The EQ equivalent of MOTD states that they're banning accounts for using 3rd party software which violates their EULA- and mentions macroing tradeskill items as one specific bannable offense. The future is now.
They've been banning accounts for using 3rd party for some time- ShowEQ, a packet sniffer, is hard for them to detect if done right, but if they can tell you're using it they actively ban accounts. They've been doing this for a while, at least a year. There's a grey area program that allows EQ to be played in a window which they haven't been enforcing a ban for- but it encourages people to pay for and play multiple accounts. There have been item and platinum duplication schemes discovered in the past, some of which have resulted in bans.
This is somewhat different, as the characters are doing legal actions in game, they're just doing them without the effort of actually clicking from the keyboard, and likely doing them faster than that. Still, it's yet another action covered by the 3rd party software ban, and from the MOTD they may have figured out how to detect it. Once the method like this gets out to the general public they have in the past always figured out a way to shut it down.
Numerous studies have shown rates of gun violence correlate closely with the number of guns around.
Cite? How do you explain Switzerland, which has a very low 'gun violence' rate yet nearly every adult male citizen possesses and maintains a military rifle?
IAAC, and I'd bet that the gas used was SF6. It's fairly commonly available and biologically inactive. The only caution with using it or any other heavier than air gas is that you need to allow it to escape from your lungs- it will do this eventually by diffusion, but it's better to hang upside down and breathe so that it leaves in time for you to get enough oxygen.
Why you object to the definition I presented for ex post facto? I see no contradiction between my definition and yours.
I did realize that this is not strictly an ex post facto case- that was why I phrased it as 'should be' and 'for similar reasons'. I think the comparison is much closer than your example, however; in each case the law at the time of the action is taken should govern, whether it's an illegal action or an action of creating a copyrighted work. It's not legal to retroactively add ten years to the jail terms of persons already convicted and sentenced- why is it permissable to forbid the general public from access to a work after the time that was established to be the duration of copyright when the work was made?
(Warning: IANAL)
If a law is passed which makes an action illegal(e.g. banning a specific drug) it is expressly forbidden to prosecute people for 'breaking' that law before it went into affect. You can't change law in order to make an action which has already happened illegal after the fact.
The law applied to copyrights should be the law that was in place at the time of their creation, not subsequent law, for similar reasons. The intention of copyright law is to encourage creativity; changing the length of copyright after the work has been created inherently cannot do this. Similarly, it would be unfair to those who created works under the 1976 and 1998 versions of copyright law for the rules of their copyright to be ex post facto altered to their (and their heirs) detriment. Any ex post facto change to copyright law is unfair.
Re:Slashdot Pong!
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First, a brief comment on the OP: von Neumann machines need not be nanotech based nor spacecraft- the definition and primary characteristic is self-duplication. The other two would facilitate the tasks you have in mind, admittedly.
Perrin5, I think you're missing part of his point. He projects that a healthy spacefaring race would colonize the galaxy in a million years. This part is arguable, but if humans eventually do this that seems to me to be a reasonable estimate of the length of time required.
As to your specifics:
1a. I find completely plausable. Radial expansion at a constant rate is a much shallower growth curve than an exponential! Suppose that humans radically slow our population growth, so much so that the population requires 100 years to double itself. Multiplying our current population by 100 billion (very roughly the number of stars in the galaxy) would take less than 4000 years. I expect that humans (and Alien species X) would not have a problem of not enough population growth. This also could be the expected motive for Alien species X to expand.
2. You completely miss the point, he assumed no such thing. He merely pointed out that given a rough million year timeframe to encompass the galaxy, an unknown civilization would have to be very very recent by galactic time standards for them not to already be here. If you believe his expansion timescale, the first species to achieve spacefaring colonization would be overwhelmingly likely take over the whole galaxy; it would require a huge coincidence for two species to start expanding at times close enough to overlap, given how quickly the takeover is expected to take on a galactic timescale.
If you're a physics student at UC Berkeley I'm surprised you don't know where SETI is. I believe it has some ties with with the national NASA administration; you could ask there.
I've seen it, it was at the Boston Aquarium. Excellent film, just the right combination of "wow" shots and exposition. Highly recommended, if you're the sort of person who likes the topic you'll love the film.
An interview with Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) argues that the notion that the symbolic representation of violence causes real world violence is strictly analogous to voodoo.
If someone appraoches the edge of a cliff, and someone else pushes them off, the guy who pushed him off would never get away with "it is not my fault, because they where close to the edge all ready."
If it was later revealed that the suicidal individual enjoyed playing basketball, would you advocate banning basketball on the basis that it is correlated with suicide? Perhaps you could even equate correlation with causation and claim it causes suicide?
What we need is serious studies that try to find out:
We have one, that's what the article above is about. Apparently what you actually want is a study done that confirms your preconceived notions.
Many, perhaps most scientific computing applications can use more computational power. In computational chemistry, for example, a faster cluster can allow you can model larger molecules or the same molecules to a higher level of theory (generally, that means more accurately.) Many of these jobs take months to run on existing computers. Similarly for memory, a number of coworkers I know wish that the Xeon motherboard they have would support more than 3.5 GB of RDRAM...
In addition, I expect many slashdotters are familiar with distributed computing efforts which are all examples of problems requiring much more power than a single desktop provides.
Pyroman, Miss Masque, The American Crusader, The Black Terror, the Fighting Yank, and Doc Strange
No Captains, and one heroic doctor- in direct opposition to your naming rule claim.
There are good and evil characters with each title. See a list of characters named "Doctor" here. Ignoring multiple characters with the same name, good superheroes called "Doctor" or "Doc" of note include Strange, Fate, and Savage all of whom have had their own series; for evil "Doctor"s the only ones of similar stature are Doom and Octopus. (I'm not including the more obscure villians Destiny, Psychlo, or Alchemy; heroes of similar notability include Samson, "Doc" in the DCU, Light, and Midnight.) "Doctor" heroes actually slightly outnumber villians in my opinion.
Notable "Captain" villians are fewer but ones I'd heard of include "Captain"s Boomerang, Cold, and Nazi; they're similar in notability to the second group above, while there are three very well known hero "Captain"s who have had their own series (America, Marvel, Britain)... So I can agree that there's a correlation of good characters and the "Captain" name, but dispute the above absolute statement if "military all good".
Even without going in to an expanding universe explanation, consider this (over-)simplified version:
Soon after the big bang, the universe was expanding at near the speed of light. The part of the universe that will become earth is travelling almost of the speed of light away from some other part of the universe (the part emitting the radiation that was detected.)
Say we were/are travelling (assuming for the sake of simplicity that we didn't accelerate) 34999/35000 of the speed of light away from the source of the radiation. So that even though we were only about 400000 light years away from the source when the light was emitted, the light took 35000 times that long to catch up to us (14 billion years) as we sped away from it. (This is in the 'reference frame', to use a physics term, of the object emitting the radiation)
This explanation ignores some things, and the velocity number is made up, but I hope it makes the general concept plausable.
As a footnote, of course theories are all they are- if you require someone to tell you things with absolute conviction, you'll have to look to religion. Science is too honest to claim it's perfect.
In the long tradition of responding to a flame on English use with a flame of the flame, here's an edited version of your first sentence:
"Not
[only] is the teenage/pre-teen world forming bad habits, but there are a lot of people in the world [who] learn english [predominantly] in chatrooms[.] You['d] better believe [that] they consider this to be perfectly acceptable conversation[al] language.
... I'll skip to a pet peeve, although in this case you're omitting the apostrophe instead of adding one:
Okay, you have a point for a modified definition of temperature. I'm used to using a thermodynamic definition of temperature.
On the other hand, you can put as much energy as you like into a magnetic field in a vacuum and light travelling parallel to that magnetic field will still travel at c. In other directions it will be slowed, however.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been banning accounts for using 3rd party for some time- ShowEQ, a packet sniffer, is hard for them to detect if done right, but if they can tell you're using it they actively ban accounts. They've been doing this for a while, at least a year. There's a grey area program that allows EQ to be played in a window which they haven't been enforcing a ban for- but it encourages people to pay for and play multiple accounts. There have been item and platinum duplication schemes discovered in the past, some of which have resulted in bans.
This is somewhat different, as the characters are doing legal actions in game, they're just doing them without the effort of actually clicking from the keyboard, and likely doing them faster than that. Still, it's yet another action covered by the 3rd party software ban, and from the MOTD they may have figured out how to detect it. Once the method like this gets out to the general public they have in the past always figured out a way to shut it down.
IAAC, and I'd bet that the gas used was SF6. It's fairly commonly available and biologically inactive. The only caution with using it or any other heavier than air gas is that you need to allow it to escape from your lungs- it will do this eventually by diffusion, but it's better to hang upside down and breathe so that it leaves in time for you to get enough oxygen.
I did realize that this is not strictly an ex post facto case- that was why I phrased it as 'should be' and 'for similar reasons'. I think the comparison is much closer than your example, however; in each case the law at the time of the action is taken should govern, whether it's an illegal action or an action of creating a copyrighted work. It's not legal to retroactively add ten years to the jail terms of persons already convicted and sentenced- why is it permissable to forbid the general public from access to a work after the time that was established to be the duration of copyright when the work was made?
The law applied to copyrights should be the law that was in place at the time of their creation, not subsequent law, for similar reasons. The intention of copyright law is to encourage creativity; changing the length of copyright after the work has been created inherently cannot do this. Similarly, it would be unfair to those who created works under the 1976 and 1998 versions of copyright law for the rules of their copyright to be ex post facto altered to their (and their heirs) detriment. Any ex post facto change to copyright law is unfair.
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The message filter demands that I include text.
Perrin5, I think you're missing part of his point. He projects that a healthy spacefaring race would colonize the galaxy in a million years. This part is arguable, but if humans eventually do this that seems to me to be a reasonable estimate of the length of time required.
As to your specifics:
1a. I find completely plausable. Radial expansion at a constant rate is a much shallower growth curve than an exponential! Suppose that humans radically slow our population growth, so much so that the population requires 100 years to double itself. Multiplying our current population by 100 billion (very roughly the number of stars in the galaxy) would take less than 4000 years. I expect that humans (and Alien species X) would not have a problem of not enough population growth. This also could be the expected motive for Alien species X to expand.
2. You completely miss the point, he assumed no such thing. He merely pointed out that given a rough million year timeframe to encompass the galaxy, an unknown civilization would have to be very very recent by galactic time standards for them not to already be here. If you believe his expansion timescale, the first species to achieve spacefaring colonization would be overwhelmingly likely take over the whole galaxy; it would require a huge coincidence for two species to start expanding at times close enough to overlap, given how quickly the takeover is expected to take on a galactic timescale.
I've seen it, it was at the Boston Aquarium. Excellent film, just the right combination of "wow" shots and exposition. Highly recommended, if you're the sort of person who likes the topic you'll love the film.
An interview with Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) argues that the notion that the symbolic representation of violence causes real world violence is strictly analogous to voodoo.
In addition, I expect many slashdotters are familiar with distributed computing efforts which are all examples of problems requiring much more power than a single desktop provides.
There are good and evil characters with each title. See a list of characters named "Doctor" here. Ignoring multiple characters with the same name, good superheroes called "Doctor" or "Doc" of note include Strange, Fate, and Savage all of whom have had their own series; for evil "Doctor"s the only ones of similar stature are Doom and Octopus. (I'm not including the more obscure villians Destiny, Psychlo, or Alchemy; heroes of similar notability include Samson, "Doc" in the DCU, Light, and Midnight.) "Doctor" heroes actually slightly outnumber villians in my opinion.
Notable "Captain" villians are fewer but ones I'd heard of include "Captain"s Boomerang, Cold, and Nazi; they're similar in notability to the second group above, while there are three very well known hero "Captain"s who have had their own series (America, Marvel, Britain)... So I can agree that there's a correlation of good characters and the "Captain" name, but dispute the above absolute statement if "military all good".
Soon after the big bang, the universe was expanding at near the speed of light. The part of the universe that will become earth is travelling almost of the speed of light away from some other part of the universe (the part emitting the radiation that was detected.)
Say we were/are travelling (assuming for the sake of simplicity that we didn't accelerate) 34999/35000 of the speed of light away from the source of the radiation. So that even though we were only about 400000 light years away from the source when the light was emitted, the light took 35000 times that long to catch up to us (14 billion years) as we sped away from it. (This is in the 'reference frame', to use a physics term, of the object emitting the radiation)
This explanation ignores some things, and the velocity number is made up, but I hope it makes the general concept plausable.
As a footnote, of course theories are all they are- if you require someone to tell you things with absolute conviction, you'll have to look to religion. Science is too honest to claim it's perfect.
Okay, you have a point for a modified definition of temperature. I'm used to using a thermodynamic definition of temperature.
On the other hand, you can put as much energy as you like into a magnetic field in a vacuum and light travelling parallel to that magnetic field will still travel at c. In other directions it will be slowed, however.
Temperature is meaningless in a true vacuum. What do you define its temperature as? How do you alter the temperature of a true vacuum?
I'd say stick with the degree in Finnish. It will be a great help in looking for a job in Finland.