imatfaal

I realise that different jurisdictions have different laws - but in UK I think Captain Refs actions could well still be considered illegal. A defence to murder that the action was justified requires a reasonable subjective belief that these actions were necessary and proportionate - ie even if the man on the clapham omnibus thinks you were justified; if the accused admits to believing he used excessive force then the defence fails. And, of course, if you had admitted to shooting at random then you would have no claim to a reasonable belief. You would have the mens, the actus, no justification and no excuse. I would have to double check this - but that's the way I think it goes.

Whoops, I misunderstood - OK reread post and understand yours now.

Captain Just noticed your post on the rep points above - Wow, nice one! Talk about the benefits of an efficient and benevolent dictatorship

Captain - not sure why you have singled out one sentence of my post - and responded as above. I do follow who says what and respond to the person with all the corresponding thoughts of what he or she has posted in the past. I do not think Marat is the sort of poster who says much by mistake or 'faultiness' (I like that word). As Marat posted the below immediately after one of the (admittedly few) posts with a photograph: I thought it was fairly reasonable to ascertain on what basis he made that comment.

Marat - that's a very strange quasi-solipsistic view to take and would seem to mechanize and dehumanize what is basically a social interaction. Whilst many things are possible, few are likely and to live one's life betting on the least likely option seems perverse. Do you have any evidence that the man staring out from the post above yours isn't an individual but a committee? On the friendliness of this site - I could not disagree with you more. This is a noticeably strict site, where the mods are pretty punctilious, potentially draconian, but there is very little flaming, sledging or rudeness.

Happy Birthday! Back on the rep points - would it not be possible to allow member to give only +ve rep points until they have posted 30 or so messages? This would seem to weed out lots of the neg reps from disgruntled teens who have their pet theory torn to shreds.

edit fr double post

Will re-iterate what Bignose said - but from different angle, I am established with a good long term job etc etc but still suffer from the bad credit rating I built up many years ago at University. Its pretty hard to build up a good rating - it is damn near impossible to expunge a bad one. In England it is the bizarre situation that if I had been convicted of a minor criminal offence my record would have been wiped clean by now, but as I had a county court judgment against me for unpaid poll tax and the bailiffs came round I still suffer because of it. Be more careful to avoid bad credit rating than building up a good one.

Kids who think rebellion is the automatic gainsaying and mockery of anything said/stated by any authority figure (or in SF.N's case - vague approximation of an authority figure). The only time I will neg-rep is when the poster is rude/obnoxious; or, no-matter how politely, answers a straight science question with a wild guess dressed up as fact.

Yep - the forum had a pet flat fish - and that sole was sold to a group of nutty l ron hubbard freaks on April 1st

No I am thinking of Daidoji Yuzan's instructions to wannabe Samurai to avoid being merely a rustic warrior and take up poetry, calligraphy and the tea-ceremony.

Thanks.

Too right! We might see how much the ability to craft a fine poem, or a knowledge of calligraphy really helps a fighting man.

Because quite a lot of Pakistanis did not support Osama Bin Ladin and hated the fact that their intelligence/security forces seemed to enjoy playing the dangerous game of soft-peddling on the extremist terrorists with Pakistan. There are far too many Pakistani military/security personnel who see the only enemy as India - and everybody else as a potential asset to be utilised. Pakistan has a population the same magnitude as the United States - and to expect unanimity amongst them would be naive; the islamic extremist hate the government due to the ties with the united states anyway... And I have just remembered this is a conspiracy theory thread and you weren't serious any way

Alka Seltzar before you go to sleep - and a Bloody Mary for breakfast. I am British - and I am typing after the benefit of a liquid lunch in the sun!

Lemur - sorry, but both Moontanman and Jackson have it right that speculation on the futures markets are the nub of the matter. The connection with availability at the well-head or demand at the refinery is passing and illusory in the short term - and these movements are all short term. Log on to the Intercontinental Exchange (theice.com) here in London or the New York Merc (Nymex) to see the unimaginable volumes of commodities being traded with only a passing nod to the underlying physical market. I am a oil-tanker charterer and have a pretty good handle on the amount of oil on the water and in the pipelines at any one time - it is several orders of magnitude smaller than the oil traded at ICE or the Merc in any one day. In the long term supply and demand will reassert themselves and they set a baseline for the market to follow - but the changes in the oil price that affect all our wallets and make the headlines at the moment are fluctuations due to trading not macroeconomic trends.

I am very anti-gambling in a purely instinctive manner, it doesn't appeal to me, I can't see it as anything but harmful, its a waste of time and money etc. but I would recommend reading to The Road to Wigan Pier - by George Orwell who in a very short passage describes the way that gambling in general and a lottery in particular creates a licence to day-dream for many very poor people with absolutely no hope of remission from poverty apart from the lottery. They knew the chances were tiny, and rationally held no hope for the day they would be lifted out of poverty by some lucky numbers, but the lottery created the possibility, no matter how slight, that this might happen, and that vanishingly small chance was worth it.

lemur The interpretation of text is highly cultural and not a mechanistic process that is objective and value free. Whilst you are right to argue that a reader in English has no less access to works translated from the German than a native - the implied corollary to your question that they have the same access is incorrect. Your use of the word "better" implies the existence of a canonical interpretation that all readers must aspire to reach - this is simply not the case. Each interpretive community will give different weighting and importance to the themes, language, and construction of a piece. Whilst we may fantasize of a correct interpretation, a direct link from the consciousness of the author to the reader, in reality as soon as the work is published the authors interpretation is immaterial and it is the reader's that is privileged. Trip Great post - reminds me of comment of Julian Huxley I heard on the radio a few days ago in which he said that attempting to prove religion scientifically was like attempting to prove the world was flat musically. It has struck me recently that many of your posts on religion are strangely similar to those of Tom Swanson on the physics boards; both sets of replies are saying "just because you are unable to reconcile quantum mechanics/relativity/religious belief (delete as applicable) with your internal model of how the world and universe works does not necessarily mean that these ideas are wrong". On the physics boards it is experimental proof that is the final arbiter, in religion is is faith and belief ; but in neither science nor religion is a personal preconception of the underpinning logic of the universe useful. And Thor is irrational - both in actions and belief, but who would neg-rep for saying it!!

Stefan if you don't use it to signify something why are you saying it? Is it merely verbal padding? As if so, is it not a little bit intolerant to use as a mere space filler a word that some find offensive, even if you disagree about their reasons for finding it offensive. Personally I find your sig more offensive than the swear word under discussion, but I don't swear unless I either lose complete control or I am in the company only of other people who swear.

We have also been practising the suppression of women, the maltreatment of children, and the violent exploitation of races and creeds that are not our own; that we have been doing something for a long time is only really proof that we have been doing it for a long time. the standard model is founded on theory and experimentation, it is predictive and logically sound; on the other hand the monogamous nuclear family is not the only existing answer to the problem, is far from common outside our own species and is a societal construct rather than a logical one.

Whilst some equations will allow you pluck a factor straight out from an equation with two or more sets of brackets added together, most of the time you need to carefully multiply out completely, collect similar terms, and start from there. the needless complexity of the above makes me think that this long winded route is exactly what the setter wanted to test. make sure you follow rules for brackets and multiplication closely and keep firm track of minus signs. Edit after a bit of crunching - this is not a bad one! Follow method above - factors/roots should be easily guessable once you have simple cubic. Remember that the term with no powers of x must be the multiple of all of the three numbers in the brackets ie y=(x+a)(x+b)(x+c) = x^3 + (a+b+c)x^2 + (ab+ac+bc)x + abc In this case there are only a very small number of ways of making abc

If you are gonna redefine everything to make it harmful then; Yes, you are right all sin is harmful.

I hadn't read the question properly

Here is an easier explanation of Shor's algorithm by MIT's Scott Aaronson (nb the third comment!) Shtetl-Optimized

Taking the name of the lord your god in vain, fornication, worshipping false idols, onanism