I don't think the poster was implying that everyone working for these companies are families and cronies of the politicians awarding the contracts. Rather that family, friends and cronies of these politicians seem to have an amazingly easy time getting jobs and contracts from these companies. That would still only make those people a very small percentage of the employees of the company.
Yeah, you mean to, but so what? Laws like the one you're proposing just mean that, for every 50 illegal immigrants employed, there will be a "boss" whose job is mainly to collect a salary and act as a fall guy for the real employer.
Actually the staff of Asclepius only has one serpent. For some reason, the US medical industry especially, uses a staff with two serpents and wings, the Caduceus. Apparently, that symbol was used by a medical publisher and became a default symbol. The Caduceus was the symbol of Hermes (although it may date back before greek culture), who was the messenger god and also god of liars, thieves and of the dead who were passing from life to the underworld. Depending on your opinion of doctors, you might think that's spot on, or you might think it's bad advertising for their profession.
Crossing the border has its own natural risks as well. All kinds of activities have risks, but artificially adding to them is still immoral. For your jaywalking and speeding examples, yes it's dangerous to cross the road and yes it's dangerous to speed, but we work to reduce those dangers, not increase them on the crazy theory that making them more horrible will stop people from doing them. We don't, for example, put a Spiky Thing in Front(TM) on every car to be extra sure it will kill jaywalkers. We also don't put large spikes on the steering columns of cars so that anyone who crashes their car will be impaled. It's this whole sanity thing we have going.
Errrm. You're joking right? How is that teleportation? It actually goes beyond "quantum teleportation" and hits the definition of the classic sci fi molecular teleporter that takes matter on one end sends information about it as a signal and reconstructs the object molecule by molecule from other atoms at the other end.
I was always of the understanding that most of the mass for the moon came not from some of the mars sized mass that hit earth rebounding, but instead from the opposite side of the earth from the impact. Sort of like a Newtons cradle. So, mars sized mass hits earth and some of it does break up and maybe end up as part of the moon, but most of it just gets swallowed by earth, the shockwave blows off a huge piece of the earth on a similar trajectory some of which returns to earth and the rest of which accumulates into the moon.
Tritium isn't really that incredibly rare. Granted, there's probably only about 6 tons in the earths oceans, but it has to be considered in terms of how much is actually needed, rather than absolute quantity. Also, it has a half life of about 12.5 years, so the fact that the amount in the oceans remains pretty much constant means that it's being replenished constantly from radioactive decay of other elements. Plus, of course, we can just make the stuff from other, more common, isotopes and a neutron source (such as a neutron reactor).
For gold, if the 7-11 sells liquor, buy Goldschlager. Otherwise, they may sell some cheap gold-plated jewelery and the like. Or maybe some electronics with some gold contacts? Otherwise go next door to the liquor store or to the local Wal~mart. As for tritium and Deuterium... A gallon jug of water should contain about 65 milligrams of Deuterium and about 17 femtograms of Tritium. So let's say there's about 1000 gallons of water contained in products to buy in a 7-11, that's a whole 65 grams of deuterium and 17 picograms of tritium to buy in a 7-11. That's about 1/5 the weight of an E. Coli bacterium in tritium, not too shabby for a trip to the store.
Consider something else that is handled with civil fines: speeding. The rationale behind copyright infringement being illegal is that it hurts the profits of the producers and distributors of the copyrighted content. The rationale behind speeding being illegal is that it's unsafe and can kill people. In file sharing, every instance of sharing a song potentially costs the record company something like a dollar in lost sales. In speeding, every instance of going over the speed limit potentially causes thousands in property damage and crushes, tears and/or burns one or more people to horrible, painful death or permanent disfigurement and disability. Far, far more unauthorized file sharing goes on than is ever detected and taken to court. Far, far more speeding goes on than is ever detected and ticketed. So, when are we going to start seeing $54,000 minimum speeding fines? Aside from Swiss judges making a point to multi-millionaires with overdeveloped speeding habits like in the recent speeding case mentioned on slashdot, that is.
If you were to steal all of the Van Gogh artwork in the world, and make copies of it, you wouldn't be violating copyright laws, since Van Gogh's work is all in the public domain now. If you didn't steal it and made copies from museum prints and so forth, then you would be violating copyright laws (gray area in some jurisdictions) because their mechanical reproduction (photo) of a public domain work is somehow magically a new copyrighted work. This lets the owner of the physical original of a public domain work essentially remove it from the public domain. I believe that's one of the ideas behind Corbis. The sad thing is that public museums do this. I suppose they have to make money somehow, but that doesn't really make it right. Anyway, even if stealing the painting and making a copy and distributing it doesn't violate copyright laws, I'm pretty sure that if the museum or private owner has a policy against copies then the courts are going to issue an injunction against distributing your copies while they're putting you away in prison for theft.
Good point. As an example, the 300 were actually 900. There were 300 Spartans, but each warrior had two Helots who flanked him. The Helots were Sparta's serf/slave class and would, quite frankly, have probably been better off under Persian rule. The incident was actually one where a small army did manage to hold back a large one for a time, eventually sacrificing their lives for it. However, the relative size of the army, and many other details have been distorted greatly by propaganda over the years.
I'm not sure where vampires burning in sunlight first appeared in literature, but I'm pretty sure that it first appeared in film in _Nosferatu_, sort of. He didn't burn exactly, just vanished in a poof of flash powder, but the implication of combustion was there. I'm pretty sure the idea didn't appear in literature until after film made it popular. The idea of the sun, or the dawn (even if the vampire isn't exposed to the sunlight in some cases) killing vampires has been around for a long time, although most stories were pretty vague about whether it actually killed them, or just drove them back to their graves, made them drop dead until night came again, etc. There was one story where a priest defeated a vampire with a rooster, it crowed and made the vampire drop dead, even though it was night. But most of the time, daytime isn't a problem, or it doesn't even come up. Trolls are more consistently killed by sunlight than vampires. Considering how widely varying the mythical characteristics of trolls are, the fact that they're more consistent than those of vampires really says something. The idea that vampires are creatures of night certainly appears in early vampire novels, but Dracula and Carmilla are able to move around during the day, even in sunlight, even if they don't necessarily have all of their powers. Vampire myths come, of course, from numerous sources, with lots of ideas about what a vampire is. A lot of old vampire stories are really ghost stories. The vampire isn't a re-animated corpse, but is a spirit apparition, usually of the recently deceased, which visits the living at night, often family, and drains their life, one by one. That kind of story seems to be pretty obviously a rationalization of infectious disease but in any case depicts the vampire as a ghost, which are generally considered creatures of the night, but generally not destroyable by sunlight. Other vampire stories seem to be based on doctors who, at the time, were often quite literally men who visited people in their beds, and drained their blood again and again until they died from it. Witchcraft was also an association, as some myths said that a vampire was a witch or warlock, risen (bodily, not as a ghost in this case) after death. I remember a vampire story involving a physical vampire. A woman is the victim of a vampire by night and ends up trapped near death in a sleep from which she will not awake. A vampire has been visiting her by night and a soldier visiting the family realizes this and lies in wait for the vampire and confronts him the next night. The vampire reveals that he has been taking her blood and has it in a bottle and she will never awaken unless it is returned to her. He also reveals that he cannot be killed except if he were to be burned in a fire, at which point his body would turn into a multitude of rats, snakes, ravens, etc. which would try to escape and must be slain and cast back into the fire. If even one should escape, the vampire would live again. After giving this helpful advice, the vampire attacks the soldier. The fight, the vampire falls, and the soldier carries out his instructions, burning the vampire and killing all the creepy crawlers that come out. Then he takes the bottle of blood back to the home and it's returned to the woman (I have no idea how) and she returns to health. The vampire in that story was clearly corporeal and collects blood with tools, not through fangs, and clearly doesn't drink the blood right away, if at all. Maybe the vampire uses the blood instead in some sort of magic ritual, Countess Bathory style, to preserve its life. In any case, this vampire operates by night because that's when he can sneak into womens rooms and steal their blood, but it's never suggested the day will kill it. According to its boasts, only the fire will do the job. In any case, this vampire may not actually be undead, but merely some sort of evil sorcerer. In many vampire stories in fact, the vampire is an apparently respectable member of the community, quite alive as far as anyone can tell, b
Interesting thought on that. I remember an old episode of _Sliders_ where they ended up on a world in the midst of a big fire, and accidentally brought some living (and intelligent) fire with them to the next universe. I got into a discussion (funny, I can't remember who it was with anymore) about what things would be necessary to actually have living fire. In other words, what additional things would fire need to have to be considered living and how could it be achieved in nature. We covered a lot of ground, and the conclusion we sort of got to is that, in a sense, we, and all other aerobic life at least are already a form of living fire. That's what cellular respiration is all about. It was an interesting discussion and, in the end, a lot of it depends on points of view. That of course is the problem. You don't think fire is alive because you know that fire isn't alive and if someone comes along and tells you that fire is now included in the scientific definition of things that are alive, you'll disagree, just like lots of people are still pretty upset that Pluto isn't a planet anymore. If you examine what is and isn't alive in enough detail, the boundary gets fuzzy enough that it becomes harder to know where to draw the line rather than easier.
It's a bit more like if the government tried and convicted everyone for murder 20 years when they turned 18 just in case they someday murdered someone. They might then feel that they did, in fact, have a right to go out and kill someone. There's a concept in law called double jeopardy, where you're not supposed to be able to be tried twice for the same crime. It should be applicable to summary judgments without due process as well. I suppose you could make the argument that, since it's an illegal punishment in the first place, being an automatic summary judgment without trial or the possibility of defending yourself, that normal legal rules shouldn't apply. So let's just throw the law out the window! Punishment all around. Everyone's probably done something to deserve it! There was actually a movie titled _Double Jeopardy_ about exactly that. A man frames his wife for murder and she goes to prison for murder. When she gets out, she discovers that he is still alive. The premise is that, since she's already been convicted of his murder, it would be double jeopardy to be tried for it if she were to actually do it. This premise is a little shaky in the real world since the justice system is far from just and tends to shrug off unjust punishment. It's probably because it was "god's will" or some other bit of religious "all's for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds" remnant that no amount of constitutional amendments and the like can scour from the system. In any case, the legal system usually has little problem with allowing prosecutors to charge a person with multiple crimes and multiple times for the same actions. There's little chance that the second murder of her husband, in another location, under different circumstances, and at another time would be considered the same crime for purposes of a double jeopardy defense. It's even pretty unlikely that she'd get time served or any time off her sentence. However unlikely the movie is, the idea in it appeals to most people's natural sense of justice. This is why indiscriminate or incautious punishment is a bad idea. People end up resenting an authority that is obviously doing such a bad job of administering justice and end up feeling that they might as well commit offenses if they're going to be punished either way. I don't know, maybe if the idea that the tax goes to compensate actual creators wasn't purely theoretical people wouldn't be so cynical about it. Maybe if the money were collected by the government and fairly distributed through some sort of grant program it wouldn't be so bad. As it stands, just giving the money to an oligopolistic cartel rubs people the wrong way.
Is this the _Full Metal Jacket_ approach to punishment? Don't punish the offender, punish everyone around them so they'll lash out at the offender for you and deliver harsher punishment than you're allowed to? Is that what we're supposed to be doing? Putting bars of soap in a sock and beating everyone we know who copies music with it in the night?
Sorry, wasn't this in The Art of Computer Programming? That is not in any way shape or form an obscure text in the field of computer science. In any sane world, any patent examiner dealing with patents in computer science would have the set on their desk.
I would have to say that treating womens sexuality as a treasure owned not by her, but by her family and society, which is what you're really talking about here, is typically just another way of demeaning women. Pornography, prostitution and promiscuity (how alliterative) are fairly divisive issues even among feminists. Some feminists take an absolutist approach and insist that a women's ability to choose to participate in such is a form of empowerment, whereas others see some or all of those things as demeaning and damaging. Frankly though, I don't think feminists from either camp would actually agree with you that China's porn crackdown is really about defending the rights of women. My personal point of view is that the social harm from such things is almost always less than the harm from criminalizing them. Anyway, this is all irrelevant. The real question is, is anyone being prosecuted/persecuted in this mess for pure male/male homosexual porn. If there's even one, then it puts the lie to your theory that this is all about protecting women from being demeaned.
But he's not measuring mass, he's measuring how much he can bench press. If he were on Phobos, and measured that in terms of mass, then moved to earth, suddenly he'd experience a massive performance loss, whereas, if he used pounds, he would get almost exactly the same results in both places. Ok, maybe not, now that I think about it, I'm ignoring inertia. Mars would be a better example, since the inertial effects of something with about two and a half times the mass of 225 lb weights would probably be negligible. However, something with 1000 times that mass is going to have some serious inertia, so to bench press the equivalent of 225 pounds on Phobos, you'd have to be strapped to a bench, bolted to the ground and start pulling back once the weight is nearly halfway up to avoid having it break free of your grip and fly into the air. Not to mention having to pull the weight down towards you rather than waiting for it to drop by itself and having to start pushing back up about halfway down and get it exact too, in order to avoid being crushed. Yeah, in any case, I would have to say that what I've written here clearly proves that I'm a nerd.
Before you jump to conclusions about something like this, you should check your assumptions. Your biggest assumption is about how BGs hyperspace jumping works. You are assuming that they can jump in anywhere they want at any vector they choose. There is no reason to believe that is the case. There may very well be restrictions on where they can jump into a solar system and their direction/speed when they get there. Maybe it's a tradeoff where they could jump wherever they want, but it would cost a huge amount of fuel, whereas it might be easier to jump in near a massive object like a planet. Or who knows how the rules would work. I think you're also assuming that their ships sensor equipment is better than it may be. I'm sure it's more advanced than what we have now, but it looks like they still rely on plain old optical and radio telescope style equipment. They don't seem to have star trek style sensor equipment that can see things happening _now_ light-years away, for example. So, figuring out what you're going to actually be near when you drop into another system seems like it would be pretty hard. Locating a single comet in our own star system is hard enough. Finding one orbiting a nearby star and figuring out what its current orbit will be in a matter of a few days is a feat well beyond us today. Even with much more advanced equipment, it would still be tremendously difficult to spot a comet in a short time frame. Especially when you consider the fact that, at the start of all this they were about to turn the Galactica into a museum, I'm guessing that the military probably had a lot of excellent astronomers and the like, but probably lost most of them to the private sector. So a lot of the surveying is probably being done by people who learned the details as part of their training, but haven't exactly been doing it on a day to day basis. So, I'm thinking that their choices are pretty much limited to dropping in near large planetary bodies, and searching for what they can in narrow, directed ways, not with some supreme omnidirectional scan like in star trek. Like others have pointed out, they would probably have to pass over various water sources as being too hard to refine for whatever reason, such as being in too deep a gravity well, or being too contaminated. I do remember them talking about how good their water reclamation system was in that same episode, however, but I'm sure it has its limits. They don't call comets "dirty snowballs" for nothing. So, overall, it's not that hard to believe it could be a challenge to find enough water in short order.
The father of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, had a slightly different idea of how the mouse would be used. The mouse was developed in conjunction with the chord keyboard. If you've never encountered the idea before, a chord keyboard is a minimalist one handed keyboard with just a few keys. Letters are typed with a chord keyboard through key combinations or "chords". The idea was that you would use the mouse with one hand and type with the other.
Of course, considering that the Qwerty keyboard is still in wide use and there are many computer users who wouldn't even comprehend the concept of a different keyboard layout let alone a different type of keyboard entirely, it's not surprising that the chord keyboard hasn't caught on. It's kind of sad really, it might be a much better system. Of course, it has a learning curve, but so does a regular keyboard.
I think that the mouse was a good idea. It's not being used entirely as it was intended, however.
Errr, the poster you're flaming wasn't the one who brought up ozone depletion. However the post which that poster was replying to, which did bring up the ozone hole and implied that it was an all natural phenomenon had a score of zero. So, it's quite possible that you saw the reply to the post and not the original post.
In short, yes, you are the only one who finds this a wee bit ironic. And no, I don't think that the poster you flamed made the original posters point at all.
I've thought about that one a bit. It ocurred to me that they already had an alien computer to study. They did say that none of the gadgets in it worked until the aliens showed back up, but maybe they just meant things like force fields and drive system. If they'd been studying a working alien computer for decades, they might have discovered security holes. In which case it's not all that improbable that they could interface a human computer with the alien computer. As for the aliens lousy overall security, there probably isn't a whole lot of dissent in the telepathic alien society. As a result of no-one ever trying to break into the computer system, there probably wasn't any real security to speak of, nor was there any reason to change the security in the decades since the small ship crashed. It might have been unthinkable to the aliens that any being from the planets they attacked could ever reach one of their motherships.
Obviously the Macintosh was used as part of a product placement deal. That's probably why many of us attack that detail so sharply. There are much better things to nit-pick about in that movie. For example, why would aliens with an enourmous ship already in orbit need to hi-jack primitive human sattelites to time their attack? Why would they send massive ships from orbit to the ground to destroy cities? Human beings can already destroy cities from space, and we can do it a lot faster than those ships were managing. Possibly the aliens had some way of storing a large portion of the energy released when dropping those ships in order to raise them again later, but the amount of energy required to put one of those things into orbit is probably easily greater than the amount it would take technologically advanced aliens to destroy every city on the planet. For that matter, those alien ships probably contained more metal and other resources than human beings have managed to mine in their entire history. What resources were those aliens going to consume like locusts? Wouldn't mining asteroids be more profitable? What's so special about earth? Also, how could one fighter pilot manage to punch out an alien in an armored organic suit when that alien was capable of killing a room full of people without the armor? Well, maybe the alien was really hurt by the crash, healed, and then used its telepathic abilities to kill all those people.
Anyway, my point is just that the computer thing wasn't really all that farfetched if certain circumstances which weren't actually explored in the movie are true. Also, Hollywood doesn't just get confused about computers. Anything technological, scientific or medical also seems to give them a lot of trouble.
As I understand it, n-cube is the generic name for a type of graph representing all possible bit strings of length n. A vertex (for example 001, where n==3) is connected to another vertex (let's say 011) if and only if the bit strings differ by only one bit position. So, 001 would be connected to 011 since the two bit strings differ only in the second bit position. 011 would be connected to 111, but 111 would not be connected to 001.
Anyway, an n-cube or hypercube is an efficient way to connect the processors in a massively parrallel supercomputer. As a result, there are already plenty of computers that are referred to as n-cubes. As a result, I'm pretty certain that Nintendo will not end up calling this machine the N-cube because the name is already taken, and defending their trademark would be very difficult.
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I don't think the poster was implying that everyone working for these companies are families and cronies of the politicians awarding the contracts. Rather that family, friends and cronies of these politicians seem to have an amazingly easy time getting jobs and contracts from these companies. That would still only make those people a very small percentage of the employees of the company.
If they're based on the seasons, then shouldn't the precession of the seasons affect them?
Yeah, you mean to, but so what? Laws like the one you're proposing just mean that, for every 50 illegal immigrants employed, there will be a "boss" whose job is mainly to collect a salary and act as a fall guy for the real employer.
Actually the staff of Asclepius only has one serpent. For some reason, the US medical industry especially, uses a staff with two serpents and wings, the Caduceus. Apparently, that symbol was used by a medical publisher and became a default symbol. The Caduceus was the symbol of Hermes (although it may date back before greek culture), who was the messenger god and also god of liars, thieves and of the dead who were passing from life to the underworld. Depending on your opinion of doctors, you might think that's spot on, or you might think it's bad advertising for their profession.
Crossing the border has its own natural risks as well. All kinds of activities have risks, but artificially adding to them is still immoral. For your jaywalking and speeding examples, yes it's dangerous to cross the road and yes it's dangerous to speed, but we work to reduce those dangers, not increase them on the crazy theory that making them more horrible will stop people from doing them. We don't, for example, put a Spiky Thing in Front(TM) on every car to be extra sure it will kill jaywalkers. We also don't put large spikes on the steering columns of cars so that anyone who crashes their car will be impaled. It's this whole sanity thing we have going.
Errrm. You're joking right? How is that teleportation? It actually goes beyond "quantum teleportation" and hits the definition of the classic sci fi molecular teleporter that takes matter on one end sends information about it as a signal and reconstructs the object molecule by molecule from other atoms at the other end.
I was always of the understanding that most of the mass for the moon came not from some of the mars sized mass that hit earth rebounding, but instead from the opposite side of the earth from the impact. Sort of like a Newtons cradle. So, mars sized mass hits earth and some of it does break up and maybe end up as part of the moon, but most of it just gets swallowed by earth, the shockwave blows off a huge piece of the earth on a similar trajectory some of which returns to earth and the rest of which accumulates into the moon.
Tritium isn't really that incredibly rare. Granted, there's probably only about 6 tons in the earths oceans, but it has to be considered in terms of how much is actually needed, rather than absolute quantity. Also, it has a half life of about 12.5 years, so the fact that the amount in the oceans remains pretty much constant means that it's being replenished constantly from radioactive decay of other elements. Plus, of course, we can just make the stuff from other, more common, isotopes and a neutron source (such as a neutron reactor).
For gold, if the 7-11 sells liquor, buy Goldschlager. Otherwise, they may sell some cheap gold-plated jewelery and the like. Or maybe some electronics with some gold contacts? Otherwise go next door to the liquor store or to the local Wal~mart. As for tritium and Deuterium... A gallon jug of water should contain about 65 milligrams of Deuterium and about 17 femtograms of Tritium. So let's say there's about 1000 gallons of water contained in products to buy in a 7-11, that's a whole 65 grams of deuterium and 17 picograms of tritium to buy in a 7-11. That's about 1/5 the weight of an E. Coli bacterium in tritium, not too shabby for a trip to the store.
Consider something else that is handled with civil fines: speeding. The rationale behind copyright infringement being illegal is that it hurts the profits of the producers and distributors of the copyrighted content. The rationale behind speeding being illegal is that it's unsafe and can kill people. In file sharing, every instance of sharing a song potentially costs the record company something like a dollar in lost sales. In speeding, every instance of going over the speed limit potentially causes thousands in property damage and crushes, tears and/or burns one or more people to horrible, painful death or permanent disfigurement and disability. Far, far more unauthorized file sharing goes on than is ever detected and taken to court. Far, far more speeding goes on than is ever detected and ticketed.
So, when are we going to start seeing $54,000 minimum speeding fines? Aside from Swiss judges making a point to multi-millionaires with overdeveloped speeding habits like in the recent speeding case mentioned on slashdot, that is.
If you were to steal all of the Van Gogh artwork in the world, and make copies of it, you wouldn't be violating copyright laws, since Van Gogh's work is all in the public domain now. If you didn't steal it and made copies from museum prints and so forth, then you would be violating copyright laws (gray area in some jurisdictions) because their mechanical reproduction (photo) of a public domain work is somehow magically a new copyrighted work. This lets the owner of the physical original of a public domain work essentially remove it from the public domain. I believe that's one of the ideas behind Corbis. The sad thing is that public museums do this. I suppose they have to make money somehow, but that doesn't really make it right. Anyway, even if stealing the painting and making a copy and distributing it doesn't violate copyright laws, I'm pretty sure that if the museum or private owner has a policy against copies then the courts are going to issue an injunction against distributing your copies while they're putting you away in prison for theft.
Good point. As an example, the 300 were actually 900. There were 300 Spartans, but each warrior had two Helots who flanked him. The Helots were Sparta's serf/slave class and would, quite frankly, have probably been better off under Persian rule. The incident was actually one where a small army did manage to hold back a large one for a time, eventually sacrificing their lives for it. However, the relative size of the army, and many other details have been distorted greatly by propaganda over the years.
I'm not sure where vampires burning in sunlight first appeared in literature, but I'm pretty sure that it first appeared in film in _Nosferatu_, sort of. He didn't burn exactly, just vanished in a poof of flash powder, but the implication of combustion was there. I'm pretty sure the idea didn't appear in literature until after film made it popular. The idea of the sun, or the dawn (even if the vampire isn't exposed to the sunlight in some cases) killing vampires has been around for a long time, although most stories were pretty vague about whether it actually killed them, or just drove them back to their graves, made them drop dead until night came again, etc. There was one story where a priest defeated a vampire with a rooster, it crowed and made the vampire drop dead, even though it was night. But most of the time, daytime isn't a problem, or it doesn't even come up. Trolls are more consistently killed by sunlight than vampires. Considering how widely varying the mythical characteristics of trolls are, the fact that they're more consistent than those of vampires really says something. The idea that vampires are creatures of night certainly appears in early vampire novels, but Dracula and Carmilla are able to move around during the day, even in sunlight, even if they don't necessarily have all of their powers.
Vampire myths come, of course, from numerous sources, with lots of ideas about what a vampire is. A lot of old vampire stories are really ghost stories. The vampire isn't a re-animated corpse, but is a spirit apparition, usually of the recently deceased, which visits the living at night, often family, and drains their life, one by one. That kind of story seems to be pretty obviously a rationalization of infectious disease but in any case depicts the vampire as a ghost, which are generally considered creatures of the night, but generally not destroyable by sunlight. Other vampire stories seem to be based on doctors who, at the time, were often quite literally men who visited people in their beds, and drained their blood again and again until they died from it. Witchcraft was also an association, as some myths said that a vampire was a witch or warlock, risen (bodily, not as a ghost in this case) after death.
I remember a vampire story involving a physical vampire. A woman is the victim of a vampire by night and ends up trapped near death in a sleep from which she will not awake. A vampire has been visiting her by night and a soldier visiting the family realizes this and lies in wait for the vampire and confronts him the next night. The vampire reveals that he has been taking her blood and has it in a bottle and she will never awaken unless it is returned to her. He also reveals that he cannot be killed except if he were to be burned in a fire, at which point his body would turn into a multitude of rats, snakes, ravens, etc. which would try to escape and must be slain and cast back into the fire. If even one should escape, the vampire would live again. After giving this helpful advice, the vampire attacks the soldier. The fight, the vampire falls, and the soldier carries out his instructions, burning the vampire and killing all the creepy crawlers that come out. Then he takes the bottle of blood back to the home and it's returned to the woman (I have no idea how) and she returns to health.
The vampire in that story was clearly corporeal and collects blood with tools, not through fangs, and clearly doesn't drink the blood right away, if at all. Maybe the vampire uses the blood instead in some sort of magic ritual, Countess Bathory style, to preserve its life. In any case, this vampire operates by night because that's when he can sneak into womens rooms and steal their blood, but it's never suggested the day will kill it. According to its boasts, only the fire will do the job. In any case, this vampire may not actually be undead, but merely some sort of evil sorcerer. In many vampire stories in fact, the vampire is an apparently respectable member of the community, quite alive as far as anyone can tell, b
Interesting thought on that. I remember an old episode of _Sliders_ where they ended up on a world in the midst of a big fire, and accidentally brought some living (and intelligent) fire with them to the next universe. I got into a discussion (funny, I can't remember who it was with anymore) about what things would be necessary to actually have living fire. In other words, what additional things would fire need to have to be considered living and how could it be achieved in nature. We covered a lot of ground, and the conclusion we sort of got to is that, in a sense, we, and all other aerobic life at least are already a form of living fire. That's what cellular respiration is all about. It was an interesting discussion and, in the end, a lot of it depends on points of view. That of course is the problem. You don't think fire is alive because you know that fire isn't alive and if someone comes along and tells you that fire is now included in the scientific definition of things that are alive, you'll disagree, just like lots of people are still pretty upset that Pluto isn't a planet anymore. If you examine what is and isn't alive in enough detail, the boundary gets fuzzy enough that it becomes harder to know where to draw the line rather than easier.
It's a bit more like if the government tried and convicted everyone for murder 20 years when they turned 18 just in case they someday murdered someone. They might then feel that they did, in fact, have a right to go out and kill someone. There's a concept in law called double jeopardy, where you're not supposed to be able to be tried twice for the same crime. It should be applicable to summary judgments without due process as well. I suppose you could make the argument that, since it's an illegal punishment in the first place, being an automatic summary judgment without trial or the possibility of defending yourself, that normal legal rules shouldn't apply. So let's just throw the law out the window! Punishment all around. Everyone's probably done something to deserve it!
There was actually a movie titled _Double Jeopardy_ about exactly that. A man frames his wife for murder and she goes to prison for murder. When she gets out, she discovers that he is still alive. The premise is that, since she's already been convicted of his murder, it would be double jeopardy to be tried for it if she were to actually do it. This premise is a little shaky in the real world since the justice system is far from just and tends to shrug off unjust punishment. It's probably because it was "god's will" or some other bit of religious "all's for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds" remnant that no amount of constitutional amendments and the like can scour from the system. In any case, the legal system usually has little problem with allowing prosecutors to charge a person with multiple crimes and multiple times for the same actions. There's little chance that the second murder of her husband, in another location, under different circumstances, and at another time would be considered the same crime for purposes of a double jeopardy defense. It's even pretty unlikely that she'd get time served or any time off her sentence.
However unlikely the movie is, the idea in it appeals to most people's natural sense of justice. This is why indiscriminate or incautious punishment is a bad idea. People end up resenting an authority that is obviously doing such a bad job of administering justice and end up feeling that they might as well commit offenses if they're going to be punished either way.
I don't know, maybe if the idea that the tax goes to compensate actual creators wasn't purely theoretical people wouldn't be so cynical about it. Maybe if the money were collected by the government and fairly distributed through some sort of grant program it wouldn't be so bad. As it stands, just giving the money to an oligopolistic cartel rubs people the wrong way.
Is this the _Full Metal Jacket_ approach to punishment? Don't punish the offender, punish everyone around them so they'll lash out at the offender for you and deliver harsher punishment than you're allowed to? Is that what we're supposed to be doing? Putting bars of soap in a sock and beating everyone we know who copies music with it in the night?
Sorry, wasn't this in The Art of Computer Programming? That is not in any way shape or form an obscure text in the field of computer science. In any sane world, any patent examiner dealing with patents in computer science would have the set on their desk.
I would have to say that treating womens sexuality as a treasure owned not by her, but by her family and society, which is what you're really talking about here, is typically just another way of demeaning women. Pornography, prostitution and promiscuity (how alliterative) are fairly divisive issues even among feminists. Some feminists take an absolutist approach and insist that a women's ability to choose to participate in such is a form of empowerment, whereas others see some or all of those things as demeaning and damaging. Frankly though, I don't think feminists from either camp would actually agree with you that China's porn crackdown is really about defending the rights of women. My personal point of view is that the social harm from such things is almost always less than the harm from criminalizing them.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant. The real question is, is anyone being prosecuted/persecuted in this mess for pure male/male homosexual porn. If there's even one, then it puts the lie to your theory that this is all about protecting women from being demeaned.
Fracken ay?
But he's not measuring mass, he's measuring how much he can bench press. If he were on Phobos, and measured that in terms of mass, then moved to earth, suddenly he'd experience a massive performance loss, whereas, if he used pounds, he would get almost exactly the same results in both places. Ok, maybe not, now that I think about it, I'm ignoring inertia. Mars would be a better example, since the inertial effects of something with about two and a half times the mass of 225 lb weights would probably be negligible. However, something with 1000 times that mass is going to have some serious inertia, so to bench press the equivalent of 225 pounds on Phobos, you'd have to be strapped to a bench, bolted to the ground and start pulling back once the weight is nearly halfway up to avoid having it break free of your grip and fly into the air. Not to mention having to pull the weight down towards you rather than waiting for it to drop by itself and having to start pushing back up about halfway down and get it exact too, in order to avoid being crushed.
Yeah, in any case, I would have to say that what I've written here clearly proves that I'm a nerd.
Before you jump to conclusions about something like this, you should check your assumptions. Your biggest assumption is about how BGs hyperspace jumping works. You are assuming that they can jump in anywhere they want at any vector they choose. There is no reason to believe that is the case. There may very well be restrictions on where they can jump into a solar system and their direction/speed when they get there. Maybe it's a tradeoff where they could jump wherever they want, but it would cost a huge amount of fuel, whereas it might be easier to jump in near a massive object like a planet. Or who knows how the rules would work.
I think you're also assuming that their ships sensor equipment is better than it may be. I'm sure it's more advanced than what we have now, but it looks like they still rely on plain old optical and radio telescope style equipment. They don't seem to have star trek style sensor equipment that can see things happening _now_ light-years away, for example. So, figuring out what you're going to actually be near when you drop into another system seems like it would be pretty hard. Locating a single comet in our own star system is hard enough. Finding one orbiting a nearby star and figuring out what its current orbit will be in a matter of a few days is a feat well beyond us today. Even with much more advanced equipment, it would still be tremendously difficult to spot a comet in a short time frame. Especially when you consider the fact that, at the start of all this they were about to turn the Galactica into a museum, I'm guessing that the military probably had a lot of excellent astronomers and the like, but probably lost most of them to the private sector. So a lot of the surveying is probably being done by people who learned the details as part of their training, but haven't exactly been doing it on a day to day basis.
So, I'm thinking that their choices are pretty much limited to dropping in near large planetary bodies, and searching for what they can in narrow, directed ways, not with some supreme omnidirectional scan like in star trek. Like others have pointed out, they would probably have to pass over various water sources as being too hard to refine for whatever reason, such as being in too deep a gravity well, or being too contaminated. I do remember them talking about how good their water reclamation system was in that same episode, however, but I'm sure it has its limits. They don't call comets "dirty snowballs" for nothing. So, overall, it's not that hard to believe it could be a challenge to find enough water in short order.
The father of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, had a slightly different idea of how the mouse would be used. The mouse was developed in conjunction with the chord keyboard. If you've never encountered the idea before, a chord keyboard is a minimalist one handed keyboard with just a few keys. Letters are typed with a chord keyboard through key combinations or "chords". The idea was that you would use the mouse with one hand and type with the other.
Of course, considering that the Qwerty keyboard is still in wide use and there are many computer users who wouldn't even comprehend the concept of a different keyboard layout let alone a different type of keyboard entirely, it's not surprising that the chord keyboard hasn't caught on. It's kind of sad really, it might be a much better system. Of course, it has a learning curve, but so does a regular keyboard.
I think that the mouse was a good idea. It's not being used entirely as it was intended, however.
Errr, the poster you're flaming wasn't the one who brought up ozone depletion. However the post which that poster was replying to, which did bring up the ozone hole and implied that it was an all natural phenomenon had a score of zero. So, it's quite possible that you saw the reply to the post and not the original post.
In short, yes, you are the only one who finds this a wee bit ironic. And no, I don't think that the poster you flamed made the original posters point at all.
I've thought about that one a bit. It ocurred to me that they already had an alien computer to study. They did say that none of the gadgets in it worked until the aliens showed back up, but maybe they just meant things like force fields and drive system. If they'd been studying a working alien computer for decades, they might have discovered security holes. In which case it's not all that improbable that they could interface a human computer with the alien computer. As for the aliens lousy overall security, there probably isn't a whole lot of dissent in the telepathic alien society. As a result of no-one ever trying to break into the computer system, there probably wasn't any real security to speak of, nor was there any reason to change the security in the decades since the small ship crashed. It might have been unthinkable to the aliens that any being from the planets they attacked could ever reach one of their motherships.
Obviously the Macintosh was used as part of a product placement deal. That's probably why many of us attack that detail so sharply. There are much better things to nit-pick about in that movie. For example, why would aliens with an enourmous ship already in orbit need to hi-jack primitive human sattelites to time their attack? Why would they send massive ships from orbit to the ground to destroy cities? Human beings can already destroy cities from space, and we can do it a lot faster than those ships were managing. Possibly the aliens had some way of storing a large portion of the energy released when dropping those ships in order to raise them again later, but the amount of energy required to put one of those things into orbit is probably easily greater than the amount it would take technologically advanced aliens to destroy every city on the planet. For that matter, those alien ships probably contained more metal and other resources than human beings have managed to mine in their entire history. What resources were those aliens going to consume like locusts? Wouldn't mining asteroids be more profitable? What's so special about earth? Also, how could one fighter pilot manage to punch out an alien in an armored organic suit when that alien was capable of killing a room full of people without the armor? Well, maybe the alien was really hurt by the crash, healed, and then used its telepathic abilities to kill all those people.
Anyway, my point is just that the computer thing wasn't really all that farfetched if certain circumstances which weren't actually explored in the movie are true. Also, Hollywood doesn't just get confused about computers. Anything technological, scientific or medical also seems to give them a lot of trouble.
As I understand it, n-cube is the generic name for a type of graph representing all possible bit strings of length n. A vertex (for example 001, where n==3) is connected to another vertex (let's say 011) if and only if the bit strings differ by only one bit position. So, 001 would be connected to 011 since the two bit strings differ only in the second bit position. 011 would be connected to 111, but 111 would not be connected to 001.
Anyway, an n-cube or hypercube is an efficient way to connect the processors in a massively parrallel supercomputer. As a result, there are already plenty of computers that are referred to as n-cubes. As a result, I'm pretty certain that Nintendo will not end up calling this machine the N-cube because the name is already taken, and defending their trademark would be very difficult.