If you can do scientific research that can assist the world in a decade, two decades or even 50 years then go ahead, if your doing research that has an expected date of 10 billion years then your wasting time.
Uh huh. And then someone researching this 10 billion year problem, trying to discover if they can test whether it will really happen, or if there might be some unknown physical principle that will prevent it, makes a discovery that enables other researchers to develop, in a mere 10 years, a better battery and slightly prettier screen for your iPhone 17.
Then you say "Gee, why couldn't you have been working on that the whole time instead of wasting your time studying the fate of the universe."
Which leads the researchers to their ultimate goal: Measuring emissions from your head at the moment you make that statement, they discover the elusive Irony Tardino.
Let's forget about colonialism and the last 100 years.
What I'm interested in is how the paper reconciles the notion that genetic diversity correlates with economic growth, that genetic diversity correlates with migratory distance from Africa, and the periods in time where the greatest centers of civilization, trade and economic growth were in Africa, while areas more distant were as to Ethiopia today?
Are they suggesting that genetic diversity rapidly tracks up and down with the rise and fall of nation-states absent any explanatory mass influx of immigrants or genetically-selective die-offs? Where did all the genetic diversity come from in Europe that led to today's economic growth if it was not there when Europe was in economic doldrums?
Or could this simply be yet another case of a researcher starting with the assumption that the socio-economic tapestry of today and only today is the natural, inevitable workings of biology?
I give them props for considering the entire globe, at least. It's really funny when someone only looks at a specific time and place and declares it the perfect reflection of inherent biological differences.
Though, they arent called ballistic for the hell of it.
Right. They're called that because the majority of their flight is ballistic. So it's an accurate term, even if they do incorporate terminal guidance.
They aren't called "ballistic" because terminal guidance is verboten, as you are implying.
still most of these people cant tell the difference between a ballistic munition and a guided one
Though I do. And I also know that being in the "ballistic" category does not categorically prohibit having terminal guidance... something you apparently do not understand. Fortunately weapon and defense system designers are smarter than you.
This is the only aiming/steering that modern ballistic ICBMs perform after launch... However, once each RV reenters the atmosphere, that's it. It is back to being a purely ballistic path again.
Shows what you know. There are lots of ICBMs with terminal guidance -- you know, guidance during the phase that begins once the RV reenters the atmosphere when you said it is 'purely ballistic' -- dating back to the 80s.
Except, according to the website, JREF owns the rights to any and all material submitted by applicants.
Um, no, according to the website JREF may use those materials freely. That's not the same as owning exclusive rights. So no, they can't prevent the applicant from publishing, fuddy.
I wonder about hybrids? Ballistic high arc, then go guided (for any definition of guided)?
A very good question! One which occurred to ballistic missile makers as soon as they realized 1) trajectories can very much not be predicted with 100% accuracy, and so your options are either make them bigger and bigger, or have a way to steer and 2) the possibility of anti-ballistic missile defenses.
The GP thinks the issue is settled by looking at the dictionary definition of "ballistic."
For a ballistic missle, yes. That's why its a ballistic missle. They arent steered. They are aimed. They go where pointed and no where else.
Ah, it's the "it's named this ergo it works like this" method of reverse-engineering. "Ballistic" is only partially descriptive of how modern (which is relative) missiles work. They've been capable of guidance and steering for a long time -- one of the dirty secrets the ABM folks haven't been talking about much when displaying their "successes". It's not as much as a cruise missile, but it doesn't need to be.
Assuming you have enough "cheap" munitions in a coordinated attack designed to overwhelm interception defenses, the attacker would require several strongpoints with lots of weapons (no way you could ransomly distribute that level of coordinated attack with enough munitions to overwhelm defenses).
Yeah that's what the Navy thought when in their asymmetrical war games and the entire carrier group was (virtual) sunk.
Assuming the enemy cannot possibly be coordinated enough to launch an attack without being concentrated in one convenient spot for counter-attack is the kind of arrogance that is going to get a lot of people killed in the early days of the next war.
Remember, too, there's a difference between overwhelming a defense systems ability to track and down targets, and overwhelming its ability to stay supplied with ammo.
The rebels take pot-shots in small numbers because they only have a small amount of material and never want to risk over-exposure or the chance of a decisive conflict (that's not what guerrilla warfare is about). However guerrilla tactics can display extremely high levels of coordination, and if adopted by a military force that can afford ballistic missiles then they could also afford to use overwhelming numbers of smaller portable weapons.
No, as you could make a BBS be very similar to slashdot.
Except for the part where you have links to data stored on other servers. Thousands of other servers (back in the late 80s), with more aggregate data than you could ever hope to store on your one computer, and more users than you could ever hope to connect through your (if you were lucky) bank of modems.
The comparison isn't between/. and a BBS. It's between the Internet and a BBS. The idea that the Internet, globally connected network, is the same as BBSes, is ludicrously stretching the idea of "same" to "involves computers and communication of some kind".
Source: Co-Operator (not owner) of the Paradigm Shift BBS in Kalamazoo, MI. Which we all abandoned INSTANTLY as soon as we got internet connections because the difference was so stark and obvious.
No, the transistor was just an incremental improvement of the VCCS/amplifier, which before was implemented as a vacuum tube. It took many incremental improvements on top of that first transistor before it got so much better than the vacuum tube that you could call it fundamentally superior to the old technology. But it was still an implementation of the same fundamental concept.
I mean if you're not going to accept using interference to allow the etching of features on a chip smaller than the wavelength of light used to etch them because it's just "photo lithography", or the switch from plasma etching to additive patterning to allow copper interconnect because it's just "materials improvements", or any of the other improvements in manufacturing regardless of how much invention was involved because it's all just "integrated circuits", then I'm sure as hell not going to give you your "voltage-controlled current source" just because you're aware of it being a big deal.
But I think your post really does reveal why we have this perception. People judge invention based on *function*, not the innovation that went into making it work. A turbo-charger is just a thing that makes your car work slightly better. It's still just a car. My computer is 20,000 times faster than the one I had 20 years ago, and of course it took ridiculous amounts of completely new technology to make it, but it's still just a computer (just like pre-transistor computers were computers, btw).
Which I guess is fair. It's just a weird tack to take when something like a cell phone is considered an invention even though it was really just the coordinated application of well-established technology, while seemingly "incremental" improvements in the power of that cell phone are due to fundamental improvements in the underlying technology.
So I guess that's it -- the reason there's less "invention" today is because it's harder to come up with new stuff to do. We already have machines that move us around rapidly on the ground or in the air. We already have machines that do math and send communications globally. We have machines that heat and cool the air. We have machines that do a crazy amount of different "things", and the only way to "invent" is to invent a new "thing".
... except for the part where it reveals that the closest approach will be in the middle of the day in my time zone. T_T
I guess I can *try* to see it when it's farther away (and has less apparent motion so I should still be able to use that chart to find it) but it's going to be tough without going to a dark sky sight...
The neo.jpl.nasa.gov link in the summary says that it will reach a magnitude below 7. So, outside of visible for most people (and especially most locations), but it shouldn't be hard to pick up with binoculars if you can just get it in your field of view. Hopefully there will be some guides to locating it, what constellations it will be going through, etc.
Tracking it with an amateur telescope is probably not going to work too well since it will be moving too quickly. Some amateurs I'm sure will get good views; there are people who photograph the ISS for example which requires even faster tracking than this asteroid will.
I know I'm not going to bother with my scope. But I might try to find it in my bins.
Given the extremely low odds of them being wrong and the asteroid hitting the earth in the first place, the odds of it killing the person who uttered those words are astronomically low.
Of course if this was a movie, then that means it'd be a sure bet. I guess this will be a good test of whether the universe obeys the laws of dramatic irony.
winners often have a background from a variety of styles which is why they are called "mixed martial arts" competitions.
Since someone else pointed out how inappropriate your observation is with regard to Bruce Lee, I'll say this:
The reason they're called "mixed martial arts" competitions is because they allow people from any martial art discipline to participate. As opposed to a Tang Soo Do, Judo, kick boxing, boxing, etc. competition which is dedicated to a particular style.
People who practice only one style often win, but it has to be a style that can handle a variety of circumstances and not just the moves of their own style. People with multi-disciplinary backgrounds also do quite well, but the name came first.
Case in point (pointed by Aristotle): one-off events are outside science's problem domain. Science is about comparing and generalizing. If you don't have two of something, you cannot compare them, and hence you cannot develop any theory on it. At best you cat say that it hasn't happened twice, or at least to you, but that's it.
Aristotle never felt the need to test his theories of motion. Great philosopher, but I'm not sure he's the best reference on the modern scientific method.
The thing is, what you say is in some ways an oversimplification. Science is really about comparing observation with theory. Some things may be transient enough that it is difficult to have enough observations for a theory to be properly tested, but it still isn't necessarily the case that something happen more than once.
For instance, there is as far as we can tell only one Universe, and in the Big Bang Theory only one Big Bang. So how can we have a theory of the birth of the universe if it only happened once? Well, the Big Bang makes an extremely specific prediction: That at the point the universe expanded and cooled enough that neutral atoms could form, light would for the first time be able to pass through the universe, and we should see this light in all directions, and it should have a very particular temperature.
Then we made observations, and we saw that this prediction was borne out to an extremely high degree of precision.
One could call all the millions of data points taken of the CMBR at different wavelengths across the sky constitute the 'multiple events'. A photon interacting with a detector is an 'event'. But there is still the one singular Big Bang, yet still a very good theory about it.
You could say the same thing about the extinction of the dinosaurs. We don't really need to form another earth, have dinosaurs evolve on it, and then smack a big comet or asteroid into it to see if it drives them extinct a second time.
It would seem that, by definition, it is going to be unexplainable by natural law and may be, by extension, "supernaturally" unsuitable for reproduction.
And similarly "supernaturally" unsuitable for demonstration that it actually exists.
It is true that by nature the Randi prize is only accessible to those whose "abilities" are reproducible. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people who claim that their abilities are reproducible. Particularly those who are willing to charge others to employ these abilities -- psychics, dousers, etc.
I do feel bad for the people who are really, truly, psychic but only at a rate indistinguishable from chance alone.
Nobody has even passed the preliminary selection for this challenge, which makes you wonder if it is real after all.
Why yes, it does make you wonder if any of these alleged abilities are... Oh, wait, you meant the challenge itself.
Lots of people have been accepted as "applicants", and then tested. None have succeeded in demonstrating their ability under controlled conditions, and thus failed to pass the preliminary test and become "claimants".
That you see this as evidence that the challenge itself is fake, when it's exactly what you would expect if 1) the tests were conducted properly and 2) psychics, dousers, etc were not real, is telling.
The criteria for selection are not public.
Yes they are. In that forum you can see all applicants, the protocols that are agreed upon, including what would qualify as a significant result sufficient to pass the preliminary test.
There is, as far as I can tell, nothing scientific behind this challenge. It looks more like propaganda.
It's amazing what things look like to people who haven't actually looked.
No computer can, or will, understand pain or pleasure (although they can fake them) until we invent chemistry-based replicants.
What's special about chemistry that electricity cannot reproduce? I'll even let you ignore that chemistry is actually just electromagnetic phenomenon.
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every single atom in a human brain in real-time. All the chemical reactions in the brain are modeled down to quark at the Plank scale. Why can that simulation not be intelligent, but the pile of real chemicals can?
The appearance of a thing does not equal that thing. Just ask the amazing Randi.
Ah, but as Randi knows, that "appearance" disappears as soon as you step behind the curtain, see the act from the wrong angle, or control for obvious trickery.
Once the computer is "faking" feeling pain to the point where it is impossible to distinguish, is it really faking any more?
Who is to say that humans aren't "faking" sentience? After all, we appear sentient, but that's not the same thing.
Henry James, a major philosopher and Harvard professor at the turn of the 20th century, was talking about radical empiricism were unexplained phenomena should be studied with the scientific method. It seems that you are taking a leap of faith that this is not necessary. Am I right?
No, because studying these alleged phenomenon using the scientific method is exactly what James Randi and his Challenge are all about.
And every time someone claiming to have some kind of supernatural ability submits themselves to a controlled scientific study, the ability vanishes.
When something is 'not better then placebo' that means 'not better then this stuff we know has no effect'
Which is measurably better than "nothing". How can a placebo not cure anything if it cures more than doing nothing?
The term has been greatly abuses by SCAM practitioners for years, so it's actual meaning isn't know to many people.
Indeed, but that doesn't mean you can take advantage of that by giving them an incorrect definition.
The placebo effect is real, and non-zero. It does cure some things, and assist with others.
The question is how to account for that ethically. One way NOT to do it is to charge exorbitant prices for sugar pills (I'm looking at you, homeopath shysters).
Slashdot Mirror
If you can do scientific research that can assist the world in a decade, two decades or even 50 years then go ahead, if your doing research that has an expected date of 10 billion years then your wasting time.
Uh huh. And then someone researching this 10 billion year problem, trying to discover if they can test whether it will really happen, or if there might be some unknown physical principle that will prevent it, makes a discovery that enables other researchers to develop, in a mere 10 years, a better battery and slightly prettier screen for your iPhone 17.
Then you say "Gee, why couldn't you have been working on that the whole time instead of wasting your time studying the fate of the universe."
Which leads the researchers to their ultimate goal: Measuring emissions from your head at the moment you make that statement, they discover the elusive Irony Tardino.
Let's forget about colonialism and the last 100 years.
What I'm interested in is how the paper reconciles the notion that genetic diversity correlates with economic growth, that genetic diversity correlates with migratory distance from Africa, and the periods in time where the greatest centers of civilization, trade and economic growth were in Africa, while areas more distant were as to Ethiopia today?
Are they suggesting that genetic diversity rapidly tracks up and down with the rise and fall of nation-states absent any explanatory mass influx of immigrants or genetically-selective die-offs? Where did all the genetic diversity come from in Europe that led to today's economic growth if it was not there when Europe was in economic doldrums?
Or could this simply be yet another case of a researcher starting with the assumption that the socio-economic tapestry of today and only today is the natural, inevitable workings of biology?
I give them props for considering the entire globe, at least. It's really funny when someone only looks at a specific time and place and declares it the perfect reflection of inherent biological differences.
Apples to penguins results in an unhappy penguin. Fish to penguins on the other hand leads to fat and happy penguins.
Wait, I think I'm misunderstanding.
Semiconductor device physics depends on quantum mechanics.
We can't manipulate the nuclear forces at will, but we do have enough understanding of them for certain applications like nuclear power.
Manipulating gravity like we do magnetism sounds great but I'm not holding my breath.
Nevertheless, I agree with your general sentiment. :)
You act as if the Navy learned nothing from that.
No, only that the poster I replied to hadn't gotten the message yet.
Though, they arent called ballistic for the hell of it.
Right. They're called that because the majority of their flight is ballistic. So it's an accurate term, even if they do incorporate terminal guidance.
They aren't called "ballistic" because terminal guidance is verboten, as you are implying.
still most of these people cant tell the difference between a ballistic munition and a guided one
Though I do. And I also know that being in the "ballistic" category does not categorically prohibit having terminal guidance... something you apparently do not understand. Fortunately weapon and defense system designers are smarter than you.
This is the only aiming/steering that modern ballistic ICBMs perform after launch... However, once each RV reenters the atmosphere, that's it. It is back to being a purely ballistic path again.
Shows what you know. There are lots of ICBMs with terminal guidance -- you know, guidance during the phase that begins once the RV reenters the atmosphere when you said it is 'purely ballistic' -- dating back to the 80s.
since you want to be an obtuse arse
You're so funny!
Except, according to the website, JREF owns the rights to any and all material submitted by applicants.
Um, no, according to the website JREF may use those materials freely. That's not the same as owning exclusive rights. So no, they can't prevent the applicant from publishing, fuddy.
it only works if you think you've been given real medicine.
Or does it...
I wonder about hybrids? Ballistic high arc, then go guided (for any definition of guided)?
A very good question! One which occurred to ballistic missile makers as soon as they realized 1) trajectories can very much not be predicted with 100% accuracy, and so your options are either make them bigger and bigger, or have a way to steer and 2) the possibility of anti-ballistic missile defenses.
The GP thinks the issue is settled by looking at the dictionary definition of "ballistic."
For a ballistic missle, yes. That's why its a ballistic missle.
They arent steered. They are aimed. They go where pointed and no where else.
Ah, it's the "it's named this ergo it works like this" method of reverse-engineering. "Ballistic" is only partially descriptive of how modern (which is relative) missiles work. They've been capable of guidance and steering for a long time -- one of the dirty secrets the ABM folks haven't been talking about much when displaying their "successes". It's not as much as a cruise missile, but it doesn't need to be.
Assuming you have enough "cheap" munitions in a coordinated attack designed to overwhelm interception defenses, the attacker would require several strongpoints with lots of weapons (no way you could ransomly distribute that level of coordinated attack with enough munitions to overwhelm defenses).
Yeah that's what the Navy thought when in their asymmetrical war games and the entire carrier group was (virtual) sunk.
Assuming the enemy cannot possibly be coordinated enough to launch an attack without being concentrated in one convenient spot for counter-attack is the kind of arrogance that is going to get a lot of people killed in the early days of the next war.
Remember, too, there's a difference between overwhelming a defense systems ability to track and down targets, and overwhelming its ability to stay supplied with ammo.
The rebels take pot-shots in small numbers because they only have a small amount of material and never want to risk over-exposure or the chance of a decisive conflict (that's not what guerrilla warfare is about). However guerrilla tactics can display extremely high levels of coordination, and if adopted by a military force that can afford ballistic missiles then they could also afford to use overwhelming numbers of smaller portable weapons.
Specifically by carving out miscellaneous organs and selling them to the clerk at the 7-11. Who, for the record, is an uncooperative bastard.
No, as you could make a BBS be very similar to slashdot.
Except for the part where you have links to data stored on other servers. Thousands of other servers (back in the late 80s), with more aggregate data than you could ever hope to store on your one computer, and more users than you could ever hope to connect through your (if you were lucky) bank of modems.
The comparison isn't between /. and a BBS. It's between the Internet and a BBS. The idea that the Internet, globally connected network, is the same as BBSes, is ludicrously stretching the idea of "same" to "involves computers and communication of some kind".
Source: Co-Operator (not owner) of the Paradigm Shift BBS in Kalamazoo, MI. Which we all abandoned INSTANTLY as soon as we got internet connections because the difference was so stark and obvious.
The transistor was a fundamental invention.
No, the transistor was just an incremental improvement of the VCCS/amplifier, which before was implemented as a vacuum tube. It took many incremental improvements on top of that first transistor before it got so much better than the vacuum tube that you could call it fundamentally superior to the old technology. But it was still an implementation of the same fundamental concept.
I mean if you're not going to accept using interference to allow the etching of features on a chip smaller than the wavelength of light used to etch them because it's just "photo lithography", or the switch from plasma etching to additive patterning to allow copper interconnect because it's just "materials improvements", or any of the other improvements in manufacturing regardless of how much invention was involved because it's all just "integrated circuits", then I'm sure as hell not going to give you your "voltage-controlled current source" just because you're aware of it being a big deal.
But I think your post really does reveal why we have this perception. People judge invention based on *function*, not the innovation that went into making it work. A turbo-charger is just a thing that makes your car work slightly better. It's still just a car. My computer is 20,000 times faster than the one I had 20 years ago, and of course it took ridiculous amounts of completely new technology to make it, but it's still just a computer (just like pre-transistor computers were computers, btw).
Which I guess is fair. It's just a weird tack to take when something like a cell phone is considered an invention even though it was really just the coordinated application of well-established technology, while seemingly "incremental" improvements in the power of that cell phone are due to fundamental improvements in the underlying technology.
So I guess that's it -- the reason there's less "invention" today is because it's harder to come up with new stuff to do. We already have machines that move us around rapidly on the ground or in the air. We already have machines that do math and send communications globally. We have machines that heat and cool the air. We have machines that do a crazy amount of different "things", and the only way to "invent" is to invent a new "thing".
... except for the part where it reveals that the closest approach will be in the middle of the day in my time zone. T_T
I guess I can *try* to see it when it's farther away (and has less apparent motion so I should still be able to use that chart to find it) but it's going to be tough without going to a dark sky sight...
Thanks! That looks perfect.
The neo.jpl.nasa.gov link in the summary says that it will reach a magnitude below 7. So, outside of visible for most people (and especially most locations), but it shouldn't be hard to pick up with binoculars if you can just get it in your field of view. Hopefully there will be some guides to locating it, what constellations it will be going through, etc.
Tracking it with an amateur telescope is probably not going to work too well since it will be moving too quickly. Some amateurs I'm sure will get good views; there are people who photograph the ISS for example which requires even faster tracking than this asteroid will.
I know I'm not going to bother with my scope. But I might try to find it in my bins.
Given the extremely low odds of them being wrong and the asteroid hitting the earth in the first place, the odds of it killing the person who uttered those words are astronomically low.
Of course if this was a movie, then that means it'd be a sure bet. I guess this will be a good test of whether the universe obeys the laws of dramatic irony.
winners often have a background from a variety of styles which is why they are called "mixed martial arts" competitions.
Since someone else pointed out how inappropriate your observation is with regard to Bruce Lee, I'll say this:
The reason they're called "mixed martial arts" competitions is because they allow people from any martial art discipline to participate. As opposed to a Tang Soo Do, Judo, kick boxing, boxing, etc. competition which is dedicated to a particular style.
People who practice only one style often win, but it has to be a style that can handle a variety of circumstances and not just the moves of their own style. People with multi-disciplinary backgrounds also do quite well, but the name came first.
Case in point (pointed by Aristotle): one-off events are outside science's problem domain. Science is about comparing and generalizing. If you don't have two of something, you cannot compare them, and hence you cannot develop any theory on it. At best you cat say that it hasn't happened twice, or at least to you, but that's it.
Aristotle never felt the need to test his theories of motion. Great philosopher, but I'm not sure he's the best reference on the modern scientific method.
The thing is, what you say is in some ways an oversimplification. Science is really about comparing observation with theory. Some things may be transient enough that it is difficult to have enough observations for a theory to be properly tested, but it still isn't necessarily the case that something happen more than once.
For instance, there is as far as we can tell only one Universe, and in the Big Bang Theory only one Big Bang. So how can we have a theory of the birth of the universe if it only happened once? Well, the Big Bang makes an extremely specific prediction: That at the point the universe expanded and cooled enough that neutral atoms could form, light would for the first time be able to pass through the universe, and we should see this light in all directions, and it should have a very particular temperature.
Then we made observations, and we saw that this prediction was borne out to an extremely high degree of precision.
One could call all the millions of data points taken of the CMBR at different wavelengths across the sky constitute the 'multiple events'. A photon interacting with a detector is an 'event'. But there is still the one singular Big Bang, yet still a very good theory about it.
You could say the same thing about the extinction of the dinosaurs. We don't really need to form another earth, have dinosaurs evolve on it, and then smack a big comet or asteroid into it to see if it drives them extinct a second time.
It would seem that, by definition, it is going to be unexplainable by natural law and may be, by extension, "supernaturally" unsuitable for reproduction.
And similarly "supernaturally" unsuitable for demonstration that it actually exists.
It is true that by nature the Randi prize is only accessible to those whose "abilities" are reproducible. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people who claim that their abilities are reproducible. Particularly those who are willing to charge others to employ these abilities -- psychics, dousers, etc.
I do feel bad for the people who are really, truly, psychic but only at a rate indistinguishable from chance alone.
Nobody has even passed the preliminary selection for this challenge, which makes you wonder if it is real after all.
Why yes, it does make you wonder if any of these alleged abilities are... Oh, wait, you meant the challenge itself.
Lots of people have been accepted as "applicants", and then tested. None have succeeded in demonstrating their ability under controlled conditions, and thus failed to pass the preliminary test and become "claimants".
That you see this as evidence that the challenge itself is fake, when it's exactly what you would expect if 1) the tests were conducted properly and 2) psychics, dousers, etc were not real, is telling.
The criteria for selection are not public.
Yes they are. In that forum you can see all applicants, the protocols that are agreed upon, including what would qualify as a significant result sufficient to pass the preliminary test.
There is, as far as I can tell, nothing scientific behind this challenge. It looks more like propaganda.
It's amazing what things look like to people who haven't actually looked.
No computer can, or will, understand pain or pleasure (although they can fake them) until we invent chemistry-based replicants.
What's special about chemistry that electricity cannot reproduce? I'll even let you ignore that chemistry is actually just electromagnetic phenomenon.
Imagine a computer of power sufficient to model every single atom in a human brain in real-time. All the chemical reactions in the brain are modeled down to quark at the Plank scale. Why can that simulation not be intelligent, but the pile of real chemicals can?
The appearance of a thing does not equal that thing. Just ask the amazing Randi.
Ah, but as Randi knows, that "appearance" disappears as soon as you step behind the curtain, see the act from the wrong angle, or control for obvious trickery.
Once the computer is "faking" feeling pain to the point where it is impossible to distinguish, is it really faking any more?
Who is to say that humans aren't "faking" sentience? After all, we appear sentient, but that's not the same thing.
Henry James, a major philosopher and Harvard professor at the turn of the 20th century, was talking about radical empiricism were unexplained phenomena should be studied with the scientific method. It seems that you are taking a leap of faith that this is not necessary. Am I right?
No, because studying these alleged phenomenon using the scientific method is exactly what James Randi and his Challenge are all about.
And every time someone claiming to have some kind of supernatural ability submits themselves to a controlled scientific study, the ability vanishes.
When something is 'not better then placebo' that means 'not better then this stuff we know has no effect'
Which is measurably better than "nothing". How can a placebo not cure anything if it cures more than doing nothing?
The term has been greatly abuses by SCAM practitioners for years, so it's actual meaning isn't know to many people.
Indeed, but that doesn't mean you can take advantage of that by giving them an incorrect definition.
The placebo effect is real, and non-zero. It does cure some things, and assist with others.
The question is how to account for that ethically. One way NOT to do it is to charge exorbitant prices for sugar pills (I'm looking at you, homeopath shysters).
One good thing is that there is some indication that you don't even need to trick the patient into believing it is http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/23/1445207/placebos-work----even-without-deception">real medicine, which is the major ethical concern for actual medical practitioners who want to take advantage of the placebo effect.