Fair enough. I think we're well past the point where DRM is worming its way into absolutely everything, and as much as I detest the concept of the stuff, I'm only human and don't really want to cut myself out of all forms of entertainment, objecting to a principle that 95% of people still don't give a damn about, except when they get burnt. Unfortunately, even if they get burnt, most people will likely continue to use drm-laden products when there's no alternative, and so I consider embracing and encouraging steam-like DRM to be encouraging the lesser of two evils, where some evil is already inevitable.
If one option gives me a few small bonuses in the process of kicking me in the balls, then I'm gonna go for that one, if getting kicked in the balls isn't avoidable.
Yes, in theory. But by the standards of gravitational waves, thats pissing in the wind.
If we stuck a star-massed black hole on either side of the earth, at the distance of the moon, such that they orbited each other, with teh earth at their common centre... then you'd get something strong enough to be detectable, if you're lucky.
I doubt that the concept is physically sound, but its an interesting thought experiment.
Gravity is transmitted by gravitons, which travel at the speed of light, and when they hit the opposite side of the box a few nanoseconds after it was closed, they'd bounce off the opposite wall, and continue to bounce around inside it. By the time you got it to earth, they'd likely be bouncing in all directions, and so if you put something in the box, the gravitons would cancel out each others' effects on that object, and it would just be weightless.
At this point, the centripetal acceleration of the rotation of the earth, unbalanced by gravity, would likely cause them to drift to the ceiling. Whether this would be gradual, over days, or instant, pinning them there - someone else can calculate. I can't be bothered.:)
More interesting, imo, would be if you had a one-way-gravitational mirror - you could let gravity into a box from one direction, keeping it trapped there, building up over time until you open a pinhole at the far end and unleash your very own tractor beam!
Yeah you're describing gravitons. They're limited by lightspeed, just like everything else - if they weren't, it would be possible to send information faster than the speed of light (by waving stars back and forward according to morse code, or whatever).
Gravity is both a wave and a particle, like every other fundamental particle / force. In different situations its easier to think of it as one or the other, but its never truly only a particle or only wave-like, its both. Thats crazy quantum mechanics for you...
The rubber-sheet analogy requires 3d space to understand 2d gravity.
Extending it to 3d gravity requires 4d space, and most people can't begin to visualise that. I certainly can't.
Objects in 2D space "fall" down the slope, due to the 3rd dimension. If you were limited to a 2d persepective, you wouldn't see the hill, so things would just tend to be sucked towards massive bodies - ala gravity.
I was buying games in US dollars on there not so long ago with a $2 US to the £ exchange rate and now I'm suddenly seeing games the same as UK shop RRPs like £39.99 so I'm being forced to pay much more than people abroad for the same product...
You can hardly blame steam or valve for the economy, the GBP has gone down the toilet, so what do you expect? If the price is similar to shop-bought, you're trading the ability to sell second hand for the ability to install the game anywhere without actually bringing the box with you. Its up to you to decide if thats what you want. It hardly makes steam the source of all evil.
some of the most limiting DRM in the software world on people?
It certainly has issues, and some features I'm less than happy with - but compared to pretty much any other DRM I've tried, its really not that bad, and it even has the bonus of being able to install anywhere without the CD. Comparing it to the crap that came with spore, or the horrible cries of pain that the Crysis DRM produced from my dvd drive - I'll take steam any day.
Of course they can. If you couldn't predict the future, you'd be crazy to go out driving - you look at the other traffic, and predict where its going to be. If its going to be in the same place as you at the same time, you take action to prevent that, such as braking. Thats predicting the future.
IAAP (ok i used to be), and I commend this distinction - its important to realise that gravitational waves are not the same thing as gravity.
Gravity is (from one point of view) just the curvature of spacetime. Its the large sagging indentation in the rubber sheet of spacetime that a massive body creates. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in this curvature, not gravity itself.
The distinction is somewhat akin to acceleration and velocity - consider a car (hurrah!) travelling with a very high velocity, which accelerates very slightly for a short period. If you could reflect the velocity, it would turn around instantly. Reflecting the acceleration however, causes no immediately obvious change. The car's still travelling bloody fast, in the same direction.
The gravitational waves caused by the earth's motion & rotation are so minute that gravity probe b's measurements, taken over a whole year, still took many months of processing before they could even be detected. Gravity waves are far too weak to have any practical purposes, and certainly not in "anti gravity".
So what about tickling?
Not only, "whats that about?" but... is it a sense all of its own, or does it count as a specific type of pain? Cos I wouldn't call it pain, although we respond in a similar manner to tickling as we do to pain, but with added laughing.
To say that "to be a planet, a body must be in orbit around the sun" has a different meaning from saying that "in the solar system, to be a planet, a body must be in orbit around the sun"
The first excludes everything outside the solar system from being a planet, the second leaves everything outside the solar system undefined.
Honestly, it has never been secret. Its massive, and you can often see the subs sailing up and down the clyde. Besides, if I was looking for somewhere secret, and it was a choice between the big crappy warehouse on the clyde patrolled constantly by guard dogs to keep the hippies from the permanent protest camp from climbing in, or the Mysterious Blur... the blur would win every time.
They are, uh, the appropriate scientific institution. They're also, you know, informed?
Say what you like about the IAU defintion, but its a scientific definition made by scientists.
When the powers that be start defining things they aren't properly informed on, in a manner different to the rest of the world, things get pointlessly confused.
If an elected group of people were to decide that within their durestriction, the speed of light in vacuum is 2 * 10^8 m/s, this changes nothing about the state of the world, but is liable to cause significant issues for physicists working in their durestriction, and particularly for cross-durestriction collaborations.
When the 17th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures defined the speed of light as 299,792,458 m/s in 1983, they were not doing so as elected representatives of the people of Earth, they were doing so as the appropriate scientific institution. This definition clearly didn't change reality in any way, what it did do was give a global definition such that individuals wouldn't use their own favoured definitions and cause inconsistancies when the same calculation is performed by different parties.
Definition of planet, speed of light, I see no real difference here. It doesn't matter how right the definition is, as long as we agree to use it. Consider for instance the average mass of a planet in our solar system. With a standard global definition, this value is simple to agree upon. Without one, you need caveats. If you have caveats for every definition known to man, achieving any consensus quickly becomes a ridiculous process.
Nice selective quoting there.
You missed a bit:
"states that in the Solar System a planet is".. so this definition doesn't apply outside the solar system, it doesn't say that things outwith the solar system cannot be planets.
There are now 8 planets in the UNIVERSE because they defined a planet as a body orbiting the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_definition_of_planet
This definition states that a body in our solar system is a planet if... yadda yadda yadda.
The definition doesn't say that things outwith our solar system are not planets, it simply doesn't say anything about them, either way.
And while there seems to be *majority* scientific consensus on the status of pluto, most objections seem to be based on the fact that its people's "favourite" planet because its named after a disney character...
It's almost as if the poachers are even more of a significant selection force than nature and female preference put together.
Of course they are! If a female doesn't select a male in one breeding season, he can try again the next... if he dies, then he clearly can't. And I imagine that poachers are a more significant threat than tigers or other natural predators...
There's a clear distinction between using a hypothetical example and "making up whatever you want"
...but if thats the way you feel, good day to you too.
Can I record a Christopher Moore book myself and sell it for profit without permission? Nope. And I don't see how my doing that is defensibly different from my writing a piece of code (building a robot, if you will) to read it out loud.
What distinction do you make (if any) between my creating an algorithm on a computer to turn text into audio, in a non-permanent fashion, and my creating an algorithm in my brain and vocal system to turn text into speech?
If I have to pay royalties for every book I run through one, surely I should have to pay royalties for every book I run through the other, and thus pay extra to read a book to children.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks.
Nope, they are providing a seperate process that converts them to audio in a non-permanent manner, akin to reading a book aloud. The only data they transfer is the text of the book.
If I were illiterate, and bought a text-only book with the intention of having a friend read it aloud to me, should I have to pay the audiobook royalties? If not, then what if I scanned the book and ran it through text-to-speech, without saving the result? I fail to see how this is different.
A commonly occurring phenomena in engineering/tech is that guy asks question, girl gives answer, guy nods and asks again, guy2 gives exact same answer as girl, guy listens to guy2 and asks him for more information.
I get this quite a lot, despite being male. I can only presume that this isn't (of itself) a gender issue.
I think it comes down to assumed confidence of the speaker, in the mind of the listener. (If the listener was sexist in the manner described by the OP, then this would apply.) If I sit 'awkwardly' and fidget, as is my wont, I frequently get such a response, regardless of the gender of whoever I'm speaking to.
I blame simple primate group dynamics: listen the to the people that look & act in a manner that corresponds to my preconceptions of what an important person is like. Ignore everyone else!
No we didn't learn eugenics was a problem. If anything what was learned was that a group of people, whether it's the government or not, should not try to to exterminate those they don't like in an attempt to create a super race like the NAZIs did.
A lot of us did. How do you distinguish between what you describe and eugenics? Surely you're not saying that eugenics is ok if it only goes as far as segregation and tiers of citizenship, while avoiding outright genocide?
Why not? Please give rational reasons why people should not be able to make their own decisions on whether we will "design" their own children.
Ok, uh: If the child doesn't end up looking like the parent wanted, presumably they'll face a greater than average chance of rejection.
As kids that look 'different' are generally bullied more, choosing to have a green & blue stripes kid is choosing to put your kid in a situation where they would suffer more, over a prolonged period, than if you hadn't.
What if I really want a kid with no immune system? Or if the 4-arms option requires no immune system also? I wouldn't be the one killing the kid with an infection, but my action would be indirectly responsible, regardless.
And who decides what's a bad name? You?
Duh, other kids of course. You really think little Shitface is gonna ever be able to walk home from school without being mocked & beaten up? As this is reasonably forseeable and easily preventable at the point of naming the child, the parents' actions have (by proxy, due to the imperfect nature of society) caused the child physical and mental harm. Ergo, its abuse?
Designing a child as one would design one's home interior (and that's how a lot of people who would do this think) would be much worse.
Citation needed. Can you prove this or are you just making it up?
Assuming a normal spread of intentions, its safe to assume that some would, unless it can be proven otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, I really believe genetic enhancement could do a lot of good, but I don't believe that hair & eye color are ever factors that define whether a person is 'acceptable' - especially not to their parents.
Doesn't happen though, large groups of people very rarely learn from their mistakes. And last I checked, "let them murder a few million babies, they'll realise their folly eventually" wasn't considered morally acceptable... uh, anywhere. UDHR & all that.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I think we're well past the point where DRM is worming its way into absolutely everything, and as much as I detest the concept of the stuff, I'm only human and don't really want to cut myself out of all forms of entertainment, objecting to a principle that 95% of people still don't give a damn about, except when they get burnt.
Unfortunately, even if they get burnt, most people will likely continue to use drm-laden products when there's no alternative, and so I consider embracing and encouraging steam-like DRM to be encouraging the lesser of two evils, where some evil is already inevitable.
If one option gives me a few small bonuses in the process of kicking me in the balls, then I'm gonna go for that one, if getting kicked in the balls isn't avoidable.
Yes, in theory. But by the standards of gravitational waves, thats pissing in the wind. If we stuck a star-massed black hole on either side of the earth, at the distance of the moon, such that they orbited each other, with teh earth at their common centre ... then you'd get something strong enough to be detectable, if you're lucky.
I doubt that the concept is physically sound, but its an interesting thought experiment. Gravity is transmitted by gravitons, which travel at the speed of light, and when they hit the opposite side of the box a few nanoseconds after it was closed, they'd bounce off the opposite wall, and continue to bounce around inside it. By the time you got it to earth, they'd likely be bouncing in all directions, and so if you put something in the box, the gravitons would cancel out each others' effects on that object, and it would just be weightless.
:)
At this point, the centripetal acceleration of the rotation of the earth, unbalanced by gravity, would likely cause them to drift to the ceiling. Whether this would be gradual, over days, or instant, pinning them there - someone else can calculate. I can't be bothered.
More interesting, imo, would be if you had a one-way-gravitational mirror - you could let gravity into a box from one direction, keeping it trapped there, building up over time until you open a pinhole at the far end and unleash your very own tractor beam!
Twisting. Like the rotation of planets, stars, binary systems, etc.
Yeah you're describing gravitons. They're limited by lightspeed, just like everything else - if they weren't, it would be possible to send information faster than the speed of light (by waving stars back and forward according to morse code, or whatever).
Gravity is both a wave and a particle, like every other fundamental particle / force. In different situations its easier to think of it as one or the other, but its never truly only a particle or only wave-like, its both. Thats crazy quantum mechanics for you...
The rubber-sheet analogy requires 3d space to understand 2d gravity. Extending it to 3d gravity requires 4d space, and most people can't begin to visualise that. I certainly can't.
Objects in 2D space "fall" down the slope, due to the 3rd dimension. If you were limited to a 2d persepective, you wouldn't see the hill, so things would just tend to be sucked towards massive bodies - ala gravity.
I was buying games in US dollars on there not so long ago with a $2 US to the £ exchange rate and now I'm suddenly seeing games the same as UK shop RRPs like £39.99 so I'm being forced to pay much more than people abroad for the same product...
You can hardly blame steam or valve for the economy, the GBP has gone down the toilet, so what do you expect? If the price is similar to shop-bought, you're trading the ability to sell second hand for the ability to install the game anywhere without actually bringing the box with you. Its up to you to decide if thats what you want. It hardly makes steam the source of all evil.
some of the most limiting DRM in the software world on people?
It certainly has issues, and some features I'm less than happy with - but compared to pretty much any other DRM I've tried, its really not that bad, and it even has the bonus of being able to install anywhere without the CD. Comparing it to the crap that came with spore, or the horrible cries of pain that the Crysis DRM produced from my dvd drive - I'll take steam any day.
But people can't predict there future
Of course they can. If you couldn't predict the future, you'd be crazy to go out driving - you look at the other traffic, and predict where its going to be. If its going to be in the same place as you at the same time, you take action to prevent that, such as braking. Thats predicting the future.
IAAP (ok i used to be), and I commend this distinction - its important to realise that gravitational waves are not the same thing as gravity.
Gravity is (from one point of view) just the curvature of spacetime. Its the large sagging indentation in the rubber sheet of spacetime that a massive body creates. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in this curvature, not gravity itself.
The distinction is somewhat akin to acceleration and velocity - consider a car (hurrah!) travelling with a very high velocity, which accelerates very slightly for a short period. If you could reflect the velocity, it would turn around instantly. Reflecting the acceleration however, causes no immediately obvious change. The car's still travelling bloody fast, in the same direction.
The gravitational waves caused by the earth's motion & rotation are so minute that gravity probe b's measurements, taken over a whole year, still took many months of processing before they could even be detected. Gravity waves are far too weak to have any practical purposes, and certainly not in "anti gravity".
My thoughts exactly. And after a few years of patching after release, it will hopefully be as balanced as its predecessor.
So what about tickling? ... is it a sense all of its own, or does it count as a specific type of pain? Cos I wouldn't call it pain, although we respond in a similar manner to tickling as we do to pain, but with added laughing.
Not only, "whats that about?" but
As I'm normally a bit of a grammar nazi myself, I cringed horribly after posting this. No offense taken, its a horrible looking misspelling!
No, you're missing my point.
To say that "to be a planet, a body must be in orbit around the sun" has a different meaning from saying that "in the solar system, to be a planet, a body must be in orbit around the sun"
The first excludes everything outside the solar system from being a planet, the second leaves everything outside the solar system undefined.
Honestly, it has never been secret. Its massive, and you can often see the subs sailing up and down the clyde. Besides, if I was looking for somewhere secret, and it was a choice between the big crappy warehouse on the clyde patrolled constantly by guard dogs to keep the hippies from the permanent protest camp from climbing in, or the Mysterious Blur ... the blur would win every time.
Fastlane's where the UK's fleet lives. Its where they all come back to dock at - its our only nuclear sub base, afaik.
... so by definition, its a non-story.
There's a permanent protest camp just outside it.
This is about an article from the Sun
who are a bunch of snobbish scients to deny that?
They are, uh, the appropriate scientific institution. They're also, you know, informed?
Say what you like about the IAU defintion, but its a scientific definition made by scientists.
When the powers that be start defining things they aren't properly informed on, in a manner different to the rest of the world, things get pointlessly confused.
If an elected group of people were to decide that within their durestriction, the speed of light in vacuum is 2 * 10^8 m/s, this changes nothing about the state of the world, but is liable to cause significant issues for physicists working in their durestriction, and particularly for cross-durestriction collaborations.
When the 17th Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures defined the speed of light as 299,792,458 m/s in 1983, they were not doing so as elected representatives of the people of Earth, they were doing so as the appropriate scientific institution. This definition clearly didn't change reality in any way, what it did do was give a global definition such that individuals wouldn't use their own favoured definitions and cause inconsistancies when the same calculation is performed by different parties.
Definition of planet, speed of light, I see no real difference here. It doesn't matter how right the definition is, as long as we agree to use it. Consider for instance the average mass of a planet in our solar system. With a standard global definition, this value is simple to agree upon. Without one, you need caveats. If you have caveats for every definition known to man, achieving any consensus quickly becomes a ridiculous process.
Nice selective quoting there. You missed a bit: "states that in the Solar System a planet is" .. so this definition doesn't apply outside the solar system, it doesn't say that things outwith the solar system cannot be planets.
There are now 8 planets in the UNIVERSE because they defined a planet as a body orbiting the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_definition_of_planet This definition states that a body in our solar system is a planet if ... yadda yadda yadda.
The definition doesn't say that things outwith our solar system are not planets, it simply doesn't say anything about them, either way.
And while there seems to be *majority* scientific consensus on the status of pluto, most objections seem to be based on the fact that its people's "favourite" planet because its named after a disney character...
It's almost as if the poachers are even more of a significant selection force than nature and female preference put together.
Of course they are! If a female doesn't select a male in one breeding season, he can try again the next ... if he dies, then he clearly can't. And I imagine that poachers are a more significant threat than tigers or other natural predators...
There's a clear distinction between using a hypothetical example and "making up whatever you want"
...but if thats the way you feel, good day to you too.
Can I record a Christopher Moore book myself and sell it for profit without permission? Nope. And I don't see how my doing that is defensibly different from my writing a piece of code (building a robot, if you will) to read it out loud.
What distinction do you make (if any) between my creating an algorithm on a computer to turn text into audio, in a non-permanent fashion, and my creating an algorithm in my brain and vocal system to turn text into speech?
If I have to pay royalties for every book I run through one, surely I should have to pay royalties for every book I run through the other, and thus pay extra to read a book to children.
Amazon is Paying e-book prices and selling them as audiobooks.
Nope, they are providing a seperate process that converts them to audio in a non-permanent manner, akin to reading a book aloud. The only data they transfer is the text of the book.
If I were illiterate, and bought a text-only book with the intention of having a friend read it aloud to me, should I have to pay the audiobook royalties? If not, then what if I scanned the book and ran it through text-to-speech, without saving the result? I fail to see how this is different.
A commonly occurring phenomena in engineering/tech is that guy asks question, girl gives answer, guy nods and asks again, guy2 gives exact same answer as girl, guy listens to guy2 and asks him for more information.
I get this quite a lot, despite being male. I can only presume that this isn't (of itself) a gender issue.
I think it comes down to assumed confidence of the speaker, in the mind of the listener. (If the listener was sexist in the manner described by the OP, then this would apply.) If I sit 'awkwardly' and fidget, as is my wont, I frequently get such a response, regardless of the gender of whoever I'm speaking to.
I blame simple primate group dynamics: listen the to the people that look & act in a manner that corresponds to my preconceptions of what an important person is like. Ignore everyone else!
No we didn't learn eugenics was a problem. If anything what was learned was that a group of people, whether it's the government or not, should not try to to exterminate those they don't like in an attempt to create a super race like the NAZIs did.
A lot of us did. How do you distinguish between what you describe and eugenics? Surely you're not saying that eugenics is ok if it only goes as far as segregation and tiers of citizenship, while avoiding outright genocide?
Why not? Please give rational reasons why people should not be able to make their own decisions on whether we will "design" their own children.
Ok, uh: If the child doesn't end up looking like the parent wanted, presumably they'll face a greater than average chance of rejection.
As kids that look 'different' are generally bullied more, choosing to have a green & blue stripes kid is choosing to put your kid in a situation where they would suffer more, over a prolonged period, than if you hadn't.
What if I really want a kid with no immune system? Or if the 4-arms option requires no immune system also? I wouldn't be the one killing the kid with an infection, but my action would be indirectly responsible, regardless.
And who decides what's a bad name? You?
Duh, other kids of course. You really think little Shitface is gonna ever be able to walk home from school without being mocked & beaten up? As this is reasonably forseeable and easily preventable at the point of naming the child, the parents' actions have (by proxy, due to the imperfect nature of society) caused the child physical and mental harm. Ergo, its abuse?
Designing a child as one would design one's home interior (and that's how a lot of people who would do this think) would be much worse.
Citation needed. Can you prove this or are you just making it up?
Assuming a normal spread of intentions, its safe to assume that some would, unless it can be proven otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, I really believe genetic enhancement could do a lot of good, but I don't believe that hair & eye color are ever factors that define whether a person is 'acceptable' - especially not to their parents.
Doesn't happen though, large groups of people very rarely learn from their mistakes.
And last I checked, "let them murder a few million babies, they'll realise their folly eventually" wasn't considered morally acceptable... uh, anywhere. UDHR & all that.