That is actually the line that kind of ticked me off, boarders should be placed in logical locations, not just willy nilly.
Why? And what makes a border location "logical"?
The willy-nilly borders are probably the more honest and clever ones - it's the ones that were fought over that are really silly. Take a look at Israel/Palestine for an example of the logic of borders...
We were discussing bias. You presented an article and challenged me to find bias or spin. I demonstrated bias, and you attempted (weakly) to rebut this, by falling back on the unconvincing statement "However, it was a good article about SETI researchers". This completely sidesteps the issue of bias and ignores a big aspect of the article. You're attempting to argue by shifting the issue.
In your earlier message, BTW, you did what you accused me of doing, essentially putting words in my mouth: "I'll still say you are dumb as a post if you think Slashdot represents an unbiased and balanced news site". I didn't say that. What I said is that Slashdot exists on a spectrum of bias and balance, and is by no means the worst. I also explained why that's the case. So your statement was really irrelevant to this discussion.
Therefor, they employ journalists and writers that are able to find stories that appeal to their target audience. This is not bias, it's economics
Perhaps we have a definitional problem. What you're saying is that journalists and writers have a bias that tends to match what they perceive their audience to want. That's exactly my point. In fact, this bias is quite deliberate on their part, which is hardly a secret. That deliberate skewing of news to match audience desires is a bias, and results in the news not being purely factual, unbiased, and balanced.
They are not putting spin, nor are they introducing their own grain-of-salt predictions. They say, "This is what party X said, This is what party Y said." That's reporting.
This is a hopelessly naive perspective. You'd fail any course on media analysis. What I've pointed out to you is that the spin-free reporting you fantasize about is actually very rare.
In fact, reporting gets less and less spin-free the more important to society the topic is. The SETI article was too uncontroversial to really demonstrate the point, although as I showed, it was certainly not free from bias. Try a piece about an important political decision to see much more egregious spin and bias, in even the most revered mainstream media.
A more apt name for Slashdot would be, "Forums for Nerds." because that's precisely what Slashdot is. In no way shape or form is this actually what a news site is known to be.
I'm suggesting that if you open your mind and think about what news really is, namely a way to get good information about what's happening, then Slashdot actually comes off pretty well. Is it biased? Sure, but so is all other mainstream news, it's just a question of where on the spectrum it fits. Is it balanced? Same sort of answer. Do you have to apply filters to get good information from it? Yes, but the same applies to other news sources, to varying degrees.
Some of the most mainstream sources require the heaviest filtering: the example I gave in my first post was Fox News. I'll hold up Slashdot as a paragon of reportage over Fox News any day. I'm picking on Fox as one of the more egregious examples, but there are plenty of others.
You really haven't made the slightest case refuting any of this, you simply keep asserting a conventional and simplistic view of what journalism and reporting is. At the same time, you apply a preconceived idea of what you think Slashdot is, and come up with the same conclusion over and over.
The reason is that you haven't actually thought about it, in the sense of analyzing your premises and their consequences. You've simply accepted pleasant myths that others have managed to get inside your head. As a nice demonstration of this, you even manage to acknowledge the economic biases of news organizations while at the same time denying that journalists put spin on stories. This is classic rationalization, something that you have to do to maintain a belief in your worldview as consistent.
Just as an exercise, try imagining that you're wrong and reconstructing the argument in a different way (not necessarily mine). If you can't do that, you know you've got a problem: you're locked into a single perspective. If your answer to that is "yes, because it's the right perspective", then there's probably not much hope for you.
However, it was a good article about SETI researchers.
Oh please, that's lame. If you think the article is simply about SETI researchers, your reading comprehension skills are even worse than your ability to step outside your societal programming.
I miswrote re unbiased. I was responding your claim, made via insult, that Slashdot is not "more balanced and unbiased than main stream corporate media". In the message you responded to, I mentioned a media spectrum, and gave examples of which media I thought were not as balanced or unbiased as Slashdot.
Your example didn't choose one of those media sources, but nevertheless it is filled with bias. By personalizing the SETI story, with a woman and her husband as lead characters,
it makes it more interesting to the reader, but also may bias them in favor of the activity being pursued. In this case, the article is biased quite heavily in favor of SETI, otherwise the reporter would not have picked such favorable lead characters. For example, someone biased against SETI might choose characters who seem a bit crazier, or found scientists to provide a more critical appraisal of the project's prospects.
Since the scientists are quoted with no opposing opinion, a one-sided and favorable impression of the SETI project is created as a result. If one supported SETI and wanted to see it continue to be funded, this would be an excellent article to use, since it has nothing overtly negative, other than a passing mention that the job is "not easy" - an unchallenged quote from one of the scientists, which just happens to be an incredible understatement.
In short, this is at best a human interest fluff piece. What few facts there are are presented by the people involved, with no challenges or analysis. If this is what you hold up as unbiased journalism, I can see why you took issue with my statement. You're confusing lack of bias with things that agree with your own biases - you like SETI, so you think this article is unbiased. Please continue in your fantasy world - ignorance is bliss, as you pointed out.
Give me an example of what you consider a recent unbiased story in one of the media sources I mentioned, and I'll explain what you're missing.
I'll give you an example: you might take the stories about the various forest fires as fact-based reporting - not particularly political, and uncontroversial, right? Not really. They're given all sorts of spin, and other kinds of spin are avoided. The fundamental cause of these really large fires is that humans have been attempting to prevent fires for so long, creating unnaturally huge unbroken swathes of forest, which are now prone to burning all at once. IOW, this is a problem completely of human creation, right down to the people who started the fires. If serious, unbiased journalism were taking place, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior should be coming in for the same sort of criticism as leaders of Enron & Worldcom.
The same goes for the Port Authority in New York, which at the time of the building of the World Trade Center, essentially ignored complaints by police and fire department about safety problems relating to the time it would take to evacuate people from the towers in the event of emergency. So thousands of people had to die in large measure because of the big ego of the guy who ran the Port Authority at the time, and nobody learns from the mistake: although it's possible, ahead of time, to mitigate the potential for disasters, people don't do it because they're shortsighted, and other people suffer as a consequence.
But we don't get stories about these things, which are arguably important issues, and many others like it, in the mainstream media. Stories we do get are biased in all sorts of ways, often conflicting. The reason for this is not really a conspiracy, except perhaps an unconscious one. But for example, reporters tiptoe around subjects that involve dead people - that's a bias, one which much of the audience actually appreciates. Or they don't do stories because they think not enough people will be interested: the bias towards the lowest common denominator. I could go on all day.
The net result of this is that unless you behave like an uncritical sponge, you have to filter and augment what you hear to adjust for biases, missing information, and attempts to mislead. Well, guess what: if you do the same thing with a given Slashdot story and its comments, you can end up with information that's often much better, with more solid underlying facts, than is typically the case in the media sources I mentioned.
I'd love to hear your example of an unbiased story in one of the media sources I mentioned, though. It would be especially good if it were a story that had also appeared on Slashdot, which would allow a direct comparison.
That's really clever, thanks for mentioning it. I've read Forward's novels Dragon's Egg and Starquake (iirc), about a race evolving on the surface of a neutron star, and I've read some of his other speculative articles, but I hadn't heard of this one. It sounds almost practicable, I'm impressed.
Chances are the patent will have expired before Bob can collect, though. That's the problem with being so far ahead of your time - otherwise Leonardo da Vinci's estate would be getting royalties on planes and helicopters and such...
Then do not bill it as a news site. Post your opinions all you want, but don't state it as fact.
Aahahahahaha! Which unbiased, fact-based news source in the United States do you use? If you haven't noticed by now that most "news", whether print, TV, or radio, is either (a) opinion, (b) heavily biased towards the political preferences of its purveyor, (c) bought and paid for, or (d) designed to elicit maximum emotional response from the audience, then I'm sorry to have to inform you that you're living in a double fantasy world - believing that the news is factual would be bad enough on its own, but believing the actual "facts" being promulgated is even worse.
In the media spectrum, Slashdot is certainly more balanced and unbiased than anything you'll ever see in any News Corp media, e.g. Fox News or the New York daily papers, for example, or anything you see on news "magazine" programs like 20/20 or 60 Minutes. At least on Slashdot, discussion often allows real facts behind an issue to come out, unlike the one-way media which shovels carefully designed and packaged nonsense into your orifices.
From the article, this all sounds quite positive for South Africa. Legally recognized digital signatures, based on a solid technical platform, seems like a good idea. Unlike the moronic corp-bought equivalent US law, which gives legal recognition to completely insecure, unverifiable click-through agreements on the web. Perhaps the U.S. should consult President Mbeki on matters of Internet policy in future? (Just not on AIDS policy, please.)
If there's something else nefarious going on here, could someone explain?
I think this bill does contain the new.za domain control legislation, so that part may be iffy (I don't know), but that's nothing like the UK RIP-like encryption fascism described in the submitter's posting.
There's a possibly interesting pattern developing here: some of the most technologically advanced nations, arguably having the most to lose from preceived "abuses" of technology, are attempting to control development with unreasonably strict laws: DMCA, RIP, and whatever's going on in Australia with e.g. net filtering and the like. Meanwhile, some developing nations have a double incentive to be less restrictive and more open to "subversive" technological innovation: they're not dependent on revenue from the existing hi-tech industry, and they may see an opportunity to leapfrog some of their more advanced competitor nations. Perhaps this is how Western global economic and dominance will end, as short-sighted politicians try to ban innovation in genetic research, encryption, digital cash, and other promising areas...
Since New York City is usually referred to as simply "New York", the term "upstate New York" is a convenient and concise way of saying "the part of New York State (other than eastern Long Island) outside the only city that matters."
BTW, if anyone objects to the habit New York City residents have of acting as though the world revolves around their city - welcome to the way much of the rest of the world feels about the U.S. Parochialism is never pretty from the outside.
Hey, try reading the articles one of these days...
EAST FISHKILL, N.Y. (AP) - IBM Corp. unveiled what was believed to be the world's most advanced chip-making plant Wednesday, promising 1,000 new jobs and a boost to the upstate economy.
The $2.5 billion, 140,000-square-foot facility currently makes the prototype cutting-edge chips and was expected to reach full production by February 2003
The chips produced at the Fishkill plant, 60 miles north of New York City, will be the first IBM chips to be made on 300mm wafers of silicon, instead of the current 200mm wafers.
Damn people, like 10 of you totally missed the joke. Is there something running on slashdot's webservers that filters out any sense of humor you might have? Dont answer that:)
Seriously, it's much more common for nerds not to get jokes - insensitivity to social cues is one of the symptoms of things like Asperger's Syndrome, and many ADD variants. So yeah, an unusually high percentage of the Slashdot population probably has a permanent sense of humor filter.
That's why they need a system where people mark messages as Funny, so they can tell the difference...;)
When looking at the world through a remote video camera without the benefit of an artificial horizon and other instrumentation, it's very easy to get a small model into a spin or spiral from which it is difficult to recover. Being able to directly see the model from the ground is the only safe way to ensure you can regain control in such situations.
The problem is one of orientation -- once you lose view of the horizon through the camera it becomes very difficult to tell what your plane is doing -- thus very difficult to feed in the proper control corrections.
What about automatic pilots, though? For example, the AeroVironment Black Widow, which is a six-inch aircraft, has "altitude hold, airspeed hold, heading hold, and yaw damping" (from the PDF available on their site).
With bigger r/c vehicles, total autonomous flight was achieved a long time ago, even for helicopters, which are much more difficult to stabilize than planes. This can allow an operator to simply guide rather than actually pilot a vehicle, with greatly reduced chance of error.
This already exists in commercial technology: there's an r/c helicopter, made by Honda iirc, used for applications like cropspraying and aerial photography. An operator can fly these with minimal training, because stabilization is automatic.
I'm looking forward to the asteroid strike...
on
What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 2
We're on NT 5.1 right now (Windows XP). By the time we get to NT 7, we'll be praying for a planet-killing asteroid to come and put us out of our misery...
So it is not possible within your well-equipped basement
Have you seen his basement?
Oh, my basement can handle it alright. My problem now is the black vans cruising up and down outside, with roof-mounted antennae, no doubt looking for the source of all the EM radiation, hard X-rays, gamma rays, and alpha particles that I started generating this morning when I tried this. Seems like the contractor that installed the shielding system skimped on the lead lining... Lucky I was wearing my specially lined raincoat!
I had to dump the whole thing down the little quantum wormhole I use for garbage disposal - and the ceiling's going to need to be completely repainted now...
I responded to what Podkletnov claims to have done, which is observe "weak shielding properties against gravitational force". I think there's a flaw even in the wording of his claim, since he really doesn't seem to have any evidence of the nature of the observed effect.
Certainly, there are other means to defy gravity: planes, maglevs, and hovercraft use such techniques. However, since Podkletnov himself claims to be observing "shielding", I focused on what such shielding might require. Within a GR model, this would require something to negate the effects of spacetime curvature. Any other approach - such as some external force used to counteract gravity (e.g. electromagnetism) isn't "shielding" against gravity.
Of course, all sorts of other possibilities exist, including that the GR model might be wrong. However, it's still the most consistent and accurate existing model, and in the absence of suitable alternatives, it makes sense to consider what it tells us about the possibilities in a case like this.
Valid point. As soon as Podkletnov comes up with some facts, let me know!
Theory and observation often go hand in hand. Many times, interesting observations arise from attempts to prove or disprove theories, which leads to new theories, etc. Afaict, Podkletnov's work is being done in the absence of any coherent theory whatsoever, and that's not good science IMO, or at best, it's "million monkey" science in which a million Podkletnovs trying random things might come up with something eventually. Unfortunately, checking the claims of the million
Podkletnovs would be not be a worthwhile exercise. In the absence of better evidence, in the form of a replicable experiment, it's not clear that checking the claims of even a single Podkletnov is worthwhile...
My secret mathematical weapon is Mathcad, which makes calculations like this much more convenient. However, I'll have to postpone the tidal force calculation until later, since I have some actual work to do...
The mechanism I plan to use to attach the holes to my ceiling? If you've ever watched News Radio, the answer to this is obvious: duct tape!
Thanks for the corrections. I've provided an updated black hole mass calculation here.
To be precise, the earth would pull the black hole towards it with 1G and the black hole would pull earth with 1G
D'oh! Missed that completely. In my defense, I was talking about the way it would appear from my point of view, standing on the Earth's surface, in my basement. Assuming I hadn't already been converted into the monatomic fog suggested in another message by Rhombus.
As for energy causing warped spacetime, not a problem - it simply means we can achieve the same effect with a good release of energy, say a nuclear explosion. Not sure that this will make antigravity any more practical...
I'm not aware of Einstein having seriously suggested ways to counteract gravity, but if he did, I would think that he would have had some theoretical basis. The problem with Podkletnov's stuff is that, like the original cold fusion, there's no credible theory to explain why it should work.
Rhombus correctly pointed out that the mass of the black hole in my example was way off. To work out what mass it would need to be to create a microgravity environment in my basement (or at least a tidally interesting environment), we can simply plug the numbers into the equation for the gravitational force between two objects, F=GMm/r^2, where G is the universal gravitational constant. For this example, let M be the mass of Earth, m is the (unimportant) mass of a test object in my basement (e.g. me), and r is the radius of Earth. To cancel out gravity in my basement, we want the resulting force to be equal to F=GHm/s^2, where H is the mass of the black hole, and s is the distance from me to the hole.
So we have GMm/r^2 = GHm/s^2. The G and m cancel out, leaving M/r^2 = H/s^2. Using an Earth mass of 5.9736 x 10^24 kg, and a radius of 6370000m, and assuming s=1m, my calculations show that the black hole would need a mass of 1.472 x 10^11 kg (147 billion kilograms) to create a micro-gravity environment in my basement - however localized, and however briefly. That's hundredths of trillionths of the mass of the Earth - quite a lot lighter, as Rhombus guessed.
All I meant was that because you're near the Schwarzchild radius, you're very close to the entire mass. As for the monatomic fog, well, I wouldn't be doing this without a good pair of boots and a hard hat!!
Slashdot Mirror
Why? And what makes a border location "logical"?
The willy-nilly borders are probably the more honest and clever ones - it's the ones that were fought over that are really silly. Take a look at Israel/Palestine for an example of the logic of borders...
We were discussing bias. You presented an article and challenged me to find bias or spin. I demonstrated bias, and you attempted (weakly) to rebut this, by falling back on the unconvincing statement "However, it was a good article about SETI researchers". This completely sidesteps the issue of bias and ignores a big aspect of the article. You're attempting to argue by shifting the issue.
In your earlier message, BTW, you did what you accused me of doing, essentially putting words in my mouth: "I'll still say you are dumb as a post if you think Slashdot represents an unbiased and balanced news site". I didn't say that. What I said is that Slashdot exists on a spectrum of bias and balance, and is by no means the worst. I also explained why that's the case. So your statement was really irrelevant to this discussion.
Therefor, they employ journalists and writers that are able to find stories that appeal to their target audience. This is not bias, it's economics
Perhaps we have a definitional problem. What you're saying is that journalists and writers have a bias that tends to match what they perceive their audience to want. That's exactly my point. In fact, this bias is quite deliberate on their part, which is hardly a secret. That deliberate skewing of news to match audience desires is a bias, and results in the news not being purely factual, unbiased, and balanced.
They are not putting spin, nor are they introducing their own grain-of-salt predictions. They say, "This is what party X said, This is what party Y said." That's reporting.
This is a hopelessly naive perspective. You'd fail any course on media analysis. What I've pointed out to you is that the spin-free reporting you fantasize about is actually very rare.
In fact, reporting gets less and less spin-free the more important to society the topic is. The SETI article was too uncontroversial to really demonstrate the point, although as I showed, it was certainly not free from bias. Try a piece about an important political decision to see much more egregious spin and bias, in even the most revered mainstream media.
A more apt name for Slashdot would be, "Forums for Nerds." because that's precisely what Slashdot is. In no way shape or form is this actually what a news site is known to be.
I'm suggesting that if you open your mind and think about what news really is, namely a way to get good information about what's happening, then Slashdot actually comes off pretty well. Is it biased? Sure, but so is all other mainstream news, it's just a question of where on the spectrum it fits. Is it balanced? Same sort of answer. Do you have to apply filters to get good information from it? Yes, but the same applies to other news sources, to varying degrees.
Some of the most mainstream sources require the heaviest filtering: the example I gave in my first post was Fox News. I'll hold up Slashdot as a paragon of reportage over Fox News any day. I'm picking on Fox as one of the more egregious examples, but there are plenty of others.
You really haven't made the slightest case refuting any of this, you simply keep asserting a conventional and simplistic view of what journalism and reporting is. At the same time, you apply a preconceived idea of what you think Slashdot is, and come up with the same conclusion over and over.
The reason is that you haven't actually thought about it, in the sense of analyzing your premises and their consequences. You've simply accepted pleasant myths that others have managed to get inside your head. As a nice demonstration of this, you even manage to acknowledge the economic biases of news organizations while at the same time denying that journalists put spin on stories. This is classic rationalization, something that you have to do to maintain a belief in your worldview as consistent.
Just as an exercise, try imagining that you're wrong and reconstructing the argument in a different way (not necessarily mine). If you can't do that, you know you've got a problem: you're locked into a single perspective. If your answer to that is "yes, because it's the right perspective", then there's probably not much hope for you.
Oh please, that's lame. If you think the article is simply about SETI researchers, your reading comprehension skills are even worse than your ability to step outside your societal programming.
Your example didn't choose one of those media sources, but nevertheless it is filled with bias. By personalizing the SETI story, with a woman and her husband as lead characters, it makes it more interesting to the reader, but also may bias them in favor of the activity being pursued. In this case, the article is biased quite heavily in favor of SETI, otherwise the reporter would not have picked such favorable lead characters. For example, someone biased against SETI might choose characters who seem a bit crazier, or found scientists to provide a more critical appraisal of the project's prospects.
Since the scientists are quoted with no opposing opinion, a one-sided and favorable impression of the SETI project is created as a result. If one supported SETI and wanted to see it continue to be funded, this would be an excellent article to use, since it has nothing overtly negative, other than a passing mention that the job is "not easy" - an unchallenged quote from one of the scientists, which just happens to be an incredible understatement.
In short, this is at best a human interest fluff piece. What few facts there are are presented by the people involved, with no challenges or analysis. If this is what you hold up as unbiased journalism, I can see why you took issue with my statement. You're confusing lack of bias with things that agree with your own biases - you like SETI, so you think this article is unbiased. Please continue in your fantasy world - ignorance is bliss, as you pointed out.
I'll give you an example: you might take the stories about the various forest fires as fact-based reporting - not particularly political, and uncontroversial, right? Not really. They're given all sorts of spin, and other kinds of spin are avoided. The fundamental cause of these really large fires is that humans have been attempting to prevent fires for so long, creating unnaturally huge unbroken swathes of forest, which are now prone to burning all at once. IOW, this is a problem completely of human creation, right down to the people who started the fires. If serious, unbiased journalism were taking place, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior should be coming in for the same sort of criticism as leaders of Enron & Worldcom.
The same goes for the Port Authority in New York, which at the time of the building of the World Trade Center, essentially ignored complaints by police and fire department about safety problems relating to the time it would take to evacuate people from the towers in the event of emergency. So thousands of people had to die in large measure because of the big ego of the guy who ran the Port Authority at the time, and nobody learns from the mistake: although it's possible, ahead of time, to mitigate the potential for disasters, people don't do it because they're shortsighted, and other people suffer as a consequence.
But we don't get stories about these things, which are arguably important issues, and many others like it, in the mainstream media. Stories we do get are biased in all sorts of ways, often conflicting. The reason for this is not really a conspiracy, except perhaps an unconscious one. But for example, reporters tiptoe around subjects that involve dead people - that's a bias, one which much of the audience actually appreciates. Or they don't do stories because they think not enough people will be interested: the bias towards the lowest common denominator. I could go on all day.
The net result of this is that unless you behave like an uncritical sponge, you have to filter and augment what you hear to adjust for biases, missing information, and attempts to mislead. Well, guess what: if you do the same thing with a given Slashdot story and its comments, you can end up with information that's often much better, with more solid underlying facts, than is typically the case in the media sources I mentioned.
I'd love to hear your example of an unbiased story in one of the media sources I mentioned, though. It would be especially good if it were a story that had also appeared on Slashdot, which would allow a direct comparison.
Chances are the patent will have expired before Bob can collect, though. That's the problem with being so far ahead of your time - otherwise Leonardo da Vinci's estate would be getting royalties on planes and helicopters and such...
Aahahahahaha! Which unbiased, fact-based news source in the United States do you use? If you haven't noticed by now that most "news", whether print, TV, or radio, is either (a) opinion, (b) heavily biased towards the political preferences of its purveyor, (c) bought and paid for, or (d) designed to elicit maximum emotional response from the audience, then I'm sorry to have to inform you that you're living in a double fantasy world - believing that the news is factual would be bad enough on its own, but believing the actual "facts" being promulgated is even worse.
In the media spectrum, Slashdot is certainly more balanced and unbiased than anything you'll ever see in any News Corp media, e.g. Fox News or the New York daily papers, for example, or anything you see on news "magazine" programs like 20/20 or 60 Minutes. At least on Slashdot, discussion often allows real facts behind an issue to come out, unlike the one-way media which shovels carefully designed and packaged nonsense into your orifices.
If there's something else nefarious going on here, could someone explain?
I think this bill does contain the new .za domain control legislation, so that part may be iffy (I don't know), but that's nothing like the UK RIP-like encryption fascism described in the submitter's posting.
There's a possibly interesting pattern developing here: some of the most technologically advanced nations, arguably having the most to lose from preceived "abuses" of technology, are attempting to control development with unreasonably strict laws: DMCA, RIP, and whatever's going on in Australia with e.g. net filtering and the like. Meanwhile, some developing nations have a double incentive to be less restrictive and more open to "subversive" technological innovation: they're not dependent on revenue from the existing hi-tech industry, and they may see an opportunity to leapfrog some of their more advanced competitor nations. Perhaps this is how Western global economic and dominance will end, as short-sighted politicians try to ban innovation in genetic research, encryption, digital cash, and other promising areas...
BTW, if anyone objects to the habit New York City residents have of acting as though the world revolves around their city - welcome to the way much of the rest of the world feels about the U.S. Parochialism is never pretty from the outside.
I'd like to know, myself!
Was that a cynical comment, or are you somehow threatened by the idea of someone wanting to "leave society"??
And your technical reason for that is "X is a resource hog"? Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
Whoa! They have trained you guys well...
Seriously, it's much more common for nerds not to get jokes - insensitivity to social cues is one of the symptoms of things like Asperger's Syndrome, and many ADD variants. So yeah, an unusually high percentage of the Slashdot population probably has a permanent sense of humor filter.
That's why they need a system where people mark messages as Funny, so they can tell the difference... ;)
What about automatic pilots, though? For example, the AeroVironment Black Widow, which is a six-inch aircraft, has "altitude hold, airspeed hold, heading hold, and yaw damping" (from the PDF available on their site).
With bigger r/c vehicles, total autonomous flight was achieved a long time ago, even for helicopters, which are much more difficult to stabilize than planes. This can allow an operator to simply guide rather than actually pilot a vehicle, with greatly reduced chance of error.
This already exists in commercial technology: there's an r/c helicopter, made by Honda iirc, used for applications like cropspraying and aerial photography. An operator can fly these with minimal training, because stabilization is automatic.
We're on NT 5.1 right now (Windows XP). By the time we get to NT 7, we'll be praying for a planet-killing asteroid to come and put us out of our misery...
Guess they'll have to update that page now, to explain how, big surprise, C64s are not invincible after all?
I had to dump the whole thing down the little quantum wormhole I use for garbage disposal - and the ceiling's going to need to be completely repainted now...
Certainly, there are other means to defy gravity: planes, maglevs, and hovercraft use such techniques. However, since Podkletnov himself claims to be observing "shielding", I focused on what such shielding might require. Within a GR model, this would require something to negate the effects of spacetime curvature. Any other approach - such as some external force used to counteract gravity (e.g. electromagnetism) isn't "shielding" against gravity.
Of course, all sorts of other possibilities exist, including that the GR model might be wrong. However, it's still the most consistent and accurate existing model, and in the absence of suitable alternatives, it makes sense to consider what it tells us about the possibilities in a case like this.
Valid point. As soon as Podkletnov comes up with some facts, let me know!
Theory and observation often go hand in hand. Many times, interesting observations arise from attempts to prove or disprove theories, which leads to new theories, etc. Afaict, Podkletnov's work is being done in the absence of any coherent theory whatsoever, and that's not good science IMO, or at best, it's "million monkey" science in which a million Podkletnovs trying random things might come up with something eventually. Unfortunately, checking the claims of the million Podkletnovs would be not be a worthwhile exercise. In the absence of better evidence, in the form of a replicable experiment, it's not clear that checking the claims of even a single Podkletnov is worthwhile...
The mechanism I plan to use to attach the holes to my ceiling? If you've ever watched News Radio, the answer to this is obvious: duct tape!
To be precise, the earth would pull the black hole towards it with 1G and the black hole would pull earth with 1G
D'oh! Missed that completely. In my defense, I was talking about the way it would appear from my point of view, standing on the Earth's surface, in my basement. Assuming I hadn't already been converted into the monatomic fog suggested in another message by Rhombus.
As for energy causing warped spacetime, not a problem - it simply means we can achieve the same effect with a good release of energy, say a nuclear explosion. Not sure that this will make antigravity any more practical...
I'm not aware of Einstein having seriously suggested ways to counteract gravity, but if he did, I would think that he would have had some theoretical basis. The problem with Podkletnov's stuff is that, like the original cold fusion, there's no credible theory to explain why it should work.
So we have GMm/r^2 = GHm/s^2. The G and m cancel out, leaving M/r^2 = H/s^2. Using an Earth mass of 5.9736 x 10^24 kg, and a radius of 6370000m, and assuming s=1m, my calculations show that the black hole would need a mass of 1.472 x 10^11 kg (147 billion kilograms) to create a micro-gravity environment in my basement - however localized, and however briefly. That's hundredths of trillionths of the mass of the Earth - quite a lot lighter, as Rhombus guessed.
All I meant was that because you're near the Schwarzchild radius, you're very close to the entire mass. As for the monatomic fog, well, I wouldn't be doing this without a good pair of boots and a hard hat!!