He was not buying the shares, he way buying put options, which basically give you the right to sell ("put") the shares at a predetermined price. If the share price suddenly drops, you can make money by just buying the shares on the open market and exercising your put options (which give you a fixed selling price that is now higher than what you're paying for the shares on the stock market). Alternatively, you can just sell the options themselves, which is less of a hassle.
Out of what we've seen so far, this is the best hope for finding Earth-like life, or a possible colonization opportunity for humans.
At 5000 ly, I'd say "don't hold your breath for the latter".
I would bet my money that we're able to do useful planet-scale terraforming long, long before we can send anything, let alone a colony ship, to a star system 5000 ly away.
In guerrilla warfare through city streets, masked by civilians, fighting an enemy who has lived their entire life within the confines a a few square miles, they're all sitting ducks. Read the news sometime!
They're only sitting ducks if/because they have to pay attention to the "news". If you don't care about that, keeping an insurgency under control is relatively simple - just kill enough people. Saddam had managed to do so for, what, decades ?
I wasn't clear. I was questioning why it would be worth to make people afraid of traveling by plane when you could launch a more general campaign on the ground.
Think about the psychological effects (large number of casualties, disruption of air traffic, fire/wreckage, international headlines, etc). People in the US are already fairly indifferent to people getting gunned down by random nutbags (there've been how many shootings in the US in last three days ?).
Because a single, authoritative piece of ID is:
* more attractive to steal
No. See any country that has ID cards. These things are pretty much never the target of theft since they are, compared to all the other things in your wallet (CCs, ATM cards, cash), fairly useless to a thief (they include a photo and the address and are very hard to manipulate). Thieves might use it to find out your address (if you're a foreigner, that usually means that your home is a good target for a break-in now), but there's enough hints on other things in your wallet that this is pretty much a non-issue.
* more damaging when it is stolen
It's a bit of a hassle to get a replacement, but what is a thief going to do with it ? If he tries to have stuff/mail shipped to an address that's different from the one on the card, he'll raise quite a few red flags.
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
The funny thing is: Here in Europe we have ID cards, but we're very rarely asked to present them (I've had to show mine last time to get the birth certificate for my daughter). However, in the countries that seem so proud of not having national ID cards, everyone and their dog wants my ID for all kinds of crap (I'm 30+ years old and still they want to see my ID if I'm buying alcohol. And they wanted to see it when I was accompanying my wife to the federal building where she had to take care of some paperwork. ID necessary to enter what's essentially an office complex, WTF guys ??), forcing me to carry my passport around everywhere I go (which is _very_ annoying as it doesn't fit in a wallet and there's going to be major hassles if it ever gets lost or stolen).
I'm sure every sane engineer would look at that 3.2 and decide that, for reasons related to what's practical and works well, the exact 3.20000000 can't be used with full precision, instead a rough approximation is needed, say 3.14159265 or thereabouts.
... and not too long ago, there was an article about engineers supposedly having a terrorist mindset. I think we could add "Criminally adulterating the legislated value of pi" to the list of possible terrorist acts.
You seem to be under the impression that nothing in the world ever changes, this is an observation which is obviously incorrect. For example if Hertz initally have the best deal for rental cars there's no guarantee that in a years time Avis won't have improved it's offerings and be able to do you a better deal.
You seem to be under the impression that management always acts rationally, which is also incorrect.
You must be an American... what is *with* you people always reaching for the lawyer every time some little conflict with another person comes up.
That's because for Americans, the choice is using either lawyers or guns, no matter how small the conflict. And if you reach for the lawyer, you can at least pretend to be civilized.
The article suggests that the baby will have DNA from all three parties and says appearance and "other characteristics" will be like the 'real' mother. But maybe it could also receive the "healthy" DNA strings from the donor egg thereby not passing on the genetic malfunction?
That is not going to work, unless the genetic defect was in the mitochondrial DNA of the original zygote. Mitochondria are organelles (kind of like organs for a single cell) that have their own DNA (some suspect that they might actually once have been separate life forms that sort of formed a permanent symbiosis with the rest of the cell). What's in the mitochondrial DNA doesn't affect the rest of the body, as long as the mitochondria are functioning correctly.
The process described in the article is about making a cell that has a nucleus with DNA from two parents, and mitochondria with DNA from a third "parent".
Also, when it comes to golden plates, they are just not that weird.
Well, it is if you're talking about a message from Him. You'd expect Him to either stick with tried and true materials (stone tablets were good enough for the ten commandments), or that He knows the periodic table well enough to chose something that's even more resistant than gold, for example,
IANAP, but most "energy" variables can be thought of as the square of some other physical properties (kinetic energy is related to velocity squared, electrical energy is related to voltage or current squared, etc.)
... the negative mass. See the famous E = mc^2 - if something has a negative mass, it will also have negativ energy (since c is a constant). No imaginary math necessary, you just need to wrap your head around the concept of particles (?) with a negative mass.
I think it's you who believes in the ages-old myth that whether something is "someone" or "no one" chiefly depends on how it takes up nutrients and gets rid of waste products.
I don't happen to believe in their power.
Yet you're echoing pretty much what they say. It's just a different bunch of people in pointy hats, and a different passage from an old and dusty book. I happen to believe in physiology textbooks, mainly because I could actually verify their contents if I had reason to assume that they're false.
Can't we just agree to disagree and leave each other alone on this issue?
I'm afraid of people with arbitrary and malleable definitions of "no one", that could be easily expanded to include whomever they don't like at any particular moment.
It's because murder has this terrible side effect of someone else getting hurt as a result of your actions. No one gets killed during an abortion, despite what powerful people in pointy hats would have you believe.
That all depends on how you define "someone" and "no one". If you believe in magic pixie dust happening during delivery, which magically turns a viable "no one" into "someone", then yeah, you might be right.
It seems reasonable to me that what most makes us human is our minds, and thus once a fetus has a human mind, it should be considered human.
The problem with this is: How do you weigh past and future "thinking" ? Is anyone who isn't going to think in the next few months (due to coma, cryogenic preservation, whatever) not to be considered human, even if there's a good chance that he or she will be able to think at some point in the future ?
Also, the limit of viability (that is, the point at which a fetus has a 50% chance of surviving outside the womb if delivered prematurely) is currently at 25 weeks, which is juuust a little bit shorter than 6 months, and is probably going to become even lower in the future. Would that mean that a really premature baby would not be considered human, due to being short a few days of neural development ?
Drugs companies will make a lot more money from AIDS medication than sexual enhancement drugs.
The possible market for the latter is larger by a few orders of magnitude. You can't convince someone that they need HIV medication if they're not infected, but you can easily convince people that they should try your ED drug to see if it's "right for them".
Slashdot Mirror
He was not buying the shares, he way buying put options, which basically give you the right to sell ("put") the shares at a predetermined price. If the share price suddenly drops, you can make money by just buying the shares on the open market and exercising your put options (which give you a fixed selling price that is now higher than what you're paying for the shares on the stock market). Alternatively, you can just sell the options themselves, which is less of a hassle.
Welcome to securities 101.
At 5000 ly, I'd say "don't hold your breath for the latter".
I would bet my money that we're able to do useful planet-scale terraforming long, long before we can send anything, let alone a colony ship, to a star system 5000 ly away.
Some company makes a "remake" of the famous Competition Pro joystick (complete with micro-switches and all) that has a USB connector.
They're only sitting ducks if/because they have to pay attention to the "news". If you don't care about that, keeping an insurgency under control is relatively simple - just kill enough people. Saddam had managed to do so for, what, decades ?
Uhhh. Bad idea. Really bad idea. They can't detain/cavity search/deny entry to/arrest/disappear a company, but they can do any of that to you.
Not only are they overly intrusive but they are causing losses in a very real way. Measurable losses.
Yes, and especially if it's not a company, these "losses" are quite desired and expected. Corporate espionage, anyone ?
Think about the psychological effects (large number of casualties, disruption of air traffic, fire/wreckage, international headlines, etc). People in the US are already fairly indifferent to people getting gunned down by random nutbags (there've been how many shootings in the US in last three days ?).
Hm, the first name that comes to mind is "Stinger". Not exactly Russian or Chinese.
Unless you want to make people afraid of flying in particular. I'm not sure what strategic purpose that would serve.
Think about why terrorism has the word terror in it. That might make things clearer.
Apparently, one guy in Germany followed your advice and almost ended up with a Darwin Award after downing a 1 liter bottle of vodka.
No. See any country that has ID cards. These things are pretty much never the target of theft since they are, compared to all the other things in your wallet (CCs, ATM cards, cash), fairly useless to a thief (they include a photo and the address and are very hard to manipulate). Thieves might use it to find out your address (if you're a foreigner, that usually means that your home is a good target for a break-in now), but there's enough hints on other things in your wallet that this is pretty much a non-issue.
* more damaging when it is stolen
It's a bit of a hassle to get a replacement, but what is a thief going to do with it ? If he tries to have stuff/mail shipped to an address that's different from the one on the card, he'll raise quite a few red flags.
The funny thing is: Here in Europe we have ID cards, but we're very rarely asked to present them (I've had to show mine last time to get the birth certificate for my daughter). However, in the countries that seem so proud of not having national ID cards, everyone and their dog wants my ID for all kinds of crap (I'm 30+ years old and still they want to see my ID if I'm buying alcohol. And they wanted to see it when I was accompanying my wife to the federal building where she had to take care of some paperwork. ID necessary to enter what's essentially an office complex, WTF guys ??), forcing me to carry my passport around everywhere I go (which is _very_ annoying as it doesn't fit in a wallet and there's going to be major hassles if it ever gets lost or stolen).
Apparently, you haven't imagined yet what many engineering projects would be like if they assumed that pi = 3.2.
You seem to be under the impression that management always acts rationally, which is also incorrect.
Then again, maybe I'll patent 22/7 as a good way to approximate pi. I heard that intellectual property is all the rage nowadays.
That's because for Americans, the choice is using either lawyers or guns, no matter how small the conflict. And if you reach for the lawyer, you can at least pretend to be civilized.
That is not going to work, unless the genetic defect was in the mitochondrial DNA of the original zygote. Mitochondria are organelles (kind of like organs for a single cell) that have their own DNA (some suspect that they might actually once have been separate life forms that sort of formed a permanent symbiosis with the rest of the cell). What's in the mitochondrial DNA doesn't affect the rest of the body, as long as the mitochondria are functioning correctly.
The process described in the article is about making a cell that has a nucleus with DNA from two parents, and mitochondria with DNA from a third "parent".
Well, it is if you're talking about a message from Him. You'd expect Him to either stick with tried and true materials (stone tablets were good enough for the ten commandments), or that He knows the periodic table well enough to chose something that's even more resistant than gold, for example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium
See the famous E = mc^2 - if something has a negative mass, it will also have negativ energy (since c is a constant). No imaginary math necessary, you just need to wrap your head around the concept of particles (?) with a negative mass.
I think it's you who believes in the ages-old myth that whether something is "someone" or "no one" chiefly depends on how it takes up nutrients and gets rid of waste products.
I don't happen to believe in their power.
Yet you're echoing pretty much what they say. It's just a different bunch of people in pointy hats, and a different passage from an old and dusty book. I happen to believe in physiology textbooks, mainly because I could actually verify their contents if I had reason to assume that they're false.
Can't we just agree to disagree and leave each other alone on this issue?
I'm afraid of people with arbitrary and malleable definitions of "no one", that could be easily expanded to include whomever they don't like at any particular moment.
That all depends on how you define "someone" and "no one". If you believe in magic pixie dust happening during delivery, which magically turns a viable "no one" into "someone", then yeah, you might be right.
You underestimate the number of things that can go wrong during labor and delivery.
The problem with this is: How do you weigh past and future "thinking" ? Is anyone who isn't going to think in the next few months (due to coma, cryogenic preservation, whatever) not to be considered human, even if there's a good chance that he or she will be able to think at some point in the future ?
Also, the limit of viability (that is, the point at which a fetus has a 50% chance of surviving outside the womb if delivered prematurely) is currently at 25 weeks, which is juuust a little bit shorter than 6 months, and is probably going to become even lower in the future. Would that mean that a really premature baby would not be considered human, due to being short a few days of neural development ?
No
Duck and cover.
Preferably in the form of a song snippet from one of those "instructional movies".
The possible market for the latter is larger by a few orders of magnitude. You can't convince someone that they need HIV medication if they're not infected, but you can easily convince people that they should try your ED drug to see if it's "right for them".