Nah. michael timothy, and the rest of the late-night editorial crew do shit like that all the time. Usually when one of them posts a story I think I'd read a couple of days ago, it's because... it had been posted to/. a couple of days ago!
(unless you believe in some creation myth and the attendant notion that language is a natural gift of humankind)
Although I do personally beleive in a creation myth, I should point out that the idea that language is a "natural gift of humankind," as you put it, is not dependent on such myths. There is a considerable amount of research that suggests that in the absence of any kind of exposure to language, human children would develop one on their own. The capacity for and the impulse to use language appear to be hardwired into the human brain. You may regard this as an evolutionary development if you will, since our primary advantage -- intelligence -- is greatly enhanced by language both to organize our thoughts and to communicate them.
Indeed it is. Restrictiing language, either by forbidding the use of certain words or by methodically redefining them, has been going on for quite some time now without Microsoft's involvement. The academic elite has pushed certain concepts so vociferously for so long that some important (but unfashionable) ideas can no longer be expressed simply, in a few words. I was having an online conversation on theology with some friends of mine, sensible, honest, sincere people all, and I found that it took an entire paragraph to express what I meant by (and what was once the standard meaning of, and still is in the theological environment in which I normally operate) the word "true". The others were utterly unable to conceive a meaning for it in anything but epistemological terms, although what I was trying to say could only be understood ontologically -- and "truth" ought to be an ontological term by definition.
Such deliberate modifications of the language are disturbing enough, but the exact thrust of this one is positively alarming. It's the sort of thing that, for example allowed Bill Clinton to question the meaning of the word "is," an act that in and of itself ought to have earned him a contempt of court charge.
But the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, said negotiators have placed safeguards on the legislation, like a four-year expiration date on the wiretapping and electronic surveillance portion, court permission before snooping into suspects' formerly private educational records and court oversight over the FBI's use of a powerful e-mail wiretap system.
So yes, on significant portions of the bill there's a four-year sunset.
Spiderweb Software
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Old-fashioned Ultima-style games with a more modern interface and look-&-feel are being produced right now! Check out Spiderweb Software. The games are all shareware -- crippleware, actually -- that let you get through about 1/3 of the way through play before you're forced to register to continue. But at $25, it's not all that painful to register.
Could someone in the press pleas at least ask the damn question? To wit: how exactly would these ID cards have prevented the events of 9/11? The terrorists didn't have to lie about their names to get on the airplanes, they just had to buy the tickets!
Heard about it? Um, yes. That's what my second paragraph was about ("TMI"). Chernobyl was incredibly destructive. No one got so much as a sunburn from Three Mile Island. (I suppose I'd better spell it out since you morons apparently don't follow abbreviations very well.)
There were two paragraphs in my post. The first talked about Chernobyl. The second mentioned something called "TMI". Gosh, what could that be? Three Mile Island, perhaps?
Pay attention before you shoot your mouth off. You won't look so stupid then.
You're being silly. The only thing Chernobyl proved was that the Soviet government counted the lives of its citizens very cheaply. In the West, no one has built a nuclear plant of the Chernobyl design for about 50 years. It was antiquated and inherently dangerous.
What is often conveniently ignored about TMI is that the containment system by and large worked. The radiation the public was exposed to was on average 1/6 that from a chest X-ray. Nobody got cancer from it. See the official report if you don't believe me.
That will seriously reduce the amount of Oxygen in the air, turning it into water, and plants can't breath water.
Plants can't breathe oxygen either. They breathe carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. And some arboreal plants do indeed rely on the water in the air to survive.
I have no numbers to hand, but a fuel cell is much more efficient than any internal combustion engine currently available, and mole for mole uses half as much oxygen as hydrogen. I'd say it won't make much of an impact, expecially compared to IC engines, which also use plenty of oxygen but spew toxic fumes.
You don't have to produce your hydrogen as you're describing, and carbon dioxide is not necessarily going to be the byproduct even if you use hydrocarbons. You can also get your hydrogen via electrolysis of water, which produces oxygen as a byproduct. This process uses electricity, but it seems to me a well-designed system would use tidal flows to produce the power. You need to add an electrolyte to water for electrolysis to work, so sea water would be ideal, which means you might as well locate your hydrogen plants along the coast. A further byproduct would be the minerals originally dissolved in the water, which could then be put to good use. Such plants could be small and discreet, and need not place any strain to speak of on the local environment.
Come to think of it, such a system could be a boon for poor countries with a coastline and good tides but few other resources. They would become energy and mineral exporters.
I'd love it if someone could give this idea a good critique.
At some point you have to being working with reality. The reality is that Israel won for itself all the disputed territories, Jerusalem included, in the 1967 war, a war in which only the most biased observer could call them the aggressors. If you are among those so biased, then we have nothing to talk about.
More reality: had Arafat accepted the deal offered by Ehud Barak, and had terrorist activity against Israeli civillians then ceased, there would be a (more or less) cohesive Palestinian state in existence today.
I do not see how the current situation is the fault of the US, especially considering the government's recent, relatively pro-Palestinian policies.
I do not doubt that some Palestinian Christians are among those throwing rocks as Israeli troops. (Which is a brave but supremely stupid thing to do.) The terrorist groups who target Israeli civillians are all explicitly Muslim in name and exclusively Muslim in membership. Christians aren't as throughly second-class in the PA as they were back when the entire region was under Muslim control, if for no other reason than the perception of a common enemy in Israel, but there's still a gulf there that's rarely if ever crossed.
Honestly I think it's cruel to bring a child to the work with a debilitating dieseas that will kill him (if from the complications if nothing else) before his 20th birthday, especially if he will spend most of his youth half dead and in pain.
You perhaps ought to have edited this before sending it; I have no idea what you mean by "to the work." As it happens, in this particular case the child's death was by no means a foregone conclusion. My own son had a similar condition -- chronic acid reflux sending the contents of his stomach up the esophagus and back down into the lungs, causing a chronic pnemonia. This common in children with Cerebral Palsy, but it can also occur to normal kids. It's easily correctable with surgery and poses no real threat unless it goes unidentified for a long period and there's an inordinate wait for the surgery -- as there was in this case.
As far as your point regarding computer diagnoses: In the first place, we're not even talking about a real diagnosis, just an evaluation of risk factors. A live doctor would have been able to identify possible risk of Down Syndrome simply by asking the women their ages. There would have been no Y2K problem. It does not seem to me that you understand the process of diagnosis very well; 99% of the problem is correctly identifying the symptoms. A computer can't do that part of the job at all, it takes a real doctor talking to the patient to extract all the necessary information. After that, in the vast majority of cases the diagnosis is -- well, not trivial, but there are well-established protocols that deal with all but the most unusual cases, which by definition are very rare.
But even with the system you're proposing, a real MD needs to be involved. In the case of this story, there was not even that.
My point, which you seem insistent on missing, is that autism cannot be diagnosed in the womb, and that you therefore cannot abort autistic children before they're born. You could have extracted that from the link I gave you if you hadn't been so intent on proving your own point. Or are you actually advocating euthanizing autistic children? If so, come right out and say it rather than hiding behind obfuscations. If not, be more clear and pay better attention to the materials at hand.
You also seem to have missed that in many cases autism is treatable. It's not easy, but it can be done. We ought not kill people who have a treatable disease when we have a chance of giving them a life instead.
Is "natural evil" a Protestant term? I've never heard it. I'm a fairly well-educated Orthodox Christian, and we would consider this term heretical. No evil is natural, strictly speaking.
This is insightful? Rather, I'd say it's symptomatic of the blind hatred for the US we see in many Muslem countries, regardless of what we may or may not do.
Why are there now areas within Israel where Palestinian Arabs are self-administered? Because of a US-mediated settlement between the PLO and Israel. Why are these areas now under "Israeli seige"? Because Palestinian terrorists, whom Arafat is either unwilling or unable to control, started blowing up Israeli civillians. Why did Israel take such a hard line against the Muslims within their borders in the first place? Does the year 1967 remind anyone of anything? (Not the main cause perhaps, but a symptom of why Israel has valid reasons for doing what they do, by their own lights if nothing else.) Nor has US support for Israel in recent years been either blind or unconditional. We have repeatedly insisted that Israel back off on reprisals to Palestinian terror, often clearly to the detriment of Israel's own self-interest, in the hopes that this time, just maybe, the cycle of terror will be broken. The terrorist groups instead have shown absolutely no interest in peace, but continue to escalate their activities.
As Americans go, I'm a Palestinian sympathizer. I'm an Orthodox Christian, within the same communion as the indigenous Christian Church in the Holy Land. Palestinian Christians suffer from all of the disadvantages of being Arabs in Israel even though they are not among the militants. I know very well that Palestinians have lived under conditions of oppression. But I'd have to be blind not to realize that the militant Palestinian factions brought most of it upon themselves and upon every other Palestinian, terrorist or not, Muslim or not, by their actions.
As far as Iraq goes, neither sanctions nor bombings would ever happen if Saddam Hussein would simply abide by the terms of the agreements he made at the end of the Gulf War. He would be able to end all sanctions tomorrow by doing so if only he hadn't proven repeatedly that his word can't be trusted for anything. I suppose the Jordanians don't much care that the reason the Gulf War happened in the first place was because of Saddam's sudden, unprovoked assault on a peaceful neighboring Muslim state. (And are 5,000 Iraqi babies really dying every day due to economic sanctions while Saddam rests comfortably in one of his many palaces? Even if it's true, how can it possibly be the fault of the US when Saddam clearly has the resources to deal with it, but chooses instead to spend them on militancy?)
Perhaps this is the beginning of the decline of the great American Empire.
They can but hope. I suppose it's useless to point out that the US doesn't really have an empire. If we did, our "client states" are the most unruly and disobedient of those of any empire in the history of the world. But I'm well read in world history, and I say that anyone who would provoke the US again ought to proceed with extreme caution. If the provocation is sufficient, the US just might be moved to create a genuine empire, if that's what it takes to make itself secure. Be very, very careful.
It may sound really cruel, but I think it would be better - for everyone - had they never been born, in the cases of severe autism.
It not only sounds cruel, it is cruel. You're speaking with only a tiny smidgen of real-life experience, and not from any real knowledge. Educate yourself before spouting nonsense next time.
Oh, and privatized hospitals never try to cut costs. Noooo, sir.
Of course they do, but in my extensive experience never to the extent of having non-MDs make diagnoses, with or without expert systems. If nothing else, the fear of a malpractice suit in the event of a misdiagnosis would prevent it. In the American system, I'm also reasonably sure it would be considered unethical.
What, exactly, is wrong with aborting based on Downs syndrome as opposed to ordinary abortion?
"Eugenics", when applied to human beings, is rightly considered a dirty word by most civilized people I would hope. The Nazis showed us how slippery the slope is.
(I'm not talking about whether abortion as a whole is right, perhaps another thread should discuss that).
I enjoy a good righteous flamefest as much as the next guy, but be aware that's exactly what your asking for here.
A couple of years ago, the son of one of my co-workers passed away at age 14 from respiratory problems. It was a complication of the Down Syndrome and cerebral palsy from which he suffered.
Although I had never met the boy, I went to the memorial service to support my friend. It was a very informal event. His family, friends, teachers and therapists were all present. One by one they took the podium to say a few words about how Michael had enriched their lives with his joy, enthusiasm, and love. Not a single person in the room -- and certainly not his parents -- regretted having known him, or begrudged him their efforts on his behalf. As far as these genuinely good people were concerned, the rewards for having done so far outweighed what it cost them, and Michael's presence in their lives was a gift from God. It was extraordinarily moving.
Having made the choice myself, together with my wife, to maintain life support for a very prematurely born infant when we were given the choice to terminate it, knowing full well that he would likely be severly disabled, I cannot regard the decision to abort a potentially disabled child as anything but evil. They really are gifts from God. Raising them makes you a better person. Throwing them away as if they were nothing more than organic trash is sick. The fact that society seems to assume that anyone would want to do so is a sign of a very sick society.
In other matters, I suspect the reliance on a computer program to diagnose risk factors is a consequence of the UK's wonderful national heath system. Yes, a living, breathing OB/GYN certainly would have known the risk factors for Down Syndrome and other diseases without the aid of a computer. But I suspect that MDs are dispensed with for routine pregnancy counselling and diagnoses in order to save money, being replaced with relatively untrained personnel running expert system. Disturbing as the implications of this story are, it's a good example of why this is a rather bad idea.
I know it's difficult to wrap your mind around the magnitude of all this, but listen: 50,000 -- that's 50,000 -- people worked in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. I hope and pray that most of them got out before the buildings collapsed, but in realistic terms we're probably talking about at least 20,000 casualties. And that's a low estimate, in the hopes that by some miracle straight from heaven most people were able to evacuate the buildings before they collapsed. By the sheer numbers alone, these are not the casualties one might expect of a terrorist attack. These are not even the casualties one might expect of a battle. These are the casualties one might expect of a war. It's comparable to the total number of American casualties for the entire Vietnam war; one-fifth the American casualties from WWI, and about one-tenth the American casuaties from WWII.
You are naive in the extreme if you think it possible to simply capture the terrorists directly responsible and bring them to justice, as if anything you could do to them could possibly amount to a just retribution for this act. Terrorists can only exist because there are nations that tolerate -- and even condone -- their presence, and they are amazingly adept at melting into the civillian population when they want to. (This was the problem Serbia had fighting the KLA, which was also a terrorist organization and not valiant freedom fighters, whatever their apologists may say.) Whatever nation harbors the party responsible for all these deaths is equally culpable.
You bring up the old saw, "violence doesn't solve violence". Crap. Learn some history before you get all sanctimonious about violence. Violence is perfectly capable of solving all kinds of violent problems if it's persued to its necessary conclusion -- as the US did not do in Iraq, Korea, and Vietnam, but did do against Germany and Japan. What are Germany and Japan doing these days? Are they notable for violence? Is Iraq? (And is N. Korea and Vietnam, at least against their citizens and their liberties?)
Now Americans will find out what it takes to fight a terrorist organization. The Serbs knew it well, as they fought a civil war against the KLA. Terrorists are cowards by definition, striking against the innocent and defenseless without warning, and using human beings as shields without hesitation. Often, the only way to get at them is to not concern yourself with the collateral damage of those who are (sometimes willingly) shielding them. This the Serbs did, and were roundly condemned as criminals for it even as it became clear that the number of casualties that had always been cited -- 100,000 or more -- was a wild exaggeration.
Bush has now said that in our retaliatory actions we will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them, just as the Serbs did. Yes it's awful. Yes it's tragic. That's the nature of terrorism, both on the parts of the terrorists themselves and those who would eradicate them. But we may well have no choice in the matter if we are to prevent this sort of thing from recurring.
Can we make the world a perfectly safe place? No, of course not. But we can make it clear to anyone who would contemplate killing tens of thousands of Americans that if they were to actually do so, they will -- not might, will -- be made to regret it bitterly, a regret that will be shared by anyone who aids them. That will undoubetdly make terrorists think twice about doing such a thing ever again, and make anyone who might harbor them think three times about it.
Before anyone replies with the kind of puerile ramblings that have been modded up today: of course we will find out for sure who was really responsible before we act. Whatever good can be extracted from what it will take to wipe out the organization responsible -- whichever it may be -- will not come from striking at the wrong targets. Obviously it's not the Palestinians, or the Iranians, and probably not Libya either. But they're partying tonight in Iraq, and there seems to be information implicating Osama bin Laden. I do not doubt, given their recent public statements, that the Afghani authorities will back away from Osama in a moment if presented convincing evidence that he is responsible. They had better. No American wants to make innocent people suffer.
But anyone who willingly harbors terrorists is not innocent.
I didn't say it made sense, I'm just reporting what time() is actually documented to do. Personally, I can't imagine, nor have I ever experienced, a situation where the system time is inaccessible. But time() allows for it, and it says right here that you get -1 back if there's an error.
You can also pass in an address for a location for time() to write the time to besides returning it as the function value. Perhaps the error results if you pass in an invalid address? Maybe?
And if you're only going to store a single byte (such as 1 or 0) there's usualy something like the int type "bool", a 1-byte long int, that allows a 1-byte value to be stored (technicaly this value could be 0 to 9, I'm not sure if negatives are allowed).
Um, no. A byte (I don't think I've ever seen a signed byte, although there's no reason why you couldn't have one) can range from 0 (0x00) to 255 (0xFF) on systems with 8-bit bytes. That's most systems now in use, including the computer you're likely using right now. I first learned to program on a DECsystem 10, which had 36-bit words which were (usually) considered to be 6 bytes of 6 bits each, although there was no hard-and-fast rule requiring this. In MACRO-10, bytes could be of arbitrary length up to the size of the word. Naturally we tended to work in octal rather than hex because a single byte could be expressed as a two-digit octal number from 00 to 77 (63 dec). Yes, there was a fairly limited character set, but in those days you were usually working in all-caps anyway.
Now I work on VMS systems, which effectively do not have date issues. Neener-neener, O Unix freaks!
The other, not-as-clean-but-quick-and-simple, solution is to bump the variable holding the time to a signed long int.
You of course meant to say an unsigned long int. That wouldn't work for the reason others have mentioned: -1 is reserved as an error return. Yes, you could do it and come up with some other error reporting mechanism, but there's a whole big bunch of code that would have to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
I'm not entirely sure that the product is simply burned sugar. Obviously it trapped a lot of gasses along the way in order to increase in volume like that. But I wonder what the reaction was, and if you don't wind up with some kind of polymer instead? As far as I can tell, the text descriptions don't include this particular experiment.
Yes, I know that this is not real feces. It's a joke, get it? Ha ha.
I noticed the professor's lack of protective equipment too. Awful brave of him to be stirring a sulfuric acid solution so vigorously without so much as latex gloves on. But I guess that's why he's a professor and I'm just a geek.
Slashdot Mirror
The horror!!!!!
Although I do personally beleive in a creation myth, I should point out that the idea that language is a "natural gift of humankind," as you put it, is not dependent on such myths. There is a considerable amount of research that suggests that in the absence of any kind of exposure to language, human children would develop one on their own. The capacity for and the impulse to use language appear to be hardwired into the human brain. You may regard this as an evolutionary development if you will, since our primary advantage -- intelligence -- is greatly enhanced by language both to organize our thoughts and to communicate them.
Indeed it is. Restrictiing language, either by forbidding the use of certain words or by methodically redefining them, has been going on for quite some time now without Microsoft's involvement. The academic elite has pushed certain concepts so vociferously for so long that some important (but unfashionable) ideas can no longer be expressed simply, in a few words. I was having an online conversation on theology with some friends of mine, sensible, honest, sincere people all, and I found that it took an entire paragraph to express what I meant by (and what was once the standard meaning of, and still is in the theological environment in which I normally operate) the word "true". The others were utterly unable to conceive a meaning for it in anything but epistemological terms, although what I was trying to say could only be understood ontologically -- and "truth" ought to be an ontological term by definition.
Such deliberate modifications of the language are disturbing enough, but the exact thrust of this one is positively alarming. It's the sort of thing that, for example allowed Bill Clinton to question the meaning of the word "is," an act that in and of itself ought to have earned him a contempt of court charge.
"Idiot" is a small loss by comparison.
Old-fashioned Ultima-style games with a more modern interface and look-&-feel are being produced right now! Check out Spiderweb Software. The games are all shareware -- crippleware, actually -- that let you get through about 1/3 of the way through play before you're forced to register to continue. But at $25, it's not all that painful to register.
Could someone in the press pleas at least ask the damn question? To wit: how exactly would these ID cards have prevented the events of 9/11? The terrorists didn't have to lie about their names to get on the airplanes, they just had to buy the tickets!
Heard about it? Um, yes. That's what my second paragraph was about ("TMI"). Chernobyl was incredibly destructive. No one got so much as a sunburn from Three Mile Island. (I suppose I'd better spell it out since you morons apparently don't follow abbreviations very well.)
Pay attention before you shoot your mouth off. You won't look so stupid then.
What is often conveniently ignored about TMI is that the containment system by and large worked. The radiation the public was exposed to was on average 1/6 that from a chest X-ray. Nobody got cancer from it. See the official report if you don't believe me.
Plants can't breathe oxygen either. They breathe carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. And some arboreal plants do indeed rely on the water in the air to survive.
I have no numbers to hand, but a fuel cell is much more efficient than any internal combustion engine currently available, and mole for mole uses half as much oxygen as hydrogen. I'd say it won't make much of an impact, expecially compared to IC engines, which also use plenty of oxygen but spew toxic fumes.
You don't have to produce your hydrogen as you're describing, and carbon dioxide is not necessarily going to be the byproduct even if you use hydrocarbons. You can also get your hydrogen via electrolysis of water, which produces oxygen as a byproduct. This process uses electricity, but it seems to me a well-designed system would use tidal flows to produce the power. You need to add an electrolyte to water for electrolysis to work, so sea water would be ideal, which means you might as well locate your hydrogen plants along the coast. A further byproduct would be the minerals originally dissolved in the water, which could then be put to good use. Such plants could be small and discreet, and need not place any strain to speak of on the local environment.
Come to think of it, such a system could be a boon for poor countries with a coastline and good tides but few other resources. They would become energy and mineral exporters.
I'd love it if someone could give this idea a good critique.
More reality: had Arafat accepted the deal offered by Ehud Barak, and had terrorist activity against Israeli civillians then ceased, there would be a (more or less) cohesive Palestinian state in existence today.
I do not see how the current situation is the fault of the US, especially considering the government's recent, relatively pro-Palestinian policies.
I do not doubt that some Palestinian Christians are among those throwing rocks as Israeli troops. (Which is a brave but supremely stupid thing to do.) The terrorist groups who target Israeli civillians are all explicitly Muslim in name and exclusively Muslim in membership. Christians aren't as throughly second-class in the PA as they were back when the entire region was under Muslim control, if for no other reason than the perception of a common enemy in Israel, but there's still a gulf there that's rarely if ever crossed.
You perhaps ought to have edited this before sending it; I have no idea what you mean by "to the work." As it happens, in this particular case the child's death was by no means a foregone conclusion. My own son had a similar condition -- chronic acid reflux sending the contents of his stomach up the esophagus and back down into the lungs, causing a chronic pnemonia. This common in children with Cerebral Palsy, but it can also occur to normal kids. It's easily correctable with surgery and poses no real threat unless it goes unidentified for a long period and there's an inordinate wait for the surgery -- as there was in this case.
As far as your point regarding computer diagnoses: In the first place, we're not even talking about a real diagnosis, just an evaluation of risk factors. A live doctor would have been able to identify possible risk of Down Syndrome simply by asking the women their ages. There would have been no Y2K problem. It does not seem to me that you understand the process of diagnosis very well; 99% of the problem is correctly identifying the symptoms. A computer can't do that part of the job at all, it takes a real doctor talking to the patient to extract all the necessary information. After that, in the vast majority of cases the diagnosis is -- well, not trivial, but there are well-established protocols that deal with all but the most unusual cases, which by definition are very rare.
But even with the system you're proposing, a real MD needs to be involved. In the case of this story, there was not even that.
You also seem to have missed that in many cases autism is treatable. It's not easy, but it can be done. We ought not kill people who have a treatable disease when we have a chance of giving them a life instead.
Is "natural evil" a Protestant term? I've never heard it. I'm a fairly well-educated Orthodox Christian, and we would consider this term heretical. No evil is natural, strictly speaking.
Why are there now areas within Israel where Palestinian Arabs are self-administered? Because of a US-mediated settlement between the PLO and Israel. Why are these areas now under "Israeli seige"? Because Palestinian terrorists, whom Arafat is either unwilling or unable to control, started blowing up Israeli civillians. Why did Israel take such a hard line against the Muslims within their borders in the first place? Does the year 1967 remind anyone of anything? (Not the main cause perhaps, but a symptom of why Israel has valid reasons for doing what they do, by their own lights if nothing else.) Nor has US support for Israel in recent years been either blind or unconditional. We have repeatedly insisted that Israel back off on reprisals to Palestinian terror, often clearly to the detriment of Israel's own self-interest, in the hopes that this time, just maybe, the cycle of terror will be broken. The terrorist groups instead have shown absolutely no interest in peace, but continue to escalate their activities.
As Americans go, I'm a Palestinian sympathizer. I'm an Orthodox Christian, within the same communion as the indigenous Christian Church in the Holy Land. Palestinian Christians suffer from all of the disadvantages of being Arabs in Israel even though they are not among the militants. I know very well that Palestinians have lived under conditions of oppression. But I'd have to be blind not to realize that the militant Palestinian factions brought most of it upon themselves and upon every other Palestinian, terrorist or not, Muslim or not, by their actions.
As far as Iraq goes, neither sanctions nor bombings would ever happen if Saddam Hussein would simply abide by the terms of the agreements he made at the end of the Gulf War. He would be able to end all sanctions tomorrow by doing so if only he hadn't proven repeatedly that his word can't be trusted for anything. I suppose the Jordanians don't much care that the reason the Gulf War happened in the first place was because of Saddam's sudden, unprovoked assault on a peaceful neighboring Muslim state. (And are 5,000 Iraqi babies really dying every day due to economic sanctions while Saddam rests comfortably in one of his many palaces? Even if it's true, how can it possibly be the fault of the US when Saddam clearly has the resources to deal with it, but chooses instead to spend them on militancy?)
Perhaps this is the beginning of the decline of the great American Empire.
They can but hope. I suppose it's useless to point out that the US doesn't really have an empire. If we did, our "client states" are the most unruly and disobedient of those of any empire in the history of the world. But I'm well read in world history, and I say that anyone who would provoke the US again ought to proceed with extreme caution. If the provocation is sufficient, the US just might be moved to create a genuine empire, if that's what it takes to make itself secure. Be very, very careful.
It not only sounds cruel, it is cruel. You're speaking with only a tiny smidgen of real-life experience, and not from any real knowledge. Educate yourself before spouting nonsense next time.
Of course they do, but in my extensive experience never to the extent of having non-MDs make diagnoses, with or without expert systems. If nothing else, the fear of a malpractice suit in the event of a misdiagnosis would prevent it. In the American system, I'm also reasonably sure it would be considered unethical.
"Eugenics", when applied to human beings, is rightly considered a dirty word by most civilized people I would hope. The Nazis showed us how slippery the slope is.
(I'm not talking about whether abortion as a whole is right, perhaps another thread should discuss that).
I enjoy a good righteous flamefest as much as the next guy, but be aware that's exactly what your asking for here.
Although I had never met the boy, I went to the memorial service to support my friend. It was a very informal event. His family, friends, teachers and therapists were all present. One by one they took the podium to say a few words about how Michael had enriched their lives with his joy, enthusiasm, and love. Not a single person in the room -- and certainly not his parents -- regretted having known him, or begrudged him their efforts on his behalf. As far as these genuinely good people were concerned, the rewards for having done so far outweighed what it cost them, and Michael's presence in their lives was a gift from God. It was extraordinarily moving.
Having made the choice myself, together with my wife, to maintain life support for a very prematurely born infant when we were given the choice to terminate it, knowing full well that he would likely be severly disabled, I cannot regard the decision to abort a potentially disabled child as anything but evil. They really are gifts from God. Raising them makes you a better person. Throwing them away as if they were nothing more than organic trash is sick. The fact that society seems to assume that anyone would want to do so is a sign of a very sick society.
In other matters, I suspect the reliance on a computer program to diagnose risk factors is a consequence of the UK's wonderful national heath system. Yes, a living, breathing OB/GYN certainly would have known the risk factors for Down Syndrome and other diseases without the aid of a computer. But I suspect that MDs are dispensed with for routine pregnancy counselling and diagnoses in order to save money, being replaced with relatively untrained personnel running expert system. Disturbing as the implications of this story are, it's a good example of why this is a rather bad idea.
You are naive in the extreme if you think it possible to simply capture the terrorists directly responsible and bring them to justice, as if anything you could do to them could possibly amount to a just retribution for this act. Terrorists can only exist because there are nations that tolerate -- and even condone -- their presence, and they are amazingly adept at melting into the civillian population when they want to. (This was the problem Serbia had fighting the KLA, which was also a terrorist organization and not valiant freedom fighters, whatever their apologists may say.) Whatever nation harbors the party responsible for all these deaths is equally culpable.
You bring up the old saw, "violence doesn't solve violence". Crap. Learn some history before you get all sanctimonious about violence. Violence is perfectly capable of solving all kinds of violent problems if it's persued to its necessary conclusion -- as the US did not do in Iraq, Korea, and Vietnam, but did do against Germany and Japan. What are Germany and Japan doing these days? Are they notable for violence? Is Iraq? (And is N. Korea and Vietnam, at least against their citizens and their liberties?)
Bush has now said that in our retaliatory actions we will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them, just as the Serbs did. Yes it's awful. Yes it's tragic. That's the nature of terrorism, both on the parts of the terrorists themselves and those who would eradicate them. But we may well have no choice in the matter if we are to prevent this sort of thing from recurring.
Can we make the world a perfectly safe place? No, of course not. But we can make it clear to anyone who would contemplate killing tens of thousands of Americans that if they were to actually do so, they will -- not might, will -- be made to regret it bitterly, a regret that will be shared by anyone who aids them. That will undoubetdly make terrorists think twice about doing such a thing ever again, and make anyone who might harbor them think three times about it.
Before anyone replies with the kind of puerile ramblings that have been modded up today: of course we will find out for sure who was really responsible before we act. Whatever good can be extracted from what it will take to wipe out the organization responsible -- whichever it may be -- will not come from striking at the wrong targets. Obviously it's not the Palestinians, or the Iranians, and probably not Libya either. But they're partying tonight in Iraq, and there seems to be information implicating Osama bin Laden. I do not doubt, given their recent public statements, that the Afghani authorities will back away from Osama in a moment if presented convincing evidence that he is responsible. They had better. No American wants to make innocent people suffer.
But anyone who willingly harbors terrorists is not innocent.
You can also pass in an address for a location for time() to write the time to besides returning it as the function value. Perhaps the error results if you pass in an invalid address? Maybe?
Um, no. A byte (I don't think I've ever seen a signed byte, although there's no reason why you couldn't have one) can range from 0 (0x00) to 255 (0xFF) on systems with 8-bit bytes. That's most systems now in use, including the computer you're likely using right now. I first learned to program on a DECsystem 10, which had 36-bit words which were (usually) considered to be 6 bytes of 6 bits each, although there was no hard-and-fast rule requiring this. In MACRO-10, bytes could be of arbitrary length up to the size of the word. Naturally we tended to work in octal rather than hex because a single byte could be expressed as a two-digit octal number from 00 to 77 (63 dec). Yes, there was a fairly limited character set, but in those days you were usually working in all-caps anyway.
Now I work on VMS systems, which effectively do not have date issues. Neener-neener, O Unix freaks!
The other, not-as-clean-but-quick-and-simple, solution is to bump the variable holding the time to a signed long int.
You of course meant to say an unsigned long int. That wouldn't work for the reason others have mentioned: -1 is reserved as an error return. Yes, you could do it and come up with some other error reporting mechanism, but there's a whole big bunch of code that would have to be rewritten to take advantage of it.
I'm not entirely sure that the product is simply burned sugar. Obviously it trapped a lot of gasses along the way in order to increase in volume like that. But I wonder what the reaction was, and if you don't wind up with some kind of polymer instead? As far as I can tell, the text descriptions don't include this particular experiment.
Yes, I know that this is not real feces. It's a joke, get it? Ha ha.
I noticed the professor's lack of protective equipment too. Awful brave of him to be stirring a sulfuric acid solution so vigorously without so much as latex gloves on. But I guess that's why he's a professor and I'm just a geek.
The Giant Artificial Poo! Although if you have sulfuric acid in your digestive tract, you're more of a man then I am.