>>Now if only American banks had the same motivation to protect its customers data from the very same agencies.
I think they're more motivated by Uncle Sam's moneybags.
If you're a friend of the government, the government will cover your risky losses. You get to be Goldman Sachs. If you're not, then you get to play as Wachovia. In other words, being a friend of the government is the optimal place to be, since it lets you gamble as wildly as you like - you pocket any upside, and if your gamble doesn't pay off you just get a job as Treasury Secretary and write a blank check to your former place of employment.
>>* unless you happen to be black (up until the 1863), female (up until 1920), an interracial couple (up until 1967) or are a homosexual (ongoing), of course.
One of Jesus' core messages was on the concept of Universal Charity. Human societies up until that point had believed in loving one's family, or one's country, or even one's neighbor, but Jesus' rather revolutionary message was that you should love everyone.
It's a easy concept to grasp intellectually, and a very hard concept to execute in real life.
Over time, you see the very reason that issues like slavery lose on philosophical grounds is because it contradicts the doctrine of Universal Charity. *Because they couldn't argue against Universal Charity*, the people in the South were pushed into the position of arguing that slavery was good for the slaves. Which caused the notion to collapse.
>>Uh, what? Is your friend 6 years old, or are you simply lying in order to paint atheists in a bad light? Hmm, I wonder-
Nope, these were all hard-nosed college friends of mine who believe in the primacy of science and logic.
I just noticed a trend in them to believe in all sorts of things which contradicts this notion of primacy, and I think this article might explain why - there's a region of the brain that is otherwise not being used, so when they don't have a religion that is at the very minimum consistent with cosmology (i.e. Christianity) they start believing in all sorts of very strange stuff.
It's like there's a basic human need for religion/spirituality.
But this results in, as with one friend, believing she could talk to plants, and could hear the Oleander on the I-5 in San Diego screaming from all the CO2 pollution being inflicted upon them. "I can feel them choking!", she said.
And no, there's no way I could make something like that up. See my reply to Grishnakh below for some more of my favorites.
>>Whoa... you think Christianity's mystical claims are more likely than the existence of aliens?
Well, specifically, alien abductions, ala X-files, including cow mutilations and crop circles. Things which are pretty much proven to be false by anyone with a modicum of critical thinking.
I'm not strawmanning, either. These are all beliefs espoused by my atheist friends, who ostensibly believe in the primacy of science and logic.
Ooh, and one atheist chick friend of mine is firmly convinced that she's psychic. And that I am too, for that matter, because I can "look at a photo and know what the people in it are like." Yeah.
My premise, which apparently got me flagged as a troll by the sheep-like moderators on Slashdot, is that if this article is correct, and we do indeed have a region of the brain devoted to the supernatural or spiritual elements of our existence, is that when it's not being used by atheists because they've given up on religion, they start adopting other, less plausible elements instead. Or it atrophies, and they become a sort of hollow, bitter person like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.
>>That's no atheist, that sounds like some kind of Gaia-fan or a follower of some kind of naturalistic religion, even if he doesn't want to admit it.
That's sort of my point. He can somehow hold both ridicule for Christianity and his belief in an obviously false creation myth side by side in his head. I think this article might explain why.
Ooh, here's another great one I heard - for billions of years, there were only females. Men were a mutation. So in Africa there were just female zebras and monkeys and such, and evil (men) didn't enter the world until very recently, and are the cause of all the suffering and war we see.
True story. The presenter told this to a room full of elementary school teachers during a professional development workshop in San Diego. To be fair, I don't know if she was an atheist, but her creation myth is funny enough to be worth relating.
>>Sure. But not as much as the idea of parting the Red Sea, resurrection, and a supreme being who has an interest in our everyday lives.
Or is it more far-fetched to say that the universe created itself, that while there should be nothing at all there is, and that we all pretend like we have certain unalienable rights endowed by a creator even from those who don't believe in a creator?
>>Long story short: Congress is allowed to do anything it wants, because everything has some effect on interstate commerce.
Uh, no. The Supreme Court ruled in Lopez that they can't just wave their hands and make everything related to interstate commerce in some way. So, no, they can't pass a law saying everyone has to wear lederhosen, because the connection is too tenuous.
Now, that said, they've given congress quite a bit of leeway in determining what relates to interstate commerce (Stewart was about a guy selling gun kits online which could be later illegally converted to machine guns).
>>Rational basis review means that a court won't overturn a commerce clause-based law if there is any rational way that the law relates to interstate commerce.
Actually, the benchmark is that it "substantially affects" or "substantially relates to" interstate commerce. Not that there is "any rational way". If that was the case, the court reasoned, then there wouldn't be a need for enumerated powers in the Constitution - they'd literally be able to make laws about everything.
>>So, this is proof that religious people aren't using their whole brain then?
Err, no.
If there's a part of our brain devoted to religion/spirituality (and since it's such a large part of human experience, I wouldn't be surprised by it), then it means that *atheists* are not using their whole brain.
In fact, over time, the neural map for this region in strict atheists ought to atrophy, making them incapable of being spiritual. Which may or more may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective. But I'd bet that in most atheists this region would start getting used for religious-ish things that aren't precisely religions, like belief in ghosts or aliens (more atheists believe in alien abductions and ghosts than Christians), or Gaia ("The earthquake in Haiti was Mother Nature's way of punishing us for global warming!" --Danny Glover) or any one of a number of other ideas that are much less likely to be true than Christianity.
"Originally," my atheist friend told me, "there were four elements, earth wind water fire, that since then became self-conscious and then divided into all the elements of the periodic table." Ok, I said, what was water made of before we had hydrogen and oxygen? He couldn't answer that.
As much as atheists like to make fun of Christians believing in kooky notions like the beginning of the universe and universal human rights, it's nice to see that Cog Sci can explain why atheists believe in even kookier stuff.
Re:Not groundbreaking at all, System Shock 2 clone
on
BioShock 2 Released
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· Score: 1
>>Actually Bioshock was essentially System Shock 2 reskin with a few features removed and the difficulty turned down
I'm playing Bioshock2 on Hard difficulty, with Vita Chambers disabled, and on an (ugh) PS3 so that my wife can watch while I play. It's actually rather hard... and lacking a mouse to do precision headshots really makes it more difficult.
>>Some people make friends with people they've met online in various ways, even if "making friends" wasn't their primary reason for going into that online venue.
Do you often make friends when playing single player games?
And, while I do agree with you, it seems rather redundant to force everyone into Bioware's social networking site when I'm already running DAO out of Steam.
>>there's LIVE, PSN, Xfire, Steam, Facebook (in a way), and now BNET 2.0.
Almost every company is making their own usually terrible social network site. For example, you have to enroll with Bioware's shitty social networking site to play Dragon Age or (presumably) ME2, or at least to get the collector's edition items that you probably should have just gotten included when you bought the game. I'm principally annoyed at them since they had two different email addresses on file for me, and kept bouncing me back and forth between the two saying that my email was wrong each time, which kept me from being able to play Dragon Age for nearly a week until they fixed the bug in their software. And my character on their online site is permanently stuck at level 12, even though it shows me having the achievement for hitting level 20. And... yeah. It's pretty bad.
But the thing that really bugs me is: Why do I need to be part of a social networking site to play Dragon Age or Mass Effect? They're single fucking player games. Adding "friends" or whatever doesn't make the slightest bloody difference.
And the very first thing they did, within mere days of the acquisition, is they took his ultra-efficient, elegant little tools and put a 200KB EULA popup into every one of them.
A GUI popup.
Even into the command line tools.
Of course, between Win95 and later versions, they took their GUI "winipconfig", removed the easy to use GUI from it, and re-released it as "ipconfig".
You know they were thinking, Why on earth should our users simply be able to click to release and renew their DHCP leases? That's too crazy for the average user. Let's make sure they know how to bring up a command line first, to prove they're worthy.
>>...a good scientist collaborates (even more so today than before)
>>Don't fucking lecture me about Einstein's postulates. I've done the basic derivations and understand them.
Then why on earth do you think that people working alone are "unscientific"? Was Einstein's work unscientific because he didn't publish special relativity with 20 authors on it? You hold a very contradictory set of beliefs.
Being "scientific" means that you generally make experiments/observations and/or develop theoretical frameworks, all of which in a logical or empirical fashion. That's it. Nothing more. Whether you shower or not, or publish papers with 1 author or 20, or investigate theories that might turn out to be total nonsense (see for instance String Theory), or are a nice person or a total jerk, doesn't have anything to do with being "scientific" or not. I'm sure I'd much rather be around the Feynmans of the world than the Gell-manns, but they're both great scientists.
>>because copyright and likeness rights aren't the same thing.
Right, I'm not disagreeing with you on this. But likeness rights don't magically give you copyright rights on a work. If they say "no commercial use" on a photo, that is a copyright restriction, which they can't do because it is in the public domain. The likeness issue is tangential to this. There are commercial ways of using a photograph that don't imply endorsement. In fact, almost all of them do not.
>>They state why the photos have been uploaded (for news purposes--purposely vague I imagine) and then go on to indicate that certain uses are prohibited--basically commercial use.
Which they can't do, because the photos are in the public domain. They have no ability to manage the rights on them at all.
This is what I said: "My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it."
This is what you said: "Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me."
These are two different statements. There is force pushing down on my desk, and force (in an equal amount) pushing back up, but no energy is being expended. My desk is a fully functioning anti-gravity device that consumes no energy to hold my monitor in its current position in the gravity well.
In fact, fans are way too subservient, and our culture is hopelessly locked into a view of "the artist" which appeared in the romantic period, and should have died a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, it became institutionalised (in large part through copyright legislation) and walks on as a ravenous zombie.
That's one of the reasons why I love PC games that can be modded. It allows fans (who often know better than the original creators how things should be done or balanced) to have a hand in the creation and evolution of the game, often resulting in a superior product. One of the reasons why film and TV are losing ground to games is because games are participatory, which is inherently more interesting, and moddable games are the ultimate in audience participation.
See for example the piece of crap that is the NWN storyline versus the best fan-made mods. Or, eh, Counterstrike (which I think sucks, but a lot of people used to like better than HL1). Or Tower Defense, which was originally just a mod for Starcraft, and now is an entire genre of its own. Or Sheep Tag (originally a War3 mod). Or Team Fortress (originally a Quake1 mod). Or,/cough, Custom TF (originally a mod of Team Fortress).
Now it seems that there's been a trend away from modability, mainly I think because of the prevalence of making games both for the PC and a console. CoD: Modern Warfare 2 doesn't even have private servers, so they can't even be hacked to be modded, as needs to be done with some games (like Diablo 2 or the Baldur's Gate series). I hope it's not a permanent trend.
>>If I recall, in Mass Effect 2 they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!
Yeah, one of the things I love about the Mass Effect series is that they actually have a consistent physics that would actually work if their core premise (Element Zero / Eezo) actually existed. Essentially, if you run an electric current through the Eezo, it reduces the mass of objects in the area based on the electric current, and the mass. When you reduce mass to zero, then you get to move at light speed for free. If you reduce it below zero, the theory goes, you get FTL speed.
>>Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.
But light can move faster than C. Light can also move backwards in time. You can also violate conservation of energy temporarily as long as you pay it back later. All of these effects only occur at quantum scales. If there was a way of getting them to happen at larger scales, perhaps by paying extra energy, then all sorts of interesting things would be possible without violating the laws of physics.
In particular, being able to send information via photons traveling at warp speed would have tremendous applicability, even here on earth. The time delay of light going around the world adds unavoidable lag to any worldwide FPS games.
>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?
None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!
If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.
>>In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end.
Except a string can't pass through a brick. But an electron can teleport through a "solid" barrier over very short distances. Its wavefunction can overlap a thin solid barrier, and when collapse occurs, it can appear on the other side of the barrier. This is why transistors work.
>>The nutty professor ideal has long had it's day.
You know Einstein basically derived all of relativity theory from two basic starting principles: 1) That physics are the same in all reference frames and 2) The speed of light is the same in all reference frames
And why did he start here? Because he had an intuition that the world was a rational, orderly place. It might not have been right about local reality, but if not for this intuition (which you refuse to acknowledge as part of the scientific process) he wouldn't have developed his theory.
>>So you think it's more logical to be a nasty fuckwit who can't collaborate?
I'm saying you're confused. You can be a nasty fuckwit of a scientist, or a wonderfully collaborative scientist. And beating up on Einstein because he was wrong about local realism 20 years before it was proven not to be true is an unrealistic ideal to hold anyone up to.
>>Under no circumstances is saying, "I say a comet explode" science.
It's part of science, it is not the entire scientific process. The standard Kuhnian model goes something like this: 1) We have a theoretical framework 2) Observations and experiments are conducted. If they agree, nothing changes. If they disagree with theory, pressure builds up 3) When enough pressure builds up, a paradigm shift occurs, and people reject the old framework (luminiferous aether, whatever) and adopt a new framework. 4) Repeat
You're just focusing on the theoretical framework part of it. As you said, Einstein developed a theoretical framework based solely on a thought experiment about "what if the speed of light is the same in all reference frames" and developed his whole theory using math from there. Which was an amazing achievement. But if the Michelson/Morely experiment had come out as people expected, relativity would have been rejected. So you really need both.
The point is, a lot of what we call "science" don't do experimentation in any real sense, but rather just look at stats and try to extrapolate conclusions from them. If you call Climate Science science, then you have to call Economics science. Contrawise, if you claim Economics is not science, then you have to say that Climate Science is not science. I don't think you can have it both ways.
I think there's something inherently contradictory about our current notions of science, and what I consider the false division between sciences and the arts. What Einstein did back in 1905 was an entirely mathematical activity, devoid of any experimentation and observation at all, so I'd classify it more as math than physics. So he should have been (by our current bizarre way of dividing up fields in universities) a Professor of the Arts, instead of a Professor of the Sciences. And if it sounds wrong that the father of relativity should be considered not a scientist, well, that's exactly my point.
The EPR Paradox argument was correct. Are you claiming it is not?
Pretending that everyone knew Bell's Theorem 20 years before it was even written means you don't have the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about.
You're pretending the scientific method has something to do with being nice to people, collaborating with others, and knowing ahead of time which way science will fall out. By this standard, I think you're looking for a nice, socialist, psychic, not a scientist.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Now if only American banks had the same motivation to protect its customers data from the very same agencies.
I think they're more motivated by Uncle Sam's moneybags.
If you're a friend of the government, the government will cover your risky losses. You get to be Goldman Sachs. If you're not, then you get to play as Wachovia. In other words, being a friend of the government is the optimal place to be, since it lets you gamble as wildly as you like - you pocket any upside, and if your gamble doesn't pay off you just get a job as Treasury Secretary and write a blank check to your former place of employment.
>>You're confusing Stewart with Lopez.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
>>If Congress passes the lederhosen law with the right magic words, it will withstand rational basis review.
Maybe. Depends if the Supreme Court has been eating its vitamins that day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause#The_Rehnquist_Court
>>* unless you happen to be black (up until the 1863), female (up until 1920), an interracial couple (up until 1967) or are a homosexual (ongoing), of course.
One of Jesus' core messages was on the concept of Universal Charity. Human societies up until that point had believed in loving one's family, or one's country, or even one's neighbor, but Jesus' rather revolutionary message was that you should love everyone.
It's a easy concept to grasp intellectually, and a very hard concept to execute in real life.
Over time, you see the very reason that issues like slavery lose on philosophical grounds is because it contradicts the doctrine of Universal Charity. *Because they couldn't argue against Universal Charity*, the people in the South were pushed into the position of arguing that slavery was good for the slaves. Which caused the notion to collapse.
>>Uh, what? Is your friend 6 years old, or are you simply lying in order to paint atheists in a bad light? Hmm, I wonder-
Nope, these were all hard-nosed college friends of mine who believe in the primacy of science and logic.
I just noticed a trend in them to believe in all sorts of things which contradicts this notion of primacy, and I think this article might explain why - there's a region of the brain that is otherwise not being used, so when they don't have a religion that is at the very minimum consistent with cosmology (i.e. Christianity) they start believing in all sorts of very strange stuff.
It's like there's a basic human need for religion/spirituality.
But this results in, as with one friend, believing she could talk to plants, and could hear the Oleander on the I-5 in San Diego screaming from all the CO2 pollution being inflicted upon them. "I can feel them choking!", she said.
And no, there's no way I could make something like that up. See my reply to Grishnakh below for some more of my favorites.
>>Whoa... you think Christianity's mystical claims are more likely than the existence of aliens?
Well, specifically, alien abductions, ala X-files, including cow mutilations and crop circles. Things which are pretty much proven to be false by anyone with a modicum of critical thinking.
I'm not strawmanning, either. These are all beliefs espoused by my atheist friends, who ostensibly believe in the primacy of science and logic.
Ooh, and one atheist chick friend of mine is firmly convinced that she's psychic. And that I am too, for that matter, because I can "look at a photo and know what the people in it are like." Yeah.
My premise, which apparently got me flagged as a troll by the sheep-like moderators on Slashdot, is that if this article is correct, and we do indeed have a region of the brain devoted to the supernatural or spiritual elements of our existence, is that when it's not being used by atheists because they've given up on religion, they start adopting other, less plausible elements
instead. Or it atrophies, and they become a sort of hollow, bitter person like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.
>>That's no atheist, that sounds like some kind of Gaia-fan or a follower of some kind of naturalistic religion, even if he doesn't want to admit it.
That's sort of my point. He can somehow hold both ridicule for Christianity and his belief in an obviously false creation myth side by side in his head. I think this article might explain why.
Ooh, here's another great one I heard - for billions of years, there were only females. Men were a mutation. So in Africa there were just female zebras and monkeys and such, and evil (men) didn't enter the world until very recently, and are the cause of all the suffering and war we see.
True story. The presenter told this to a room full of elementary school teachers during a professional development workshop in San Diego. To be fair, I don't know if she was an atheist, but her creation myth is funny enough to be worth relating.
>>Sure. But not as much as the idea of parting the Red Sea, resurrection, and a supreme being who has an interest in our everyday lives.
Or is it more far-fetched to say that the universe created itself, that while there should be nothing at all there is, and that we all pretend like we have certain unalienable rights endowed by a creator even from those who don't believe in a creator?
>>Long story short: Congress is allowed to do anything it wants, because everything has some effect on interstate commerce.
Uh, no. The Supreme Court ruled in Lopez that they can't just wave their hands and make everything related to interstate commerce in some way. So, no, they can't pass a law saying everyone has to wear lederhosen, because the connection is too tenuous.
Now, that said, they've given congress quite a bit of leeway in determining what relates to interstate commerce (Stewart was about a guy selling gun kits online which could be later illegally converted to machine guns).
>>Rational basis review means that a court won't overturn a commerce clause-based law if there is any rational way that the law relates to interstate commerce.
Actually, the benchmark is that it "substantially affects" or "substantially relates to" interstate commerce. Not that there is "any rational way". If that was the case, the court reasoned, then there wouldn't be a need for enumerated powers in the Constitution - they'd literally be able to make laws about everything.
>>So, this is proof that religious people aren't using their whole brain then?
Err, no.
If there's a part of our brain devoted to religion/spirituality (and since it's such a large part of human experience, I wouldn't be surprised by it), then it means that *atheists* are not using their whole brain.
In fact, over time, the neural map for this region in strict atheists ought to atrophy, making them incapable of being spiritual. Which may or more may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective. But I'd bet that in most atheists this region would start getting used for religious-ish things that aren't precisely religions, like belief in ghosts or aliens (more atheists believe in alien abductions and ghosts than Christians), or Gaia ("The earthquake in Haiti was Mother Nature's way of punishing us for global warming!" --Danny Glover) or any one of a number of other ideas that are much less likely to be true than Christianity.
"Originally," my atheist friend told me, "there were four elements, earth wind water fire, that since then became self-conscious and then divided into all the elements of the periodic table." Ok, I said, what was water made of before we had hydrogen and oxygen? He couldn't answer that.
As much as atheists like to make fun of Christians believing in kooky notions like the beginning of the universe and universal human rights, it's nice to see that Cog Sci can explain why atheists believe in even kookier stuff.
>>Actually Bioshock was essentially System Shock 2 reskin with a few features removed and the difficulty turned down
I'm playing Bioshock2 on Hard difficulty, with Vita Chambers disabled, and on an (ugh) PS3 so that my wife can watch while I play. It's actually rather hard... and lacking a mouse to do precision headshots really makes it more difficult.
>>Some people make friends with people they've met online in various ways, even if "making friends" wasn't their primary reason for going into that online venue.
Do you often make friends when playing single player games?
And, while I do agree with you, it seems rather redundant to force everyone into Bioware's social networking site when I'm already running DAO out of Steam.
>>But to answer the question, it was needed because they plan to make some additional money by selling expansions and additional content.
An online store is one thing. A social network, though? That's kind of inexplicable.
>>there's LIVE, PSN, Xfire, Steam, Facebook (in a way), and now BNET 2.0.
Almost every company is making their own usually terrible social network site. For example, you have to enroll with Bioware's shitty social networking site to play Dragon Age or (presumably) ME2, or at least to get the collector's edition items that you probably should have just gotten included when you bought the game. I'm principally annoyed at them since they had two different email addresses on file for me, and kept bouncing me back and forth between the two saying that my email was wrong each time, which kept me from being able to play Dragon Age for nearly a week until they fixed the bug in their software. And my character on their online site is permanently stuck at level 12, even though it shows me having the achievement for hitting level 20. And... yeah. It's pretty bad.
But the thing that really bugs me is: Why do I need to be part of a social networking site to play Dragon Age or Mass Effect? They're single fucking player games. Adding "friends" or whatever doesn't make the slightest bloody difference.
Of course, between Win95 and later versions, they took their GUI "winipconfig", removed the easy to use GUI from it, and re-released it as "ipconfig".
You know they were thinking, Why on earth should our users simply be able to click to release and renew their DHCP leases? That's too crazy for the average user. Let's make sure they know how to bring up a command line first, to prove they're worthy.
>>...a good scientist collaborates (even more so today than before)
>>Don't fucking lecture me about Einstein's postulates. I've done the basic derivations and understand them.
Then why on earth do you think that people working alone are "unscientific"? Was Einstein's work unscientific because he didn't publish special relativity with 20 authors on it? You hold a very contradictory set of beliefs.
Being "scientific" means that you generally make experiments/observations and/or develop theoretical frameworks, all of which in a logical or empirical fashion. That's it. Nothing more. Whether you shower or not, or publish papers with 1 author or 20, or investigate theories that might turn out to be total nonsense (see for instance String Theory), or are a nice person or a total jerk, doesn't have anything to do with being "scientific" or not. I'm sure I'd much rather be around the Feynmans of the world than the Gell-manns, but they're both great scientists.
>>because copyright and likeness rights aren't the same thing.
Right, I'm not disagreeing with you on this. But likeness rights don't magically give you copyright rights on a work. If they say "no commercial use" on a photo, that is a copyright restriction, which they can't do because it is in the public domain. The likeness issue is tangential to this. There are commercial ways of using a photograph that don't imply endorsement. In fact, almost all of them do not.
>>They state why the photos have been uploaded (for news purposes--purposely vague I imagine) and then go on to indicate that certain uses are prohibited--basically commercial use.
Which they can't do, because the photos are in the public domain. They have no ability to manage the rights on them at all.
This is what I said: "My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it."
This is what you said: "Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me."
These are two different statements. There is force pushing down on my desk, and force (in an equal amount) pushing back up, but no energy is being expended. My desk is a fully functioning anti-gravity device that consumes no energy to hold my monitor in its current position in the gravity well.
In fact, fans are way too subservient, and our culture is hopelessly locked into a view of "the artist" which appeared in the romantic period, and should have died a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, it became institutionalised (in large part through copyright legislation) and walks on as a ravenous zombie.
That's one of the reasons why I love PC games that can be modded. It allows fans (who often know better than the original creators how things should be done or balanced) to have a hand in the creation and evolution of the game, often resulting in a superior product. One of the reasons why film and TV are losing ground to games is because games are participatory, which is inherently more interesting, and moddable games are the ultimate in audience participation.
See for example the piece of crap that is the NWN storyline versus the best fan-made mods. Or, eh, Counterstrike (which I think sucks, but a lot of people used to like better than HL1). Or Tower Defense, which was originally just a mod for Starcraft, and now is an entire genre of its own. Or Sheep Tag (originally a War3 mod). Or Team Fortress (originally a Quake1 mod). Or, /cough, Custom TF (originally a mod of Team Fortress).
Now it seems that there's been a trend away from modability, mainly I think because of the prevalence of making games both for the PC and a console. CoD: Modern Warfare 2 doesn't even have private servers, so they can't even be hacked to be modded, as needs to be done with some games (like Diablo 2 or the Baldur's Gate series). I hope it's not a permanent trend.
>>If I recall, in Mass Effect 2 they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!
Yeah, one of the things I love about the Mass Effect series is that they actually have a consistent physics that would actually work if their core premise (Element Zero / Eezo) actually existed. Essentially, if you run an electric current through the Eezo, it reduces the mass of objects in the area based on the electric current, and the mass. When you reduce mass to zero, then you get to move at light speed for free. If you reduce it below zero, the theory goes, you get FTL speed.
>>Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.
But light can move faster than C. Light can also move backwards in time. You can also violate conservation of energy temporarily as long as you pay it back later. All of these effects only occur at quantum scales. If there was a way of getting them to happen at larger scales, perhaps by paying extra energy, then all sorts of interesting things would be possible without violating the laws of physics.
In particular, being able to send information via photons traveling at warp speed would have tremendous applicability, even here on earth. The time delay of light going around the world adds unavoidable lag to any worldwide FPS games.
>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?
None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!
If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.
>>In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end.
Except a string can't pass through a brick. But an electron can teleport through a "solid" barrier over very short distances. Its wavefunction can overlap a thin solid barrier, and when collapse occurs, it can appear on the other side of the barrier. This is why transistors work.
>>The nutty professor ideal has long had it's day.
You know Einstein basically derived all of relativity theory from two basic starting principles:
1) That physics are the same in all reference frames and
2) The speed of light is the same in all reference frames
And why did he start here? Because he had an intuition that the world was a rational, orderly place. It might not have been right about local reality, but if not for this intuition (which you refuse to acknowledge as part of the scientific process) he wouldn't have developed his theory.
>>So you think it's more logical to be a nasty fuckwit who can't collaborate?
I'm saying you're confused. You can be a nasty fuckwit of a scientist, or a wonderfully collaborative scientist. And beating up on Einstein because he was wrong about local realism 20 years before it was proven not to be true is an unrealistic ideal to hold anyone up to.
>>Under no circumstances is saying, "I say a comet explode" science.
It's part of science, it is not the entire scientific process. The standard Kuhnian model goes something like this:
1) We have a theoretical framework
2) Observations and experiments are conducted. If they agree, nothing changes. If they disagree with theory, pressure builds up
3) When enough pressure builds up, a paradigm shift occurs, and people reject the old framework (luminiferous aether, whatever) and adopt a new framework.
4) Repeat
You're just focusing on the theoretical framework part of it. As you said, Einstein developed a theoretical framework based solely on a thought experiment about "what if the speed of light is the same in all reference frames" and developed his whole theory using math from there. Which was an amazing achievement. But if the Michelson/Morely experiment had come out as people expected, relativity would have been rejected. So you really need both.
The point is, a lot of what we call "science" don't do experimentation in any real sense, but rather just look at stats and try to extrapolate conclusions from them. If you call Climate Science science, then you have to call Economics science. Contrawise, if you claim Economics is not science, then you have to say that Climate Science is not science. I don't think you can have it both ways.
I think there's something inherently contradictory about our current notions of science, and what I consider the false division between sciences and the arts. What Einstein did back in 1905 was an entirely mathematical activity, devoid of any experimentation and observation at all, so I'd classify it more as math than physics. So he should have been (by our current bizarre way of dividing up fields in universities) a Professor of the Arts, instead of a Professor of the Sciences. And if it sounds wrong that the father of relativity should be considered not a scientist, well, that's exactly my point.
The EPR Paradox argument was correct. Are you claiming it is not?
Pretending that everyone knew Bell's Theorem 20 years before it was even written means you don't have the slightest fucking clue of what you're talking about.
You're pretending the scientific method has something to do with being nice to people, collaborating with others, and knowing ahead of time which way science will fall out. By this standard, I think you're looking for a nice, socialist, psychic, not a scientist.
Nope. It rejected my second player from being able to play online, because my wife's account was Silver, not Gold.
Fortunately, I had one of those three-day trial cards lying around, so we could enable Gold for her for the weekend.