This write-up shows your extreme lack of understanding of both war and humanity. We, as humans, compete for resources chiefly on various organizational (read: tribal) levels. War is the chief way of doing that. Eliminating or enslaving civilian population has always been the key to winning wars, because civilian population is where soldiers and resources for any oppositions are raised from. Hell, one of the reasons why West (and by extension Soviets) can't win a war in dirty third world countries in over half a century is because the rise of cameras and television made people sensitive to civilian deaths. As a result, you no longer can do the war the way it's meant to be done, "kill the men, rape and enslave women and children, take the land".
But once you take off that mask of civility and go back to where real wars without TV cameras everywhere are still fought today, such as various parts of Africa, you see that war hasn't changed one bit. It's still exactly the same, except that people who can be efficient killers need less physical strength due to existence of cheap firearms. We see the same in both former Soviet and current NATO/USA armies - when soldiers know that they won't be caught, we get Abu Graibs, rapes of teenage girls that are followed by gunning down of her entire family to remove witnesses, gunning down of civilians to collect body parts as "trophies", not to even mention more "acceptable" issues like forced "hiring" of local female populace into prostitution for invaders and other similar acts. It's only human to do so, and we have plenty of history to prove it.
The game paints russians as bad guys and american soldiers as valorous heroes defending their homeland.
Hell, it even plays like a Rambo movie. Go out, kill a whole lot of russians, black guys and other non-american trash. The only good guys are americans, brits and a few russians, who, get this - betray their country. Turn this concept on its head and you won't sell a single copy in US, because no one will do the commercial suicide of putting it on the shelves. It would offend the very core belief that America is just and a force for good.
You talk about government ban. He's talking about corporate ban - corporations simply not selling the game.
We can split hair on semantics of whether or not that is censorship, but end result would be the same. Game would not be accessible in the country through ways other then import or fringe small time traders who will choose to not follow the trend and suffer the potential consequences.
That would be because it was set so far in the future, it was obviously not related to modern USA in any way.
Try a game that would do that to a modern country. Hell, for all the dicking around with portraying russians like some kind of inhumane monsters, they couldn't even make the scene where you have to shoot a bunch of civilians in a russian airport in modern warfare without giving you an option to "opt-out" of that scene.
What kind of reaction do you think the game would get if you could do the same to american folks in an american airport? Lieberman et al WOULD get it banned, not though government but through corporate interference and having a lot of clueless moms and dads call the company and tell it to stop selling such "unamerican" games. It would have AO rating, and then it would not be stocked by anyone anywhere, and everyone would pretend really hard that this is not censorship.
In my defense, there were multiple false claims in addition to this correct one in those posts, such as claim that polarizing glasses were used to preserve reflections. But that doesn't excuse the fact that I was indeed wrong on this one. Let this be a lesson to all participants: sometimes one proper link and a short explanation of what part of the link explains the problem with the hypothesis goes much further then a lot of saying "because this is how it is".
Actually I quoted from my head, and the last time I studied the subject was a two page lesson from high school physics over a decade ago. I just found the book in question and compared it to your link, and unfortunately it appears to not delve into the intensity issue, which is probably why I was wrong about it.
You are correct that one wavelength will be "stripped" - this is the entire point of the phenomenon we call polarization. Part where your hypothesis falls apart is where you assume that losing one dimension of the wave of light from the Sun reduces the amount of luminance carried by the wave of light from the Sun. This is false.
Good point, but how long will you be able to do that without alerting your victim? They still need to be high enough to be between your eye and the screen, and close enough to your eyes to give you sufficient view of the screen.
As noted, all methods of "privacy screening" are defeated by an offender willing to spend a significant effort to defeat them. That said, this will defeat all CASUAL people taking a peek, including those who are wearing polarized glasses.
This is false. Sunlight is fully unpolarized, therefore it will not be hindered by polarization until it is polarized by being reflected. To quote wikipedia on the origin of usage of polarization in sunglasses:
Some models have polarized lenses, made of Polaroid polarized plastic sheeting, to reduce glare caused by light reflected from polarizing surfaces such as water (see Brewster's angle for how this works) as well as by polarized diffuse sky radiation (skylight). This can be especially useful when fishing, for which the ability to see beneath the surface of the water is crucial.
You're most likely thinking of polarized glasses reducing skylight.
You may want to read up on how polarization actually works, and how polarizing has no effect on brightness of unpolarized light (beyond the impact of filter's imperfect optical properties of course).
I know, I actually exclusively use polarized glasses since I'm something of a swimming enthusiast in the summers (and I learned to hate water reflections), but things like my phone clearly not well visible with glasses on due to polarization issues.
But as I mentioned in another post, try sitting for a while with a 45 degree tilt of your head for more then a few minutes, then report back on just how painful it was for your neck. Not to mention your extreme obviousness to the person you're "spying" on.
And of course, it requires you to know what's going on, so you must have spent quite a bit of effort researching what's target doing. Most of the general "privacy screens" aren't designed to protect you against persistent offender who will research your method of protection. Against everyone else, it will work quite well, and this will include the occasional "person wearing polarizing sunglasses" who takes an occasional look at your screen but doesn't know how your protection actually works.
You and several others who suggested this probably didn't think of two major problems:
1. You're going to be pretty obvious 2. You head weighs a LOT. Neck muscles are designed to keep your head straight and turn it, and tilt it for a few moments, mostly into front or back (i.e. getting view of your surroundings, what's right in front of you and above you). Prolonged attempt at even a modest 45 deg sideways tilt will have your neck muscles scream for mercy in just a couple of minutes unless you're very fit - we're just not designed for that kind of strain.
Iirc polarizing sun glasses always have horizontal polarization (or was it vertical, can't remember, it's basically aimed at removing the rays reflected off water surface).
You can require exact opposite polarization here, meaning that sunglasses wouldn't work.
We are all humans in the end, and we cannot question everything around us and remain sane. Some things, like our own existence for example, or the fact that world that we perceive is real have to be believed in.
This worked for you because you worked in a field where "religious" point of view was held by establishment of people who were, for all their flaws, scientists at heart. They may not have been able to accept your hypotheses/theories for personal reasons, but they at least actively tried (in their own minds) to not let that imapact their point of view too much (as in fail you). You on the other hand most likely presented fairly solid reasoning (I have dabbled in the same subject as you, though not on as high of a level and encountered same issue).
When it comes to this case, we have a one very significant difference: The base on which the students are basing their arguments is not scientific. It's purely religious. Their arguments also cannot be backed by scientific point of view, and most importantly, their REASONING on the subject is not scientific in nature. This is where the key difference lies. One who does not even want to reason, but instead purely believes and refuses to accept reason for reasons of his belief denying him the right to accept them will not be as agreeable as your professors, who while having a rather religious point of view, will maintain their scientific REASONING, and when having trouble finding actual faults in your logic will have to "do the Einstein". That is, find that while they feel your arguments are flawed, they cannot find proper reasoning for it being wrong and therefore are forced to accept it (and not fail your papers).
For religious person, instead of pained acceptance you will get rejection "because it doesn't fit the dogma". I would suggest your mark downs are not so much a result of a subject itself, as the fact that controversy of the subject results in much deeper level of inspection of your facts and reasoning, and therefore finding more issues for which to mark your paper down.
1. In many regards, Iran is quite good in terms of advancing human rights in its territory, especially when concerned with evolving from a full fledged dictatorship (under shah) with secret prisons, full out torture and other kinds of that system to democratic elections for several important political bodies, improvement of judicial process to better match general population's opinions and so on. It's obviously very different from our way of doing things, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't improved remarkably since Shah's times. And yes, USA still has the highest percentage of its population behind bars in the world, including Iran. Yet it paints itself as the biggest protector of human rights. I would view a right to grow into something other then criminal, and being able to be rehabilitated after committing a crime rather then being incarcerated for extreme time in atrocious conditions (as in comparison to for example most of Western Europe) as a human right. So its not like there is a country out there with a perfect human rights record. Problem is when people start using human rights issues as a tool for their own political agenda (which was seen so well in trade with China - they want you to effectively stfu about human rights if you want to deal with them and Western countries by far and large have complied).
2. "Creating a conflict" != "starting a conflict". I can create a conflict between two neighbors by stealing one's shovel and putting it in other's yard. I won't be the one starting the conflict, the neighbor who's shovel got stolen will.
And editor ate the rest of the message for some reason:
Advantages are somewhat comparable to more general "PC vs console" argument. I get a bit more bugs, but better graphics, better saving system and better loading speeds.
Number of games supported at the moment is big enough to last me several years, and encompasses most of the popular games in existence. Best part is, the emulator is done by enthusiasts who instead of focusing only on big time games, focus on games they themselves and those who support them like to play, meaning quite a few relatively small budget titles are also supported properly.
While partially true, it's not fully true. You have a great point with wide screen (I crop to 4:3 on my monitor), but I still DO get 1080p vertically. Which was the claim. Also, actual rendering is done properly in high resolution. No jaggies of any kind anywhere. Of course you see textures being for what they really are - smudgy pieces of crap. But it still looks worlds better because you do render at higher resolution rather then rendering at normal and then upscaling (as far as I know), which means that there is no "laddering" anywhere as there would with upscale.
What of those white plantation owners who didn't agree with abolishing of slavery? Religious leaders that didn't agree with people's right not to belong to their religion?
In general, our culture is based on maintaining a certain level of balance between all members. One of the biggest negative changes to hit our daily lives this century have been because some have acted to extract a nice extra bit profit out of the system at the cost of the system itself. We still haven't figured out how to get out of that one.
And I was talking about banking if you were wondering. Though you could easily apply the same reasoning to modern copyright.
Ah, you mean like those that put USA, Russia, GB, France and China as permanent members on security council?
Funnily, the list pretty much sums up everyone in the world who creates major conflicts in one way or another. So it would seem that Iran is indeed very fit for human rights council.
So perhaps it's quite neutral, and your world view is massively skewed by the bubble you're living in?
So, if this is a new, "functional" lie detector, can it be fooled in the similar ways as polygraph, by clenching one's ass? I can already see all the stiff-looking people marching through the checkpoint, and suddenly relaxing when relevant part of check starts.
(Reality is, polygraph and other lie detectors work only as well as the person operating them measures against one being interrogated).
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This write-up shows your extreme lack of understanding of both war and humanity. We, as humans, compete for resources chiefly on various organizational (read: tribal) levels. War is the chief way of doing that. Eliminating or enslaving civilian population has always been the key to winning wars, because civilian population is where soldiers and resources for any oppositions are raised from. Hell, one of the reasons why West (and by extension Soviets) can't win a war in dirty third world countries in over half a century is because the rise of cameras and television made people sensitive to civilian deaths. As a result, you no longer can do the war the way it's meant to be done, "kill the men, rape and enslave women and children, take the land".
But once you take off that mask of civility and go back to where real wars without TV cameras everywhere are still fought today, such as various parts of Africa, you see that war hasn't changed one bit. It's still exactly the same, except that people who can be efficient killers need less physical strength due to existence of cheap firearms. We see the same in both former Soviet and current NATO/USA armies - when soldiers know that they won't be caught, we get Abu Graibs, rapes of teenage girls that are followed by gunning down of her entire family to remove witnesses, gunning down of civilians to collect body parts as "trophies", not to even mention more "acceptable" issues like forced "hiring" of local female populace into prostitution for invaders and other similar acts. It's only human to do so, and we have plenty of history to prove it.
The game paints russians as bad guys and american soldiers as valorous heroes defending their homeland.
Hell, it even plays like a Rambo movie. Go out, kill a whole lot of russians, black guys and other non-american trash. The only good guys are americans, brits and a few russians, who, get this - betray their country. Turn this concept on its head and you won't sell a single copy in US, because no one will do the commercial suicide of putting it on the shelves. It would offend the very core belief that America is just and a force for good.
You talk about government ban. He's talking about corporate ban - corporations simply not selling the game.
We can split hair on semantics of whether or not that is censorship, but end result would be the same. Game would not be accessible in the country through ways other then import or fringe small time traders who will choose to not follow the trend and suffer the potential consequences.
That would be because it was set so far in the future, it was obviously not related to modern USA in any way.
Try a game that would do that to a modern country. Hell, for all the dicking around with portraying russians like some kind of inhumane monsters, they couldn't even make the scene where you have to shoot a bunch of civilians in a russian airport in modern warfare without giving you an option to "opt-out" of that scene.
What kind of reaction do you think the game would get if you could do the same to american folks in an american airport? Lieberman et al WOULD get it banned, not though government but through corporate interference and having a lot of clueless moms and dads call the company and tell it to stop selling such "unamerican" games. It would have AO rating, and then it would not be stocked by anyone anywhere, and everyone would pretend really hard that this is not censorship.
Idiot's luck.
In my defense, there were multiple false claims in addition to this correct one in those posts, such as claim that polarizing glasses were used to preserve reflections. But that doesn't excuse the fact that I was indeed wrong on this one. Let this be a lesson to all participants: sometimes one proper link and a short explanation of what part of the link explains the problem with the hypothesis goes much further then a lot of saying "because this is how it is".
Actually I quoted from my head, and the last time I studied the subject was a two page lesson from high school physics over a decade ago. I just found the book in question and compared it to your link, and unfortunately it appears to not delve into the intensity issue, which is probably why I was wrong about it.
Beam of unpolarized light != Beam of unpolarized light from the Sun.
Unpolarized light from the sun is very uniform in term of linear polarizations, unless it's reflected from a surface.
You are correct that one wavelength will be "stripped" - this is the entire point of the phenomenon we call polarization. Part where your hypothesis falls apart is where you assume that losing one dimension of the wave of light from the Sun reduces the amount of luminance carried by the wave of light from the Sun. This is false.
Good point, but how long will you be able to do that without alerting your victim? They still need to be high enough to be between your eye and the screen, and close enough to your eyes to give you sufficient view of the screen.
As noted, all methods of "privacy screening" are defeated by an offender willing to spend a significant effort to defeat them. That said, this will defeat all CASUAL people taking a peek, including those who are wearing polarized glasses.
This is false. Sunlight is fully unpolarized, therefore it will not be hindered by polarization until it is polarized by being reflected. To quote wikipedia on the origin of usage of polarization in sunglasses:
Some models have polarized lenses, made of Polaroid polarized plastic sheeting, to reduce glare caused by light reflected from polarizing surfaces such as water (see Brewster's angle for how this works) as well as by polarized diffuse sky radiation (skylight). This can be especially useful when fishing, for which the ability to see beneath the surface of the water is crucial.
You're most likely thinking of polarized glasses reducing skylight.
You may want to read up on how polarization actually works, and how polarizing has no effect on brightness of unpolarized light (beyond the impact of filter's imperfect optical properties of course).
I know, I actually exclusively use polarized glasses since I'm something of a swimming enthusiast in the summers (and I learned to hate water reflections), but things like my phone clearly not well visible with glasses on due to polarization issues.
But as I mentioned in another post, try sitting for a while with a 45 degree tilt of your head for more then a few minutes, then report back on just how painful it was for your neck. Not to mention your extreme obviousness to the person you're "spying" on.
And of course, it requires you to know what's going on, so you must have spent quite a bit of effort researching what's target doing. Most of the general "privacy screens" aren't designed to protect you against persistent offender who will research your method of protection. Against everyone else, it will work quite well, and this will include the occasional "person wearing polarizing sunglasses" who takes an occasional look at your screen but doesn't know how your protection actually works.
You and several others who suggested this probably didn't think of two major problems:
1. You're going to be pretty obvious
2. You head weighs a LOT. Neck muscles are designed to keep your head straight and turn it, and tilt it for a few moments, mostly into front or back (i.e. getting view of your surroundings, what's right in front of you and above you). Prolonged attempt at even a modest 45 deg sideways tilt will have your neck muscles scream for mercy in just a couple of minutes unless you're very fit - we're just not designed for that kind of strain.
Iirc polarizing sun glasses always have horizontal polarization (or was it vertical, can't remember, it's basically aimed at removing the rays reflected off water surface).
You can require exact opposite polarization here, meaning that sunglasses wouldn't work.
Nope, any proper polarized glasses would work here. For example, polarized sun glasses.
We are all humans in the end, and we cannot question everything around us and remain sane. Some things, like our own existence for example, or the fact that world that we perceive is real have to be believed in.
This worked for you because you worked in a field where "religious" point of view was held by establishment of people who were, for all their flaws, scientists at heart. They may not have been able to accept your hypotheses/theories for personal reasons, but they at least actively tried (in their own minds) to not let that imapact their point of view too much (as in fail you). You on the other hand most likely presented fairly solid reasoning (I have dabbled in the same subject as you, though not on as high of a level and encountered same issue).
When it comes to this case, we have a one very significant difference: The base on which the students are basing their arguments is not scientific. It's purely religious. Their arguments also cannot be backed by scientific point of view, and most importantly, their REASONING on the subject is not scientific in nature. This is where the key difference lies. One who does not even want to reason, but instead purely believes and refuses to accept reason for reasons of his belief denying him the right to accept them will not be as agreeable as your professors, who while having a rather religious point of view, will maintain their scientific REASONING, and when having trouble finding actual faults in your logic will have to "do the Einstein". That is, find that while they feel your arguments are flawed, they cannot find proper reasoning for it being wrong and therefore are forced to accept it (and not fail your papers).
For religious person, instead of pained acceptance you will get rejection "because it doesn't fit the dogma". I would suggest your mark downs are not so much a result of a subject itself, as the fact that controversy of the subject results in much deeper level of inspection of your facts and reasoning, and therefore finding more issues for which to mark your paper down.
1. In many regards, Iran is quite good in terms of advancing human rights in its territory, especially when concerned with evolving from a full fledged dictatorship (under shah) with secret prisons, full out torture and other kinds of that system to democratic elections for several important political bodies, improvement of judicial process to better match general population's opinions and so on. It's obviously very different from our way of doing things, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't improved remarkably since Shah's times.
And yes, USA still has the highest percentage of its population behind bars in the world, including Iran. Yet it paints itself as the biggest protector of human rights. I would view a right to grow into something other then criminal, and being able to be rehabilitated after committing a crime rather then being incarcerated for extreme time in atrocious conditions (as in comparison to for example most of Western Europe) as a human right.
So its not like there is a country out there with a perfect human rights record. Problem is when people start using human rights issues as a tool for their own political agenda (which was seen so well in trade with China - they want you to effectively stfu about human rights if you want to deal with them and Western countries by far and large have complied).
2. "Creating a conflict" != "starting a conflict". I can create a conflict between two neighbors by stealing one's shovel and putting it in other's yard. I won't be the one starting the conflict, the neighbor who's shovel got stolen will.
And editor ate the rest of the message for some reason:
Advantages are somewhat comparable to more general "PC vs console" argument. I get a bit more bugs, but better graphics, better saving system and better loading speeds.
Number of games supported at the moment is big enough to last me several years, and encompasses most of the popular games in existence. Best part is, the emulator is done by enthusiasts who instead of focusing only on big time games, focus on games they themselves and those who support them like to play, meaning quite a few relatively small budget titles are also supported properly.
While partially true, it's not fully true. You have a great point with wide screen (I crop to 4:3 on my monitor), but I still DO get 1080p vertically. Which was the claim. Also, actual rendering is done properly in high resolution. No jaggies of any kind anywhere. Of course you see textures being for what they really are - smudgy pieces of crap. But it still looks worlds better because you do render at higher resolution rather then rendering at normal and then upscaling (as far as I know), which means that there is no "laddering" anywhere as there would with upscale.
Applying concept of "right" and "wrong" to world politics and human relationships?
Are you really this ignorant of reality, or just plain brainwashed?
Bingo. We have a winner. How is this different with Iran and human rights?
P.S. Funny how everyone answering this one is AC :D.
What of those white plantation owners who didn't agree with abolishing of slavery? Religious leaders that didn't agree with people's right not to belong to their religion?
In general, our culture is based on maintaining a certain level of balance between all members. One of the biggest negative changes to hit our daily lives this century have been because some have acted to extract a nice extra bit profit out of the system at the cost of the system itself. We still haven't figured out how to get out of that one.
And I was talking about banking if you were wondering. Though you could easily apply the same reasoning to modern copyright.
Ah, you mean like those that put USA, Russia, GB, France and China as permanent members on security council?
Funnily, the list pretty much sums up everyone in the world who creates major conflicts in one way or another. So it would seem that Iran is indeed very fit for human rights council.
So perhaps it's quite neutral, and your world view is massively skewed by the bubble you're living in?
So, if this is a new, "functional" lie detector, can it be fooled in the similar ways as polygraph, by clenching one's ass? I can already see all the stiff-looking people marching through the checkpoint, and suddenly relaxing when relevant part of check starts.
(Reality is, polygraph and other lie detectors work only as well as the person operating them measures against one being interrogated).