As so often happens on slashdot, although I do not know enough to refute the surgeon you speak of, I know enough to suggest you get a second opinion. It would appear that having one eye for near and one for far sight would produce massive eyestrain. The brain cannot take a large difference between either eye - many of us who have a normal range of vision in one eye and near/farsighted in the other eye have to wear glasses, because one does not just focus on one eye and then the other. Also, even if eyestrain were not a factor, depth perception must be somewhat off. I do not underestimate the lengths people go to get rid of glasses - before laser surgery there were scalpal-based procedures that had 50% failure rates - but I would merely suggest you ask another eyedoctor. I believe that the "farsighted in 4 years" thing is total bullox, as the other eye will be unchanged.
(except after Bush jr. was elected. He blocked those disclosuers)
Why do these things never hit the fan? The "Liberal Media" had 9 months to turn that into a source for discussion, yet the only place one finds out about it is from slashdot and anti-government sites like counterpunch.
I believe I read in a column in PC Magazine a couple years back something like the following quote(Columnists with too much time on their hands are the only thing that makes the mag worth reading, really):
"In the future...(This was I think '97, back when the bubble was swelling), The truly smart and powerful people will be not those who merely posses knowledge, but those who know ways of procuring more knowledge on demand, of learning and of knowing where to learn things faster than their peers."
It was one of the few things in their ludicrous 5-year forcasts that is starting to come true.
Go look what happened at the Redskins-Eagles game. They had to stop the game because some jackass security officer had sprayed it into a crowd to stop some fight between two drunks. The resulting irritant-filled air cause a chunk of the crowd to leave and the game to halt because the players(30 yards away down on the field) were complaining of irritated eyes. Pepper spray is basically Tear Gas Lite, liquified. It is not only an irritant if it is in one's eyes.
It has been thought about for years, since a little after DDR was made standard. QBM uses a nice, clean quadruple-sine, spaced out evenly in quarter-clocks, unlike the messy jagged lines that DDR2 will use. The problem has always been how to eliminate the interference. It was looking as if there were going to need double-ECC circuits built in, because the neat quad-sinewave averages out to a straight line much easier than the jagged DDR2 lines, which are made to be combinative waves offset as little as possible, to made the signal stronger than the signal chatter. Radiation(white noise) was always a problem with RAM, much more so at higher elevations(Colorado gets about 100x more ram errors than sealevel does, necessitating ECC ram), and Kentron still hasnt explained how the PLL will work to filter out all that noise.
I never really saw the rationale in upgrading past Word 97 as a desktop user(and not as a corporate purchasing consultant, who lease their souls to the most established company). Are there any new, compelling features? Any? Will I be able to strangle the bump-mapped, anisotropically filtered paperclip with the $479 CDW receipt for the STANDARD VERSION of office XP?
The delay on the lightning gun prevents it from being better than the redeemer. What cripples it is that the netcode for the game right now is so crappy that unless the person is standing still, it is impossible to hit anyone unless you are running back and forth firing at someone else with a lightning gun 10 yards away.
You're right, the british offered freedom from slavery to blacks who would join up/revolt in both the Revolution and 1812.
I was talking about the result of 1812 with a british friend the other day, about how it ended in a stalemate, and then he pointed out that London wasn't burned to the ground. The fact that the war was fought in North America and only on our side of the Atlantic shows just who won.
1)There is a considerable percentage of people in the US that have spinal problems like herniated disks.
2)There is a considerable percentage of people in the US that are too stupid to read signs warning that people with condition 1) are not to use the coaster.
3)The main injury-producing(and this includes brain injuries, spinal injuries, etc.) factor in roller coasters is the fact that they are not a smooth ride. Banging one's head against the side of the restraint 100 times in the course of a minute long ride has a lot more effect on people than any "sustained g-force injury"
4)Any average coaster will shake/give a rough ride 10x more under sustained, high G-forces than in a straightaway, because the only place one encounters sustained, high G-forces is at the bottom of a steep hill, and in addition to being at the greatest speed of the whole ride, it is changing direction from pointing at the center of the earth to pointing at the sky again, and this means that much of the energy goes into friction.
The fact that high G-forces are not the root cause does not make them any less dangerous, they are an indicator(and a cause) of turbulance in the ride, and it is much easier to tell a lay audience that they are limiting G-forces than to go into WHY high G-forces cause injuries.
This drammatically increases the chances that CG will become somewhat of a standard. Right now, it looks as if this is a case of NV putting forward the technology merely in order to push their products forward. Any standard without industry acceptance would be dead in the water, and its failure would invalidate the 3-dTbufferAnisographotopically mapped TexSurfaces features they would be including on their next cards. This way they have a way to get past the slow-as-hell OpenGL board and actually retain some control over the standards they work on without either ceding control to BillyG or keeping their competitors out. It works like this: NV knows it does not have the force to push its own Glide-esque language on the industry. There are too many other cards out there *cough*R300*cough* that could potentially grab enough market share to lure developers away from anything proprietory into existing standards that work on everything. Open-sourcing CG is also a way of putting pressure on other companies to adopt it, as ATI seems a little reluctant to adopt something that NV controls tightly. In the war between OpenGL2.0 and DirectX9.0, CG looked like it didn't have a chance to replace these venerable industry standards, but with a lot of developer support before either of these is released(by giving any potential CG programmer the source code for free) will validate it. It's explained pretty well in this article about the impending split in developer's plans.
I would like to thank you for being one of the first authors of an article to a) have personal information of the subject b) to actively respond to debates which would normally end 10 deep into a stupid arguement and c) to care about feedback.
Mods: This guy deserves a +3 on every comment for merely responding to comments on his article. Hundreds of others never bother.
The last person who admitted they worked for microsoft on slashdot never got the chance to retire at 35 on 401k benefits, if you know what I mean.
Seriously though, Gates(and I could have a link for as many offenses against humanity as there are posts on this page) is trying to take over the world: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4452
Brings to mind one of my favorite audio clips. Say what you will about trey parker and matt stone being immature idiots who enjoy potty humor, but they do have a better sense of what's going on in the world than 99% of the rest of TV 'personalities'.
One of the abilities of the Radeon 9700 that is very promising to this type of application is that it allows you to code in the GPU's ASM language, and it spits back the image. This could vastly, vastly improve rendering, and allow you to use one GPU where previously you needed a renderfarm.
A little explanation to non-USians: In the US, pedophilia is referred to by the general population as an adult being attracted to an under-18 person. The age of consent here ranges from around 14 to 18, depending on state and situation. There is a huge ignorance of what consitutes a pedophile.
In a medical/psychological sense (IMO the correct sense when deciding when to be disgusted or not) pedophilia is sexual interest by a mature person in a pre-pubescent. Socially, people mix this up with the legal definition of pedophilia(a person with a large age difference) which was made to be absolutely sure that all people who went through puberty. A large majority of what people call pedophiles(judging from child-porn reports) are interested in adolescents who have already gone through puberty. There are tons of people who say there is no difference between a 25-year-old molesting a 7-year-old and a 25-year-old having consensual sex with a 15-year-old. As to your and many other's VR-fantasy thing:
pedophilia - virtual child porn, after being ruled illegal, was ruled legal on appeal, as long as no actual children were involved
rape - From what I can tell, most psychiatrists acknowledge 2 kinds of rape - 1 where the rapist derives pleasure from hurting/controlling the person(probably wouldn't translate into VR) and 1 where the rapist is merely looking for a way to get off, or convinces himself of consensuality where there isnt any. The second kind could partake in VR-sex, but in any case, since pornography is already too easy to find, I doubt they would seek it out.
murder - Go play GTA3, SoF2, Q3, UT, CS, god, pick any acronym you want, and it will correspond to a first person shooter.
theft - usually the majority of the thrill someone gets from stealing is in the acquisition of the goods, meaning the increase in their wealth, with notable exceptions. In the case of these exceptions, I doubt that a petty shoplifter needs VR. It's simply not cost-effective, and it won't really help any more than chewing gum helps w/ the oral fixation part of quitting smoking. Yes, it's a compulsive behavior, but knowledge that the VR is merely therapy quickly takes away any thrill/adrenaline rush incurred in stealing.
While it at first sounds interesting, VR as therapy is not something that can easily fix something the person doesn't want to fix. Until we completely repeal amendments 4 through 10, and 8 in particular(at the rate we are going, this should be completed about 6 months into Bush's second term in office), a judge will probably not be able to sentence a person to virtual reality therapy. Seeing the age of the judges, they probably won't, for a while, as least. As Douglas Adams said, 'anything invented after you turn 35 is against the natural order of things.'
Overall, the use of VR to simulate crimes in order to prevent them is not a very good idea, and I feel it is better to fix the situation at the source, like if a person is poor, give them a job, give them welfare, something, just don't make them steal to eat. If a person wants to kill people, find out why, etc. (*small note: I am of the opinion that child porn is caused by pedophilia, not the other way around, and I am absent a good way to deal with pedophilia other than locking them up. I merely regard it as wrong when consent is only considerred invalid by the law*)
Please, to all gun nuts out there, don't do this and leave it in the field. Cart it away to someplace not affected by the watershed. I'm not a tree-hugger, but monitors have something like 8 pounds of lead a piece for a 17". That's enough, properly dissolved, to poison all of the water consumed by Washington DC water supply in a day to federally unsafe levels.
Cancer cells are merely normal human cells with a few extraordinarily improbably mutations that allow them to break free of whatever it is that self-organises cells in a multicellular organism and reproduce without control.
Ones that have the same telomere-shortening vulerabilities as human cells(and from what I can tell, almost all sexual organisms) eventually stop reproducing, and we call them moles, or cysts. Strains that have somehow bypassed this aging process are called Cancer.
Cancerous cells are merely malignant(meaning they won't stop growing) moles/cysts/whatever you call them in X part of your body. They are still 99.99percent human cells.
Any virus that is designed to destroy cancer cells will destroy human cells just as easily(It seems that the body does not specifically code for angiogenesis[dynamic formation of blood vessels] so it adapts to the tumor's demands for blood the same way it would as for any other growing body part, by forming new blood vessels. Without angiogenesis(and there are angiogenesis-inhibitors that are looking promising) a tumor without blood running through it dies the same way a body part without circulation would. All this means that any antibodies formed in the person's blood against virii work for the cancerous cells too.) Since antiviral medications are so volatile(usually they are carcinogens at even moderate doses) there is no way we could treat people wholesale with this kind of thing.
The only thing that might work are virii that only code a specific, small segment of cancerous cells that tells them to either suicide(would be very dangerous since the virus would likely affect the host too) or to reprogram whatever section of their genetic code that has been modified to make them cancerous. This would be extremely hard as most cancers are genetically unique, as are the people infected with them.
There are also, on the horizon, growth-inhibitors that look very promising as a cure for any type of cancer, but could bring on premature aging or stop growth in non-mature patients. I recall a study somewhere in popular science a couple years back about a group of hormones that are released from south pacific sea slugs in trace amounts that stopped tumor growth in 100% of mice and reduced the size of tumors in 80%, but which could only be made at incredible expense from dozens of sea slugs that live at 2 miles deep and were impossible(so far) to manufacture. Things like this are why we need to have wider-ranging studies(not 100$ million put into the healing affects of soy) on unique substances' anti-cancer properties.
Any way you slice it, it is very hard to negatively affect a cancer without negatively affecting the body, other than some type of surgery, which doesn't protect from metastasizing.
--------- I disagree with your right to exist, but I will defend to the death your parent's right to grant it to you.
900 posts into this(What is it that makes this so popular?) I doubt this will be read, but my 2 cents: Get the insight w/ CVT. Better gas mileage and a completely computer-controlled transmission. This could make as much difference as automatic over manual. Also, and more importantly, looks. The closest thing the prius resembles is someone that needs a nosejob. It is one of the ugliest cars I have seen in a while. It's too short, snubby, and other than being a hybrid, it adds no features we havn't seen on a million other cars. The insight actually looks GOOD, better than most sedans and a lot of sports cars IMO. Another factor: A 2 seater trying to cut down on size is inherently roomier than a 4-seater trying to cut down on size. Better gas mileage, tons better looks, CVT, more room, and(in comparison to your 50 mile electric) u get 600 miles off of 20$(10 gallons) of gas. Much as I would like to reccomend a true alternative fuel car, the infrastructure is just not ready, even if the tech may be.
I'm tired of the word "cult." It is just a way of saying "A contemptuous religion I don't like, which I don't care about offending followers." If your religion requires you to suicide bomb other people(In the eyes of the idiotic news media anyway), then you are a "militant radical." If it requires you to have sex with your spiritual leader at age 9, then you are an "innocent victim," and it is an "isolated incident" in a "religion." If you decide emigrate here from pakistan, with your 4 wives, you are committing a "crime," no matter that the government is interfering with your religion. If your religion says that you must avoid the modern world and live in isolation from others, you are either the "quaint little sect of the amish" or you are a "cult" that must be firebombed out of Waco. If your religion requires you to commit suicide when you turn 70 and you can no longer contribute to society, and you do this voluntarily, it is a "cult." If you decide to dedicate your life to making a stand for free speech(the point is not in what u say, but in saying it), as in Falun Gong, you are a "cult" who don't have any sense to stay out of the eyes of the government. What money do you think Falun Gong requires? It has 70 million members, for god's sake. The reason the government gave for outlawing 5% of its populace was their belief in faith-healing jeopardised public safety, in that according to the government, 1600 of its members refused medical treatment(how many people do that in the US on a purely secular basis, via 'do not revive' orders?) and died. In a country with so little good healthcare, and so many people, I think the issue is a bit trivial. People near-death rarely contribute much more to the workforce if they are saved(usually the very old), and that is the only basis I can think of for a communist society, the stability of the population, for them to do this. Why are they considerred 'evil' in the least bit? What have they done to deserve this label? Make choices on their medical treatment based on their beliefs? What, were this in the US, would be considerred dangerous, illegal, or cultlike about Falun Gong?
Slashdot Mirror
As so often happens on slashdot, although I do not know enough to refute the surgeon you speak of, I know enough to suggest you get a second opinion. It would appear that having one eye for near and one for far sight would produce massive eyestrain. The brain cannot take a large difference between either eye - many of us who have a normal range of vision in one eye and near/farsighted in the other eye have to wear glasses, because one does not just focus on one eye and then the other. Also, even if eyestrain were not a factor, depth perception must be somewhat off. I do not underestimate the lengths people go to get rid of glasses - before laser surgery there were scalpal-based procedures that had 50% failure rates - but I would merely suggest you ask another eyedoctor. I believe that the "farsighted in 4 years" thing is total bullox, as the other eye will be unchanged.
(except after Bush jr. was elected. He blocked those disclosuers)
Why do these things never hit the fan? The "Liberal Media" had 9 months to turn that into a source for discussion, yet the only place one finds out about it is from slashdot and anti-government sites like counterpunch.
I believe I read in a column in PC Magazine a couple years back something like the following quote(Columnists with too much time on their hands are the only thing that makes the mag worth reading, really):
"In the future...(This was I think '97, back when the bubble was swelling), The truly smart and powerful people will be not those who merely posses knowledge, but those who know ways of procuring more knowledge on demand, of learning and of knowing where to learn things faster than their peers."
It was one of the few things in their ludicrous 5-year forcasts that is starting to come true.
Go look what happened at the Redskins-Eagles game. They had to stop the game because some jackass security officer had sprayed it into a crowd to stop some fight between two drunks. The resulting irritant-filled air cause a chunk of the crowd to leave and the game to halt because the players(30 yards away down on the field) were complaining of irritated eyes. Pepper spray is basically Tear Gas Lite, liquified. It is not only an irritant if it is in one's eyes.
It has been thought about for years, since a little after DDR was made standard. QBM uses a nice, clean quadruple-sine, spaced out evenly in quarter-clocks, unlike the messy jagged lines that DDR2 will use. The problem has always been how to eliminate the interference. It was looking as if there were going to need double-ECC circuits built in, because the neat quad-sinewave averages out to a straight line much easier than the jagged DDR2 lines, which are made to be combinative waves offset as little as possible, to made the signal stronger than the signal chatter. Radiation(white noise) was always a problem with RAM, much more so at higher elevations(Colorado gets about 100x more ram errors than sealevel does, necessitating ECC ram), and Kentron still hasnt explained how the PLL will work to filter out all that noise.
AMD's numbering scheme is supposed to be equal to pre-palamino Athlon XP's. This was back when Athlon MHz was the same as P3 Mhz.
I never really saw the rationale in upgrading past Word 97 as a desktop user(and not as a corporate purchasing consultant, who lease their souls to the most established company). Are there any new, compelling features? Any? Will I be able to strangle the bump-mapped, anisotropically filtered paperclip with the $479 CDW receipt for the STANDARD VERSION of office XP?
And the Athlon 1x00 XP will do half to 3/4 as well for $60.
The delay on the lightning gun prevents it from being better than the redeemer. What cripples it is that the netcode for the game right now is so crappy that unless the person is standing still, it is impossible to hit anyone unless you are running back and forth firing at someone else with a lightning gun 10 yards away.
You've got some serious anti-mexican sentiments goin on here. What'ed an immigrant do to you personally?
Nitpick:Japan's reigning emperor has had a purely ceremonial function since 1946, much like the british monarchy, but they are far from outlawed.
You're right, the british offered freedom from slavery to blacks who would join up/revolt in both the Revolution and 1812.
I was talking about the result of 1812 with a british friend the other day, about how it ended in a stalemate, and then he pointed out that London wasn't burned to the ground. The fact that the war was fought in North America and only on our side of the Atlantic shows just who won.
1)There is a considerable percentage of people in the US that have spinal problems like herniated disks. 2)There is a considerable percentage of people in the US that are too stupid to read signs warning that people with condition 1) are not to use the coaster. 3)The main injury-producing(and this includes brain injuries, spinal injuries, etc.) factor in roller coasters is the fact that they are not a smooth ride. Banging one's head against the side of the restraint 100 times in the course of a minute long ride has a lot more effect on people than any "sustained g-force injury" 4)Any average coaster will shake/give a rough ride 10x more under sustained, high G-forces than in a straightaway, because the only place one encounters sustained, high G-forces is at the bottom of a steep hill, and in addition to being at the greatest speed of the whole ride, it is changing direction from pointing at the center of the earth to pointing at the sky again, and this means that much of the energy goes into friction. The fact that high G-forces are not the root cause does not make them any less dangerous, they are an indicator(and a cause) of turbulance in the ride, and it is much easier to tell a lay audience that they are limiting G-forces than to go into WHY high G-forces cause injuries.
Why the !#$@ can't I just get simple pagebreaks.
This drammatically increases the chances that CG will become somewhat of a standard. Right now, it looks as if this is a case of NV putting forward the technology merely in order to push their products forward. Any standard without industry acceptance would be dead in the water, and its failure would invalidate the 3-dTbufferAnisographotopically mapped TexSurfaces features they would be including on their next cards. This way they have a way to get past the slow-as-hell OpenGL board and actually retain some control over the standards they work on without either ceding control to BillyG or keeping their competitors out. It works like this: NV knows it does not have the force to push its own Glide-esque language on the industry. There are too many other cards out there *cough*R300*cough* that could potentially grab enough market share to lure developers away from anything proprietory into existing standards that work on everything. Open-sourcing CG is also a way of putting pressure on other companies to adopt it, as ATI seems a little reluctant to adopt something that NV controls tightly. In the war between OpenGL2.0 and DirectX9.0, CG looked like it didn't have a chance to replace these venerable industry standards, but with a lot of developer support before either of these is released(by giving any potential CG programmer the source code for free) will validate it. It's explained pretty well in this article about the impending split in developer's plans.
I would like to thank you for being one of the first authors of an article to a) have personal information of the subject b) to actively respond to debates which would normally end 10 deep into a stupid arguement and c) to care about feedback.
Mods: This guy deserves a +3 on every comment for merely responding to comments on his article. Hundreds of others never bother.
The last person who admitted they worked for microsoft on slashdot never got the chance to retire at 35 on 401k benefits, if you know what I mean.
Seriously though, Gates(and I could have a link for as many offenses against humanity as there are posts on this page) is trying to take over the world: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4452
Could we stop this whole line of questioning, since the satellites in question are many earth-diameters above the planet?
Brings to mind one of my favorite audio clips. Say what you will about trey parker and matt stone being immature idiots who enjoy potty humor, but they do have a better sense of what's going on in the world than 99% of the rest of TV 'personalities'.
One of the abilities of the Radeon 9700 that is very promising to this type of application is that it allows you to code in the GPU's ASM language, and it spits back the image. This could vastly, vastly improve rendering, and allow you to use one GPU where previously you needed a renderfarm.
- pedophilia - virtual child porn, after being ruled illegal, was ruled legal on appeal, as long as no actual children were involved
- rape - From what I can tell, most psychiatrists acknowledge 2 kinds of rape - 1 where the rapist derives pleasure from hurting/controlling the person(probably wouldn't translate into VR) and 1 where the rapist is merely looking for a way to get off, or convinces himself of consensuality where there isnt any. The second kind could partake in VR-sex, but in any case, since pornography is already too easy to find, I doubt they would seek it out.
- murder - Go play GTA3, SoF2, Q3, UT, CS, god, pick any acronym you want, and it will correspond to a first person shooter.
- theft - usually the majority of the thrill someone gets from stealing is in the acquisition of the goods, meaning the increase in their wealth, with notable exceptions. In the case of these exceptions, I doubt that a petty shoplifter needs VR. It's simply not cost-effective, and it won't really help any more than chewing gum helps w/ the oral fixation part of quitting smoking. Yes, it's a compulsive behavior, but knowledge that the VR is merely therapy quickly takes away any thrill/adrenaline rush incurred in stealing.
While it at first sounds interesting, VR as therapy is not something that can easily fix something the person doesn't want to fix. Until we completely repeal amendments 4 through 10, and 8 in particular(at the rate we are going, this should be completed about 6 months into Bush's second term in office), a judge will probably not be able to sentence a person to virtual reality therapy. Seeing the age of the judges, they probably won't, for a while, as least. As Douglas Adams said, 'anything invented after you turn 35 is against the natural order of things.' Overall, the use of VR to simulate crimes in order to prevent them is not a very good idea, and I feel it is better to fix the situation at the source, like if a person is poor, give them a job, give them welfare, something, just don't make them steal to eat. If a person wants to kill people, find out why, etc. (*small note: I am of the opinion that child porn is caused by pedophilia, not the other way around, and I am absent a good way to deal with pedophilia other than locking them up. I merely regard it as wrong when consent is only considerred invalid by the law*)Please, to all gun nuts out there, don't do this and leave it in the field. Cart it away to someplace not affected by the watershed. I'm not a tree-hugger, but monitors have something like 8 pounds of lead a piece for a 17". That's enough, properly dissolved, to poison all of the water consumed by Washington DC water supply in a day to federally unsafe levels.
Cancer cells are merely normal human cells with a few extraordinarily improbably mutations that allow them to break free of whatever it is that self-organises cells in a multicellular organism and reproduce without control.
Ones that have the same telomere-shortening vulerabilities as human cells(and from what I can tell, almost all sexual organisms) eventually stop reproducing, and we call them moles, or cysts. Strains that have somehow bypassed this aging process are called Cancer.
Cancerous cells are merely malignant(meaning they won't stop growing) moles/cysts/whatever you call them in X part of your body. They are still 99.99percent human cells.
Any virus that is designed to destroy cancer cells will destroy human cells just as easily(It seems that the body does not specifically code for angiogenesis[dynamic formation of blood vessels] so it adapts to the tumor's demands for blood the same way it would as for any other growing body part, by forming new blood vessels. Without angiogenesis(and there are angiogenesis-inhibitors that are looking promising) a tumor without blood running through it dies the same way a body part without circulation would. All this means that any antibodies formed in the person's blood against virii work for the cancerous cells too.) Since antiviral medications are so volatile(usually they are carcinogens at even moderate doses) there is no way we could treat people wholesale with this kind of thing.
The only thing that might work are virii that only code a specific, small segment of cancerous cells that tells them to either suicide(would be very dangerous since the virus would likely affect the host too) or to reprogram whatever section of their genetic code that has been modified to make them cancerous. This would be extremely hard as most cancers are genetically unique, as are the people infected with them.
There are also, on the horizon, growth-inhibitors that look very promising as a cure for any type of cancer, but could bring on premature aging or stop growth in non-mature patients. I recall a study somewhere in popular science a couple years back about a group of hormones that are released from south pacific sea slugs in trace amounts that stopped tumor growth in 100% of mice and reduced the size of tumors in 80%, but which could only be made at incredible expense from dozens of sea slugs that live at 2 miles deep and were impossible(so far) to manufacture. Things like this are why we need to have wider-ranging studies(not 100$ million put into the healing affects of soy) on unique substances' anti-cancer properties.
Any way you slice it, it is very hard to negatively affect a cancer without negatively affecting the body, other than some type of surgery, which doesn't protect from metastasizing.
---------
I disagree with your right to exist, but I will defend to the death your parent's right to grant it to you.
900 posts into this(What is it that makes this so popular?) I doubt this will be read, but my 2 cents:
Get the insight w/ CVT. Better gas mileage and a completely computer-controlled transmission. This could make as much difference as automatic over manual. Also, and more importantly, looks. The closest thing the prius resembles is someone that needs a nosejob. It is one of the ugliest cars I have seen in a while. It's too short, snubby, and other than being a hybrid, it adds no features we havn't seen on a million other cars. The insight actually looks GOOD, better than most sedans and a lot of sports cars IMO. Another factor: A 2 seater trying to cut down on size is inherently roomier than a 4-seater trying to cut down on size. Better gas mileage, tons better looks, CVT, more room, and(in comparison to your 50 mile electric) u get 600 miles off of 20$(10 gallons) of gas. Much as I would like to reccomend a true alternative fuel car, the infrastructure is just not ready, even if the tech may be.
I'm tired of the word "cult." It is just a way of saying "A contemptuous religion I don't like, which I don't care about offending followers." If your religion requires you to suicide bomb other people(In the eyes of the idiotic news media anyway), then you are a "militant radical." If it requires you to have sex with your spiritual leader at age 9, then you are an "innocent victim," and it is an "isolated incident" in a "religion." If you decide emigrate here from pakistan, with your 4 wives, you are committing a "crime," no matter that the government is interfering with your religion. If your religion says that you must avoid the modern world and live in isolation from others, you are either the "quaint little sect of the amish" or you are a "cult" that must be firebombed out of Waco. If your religion requires you to commit suicide when you turn 70 and you can no longer contribute to society, and you do this voluntarily, it is a "cult." If you decide to dedicate your life to making a stand for free speech(the point is not in what u say, but in saying it), as in Falun Gong, you are a "cult" who don't have any sense to stay out of the eyes of the government. What money do you think Falun Gong requires? It has 70 million members, for god's sake. The reason the government gave for outlawing 5% of its populace was their belief in faith-healing jeopardised public safety, in that according to the government, 1600 of its members refused medical treatment(how many people do that in the US on a purely secular basis, via 'do not revive' orders?) and died. In a country with so little good healthcare, and so many people, I think the issue is a bit trivial. People near-death rarely contribute much more to the workforce if they are saved(usually the very old), and that is the only basis I can think of for a communist society, the stability of the population, for them to do this. Why are they considerred 'evil' in the least bit? What have they done to deserve this label? Make choices on their medical treatment based on their beliefs? What, were this in the US, would be considerred dangerous, illegal, or cultlike about Falun Gong?