I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead? That's easy. You still live. Now if someone made a copy of you and then you died, then the question becomes murky.
Who are you? Are you an immortal spirit enshrouded the flesh by God's will? Are you merely a collection of ever-replaced tissues? Are you a nothing but a collection of memories on a replaceable meat substrate?
If you develop Alzheimer's, are you still you? If you suffer brain damage that makes you mistake your wife for a hat, are you still you? If you take an antipsychotic to fight schizophrenia, are you still you? If you are captured by the military and broken under torture, are you still you? If a hypnotist attempting to bring up suppressed memories instead creates new ones for you, are you still you? If you get amnesia and have to relearn your former life through the testimony of those who knew you and your personal writings, are you still you?
Can anyone else be you? Is a copy you? Are you still you if you're the copy? Are you the person you were copied from? Are you really the same person as the child you were many years ago?
I don't present any answers. These questions are as deep as any religious question ever asked. You may find your answers to them come immediately and without need for consideration. You may find that they trouble you for years to come. You may find that it's a bunch of sophistry and blow it all off without an answer or any desire for one.
But ultimately, people who believe in digital immortality have found their answer. It's probably different from yours and probably different from mine, but it's not really that hard to imagine their answers once you start pondering the essential question of who exactly *you* are.
Unfortunately, that very fact means that it's going to be one hell of a fight for Tele2 and the Pirate Bay considering that most EU countries are heading towards stronger copyright restrictions against P2P sharing.
Woah, woah, woah! McCain is the only Republican candidate that's actually tried hard to *do* something to oppose torture. He's was the author of several bills and amendments to ban torture, which faced strident opposition from the Bush administration. McCain was tortured himself, after all.
If you're going to slam the guy, don't lie about one of his well-known positions that define the differences between him and the alternatives.
Both of whom didn't manage to pick up a single state.
If the Republican Party had proportional voting, then maybe Ron Paul would have a chance of being relevant with some of his 2nd & 3rd place wins last night, but with 16 delegates and the gap between the 1st & 2nd place candidates at nearly 300 delegates, he doesn't even have a chance of influencing the convention at all.
Yes. It bugs the heck out of me. Especially as an Obama supporter since before Super Tuesday, Obama has an elected delegate lead but Clinton had a superdelegate lead, if I recall correctly.
I really like the facts that the Democratic Party has proportional voting, unlike the Republicans, but why do we have such a patrician system for power brokering? Superdelegates need to go.
I'm sorry, but could you explain how Ron Paul's opposition to NAFTA (including his rants about the "NAFTA Superhighway" and conspiracy theories of a North American Union) reflect support of free trade?
i.e. Give us more details about how NAFTA is actually anti-free trade, especially in comparison to what existed before.
For bonus points, please defend his hand-wringing about a North American Union as somehow substantiated and how it does not play primarily to an audience that fears free trade with Mexico and Canada.
Many years ago, on a certain presidential campaign (which one is not important; he didn't win), if you got a "personal" answer to your letter addressed to the candidate, chances are that I wrote it and "signed" his name with a machine that scrawled "his" signature with a felt-tip pen. I worked on a state-wide campaign, and our candidate actually had to hand-sign all the letters he wrote. Could you post some more info about that machine? If I ever work on a major political campaign again, I want to know where to get one to save my candidate's time.
Plus, I admit that I just want to track down pictures of the machine because it sounds like it has to look really cool.
I've often pondered why no one has made a software program that could DM once certain parameters were established. It seems AI in gaming has advanced to the point where this is at least feasible. Of course it wouldn't be anything as great as a competent human DM, but for those of us outside large urban centers it would of been a god send. To DM *well,* it would have to pass the Turing test. The hard part of being a DM is breathing life into your NPCs and your worlds.
(Also, try out Planescape: Torment if you can find it.)
Because you're ROLE-PLAYING. Aren't you? You aren't just rolling dice and putting the business end of a sword into randomly-generated monsters to acquire their gold and +2 swords (+4 vs. randomly-generated monsters), are you? What exactly can you RP as a Paladin that you can't roleplay as a LG Cleric? Why do some people think that you can only RP if you pick a sub-optimal character?
Paul is +10% in several states. Not a single Super Tuesday state from what I've been able to find. If I'm wrong (and I do know that I couldn't find data for a few states), please post some polling data showing the opposite.
He . . . MIGHT have won Louisiana, 66% of provisional ballots went uncounted, it was enough to hand paul the win as 80% of provisionals that were counted went to Paul delegates. There is an official complaint filed by the campaign to find out what happend (Essentially all the people who signed up as Republican's late november paperwork went unfiled) Really, now. Did you expect the Republican Party to change the way it treats provisional ballots for candidates they don't like just because that person's a Republican too? Provisional ballots are a complete sham in most states -- a way of shutting people who might complain about voter suppression.
The economic collapse we are now experiencing makes the likelyhood of Paul running away with the Republican nomination increasingly likely as spring turns to summer. I get what you're saying, then...
Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!
Huckabee has won a state and is polling above 10% in at least some of the Super Tuesday states. Paul can't say the same. Paul is only relevant for the fanaticism of his supporters in spite of/because of his somewhat radical views.
Sure. The fallacious part of your argument is assuming that the first is the Christian and the second is the atheist, when it's the reverse that's more usually true.
Having seen the amount of effort that people who go to church spend on reading the Bible every week, I would seriously doubt it. Why would all (but a select few) atheists spend every week reading something they consider an offensive fantasy?
It's not my assumption, buddy. It's what religion's defenders are saying. Upthread there's a defender upbraiding a guy for asserting that Christians follow the Bible - that is, are fundamentalists. And now here's you saying that we should automatically assume that a Christian follows the Bible so closely as to be an expert on the subject.
You're not getting it again. Two people can be very familiar with the text, to the point of being experts, and follow it very differently. It's the same way that economists can look at the exact same data and end up supporting very different policies based on their other experiences. Liberals vs. conservatives, Keynesians vs. Monetarists, Austrian school vs. Chicago school, etc.
Well, which is it? Are Christians to be assumed to be fundamentalist Bible experts, or not? Are they to be assumed to be adherents of their Bible, or not? You can't have it both ways. Maybe you religionists could get together and agree on the arguments you're going to make? Just a thought.
It's not much of a thought. You seem incapable of viewing Christians in anything other than binary terms. Either they're ultra-orthodox fundamentalists who march in lock step with The One True Interpretation of the Bible, or they're just screwing off, making up crap as they go. This reductionist viewpoint shows nothing more than your intellectual bankruptcy. If everyone was capable of interpreting the Bible the *exact* same way and applying it to situations in life that it never talked about in the *exact* same way, we wouldn't have hundreds of Christian denominations and off-shoots. Interpretation matters.
So maybe it's not a good idea to assert that all Christians are to be assumed to be experts in their own Bible, and when an atheist questions the material in front of a believer, we should not automatically adopt the believer's position on the assumption that they're the expert.
*sigh* The believer is likely to be *more* familiar with the material. *More* is a RELATIVE TERM! Is this so freaking impossible to understand?
Who do you go to to get your car fixed if they're your only two choices? A) The Amish guy B) The friend who tinkers with cars
You paint me as saying that the guy who tinkers with cars has to have the same exact kinds of experiences as a trained mechanic with 10 years of work experience in spite of me explicitly and repeatedly claiming to the contrary. And that since that assertion is obviously not true, you "reason" that we should trust the Amish guy since he's more likely as an outsider to have had good reasons for rejecting machines which may have come from study of them.
Of course, one should not *automatically* suggest that the atheist knows less than the Bible scholar. Like in the obligatory car analogy, maybe your car is older, and your friend only has experience with EFI systems while the Amish guy once read about carburetors and knows more. Similarly, if an atheist comes in with some comment about the Book of Obadiah, then the chances that your average Christian knows enough to counter him is going to be very slim.
But the truth is that your average atheist is going to be *far, far* less familiar with the New Testament, the Pentateuch, and other books very commonly studied in most churches. This is the kind of stuff they cover in Sunday school, after all. What do you think people do at church in the mornings before the main worship service?
Children believe in Santa Claus. They're practically born believi
Sure there is - the supernatural's complete failure to be substantiated by any evidence in every single test. That's a great reason. The lack of evidence for milk in your fridge is more than enough to send you to the store for some; it's hardly unreasonable to conclude from the same lack of evidence - the universal failure of the supernatural to ever hold up to scrutiny - that the supernatural entities being proposed are, in all likelyhood, make-believe. I knew it would eventually come down to this argument. Your milk example shows that you believe in the logical fallacy that absence of evidence is that same as evidence of absence. We've demonstrated before that set theory is not a strong suit for you, but here it is all laid out. The inherent logicall fallacy behind your beliefs.
Sure. All bets are off. They might just as easily claim it to be pink as blue. They've demonstrated an inability to discern truth from fiction in one area; I wouldn't count on their ability to do so in any other. It would be foolish to do so. It's clear that you live in a world of extremes. One statement by a person that you think it logically flawed is an inherent sign that all other statements must be considered suspect to the point of expecting the absurd response of claiming that something before their eyes is not as they see it. If this is the extent of your critical thinking, then it's clear how you got to the positions that you have today.
Open and auditable methods. They're right there in the papers, you know - "Materials and methods." You can look and see exactly what they did.
And, at the last straw, if I don't believe them I can do the same experiment myself. If I spend the time I can become as much an expert as they are, and do the exact same experiment. But you don't, ultimately. You can't do it with everything.
There's no such replicability in religion. If I have doubts about the revelations that John received, there's no way I can replicate the experience. You can't study to be a prophet. You can't get a degree in divine revelation. That's faith-based thinking. A valid critique. Ultimately, all religion is personal. Much like the way you one day concluded that God was not real without any way of proving so.
Er, wait. Now you're asking me to prove something I never said. You denied that anybody does this at all, that to assert that people do was "divorced from reality." Your words. I know what they mean. You don't seem to. [...] All people? You asserted that the assertion that even some were dogmatic was "divorced from reality." At the same time that you were being dogmatic, of course, which is what makes the whole thing so hilarious. No, I never did, and you have completely failed to prove so. I've requoted lines you've quoted and explained in detail what I said which is that not everybody does this and not that nobody does it. I'd diagram the sentence for you if Slashdot allowed for complex drawings, but I can't. At this point, you're just being willfully blind to the truth in an attempt to win an argument based on a falsehood.
Let me restate this: you are are complete liar or completely delusional.
There's really no such thing as a "religious moderate". And there we are. The black and white view of a zealot. Really what point is there in discussing things further? You believe that everyone who thinks differently than you on matters of religion is a fundamentalist, a crazy, and incapable of moderation. You are incapable of seeing things in shades of gray and thus no different from any other religious zealot.
Until you can do something to back up a single one of your claims about something that I've said, I see no point in further discussion with someone with such a blatantly inflexible and skewed view of the world.
While feminists like to exaggerate the bad properties and general uselessness of men and the superior characteristics of women, they fail to realize that those properties have been genetically selected by their sexual counterpart. If men are really that useless, this must mean that women really suck at selecting a sexual partner.
I would like to point out that natural selection has given us obesity (thanks to genes adapted to surviving famine), arthritis (due to inflammation mechanisms meant to fight off diseases), a lack of ability to produce Vitamin C (due to the abundance of fruit in our ancestors' diets), and a whole host of other adaptations that seemed like a really good idea back when we were uncivilized hunter-gatherers but which are flaws in modern society.
I mean, am I the only one who's been using Python since at least 1.5.2? The made major changes between that version and 2.0 that broke almost all of our 1.5.2 scripts (particularly in the way they handled regular expressions).
I didn't kill Python then, and it didn't stop us from using 1.5.2 for years to come for our old scripts and 2.x for our newer scripts.
That's not quite the same as saying that there is evidence that they do not code any amino acid. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I concede that you have a logically superior argument here. I can only offer the weaker argument that such an obvious (and natural) application of DNA would have most likely been mentioned if it existed due to said obviousnes, but the lack of such a mention does not prove that it does not do so.
Instead, I will simply offer that the lack of a start-stop codon sequence around any such base pairs would render it them non-encoding. In fact, as a safety precaution, one could prefix any use of this artificial nucleotide with a few stop codons just in case.
Still, I think you kind of shot me out of the water, there. I think the preponderance of evidence is in my favor, but it's no slam dunk that there's no real safety issues.
Note: Everyone can always find someone who knows more about LOTR than themselves, sometimes a scary amount more. Which you've amply demonstrated. <g> All I did was make a joke about the Eternal September of 1993 and LOTR-ize it with about 2 minutes of searching the Wikipedia for months of the year and a rough timeline of events, which I thought said that the 4th Age started a few decades before that year.
Nor does accepting the existence of the supernatural inherently lead to irrational behavior (especially in the domain of the observable). But that's where it fails. There's no good reason to accept the existence of the supernatural. None. The only way to do it is with faith-based thinking, which is by definition irrational; thus, someone who accepts the supernatural is already behaving irrationally, in at least one instance. There's no good reason to accept the non-existence of the supernatural either. The only way to do it is with faith-based thinking. Both propositions are equally impossible to prove or disprove. The only rational position, if you want to take a purely materialist point of view is, "I don't know." That's not the position you've advocated, though.
Now, you're trying to tell me that someone who embraces irrationality in one area can't be expected to be irrational in any other; I don't see why that would be true. Someone crazy enough to assert, in all seriousness, that they are 18th-century general Napoleon Bonaparte can reliably be expected to be crazy about other things, too. Can you assume them to be crazy about all things? If someone claims that they're Napoleon, do you immediately expect them not to realize the sky is blue? Irrationality in one area does not imply irrationality in others no more than rationality in one area implies rationality in others. Believing unprovable things about the matters we cannot test and observe does not imply irrationality about the things which we can test and observe. (One can believe in God and evolution at the same time, for example.)
Nonsense. The strictures of the scientific method allow me to accept as proven information that others have done the work to prove. That's how it works - it doesn't matter who does the proving. There's nothing at all similar in religion. Doctrine and trust. How do you know that they adequately proved it? Because they said that their proof is adequate? Well then, bring on the cold fusion and the antigrav, 'cause there was never a need for anyone else to test and confirm it. At some point you have to take someone else's word because you lack the background and resources to test their claims yourself.
I did, already. You're either forgetful or a liar. Probably both depending on what's convenient. There's certainly no honest defense of religion. No. You didn't. You merely quoted a line where I said *explicitly* that they didn't and claimed "Nuh-uh. That's not what you said." Show me a line where I said or directly implied that one must accept as inerrant scripture when faced with physical evidence to the contrary. Just show me ONE line. You can't, and because you can't, you call *me* a liar when it is you making an indefensible accusation. The intellectual dishonesty would be stunning if it wasn't so common for hardliners like yourself.
Do you see yours? "Divorced from reality." I know what that phrase means. You don't seem to. You're either ignorant or a liar. Are you that dense? The stereotype that all people of faith are dogmatic is false -- thus divorced from reality. I'd love to hear your alternate bizarro-English definition of the phrase. I'm sure it's just as connected to reality as the rest of your claims about what I've said which are viewable on record above. But go ahead -- quibble over the definition of what "is" is in stubborn, prideful defense of a demonstrably wrong statement.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just picture it now... "Here's the fish you ordered sir". "But wait, its an empty plate, I don't see the fish".
Strange. The Emperor seems quite fond of the dish...
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead? That's easy. You still live. Now if someone made a copy of you and then you died, then the question becomes murky.
Who are you? Are you an immortal spirit enshrouded the flesh by God's will? Are you merely a collection of ever-replaced tissues? Are you a nothing but a collection of memories on a replaceable meat substrate?
If you develop Alzheimer's, are you still you? If you suffer brain damage that makes you mistake your wife for a hat, are you still you? If you take an antipsychotic to fight schizophrenia, are you still you? If you are captured by the military and broken under torture, are you still you? If a hypnotist attempting to bring up suppressed memories instead creates new ones for you, are you still you? If you get amnesia and have to relearn your former life through the testimony of those who knew you and your personal writings, are you still you?
Can anyone else be you? Is a copy you? Are you still you if you're the copy? Are you the person you were copied from? Are you really the same person as the child you were many years ago?
I don't present any answers. These questions are as deep as any religious question ever asked. You may find your answers to them come immediately and without need for consideration. You may find that they trouble you for years to come. You may find that it's a bunch of sophistry and blow it all off without an answer or any desire for one.
But ultimately, people who believe in digital immortality have found their answer. It's probably different from yours and probably different from mine, but it's not really that hard to imagine their answers once you start pondering the essential question of who exactly *you* are.
Unfortunately, that very fact means that it's going to be one hell of a fight for Tele2 and the Pirate Bay considering that most EU countries are heading towards stronger copyright restrictions against P2P sharing.
Yes, as the article clearly says.
More importantly, is it compatible with Time Machine? I'd love to not have my backup drive be a security risk.
Woah, woah, woah!
McCain is the only Republican candidate that's actually tried hard to *do* something to oppose torture. He's was the author of several bills and amendments to ban torture, which faced strident opposition from the Bush administration. McCain was tortured himself, after all.
If you're going to slam the guy, don't lie about one of his well-known positions that define the differences between him and the alternatives.
Both of whom didn't manage to pick up a single state.
If the Republican Party had proportional voting, then maybe Ron Paul would have a chance of being relevant with some of his 2nd & 3rd place wins last night, but with 16 delegates and the gap between the 1st & 2nd place candidates at nearly 300 delegates, he doesn't even have a chance of influencing the convention at all.
Paul is irrelevant at this point.
Yes. It bugs the heck out of me. Especially as an Obama supporter since before Super Tuesday, Obama has an elected delegate lead but Clinton had a superdelegate lead, if I recall correctly.
I really like the facts that the Democratic Party has proportional voting, unlike the Republicans, but why do we have such a patrician system for power brokering? Superdelegates need to go.
I'm sorry, but could you explain how Ron Paul's opposition to NAFTA (including his rants about the "NAFTA Superhighway" and conspiracy theories of a North American Union) reflect support of free trade?
i.e. Give us more details about how NAFTA is actually anti-free trade, especially in comparison to what existed before.
For bonus points, please defend his hand-wringing about a North American Union as somehow substantiated and how it does not play primarily to an audience that fears free trade with Mexico and Canada.
Plus, I admit that I just want to track down pictures of the machine because it sounds like it has to look really cool.
(Also, try out Planescape: Torment if you can find it.)
Why do some people think that you can only RP if you pick a sub-optimal character?
Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!
Huckabee has won a state and is polling above 10% in at least some of the Super Tuesday states.
Paul can't say the same. Paul is only relevant for the fanaticism of his supporters in spite of/because of his somewhat radical views.
Sure. The fallacious part of your argument is assuming that the first is the Christian and the second is the atheist, when it's the reverse that's more usually true.
Having seen the amount of effort that people who go to church spend on reading the Bible every week, I would seriously doubt it. Why would all (but a select few) atheists spend every week reading something they consider an offensive fantasy?
It's not my assumption, buddy. It's what religion's defenders are saying. Upthread there's a defender upbraiding a guy for asserting that Christians follow the Bible - that is, are fundamentalists. And now here's you saying that we should automatically assume that a Christian follows the Bible so closely as to be an expert on the subject.
You're not getting it again. Two people can be very familiar with the text, to the point of being experts, and follow it very differently. It's the same way that economists can look at the exact same data and end up supporting very different policies based on their other experiences. Liberals vs. conservatives, Keynesians vs. Monetarists, Austrian school vs. Chicago school, etc.
Well, which is it? Are Christians to be assumed to be fundamentalist Bible experts, or not? Are they to be assumed to be adherents of their Bible, or not? You can't have it both ways. Maybe you religionists could get together and agree on the arguments you're going to make? Just a thought.
It's not much of a thought. You seem incapable of viewing Christians in anything other than binary terms. Either they're ultra-orthodox fundamentalists who march in lock step with The One True Interpretation of the Bible, or they're just screwing off, making up crap as they go. This reductionist viewpoint shows nothing more than your intellectual bankruptcy. If everyone was capable of interpreting the Bible the *exact* same way and applying it to situations in life that it never talked about in the *exact* same way, we wouldn't have hundreds of Christian denominations and off-shoots. Interpretation matters.
So maybe it's not a good idea to assert that all Christians are to be assumed to be experts in their own Bible, and when an atheist questions the material in front of a believer, we should not automatically adopt the believer's position on the assumption that they're the expert.
*sigh*
The believer is likely to be *more* familiar with the material. *More* is a RELATIVE TERM! Is this so freaking impossible to understand?
Who do you go to to get your car fixed if they're your only two choices?
A) The Amish guy
B) The friend who tinkers with cars
You paint me as saying that the guy who tinkers with cars has to have the same exact kinds of experiences as a trained mechanic with 10 years of work experience in spite of me explicitly and repeatedly claiming to the contrary. And that since that assertion is obviously not true, you "reason" that we should trust the Amish guy since he's more likely as an outsider to have had good reasons for rejecting machines which may have come from study of them.
Of course, one should not *automatically* suggest that the atheist knows less than the Bible scholar. Like in the obligatory car analogy, maybe your car is older, and your friend only has experience with EFI systems while the Amish guy once read about carburetors and knows more. Similarly, if an atheist comes in with some comment about the Book of Obadiah, then the chances that your average Christian knows enough to counter him is going to be very slim.
But the truth is that your average atheist is going to be *far, far* less familiar with the New Testament, the Pentateuch, and other books very commonly studied in most churches. This is the kind of stuff they cover in Sunday school, after all. What do you think people do at church in the mornings before the main worship service?
Children believe in Santa Claus. They're practically born believi
And, at the last straw, if I don't believe them I can do the same experiment myself. If I spend the time I can become as much an expert as they are, and do the exact same experiment. But you don't, ultimately. You can't do it with everything. There's no such replicability in religion. If I have doubts about the revelations that John received, there's no way I can replicate the experience. You can't study to be a prophet. You can't get a degree in divine revelation. That's faith-based thinking. A valid critique. Ultimately, all religion is personal. Much like the way you one day concluded that God was not real without any way of proving so. Er, wait. Now you're asking me to prove something I never said. You denied that anybody does this at all, that to assert that people do was "divorced from reality." Your words. I know what they mean. You don't seem to.
[...]
All people? You asserted that the assertion that even some were dogmatic was "divorced from reality." At the same time that you were being dogmatic, of course, which is what makes the whole thing so hilarious. No, I never did, and you have completely failed to prove so. I've requoted lines you've quoted and explained in detail what I said which is that not everybody does this and not that nobody does it. I'd diagram the sentence for you if Slashdot allowed for complex drawings, but I can't. At this point, you're just being willfully blind to the truth in an attempt to win an argument based on a falsehood.
Let me restate this: you are are complete liar or completely delusional. There's really no such thing as a "religious moderate". And there we are. The black and white view of a zealot. Really what point is there in discussing things further? You believe that everyone who thinks differently than you on matters of religion is a fundamentalist, a crazy, and incapable of moderation. You are incapable of seeing things in shades of gray and thus no different from any other religious zealot.
Until you can do something to back up a single one of your claims about something that I've said, I see no point in further discussion with someone with such a blatantly inflexible and skewed view of the world.
While feminists like to exaggerate the bad properties and general uselessness of men and the superior characteristics of women, they fail to realize that those properties have been genetically selected by their sexual counterpart. If men are really that useless, this must mean that women really suck at selecting a sexual partner.
I would like to point out that natural selection has given us obesity (thanks to genes adapted to surviving famine), arthritis (due to inflammation mechanisms meant to fight off diseases), a lack of ability to produce Vitamin C (due to the abundance of fruit in our ancestors' diets), and a whole host of other adaptations that seemed like a really good idea back when we were uncivilized hunter-gatherers but which are flaws in modern society.
No it wouldn't.
I mean, am I the only one who's been using Python since at least 1.5.2? The made major changes between that version and 2.0 that broke almost all of our 1.5.2 scripts (particularly in the way they handled regular expressions).
I didn't kill Python then, and it didn't stop us from using 1.5.2 for years to come for our old scripts and 2.x for our newer scripts.
Python already has C-style string formatting in the form of the % operator.
i.e. print "%03d %03d" % ( num1, num2 )
or, using a hash, print "%(foo)03d %(bar)03d" % { 'foo': num1, 'bar': num2, 'baz': num3 }
So, what exactly is Python missing here, oh wise and mighty smartass C programmer?
Instead, I will simply offer that the lack of a start-stop codon sequence around any such base pairs would render it them non-encoding. In fact, as a safety precaution, one could prefix any use of this artificial nucleotide with a few stop codons just in case.
Still, I think you kind of shot me out of the water, there. I think the preponderance of evidence is in my favor, but it's no slam dunk that there's no real safety issues.
All I did was make a joke about the Eternal September of 1993 and LOTR-ize it with about 2 minutes of searching the Wikipedia for months of the year and a rough timeline of events, which I thought said that the 4th Age started a few decades before that year.
I bow to your superior geek knowledge, though.