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This goes back to at least Eliza program, which drew in a surprising number of folks, and was hardly AI.

the cost of air pollution, about $1,000 per person annually

You did well to offer an actual citation. However, the study you are citing seems like utter bullshit.

To wit:

• The page laments, I quote: "Latinos/Hispanics and African-Americans, are harder hit than others" — a sure sign of demagoguery.
• The report was made in 2006 and cautions of the problem "becoming much worse" if not addressed. It is now 2018 and nothing significant was done to address it — is the San Joaquin Valley the nationally-known environmental disaster it was going to be? Somehow, it is not in the news at all...
• At least one of the authors — "Fred Lurmann, who has 27 years of experience in air-quality and exposure analysis, and advises several state air-pollution agencies" — had an obvious and blatant conflict of interest. Had he concluded, that there is no cause for concern, he would've found himself unemployed very soon. It was and remains in his own self-interest to talk up the threat however imaginary.

You, probably, should not have cited anything so suspect. But, if you raised your standards of evidence, I readily concede, you would've found nothing else to support your case...

That's true. The government's role should be to make the market work efficiently, which means eliminating market failures such as monopolies and negative externalities.

But the federal government doesn't seem to be eager to internalize negative externalities by charging polluters the cost of air pollution, about $1,000 per person annually. Instead, the current administration has been doing the opposite by dismantling protections!

While it lasted, the government's investments in clean energy research were a good way to repay its negligence in making sure the market cleaned up after itself. Ending the research will only accelerate the environmental debt that our children and grandchildren will inherit from us.

So a few things are undeniable. First off, Facebook is most certainly censoring content. They by their own admission removed pages. Secondly, information from Russia is not inherently false, anyone who says this is committing a logical fallacy: Damning the Source http://commfaculty.fullerton.e... Were these sites Russian propaganda outlets? That is very likely. Should they have been banned from Facebook? Again, I think that was still the right move, but the above are also true, and it is a slipery slope to have any corporation decide what information US citizens have access to. Combined, Facebook, Google and Twitter are now positioned to become big brother controlling the information that you have access to and knowing every deep dark secret you would rather not have made public. It is high time that they are legally regulated to reserve the power to manipulate our lives back to the government and officials who we at least have the ability to elect or kick out of office...

As for the entire Russian investigation heating up, it has been nearly 18 months (the FBI investigation started in August 2016) and there is zero evidence that Trump or his administration colluded, in fact the only evidence that has turned up is that the Obama administration used a false report to spy on the Trump campaign, which is a felony, and everyone involved with that deception is facing 10 year prison sentences. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, but the more shrill the MSM gets about Trump collusion, you will know that the noose is closing in on the Obama administration.

In 2 years, when the economy is great, religious freedom is better protected, 2nd amendment is less infringed, crime is lower, drug deaths are down, and no collusion is found and 15 plus high ranking Obama officials are in federal prison for abuse of power (18 USC 242) https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... which is actually a crime, unlike the alleged Trump collusion, it will be interesting to see if MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the MSM go the way of the newspapers, bankrupt and looking for a new line of work. It would truly be refreshing to have a brand new media landscape who focus on getting the truth, no mater where it leads, rather than trying to "change the world" based on their twisted, alt left fascist worldviews...

The incentive to adopt renewable technologies should come from them naturally being better from an economic standpoint (which they obviously aren't, in reality, thus the need for subsidies).

Did you know that air pollution costs us up to $1,000 per person per year? Are you factoring that into the economics of renewables versus fossil fuels? (Probably not.)

As others have said, the credit disproportionately benefits people who (1) are in higher tax brackets (wealthy people), and (2) those who can afford electric vehicles (also wealthy people).

What we should be doing instead is to charge the full societal cost of gasoline consumption (up to $1,000 per person per year) and adding that to the price of gasoline. Then people will naturally switch to electric vehicles, no subsidies or government social engineering necessary.

Of course, we also need to charge drivers the full cost of the roads, up from less than half (who says Republicans oppose welfare?); and abolish laws that show favoritism toward Big Oil such as those that force developers to build more parking than the market wants, but that's a different topic of discussion.

Is there an app for that?

Yes

$30B / 3k people = $10 million per person. That's a heck of a lot of economic benefit per person.

Indeed. It seems silly to say that preventing the premature death of some random person would bring $10M in economic benefit.

The $30 billion is the total economic benefit, and the 3,000 is number of deaths only.

Cal State Fullerton came up with a much more conservative estimate of a pollution cost of $1,600 per person per year in health costs, lost income and so on in the San Joaquin Valley.

My bet is that the EM drive is operating on the same fundamentals as the Woodward Effect:

Dr. Woodward has continued the discourse started started long ago between Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein on trying come up with a better understanding of inertia. This work has been ongoing for many years, including peer reviewed publications and reproducible experiments.

Dr. Fearn at Fullerton has been doing a lot of work on the Mach Effect Thrusters. It's interesting stuff, well worth investigating.

Why would I want to talk to a bot? I mean, Eliza was fun back in the day, Siri is fun to taunt from time to time, but.. why would I want to talk to a bot? (talk, type, whatever. Interact.)

Now, if this were a sentient android, yes, I probably would. But a bot? A bot that spews trendy chat and gifs? For businesses? What?

Does not compute.

However, I used UNIX through a borrowed CSUF's remote shell account before I even went to college with dial-up modems. I used mostly to FTP (e.g., ftp.cdrom.com) and Z-modem (still use this old school BBS' file transfer protocol!). After I started going to college, then I learned about Linux in c(lass/ours)es and from (nerd/geek)s. They were mostly on their local machines (labs) and still remotely (mostly dial-up). And then, I finally installed Red Hat (RH) Linux (v5?) on my own box (dual boot with Windows) after I graduated. I kept using RH until v7.2(?) since v8 sucked until Mouse(y) told me about Debian which I still use today. :)

Unless you can point to or create an objective set of criteria for those "negative externalities" and do so in a way that sets an objective price point for them? It's a nice way of saying that pollution sucks, but way too subjective to actually use fairly.

Here's one example: The cost of air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley is more than $1,600 per person per year, or $6 billion to the region's economy, according to the researchers.

So. Cal has a ways to go before it sees its "worst droughts". A paper published last year shows evidence of 2 multicentury droughts in Southern California in the last 3000 years.
Not a typo. They were multi-CENTURY droughts.

the cost of improving brakes is likely to be far, far less than the economic cost of excluding millions of people from driving, in a society where driving is nearly essential for daily life.

Or taking bad drivers off the road would create better drivers and help free ourselves from an overdependence on a single mode of travel (a single point of failure), one that consumes massive amounts of land for roads and parking, drains similarly massive amounts of money to overseas oil and car companies, and creates respiratory problems, up to $1,600 per person per year.

This is why we should keep the gas tax even after implementing a mileage fee. In fact, the cost of dirty air is up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs and lost work days. Shouldn't the polluters pay those costs?

Air pollution costs our economy up to $1,600 per person per year in medical expenses, lost work, and so on. Shouldn't those who cause the damage pay for it? It would stimulate the economy by increasing demand for alternatives and at the same time it would pay the medical bills of those who are injured by air pollution. That's two benefits for the price of one, and who doesn't like 2-for-1 deals?

Those "external costs" are unproven and in fact highly questionable.

The cost of air pollution is up to $1,600 per person annually according to Cal State Fullerton.

This isn't "market". This is government fiat. It would remove any remaining pretense of free market.

That's the same thing monopolies claim when they are broken up.

While I can't quite say tailpipe emissions are a complete non-issue, there are only a handful of cities in the US where they even matter a little.

Such as the San Joaquin Valley, where dirty air costs up to $1,600 per person per year in medical costs and lost work.

Forcing other people to drive less has been core to leftwing philosophy for decades now.

That's the opposite of the right wing, which supports road and fuel subsidies and zoning and density limits that force people to drive more.

in nearly all states, collected gas tax doesn't actually get spent on roads

"[E]ven if [fuel tax] funds were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."

Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.

Because air pollution is proportional to the amount of fuel burned, the gas tax is a good way to pay for air pollution, which costs us up to $1,600 per person annually in medical costs, lost days of work, and so on. It's also the least bad way to pay for global warming. Ideally, the gas tax should also vary according to the quality of the vehicle's emissions system, because older cars pollute more per gallon of gasoline than newer cars.

But the gas tax isn't a good way to pay for road wear, which is proportional to the 4th power of the axle weight. For that we'd need a mileage fee that varies according to vehicle type or weight.

And the gas tax also isn't an effective way to manage traffic congestion, which varies by the hour and the location. For that, we would need some kind of congestion pricing such as variable express tolls or a mileage fee coupled with information about when and where you drove (but there are privacy concerns with that option).

So if the goal is for the roads to pay for themselves, then the most efficient and equitable way to achieve this goal in a capitalist society where people pay each according to the benefit they receive and the burden they place on the system, is with not just a gas tax but also some kind of mileage fee and congestion pricing. Then we could lower transportation sales taxes such as Prop K in San Francisco or Measure R in Los Angeles.

The humble Ford Model T cost about 1 cent a mile to operate --- in an era when a streetcar ticket cost 5 cents.

Operating costs include not just gasoline but also maintenance, insurance, registration, and parking.

Other costs of owning a car include depreciation, loan servicing, and the opportunity cost of capital.

And then there are hidden costs such as air pollution, carbon emissions, the urban heat island effect, sales and property taxes to build and maintain the roads, and the loss of freedom (and loss of capital utility) to own a home or business without the government forcing you to overbuild your parking lot.

Far fewer people would drive if not for all of these government incentives and coercion to drive.

Most people don't trust "Photojournalism" because of how easy it is to "stage" a photo to get the desired "effect" (propaganda)

http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/

http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/faking.html

There are relatively subtle signs that our science is incomplete. For what you wish for, it would have to be very, very wrong. A Universe with FTL (=time travel) would be most likely very different from the one we observe (and which agrees remarkably well with our understanding of it)

It seems to be a very fundamental limit; I wouldn't be too surprised if even more integral to our reality than we suspect now. Inertia appears to act like a gravitational influence from the rest of the Universe. Of course you'll say "so what?" ... well, that brings with it few headaches, like requirement for instantaneousness or requiring the "interaction" to go backwards in time! Couple it with how the Universe doesn't appear to have signs of expansive intelligence which developed (that's almost exactly equivalent to "will ever develop"!) FTL / time travel. Trying to work around it might not matter - the relative values, properties and characters of interactions remaining similarly limited for all sensible Universes.

Don't treat works of fiction like an oracle (airplanes from "our" time, as envisioned ~130 years ago, probably a mix of rapid advances in marine tech + a large doze of wishful thinking ... I don't see much in common with the boring reality ... but, the best part in this case - we even can build them! Basically: take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy. Nobody in their right mind would).

Can't you at least see that wishful thinking must have limits? Don't extrapolate progress (hm, I've seen a nice movie recently ... one happening in 2010); if anything, relative technological stability with shorts spurts of progress is a normal state for our species.
(but you might start by building a ship with a hull not constrained by Archimedes' principle ... its over 2 thousand years old, surely should be easier to ignore!)

Do not forget to mention how, if anything, the realization of the consequences of Michelson-Morley experiment (and also the then triumphant wave theory hitting some dualities) had shown also many further limits of our world. And those effects were, ultimately, quite large.

If the Pioneer anomaly exists, it's exceedingly minuscule. Sensible proportions of dark matter and dark energy dictated by cosmological models ... surprisingly in line with those suggested by observations. Or, one of my favorites: how inertia appears to act like a gravitational influence from the rest of the Universe ... but this has a major headache of, for one example, requiring the interaction to go backwards in time! Couple it with how the Universe doesn't appear to have signs of expansive intelligence which developed (that's almost equivalent to "will ever develop"!) FTL / time travel - and I wouldn't be too surprised if our speed of light limit will turn out to be even more fundamental than we thought. Or, to put it another way, maybe so ingrained into other basics, that trying to work around it doesn't matter - the relative values, properties and character remaining similarly limited for all sensible Universes.

Don't get me wrong - escaping our constraints would be great. But wishful thinking certainly has its limits.

I think you're delusional if you think something better than jet airplanes will be around in 20 years for transporting people long distances and between continents quickly.

We're going to be flying jets, just like we do now. They might have nicer avionics, and have better entertainment systems for the passengers, but that's it. Some more advanced countries might have high-speed trains for shorter and medium distances, but trains won't take you across oceans, and even the fastest maglevs aren't fast enough to compete with jets for cross-continent travel (like NY-LA), aside from their insane installation costs.

Don't tell me you saw a program on Discovery about an evacuated undersea tube and you think they'll have those everywhere in 20 years.

As a Mechanical Engineer I can tell you Jet Airplane Engines are very old technologies. We've been refining it for the past 50 years. That's it. If you think in 50-100 years we aren't using localized gravitational electromagnetic drives then you must think Positron Drives won't be seen in 50-100 years. Basic Drag and Lift with a compressed air force to give us a boost to stay in the air is not cutting edge.

Even this basic overview presented 13 years ago should give you a clue: http://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/nasa-pap/

All travels are in spacetime, not merely one or the other. With "normal"/forward mode - basic things like inertia, conservation of energy or causality keep everything in check.

They break down completely with tricks like in BTTF. It might be not a coincidence that the inertia appears to act like the sum of gravitational influence exerted on a given body by the rest of the universe - but there's one problem with that. Gravitation works at the speed of light. For it to be responsible for inertia, the influence would have to be instantaneous - essentially going back in time to the body in question.

It does hint that tricks meddling with FTL and time travel would step on the toes of some very fundamental stuff. Perhaps also at: however different the value of c would be, it still wouldn't change things much proportionally when assuming a universe close to ours.

BTTF is just a fun fairytale, can we get over it?

This was a fun read about inertia...
http://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/general/inertia/index.htm

One of the probable explanations seems to be - inertia is equivalent to the gravitational force that acts on the body...from the rest of the Universe. With a disclaimer that this would need propagation of gravitational disturbances into and from distant future!

Which would be...most interesting. Possibly actually strenghtening speed limits present in our Universe, with those limits being probably even more crucial part of fundamental mechanisms of our world. OTOH with the potential to bring even more wild scenarios if it's possible to break away from said limits?

Here's a story about a 'clever idea' I wanted to vet. I wanted to vet it because although it seemed clever to me I didn't know enough about it to know if it was just plain silly. I know very little about physics and electronics, so I posted it in sci.physics.

A while back a guy named James Woodward did an experiment where he attached capacitors to piezoelectric elements which vibrated them back and forth at a certain frequency. The capacitors would be charged and discharged in time with their vibrations. Woodward claims that the mass of the capacitors changes when charged and discharged in such a way that when they are being pushed by the piezoelectric vibrator they have a different mass than when they are being pulled thus producing net thrust. ( I have no idea or ability to judge the silliness or not of this basic idea ) however he claims to have seen the effect on a tabletop device.

Suppose it's not real. Then whooptee doo nothing to see here.

Suppose it is real. Another dude, figured out that the thrust is affected by ( I don't remember was it the 4th power? of the frequency of vibration . I can't find the paper any more. ). Woodward's device vibrated in the X kilohertz range, which was about as much as such a device could do, and produced ( he claims ) a small signal. However if you could devise something that operated in the megahertz range you'd have a clear and undeniable yes/no, as well as probably a practical device that could be used for flying jetson cars etc.

It seemed to me that the basic problem was to find something that could store and release energy as a capacitor does which can also be vibrated at megahertz frequencies. An answer that seemed plausable to me was: Why not have a piezoelectric crystal that is also phosphorescent? You could have say a drum shaped piezo crystal and shine a light on the center to charge it with energy as it vibrates in one direction, and then it would release that energy as it moved to it's other extreme and vibrate back and forth. There are phosphorescent substances that release their energy quite fast, so megahertz operation should be possible.

Anyway, I posted this on usenet, and guess what - nobody cared. It was a dumb idea probably. If you have to ask experts about your idea then it's probably not a good idea to begin with. This is because you don't know what the heck you are talking about.

>You know who exactly are poor, right ? It's the 10% lowest earners.

>And in a total surprise, everybody is totally shocked and utterly amazed ... ~10% of people are poor.

Since 1965, the US government has been basing the threshold for "poverty" on the Orshansky measure, which is based on expenditures needed for a minimal standard of living.

There are some problems with the way this is calculated, which may understate poverty: "The present system is based on a minimally nutritious food budget devised decades ago by the Department of Agriculture. The food budget is multiplied by three because back in the 1950's and 60's food was considered one-third of an average family's outlays.

Neither the food budget nor the multiplier have changed in all these years, although food is less than 20 percent of the average family budget today."

In this century the official US poverty rate has ranged between 11.3% and 12.7%.

Great Salt Lake is at a water activity of 0.75 at 30 percent salt solution and has life.

http://biology.fullerton.edu/biol302/envir.html

It's still dependent on an ecosystem. If anything could possibly be alive there it would be eating leftovers. I pity the first people to go there because they'd NEW FOOD. ;)

Everyone knows A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Assuming English, we have the "...estimated average word length of five..." for a simple calculation:

250,000 X 1000 X 5 = 1,250,000,000 bytes.

Of course all your words would be mushed together and that wouldn't be a pretty word picture, so using the Wikipedia tip of assuming 5 letters plus a space, per word, we get:

250,000 X 1000 X 6 = 1,500,000,000 bytes.

Of course, you could use Unicode characters and double all the byte counts. (And I am not even going to mention the 1024 vs 1000 debate.)

Finally, some think the "picture : 1000 words" ratio is off by a factor of 10. If we use that, then we get 30GB (assuming UTF-16)

So there you have it - Comcast only wants you to use about 100 kbps of bandwidth (1GB/day).

We can also thank them for a new constant - A song is worth 8.3 pictures

There was also a bloom in 1999 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA - which they pollinated from in Fullerton in 2003.

So that's three in five years here in sunny southern California. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

There was also a bloom in 1999 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA - which they pollinated from in Fullerton in 2003.

So that's three in five years here in sunny southern California. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And for even more fun, check out the Web site of the good Dr. C., where he offers tools to monitor eBay for auctions of gaming items.

No. I suppose I could have been clearer on the point. Fallacy isn't error in deduction, which is always suspect. Fallacy is applying rules which are known to be in error. What you're suggesting is an interesting and subtle misinterpretation of what I said, and something I'm going to need to be a lot more careful about specifying in the future.

Induction and deduction are implicitly guesses, and therefore suspect. More specifically, they're best guesses; you go with the available evidence, and if something new crops up that replaces it, well, great, let's all jump ship. Common sense was replaced by classical physics was replaced by newtonian physics was replaced by relativistic physics was replaced by quantuum mechanics; we'll probably be adding something to that list in the next 30 years or so (strings and branes are the horse i'm putting my money on.) Herbalism to Alchemy to Phlogiston to Oxidation to Modern Chemistry to Materials Science. The list for math is obscene. Computer science is already doing pretty well for lists itself, but that's my field, so that may just reflect my better understanding of its history than the other topics.

None of that is fallacy. It's falsehood. Granted, history of science is /also/ peppered with fallacy, but on the whole, that list represents a revealing of and refinement of knowledge, not (in any real sense) the undoing of bad logic. We weren't cavement because we believed quantuum mechanics due to the teachings of our parents/elders (argumentum ad verecundiam,) out of appeal to furce (ad baculum,) or because all the other cavemen believed in QM (ad populum;) it was simply because we didn't know not only about QM, but about physics, or in most cases fire.

The issue here is that they've been given a good explanation, and facts which support it. At that point, no amount of re-explanation is a fallacy; if it were the case that the glass had been flat and then that the glass after N years was thicker at the bottom, then the explanation they were giving would in fact be both logical and sound. The issue is that their supporting facts are false - the glass was never univorm, and therefore there is a question of whether significant flow has in fact occurred, which it has not.

Arguments topple due to both fallacies and falsehoods. The germane difference is whether it's the initial facts or the logic which led to a result which is in error. This would be fallacy if this guy had said "it's true because Bill Nye said so," or "It's obviously true because everybody knows it," or "It's been known since such-and-such ancient book, so clearly it's true" (This kills me - one of my favorite comics, Lewis Black, indulged in argumentum ad lazarum when mocking the Atkins Diet, questioning whether we'd in fact been eating exactly the wrong thing since the dawn of civilization. Though it left me in tears laughing, which is probably the important part, that is in fact fallacy.)

I should point out that making a misstep during reasoning is not the same thing as a fallacy. A fallacy is using one of a concrete series of logical errors; an error in reasoning is an error in reasoning. If you neglect to take an issue into account, or go through a complex series of reasoning and accidentally swap two individuals leading to error, or if you make a judgement based on a misimpression regarding an individual or situation, that's not a fallacy; that's an error, which leads to a falsehood. Fallacies are using mechanisms which are in error in justification. Whereas this list isn't complete, there's a good primer at each of these links.

Therefore:
- I killed the queen because she was an alien, so she'll ruin us all.
Action on false

FAST FORWARD TO 2014: ..... Virtual property will emerge as a major driver for gamers and game companies.

Reminds me of a discussion recently held at /. Will Virtual Economies Affect Real-World Economics? Maybe the author of the article discussed there, Edward Castronova, could use some numbers from the report mentioned in the current discussion to give more concrete shape to his ideas. Would love to continue the discussion then ....

Mutations in Bacterial Cultures

Don't Worry - Be Careful!

Treat all micro-organisms with respect - and DO NOT touch them!

Remember, mutations arise because the sequences of bases change in the DNA. These changes can change the organism. Could it change the bacteria to something pathogenic? Possibly. Let's see...
SPONTANEOUS MUTATIONS

Occur because of environmental factors (radiation from cosmic rays, certain chemicals) and errors in base pairing during replication. The rate:

approximately 1 in every 100,000 to 1,000,000.
Seems low? Figure this:

1. Let's say, the mutation rate in a given bacteria is 1 in every 100,000.
2. Grow the culture to a concentration of 1,000,000,000 per milliliter.
3. Grow 100 milliliters of the culture.

* How many possible mutations are there?
* Answer: about 1,000,000 mutations

Conclusion: BE CAREFUL WITH ALL MICRO-ORGANISMS!
DISPOSING OF CULTURES:

ON PLATES: Put the plate in the autoclave bags in the marked "biohazard" containers. Make sure these bags are autoclaved regularly!

LIQUID: Put a drop or two of bleach per 100 ml in the culture before drain disposing. Flush the drain well with water.

Check out this site: http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~jbrown/ecoli.html

Of course some of the best writings on the subject (not from academia, btw) are the seminal "Habitat Papers" by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. Their main home at communities.com is gone, with the collapse of that company - does anybody out there have copies or links to another site that has them?

Okay, granted, I'm not one of them myself. I wear glasses and a size 15. I have hips. I even kinda like my hips

Now I have no idea what a "size 15" is, but its not the size of this hips that matters so much, its the size relationship they have to the waist. The wast majority of men (wether they know it or not) are attracted to hip waist ratio of 0.7 Text version here - PDF here

Edward Castronova wrote a paper a while back concerning emerging economic theory within virtual worlds.
The paper goes into much greater detail about the type of people who play MMORPGs than the BBC article. In addition to a short history of MMORGSs, he also gives his thoughts on the future of avatars as our means of shopping/working/interacting.
"Journal entry, 18 April. I have called my avatar 'Alaniel.' I land in Norrath for the first time, in a town called Freeport. I am standing in a stone courtyard behind a gate. I see several lean-tos and a firepit. All around I hear the sounds of footsteps and I see humanoids of various shapes and sizes running back and forth, names like "Zikon" and "Sefirooth" over their heads, wearing odd costumes, carrying strange implements. Are they people? Or merely beings created by the software? Statements flow into my chat box at a rapid rate. "Galadriel shouts: Looking for bind at gate." I see a being with the name Galadriel. Is he talking to me? What is he saying? "Friitz says out of character: brt -omwb." What? No sign of anyone named Friitz. "Ikillu auctions: WTS bone chips." An auction. What should I do? I feel the presence of humanity, but I suddenly feel like a stranger in a very foreign culture. I become afraid of breaking some taboo, of making a fool of myself. Clumsily, I maneuver Alaniel toward the nearest lean-to and hide behind it. No one can see me here." (Castronova, p.2, Virtual Worlds, 2001)

Despite the expanding popularity of games like EverQuest and it's huge array of derivatives and competitors to suggest that the "economy" (and those quotes are deliberate; to suggest that any of these games has anything like a real economy is patently ludicrous) is in anyway comparable to that of real-world markets is... well, just wrong. Any Economic 101 student should be able to tell you that.

Anyhow, the thing I really got out of college was not the information and knowledge I acquired, but the skills. And the #1 skill was knowing how to learn effectively. On a day to day basis at my job, I use little if any technical knowledge I learned directly in my college courses. What I do use are the skills and the knowledge that I've learned in 6 years in the industry. I've been able to impress my management with my ability to pick up new concepts and solve problems that had stumped others, so I've done fairly well in the raise department - but not because of the facts that I learned in college.

If you can learn effectively, you can do anything you want when you get out of school. It doesn't matter so much what your major was, but simply that you got the degree and can show any prospective employers or clients that you can do the job they are looking for. The best people I work with are ones who didn't go directly in the exact field they majored in, but who sought jobs that would interest and challenge them, and that they knew they were capable of picking up.

With that in mind, make sure you choose a major that interests you. Preferably also one that you'll excel at, or that you'll at least do ok with. Don't worry so much about what the job market will be in that field - 4 years is a long time and things can change dramatically (just think about people who graduated this year - they started just as the dot com bubble was starting to swell up). As I said above, if you can demonstrate intelligence, an innovative spirit, and both a willingness and ability to learn quickly, employers won't care what your specific major was.

Along the same lines, don't stress about choosing a major too soon. Explore and take classes that sound interesting. If you stumble onto something that really excites you, great! By the same token, don't fret if you get into your upper division classes and start to lose interest. This happened to me as a physics major - I completed the degree but have no desire to go any further in the field. I concentrated on rounding out my education and diversifying my learning as much as possible.

My alma mater was a science and engineering school that emphasized the humanities, and I'm ever greatful for that. I had to take more humanities classes that most science and engineering majors at other schools, and it significantly broadened my horizons. I ended up taking some really neat philosophy, music, history and other classes that I wouldn't have otherwise. The music classes in particular led me to expand my hobbies as an amateur musician after I got out of school. Whenever possible, take classes outside your major that sound interesting and that you might not otherwise take.

Other people have already made some good comments about the non academic stuff. Make sure you have fun, take a break, get out of the dorm (and do live in the dorms - group study sessions were often lifesavers in those really tough classes), go to parties, exercise and all that. Take an extended break if you feel yourself burning out, but don't let it go too long. I can say after being in the "real world" for 6 years, I have little motivation to go back to school and get a graduate degree. I may do it yet, but it'll be tough.

One last thing I'd say is that you get out whatever you put into your education. Yeah, it's a little clich but it's true. My wife's school seemed more like a diploma mill than a real school. The vast majority of the students were only interested in going through the motions to get a piece of paper at the end. It not only made things difficult for her in group projects where she did most of the work because they didn't care, but I think contributed to an overall attitude of apathy at the school. Most of her classmates got little to nothing out of their years there. Some of them acquired some knowledge, but I'd say most never got it, never learned how to learn.

And unfortunately these people will probably be our bosses in the future... ;-)

it would mean switching to Microsoft first. I'm within a handful of classes from graduating with a CS degree, and I've not used a Microsoft product for program development since 2000. (I have used MS Word a couple times when I had to write a paper and there weren't other options available. I still feel dirty)

Of course, the rest of the department has gone overboard implementing whatever they view as "currently being used by the marketplace" (note the awful flash animations on the page. Also note that many pictures of students hard at work are not students, but paid models at somewhere definitely not at our school. I don't know why the hell they went down that road), and for now, Microsoft and the marketplace are linked in many people's minds. The real trauma is that they keep getting rid of pure CS classes and replacing them with gimpy CIS classes (which is another program). The classes on AI and parallel processing haven't been held for years.(rumor has it the parallel processing class ceased after the hypercube had a meltdown) Of the new classes we've been offered in recent semesters, only one is what I'd call actual computer science (Quantum Computing. We've also received classes on J2EE and web-enabled databases. Yuck.)

But I digress. My point was that using unix or unix-like systems, even within a great sea of Microsoft, is not only possible but arguably preferable. I've had to jump through a few additional hoops, such as porting code provided by the instructor to be os-independent, having to arrange showing my projects during office hours in lieu of turning in a binary, having to persuade instructors that I'm not on crack....

So I've had to learn more on my own. Big deal. I'm still quite a bit more happy using joe and gcc to write code rather than the point-and-drool nature of MSVC. It's also worth noting that I'm starting out ahead of my peers in my compiler class this semester (where the instructor is requiring our projects to run on a solaris box)

-transiit

Another academic study of EverQuest, from a different angle: Cal State Fullerton business professor Edward Castranova did an economic survey of Norrath, which he plans to publish in an economics journal.

Typing

<a href="http://chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html"&gt ;James Woodwards's homepage</a>

gets you

James Woodwards's homepage

Naw. Those propellant rockets are so old school. Build yourself a Woodward drive and not have to bring any propellant.

In practice, it's difficult but not inconceivable. The effect gets stronger with the cube of the vibration rate. You need a very fast vibration, and experimentally it's really hard to accurately measure force on something vibrating that fast. So experiments so far have been somewhat inconclusive. The interesting thing is that there's no new physics postulated here--it's all a natural consequence of general relativity.

Well, there's Woodward's work. Basically, as a result of Mach's principle, it predicts a transient mass fluctuation in an LRC circuit.
It could be the "impulse engine" of ST fame, or the hover cars off the Jetsons...

(Just maybe, it could also provide a large enough mass fluctuation for more exotic uses, like temporary wormhole stabilisation...)

NB. IANAP (I am not a Physicist (...and boy, does it show...))

Woodward carried out a test, which seemed to confirm the theory. However, an unforseen non-linear response in some of the experimental equipment casts doubt on the first results. Even if the fluctuations were a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than observed, it would still be a major breakthrough. NASA seems to think so too, and are, AFAIK, quietly working on a repeat test in their breakthrough propulsion labs...

Anyway, the theory makes interesting reading.

Here's the relevant links:

chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html

www.inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/wo odward.html