You don't know the alumni I know. As it happens I think I may have met Mr. Martin - I used to run a jazz jam session in one of the bars on a Monday night. Martin was in the same halls of residence as a mate of mine, the year after my mate was there.
I think Martin might have been in one of the bands that used to come up to me and ask if they could do 3 or 4 numbers without having sent me a demo tape or anything. I seem to remember being unimpressed both with him and his band.
I haven't felt the need to change my opinion so far.
same benefits, fewer side-effects, no reports of dependency or aggression.
It's good shit. Doesn't make you high though which is why some people find it a little disappointing. Having become used to the flood of seratonin, melatonin and adrenalin which kicks in with coke & sulphate - ie the high - some people don't appreciate having it taken away when they take safer stuff like modafinil. But once you get over that it's quite nice to stay awake without having your judgement impaired.
presumably where said fish is eaten by a penguin that's Pingu...
To be honest with you the results you're getting with algae aren't much worse than my current ISP.
Firstly I'm in the UK so I don't know how I'd get hold of injectible forms of the Klenner Protocol vitamins.
Secondly in terms of correct quanities of supplement to use is there some kind of blood test which can determine what's is missing?
Thirdly wrt double-blind tests, the deal with any kind of test is sample size. Test enough patients and you will find a rough overall average but there need to be thousands on the treatment. I'm not too bothered if tests are double-blind or not - after all the placebo effect is unlikely to alter levels of demyelination to a significant degree. However it would foolish for me to adandon treatment which is guaranteed to show an overall 33% drop in remission for one which overall is less effective (but you only read the successful case studies - it's not just pharmaceutical companies who hide results).
As for needle-aversion it's irrelevant. I too don't like needles but I have to inject Copaxone daily - you get used to it. It's far less unpleasant than the damage being done to your brain every day you don't take it. The same would probably be true of B1 injections. If you Copaxone it is destroyed in the stomach, B1 is just not absorbed properly.
The bottom line is that I don't want to waste time, effort and money on a treatment which is not proven to be effective at all.
You ask is it ok to throw out the cake while it is baking?
Let's define "baking".
In terms of embryonic stem cell research the "baking" is not that the cake has been in the oven. It's not even that the cake has been waved in the general direction of the oven. The cake in the case of stem cell research is more at the stage where the person with the mixing bowl thinks "Ooo I'd better put the oven on" then puts the bowl down, wanders over to the oven and switches it on. It's the baking that's done at room-temperature while the baker is at the oven peering through inches of grime at the temperature guage trying to work out whether that half covered number is a 5 or a 9.
When a woman miscarries do we have a full-blown funeral? No.
Moral questions are being raised and left unanswered by people whose beliefs preclude the concept of making the laws, by which they live, apply to new situations. Is it not the prime duty of all people to ensure that those who are alive are able to remain so? In some religions abortion is permitted where birth would damage or even kill the mother. Therefore some religions are already drawing a distinction between living and the "not-yet-living".
Would it not be sensible to assign a sliding scale to the viability of embryos? Thus a 2 or 3 day old clump of stem cells is clearly not viable and therefore not as "alive" as a foetus after 3 months. And a foetus at that stage is not as alive as a feotus after 6 months, which in turn is not as alive as a baby just about to be born.
How "alive" is a bunch of cells at 2 or 3 days? Is it as alive as a full grown adult dying from a disease that could only have been researched and cured had stem cells been available?
Also since stem-cells are the building blocks of life, surely these synthesized stem cells are just as viable and able to produce a live baby as the stem cells sourced directly from an embryo?
Let's imagine that you can treat MS with mega-doses of vitamins. Let's also imagine that the deficiency of these vitamins in the diet is at least a contributory factor in causing MS.
Most of us don't take the vast quantities of vitamins suggested in these documents. Yet only 1 in 800 of people have MS. Logic dictates that vitamin defficiency is not the cause of MS.
Also there are several types of MS - not in terms of progression which is well documented but in terms of which bits of immune system are causing the damage.
Here is an article scanned from The Lancet from Aug 13th 2005 discussing multiple sclerosis in terms of the immune system:
Immunohistopathology to guide multiple sclerosis treatment.
See Research Letters page 579
Immunologists have often been accused of overly complicating medicine with details of molecules, cellular differentiation patterns, and insights with disputable usefulness. By contrast, the recognition that one subtle fact of medical history or clinical sign is the key to distinguishing between diagnoses, often with the implication of a completely different therapy, is a cornerstone of good medical practice. In today's Lancet, Mark Keegan and colleagues(1) show that immunopathological differentiation might lead to better therapies for complex disorders, such as multiple sclerosis.
Multiple sclerosis is a multifactorial disease, with interactions between genetic and environmental factors via the immune system. MHC molecules, which present foreign antigens and self-antigens to T lymphocytes, are encoded by the highly polymorphic locus of the human leucocyte antigen on chromosome 6. Specific haplotypes of this susceptibility locus, in interaction with other genetic factors and environmental influences, might contribute to the various phenotypes of the neurological deficits (eg, relapsing-remitting versus primary-progressive, severity, course). Although no factor has been proven as the cause of multiple sclerosis, the pathological changes involve inflammatory processes that lead to the production of cytokines, chemokines, gelatinase-B/matrix-metalloproteinase-9, autoantibody-producing B lymphocytes, and autopeptide-recognising T cells, hence its classification as an autoimmune disease(2-5).
Current therapies for multiple sclerosis are disease-modifying, rather than real cures, and have been given to rather broad groups of patients with multiple sclerosis and solely on the basis of a clinical diagnosis. The cytokine interferon B, and the co-polymer glatiramer acetate, delay progression, but are both fraught with side-effects and high costs.(6,7) These elements constitute enough grounds to search for better, more efficient, and less expensive therapies. One way to achieve such therapies is to detail the subtle diagnostic differences, subcategorise patients who might respond better to a particular therapy, and assess the benefits.
Combinations of attacks, clinical evidence and paraclinical signs, including neuroimaging, evoked potentials, and laboratory findings of oligoclonal bands in the spinal fluid, or intrathecal immunoglobulin production, are used in the classical Poser criteria for diagnosis of multiple sclerosis(8). The IgG index - ie. the ratio of spinal fluid immunoglobulin to serum levels - is a marker that suggests the involvement of B lymphocytes and antibodies. The index correlates with the ratio of gelatinase B to A, a marker of innate immunity.(9)
The study by Keegan and colleagues is based on the combination of two studies: the clinical finding that total plasma-exchange might help in demyelination diseases,(10) and the refinement of the differential diagnosis of multiple sclerosis on the basis of careful histopathology of brain sections.(11) Similar to other frequent autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, multiple sclerosis is not just one disease. Instead, it forms a heterogeneous group of clinical and histopathological entities. For instance, T lymphocytes predominate in some forms of multi
As a Multiple Sclerosis patient I had a look at the links to see if there were any suggestions regarding my condition. There were and I read them with interest. However none of the proposed treatments showed full results of any kind of clinical trials. Claims such as the ones made in the various articles linked on "doctoryourself" would carry far more weight if backed by clinical trials rather than anecdotal evidence. After all, what about those who underwent these treatments who did not respond or even deteriorated?
As for the claims that drug companies are out to swindle the public, it's worth noting that at the doses required, the costs of these vitamin treatments would be similar to the two current approved treatments (interferon and glatiramer acetate).
I'm not saying that the articles are wrong. I'm merely saying that if what they are saying is right it needs to be proven beyond all doubt and any safety fears need to be measured against benefits. This is something articles such as this fail to do as far as I can tell.
I remember reading an article ages ago - possible when the Athlon first came out or maybe even before that.
My memory is hazy but it detailed how AMD was using the DEC Alpha architecture for memory which meant that AMDs can address more RAM through the bus simultaneously that Intel's Pentiums could.
Maybe they will co-opt the other parts of the DEC chip design mentioned in the article at the top? Don't AMD already use a translation module to execute x86? Or am I totally confused which is more than likely...
1.) Stick with Mambo or whatever they decide to call it. Even if the code "forks" as long as you go with the fork you'll be fine. They're a competent lot and aren't going to leave their customers in the lurch.
2.) Stick with Miro. Whatever they do will at least be supported by a commercial organisation but that will mean not as many developers on the project and paid support which might not live up to your expectations.
3.) Change to a different CMS. As well as Mambo I use CMSMadeSimple. I prefer it as it uses Smarty and is really, really simple to use and template. Doesn't have e-commerce yet though and is still in "beta" though very stable and well written. (Look I'm a fan, OK?)
David Icke was right - we're going to be taken over by 12ft shape-shifting lizards (well - crocodiles)... Which are immune to HIV and other assorted bacterial and viral infections...
They have indeed got a long way to go for orbital capability. However as an initial proof of concept, SpaceShipOne and this Virgin thing aren't bad going.
I'd love to know whether launching from 30,000 feet significantly reduces the required mass of rocket / booster rockets required to get a shuttle into orbit versus a ground launch. Clearly whatever (very large) aeroplane is used as a launch platform will have to get out of the way quick before main engines fire. Maybe it would be possible for main engines to idle and keep the shuttle sort of hovering while the launch craft gets out of the way.
Also it might be possible for this Virgin thing to get to its maximum height, then deploy another rocket which fires a payload into orbit. A sort of matryoshka doll approach...
I think you'll find it's bi-amped - one amp for each side. It's not quite as portable as a standard iPod but listening to it you almost don't notice the mp3 remnants.
Oh and it plays flac & shn too...
> The ones and zeros will be of a much higher quality than here in the west. Same bit rates. Same file sizes. But an expert such as yourself will be able to hear the difference.
Now here's a thing. I'm a record dealer (ex-programmer) and know that Japanese pressings command high prices here in the west. Reasons given for this are variously:
1.) they use better quality vinyl in Japan so the music sounds better 2.) the pressings are of a higher quality in Japan so the music sounds better 3.) the writing looks cool and you don't see Japanese records every day of the week
A similar reason is given for why people collect Japanese cds - unique cover art, better processes to produce the cd etc. etc.
Will iTunes Japan be using the same naff, low quality, lossy compressed files we get here in the west or will their files be of a better quality?
The earth, and the universe it sits within, run by a set of rules, a subset of which we understand to some extent.
Whether the earth was created 6,000 years ago or 4.6bn years ago is immaterial because:
1.) If the earth was created 6,000 years ago, it has been made to look and behave as though it were 4.6bn years old. After all if you are a creationist and believe that god is clever enough to create the universe, god is surely clever enough to allow us to think that god didn't create it at all and this all came about through the processes we see ongoing today.
2.) Regardless of what you believe it doesn't change the processes that are running. And since the processes running in the past (or appearing to run in the past) are by and large ongoing, it's reasonable to expect they will continue running into the future.
3.) Someone's probably already posted this and I'm just too lazy to read every single post of this thread.
Re:DynLayer is the way to go
on
DHTML Utopia
·
· Score: 1
> Whenever I see books like this, I always wonder why people do not use the dynlayer api. DynLayer Api at SourceForge
Lots of reasons.
Firstly from a philosophical stand-point it is always best to have more than one way to do things.
Secondly because not everyones' experiences of dynapi are positive.
I found it:
1.) awkward to use. 2.) able to cause even well specced machines to grind to a halt. 3.) a pain to extend. 4.) clunky, overwrought, fairly incomprehensible.
Also I'm not sure that it entirely separates the scripting from the content.
As a guitarist I have to say this thing is very cool. Those of my axe-wielding brethren who are getting defensive about "oh it can't bend strings / play harmonics / do 2-hand tapping like Joe Satriani" are surely missing the point.
It's a cool piece of robotics, it plays a guitar and it's interesting.
It'd be interesting to see them put the fingertips all the way up the neck - it'd be great to hear it play something that is physically impossible for a human to play.
It must also have an application for luthiers. Given that the sound of a guitar involves the interaction between fingers, string, guitar (and pickups -> electronics -> amps etc) it'd be a very useful way to standardise the sound across mass-produced guitars. Yes I'd also like a hand-made PRS custom but if I have only a little money to spend it would be nice to know that the guitar I get isn't a dud. It would be handy for automatic setup of guitars - being able to check the intonation - those "fingertips" look as though they could be set to hover on the string at the harmonic points. Being able to check that the frets aren't sticking out too much, are properly aligned etc. in a factory where 1000s are being built at once would surely be a useful asset.
For expulsion read massacre and expulsion. The vast majority of these activities (which clearly didn't involve anybody killing Jews unless they were attacked NOT) were carried out by Catholics. Most Protestants were a bit more easy going with the idea of forgivenes...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know the alumni I know. As it happens I think I may have met Mr. Martin - I used to run a jazz jam session in one of the bars on a Monday night. Martin was in the same halls of residence as a mate of mine, the year after my mate was there. I think Martin might have been in one of the bands that used to come up to me and ask if they could do 3 or 4 numbers without having sent me a demo tape or anything. I seem to remember being unimpressed both with him and his band. I haven't felt the need to change my opinion so far.
it does make you conceited though. Hell I did my degree there and I'm not nearly as intelligent as most people think I am...
same benefits, fewer side-effects, no reports of dependency or aggression.
It's good shit. Doesn't make you high though which is why some people find it a little disappointing. Having become used to the flood of seratonin, melatonin and adrenalin which kicks in with coke & sulphate - ie the high - some people don't appreciate having it taken away when they take safer stuff like modafinil. But once you get over that it's quite nice to stay awake without having your judgement impaired.
yes but there'll be a patch for it based on a new dns field called the c-alias.
(reads rfc again)
no that said cialis...
Also can anyone tell me - these spams go on about soft tabs. Is that like a tab that only sometimes line wraps?
presumably where said fish is eaten by a penguin that's Pingu... To be honest with you the results you're getting with algae aren't much worse than my current ISP.
Thanks,
Firstly I'm in the UK so I don't know how I'd get hold of injectible forms of the Klenner Protocol vitamins.
Secondly in terms of correct quanities of supplement to use is there some kind of blood test which can determine what's is missing?
Thirdly wrt double-blind tests, the deal with any kind of test is sample size. Test enough patients and you will find a rough overall average but there need to be thousands on the treatment. I'm not too bothered if tests are double-blind or not - after all the placebo effect is unlikely to alter levels of demyelination to a significant degree. However it would foolish for me to adandon treatment which is guaranteed to show an overall 33% drop in remission for one which overall is less effective (but you only read the successful case studies - it's not just pharmaceutical companies who hide results).
As for needle-aversion it's irrelevant. I too don't like needles but I have to inject Copaxone daily - you get used to it. It's far less unpleasant than the damage being done to your brain every day you don't take it. The same would probably be true of B1 injections. If you Copaxone it is destroyed in the stomach, B1 is just not absorbed properly.
The bottom line is that I don't want to waste time, effort and money on a treatment which is not proven to be effective at all.
A little more nit-picking here.
You ask is it ok to throw out the cake while it is baking?
Let's define "baking".
In terms of embryonic stem cell research the "baking" is not that the cake has been in the oven. It's not even that the cake has been waved in the general direction of the oven. The cake in the case of stem cell research is more at the stage where the person with the mixing bowl thinks "Ooo I'd better put the oven on" then puts the bowl down, wanders over to the oven and switches it on. It's the baking that's done at room-temperature while the baker is at the oven peering through inches of grime at the temperature guage trying to work out whether that half covered number is a 5 or a 9.
When a woman miscarries do we have a full-blown funeral? No.
Moral questions are being raised and left unanswered by people whose beliefs preclude the concept of making the laws, by which they live, apply to new situations. Is it not the prime duty of all people to ensure that those who are alive are able to remain so? In some religions abortion is permitted where birth would damage or even kill the mother. Therefore some religions are already drawing a distinction between living and the "not-yet-living".
Would it not be sensible to assign a sliding scale to the viability of embryos? Thus a 2 or 3 day old clump of stem cells is clearly not viable and therefore not as "alive" as a foetus after 3 months. And a foetus at that stage is not as alive as a feotus after 6 months, which in turn is not as alive as a baby just about to be born.
How "alive" is a bunch of cells at 2 or 3 days? Is it as alive as a full grown adult dying from a disease that could only have been researched and cured had stem cells been available?
Also since stem-cells are the building blocks of life, surely these synthesized stem cells are just as viable and able to produce a live baby as the stem cells sourced directly from an embryo?
Let's imagine that you can treat MS with mega-doses of vitamins. Let's also imagine that the deficiency of these vitamins in the diet is at least a contributory factor in causing MS.
Most of us don't take the vast quantities of vitamins suggested in these documents. Yet only 1 in 800 of people have MS. Logic dictates that vitamin defficiency is not the cause of MS.
Also there are several types of MS - not in terms of progression which is well documented but in terms of which bits of immune system are causing the damage.
Here is an article scanned from The Lancet from Aug 13th 2005 discussing multiple sclerosis in terms of the immune system:
Immunohistopathology to guide multiple sclerosis treatment.
See Research Letters page 579
Immunologists have often been accused of overly complicating medicine with details of molecules, cellular differentiation patterns, and insights with disputable usefulness. By contrast, the recognition that one subtle fact of medical history or clinical sign is the key to distinguishing between diagnoses, often with the implication of a completely different therapy, is a cornerstone of good medical practice. In today's Lancet, Mark Keegan and colleagues(1) show that immunopathological differentiation might lead to better therapies for complex disorders, such as multiple sclerosis.
Multiple sclerosis is a multifactorial disease, with interactions between genetic and environmental factors via the immune system. MHC molecules, which present foreign antigens and self-antigens to T lymphocytes, are encoded by the highly polymorphic locus of the human leucocyte antigen on chromosome 6. Specific haplotypes of this susceptibility locus, in interaction with other genetic factors and environmental influences, might contribute to the various phenotypes of the neurological deficits (eg, relapsing-remitting versus primary-progressive, severity, course). Although no factor has been proven as the cause of multiple sclerosis, the pathological changes involve inflammatory processes that lead to the production of cytokines, chemokines, gelatinase-B/matrix-metalloproteinase-9, autoantibody-producing B lymphocytes, and autopeptide-recognising T cells, hence its classification as an autoimmune disease(2-5).
Current therapies for multiple sclerosis are disease-modifying, rather than real cures, and have been given to rather broad groups of patients with multiple sclerosis and solely on the basis of a clinical diagnosis. The cytokine interferon B, and the co-polymer glatiramer acetate, delay progression, but are both fraught with side-effects and high costs.(6,7) These elements constitute enough grounds to search for better, more efficient, and less expensive therapies. One way to achieve such therapies is to detail the subtle diagnostic differences, subcategorise patients who might respond better to a particular therapy, and assess the benefits.
Combinations of attacks, clinical evidence and paraclinical signs, including neuroimaging, evoked potentials, and laboratory findings of oligoclonal bands in the spinal fluid, or intrathecal immunoglobulin production, are used in the classical Poser criteria for diagnosis of multiple sclerosis(8). The IgG index - ie. the ratio of spinal fluid immunoglobulin to serum levels - is a marker that suggests the involvement of B lymphocytes and antibodies. The index correlates with the ratio of gelatinase B to A, a marker of innate immunity.(9)
The study by Keegan and colleagues is based on the combination of two studies: the clinical finding that total plasma-exchange might help in demyelination diseases,(10) and the refinement of the differential diagnosis of multiple sclerosis on the basis of careful histopathology of brain sections.(11) Similar to other frequent autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, multiple sclerosis is not just one disease. Instead, it forms a heterogeneous group of clinical and histopathological entities. For instance, T lymphocytes predominate in some forms of multi
anything that recommends coldplay has to be bad.
As a Multiple Sclerosis patient I had a look at the links to see if there were any suggestions regarding my condition. There were and I read them with interest. However none of the proposed treatments showed full results of any kind of clinical trials. Claims such as the ones made in the various articles linked on "doctoryourself" would carry far more weight if backed by clinical trials rather than anecdotal evidence. After all, what about those who underwent these treatments who did not respond or even deteriorated?
As for the claims that drug companies are out to swindle the public, it's worth noting that at the doses required, the costs of these vitamin treatments would be similar to the two current approved treatments (interferon and glatiramer acetate).
I'm not saying that the articles are wrong. I'm merely saying that if what they are saying is right it needs to be proven beyond all doubt and any safety fears need to be measured against benefits. This is something articles such as this fail to do as far as I can tell.
I remember reading an article ages ago - possible when the Athlon first came out or maybe even before that.
My memory is hazy but it detailed how AMD was using the DEC Alpha architecture for memory which meant that AMDs can address more RAM through the bus simultaneously that Intel's Pentiums could.
Maybe they will co-opt the other parts of the DEC chip design mentioned in the article at the top? Don't AMD already use a translation module to execute x86? Or am I totally confused which is more than likely...
You need it to run OSX x86 - which is why it will run on P4 but only on AMD64...
you have 3 options
1.) Stick with Mambo or whatever they decide to call it. Even if the code "forks" as long as you go with the fork you'll be fine. They're a competent lot and aren't going to leave their customers in the lurch.
2.) Stick with Miro. Whatever they do will at least be supported by a commercial organisation but that will mean not as many developers on the project and paid support which might not live up to your expectations.
3.) Change to a different CMS. As well as Mambo I use CMSMadeSimple. I prefer it as it uses Smarty and is really, really simple to use and template. Doesn't have e-commerce yet though and is still in "beta" though very stable and well written. (Look I'm a fan, OK?)
David Icke was right - we're going to be taken over by 12ft shape-shifting lizards (well - crocodiles)... Which are immune to HIV and other assorted bacterial and viral infections...
Ph33r
Of course it'll be even hotter if it's the tube driven iPod...
<shameless link back to something I posted before>
wow - so the mp3s really do sound warmer
</shameless link back to something I posted before>
this is all digital, remember?
That said I'm sure someone will come out with gold-plated nano-tubes which are somehow better than the standard ones...
They have indeed got a long way to go for orbital capability. However as an initial proof of concept, SpaceShipOne and this Virgin thing aren't bad going.
I'd love to know whether launching from 30,000 feet significantly reduces the required mass of rocket / booster rockets required to get a shuttle into orbit versus a ground launch. Clearly whatever (very large) aeroplane is used as a launch platform will have to get out of the way quick before main engines fire. Maybe it would be possible for main engines to idle and keep the shuttle sort of hovering while the launch craft gets out of the way.
Also it might be possible for this Virgin thing to get to its maximum height, then deploy another rocket which fires a payload into orbit. A sort of matryoshka doll approach...
I think you'll find it's bi-amped - one amp for each side. It's not quite as portable as a standard iPod but listening to it you almost don't notice the mp3 remnants. Oh and it plays flac & shn too...
> The ones and zeros will be of a much higher quality than here in the west. Same bit rates. Same file sizes. But an expert such as yourself will be able to hear the difference.
Of course - they'll sound warmer...
Now here's a thing. I'm a record dealer (ex-programmer) and know that Japanese pressings command high prices here in the west. Reasons given for this are variously:
1.) they use better quality vinyl in Japan so the music sounds better
2.) the pressings are of a higher quality in Japan so the music sounds better
3.) the writing looks cool and you don't see Japanese records every day of the week
A similar reason is given for why people collect Japanese cds - unique cover art, better processes to produce the cd etc. etc.
Will iTunes Japan be using the same naff, low quality, lossy compressed files we get here in the west or will their files be of a better quality?
I think we should be told...
The earth, and the universe it sits within, run by a set of rules, a subset of which we understand to some extent.
Whether the earth was created 6,000 years ago or 4.6bn years ago is immaterial because:
1.) If the earth was created 6,000 years ago, it has been made to look and behave as though it were 4.6bn years old. After all if you are a creationist and believe that god is clever enough to create the universe, god is surely clever enough to allow us to think that god didn't create it at all and this all came about through the processes we see ongoing today.
2.) Regardless of what you believe it doesn't change the processes that are running. And since the processes running in the past (or appearing to run in the past) are by and large ongoing, it's reasonable to expect they will continue running into the future.
3.) Someone's probably already posted this and I'm just too lazy to read every single post of this thread.
> Whenever I see books like this, I always wonder why people do not use the dynlayer api. DynLayer Api at SourceForge
:D
Lots of reasons.
Firstly from a philosophical stand-point it is always best to have more than one way to do things.
Secondly because not everyones' experiences of dynapi are positive.
I found it:
1.) awkward to use.
2.) able to cause even well specced machines to grind to a halt.
3.) a pain to extend.
4.) clunky, overwrought, fairly incomprehensible.
Also I'm not sure that it entirely separates the scripting from the content.
Other than that it's great
As a guitarist I have to say this thing is very cool. Those of my axe-wielding brethren who are getting defensive about "oh it can't bend strings / play harmonics / do 2-hand tapping like Joe Satriani" are surely missing the point. It's a cool piece of robotics, it plays a guitar and it's interesting. It'd be interesting to see them put the fingertips all the way up the neck - it'd be great to hear it play something that is physically impossible for a human to play. It must also have an application for luthiers. Given that the sound of a guitar involves the interaction between fingers, string, guitar (and pickups -> electronics -> amps etc) it'd be a very useful way to standardise the sound across mass-produced guitars. Yes I'd also like a hand-made PRS custom but if I have only a little money to spend it would be nice to know that the guitar I get isn't a dud. It would be handy for automatic setup of guitars - being able to check the intonation - those "fingertips" look as though they could be set to hover on the string at the harmonic points. Being able to check that the frets aren't sticking out too much, are properly aligned etc. in a factory where 1000s are being built at once would surely be a useful asset.
The British are the butt of many a French joke too, we just can't understand them... ;)
Guns don't kill Jews, Catholics do
For expulsion read massacre and expulsion. The vast majority of these activities (which clearly didn't involve anybody killing Jews unless they were attacked NOT) were carried out by Catholics. Most Protestants were a bit more easy going with the idea of forgivenes...