Mr Skeptic

You can always rinse the stuff off the eggs, no? Rinse and centrifuge? I don't think any of those you listed will affect the DNA, and the other parts you need to remove anyways.

Well, it seems to me that the Democrats' favorite programs would benefit the people, whereas the Republicans' favorite programs make us a more powerful nation (or bigger dicks, as the case may be). Military spending is economically waste, unless you value their product (the ability to do violence).

Discrete is just like digital.

Not really, it's a different principle. You can't pump more than 10 m above the surface of the water. However, because the pipe would be underwater, the pressure difference will just get transferred down rather than counteracted by gravity. In fact, if you assume that the density of the fluid in your pipe is lower than the density of the seawater, it will flow upward even without a pump.

Really, it depends a lot on what the alternative is. In many cases, the alternative is simply to do nothing, which is safe. But when it comes to crime, doing nothing means more crime which is unsafe. Lowering the false conviction rate will require lowering the overall conviction rate, almost certainly by a lot more. If you have a serial killer, for example, and you're only 96% sure he's guilty, and you let him go on a 4% chance he's innocent, he's almost certainly going to kill again, which will likewise cost an innocent (or more!) their lives. Of course the false conviction would have the double whammy of ruining one innocent person's life and allowing the criminal to go free and do more evil. But at such a small false positive rate, the people would be better off despite this. So really, the question is what will it cost to lower the false conviction rate? Will halving the false conviction rate from 4% to 2% halve the overall conviction rate? That would probably be unacceptable.

Which is toxic.

I was robbed when I was a kid. My mom had done a house sale in Paraguay, I guess she didn't know there was a problem letting strangers wander all over the house. Anyhow, a couple of days later all our Legos were gone. They were on a porch enclosed only with screen. Me and my brothers went asking around, and fortunately found the Legos due to honest parents. However, they were all busted up already. I was also robbed at gunpoint by a bunch of scared kids. I guess there's a reason not to walk while texting. All they took was my cell phone. The police took me for a ride, didn't find anyone, and when I got back they had some random people to see if I could blame them. However, I have no idea how they looked despite them not wearing masks. I was in a bit of a daze. None of my stuff has enough significance that I'd kill over it. Probably because I'm a pretty boring guy, too boring for anything to have that much significance too me. However, I just might shoot a thief if caught in the act -- there really is no excuse possible for stealing from someone who themselves have very little. And if someone knew me well enough to know a possession had such sentimental value but stole it anyways, I'd probably want to hunt them down too. There is a chance that you'll get some of your stuff back, and you definitely should have the police check for prints. I wish you luck in your search. But remember that in the end, its just stuff and has only as much significance as you give it.

Well, you've largely misunderstood the reason for drinking the breast milk. Think about it: who normally drinks breast milk? Your children and adopted children (and possibly also children from a close friend of the family). They're also going to be over a decade younger. This is why the Sharia law would consider people who drank someone's breast milk family, which means they can see the woman unvailed and be alone with her. It also means that if they had sex with her it would be considered incest or technical incest, either due to blood relation or from being considered relatives. This would allow the women to be alone with their friends while technically following the outdated laws. It's also a really amusing idea and goes very much against the spirit of said law.

Tell that to the tachyons.

There seem to be a few similarities between the universe and black holes. There's some differences too obviously. Not sure if there is any significance to this. Similarities: * Both have an "event horizon". For the black hole, its a spherical (ish) surface where anything that goes in doesn't come back out, ever. With the universe (if expanding), there is an event horizon where anything going past is regressing faster than the speed of light and so can't come back "in" (it's still in the universe, of course, just forever separated from a different point to which it was previously connected). * Stuff may always be visible as it passes through the event horizon. It just gets redshifted to insignificance. Differences: * No singularity inside the universe (unless we have a Big Crunch universe) * Universe is like an inside-out black hole?

The photon would be red-shifted into negative energy, I think, whatever that means. We can still see stuff receding from us at FTL, however it is due to the fact we see photons it emitted while it was still nearer. I think we would always be able to see it due to this (unless it "started out" that far), however the image would be more and more redshifted to the point it would be indistinguishable from the background radiation.

It would be technical incest, and adultery.

Only if it is possible to do so... Isn't it the responsibility of the lawmakers to ensure that it is possible to know the law, before people can be held accountable for not knowing it?

To my knowledge, we mostly follow the ancient Roman tradition that ignorance of the law is no excuse. There do seem to be a few exceptions however. Even so, the amount of laws we have is tremendous, and no one could possibly in their lifetime know all the laws. Every last one of us is ignorant of the law, from lawyers to judges to the very people writing the laws -- some of whom seem to be voting on laws they haven't even bothered to read. Oh, and us regular civilians too. Back in the day, there weren't all that many laws, and it wasn't crazy to expect people to know the law. But now that's not even possible. Is it really ethical to expect the impossible from people? This is now a fault of the laws, not of the people. On the other hand, the original reason for this tradition remains -- the alternative is that willful ignorance of the law becomes expedient, and the necessity to prove that someone was aware of the law. Maybe this should be in politics.

So, how do you plan to get rid of cash? Even if there is no government backed cash, there's nothing to stop others from making their own cash system purely for black market purposes. Back in the day, cash was made by individuals, you know.

You can open the task manager (press Ctrl+Alt+Del), which contains a list of running programs. It can be sorted by memory footprint and by CPU usage. Many of these programs are unnecessary. You can close them from task manager and see if bad things happen, or look them up online first. Some of them you may want to disable them from starting automatically when you turn on your computer.

Images can be compressed to sacrifice quality in exchange for smaller size.

I'm not entirely convinced of that either. Sure, this if planned worked brilliantly for putting the spotlight on the blockade and the plight of the Gaza strip. Yes, at the cost of some deaths but journalists and their readers need that blood. However, the folks on that ship seemed to have been under the impression that they were being fired upon, before being boarded. This is not entirely baseless as one of the Israelis said he fired warning shots (presumably up in the air but at night all you see is the flash). Also, some of the news stories say that the Israelis warned to turn away or they would be confronted with lethal force (which is false as shown by recordings, but may have been confused by people on the ship and not just journalists). So they could have thought that they would be attacked and decided to go down with a fight (as stupid as that may be). All it takes is a small percentage of paranoid folks.

*Puts up a "Don't Feed the Trolls" sign*

Why?

This is worrisome. I'm sure we'd have some precious words if, say, Senator Obama had participated in defending Iraq from the US or aiding Al Qaeda in any way. Talk about partisanship.

[about the blockade being illegal due to being disproportionate] But, who judges what is disproportionate? Also, who enforces this law, and what were they doing for the last couple of years? It's not like we just found out about the blockade or something.

Wow, a whole 19 activists dead after being attacked by the "zodiacs", and here I thought it was only 9. Yes, because normally military and law enforcement always publish and allow themselves to be filmed, right? Actually, the job of journalists is to make money for news agencies, not to report the news. Accuracy really isn't a concern other than that it needs to have enough of the facts that people still consider them a news source and they don't have too many embarrassing retractions. If you've ever seen the news on a story you personally know about, you would realize what a difference this can be. Note that you don't make news by saying people who attacked a military with melee weapons died, you make news by saying that Israel killed aid workers. And what makes news makes money: this is what journalists are paid to do. What's left is facts. Sure, there are few facts that can be known for sure at the time, but you don't get to just make them up because the facts are unavailable. The fact is, the eyewitness testimonies are not facts because they contradict each other and so have to be considered unreliable. Ah yes, I guess we should believe the guy who says 10 people were killed, yes? Didn't I earlier say something about eyewitnesses being unreliable? Generally when presented with testimonies from criminals and law enforcement, I tend to believe the law enforcement side. Even if some of the criminals were killed in the confrontation. (see how fun labeling is?) Dealing with the facts comes last because you don't know the facts at the start. Oh, here's another one from a link the Capt'n shared: http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=289874 *** In a previous version of this article Arraf was quoted as saying she was "certain" that she did not say she had permission to dock in Gaza from the Port Authority there, but later clarified that "Listening to the new version released by the Israelis, I have no reason to doubt that I did say it on this voyage also." The article has been modified to reflect that clarification. Witnesses are all kinds of unreliable. Actually, I think mooey's contribution was far more valuable than your own. Also, I think you are misunderstanding what is going on in this thread as well. If everyone here were railing against the flotilla, I suspect mooey would be pointing out where Israel made mistakes. I suspect the Capt'n is taking the other side mostly because despite their numbers he doesn't think that side is doing a good job. Because when dealing with the facts, if one side is being taken care of by lots of people someone has to take the other side, for a while at least. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Exactly. People died to make this news. Not sure if they intended to die, maybe just wanted to get beat up to complain about Israeli brutality, or maybe this whole thing was a mistake and everyone was trying to defend themselves (they say they were attacked before being boarded, which they responded to by defending themselves by attacking the soldiers who responded by defending themselves). Plus due to the damage the blockade is doing, it would be illegal or borderline legal, which makes said spotlight all the more powerful.

Women are genetically more stable due to having two X chromosomes, and they live longer (at least now that they don't die in childbirth). Only one X chromosome is used and the other in inactivated; this is chosen fairly early on and the result is that they are a mosaic of cells with one or the other X chromosome active. This generally doesn't matter much, but in the case of tortoiseshell cats it gives them their distinctive coat, and in the case of a defective X chromosome it often means they can survive (and possibly be just fine) whereas a man would die. Men have more genetic information used (an X and a Y chromosome) but women have more genetic information altogether (an X is bigger than a Y chromosome) though most of it will be redundant (as it is with every other gene except X and Y). In early development, men follow the default female body plan development, but the Y chromosome interferes with it in a process called defeminization.

My first thought is that, just like the rest of us, you will be unable to devise a theory that makes accurate numerical predictions that can be verified. Also, gravity is the domain of general, not special, relativity.