Greg H.

Fair point.

It may shorten some, but at some point the fetus is just too underdeveloped to be viable. A fetus with no lungs (for example) isn't going to live long even if you put it in a respirator - there's nothing for it to breathe with. I don't think medical science will advance rapidly enough to make this kind of "floating date" a serious issue, but I could be wrong.

hmm. Ok, how about the fetus shall be termed a person when it can live independently of the biological mother. In other words, when the fetus is what the medical community terms viable, it becomes a person. That's roughly 24 - 28 weeks, and gels with your 26 week proposal. After that point, abortions would only be allowed in cases where the health of the mother was in jeopardy and surgical methods of removing the fetus (i.e. a cesarean, for example) would be considered too risky for the mother or fetus (as judged by a competent medical professional).

Personally, I would say you're a person at the moment you're born, in whatever fashion. That's the moment you become a citizen, so it seems as good a definition as any (I mean if we're leaving aside biological considerations and looking for an arbitrary definition).

Perhaps the simpler answer is that some people are just assholes and the Internet, unfortunately, makes it easier for them to be that way without fear of reprisal for their behavior.

Well, you'd certainly get the Republican fanatics caught in a rock and hard place situation. "No abortions! Unless the fetus has the gay gene."

It's also a big assumption. Correlation is not necessarily causation after all.

You can lead a politician to a controversial question, but you can't make him answer it. Personally, I am considering borrowing from Richard Pryor and starting a "None of the Above" movement.

I find your use of the term guilty very telling in the post above. You're looking for something you can point to and say "I identify as a homosexual but it's not my fault." This seems to, in turn, imply that homosexuality is something bad that should be shunned or fixed. Is that how you feel about it?

I'll give you the same advice one of my comp-sci professors gave me - when you have a huge project to write, start small and work your way up. Think about what objects you might need and create those classes - if you forget one, it's not really a problem, because you can always go back and write it later. Keep your methods as small as possible, so they are easy to debug. If you find yourself with a method that's more than about 200 lines long, ask yourself if it really needs to be that large. Break what needs to be done into manageable chunks and focus on writing those, then bring them together at the end. Write reusable code - if you find yourself putting the same piece of code into a lot of different methods, that's a good candidate for it's own public method that can be called from multiple places. Learn to love your debugger. Finally, just start writing the code. You'll make mistakes, your program will explode into glorious error messages and you will occasionally bang your head on your desk to induce creative thinking, but the best way I have found to learn to write code is to just write it, break a few things, and then find out why it's broken.

While I don't disagree on any particular point, there are plenty of industries that exploit people, including their own workers, to get ahead. Why are you singling out logging?

Ok, in that light, I can see the ethics - your opening post wasn't really phrased like like an ethical question. That said, your fence idea is only going to work if the loggers in question have some reason to respect said fence. If they're willing to shoot people to get at the trees, I have serious doubts that a fence is going to stop them.

Just FYI. I know we're not supposed to reply to Mod Notes as a general rule, but I saw this bit and laughed so loud the people at work thought I was having some kind of seizure. That's just too funny.

Isn't this something you should be discussing with your thesis advisor? I mean not to put off your question, but that's what they're for - to make sure the thesis topic you choose for your graduate work is applicable to the topic, your area of study, and will be accepted by whatever group reviews these things.

If you own the land, my supposition is you can tell them to leave certain areas of your land unharvested. In short, yes, I suppose it should be possible, assuming the actual owner of the land chooses to do so. I fail to see how this is an ethical question though - can you expand on your opening post?

These are the kinds of people I usually give the wrong answer to. I'll refrain, and merely echo the calls of my forum brethren above - do your own homework. We are not "phone-a-friend".We are more than happy to help you understand the material more deeply, or to help you find flaws in reasoning that you have already done, but we're not here to do the work for you.

The reason is that in Java when you compare objects (and nearly everything in Java is an object, except for the primitive variable types), == compares the memory location instead of the value stored in that memory location. That may be different from C++, I'm not sure. If you want to compare the value of an object (like a String) you should use .equals() at all times. If your professor won't let you use Eclipse to learn to write Java I question his methods. Every Java class I have ever taken has used Eclipse as the editor. It saves a ton of time running and debugging applications. That aside, I am glad it's working for you now.

Do shredded tennis balls still have a diameter?

So that's why they stack fruit that way. I never knew that.

It depends on how they end up stacked. If you assume the least optimal stacking method (treating each ball like a cube with a side equal to the diameter of the ball), the minimum number is 1,286,635 (give or take). Edit to add You'd also have to assume that the tennis balls on the lowest tiers of the stack do not deflect from the weight of the ones on top of them.

Meh, I missed the part about TV only, so I retract my chatisement.

You need to put the cout variable outside the inner loop. You're getting hung up on a scope problem. Also, never use == to compare two strings. Edit: I should have added, as your new to the language The reason it's failing is because your cont variable is only available INSIDE the do loop. It actually gets moved off to garbage collection and becomes unavailable the second the code reaches the closing braces of that loop, which is prior to the while statement. Think of each loop as a little mini program - the variables created inside that loop are not accessible outside the loop because they don't exist as far as the class is concerned. As for the == thing, when you compare two objects (such as Strings, Longs, Cars, or whatever), you should always use the object's .equals method to determine equivalence. Using == compares memory addresses, and will only return true if the memory addresses match. When comparing simple types, such as int or char, using == is perfectly fine. As an aside, it's considered good practice, when comparing string variables to string constants, to use the constant as the base i.e. "YES".equals(cont), rather than cont.equals("YES"). This helps avoid an occasioanlly hard to find Null Pointer Exception if the cont variable happens to have no value at the time the comparison is done. See the revised code below import java.util.Scanner; public class PrimeCalculator{ public static void main(String[] args){ Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in); String cont = "No"; do{ System.out.println("Please enter a number greater than 0"); int input; input = sc.nextInt(); int counter = input-1; double remainder=1.0; if (input==1){ System.out.println("This is not a prime number"); }else{ while ((counter > 1) && (remainder!=0)) { remainder= input%counter; counter--; } } if (remainder==0){ System.out.println("This is not a prime number"); }else{ System.out.println("This is a prime number!"); } System.out.println("Would you like to continue? (Yes or No)"); cont = sc.nextLine(); } while ("YES".equals(cont.toUpperCase()); } }

You left out the Alien/Predator universe and for that I chastise you. Is there a universe in which the laws of physics do not permit her to wear any clothes? Cause I want to live there.

There are so many things wrong with this article that it's either really old, deliberately misrepresenting the science, or the chap that wrote it doesn't know what he's speaking of. Could be all three, or any combination thereof. In any case, there are several fundamental problems - too many to list really. As a source, it's pure bunk.

Neutrons can decay into protons, and protons can change back into a neutron - what does this have to with the statement you quoted?