Didn't we have a story recently where it was possible to sign new certs in an existing domain without authorisation ? That would make the "don't worry too much, it's a sub-domain" answers a bit weak.
I understand why it's difficult to place limits on free speech. But are you prepared to campaign against the Nazis if they stand for an election ? Are you prepared to expose their lies in public to ensure that no-one gets taken in again ?
If not, then just maintaining a cry of "free speech for all" is dodging the consequences and relying on someone else to do the work. If you don't support the nazis, and after a great deal of polling we discover that no-one in their right mind would support their policies, what is wrong with banning the nazi party ? Who suffers apart from your typical nazi supporter who doesn't give 2 shits about you or anyone else ? If you were hosting a government meeting and one candidate did nothing but use expletive after expletive while talking, would you allow them to continue being offensive or chuck them out ?
Sometimes we have to have rules of conduct, and I think espousing racial purity, ethnic cleansing or violence against non-whites should be among those things prohibited by the rules. What is wrong with that ?
I'm not calling for a politically derived list of banned subjects, I'm calling for a humanitarian list of subjects which are not acceptable, at any time ever. The politicians have to work within those rules. Nothing says you can't hold those views, or talk to others with those views, but you can never stand for election while professing those views. That is the price of civilisation.
As for your last statement, no I agree, freedom of speech didn't gas anybody, but the guy who set that in motion started his political career promising lebensraum, which necessitated war. But he still got elected and the rest is history. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. So in order to guard against such "feature creep" in future, we should agree that anybody whose election promises necessitate violence against others simply because they are foreign or black or jewish or whatever should not be allowed to stand.
All plants release CO2. They take in CO2 in the daytime, and exhale CO2 at night. Oxygen is the reverse. They don't produce oxygen at night as they need it to survive. During the day they get their energy from photosynthesis which uses CO2 as an energy input and building material.
And if you don't limit things so that you end up with a Nazi police state, how does that benefit anybody ? Slippery slopes can be angled both ways. There need to be agreed levels of asshattery.
It's one thing to defend speech, it's quite another to defend the actions that result from that speech. You prefer to rely on hope and the goodwill and intelligence of others to prevent those actions taking place. Hell, in the US the people have trouble filling in paper ballots. But they should be trusted to recognise a threat to society ?
Do you believe it's OK to teach Creationism in schools ? Even though it is complete and obvious fabrication ? Why should Nazism have more "rights" then Creationism ? Sure an individual is allowed to believe in what they like, but if they seek to push their erroneous views on others that is going too far.
Any group or organisation that demonstrates, through their free speech, that they seek to deprive others of said free speech or worse, should forfeit their right to organise. Can't we agree on a minimum level of conduct that is acceptable in a civilised society ? Maybe we need a GPL of politics, so that you can do and say what you like with an idea but if you seek to pass it on then you must observe certain minimum rules.
Are the actions at Auschwitz defensible because the Nazis came to power democratically ? What does that say about democracy ?
These are very hard questions to answer, but just proclaiming your outright defence of free speech ducks the issue of consequences.
I realise you are trying to be sarcastic, but all your type ever seem to say is "we should defend freedom of speech", you never propose a solution to the problem of people or organisations who use that free speech for nefarious purposes.
I agree you should be free to say, or write anything you want, from a philosophical point of view. But when you go further and attempt to extend free speech to mean freedom to deliberately cause trouble, real physical trouble for other members of the world, then you're over stepping the mark.
It's pretty childish to just finish the sentence at "allow free speech" without qualifying where that freedom ends, especially when you conflate free speech with complete and total freedom to do what you want. It's like people bitching about dependence on motor vehicles or being stuck in traffic and burning fuel. The glib answer is "ride a bike". You say "but I have to travel 50 miles" or "I have only got 1 leg" but they don't have an answer to that. They don't want to consider the consequences just make a point and move on.
Take the Nazis for instance. If you really believe your nation would be better run by Nazis, then you need to read a bit of history. Time and time again the democratic process has proved that people don't agree with it. But you are willing to give the Nazis the right to free speech and you just hope that nobody ever takes them seriously enough to get any power. I think there should be limits before it gets that far. You are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery - why should you be allowed to vote for a vicious, xenophobic, racist, elistist bunch of scumbags like the nazis ? Giving them a platform in an election is lending them legitimacy, as if it's OK to kill people you don't like or agree with. I don't believe that is a legitimate viewpoint.
Draw a line where you believe no respectable political movement should go beyond, or you will end up regretting it. It's like the "your freedom to throw a punch, ends at the tip of my nose". It's too late when they hit you, they have already gone too far. If you allow the nazis sympathisers to march up and down a predominantly jewish neighbourhood, that is getting pretty close to the tip of a lot of peoples noses, and for what ? Are you seriously defending the right to deliberately piss people off just because you can ? And yet we see the same apologists complaining vehemently about cases of bullying even when it takes place over the net and there is no physical danger to anyone. Can we have some joined up thinking please ?
I'm not against free speech, I'm against finding out the hard way. (note that the Nazis didn't originally come to power under a banner of "let's kill all the jews", their politics were socialist and publicly promised beer and kittens. Any organisation that is still prepared to call themselves Nazis must be referring to the Nazis as they turned out to really be [hate, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, etc], or else they have a pretty stupid marketing guy. The BNP figured that one out, but "British National Party" is still a bit too close so they have been spotted)
There have been (too) many cases in the UK of people with babies and toddlers allowing their dogs to have free reign. They always say that the dog is no threat, it has always been sweet tempered and friendly towards people. Then one day the dog takes the kids face off. Guess what, it's too fucking late.
What's the quote ? "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance". Who's watching ? You ? Your elected representative ?
It appears to me that like most things these days, it's somebody elses job to do that, while you just sit around mouthing platitudes.
Congratulations if you made it this far. Most people who should read this (the ones I have a problem with) stopped reading as soon as I disagreed with their point of view (ironic huh). Now you can make your own mind up on what is acceptable in a civilised society. I hope you question yourself thoroughly. I'm not running for office, I'm appealing to common sense (heh).
So if they congregate, plan and then physically get together en mass with legal weapons and legal armoured cars and other legal non-essential items in order to march legally on a city, does it matter if it's all legal ? Do you have the right to stage a coup in the US ? Do you have the right to stage an unsuccessful coup in the US ? What price democracy ?
Do you admire Somalias freedom to assemble ? Fucking Nazis are fucking Nazis. They are not, by definition, peaceful people. Yes they can talk all they like, but when they start *doing*, you have to do something about it. Have you ever been present at a Nazi rally ? I have, in Germany of all places, and let me tell you, it was not a pleasant affair. All they did was march past shouting stupid slogans, but the potential was terrifying. They are worse than soccer hooligans but even soccer hooligans are thugs to be kept at a distance.
It's all very well having these liberated values, but in real life they have to be controlled, for the benefit of everybody. You can let the Nazis have their free speech while they are few in number, but when you have 200,000 armed to the teeth you are in trouble. But you just sit back and do nothing, what have you got to fear.
A standard limited company does not trade shares (Ltd) they can own them or sell them but not on the stock market. A public limited company trades shares (PLC). I don't believe £1 is the limit either. I thought it was limited by the amount of investment. If you haven't paid in full for your shares, then you are liable to the company for that difference in value. http://www.ukcorporator.co.uk/limited_companies.php Or from the FSA
Private Limited Company
An entity incorporated by registration under the Companies Act 1985 whose members (i.e. shareholders) have a limited liability towards their company. Its name must end with 'Ltd'. 'Limited liability' means that the members' liability is limited to paying to the company the price they have agreed to pay for their shares - after the shares are fully paid up no further liability exists. The company has its own legal personality so is separate from the individual(s) who formed the company and from directors/shareholders.
Decisions affecting the business, the company or its assets are made either by directors or by shareholders. The division of powers between board meetings (directors' decisions) and general meetings (shareholders' decisions) imposes a more formal regime on companies compared to partnerships and sole traders. In private companies the same people are often the directors and the major shareholders.
The company alone is responsible for the debts and obligations of the business, even in insolvency (with some exceptions). The obligations concerning the publishing of company information are more onerous than for sole traders and partnerships.
Safety issues with high pressures ? You do realise that your car runs on harnessing explosions (actually controlled burns - but fast). How do you get any power except by harnessing pressure and releasing it in a controlled fashion.
The pressure on the piston in a steam engine was only around 7psi for a 100HP engine (obviously quite a large piston for 100HP). I don't get how they are proposing a hydraulically pressurised system. You can't compress a fluid, and if it's hydraulic it isn't using air/steam. The system must be related to an automatic transmission / torque convertor somehow, but the naming is confusing if they are using a pressure vessel. Forcing fluid under pressure into a spring loaded chamber I could understand, but a pressure vessel ?
Also I don't think it runs full time on the accumulated pressure, it just reclaims that energy to supplement the electric motor as you accelerate after braking.
What you appear to miss is that the US offshores everything it can and so you end up with Brazilian rainforest cut down to grow crops for US bio-diesel, and existing third world subsistence farmers switching to bio-diesel crops because they are worth more money in exports than local market produce would bring. Meanwhile, YOUR farmers are still getting subsidies on excess corn production because that's the way it is.
Global warming is a consequence of climate change. Global cooling is a consequence of climate change.
I am not a denier, but I am not about to be told we must halt climate change. This is a phenomenon that is as old as the earth, and to think we can just stop it when we want to is ludicrous. If you want to limit our impact on that change, fair enough. But don't tell me it has to stop, because you make yourselves look like idiots. The climate has changed in cycles, and despite the CO2 lobbys best propoganda, the climate was already on an upward curve regarding CO2 before we even discovered fire. And if you take those same records which are used to promote the current scare tactics, you would see that after it (CO2) goes up, it goes down - way way down. It is cyclic.
So even if we completely stop producing CO2 now, the cycle will continue. So you are left with politics. The real question is one of adaptation, not prevention. It amuses me when people blame cows for farting too much, completely forgetting there are billions of humans farting too. And as our population continues to increase, we will rely more and more on vegetable matter to survive, and this makes us fart even more. It's us that causes the problem right down to our basic existence.
So go ahead and do your worst. The only way to stop climate change is to kill the planet. We are better off finding ways to live with it. We are responsible for the crops that will suffer in a warmer world. We helped their colonisation much better than they would have done on their own. We bred cattle. We use fresh water for more things than there is sufficient fresh water to accomplish, and waste it. We over fish the seas, poach wildlife, deforest whole areas and drive animals to extinction. We use chemicals to eradicate species we don't find a use for, even when we don't know what that means for other species in that chain. Then we let chemicals run into the seas killing and mutating who knows what in the process. Worrying about the climate is secondary to all those concerns IMHO.
But then I've always been a "happy camper". I try not to leave any evidence of my passing. Like grasshopper on the rice paper, you try to leave no mark. The current world seems to care only about what it wants, not what it should do, or how it should do it. Fuck the consequences. Well it seems like in Soviet Russia, the consequences fuck you !
To be honest, I'll be dead long before this starts to bite and I have no kids, so I'm finding it hard to care too much. On principal I care, but for practical purposes, it's already too late. I live in a one room flat. I use no gas for cooking, only electricity. I don't have central heating or air-con. I have a car (17 years old, 45 mpg, 0.16% volume CO2 [limit is 3.5%])that is used maybe once a week. I'm not obese, I recycle where possible and I resist convenience products. What else can I do anyway ? But senior climate scientists find it acceptable to fly around the world just to have meetings on the serious state of global warming.
When talking about a Mars sized impact, there would be no crater. It would pretty much liquify the crust and homogenize the rock structure planet wide. The moon was probably formed before the earths surface was completely solidified anyway, if you take an impact as the likely formation method. The fact of the moons low density does give credence to the impact theory as it is composed of the less dense rocks that might have been knocked off the earth. The denser stuff like iron was already deeper in the earth and so remained there.
You missed the fact that most drivers *obey* the speed limit on the autobahn when they see one posted. It's not advisory, it's mandatory. When I was riding bikes (motor) I always used to obey the police, where my mates thought it was clever to accelerate and run away. If a police officer is standing in the road with his hand up signifying STOP, just before a blind bend, only an idiot would speed past them. If there is a truck on its side blocking the road, I don't want to find it while leaning over doing 80. I'd rather be done for no tax or whatever than die.
It's a similar thing with speed cameras. Most of the time, the cameras are placed in high risk areas, and ignoring that is at your peril - not from a ticket, but from the reason the camera is there in the first place. And to be honest, if you don't spot a speed camera, then you aren't paying attention like you should be.
Regarding off-ramps in the US, when I first drove onto one, I saw the sign saying slow, but they all say that right ? I hit the bend doing 40 mph and it was a case of "Oh, shit !" When they said slow, they meant slow ! I only just made it round the corner. But it never happened again. In the UK, you can take most off ramps doing 60 at least, as there is much more road made available to slow down after the less tight bends.
I don't really care about the law when I'm driving. It only serves to provide a framework within which to prosecute people after the fact. What matters is how you interpret the information you are given. From road signs to lines on the road, they are all there to give the driver information and it is up to the driver to act on that information accordingly. If you see arrows on the road indicating that you should merge back into the traffic because your lane is ending, you should look for a way to merge safely immediately, not think you can just ignore the markings and try to get past that last few cars. If you do ignore the markings, then it is your own damn fault if you run out of road. To complain about the law is futile and stupid, as the markings are there for your benefit in the first place.
The UK law says that it is an offence to prevent someone from passing you. But if you are in the correct lane and some idiot tries to push past way after the markings have told them to merge, all bets are off. And that has been tested in court, believe me. If you drive with no insurance, but perfectly safely, and someone pulls out of a junction in front of you and you hit them, then you will get done, as you should not have been there anyway. They might get prosecuted, but you have no defence whatsoever. Call it personal responsibility. I know that's a dirty term these days, but life is so much better for everybody when you exercise it.
I have a full truck licence in the UK. By truck I mean articulated lorry. 44 tonnes maximum loaded weight and 56 feet long. I also have a motorbike licence and a car licence, and a fork lift licence etc. I took training and passed a test on a bicycle when I was 11 years old.
The main point I want to make is that passing the test is simply demonstrating that you know the *bare minimum* to be able to drive safely on the public road. You are supposed to learn continuously after that. Too many people seem to think that passing the test means they can now drive anyway they want. You can't.
I have driven motor bikes and cars and trucks at illegal speeds, but I don't do it when there are any other vehicles on the road nearby. I have fallen off the motor bike many times when I was young and stupid, but never hit another vehicle ever. I have never collided with another vehicle in a car or a truck. It's all down to common sense, which is the root of the problem. I also have trained as a mechanic, so when I'm driving potentially dangerously, I know that there is sufficient oil in the engine so it won't suddenly seize up, my tyres are good and properly inflated, so less chance of a blow-out. I can see through the front screen, the lights all work, and I don't have the stereo so loud I can't hear the engine.
I am reminded of a time I was driving with my GF in Florida. The road was completely empty, not a car in sight either in front or behind me. We approached a junction and I slowed down, established that nothing was coming from any direction, and there were no parked cars with anybody inside. So I turned left without indicating and she warned me that if a cop had seen me doing that I would have got a ticket.
Please tell me what the word indicate means. I always assumed that it meant demonstrating to others what you are about to do. What is the point of indicating if there is no-one there to indicate to ? If you are alone in the forest and you cut down a tree, do you shout timber for your own edification ? Plainly people regard rules as actions to be complied with regardless of the situation you are in. That causes more accidents than anything else in my experience. Of course it would have pointless arguing that point to a typical Florida cop. Which demonstrates the idiotic position we find ourselves in, where the rules trump common sense.
After that occasion in Florida I drove across the US to Seattle in 4 and a half days. Not a bump, near miss, ticket, argument. Is that luck ? Oh, and the previous poster who said you shouldn't pass vehicles while going 20 mph faster is an idiot. Passing is something to be done as quickly and safely as possible. Crawling past at 1 mph more than the other car is one of the worst things to do. You are at the closest possible to another vehicle, you aren't 50 feet away at 60 mph, you are 3 or 4 feet away, and any sudden move on either persons part will land you both in the shit. You should always start accelerating a fair way back and time it so that when you reach the car you want to pass there is space to pass and you are already doing sufficient speed to pass them quickly, then you pull back in a fair way ahead of them and slow down to normal speed.
The worst problem I see today (in the UK anyway) is that whatever happens on the road, most peoples first reaction is to hit the brakes, which often makes the situation worse. Quite often, if they had been paying attention they could have just eased off the throttle and by the time they got to the obstruction, it would have been gone. But they brake anyway, which makes the idiot behind them brake, and so on all the way back down the following traffic. This is where the pulses in highway traffic originate.
People need to learn how to drive in convoy, and also to recognise that you must always be paying attention. No excuses ever. Dropping your hot coffee is not an excuse, as you should not be drinking it while moving.
One of the main reasons I gave up driving professionally is because too m
His hypothesis doesn't take account of many factors. He just assumes that because they appear fully formed in the records we know about, then that's the way they started. Given the overbearing evidence provided by the rest of the natural world, Occam would have a word or two to say about it. I would start with the fact that octopuses are soft-bodied so would not leave much of a fossil anyway. As quoted in the linked article "the chances of an octopus corpse surviving long enough to be fossilized are so small that prior to this discovery only a single fossil species was known, and from fewer specimens than octopuses have legs."
Also, they tend to hang around in rocky places so they are less likely to be buried in sediment if they die, and thirdly, we have only explored a minute percentage of the ocean floor. It's a bit early to be saying "Ok, the octopus proves it, God did it", especially as the specimens found are not all "identical" to modern species, merely surprisingly similar.
The coelacanth is almost identical to fossil records (that's why it was termed the fossil fish) and that's unchanged in roughly 400 million years.
All this discovery does is push back the earliest date that octopuses could have first appeared. If they appeared then much as they do now, then they must have already evolved by that time. They had plenty of time, 95 million years ago is nothing compared to billions of years of the ocean existing.
If I had a link to the Asimov essay where he explained how his math works predicting moons for particular planets, you would see what I meant. We shouldn't have a moon that big, this close to the sun. Venus and Mercury have no moons, and Mars has at least 2, but they are tiny in relation to their parent body. All the others have multiple moons, but again are tiny in comparison with the parent bodies. We have a relatively massive moon, within the orbital band where the theory says there should only be small moons or none at all. That's what I meant by rare. It's more like we share an orbit than we have a moon.
BTW, found another link to the original topic from 2001 ! Same person as in the pdf paper linked from the summary. They keep sending balloons up and keep finding microbes. But he (Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe) might have an axe to grind.
Also, 27 is the age where we stop learn new stuff : studies are finished, you begin to be veteran at your work, so learning basically stops.
If you believe that, then you obviously aren't 27 yet. Even TFS said that the 60 year olds had more knowledge, so how did they get that without learning something after the age of 27 ?
There are going to be plenty of terrestrial explanations for them being uncultivable which do not lend any support to them having a population outside of Earth's biosphere.
This is true, I don't believe I said they DID come from space, but the fact remains they are until now, unculturable. And "here on earth" refers just as well to here on the ground as it does to here on the planet Earth.
I'm only going off the pdf which was pretty light on details. Whatever the origin of these organisms, it will be hard to prove they're NOT from space by testing in the immediate environs of earth. We need to go further away and check to see if they're still in evidence there (as well as looking here). Maybe some big fly papers on the moon or something... If they showed up there, then we are still stuck with "did they originate on earth" but at least we will know that they can and do travel in outer space.
There is another article from last year regarding the meteorites found in Antarctica, which were found to be loaded with amino acids. I also remember reading something about actual microbes/bacteria that were found to have entered the atmosphere from space quite recently, but I can't remember the link. It could have been this current story, considering the paper dates from 4 years ago.
I see no reason that this could not be valid. Comets and asteroids have near misses with planets quite regularly and the occasional glancing blow will surely take some of whatever is on the planet out into space. As the paper states, these micro-organisms are viable but don't respond to culturing. Which could mean they were alive but are dormant and don't respond to conditions here on earth.
Being previously undiscovered doesn't really prove anything as the Amazon is full of insects and other life that have yet to be "discovered" by man, but this is not definitively disproving panspermia. IMHO, this is one of the prime reasons for humans to visit Mars, as it is very difficult to get a robot to be able to spot these kinds of organisms, especially if they are not currently alive. The conditions on Mars are not favourable for large organisms, but if there is water ice, then you have the capability of getting H2 and O2 at the least. And as Mars has no magnetic field (to speak of), there would be large amounts of mutating cosmic rays hitting the surface continually for billions of years. It would be odd if nothing came of it.
I've been reading some of Asimovs later scientific essays, and he describes how you can predict with some certainty which planets are likely to have a magnetosphere. Basically, you need a reasonably rapid rotation, and a molten or high temperature metallic core which "sloshes" about as the planet spins. This core acting against the outer layers of the planet causes the magnetic field. The only real reason our planet is special, regarding life, is that we have an exceptionally large moon, too large in fact as conventional wisdom goes, to have been formed by capturing passing debris. We are almost a binary planet system, and that is pretty rare. So the possibility of life forming actually in space (rather than on another planetary body) has to be considered.
If we send men to Mars and they find similar micro-organisms there, then it is possible they came from space rather than evolved natively. Especially if there are no other traces of activity that can be construed as being the result of living organisms.
Interesting stuff, which can never be verified while we sit here exploring from a distance.
Lovefilm are good until you have been with them a month or so, then you get all the second rate films from your list and none of the new ones. I was with them for about a year (this was around 2004), and I've lost count of the number of DVDs that simply "disappeared" in the post, or were unwatchable due to scratching when they arrived. I was on either a 3 or 5 movies a week deal, I can't remember now - but they are still sending begging letters asking me back. No chance.
Not at all. RTGs rely on heat (or a temp. difference) to generate electricity. As far as I could tell, the magnetic spin "battery" does not rely on heat.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we have a story recently where it was possible to sign new certs in an existing domain without authorisation ? That would make the "don't worry too much, it's a sub-domain" answers a bit weak.
mod parent up
I understand why it's difficult to place limits on free speech. But are you prepared to campaign against the Nazis if they stand for an election ? Are you prepared to expose their lies in public to ensure that no-one gets taken in again ?
If not, then just maintaining a cry of "free speech for all" is dodging the consequences and relying on someone else to do the work. If you don't support the nazis, and after a great deal of polling we discover that no-one in their right mind would support their policies, what is wrong with banning the nazi party ? Who suffers apart from your typical nazi supporter who doesn't give 2 shits about you or anyone else ? If you were hosting a government meeting and one candidate did nothing but use expletive after expletive while talking, would you allow them to continue being offensive or chuck them out ?
Sometimes we have to have rules of conduct, and I think espousing racial purity, ethnic cleansing or violence against non-whites should be among those things prohibited by the rules. What is wrong with that ?
I'm not calling for a politically derived list of banned subjects, I'm calling for a humanitarian list of subjects which are not acceptable, at any time ever. The politicians have to work within those rules.
Nothing says you can't hold those views, or talk to others with those views, but you can never stand for election while professing those views. That is the price of civilisation.
As for your last statement, no I agree, freedom of speech didn't gas anybody, but the guy who set that in motion started his political career promising lebensraum, which necessitated war. But he still got elected and the rest is history. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. So in order to guard against such "feature creep" in future, we should agree that anybody whose election promises necessitate violence against others simply because they are foreign or black or jewish or whatever should not be allowed to stand.
All plants release CO2. They take in CO2 in the daytime, and exhale CO2 at night. Oxygen is the reverse. They don't produce oxygen at night as they need it to survive. During the day they get their energy from photosynthesis which uses CO2 as an energy input and building material.
And if you don't limit things so that you end up with a Nazi police state, how does that benefit anybody ? Slippery slopes can be angled both ways. There need to be agreed levels of asshattery.
It's one thing to defend speech, it's quite another to defend the actions that result from that speech. You prefer to rely on hope and the goodwill and intelligence of others to prevent those actions taking place. Hell, in the US the people have trouble filling in paper ballots. But they should be trusted to recognise a threat to society ?
Do you believe it's OK to teach Creationism in schools ? Even though it is complete and obvious fabrication ? Why should Nazism have more "rights" then Creationism ? Sure an individual is allowed to believe in what they like, but if they seek to push their erroneous views on others that is going too far.
Any group or organisation that demonstrates, through their free speech, that they seek to deprive others of said free speech or worse, should forfeit their right to organise. Can't we agree on a minimum level of conduct that is acceptable in a civilised society ?
Maybe we need a GPL of politics, so that you can do and say what you like with an idea but if you seek to pass it on then you must observe certain minimum rules.
Are the actions at Auschwitz defensible because the Nazis came to power democratically ? What does that say about democracy ?
These are very hard questions to answer, but just proclaiming your outright defence of free speech ducks the issue of consequences.
I realise you are trying to be sarcastic, but all your type ever seem to say is "we should defend freedom of speech", you never propose a solution to the problem of people or organisations who use that free speech for nefarious purposes.
I agree you should be free to say, or write anything you want, from a philosophical point of view. But when you go further and attempt to extend free speech to mean freedom to deliberately cause trouble, real physical trouble for other members of the world, then you're over stepping the mark.
It's pretty childish to just finish the sentence at "allow free speech" without qualifying where that freedom ends, especially when you conflate free speech with complete and total freedom to do what you want. It's like people bitching about dependence on motor vehicles or being stuck in traffic and burning fuel. The glib answer is "ride a bike". You say "but I have to travel 50 miles" or "I have only got 1 leg" but they don't have an answer to that. They don't want to consider the consequences just make a point and move on.
Take the Nazis for instance. If you really believe your nation would be better run by Nazis, then you need to read a bit of history. Time and time again the democratic process has proved that people don't agree with it. But you are willing to give the Nazis the right to free speech and you just hope that nobody ever takes them seriously enough to get any power. I think there should be limits before it gets that far. You are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery - why should you be allowed to vote for a vicious, xenophobic, racist, elistist bunch of scumbags like the nazis ? Giving them a platform in an election is lending them legitimacy, as if it's OK to kill people you don't like or agree with. I don't believe that is a legitimate viewpoint.
Draw a line where you believe no respectable political movement should go beyond, or you will end up regretting it. It's like the "your freedom to throw a punch, ends at the tip of my nose". It's too late when they hit you, they have already gone too far. If you allow the nazis sympathisers to march up and down a predominantly jewish neighbourhood, that is getting pretty close to the tip of a lot of peoples noses, and for what ? Are you seriously defending the right to deliberately piss people off just because you can ? And yet we see the same apologists complaining vehemently about cases of bullying even when it takes place over the net and there is no physical danger to anyone. Can we have some joined up thinking please ?
I'm not against free speech, I'm against finding out the hard way.
(note that the Nazis didn't originally come to power under a banner of "let's kill all the jews", their politics were socialist and publicly promised beer and kittens. Any organisation that is still prepared to call themselves Nazis must be referring to the Nazis as they turned out to really be [hate, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, etc], or else they have a pretty stupid marketing guy. The BNP figured that one out, but "British National Party" is still a bit too close so they have been spotted)
There have been (too) many cases in the UK of people with babies and toddlers allowing their dogs to have free reign. They always say that the dog is no threat, it has always been sweet tempered and friendly towards people. Then one day the dog takes the kids face off. Guess what, it's too fucking late.
What's the quote ?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
Who's watching ? You ? Your elected representative ?
It appears to me that like most things these days, it's somebody elses job to do that, while you just sit around mouthing platitudes.
Congratulations if you made it this far. Most people who should read this (the ones I have a problem with) stopped reading as soon as I disagreed with their point of view (ironic huh). Now you can make your own mind up on what is acceptable in a civilised society. I hope you question yourself thoroughly. I'm not running for office, I'm appealing to common sense (heh).
Because of course, we are all fucking psychic !
It strikes me that you have nothing worth saying, so you twist the words to hide the fact.
So if they congregate, plan and then physically get together en mass with legal weapons and legal armoured cars and other legal non-essential items in order to march legally on a city, does it matter if it's all legal ? Do you have the right to stage a coup in the US ? Do you have the right to stage an unsuccessful coup in the US ? What price democracy ?
Do you admire Somalias freedom to assemble ? Fucking Nazis are fucking Nazis. They are not, by definition, peaceful people. Yes they can talk all they like, but when they start *doing*, you have to do something about it. Have you ever been present at a Nazi rally ? I have, in Germany of all places, and let me tell you, it was not a pleasant affair. All they did was march past shouting stupid slogans, but the potential was terrifying. They are worse than soccer hooligans but even soccer hooligans are thugs to be kept at a distance.
It's all very well having these liberated values, but in real life they have to be controlled, for the benefit of everybody. You can let the Nazis have their free speech while they are few in number, but when you have 200,000 armed to the teeth you are in trouble. But you just sit back and do nothing, what have you got to fear.
I don't believe £1 is the limit either. I thought it was limited by the amount of investment. If you haven't paid in full for your shares, then you are liable to the company for that difference in value.
http://www.ukcorporator.co.uk/limited_companies.php
Or from the FSA
Safety issues with high pressures ?
You do realise that your car runs on harnessing explosions (actually controlled burns - but fast). How do you get any power except by harnessing pressure and releasing it in a controlled fashion.
The pressure on the piston in a steam engine was only around 7psi for a 100HP engine (obviously quite a large piston for 100HP). I don't get how they are proposing a hydraulically pressurised system. You can't compress a fluid, and if it's hydraulic it isn't using air/steam. The system must be related to an automatic transmission / torque convertor somehow, but the naming is confusing if they are using a pressure vessel. Forcing fluid under pressure into a spring loaded chamber I could understand, but a pressure vessel ?
BTW you can already get this kind of stuff http://www.nicecarcompany.co.uk/mega-city.html and http://www.mygreenwheels.com/ev-comparison-guide/
Also I don't think it runs full time on the accumulated pressure, it just reclaims that energy to supplement the electric motor as you accelerate after braking.
What you appear to miss is that the US offshores everything it can and so you end up with Brazilian rainforest cut down to grow crops for US bio-diesel, and existing third world subsistence farmers switching to bio-diesel crops because they are worth more money in exports than local market produce would bring. Meanwhile, YOUR farmers are still getting subsidies on excess corn production because that's the way it is.
Fuel crisis 1970's. Never ?
No fuel, no transport, no harvest, no food. Luxury ?
Were you hoping for "insightful" ?
Global warming is a consequence of climate change. Global cooling is a consequence of climate change.
I am not a denier, but I am not about to be told we must halt climate change. This is a phenomenon that is as old as the earth, and to think we can just stop it when we want to is ludicrous. If you want to limit our impact on that change, fair enough. But don't tell me it has to stop, because you make yourselves look like idiots. The climate has changed in cycles, and despite the CO2 lobbys best propoganda, the climate was already on an upward curve regarding CO2 before we even discovered fire. And if you take those same records which are used to promote the current scare tactics, you would see that after it (CO2) goes up, it goes down - way way down. It is cyclic.
So even if we completely stop producing CO2 now, the cycle will continue. So you are left with politics. The real question is one of adaptation, not prevention. It amuses me when people blame cows for farting too much, completely forgetting there are billions of humans farting too. And as our population continues to increase, we will rely more and more on vegetable matter to survive, and this makes us fart even more. It's us that causes the problem right down to our basic existence.
So go ahead and do your worst. The only way to stop climate change is to kill the planet. We are better off finding ways to live with it. We are responsible for the crops that will suffer in a warmer world. We helped their colonisation much better than they would have done on their own. We bred cattle. We use fresh water for more things than there is sufficient fresh water to accomplish, and waste it. We over fish the seas, poach wildlife, deforest whole areas and drive animals to extinction. We use chemicals to eradicate species we don't find a use for, even when we don't know what that means for other species in that chain. Then we let chemicals run into the seas killing and mutating who knows what in the process. Worrying about the climate is secondary to all those concerns IMHO.
But then I've always been a "happy camper". I try not to leave any evidence of my passing. Like grasshopper on the rice paper, you try to leave no mark. The current world seems to care only about what it wants, not what it should do, or how it should do it. Fuck the consequences. Well it seems like in Soviet Russia, the consequences fuck you !
To be honest, I'll be dead long before this starts to bite and I have no kids, so I'm finding it hard to care too much. On principal I care, but for practical purposes, it's already too late. I live in a one room flat. I use no gas for cooking, only electricity. I don't have central heating or air-con. I have a car (17 years old, 45 mpg, 0.16% volume CO2 [limit is 3.5%])that is used maybe once a week. I'm not obese, I recycle where possible and I resist convenience products. What else can I do anyway ? But senior climate scientists find it acceptable to fly around the world just to have meetings on the serious state of global warming.
??????
When talking about a Mars sized impact, there would be no crater. It would pretty much liquify the crust and homogenize the rock structure planet wide. The moon was probably formed before the earths surface was completely solidified anyway, if you take an impact as the likely formation method. The fact of the moons low density does give credence to the impact theory as it is composed of the less dense rocks that might have been knocked off the earth. The denser stuff like iron was already deeper in the earth and so remained there.
You missed the fact that most drivers *obey* the speed limit on the autobahn when they see one posted. It's not advisory, it's mandatory. When I was riding bikes (motor) I always used to obey the police, where my mates thought it was clever to accelerate and run away. If a police officer is standing in the road with his hand up signifying STOP, just before a blind bend, only an idiot would speed past them. If there is a truck on its side blocking the road, I don't want to find it while leaning over doing 80. I'd rather be done for no tax or whatever than die.
It's a similar thing with speed cameras. Most of the time, the cameras are placed in high risk areas, and ignoring that is at your peril - not from a ticket, but from the reason the camera is there in the first place. And to be honest, if you don't spot a speed camera, then you aren't paying attention like you should be.
Regarding off-ramps in the US, when I first drove onto one, I saw the sign saying slow, but they all say that right ? I hit the bend doing 40 mph and it was a case of "Oh, shit !" When they said slow, they meant slow ! I only just made it round the corner. But it never happened again. In the UK, you can take most off ramps doing 60 at least, as there is much more road made available to slow down after the less tight bends.
I don't really care about the law when I'm driving. It only serves to provide a framework within which to prosecute people after the fact. What matters is how you interpret the information you are given. From road signs to lines on the road, they are all there to give the driver information and it is up to the driver to act on that information accordingly. If you see arrows on the road indicating that you should merge back into the traffic because your lane is ending, you should look for a way to merge safely immediately, not think you can just ignore the markings and try to get past that last few cars. If you do ignore the markings, then it is your own damn fault if you run out of road. To complain about the law is futile and stupid, as the markings are there for your benefit in the first place.
The UK law says that it is an offence to prevent someone from passing you. But if you are in the correct lane and some idiot tries to push past way after the markings have told them to merge, all bets are off. And that has been tested in court, believe me. If you drive with no insurance, but perfectly safely, and someone pulls out of a junction in front of you and you hit them, then you will get done, as you should not have been there anyway. They might get prosecuted, but you have no defence whatsoever. Call it personal responsibility. I know that's a dirty term these days, but life is so much better for everybody when you exercise it.
I have a full truck licence in the UK. By truck I mean articulated lorry. 44 tonnes maximum loaded weight and 56 feet long. I also have a motorbike licence and a car licence, and a fork lift licence etc. I took training and passed a test on a bicycle when I was 11 years old.
The main point I want to make is that passing the test is simply demonstrating that you know the *bare minimum* to be able to drive safely on the public road. You are supposed to learn continuously after that. Too many people seem to think that passing the test means they can now drive anyway they want. You can't.
I have driven motor bikes and cars and trucks at illegal speeds, but I don't do it when there are any other vehicles on the road nearby. I have fallen off the motor bike many times when I was young and stupid, but never hit another vehicle ever. I have never collided with another vehicle in a car or a truck. It's all down to common sense, which is the root of the problem. I also have trained as a mechanic, so when I'm driving potentially dangerously, I know that there is sufficient oil in the engine so it won't suddenly seize up, my tyres are good and properly inflated, so less chance of a blow-out. I can see through the front screen, the lights all work, and I don't have the stereo so loud I can't hear the engine.
I am reminded of a time I was driving with my GF in Florida. The road was completely empty, not a car in sight either in front or behind me. We approached a junction and I slowed down, established that nothing was coming from any direction, and there were no parked cars with anybody inside. So I turned left without indicating and she warned me that if a cop had seen me doing that I would have got a ticket.
Please tell me what the word indicate means. I always assumed that it meant demonstrating to others what you are about to do. What is the point of indicating if there is no-one there to indicate to ? If you are alone in the forest and you cut down a tree, do you shout timber for your own edification ? Plainly people regard rules as actions to be complied with regardless of the situation you are in. That causes more accidents than anything else in my experience. Of course it would have pointless arguing that point to a typical Florida cop. Which demonstrates the idiotic position we find ourselves in, where the rules trump common sense.
After that occasion in Florida I drove across the US to Seattle in 4 and a half days. Not a bump, near miss, ticket, argument. Is that luck ? Oh, and the previous poster who said you shouldn't pass vehicles while going 20 mph faster is an idiot. Passing is something to be done as quickly and safely as possible. Crawling past at 1 mph more than the other car is one of the worst things to do. You are at the closest possible to another vehicle, you aren't 50 feet away at 60 mph, you are 3 or 4 feet away, and any sudden move on either persons part will land you both in the shit. You should always start accelerating a fair way back and time it so that when you reach the car you want to pass there is space to pass and you are already doing sufficient speed to pass them quickly, then you pull back in a fair way ahead of them and slow down to normal speed.
The worst problem I see today (in the UK anyway) is that whatever happens on the road, most peoples first reaction is to hit the brakes, which often makes the situation worse. Quite often, if they had been paying attention they could have just eased off the throttle and by the time they got to the obstruction, it would have been gone. But they brake anyway, which makes the idiot behind them brake, and so on all the way back down the following traffic. This is where the pulses in highway traffic originate.
People need to learn how to drive in convoy, and also to recognise that you must always be paying attention. No excuses ever. Dropping your hot coffee is not an excuse, as you should not be drinking it while moving.
One of the main reasons I gave up driving professionally is because too m
s/scientists/creationists/g .
His hypothesis doesn't take account of many factors. He just assumes that because they appear fully formed in the records we know about, then that's the way they started. Given the overbearing evidence provided by the rest of the natural world, Occam would have a word or two to say about it. I would start with the fact that octopuses are soft-bodied so would not leave much of a fossil anyway. As quoted in the linked article "the chances of an octopus corpse surviving long enough to be fossilized are so small that prior to this discovery only a single fossil species was known, and from fewer specimens than octopuses have legs."
Also, they tend to hang around in rocky places so they are less likely to be buried in sediment if they die, and thirdly, we have only explored a minute percentage of the ocean floor. It's a bit early to be saying "Ok, the octopus proves it, God did it", especially as the specimens found are not all "identical" to modern species, merely surprisingly similar.
The coelacanth is almost identical to fossil records (that's why it was termed the fossil fish) and that's unchanged in roughly 400 million years.
All this discovery does is push back the earliest date that octopuses could have first appeared. If they appeared then much as they do now, then they must have already evolved by that time. They had plenty of time, 95 million years ago is nothing compared to billions of years of the ocean existing.
I smell a troll.
If I had a link to the Asimov essay where he explained how his math works predicting moons for particular planets, you would see what I meant. We shouldn't have a moon that big, this close to the sun. Venus and Mercury have no moons, and Mars has at least 2, but they are tiny in relation to their parent body. All the others have multiple moons, but again are tiny in comparison with the parent bodies. We have a relatively massive moon, within the orbital band where the theory says there should only be small moons or none at all. That's what I meant by rare. It's more like we share an orbit than we have a moon.
BTW, found another link to the original topic from 2001 ! Same person as in the pdf paper linked from the summary. They keep sending balloons up and keep finding microbes. But he (Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe) might have an axe to grind.
If you believe that, then you obviously aren't 27 yet. Even TFS said that the 60 year olds had more knowledge, so how did they get that without learning something after the age of 27 ?
:/
NURSE ! come and wipe the dribble off my chin
This is true, I don't believe I said they DID come from space, but the fact remains they are until now, unculturable. And "here on earth" refers just as well to here on the ground as it does to here on the planet Earth.
... If they showed up there, then we are still stuck with "did they originate on earth" but at least we will know that they can and do travel in outer space.
I'm only going off the pdf which was pretty light on details. Whatever the origin of these organisms, it will be hard to prove they're NOT from space by testing in the immediate environs of earth. We need to go further away and check to see if they're still in evidence there (as well as looking here). Maybe some big fly papers on the moon or something
There is another article from last year regarding the meteorites found in Antarctica, which were found to be loaded with amino acids. I also remember reading something about actual microbes/bacteria that were found to have entered the atmosphere from space quite recently, but I can't remember the link. It could have been this current story, considering the paper dates from 4 years ago.
I see no reason that this could not be valid. Comets and asteroids have near misses with planets quite regularly and the occasional glancing blow will surely take some of whatever is on the planet out into space. As the paper states, these micro-organisms are viable but don't respond to culturing. Which could mean they were alive but are dormant and don't respond to conditions here on earth.
Being previously undiscovered doesn't really prove anything as the Amazon is full of insects and other life that have yet to be "discovered" by man, but this is not definitively disproving panspermia. IMHO, this is one of the prime reasons for humans to visit Mars, as it is very difficult to get a robot to be able to spot these kinds of organisms, especially if they are not currently alive. The conditions on Mars are not favourable for large organisms, but if there is water ice, then you have the capability of getting H2 and O2 at the least. And as Mars has no magnetic field (to speak of), there would be large amounts of mutating cosmic rays hitting the surface continually for billions of years. It would be odd if nothing came of it.
I've been reading some of Asimovs later scientific essays, and he describes how you can predict with some certainty which planets are likely to have a magnetosphere. Basically, you need a reasonably rapid rotation, and a molten or high temperature metallic core which "sloshes" about as the planet spins. This core acting against the outer layers of the planet causes the magnetic field. The only real reason our planet is special, regarding life, is that we have an exceptionally large moon, too large in fact as conventional wisdom goes, to have been formed by capturing passing debris. We are almost a binary planet system, and that is pretty rare. So the possibility of life forming actually in space (rather than on another planetary body) has to be considered.
If we send men to Mars and they find similar micro-organisms there, then it is possible they came from space rather than evolved natively. Especially if there are no other traces of activity that can be construed as being the result of living organisms.
Interesting stuff, which can never be verified while we sit here exploring from a distance.
O RLY ?
Lovefilm are good until you have been with them a month or so, then you get all the second rate films from your list and none of the new ones. I was with them for about a year (this was around 2004), and I've lost count of the number of DVDs that simply "disappeared" in the post, or were unwatchable due to scratching when they arrived. I was on either a 3 or 5 movies a week deal, I can't remember now - but they are still sending begging letters asking me back. No chance.
Not at all. RTGs rely on heat (or a temp. difference) to generate electricity. As far as I could tell, the magnetic spin "battery" does not rely on heat.