brackets and supports for heavy equipment that isn't used anymore, old wiring and panels, concrete slabs that something mystery object used to sit on, etc. When was the last time you saw anyone take away some 30 ton piece of equipment then pay more money to have the floor where it used to sit un-reinforced? Now, sometimes they do. Usually it's when the place is being sold and the new owners are re-modelling. Other times the owners do decide to do a major cleanup. That's exactly what's being done here with libreoffice. Makes it no different than any other engineering discipline then.
Incidentally, if it's truly "dead" code, then it shouldn't actually be compiled, so it's not like the bridge engineer left in a bunch of extra girders, it's more like he's keeping addendum 6-c to revision 12b of the plans for section 3 in the same file cabinet as revision 13 rather than shifting it to a storage box and warehousing it.
So, to be clear, a man/woman in a mutual relationship with a man/woman 1 day from the statutory age where it would be legal for them to have sex who has sex, without any force involved deserves *death*, no exceptions, no appeal. Meanwhile, 5 miles from where the crime was committed, across a state line, a couple with the exact same ages could have sex and it's perfectly legal. Do you understand why this bothers people? The fact that the exact same actions can either be completely ok (well, maybe not to busybodies), or worthy of a death sentence based on arbitrary local age standards. It certainly breaks the illusion that the law is just and fair.
Anyway that's virtually irrelevant to my point. In the scenario I mentioned, the older partner might be amorally preying on the younger partners youth and inexperience. That happens a lot virtually regardless of the younger partners age. It certainly happens a lot to sheltered teenagers 18 and older when they go off to college. If the younger partner is in love with the older partner, regardless of whether the older partner is actually in love too or is a predatory monster, it's going to seriously mess them up if the older partner is gruesomely murdered because they had sex.
Seriously. I just get so sick of all these super judgemental people who don't care about details, they just want to jump straight to the gruesome fatal vengeance. They're living in a fantasy world where that solves everything and any other solution is a weakness that just makes things worse. They don't care about the morality of the situation, they just want to judge harshly and take what they see as heroic action against the "scum". Often these same people also want to commit genocide on 50% of the worlds population or more based on things like their religious affiliation or because they're "stealing" jobs, etc. It's pretty sick.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but different methods of voting aren't in any way constitutional. Simple plurality voting, which is used in all US States is the absolute perfect method for representing the will of an electorate when there are 0, 1, or 2 choices. For 3 choices and above, it's the worst method. This is a self-evident fact to anyone who has actually studied the issue. That simple plurality method is not specified anywhere in the constitution for the general public, only for the electoral college. The constitution basically says that, for the presidential election, the electoral college members cast their lots for the candidate they choose (the constitution doesn't guarantee that they can't just pick whoever they like, although some states have laws requiring it) and that the candidate who gets the majority wins the election. For House and Senate (since the 17th amendment at least), the constitution says that the members will be elected by "the people". Aside from that, there are parts of the constitution specifying that women and minorities get to vote as well and establishing the minimum voting age as 18 (States can constitutionally allow people younger than 18 to vote, but they can't withhold the vote from anyone 18 or older on the grounds of age). I think there's some bits in there about poll taxes and so forth as well. There is however, absolutely nothing saying how elections are to be carried out. Maybe the writers thought there was only one way. In any case, constitutionally, the States can conduct elections in any way that meets the requirement that Congressmen are elected by the people and for the President, they can appoint Electors any way they feel like. That's right, constitutionally, the States don't even have to hold popular elections to appoint their Electors. That falls to state law.
Wierd. I tested the link. Just tried it again and it's working. It should be http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-07/homemade-open-source-scanning-tunneling-electron-microscope
What if it were statutory rape? I don't know how old your daughter is, but let's say at some point in time either the future or the past she has or had sex with an over age boyfriend (for whatever the statutory age and close in age exemptions happen to be in your jurisdiction). Would you gruesomely murder the raping boyfriend then? If she's in love with the guy, how is that humane to your daughter? He would still be just as guilty under the law as someone who raped an adult woman by force. Quite possible more guilty. He'd be considered a pedophile in prison, so would probably get less humane treatment from simple-minded, vengeance-oriented prisoners and staff even than someone who'd forcibly raped an adult even if there were only a matter of months making it illegal.
For that matter, regardless of the exact nature of the rape, even if it were forcible, are you sure your wife and daughter are in line with your thinking? They might, for example, not want horrible, violent vengeance meted out regardless of the crime, so murder still might not be humane to them. Plus, there's the matter of how they'd feel about you knowing for dead certain that you're capable of gruesome murder. The theory of the brave protector being willing to do anything might seem romantic in theory. In practice, they might end up terrified of you every time you lose your temper. Also, however much you might fantasize about righteously murdering someone, the reality is that it would probably leave you psychologically scarred, possibly with some form of PTSD. That kind of damage to you might very well also make your family miserable.
That's a ridiculous statement. That might work for some things, but not others, and sometimes you can be easily mislead about intent by really small errors. What if you're trying to program some sort of complex biology formula. Do you really expect everyone who ever reviews the code to be able to just look at it and tell both what it's supposed to do and if there are any errors just based on the names of the objects? Putting that kind of information in the comments is a solid engineering practice. You can also have that information in accompanying documentation, but you should still have comments to at least provide a reference to the documentation.
You can make one now if you like. There's an article here about someone working on an open source kit, but it also mentions other places that will sell you a kit to build your own.
There isn't just one theoretical limit. There are lots of theoretical limits. Some of those theoretical limits people are more sure of than others, but dozens or even hundreds of theoretical limits have been broken through already in computer engineering and in data storage specifically. Then the theories have to change. There were plenty of people who theorized that Charles Babbage's Difference Engine could never work. They might not have been very good theories, but many people still accepted them until the actual construction of a full working version disproved those theories.
But parasites, even internal ones that rely on the environment of their host bodies to reproduce, take in food and process it into new parasites internally. For a virus, everything that could be considered a life process is outsourced to the host. A virus, at least by a classical textbook understanding (although I distrust those because they're always oversimplified), doesn't have any life processes of its own. It doesn't aquire food or process it to grow/heal/regenerate, or to make more viruses. It doesn't process energy to move itself around (although, this is one of those oversimplified things, since viruses do have all kinds of adaptations for making use of their environment to get to where they need to go) or for anything really. It's basically just floating around, lifeless until it's attached itself to the DNA of a living cell, at which point it hijacks the cells own life processes to make copies of itself.
Of course, that said, viruses, or at least virus-like entities almost certainly predate actual cellular life. It's hard to say exactly how they existed and replicated at that time. With mechanisms that are unnecessary today because of their parasitic existence probably. It's likely that once more complex life came along, they couldn't compete on gathering the resources to survive, but they could still "live" a zero-energy "lifestyle" between parasitic reproductions. For all we know, there could actually be thriving populations of virus-like organisms out there that gather resources to reproduce themselves and fully meet pretty much all the definitions of life, but it's unlikely we'd even notice them if they don't infect cells and that's what would draw our attention to them in the first place
All that said, I'm not sure that I buy that viruses aren't alive. Or rather, I don't buy that there's such a bright line between alive and not alive. If a person dies. We can usually be very clear on whether or not they're dead if their heart has been stopped for an hour or so. But, at that point, provided the death didn't come from something extraordinary, pretty much every single cell in the person's body is still alive. The biotech industry makes a lot of use of CHO cells, which are a strain of chinese hamster ovary cells which self replicate indefinitely. The original hamster is long dead, but cells derived from it live on as a single celled organism that can survive on its own in the right environmental niche (admittedly that environmental niche pretty much needs to be a sterile, nutrient filled bioreactor built by humans). Some vertebrates regularly survive being frozen completely solid, with all life processes stopping, and then they thaw and are alive again. Basically, the whole life thing is a lot more complicated than alive/not alive and viruses really fall a lot more into the life category than the unalive category.
The problem is the way that the election is conducted. The simple plurality voting system used is perfect for selecting between exactly two options and the worst possible system when there's more than two. All of the single pass systems are imperfect and have paradoxes like the spoiler effect, but they're much less pronounced, so every single one of them is better than the system that's used. Then there are the two pass systems.
The thing is, the Republicans and the Democrats realise perfectly well that the single pass simple plurality election system is completely broken. Rather than use their joint monopoly on government to fix the problem for everyone, they just fix it for themselves. That's why they game the system by having their own party primaries. Think about that. If the system weren't broken, then all Democratic and Republican candidates could participate in the general election and it would perform the same function as the primaries. They don't do it that way.
Wow. Such vitriol for me for pointing out the flaw in the system. I didn't say that it was my personal philosophy, just that the ways the rules are set up turns the election into that sort of multi-player game. The fundamental problem is that the consequence of people of conscience voting for the candidate they want is likely to be that the candidate who is _least_ like that candidate winning rather than their candidate or any candidate like them. Essentially, it gives all the power in the election to those who group together to game the vote. You can pour scorn on those who don't fearlessly vote their conscience regardless of consequences, personally, I prefer to pour scorn on the broken system of voting that forces people to choose between their conscience and unintended consequences. The simple fact is that there are other ways to conduct an election which much better reflect the will of the voters.
The thing is, if it isn't absolutely impossible, then there's a 100% growth opportunity within that niche. Overall though, I do think that governments are a basic requirement for getting this done since corporations are too risk averse.
Temperature is virtually meaningless in a near vacuum. The temperature of the ground might be an issue, but frozen ground can be found in a lot of places.
Sadly, thanks to the paradoxical voting system the US uses where each person gets one vote to cast in favor of one candidate in a one-pass election, there's this thing called the Spoiler Effect. Basically it's what leads to "a vote for Nader, is a vote for Bush" being essentially true. It forces people to game their vote rather than casting it where their true preferences lie and, although it doesn't make upsets impossible, it creates a very strong attractor towards a two party system.
Did she go out of her way to make herself look suspicious in every possible way, or did the prosecution go out of the way to make it look like she was going out of her way to make herself look suspicious. Her 'confession' to the Italian authorities had all the hallmarks of a coerced confession. Her 'accusation' initially of a man has all the hallmarks of coercion as well. Apparently, the interrogators played the old "imagine he did this, and describe how he would have done it" ploy for that one. People go on about all kinds of ridiculous claims she supposedly made, but they neglect the critical point that most of these would have been in response to questions from interrogators who are trying to make her look as bad as possible. It's pretty standard practice for interrogators, after wearing down the subject and leading them around in circles until they're dizzy and breaking down their sense of reality, they introduce hypotheticals as truth (essentially, they lie about what they found at the crime scene) and demand that the subject explain them.
The simple fact that they prosecuted and convicted one guy of the murder under one theory of how it happened and then convicted two other people of the murder under another theory of how it happened and joined the two theories together with spit and baling wire should be enough for anyone to realize that something wasn't quite right with the conviction. The thing that really bothers me about it, is that everyone knows who Amanda Knox is, but not who Raffaele Sollecito is. He's her boyfriend who went through the same nightmare she did. Now, in a way he's very lucky since without her, it's probably no-one would have given his conviction a second look. On the other hand, he might never have been pursued for this in the first place if they hadn't decided to go after her.
Am I alone in wondering why they're using rags on the inside of fuel lines in the first place? Wouldn't you think they've be using some sort of more specialized tool? A pipe cleaner maybe? I just get this image of an aerospace engineer jabbing a rag down the line on the end of a bit of straightened out coathanger wire.
How would Antarctica be more comparable? Antarctica is a lot more hostile to someone operating in a spacesuit than Mars is. Sure, the temperatures on Mars can get both colder and warmer than Antarctica, but since the atmosphere is virtually non-existent compared to ours, much less insulation is required. The wind gusts you get on Mars might be able to reach very high speeds, but how do you compare high wind speeds in an almost vacuum to high wind speeds on Earth? What Martian conditions would require the environment of Antarctica to simulate?
I'm curious about that 3 tons of food per astronaut per year figure. That's over 8 kilograms of food per person, per day, so clearly that doesn't include just food, but is probably food plus water, plus clothing, plus cleaning and medical supplies, etc. In other words, all supplies required to maintain personnel rather than other equipment and experiments. What I'm curious about is where you get that figure, and does it have a breakdown? Does it include supplies for providing oxygen as well, or is that separate. I'm actually very curious about what things are on the list of supplies, but I've never found a good breakdown before. It seems like they think that no-one would be interested, or they treat it as secret information.