Sayonara

Iirc, Vitamin C is required for the matrix of the cell membrane - so it helps in the recovery of tissues (and therefore reinforcing existing defences, as it were) rather than fighting disease directly.

It has no discernable effect on traffic (search engines simply do not work that way any more - they now look for semantic context and a scalar value called "authority" which deals with inward and outward links and metadata). The problems with more categories are: - The database gets bigger. - Moderation becomes more difficult. - The index page becomes longer than twice the depth of the fold, which is user-hostile. - Users who bother to post in the correct forum become less confident about where they should start a thread... - ...then the multiple posting starts. And so on.

Isn't that just the answer to the question "why did they not die off until time X?"

I doubt there was scientific reasoning behind it - it was simply the unknown at the time (and the scientifically minded would of course have been pointing out that plenty of things travel faster than sound anyway, like military ordinance, but of course the universal common factor with crazies is that they won't listen.)

Yang_du, if you're such a loyal supporter of the Chinese government, then why are you posting here from a computer in Canada?

No, that's a generalisation (as are most stories about scorpions). The ones I have are venom-conservative, but other species will hit as often and for as long as they can.

It doesn't matter what manner you present the question in; you're still suggesting the same thing and since traffic has not spiked dramatically since the last thread on this, the answer is still the same: We condensed the forums because some were practically empty, and none of the topics currently covered by "General Sciences" are drawing enough interest to justify making new forums. The only forum that is likely to be re-split any time soon is Chemistry.

In case anyone was wondering, my observations show that scorpions are as thick as planks.

Well bear in mind you can't patent "doing X", only "method for doing X", so a lot of patents turn out to be useless anyway after a couple of years of hard reverse engineering With enough evidence to support you as the inventor, you could probably hand this off to a body like NASA and receive full credit. Just make sure it does what it says on the tin first, because if they need to redesign parts of it you'll end up sharing credit.

Check the patent office site to see what your rights are and how to protect them: http://www.patent.gov.uk/ An invention is not protected if it is not patented.

I was putting that under "make a stable superstructure". Let's put every problem under that heading, then there's only one thing stopping us building one right now for a laugh.

Well, apart from the ones who aren't deterred and get the sentence, and also apart from the ones who make a proper effort to not get caught. Still, it's better than countries without capital punishment, where everyone is constantly going around plotting murders because there is no scary deterrent If he's paying for the life he took with his own life (which I have issues with to begin with) I have to wonder why he is also made to suffer perhaps a decade of incarceration (assuming Blike's explanation of Justice).

Like you said, this has already been discussed.

Hence it's in general discussions.

Well yes, but his question was whether that is its purpose, not whether it succeeds.

Well, there is that. But given that you have probably already smelted anything local that was big enough to puncture it, you can always add more complexity when the superstructure is in place, and it's getting that erected in a stable fashion that's the only really physicsy problem (apart from the giant numbers and such).

THEM! was a great film. Apart from all the bits where things happened, or people were talking.

Building a Dyson Sphere is actually pretty easy (assuming you have the raw resources, lots of time, and lots of ships/robots/slaves).

Do not dis the Hyperdimensional Resonator. It can even allow you to carry friends on amazing trips through time - all they have to do is hold on tight. (I suspect this device only allows you to travel to the future, due to the coma that the electric shock puts you in.)

It's only a balance if you hang the two -1s off some metaphorical fulcrum that has no tangible meaning. The reality is that two people (in a simple scenario, anyway) have been killed where we had the power to stop it at one. Not only did we not stop it, but we actively participated. A society that uses capital punishment will never have clean hands. And yet in order to justify your position on capital punishment your key argument centers around an eye for an eye approach, on the basis that life cannot be quantified, when quite clearly the United States can and does quantify the value of lives every single day; much like, in fact, any country that has mobile armed forces, a national health system, emergency services, a welfare system, and the concept of life insurance. I really need convincing that this argument is not a case of special pleading. There are plenty of people you know within a single degree of separation who can tell you exactly how much you are worth to society - in dollars - and why. If this is the case, why are all killings not punished by death? If that which the victim has been deprived of is invaluable, then no extenuating circumstances should be able to affect the sentence. And on top of that, I am fairly certain that not all instances of capital punishment are on the back of a murder sentence. So you have said, however as I have mentioned I have issues with that. There is of course also the flaw that a convicted murder with a sentence of capital punishment could offer to hand over their collection of 12th dynasty Egyptian amulets as recompense, rather than having the executor (pun not intended) of their estate destroy them all upon their death. Are those more invaluable than a life, or less invaluable? Since we aren't allowed to quantify invaluable, we now have a problem. I don't particularly appreciate being asked strongly leading questions before I have agreed to this method of debate, but alright. Yes. However I am also aware that (i) humans are fickle, (ii) invaluable is relative, (iii) the principle that life is invaluable does not actually relate to the relative worths that any two people have with respect to society. Also, I do not in fact personally decide how valuable a life is on behalf of society - my opinion on that is not really relevant at all. Therefore I am not actually basing my arguments on my personal beliefs, but on what I see as an emotive hypocrisy in societies that practice capital punishment. Yes, however I would argue strongly against having "special punishments" for certain crimes on the basis of a single semantic that could well be applied unilaterally, but isn't.

If that's the majority audience you expect to find on a science forum, you are - in all likelihood - not a credible source for any kind of analysis.

That was kind of my point Blike. How does destroying something we have defined as invaluable redress the balance of something invaluable being destroyed? That's like saying if you lend me a $20 bill and I give you back two $10 bills, I have not repaid the debt. What you are saying here is that the only true justice system is one in which the sentence is always the mirror of the crime. But if "an eye for an eye" was workable, it surely would be mainstream all over the advanced world, given that most countries have had justice systems for quite a while. They aren't saying that at all. Depriving someone of the freedom to be self-determining renders any of the attributes associated with being alive fairly pointless, so with the exception of being less barbaric it's essentially the same think as "taking life". The fact that some people (i.e. the family) feel that the perpetrator deserves death as their punishment is understandable, but immaterial to the proceedings. I really don't see how you can compare life imprisonment in jail with a relatively quick death and decide the former is a "soft option". Firstly, I don't accept that justice can only be served by a punishment that mirrors a crime exactly, so I don't really need to respond to that. Secondly, I would point out that not all countries actually do hold human life invaluable, and those that do frequently have to make decisions that cost lives regardless, so obviously absolutes are simply not applicable here. Thirdly, I would say that in your scenario, it would be no less hypocritical than a country that claims to hold life to be invaluable yet is willing to destroy it in order to make a point that obviously is not getting across. Someone who has been executed doesn't really care how they stand relative to society.

Consider the Best Quotes thread to be a nominations list then.