Stop. Think about the meaning of the words you are using. Select correct words. Continue.
If I actually thought about the meaning of words I'm using, then I'd never be able to use the word "fartknocker". So I simply find your advice impractical.
Technically, two of those upmods were funny, so I can actually lose karma for this post - even if it shows as +5 something.;)
But, funny was what I was going for.
Which is the dumbest thing ever, btw... A moderation system that is supposed to in part categorize posts, but which gives moderators an incentive to lie about the category if they want to reward the poster with "karma". A system which acts like this karma is something you should care about!
Though for all it's weirdness, I've actually come to appreciate Slashdot for at least one shining virtue: Threaded comments. Man, it's amazing what you miss when it goes out of style.
True but, there is more than one way to interfere than to be an obvious threat.
And we're more than aware of those ways due to our dealings with other humans.
My point, basically, is that just because we have a Prime Directive doesn't mean we automatically forget everything we know and become weak, vulnerable, and stupid.
Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there.
That's a good thing. The fact that WP's nature makes you inherently suspicious means that you have the correct mentality when reading it, as opposed to say Britannica which naturally tends to have an air of authority about it when in reality you should be equally suspicious of what you read there.
Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors.
How many of them would seriously damage the understanding of a layman browsing the subject? As in, they're not trying to actually put what they read into practice, but are trying to gain a general and basic knowledge set?
I remember reading through aforementioned Britannica when I had a copy in my parents' home years ago, and finding quite a few errors in the computer-related articles. But like a lot of the errors I find on WP, they're mostly factual errors of some minutia which while clearly false wouldn't actually matter much unless you were for some reason depending on them to re-create what the article is talking about.
I see your point, but on the other hand, new movies are always being created and thus the filmographies of all the people involved are constantly changing. Unless you restricted the print-form to solely those entries of actors etc. who had passed on and made it essentially a film history book, you're necessarily putting a short window on its relevance.
Whereas with Wikipedia, while further edits are certainly possible, there's nothing actually new happening wrt say the Expressionist Movement, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Juniper Bushes. If the article as it stands is good and essentially complete, then it isn't inherently a bad idea to capture it and put it in a fixed format. There may be further edits that improve the article, but that's not so different than a future edition of a print encyclopedia, and in fact if the print version takes off then there would almost certainly be such.
So while it is true that making a print version of Wikipedia loses some of the inherent appeal of the WP, it also makes a lot more sense than a print version of IMDB, and could actually be a useful and cheaper alternative to other print encyclopedias which never had that dynamism to begin with.
If Slashdot users were designing a product, it would be in development for twenty years because nobody would ever be able to agree on what the product would actually be, and every feature discussion would devolve into an endless flamefest between people of diametrically opposed opinions.
Slashdot "groupthink" is at worst one of high school cliques, where everyone joins their favorite group and pretends it's the best, but there are dozens of cliques and there's essentially no downside to being part of an "uncool" clique.
The difference is that at Microsoft there is a Boss Man whose personal opinion is the Officially Sanctioned Groupthink, and you need to have some serious stones to speak up against it because it's your job on the line.
What are you risking for going against the "groupthink" here? Some fucking worthless "karma"? Oh wait, you got modded up, I bet you're real surprised too.
Hah, I was able to use the term quite accurately recently to describe a layoff. I was rather pleased with myself to be able to say "We've been decimated".:)
Even in the world of Star Trek, when another species poses a threat humans have no problem turning around and baring their fangs.
I personally don't think having a "Prime Directive" policy of non-interference or at least peaceful interaction by default is a bad idea, because there is always the inherent addendum that if it doesn't work out then we're going to kick some ass.
Unless they truly outclass us in technology, I'm not all that worried. Humans have a talent for war, undiminished by our overtures at peace.
Heh, I read "Key Roll" and thought that meant that there was a special roll of duct tape they put on the Apollo missions for exactly such purposes, and while there may be other rolls on board, this one was the "Key Roll".
light side, dark side, holds the universe together, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, George Lucas ruined this joke, since duct tape isn't made my symbiotic microorganisms living inside everything.
Well at least now we know why he came up with them.
He probably considered the duct tape joke to be infringing on his Star Wars IP rights, and since the courts wouldn't take him seriously, he took other steps.
"Ergodic means that if you imagine generating an ensemble of universes, each with its own random initial conditions, then the probability distribution of outcomes in a given volume is identical to the distribution that you get by sampling different volumes in a single universe."
to
"In other words, it means that everything that could in principle have happened here did in fact happen somewhere else."
Because the first is strictly a probabilistic and statistical statement that means that examining a sufficiently large subset of the infinite set will give you the same probability distribution as the larger set. This is a common and basically necessary assumption in many areas of probabilistic and statistical reasoning, you have to make this assumption basically any time you attempt to analyze a random event, i.e. an electron cloud. You assume that by only sampling the position of an electron for a day, you get essentially the same probability distribution as you would if you examined it forever.
How that becomes that the electron will necessarily occupy any particular position at some particular moment in time, I don't see.
"Inflation in fact generates all possible initial conditions with non-zero probability..." also makes no sense. If the probability of an initial condition occuring is non-zero (but non-one), then it is exactly as I've described, where even infinitely many universes does not mean every possible universe will be seen. If the probability of any particular universe being created is one, and due to the uniform distribution thus every outcome has a probability of one, then there's no point about talking about a "probability distribution" at all.
There's no way to go from a probabilistic statement that Universe X has Y non-zero, non-one probability of occurring, to a factual statement that Universe X must therefore have occurred. Even in an infinite, uniform universe.
But given the distinct possibility that I'm wrong, I will continue to ponder the disturbing thought that there are other mes out there who are about to be, are currently being, and are just no recovering from being raped by a herd of randy goats. And fearfully worrying if I'm not destined to be one.
As in dog breeding you want a dog to have the correct dog genes and actions for the breed.
But this isn't just dog breeding, this is training for a specific field. They're not just checking that the dog has the proper coloration and temperament for their breed. Much like with seeing-eye dogs or police dogs, the most basic check involves a degree of training to ensure that they are capable of learning what is necessary. "Behavioral patterns" is more complex when you're talking about a potential professional canine.
I didn't take it that the cloned dogs where past a round of tests for ability to train other than to make sure they are not retarded Golden Retrievers.
Well since they said they had trained them and found them easier, maybe you should have taken it that way.
Again, maybe the project manager is exaggerating, but to assume that they are contradicting themselves by saying they have trained the dogs when you take another statement to mean that they haven't, seems unfounded. More likely your assumption is wrong.
Quite right. Which is why I specified "ergodic", which means that all of phase space is equally likely, so that a sufficiently large set will contain every allowed permutation (in your analogy, ergodicity means that all numbers are equally represented; no skipping "2"). An infinite universe is certainly big enough to contain every point in phase space.
That each state is equally likely changes nothing; I had in fact assumed a uniform distribution in my previous post not that it matters.
Ergodicity just means that 2 is equally likely as 2.00001 (and all other possible values), considered over a long period of time. It does not mean that there is necessarily any period of time in which the state 2 or 2.00001 occurs. It's still just a statistical and probabilistic statement.
If the universe is non-ergodic, that just means the distribution of states is non-uniform, and all that means is that some states are more probable than others. That still doesn't mean that you will necessarily encounter the most probable state, or that you will never encounter the least probable state.
Think of it this way: each causally-disconnected Hubble volume is large, but finite. Each of these finite volumes has a large but finite number of possible internal arrangements: there are only so many ways that you can arrange matter and energy within this finite volume. If the universe is then infinitely large, there is more than enough space to "fit" every possible one of these Hubble volumes. If the initial conditions were ergodic, then each possible Hubble volume will appear somewhere.
An infinitely large universe does not mean there are an infinite number of Hubble volumes. The size of the universe and the matter contained therein are not necessarily the same countability.
And in any case, even if you assume ergodicity, that does not mean that every possible arrangement of states will necessarily occur.
But those days are over for "begs the question". Even the NY Times has, on occasion, used the phrase in its new way (though they are pretty good compared to those scamps over at Wired).
Given how thoroughly the NYT has proven its reputation is undeserved in the last 8 years, I think the fact that they mostly use it correctly is proof that those days are not over at all. We're in the transition period, where an ever-increasing number of people use it, but don't actually know what it means. Eventually what they assume it means will become the real definition. In the meantime, it's like people saying "loose" when they mean "lose" -- you just grin and bear it.
In defense of the people using "begs" instead of "raises"... I think they are trying to imply the obviousness of the question. "Raises" probably doesn't quite convey that in the same way as the word "beg", which sounds much more desperate.
"That raises the obvious question", add superlatives in front of obvious to taste. Proper, grammatical, flexible.
I can't get behind "that begs the question" because that's simply tortuous grammar when you're using "beg" to mean "to plead for". It's like saying "the child begs the allowance".
"The question begs to be asked" is fine as far as both grammar and understanding are concerned, but it's a very different phrase because when someone says "that begs the question" (either in correct or new usage) the thing doing the begging is what was previously stated, but now you've changed the subject to the new question being raised. You could say "As a result of what you just said the question begs to be asked", or "The question begs to asked after what you just said". But that's awkward.
So why do this? It seems a ridiculously expensive, unreliable and dangerous way to try and go about breeding better dogs for a pretty trivial purpose. This technology is being mass marketed before it's even close to being ready for prime time.
Well I don't have any figures with which to do a cost/benefit analysis, but I do know that finding a good sniffer dog is not necessarily trivial. While your average dog has a sense of smell vastly superior to our own, and could probably serve well enough on Podunk U.S.A's police force, there's still a lot of variance and an extremely good sniffer is a rare find. Being able to clone those with the desirable traits may have some advantages, even over breeding the successful ones.
On the other hand, I could be wrong, I don't think they are really "mass marketing" this. It sounds like it's a small-scale government-funded research project, basically a feasibility study to see if it is possible and has good results. I don't get the impression that they're planning on staffing SK's entire police force with cloned dogs any time soon.
It's basic research into cloning, with the side benefit that the end result (these few animals) can be put to immediate practical use. At least that's my take on it.
The Toppies have passed the first round of tests for behavioural patterns and genetic qualities, it said.
"They will report for duty in June after completing a second round of training," Customs spokesman Lee Ho told AFP. Emphasis added. So, basically, these clones have undergone at least one round of training, with results good enough that they are confident the animals will pass the second set and be deployed, and causing the project manager to say that they were easier to train than "ordinary" dogs.
Sure, you can say the jury is out until they have fully trained the dogs, deployed them, and examined their service records after several years. Or gone through the process with many batches of cloned sniffers. Nevertheless as a preliminary statement the claim that the clones are easier to train is not fundamentally without merit, after all who would be better able to judge the ease with which dogs are trained than the trainers?
If the project manager is exaggerating for the sake of his project, that's a different thing, but it's not like they don't know anything about these dogs.
Not only does the old usage hardly exist anymore, but when you try to use it people have no idea what you are talking about.
Language changes.
That's all well and dandy. Just don't interpret "language changes" to imply "therefore I can say whatever the fuck I want and it's okay". Meaning, don't think the fact that you are speaking a living language gives you carte blanch to be that instrument of change, especially through ignorance. It's still ignorance, and still wrong. Over time that ignorant incorrectness may become the new correct usage, but that time doesn't magically arrive at the instant you use the phrase wrong and can't be arsed to learn the current right way.
That said, I do think the old definition of "begs the question" is on its way out. It is still used quite frequently, actually, but there are an ever increasing number of people that use the phrase but don't know the definition, because frankly it's a fairly unintuitive way to say "You're using circular logic" for a modern English speaker when the definition of "beg" used is itself obscure.
On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned the solution is for people to stop saying "it begs the question" as a faux-intellectual way of saying "it raises the question".
But, if the universe is infinite (our current best measurements indicate that the universe is flat and infinite),
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but none of our measurements indicate that the universe contains an infinite amount of mass or energy, merely that it is geometrically unbounded. With a finite amount of mass/energy, there are only so many chances for life to arise.
What this means is that in an infinite universe that has totally random initial conditions, every possible state will be realized somewhere.
Now that I'm certain is wrong. "Infinite" does not mean "every". There are infinitely many real numbers between 1 and 3 even if you exclude 2, so an infinite set of randomly selected real numbers between 1 and 3 does not necessarily include 2. In fact the set of real numbers not contained in the infinite set of random real numbers is also infinite in size.
Similarly if we assume an infinite universe then this also means there are an infinite number of possible states, it is by no means a given that any particular set of states will appear, or appear more than once.
Which is good news as far as I'm concerned. It would be rather disturbing to me to know that no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, there is an exact duplicate of me on a distant planet doing the exact same thing, only they are 12 seconds away from being sexually assaulted by a herd of randy goats.
No, it means they _can_ be sued for copyright infringement. The court held that the Congress exceeded its authority under the Constitution to exempt government entities from litigation under the copyright act.
No, genius, that "shall not be immune" line came from the law that Congress passed, which tried to remove the state's immunity from litigation from the 11th Amendment. Congress wasn't exempting government entities from litigation, they were trying to enable it.
The Court ruled this Unconstitutional, so now the immunity the states enjoyed before remains in force.
This is where I disagree. First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing. No worse than Darwin's proposition that transitional forms should exist.
Please explain how that is a testable prediction of ID -- remember, the entire premise is that this could not have happened "naturally", meaning by chance. Sounds more like a test of convergent evolution.
Many things that fall in this category are taught in the science classrooms of public school....with no qualms.
Nonsense.
The only thing that comes close is String Theory, and that is not taught as an accepted theory in lower schools, and only delivered in-depth in theoretical physics courses where the students know they are dealing with an untested hypothesis.
Can you actually name a "science" that is untestable and taught in science class? Kansas and Florida schools don't count.
Any practical untethered system would only be usable for a very short time, or it would be designed around the need to carry a massive power source. I can imagine specialized uses for a suit that worked for ten or fifteen minutes though, although higher endurance ROVs could perform many of the same functions.
That's why the Japanese are working on a combination tethered/untethered system for city defense. As long as the unit remains attached to the tether it can operate effectively indefinitely, but if the tether is lost (either because it isn't long enough, or because the tether is severed) then the machine can still operate for five minutes at full capacity (which may not seems like long but is fairly impressive considering the size of these weapons).
Slashdot Mirror
Stop. Think about the meaning of the words you are using. Select correct words. Continue.
If I actually thought about the meaning of words I'm using, then I'd never be able to use the word "fartknocker". So I simply find your advice impractical.
Technically, two of those upmods were funny, so I can actually lose karma for this post - even if it shows as +5 something. ;)
But, funny was what I was going for.
Which is the dumbest thing ever, btw... A moderation system that is supposed to in part categorize posts, but which gives moderators an incentive to lie about the category if they want to reward the poster with "karma". A system which acts like this karma is something you should care about!
Though for all it's weirdness, I've actually come to appreciate Slashdot for at least one shining virtue: Threaded comments. Man, it's amazing what you miss when it goes out of style.
"Rammstein is a German band that was formed in kyle is a big fag, Germany. They..."
I have to admit, reading your post was the first time I've ever felt the temptation to vandalize a Wikipedia article...
And for some reason, I can't help but feel that among those who would want to buy a Wikipedia book, this factor will only increase the appeal.
True but, there is more than one way to interfere than to be an obvious threat.
And we're more than aware of those ways due to our dealings with other humans.
My point, basically, is that just because we have a Prime Directive doesn't mean we automatically forget everything we know and become weak, vulnerable, and stupid.
Apprehensions about Jimmy Wales' character aside, my main gripe with Wikipedia is that I am suspicious of everything I read there.
That's a good thing. The fact that WP's nature makes you inherently suspicious means that you have the correct mentality when reading it, as opposed to say Britannica which naturally tends to have an air of authority about it when in reality you should be equally suspicious of what you read there.
Mostly this stems from the fact that in any topic on which I am an expert, I can generally stumble across several very glaring errors.
How many of them would seriously damage the understanding of a layman browsing the subject? As in, they're not trying to actually put what they read into practice, but are trying to gain a general and basic knowledge set?
I remember reading through aforementioned Britannica when I had a copy in my parents' home years ago, and finding quite a few errors in the computer-related articles. But like a lot of the errors I find on WP, they're mostly factual errors of some minutia which while clearly false wouldn't actually matter much unless you were for some reason depending on them to re-create what the article is talking about.
Which you should never do, whether it's WP or EB.
I see your point, but on the other hand, new movies are always being created and thus the filmographies of all the people involved are constantly changing. Unless you restricted the print-form to solely those entries of actors etc. who had passed on and made it essentially a film history book, you're necessarily putting a short window on its relevance.
Whereas with Wikipedia, while further edits are certainly possible, there's nothing actually new happening wrt say the Expressionist Movement, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Juniper Bushes. If the article as it stands is good and essentially complete, then it isn't inherently a bad idea to capture it and put it in a fixed format. There may be further edits that improve the article, but that's not so different than a future edition of a print encyclopedia, and in fact if the print version takes off then there would almost certainly be such.
So while it is true that making a print version of Wikipedia loses some of the inherent appeal of the WP, it also makes a lot more sense than a print version of IMDB, and could actually be a useful and cheaper alternative to other print encyclopedias which never had that dynamism to begin with.
You're kidding, right?
If Slashdot users were designing a product, it would be in development for twenty years because nobody would ever be able to agree on what the product would actually be, and every feature discussion would devolve into an endless flamefest between people of diametrically opposed opinions.
Slashdot "groupthink" is at worst one of high school cliques, where everyone joins their favorite group and pretends it's the best, but there are dozens of cliques and there's essentially no downside to being part of an "uncool" clique.
The difference is that at Microsoft there is a Boss Man whose personal opinion is the Officially Sanctioned Groupthink, and you need to have some serious stones to speak up against it because it's your job on the line.
What are you risking for going against the "groupthink" here? Some fucking worthless "karma"? Oh wait, you got modded up, I bet you're real surprised too.
Hah, I was able to use the term quite accurately recently to describe a layoff. I was rather pleased with myself to be able to say "We've been decimated". :)
Even in the world of Star Trek, when another species poses a threat humans have no problem turning around and baring their fangs.
I personally don't think having a "Prime Directive" policy of non-interference or at least peaceful interaction by default is a bad idea, because there is always the inherent addendum that if it doesn't work out then we're going to kick some ass.
Unless they truly outclass us in technology, I'm not all that worried. Humans have a talent for war, undiminished by our overtures at peace.
I've seen that show. The first season was good, but it went down hill after that.
I didn't know it was made by aliens. Pretty cool. I hope they think to release it on DVD.
Heh, I read "Key Roll" and thought that meant that there was a special roll of duct tape they put on the Apollo missions for exactly such purposes, and while there may be other rolls on board, this one was the "Key Roll".
light side, dark side, holds the universe together, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, George Lucas ruined this joke, since duct tape isn't made my symbiotic microorganisms living inside everything.
Well at least now we know why he came up with them.
He probably considered the duct tape joke to be infringing on his Star Wars IP rights, and since the courts wouldn't take him seriously, he took other steps.
Well played, Lucas. Well played.
Yeah, I'm just not getting how we go from:
"Ergodic means that if you imagine generating an ensemble of universes, each with its own random initial conditions, then the probability distribution of outcomes in a given volume is identical to the distribution that you get by sampling different volumes in a single universe."
to
"In other words, it means that everything that could in principle have happened here did in fact happen somewhere else."
Because the first is strictly a probabilistic and statistical statement that means that examining a sufficiently large subset of the infinite set will give you the same probability distribution as the larger set. This is a common and basically necessary assumption in many areas of probabilistic and statistical reasoning, you have to make this assumption basically any time you attempt to analyze a random event, i.e. an electron cloud. You assume that by only sampling the position of an electron for a day, you get essentially the same probability distribution as you would if you examined it forever.
How that becomes that the electron will necessarily occupy any particular position at some particular moment in time, I don't see.
"Inflation in fact generates all possible initial conditions with non-zero probability..." also makes no sense. If the probability of an initial condition occuring is non-zero (but non-one), then it is exactly as I've described, where even infinitely many universes does not mean every possible universe will be seen. If the probability of any particular universe being created is one, and due to the uniform distribution thus every outcome has a probability of one, then there's no point about talking about a "probability distribution" at all.
There's no way to go from a probabilistic statement that Universe X has Y non-zero, non-one probability of occurring, to a factual statement that Universe X must therefore have occurred. Even in an infinite, uniform universe.
But given the distinct possibility that I'm wrong, I will continue to ponder the disturbing thought that there are other mes out there who are about to be, are currently being, and are just no recovering from being raped by a herd of randy goats. And fearfully worrying if I'm not destined to be one.
As in dog breeding you want a dog to have the correct dog genes and actions for the breed.
But this isn't just dog breeding, this is training for a specific field. They're not just checking that the dog has the proper coloration and temperament for their breed. Much like with seeing-eye dogs or police dogs, the most basic check involves a degree of training to ensure that they are capable of learning what is necessary. "Behavioral patterns" is more complex when you're talking about a potential professional canine.
I didn't take it that the cloned dogs where past a round of tests for ability to train other than to make sure they are not retarded Golden Retrievers.
Well since they said they had trained them and found them easier, maybe you should have taken it that way.
Again, maybe the project manager is exaggerating, but to assume that they are contradicting themselves by saying they have trained the dogs when you take another statement to mean that they haven't, seems unfounded. More likely your assumption is wrong.
Quite right. Which is why I specified "ergodic", which means that all of phase space is equally likely, so that a sufficiently large set will contain every allowed permutation (in your analogy, ergodicity means that all numbers are equally represented; no skipping "2"). An infinite universe is certainly big enough to contain every point in phase space.
That each state is equally likely changes nothing; I had in fact assumed a uniform distribution in my previous post not that it matters.
Ergodicity just means that 2 is equally likely as 2.00001 (and all other possible values), considered over a long period of time. It does not mean that there is necessarily any period of time in which the state 2 or 2.00001 occurs. It's still just a statistical and probabilistic statement.
If the universe is non-ergodic, that just means the distribution of states is non-uniform, and all that means is that some states are more probable than others. That still doesn't mean that you will necessarily encounter the most probable state, or that you will never encounter the least probable state.
Think of it this way: each causally-disconnected Hubble volume is large, but finite. Each of these finite volumes has a large but finite number of possible internal arrangements: there are only so many ways that you can arrange matter and energy within this finite volume. If the universe is then infinitely large, there is more than enough space to "fit" every possible one of these Hubble volumes. If the initial conditions were ergodic, then each possible Hubble volume will appear somewhere.
An infinitely large universe does not mean there are an infinite number of Hubble volumes. The size of the universe and the matter contained therein are not necessarily the same countability.
And in any case, even if you assume ergodicity, that does not mean that every possible arrangement of states will necessarily occur.
But those days are over for "begs the question". Even the NY Times has, on occasion, used the phrase in its new way (though they are pretty good compared to those scamps over at Wired).
Given how thoroughly the NYT has proven its reputation is undeserved in the last 8 years, I think the fact that they mostly use it correctly is proof that those days are not over at all. We're in the transition period, where an ever-increasing number of people use it, but don't actually know what it means. Eventually what they assume it means will become the real definition. In the meantime, it's like people saying "loose" when they mean "lose" -- you just grin and bear it.
In defense of the people using "begs" instead of "raises"... I think they are trying to imply the obviousness of the question. "Raises" probably doesn't quite convey that in the same way as the word "beg", which sounds much more desperate.
"That raises the obvious question", add superlatives in front of obvious to taste. Proper, grammatical, flexible.
I can't get behind "that begs the question" because that's simply tortuous grammar when you're using "beg" to mean "to plead for". It's like saying "the child begs the allowance".
"The question begs to be asked" is fine as far as both grammar and understanding are concerned, but it's a very different phrase because when someone says "that begs the question" (either in correct or new usage) the thing doing the begging is what was previously stated, but now you've changed the subject to the new question being raised. You could say "As a result of what you just said the question begs to be asked", or "The question begs to asked after what you just said". But that's awkward.
So why do this? It seems a ridiculously expensive, unreliable and dangerous way to try and go about breeding better dogs for a pretty trivial purpose. This technology is being mass marketed before it's even close to being ready for prime time.
Well I don't have any figures with which to do a cost/benefit analysis, but I do know that finding a good sniffer dog is not necessarily trivial. While your average dog has a sense of smell vastly superior to our own, and could probably serve well enough on Podunk U.S.A's police force, there's still a lot of variance and an extremely good sniffer is a rare find. Being able to clone those with the desirable traits may have some advantages, even over breeding the successful ones.
On the other hand, I could be wrong, I don't think they are really "mass marketing" this. It sounds like it's a small-scale government-funded research project, basically a feasibility study to see if it is possible and has good results. I don't get the impression that they're planning on staffing SK's entire police force with cloned dogs any time soon.
It's basic research into cloning, with the side benefit that the end result (these few animals) can be put to immediate practical use. At least that's my take on it.
"They will report for duty in June after completing a second round of training," Customs spokesman Lee Ho told AFP. Emphasis added. So, basically, these clones have undergone at least one round of training, with results good enough that they are confident the animals will pass the second set and be deployed, and causing the project manager to say that they were easier to train than "ordinary" dogs.
Sure, you can say the jury is out until they have fully trained the dogs, deployed them, and examined their service records after several years. Or gone through the process with many batches of cloned sniffers. Nevertheless as a preliminary statement the claim that the clones are easier to train is not fundamentally without merit, after all who would be better able to judge the ease with which dogs are trained than the trainers?
If the project manager is exaggerating for the sake of his project, that's a different thing, but it's not like they don't know anything about these dogs.
Keep banging that head against the wall.
Not only does the old usage hardly exist anymore, but when you try to use it people have no idea what you are talking about.
Language changes.
That's all well and dandy. Just don't interpret "language changes" to imply "therefore I can say whatever the fuck I want and it's okay". Meaning, don't think the fact that you are speaking a living language gives you carte blanch to be that instrument of change, especially through ignorance. It's still ignorance, and still wrong. Over time that ignorant incorrectness may become the new correct usage, but that time doesn't magically arrive at the instant you use the phrase wrong and can't be arsed to learn the current right way.
That said, I do think the old definition of "begs the question" is on its way out. It is still used quite frequently, actually, but there are an ever increasing number of people that use the phrase but don't know the definition, because frankly it's a fairly unintuitive way to say "You're using circular logic" for a modern English speaker when the definition of "beg" used is itself obscure.
On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned the solution is for people to stop saying "it begs the question" as a faux-intellectual way of saying "it raises the question".
I always thought that's why it's the "prime" directive - because it's the first one to go out the window when inconvenient.
Ha, never thought of it that way.
I guess then the Second Directive would be something about keeping the Red Shirts safe from harm, then.
Third might be a prohibition against a ship's captain sleeping with any allegedly female alien they come across.
But, if the universe is infinite (our current best measurements indicate that the universe is flat and infinite),
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but none of our measurements indicate that the universe contains an infinite amount of mass or energy, merely that it is geometrically unbounded. With a finite amount of mass/energy, there are only so many chances for life to arise.
What this means is that in an infinite universe that has totally random initial conditions, every possible state will be realized somewhere.
Now that I'm certain is wrong. "Infinite" does not mean "every". There are infinitely many real numbers between 1 and 3 even if you exclude 2, so an infinite set of randomly selected real numbers between 1 and 3 does not necessarily include 2. In fact the set of real numbers not contained in the infinite set of random real numbers is also infinite in size.
Similarly if we assume an infinite universe then this also means there are an infinite number of possible states, it is by no means a given that any particular set of states will appear, or appear more than once.
Which is good news as far as I'm concerned. It would be rather disturbing to me to know that no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, there is an exact duplicate of me on a distant planet doing the exact same thing, only they are 12 seconds away from being sexually assaulted by a herd of randy goats.
No, it means they _can_ be sued for copyright infringement.
The court held that the Congress exceeded its authority under the Constitution to exempt government entities from litigation under the copyright act.
No, genius, that "shall not be immune" line came from the law that Congress passed, which tried to remove the state's immunity from litigation from the 11th Amendment. Congress wasn't exempting government entities from litigation, they were trying to enable it.
The Court ruled this Unconstitutional, so now the immunity the states enjoyed before remains in force.
This is where I disagree. First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing. No worse than Darwin's proposition that transitional forms should exist.
Please explain how that is a testable prediction of ID -- remember, the entire premise is that this could not have happened "naturally", meaning by chance. Sounds more like a test of convergent evolution.
Many things that fall in this category are taught in the science classrooms of public school....with no qualms.
Nonsense.
The only thing that comes close is String Theory, and that is not taught as an accepted theory in lower schools, and only delivered in-depth in theoretical physics courses where the students know they are dealing with an untested hypothesis.
Can you actually name a "science" that is untestable and taught in science class? Kansas and Florida schools don't count.
Any practical untethered system would only be usable for a very short time, or it would be designed around the need to carry a massive power source. I can imagine specialized uses for a suit that worked for ten or fifteen minutes though, although higher endurance ROVs could perform many of the same functions.
That's why the Japanese are working on a combination tethered/untethered system for city defense. As long as the unit remains attached to the tether it can operate effectively indefinitely, but if the tether is lost (either because it isn't long enough, or because the tether is severed) then the machine can still operate for five minutes at full capacity (which may not seems like long but is fairly impressive considering the size of these weapons).
Here's an artist's rendition of the prototype and test type systems.
I think that's a good sign for lunar exploration -- brothels and legalized drugs will make space attractive for much more of the population. :-P
Wait, wait... Space weed and space hookers? That's even better than Firefly (which only had one of the two iirc). Where can I pre-order my ticket?