Also, your post would be a strawman (GP never said anything about racism), if it weren't for the fact that it's actually a WHOOOSH! (Did you really not catch the sarcasm in "important American allies, like Georgia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia"?)
SimCity, seriously? Wow, just wow. Go back to your computer games; grown-ups are talking about the real economy here.
Before you start arguing I know nothing about SimCity and that it's actually is a good model for a real-life economy, no, it isn't. As a teenager, I incidentally tried to replicate some real-life situations in cities I knew well in the SimCity universe, and my exact conclusion was that something was seriously unrealistic regarding the balance between the cost of infrastructure projects, the amount of direct taxation needed to fund them, and the impact of said taxation. (Yes, I was one weirdo teenager.) It's a game, kid. If it were realistic, it would be far less entertaining to play.
When a political movement puts itself on a collision course with science, science will defend itself. When proposed policies are based on scientifically incorrect assumptions, it is nothing less than the sacred duty of media in general and science magazines in particular to call them out on it. Else democracy itself is in peril.
If the editorials in Science and Scientific American offend conservatives, conservatives have no-one to blame but themselves. Sure, you can argue that moderate conservatives who are not idiots are also victims for being made "guilty by association", but they could have done a better job at distancing themselves from said idiots. We wouldn't be having this debt ceiling shitstorm if they had.
There are quantum effects involved in this process. Quantum effects (more specifically wave function collapse) are thought to be a source of true, inherent and perfectly unpredictable randomness. Throw that into a massive (from an atomistic point of view) chaotic system and you get a gigantic mess that is impossible to simulate with sufficient precision to predict the noise that comes out (and far, far beyond our computational means even if you don't care about precision).
I would say "read more about it here, but a lot of what's written there is inaccurate. Both resistor noise and avalanche noise have important quantum nature and classifying them under "physical phenomena without quantum-random properties" is factually incorrect. The second comment by user "agr" in the discussion nails it. Pretty much anything involving electrons is quantum at the microscopic level.
Are you guys dense or what? I really didn't think I needed to explain this. What do the following disciplines have in common?
- Geology
- Genetics
- Evolutionary biology
- Economy
- Social Science
- Climate Science
- Reproductive Biology
Answer: for each of them, there have been American Republicans making statements that are at odds with scientifically established observations of reality. In order:
- Creationism is at odds with geology and genetics
- Intelligent Design is at odds with evolutionary biology
- Trickle-down effect, "all economic regulation is bad", "Obamacare = socialism", "defaulting on our debt will no be that bad" and the list goes on...
- More guns = less murders. Nuh-huh! This has been disproven ad nauseum.
- Don't even get me started about climate change denialism. Were we talking about Scientific American? Michael Shermer, science writer and founder of the Skeptics Society (devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs) has a longstanding column ins SciAm titled "Skeptic". For the longest time, he used to be critical of the scientific consensus on this subject. At long last, in may 2006, he conceded against overwhelming scientific evidence. A wise man can change his mind, even though he was 10 years behind the curve. That is now 7 years ago and a large number of Republicans are still in denial. In the meanwhile, the consensus has monotonously grown and satellite measurements are showing beyond reasonable doubt that there is more thermal energy entering the biosphere than leaving it. Just what kind of evidence would be sufficient to change the minds of you fools?
- An then there's the infamous legitimate rape incident...
The Republican (and Tea) party's worldview is based upon dogma that is rapidly drifting away from reality, like a boat drifting away from the shore. So no, reality indeed doesn't literally have a liberal bias, as pointed out "concisely, to the point, and insightfully" by Capt. Obvious. However, if you're observing reality from a drifting reference frame, it seems to be getting more liberal by the day. Of course, you won't be calling it reality at that point.
(TL;DR version: "whoosh" doesn't mean "you're wrong", it means "you didn't get it".)
that's the *only* one that uses the prefix "a" correctly, and is closest to the original definition
In contemporary (especially American) English, a great many words have deviated ridiculously from their "original definition" and Greek and Latin prefixes are often used inaccurately. For one who knows a bit about languages, this can be a constant source of fun or frustration (depending on one's attitude). However, insisting on using the "original / correct meaning" in a serious conversation only sows confusion. So yes, I know the contemporary usage is inaccurate, and there are some (sorry can't come up with more examples atm) other English words that make me feel icky every time I have to use them in a contemporary sense that doesn't correspond to their original meaning. Grin and bear it.
The actual test for atheism is "do you believe in God?" Any answer other than "Yes" is atheist. Every baby is born atheist, and taught God by their parents (by means of the virus). Someone who is agnostic (in the modern definition) is an atheist.
Example: I consider myself agnostic. Do I believe in God? No. That makes me not-a-believer. Do I believe there's no God? No. That makes me not-an-atheist. Agnostic is a valid classification and distinct from both believer and atheist. Don't make this an "either you're with us or against us" thing; please allow for neutral parties to exist.
Not Scientific American's fault reality has a liberal bias. And yes, very astute of you, it's getting worse and worse; quite dramatically so indeed. Why o why, good lady, would you think that is happening? Why is the shore moving further and further away? Why can't it stop moving?
Congratulations, you're clueless both about the amount of red tape and strict rigor that is required when handling HIPAA data, and about the meaning of "the cloud" in this context. Why did you even bother to comment?
In the context of handling peaks of demand in computer power, "the cloud" refers to 3rd party services such as Amazon EC2. You'll often be running on virtual machines, with no easy way to ensure in a 100% foolproof fashion where data winds up. Even if you keep everything in memory, it may be swapped to disk on the host operating system, with no convenient way to wipe it. Granted, it won't be easy for an attacker to exploit these kind of phenomena, but HIPAA doesn't care about such arguments; a potential breach is a potential breach. To legally use a cloud service for HIPAA - protected data, the cloud service in question would need to go through a lengthy certification process so that they can offer a "HIPAA-compliant cloud service". Now they could have gone to Amazon and asked them to do just that, but it would have come at a price... (see my post is suddenly not offtopic anymore)
About MD being easy, I beg to differ. The only thing that's easy about it is to do crap. Computers are garbage in, garbage out. It is possible to do things right, only it's much, much more difficult. In fact, so few people know how to do things right that the crap easily passes peer review. It's not so much that the reviewers let the crap pass on purpose in a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" fashion, it's that a lot of the reviewers simply don't know any better. To put it differently, there are far too few reviewers who know what they're doing to reliably block crap from getting published. And this is exacerbated by the attitude of those who do crap. Got a bad review? Reviewer had a bad day and is being unreasonable - submit same stuff to different journal. There are enough journals, and the chance to get a knowledgeable reviewer who can recognize the flaws 2 or 3 times in a row gets almost vanishingly small.
The problem is not so much the computational resources or accuracy of the models. Although these have improved dramatically, even 10 years ago, highly significant results could be gotten out of them, assuming very careful setup, analysis and interpretation. That is what a lot (but not all!) of computational studies are lacking.
To end on a more positive note, post-publication, the really good stuff does get recognized by the community and often gets highly cited. As you alluded, evaluating scientists in the field by number of citations instead of number of publications and impact factor would go a long way in rectifying this crooked situation.
Are you the same person who posted this? I can assure you you're just as wrong as you were back then. Since you're acting like a broken record, allow be to return the favor:
Raltegravir (trade name: Isentress) is one example of a molecule that wouldn't probably exist without classical computational chemistry.
[You are] living 10 years in the past. New examples [of computer-designed drug in clinical trials] are popping up on a yearly basis at medicinal chemistry conferences. I've personally witnessed a lead structure coming out of a modeling study that only needed a little experimental validation and optimization to give rise to a drug candidate that is now in clinical trials.
Computer modeling has been badly oversold during the 1980s, resulting in a period of disillusionment in the 1990s. Some people (mostly at non-US academic institution, I'm sad to say) apparently never got over it. To those people: wake up, it's 2013! Computational techniques have become better, and computer power has increased a few orders of magnitude. Equally important, computational medicinal chemists have come to understand there's no free lunch: a simple calculation will yield simplistic results. To get truly predictive results, a labor- and computer-intensive project involving an diverse palette of computational techniques is required, and collaboration with experimentalists is a must. Conversely, any experimentalist who doesn't have a modeling expert among his/her collaborators by now deserves the imminent outsourcing of his/her job to India or China.
To continue replying on your present post: there do exist rigorous ways to benchmark the accuracy of force field parameters against experimental observables; it's just that only a handful of experts routinely do this. And that's exactly the problem with this field - it has a bad name because of all the people doing crap, and patting each other on the back in true circle-jerk fashion (so you're right on that account). Like your friend; to do things right in this field is more difficult than Quantum Chemistry, so unless he is a supergenius, I cannot imagine 20 papers written in 3 years by a junior grad student to be worth a dime. Indeed, I'm reading papers ranging from utterly worthless to deeply flawed on a daily basis. But that doesn't imply that the whole field is flawed; just that a large number of its participants have no clue what they're doing. There's a small elite of experts who do, and they're almost consistently getting good results.
"Conflict of interest" notice: one of the 3 nobelists in TFA is my mentor's mentor.
When Warcraft was released, nobody I knew was even talking about Dune 2.
Well duh, that was 2 years later. Dune II was single-player only (IIRC), so by the time Warcraft came out, everyone had finished the campaigns a couple of times and got bored.
The balance wasn't great (though your catapult issue was way off as catapults were too expensive and were nowhere near as good as Water Elementals/Demons that cost nothing)
I give you the catapults may not have been very cost-effective on average, but every so often, a catapult would make an epic lucky hit, ruining the battle for the opponent. That kind of randomness is very frustrating.
but it was fun (particularly multiplayer).
OK, I'll retract my statement that Warcraft had little innovation. The multiplayer part was definitely new at that time (yes, there was Modern Wars, but I'm not sure that one can be classified as an RTS in the present-day sense of the word). It just happened that modems were not very widespread amongst my friends at the time, so probably Warcraft had a lot more replay value and thus longer lasting popularity amongst people who had modems.
Dune 2? My friends were pretty hardcore videogamers at the time that Warcraft was released (a time when videogames on the computer were relegated to nerds) and I'd be surprised if any of them even played Dune 2 at the time.
I was in high school when Dune II came out and just about everyone who had a PC and was interested in games was playing it. Even 4 years after it was released, a father of a friend walked into a room where someone happened to be playing Dune II on an old computer, and instantly commented: "ooh I know that game - it's burned into our screen" (he was speaking figuratively).
In the end, our disagreement in perception is probably a difference between the modem haves and have-nots. I insist that as a purely single-player RTS, Dune II was way more innovative, groundbreaking and influential than Warcraft, but I can easily see that in an audience with modems, Warcraft would be the bigger hit because it enabled challenging and less boring battles against human intelligence.
It would just explode, and the ultimate ceiling is the tiny amount of fuel they're using (though in practice, there are lower ceilings related to the amount of heating/compression the machine can manage and the amount of time this compression is maintained). Wikipedia says that they're ultimately expecting 20MJ with the current setup (though the announcement indicates they only surpassed 1.8MJ), and with design improvements to the apparatus up to 100-150MJ. It also says the chamber is designed to contain a 45MJ explosion, equivalent to 11kg of TNT. To make a politically incorrect analogy, that's roughly as much a suicide bomber would carry, or the warhead of a hellfire anti-tank missile. It will make a decent "boom" but it won't destroy the building.
Except that the news is not on their website yet (maybe the people who update it are "non-essential government personnel"). The shot they're talking about in your link consumed 1.7MJ and yielded 8kJ, which is a far cry from what is claimed on the BBC website. As I understood, it also wasn't aimed to maximize energy yield.
Since the release of Torchlight II and the announcement there won't be another Torchlight a year ago, it's been awfully quiet. Is the company doing OK? Are you still working on something? If yes, can you reveal something, a hint, anything?
The original Warcraft and Diablo games hold a special status in the hearts of many gamers. Each game brought its genre into focus,
That sounds a bit exagerrated. Maybe it's true for Diablo, but in the RTS genre, Dune II was pretty high-profile and came out 2 years earlier. In comparison, Warcraft felt like a knock-off, with little innovation, and less balanced (once the catapults started rolling out, it often became a game of chance, depending on which catapult would insta-kill a bunch of difficult-to-control units that were running around erratically). Bilzzard later redeemed itself big time with the epic StarCraft and Warcraft III, but the original Warcraft? Meh!
That would effectively be the same as saying: "Capitalism, without significant interference, will tend towards a class society."
So if that's true, then it seems we have the choice between:
(A) significant regulatory interference
(B) a class society
(C) something else than pure capitalism
Yeah, and 99.99% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I give you that a significant percentage of micromanagers don't know and don't care about much, but your 99.99% is way overestimated. The reason you have such a negative perception of micromanages is likely that micromanagement bruises people's egos, so they will complain about it even if the micromanager in question knows what they're doing and has a clear vision. Case in point, most sources say your St. Jobs was infuriating to work for. These kind of complaints (not only about Jobs of course) are so pervasive that they grew into a stereotype of the hated nitwit micromanager.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, your post would be a strawman (GP never said anything about racism), if it weren't for the fact that it's actually a WHOOOSH! (Did you really not catch the sarcasm in "important American allies, like Georgia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia"?)
Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better. To use the words of former British ambassador Christopher Meyer, who doesn't seem to have a any horses in this race, The Tea Party is "[a] combination of grassroots populism, professional conservative politics, and big money, floating on a sea of economic distress" (with excuses for linking to the mail; don't worry, it is Sir Christopher Meyer who wrote the article).
SimCity, seriously? Wow, just wow. Go back to your computer games; grown-ups are talking about the real economy here.
Before you start arguing I know nothing about SimCity and that it's actually is a good model for a real-life economy, no, it isn't. As a teenager, I incidentally tried to replicate some real-life situations in cities I knew well in the SimCity universe, and my exact conclusion was that something was seriously unrealistic regarding the balance between the cost of infrastructure projects, the amount of direct taxation needed to fund them, and the impact of said taxation. (Yes, I was one weirdo teenager.) It's a game, kid. If it were realistic, it would be far less entertaining to play.
When a political movement puts itself on a collision course with science, science will defend itself. When proposed policies are based on scientifically incorrect assumptions, it is nothing less than the sacred duty of media in general and science magazines in particular to call them out on it. Else democracy itself is in peril.
If the editorials in Science and Scientific American offend conservatives, conservatives have no-one to blame but themselves. Sure, you can argue that moderate conservatives who are not idiots are also victims for being made "guilty by association", but they could have done a better job at distancing themselves from said idiots. We wouldn't be having this debt ceiling shitstorm if they had.
There are quantum effects involved in this process. Quantum effects (more specifically wave function collapse) are thought to be a source of true, inherent and perfectly unpredictable randomness. Throw that into a massive (from an atomistic point of view) chaotic system and you get a gigantic mess that is impossible to simulate with sufficient precision to predict the noise that comes out (and far, far beyond our computational means even if you don't care about precision).
I would say "read more about it here, but a lot of what's written there is inaccurate. Both resistor noise and avalanche noise have important quantum nature and classifying them under "physical phenomena without quantum-random properties" is factually incorrect. The second comment by user "agr" in the discussion nails it. Pretty much anything involving electrons is quantum at the microscopic level.
Are you guys dense or what? I really didn't think I needed to explain this. What do the following disciplines have in common?
- Geology
- Genetics
- Evolutionary biology
- Economy
- Social Science
- Climate Science
- Reproductive Biology
Answer: for each of them, there have been American Republicans making statements that are at odds with scientifically established observations of reality. In order:
- Creationism is at odds with geology and genetics
- Intelligent Design is at odds with evolutionary biology
- Trickle-down effect, "all economic regulation is bad", "Obamacare = socialism", "defaulting on our debt will no be that bad" and the list goes on...
- More guns = less murders. Nuh-huh! This has been disproven ad nauseum.
- Don't even get me started about climate change denialism. Were we talking about Scientific American? Michael Shermer, science writer and founder of the Skeptics Society (devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs) has a longstanding column ins SciAm titled "Skeptic". For the longest time, he used to be critical of the scientific consensus on this subject. At long last, in may 2006, he conceded against overwhelming scientific evidence. A wise man can change his mind, even though he was 10 years behind the curve. That is now 7 years ago and a large number of Republicans are still in denial. In the meanwhile, the consensus has monotonously grown and satellite measurements are showing beyond reasonable doubt that there is more thermal energy entering the biosphere than leaving it. Just what kind of evidence would be sufficient to change the minds of you fools?
- An then there's the infamous legitimate rape incident...
The Republican (and Tea) party's worldview is based upon dogma that is rapidly drifting away from reality, like a boat drifting away from the shore. So no, reality indeed doesn't literally have a liberal bias, as pointed out "concisely, to the point, and insightfully" by Capt. Obvious. However, if you're observing reality from a drifting reference frame, it seems to be getting more liberal by the day. Of course, you won't be calling it reality at that point.
(TL;DR version: "whoosh" doesn't mean "you're wrong", it means "you didn't get it".)
that's the *only* one that uses the prefix "a" correctly, and is closest to the original definition
In contemporary (especially American) English, a great many words have deviated ridiculously from their "original definition" and Greek and Latin prefixes are often used inaccurately. For one who knows a bit about languages, this can be a constant source of fun or frustration (depending on one's attitude). However, insisting on using the "original / correct meaning" in a serious conversation only sows confusion. So yes, I know the contemporary usage is inaccurate, and there are some (sorry can't come up with more examples atm) other English words that make me feel icky every time I have to use them in a contemporary sense that doesn't correspond to their original meaning. Grin and bear it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism I note that there'd be no reason for such a term if the two terms were mutually exclusive.
Neither would there be need for such a term if all agnosticism is automatically atheism.
I think that would qualify for a -whooosh-
The actual test for atheism is "do you believe in God?" Any answer other than "Yes" is atheist. Every baby is born atheist, and taught God by their parents (by means of the virus). Someone who is agnostic (in the modern definition) is an atheist.
I mostly agree with your post, but not on this particular statement. Only the answer "No" is atheist. The answers "maybe", "I don't care", "depends on your definition of God", "I can't answer this" or "question does not compute" are not atheism. In contemporary English, "atheist" specifically refers to someone who believes there is no deity:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/atheism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agnostic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
Example: I consider myself agnostic. Do I believe in God? No. That makes me not-a-believer. Do I believe there's no God? No. That makes me not-an-atheist. Agnostic is a valid classification and distinct from both believer and atheist. Don't make this an "either you're with us or against us" thing; please allow for neutral parties to exist.
Neither do I. Weird, isn't it?
Not Scientific American's fault reality has a liberal bias. And yes, very astute of you, it's getting worse and worse; quite dramatically so indeed. Why o why, good lady, would you think that is happening? Why is the shore moving further and further away? Why can't it stop moving?
Oops sorry, I'll have to retract that post. Looks like someone took care of it already.
Congratulations, you're clueless both about the amount of red tape and strict rigor that is required when handling HIPAA data, and about the meaning of "the cloud" in this context. Why did you even bother to comment?
In the context of handling peaks of demand in computer power, "the cloud" refers to 3rd party services such as Amazon EC2. You'll often be running on virtual machines, with no easy way to ensure in a 100% foolproof fashion where data winds up. Even if you keep everything in memory, it may be swapped to disk on the host operating system, with no convenient way to wipe it. Granted, it won't be easy for an attacker to exploit these kind of phenomena, but HIPAA doesn't care about such arguments; a potential breach is a potential breach. To legally use a cloud service for HIPAA - protected data, the cloud service in question would need to go through a lengthy certification process so that they can offer a "HIPAA-compliant cloud service". Now they could have gone to Amazon and asked them to do just that, but it would have come at a price... (see my post is suddenly not offtopic anymore)
Yes, Raltegravir. Not a neutral source? Fine, here's another one: Zanamivir.
About MD being easy, I beg to differ. The only thing that's easy about it is to do crap. Computers are garbage in, garbage out. It is possible to do things right, only it's much, much more difficult. In fact, so few people know how to do things right that the crap easily passes peer review. It's not so much that the reviewers let the crap pass on purpose in a "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" fashion, it's that a lot of the reviewers simply don't know any better. To put it differently, there are far too few reviewers who know what they're doing to reliably block crap from getting published. And this is exacerbated by the attitude of those who do crap. Got a bad review? Reviewer had a bad day and is being unreasonable - submit same stuff to different journal. There are enough journals, and the chance to get a knowledgeable reviewer who can recognize the flaws 2 or 3 times in a row gets almost vanishingly small.
The problem is not so much the computational resources or accuracy of the models. Although these have improved dramatically, even 10 years ago, highly significant results could be gotten out of them, assuming very careful setup, analysis and interpretation. That is what a lot (but not all!) of computational studies are lacking.
To end on a more positive note, post-publication, the really good stuff does get recognized by the community and often gets highly cited. As you alluded, evaluating scientists in the field by number of citations instead of number of publications and impact factor would go a long way in rectifying this crooked situation.
Are you the same person who posted this? I can assure you you're just as wrong as you were back then. Since you're acting like a broken record, allow be to return the favor:
Raltegravir (trade name: Isentress) is one example of a molecule that wouldn't probably exist without classical computational chemistry.
[You are] living 10 years in the past. New examples [of computer-designed drug in clinical trials] are popping up on a yearly basis at medicinal chemistry conferences. I've personally witnessed a lead structure coming out of a modeling study that only needed a little experimental validation and optimization to give rise to a drug candidate that is now in clinical trials.
Computer modeling has been badly oversold during the 1980s, resulting in a period of disillusionment in the 1990s. Some people (mostly at non-US academic institution, I'm sad to say) apparently never got over it. To those people: wake up, it's 2013! Computational techniques have become better, and computer power has increased a few orders of magnitude. Equally important, computational medicinal chemists have come to understand there's no free lunch: a simple calculation will yield simplistic results. To get truly predictive results, a labor- and computer-intensive project involving an diverse palette of computational techniques is required, and collaboration with experimentalists is a must. Conversely, any experimentalist who doesn't have a modeling expert among his/her collaborators by now deserves the imminent outsourcing of his/her job to India or China.
To continue replying on your present post: there do exist rigorous ways to benchmark the accuracy of force field parameters against experimental observables; it's just that only a handful of experts routinely do this. And that's exactly the problem with this field - it has a bad name because of all the people doing crap, and patting each other on the back in true circle-jerk fashion (so you're right on that account). Like your friend; to do things right in this field is more difficult than Quantum Chemistry, so unless he is a supergenius, I cannot imagine 20 papers written in 3 years by a junior grad student to be worth a dime. Indeed, I'm reading papers ranging from utterly worthless to deeply flawed on a daily basis. But that doesn't imply that the whole field is flawed; just that a large number of its participants have no clue what they're doing. There's a small elite of experts who do, and they're almost consistently getting good results.
"Conflict of interest" notice: one of the 3 nobelists in TFA is my mentor's mentor.
When Warcraft was released, nobody I knew was even talking about Dune 2.
Well duh, that was 2 years later. Dune II was single-player only (IIRC), so by the time Warcraft came out, everyone had finished the campaigns a couple of times and got bored.
The balance wasn't great (though your catapult issue was way off as catapults were too expensive and were nowhere near as good as Water Elementals/Demons that cost nothing)
I give you the catapults may not have been very cost-effective on average, but every so often, a catapult would make an epic lucky hit, ruining the battle for the opponent. That kind of randomness is very frustrating.
but it was fun (particularly multiplayer).
OK, I'll retract my statement that Warcraft had little innovation. The multiplayer part was definitely new at that time (yes, there was Modern Wars, but I'm not sure that one can be classified as an RTS in the present-day sense of the word). It just happened that modems were not very widespread amongst my friends at the time, so probably Warcraft had a lot more replay value and thus longer lasting popularity amongst people who had modems.
Dune 2? My friends were pretty hardcore videogamers at the time that Warcraft was released (a time when videogames on the computer were relegated to nerds) and I'd be surprised if any of them even played Dune 2 at the time.
I was in high school when Dune II came out and just about everyone who had a PC and was interested in games was playing it. Even 4 years after it was released, a father of a friend walked into a room where someone happened to be playing Dune II on an old computer, and instantly commented: "ooh I know that game - it's burned into our screen" (he was speaking figuratively).
In the end, our disagreement in perception is probably a difference between the modem haves and have-nots. I insist that as a purely single-player RTS, Dune II was way more innovative, groundbreaking and influential than Warcraft, but I can easily see that in an audience with modems, Warcraft would be the bigger hit because it enabled challenging and less boring battles against human intelligence.
It would just explode, and the ultimate ceiling is the tiny amount of fuel they're using (though in practice, there are lower ceilings related to the amount of heating/compression the machine can manage and the amount of time this compression is maintained). Wikipedia says that they're ultimately expecting 20MJ with the current setup (though the announcement indicates they only surpassed 1.8MJ), and with design improvements to the apparatus up to 100-150MJ. It also says the chamber is designed to contain a 45MJ explosion, equivalent to 11kg of TNT. To make a politically incorrect analogy, that's roughly as much a suicide bomber would carry, or the warhead of a hellfire anti-tank missile. It will make a decent "boom" but it won't destroy the building.
Except that the news is not on their website yet (maybe the people who update it are "non-essential government personnel"). The shot they're talking about in your link consumed 1.7MJ and yielded 8kJ, which is a far cry from what is claimed on the BBC website. As I understood, it also wasn't aimed to maximize energy yield.
Since the release of Torchlight II and the announcement there won't be another Torchlight a year ago, it's been awfully quiet. Is the company doing OK? Are you still working on something? If yes, can you reveal something, a hint, anything?
+1 Ooh, that game was sooo good! Wants one! Wants one!
The original Warcraft and Diablo games hold a special status in the hearts of many gamers. Each game brought its genre into focus,
That sounds a bit exagerrated. Maybe it's true for Diablo, but in the RTS genre, Dune II was pretty high-profile and came out 2 years earlier. In comparison, Warcraft felt like a knock-off, with little innovation, and less balanced (once the catapults started rolling out, it often became a game of chance, depending on which catapult would insta-kill a bunch of difficult-to-control units that were running around erratically). Bilzzard later redeemed itself big time with the epic StarCraft and Warcraft III, but the original Warcraft? Meh!
Yes. Live just north of Baltimore. Previous job was a DOE contractor. Had a friend (female)
Hold it right there! You almost had me. How much of your part of this discussion am I supposed to believe if you're making such outrageous claims?!
Well played, sir!
That would effectively be the same as saying: "Capitalism, without significant interference, will tend towards a class society."
So if that's true, then it seems we have the choice between:
(A) significant regulatory interference
(B) a class society
(C) something else than pure capitalism
Yeah, and 99.99% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I give you that a significant percentage of micromanagers don't know and don't care about much, but your 99.99% is way overestimated. The reason you have such a negative perception of micromanages is likely that micromanagement bruises people's egos, so they will complain about it even if the micromanager in question knows what they're doing and has a clear vision. Case in point, most sources say your St. Jobs was infuriating to work for. These kind of complaints (not only about Jobs of course) are so pervasive that they grew into a stereotype of the hated nitwit micromanager.