It's not giving the parents any legal power that they didn't already have. It's forcing the companies to jump through useless hoops in order to show the Ministry's disapproval of an activity.

Of course, next to a lot of other crap China has in place, this is pretty much inconsequential. I doubt the expenses are going to drive anyone to bankruptcy. Sure, it's part of the way things are normally done there. It's still a nanny state action.

I don't think the limiting factor in cancer research is lack of computer time. If it were something so simple, getting the resources wouldn't be a problem.

Your raging is pointless.

I wasn't offering the breeder pattern as an example of self-replication, just as an example of a "glider gun gun". As for Wade's pattern... Well, I've been running the simulation for over an hour and it's barely past generation 10M (and the actual replication isn't supposed to be complete until almost 40M). Perhaps the construction outpaces the destruction in such a way that we do have two full copies of the original pattern, eventually.

Wolfram did seem impressed by Wade's pattern; he just said that the interviewer was trying to apply it to the wrong field:

There is a breeder pattern that uses a set of ships to produce a stream of glider guns, but (being regular Gosper Glider Guns) they don't move once they've been created.

The applet on Paul Callahan's page has it stored as one of the example patterns.

They just choose to ignore a different set of civil liberties.

The Chronicles of Riddick WAS "Riddick 3".

1. Pitch Black
2. Dark Fury
3. Chronicles of Riddick

Isn't this just different age groups acting out their normal roles?

The young take the world as they see it and learn from it, adults try to use it productively, and elders warn people about observed and potential dangers.

Plenty of flamewars get started due to miscommunication when someone either says something that they don't mean to say, or tries to compress an idea too much and winds up making a vague statement that can be interpreted in different, or even conflicting, ways. It's easy enough to do this with "correct" or formal writing.

Poke around in the comments section of YouTube and you'll find that this new mode communication isn't really working well, even for the people who use it regularly. It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.

As you imply in your last paragraph, if someone wants to simplify grammar, it needs to be done in such a way that functionality is not lost.

For all the talk of "Dances with Wolves", the two things that Avatar reminded me of the most were Ferngully and Alpha Centauri (the game, that is).

Apart from the general plot being the same, the jealous boyfriend with a pair of hangers-on was pretty much the same guy that he was in Ferngully.

I was thinking that it would be one for that reason, as well as the gray legality, but upon further thought you may be right. The ISPs might not be able to actually do as ordered, but they'll spend money on creating a department of Bill X Compliance, pass that cost onto the consumers, and it won't be possible to prove that it isn't having any major effect. After all, the media companies can just claim that the piracy rate would have increased even more if it weren't for the ISP's efforts...

I'm not sure what the bill's chances are of being passed (the summary says "will", but it's a "would" if I understand the article correctly).

If this were an act of law enforcement and the money were a fine, I believe some sort of trial would be required.

What's actually happening is that the UK's government is forcing ISPs to warn people who they believe are breaking the law. Of course, ISPs are saying that this is expensive and that they plan to pass the costs along to consumers.

I think this is going to be a laughable clusterfuck.

Okay, I understand that it's possible for three-year-olds to be bipolar, but how on Earth do you reliably test for that?

If you say you don't like the "Awesome Bar", prepare to be bombarded by people saying "Just install and you'll have the old behavior back".

I have tried several of these plugins, and not one of them actually emulated the old behavior. Some of them imitated the old look, some of them simply disabled the new features, but they did NOT emulate the old behavior. Have the people recommending these plugins never actually used them, or are they not familiar with the old behavior of Firefox?

One poster above recommended simply typing in a full word from the page that you want to find. That isn't good enough. That gets me a huge list of all the pages that have that string.

I can live with it, but I could also live with nine fingers... I prefer to have 10.

14 is 22% younger than 18 (it's approximately (100-22)% of 18).
18 is 29% older than 14 (it's approximately (100+29)% of 14).

Silly.

There's a difference between slacking off or working on unrelated projects and occasionally making B's when you could make A's, and screwing up consistently enough to get a 2.7. Did you jump to reply before reading the next sentence in my post?