A man on a television documentary said the following line.
It then became a hands-off operation as opposed to a hands-on operation.
Why bother spelling the alternative out? Would anybody really have thought of something else such the following?
It then became a hands-off operation as opposed to a turkey sandwich.
If the alternative is obvious (like pretty much every binary scenario), then there is no need to spell it out.
Some people wonder what the difference is between the words edible and eatable (a lot of people do not even think of eatable as a real word). The difference is between possibility and desirability. For example:
Edible is the difference between a cookie and a chair.
Eatable is the difference between a cookie and a Brussels-sprout.
It is common knowledge that when a person is bitten by a zombie, they become infected with the virus and themselves eventually turn into a zombie after a while. It is also common in movies for the friends or family of an infected person to kill them before they turn in order to save them the presumed torture of becoming a mindless, violent creature. Unfortunately, this is always the wrong thing to do.
There are two scenarios in which a person may be infected by a zombie: (1) during a fight in which zombies are closing in, with little time to think or rest before the the person turns, (2) incidentally, with plenty of down time and waiting before the person turns.
In scenario (1) in which zombies are everywhere and everybody is desperately fighting for their lives, then mercy-killing an infected person is pointless. It wastes time, allowing the zombies to get closer, and deprives you of a an extra person who can fight or at the very least stall them and hold them off to give you time to get away.
In scenario (2) in which a person has been bitten (perhaps in a prior battle or close call) and now has time to sit and wait before turning, mercy-killing them is again pointless, and worse, potentially destructive. First, you deprive them of whatever little time they have left. Further, what happens if that person happens to be immune‽ Not only have you killed them unnecessarily, but you have just thrown away the possibility of developing a vaccine or even cure from their blood (yes, they must be alive otherwise the blood is in limited supply and decaying all the while).
Granted, waiting until the person turns puts you at risk because once they turn they become violent. However, the benefits of waiting until they turn to ensure that they are indeed gone far outweighs the risk. Besides, in scenario (1), there is no difference from one extra zombie (especially since they are not even a zombie yet), and in scenario (2), there is time and opportunity to secure the person to eliminate the risk altogether.
Moreover, even if a person looks like they are infected, it does not mean that they are not immune. When you get a cold or flu, you look and feel terrible for a few days, but eventually the immune system beats the virus back and you recover. It is no different from a zombie-virus; it may take a few hours or days, perhaps even weeks, who knows, but it is possible that some people could recover and not become a zombie.
In summary NEVER KILL A ZOMBIE-INFECTED PERSON UNTIL THEY HAVE TURNED!.
The idea that ghosts can haunt and torment the living is absurd and logically impossible.
Nobody knows for sure what lies after death, but there are two commonly accepted possibilities; either there is or is not an after-life:
The only scenario in which a ghost could even exist is if the person was good and needs to put off going to Heaven in order to help bring their murder to justice or look after a loved one for a while or some such. Either way, there is no scenario in which a ghost can exist to haunt and harass the living.
Dr. Oz discussed the film Contagion with the filmmakers. One thing they discussed is how a virus can spread quickly and thoroughly amongst a population. Before that, the MythBusters did an experiment to visualize how much a virus can spread at a simple dinner party and how to minimize the spread. The experiment used a clear liquid that could be seen under an ultra-violet light.
This is an obvious technique; to use a paint or dye of some sort to see who and what is “infected” after some time. Now one might think that the spread is not as bad as virus movies would make it seem because “patient zero” may have a large amount of the virus in them, but each time they contaminate someone, they pass off less and less. As well, each contaminated person is naturally less contaminated than the person that infected them, and so passes on less and less of the virus such that at some point, only minuscule amounts are being transferred.
Imagine one person holding an unsliced loaf of bread, and each time they pass someone, they rip off a chunk and give it to them, and those people do the same. At some point, people will be passing on mere crumbs.
This seems somewhat of a relief to know that the amounts drop off, and if you get infected later on (eg, by trying to stay clean as long as possible), you would be getting little enough to be able to fight it off. Unfortunately, while this is indeed the case for things like paint or bread, it is not true for bacteria and viruses because infections reproduce. You may only receive a small amount of a virus or bacteria, however they will reproduce inside you and increase their numbers, so that when you pass it off to someone else, you give them about as large a dose as anybody else, not less. Unfortunately, attrition does not apply to viral or bacterial spread.
Pursuant to an argument at this Super User question, I have done some testing and written a test program to try to clarify the situation with current-working-directories.
As Raymond Chen explains, per-drive CWDs have been around since DOS, which makes sense because DOS’s only interface was the command-line. He goes on to explain that in Windows, the command prompt keeps track of per-drive CWDs by using environment variables.
The point is that while the actual manner in which they are tracked may differ, there are per-drive CWDs in all Microsoft operating systems from DOS, up to Windows 7. This can be easily demonstrated with the following program (adjusting drive letters and paths as appropriate).
#include#include #include void PrintCWDs() { char cwd[260]=""; for (int i=3; i<27; i++) { if (!_chdrive(i)) { getcwd(cwd,260); printf(" %c: = %s\n", 64+i, cwd); } } printf("Press a key...\n"); char key=getch(); } void ChangeCWDs() { for (int i=3; i<27; i++) { if (!_chdrive(i)) { switch (i) { case 'C'-'A'+1 :chdir("\\Windows\\System32\\Drivers"); break; case 'H'-'A'+1 :chdir("\\Temp\\Chromium\\Cache"); break; case 'K'-'A'+1 :chdir("\\Data\\eMail\\OE"); break; case 'P'-'A'+1 :chdir("\\Videos\\Commercials"); break; case 'T'-'A'+1 :chdir("\\Program Files\\Common Files"); break; } } } } int main(int argc, char**argv) { printf("\nOriginal CWDs:\n"); PrintCWDs(); printf("\nChanging CWDs...\n"); ChangeCWDs(); printf("\nNew CWDs:\n"); PrintCWDs(); printf("\nAnd again:\n"); PrintCWDs(); return 0; }
This program shows that the CWD is maintained for each drive in DOS, Windows XP, and Windows 7 as seen below.
DOS:
XP:
7:
It is no surprise that there is no record of a hostage situation ever working out for the bad guys. The fact is, it is for all intents and purposes impossible for that to happen. When criminals take a hostage, be it a whole room of them such as in a bank robbery, or a single one as a human-shield, it cannot work out for them for several reasons.
When they take a room full of hostages, the police eventually surround them (they probably already have, otherwise the criminals would have tried to escape instead of taking hostages). Once surrounded, there is no hope for the criminals because it is not like the police will just give up and go home; they will stay there as long as it takes and if need be (eg the bad guys actually get their fast car or airplane), follow the bad guys wherever they go on the road or in the air.
If they take a single person as a human-shield, then they are in a logic-loop that always ends in their losing. They cannot kill the hostage because if they do, the police are then free to instantly shoot them (they would not bother to arrest them at this point, the bad guy is dead). If they do not kill the hostage, then their threat is meaningless and the police could just as well just approach and arrest them.
Yet, bad guys continue to take hostages, thinking that they are smart and can find a clever way to make it work. For example, they may blackmail the chief of police or something, as though everybody would just stand down and allow the criminals to go free just because one person is being pressed.
A hostage situation is basically a tautology that always causes the bad guys to lose, either getting arrested or killed. It may make for exciting fiction, but in real life, there’s a reason there has never been a case of it succeeding.
It seems intuitive that the opposite of interesting is boring or vice versa. However, the truth is that is not quite the case.
For example, a boring movie is one in which nothing really happens. A movie such as this would be unlikely to hold the viewer’s attention. A movie does not necessarily however need to be boring to lose the viewer’s attention; it can have plenty going on, yet still be uninteresting enough that the viewer’s mind starts to wander. Some (all too-)common examples of non-boring, but entirely uninteresting tropes frequently used in movies include car-chases, shoot-outs, sex-scenes, and
(This is the case at this very moment, as I type this. I am trying to watch a movie, which I would hardly call “boring”, yet I keep pausing to do other things because it just can’t hold my attention like some of the others movies I’ve watched recently. I should have been done two hours ago, but I still have 30 mins. left. I should get back to it now, or else I’ll never finish…)
A person on the weather network just recited this piece of sailing lore.
Red sky at morning; sailor’s warning
The problem with this is that there are two variables, namely the time of day and the color of the sky. However because warning rhymes with morning, it focus on the time of day instead of the color. As a result, the color could end up getting substituted without changing anything, and thus ruining the mnemonic:
Blue sky at morning; sailor’s warning
Purple sky at morning; sailor’s warning
…
The mnemonic should rhyme the primary variable, for example:
Morning sky be red; sailors be dead.
(Of course in this specific case, the mnemonic actually is correct because the line she recited was part of a longer one in which the active variable is in fact the time of day:
Red sky at night; sailor’s delight.
Red sky at morning; sailor’s warning.
However if the quote was indeed just that one line, then it would need to be rewritten to focus on the active variable.)
Eating eggs is not murder, nor it is eating meat. Eating eggs can be okay for a vegetarian.
The eggs that we eat are not fertilized, and therefore are not unborn chickens. The chicken eggs that you get at the grocery store are basically the same as the eggs that come out of a woman’s ovaries. Regardless of what stage of development an embryo is considered to be a person, even most die-hard pro-lifer would not contend that an unfertilized egg is a “life”, so there is no moral or ethical problem with eating eggs; at least not in that way.
The problem with eating eggs comes not from the eggs themselves, but the horrible, cruel torturous treatment that the chickens who lay the eggs are given. The eggs that you buy in the grocery store usually come from factories (the modern day “farm”), where countless chickens are locked in tiny steel cages that are not big enough for the chicken to even turn around in. The cages are piled high (causing the chickens to urinate and defaecate on each other depending on the cage design), in either continually dark or lit warehouse to trick the chickens into constantly laying eggs. Their beaks are often cut in half as well to prevent them from pecking at themselves or each other. And it should come as no surprise, that once a chicken can no longer produce good eggs, its retirement package is a trip to the slaughterhouse. Even worse than all of that is the fact that because only females can lay eggs, the farms factories have no use of males chicks, so they have all of the adorable little yellow baby chicks move by on a conveyor belt while inspectors check their cloacas to sex them, letting the females pass, and throwing the males in a literal SHREDDER! Imagine if aliens came down and started throwing human babies and children into a shredder. 😒
This is the reason to not eggs.
That said, if you can source your eggs from a real farm, specifically a “free-range” farm where the eggs are hand-picked by a presumably caring farmer from chickens who are treated well, fed well, allowed to frolic on the grounds, and basically given a proper and happy life, then there is no reason not to eat eggs. Eggs are a “power-food”, and it has been shown that eggs from “happy” chickens who naturally lay eggs instead of being forced, are better tasting and more nutritious.
Unfortunately because of the unending increase of the human (over-)population, true farms where animals are given personal attention are just not feasible. To provide for the never-ending human demand, many farms had (and still have) to sell out to large firms who convert to factories to mass-produce meat, eggs, and milk. That’s why it is the same story for milk; not only is getting milk from a cow not murder, but it can actually help the cow to remove excess milk once its calf has ceased nursing. However that only works for hands-on farms, not factories where cows are locked in a tiny stall, hooked up to machines that suck them dry non-stop, until they can no longer produce good milk, then the cow is shipped off to the abattoir.
So try to find a real farm, (or even consider making your own; you don’t have to have a big one with lots of animals) because you can have eggs and milk without the guilt, plus you would be helping the farmer—of course if too many people go to a single farm, then the farmer might end up having to “factory-ize” to provide the excess demand. (Alternately, it would be much easier if everybody just stopped having kids for a couple of generations; if the human population were—much—lower, everything would be easier.)