The federation ranks are clearly based on British and American navies. It's reasonable to believe commodore works the same way as all the rest of the ranks. Commodore has always been a job description in the British navy. Brief periods in the US navy are the only precedent for a permanent rank of commodore.
Except for brief periods of time in the US navy, commodore has always been a temporary title, not a rank. You got to be a commodore (temporarily) if you were put in command of a group of ships and either the admiral liked you and wanted to give you a chance to wear extra gold braid, or there was some need to clearly elevate you above the other captains (for example, if one of the others was senior to you but you were supposed to be in overall command).
So Decker would have been a captain with the title of commodore while he was commanding a task force, and IIRC Picard generally commanded multiple ships in emergencies and impromptu fleets, where he would have taken command as senior captain.
Only a few percent of the popular vote in the US is for anyone other than the Republicans and Democrats. No fancy electoral system resembling any kind of democracy is going to solve your problems for you.
You're probably thinking of either mifepristone or methotrexate (likely methotrexate, since it seems to be the more famous). They're certainly much, much better than a late stage surgical abortion, but they're nothing like plan B. Where I live a woman can walk down to a drug store after an accident, ask the pharmacist for plan B, pop two pills (they're basically birth control pills in a different package), and be done. Methotrexate can be in pill form or injected but it's usually given as an outpatient procedure, and you generally take misoprostol a week later, which induces contractions. Various things should be monitored via blood work too.
I completely agree with you, third trimester abortions are nasty things for their invasiveness, physical and psychological effects on the woman, and psychological effects on the rest of society. The funny thing is though, they're illegal in most European countries except in cases of medical emergency, and it's not an issue. They're also not protected by Roe v Wade in the US. Third trimester abortion is really only a boogey man held up by anti-abortion crusaders and some kind of crazy ideal demanded by equally crazy extreme feminists.
"As one of the people who has been largely funding your defenses for the last lots of years after WWII"
Americans love to say that. Problem is, nobody is really sure who you're defending us from. I guess you'd have a point with Israel. Kuwait. Probably Saudi Arabia. Although Saudi Arabia is one of the very few countries that actually outspends the US per capita on defence. I don't think you're defending Europe anymore. You did at one point (although let's not pretend you weren't doing it out of self interest) but that was a long time ago.
In terms of the amount you spend compared to what you used to spend, are you making comparisons to WWII? Or the cold war? When you actually faced credible threats? Besides, US defence spending is currently higher (either in constant dollars or as a % of GDP) than it's been since the end of WWII (if you want to quibble it's a hair lower than it was around 2006).
In the midterm US senate election the third party (Libertarian) scraped up 1.14% of the popular vote. That would translate into one (completely ignored) seat if you had proportional voting. The Libertarians (again third party) scraped together 1.16% of the popular vote for the house of representatives, which would give them 5 ignored seats in the house. Meanwhile LOTS of other democracies have representative systems and have thriving third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties.
It seems to be popular to blame your two party system on voting systems, but the numbers don't hold up and examples from the rest of the world don't support that hypothesis either. There's something else about the US that causes the vast majority of you to vote for one of two parties.
What candidates say they're going to do is not very likely to be what they're actually going to accomplish. Romney might say tax cuts for the rich, but you're all so far in debt that it's not like a little more is going to make a big difference, even if he can get away with introducing anything significant.
Everyone voting for the plastic mouthpiece for "their" party, and everyone else choosing whichever of the big two is supposedly closer to their views, leaving actual winners to be decided by statistical fluctuations just leaves you forever trapped in the status quo. Both major parties get closer and closer together to attract the maximum vote, and nothing changes. It's like outbidding the other player by $1 on The Price is Right.
As one of your "neglected allies," we're mystified how spending almost as much on your military as the rest of the world combined is "neglecting" it. Can you explain?
Actually, third(ish) trimester fetuses can feel pain. The parts of the brain required finish being hooked up early in the third trimester. Second trimester fetuses can't.
You sound fairly reasonable (you actually described the situation in my country with regards to plan B and abortion). Except... plan B isn't for "first trimester abortions." It works within the first 48 to 72 hours. That's why it's called the morning after pill. It prevents implantation of the embryo, it doesn't abort it.
Tangentially, Roe v. Wade is essentially in agreement with your position, even if it is a little wishy washy on it. Roe v Wade requires that states don't interfere with women getting abortions up until the time a fetus is viable outside the womb, which the justices put between 24 and 28 weeks -- right around the end of the second trimester.
That attitude is what's wrong with US elections. Vote your conscience. Sure, it might cause your least favourite party to win this election, but how big is the difference anyway? And if you keep up the strategic voting crap, nothing will ever change.
You guys have a system where third (and fourth, etc.) parties get low single digit percentages in presidential elections and rarely elect any representatives to either of the two legislative houses. And it wasn't always that way.
Your problems won't be fixed by getting rid of the electoral college or some sort of proportional representation in the legislative houses. The entire country is brainwashed into voting for "their" party. That's what has to change.
Just to be clear, I'm not a libertarian, I'm making fun of them. I don't really see any difference between a government taking this guy out or a bunch of rich vigilantes, except that with a democratic government doing it we all get to vote no matter how much money we have. And a libertarian world where nobody has to pay taxes would be a world where nobody DOES pay taxes and the government that's supposed to protect people would end up being a bunch of private security goons who protect the rich and screw the rest.
I'm sure that if one of the variants of libertarianism was enacted it would end up somewhere between the environmental free for all of the 1960s and 70s and the laissez-faire capitalism (read child coal miners) of the early industrial revolution. Or maybe warlord Somalia if you were REALLY libertarian.
I don't really follow what you're saying. What does "a time basis that is much more loosely related to the actual state of development" mean? Are you suggesting that a doctor should do an ultrasound and see what the fetus looks like before deciding if it's okay to abort or not? Maybe a 3D ultrasound and then decide how "babyish" it looks?
In the US (not to say US abortion law is sane, but it's the only country most Slashdotters seem to have any experience with), abortions the supreme court said a state couldn't interfere with abortions up to the point the fetus becomes viable. Since each state gets to make it's own laws they aren't very uniform, but seems to be usually placed at about 24 weeks. A 24 week old fetus doesn't have eyelids that open, doesn't have functional lungs, and has a very undeveloped brain - a brain that can't process sensory input. The thalamic development that allows processing sensory input usually doesn't happen for almost another two months. There isn't that much variance in prenatal development.
The religious people got all abortion banned in many places, then (a hundred years later) women protested (justifiably), and now it's pretty much impossible to have any sane laws passed because any reasonable law is opposed on both sides by two very vocal minorities.
Personally I think 24 weeks is probably unnecessarily late. A woman should be pretty sure she's pregnant by the second month of pregnancy. If you put the line at sixteen or 19 weeks there's plenty of time to make the decision. Ironically, that's about where the line used to be drawn. Places where abortion isn't a contentious issue seem to have settled on pretty much those rules. In Sweden, for example, abortion is free up to 18 weeks. From 18 to 22 weeks a woman needs permission from a national board. France it's 12 weeks, then you need two doctors to certify it and it has to be for the health of the mother or serious defects in the fetus. Russia is 12 weeks, with exceptions for rape or medical necessity.
Anyway, the OP says "a newborn baby is no different than a near term fetus. No difference at all", which is true for REALLY near term fetuses. He then goes on to imply that you can freely abort such a fetus. You can't. In many places it's illegal. In places where there aren't specific laws against it, you won't find a doctor who will do it. Thus, straw man.
A share of a stock is precisely that - a share of a company. A little bit of it that you own. If the share price rises, the bit of the company you own is becoming more valuable. If it falls, less valuable.
If you buy a house, the amount of money you can sell that house for may increase or decrease. You usually don't actually GET any money until you sell the house, but you can get a reverse mortgage or something and get some cash out, at the cost of devaluing your house.
The market didn't go "SELLSELLSELLOHGODSELLIT" with Nokia and RIM. Both of those companies have been in downward spirals for quite a while. If anything, the markets have reacted very slowly to those two. I imagine plenty of people with a clue have made lots of money shorting them.
If you've got capitalism you need to have a way for the people with the capital to decide what to use it for. Any restrictions on how they do that are anti-capitalist.
The actual mechanism doesn't have to be a stock market, but the result is the same: if the people with the capital decide for some reason they don't like you, you're going to have less capital available.
The phenotype is ALWAYS selected for. There's nothing in the environment that goes in, looks at your genes and says "this one gets to breed!"
But the phenotype is created by the genotype, and the gene, the combination of base pairs, methylation status, and whatever epigenetic factors exist, is the basic unit of the genotype.
Epigentic factors can change in response to the environment, which makes everything more complicated but doesn't change the basic units. For example, if a gene that is prone to becoming methylated in a particular environment is advantageous, selection favours that gene, with it's propensity for becoming methylated in those circumstances, and potentially another gene or genes that are responsible for enabling that methylation.
Slashdot Mirror
The federation ranks are clearly based on British and American navies. It's reasonable to believe commodore works the same way as all the rest of the ranks. Commodore has always been a job description in the British navy. Brief periods in the US navy are the only precedent for a permanent rank of commodore.
He cashed in writing pulp horror for adolescents.
Except for brief periods of time in the US navy, commodore has always been a temporary title, not a rank. You got to be a commodore (temporarily) if you were put in command of a group of ships and either the admiral liked you and wanted to give you a chance to wear extra gold braid, or there was some need to clearly elevate you above the other captains (for example, if one of the others was senior to you but you were supposed to be in overall command).
So Decker would have been a captain with the title of commodore while he was commanding a task force, and IIRC Picard generally commanded multiple ships in emergencies and impromptu fleets, where he would have taken command as senior captain.
Never heard of a port captain, hey?
Only a few percent of the popular vote in the US is for anyone other than the Republicans and Democrats. No fancy electoral system resembling any kind of democracy is going to solve your problems for you.
You're probably thinking of either mifepristone or methotrexate (likely methotrexate, since it seems to be the more famous). They're certainly much, much better than a late stage surgical abortion, but they're nothing like plan B. Where I live a woman can walk down to a drug store after an accident, ask the pharmacist for plan B, pop two pills (they're basically birth control pills in a different package), and be done. Methotrexate can be in pill form or injected but it's usually given as an outpatient procedure, and you generally take misoprostol a week later, which induces contractions. Various things should be monitored via blood work too.
I completely agree with you, third trimester abortions are nasty things for their invasiveness, physical and psychological effects on the woman, and psychological effects on the rest of society. The funny thing is though, they're illegal in most European countries except in cases of medical emergency, and it's not an issue. They're also not protected by Roe v Wade in the US. Third trimester abortion is really only a boogey man held up by anti-abortion crusaders and some kind of crazy ideal demanded by equally crazy extreme feminists.
"As one of the people who has been largely funding your defenses for the last lots of years after WWII"
Americans love to say that. Problem is, nobody is really sure who you're defending us from. I guess you'd have a point with Israel. Kuwait. Probably Saudi Arabia. Although Saudi Arabia is one of the very few countries that actually outspends the US per capita on defence. I don't think you're defending Europe anymore. You did at one point (although let's not pretend you weren't doing it out of self interest) but that was a long time ago.
In terms of the amount you spend compared to what you used to spend, are you making comparisons to WWII? Or the cold war? When you actually faced credible threats? Besides, US defence spending is currently higher (either in constant dollars or as a % of GDP) than it's been since the end of WWII (if you want to quibble it's a hair lower than it was around 2006).
In the midterm US senate election the third party (Libertarian) scraped up 1.14% of the popular vote. That would translate into one (completely ignored) seat if you had proportional voting. The Libertarians (again third party) scraped together 1.16% of the popular vote for the house of representatives, which would give them 5 ignored seats in the house. Meanwhile LOTS of other democracies have representative systems and have thriving third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties.
It seems to be popular to blame your two party system on voting systems, but the numbers don't hold up and examples from the rest of the world don't support that hypothesis either. There's something else about the US that causes the vast majority of you to vote for one of two parties.
What candidates say they're going to do is not very likely to be what they're actually going to accomplish. Romney might say tax cuts for the rich, but you're all so far in debt that it's not like a little more is going to make a big difference, even if he can get away with introducing anything significant.
Everyone voting for the plastic mouthpiece for "their" party, and everyone else choosing whichever of the big two is supposedly closer to their views, leaving actual winners to be decided by statistical fluctuations just leaves you forever trapped in the status quo. Both major parties get closer and closer together to attract the maximum vote, and nothing changes. It's like outbidding the other player by $1 on The Price is Right.
As one of your "neglected allies," we're mystified how spending almost as much on your military as the rest of the world combined is "neglecting" it. Can you explain?
Actually, third(ish) trimester fetuses can feel pain. The parts of the brain required finish being hooked up early in the third trimester. Second trimester fetuses can't.
You sound fairly reasonable (you actually described the situation in my country with regards to plan B and abortion). Except... plan B isn't for "first trimester abortions." It works within the first 48 to 72 hours. That's why it's called the morning after pill. It prevents implantation of the embryo, it doesn't abort it.
Tangentially, Roe v. Wade is essentially in agreement with your position, even if it is a little wishy washy on it. Roe v Wade requires that states don't interfere with women getting abortions up until the time a fetus is viable outside the womb, which the justices put between 24 and 28 weeks -- right around the end of the second trimester.
That attitude is what's wrong with US elections. Vote your conscience. Sure, it might cause your least favourite party to win this election, but how big is the difference anyway? And if you keep up the strategic voting crap, nothing will ever change.
You guys have a system where third (and fourth, etc.) parties get low single digit percentages in presidential elections and rarely elect any representatives to either of the two legislative houses. And it wasn't always that way.
Your problems won't be fixed by getting rid of the electoral college or some sort of proportional representation in the legislative houses. The entire country is brainwashed into voting for "their" party. That's what has to change.
Just to be clear, I'm not a libertarian, I'm making fun of them. I don't really see any difference between a government taking this guy out or a bunch of rich vigilantes, except that with a democratic government doing it we all get to vote no matter how much money we have. And a libertarian world where nobody has to pay taxes would be a world where nobody DOES pay taxes and the government that's supposed to protect people would end up being a bunch of private security goons who protect the rich and screw the rest.
I'm sure that if one of the variants of libertarianism was enacted it would end up somewhere between the environmental free for all of the 1960s and 70s and the laissez-faire capitalism (read child coal miners) of the early industrial revolution. Or maybe warlord Somalia if you were REALLY libertarian.
And that 18 days was in a rocking chair competition, not exactly a cognitively demanding task, and one with lots of opportunities for microsleeps.
I don't really follow what you're saying. What does "a time basis that is much more loosely related to the actual state of development" mean? Are you suggesting that a doctor should do an ultrasound and see what the fetus looks like before deciding if it's okay to abort or not? Maybe a 3D ultrasound and then decide how "babyish" it looks?
In the US (not to say US abortion law is sane, but it's the only country most Slashdotters seem to have any experience with), abortions the supreme court said a state couldn't interfere with abortions up to the point the fetus becomes viable. Since each state gets to make it's own laws they aren't very uniform, but seems to be usually placed at about 24 weeks. A 24 week old fetus doesn't have eyelids that open, doesn't have functional lungs, and has a very undeveloped brain - a brain that can't process sensory input. The thalamic development that allows processing sensory input usually doesn't happen for almost another two months. There isn't that much variance in prenatal development.
The religious people got all abortion banned in many places, then (a hundred years later) women protested (justifiably), and now it's pretty much impossible to have any sane laws passed because any reasonable law is opposed on both sides by two very vocal minorities.
Personally I think 24 weeks is probably unnecessarily late. A woman should be pretty sure she's pregnant by the second month of pregnancy. If you put the line at sixteen or 19 weeks there's plenty of time to make the decision. Ironically, that's about where the line used to be drawn. Places where abortion isn't a contentious issue seem to have settled on pretty much those rules. In Sweden, for example, abortion is free up to 18 weeks. From 18 to 22 weeks a woman needs permission from a national board. France it's 12 weeks, then you need two doctors to certify it and it has to be for the health of the mother or serious defects in the fetus. Russia is 12 weeks, with exceptions for rape or medical necessity.
Anyway, the OP says "a newborn baby is no different than a near term fetus. No difference at all", which is true for REALLY near term fetuses. He then goes on to imply that you can freely abort such a fetus. You can't. In many places it's illegal. In places where there aren't specific laws against it, you won't find a doctor who will do it. Thus, straw man.
A share of a stock is precisely that - a share of a company. A little bit of it that you own. If the share price rises, the bit of the company you own is becoming more valuable. If it falls, less valuable.
If you buy a house, the amount of money you can sell that house for may increase or decrease. You usually don't actually GET any money until you sell the house, but you can get a reverse mortgage or something and get some cash out, at the cost of devaluing your house.
Why buy Nokia for $10 billion when you can pick up the bits you want for next to nothing if you just wait a little?
The market didn't go "SELLSELLSELLOHGODSELLIT" with Nokia and RIM. Both of those companies have been in downward spirals for quite a while. If anything, the markets have reacted very slowly to those two. I imagine plenty of people with a clue have made lots of money shorting them.
"But that's unlikely if it's a company that actually makes something."
Yes, but we're talking about Google.
If you've got capitalism you need to have a way for the people with the capital to decide what to use it for. Any restrictions on how they do that are anti-capitalist.
The actual mechanism doesn't have to be a stock market, but the result is the same: if the people with the capital decide for some reason they don't like you, you're going to have less capital available.
He was. You're speaking it's bastard son, American.
So now you've sent me a Bitcoin. I need to go buy groceries. What do I do? Get an exchange, or someone else to:
send me cash in the mail
send me a cheque in the mail
wire me funds
or send me money using a credit card.
The phenotype is ALWAYS selected for. There's nothing in the environment that goes in, looks at your genes and says "this one gets to breed!"
But the phenotype is created by the genotype, and the gene, the combination of base pairs, methylation status, and whatever epigenetic factors exist, is the basic unit of the genotype.
Epigentic factors can change in response to the environment, which makes everything more complicated but doesn't change the basic units. For example, if a gene that is prone to becoming methylated in a particular environment is advantageous, selection favours that gene, with it's propensity for becoming methylated in those circumstances, and potentially another gene or genes that are responsible for enabling that methylation.