You can't just have a big pile of neutrons because neutrons convert to protons and electrons with a halflife of about 10 minutes if not bound up with sufficient protons. So if you started with 200 neutrons, after awhile you'd end up with some mix of protons and neutrons forming elements.
On the other hand, in appropriate conditions (very large pressures) you can suppress that conversion and you get a very big pile of neutrons - a neutron star. Unfortunately, I don't think we have the ability to generate sufficient pressures for this in a lab:)
The difference isn't what they do to the body, it's the context in which they're used. A mental enhancer would be forbidden to quiz show contestants just like a muscle enhancer would be forbidden to athletes. That's because those environments are a competition.
University is a different situation. Although there are competitive aspects, that's simply because businesses that hire university graduates want the best. If you have someone naturally smart versus someone boosted through some kind of artificial means, if the person boosted by artificial means is better at the job, then they're the one one should get it. More broadly, the point of university and jobs isn't to highlight differences in people's natural abilities like a competitive sport, but is rather to advance some goal: invention, research, etc. That goal can be furthered by performance enhancement.
The downside is that most of this kind of thing is highly untested for long-term sideeffects. If someone could put in front of me a product which was used for, say, 50 years without major sideeffects from those taking it, and with visible gains in mental performance, I'd have no qualms in taking it. Just as if someone came up with a proven and tested drug that would improve eyesight or hearing or increase my lifespan.
The difference between fog and water vapor is that in fog, the water has formed small droplets of fluid which are suspended in the air, as opposed to a uniform mixture of water and air (or pure water vapor in extreme cases). Those droplets scatter light, and you get an opaque screen. However, those droplets convert to water vapor as long as the humidity isn't near saturation for that temperature, and the fog dissipates. Water vapor does not have to be at 100C (or even 100F) ; 100C is the point at which the vapor state dominates, but you get a fraction of vapor supported at lower temperatures (the vapor pressure of a substance).
If you used water in the machine, the simple solution would be to keep the room's humidity low, so that the fog dissipates more quickly. Either way, damage to the people in the room would be no worse than breathing the air on a foggy day.
So is the one determination of whether one's life is well used the sum of it's income? Just because something has value doesn't mean it should be accompanied by the monetary equivalent.
You say 'use leisure time to goof off' as if it's a new trend. Well, look to the beginnings of the sciences, where most of the seminal work was done by the wealthy who had the time to 'goof off'. Now, as the work needed to support onesself decreases and communications become faster and more readily available, people who before didn't have any spare time can now put hours or more into doing what they want to do, rather than what they need to do to survive. As I see it, anything which gives people more time to do what they want to instead of what they need to is a good thing:) But if leisure time gains an inherent cost, then it's going to decrease for everyone who needs to work a bit more to cover that cost.
There are some people who believe that they have the inherent right to be paid for producing something of quality. That's not true though; they have the right to restrict access to it and to attempt to sell it to others. They don't have the right to stop others from providing content of the same quality or better for fun, or to demand that everyone purchase their product. In short, while they can try to make a living off of what was previously their leisure, no one has a duty to support them.
Some people may want a reward, but fortunately there are a lot of people who simply want to create and share their creations freely.
Hm.. just because I'm bored and wanted some entertainment, I decided to calculate how much I pay to be entertained.
Let's see... internet access.. High speed is about $50/mo. That equates to 9 minutes of internet access for every 10 cents. Already I'm quite a bit ahead.
If I consider the lifetime of my computer between upgrades, and the cost of an upgrade, I get maybe a year and a half for $300. That boils down to $.10 for every 26 minutes. I could stretch it longer if I wanted to, since most of those upgrades aren't because of failing components.
On the other hand, there are some things which cost me a bit more per second, like books. If I read a $10 book through once (about 5 hours), that's a whopping $.10 for every 18 seconds. Except that I can reread some of the better ones, and maybe push that up to a minute for every $.10.
Now let's look at it the other way around. Let's say that I had to pay $.10/15 seconds in order to be entertained. That's $24/hour. If I don't take into account that I get paid to be entertained for 8 or so hours a day, there goes a good chunk, if not all of my income, depending on my job. Granted, things like food and shelter come before being entertained.
The point is, while $.25 cents seems trivial, it can add up, especially if you don't take the attitude that, yes, you ARE paying for something. So the attitude that "if I'm paying $.25, it'd better be worth it" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, it means we'll see fewer websites which are the equivalent of bums on the street asking for spare change "hey buddy, got a quarter so I can show you a blank page with the words 'under construction'?"
Maybe I'm being a bit cynical, and maybe there is stuff out there where I wouldn't mind paying small or large for it, but I don't like the idea that someone is entitled to a payment just because they put up a web page asking for it.
Now, after this rant, I do have to say that this particular comic does not simply do that. It does seem to provide some content before payment, to at least show that something's there, and that it isn't just a scam. Reputation is also a big help. But just like we can have sites with unobtrusive ads which are related to the site's content, there's likely to be a huge number of the abusive and irritating variety.
Is becoming so engrossed in a game that one plays for hours on end any different than becoming engrossed in a good novel? They can both be methods of escape, social commentary literature aside. The same goes for watching a movie, or really any other form of absorbing and interacting with information that doesn't involve talking to another human face-to-face. While I realize books and movies aren't interactive, that just means that we're getting better at improving the escape experience. It used to be that one's only choice was what character to identify with (small set of game paths.. used to be pretty standard). Now, we've simply come up with ways of making paths dynamically, so there are more options.
Another aspect of this... pen and paper roleplaying. I think many people would find that less objectionable, even despite the long periods of time involved (months or even years for a set of characters to evolve), though I could be wrong about that.
Still, I find it interesting to look at the various similarities between these things, yet to find that this one particular thing is being so negatively received.
I'm almost tempted to say that this is a side-effect of all those teachers who said 'I want at least 10 references and a 5 page paper'. At least, I can't think of any serious reason why, even if someone was just publishing fluff, they'd need to bulk up the references with irrelevant ones. The only other thing I can immediately think of is that a reference becomes somewhat standard, so they use it for something they learned and forgot where they learned it from (you can't exactly say [11], 11. Professor Ragan's Astrophysics 521 class or [12], 12. Two dozen vaguely remembered textbooks). Even then, I suppose its bad form not to find some reference with the relevant information just to prove you're not making it up (yes, pi IS 3.1415....).
Seems to me that as long as the activity doesn't seriously damage your health (or create some kind of long term instability) it can't really be called damaging. It can reduce other activities, but if thats what a person wants to do with their time, I have no objection. I have to trust that person to make their own decisions about what they want in life, long or short term.
If it is a person's wish to pursue something, whether that be nonstop gaming, reading a book, pursuing a career, or becoming an interesting person (or any combination of these and an almost-infinite number of other options), then I have no right to object to that desire. That is their choice to make. I simply wonder at the logic which says that one set of goals is somehow fundamentally 'bad' while another set of goals is somehow fundamentally 'good'.
Not to mention that the hint book wasn't the end-all of what was in the game:)
I remember when I first found the Greater Wilds wandering around in the boat 'gee, this is sure a large random accessible area. Huh... I've never seen that monster before. Ack! [Terminate Game]'
(Conquilados, I think)
Pity the encounter generator in the center wasn't as impressive as I'd've liked (I was hoping for nonstop Godzylli:)
And of course there's the Cane of Corpus. Well known on the boards and stuff, but the location isn't mentioned by the hint book, though its well-known on the boards by now.
And although the hint book mentions the Hall of Gorrors encounters, theres nothing like trying to actually fight the things (well, except Ra-sep-ra-tep):)
And then there're the crazy types of parties you can run through the game. I never pulled if off, but I've read posts of people who had one-character parties (you get 6x the experience, so its not SO crazy:))
I don't really think I agree with the entire premise. The case of giving a gun to a kid is special because most laws and people consider a kid to be the responsibility of their parents, eg that they have no responsibility for their own actions. So if a parent gave a gun to a kid, then by that logic, the responsibility would still fall on the parent, even if the kid is doing the shooting. Scientists don't have power over the actions of the world, so they can't be held responsible for them. If a scientist invents a gun, they're giving it to an entity considered an adult, with its own responsibility. Any action then taken is within the responsibility of the taker of that action, not the one who made it possible.
As for giving a gun to a criminal, this is somewhat grey at first. It asks about foreknowledge of any crimes to be committed. I think the PRIMARY concern is more on the order of 'if you give a gun to a criminal expecting the criminal to use it in crime, you're conspiring in the crime' as opposed to 'its your responsibility to judge whether this WILL be used in crime in the future'. Of course, this is just my own bias of interpretation. If a scientist made a weapon of destruction with the intention of using it to destroy someone, then proceeded to or had someone else do the destruction for them, then I'd say they were responsible for that event. However, if they make a weapon of destruction and then just hand it out to some random person walking down the street, I'd lay responsibility on the random person, not the scientist.
I see, so it doesn't matter that people died as long as the blame is placed on the right person. I'll have to remember that and ensure that I live some place far away from anyone considered responsible for something, so that people won't bomb near me cause they can't blame it on anyone.
Well... I have a belief, which may be somewhat unfounded, that you only get complex functions in complex situations, and that once you break it down, they're really composed of a LOT of very simple functions. A reason 'modern' physics tends to seem mathematically complicated may just be that we're observing and describing these emergent properties of very large and complex systems. By studying the system in greater and greater detail, we manage to generalize the math we use to describe it, so that we get to the level where we can give a couple very simple equations that, when iterated or compounded over a complex set of initial conditions, become the nasty thorny things that we had at first observed.
For instance, consider something like fluid dynamics. The patterns created in fluid flow can be mathematically mathematically complex compared to the source equations which produce them (either using Navier-Stokes, or even based on <a href="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/414684.html"> colliding particles</a>.
So, it may be overly optimistic, but I tend to think that although the observed behaviors may be complex, the sources of those behaviors will tend to be simple, and that as a whole, the progression is from complex to simple, not vice versa.
Um, see, heres the thing. Those formulas aren't just predictive tools. They're insights into that why you believe we have no grasp at. Let me put it this way: The physics of the universe as known by us can be expressed in a set of equations. Now, many of these equations have some arbitrary terms. Stuff like the speed of light, the relative strengths of forces, so forth. Something that increases our overall understanding maybe be something that just 'fixes' a bit of the equations, but whats really amazing is when you find that two 'constants' that seem unrelated to begin with are suddenly connected and dependant, thus you get rid of one more arbitrary factor. Eventually, the goal would be to get the number of arbitrary numbers (i.e. the stuff we don't understand why it is) down to zero, but so far we've done pretty well. Essentially all of the constants relating to materials in mechanics, for instance, come about because of electromagnetic interactions within the material (well, and some nuclear strong\nuclear weak to describe exactly what elements making these materials are stable). These are essentially emergent properties of the simpler set of equations of EM. Even the EM equations are fairly simple in concept, though they may look daunting. In fact, as was mentioned in an earlier thread, you can reduce 'EM' down to just 'E' if you look at it under relativity (which is a theory derived from logical backgrounds first, then tested with theoretical results. We know the 'why' of relativity. Relativity comes out of the idea that a fundamental constant of the universe should be constant everywhere and in any reference frame.)
The remaining bit describing the electric force simply comes out of treating it as sources and sinks of a field which propagates as a wave. Of course, you still have the 'like repel, opposite attract' bit, which probably has its own derivation for simple principles, but yet isn't within my reach yet (for all I know, its out there already). I'm not saying that we know EVERYTHING about EM, but we know a lot. There are of course things to fill in, not the least of which as relating it to the other forces.
As for gravity, thats a bit trickier and not understood as well, but it seems to behave along the same wave equations. The 1/r^2 dependance of both electric and gravitational fields is characteristic of a static source given the wave equation (its essentially distributing the field over the surface of a sphere in 3-space. Interestingly, there are studies (being?) done to verify the existance of more than 3 dimensions, and their 'size' (I don't really know how one would define this term in respect to dimensions... maybe if the dimensions are in a closed spherical or toroidial space)) based on the deviation from 1/r^2 for an electric field.
This isn't necessarily so. One would imagine that it would require energy to move something from a shielded to unshielded region. The electrostatics version of this is a capacitor with a dielectric. When a dielectric is placed between the capacitor plates, there is a change in the strength of the field between the places (i.e. shielding), but it takes energy to remove that dielectric.
Or, if you will, look at it another way. With your apparatus, you either have to stick in new buckets, in which case you're adding energy based on their potential energy, or a bucket has to cross the line between shielded and unshielded, over which there would be a gradient of potential, which you'd need to dump in energy to counteract.
I'm just a physics major at this point, so anyone feel free to contradict.
NichG
Actually, MRI machines do up to 2 or 3 tesla, and some devices are designed to provide 5 tesla to a fairly small space. I must be missing something though, because that current at that voltage would suggest 100 ohm resistance, but a superconductor has very very close to zero (theoretical limit being zero, but due to practical considerations, theres a very fast exponential decay near the critical temperature) I guess in this case its a limit of their HV generator. Perhaps they should try a different technique, since they they could get larger currents, though at lower voltages. If the problem is getting the discharge, they can use argon to increase the spark length.
Also, their method of detecting pendulum deflection is VERY crude. Its not hard to set up something with a small mirror hanging on the pendulum's thread, such that when the pendulum moves, it causes the deflection of a beam of laser light. This is how they measure deflections in the Cavendish apparatus, which essentially measures the gravitational attraction between two balls of lead (an ammount which is exceedingly small).
The other thing I'd like to see is how much force the 'emitter' device device experiences with different targets, or with under a variety of circumstances. If its behaving like a coherent beam emitter, it should be pushed away even when there isn't a target present.
Still, given all of the things they haven't tried, and all of the things they've yet to do, I think this is a bit early for them to go into the involved set of theories they've discussed in the paper. I think they need to do some narrowing down first:)
Different fights are worth winning to different people though. Yes, the average user won't want to waste time to learn to use Linux, just like someone studying political science won't want to take a physics or engineering class so that they can improve the design of their car.
However, there are steps around this. People who don't want to take the trouble to design their own car buy from a manufacturer that employs engineers. People who don't want to take the time to learn Linux would buy their OS from a company that specializes in making their OS easy to use for the average user. Trying to make Linux into something like that would be cross-purpose; it IS rough around the edges, because its customized by the people who use it. Of course, even to Linux users, this argument applies in part... after all, comparitively few Linux users have written their own OS from scratch (could be wrong about this of course;)).
Hmm, I would have thought the view from the lower classes that the upper classes owe them would be more characteristic. After all, who ever heard of the upper class staging a revolution so that they could replace themselves with the current lower class;)
Well, the problem with that vein of thought is that it assumes that you're only going to store one piece of software\video\whatever on the drive at one time. Lets take video for instance. Lock the quality and compression at DVD level, and then look how much space it would take to store a day's worth of broadcast television (we won't even mention HDTV and ITS storage requirements). At 5-9GB for 2 hours, this goes to an upper limit of 108 GB/day. Still, by future harddrive standards this may not be overly much. However, in conjunction with everything else someone might want to store on their system, the numbers will just keep growing. Store the library of congress on your harddrive;)
Its really another form of the desk space syndrome... The more space thats available, the quicker it gets used up.
There is also the issue of very high resolution data, not necessarily for human viewing, but for computer analysis. This isn't likely to hit the average user as something useful or necessary on their own system, but commercial and research systems could certainly find a thousand ways to fill up harddrives that would not normally occur to a user.
Heres the problem. Not all anonymity is to protect
from legal reprocussions. For instance, if you're
a professor at some college, or you work for some
firm, theres nothing truly stopping those places
from taking against you that you published some
opinion that they disagree with. They probably
couldn't use it legally to fire you (depends on the criteria for what you want to call a free-speech stable society), but they could pass you over for tenure or promotions. Just because the government can't limit your speech doesn't mean that other businesses can't discriminate based on that speech.
Rather than buying commercial games, we (linux
users) can write our own:)
I gather that was the type of linux game referred
to earlier in this thread.
At first, you get a lot of straight-off clones of
whatever was written for a linux system (for
instance, StarCraft clones of which I've seen a
ton). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all, you may want to play a game like that on linux. Eventually (hopefully) we'll also get new variations and types of games not seen before. The number of linux games being developed by the opensource community is increasing, especially after ClanLib was released (there are a number of penguin-platform or penguin-rpg derivatives out there which I don't recall the names) although few of them are what you would call 'complete', but at least theres interest.
Pay $10 for a distribution now, pay $10 to download a 200 byte perlscript later. One of the advantages of having something completely free is that you can download it, and delete it if you don't like it, with no loss. If there were 10000 distributions out there I wanted to try, each one free, all I'd be spending is my own time (and whatever for my internet connection which is a foregone conclusion anyhow;)). If I had to pay $10 for each one...
Slashdot Mirror
You can't just have a big pile of neutrons because neutrons convert to protons and electrons with a halflife of about 10 minutes if not bound up with sufficient protons. So if you started with 200 neutrons, after awhile you'd end up with some mix of protons and neutrons forming elements.
:)
On the other hand, in appropriate conditions (very large pressures) you can suppress that conversion and you get a very big pile of neutrons - a neutron star. Unfortunately, I don't think we have the ability to generate sufficient pressures for this in a lab
NichG
The difference isn't what they do to the body, it's the context in which they're used. A mental enhancer would be forbidden to quiz show contestants just like a muscle enhancer would be forbidden to athletes. That's because those environments are a competition.
University is a different situation. Although there are competitive aspects, that's simply because businesses that hire university graduates want the best. If you have someone naturally smart versus someone boosted through some kind of artificial means, if the person boosted by artificial means is better at the job, then they're the one one should get it. More broadly, the point of university and jobs isn't to highlight differences in people's natural abilities like a competitive sport, but is rather to advance some goal: invention, research, etc. That goal can be furthered by performance enhancement.
The downside is that most of this kind of thing is highly untested for long-term sideeffects. If someone could put in front of me a product which was used for, say, 50 years without major sideeffects from those taking it, and with visible gains in mental performance, I'd have no qualms in taking it. Just as if someone came up with a proven and tested drug that would improve eyesight or hearing or increase my lifespan.
NichG
The difference between fog and water vapor is that in fog, the water has formed small droplets of fluid which are suspended in the air, as opposed to a uniform mixture of water and air (or pure water vapor in extreme cases). Those droplets scatter light, and you get an opaque screen. However, those droplets convert to water vapor as long as the humidity isn't near saturation for that temperature, and the fog dissipates. Water vapor does not have to be at 100C (or even 100F) ; 100C is the point at which the vapor state dominates, but you get a fraction of vapor supported at lower temperatures (the vapor pressure of a substance).
If you used water in the machine, the simple solution would be to keep the room's humidity low, so that the fog dissipates more quickly. Either way, damage to the people in the room would be no worse than breathing the air on a foggy day.
NichG
So is the one determination of whether one's life is well used the sum of it's income? Just because something has value doesn't mean it should be accompanied by the monetary equivalent.
:) But if leisure time gains an inherent cost, then it's going to decrease for everyone who needs to work a bit more to cover that cost.
You say 'use leisure time to goof off' as if it's a new trend. Well, look to the beginnings of the sciences, where most of the seminal work was done by the wealthy who had the time to 'goof off'.
Now, as the work needed to support onesself decreases and communications become faster and more readily available, people who before didn't have any spare time can now put hours or more into doing what they want to do, rather than what they need to do to survive.
As I see it, anything which gives people more time to do what they want to instead of what they need to is a good thing
There are some people who believe that they have the inherent right to be paid for producing something of quality. That's not true though; they have the right to restrict access to it and to attempt to sell it to others. They don't have the right to stop others from providing content of the same quality or better for fun, or to demand that everyone purchase their product. In short, while they can try to make a living off of what was previously their leisure, no one has a duty to support them.
Some people may want a reward, but fortunately there are a lot of people who simply want to create and share their creations freely.
Ack... alright, my figures are screwy tonight. I was doing per cent, not per dollar.
:)
Figure the rest out, cause I don't trust myself to come up with an accurate correction at this point
Shoulda quit when I was ahead...
NichG
Heh.. just noticed the figures I quoted are per dollar, not per $.10, so it's not quite as bad as I've made out.
So 52 seconds per $.10 for internet, and 2.6 minutes/$.10 for a computer, and a book is quite expensive at only 1.8 seconds/$.10 (but often worth it).
The $24/hour is still correct though.
Hm.. just because I'm bored and wanted some entertainment, I decided to calculate how much I pay to be entertained.
Let's see... internet access.. High speed is about $50/mo. That equates to 9 minutes of internet access for every 10 cents. Already I'm quite a bit ahead.
If I consider the lifetime of my computer between upgrades, and the cost of an upgrade, I get maybe a year and a half for $300. That boils down to $.10 for every 26 minutes. I could stretch it longer if I wanted to, since most of those upgrades aren't because of failing components.
On the other hand, there are some things which cost me a bit more per second, like books. If I read a $10 book through once (about 5 hours), that's a whopping $.10 for every 18 seconds. Except that I can reread some of the better ones, and maybe push that up to a minute for every $.10.
Now let's look at it the other way around. Let's say that I had to pay $.10/15 seconds in order to be entertained. That's $24/hour. If I don't take into account that I get paid to be entertained for 8 or so hours a day, there goes a good chunk, if not all of my income, depending on my job. Granted, things like food and shelter come before being entertained.
The point is, while $.25 cents seems trivial, it can add up, especially if you don't take the attitude that, yes, you ARE paying for something. So the attitude that "if I'm paying $.25, it'd better be worth it" isn't necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, it means we'll see fewer websites which are the equivalent of bums on the street asking for spare change "hey buddy, got a quarter so I can show you a blank page with the words 'under construction'?"
Maybe I'm being a bit cynical, and maybe there is stuff out there where I wouldn't mind paying small or large for it, but I don't like the idea that someone is entitled to a payment just because they put up a web page asking for it.
Now, after this rant, I do have to say that this particular comic does not simply do that. It does seem to provide some content before payment, to at least show that something's there, and that it isn't just a scam. Reputation is also a big help. But just like we can have sites with unobtrusive ads which are related to the site's content, there's likely to be a huge number of the abusive and irritating variety.
NichG
With a bit of reflection, I have to wonder...
Is becoming so engrossed in a game that one plays for hours on end any different than becoming engrossed in a good novel? They can both be methods of escape, social commentary literature aside. The same goes for watching a movie, or really any other form of absorbing and interacting with information that doesn't involve talking to another human face-to-face. While I realize books and movies aren't interactive, that just means that we're getting better at improving the escape experience. It used to be that one's only choice was what character to identify with (small set of game paths.. used to be pretty standard). Now, we've simply come up with ways of making paths dynamically, so there are more options.
Another aspect of this... pen and paper roleplaying. I think many people would find that less objectionable, even despite the long periods of time involved (months or even years for a set of characters to evolve), though I could be wrong about that.
Still, I find it interesting to look at the various similarities between these things, yet to find that this one particular thing is being so negatively received.
NichG
I'm almost tempted to say that this is a side-effect of all those teachers who said 'I want at least 10 references and a 5 page paper'. At least, I can't think of any serious reason why, even if someone was just publishing fluff, they'd need to bulk up the references with irrelevant ones. The only other thing I can immediately think of is that a reference becomes somewhat standard, so they use it for something they learned and forgot where they learned it from (you can't exactly say [11], 11. Professor Ragan's Astrophysics 521 class or [12], 12. Two dozen vaguely remembered textbooks). Even then, I suppose its bad form not to find some reference with the relevant information just to prove you're not making it up (yes, pi IS 3.1415....).
Seems to me that as long as the activity doesn't seriously damage your health (or create some kind of long term instability) it can't really be called damaging. It can reduce other activities, but if thats what a person wants to do with their time, I have no objection. I have to trust that person to make their own decisions about what they want in life, long or short term.
If it is a person's wish to pursue something, whether that be nonstop gaming, reading a book, pursuing a career, or becoming an interesting person (or any combination of these and an almost-infinite number of other options), then I have no right to object to that desire. That is their choice to make. I simply wonder at the logic which says that one set of goals is somehow fundamentally 'bad' while another set of goals is somehow fundamentally 'good'.
NichG
Not to mention that the hint book wasn't the end-all of what was in the game :)
:)
:)
:))
I remember when I first found the Greater Wilds wandering around in the boat 'gee, this is sure a large random accessible area. Huh... I've never seen that monster before. Ack! [Terminate Game]'
(Conquilados, I think)
Pity the encounter generator in the center wasn't as impressive as I'd've liked (I was hoping for nonstop Godzylli
And of course there's the Cane of Corpus. Well known on the boards and stuff, but the location isn't mentioned by the hint book, though its well-known on the boards by now.
And although the hint book mentions the Hall of Gorrors encounters, theres nothing like trying to actually fight the things (well, except Ra-sep-ra-tep)
And then there're the crazy types of parties you can run through the game. I never pulled if off, but I've read posts of people who had one-character parties (you get 6x the experience, so its not SO crazy
NichG
Heh, it was late at night when I wrote it, :)
guess its back to a thesarus for me, since that
is certainly not my intended meaning
I don't really think I agree with the entire premise. The case of giving a gun to a kid is special because most laws and people consider a kid to be the responsibility of their parents, eg that they have no responsibility for their own actions. So if a parent gave a gun to a kid, then by that logic, the responsibility would still fall on the parent, even if the kid is doing the shooting. Scientists don't have power over the actions of the world, so they can't be held responsible for them. If a scientist invents a gun, they're giving it to an entity considered an adult, with its own responsibility. Any action then taken is within the responsibility of the taker of that action, not the one who made it possible.
As for giving a gun to a criminal, this is somewhat grey at first. It asks about foreknowledge of any crimes to be committed. I think the PRIMARY concern is more on the order of 'if you give a gun to a criminal expecting the criminal to use it in crime, you're conspiring in the crime' as opposed to 'its your responsibility to judge whether this WILL be used in crime in the future'. Of course, this is just my own bias of interpretation. If a scientist made a weapon of destruction with the intention of using it to destroy someone, then proceeded to or had someone else do the destruction for them, then I'd say they were responsible for that event. However, if they make a weapon of destruction and then just hand it out to some random person walking down the street, I'd lay responsibility on the random person, not the scientist.
Useful application for nerve gas: bug spray. (Just be sure to use one that doesn't have a strong effect on human neuroanatomy! :))
I see, so it doesn't matter that people died as long as the blame is placed on the right person. I'll have to remember that and ensure that I live some place far away from anyone considered responsible for something, so that people won't bomb near me cause they can't blame it on anyone.
Well... I have a belief, which may be somewhat unfounded, that you only get complex functions in complex situations, and that once you break it down, they're really composed of a LOT of very simple functions. A reason 'modern' physics tends to seem mathematically complicated may just be that we're observing and describing these emergent properties of very large and complex systems. By studying the system in greater and greater detail, we manage to generalize the math we use to describe it, so that we get to the level where we can give a couple very simple equations that, when iterated or compounded over a complex set of initial conditions, become the nasty thorny things that we had at first observed.
For instance, consider something like fluid dynamics. The patterns created in fluid flow can be mathematically mathematically complex compared to the source equations which produce them (either using Navier-Stokes, or even based on <a href="http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/414684.html"> colliding particles</a>.
So, it may be overly optimistic, but I tend to think that although the observed behaviors may be complex, the sources of those behaviors will tend to be simple, and that as a whole, the progression is from complex to simple, not vice versa.
NichG
Um, see, heres the thing. Those formulas aren't just predictive tools. They're insights into that why you believe we have no grasp at. Let me put it this way: The physics of the universe as known by us can be expressed in a set of equations. Now, many of these equations have some arbitrary terms. Stuff like the speed of light, the relative strengths of forces, so forth. Something that increases our overall understanding maybe be something that just 'fixes' a bit of the equations, but whats really amazing is when you find that two 'constants' that seem unrelated to begin with are suddenly connected and dependant, thus you get rid of one more arbitrary factor. Eventually, the goal would be to get the number of arbitrary numbers (i.e. the stuff we don't understand why it is) down to zero, but so far we've done pretty well. Essentially all of the constants relating to materials in mechanics, for instance, come about because of electromagnetic interactions within the material (well, and some nuclear strong\nuclear weak to describe exactly what elements making these materials are stable). These are essentially emergent properties of the simpler set of equations of EM. Even the EM equations are fairly simple in concept, though they may look daunting. In fact, as was mentioned in an earlier thread, you can reduce 'EM' down to just 'E' if you look at it under relativity (which is a theory derived from logical backgrounds first, then tested with theoretical results. We know the 'why' of relativity. Relativity comes out of the idea that a fundamental constant of the universe should be constant everywhere and in any reference frame.)
The remaining bit describing the electric force simply comes out of treating it as sources and sinks of a field which propagates as a wave. Of course, you still have the 'like repel, opposite attract' bit, which probably has its own derivation for simple principles, but yet isn't within my reach yet (for all I know, its out there already). I'm not saying that we know EVERYTHING about EM, but we know a lot. There are of course things to fill in, not the least of which as relating it to the other forces.
As for gravity, thats a bit trickier and not understood as well, but it seems to behave along the same wave equations. The 1/r^2 dependance of both electric and gravitational fields is characteristic of a static source given the wave equation (its essentially distributing the field over the surface of a sphere in 3-space. Interestingly, there are studies (being?) done to verify the existance of more than 3 dimensions, and their 'size' (I don't really know how one would define this term in respect to dimensions... maybe if the dimensions are in a closed spherical or toroidial space)) based on the deviation from 1/r^2 for an electric field.
NichG
This isn't necessarily so. One would imagine that it would require energy to move something from a shielded to unshielded region. The electrostatics version of this is a capacitor with a dielectric. When a dielectric is placed between the capacitor plates, there is a change in the strength of the field between the places (i.e. shielding), but it takes energy to remove that dielectric.
Or, if you will, look at it another way. With your apparatus, you either have to stick in new buckets, in which case you're adding energy based on their potential energy, or a bucket has to cross the line between shielded and unshielded, over which there would be a gradient of potential, which you'd need to dump in energy to counteract.
I'm just a physics major at this point, so anyone feel free to contradict.
NichG
Actually, MRI machines do up to 2 or 3 tesla, and some devices are designed to provide 5 tesla to a fairly small space. I must be missing something though, because that current at that voltage would suggest 100 ohm resistance, but a superconductor has very very close to zero (theoretical limit being zero, but due to practical considerations, theres a very fast exponential decay near the critical temperature) I guess in this case its a limit of their HV generator. Perhaps they should try a different technique, since they they could get larger currents, though at lower voltages. If the problem is getting the discharge, they can use argon to increase the spark length.
:)
Also, their method of detecting pendulum deflection is VERY crude. Its not hard to set up something with a small mirror hanging on the pendulum's thread, such that when the pendulum moves, it causes the deflection of a beam of laser light. This is how they measure deflections in the Cavendish apparatus, which essentially measures the gravitational attraction between two balls of lead (an ammount which is exceedingly small).
The other thing I'd like to see is how much force the 'emitter' device device experiences with different targets, or with under a variety of circumstances. If its behaving like a coherent beam emitter, it should be pushed away even when there isn't a target present.
Still, given all of the things they haven't tried, and all of the things they've yet to do, I think this is a bit early for them to go into the involved set of theories they've discussed in the paper. I think they need to do some narrowing down first
NichG
Different fights are worth winning to different people though. Yes, the average user won't want to waste time to learn to use Linux, just like someone studying political science won't want to take a physics or engineering class so that they can improve the design of their car.
;)).
However, there are steps around this. People who don't want to take the trouble to design their own car buy from a manufacturer that employs engineers. People who don't want to take the time to learn Linux would buy their OS from a company that specializes in making their OS easy to use for the average user. Trying to make Linux into something like that would be cross-purpose; it IS rough around the edges, because its customized by the people who use it. Of course, even to Linux users, this argument applies in part... after all, comparitively few Linux users have written their own OS from scratch (could be wrong about this of course
NichG
Hmm, I would have thought the view from the lower classes that the upper classes owe them would be more characteristic. After all, who ever heard of the upper class staging a revolution so that they could replace themselves with the current lower class ;)
NichG
Well, the problem with that vein of thought is that it assumes that you're only going to store one piece of software\video\whatever on the drive at one time. Lets take video for instance. Lock the quality and compression at DVD level, and then look how much space it would take to store a day's worth of broadcast television (we won't even mention HDTV and ITS storage requirements). At 5-9GB for 2 hours, this goes to an upper limit of 108 GB/day. Still, by future harddrive standards this may not be overly much. However, in conjunction with everything else someone might want to store on their system, the numbers will just keep growing. Store the library of congress on your harddrive ;)
Its really another form of the desk space syndrome... The more space thats available, the quicker it gets used up.
There is also the issue of very high resolution data, not necessarily for human viewing, but for computer analysis. This isn't likely to hit the average user as something useful or necessary on their own system, but commercial and research systems could certainly find a thousand ways to fill up harddrives that would not normally occur to a user.
NichG
Heres the problem. Not all anonymity is to protect from legal reprocussions. For instance, if you're a professor at some college, or you work for some firm, theres nothing truly stopping those places from taking against you that you published some opinion that they disagree with. They probably couldn't use it legally to fire you (depends on the criteria for what you want to call a free-speech stable society), but they could pass you over for tenure or promotions. Just because the government can't limit your speech doesn't mean that other businesses can't discriminate based on that speech.
Rather than buying commercial games, we (linux users) can write our own :)
I gather that was the type of linux game referred
to earlier in this thread.
At first, you get a lot of straight-off clones of
whatever was written for a linux system (for
instance, StarCraft clones of which I've seen a
ton). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all, you may want to play a game like that on linux. Eventually (hopefully) we'll also get new variations and types of games not seen before. The number of linux games being developed by the opensource community is increasing, especially after ClanLib was released (there are a number of penguin-platform or penguin-rpg derivatives out there which I don't recall the names) although few of them are what you would call 'complete', but at least theres interest.
Pay $10 for a distribution now, pay $10 to download a 200 byte perlscript later. One of the advantages of having something completely free is that you can download it, and delete it if you don't like it, with no loss. If there were 10000 distributions out there I wanted to try, each one free, all I'd be spending is my own time (and whatever for my internet connection which is a foregone conclusion anyhow ;)). If I had to pay $10 for each one...