The problem is that religious ethics were a code of conduct developed for a world where no one knew how the life of a new human actually begins - and where the infinitesimal steps before the actual birth were unknowable and therefore for all intents and purposes irrelevant.
Example:
There is an empty room with a perfectly clean and smooth floor. If you came looking, you would say "that room is clean and empty".
In the classical example, we would put in sand, grain after grain, until you decide that there's not "some sand" but "a heap of sand". But that is insufficient, because it doesn't carry a lawful penalty of doing something with it.
So here's the modified example, which is ironically the exact opposite of producing a baby:
If I were to bring in a small piece of metal that I produced in the neighboring room with tools and raw materials there, you would attest "the room is not empty anymore".
Now I am constantly bringing small pieces of metal into the room, differently shaped, but somehow they fit or connect to each other. You come looking and could tell, that the room is not only filling up, but actually some coordinated production is going on. Maybe you even recognize what I am up to, maybe you don't
I toil day and night and produce even more metal pieces and assemble them according to the plan I made. You come into the room and now you clearly recognize it just by looking at its shape. Some levers and springs of this item already work as they are supposed to. It's clearly not yet complete, but every kid would recognize it by now.
Now as I continue to work, at what point would I become liable to "possessing an unlicensed firearm"?
At which point do the assembled items constitute fit the description and intent of the law? Do plans, raw materials, tools and intent suffice? Is possession of the disassembled parts enough? Is possessing all parts relevant or only the critical ones? At which point in time did the unmachined blank became a firearm part unlawful to possess?
Shorter example: owning an 120cm rod of hardened steel and a grinder is allowed, owning a 120cm sword is not. At what point in time does the steel rod become an illegal item if I set out to produce one?
Excuse me for taking all that destructive stuff, but that's a suitable comparison, since it is assembled in infinitesimal steps with legal repercussions beyond a certain point.
Now back to the embryo: is the fertilized ovum possessing "human" rights?
Do human rights start with the first cluster of cells? With a human shape? With the first heart beat or the first brain wave, the first breath, the first word?
Even if it was to start with the fertilized egg as most religious types contest, we could not ever hope to get around this demarcationg problem. There's a high chance the fertilized egg will not take hold, so it would mean that 70% of all "humans" are dying several hours after conception. And then there's the "components" of a fertilized egg:
Wasting semen, especially when using a condom for intercourse, would be a capital sin for men - it already is for some religions. No one seems to notice that all non-pregnant, menstruating females would then be killing "humans" every month - under the same law that men shouldn't "spill their seed", they would be required to take any opportunity to get pregnant.
That inconsistency is bothering enough, but it'd get worse: if a lawfully wedded couple would use a condom to not get the female pregnant, it would be a major sin. If the same couple refused to have sex, it is not. Coitus interruptus is a catholic sin as well, the phone ring that interrupts the Coitus is not.
I believe we cannot reliably tell when human rights begin and that we must learn to deal with it. We know that semen and eggs are not really different from fingernails in growing and re-growing. We know that the newborn baby has the full rights of all humans. When these rights start in between them will be up to eternal speculation.
Because we all know there never could be a naturally occurring dust cloud and fire in the dry, dry desert over a whole forty years.
To me, it is miraculous that a tribe of thousands of people can survive for 40 years in the desert, but the Tuareg managed to not only survive but actually live in the desert, full-time, for all recorded history. Most of them still live that way.
So surviving in the desert is miraculous only to a city slicker like me, since a whole tribe is proving it to be feasible in this very moment.
Managing to cross any desert in "only" a forty years is much much easier than that. The problem is survival, which we now know *can* be done by sufficiently modest and experienced humans. With survival assured, it's only a matter of walking in a sufficiently straight line to reach the other side of any desert.
Even if they crossed the whole Sahara desert in the longest straight line possible, 40 years make for a slightly disappointing average speed.
Let's start with testable assumptions: 1) Do big dogs have bigger offspring than small dogs? 2) Will repeatedly pairing the biggest dogs produce even bigger breeds of dogs? 3) Will ever growing breeds at some point be physically unable to mate with small dogs? 4) Will the DNA of offspring differ slightly from the DNA of any of the parents? (ie. random and harmless mutations)
Is it conceivable that in absence of medium-sized breeds, those small and big breeds of dogs will never mate again forever?
Fast forward a few thousand years: Is it conceivable that two "breeds" of dogs that have not interbred for centuries have accumulated enough genetic drift that a combination of their DNA material will produce only sterile offspring?
Animal "breeds" that cannot have fertile offspring when interbred are usually considered to be a "species".
If bigger and smaller dogs can evolve into different species, if horses and donkeys are similar enough to have live but infertile offspring, then we can prove that physical restrictions on mating and interbreeding will at some point in the far future produce different species.
From there, it is perfectly conceivable that animals that become physically separated through mountain ranges, oceans, on different continents or islands, will surely evolve into non-interbreedable species.
If the main predators on continent A are different from those on continent B, both species will totally diverge.
Anyone that can watch the scene for several hundred thousand years will then observe the forming of physical features in one population that is not present in the other. Species A will develop heavy claws, species B will develop a potent venom.
Anyone that can watch for several *million* years will see the formation of totally different features.
Unless there is a treatment available with "only" an 80% failure rate, an experimental treatment with a 90% failure rate is acceptable when administered to terminally ill patients.
In my opinion, it's perfectly ethical to try all kinds of weird stuff to patients that are otherwise absolutely damned to die soon from a terminal disease. As long as the procedure and it's results are freely chosen by the patient and duly noted, evaluated by the doctor - and only if no procedure that doesn't show results is repeated beyond a small confidence interval.
I cannot stress enough the impact of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol - it had the first rabies survivor ever recorded and saved a handful of other patients. Maybe 80-90% of the patients died in spite of this treatment, but against rabies, that's the best we've seen in all of recorded human history.
The choice is "die a slow death with 100% probability over the next 3 weeks" or "perish fast with an 90% probability after the experimental treatment over the next 3 days".
Maybe it is clearer if it's translated: "survive with 0% probability" or "survive with 10% probability *and* maybe help countless patients after you in fighting that disease".
A Swiss VPN or SSL/SSH/TLS whatever proxy is not exposed on the client side. On the server side, it is, but pretty anonymous. And in Swiss datacenters, of course.
Everyone who was locked up has the connections to procure weapons and all other kinds of contraband. The joint is something like vocational school of crime. Having been there innocently for several years will permanently change everyone. Not for the better.
As I understand it, the justice system of the free world is designed to try as much as possible to not ever imprison innocents. That is the basis of our society and democracy.
Suspects can of course be imprisoned for committing a crime even if they don't confess anything. But imprisoning people that are not proven guilty simply for NOT talking, in other words, taking voluntary silence as an admission or even proof of guilt is way, way, way over the line.
Politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, law enforcement officers who try to turn this basis of our society around, if they imprison innocents, if they force suspects to incriminate themselves or even imprison suspects for the "crime" of "not talking" are enemies of the rule of law and enemies of the people. They can be brought to justice by any means necessary. Ballot, soap, jury and of course ammo.
I don't buy into that "don't ever use violence because violence is fundamentally wrong" mantra that everyone seems to be praying these days, because there are situation when violence is not only permissible but where it is the most rational and effective thing to do. At least in hostage situations and concerning mass-murdering dictators. And politicians who imprison innocents are some kind of dictator already. We don't always need to wait until AFTER the camps are operating before we act...
Just because you CAN throw specific stuff at specific browser, it doesn't make it the best idea.
Specific stuff for specific browsers is the exact antithesis to "standards".
I know this is Apple, so/. becomes Miniluv 2.0 and Minitrue 3.0, but I will not accept any re-framing of the word "standard" so that it describes a concept that is different for every instance and audience.
Base load power plants may not always have turbines like this and gas fired turbines can be controlled well enough by air and fuel intake.
Of course, steam turbines will attain an equilibrium mostly by themselves, without load, they just don't extract as much energy and the steam leaves the plant hotter than usual.
But on today's grids, I think there is usually at least one plant that can follow demand with a variable-pitch propeller, it's usually hydroelectric plants like dams and pumped-storage reservoirs.
The generators do NOT run whether people are using power or not. Electricity generation are meticulously and continously matched to power demand, because otherwise the grid, the generators, transformers etc. would take physical damage or voltage would drop below acceptable levels, damaging some sensitive appliances and through brownouts cause major losses in some industry branches.
Thermodynamics: the energy generated has to go somewhere or it is converted to heat - and nothing can convert even a tiny fraction of the energy in the grid into heat and survive for more than a few seconds.
The instant you switch on your light bulb, the turbine blades / vanes of a generator will to be automatically adjusted my some microns and therefore extracting more energy from steam or gas they are fired with, with steam production or gas input matched every few seconds.
You didn't thought power had no marginal cost - that shutting down appliances didn't actually save some fuel in the power plant, did you?
Doesn't matter - Exxon will rake in the cash then while BP pays all out for the settlements and punitive damages. And next time, Exxon and BP *will* remember.
Doing nothing will not work, so you either dissolve BP altogether, put the Execs in prison - or you institute fines on them so huge they make the annual deficit of the Fed look like bird droppings.
Thanks for the calculation, you are of course right with the small population that is quite possible not really representative for all genotypes. Nonetheless, it's quite good against a deadly virus like this.
No. They will just leave the Internet cafes, WiFi hotspots and mother's basements.
I think we should buy stock from makers of alcoholic beverages, condoms, morning-after pills and AIDS drugs. And bolster funds for rape recovery therapy.
Banning online porn in a country where half the males have HIV. What a brilliant idea.
No, because every idjit voter will recognize the fallacy and dare to speak up against it.
But who will speak up in favor of online porn without fear of being ostracized? Will honored members of society that DO look at porn please raise their hands and say "Yes, I do look at porn out of my own free will"? Probably not.
That is the usual hypocrisy behind all those "immoral" things: drugs, prostitution, pornography - "nobody uses that, or better: nobody should" - all while it's a multi billion dollar market with millions of customers.
And it's another attempt at banning "free speech that might offend someone", ie. killing the "free" part. Popular opinions don't need much protection, after all.
A mortality rate of 80% of out 5 monkeys, 4 would have died. If 0 died in the vaccine group, it is a pretty significant finding.
Maybe someone here can be bothered to draw up the exact significance, but I'm pretty sure it will be a percentage surprisingly high for a sample of 5 individuals, since the mortality is so high to begin with.
For example with rabies, the mortality rate is a solid 100%. Managing to save even 1 infected individual is nothing short of a monumental achievement, as in all recorded history, we only have 3 survivors total, with Jeanna Giese being the first and the 2 others with the course derived from her treatment. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol - so these 3 survivor make up a pretty high significance when compared to 0 before.
Well, drilling for pressurized oil in record depths with cheap, faulty equipment in a sensitive maritime environment is not a sign for failures of Capitalism, it's simply Capitalism wrongly understood.
In other words, what radical terrorists are to Islam and White Supremacists are to people of caucasian descent, BP Oil is to Capitalism.
Thank you for opening that convenient avenue of excuse: if horrible effects occur after an ideology is driven too far, simply claim it's not that ideology anymore.
See? If people died, they "misunderstood" Communism. If spilled oil pollutes half a continent, they "misunderstood" Capitalism.
The world would be a happier place if "Anthropogenic Global Warming" was as easy to analyze as the toxic fumes some plastic gives off when burned in an open pit.
Observing the effects of a cheaply repeatable local experiment yields an unmistakable chain of cause-and-effect for every willing observer. When they have corroded lungs after inhaling the fumes of a PVC fire, they can experience first hand that plastic fires can be toxic.
This is totally different to AGW theory, where the proposed effect is a global, slow but steady increase in temperature. Personal experience will yield only anecdotal evidence here and neither human common sense nor local temperature recording is sufficient to prove or disprove a global warming, let alone tell if this is man-made or not.
If it were, the last winter - the coldest and longest winter in Europe for about three decades - would have shattered AGW theory, but even as a sceptic, I know it would take much more than one winter in one area to prove or disprove anything.
But I think that wasn't the point of your argument. You just wanted to paint skeptics, denialists and lunatics with the same brush.
Be sure to include stations on sinking sand ground from Hong Kong in the sea level measurements and metropolitan area warming in the temperatures. And tree ring proxy data from errm "selected" trees. Hide the decline and make sure your raw data is only peer-reviewed by YOUR peers.
Producing Coca Cola must be guzzling water like there's no tomorrow.
Producing one liter of Coke in all probability uses up one liter of water. And another two for rinsing the new PET bottles before filling. And all this Coke is then drunk by people,
Totally unacceptable.
Now if I would just remember anything that uses LESS water in production than soda bottles. Even plain drinking water uses up more, because it lacks the syrup percentage...
No all these links have anything to do with communism or socialism, because all these dictatorships and regimes were simply not understanding and properly instituting communism and socialism.
All those communist parties, communist leaders, communist activists, communist revolutions, communist manifestos, all of them misunderstood Communism and misinterpreted it, no, abused it.
National Socialists were not socialists, the Communist Party of the Union of Socialistic Soviet Republic had nothing to do with either Communism and Socialism.
Just claim "If people die, it's not Communism." and then plug your ears and eyes.
Thousands of people who commit bombings after reading the Quran and praying to Allah day and night have nothing to do with Islam. Yeah. Just like re-education camps, forced labor, mass famine, totalitarian brainwashing and the prison formerly known as North Korea have nothing to do with Communism. It's all just a major misunderstanding. The next, the real Communism, will be so much better than the last one, really.
We currently know of no quantum shit that breaks special relativity. Our current theory of quantum mechanics does not break relativity, but it sort of breaks everything else, hence we have no unified theory of even everything we currently know.
You can only believe the current knowledge of physics and the world in general to be complete, finite and exhaustively researched, not know or prove it. Not entirely different from believing the entire world was created in a few days by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
As long as you can't disprove Goedel, I'm looking forward for someone to achieve meaningful FTL comm.
1 billion people in Asia are perfectly capable of reading and writing "Chinese simplified". Then there's several million people in Macao, Singapore, Taiwan that can read and write "Chinese traditional" Another 130 million are perfectly capable of reading and writing Japanese symbols, which are "Chinese traditional" symbols plus one or two entire alphabets added. People capable of writing Simplified or Traditional characters don't lose their sleep when trying to read text of the other character set, it's not totally different after all. Most other Asian languages have grammar that looks slightly similar to Chinese and Japanese, with other symbols and alphabets of course.
Why build and invent a rotten wheelbarrow when there's a fully equipped 21st-century luxury pick up already waiting at the tarmac that can be had for free?
Most Asian phones have a full character set already, most Asian people are capable of understanding all of them, most Asian networks are capable of transmitting the messages.
Every PowerPoint slide written to defend the idea of reinventing Kanji/Hanzi type languages is a crime against mental sanity.
It may or may not have all the required libraries. How will the webpage know? How will the user know?
You know why I use VideoLAN for media playback? Because it has its own codecs for everything. Drop a file in it, works, everytime. If it doesn't, an update is already available or the file itself is damaged.
Modular solutions are a nice way to implement functionality and has its advantages, but the monolithic model is sometimes the way to go. The average user will have one tool to download and that's it. They don't know about the difference between codecs, or even what a codec is at all.
We have come a long way to bring Firefox some market share among the usual tech support leeching crowd around us, family, friends and fools, so to speak. And I want to be able to continue saying "download Firefox and everything will work", knowing that missing plug-ins will be auto-downloaded from a probably known-good source (mozdev etc) and updates for all components are auto-enabled as much as possible.
Since using the web is a must-have feature for everyone and their dog, this functionality should be assumed and fulfilled by a quality product of free open source software.
And I'd rather sacrifice the free part of the video-codec than letting Joe User migrate back to IE8 and IE9. Which they will do, because they - at least some of them - are the most pathetically ignorant crowd you could ever imagine and they want to be able to use their YouTube, Facebook, whatever stuff to maintain their 1000 friends network. They will not ever care about patents, copyrights, fair use and DRM. They will leech off whatever they need to off PirateBay and be done with it. They don't even care about malware, spyware and trojans, as long as their steady download of porn, music, games and movies isn't slowed down too much. These Joe Normals are nice and friendly people, and for them, we need quality free software.
Giants like Apple and Google can take over market share much much faster than the Mozilla foundation, so we need to take great care here.
"On the flip side, driving drunk has never really caused ME any problems, so I just drive drunk and not care about it." "I have never been shot, so it's okay that everyone gets a machine gun to play with" "I have never fallen off that bridge, so a handrail is clearly not needed. Only fools would fall off from a bridge with no handrail"
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Most women are currently about to waste a potential life form. Most of them do it once per month.
Unless we get ready to impregnate all them at the drop of a hat, potential life forms will be wasted.
Mating duties for all men or stem cells for the sick. I'm fine with either choice, as long as it's consistent.
The problem is that religious ethics were a code of conduct developed for a world where no one knew how the life of a new human actually begins - and where the infinitesimal steps before the actual birth were unknowable and therefore for all intents and purposes irrelevant.
Example:
There is an empty room with a perfectly clean and smooth floor. If you came looking, you would say "that room is clean and empty".
In the classical example, we would put in sand, grain after grain, until you decide that there's not "some sand" but "a heap of sand". But that is insufficient, because it doesn't carry a lawful penalty of doing something with it.
So here's the modified example, which is ironically the exact opposite of producing a baby:
If I were to bring in a small piece of metal that I produced in the neighboring room with tools and raw materials there, you would attest "the room is not empty anymore".
Now I am constantly bringing small pieces of metal into the room, differently shaped, but somehow they fit or connect to each other. You come looking and could tell, that the room is not only filling up, but actually some coordinated production is going on. Maybe you even recognize what I am up to, maybe you don't
I toil day and night and produce even more metal pieces and assemble them according to the plan I made. You come into the room and now you clearly recognize it just by looking at its shape. Some levers and springs of this item already work as they are supposed to. It's clearly not yet complete, but every kid would recognize it by now.
Now as I continue to work, at what point would I become liable to "possessing an unlicensed firearm"?
At which point do the assembled items constitute fit the description and intent of the law? Do plans, raw materials, tools and intent suffice? Is possession of the disassembled parts enough? Is possessing all parts relevant or only the critical ones? At which point in time did the unmachined blank became a firearm part unlawful to possess?
Shorter example: owning an 120cm rod of hardened steel and a grinder is allowed, owning a 120cm sword is not. At what point in time does the steel rod become an illegal item if I set out to produce one?
Excuse me for taking all that destructive stuff, but that's a suitable comparison, since it is assembled in infinitesimal steps with legal repercussions beyond a certain point.
Now back to the embryo: is the fertilized ovum possessing "human" rights?
Do human rights start with the first cluster of cells? With a human shape? With the first heart beat or the first brain wave, the first breath, the first word?
Even if it was to start with the fertilized egg as most religious types contest, we could not ever hope to get around this demarcationg problem. There's a high chance the fertilized egg will not take hold, so it would mean that 70% of all "humans" are dying several hours after conception. And then there's the "components" of a fertilized egg:
Wasting semen, especially when using a condom for intercourse, would be a capital sin for men - it already is for some religions. No one seems to notice that all non-pregnant, menstruating females would then be killing "humans" every month - under the same law that men shouldn't "spill their seed", they would be required to take any opportunity to get pregnant.
That inconsistency is bothering enough, but it'd get worse: if a lawfully wedded couple would use a condom to not get the female pregnant, it would be a major sin. If the same couple refused to have sex, it is not. Coitus interruptus is a catholic sin as well, the phone ring that interrupts the Coitus is not.
I believe we cannot reliably tell when human rights begin and that we must learn to deal with it. We know that semen and eggs are not really different from fingernails in growing and re-growing. We know that the newborn baby has the full rights of all humans. When these rights start in between them will be up to eternal speculation.
Eggs that
Because we all know there never could be a naturally occurring dust cloud and fire in the dry, dry desert over a whole forty years.
To me, it is miraculous that a tribe of thousands of people can survive for 40 years in the desert, but the Tuareg managed to not only survive but actually live in the desert, full-time, for all recorded history. Most of them still live that way.
So surviving in the desert is miraculous only to a city slicker like me, since a whole tribe is proving it to be feasible in this very moment.
Managing to cross any desert in "only" a forty years is much much easier than that. The problem is survival, which we now know *can* be done by sufficiently modest and experienced humans. With survival assured, it's only a matter of walking in a sufficiently straight line to reach the other side of any desert.
Even if they crossed the whole Sahara desert in the longest straight line possible, 40 years make for a slightly disappointing average speed.
Let's start with testable assumptions:
1) Do big dogs have bigger offspring than small dogs?
2) Will repeatedly pairing the biggest dogs produce even bigger breeds of dogs?
3) Will ever growing breeds at some point be physically unable to mate with small dogs?
4) Will the DNA of offspring differ slightly from the DNA of any of the parents? (ie. random and harmless mutations)
Is it conceivable that in absence of medium-sized breeds, those small and big breeds of dogs will never mate again forever?
Fast forward a few thousand years:
Is it conceivable that two "breeds" of dogs that have not interbred for centuries have accumulated enough genetic drift that a combination of their DNA material will produce only sterile offspring?
Animal "breeds" that cannot have fertile offspring when interbred are usually considered to be a "species".
Is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule any hint?
If bigger and smaller dogs can evolve into different species, if horses and donkeys are similar enough to have live but infertile offspring, then we can prove that physical restrictions on mating and interbreeding will at some point in the far future produce different species.
From there, it is perfectly conceivable that animals that become physically separated through mountain ranges, oceans, on different continents or islands, will surely evolve into non-interbreedable species.
If the main predators on continent A are different from those on continent B, both species will totally diverge.
Anyone that can watch the scene for several hundred thousand years will then observe the forming of physical features in one population that is not present in the other. Species A will develop heavy claws, species B will develop a potent venom.
Anyone that can watch for several *million* years will see the formation of totally different features.
Unless there is a treatment available with "only" an 80% failure rate, an experimental treatment with a 90% failure rate is acceptable when administered to terminally ill patients.
In my opinion, it's perfectly ethical to try all kinds of weird stuff to patients that are otherwise absolutely damned to die soon from a terminal disease. As long as the procedure and it's results are freely chosen by the patient and duly noted, evaluated by the doctor - and only if no procedure that doesn't show results is repeated beyond a small confidence interval.
I cannot stress enough the impact of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol - it had the first rabies survivor ever recorded and saved a handful of other patients. Maybe 80-90% of the patients died in spite of this treatment, but against rabies, that's the best we've seen in all of recorded human history.
The choice is "die a slow death with 100% probability over the next 3 weeks" or "perish fast with an 90% probability after the experimental treatment over the next 3 days".
Maybe it is clearer if it's translated: "survive with 0% probability" or "survive with 10% probability *and* maybe help countless patients after you in fighting that disease".
Now what would you choose?
A Swiss VPN or SSL/SSH/TLS whatever proxy is not exposed on the client side. On the server side, it is, but pretty anonymous. And in Swiss datacenters, of course.
Everyone who was locked up has the connections to procure weapons and all other kinds of contraband. The joint is something like vocational school of crime. Having been there innocently for several years will permanently change everyone. Not for the better.
As I understand it, the justice system of the free world is designed to try as much as possible to not ever imprison innocents. That is the basis of our society and democracy.
Suspects can of course be imprisoned for committing a crime even if they don't confess anything. But imprisoning people that are not proven guilty simply for NOT talking, in other words, taking voluntary silence as an admission or even proof of guilt is way, way, way over the line.
Politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, law enforcement officers who try to turn this basis of our society around, if they imprison innocents, if they force suspects to incriminate themselves or even imprison suspects for the "crime" of "not talking" are enemies of the rule of law and enemies of the people. They can be brought to justice by any means necessary. Ballot, soap, jury and of course ammo.
I don't buy into that "don't ever use violence because violence is fundamentally wrong" mantra that everyone seems to be praying these days, because there are situation when violence is not only permissible but where it is the most rational and effective thing to do. At least in hostage situations and concerning mass-murdering dictators. And politicians who imprison innocents are some kind of dictator already. We don't always need to wait until AFTER the camps are operating before we act...
Just because you CAN throw specific stuff at specific browser, it doesn't make it the best idea.
Specific stuff for specific browsers is the exact antithesis to "standards".
I know this is Apple, so /. becomes Miniluv 2.0 and Minitrue 3.0, but I will not accept any re-framing of the word "standard" so that it describes a concept that is different for every instance and audience.
Base load power plants may not always have turbines like this and gas fired turbines can be controlled well enough by air and fuel intake.
Of course, steam turbines will attain an equilibrium mostly by themselves, without load, they just don't extract as much energy and the steam leaves the plant hotter than usual.
But on today's grids, I think there is usually at least one plant that can follow demand with a variable-pitch propeller, it's usually hydroelectric plants like dams and pumped-storage reservoirs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant
You are wrong, wrong, wrong.
The generators do NOT run whether people are using power or not. Electricity generation are meticulously and continously matched to power demand, because otherwise the grid, the generators, transformers etc. would take physical damage or voltage would drop below acceptable levels, damaging some sensitive appliances and through brownouts cause major losses in some industry branches.
Thermodynamics: the energy generated has to go somewhere or it is converted to heat - and nothing can convert even a tiny fraction of the energy in the grid into heat and survive for more than a few seconds.
The instant you switch on your light bulb, the turbine blades / vanes of a generator will to be automatically adjusted my some microns and therefore extracting more energy from steam or gas they are fired with, with steam production or gas input matched every few seconds.
You didn't thought power had no marginal cost - that shutting down appliances didn't actually save some fuel in the power plant, did you?
Doesn't matter - Exxon will rake in the cash then while BP pays all out for the settlements and punitive damages. And next time, Exxon and BP *will* remember.
Doing nothing will not work, so you either dissolve BP altogether, put the Execs in prison - or you institute fines on them so huge they make the annual deficit of the Fed look like bird droppings.
Thanks for the calculation, you are of course right with the small population that is quite possible not really representative for all genotypes. Nonetheless, it's quite good against a deadly virus like this.
No. They will just leave the Internet cafes, WiFi hotspots and mother's basements.
I think we should buy stock from makers of alcoholic beverages, condoms, morning-after pills and AIDS drugs. And bolster funds for rape recovery therapy.
Banning online porn in a country where half the males have HIV. What a brilliant idea.
No, because every idjit voter will recognize the fallacy and dare to speak up against it.
But who will speak up in favor of online porn without fear of being ostracized? Will honored members of society that DO look at porn please raise their hands and say "Yes, I do look at porn out of my own free will"? Probably not.
That is the usual hypocrisy behind all those "immoral" things: drugs, prostitution, pornography - "nobody uses that, or better: nobody should" - all while it's a multi billion dollar market with millions of customers.
And it's another attempt at banning "free speech that might offend someone", ie. killing the "free" part. Popular opinions don't need much protection, after all.
There is obviously a relation between looking at porn and actually having sexual intercourse with other people.
An INVERSE one.
Every /.'er knows that.
Account and geek card please.
A mortality rate of 80% of out 5 monkeys, 4 would have died. If 0 died in the vaccine group, it is a pretty significant finding.
Maybe someone here can be bothered to draw up the exact significance, but I'm pretty sure it will be a percentage surprisingly high for a sample of 5 individuals, since the mortality is so high to begin with.
For example with rabies, the mortality rate is a solid 100%. Managing to save even 1 infected individual is nothing short of a monumental achievement, as in all recorded history, we only have 3 survivors total, with Jeanna Giese being the first and the 2 others with the course derived from her treatment. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol - so these 3 survivor make up a pretty high significance when compared to 0 before.
Well, drilling for pressurized oil in record depths with cheap, faulty equipment in a sensitive maritime environment is not a sign for failures of Capitalism, it's simply Capitalism wrongly understood.
In other words, what radical terrorists are to Islam and White Supremacists are to people of caucasian descent, BP Oil is to Capitalism.
Thank you for opening that convenient avenue of excuse: if horrible effects occur after an ideology is driven too far, simply claim it's not that ideology anymore.
See? If people died, they "misunderstood" Communism. If spilled oil pollutes half a continent, they "misunderstood" Capitalism.
The world would be a happier place if "Anthropogenic Global Warming" was as easy to analyze as the toxic fumes some plastic gives off when burned in an open pit.
Observing the effects of a cheaply repeatable local experiment yields an unmistakable chain of cause-and-effect for every willing observer. When they have corroded lungs after inhaling the fumes of a PVC fire, they can experience first hand that plastic fires can be toxic.
This is totally different to AGW theory, where the proposed effect is a global, slow but steady increase in temperature. Personal experience will yield only anecdotal evidence here and neither human common sense nor local temperature recording is sufficient to prove or disprove a global warming, let alone tell if this is man-made or not.
If it were, the last winter - the coldest and longest winter in Europe for about three decades - would have shattered AGW theory, but even as a sceptic, I know it would take much more than one winter in one area to prove or disprove anything.
But I think that wasn't the point of your argument. You just wanted to paint skeptics, denialists and lunatics with the same brush.
Be sure to include stations on sinking sand ground from Hong Kong in the sea level measurements and metropolitan area warming in the temperatures. And tree ring proxy data from errm "selected" trees. Hide the decline and make sure your raw data is only peer-reviewed by YOUR peers.
Producing Coca Cola must be guzzling water like there's no tomorrow.
Producing one liter of Coke in all probability uses up one liter of water. And another two for rinsing the new PET bottles before filling. And all this Coke is then drunk by people,
Totally unacceptable.
Now if I would just remember anything that uses LESS water in production than soda bottles. Even plain drinking water uses up more, because it lacks the syrup percentage...
No all these links have anything to do with communism or socialism, because all these dictatorships and regimes were simply not understanding and properly instituting communism and socialism.
All those communist parties, communist leaders, communist activists, communist revolutions, communist manifestos, all of them misunderstood Communism and misinterpreted it, no, abused it.
National Socialists were not socialists, the Communist Party of the Union of Socialistic Soviet Republic had nothing to do with either Communism and Socialism.
Just claim "If people die, it's not Communism." and then plug your ears and eyes.
Thousands of people who commit bombings after reading the Quran and praying to Allah day and night have nothing to do with Islam. Yeah. Just like re-education camps, forced labor, mass famine, totalitarian brainwashing and the prison formerly known as North Korea have nothing to do with Communism. It's all just a major misunderstanding. The next, the real Communism, will be so much better than the last one, really.
We currently know of no quantum shit that breaks special relativity. Our current theory of quantum mechanics does not break relativity, but it sort of breaks everything else, hence we have no unified theory of even everything we currently know.
You can only believe the current knowledge of physics and the world in general to be complete, finite and exhaustively researched, not know or prove it. Not entirely different from believing the entire world was created in a few days by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
As long as you can't disprove Goedel, I'm looking forward for someone to achieve meaningful FTL comm.
1 billion people in Asia are perfectly capable of reading and writing "Chinese simplified".
Then there's several million people in Macao, Singapore, Taiwan that can read and write "Chinese traditional"
Another 130 million are perfectly capable of reading and writing Japanese symbols, which are "Chinese traditional" symbols plus one or two entire alphabets added.
People capable of writing Simplified or Traditional characters don't lose their sleep when trying to read text of the other character set, it's not totally different after all.
Most other Asian languages have grammar that looks slightly similar to Chinese and Japanese, with other symbols and alphabets of course.
Why build and invent a rotten wheelbarrow when there's a fully equipped 21st-century luxury pick up already waiting at the tarmac that can be had for free?
Most Asian phones have a full character set already, most Asian people are capable of understanding all of them, most Asian networks are capable of transmitting the messages.
Every PowerPoint slide written to defend the idea of reinventing Kanji/Hanzi type languages is a crime against mental sanity.
It may or may not have all the required libraries. How will the webpage know? How will the user know?
You know why I use VideoLAN for media playback? Because it has its own codecs for everything. Drop a file in it, works, everytime. If it doesn't, an update is already available or the file itself is damaged.
Modular solutions are a nice way to implement functionality and has its advantages, but the monolithic model is sometimes the way to go. The average user will have one tool to download and that's it. They don't know about the difference between codecs, or even what a codec is at all.
We have come a long way to bring Firefox some market share among the usual tech support leeching crowd around us, family, friends and fools, so to speak. And I want to be able to continue saying "download Firefox and everything will work", knowing that missing plug-ins will be auto-downloaded from a probably known-good source (mozdev etc) and updates for all components are auto-enabled as much as possible.
Since using the web is a must-have feature for everyone and their dog, this functionality should be assumed and fulfilled by a quality product of free open source software.
And I'd rather sacrifice the free part of the video-codec than letting Joe User migrate back to IE8 and IE9. Which they will do, because they - at least some of them - are the most pathetically ignorant crowd you could ever imagine and they want to be able to use their YouTube, Facebook, whatever stuff to maintain their 1000 friends network. They will not ever care about patents, copyrights, fair use and DRM. They will leech off whatever they need to off PirateBay and be done with it. They don't even care about malware, spyware and trojans, as long as their steady download of porn, music, games and movies isn't slowed down too much. These Joe Normals are nice and friendly people, and for them, we need quality free software.
Giants like Apple and Google can take over market share much much faster than the Mozilla foundation, so we need to take great care here.
"On the flip side, driving drunk has never really caused ME any problems, so I just drive drunk and not care about it."
"I have never been shot, so it's okay that everyone gets a machine gun to play with"
"I have never fallen off that bridge, so a handrail is clearly not needed. Only fools would fall off from a bridge with no handrail"