Doesn't your definition mean that persons who have had voluntary sterilization, i.e. a vasectomy, have committed suicide? Talk about mental health issues - there appear to be whole groups of walking, talking people you can't accept as living, quite possibly including me and others who have chosen by surgical means to stop doing any more reproducing.
            Even if you aren't lumping me in your special group, classifying some people you disagree with as dead certainly stops you from having to consider their current opinions, but it doesn't sound like an evolutionarily successful strategy, anymore than classifying some traffic signs as not being real, working traffic signs would be.

If you really want to check facts, the Vatican was first recognized as a separate nation in 1929 a.d. by the Lateran Treaty, signed by representitives of the then current pope on one hand and Benito Mussolini on the other. 1929 is just a tad later than the end of the Roman empire.* Maybe you are thinking of 'the' Holy See,** or some of the Papal Estates that went back to at least Medieval times.

* Watch someone post "citation needed".

**Technically, any Bishop's diocese is a See, and presumably at least some Bishops in some eras have been not particularly unholy, so what the Pope, as Bishop of Rome, has, is merely a holy see, even though a lot of lay people seem to use the term like he has a lock on it.

I'd be skin and bones at 170. I can stay at 200 and still be under 16% bodyfat. OTOH, maybe it will scale. Get it to a base payload of about 250 lbs, and I'd give it a try.

If you want diet that tastes like sugar, there are some options:

For the big producers:
Pepsi's Aquafina FlavorSplash waters - grape, raspberry and wild berry, use just Sucralose, (a 0 calorie substitute) last I checked. No other Pepsi products use just Sucralose to my knowledge, but rather mix it with something else such as Apartamine and/or Ace-K. Ace-K is a big issue for diet soda safety, in that it's not commonly mentioned and less seems to be known about it than other non-sugar alternatives. Sucralose occasionally tends to upset digestion, but mostly in people who are consuming quite a few cans a day, and switching over to it gradually helps - 80% or more of people who do a lot of sodas a day, do OK by gradually switching and giving the digestive system a couple of weeks to adapt. There are no Coca-Cola products with just Sucralose, as far as I can tell. Diet-Rite cola is usually made with just Splenda (sucralose), as is Diet RC cola. It doesn't hurt to check the labels on any of these, as there may be some canned or bottled in other countries than the US that isn't exactly to the US formula.

Honest Fizz is a bit pricy, running about 1.20$ US a can. It's sweetened with a mixture of Stevia Leaf Extract and Erythritol. Erythritol is a complex alchohol and means one can has about 5 grams of carbs. (that's not a lot, but it's a few calories - about 30-40). Just like Sucralose, some people get increased gas or even cramping from Erythritol, some don't, at least if they aren't drinking eight cans a day. Just because one of these substances causes discomfort in some users doesn't mean the other one will affect the same people.

For pure Stevia sweetener, you could try Zevia, which now has 15 flavors, including Mountain Zevia, Doctor Zevia, and Caffine Free Cola.

I don't get paid to plug any of these. I don't own stock in them and nobody with them has asked me to say anything about them.

You need to be at plus 5, just for that first sentence, and the rest are as good.

1, Company has trouble with commonly skilled criminal crackers.
2. Company gets special permission to take matters into its own hands. To get this, company does special favors for a nation state.
        (You don't think the politicians just ask for campaign contributions when they can also ask for "law enforcement assistance" against terrorists, do you? Or that those same terrorists, who think of themselves as involved in a war, respect a strong distinction between homeland security and the US military, or similar set ups in other countries?)
3. More skilled political/military crackers, who may also even be backed by the full special resources of another nation, now treat the company as just another arm of a government's military, and even if they have some strange desire to abide by the Geneva convention or other limits, can make a fair case it's a 'legitimate' target.
4. War between two nation states breaks out, starting with computer actions, and with the Company's assets as the primary battlefield.
5. Since everyone thinks cyber-war sounds dumb, there are no firm lines, and the war that starts inside computers ends as the company's employees face special attention from landmines, IEDs and rocket propelled grenades.

Yes, I left out the "?" and "profit" steps. Anyone really think they need to be there?

There's a difference between taking the thread off topic and responding to someone else's having already taken the tread off topic. If a mod can't be bothered to identify where the first off topic post happened, and finds his or herself giving an offtopic to the fifth post down, he or she should stop using offtopic untill they understand modding better.
        (And I'm not offtopic to post about how the thread is being modded, I'm just meta.).

One of the big reasons they won't be profitable without state sponsorship is the military applications of enriched Uranium. The US made Energy a whole cabinet level entity chiefly because of nuclear prolifieration issues. Any effort by the far right in the US to "drown government in a bathtub" runs into the problem of how you can have a tiny federal government with a multi-billion dollar Dept. of Energy.
          ( As a small proof of these statements, the total budget for DOE 2014 is a tad over 26 Billion dollars, and the portion of it that is for dealing with weapons and prolifieration related activities is the largest single section of that total at just over 11 billion.)

                                                                                        http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf

  (If readers want to cut to the chase, try the table on page 19). Interested people may note that the costs of all kinds of energy generation and of environmental activities are grouped together as one section, but they still come out smaller even lumped together, than the 'blowing things up and stopping other people from doing the same back at us' section does. Scientific research is smaller yet, only about a sixth of the budget. Then there's the question, how much of that environmental clean up and scientific research is actually to support the military parts of DoE activites and maybe ought to show up as another cost of war and proliferation?

        Those costs are going to be incurred so long as the US runs a Nuclear Navy, has H-bombs in its arsenal, and wants to stop various 'rogue nations and state sponsored action groups' from getting their hands on the resulting materials. Stop all civilian energy research (of all kinds, not just nuclear) and all civilian nuclear power plants cold, and you still have that 11 billion, plus its share of general administration costs, internal safety inspections, workforce health compliance, and such. The complex legal procedures for civilian nuclear involve taking fees that are supposed to help offset other DoE costs, then giving more back in exchange, more that is paid for by common taxation, so that it is very hard to say just how much of the grants actually go to the civil corporations and how much of them involves using the corps as a pass through to transfer money back to the military side.
              No other power generation technology faces this problem. We don't have to worry about the costs of military prolifieration of, say, wind or hydro technologies. But, what will happen if we start having to pay to prevent dirty coal projects in other countries? What if, for example, the US starts taking Kyoto seriously and wants to really cut coal prolifieration? About the only options we would have (short of just stopping all those nations from building enough powerplants of any sorts to keep their people alive), would be to let some of them develop nuclear plants. Those costs would then again be counted as part of our nuclear power costs. In other words, A large part of the cost of reducing other nations dirty coal emissions and greenhouse gasses would show up in the US budget as a nuclear proliferation control cost, even if the US completely stopped building or running all civilian nuclear plants on its own soil. Our economic system isn't just built to reward dangerous cost cutting, it is built to push costs that are only tangentially related to nuclear power into counting as 'Nuclear power' costs. That alone means Nukes will never be economically viable without taxation, but it's an artifact of the way we do the budget.

Your point seems to be that you are the only 'objective' one here and your 'enemies' are biased. The very fact that you think that can be reinforced by others who have no facts, only biases, proves you are wrong. If all the people who disagree with you are offering only unsupported or biased opinions, you should not change your fact based opinion in the slightest. If hsmith ()or me for that matter) has no objective facts, then he has given you no new data to either reinforce or moderate your conclusion. So, was your position reinforced by a non-fact, or are you ignoring a fact that disproves it - which is it?

If I started getting the idea that there were some odd, unpublicised laws which seemed to have 'draconian interpretations' or relatively excessive consequences in Nepal, or anywhere else, I might avoid that nation on the principle that they may have many more, that some of them might have much worse consequences than being told to get off a mountain and stay off, and the chance of a more serious problem appears to be high. For more on this, just look up "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", and whether that fine article has had any effect on anybody's tourism.
          Within the US, there are millions of people who go to Louisiana once, just for a Mardi Gras. A lot of them plan to do it only once in their lives. I've known people to go out of their way to advise against it, because of the 'speed traps' in surrounding parishes, and stories of people getting $500 tickets for going two miles over the speed limit. I suspect that many of those stories are apocryphal, but I most certainly would not bet that 100% of the people who consider going to see Bourbon street on Fat Tuesday don't care about them. I think you were making a pretty good point about whether the consequences mattered in the case of this particular rule, but you got hyperbolic with your 100%, and I suspect you've weakened your own argument.

The rules were written to cover the situation of people setting up something at least roughly like a largeish array of a videotape holding camera, a boom mike, a foldable dish, battery packs and such to transmit commercial video from a remote location. It's the kind of thing where Everest expeditions tended to leave extra clutter and junk behind, and that's part of the justification for the fees. The rules, as read, spell out some specific situations, and are so 'established' - if you take those rules, ignore some parts, and maybe put in some verbal only interpretations that let some minor government official stretch those rules to cover technologies that didn't exist when those rules were written, you get this situation, where a lot of things have not have been legally 'established'.
        The rules are also being used to give the government heads up before any image can be sent, which makes a good backdoor way of knowing when to put persons in place to censor what gets sent out. Yeah, they're probably just trying to make sure it looks good to attract more tourists, not stifle political dissent. Still, why encourage that?

OK, but why do Ferrets get used preferentially for influenza studies?
I hope this doesn't come off as know-it-all, but there's a classic example of how picking test animals in medical studies really gave some erronious results and delayed recognizing a major health problem - Thalidomide.
Most of the lab animals used to test Thalidomide have zero incidence of birth defects under the doses normally used (even if these are proportionately dozens of times human doses). After reports of stunted limb growth and related syndromes started showing up, mostly in Europe, American researchers retested the drug on a much wider variety of animals, and after seeing several new test animal types with no negative effects, found the problem also occured in horses (and if memory serves, even tested it on a couple of elephants and found it occured there too). Horses were not generally considered major animal test subjects because of expense, and were sometimes not considered good for pregnancy related testing because of their long gestation times.
          So the broader question should be, what are the arguments for using ferrets for influenza studies? Is it a matter of cost? Has somebody sequenced the parts of ferret DNA that explain how the flu might affect them and found it has particular similarities to human DNA? Did ferret results translate to a good prediction about human epedemics in the past? This article doesn't really say why, so I see why even people who read more than the summary aren't comfortable with some of the conclusions.
          I followed through on my own questions here, so as not to just be nitpicking:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19412910
        This is just a short abstract, but it indicates that ferrets get the same broad set of symptoms as humans when they contract a flu. It also mentions that some of the more common lab animals, such as rats and guinea pigs are still quite useful for flu research.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180220/
        A much longer article. It discusses why mice don't work as well as larger rodents, and why even cotton rats (which ARE used) are not ideal. (You learn something every day - today I learned Cotton Rats don't have a sneeze reflex).

L/100Km is a unit where we have length cubed over length, leaving length squared, or area, in the end. Gallons/mile works the same, so MPG is the inverse of an area. So, what real world object or property is being described by this area in metric, or its inverse in imperial? Complaining that either system is flawed because of these particular combinations of units is pretty strange, when it will probably take a 20 year veteran automotive engineer to explain just what esoteric area related property of internal combustion engines actually can be calculated starting from either formula.
            To put it another way, why are we debating how hard or simple it is to apply a formula when we studiously have to avoid reducing that formula to simplest terms just so we can get at least a little use out of it? Isn't this in effect saying, "Ha-Ha, my system doesn't mess up quite as much when it trys to create an esoteric compound measurement that doesn't actually mean what most common users will think it means, as your system does?" It's kind of like debating swallows carrying coconuts, and thnking just because you backed the Adfrican, your whole argument now actually makes perfect sense.

I don't know about that - he seems to be one of those people who are imagining a special IP protection that isn't limited to any of the existing ones. He appears to have imagined a form of patent where 'because it's passing through a 3-D printer' makes an existing material novel, or one where the unlimited timeframe of a copyrighted design applies to the raw materials or individual design elements, or something such as that.
          "I imagine you're gonna give me special laws with all of the advantages and none of the drawbacks, cause I'm a special butterfly." That's a pretty good imagination right there.

Any competent professional ought to be able to come up with a new name for whatever it is and an easy way to say it's 'obviously' something completely distinct from cold fusion; "Gentlemen, this is not some crackpot cold fusion scheme - it's a perfectly legitimate catalyzed sub-nuclear synthesis." For extra credit, claim to have been led down that path by tantalizing hints you found in three articles published by grad students of people who also co-authored with Einstein, but DON'T claim to have been inspired directly by anything the great man wrote, except in the general 'science is cool' sense.

1. Stopping an attacker more quickly is often the important consideration to designers. Modern firearms achieve that 'more quickly' by increasing lethality. Hollow point rounds, Glazier slugs, and high capacity magazines are generally all methods of stopping more people faster, but the 'stopping' part converts pretty directly to killing more often, or in larger numbers, and trying to make a semantic distinction there is psychobabble. 'Stopping' by deterence is far from all 'stopping', and if we are talking logically here, show me one perp who has ever claimed he would have continued with his attack except he realized the pistol he faced had 17 rounds and not just 6. Yes, I'll freely concede that deterrance sometimes works. Hell, I've used it myself. Now what about all that other stopping?

2. I'm a former enlisted soldier who eventually took a comission as a military officer, and who has actually trained people with things the professionals call guns (up to 120 mm MBT pieces) and not just those silly pistols and rifles and such. I can't count the number of times I have disagreed with someone on the NRA right and recieved that lecture that starts with "Guns don't kill people...", as though anyone who disagrees with any point in their playbook must be that totally ignorant. I've had my claim to service challenged, by people who admit they have never served, but can't believe anyone who disagrees with them over any point at all might have given more to the USA than they did. I've had people tell me that only people who were wounded count as real patriots, or that Desert Shield/Storm didn't count as real combat or even real service, because I disagreed with an NRA talking point. I've had self professed NRA spokesmen accuse me of war crimes, saying without any evidence what-so-ever that if I really served at all, I was probably the kind of bad soldier who shot unarmed civilians and ran from real combat. Your post is more of the same - defending verbal tricks by insulting everybody who disagrees with you.
          You don't know me. You probably didn't mean any of your remarks about illogical libtards and such to apply to me. But I have met enough of the people on your side that stoop to that that I do hold you responsible for standing alongside them. Please don't ever thank me for my service, it would sound too much like you spitting on it.
 

Wonder Woman - she's both even more Amurikan and nipplier!