This idea has been tried several times and it always ends the same way (with fail [wikipedia.org]).

Its neighbor could conquer it if the neighbor so desired, but that's true for many small nations.
It accepted aid offered by a neighbor during a disaster (the fire), but nations do that all the time.

It defeated an armed invasion by a group of mercenaries, and it has existed in a state of self-rule since 1967 (ignoring British firearm laws).

What would you consider a "success"?

I'm not trying to be confrontational -- I'm genuinely curious. Both B.Sc. and B.A. have breadth requirements, partly to encourage inquiry outside of the student's chosen discipline. If you strip those away, you're no longer talking about a university education but a trade-school-style training.

No, trade school-style training would be learning how to perform the basic tasks expected in an industry, with little if any of the theory.

Taking a good school's CS or mathematics program, stripping out the requirements for intro-level soft-science classes, and replacing them with more relevant classes wouldn't turn it into a trade school program. It would just be a more specialized university degree.

Having these filters as an option is a good thing; that's just a tool you can use to refine a search.

Having them on by default and invisible (or obfuscated) is not. In this case, information is being hidden from searchers who may not even realize that filtering is taking place.

The TED page for the speech has a transcript for those who don't have sound, or just don't want to sit through a nine-minute video.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that you're right, seeing as he just wanted the illusion of fireworks and not a detailed (physics-wise) simulation. Applying an actual force and then calculating the velocity would have been a waste of time for him, so he probably just assigned a velocity at birth and (erroneously) called it a force in the article.

Upward force is applied to the object. Upward velocity is the result.

Problem?

No, that's an attempt by Brazil to pump up a national hero.

The Wright brothers didn't use a catapult in the 1903 flight, and the claim you just made would be wrong even if they had.

His reading comprehension isn't at fault here.

"That" refers to the preceding statement. The quote claims that a hypothetical outcome is a historical fact.

This is what you meant (and yes, it is most likely true).

Editing out scenes that had the old WTC was stupid, and so is this.

Stop being oversensitive nutless wonders and expecting others to be the same.

Are they missing the point or just playing dumb?

For one, their "advice" isn't going to accomplish anything. That's like fixing a broken limb by amputating it.

Secondly, Rogers is the one that's breaking things, so it's their responsibility, not the responsibility of their users. Whether a workaround exists is irrelevant, because they shouldn't be breaking things in the first place.

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.