Life begins much earlier than conception. You cannot take a dead egg and a dead sperm and make anything living out of it. Stop co-mingling the idea of life with the idea of sexual reproduction, and you'll realize that there's a lot of life out there, and only some of it is sexual. Even in sexual organisms, living sperm and eggs are not where life begins; they are literally byproducts of the life they are made from.
Life is a continuum. Of course, now that I've stated the only consistent obvious rationalization, you'll definitely agree.
The millennia of pre-scientific religious training is the barrier that's prompting people to pipe up and say, "Well when I said Life I didn't mean it that way. I meant we as-in super-special HUMAN animal life." Which again doesn't make sense from the human angle, because you can't take a dead human sperm and a dead human egg and make a living anything either.
So what it boils down to is the "super-special" part. We become super-special at inception, and to prove it to ourselves, we'll state that we have an exclusive something that no other animal in the universe has. So we don't get called out on it, let's make it undetectable. Call it a soul, if you will.
Now all the arguments boil down to, "The soul is first present at inception." Which is actually a decent argument, even if it can never be proven or dis-proven. But somehow it feels like a hollow argument, like you're not really arguing for your betterment. It's almost like you're arguing for the preservation of the Church, and you really couldn't give a damn if it means that Alzheimer's disease is cured as long as nobody shatters the super-special soul idea the Church has created which makes you better than everything else that's alive, with the exception of Jesus, who despite being alive hasn't been seen for 2000 years.
The arguments concerning "independent self sustaining" to equate to life don't make sense; infants are far from independent or self-sustainable for years. The arguments for possibly self-sustainable outside the womb equates to life don't make sense either. Possibly doesn't indicate the percentage of chance, so it could range from 100% to 0%. Assuming you dictate that it has to be more than 0%, I can pick a percentage so small that it's practially zero.
But the "possibly could be self-sustaining" is a tilted argument in other ways too. A severely premature child in a hospital is in no way self-sustaining. It's a wonder that we have such a good success rate at keeping them alive. And sooner or later the technology will be developed to have a in-vitrio child. Then the outside-the-womb self-sustaining argument won't even make sense, as the technique will remove the womb from the picture.
Perhaps we'll never develop out-of-the-womb pregnancies. But if we do not, I'll wager that it has more to do with researchers leaving certain aspects of our development untouched due to respect or fear of nearly two millennia of reasoning not based on observation, but based on patting ourselves on the back due to our super-special-nees. We have souls, hooray for us!
You mean well, but you're dangerously close to destroying the USA. I mean, it's just a matter of time before the politician puts two and two together and deploys millions of "decoy" school traffic zones. In his eyes it would be both a revenue generating exercise and an anti-terrorism act.
It pretty much had everything you mentioned. Way too easy to die, creepy atmosphere, odd camera angles, spooky music, and a story line intended to creep you out.
Too bad that the series stalled long ago. I wonder what it could do with a modern makeover. In horror games, perhaps borrowing FPS engines went a step too far, becoming a subset of the FPS genre. Horror isn't about killing, it's about waiting to be killed.
For all practical purposes, there is no waste aluminium.
Aluminium ore is plentiful but the costs to refine the ore into pure metal are very high. The technique uses tons of electricity to reverse the natural oxidation process. If you have post-consumer aluminium to start with, you can recover about 85% of the metal at a much lower energy cost. The lower energy cost is significant since it comprises 20% to 40% of the cost of production.
It sounds like these gentleman have discovered a faster way to get aluminium metal to oxidise to it's lower energy states with Hydrogen as a useful by-product. I'm curious how this would work past the surface area of an aluminium block. Aluminium oxide is incredibly durable, somewhat brittle, and rather impervious to oxygen. With a combination like that, the oxide protects the inner aluminium metal from further oxidation. I'll wager that's why their technique requires "small clusters" of atoms.
This sounds interesting as a use-once hydrogen battery, but it's not solving any global scale energy needs. The cost to produce aluminium metal is just too high. Still, it has a number of niche areas where it could be very useful. Aluminium could be seen as a high density battery for hydrogen powered fuel cells. It's relatively light, and could be incorporated into electrical generation systems for space vehicles.
But Unbuntu is supported by a rich fat cat, who's been propping up the community until it becomes self-sustaining. To their credit, they now claim they are.
That means Unbuntu is the most advertised Linux. You can't get around the marketing. It starts with world peace and ends with children in Africa not falling victim to evil Microsoft.
In other words, it's hard to talk to an Unbuntuite without hearing the marketing talk back to you. I've heard that it's the first Linux "for the people", and that's let me to wonder if I was not "one of the people" over the last pre-Unbuntu decade. I've heard how Unbuntu finally made Linux "user friendly", leading me to wonder how my near-identical desktop was not.
When the really want to get "technical" they bring up the old yum/apt-get wars. Yes, the reasoning is that bad.
Yes, and if I drive my car into all barriers, it doesn't drive so well after I sanely decide to not drive it into barriers.
Exactly what is the use case for removing all kernels from a system? It's not like the kernel is an optional part of the operating system. It doesn't hurt you to install the new one first and then remove the old one.
In fact, keeping the old one might even save your skin. You never know if the new kernel works properly until after you're running on it. You have no fall back plan if you removed the old kernel.
Some people walk tightropes without a net, while others insist on nets. The skill of the performer makes falling a rarity. Once a mishap occurs, only one performer is considered wise.
He had a brash leadership style, which basically consisted of deciding the quality of an idea by how well someone stood up to being torn apart by the ruler-king-tyrant of Microsoft.
From what I've gleaned (never worked there myself) those that managed to survive the beating by backing up what they presented were given the green light, while those that cowered under the barrage of attacks lost their opportunities.
There are obvious non-fatal problems with this style. It didn't immediately hamper Microsoft, but I wondered how deeply Bill could really analyse all those he berated. Certainly he couldn't be prepared for every pitch, so how many pitches won on the basis of a strong (headed) arguing techniques instead of technical merit?
If dubbing robs the film of it's sound quality, then they wouldn't do it in the first place. Dubbing is done to improve the sound quality, whether the improvement is the traditional signal / noise ratio, or to alter tone and volume to enhance the intensity of a scene.
While you might lose a little of the "on-site" feeling by dubbing, that's the entire point. The on-site sound sucked. If it was so superior, then there wouldn't be sound stages, dubbing, or any kind of post-shooting clean up done at all.
Alt-click is your friend, and doing so on any background area of the window will allow you to move the window around so you can get to the interesting parts.
Alt-click doesn't work properly if you have the desktop effects enabled though. I guess that the affects does boundary checking to prevent the top of the window from being dragged higher that the screen, which is something that it really shouldn't be doing.
Also, Gnome is working on a "tiny" window manager theme for screen space constrained devices. I haven't checked into it recently, but I imagine it's coming along (it should be in Fedora 11).
His analogy does not fail. If he invested a lot of time and money or little time and money in the acquiring of the calculator, he would still have the calculator.
The right to reproduce an item is not inheritly assigned to it's creator. It is legally assigned, in some circumstances, under certain conditions.
If you believe you can charge more than the investment cost in selling your item, then you might have a viable business plan. If you feel that the only way you can charge more than the investment cost is to enforce rarity, you might have a viable business plan if the item you produce is very hard to duplicate.
If you feel that the only way this item hard to duplicate is legal injunction, you have a hard reality to face. The law can do many things, but it cannot effectively violate the real world. Even if you win a case here or there, an item that is easy to replicate is easy to replicate.
When value is intricately tied to rarity; yes, you can decrease the value of an item by copying it. Just like you can increase the value of an item by destroying it's duplicates.
But when you remove the barriers of duplication, then you cannot base something's value on its rarity. That's the issue that the recording industries are in today. Music recordings are a-dime-a-dozen, and the intrinsic value had decreased below the purchase price permitted under the current "ship a CD to a store" system.
I just can't wait until automobiles are trivially easy to duplicate, because the price of Ferrari's really doesn't agree with my pocketbook.
B still has the right to produce copies. It's just that A can do it too.
You can't live in a society where everything is protected from copying because it would halt all production.
Imagine that you're cooking a grilled cheese sandwich, somebody somewhere has grilled one the way you do. How are you going to find the individual to ask for permission to copy their technique? What sort of compensation should they be able to demand? Should society be bereft of all grilled cheese sandwiches because the first inventor demands a punitive fee for grilling one?
That's why even the government has limited copyright to fall on a particular subset of products, and then with limitations. Why you see so much push against Copyright Law has to do with the increase on the limitations recently passed.
The law stood for so long because production costs to infringe were much higher in the past; today the average citizen can afford to infringe, in the past you would have to hire an orchestra, develop hundreds of feet of expensive film, or create dies to press records. Now you only need a computer which you already have purchased for other reasons.
I expect even more draconian attempts to "fix" the issue of illegal copying before any sane resolutions are considered.
Good thing I can't practice law, I'd be one step ahead of them: Aiding and Abetting the Assistance of Making Available Material that Might be Copyrighted.
If in risk of losing the case, follow it up with Obstruction of Justice via Using Technology to Confusing to Allow the Speedy Determination of Guilt.
Any argument can be made to sound good, but it still doesn't separate the wheat from the chaff.
In the less than glamorous fictional universe, you'd just be stuck with a Lava Man that would die of hypothermia as soon as he left his thermal vent.
I can see it now... In Neo-Gotham city, a crime has just been committed. Commissioner, "Who can we go to for help?" Gordon boldly replies, "Book me a flight to Hawaii! I must enlist the aid of Lava man!"
Later that week, "Lava Man has suggested that we dust the crime scene for fingerprints, run over all the security surveillance, and engrave all the details of the report on thermally resistant used space shuttle tiles for his review!" I'll take the report to him in Mt. Etna, Italy.
Next Monday, "Here's the preliminary findings, we need to follow up and get back with Lava Man on Tuesday near Mt. Fuji, Japan."
A week later, "Lava Man has requested more photos of the crime scene, let me know when you get them and then I'll drag them over to Prince Edward Island, Canada." "Chief, isn't Prince Edward a sedimentary island?... Busted!"
Yeah, I can see how a Lava Man will really help out. Sort of like a consultant, but you have to fly to him, in exotic destinations.
For such a high speed link, I think that a CSMA/CD technology is probably the wrong answer. Your "bubbles" in the network wire of collision screaming must be incredibly wasteful. But hey, we live in a field where waste is justified by the comparative cost of hardware upgrades over man hours.
I'd love to route Ethernet packets tunneled through an ATM link set up on this kind of bandwith, but somehow I don't think that solution requires cutting edge research.
Ethernet is good at doing what it does well, but the tuning require to make this truly effective might make the mess of jumbo packets look like child's play. I imagine that as the speeds increase, so will the issues. It's a remarkable achievement to push Ethernet this fast, but it seems that it's the equivalent of making your car travel 0.6c. At those speeds you have to wonder if you're using the right vehicle.
My setup seems to have a repeater every two inches. Should I get a CCSPE (Certified Cisco Slashdot Posting Expert) to fix this or is it safe to adjust the font settings myself?
Most companies know how to discount software to make the sale. I doubt that Microsoft and Adobe are unaware of such a practice.
Odds are the cost of a Chinese localized version of Windows doesn't look like the cost of an English localized version of windows. Every now and then you hear a complaint article on Slashdot about how Microsoft is offering bundles to other countries for pennies of what's paid in the USA. And that's just when they don't opt to give it away for fostering corporate good will like the often do in Africa.
All those free copies should come with a warning label, "First one's free."
... well, the extremist Muslims have no qualms with dying for their religion, nor do they seem to have much of a problem with causing the deaths of other Muslims.
Fortunately, most of the Muslims in any part of the world, including Iraq, are not extremist. The 20% or so here in the USA are not extremist, and most other countries are not fully populated by extremist Muslims either.
Arguing that a country which gains nuclear power is immediately going to find an extremist subset of their population and put them in charge of launching their military's most prized weapon is just utter nonsense and scaremongering.
By your logic, the US military command is populated with key leaders from The Army of God, Aryan Nations, Christian Patriots, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Basically all the arguments for black hole creation fail when you ask the question, "Where are you going to get all the mass to create the black hole?"
A black hole has much more mass than our planet. Energy released from the destruction of mass is supposed to be very large; even if it were possible to convert energy into mass at the LHC, the mass gain should be negligible.
The real beauty of the letter is that Private Eye didn't tell them to fuck off, they just asked for information. The information they asked for made it abundantly clear the intent but didn't voice the intent or bind them to any course of action.
I'm not a lawyer, but I appreciate a well crafted argument. This one speaks volumes without actually saying anything.
Accoring to CNET the average plasma uses about 340 watts per hour. Mine uses about 700. The average LCD uses about 210, which is about the same as a read projection TV.
My TV doesn't beat the refrigerator, but it's close. Also, my TV isn't a 50+" model, if I had bought a larger one, it would easily use more energy than anything except perhaps the hot water heater.
The fact that we have consumer laws in the USA tends to indicate that even the USA knows that "let the market decide" is not a viable plan unchecked. Let's face it, the market had decided in the past to purposefully poison people for profit. I could provide lesser examples, but when that's the cream of the crop, everything else seems less compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Life begins much earlier than conception. You cannot take a dead egg and a dead sperm and make anything living out of it. Stop co-mingling the idea of life with the idea of sexual reproduction, and you'll realize that there's a lot of life out there, and only some of it is sexual. Even in sexual organisms, living sperm and eggs are not where life begins; they are literally byproducts of the life they are made from.
Life is a continuum. Of course, now that I've stated the only consistent obvious rationalization, you'll definitely agree.
The millennia of pre-scientific religious training is the barrier that's prompting people to pipe up and say, "Well when I said Life I didn't mean it that way. I meant we as-in super-special HUMAN animal life." Which again doesn't make sense from the human angle, because you can't take a dead human sperm and a dead human egg and make a living anything either.
So what it boils down to is the "super-special" part. We become super-special at inception, and to prove it to ourselves, we'll state that we have an exclusive something that no other animal in the universe has. So we don't get called out on it, let's make it undetectable. Call it a soul, if you will.
Now all the arguments boil down to, "The soul is first present at inception." Which is actually a decent argument, even if it can never be proven or dis-proven. But somehow it feels like a hollow argument, like you're not really arguing for your betterment. It's almost like you're arguing for the preservation of the Church, and you really couldn't give a damn if it means that Alzheimer's disease is cured as long as nobody shatters the super-special soul idea the Church has created which makes you better than everything else that's alive, with the exception of Jesus, who despite being alive hasn't been seen for 2000 years.
The arguments concerning "independent self sustaining" to equate to life don't make sense; infants are far from independent or self-sustainable for years. The arguments for possibly self-sustainable outside the womb equates to life don't make sense either. Possibly doesn't indicate the percentage of chance, so it could range from 100% to 0%. Assuming you dictate that it has to be more than 0%, I can pick a percentage so small that it's practially zero.
But the "possibly could be self-sustaining" is a tilted argument in other ways too. A severely premature child in a hospital is in no way self-sustaining. It's a wonder that we have such a good success rate at keeping them alive. And sooner or later the technology will be developed to have a in-vitrio child. Then the outside-the-womb self-sustaining argument won't even make sense, as the technique will remove the womb from the picture.
Perhaps we'll never develop out-of-the-womb pregnancies. But if we do not, I'll wager that it has more to do with researchers leaving certain aspects of our development untouched due to respect or fear of nearly two millennia of reasoning not based on observation, but based on patting ourselves on the back due to our super-special-nees. We have souls, hooray for us!
Terrorist Bob: Arrgghh!!!! I'm ready to die for the cause!
Terrorist Steve: Dude! They just blurred out your target!
Terrorist Bob: NOooooo!!!!!
Terrorist Steve: Sorry dude, you're going to live.
Hey, it worked for Vulgaria!
You mean well, but you're dangerously close to destroying the USA. I mean, it's just a matter of time before the politician puts two and two together and deploys millions of "decoy" school traffic zones. In his eyes it would be both a revenue generating exercise and an anti-terrorism act.
Alone in the dark, anyone?
It pretty much had everything you mentioned. Way too easy to die, creepy atmosphere, odd camera angles, spooky music, and a story line intended to creep you out.
Too bad that the series stalled long ago. I wonder what it could do with a modern makeover. In horror games, perhaps borrowing FPS engines went a step too far, becoming a subset of the FPS genre. Horror isn't about killing, it's about waiting to be killed.
For all practical purposes, there is no waste aluminium.
Aluminium ore is plentiful but the costs to refine the ore into pure metal are very high. The technique uses tons of electricity to reverse the natural oxidation process. If you have post-consumer aluminium to start with, you can recover about 85% of the metal at a much lower energy cost. The lower energy cost is significant since it comprises 20% to 40% of the cost of production.
It sounds like these gentleman have discovered a faster way to get aluminium metal to oxidise to it's lower energy states with Hydrogen as a useful by-product. I'm curious how this would work past the surface area of an aluminium block. Aluminium oxide is incredibly durable, somewhat brittle, and rather impervious to oxygen. With a combination like that, the oxide protects the inner aluminium metal from further oxidation. I'll wager that's why their technique requires "small clusters" of atoms.
This sounds interesting as a use-once hydrogen battery, but it's not solving any global scale energy needs. The cost to produce aluminium metal is just too high. Still, it has a number of niche areas where it could be very useful. Aluminium could be seen as a high density battery for hydrogen powered fuel cells. It's relatively light, and could be incorporated into electrical generation systems for space vehicles.
But Unbuntu is supported by a rich fat cat, who's been propping up the community until it becomes self-sustaining. To their credit, they now claim they are.
That means Unbuntu is the most advertised Linux. You can't get around the marketing. It starts with world peace and ends with children in Africa not falling victim to evil Microsoft.
In other words, it's hard to talk to an Unbuntuite without hearing the marketing talk back to you. I've heard that it's the first Linux "for the people", and that's let me to wonder if I was not "one of the people" over the last pre-Unbuntu decade. I've heard how Unbuntu finally made Linux "user friendly", leading me to wonder how my near-identical desktop was not.
When the really want to get "technical" they bring up the old yum/apt-get wars. Yes, the reasoning is that bad.
Yes, and if I drive my car into all barriers, it doesn't drive so well after I sanely decide to not drive it into barriers.
Exactly what is the use case for removing all kernels from a system? It's not like the kernel is an optional part of the operating system. It doesn't hurt you to install the new one first and then remove the old one.
In fact, keeping the old one might even save your skin. You never know if the new kernel works properly until after you're running on it. You have no fall back plan if you removed the old kernel.
Some people walk tightropes without a net, while others insist on nets. The skill of the performer makes falling a rarity. Once a mishap occurs, only one performer is considered wise.
He had a brash leadership style, which basically consisted of deciding the quality of an idea by how well someone stood up to being torn apart by the ruler-king-tyrant of Microsoft.
From what I've gleaned (never worked there myself) those that managed to survive the beating by backing up what they presented were given the green light, while those that cowered under the barrage of attacks lost their opportunities.
There are obvious non-fatal problems with this style. It didn't immediately hamper Microsoft, but I wondered how deeply Bill could really analyse all those he berated. Certainly he couldn't be prepared for every pitch, so how many pitches won on the basis of a strong (headed) arguing techniques instead of technical merit?
If dubbing robs the film of it's sound quality, then they wouldn't do it in the first place. Dubbing is done to improve the sound quality, whether the improvement is the traditional signal / noise ratio, or to alter tone and volume to enhance the intensity of a scene.
While you might lose a little of the "on-site" feeling by dubbing, that's the entire point. The on-site sound sucked. If it was so superior, then there wouldn't be sound stages, dubbing, or any kind of post-shooting clean up done at all.
Alt-click is your friend, and doing so on any background area of the window will allow you to move the window around so you can get to the interesting parts.
Alt-click doesn't work properly if you have the desktop effects enabled though. I guess that the affects does boundary checking to prevent the top of the window from being dragged higher that the screen, which is something that it really shouldn't be doing.
Also, Gnome is working on a "tiny" window manager theme for screen space constrained devices. I haven't checked into it recently, but I imagine it's coming along (it should be in Fedora 11).
Cheers,
Ed
His analogy does not fail. If he invested a lot of time and money or little time and money in the acquiring of the calculator, he would still have the calculator.
The right to reproduce an item is not inheritly assigned to it's creator. It is legally assigned, in some circumstances, under certain conditions.
If you believe you can charge more than the investment cost in selling your item, then you might have a viable business plan. If you feel that the only way you can charge more than the investment cost is to enforce rarity, you might have a viable business plan if the item you produce is very hard to duplicate.
If you feel that the only way this item hard to duplicate is legal injunction, you have a hard reality to face. The law can do many things, but it cannot effectively violate the real world. Even if you win a case here or there, an item that is easy to replicate is easy to replicate.
When value is intricately tied to rarity; yes, you can decrease the value of an item by copying it. Just like you can increase the value of an item by destroying it's duplicates.
But when you remove the barriers of duplication, then you cannot base something's value on its rarity. That's the issue that the recording industries are in today. Music recordings are a-dime-a-dozen, and the intrinsic value had decreased below the purchase price permitted under the current "ship a CD to a store" system.
I just can't wait until automobiles are trivially easy to duplicate, because the price of Ferrari's really doesn't agree with my pocketbook.
B still has the right to produce copies. It's just that A can do it too.
You can't live in a society where everything is protected from copying because it would halt all production.
Imagine that you're cooking a grilled cheese sandwich, somebody somewhere has grilled one the way you do. How are you going to find the individual to ask for permission to copy their technique? What sort of compensation should they be able to demand? Should society be bereft of all grilled cheese sandwiches because the first inventor demands a punitive fee for grilling one?
That's why even the government has limited copyright to fall on a particular subset of products, and then with limitations. Why you see so much push against Copyright Law has to do with the increase on the limitations recently passed.
The law stood for so long because production costs to infringe were much higher in the past; today the average citizen can afford to infringe, in the past you would have to hire an orchestra, develop hundreds of feet of expensive film, or create dies to press records. Now you only need a computer which you already have purchased for other reasons.
I expect even more draconian attempts to "fix" the issue of illegal copying before any sane resolutions are considered.
Good thing I can't practice law, I'd be one step ahead of them: Aiding and Abetting the Assistance of Making Available Material that Might be Copyrighted.
If in risk of losing the case, follow it up with Obstruction of Justice via Using Technology to Confusing to Allow the Speedy Determination of Guilt.
Any argument can be made to sound good, but it still doesn't separate the wheat from the chaff.
In the less than glamorous fictional universe, you'd just be stuck with a Lava Man that would die of hypothermia as soon as he left his thermal vent.
I can see it now... In Neo-Gotham city, a crime has just been committed. Commissioner, "Who can we go to for help?" Gordon boldly replies, "Book me a flight to Hawaii! I must enlist the aid of Lava man!"
Later that week, "Lava Man has suggested that we dust the crime scene for fingerprints, run over all the security surveillance, and engrave all the details of the report on thermally resistant used space shuttle tiles for his review!" I'll take the report to him in Mt. Etna, Italy.
Next Monday, "Here's the preliminary findings, we need to follow up and get back with Lava Man on Tuesday near Mt. Fuji, Japan."
A week later, "Lava Man has requested more photos of the crime scene, let me know when you get them and then I'll drag them over to Prince Edward Island, Canada." "Chief, isn't Prince Edward a sedimentary island? ... Busted!"
Yeah, I can see how a Lava Man will really help out. Sort of like a consultant, but you have to fly to him, in exotic destinations.
For such a high speed link, I think that a CSMA/CD technology is probably the wrong answer. Your "bubbles" in the network wire of collision screaming must be incredibly wasteful. But hey, we live in a field where waste is justified by the comparative cost of hardware upgrades over man hours.
I'd love to route Ethernet packets tunneled through an ATM link set up on this kind of bandwith, but somehow I don't think that solution requires cutting edge research.
Ethernet is good at doing what it does well, but the tuning require to make this truly effective might make the mess of jumbo packets look like child's play. I imagine that as the speeds increase, so will the issues. It's a remarkable achievement to push Ethernet this fast, but it seems that it's the equivalent of making your car travel 0.6c. At those speeds you have to wonder if you're using the right vehicle.
My setup seems to have a repeater every two inches. Should I get a CCSPE (Certified Cisco Slashdot Posting Expert) to fix this or is it safe to adjust the font settings myself?
I've heard that the core of Mono is Mono nucleus, and contracting it is called Mononucleosis. That's reason enough to avoid it like the plague!
Most companies know how to discount software to make the sale. I doubt that Microsoft and Adobe are unaware of such a practice.
Odds are the cost of a Chinese localized version of Windows doesn't look like the cost of an English localized version of windows. Every now and then you hear a complaint article on Slashdot about how Microsoft is offering bundles to other countries for pennies of what's paid in the USA. And that's just when they don't opt to give it away for fostering corporate good will like the often do in Africa.
All those free copies should come with a warning label, "First one's free."
Fortunately, most of the Muslims in any part of the world, including Iraq, are not extremist. The 20% or so here in the USA are not extremist, and most other countries are not fully populated by extremist Muslims either.
Arguing that a country which gains nuclear power is immediately going to find an extremist subset of their population and put them in charge of launching their military's most prized weapon is just utter nonsense and scaremongering.
By your logic, the US military command is populated with key leaders from The Army of God, Aryan Nations, Christian Patriots, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Basically all the arguments for black hole creation fail when you ask the question, "Where are you going to get all the mass to create the black hole?"
A black hole has much more mass than our planet. Energy released from the destruction of mass is supposed to be very large; even if it were possible to convert energy into mass at the LHC, the mass gain should be negligible.
The real beauty of the letter is that Private Eye didn't tell them to fuck off, they just asked for information. The information they asked for made it abundantly clear the intent but didn't voice the intent or bind them to any course of action.
I'm not a lawyer, but I appreciate a well crafted argument. This one speaks volumes without actually saying anything.
Accoring to CNET the average plasma uses about 340 watts per hour. Mine uses about 700. The average LCD uses about 210, which is about the same as a read projection TV.
My TV doesn't beat the refrigerator, but it's close. Also, my TV isn't a 50+" model, if I had bought a larger one, it would easily use more energy than anything except perhaps the hot water heater.
The fact that we have consumer laws in the USA tends to indicate that even the USA knows that "let the market decide" is not a viable plan unchecked. Let's face it, the market had decided in the past to purposefully poison people for profit. I could provide lesser examples, but when that's the cream of the crop, everything else seems less compelling.