>>Actually, I'm ignoring it on dumbscientist altogether.
Naturally.
Wouldn't want to make yourself look bad, like last time.
Shaka: Here's four thesis statements, some of which I've never raised before. Please agree or disagree. Khayman: I already have answered them! Shaka: No you haven't Khayman: I don't have time to be your tutor! Shaka: Just answer yes or no to each of them. Khayman: I have a paper to write! Shaka: You'd save time by just answering yes or no Khayman: I've referenced 50 papers which contains my answer somewhere! Shaka: What's your thesis statement? Answer yes or no to each, and why. Khayman: I've already answered them and I hate repeating myself!...and reading back through your Dumb Scientist blog reveals exactly that - that you never answered any of the questions before, and only one after.
Thanks for making the record. You sounded just like the Creationists that get really evasive when pressed to explain some of their answers. In fact, saying that they don't have time to educate people is one of their favorite lines.
>>That's the official story, but I find it hard to believe that Einstein really didn't think about the Michelson-Morley experiment during this process. However, that's what Einstein claimed and the story is at least remotely plausible given his stratospheric genius.
There's people on both sides of the issue. Some say he wasn't aware, other's that he was aware, still others that he was peripherally aware but relied more on his gedunkenexperiment.
Personally, it doesn't bother me that much, since either way Einstein had the genius to derive special relativity when other people were trying to figure out the experimental error in the M-M experiment. Really though, I think the overarching point here (as Kuhn makes) is that science can be wrong, but (if given enough evidence) will paradigm shift to a better, more accurate model.
Naturally I'm sure you are going to mis-summarize this entirely reasonable statement of mine as saying that scientists are all lying liars who lie a lot, like my response to Vshael.
Your game may or may not come with a rave and/or hot Swedish women. (Make sure you pick up the Collector's Edition.)
In all honesty though - with the number of DotA clones that have come out in the last year (Demigod, DotA for SC2, etc.) do we really need more? The gameplay isn't really that exciting.
And just because it's funny to mine your rambling posts for examples of you trying to be annoying and pedantic, but failing:
Huh? The Michelson-Morley experiment has nothing to do with your "notion that inertia somehow doesn't apply to light." Inertia wasn't the problem, galilean [dumbscientist.com] relativity was. Light most certainly does have inertia in special relativity, as anyone who designs solar sails could tell you. If you don't know any, just open Jackson 3rd ed to page 259, calculate a Poynting vector as in equation 6.109, divide by c^2 as in equation 6.123, and remember that non-zero inertia is necessary for non-zero momentum
Light has *momentum*. Technically, it's just p = hf. I'm not sure why you need to reference a textbook, but you seem to go about everything in bizarre and unproductive ways.
Whether or not light has *inertia* depends on your definition of inertia. Some people say that momentum and inertia are the same thing (including Einstein, so you're in good company), but I only consider objects with mass to have inertia, as a massless object cannot have an inertial reference frame that makes any sense. A number of people agree with me. For example, Greene equates inertia with particles with mass.
In any event, you're again missing my point in a bad attempt to be pedantic, which is that, for example, light launched from the front of a spaceship flying by me will travel at the same speed as light coming out of my stationary (in my reference frame) computer monitor. This *was* a revolutionary discovery. You're quite wrong that it was an expected result - read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment, and look at the number of times they kept trying to get the experiment to "succeed".
Actually, let me give a more detailed response, since the ad hominem from you is getting intolerable. (Yes, the physics courses were at UCSD, and yes, a number of the posts I made were off the top of my head so I have indeed made mistakes. None as stupid as you not understanding what single quotes are, or what they mean, in the English language. Think about the difference between 'pressure' and pressure. I'll give you all the time you want. It's an internet forum.
1) As I said in my other post, if you disagree with something I say, respond to that post, and don't jumble it together with other posts from years ago. It makes you sound more like the unibomber than a physicist.
2) "For example, when VShael joined the chorus of slashdotters accusing cosmologists of incompetence and/or unscientific dogma, you agreed with him." Indeed. And I was right, since I was talking about Fred Hoyle and his dogmatic rejection of Big Bang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang) You, however, fly off into unibomber land with your talk about unrelated issues like MOND and Cold Dark Matter, and show that I'm wrong by referencing 95 papers *that have nothing the fuck to do with what I was talking about*. If you're a scientist, as you purport to be, you're a very bad scientist.
(Note that Hoyle eventually accepted Big Bang theory, when the evidence became overwhelming, but that didn't stop him from originally rejecting the theory because he didn't like the philosophical implications of it.)
3) "Either one would be a massive improvement over the current situation where you repeatedly pose as a physicist while spouting vague gibberish. (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1812994&cid=33833012)" You know that I don't have a single post inside that hyperlink you provided? While it may look impressive to put tons of hyperlinks into your posts, you come off very poorly when people check your "references". Your link leads to posts by Syousef. Perhaps you got confused because both of our usernames start with 'S'?
4) "After reviewing the surfacestations FAQ (where he fumbles with that lid) and comparing it to your claims, I'm inclined to agree with you. But I've already addressed that kind of "research."" Why are you talking about AGW in a thread about the consistency of the rules of physics? Besides trying to engage in ad homimem? Especially since your ad hominem includes assigning me claims of "gibberish" by linking to posts that aren't even by me. If you want to argue a particular topic, do so - but by this laughably dishonest (did you think that people would just never bother to check your references?) attempt at discrediting someone on the internet, you're just exploding any cachet you had with anyone who cares.
5) "Even in classical statistical mechanics, the probability of all the oxygen in a room moving into a corner isn't zero, just absurdly small. In the MWI, this fact is explained by saying that the relative amplitude of this "suffocation" branch of the wavefunction is absurdly small. The absolute square of this relative amplitude is proportional to the chance that we find ourselves in that branch." Your other great talent is to restate what I say, and make it sounds like I was wrong when I said it. There's various interpretations of QM (which I mention above, which you state as if you didn't just quote me on it), and so how you look at very fundamental things like entanglement vary. This is not to say that the mechanics of entanglement vary, but rather what it means. The point I was making above about the MWI is that there is a difference between things that are logically impossible (a married bachelor) and things that are just very very unlikely (a different world - assuming MWI - in which all the air left my room and I suffocated). If you think Dr. Zurek says I'm wrong because it is *too* unlikely, then so be it. There's other people that disagree with him, too. But you missed the fundamental point, which was about the difference betw
Stop copying my posts onto Dumbscientist.com. If you want to respond to my Slashdot posts, respond on Slashdot. Your site is just not as well constructed.
>>Huh? Your customarily vague but authoritative comment which doesn't include an "IANAP" disclaimer
You keep laboring under the delusion that because I got a degree in computer science, I can't possibly be a physics person, regardless of, say, the fact that I got a perfect score on the Physics SAT II and a 5 on the AP Physics test, took physics in college, and have a library shelf full of physics books that I've been reading since then.
>>will just reinforce the disturbingly common impression that physicists are bullshitting about concepts like inflation and dark matter.
Khayman, you've gone completely off the deep end, or completely misread my post that you were responding to, or were responding to some other post in the wrong thread.
My post above talks about the regularity of the rules of the universe, and how there's no evidence of things like C changing values over time. I have no fucking idea how you transition from that to calling into question notions like dark matter, or that physicists don't know what they're talking about. If you want to keep writing these long, unibomber-like screeds responding to 50 different posts by myself, at least make sure that my thesis statement in the one thread you're responding do doesn't *agree* with what you're saying.
"Deaf or blind people often report enhanced abilities in their remaining senses, but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be."
Up until now? Pfft.
There's been a lot of experiments done on the brain repurposing unused areas of the brain. For example, a school of the blind in France requires all of their teachers to spend some period of time living in perfect darkness inside a house so that they can better appreciate what their students are going through. Teachers that go through the program report being able to 'see sound', which is basically the result of their visual cortex being repurposed to process audio input, but which the brain is still taking as input into whatever it is that creates our visual senses in our sensorium.
Likewise, when they leave the darkness, they have a really hard time seeing for a few days, as the brain slowly adjusts back to using the visual cortex for what it was intended for.
I'd really recommend Dioge's book, The Brain that Changes Itself. It's a good summary of brain plasticity.
>>I'll guess fans will be disappointed with it being "reimagined".
I guess. I wasn't that impressed with the novel, though PKD evidentally was.
IIRC from reading the notes in the back of the book, he randomly rolled the entire story using the I-Ching, and was reportedly creeped out by how well it worked.
>>When people troll on about "Faux News" and Murdock I simply point to the problems with other "news" organizations that don't report certain news stories because it doesn't fit the narrative of the left. Which is why people should get the news raw and and unfiltered.
Shush! Next you'll be asking people to think for themselves!
I honestly think the best way to read news is to read *everything*, from Mother Jones to The Blaze, from NPR to Fox News, and when you find points of disagreement in their narratives, dig into it and figure it out for yourself. Too much work for most people, but if you just listen to one news source, due to the gatekeeper effect, you'll have a very biased idea of what is happening in our world.
>>they were removed during the Reagan administration when they were making repairs to the roof since it wasn't considered cost-effective to replace the panels (although the truthfulness of that could of course be doubted since we're talking about the Reagan administration).
I'd trust Reagan more on cost-effectiveness than Obama, whose answer to every question is "YES".
That said, according to a solar website I read today (so take it with a grain of salt) PV panels have come down from $40,000/watt to $5/watt. Though this may be including subsidies that make up half or more of the cost, it's still a good improvement over the '60s. They're also willing to do the installation for free, and sell you power at a 20% discount, so I guess they're putting their money where their mouth is (if it's not a scam).
Don't get me started. The clean air act makes it basically impossible to convert vehicles to alternative fuels. To get a conversion system certified, you need to pay $100,000+ per model, per model year, per engine option package. That makes it completely non-cost effective for a small business to do so. Because if someone comes with a 1999 camry instead of a 1998 (even though there's no difference between the two outside of some buttons), $100,000 dollars. The clean air act means we cannot convert vehicles to clean fuels. This needs to be fixed.
Do you have a reference for that? On the EPA's website, it just talks about how it encourages the adoption of renewable fuels.
>>Sorry but cutting carbon dioxide by half doesn't cut it when there are 6.8 billion people.
Actually, halving our CO2 output is the consensus view of what we need to do to stabilize temperatures at a reasonable level.
We could nearly accomplish this by switching from coal to nuclear (40% of our CO2 comes from coal alone), and make the target with minor other improvements. Without disrupting our economy, like a CO2 tax would impose.
By contrast, bullshit like Kyoto tries to merely stabilize CO2 targets at our 1988 levels, which isn't enough. It's basically nothing more than a feel-good tax on rich countries, and if that sounds paradoxical to you, well...
>>Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers.
Environmentalists are responsible for global warming (they've kept us on coal and oil as our primary energy sources) *and* SUV drivers (via the paradoxical effect from braindead CAFE laws).
Cleaning up the atmosphere also contributed a bit to global warming as well. Damn Clean Air Act. =)
>>I got several alt characters, I do not want to lose my conversations - the SOCIAL aspect of a highly social game just because I switched alt. I don't want to lose the ability to talk to my guildies on the alliance side about tomorrow night's Lich King tactics just because I'm busy levelling my troll hunter.
Ditto.
>>We freaked out about requiring it on forums, I personally would like to see it changed to be able to use a nickname rather than real name
The Blizzard forums are an absolute cesspool. Perhaps full name is too much, but perhaps first name and last initial, or vice versa, would be enough to put a person's personal stamp on it that they will stop responding to every thoughtful thread with "LOL NOOB LOL" like the pure pwnage wannabees that they are.
>>Researchers have been seduced by subjectively elegant and simple equations all the way back to F=MA... these worked well enough, but were ultimately wrong, the truth was more complex and nuanced, but now we're finding the universe is fuzzy, clumsy and possibly buggy (inflation, possible variations in c, other weirdness).
There's yet to be any evidence the universe doesn't run on very specific mathematical rules. For example, there's a very good reason for inflation having to do with the 'pressure' at high energy states.
There's been occasional theories tossed about with C (or other cosmological constants) changing values, but there hasn't been any actual evidence for it.
This sounds like it would be a great setup for a Charlie Stross novel. Protagonist stumbles upon a conspiracy centered around an ancient alien text allegedly detailing knowledge of the state machine upon which reality executes -- and an artifact, which if activated, may place the universe into a halting state! Amazon review: "A hyperkinetic, Meme-filled trip with an explosive plot twist!"
Doesn't he already have a book called Halting State?
Then again, we could get to the moon with all the hand-waving he does in his books, if only there was enough atmosphere to get us there.
>>However, after his comments on active SETI being dangerous
Uh, active SETI *is* dangerous.
Let's say right now, we could push a button and contact a spacefaring alien race. Is it a good idea to push it or not?
If it's a 50% chance that they'll show up and be hot Vulcans, that's well and good. But if the other 50% chance is they blow up Earth, you'll see why it's not a good bet to make.
>>The "concept of justice" in this country has been a mockery, now, for quite awhile, at least since the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc., if not for considerably longer. What wonderful Utopia have you been in these last several years?
Slashdot Mirror
>>Actually, I'm ignoring it on dumbscientist altogether.
Naturally.
Wouldn't want to make yourself look bad, like last time.
Shaka: Here's four thesis statements, some of which I've never raised before. Please agree or disagree. ...and reading back through your Dumb Scientist blog reveals exactly that - that you never answered any of the questions before, and only one after.
Khayman: I already have answered them!
Shaka: No you haven't
Khayman: I don't have time to be your tutor!
Shaka: Just answer yes or no to each of them.
Khayman: I have a paper to write!
Shaka: You'd save time by just answering yes or no
Khayman: I've referenced 50 papers which contains my answer somewhere!
Shaka: What's your thesis statement? Answer yes or no to each, and why.
Khayman: I've already answered them and I hate repeating myself!
Thanks for making the record. You sounded just like the Creationists that get really evasive when pressed to explain some of their answers. In fact, saying that they don't have time to educate people is one of their favorite lines.
>>That's the official story, but I find it hard to believe that Einstein really didn't think about the Michelson-Morley experiment during this process. However, that's what Einstein claimed and the story is at least remotely plausible given his stratospheric genius.
There's people on both sides of the issue. Some say he wasn't aware, other's that he was aware, still others that he was peripherally aware but relied more on his gedunkenexperiment.
Personally, it doesn't bother me that much, since either way Einstein had the genius to derive special relativity when other people were trying to figure out the experimental error in the M-M experiment. Really though, I think the overarching point here (as Kuhn makes) is that science can be wrong, but (if given enough evidence) will paradigm shift to a better, more accurate model.
Naturally I'm sure you are going to mis-summarize this entirely reasonable statement of mine as saying that scientists are all lying liars who lie a lot, like my response to Vshael.
>>What the hell is a DotA?
Oblig Basshunter explanation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y
Your game may or may not come with a rave and/or hot Swedish women. (Make sure you pick up the Collector's Edition.)
In all honesty though - with the number of DotA clones that have come out in the last year (Demigod, DotA for SC2, etc.) do we really need more? The gameplay isn't really that exciting.
And just because it's funny to mine your rambling posts for examples of you trying to be annoying and pedantic, but failing:
Huh? The Michelson-Morley experiment has nothing to do with your "notion that inertia somehow doesn't apply to light." Inertia wasn't the problem, galilean [dumbscientist.com] relativity was. Light most certainly does have inertia in special relativity, as anyone who designs solar sails could tell you. If you don't know any, just open Jackson 3rd ed to page 259, calculate a Poynting vector as in equation 6.109, divide by c^2 as in equation 6.123, and remember that non-zero inertia is necessary for non-zero momentum
Light has *momentum*. Technically, it's just p = hf. I'm not sure why you need to reference a textbook, but you seem to go about everything in bizarre and unproductive ways.
Whether or not light has *inertia* depends on your definition of inertia. Some people say that momentum and inertia are the same thing (including Einstein, so you're in good company), but I only consider objects with mass to have inertia, as a massless object cannot have an inertial reference frame that makes any sense. A number of people agree with me. For example, Greene equates inertia with particles with mass.
In any event, you're again missing my point in a bad attempt to be pedantic, which is that, for example, light launched from the front of a spaceship flying by me will travel at the same speed as light coming out of my stationary (in my reference frame) computer monitor. This *was* a revolutionary discovery. You're quite wrong that it was an expected result - read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment, and look at the number of times they kept trying to get the experiment to "succeed".
>>Could you teach those tricks to a few European governments ? That'd be great.
Doesn't the UK have a Pay As You Earn system in place?
Actually, let me give a more detailed response, since the ad hominem from you is getting intolerable. (Yes, the physics courses were at UCSD, and yes, a number of the posts I made were off the top of my head so I have indeed made mistakes. None as stupid as you not understanding what single quotes are, or what they mean, in the English language. Think about the difference between 'pressure' and pressure. I'll give you all the time you want. It's an internet forum.
1) As I said in my other post, if you disagree with something I say, respond to that post, and don't jumble it together with other posts from years ago. It makes you sound more like the unibomber than a physicist.
2) "For example, when VShael joined the chorus of slashdotters accusing cosmologists of incompetence and/or unscientific dogma, you agreed with him." Indeed. And I was right, since I was talking about Fred Hoyle and his dogmatic rejection of Big Bang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Big_Bang) You, however, fly off into unibomber land with your talk about unrelated issues like MOND and Cold Dark Matter, and show that I'm wrong by referencing 95 papers *that have nothing the fuck to do with what I was talking about*. If you're a scientist, as you purport to be, you're a very bad scientist.
(Note that Hoyle eventually accepted Big Bang theory, when the evidence became overwhelming, but that didn't stop him from originally rejecting the theory because he didn't like the philosophical implications of it.)
3) "Either one would be a massive improvement over the current situation where you repeatedly pose as a physicist while spouting vague gibberish. (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1812994&cid=33833012)" You know that I don't have a single post inside that hyperlink you provided? While it may look impressive to put tons of hyperlinks into your posts, you come off very poorly when people check your "references". Your link leads to posts by Syousef. Perhaps you got confused because both of our usernames start with 'S'?
4) "After reviewing the surfacestations FAQ (where he fumbles with that lid) and comparing it to your claims, I'm inclined to agree with you. But I've already addressed that kind of "research."" Why are you talking about AGW in a thread about the consistency of the rules of physics? Besides trying to engage in ad homimem? Especially since your ad hominem includes assigning me claims of "gibberish" by linking to posts that aren't even by me. If you want to argue a particular topic, do so - but by this laughably dishonest (did you think that people would just never bother to check your references?) attempt at discrediting someone on the internet, you're just exploding any cachet you had with anyone who cares.
5) "Even in classical statistical mechanics, the probability of all the oxygen in a room moving into a corner isn't zero, just absurdly small. In the MWI, this fact is explained by saying that the relative amplitude of this "suffocation" branch of the wavefunction is absurdly small. The absolute square of this relative amplitude is proportional to the chance that we find ourselves in that branch." Your other great talent is to restate what I say, and make it sounds like I was wrong when I said it. There's various interpretations of QM (which I mention above, which you state as if you didn't just quote me on it), and so how you look at very fundamental things like entanglement vary. This is not to say that the mechanics of entanglement vary, but rather what it means. The point I was making above about the MWI is that there is a difference between things that are logically impossible (a married bachelor) and things that are just very very unlikely (a different world - assuming MWI - in which all the air left my room and I suffocated). If you think Dr. Zurek says I'm wrong because it is *too* unlikely, then so be it. There's other people that disagree with him, too. But you missed the fundamental point, which was about the difference betw
Stop copying my posts onto Dumbscientist.com. If you want to respond to my Slashdot posts, respond on Slashdot. Your site is just not as well constructed.
>>Huh? Your customarily vague but authoritative comment which doesn't include an "IANAP" disclaimer
You keep laboring under the delusion that because I got a degree in computer science, I can't possibly be a physics person, regardless of, say, the fact that I got a perfect score on the Physics SAT II and a 5 on the AP Physics test, took physics in college, and have a library shelf full of physics books that I've been reading since then.
>>will just reinforce the disturbingly common impression that physicists are bullshitting about concepts like inflation and dark matter.
Khayman, you've gone completely off the deep end, or completely misread my post that you were responding to, or were responding to some other post in the wrong thread.
My post above talks about the regularity of the rules of the universe, and how there's no evidence of things like C changing values over time. I have no fucking idea how you transition from that to calling into question notions like dark matter, or that physicists don't know what they're talking about. If you want to keep writing these long, unibomber-like screeds responding to 50 different posts by myself, at least make sure that my thesis statement in the one thread you're responding do doesn't *agree* with what you're saying.
Hmm, I doubt the /. er girlfriends would allow it.
"Deaf or blind people often report enhanced abilities in their remaining senses, but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be."
Up until now? Pfft.
There's been a lot of experiments done on the brain repurposing unused areas of the brain. For example, a school of the blind in France requires all of their teachers to spend some period of time living in perfect darkness inside a house so that they can better appreciate what their students are going through. Teachers that go through the program report being able to 'see sound', which is basically the result of their visual cortex being repurposed to process audio input, but which the brain is still taking as input into whatever it is that creates our visual senses in our sensorium.
Likewise, when they leave the darkness, they have a really hard time seeing for a few days, as the brain slowly adjusts back to using the visual cortex for what it was intended for.
I'd really recommend Dioge's book, The Brain that Changes Itself. It's a good summary of brain plasticity.
>>I can't wait till it becomes cheaper.
Didn't you read the headline? It flew free for the first time today.
>>I'll guess fans will be disappointed with it being "reimagined".
I guess. I wasn't that impressed with the novel, though PKD evidentally was.
IIRC from reading the notes in the back of the book, he randomly rolled the entire story using the I-Ching, and was reportedly creeped out by how well it worked.
>>Footnote, page 252, Unix Hater's Handbook. And people wonder why "ed" is unpopular...
Ed???
Real men use 'e'.
>>When people troll on about "Faux News" and Murdock I simply point to the problems with other "news" organizations that don't report certain news stories because it doesn't fit the narrative of the left. Which is why people should get the news raw and and unfiltered.
Shush! Next you'll be asking people to think for themselves!
I honestly think the best way to read news is to read *everything*, from Mother Jones to The Blaze, from NPR to Fox News, and when you find points of disagreement in their narratives, dig into it and figure it out for yourself. Too much work for most people, but if you just listen to one news source, due to the gatekeeper effect, you'll have a very biased idea of what is happening in our world.
>>they were removed during the Reagan administration when they were making repairs to the roof since it wasn't considered cost-effective to replace the panels (although the truthfulness of that could of course be doubted since we're talking about the Reagan administration).
I'd trust Reagan more on cost-effectiveness than Obama, whose answer to every question is "YES".
That said, according to a solar website I read today (so take it with a grain of salt) PV panels have come down from $40,000/watt to $5/watt. Though this may be including subsidies that make up half or more of the cost, it's still a good improvement over the '60s. They're also willing to do the installation for free, and sell you power at a 20% discount, so I guess they're putting their money where their mouth is (if it's not a scam).
www.realgoodssolar.com
Do you have a reference for that? On the EPA's website, it just talks about how it encourages the adoption of renewable fuels.
>>Sorry but cutting carbon dioxide by half doesn't cut it when there are 6.8 billion people.
Actually, halving our CO2 output is the consensus view of what we need to do to stabilize temperatures at a reasonable level.
We could nearly accomplish this by switching from coal to nuclear (40% of our CO2 comes from coal alone), and make the target with minor other improvements. Without disrupting our economy, like a CO2 tax would impose.
By contrast, bullshit like Kyoto tries to merely stabilize CO2 targets at our 1988 levels, which isn't enough. It's basically nothing more than a feel-good tax on rich countries, and if that sounds paradoxical to you, well...
>>Get rid of all the stupid environmentalists who opposed nuclear energy. They are responsible for global warming, not SUV drivers.
Environmentalists are responsible for global warming (they've kept us on coal and oil as our primary energy sources) *and* SUV drivers (via the paradoxical effect from braindead CAFE laws).
Cleaning up the atmosphere also contributed a bit to global warming as well. Damn Clean Air Act. =)
Yeah, you basically got to play on a server that has an admin watching for cheaters. Hasn't been a real problem in years on the Phoenixlabs one.
>>as it used to be the best non-military multiplayer FPS on the market.
Right after the original Team Fortress, which was superior in every way except graphics.
(Or, cough, CustomTF.)
>>I got several alt characters, I do not want to lose my conversations - the SOCIAL aspect of a highly social game just because I switched alt. I don't want to lose the ability to talk to my guildies on the alliance side about tomorrow night's Lich King tactics just because I'm busy levelling my troll hunter.
Ditto.
>>We freaked out about requiring it on forums, I personally would like to see it changed to be able to use a nickname rather than real name
The Blizzard forums are an absolute cesspool. Perhaps full name is too much, but perhaps first name and last initial, or vice versa, would be enough to put a person's personal stamp on it that they will stop responding to every thoughtful thread with "LOL NOOB LOL" like the pure pwnage wannabees that they are.
>>Researchers have been seduced by subjectively elegant and simple equations all the way back to F=MA ... these worked well enough, but were ultimately wrong, the truth was more complex and nuanced, but now we're finding the universe is fuzzy, clumsy and possibly buggy (inflation, possible variations in c, other weirdness).
There's yet to be any evidence the universe doesn't run on very specific mathematical rules. For example, there's a very good reason for inflation having to do with the 'pressure' at high energy states.
There's been occasional theories tossed about with C (or other cosmological constants) changing values, but there hasn't been any actual evidence for it.
Doesn't he already have a book called Halting State?
Then again, we could get to the moon with all the hand-waving he does in his books, if only there was enough atmosphere to get us there.
>>However, after his comments on active SETI being dangerous
Uh, active SETI *is* dangerous.
Let's say right now, we could push a button and contact a spacefaring alien race. Is it a good idea to push it or not?
If it's a 50% chance that they'll show up and be hot Vulcans, that's well and good. But if the other 50% chance is they blow up Earth, you'll see why it's not a good bet to make.
I've long wanted a proposition that says this exact thing.
>>The "concept of justice" in this country has been a mockery, now, for quite awhile, at least since the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc., if not for considerably longer. What wonderful Utopia have you been in these last several years?
Still. No reason to encourage bad behavior.