LucidDreamer

Sounds like a great party gift. Another gift, which could score you big points with your significant other, is to name a star after them.

It is saying that every effort should be made by the people to make sure that our bill of rights' date=' which defines our freedoms, is interpreted as liberally as possible in favor of the people. Any law that will effectively erode those rights to any degree, without great reason, should be fought no matter how inconsequential the right might seem. Of course it is. This could be a disagreement on the definition of content, but I feel that words that very effectively convey a person’s emotional state have content. Example: Damn! They passed the law. I think damn very succinctly shows that I have a great emotional attachment to the law. Just saying they passed the law would not have the same meaning.

They can also prevent me from running around a movie theatre yelling "I am the knight that says ni," over and over. They should have the right to stop me doing that, but they should not have the right to stare over my shoulder as I'm talking to my friends, waiting to fine me for saying the wrong thing.

If profanity has no content or meaning then why are you arguing to make a law against it? You should be completely indifferent to it if it has no meaning. If profanity was equivalent to men having babies then you should have the same feelings towards a law against men having babies as you do about a law against profanity. People posting in this thread seem to have strong opinions about making laws against something that is content free. I'm not arguing that profanity is a good thing' date=' only that the government should keep their paws off of our ability to express ourselves. I may be wrong, but I do not believe there is a federal law against profanity in the United States. It's possible that some states have made laws against it, but I believe its more in the jurisdiction of the cities or counties. Exactly. That's because profanity and vulgar words are not strongly regulated by the government. We would have a much different situation if the government really made it their business to oppress the use of vulgar words. In the United States laws only become more numerous with a greater spheres of control.

I disagree. Both should be protected. If the government restricted all the words that we could use to negatively describe them then our freedom of speech would be drastically compromised and the way you say something can have a big impact on communication. I don’t think the people should ever give the government power over their speech unless under very specific circumstances, such as hate crimes. We don’t really need swearing to communicate properly, but once you start signing away your rights it rarely stops. Who gets to determine what is considered a swear word anyway? The list of swear words never gets smaller, only bigger. The article has a testimony from a teenage boy about how the police are always listening and you have to watch everything you say. That sounds a lot like the old USSR where the government would always by spying on the people, looking for anyone willing to speak out against them so they could threaten and imprison them. It starts with harmless laws against swearing and it ends up with the people lacking any kind of freedom of speech at all. The people should jealously guard their freedoms, even it means having to listen to some idiotic teenage boy who swears every other word.

When you are in a lucid dream and you think you are going to wake up try looking at the ground and spinning around. There is a good chance that the environment will change and you will stay asleep.

I think the majority of scientists don't consider viruses to be alive.

What we need is a reform party--a party that runs purely to force reform on the present two parties. The libertarian party is well established, yet it will never win more than a few seats in congress every once in a while. Perhaps a strong leader with a strong reform platform and the libertarian party behind him could win some power and force some major reforms. Or maybe just a reform party; people might be more willing to vote for a party that is purely intended to force reforms, at least for congress. Then again this might not work because each voting district may not be willing to give up its seat, that is looking after its own interests, for the reform of congress.

There must be alot of English blood in the states.

Download adaware http://www.lavasoft.de/ , it should eliminate your problem and get rid of most of your spyware.

I was actually quite surprised at how well Bush was able to handle himself and explain his reasoning. It's true that Kerry was able to point out several failures during the Bush administration, but what administration doesn't have failures that the opposition can't point out during election time. Bush wasn't bad at all in the debate, just a little too defensive. I do disagree with his foreign policies though. He seems to have no understanding of the importance of good relations with the rest of the world. He has no understanding of diplomacy at all. Invading Iraq and committing American troops was a bold, decisive, and proactive act, but it was also the wrong one, and obviously so.

Acidic and basic foods will have effects on the body. Acidic and basic foods will actually change the pH of the blood to some degree, but the body has an effective buffering system that will negate most of their effects. The digestive system is particularly affected by the pH of foods. Your stomach is highly acidic when it contains food, at around pH of 2. Too many acidic foods will increase this acidity and cause heartburn or stomach upset. Too many basic foods can neutralize the pH of the stomach so much that it interferes with your stomach's ability to destroy bacteria with its acid. The low pH is also helpful in the digestion of protein. Lots of basic foods can also encourage bacterial growth in the bladder. If you develop a bladder infection it can actually be quite helpful to drink lots of cranberry juice because its quite acidic. Under most circumstances you don't need to worry about the acidity or alkalinity of your foods. However, certain people with chronic medical conditions could benefit by learning about the pH of foods. What happens to the acids or bases of the foods you ingest depends on what it is. The digestive secretions or the buffer system of the blood usually neutralizes them to some degree.

Obviously nuclear weapons are the biggest threat. One could kill hundreds of thousands with a blast and more with the contamination. It is of course difficult to build a nuclear bomb and terrorists would most likely have to buy one from one of the former Soviet Union countries or wherever they ended up. I am convinced that a biological agent could be a potentially disastrous weapon if they could ever devise a means to obtain and disperse it. This would require more resources and planning than a bomb and I am not sure the terrorist have the ability to successfully carry out this plan. However, since the terrorists proved their resourcefullness with 9/11 and becaue there is so much destructive potential this should be watched for. The Bhopal disaster is relevant. It shows the effect of a toxic chemical under the right circumstances. The chemical that killed thousands wasn't even designed to kill people; it was a pesticide. It would require a much smaller concentration of gas specifically designed as a lethal agent. The correct chemical agent with an effective form of deployment could be disastrous. Of course producing chemical warfare, like nuclear weapons and biological agents, requires a certain degree of technological advancement. It's much easier to make a simple bomb and blow up a building. I guess my point is that chemical and biological weapons, even though we have not yet seen their full destructive power used effectively, have enormous potential to kill and we should not dismiss their threat lightly. Though I do believe that some people have used the threat of these weapons and overblown the likelihood of mass destruction with them for their own benefit.

I believe that a cell is the smallest single unit of life. I don't think they break it down any further. I don't think that a chloroplast or a mitochondria are considered to be alive. They are organelles that use to be single celled organisms themselves before they were incorporated into the eukaryotic cell. Now that they are part of the Eukaryotic cell they are not considered to be alive themselves. Its the whole cell that is considered living. At least that's how I learned it.

What about Ebola? Seems like you could create a means to infect several people of a large city or airport and watch it spread like a wild fire.

Spyware and addware are all about the money. Viruses are about frustration or being a teenager.

I think what Swasont was trying to point out is that there is no absolute line between alive and not alive. There is still some debate about whether viruses are alive or not. If I took out all the other mechanisms from a bacteria besides its replication system and then mutated it so it would replicate without the other mechanisms and just rely on ATP and nutrients that I pumped in would it be alive or not? If I managed to mutate a virus that could take basic components from its environment and reproduce would it be alive? At what point of a hybrid between a virus and a bacteria does that organism stop being alive.

Hydrophobic Moment http://gcg.biotech.ufl.edu/biolcomp/moment.html

I agree with sorcerer. Evolution is obvious, but it’s anyone’s guess how or why this universe appeared.

I am not sure (probably no one is) when lipids entered the scene of early life. Lipids would be necessary to form a cell' date=' but the earliest form of life was definately not a complete cell that exists today. A cell membrane probably came fairly early, but I don't think it was part of the earliest replication system. Don't think of the earliest form of life like you think of life today. There was no DNA->RNA->protein system, no cell membranes with transport proteins, no complex morphology, etc. The earliest form of life was just a replication system that mutated over billions of years to what we see today. Under certain conditions things that are relatively rare become more common. When the right set of circumstances exist a rare event actually becomes the most likely outcome. There are rare occurrences in the observable universe that astronomers have recorded and there are also rare occurrences on earth. The elements that come together to make the rare occurrence of life possible are liquid water, abundant carbon atoms, plenty of energy, a stable environment, etc. When all these things, which may not be unusual by themselves, come together then life becomes possible. In fact, it’s likely that life becomes probable under these conditions. Carbon atoms form complex yet stable molecules. When you add energy some of these molecules become much more likely. Water provides an excellent environment for these reactions to occur. The ancestor of what we consider life could have just been an RNA-based chemical reaction that replicated. This reaction was just one of many kinds of reactions that were occurring in the primordial soup. These reactions were the result of combining carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and other elements in a liquid water environment with the addition of heat and/or other kinds of energy. It might have also relied on certain levels of amino acids and nucleic acids present to fuel its reactions. The first kind of replication probably wasn’t the reproduction of an entire large molecule but just a section of RNA that was conducive for replication and the attachment of amino acids to perform chemical reactions. Once of spark of replication was introduced the elements of mutation and natural selection would work on these primitive replication molecules the same way they work on life. It’s rather analogous to forming a crystal. You might have ever heard of the 3dimaging made possible by producing a crystal of a substance and then using x-rays to form an image of the substance's structure on film. If you are familiar with the procedure then you know that often the most difficult part is forming the crystal. You need a solution of the substance with just the right amount of it dissolved in solution. You need the atmosphere and temperature of the solution to be just right. In addition to the substance you are looking to form a crystal of you may also need other substances to help form the crystal. But once you have formed just a tiny sliver of crystal the crystal will continue to grow without too much effort. Life is like that crystal. You need to provide just the right environment plus just the right amount of building blocks, but once you have that spark of replication it is likely to grow. Anyway, a lot of this is just my theories or opinions. Hope that helps

Technically you can't prove one, yet we rely on the negative proof all the time. When you go through a stoplight you are relying on the cars going the other direction to not suddenly slam on the gas and try to go through as well. When you launch a rocket you are relying on the fact that gravity will not suddenly reverse itself even though you can't prove that it will never happen. When you turn on your lights you are relying on the fact that the electromagnetic waves won't suddenly obtain an enormous amount of energy from the air and turn into x-rays and fry you. You can't prove that anything won't happen once, but you have to rely on the fact that it won't all the time. You can't prove a negative, but you can say that it's very unlikely to happen and then act on that knowledge.