As much as the feel-good people want to insist that if we behave with perfect absence of violence we shall never be met with it, they are wrong.
Hmmm, I'm not sure who you think these "feel good people" are who really think as you describe. What you've done here to set the stage for the rest of your rant is known as a straw man fallacy. The presence of one of these is often the signpost of a mind that is not accustomed to engaging others in rational discussion.
The world is violent and will continue to be until we're wiped from it.
That's a rather depressingly brutish and short-sighted opinion. I for one do not believe that we are so hopeless.
We are conflicted beings -- in part enslaved to a nature that derives from a hostile crucible of nature... to eat or be eaten. But in part, we are also miraculously intelligent, able to reason, able to control our animal programming when appropriately educated and disciplined.
Because we are capable of being rational and reasonable, I think there is hope for us. We are able to aspire to a more civilized nature. It is counterproductive to simply surrender to (or even revel in) our passion for violence.
Today we are creatures in transition -- something partway between animals and truly civilized beings. It may take time and patience, but if we can manage to survive for a while longer (on evolutionary time scales), we may be able to become something nobler, something more emotionally stable.
However, feel free to argue its points in cogent terms here.
You continue to advocate making the weak even more defenseless such that the strong can rule over them by blunt force.
You seem to equate our old passion for violence with strength. My whole point is that violence IS a weakness now. Wit and Reason are the strengths we must esteem today, or we are not deserving of the stars.
It's time for us to evolve and it's time for you to evolve your thinking.
I should add that flamewars turn off intelligent, rational, good-hearted people. Flamewars get locked down. So a flamewar, even if it quotes a controversial post, is still a squelch.
How can we devise a system that:
can keep up with the massive volume of the internet
can effectively moderate the nasties out
yet not stamp out the rational ones who are simply supporting an unpopular opinion?
the problem is that 'stamping out trolls' also ends up stamping out minority opinions as well as unpopular truth. this fosters a groupthink mentality that allows consensus to take precedence over correct information/conclusions.
Does nobody else see the irony of a comment like this being moderated to +4?
The fact that it's been validated by the system it critiques invalidates it.
You make a seemingly poignant and clever remark. However, his comment is not obscure, minority, or controversial... his comment is mainstream, rational, and well accepted, particularly among the SlashDot crowd.
What he refers to is daring, perhaps "crackpot" opinions that go against the grain of the PC ethos of the internet community. A lot of crackpots are annoying attention-starved irrational, overly emotional, etc, and they often get the down-votes they deserve. But we all know and admire the few epic heros who changed the world with their unpopular opinions because they ended up being a step ahead of the world in insight... We should make sure that the internet does not make it easier to squelch these people, but instead allows them to blossom.
He's talking about people like the guy who makes rational attempts to critique or debunk global warming science, the guy who enters a discussion forum on a San Francisco newspaper and tries to argue that it's wrong for gay couples to raise children, the Saudi who tries to argue for equal rights for women in his country, that guy who thinks Jar Jar was a worthy attempt at levity in the Star Wars mythos.
These guys, if they make their cases with reasonable doses of civility, credible knowledge, and rationality, should still be heard, even if their opinions are loathed by the majority. These people make us sharper as a society. They are out of the box thinkers. And some of them could be right.
Yet, in a pure crowd-sourced voting system, the unpopular opinions will always get squelched unless they manage to provoke a flame war before they are forgotten.
A really interesting product... But it won't do away with contollers I think... Imagine the RSI (repetitive strain) problems people will develop. The large motion big joints I think will be more vulnerable to motion strain than the small motions needed by contollers, mice, and keyboards.
I imagine people might even develop neck and back problems if they get addicted to some game that involves more full body gestures.
Should be "opinion?"... serves me right for trying to be so smug.
circletimessquare (444983), your post suffers from too many (IMO wild) opinions voiced as if they were common sense fact. Please back up your assertions with something credible.
the issue of unwanted expression of violence isn't that you can't suppress it, but that you have too much rage [citation needed]
a superior way to prevent spasms of violence in real life is to allow for some way to express violence in harmless ways
such as violent videogames [citation needed]
what gets released harmlessly on a keyboard or joystick is that which will not be released in real life situations [citation needed]
by and large, violent videogames reduce violence in society [citation needed]
the daily friction of life creates a build up of rage. the question is how is that rage released. a violent videogame provides that release, in exaclt the mechanism described above. but it's not like that rage has anywhere else to go were it not for violent videogames [citation needed]
i think we as a society should play more violent videogames to reduce real world violence
i am not in the least joking
there are unstable individuals who can't differentiate [editorial: fact?] from reality [irony noted]
(Let's pretend Apple doesn't exist so I can save some keystrokes here.)
Sun wants to encourage continued improvements in the quality and versatility of what people can get without paying MS. This way, people can continue to buy non-Windows computers, Java continues being relevant, and MS works harder to produce (or at least to tollerate) useful innovations because they have credible competition to keep them honest.
As far as I'm concerned, I would love this ability. Google in a nice mobile UI would be sweet. When on the move I often wish I had google plugged into my brain to help me find my way around, answer random questions that just pop in my head, or whatever.
We are Borg. Or soon will be.
Their auditory systems may not work the same way ours do and we could be shoveling sh*t against the tide.
Signal analysis (FFT or whatever) should find patterns. Whether the signal is intended as audio, visual, data, or whatever is irrelevant. The signal scheme will have patterns in it if it is intended as an outreach. Moreover, those patterns will likely be unambiguously artificial.
Oh come on, this whole line of thinking that aliens might consider us food is so far beyond silly, it's depressing.
Civilizations only a little more advanced than us will understand this: food is mostly just energy. To feast to your heart's content you just keep care to recycle your nutrients and use energy to reconstitute the nutrients into forms that are tasty. And energy in the universe is essentially limitless... it comes from stars. And if you can travel to other stars, you are set for at least billions of years in that regard. No need to go wiping out sentient life for a snack.
Nothing. All the folks who say "a super advanced civilisation will have evolved beyond a need to eat us" are basing that view on absolutely nothing.
Nothing but simple logic.
Sigh.
Now isn't there some nice Microsoft or Google thread nearby where you can go spewing your irrational FUD around? Go away.
but the only "opportunity" I see here for space is for G00gl3 to launch a series of high speed projectiles to craterize (print) Adwords at 1 pixel per 30m
If that's all you can think of then you're just jaded... has all the creative spirit been bled out of you? Just try to think out of the box a little...
For example: it would make a REALLY cool site for a McDonalds!
Electrons are negatively charged. How do you inject a massive charge into this gas without messing up the models big time? You still need the heavy protons to balance the charges.
I believe the assumption is that the protons are there too, but at about 2000 times heavier, they just don't play a comparable role in emission (moving and accellerating a lot more slowly). The gas (large fraction of ionized hydrogen) is neutrally charged on average over a given volume, but the electrons are the dominant emitters. So talk about electron gas really means H plasma, but it's the electrons that you see. It's just lazy use of language really.
Yeah, heh. Man, I hate the extremist spin language people use just to make their opinion seem more important and worthy of attention. Nobody has any patience any more for reasoning or facts to back up an idea, they just heap on the marketing speak to get their message out.
For example, the other day Nancy Pelosi was on NPR talking about how they had "overwhelming bipartisan support" for some insurance bill or other. But it turns out that "overwhelming bipartisan support" wasn't overwhelming enough to even get the damned bill passed! They were 10 votes short of a simple majority... that's "overwhelming support"?! And the journalists let them get away with that kind of trash all the time.
When presenting something for public consumption, people just don't give a damned any more about the truth of what is coming out of their mouths. So many words, so little actual meaning.
Pretty soon everyone in Washington will be either a "Hyperliberal" or a "Hyperconservative". Since everyone is already "extreme right/left wing somethingorother", they're gonna start needing a word that sounds a lot more unreasonable than that. Hyper is a good choice.
This is the way science works. It is based on evidence, not beliefs.
Keep in mind that there is belief in science... but not blind belief. And religion can have evidence... but not thorough evidence.
Because we are finite beings, science requires faith as well; But it is a faith based on accessible evidence, not ill-supported dogma. Ultimately, science is seeking the truth. Yet, ironically, because our minds are finite, no scientist can ever be so arrogant as to assert that they've actually found the truth. A true scientist can only make qualified predictions and speculations... things like "if the universe continues to behave as it did when these experiments and observations were done, then it is reasonable to expect that if we do such and such, then this and that will happen".
Moreover, because we are finite, nobody can know everything. Science is a collective body of knowledge. As a scientist you specialize and you build on the work that other people have done. In all practicality, you must trust that those who publish before you were careful about their data, their analysis, the tracking of sources of error, and so on. And you must trust that others have repeated and validated that work with sufficient rigor. Yet I hear with unsettling frequency about questionable papers and unrepeatable experiments only being identified as mistakes some years afterward... possibly after others have cited the work as part of the foundation of their own. Eventually we hope that the mistakes are found and recognized by the community as a whole, but to some degree that is faith. The scientific community is like an organism of interdependent parts... To make progress, the right foot must trust that the left foot is doing its job properly.
What I think really distinguishes science and religion is that the scientific method requires a certain integrity that religion does not: a true scientist accepts that they could be mistaken. Anything is open for question at any time. Science is an unflinching search for truth.
On the other hand, the religious method does not require such integrity. It only requires trust in worth-of-mouth dogma. You believe what some other guy says and you may not question or challenge that without becoming an outcast (or the founder of a new religion).
Ironically, a fundamental assumption of the scientific method is that scientific "knowledge" is not fact. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the universe will turn out to be so subtle, so complex and so beyond our limited perception and finite mental capacity that we may never come up with a truly reliable theory of everything. We are small. Until the day that we figure it all out, faith and reason must live hand in hand... even in science.
Only deductive arguments can be proven because you can always argue with the strength of the evidence in inductive claims.
Spectacular comment, thank you for making it. Too often politicians, pundits, PR spin artists, and various other emotional inflammatories run around borrowing the language of logic to try to make themselves sound credible, when in fact they end up just making themselves look foolish and undereducated. We have a serious lack of critical thinking skills among the general public and many are too easily swayed by such vague and specious arguments masquerading as authoritative fact.
Of course the problem is several orders of magnitude worse in the third world.
A way to fight this is to declare a war on ignorance... Bludgeon the world with an education budget that is of the order of current military spending. There's a jihad worth living for.
Ok, so now I'm being emotionally inflammatory.... but in a good way.
We are not robin hood, prince of thieves. We are petty criminals taking what want because no one can stop us.
Criminals?
Petty?
Taking what we want?!
WE?!
Hmm. Cute but devoid of substance. I hereby take issue with the inductive claims in your sig! But then, check out MY sig:
Black holes emit the same gravity that everything else does. They don't suck stuff down any better than any other clump of matter such as regular stars. So anything orbiting a black hole (like the rest of the galaxy) will just keep orbiting it pretty much forever... Just like the planets in our solar system will keep orbiting the sun pretty much forever.
Take the Earth as an example. The Earth is flying along at about 30 kilometers per second. The sun is tugging on the Earth constantly and causes the Earth to fall toward it. But because the Earth has velocity, it keeps flying off in a tangent and keeps _missing_ the Sun. That's an orbit... a balance between the central mass' gravitational force and the orbiting object's velocity. Stable orbits just continue forever until something alters the kinetic energy of the satellite.
If you want the Earth to actually "fall" into the Sun, you need to de-orbit the Earth. That means you need to put a huge rocket on the Earth that decelerates it by 30 kilometers per second... exactly the amount of speed at which it is flying around the Sun. This would be really hard to do. (If you look at the Saturn V rocket and see how much fuel it took to get that little pointy tip to the moon, you can imaging that doing this for the Earth would be, well, unimaginable.)
It is actually really hard to make things stop orbiting their central mass and subsequently fall into it. Usually you need something that causes drag, a decelerating force, to make that happen. In most cases there isn't much around to provide such a decelerating force.
First of all, isn't it like 100x cheaper to just set up solar arrays down here, even though total flux is 5x weaker? We could surface all builds with solar panels, for example. They should be cheaper to maintain. They wouldn't contribute to debris in orbit, etc.
Secondly, this nutty plan will actually advance global warming as well. If we replace all fossil fuels with this, we are injecting a massive amount of energy into the Earth's biosphere that otherwise would not have been there. Moreover, launching massive numbers of spacecraft to replace a significant fraction of the nation's power supply with "clean solar" will generate greenhouse gases from the initial launches and from subsequent maintenance / replacement missions.
In the distant future we will need to do this... As long as our civilization advances, our energy needs will continue to grow. The sun is the only essentially inexhaustible supply of power available to us. But in the near term, this sounds like a witless idea to me.
If someone can refute these concerns here, I'd love to hear about it...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the wiimote essentially just a thumb rocker that you activate by swinging? So you swing in one direction and that's just the equivalent of touching a button, right? Boolean? On-Off? Press-release? Right?
What's so great about that?
It's not like the wiimote is being tracked in 3 space with 6 degrees of freedom. You can't map the game lightsaber position to the position of the wiimote as you are holding it.
It's just wiik. It is dead to the force. There is no joy in Wii.
To achieve the true coolness that I think all of you latent Jedi crave, you need a controller about a foot long or more where both endpoints are tracked to at least centimeter resolution in three-space. (To be general the controller will need a third point to measure roll orientation along the main axis... but for lightsabers you'd only need two control points.)
And then of course it needs a bunch of buttons to control foot movement, inventory management, etc.
I did quite a bit of reading on spacecraft propulsion recently (specifically Nuclear pulse propulsion and basically what I got out of it is that if you have a massive energy source (say, antimatter) you're better off just blowing it up and riding the blast wave.
Not necessarily. When you blow stuff up, you're wasting a lot of energy going off in all directions. You could use a containment chamber to help capture some of that and redirect the energy in a helpful direction. But then my understanding is that antimatter "blows up" into gamma photons which are not easy to capture and redirect...
My understanding is that photons are the ultimate in terms of efficient propulsion with the ultimate exhaust velocity. Moreover, lasers can direct all that thrust in a very precise direction. You just have to have a very efficient laser mechanism. And you have to be patient because lasers don't generate a lot of raw thrust.
If we are so scared of a terrorist attack that we must suspend citizen rights in order to feel safer (regardless of how much real security is actually bought at that expense) then the terrorists have ALREADY won.
There's too much absolutism in your thinking. The fact that we are inconveniencing ourselves in order to prevent deaths of our citizens and significantly worse damage to our economic infrastructure is not the same as a terrorist "WIN".
Think of it this way... Now that the terrorists have provoked an increase in security measures, do you think they're happy with a job well done? Are they just going to go home now to their caves, pop open six-packs, and retire contentedly?
No, from their perspective a WIN is nothing short of complete eradication of any civilization or governmental structure that is not under their particular brand of fascist Islamist control. No, what they want is either:
The whole world becomes subservient to them (Islamic zombies)... by choice or by force, it doesn't matter... "Alah is compassionate, Alah is merciful!" -- OR:
The whole world is annihilated in glorious armageddon.
THAT's what an Islamist "win" is.
Our goal is to remove this twisted cancer from human society. But to do that we have to fight the war. We are all part of the war because we are all targets. Their venom is non-discriminating, their scruples non-existent. We can't just sit back in our posh couches watching this one go by on the TV. We have to be willing to accept some inconvenience as a practical matter I think. Because the terrorists have chosen techniques of infiltration, we need to counter this with less inhibited wide-ranging information gathering. That's not a win for them, it's simply us defending ourselves in a sensible and cost-effective manner.
There are lots of long term measures we need to take as well... Encouraging standards of political freedom to rise elsewhere (yes, I see the irony), promoting high standards of education that encourage critical thinking, protecting free access to information, and ensuring economic opportunity world-wide are critical long term measures for inhibiting this kind of perversity from infecting our civilization in the future.
But people need to realize and accept that right now this is a war. We're all involved. And defensive effort is sometimes going to be inconvenient.
Frankly, I'm sorry that McConnell felt he had to come out and tell the terrorists just how to avoid one of our best ways of detecting them.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as the feel-good people want to insist that if we behave with perfect absence of violence we shall never be met with it, they are wrong.
Hmmm, I'm not sure who you think these "feel good people" are who really think as you describe. What you've done here to set the stage for the rest of your rant is known as a straw man fallacy. The presence of one of these is often the signpost of a mind that is not accustomed to engaging others in rational discussion.
The world is violent and will continue to be until we're wiped from it.
That's a rather depressingly brutish and short-sighted opinion. I for one do not believe that we are so hopeless.
We are conflicted beings -- in part enslaved to a nature that derives from a hostile crucible of nature... to eat or be eaten. But in part, we are also miraculously intelligent, able to reason, able to control our animal programming when appropriately educated and disciplined.
Because we are capable of being rational and reasonable, I think there is hope for us. We are able to aspire to a more civilized nature. It is counterproductive to simply surrender to (or even revel in) our passion for violence.
Today we are creatures in transition -- something partway between animals and truly civilized beings. It may take time and patience, but if we can manage to survive for a while longer (on evolutionary time scales), we may be able to become something nobler, something more emotionally stable.
We have to. We've got nukes.
Whoosh!
That's the sound of the discussion going completely over your head.
You totally misunderstand my point.
Have you read The Giver?
No, I havent read the thing you're referring to.
However, feel free to argue its points in cogent terms here.
You continue to advocate making the weak even more defenseless such that the strong can rule over them by blunt force.
You seem to equate our old passion for violence with strength. My whole point is that violence IS a weakness now. Wit and Reason are the strengths we must esteem today, or we are not deserving of the stars.
It's time for us to evolve and it's time for you to evolve your thinking.
Evolve or die. It's the law.
I should add that flamewars turn off intelligent, rational, good-hearted people. Flamewars get locked down. So a flamewar, even if it quotes a controversial post, is still a squelch.
How can we devise a system that:
the problem is that 'stamping out trolls' also ends up stamping out minority opinions as well as unpopular truth. this fosters a groupthink mentality that allows consensus to take precedence over correct information/conclusions.
Does nobody else see the irony of a comment like this being moderated to +4?
The fact that it's been validated by the system it critiques invalidates it.
You make a seemingly poignant and clever remark. However, his comment is not obscure, minority, or controversial... his comment is mainstream, rational, and well accepted, particularly among the SlashDot crowd.
What he refers to is daring, perhaps "crackpot" opinions that go against the grain of the PC ethos of the internet community. A lot of crackpots are annoying attention-starved irrational, overly emotional, etc, and they often get the down-votes they deserve. But we all know and admire the few epic heros who changed the world with their unpopular opinions because they ended up being a step ahead of the world in insight... We should make sure that the internet does not make it easier to squelch these people, but instead allows them to blossom.
He's talking about people like the guy who makes rational attempts to critique or debunk global warming science, the guy who enters a discussion forum on a San Francisco newspaper and tries to argue that it's wrong for gay couples to raise children, the Saudi who tries to argue for equal rights for women in his country, that guy who thinks Jar Jar was a worthy attempt at levity in the Star Wars mythos.
These guys, if they make their cases with reasonable doses of civility, credible knowledge, and rationality, should still be heard, even if their opinions are loathed by the majority. These people make us sharper as a society. They are out of the box thinkers. And some of them could be right.
Yet, in a pure crowd-sourced voting system, the unpopular opinions will always get squelched unless they manage to provoke a flame war before they are forgotten.
A really interesting product... But it won't do away with contollers I think... Imagine the RSI (repetitive strain) problems people will develop. The large motion big joints I think will be more vulnerable to motion strain than the small motions needed by contollers, mice, and keyboards.
I imagine people might even develop neck and back problems if they get addicted to some game that involves more full body gestures.
Chiropractors rejoice!
So does anyone have any credible estimates on what the acoustic energy density is like of a typical office environment?
Or maybe, what is the average power output of a typical human voice?
-b
I have a T-shirt that says "Fix your own #@$^&! computer."
Get yourself one of those.
Problem solved.
Should be "opinion?"... serves me right for trying to be so smug.
circletimessquare (444983), your post suffers from too many (IMO wild) opinions voiced as if they were common sense fact. Please back up your assertions with something credible.
i am not in the least joking
there are unstable individuals who can't differentiate [editorial: fact?] from reality [irony noted]
Glibly... if OSS dies, Microsoft wins it all.
(Let's pretend Apple doesn't exist so I can save some keystrokes here.)
Sun wants to encourage continued improvements in the quality and versatility of what people can get without paying MS. This way, people can continue to buy non-Windows computers, Java continues being relevant, and MS works harder to produce (or at least to tollerate) useful innovations because they have credible competition to keep them honest.
As far as I'm concerned, I would love this ability. Google in a nice mobile UI would be sweet. When on the move I often wish I had google plugged into my brain to help me find my way around, answer random questions that just pop in my head, or whatever. We are Borg. Or soon will be.
Signal analysis (FFT or whatever) should find patterns. Whether the signal is intended as audio, visual, data, or whatever is irrelevant. The signal scheme will have patterns in it if it is intended as an outreach. Moreover, those patterns will likely be unambiguously artificial.
Oh come on, this whole line of thinking that aliens might consider us food is so far beyond silly, it's depressing.
Civilizations only a little more advanced than us will understand this: food is mostly just energy. To feast to your heart's content you just keep care to recycle your nutrients and use energy to reconstitute the nutrients into forms that are tasty. And energy in the universe is essentially limitless... it comes from stars. And if you can travel to other stars, you are set for at least billions of years in that regard. No need to go wiping out sentient life for a snack.
Nothing. All the folks who say "a super advanced civilisation will have evolved beyond a need to eat us" are basing that view on absolutely nothing.Nothing but simple logic.
Sigh.
Now isn't there some nice Microsoft or Google thread nearby where you can go spewing your irrational FUD around? Go away.
If that's all you can think of then you're just jaded... has all the creative spirit been bled out of you? Just try to think out of the box a little...
For example: it would make a REALLY cool site for a McDonalds!
Ah yes, nothing like a fresh lunar breeze...
I believe the assumption is that the protons are there too, but at about 2000 times heavier, they just don't play a comparable role in emission (moving and accellerating a lot more slowly). The gas (large fraction of ionized hydrogen) is neutrally charged on average over a given volume, but the electrons are the dominant emitters. So talk about electron gas really means H plasma, but it's the electrons that you see. It's just lazy use of language really.
Yeah, heh. Man, I hate the extremist spin language people use just to make their opinion seem more important and worthy of attention. Nobody has any patience any more for reasoning or facts to back up an idea, they just heap on the marketing speak to get their message out.
For example, the other day Nancy Pelosi was on NPR talking about how they had "overwhelming bipartisan support" for some insurance bill or other. But it turns out that "overwhelming bipartisan support" wasn't overwhelming enough to even get the damned bill passed! They were 10 votes short of a simple majority... that's "overwhelming support"?! And the journalists let them get away with that kind of trash all the time.
When presenting something for public consumption, people just don't give a damned any more about the truth of what is coming out of their mouths. So many words, so little actual meaning.
Pretty soon everyone in Washington will be either a "Hyperliberal" or a "Hyperconservative". Since everyone is already "extreme right/left wing somethingorother", they're gonna start needing a word that sounds a lot more unreasonable than that. Hyper is a good choice.
Keep in mind that there is belief in science... but not blind belief. And religion can have evidence... but not thorough evidence.
Because we are finite beings, science requires faith as well; But it is a faith based on accessible evidence, not ill-supported dogma. Ultimately, science is seeking the truth. Yet, ironically, because our minds are finite, no scientist can ever be so arrogant as to assert that they've actually found the truth. A true scientist can only make qualified predictions and speculations... things like "if the universe continues to behave as it did when these experiments and observations were done, then it is reasonable to expect that if we do such and such, then this and that will happen".
Moreover, because we are finite, nobody can know everything. Science is a collective body of knowledge. As a scientist you specialize and you build on the work that other people have done. In all practicality, you must trust that those who publish before you were careful about their data, their analysis, the tracking of sources of error, and so on. And you must trust that others have repeated and validated that work with sufficient rigor. Yet I hear with unsettling frequency about questionable papers and unrepeatable experiments only being identified as mistakes some years afterward... possibly after others have cited the work as part of the foundation of their own. Eventually we hope that the mistakes are found and recognized by the community as a whole, but to some degree that is faith. The scientific community is like an organism of interdependent parts... To make progress, the right foot must trust that the left foot is doing its job properly.
What I think really distinguishes science and religion is that the scientific method requires a certain integrity that religion does not: a true scientist accepts that they could be mistaken. Anything is open for question at any time. Science is an unflinching search for truth.
On the other hand, the religious method does not require such integrity. It only requires trust in worth-of-mouth dogma. You believe what some other guy says and you may not question or challenge that without becoming an outcast (or the founder of a new religion).
Ironically, a fundamental assumption of the scientific method is that scientific "knowledge" is not fact. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the universe will turn out to be so subtle, so complex and so beyond our limited perception and finite mental capacity that we may never come up with a truly reliable theory of everything. We are small. Until the day that we figure it all out, faith and reason must live hand in hand... even in science.
Spectacular comment, thank you for making it. Too often politicians, pundits, PR spin artists, and various other emotional inflammatories run around borrowing the language of logic to try to make themselves sound credible, when in fact they end up just making themselves look foolish and undereducated. We have a serious lack of critical thinking skills among the general public and many are too easily swayed by such vague and specious arguments masquerading as authoritative fact.
Of course the problem is several orders of magnitude worse in the third world.
A way to fight this is to declare a war on ignorance... Bludgeon the world with an education budget that is of the order of current military spending. There's a jihad worth living for.
Ok, so now I'm being emotionally inflammatory.... but in a good way.
We are not robin hood, prince of thieves. We are petty criminals taking what want because no one can stop us.Criminals?
Petty?
Taking what we want?!
WE?!
Hmm. Cute but devoid of substance. I hereby take issue with the inductive claims in your sig! But then, check out MY sig:
Black holes emit the same gravity that everything else does. They don't suck stuff down any better than any other clump of matter such as regular stars. So anything orbiting a black hole (like the rest of the galaxy) will just keep orbiting it pretty much forever... Just like the planets in our solar system will keep orbiting the sun pretty much forever.
Take the Earth as an example. The Earth is flying along at about 30 kilometers per second. The sun is tugging on the Earth constantly and causes the Earth to fall toward it. But because the Earth has velocity, it keeps flying off in a tangent and keeps _missing_ the Sun. That's an orbit... a balance between the central mass' gravitational force and the orbiting object's velocity. Stable orbits just continue forever until something alters the kinetic energy of the satellite.
If you want the Earth to actually "fall" into the Sun, you need to de-orbit the Earth. That means you need to put a huge rocket on the Earth that decelerates it by 30 kilometers per second... exactly the amount of speed at which it is flying around the Sun. This would be really hard to do. (If you look at the Saturn V rocket and see how much fuel it took to get that little pointy tip to the moon, you can imaging that doing this for the Earth would be, well, unimaginable.)
It is actually really hard to make things stop orbiting their central mass and subsequently fall into it. Usually you need something that causes drag, a decelerating force, to make that happen. In most cases there isn't much around to provide such a decelerating force.
First of all, isn't it like 100x cheaper to just set up solar arrays down here, even though total flux is 5x weaker? We could surface all builds with solar panels, for example. They should be cheaper to maintain. They wouldn't contribute to debris in orbit, etc.
Secondly, this nutty plan will actually advance global warming as well. If we replace all fossil fuels with this, we are injecting a massive amount of energy into the Earth's biosphere that otherwise would not have been there. Moreover, launching massive numbers of spacecraft to replace a significant fraction of the nation's power supply with "clean solar" will generate greenhouse gases from the initial launches and from subsequent maintenance / replacement missions.
In the distant future we will need to do this... As long as our civilization advances, our energy needs will continue to grow. The sun is the only essentially inexhaustible supply of power available to us. But in the near term, this sounds like a witless idea to me.
If someone can refute these concerns here, I'd love to hear about it...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the wiimote essentially just a thumb rocker that you activate by swinging? So you swing in one direction and that's just the equivalent of touching a button, right? Boolean? On-Off? Press-release? Right?
What's so great about that?
It's not like the wiimote is being tracked in 3 space with 6 degrees of freedom. You can't map the game lightsaber position to the position of the wiimote as you are holding it.
It's just wiik. It is dead to the force. There is no joy in Wii.
To achieve the true coolness that I think all of you latent Jedi crave, you need a controller about a foot long or more where both endpoints are tracked to at least centimeter resolution in three-space. (To be general the controller will need a third point to measure roll orientation along the main axis... but for lightsabers you'd only need two control points.)
And then of course it needs a bunch of buttons to control foot movement, inventory management, etc.
Not necessarily. When you blow stuff up, you're wasting a lot of energy going off in all directions. You could use a containment chamber to help capture some of that and redirect the energy in a helpful direction. But then my understanding is that antimatter "blows up" into gamma photons which are not easy to capture and redirect...
My understanding is that photons are the ultimate in terms of efficient propulsion with the ultimate exhaust velocity. Moreover, lasers can direct all that thrust in a very precise direction. You just have to have a very efficient laser mechanism. And you have to be patient because lasers don't generate a lot of raw thrust.
There's too much absolutism in your thinking. The fact that we are inconveniencing ourselves in order to prevent deaths of our citizens and significantly worse damage to our economic infrastructure is not the same as a terrorist "WIN".
Think of it this way... Now that the terrorists have provoked an increase in security measures, do you think they're happy with a job well done? Are they just going to go home now to their caves, pop open six-packs, and retire contentedly?
No, from their perspective a WIN is nothing short of complete eradication of any civilization or governmental structure that is not under their particular brand of fascist Islamist control. No, what they want is either:
THAT's what an Islamist "win" is.
Our goal is to remove this twisted cancer from human society. But to do that we have to fight the war. We are all part of the war because we are all targets. Their venom is non-discriminating, their scruples non-existent. We can't just sit back in our posh couches watching this one go by on the TV. We have to be willing to accept some inconvenience as a practical matter I think. Because the terrorists have chosen techniques of infiltration, we need to counter this with less inhibited wide-ranging information gathering. That's not a win for them, it's simply us defending ourselves in a sensible and cost-effective manner.
There are lots of long term measures we need to take as well... Encouraging standards of political freedom to rise elsewhere (yes, I see the irony), promoting high standards of education that encourage critical thinking, protecting free access to information, and ensuring economic opportunity world-wide are critical long term measures for inhibiting this kind of perversity from infecting our civilization in the future.
But people need to realize and accept that right now this is a war. We're all involved. And defensive effort is sometimes going to be inconvenient.
Frankly, I'm sorry that McConnell felt he had to come out and tell the terrorists just how to avoid one of our best ways of detecting them.