Yeah, difficulty levels are the common way of making story-based games challenging. Still, they're only good for replayability. They don't help challenge-based players enjoy the game the first time through.
I like the concept of putting in challenge-based side quests in otherwise story-based games. The underworld in Planescape: Torment was partially like that -- you only needed to be in there a short while and then the story could move on, but you could stay and explore the underworld for a long time before you were able to beat it. It was not a harder version of the linear story, it was a parallel challenge with no story basis that someone playing the linear game could jump to anytime they wished. Open ended RPGs use the same concept -- continue on with near certainty that you'll eventually succeed at the main quest, or stop and try a side quest that you might fail. I'd point to Oblivion as an example of that, but everything in Oblivion was scaled in a way that forced the main quest and side quests to always have the same level of challenge.
I'm seeing a divergence in computer games into two camps. One is the classic 'Game as Challenge' camp, where players seek to improve their ability to play and to overcome challenges that at first seem overwhelming.
But we're trending toward a 'Game as Novel' paradigm, where the purpose of playing the game is to see the story unfold and to make our own impact upon it. The challenge is reduced to the point that many games (like Bioshock and Prey) have zero costs for failure -- you just keep playing, keep the story progressing, as if nothing happened.
These two camps aren't completely in opposition to one another, but they can ruin each other's experience. The central nature of the Challenge game is that you may reach a point in the game past which you cannot proceed. That's anathema to the Novel game, which wants its reader to experience the entire story.
Not sure how to fix this divergence. Artificial limits (such as playing with X, where X is some helpful game mechanic) are one way but they feel contrived and hollow to the challenge player.
Not really, because at different time periods there will be different strengths of solar wind, and some of those will reach farther out from the sun than others before they stop. Refer back to the 'waves on a beach' analogy again.
Okay, so then what is this "termination shock" that Voyager is going to encounter? Isn't it encountering a termination shock every time it outpaces an overlapping solar wind front?
Yes. The solar winds spread out like waves hitting a beach. Some of them get farther up on the beach than others. Voyager is hitting the first distinct wave, then will hit another.
The solar winds do not continue on forever -- they hit the termination shock and effectively stop. Voyager is going outside of all solar winds...but because they overlap, it's a bit imprecise to say when it'll get there.
What's the big deal? Uh...maybe nothing. It's a landmark, as far as I can tell, and nothing more.
The writeup didn't bother me at all. But then, I *am* a scientist.
Are you SURE that it fluctuates in time from the sun, or do you actually mean that it fluctuates (only) in distance from the sun?
The termination shock fluctuates in distance because it's an interaction between the heliosphere of the sun and the interstellar medium. Parts will experience more drag due to magnetic fields, and thus be closer to the sun than other parts of the shock. It fluctuates in time because the sun's output fluctuates in time -- when the solar winds are stronger, the corresponding parts of the termination shock will be further away. So it fluctuates in both time and distance, and depends upon solar activity. Just as the writeup said.
Ignoring the poor English, care to explain the logic behind this? Surely, going from inside to outside, Voyager 2 will have to cross the boundary an odd number of times?
Nope. The solar winds overlap each other. A weak wind will create a shock terminator nearer to the sun, while a stronger wind will create one further away. And they hang out there for a long time after they were generated. Apparently the astronomers looked at solar activity and calculated that Voyager 2 will hit two shocks -- one from a weak, but earlier wind and one from a stronger but more recent wind. Makes perfect sense.
And you have some sort of problem with them describing the terminator shock as the boundary where the solar wind decelerates to the 'speed of sound'? That's accurate. Remember that the solar wind is composed of charged ions, and that we're talking about the speed of sound in a plasma. When the particles go below the speed of sound, then random magnetic fields suddenly become a greater influence than the outward driving force of the sun. There will probably be lots of magnetic turbulence, although nobody really knows what to expect.
The writeup was technical but accurate as far as I can tell. Sorry it if was too geeky for you.
The scientist involved in this research said himself that Bush's ban on stem cell research set the field back four or five years.
Research is not a fluid. Barriers do not cause it to flow faster in a different direction. Research is gaseous -- it expands in all directions, and will get to any breakthrough faster if you do not put barriers in its way.
Let's be honest. If humankind went out into space and found dumb animals on another world, our inter(stellar)nets would be filled with 'Hot Alien Bestiality' as fast as we could relay the signal.
Yeah, that was Eric Von Daniken's theory. Aliens came to earth, mated with dumb animals and gave birth to us, then they helped their children build pyramids or some such nonsense.
I'm more interested in the possibility that some species of dinosaur became sentient, built a technological civilization, and then erased all traces of themselves from the planet (causing mass extinctions in the process) before moving out into space. It's no more likely than ape-humping pyramid-building aliens, but sentient space dinosaurs would be a lot cooler.
We're not going to be able to say anything useful about our past until we find something with which to compare it. Finding life on just one other planet would give us enormous amounts of data to compare with Earth's biohistory. Wish more resources were being put into doing that.
There is no 'hardcore' surveillance going on. These are weather and climatology satellites. They're using AVHRR and MODIS data to model when conditions are ripe for insect outbreaks that can carry malaria. The best resolution in the study appears to be 250 meters, so it isn't capable of picking out individual houses, let alone spying on people.
It's sent to the DoD because they have a centralized database that combines these 14 satellites, coregisters them with each other, and turns them into one product. The DoD is making scientific research much easier, here, by letting researchers access this combined database. That's why it's newsworthy.
Actually, the problem is that the Democrats believe every bit of it, and see how the Bush administration is subverting government to increase their own power. The problem is that the Democrats *want* that. They can use Bush's fuckups just as well as the Republicans can, to increase the power of the democratic party. They can blame Bush for soldiers getting killed and wrecking the economy, and ride that to electoral victory. So what if it cost a few thousand lives and millions of livelihoods. And then when Dems are back in power, they'll be happy to abuse every loophole Bush opened for them.
The problem is that they're all greedy power-hungry motherfuckers. It has nothing to do with them lacking a spine, it has everything to do with lacking a soul.
As ominous Cow posted, I misspoke -- the accomplishments are for paying off debt.
The rest of my post was in response to someone (not a CoX player, I assume) asking why players would intentionally run up debt in the first place. I think I answered that well. I agree with you, the debt amnesty does not seem exploitable.
Well, they did introduce new content -- City of Villains. The fact that people who enjoyed playing Heroes might not want to play villains was apparently lost on Mr. Emmert. It is not lost on the new management, who has been creating nothing but hero content ever since (Faultline, the Hive, and the RWZ have all been revamped to high praise.)
Eh, you've got a good point. It's *not* the same game as it was. Heroes can be made almost as powerful as they used to be, but it takes more effort and some loot. But it's not the same.
I don't play my old characters anymore, because of how they were affected by the nerfs. I made new characters, who feel very powerful under the new rules. I think they've made a lot of progress and improvements on the game, but you're right that for some people, some actions in the past will never be forgotten nor forgiven.
In City of Heroes/Villains, you get badges for accomplishments. One accomplishment is running up debt. Some people let themselves be defeated so that they are in a continual state of xp debt, just so they can acquire all the badges.
It's strange behavior, but then it's an unusual game that caters to people who like thinking outside the kryptonite box.:)
The 'Crisis of Infinite Nerfs' was years ago. I was upset too -- quit the game for two years. Came back this summer after I heard that 1.) The nerfs were mitigated with the new invention system (which apparently was always the plan, they just didn't think to release the two at the same time), and 2.) Statesman was no longer with the game.
That's right -- Statesman no longer worked with City of Heroes/Villains, and he was no longer driving the game toward the Lineage PvP template that he admired so much. Positron was lead developer, and he prefers PvE games and more importantly *heroes*. The devs have spent the last year or two asking the players for what they want and then implementing those requests. The game is much, much improved and well-cared-for now than it was when the global nerfs descended years ago.
And with the latest news, it looks like it's going to remain in good hands. You might want to swing by and give the hero biz another try, see how you like it now.
Jack Emmert, and the rest of Cryptic, has been working on Marvel Universe Online for awhile now. Cryptic found themselves in a situation many developers would kill to be in -- they owned too many game franchises that competed with each other.
From this deal, Cryptic gets cash and the ability to do MUO with no conflict of interest. Win-win.
NCSoft gets a very loyal playerbase, a larger share of the CoX revenue stream, and a critically acclaimed game franchise. Win-win.
The players get to keep the same devs, and are being promised many things that they used to say were impossible, such as the holy grail of MMORPGs, the 'one server' environment. Win...we'll see.
I'm usually one of the first to cry DOOOOOM when things go sour in a game I love, but this looks almost entirely positive so far. There'll be some chaos during the transition, but I'm liking what I'm hearing from all sides. A year from now we'll know for sure, and CoX will either be dying or well on its way to having the most catered-to, fanatically devoted players and developers ever.
It all makes perfect sense now. Amazon creates the Storm virus botnet. Then it sells computing space. Anyone who tries to compete with them is shutdown by DDSes from the botnet. Amazon ends up owning the entire internet, and leasing it out for profit with suggestions on books about being a good repressed peasant.
It's like some bizarre take on DC comic's 'Amazons Attack!', only with slightly more porn.
Guild Wars also splits the city zones up by geographic location and load. You might have US Servers 1-4, Internationals 1-3, etc, all for one city zone.
It's not a true 'one server' solution. It is, however, a very smooth and well thought-out system of instant on-demand character transfer between servers.
Pauli exclusion, if I recall correctly, is also the principle that forces electrons into discrete energy states. An electron can go from state A to state B, but cannot exist in any state in between. That's what keeps the electron-positron system somewhat stable -- they have enough energy to occupy a mutually orbiting state. They have to lose all their energy at once -- not just some of it -- to exit that state and annihilate with each other. The higher the energy shift necessary, the longer it takes for a decay to occur. Thus it takes some small amount of time before their energy state decays and they annihilate. And the 'small amount of time' is mentioned in the article -- a quarter of a nanosecond.
Can this be used to make stable positronium molecules? I'd say it's pretty unlikely, as it would require even higher energies and thus make containment even more difficult. These are not truly stable systems.
But the article mentions something about using a silica 'sponge' to trap the positrons. No idea how that's supposed to work, but if it could be improved we could someday have a battery capable of producing antiparticles on demand.
Calling an electron-positron pair an 'atom' is a bit suspect, but not too bad. Any semi-stable collection of elementary particles can be referred to as an 'atom'. They took the analogy even further, saying that when these 'atoms' met each other they formed 'molecules' -- large, electromagnetically bound accumulations of electron-positron pairs. Kinda cool.
As for what's keeping them from annihilating each other...well, at first it's angular momentum and the Pauli exclusion principle. Both the electron and the positron are fermions, and they must occupy discrete states. Give the pair enough energy and they will occupy a semi-stable state that does not allow them to contact and destroy each other.
But before long they *do* annihilate each other. That's why it's called an 'annihilation laser'. The matter-antimatter pair collapses, liberating enormous amounts of energy in the form of gamma rays.
I think 'matter-antimatter annihilation laser' sounds cooler, but there's a certain mad scientist flavor to the 'gamma ray' bit, too.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have a spotless history to obtain a clearance. As long as you are HONEST and UPFRONT about your history, there's little that will stop you from obtaining it. 75% of clearance requests that are rejected are due to that alone. Many of those rejections get a second chance to come clean, as it were, and ultimately receive a clearance assignment.
That's what they tell you. As someone who has been through multiple security checks and finally had my compartmentalized clearances revoked for personal reasons, I can tell you that the above is a lie.
They can and will reject you for events and personal flaws if you admit to them. They are looking for trustworthiness, but they are also looking for someone who fits their mold of a government employee. If you have any hint of mental problems, any past actions of poor judgment, or attachments to any fringe subculture, they will reject you even if you admit to them.
My advice to those aspiring to work in secure government fields: Become a dispassionate robot. That's what they're looking for.
If they're using that standard now for non-classified work in buildings owned by government contractors, I think we're about to see a mass migration of skilled people away from government service. Which is a damn shame.
'Levers that can be used by a foreign agent' only applies if you're doing classified work. Most of the workers in TFA had no security clearance and did nothing classified. They only need this security check to get into the building.
And I'm one of them, and I'm very, very nervous. I used to have a TS compartmentalized clearance, but it was revoked because of revelations about my sexual history. I went on to a non-classified program, for a different contractor, working for a different agency, and have been here for nine years. They did the standard background checks when I was hired and every few years after that. Now we're going through this more rigorous check, and I'm wondering if sexual indiscretions as a youth -- something that used to not matter at any security level up to TS -- might now be grounds for my dismissal. Been biting my nails about this.
And because we are not told of the criteria used in security approvals, we'll never know whether there is prejudice against a certain person/race/sexual orientation/whatever inherent in the system. I'm totally disillusioned with how our government works, and I wish I could find a job outside of it.
Not as simple as that. Yahoo's employees in China could have been arrested if they didn't comply. Thus, it was a case of who Yahoo allows to get screwed -- their employees, or some people to which they have no connection. They made the best choice, to protect their employees.
The *right* choice would have been to not get into that situation in the first place. When it comes to doing business in China, the only ethical move is not to play. But very few businesses are that ethical...or have any ethics at all, where the potential for profit exists.
I am a physicist, but these subjects are often beyond me. Still, let me try a short explanation. This seems, to me, rather an important discovery.
The Casimir effect happens when you get two surfaces very nearly touching. Virtual particles emerge on the other side of the surfaces and force them together. Virtual particles being, well, virtual -- very short-lived and low-energy -- this effect only occurs when the surfaces are very, very close to one another.
What's intriguing about the Casimir effect is that it is extracting work from the zero point energy of the universe, the base energy field of empty space. (Yes, even a total vacuum contains virtual particles, and thus some energy.) It is not immediately obvious how to make this useful, however, if the only way to tap into the zero point energy is to destructively sandwich two expensive materials together.
Reversing the Casimir effect is brilliant. By placing a perfect lens between the two materials, the virtual particles create a repulsive force. This could, as stated, create a levitation effect by preventing the surfaces from ever touching. 'Levitation' is a strong word, though. It'll 'levitate' a nanometer or so above the other surface, which is only good for reducing the friction between them to zero. So 'frictionless surfaces' is probably the keyword we should be using here.
I'm intrigued because it would seem to be easier to generate power from the zero point energy with a repulsive effect than an attractive one. So this could also be the first step toward a zero point energy generator -- free energy. What will they think of next...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, difficulty levels are the common way of making story-based games challenging. Still, they're only good for replayability. They don't help challenge-based players enjoy the game the first time through.
I like the concept of putting in challenge-based side quests in otherwise story-based games. The underworld in Planescape: Torment was partially like that -- you only needed to be in there a short while and then the story could move on, but you could stay and explore the underworld for a long time before you were able to beat it. It was not a harder version of the linear story, it was a parallel challenge with no story basis that someone playing the linear game could jump to anytime they wished. Open ended RPGs use the same concept -- continue on with near certainty that you'll eventually succeed at the main quest, or stop and try a side quest that you might fail. I'd point to Oblivion as an example of that, but everything in Oblivion was scaled in a way that forced the main quest and side quests to always have the same level of challenge.
I'm seeing a divergence in computer games into two camps. One is the classic 'Game as Challenge' camp, where players seek to improve their ability to play and to overcome challenges that at first seem overwhelming.
But we're trending toward a 'Game as Novel' paradigm, where the purpose of playing the game is to see the story unfold and to make our own impact upon it. The challenge is reduced to the point that many games (like Bioshock and Prey) have zero costs for failure -- you just keep playing, keep the story progressing, as if nothing happened.
These two camps aren't completely in opposition to one another, but they can ruin each other's experience. The central nature of the Challenge game is that you may reach a point in the game past which you cannot proceed. That's anathema to the Novel game, which wants its reader to experience the entire story.
Not sure how to fix this divergence. Artificial limits (such as playing with X, where X is some helpful game mechanic) are one way but they feel contrived and hollow to the challenge player.
Not really, because at different time periods there will be different strengths of solar wind, and some of those will reach farther out from the sun than others before they stop. Refer back to the 'waves on a beach' analogy again.
Okay, so then what is this "termination shock" that Voyager is going to encounter? Isn't it encountering a termination shock every time it outpaces an overlapping solar wind front?
Yes. The solar winds spread out like waves hitting a beach. Some of them get farther up on the beach than others. Voyager is hitting the first distinct wave, then will hit another.
The solar winds do not continue on forever -- they hit the termination shock and effectively stop. Voyager is going outside of all solar winds...but because they overlap, it's a bit imprecise to say when it'll get there.
What's the big deal? Uh...maybe nothing. It's a landmark, as far as I can tell, and nothing more.
Ummmm....no, I don't agree. I could say, 'This data fluctuates', even though the data may be plotted on a spatial, not temporal axis.
I suppose you could make an argument that 'oscillates' or 'varies' would be better words, but I don't care that much about semantics.
The writeup didn't bother me at all. But then, I *am* a scientist.
Are you SURE that it fluctuates in time from the sun, or do you actually mean that it fluctuates (only) in distance from the sun?
The termination shock fluctuates in distance because it's an interaction between the heliosphere of the sun and the interstellar medium. Parts will experience more drag due to magnetic fields, and thus be closer to the sun than other parts of the shock. It fluctuates in time because the sun's output fluctuates in time -- when the solar winds are stronger, the corresponding parts of the termination shock will be further away. So it fluctuates in both time and distance, and depends upon solar activity. Just as the writeup said.
Ignoring the poor English, care to explain the logic behind this? Surely, going from inside to outside, Voyager 2 will have to cross the boundary an odd number of times?
Nope. The solar winds overlap each other. A weak wind will create a shock terminator nearer to the sun, while a stronger wind will create one further away. And they hang out there for a long time after they were generated. Apparently the astronomers looked at solar activity and calculated that Voyager 2 will hit two shocks -- one from a weak, but earlier wind and one from a stronger but more recent wind. Makes perfect sense.
And you have some sort of problem with them describing the terminator shock as the boundary where the solar wind decelerates to the 'speed of sound'? That's accurate. Remember that the solar wind is composed of charged ions, and that we're talking about the speed of sound in a plasma. When the particles go below the speed of sound, then random magnetic fields suddenly become a greater influence than the outward driving force of the sun. There will probably be lots of magnetic turbulence, although nobody really knows what to expect.
The writeup was technical but accurate as far as I can tell. Sorry it if was too geeky for you.
The scientist involved in this research said himself that Bush's ban on stem cell research set the field back four or five years.
Research is not a fluid. Barriers do not cause it to flow faster in a different direction. Research is gaseous -- it expands in all directions, and will get to any breakthrough faster if you do not put barriers in its way.
Let's be honest. If humankind went out into space and found dumb animals on another world, our inter(stellar)nets would be filled with 'Hot Alien Bestiality' as fast as we could relay the signal.
Yeah, that was Eric Von Daniken's theory. Aliens came to earth, mated with dumb animals and gave birth to us, then they helped their children build pyramids or some such nonsense.
I'm more interested in the possibility that some species of dinosaur became sentient, built a technological civilization, and then erased all traces of themselves from the planet (causing mass extinctions in the process) before moving out into space. It's no more likely than ape-humping pyramid-building aliens, but sentient space dinosaurs would be a lot cooler.
We're not going to be able to say anything useful about our past until we find something with which to compare it. Finding life on just one other planet would give us enormous amounts of data to compare with Earth's biohistory. Wish more resources were being put into doing that.
There is no 'hardcore' surveillance going on. These are weather and climatology satellites. They're using AVHRR and MODIS data to model when conditions are ripe for insect outbreaks that can carry malaria. The best resolution in the study appears to be 250 meters, so it isn't capable of picking out individual houses, let alone spying on people.
It's sent to the DoD because they have a centralized database that combines these 14 satellites, coregisters them with each other, and turns them into one product. The DoD is making scientific research much easier, here, by letting researchers access this combined database. That's why it's newsworthy.
Actually, the problem is that the Democrats believe every bit of it, and see how the Bush administration is subverting government to increase their own power. The problem is that the Democrats *want* that. They can use Bush's fuckups just as well as the Republicans can, to increase the power of the democratic party. They can blame Bush for soldiers getting killed and wrecking the economy, and ride that to electoral victory. So what if it cost a few thousand lives and millions of livelihoods. And then when Dems are back in power, they'll be happy to abuse every loophole Bush opened for them.
The problem is that they're all greedy power-hungry motherfuckers. It has nothing to do with them lacking a spine, it has everything to do with lacking a soul.
As ominous Cow posted, I misspoke -- the accomplishments are for paying off debt.
The rest of my post was in response to someone (not a CoX player, I assume) asking why players would intentionally run up debt in the first place. I think I answered that well. I agree with you, the debt amnesty does not seem exploitable.
Well, they did introduce new content -- City of Villains. The fact that people who enjoyed playing Heroes might not want to play villains was apparently lost on Mr. Emmert. It is not lost on the new management, who has been creating nothing but hero content ever since (Faultline, the Hive, and the RWZ have all been revamped to high praise.)
Eh, you've got a good point. It's *not* the same game as it was. Heroes can be made almost as powerful as they used to be, but it takes more effort and some loot. But it's not the same.
I don't play my old characters anymore, because of how they were affected by the nerfs. I made new characters, who feel very powerful under the new rules. I think they've made a lot of progress and improvements on the game, but you're right that for some people, some actions in the past will never be forgotten nor forgiven.
In City of Heroes/Villains, you get badges for accomplishments. One accomplishment is running up debt. Some people let themselves be defeated so that they are in a continual state of xp debt, just so they can acquire all the badges.
:)
It's strange behavior, but then it's an unusual game that caters to people who like thinking outside the kryptonite box.
The 'Crisis of Infinite Nerfs' was years ago. I was upset too -- quit the game for two years. Came back this summer after I heard that 1.) The nerfs were mitigated with the new invention system (which apparently was always the plan, they just didn't think to release the two at the same time), and 2.) Statesman was no longer with the game.
That's right -- Statesman no longer worked with City of Heroes/Villains, and he was no longer driving the game toward the Lineage PvP template that he admired so much. Positron was lead developer, and he prefers PvE games and more importantly *heroes*. The devs have spent the last year or two asking the players for what they want and then implementing those requests. The game is much, much improved and well-cared-for now than it was when the global nerfs descended years ago.
And with the latest news, it looks like it's going to remain in good hands. You might want to swing by and give the hero biz another try, see how you like it now.
Jack Emmert, and the rest of Cryptic, has been working on Marvel Universe Online for awhile now. Cryptic found themselves in a situation many developers would kill to be in -- they owned too many game franchises that competed with each other.
From this deal, Cryptic gets cash and the ability to do MUO with no conflict of interest. Win-win.
NCSoft gets a very loyal playerbase, a larger share of the CoX revenue stream, and a critically acclaimed game franchise. Win-win.
The players get to keep the same devs, and are being promised many things that they used to say were impossible, such as the holy grail of MMORPGs, the 'one server' environment. Win...we'll see.
I'm usually one of the first to cry DOOOOOM when things go sour in a game I love, but this looks almost entirely positive so far. There'll be some chaos during the transition, but I'm liking what I'm hearing from all sides. A year from now we'll know for sure, and CoX will either be dying or well on its way to having the most catered-to, fanatically devoted players and developers ever.
It all makes perfect sense now. Amazon creates the Storm virus botnet. Then it sells computing space. Anyone who tries to compete with them is shutdown by DDSes from the botnet. Amazon ends up owning the entire internet, and leasing it out for profit with suggestions on books about being a good repressed peasant.
It's like some bizarre take on DC comic's 'Amazons Attack!', only with slightly more porn.
Guild Wars also splits the city zones up by geographic location and load. You might have US Servers 1-4, Internationals 1-3, etc, all for one city zone.
It's not a true 'one server' solution. It is, however, a very smooth and well thought-out system of instant on-demand character transfer between servers.
Pauli exclusion, if I recall correctly, is also the principle that forces electrons into discrete energy states. An electron can go from state A to state B, but cannot exist in any state in between. That's what keeps the electron-positron system somewhat stable -- they have enough energy to occupy a mutually orbiting state. They have to lose all their energy at once -- not just some of it -- to exit that state and annihilate with each other. The higher the energy shift necessary, the longer it takes for a decay to occur. Thus it takes some small amount of time before their energy state decays and they annihilate. And the 'small amount of time' is mentioned in the article -- a quarter of a nanosecond.
Can this be used to make stable positronium molecules? I'd say it's pretty unlikely, as it would require even higher energies and thus make containment even more difficult. These are not truly stable systems.
But the article mentions something about using a silica 'sponge' to trap the positrons. No idea how that's supposed to work, but if it could be improved we could someday have a battery capable of producing antiparticles on demand.
Calling an electron-positron pair an 'atom' is a bit suspect, but not too bad. Any semi-stable collection of elementary particles can be referred to as an 'atom'. They took the analogy even further, saying that when these 'atoms' met each other they formed 'molecules' -- large, electromagnetically bound accumulations of electron-positron pairs. Kinda cool.
As for what's keeping them from annihilating each other...well, at first it's angular momentum and the Pauli exclusion principle. Both the electron and the positron are fermions, and they must occupy discrete states. Give the pair enough energy and they will occupy a semi-stable state that does not allow them to contact and destroy each other.
But before long they *do* annihilate each other. That's why it's called an 'annihilation laser'. The matter-antimatter pair collapses, liberating enormous amounts of energy in the form of gamma rays.
I think 'matter-antimatter annihilation laser' sounds cooler, but there's a certain mad scientist flavor to the 'gamma ray' bit, too.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have a spotless history to obtain a clearance. As long as you are HONEST and UPFRONT about your history, there's little that will stop you from obtaining it. 75% of clearance requests that are rejected are due to that alone. Many of those rejections get a second chance to come clean, as it were, and ultimately receive a clearance assignment.
That's what they tell you. As someone who has been through multiple security checks and finally had my compartmentalized clearances revoked for personal reasons, I can tell you that the above is a lie.
They can and will reject you for events and personal flaws if you admit to them. They are looking for trustworthiness, but they are also looking for someone who fits their mold of a government employee. If you have any hint of mental problems, any past actions of poor judgment, or attachments to any fringe subculture, they will reject you even if you admit to them.
My advice to those aspiring to work in secure government fields: Become a dispassionate robot. That's what they're looking for.
If they're using that standard now for non-classified work in buildings owned by government contractors, I think we're about to see a mass migration of skilled people away from government service. Which is a damn shame.
'Levers that can be used by a foreign agent' only applies if you're doing classified work. Most of the workers in TFA had no security clearance and did nothing classified. They only need this security check to get into the building.
And I'm one of them, and I'm very, very nervous. I used to have a TS compartmentalized clearance, but it was revoked because of revelations about my sexual history. I went on to a non-classified program, for a different contractor, working for a different agency, and have been here for nine years. They did the standard background checks when I was hired and every few years after that. Now we're going through this more rigorous check, and I'm wondering if sexual indiscretions as a youth -- something that used to not matter at any security level up to TS -- might now be grounds for my dismissal. Been biting my nails about this.
And because we are not told of the criteria used in security approvals, we'll never know whether there is prejudice against a certain person/race/sexual orientation/whatever inherent in the system. I'm totally disillusioned with how our government works, and I wish I could find a job outside of it.
Not as simple as that. Yahoo's employees in China could have been arrested if they didn't comply. Thus, it was a case of who Yahoo allows to get screwed -- their employees, or some people to which they have no connection. They made the best choice, to protect their employees.
The *right* choice would have been to not get into that situation in the first place. When it comes to doing business in China, the only ethical move is not to play. But very few businesses are that ethical...or have any ethics at all, where the potential for profit exists.
I am a physicist, but these subjects are often beyond me. Still, let me try a short explanation. This seems, to me, rather an important discovery.
The Casimir effect happens when you get two surfaces very nearly touching. Virtual particles emerge on the other side of the surfaces and force them together. Virtual particles being, well, virtual -- very short-lived and low-energy -- this effect only occurs when the surfaces are very, very close to one another.
What's intriguing about the Casimir effect is that it is extracting work from the zero point energy of the universe, the base energy field of empty space. (Yes, even a total vacuum contains virtual particles, and thus some energy.) It is not immediately obvious how to make this useful, however, if the only way to tap into the zero point energy is to destructively sandwich two expensive materials together.
Reversing the Casimir effect is brilliant. By placing a perfect lens between the two materials, the virtual particles create a repulsive force. This could, as stated, create a levitation effect by preventing the surfaces from ever touching. 'Levitation' is a strong word, though. It'll 'levitate' a nanometer or so above the other surface, which is only good for reducing the friction between them to zero. So 'frictionless surfaces' is probably the keyword we should be using here.
I'm intrigued because it would seem to be easier to generate power from the zero point energy with a repulsive effect than an attractive one. So this could also be the first step toward a zero point energy generator -- free energy. What will they think of next...