Greg H.

I prefer reading from books. I'm not against the e-readers, but I haven't yet found one that I like as much as simply picking up a book, and actually turning the pages.

Based on what I see here (see page 11 of 24), I would have to say it's a RISC based system. https://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/kyang/2009/Spring/CMPS375/ClassNotes/CMPS375ClassNotesChap04.pdf

It means absolutely nothing. In the distant past, the apparent diameters were different, and they will be again in the future. In fact, fast forward far enough ahead and you will never see another total eclipse of the sun from the earth again. According to some NASA math, the very last total solar eclipse viewable from the surface of the earth will be 560-ish million years in the future.1 1 - See http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/4Page28.pdf.

A friend will help you move. A true friend will help you move a body.

My ethics professor once posed the following question to our class when I was a freshman: "When is it socially acceptable to tell a lie?" I found the phrasing of the question odd, since I, like many others, had always been told as a child "Don't lie - it's bad!" But the question, as asked, is predicated on the idea that there are times when lying is acceptable. As I see it, there are two times when it's socially acceptable to lie: 1. When telling a lie prevents the greater of two "evils" from occuring (i.e. the murderous ax-man argument alluded to before). 2. When the person being lied to is agreeable to the falsehood. If I specifically ask you to lie to me, you're off the hook, as it were. You could even stretch the idea and consider fiction (books and movies) to be socially acceptable "lies" under this premise. It's really a question of situational versus universal ethics. Philosophically speaking, universal ethics are what most people aspire to (unless you're a sociopath). In general, people want to be moral, do good, and be thought of as ethical people. In reality, I don't know of anyone who hasn't fallen short of the mark in some fashion at some point in their lives. We live a world defined by events, and our ethical system tends to be more situational as a resuit.

If they can't make bacon, then they need to admit the whole idea is a failure and scrap it. You can have my bacon when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Good point.

Now we're getting into a fuzzy linquistic area, I think. What you're referring to as knowledge, I'm more inclined to see as application of knowledge. And I think the distinction is important - if two people see a media report about suicides, and one commits suicide while the other doesn't, was the knowledge self destructive or not? Can it be both? Or is it more correct to say that the individual reaction to the knowledge was self-destructive?

Personally, I'm more excited about it from a space exploration and settlement aspect than my own personal consumption. Being able to grow meat from very lightweight materials would make human habitation on other worlds far more viable than having to carry a whole cow along for the ride.

I'd be curious to know what knowledge is self destructive in and of iteself. Normally self-destruction comes from the application of (or mis-application) of knowledge, not simply the knowing of something.

Recent research has actually demonstrated that we are born with a kind of niave, instinctive code of morality, long before we come to grips with understanding any religious teachings. You can see studies done by Bloom, Wynn, and Hamlin, as well studies of early life altruistic behavior by Warneken and Tomasello. 1 - Bloom, P. (5 May 2010). New York Times. Retreived from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 on 7 Jan 2014.

They're not really 0 and 1 at the same time (at least not as I understand it. They have both the probability of being a 0 and the probability of being 1 at the same time. Once the probabliity waveform is analzyed, they resolve themselves from a probability to a discrete value. Just remember that pretty much everything in quantum mechanics is based on the probability of this or that state being the most prevalent, of this electron appearing here or there. once the probability waveform is analyzed, it collapses into a final, discrete state (which in the case of quantum computer, represents your answer). The actual machanics behind it (if your interested) can be found on the web, as well as more in depth information on how qubits work.

The biggest problem facing human civilization are the humans that make it up. Our inability to see beyond our own lifespan and plan for future generations combined with our almost willful ignorance of the nature of the world will kill us off as surely as any asteroid impact or nuclear war.

Quantum theory actually has quite a bit of math behind it, so what's your point?

[citation needed]

This is probably one of the most nonsensical things I've ever read. Animals feed on humans with remarkable frequency. Absolutely. Forget the fact that we didn't exist as a species for some of them. That's a mere technicality when you're dealing with the mos tadvanced species that ever existed. Obviously, they were caused by time travelling humans dumping waste heat from the future into the past. Duh. /sarcasm Humans and human activity do impact the environment around us. We're actualy pretty good at adapting the environment we live in to suit us, as opposed to adapting to suit the environment. But changing the environment comes with a price.

Because modern society is terrible at planning the next ten years, much less for time periods that our outside of our lifespan.

I don't often use frictionless surfaces, but when I do, I support elephants with them.

Please find someone who actually speaks English to translate whatever you wrote originally. Google translate seems to have succeeded only in making your OP completely unintelligible.

The limitations of computers to do things, such as read lips, are not limitations in what they are made of (living versus dead), but limitations in the software algorithms that they operate and the spoeed of the hardware running them. I am a perfectly living, breathing, human being, and I can't read lips at all. Ten years ago you had to program a voice recognition system with samples of your voice just so it could understand you. My iPhone could follow my voice commands out of the box, no cumbersome phrases required. As the algorithms get more complex, and processing power improves, I have no doubt you'll see lip reading computers - if nothing else, the value to espionage agencies would be enormous, and probably quite sufficient to drive development. Edit: 2009 called - they want their computer back. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10227163-42.html

If you don't even understand what is meant by saying the topology of the Universe is flat, how in the name of Hades do you expect to convince anyone that you actually know what you're talking about? (That's a rhetorical question - it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Consider this a plea to go get yourself educated on the toipic before you continue).

My ethics professor once described morality as necessary because there are more people in the world than just myself. I don't think goverments neccessarily create morality (though they do seem to like to legislate it), as much as they attempt to enforce the social mores already in place in the society they govern. As those social norms change, the laws tend to change (in some fashion) - to wit, the fight over Gay Marriage that's going on in the United States now. Goverments react to changes in morality, but it's the society that creates the idea of what's acceptable and what's not. When governments try to artificially impose morality (or at least in the US), it tends to bite them on the ass, if the majority of the people don't agree with the change. Look up the history of Prohibition as an example.

Define reward system.

If those signals eventually equate to carbon and iron and other elements that can only be born from solar fusion and the resultant deaths of those stars, then sure, we can say those statements are equal.

@OP: Remember this phrase. Correlation does not imply causation.