I guess one could make a trigger mechanism that would be set off by the metal detector itself... dammit, now I'm thinking like an engineer/terrorist!
Or you could just go to a phone booth, call the airport, say that you've planted bombs in the airport, hang up and walk away. Your friends could help by firing firecrackers close by.
I still get confused when my boss tells me my paycheque is going to be "two hundred then thousands" I respond with "Just say 2 million", to which they say "counting in 3's is difficult"
Two hundred ten thousands is equal to 0.02, not 2 millions. Your boss sure is a sharp businessman, paying your 8 orders of magnitude less than you think he's paying;).
Any halfway decent doctor will also tell the patient that they need to completely follow the instructions given them along with whatever prescription they are taking. If someone disregards their doctor's medical advice and suffers as a result, I'm really not sure what they were expecting or what there is to complain about. This situation is not broken, nor does it have a victim. What's the point in even going to a doctor if you (very unwisely) think you know more about medicine than they do?
If you stop taking antibiotics before they have finished their job of killing every last bacteria from your body, the ones left are the ones most resistant to antibiotics in the first place. Random variation then makes some of their descendants even more resistant; and, when you start feeling ill and taking medication again, it is those resistant bacterias which survive when you stop it again. In other words, not completing the course of medication creates a selective pressure towards medicine-resistant disease.
Now, if the bacteria would be content to sit in your body and merely kill you once they develop sufficient level of resistance to no longer be treatable, this would merely earn you a Darwing award. But they don't. Disease has a tendency to spread. Consequently, there could be dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of innocent victims, all because Joe Average couldn't be bothered to take one lousy pill per day for a few weeks.
So let's develop something which can be implanted under Joe's skin and melts there, releasing the medicine at the desired rate for the desired time.
Re:Let's think about this for a second...
on
Energy From Raindrops
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hups ! That should be 0.5*mv^2. So the above figures are twice as good as they should be - it's going to take 44 years to produce a single kWh per square meter:(.
Re:Let's think about this for a second...
on
Energy From Raindrops
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· Score: 5, Informative
Annual rainfall where I live is around 1-3 metres (more slightly inland than on the coast). Let's say 2m as an average. Cumulous cloud (the kind that typically causes rain) forms at 2-16km. Picking a number somewhere in the middle, let's say 8km for the average distance rain drops fall. That means, every year, two cubic metres of rain fall 8km per square metre of ground. That's 2,000 litres, which means roughly 2,000 kg. The total energy in this is calculated as mgh, so: 2,000 x 9.8 x 8,000 = 156,800,000 J.
Unfortunately, this is wrong. A raindrop doesn't keep on accelerating all of these 8 kilometers; it will reach it's terminal velocity, at which point the deceleration due to air resistance exactly cancels the acceleration due to gravity. Since raindrops are small, their surface area is large compared to their mass, so I'd imagine the terminal velocity to be rather small - which is a good thing, otherwise we'd get our skulls crushed to powder by rain, but sadly means that we can't extract all that much power from a single raindrop.
Actually, I checked, and according to WonderQuest, the average speed of a raindrop is between 2 (for small ones) to 9 (for large ones) meters per second. Since kinetic energy is mv^2, this works out to between 2000kg * 2m/s * 2m/s = 8000J (= 0.002 kWh) and 2000kg * 9m/s * 9m/s = 162 000J (= 0.045 kWh) per square meter per year.
Since the price of electricity is about 0.07 euros per kWh where I live, and a square meter of this thing would need about 22 years to produce a single kWh under optimal conditions and assuming a 100% efficient conversion, I don't think that it is a good investment.
If your shitty http engine is too shitty to process html without having to look up the DTD on the w3c's website every single page, your shitty http engine shouldn't be allowed out on the internet.
If you don't know the difference between the HTTP transfer protocol and a HTML renderer, then perhaps you shouldn't judge implementations of the former for problems which are clearly caused by neither, but rather by deficiencies in the cache system which goes between them.
If you choose to take it as an implied threat then all the power to you. I'll make an actual threat with no room for misunderstanding if you'd like:
It is kinda hard to take an analogy involving you killing one you're arguing with as anything but a threat, really.
If I ever found someone distributing kiddie porn of my children or younger siblings/cousins I'd blow their fucking brains out regardless of whether or not they were involved in the production of said porn. The satisfaction would almost be worth the prison term.
So you get satisfaction and your kids lose you, their parent. You get satisfaction, they get shafted. Again. And, having two strikes against them, they'll propably grow up to become abusers themselves, because when you're hurting bad enough you really can't help but hurt others around you. Such vicious circles make the world go around.
Anyway, continuing this thread seems pretty pointless, since there doesn't seem to be anything worth arguing about, and it is degenerating into bravado versus cynicism. The original claim - that kiddy porn would be taken down in a flash - and the implication that it is taboo in West certainly is proved beyond any shadow of doubt.
This is interesting and all, but as others have said... Why use HotMail at all? This is like saying "NEWSFLASH: Vista sucks!" Yes, and so? There are BETTER alternatives.
Hotmail is great for throwaway e-mail addresses to be used in registration forms which require them. Create a new address, give it in the form, answer the confirmation e-mail, and never use the address again. The inevitable flood of spam isn't going to make any difference to Hotmail, considering the amount it already gets.
Hotmail is like a public toilet: it smells bad, has shady characters hanging around, and is not a place you'd want to spend any more time than neccessary in, but it's good to have when you need a place to dispose of crap.
It's not solely about continued shame. Distributing something primarily intended for pleasure or profit that required the harming of another human being to produce is abhorrent. It serves no legitimate purpose and I'll confess to being extremely annoyed to see someone link kiddie porn to a discussion about free speech.
"It doesn't harm anyone but is abhorrent" is simply another way of saying "it doesn't harm anyone but offends me". That is not a valid reason to block anything. And "legitimate purpose" from who's point of view ? Yours ?
C'mon, do you SERIOUSLY think that kiddie porn should be legal to distribute on the basis that merely distributing it doesn't directly harm anybody?
Given the constraints I've already mentioned - that we are talking about depictions of imaginary events, not real images - yes. If it doesn't harm anyone, then the only other reason for not allowing distribution is that it offends someone; and that is an insufficient reason.
Actual kiddie porn though? Your "distribution doesn't harm anyone" argument would rightfully cause outrage in the vast majority of people.
It would certainly cause outrage. Whether this outrage would be rightfull is another matter, and depends on whether the argument - which I didn't do make; I specifically stated that allowing real child porn to spreak can harm the children in question - is correct.
Again, simply because people get offended by something is not a reason to forbid it.
It was an analogy. Nothing more, nothing less. It was no more offensive then the suggestion that kiddie porn itself is harmless. I find it interesting that you can condemn me for making said analogy but you didn't bother to condemn the GP for his assumption that the distribution of kiddie porn harms no one.
You talked about putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains out, and did it in such a way that you could later claim it was merely an analogy rather than the threat it certainly looked like to me. I condemn you for this; I merely suggested soem career paths where such skills might be usefull. Yes, I suppose I did it in a way which could be taken to mean that I called you a gangster and a politician; but that certainly wasn't my intention, any more than it was your intention to make a threat against the grandparent.
Turns out the Wikipedia article on "flag desecration" does start with a nice picture of the American flag being burned. I'd still like to check to make sure it wasn't added 10 minutes ago by the guy who made that post.
Luckily, you can, since Wikipedia has version tracking - just click on the "history" panel at the top of any page to view page history, and click on any image to view image history. The image was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on June 26, 2005, and added to this particular article on September 11, 2006.
By that logic I could film myself blowing your head off with my trusty.357 and distribute it around the world without harming anyone.
The act of blowing his head of would obviously harm him. The act of spreading pictures or video taken from said murder wouldn't. In fact, we regularly distribute films containing faked violence, and it doesn't seem to harm the actors who's deaths were faked.
Now, it is possible to argue that having pictures of child abuse in public circulation causes the victim continued shame and pain by reminding him of the event. This, however, only extends to images of actual abuse; drawn or computer-generated child porn harms no one, altought it does tend to offend a large number of people. Whether said offensive tendency is sufficient to ban depictions of imaginary events is up to the particular culture to decide.
BTW. I admire the way you worked the implied threat of violence into your post while still making it deniable if you're confronted about it. Have you considered a career in politics or organized crime ?
As the profit of the universe I hereby censor my image from view by the hethenious masses as well as by the devout itsybitsyers who worship me.
Well, they don't call it the Almighty Dollar for nothing; and AFAIK quite a few printers already have internal programming which blocks the reproduction of the likeness of bills, so I'd say that your demands are being met.
Islam does not have weaknesses. Study it and you will find this simple truth for yourself.
Lack of any perceivable weaknesses is in itself a weakness, since it makes you vulnerable to pride. You'll get so convinced of your own perfection that you'll get a swelled head and begin to pick fights you can't win, and then you'll fall, and since you since won't admit that you could be wrong (because that would imply an imperfection and weakness) you can't really do anything about it and will plummet helplessly to your fate.
The Old Testament implies that this is what happened to the Devil. It is also what got the Dragonball villain Cell killed. In fact "pride comes before the fall" is one of the most cliche themes in all fiction, and for a good reason: it is true, and the one chink in the metaphorical armor of the otherwise unbeatable villain.
As has Christianity, where fairly wide swaths of believers have embraced those who bombed not only abortion clinic but those who would come to their aide.
And so it begins. "Don't talk about muslims; look at what the christians are doing !"
And look at yourself? You've turned an online petition into a reason to rail against an entire religion!
Yes, look at me rather than your own strawmen. I pointed out that the parent post - which said it might be wise to make a backup of the Wikipedia database just in case - was not offtopic (as it had been moderated at the time), and backed up the neccessity of this operation by pointing out that protests coming from the muslim world have a tendency to become death threats.
As I specifically stated that I don't know Islam well enough to know whether it actually condones such behavior from its followers, your accusation about "slamming an entire religion" is false.
I bet you get upset when people use a few bad priests to condemn an entire religion, but you are so eager to condemn Islam based on the actions of a few extremists who are generally agreed to ignoring the basic tenets of their own religion to bring about their own political goals.
If you are referring to Catholic Church's semi-official policy of protecting practicing pedophiles and ensuring them a steady supply of new victims, you are again incorrect. I find said policy to be a very good argument against such massive religious organizations in general and Catholic Church in particular.
And the only thing I've said about Islam is that it certainly seems to draw a lot of bloodthirsty nutcases nowadays.
Unneccessary, since the Wikipedia database contents are already available for download for all interested parties. See this page for details.
That said, I don't think that this is offtopic. This being Islam we're talking about, it propably won't take too long before death threats start flying, and it's always possible some lunatic will decide to carry them out, or take less drastic action, such as a cyber-attack against the Wikipedia servers. Making sure that the database is safe from any such attacks is only common sense; and the easiest way to accomplish that is to back it up and spread the copies to as many places as possible.
Cue a hundred replies claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; and maybe it is - I wouldn't know, since I haven't read their holy book. All I know is that it certainly seems attract lots of bloodthirsty lunatics who use their religion as an excuse to live up to their murderous nature.
What are we, if not our collection of memories? If there's a perfectly identical copy of you, how is it NOT you. What is this intangible property of yours that makes one "you", and one the "copy"?
A bacteria divides and results in two identical new bacteria. Are they the same entity ? For that matter, your life began by merging two cells from your parents together; are you your own mother and father ? And are identical twins a single same entity; and if yes, and one does a crime, should the other be punished too ? Coming to think of it, since the ancestry of all humans (and all life on Earth) should be traced back to the same origin, should you be thrown to a prison if I - or anyone else for that matter - does a crime ? After all, all your cells descend from the same original cell as mine, so in a way you were once a perfectly indentical copy of me, even if we were both just single-cell lifeforms back then.
Look, it isn't the question of one being the original and the other being the copy. If they are truly identical, it is indeed impossible to tell which is which. However, what you seem to be implying is that if you can't tell which is which they are in fact the same entity, which is incorrect: I am this guy over here, and that other guy who looks like me is not me, and he would in fact agree with me on that (that he is not me). Even if we can't tell which is the original and which is the copy, we are nevertheless separate entities; which means that if I die, and the other one lives, I am still every bit as dead as if he hadn't been around.
Besides, even if you could make a perfect clone of me, it would cease to be a perfect copy after an arbitrarily short length of time; and the difference would grow greater the more time passed.
The idea that a clone of me is the same as me is hard to grasp, because we as individuals don't perceive other individuals as ourselves.
It is difficult to grasp because it is false. Observe identical twins. They are clones of one another, and were a single individual at early embryonic state. Are they the same individual now ? Of course not, they are separate entities who simply happen to share the same origin. So do you and mold on old bread, BTW; the point of divergence is simply further down the past.
Or, to put it in another way: simply because you can't tell two entities apart from each other doesn't make them the same entity. It simply makes them similar entities.
I softmodded some gaming cards to workstation cards a few years back. Worked like a charm. However, it got to be more trouble than it was worth because NVIDIA kept trying to break the softmods with driver updates.
I think we just found the real reason why NVIDIA won't release open sourced drivers for Linux.
This doesn't hold true any more, the latest generation of hardware are all using the Unified Shader Model. This removes the distinction between a pixel pipeline and a vertex pipeline as a unified pipeline is used which can be switched between pixel and vertex processing as the scene demands.
That doesn't mean that the pipelines couldn't be optimized for vertex over pixel shading or the other way around. Nor does it mean that there couldn't in fact be different pipelines optimized for different operations; it simply means that they all have the same API.
Compare this to the x87 math coprocessor emulation in Linux kernel: it allows programs to assume that x87 is present, and still work correctly (but slowly) even if it isn't.
However, the slippery slope would not justify a claim that if we have Real ID it will be used to control the purchase of frozen peas. We have made another analysis right there to *rule out* the slippery slope, because it's ridiculous.
Is it ? After all, if you make the Real ID card required for buying peas - indeed, any transaction - then it will become a lot harder to live in the US as an illegal immigrant. It would also be harder to commit crime and not get caught because increasing your spending would show in the database and draw suspicion, and not increasing it would make the crime rather pointless in the first place - indeed, it would become easy to spot any case where your reported spending is greater than earnings. Joe Average would love it, since it would make taxation easy to automate. All this means that there is a conceivable reason why the Government would want to pass such regulation, even without assuming any nefarious motives (which is assuming a lot).
Besides, if one accepts the claim "politicians in general are in politics because they want power", then almost any slippery slope in regards to increasing regulation becomes a justifiable argument. After all, more regulation means more power for the politicians.
Vengeance has nothing to do with it. It's a matter of being self-consistent within your life. Hillary and Bill are avowed Christians, they subscribe to the sanctity of marriage as a commitment of fidelity to one another. OTOH their marriage is and may never have been such a commitment... hence it is inconsistent with their values/beliefs.... thus lack of integrity. And yes it is Hillary's problem as much as Bill's.
Bullshit. Christianity (the Bible, to be exact) condemns adultery; specifically, it condemns the adulterer, not the betrayed spouse. Adultery is also mentioned as a justification for divorce. However, by no means is it the duty of a christian go ahead with the divorce; it is merely an option (s)he may take. Neither taking nor not taking it implies integrity nor lack of it, at least not based on christianity - altought obviously taking or not taking a divorce may conflict with other values a person may have.
Furthermore, only Bill has been shown to lack commitment; so, unless you have evidence that Hillary has been sleeping around too, your accusations and claims of an open marriage are baseless.
Finally, "christian" means someone who believes in Jesus Christ. While it usually also implies an associated set of moral values, such as sanctity of marriage, there has been - and propably still are - several groups and individuals who disagreed with one or more of these. While one may consider these people misguided fools, and they may or may not be so, it doesn't change the fact that they consider(ed) themselves christians. So, claiming that a christian can't have an open marriage is not true; it might make him a misguided christian, but that's a debate for theologists and not relevant to the matter at hand.
And then there's the question of just what is adultery. The context Bible uses it seems to imply that someone is getting betrayed, that a spouse is being unfaithful; which raises the question: if both spouses agree to an arrangement other than traditional 1-on-1 marriage, does that qualify as unfaithfulness ? Again, this is for theologians to debate.
One time is a mistake, twice you may have a problem but after the number of times that Bill is known to have strayed, well that is not someone who is trying to work it out and if he is a sex addict - he should never have been elected and probably would not have been if Hillary had not covered up for him.
Um, why not ? Why would having an overactive libido be an obstacle for being a president ? If anything, I'd imagine that getting laid on a regular basis would be a great counterbalance to the stress of the job and thus capable of doing it better. And studies have shown it to lessen aggressive behavior in monkeys.
Besides, what does "sex addict" mean anyway - someone who likes or can get sex more than you consider appropriate ?
Always skip one version of the OS. In my case I went from Win98 to WinXP.
I considered that too, but had been burned by both Win95 and Win98, and didn't see any reason to believe that WinXP would be any different, so I decided to try Linux instead. That's one customer Microsoft lost for good due to quality issues.
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Or you could just go to a phone booth, call the airport, say that you've planted bombs in the airport, hang up and walk away. Your friends could help by firing firecrackers close by.
Two hundred ten thousands is equal to 0.02, not 2 millions. Your boss sure is a sharp businessman, paying your 8 orders of magnitude less than you think he's paying ;).
Most such expressions don't happen near Free Speech Zones, so laughing at them would be illegal.
If you stop taking antibiotics before they have finished their job of killing every last bacteria from your body, the ones left are the ones most resistant to antibiotics in the first place. Random variation then makes some of their descendants even more resistant; and, when you start feeling ill and taking medication again, it is those resistant bacterias which survive when you stop it again. In other words, not completing the course of medication creates a selective pressure towards medicine-resistant disease.
Now, if the bacteria would be content to sit in your body and merely kill you once they develop sufficient level of resistance to no longer be treatable, this would merely earn you a Darwing award. But they don't. Disease has a tendency to spread. Consequently, there could be dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of innocent victims, all because Joe Average couldn't be bothered to take one lousy pill per day for a few weeks.
So let's develop something which can be implanted under Joe's skin and melts there, releasing the medicine at the desired rate for the desired time.
Hups ! That should be 0.5*mv^2. So the above figures are twice as good as they should be - it's going to take 44 years to produce a single kWh per square meter :(.
Unfortunately, this is wrong. A raindrop doesn't keep on accelerating all of these 8 kilometers; it will reach it's terminal velocity, at which point the deceleration due to air resistance exactly cancels the acceleration due to gravity. Since raindrops are small, their surface area is large compared to their mass, so I'd imagine the terminal velocity to be rather small - which is a good thing, otherwise we'd get our skulls crushed to powder by rain, but sadly means that we can't extract all that much power from a single raindrop.
Actually, I checked, and according to WonderQuest, the average speed of a raindrop is between 2 (for small ones) to 9 (for large ones) meters per second. Since kinetic energy is mv^2, this works out to between 2000kg * 2m/s * 2m/s = 8000J (= 0.002 kWh) and 2000kg * 9m/s * 9m/s = 162 000J (= 0.045 kWh) per square meter per year.
Since the price of electricity is about 0.07 euros per kWh where I live, and a square meter of this thing would need about 22 years to produce a single kWh under optimal conditions and assuming a 100% efficient conversion, I don't think that it is a good investment.
If you don't know the difference between the HTTP transfer protocol and a HTML renderer, then perhaps you shouldn't judge implementations of the former for problems which are clearly caused by neither, but rather by deficiencies in the cache system which goes between them.
It is kinda hard to take an analogy involving you killing one you're arguing with as anything but a threat, really.
So you get satisfaction and your kids lose you, their parent. You get satisfaction, they get shafted. Again. And, having two strikes against them, they'll propably grow up to become abusers themselves, because when you're hurting bad enough you really can't help but hurt others around you. Such vicious circles make the world go around.
Anyway, continuing this thread seems pretty pointless, since there doesn't seem to be anything worth arguing about, and it is degenerating into bravado versus cynicism. The original claim - that kiddy porn would be taken down in a flash - and the implication that it is taboo in West certainly is proved beyond any shadow of doubt.
Hotmail is great for throwaway e-mail addresses to be used in registration forms which require them. Create a new address, give it in the form, answer the confirmation e-mail, and never use the address again. The inevitable flood of spam isn't going to make any difference to Hotmail, considering the amount it already gets.
Hotmail is like a public toilet: it smells bad, has shady characters hanging around, and is not a place you'd want to spend any more time than neccessary in, but it's good to have when you need a place to dispose of crap.
"It doesn't harm anyone but is abhorrent" is simply another way of saying "it doesn't harm anyone but offends me". That is not a valid reason to block anything. And "legitimate purpose" from who's point of view ? Yours ?
Given the constraints I've already mentioned - that we are talking about depictions of imaginary events, not real images - yes. If it doesn't harm anyone, then the only other reason for not allowing distribution is that it offends someone; and that is an insufficient reason.
It would certainly cause outrage. Whether this outrage would be rightfull is another matter, and depends on whether the argument - which I didn't do make; I specifically stated that allowing real child porn to spreak can harm the children in question - is correct.
Again, simply because people get offended by something is not a reason to forbid it.
You talked about putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains out, and did it in such a way that you could later claim it was merely an analogy rather than the threat it certainly looked like to me. I condemn you for this; I merely suggested soem career paths where such skills might be usefull. Yes, I suppose I did it in a way which could be taken to mean that I called you a gangster and a politician; but that certainly wasn't my intention, any more than it was your intention to make a threat against the grandparent.
Luckily, you can, since Wikipedia has version tracking - just click on the "history" panel at the top of any page to view page history, and click on any image to view image history. The image was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on June 26, 2005, and added to this particular article on September 11, 2006.
The act of blowing his head of would obviously harm him. The act of spreading pictures or video taken from said murder wouldn't. In fact, we regularly distribute films containing faked violence, and it doesn't seem to harm the actors who's deaths were faked.
Now, it is possible to argue that having pictures of child abuse in public circulation causes the victim continued shame and pain by reminding him of the event. This, however, only extends to images of actual abuse; drawn or computer-generated child porn harms no one, altought it does tend to offend a large number of people. Whether said offensive tendency is sufficient to ban depictions of imaginary events is up to the particular culture to decide.
BTW. I admire the way you worked the implied threat of violence into your post while still making it deniable if you're confronted about it. Have you considered a career in politics or organized crime ?
Well, they don't call it the Almighty Dollar for nothing; and AFAIK quite a few printers already have internal programming which blocks the reproduction of the likeness of bills, so I'd say that your demands are being met.
Lack of any perceivable weaknesses is in itself a weakness, since it makes you vulnerable to pride. You'll get so convinced of your own perfection that you'll get a swelled head and begin to pick fights you can't win, and then you'll fall, and since you since won't admit that you could be wrong (because that would imply an imperfection and weakness) you can't really do anything about it and will plummet helplessly to your fate.
The Old Testament implies that this is what happened to the Devil. It is also what got the Dragonball villain Cell killed. In fact "pride comes before the fall" is one of the most cliche themes in all fiction, and for a good reason: it is true, and the one chink in the metaphorical armor of the otherwise unbeatable villain.
Just some food for thought.
And so it begins. "Don't talk about muslims; look at what the christians are doing !"
Yes, look at me rather than your own strawmen. I pointed out that the parent post - which said it might be wise to make a backup of the Wikipedia database just in case - was not offtopic (as it had been moderated at the time), and backed up the neccessity of this operation by pointing out that protests coming from the muslim world have a tendency to become death threats.
As I specifically stated that I don't know Islam well enough to know whether it actually condones such behavior from its followers, your accusation about "slamming an entire religion" is false.
If you are referring to Catholic Church's semi-official policy of protecting practicing pedophiles and ensuring them a steady supply of new victims, you are again incorrect. I find said policy to be a very good argument against such massive religious organizations in general and Catholic Church in particular.
And the only thing I've said about Islam is that it certainly seems to draw a lot of bloodthirsty nutcases nowadays.
Unneccessary, since the Wikipedia database contents are already available for download for all interested parties. See this page for details.
That said, I don't think that this is offtopic. This being Islam we're talking about, it propably won't take too long before death threats start flying, and it's always possible some lunatic will decide to carry them out, or take less drastic action, such as a cyber-attack against the Wikipedia servers. Making sure that the database is safe from any such attacks is only common sense; and the easiest way to accomplish that is to back it up and spread the copies to as many places as possible.
Cue a hundred replies claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; and maybe it is - I wouldn't know, since I haven't read their holy book. All I know is that it certainly seems attract lots of bloodthirsty lunatics who use their religion as an excuse to live up to their murderous nature.
A bacteria divides and results in two identical new bacteria. Are they the same entity ? For that matter, your life began by merging two cells from your parents together; are you your own mother and father ? And are identical twins a single same entity; and if yes, and one does a crime, should the other be punished too ? Coming to think of it, since the ancestry of all humans (and all life on Earth) should be traced back to the same origin, should you be thrown to a prison if I - or anyone else for that matter - does a crime ? After all, all your cells descend from the same original cell as mine, so in a way you were once a perfectly indentical copy of me, even if we were both just single-cell lifeforms back then.
Look, it isn't the question of one being the original and the other being the copy. If they are truly identical, it is indeed impossible to tell which is which. However, what you seem to be implying is that if you can't tell which is which they are in fact the same entity, which is incorrect: I am this guy over here, and that other guy who looks like me is not me, and he would in fact agree with me on that (that he is not me). Even if we can't tell which is the original and which is the copy, we are nevertheless separate entities; which means that if I die, and the other one lives, I am still every bit as dead as if he hadn't been around.
Besides, even if you could make a perfect clone of me, it would cease to be a perfect copy after an arbitrarily short length of time; and the difference would grow greater the more time passed.
It is difficult to grasp because it is false. Observe identical twins. They are clones of one another, and were a single individual at early embryonic state. Are they the same individual now ? Of course not, they are separate entities who simply happen to share the same origin. So do you and mold on old bread, BTW; the point of divergence is simply further down the past.
Or, to put it in another way: simply because you can't tell two entities apart from each other doesn't make them the same entity. It simply makes them similar entities.
I think we just found the real reason why NVIDIA won't release open sourced drivers for Linux.
That doesn't mean that the pipelines couldn't be optimized for vertex over pixel shading or the other way around. Nor does it mean that there couldn't in fact be different pipelines optimized for different operations; it simply means that they all have the same API.
Compare this to the x87 math coprocessor emulation in Linux kernel: it allows programs to assume that x87 is present, and still work correctly (but slowly) even if it isn't.
Is it ? After all, if you make the Real ID card required for buying peas - indeed, any transaction - then it will become a lot harder to live in the US as an illegal immigrant. It would also be harder to commit crime and not get caught because increasing your spending would show in the database and draw suspicion, and not increasing it would make the crime rather pointless in the first place - indeed, it would become easy to spot any case where your reported spending is greater than earnings. Joe Average would love it, since it would make taxation easy to automate. All this means that there is a conceivable reason why the Government would want to pass such regulation, even without assuming any nefarious motives (which is assuming a lot).
Besides, if one accepts the claim "politicians in general are in politics because they want power", then almost any slippery slope in regards to increasing regulation becomes a justifiable argument. After all, more regulation means more power for the politicians.
Bullshit. Christianity (the Bible, to be exact) condemns adultery; specifically, it condemns the adulterer, not the betrayed spouse. Adultery is also mentioned as a justification for divorce. However, by no means is it the duty of a christian go ahead with the divorce; it is merely an option (s)he may take. Neither taking nor not taking it implies integrity nor lack of it, at least not based on christianity - altought obviously taking or not taking a divorce may conflict with other values a person may have.
Furthermore, only Bill has been shown to lack commitment; so, unless you have evidence that Hillary has been sleeping around too, your accusations and claims of an open marriage are baseless.
Finally, "christian" means someone who believes in Jesus Christ. While it usually also implies an associated set of moral values, such as sanctity of marriage, there has been - and propably still are - several groups and individuals who disagreed with one or more of these. While one may consider these people misguided fools, and they may or may not be so, it doesn't change the fact that they consider(ed) themselves christians. So, claiming that a christian can't have an open marriage is not true; it might make him a misguided christian, but that's a debate for theologists and not relevant to the matter at hand.
And then there's the question of just what is adultery. The context Bible uses it seems to imply that someone is getting betrayed, that a spouse is being unfaithful; which raises the question: if both spouses agree to an arrangement other than traditional 1-on-1 marriage, does that qualify as unfaithfulness ? Again, this is for theologians to debate.
Um, why not ? Why would having an overactive libido be an obstacle for being a president ? If anything, I'd imagine that getting laid on a regular basis would be a great counterbalance to the stress of the job and thus capable of doing it better. And studies have shown it to lessen aggressive behavior in monkeys.
Besides, what does "sex addict" mean anyway - someone who likes or can get sex more than you consider appropriate ?
In Soviet Russia, transcendental irrationality legislates you !
I considered that too, but had been burned by both Win95 and Win98, and didn't see any reason to believe that WinXP would be any different, so I decided to try Linux instead. That's one customer Microsoft lost for good due to quality issues.
I'd imagine that most people drive better when they aren't nervous.