Bryan C's Comments

Very nice! I found an HD version up on Vimeo which I suggest watching for the full experience. A lot of subtleties, including the falling snow, are all but lost in the YouTube compression artifacts.

http://www.vimeo.com/18312392
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Yeah, we certainly wouldn't want groups of people voluntarily pooling their resources for a common cause to be able to influence politics. That sort of free speech is clearly out of bounds. Besides, groups like that, maybe we could call them "unions", could fund friendly politicians and cut all sorts of sweetheart deals. Disaster!
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White and Nauseated - It's a biopsy. You take a sample of cells and examine them to see what type of cancer you're dealing with. It'd be far more shocking to me if she hadn't had this procedure, because that would have been downright incompetent.

People donate tumors for research all the time. And if it had remained anonymous, as is standard practice, no one would ever have learned her name. I think Slacks should receive some recognition. But money? No. It's cancer, for heaven's sake. There are lots of cell cultures, and a random throw of the dice meant that these cells are both deadly and undying.
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A bit too easy. 100% here, too.

If they wanted to be really tough they could've included some golden oldies like HP-IL, and maybe a CGA or an IBM token ring connector thrown in just to be tricky.
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Back in the 80's Mother Earth magazine had a series of articles showing a pickup truck converted to run on wood gas. It was an interesting looking rig made from various plumbing supplies and surplus/recycled hardware. Looks like they recently published a modern follow-up:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Energy-Matters/Wood-Gas-Generator.aspx
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How about some kind of psychosurgery? It's not a pretty solution, but it does avoid the complications of a shared circulatory system. And I think it'd be morally preferable to killing them both or locking them both up for life.

I suppose the worst case is that the evil conjoined twin is a Jeffery-Dahmer-level sociopath who is clearly a danger to other innocent people. Punishment aside, the immediate priority is preventing the twin from hurting more people. It's not too different from a killer using an innocent hostage as a human shield. You don't want the hostage to die if at all possible, but sometimes one death is the least bad alternative. And it's killer's actions that put the innocent person in harm's way, not the law.
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Yummy. I still remember the apple pie he ate in that one episode of "Cosmos". It looked very tasty, but the crust was quite a bit more elaborate than this recipe.
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Population control is the ultimate tool of a repressive government. Malthus was completely wrong. His conclusions assumed ever-declining resources coupled with a steady geometric increase in population. It wasn't a bad guess, given what he had to work with, but it's been clear for a very long time now that he was mistaken in both cases.

When countries become more prosperous, the birth rate declines. Japan, right now, has a crisis because there are not enough babies being born to replace the aging population.

Critical resources are replaced long before they run out. We didn't stop using whale oil to light our homes because we ran out of whales. We didn't stop using horse drawn carriages because we ran out of oats and hay. We changed our behavior because we invented something cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient to replace them.

Modern famines and shortages of water are not caused by overpopulation. They're created by politics. Insane leaders who plunder the wealth of their countries, who substitute politics and ideology for sound scientific principles, or who actively interfere with people's ability to feed themselves in order to eliminate undesirables. See Norman Borlaug's agricultural breakthroughs for an example what can happen when people are allowed to do things right.
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"I always found that amusing. If a private company does it, it's ok (or just complained about at most), but if the government has any hand in it's blown out of proportion that everyone's rights have been taken away."

That's because private companies (composed of private individuals) have all the same natural rights you and I have, whereas the government has only the powers granted to it by us. Also, Google can't take our property or put us in jail, but the government can.

That said, while I agree that this is bad policy it has nothing to do with "privacy". Privacy is not a cloaking device. Your license plate and the auto registration information it references are not private. Your location on a public road is not private. Going that direction leads to madness, like cranks who try to sue photographers for taking a picture of them on a crowded city street.
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this is why i hate america

Spare me, friend. Pick any country, any leader, any timeframe, and you'll find exactly the same practices. But generally far more brutal, far more politically driven, and far less effective. War is a messy business.

The reason why you're reading about an American secret prison instead of a similar facility operated by countries like France or Italy or Qatar is because nobody much gets off on hating France or Italy or Qatar. Well, that and the fact that America doesn't have a habit of assassinating or disappearing pesky journalists who write articles about secret prisons. Unlike, say, Russia or China.
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Profile for Bryan C

  • Member Since 2012/08/07


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