TNT is trickier still because adding the third nitro group is really unfavored by the straight up nitrating acid method. I'm pretty sure industrially you use some kind of metal catalyst to do it.
Here's the problem: there's a difference between desperate and starving. You can go a long time without food if you were previously well-nourished - upto 3 weeks or so with no real problems. Which means you have a long time to realize you're in trouble, rally your allies etc.
People think that people turn on each other at the drop of dime - but they don't. The first thing desperate people do is forge alliances they might otherwise not consider, and then go looking for a solution to their common problem. They might eventually fall to infighting, but so goes the entirety of human civilization. We are fundamentally a tribal species, if we weren't then there wouldn't be a civilization to fall in the first place.
And it's not like this is a particularly difficult benefit to sell to people either: if someone's stockpiled enough food for a year, and there's 10 of you, then you have enough food for over a month if you knock over their hamlet. Heck, you can sell this idea to people who might be morally opposed, because you can leave them enough food for a month, and reasonably expect to knock over another hamlet before that time is up.
The economics and history support the only sensible conclusion: people who go it alone die out. The Mongol horde wasn't so much a horde as one of the most well-organized and powerful empires for its time, it only seemed like a horde because every village was happy to sell out its neighbors and hope they would be passed over. And the exact same problem applies to survivalists: they think the way they do, because they've misunderstood some very important things about the human condition. Worse, they think they're smarter then everyone else which means they're constantly underestimating potential allies and actual enemies.
Actually the problem with people panicking is they tend to do the stupidest possible thing en masse. Ebola infection in a city - quick, cram on the buses and flee! Congregate in public places to stockpile supplies! Like 90% of the things people would try are the exact things which turn a mild, containable outbreak into a large one.
During a collapse the number of people who are desperate - by definition - is a lot bigger then those who have everything they need. Guess who's going down first? It's not going to be the guy who tries to supply them with things, it's going to be the guy with the lights on who keeps shooting at everyone near his property. An active threat to everyone.
Right. But if you can make a lo-fi game....why not sell it? Modding is dying because the market is getting a lot easier to access and the toolkits are getting easier to use. We're closing in on the point where a competent modding team is essentially a competent development team who definitely should sell the product they create from the outset.
I'd argue also it's a consequence of the mean age of gamers being somewhere in the 30s now. We all have disposable income - I don't have to pick "free" to have my product get seen by people anymore.
The placebo effect doesn't cure actual disease. It's controlled for because when you give someone anything, chances are they change a lot of their behavior and state of mind, and we know those things have actual impacts on the way the body reacts to stressors. But it won't result in a colony of bacteria tearing through your stomach to actually die off.
No doctor prescribes placebos, and we don't plan on treating people with placebos. We worry about them, especially because in cases of looking for improvement rather then easily quantifiable effects, its a big deal, and also because we know even with quantifiable effects, a subset of the population are likely to clear up an issue regardless of intervention.
Nobody cares which drive it is, because they're both conical microwave waveguides which would violate fundamental laws of physics if they worked, being tested in ways which uniquely will fail to ever test the fundamental claim and have trivial explanations for the observed behavior.
You can debunk by asking one simple question: did they test it in a vacuum? No? Then it doesn't matter what they saw unless they were producing staggeringly large amounts of anomalous force. You can get micronewtons out of the hot air coming off a CPU core.
Go to the full paper, search for vacuum. See where that word never appears? In the experimental section describing their actual tests. Neither does "pressure". And yes, I've read the whole thing.
They describe the capabilities of the device, in such a way as to imply they tested in a vacuum. But they never did it - they never explicitly say they did it, and in the conclusions they then say they need to test in a vacuum because they couldn't because they didn't have vacuum rated RF amplifiers.
So no, no they did not test in a vacuum. They really try to hide it though.
Did the resistor have a reaction chamber around it? Maybe a conical structure which would only leak hot air through certain outlets, looking suspiciously like a rocket reaction chamber?
The original paper is wildly ambiguous about whether they actually tested the device in a vacuum. It seems apparent from the surrounding commentary and the paper that they clearly didn't (they describe the apparatus, they never say what the actual conditions they used it in are for the experimental section).
Which means they've proved precisely nothing. Microwaves and heat in a shaped chamber? It's just a wildly inefficient thruster.
No modding has gotten more expensive since Quake. The graphical fidelity expected today makes mods which can't reach it extremely jarring. If you can produce material of that quality, you're already basically good enough to work for a game company and get paid for it.
This has nothing to do with influencing people. This has to do with the real children who are harmed making them. It is noteworthy that the supreme court ruled recently that depictions of child pornography which are simulations - i.e. computer generated images - are not illegal to have.
Well it's a good thing we have a whole system of government balanced on the idea of not doing whatever 1 guy says. Seriously, the amount of people who call for government protections of something to protect them from the government which they then say they are powerless to influence is ridiculous.
If it is noteworthy that we can in fact influence policy, then it is also worth noting that there is no obvious slippery slope between hash matching child abuse images sent over services unencrypted, and then prosecuting on other evidence and the idea that suddenly we're going to allow private corporations to get piracy turned into a felony offence with similar inspection powers.
That would be the one. Saw it in new scientist a while back. There's been a few others. Someone at my university volunteered for a medical trial and as a result contracted a tumor which eventually proved fatal. You can't say "experimental" and expect sick people to actually comprehend the risks.
Ballistic conductors are not super-conducting in the usual sense. They only occur in tiny 1-dimensional conductors, and are a result of the free-path length of electrons in the material being longer then the distance to the materials edges. They also only work if the electrons entering them have allowed energy levels for the free path which any electrical current does not - hence they present resistance at the ingress points.
They're an interesting phenomenon, but definitely not a large scale energy distribution solution.
Still doesn't make it untestable. You keep fitting and explaining until you have enough description to make an unambiguous prediction - thats your test.
Pseudoscience is when you never do a test you should and can do. See any free energy insanity, or the recent EMDrive stuff.
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Here's the problem: Facebook will never not show you an ad. At the end of the day, if you don't fit a better model, they revert to lowest common denominator advertising. "Over drinking age? Male? Cue up the alcohol ad with women in it!"
And that's the thing, Facebook's advertising as a result is like all the other advertising in the world: you know where it is, you know it mostly never applies to you, so you tune it out. If they make it more prominent, you turn on ad block. Which says worlds about their actual confidence in their data: they don't have any. They don't know what you will do next. Which is why they always show you something - because they can't afford not to. They won't leave ads turned off, then strategically show them right when you show a high probability of being interested in X and could be swayed to a brand. They have no idea when that is, or what it will be.
Why is.NET called that? I would love to know how the hell they came up with that, since it's definitely tricky to Google (do you include or exclude the leading period? Who knows!)
Absolutely everything in space travel is about 'legacy' - "has this part, flown and operated, in an actual space mission before?"
Everything about space travel requires testing because you can't properly test anything on Earth. Not really, not as good as actually sending it up there and checking it works in the real environment. One of the fun things people do with Cubesats at the moment is build them with all sorts of random components, because a cubesat is so cheap you can afford and expect to lose it, but if it works, you can put a big tick on "yep, operates for X hours in low earth orbit".
You absolutely would not want to send a CO2 -> O2 device to Mars, to supply humans with O2, that has never been into space or onto Mars before. Do we truly understand Martian dust environments? Chemistry at extended periods of time (months) of catalysts at low pressure/temperature?
Developing the space legacy of components like that (and it's not just a CO2 -> O2 converter it will be many individual component designs) is staggeringly important. Not to mention, that it means in the future you can more reliably design experiments to go to Mars which depend on an oxidizing atmosphere, if you can reliably make it and purify it in situ. But you wouldn't want to put a chain of stuff like that on a probe, and then discover none of it will work because your oxygen maker breaks down after a few hours.
The whiplash on that one when someone finally figures out how to make asteroid mining even slightly viable is going to be incredible. I expect many breathless articles by terrestial mining magnates on how it's a terrifically poor investment that will never work in the lead up to someone splashing down a blob of aerated platinum.
Slashdot Mirror
Teach a man to steal and you keep him in explosives for a day. Teach a man to synthesize TNT and you can bother the FBI for years.
Pretty sure we've got the last part covered in this thread quite aptly.
TNT is trickier still because adding the third nitro group is really unfavored by the straight up nitrating acid method. I'm pretty sure industrially you use some kind of metal catalyst to do it.
Here's the problem: there's a difference between desperate and starving. You can go a long time without food if you were previously well-nourished - upto 3 weeks or so with no real problems. Which means you have a long time to realize you're in trouble, rally your allies etc.
People think that people turn on each other at the drop of dime - but they don't. The first thing desperate people do is forge alliances they might otherwise not consider, and then go looking for a solution to their common problem. They might eventually fall to infighting, but so goes the entirety of human civilization. We are fundamentally a tribal species, if we weren't then there wouldn't be a civilization to fall in the first place.
And it's not like this is a particularly difficult benefit to sell to people either: if someone's stockpiled enough food for a year, and there's 10 of you, then you have enough food for over a month if you knock over their hamlet. Heck, you can sell this idea to people who might be morally opposed, because you can leave them enough food for a month, and reasonably expect to knock over another hamlet before that time is up.
The economics and history support the only sensible conclusion: people who go it alone die out. The Mongol horde wasn't so much a horde as one of the most well-organized and powerful empires for its time, it only seemed like a horde because every village was happy to sell out its neighbors and hope they would be passed over. And the exact same problem applies to survivalists: they think the way they do, because they've misunderstood some very important things about the human condition. Worse, they think they're smarter then everyone else which means they're constantly underestimating potential allies and actual enemies.
Actually the problem with people panicking is they tend to do the stupidest possible thing en masse. Ebola infection in a city - quick, cram on the buses and flee! Congregate in public places to stockpile supplies! Like 90% of the things people would try are the exact things which turn a mild, containable outbreak into a large one.
During a collapse the number of people who are desperate - by definition - is a lot bigger then those who have everything they need. Guess who's going down first? It's not going to be the guy who tries to supply them with things, it's going to be the guy with the lights on who keeps shooting at everyone near his property. An active threat to everyone.
Right. But if you can make a lo-fi game....why not sell it? Modding is dying because the market is getting a lot easier to access and the toolkits are getting easier to use. We're closing in on the point where a competent modding team is essentially a competent development team who definitely should sell the product they create from the outset.
I'd argue also it's a consequence of the mean age of gamers being somewhere in the 30s now. We all have disposable income - I don't have to pick "free" to have my product get seen by people anymore.
The placebo effect doesn't cure actual disease. It's controlled for because when you give someone anything, chances are they change a lot of their behavior and state of mind, and we know those things have actual impacts on the way the body reacts to stressors. But it won't result in a colony of bacteria tearing through your stomach to actually die off.
No doctor prescribes placebos, and we don't plan on treating people with placebos. We worry about them, especially because in cases of looking for improvement rather then easily quantifiable effects, its a big deal, and also because we know even with quantifiable effects, a subset of the population are likely to clear up an issue regardless of intervention.
*sigh*
Nobody cares which drive it is, because they're both conical microwave waveguides which would violate fundamental laws of physics if they worked, being tested in ways which uniquely will fail to ever test the fundamental claim and have trivial explanations for the observed behavior.
You can debunk by asking one simple question: did they test it in a vacuum? No? Then it doesn't matter what they saw unless they were producing staggeringly large amounts of anomalous force. You can get micronewtons out of the hot air coming off a CPU core.
They did not test it in a vacuum.
Go to the full paper, search for vacuum. See where that word never appears? In the experimental section describing their actual tests. Neither does "pressure". And yes, I've read the whole thing.
They describe the capabilities of the device, in such a way as to imply they tested in a vacuum. But they never did it - they never explicitly say they did it, and in the conclusions they then say they need to test in a vacuum because they couldn't because they didn't have vacuum rated RF amplifiers.
So no, no they did not test in a vacuum. They really try to hide it though.
Did the resistor have a reaction chamber around it? Maybe a conical structure which would only leak hot air through certain outlets, looking suspiciously like a rocket reaction chamber?
The original paper is wildly ambiguous about whether they actually tested the device in a vacuum. It seems apparent from the surrounding commentary and the paper that they clearly didn't (they describe the apparatus, they never say what the actual conditions they used it in are for the experimental section).
Which means they've proved precisely nothing. Microwaves and heat in a shaped chamber? It's just a wildly inefficient thruster.
No modding has gotten more expensive since Quake. The graphical fidelity expected today makes mods which can't reach it extremely jarring. If you can produce material of that quality, you're already basically good enough to work for a game company and get paid for it.
This has nothing to do with influencing people. This has to do with the real children who are harmed making them. It is noteworthy that the supreme court ruled recently that depictions of child pornography which are simulations - i.e. computer generated images - are not illegal to have.
Well it's a good thing we have a whole system of government balanced on the idea of not doing whatever 1 guy says. Seriously, the amount of people who call for government protections of something to protect them from the government which they then say they are powerless to influence is ridiculous.
If it is noteworthy that we can in fact influence policy, then it is also worth noting that there is no obvious slippery slope between hash matching child abuse images sent over services unencrypted, and then prosecuting on other evidence and the idea that suddenly we're going to allow private corporations to get piracy turned into a felony offence with similar inspection powers.
Welcome to slippery slope fallaciously.
That would be the one. Saw it in new scientist a while back. There's been a few others. Someone at my university volunteered for a medical trial and as a result contracted a tumor which eventually proved fatal. You can't say "experimental" and expect sick people to actually comprehend the risks.
Ballistic conductors are not super-conducting in the usual sense. They only occur in tiny 1-dimensional conductors, and are a result of the free-path length of electrons in the material being longer then the distance to the materials edges. They also only work if the electrons entering them have allowed energy levels for the free path which any electrical current does not - hence they present resistance at the ingress points.
They're an interesting phenomenon, but definitely not a large scale energy distribution solution.
Still doesn't make it untestable. You keep fitting and explaining until you have enough description to make an unambiguous prediction - thats your test.
Pseudoscience is when you never do a test you should and can do. See any free energy insanity, or the recent EMDrive stuff.
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).
40% is still a big minority.
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Here's the problem: Facebook will never not show you an ad. At the end of the day, if you don't fit a better model, they revert to lowest common denominator advertising. "Over drinking age? Male? Cue up the alcohol ad with women in it!"
And that's the thing, Facebook's advertising as a result is like all the other advertising in the world: you know where it is, you know it mostly never applies to you, so you tune it out. If they make it more prominent, you turn on ad block. Which says worlds about their actual confidence in their data: they don't have any. They don't know what you will do next. Which is why they always show you something - because they can't afford not to. They won't leave ads turned off, then strategically show them right when you show a high probability of being interested in X and could be swayed to a brand. They have no idea when that is, or what it will be.
Why is .NET called that? I would love to know how the hell they came up with that, since it's definitely tricky to Google (do you include or exclude the leading period? Who knows!)
Actually he's not. Its pretty accurate way to describe why you can't have perfect information.
Absolutely everything in space travel is about 'legacy' - "has this part, flown and operated, in an actual space mission before?"
Everything about space travel requires testing because you can't properly test anything on Earth. Not really, not as good as actually sending it up there and checking it works in the real environment. One of the fun things people do with Cubesats at the moment is build them with all sorts of random components, because a cubesat is so cheap you can afford and expect to lose it, but if it works, you can put a big tick on "yep, operates for X hours in low earth orbit".
You absolutely would not want to send a CO2 -> O2 device to Mars, to supply humans with O2, that has never been into space or onto Mars before. Do we truly understand Martian dust environments? Chemistry at extended periods of time (months) of catalysts at low pressure/temperature?
Developing the space legacy of components like that (and it's not just a CO2 -> O2 converter it will be many individual component designs) is staggeringly important. Not to mention, that it means in the future you can more reliably design experiments to go to Mars which depend on an oxidizing atmosphere, if you can reliably make it and purify it in situ. But you wouldn't want to put a chain of stuff like that on a probe, and then discover none of it will work because your oxygen maker breaks down after a few hours.
The whiplash on that one when someone finally figures out how to make asteroid mining even slightly viable is going to be incredible. I expect many breathless articles by terrestial mining magnates on how it's a terrifically poor investment that will never work in the lead up to someone splashing down a blob of aerated platinum.