I think not. Most people can differentiate between the potential for life (semen and eggs) and actual life itself (autonomous life including self-replicating cells that may or may not have certain dependencies for life; don't we all?).
Oh your being semantic and in the same regard you can't kill a virus because its not truly "alive" because it can't replicate without a host.;)
My skin, hair, and nails can self replicate a while after I'm dead.
Technically you could put a bit of skin in a petri dish and let it grow for as long as you feed it.
And I said... Murder not kill...
Your skin cells, sperm, eggs, and embryos have as much sentience as each other and much less than your pet fish or the animal you ate for dinner.
By sweet deal... I meant going to heaven without ever having the chance to go to hell. If you are born and live into adulthood you've got a 50/50 chance to going to hell (maybe more if you were born in the wrong country) so statically speaking if god does send miscarriages and abortions to heaven its a 100% success rate in which the person involved should be thankful for not being put at risk of going to hell... If it is that bad of a place.
And when the embryo is not brought to term the soul would go to hell... or would that be heaven since it hasn't committed sin yet? Wait what are the thorny ethical questions again?
So does god send unborn yet dead people to hell or heaven?
If he sends them to heaven then its sweet deal for the person involved.
If he sends them to hell... Well... I'm not sure if that is a kind and loving god. Could you worship something like that?
I suppose retrospectively Geneva convention is just used by the victors to hang people it deemed didn't play by the rules but overlooked when their own troops did the same.
I suppose if one day we find ourselves on the wrong end of an occupation with say Chinese-Russia alliance that I personally hope they'll abide by the Geneva conventions.
I am not even really that mad at them. They found a price point that people were willing to pay for a product that cost them far far less to "produce".
Right. This is no different than paying $4 for a hot dog at a ball park when you could get the same hot dog at home for $0.25. Yeah it's a ripoff, but you're a captive audience. If you don't like it, wait until you get home.
But many people these days don't even have landlines anymore so its like being charged that much anywhere you go.
I know next to nothing about sailing, despite the fact that I live near the ocean.
I hardly know much about sailing other than history interest in sail travel during the 1500's through the 1700's and from my understanding sail travel is quite difficult compared to your standard propeller travel.
Especially if the wind is blowing the the opposite direction you want to go. One of the key inventions that did allow travel between Europe and the new world was the triangular sail which mitigates the issue by allowing the ship to travel at an angle sort of towards the destination even though the wind is blowing in the wrong direction. This is why the compass, sextant, and various other navigational tools were so important back then because since you couldn't often travel to your destination as the crow flies in a straight line you had to often find out where you were and then turn at an angle to aim towards your destination.
Of course if the winds were favorable, you could just plop up some square sails and enjoy the ride.
The key for these robots would be to able tell the wind direction and adjust accordingly which is a good deal easier with with GPS these days.
"Freight" doesn't go by plane. Some desirable foodstuffs and trinkets might get shipped by air, but everything else gets stuck on a ship.
Point taken, but I was thinking more on the lines of FedEx or UPS international shipments. Boats will always be cheaper, but if you had something time critical but didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for fixed wing shipping you could get it there in a decent amount of time with an airship before a boat could make the trip.
I'm just saying, if they really wanted to spy on you they could install a chip that could handle such a secret thing if say the FBI got a warrant. Of course, its still just as about tin foil hattish as the rumor about the NSA having a backdoor in windows.
Of course if that paranoid about someone looking at you with the built in camera on your Mac...
What would interest me far more would be an attempt to make hydrogen airships once more. It is like any technology involving large amounts of energy, there are dangers but they only apply if you don't design your machine properly.
An unmanned automated airship would be the best candidate for such a thing. As long as it doesn't crash on anyone, if it were to burn up the only thing lost would be it and the cargo.
I'm curious of you could get enough solar cells light enough to wrap it in it so that it could power itself and run 24/7 365 days a year without having to refuel.
Re:The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs...
on
Zeppelins Over California
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Depends what happens to fuel costs.
In theory, an airship ability to move 1,000lbs of cargo is the same as carrying 10,000lbs of cargo due to fact its altitude is simply stabilized in the air by how much ballast and helium. Yes there is still the cost of the fueled into the momentum of the airship which is still offset by mass, headwinds, and of course aerodynamics.
Though the main advantage the airship has over the fixed wing is that the fixed wing has to use its engines to keep itself aloft where the airship could turn its engines off at any point and not risk falling out of the sky.
So it really depends on how much fuel costs for air travel is going to get in the near future. If something like peak oil got really bad, one solution for international shipping could to simply take an airship into the jet streams, turn off the engines, and say just drift until you are close to your destination and then turn the engines back on to get to your exact destination.
Of course that would make shipping things from Japan to California quite efficient, but shipping to California to Japan would take a bit longer using this method.
If we do find cheap alternative fuels for fixed winged aircraft I'm sure we'll stick with that, but otherwise airships might be more economically viable.
The only real solution is not legislation but full commercial use of the technology designed in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Then laws will be a moot point when no humans error results in car accidents.
One thing I have learned in my short time on this planet. Every doomsayer's predictions of over population and food shortages comes to nothing. We always shift how things are done and accommodate it.
If you mean accommodating by having 1/6th of the worlds population living in extreme poverty (living under $1 a day) then I suppose you are right.
The problem with letting people reproduce wily nilly is that the poor and uneducated tend to breed the most and statically their children will face the same fate. Apparently the rest of the world doesn't care enough to help them economically, educationally, or even bother sending them condoms. At worst, some very large religious organizations condemn birth control in these regions even when it is available.
So unless something changes on the core level of how humanity treats the situation, we'll have 2 billion people living in extreme poverty instead of just 1 in a few years.
I'm sure if the TSA reads this it will be better for most people in general but it does not solve the core problem of terrorist. You catch or kill one and there is ten more to replace him.
Its like the problem with Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the Soviet. Sometimes you cannot win by force. Either it has to come to understand, negotiation, or at least putting them at arms length such as building a massive security wall like Israel.
Having military bases in these people's lands, other throwing legitimate governments for over 50 years, and backing unpopular dictators is what causes them to attack us. Not because we believe in freedom or a different religion. We stop messing with things over there and when we do that the common man who currently supports the terrorists and their Jihad will be more apathetic and the popular support base the terrorists enjoy now will go away.
Then again, I play plenty of Steam games, so I guess I'm not really that worried.
I used to abhor steam like the plague until one of my favorite mods went retail with it (Red Orchestra) went with it while holding my nose.
I had some major problems with it for about 6 months and was very disappointed I couldn't play the game but after I did a full format it played fine (bad TCP/IP stack I guess).
I still didn't like Steam though... And only downloaded free demos, but one day I was itching for a good Warhammer 40K game and I didn't didn't want to wait for mail order so I bought it and played it that day. Then I felt it wasn't so bad and bought the Orange Box and then Total War 2.
Then I got a new computer and I realized I didn't even have to bother with hunting down all the CDs. I suppose Steam could belly up one day and I'd be out of the games but then I got about 50 games in a box down stairs which I hardly ever play (except Shogun Total War) and the fact I don't have to scrounge through that box to play a random game saves me time.
Secondly, most Steam games have their Starforce or CD DRM removed as it is and I chuckled to myself on the DoW forums about everyone complaining about having to have to have the CD in the drive.
My only complaint about Steam is that you can't purchase games in OS X and then load them in Windows.
If stockholders come to MS for a bailout of their capital, they don't even need a hostile takeover -- it will be a willing one.
What about the MS Shareholders?
Buying a house that is a money hole at half off is still buying a money hole.
Strategically, MS buying Yahoo makes no sense at this point because they already have MSN and if they simply axed yahoo it will benefit Google more than MSN. If I owned MSFT at this point, I'd be breathing a sigh of relief.
Why on earth would I want to have to reference the ParisHilton class? and how would that be helpful to other developers? This is silliness.
I think the reason why so many open source projects have odd comments or funny comments is that its being made by people who aren't being paid and don't have a manager breathing down their necks so they'll use whatever they'd like at the time. Personally I think comments are the best part of open source code.
The key to wireless power is resonance. Think of a wineglass that shatters when an opera singer hits just the right note. When the voice matches the glass's resonant frequency--the tone you hear when you tap the glass--the glass efficiently absorbs the singer's energy and cracks. Using magnetic induction and two identical copper coils that resonate at the same frequency, the MIT scientists successfully powered a 60-watt lightbulb from a power source seven feet away. The team called their invention WiTricity, short for "wireless electricity." Next up: sending the juice even farther and more efficiently.
Why not use a combination for more realism? FPS's lack eye focus because there is no way the FPS game can tell if you are looking at an object in the background and foreground and then blurr or focus depending on what you are looking at.
In real life this is how we look at things but in games they have to fake it by focusing at the tip of you gun in the newer games but sometimes the player doesn't always look there.
The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, far from being a unique or rare thing in the universe, is actually an inevitable natural process, and will consistently and repeatedly erupt under environmental conditions that are actually very common across the universe.
Its not unlikely that life is common, but as far as we can tell is that intelligent life may be very rare or at least it tends to die out before or after some planet ending disaster like meteor impacts, super volcanoes, and cosmic rays.
If we view that natural selection is the ultimate process of determine which species will invariably live or go extinct then the only species that will survive over time is one that becomes intelligent enough or biologically capable enough to avoid, minimize, or just survive such disasters.
Hell for all we know the cockroaches descendants might outlive us due to the fact the might be able to survive meteor impacts and then go on to have a space faring species that travel on rocks colonizing planets over time.
china is not a worker's paradise anymore, it is a capitalist's paradise, because there are no pesky democratic impulses in the political sphere to interfere with the pure unadulterated pursuit of the almighty buck. its pure autocracy, technocracy, pure capitalism. china is one giant corporation now
I remember an article while back comparing modern day China to what Fascist Italy would have been like had the Axis won the war.
Thus, classical fascism should be the starting-point for our efforts to understand the People's Republic. Imagine Italy 50 years after the Fascist revolution, Mussolini dead and buried, the corporate state intact, the party still firmly in control, the nation governed by professional politicians and a corrupt elite rather than the true believers. No longer a system based on charisma, but on political repression, cynical not idealistic, and formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the "great Italian people," endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of its ancestors.
That is China today. It may be with us quite a while.
That pretty much sums this up. They wave Red Flags and Sell Red Books, but no one is a real communist anymore in government.
Slashdot Mirror
I think not. Most people can differentiate between the potential for life (semen and eggs) and actual life itself (autonomous life including self-replicating cells that may or may not have certain dependencies for life; don't we all?).
;)
Oh your being semantic and in the same regard you can't kill a virus because its not truly "alive" because it can't replicate without a host.
My skin, hair, and nails can self replicate a while after I'm dead.
Technically you could put a bit of skin in a petri dish and let it grow for as long as you feed it.
And I said... Murder not kill...
Your skin cells, sperm, eggs, and embryos have as much sentience as each other and much less than your pet fish or the animal you ate for dinner.
By sweet deal... I meant going to heaven without ever having the chance to go to hell. If you are born and live into adulthood you've got a 50/50 chance to going to hell (maybe more if you were born in the wrong country) so statically speaking if god does send miscarriages and abortions to heaven its a 100% success rate in which the person involved should be thankful for not being put at risk of going to hell... If it is that bad of a place.
And when the embryo is not brought to term the soul would go to hell... or would that be heaven since it hasn't committed sin yet? Wait what are the thorny ethical questions again?
So does god send unborn yet dead people to hell or heaven?
If he sends them to heaven then its sweet deal for the person involved.
If he sends them to hell... Well... I'm not sure if that is a kind and loving god. Could you worship something like that?
Wouldn't that mean they were murdered? That is if you accept the religious side of the house...
As much as you murder millions of children every night with bottle of lotion and a box of kleenex...
I suppose retrospectively Geneva convention is just used by the victors to hang people it deemed didn't play by the rules but overlooked when their own troops did the same.
I suppose if one day we find ourselves on the wrong end of an occupation with say Chinese-Russia alliance that I personally hope they'll abide by the Geneva conventions.
I am not even really that mad at them. They found a price point that people were willing to pay for a product that cost them far far less to "produce".
You mean like how Standard Oil did in 1911?
Right. This is no different than paying $4 for a hot dog at a ball park when you could get the same hot dog at home for $0.25. Yeah it's a ripoff, but you're a captive audience. If you don't like it, wait until you get home.
But many people these days don't even have landlines anymore so its like being charged that much anywhere you go.
...until a meteor hits a major city. Then people will be asking why NASA didn't do anything even though they cut their budget to near nothing.
I know next to nothing about sailing, despite the fact that I live near the ocean.
I hardly know much about sailing other than history interest in sail travel during the 1500's through the 1700's and from my understanding sail travel is quite difficult compared to your standard propeller travel.
Especially if the wind is blowing the the opposite direction you want to go. One of the key inventions that did allow travel between Europe and the new world was the triangular sail which mitigates the issue by allowing the ship to travel at an angle sort of towards the destination even though the wind is blowing in the wrong direction. This is why the compass, sextant, and various other navigational tools were so important back then because since you couldn't often travel to your destination as the crow flies in a straight line you had to often find out where you were and then turn at an angle to aim towards your destination.
Of course if the winds were favorable, you could just plop up some square sails and enjoy the ride.
The key for these robots would be to able tell the wind direction and adjust accordingly which is a good deal easier with with GPS these days.
"Freight" doesn't go by plane. Some desirable foodstuffs and trinkets might get shipped by air, but everything else gets stuck on a ship.
Point taken, but I was thinking more on the lines of FedEx or UPS international shipments. Boats will always be cheaper, but if you had something time critical but didn't want to pay an arm and a leg for fixed wing shipping you could get it there in a decent amount of time with an airship before a boat could make the trip.
This LED cannot be disabled in software.
Nothing a soldering iron couldn't solve.
I'm just saying, if they really wanted to spy on you they could install a chip that could handle such a secret thing if say the FBI got a warrant. Of course, its still just as about tin foil hattish as the rumor about the NSA having a backdoor in windows.
Of course if that paranoid about someone looking at you with the built in camera on your Mac...
Nothing a sharpie couldn't solve.
What would interest me far more would be an attempt to make hydrogen airships once more. It is like any technology involving large amounts of energy, there are dangers but they only apply if you don't design your machine properly.
An unmanned automated airship would be the best candidate for such a thing. As long as it doesn't crash on anyone, if it were to burn up the only thing lost would be it and the cargo.
I'm curious of you could get enough solar cells light enough to wrap it in it so that it could power itself and run 24/7 365 days a year without having to refuel.
Depends what happens to fuel costs.
In theory, an airship ability to move 1,000lbs of cargo is the same as carrying 10,000lbs of cargo due to fact its altitude is simply stabilized in the air by how much ballast and helium. Yes there is still the cost of the fueled into the momentum of the airship which is still offset by mass, headwinds, and of course aerodynamics.
Though the main advantage the airship has over the fixed wing is that the fixed wing has to use its engines to keep itself aloft where the airship could turn its engines off at any point and not risk falling out of the sky.
So it really depends on how much fuel costs for air travel is going to get in the near future. If something like peak oil got really bad, one solution for international shipping could to simply take an airship into the jet streams, turn off the engines, and say just drift until you are close to your destination and then turn the engines back on to get to your exact destination.
Of course that would make shipping things from Japan to California quite efficient, but shipping to California to Japan would take a bit longer using this method.
If we do find cheap alternative fuels for fixed winged aircraft I'm sure we'll stick with that, but otherwise airships might be more economically viable.
When on the road there is only one thing that is important and that is safety.
In that case, there should be no problem in passing a law requiring all calls to be fully automated like the DARPA Grand Challenge by the year 2018.
I'm just saying... If you really want to go safe that would be the way to go and not outlawing cell phones.
The only real solution is not legislation but full commercial use of the technology designed in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Then laws will be a moot point when no humans error results in car accidents.
Give it about 10 years.
One thing I have learned in my short time on this planet. Every doomsayer's predictions of over population and food shortages comes to nothing. We always shift how things are done and accommodate it.
If you mean accommodating by having 1/6th of the worlds population living in extreme poverty (living under $1 a day) then I suppose you are right.
The problem with letting people reproduce wily nilly is that the poor and uneducated tend to breed the most and statically their children will face the same fate. Apparently the rest of the world doesn't care enough to help them economically, educationally, or even bother sending them condoms. At worst, some very large religious organizations condemn birth control in these regions even when it is available.
So unless something changes on the core level of how humanity treats the situation, we'll have 2 billion people living in extreme poverty instead of just 1 in a few years.
I'm sure if the TSA reads this it will be better for most people in general but it does not solve the core problem of terrorist. You catch or kill one and there is ten more to replace him.
Its like the problem with Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the Soviet. Sometimes you cannot win by force. Either it has to come to understand, negotiation, or at least putting them at arms length such as building a massive security wall like Israel.
Having military bases in these people's lands, other throwing legitimate governments for over 50 years, and backing unpopular dictators is what causes them to attack us. Not because we believe in freedom or a different religion. We stop messing with things over there and when we do that the common man who currently supports the terrorists and their Jihad will be more apathetic and the popular support base the terrorists enjoy now will go away.
Then again, I play plenty of Steam games, so I guess I'm not really that worried.
I used to abhor steam like the plague until one of my favorite mods went retail with it (Red Orchestra) went with it while holding my nose.
I had some major problems with it for about 6 months and was very disappointed I couldn't play the game but after I did a full format it played fine (bad TCP/IP stack I guess).
I still didn't like Steam though... And only downloaded free demos, but one day I was itching for a good Warhammer 40K game and I didn't didn't want to wait for mail order so I bought it and played it that day. Then I felt it wasn't so bad and bought the Orange Box and then Total War 2.
Then I got a new computer and I realized I didn't even have to bother with hunting down all the CDs. I suppose Steam could belly up one day and I'd be out of the games but then I got about 50 games in a box down stairs which I hardly ever play (except Shogun Total War) and the fact I don't have to scrounge through that box to play a random game saves me time.
Secondly, most Steam games have their Starforce or CD DRM removed as it is and I chuckled to myself on the DoW forums about everyone complaining about having to have to have the CD in the drive.
My only complaint about Steam is that you can't purchase games in OS X and then load them in Windows.
If stockholders come to MS for a bailout of their capital, they don't even need a hostile takeover -- it will be a willing one.
What about the MS Shareholders?
Buying a house that is a money hole at half off is still buying a money hole.
Strategically, MS buying Yahoo makes no sense at this point because they already have MSN and if they simply axed yahoo it will benefit Google more than MSN. If I owned MSFT at this point, I'd be breathing a sigh of relief.
Sould searching time for yahoo investors.
Not if they sold short... Then they would be laughing all the way to the bank right now.
Of course, I wonder if some investor friend at MS knew about this ahead of time before shorting... Of course that would be illegal.
I think the reason why so many open source projects have odd comments or funny comments is that its being made by people who aren't being paid and don't have a manager breathing down their necks so they'll use whatever they'd like at the time. Personally I think comments are the best part of open source code.
My fav so far:
Source and some more amusing comments.
It does work.
Here is a Popular Science explanation on how it does:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/gallery/2008-01/electricity-air
And also from another article:
at least for FPS.
Why not use a combination for more realism? FPS's lack eye focus because there is no way the FPS game can tell if you are looking at an object in the background and foreground and then blurr or focus depending on what you are looking at.
In real life this is how we look at things but in games they have to fake it by focusing at the tip of you gun in the newer games but sometimes the player doesn't always look there.
The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that life, far from being a unique or rare thing in the universe, is actually an inevitable natural process, and will consistently and repeatedly erupt under environmental conditions that are actually very common across the universe.
Its not unlikely that life is common, but as far as we can tell is that intelligent life may be very rare or at least it tends to die out before or after some planet ending disaster like meteor impacts, super volcanoes, and cosmic rays.
If we view that natural selection is the ultimate process of determine which species will invariably live or go extinct then the only species that will survive over time is one that becomes intelligent enough or biologically capable enough to avoid, minimize, or just survive such disasters.
Hell for all we know the cockroaches descendants might outlive us due to the fact the might be able to survive meteor impacts and then go on to have a space faring species that travel on rocks colonizing planets over time.
I remember an article while back comparing modern day China to what Fascist Italy would have been like had the Axis won the war.
Ah here it is... http://www.benadorassociates.com/pf.php?id=31
That pretty much sums this up. They wave Red Flags and Sell Red Books, but no one is a real communist anymore in government.