Now I'm an AA brigade guy, so admittedly our training wasn't up to USMC standards. We did do the basic infantry training, though, so, yes, I do have _some_ first hand idea what it's like to charge uphill several hundreds metres, sprinting and dropping every 3n. You're right, it's physical stress. I'll point out though, that:
1. It's more of a matter of _endurance_ than physical strength. _Everyone_ has the physical strength to lift 60 pounds of junk on their back, or can be trained and drilled into it. Whether you still have breath after 100m if that, though, has zero to do with strength and everything to do with endurance.
Given that such flaunted averages are along the line of "but men on the average are stronger", I'd say they make a piss-poor argument to keep women out. I've seen plenty of other statistics saying, basically, "but women on the average have better endurance", so that would make them on the average better soldiers then. But, as I was saying, I know better than to extrapolate from averages to individuals, so I'm not going to propose kicking the males out of the army.
2. An even bigger factor is mental stability and resistance to mental stress. You can dig out examples from ancient Egypt and Greece wars, to Charles Martel's phalanx against the moor heavy cavalry, to Waterloo, to WW2 and the Gulf Wars where the unit that broke down and lost cohesion first got simply rolled up. And the one that stayed cohesive just a bit longer won.
Entire concepts like suppression, shock, etc, are more based on mental discipline than on anything even remotely physical. The reason you have that SAW you mention, or a Designated Marksman, is more for suppression value than for kills. (A designated marksman ranks up there with heavy machineguns for psychological effect.)
So judging war or military fitness by an average strength benefit, is at best misleading.
Now I don't know if women score better or worse in that aspect on the average, but at least a (flawed) case could be made that I'd rather _not_ bet a war on a bunch of people trying to act macho and testosterone-driven. And in fact most of the military training is to make you act like a trained pro, not like a macho poser.
3. As I was saying, the army already knows how to drill and train you into having as much strength and endurance as they need. Even if you've been a sedentary nerd all your life (I certainly had been), after a few months of drills and exercises, I was surprised myself at what I could do. Not only endurance- and strength-wise, but mobility too.
Does it mean you'll ever be in shape to be 100% guaranteed survival or to enjoy that kind of sprint-and-drop-and-sprint routines? No, by far. But you'll be in shape enough to do it within the parameters expected from you.
Briefly, we don't draft only the fittest athletes anyway.
4. There are a bunch of jobs and roles in the army where you're not mainly supposed to do that. As I was saying, as an AA guy my _main_ role wouldn't be to run across the field. I'd still be expected to fight it off if the enemy charges our position, but my primary role would be to see that anything overhead comes down in flames before shooting at you guys sprinting across the field.
More such roles in a jiffy.
5. Historically, the USSR successfully used a _lot_ of women in the army in WW2, in such roles as:
- pilots. And we're not talking fly-by-wire jets, but old WW2 airplanes where you might need 45 lbs pull just to turn the damn thing. (I don't know the exact number for soviet airplanes, that number's what I remember offhand for the German BF-109). They had whole squadrons of women.
- snipers. They actually found them to be better than men at venting someone's brains from half a mile away.
- tank crews
- artillery or mortar crews. And let's remember that the Soviets were the first to go 120mm on their mortars. Quite a beast to haul across the field, even more so than the SAW you mention.
The only problem is that, as the saying goes, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Where there is a hideously large variability in the sample, _only_ comparing averages is at best misleading. There's a reason why, for example, in science and engineering you don't just calculate the average of the data you measured, but also the error bar.
Plus, most people who bring up an argument along the lines of "on the average X are better at Y than Z", will proceed to use it along the lines of "therefore all and each X are better than all Z". Or some equivalent redefining from average to one member, like:
1. therefore I'm better than you
2. therefore we should only hire X
3. therefore it's ok to pay Z less for doing the same job and meeting the same goals/quotas/deadlines/etc
4. therefore some ridiculously non-challenging task is (or should be) an X-only job
Etc.
E.g., as an extreme example of 4, there's a whole horde of machos arguing that a woman shouldn't ever be allowed to join the army and carry a 6 pound assault rifle, because women are on the average weaker. Never mind that even a couch-potato of either sex can jolly well use one, and that the whole point of the army is to drill you and train you into the shape they want you, even if you hadn't moved more than from the couch to the fridge in your whole life before.
So I can't honestly blame anyone who's weary of having such averages shoved in their face.
Averages have at best a trivia value most of the time. In any given situation you're dealing with individuals (e.g., if you actually need to hire someone strong) or with the whole gauss curve (e.g., if you want to make such an arcade machine which doesn't break the arm of someone on the far left end of the scale.) Trying to reduce it all to an average is, at best, bad science, even if you don't have some supremacist agenda.
Even taking your skin colour example, just the average is useless in just about any conceivable practical situation. Even if you were judging the potential market for sunblock or tanning beds there, you have such variables and market niches as:
- white western-origin people living in Africa or viceversa. Unless you mean actual racial profiling, someone could "hail from West Africa" only because their white portuguese ancestors settled in a trading post there in the 1600's.
- native populations such as the Khoisan, which have quite a range of skin tones, some fairly light
Etc.
Yes, I know what an average is, but you don't actually deal with only the average for any practical purposes.
So I too would be weary of people pointing out such misleading averages left and right and then retreating into "I'm just pointing facts." A "fact" taken out of context, or used in the wrong context, can be as mis-leading as an outright lie. Unless you've found some problem where the average alone is relevant, that is.
It's still something, because to knock an electron out, the minimum frequency of the photon has to be at least the difference between the conduction band (where you want that electron) and the lower-energy valence band (where the electron originally is.) So you have a minimum energy cut off point. Exactly where that is, depends on the material, but generally you won't get any power out of the infrared falling on that cell.
However, the downside is that photons with higher energy than that bandgap, well, the extra energy is essentially wasted.
So basically, say, if you used Germanium at 0.67 EV bandgap, you'd catch more photons than with Silicium at 1.11 EV bandgap, but get less useful energy (i.e., electricity as opposed to heat) out of each photon.
And the higher frequency the photon, the more you waste as heat. So you won't waste more in the visible spectrum (well, unless the photon had less energy than the bandgap, in which case it's completely wasted), but in the UV spectrum you waste a lot.
So reducing the waste in the UV spectrum is really where it counts the most. Sure, it would be neat to gain everywhere, but the UV range is where we waste the most.
Their talk about fluorescent particles, makes me think they're essentially converting an UV photon into at least one lower frequency photon. The question is what they do with the extra energy. At the simplest imaginable way, you'd get at least two low energy photons from one UV photon.
On the other hand, it seems to be a bit more than that, from that short summary linked to. From their claim that they improve voltage, not just current, and that something happens at the interface between the particles and the substrate, it sounds like essentially they created a bunch of new junctions there. I.e., that it's a new way to make a multi-junction solar cell.
Multi-junction cells aren't exactly new, but traditionally they've been very expensive so far. If these guys invented a cheap way to make one, kudos to them.
On yet another hand, it will be interesting to see on exactly what existing cells can their film be applied. On silicon or other semiconductors, ok, I can see how it would form an extra junction. Would it also work on, say, Dye-sensitized Solar Cells? There essentially their particles would come on top of the dye, and I'm not sure how well that works. It'll be interesting to find out, eventually.
I doubt that it's that simple. I can see how some of the reflex stuff, like the eye contact or distance from each other might count, so I'm not dismissing their research. But I'm saying you should know when to stop extrapolating from what they actually studied, to stuff that you just imagine _should_ work the same way.
1. Other stuff is more like built on logical decisions, and (consciously or subconsciously) min-maxing rewards vs risks within the rules of the game, not within the rules of RL. The solution picked in the game might be _very_ dissimilar to the one picked IRL.
E.g., rogues are popular in WoW because they're all-out-offense and get XP fast, and people are willing to take a few extra deaths if in the long term they level up faster. It's an option not many will take IRL. If someone told you you'll likely get a promotion faster if you run on foot across the highway daily, chances are you wouldn't take that risk. Or I don't think russian roulette is very popular a passtime IRL, as another example.
Or if you want another IRL comparison, take fencing, the original life-and-death kind. It was primarily defense oriented. The very name comes from "defence" via "defencing". The priority was defense, and harming the opponent was only left for when the oportunity presents itself. Both touching each other was _not_ an option, because then both would be dead. Then it was turned into a harmless sport based on points, and it went all aggressive instead of defensive, because that's what gets more point. Olympic fencing nowadays would look outright _absurd_ to a gentleman with a rapier from the days of yore. That's how much a behaviour can differ even when you simulate an activity IRL with RL props.
Essentially people are more willing to accept virtual "death" in a game (whether WoW or competition fencing) than IRL. That should already give you a hint that their reaction to having a deadly plague might not be exactly the same in WoW as IRL.
2. The study you linked is about Second Life, a primarily role-playing environment. I mean, it's not like there's even an actual game in there.
Role-playing is somewhat different from playing for xp, loot and honour points. Role-playing is primarily about acting, and making your character and reactions _believable_ to the other. I.e., the whole idea is to act like a RL human, or close enough. (Even if you RP a dwarf or elf or klingon, RP racial cultures are essentially just slightly exagerated human cultures and personalities.) So it makes sense that you'd pay attention to such details as whether your character would make eye contact, how close he'd stay to another guy, and that he'd react believably to the news of having a deadly plague. It's the whole point of RP, it's _expected_ that you do, and if you don't meet that expectation, you'll find less and less people want to RP with you.
In games like WoW, that assumption just doesn't exist any more. In WoW what's expected of you is that you make the most of the rules, and ignore stuff that doesn't directly impact your character's progress. What would be a realistic reaction suddenly doesn't really matter any more, unless you found yourself a group of die-hard roleplayers. Stuff that in a RP session would count as good RP (e.g., stopping to huff and pant when running uphill, or "omg, I'm gonna die" scenes when infected), here count at most of "lol, dude, you're funny" or even "yeah, yeah, cut it out with whining about realism already" if you overdo it.
And then there are some people who even make a point of acting as shocking or unconventional as possible, or even being as annoying as possible. E.g., I can assure you that in the WoW plague event a lot didn't think "omg, I'm so depressed that I'm gonna die", but quite the contrary, "bwahahaha, it's so cool that I can infect and kill non-PvP newbies." I.e., far from ruining their day as would happen IRL, it was the happiest day of their online life. Some even went and deliberately got infected just to that end.
Further, there is still a strong psychological tie to purchasing something physical, which trend is especially prevalent in the previous generations buying for their children and grandchildren.
You make it sound like some illogical attachment to something physical, but in practice it's not that simple. There are perfectly logical reasons to go and buy a CD instead of downloading some installer, even if the download was instant. The two choices, more often than not, are just not the same. In no particular order:
1. Sometimes the download imposes far more unreasonable activation conditions than being tied to a CD. The fact is, publishers are paranoid about their content being copied, and it's the same guys that got us saddled with Starforce back in the day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're malevolent or anything, but in some cases the mere thought of even a copy getting pirated instead of bought seems to get these guys' brains to shut down and come up with stupid protection ideas than last time. So if they're going to let you just download their precious content, expect all sorts of draconic measures to prevent you from running it on more than one machine... or even on one machine without authenticating all the time with the server.
And I'm sorry, but I think it's more than just psychological attachment to expect to treat a game like I'd treat a book. If I want to pack it on a laptop too, for when I'm on the train, then I bloody expect to be able to do so. I don't want some retarded DRM scheme to kick in in the middle of the flight and go, "auugh, I can't talk to the servers, therefore I'll assume you're a pirate!" Or "auugh, you've activated it on another computer before, therefore I'll need all your personal data, home adress and telephone number, employer's telephone number, and notarized affidavit from two witnesses that you haven't pirated it!" Well, maybe not that extreme, but just to illustrate the point.
And just to hammer some more on that point:
2. Some online registration forms are stupidly intrusive and ask for personal data that they just don't have any need or excuse to ask for.
I'm sorry, even data mining only goes so far. To get a distribution of market by age, you just need to know my age bracket, not exact day and month of birth. To get a distribution by region they need at most the city I'm in, not exact street and house number. And why are they asking for a phone number? Basically a correlation along the lines of "our game sold the most to people in their mid-20's" is valuable data, but something like "1% of our buyers were born on a Friday the 13'th" is just useless trivia. Going into finer grained detail than you need is just turning information into trivia.
So why are they asking for that kind of data? At worst, some marketroid had at least in the back of the head the possibility of using that data for spam (directly or selling it to third parties), and at "best", they're just too clueless to know what data they need and how they're going to use it. And I say "best" between quotes, because it doesn't really make me feel better to give all my personal data to someone thoroughly incompetent. It's a bit like giving your credit card number and SSN to the village idiot: even if he doesn't use them personally, you just have to wonder where he'll lose that piece of paper or who he'll share it with.
Maybe that sounded too harsh, but at the very least data losses, break-ins, lost laptops, hard-drives binned or sold without properly erasing them, etc, happen all the time. Each extra place that has my data, is essentially an extra bit of risk that that data will be lost or stolen. So if they don't have a legitimate reason to absolutely _need_ that data, I don't want them demanding it to let me play the game I bought. And no, just the fact that some PHB feels so powerful and informed for having all that data, doesn't really count as a legitimate need.
Now admittedly, some games that come on CD have equ
While I see your point about _some_ retailers (though at least here plenty carry 18+ games anyway), two wrongs still don't make a right. Publishers arguing that the ESRB should give anyone a lower rating just so WalMart would carry their game is still not a fix, it's just the second wrong. And that's exactly what a couple of publishers are whining about.
They have my compassion for being shut out by WalMart (but again, not by a bunch of other chains) from some potential market share, but not for trying to fight it with dishonesty towards everyone else, and not for trying to subvert the ratings. Ratings, imperfect as they may be, are supposed to at least give a parent some indication of what they're buying there. I.e., they're supposed to reflect the actual content. _Not_ be just a rubberstamping of whatever market segment the publisher's marketting want.
Moving everything into the "over 17" instead of the "over 18" bracket isn't even a long term solution. Even if the ESRB just bent over and rubberstamped all porn and splatter as the lower category, how long until WalMart starts not carrying that category either? Since their objection (for PR image reason) was essentially to the content, not to the letters A and O. WalMart just tries to keep its image as far as possible from being associated with that kind of content. So if someone just "pushes the envelope" to include it in a lower bracket, then that bracket too might vanish off the shelves just as well.
Plus, as I was saying before, I'm seeing it as pure dishonesty of a couple of publishers. They can't have their cake and eat it. They can't claim, basically, "some games are for adults only, they're never meant for the kids and teenagers, we wouldn't ever encourage selling them to kids and teenagers" _and_ then come and whine that a game should get a lower rating because otherwise they'll lose profits. Sorry, one or the other. Asking that a game gets a lower rating, inherently means rubberstamping that it's ok for lower aged people, which blatantly contradicts the other claim.
Even the other popular whine that parents should look at what their kids buy and be more involved, is meaningless if they manage to corrupt the information a parent can base that kind of a decision on. The ESRB rating, imperfect as it may be, it tells a parent some rough idea of what it might contain. It's some (imperfectly) condensed information about the content. You can see there and see stuff like "nudity", and decide whether you want or don't want little Billy to see that. If it becomes just some meaningless collection of whatever lies it took to get WalMart to put it on the shelves, then essentially it just became useless. And in the process subverted the basis for the other whine too: one can't moan and bitch about parents who don't get involved enough, _and_ at the same time argue for subverting the very information that's supposed to help a parent make that decision.
You know, the shouting "dialogue" between the industry and ESRB/congress/naysayers/whoever is already looking to me sorta like this. (The somewhat sanitized version, with a lot of hyperbole and think-of-the-children taken out, for clarity sake.)
Objector: Aauugh, they're selling that sex and violence stuff to kids. Publisher: STFU, not all games are for kids. My games were never meant for kids, at least. We have ESRB ratings for it, the sex and violence games don't get sold to kids. ESRB: Ah, glad that you feel that way, because we're rating your latest sex- and gore-fest AO. It should be ok, if they're not sold to kids, right? Publisher: Aauugh, ESRB is oppressing me! Help! First ammendment! If my game isn't on the kiddie shelf at WalMart and EB Games, I'll make less money! The outrage!
This is, as I was saying, just a massively sanitized excerpt, to illustrate the point that's starting to irk me: the two-facedness of the industry. They're essentially trying to have it both ways at the same time.
In a nutshell: fucking decide already whether you're (A) making a game for kids and teenagers, and live with the restrictions there, or (B) admit that it's for adults, and get that M or AO rating. That's what it's for.
Because otherwise it looks like the whole "leave us alone, we already have the ESRB ratings for it" is essentially a lie, if then you come and demand that everything gets a low rating so it can sell more copies. I don't freakin' care whether it's WalMart rules or Nintendo rules or whatever. Decide from the start whether you want to be in that slot or not.
Talk about "pushing the envelope" in this context is just weasel-wording for "I want to sneak a game that's just a little over the limits of AO, imto a lower category". Or simpler still, "I want to be allowed to lie about the rating, because we'll make more money that way." I'm sorry, that's not as much "pushing the envelope" as plain old dishonesty. And it being motivated by nothing more than profit (as in, "but we'll sell less copies if it's AO!!!") doesn't make dishonesty acceptable, it just turns it into fraud.
No, I don't think anyone has a sacred right to make money by breaking the rules. We don't live in that kind of society generally, so I fail to see why games would get a free ticket there. Just freakin' decide in which category you want to be, and live by those rules.
Trying to argue both "but some games are made for adults only, so STFU with the think-of-the-kids" _and_ "auugh, but I don't want to actually label it Adults Only" is getting surrealistic already in its overt dishonesty. And I, for one, had enough of it already.
It's sorta like this. Let's say there are two pubs in your neighbourhood:
1. The Broken Bell, cheap, but treats their beer like it's a potted plant. They water it generously. And I wouldn't touch their stronger drinks if you value your eyesight. At any rate, what you actually get in that glass isn't what they advertised, by far, and not the quantity they advertised either.
2. The Belching Hydra, doesn't do any of that crap, but, of course, then their prices are higher. Or rather, their prices are the natural ones, since they can't cost prices by doing the bad stuff.
I can't see how you could say that the latter is doing the equivalent of taking a bribe.
Mind you, in an ideal RL, or even in the less ideal Europe down here, we'd just pass some government regulation and send the cops or the consumer rights agencies after the crooked barkeep. On Slashdot and with it's nerdy population fond of utopian extremes and no shades of grey in between, someone (or a lot of someones) will scream, "noooo! Governments are evil! If you let the government do anything, there's no stopping until you have a verbatim copy of the USSR or Nazi Germany! The free unregulated market can solve anything by itself!" Never mind that it's what created this fuckup in the first place, and the whole push against net neutrality is asking the government to remove the regulations and let them be as crooked as they want to.
But in the meantime or if that's not an option, well, it's up to you to decide whether you want to support the former and save a few bucks, or the latter and pay more for the privilege. But saying the latter is like extortion just isn't right.
Why? It's never stopped bubbles from forming or bursting in the past, going all the way back to the famous South Sea Bubble.
Well, that's insightful in its own way, but you have to remember that bubbles are caused slightly differently.
Bubbles are based on greed. Pure, distilled, unadulterated greed. At some point the prospect of making lots of undeserved money, is causing people's brains to switch to the wishful thinking that some greater dope will take the fall. People keep dumping money into a bubble precisely _because_ it's a bubble and keeps expanding, so any bubble-goods (shares, tulip bulbs, etc) you buy now, can hopefully be sold more expensive later.
The Dutch tulip craze, for example, was based on the idea that if you buy a tulip bulb for 100 guldens (a huge sum at the time), some other idiot will later buy it from you for 1000 (a king's ransom.)
The dot-com bubble, for example was a 1-2 punch of greed:
1. The idea that you can defraud the advertisers for as much money as you want to. Advertising rates were originally calculated for sites with exactly 1 banner on the front page, and it tended to be relevant too, so people actually clicked on it. Then someone came with the idea that you can make sites with wall-to-wall banners and the advertisers will pay you hundreds of thousands per month for just having a homepage. And surely the advertisers won't catch on. (And when advertisers were slow to react, some waiting to see if more ads actually mean more clicks and sales, it just "confirmed" the idea that it's free money for anyone who wants to take them.)
A lot of companies were bought for a lot of money or made huge profits, apparently for no other reason than having a web server with lots of ads. Others were bought for other reasons, such as actually having a service and a share of the users that someone else was willing to subsidize as part of their empire (e.g., ICQ or Hotmail), but it fit in the same general picture: make a high-tech company, get bought for hundreds of millions.
This helped "bootstrap" the bubble.
2. As I was saying before, it kept going precisely _because_ it was a bubble. A lot of companies were formed not because they believed there was a valid business plan in just having an "I love cats" web page, but to get a lot of money in an IPO. (I actually worked for a company whose _sole_ business plan was "we'll have an IPO and people will give us hundreds of millions!") And a lot of VCs invested in those companies, not because they genuinely believed that they'll work great in the long term, but because they hoped they can wait until right before they peak, and sell every share before it crashes and burned. And stock advisors were known to even directly manipulate that mechanism, e.g., by advising people to buy the shares of some imploding dot-com just as they were selling their shares in it.
Even the absurd unsustainable structure of a dot-com in that bubble wasn't genuine stupidity in most cases, but deliberately trying to have the same image as the dot-coms that got millions in IPO before or got bought. If the ones that peaked sky high before consisted of hundreds of programmers and tens of millions of dollars worth of servers just for a web site that sold nothing, the new ones tried to look exactly the same. It was a "pick me" marker, if you will, rather than just believing that lots of expensive hardware equals growth.
At one point, some even lost sight of the goal to get and retain lots of users, which was (A) the original way to get lots of advertising money, and (B) later the dot-com bubble's excuse: "see, we'll get millions of users first, and sometime later actually figure out a way to sell them stuff." (E.g., the dot-com I worked for, had such memorable management quotes as, "no, we don't want a forum, we don't want users to post all sorts of crap on our servers" and "no, chatrooms are just for cybersex and other crap, we don't need one" and so on for all the proposed ways to g
Heh. Except it's Sun's CTO and he doesn't actually say that. What he says is, "companies who buy lots and lots of expensive hardware will experience spectacular growth, while those who don't buy our crap will be left behind!"
Which doesn't even make sense as "growth equals growth", since not everyone is a software company. E.g., for a car manufacturer or someone like Nike or Coca Cola, exactly how does overspending on IT translate into faster growth? While _some_ benefits do exist, and I've seen them first hand, the factor is fairly small and that growth-because-of-IT is essentially capped. In the end as a manufacturing company you live or die by your marketing and your product quality (sadly, in that order), not by how Web 2.0 your site is.
E.g., sure, you can save some money by moving to an online relationship with your suppliers, but even then:
1. You need to be a certain size where you can actually apply some volume and pressure to negotiating discounts, because otherwise everyone will just direct you to their list price, online or not. And at that size, exponential growth pretty much stopped anyway.
2. It only goes so far. You might be able to squeeze a few more bucks out of the suppliers by making them compete with each other online, but there's a limit even to that. They won't go into negative profits just for you. (And if they did, they'll go out of that market soon.) So at some point you're pretty much capped there, everyone started doing the same thing too, and adding more expensive servers won't help any more.
3. Doubly so because suppliers of big companies are a bit of an exclusive club. You can push prices down only so much, before it comes at the expense of quality, and that you really don't want to drop too much. So before (and after) accepting someone in such an online process, there'll be a lot of checking if they can supply the quality you want, the quantities they need, if they have anything to lose (suing them for damages won't do much if they're broke), if they have a reasonable reputation, etc.
4. For the same reason as above, you're not saving that much manpower and other such costs. Plus, in addition to the above, a lot of deals will still be done in person or on the golf course. (E.g., don't think Dell negotiates its discounts from Intel by just pointing them at a reverse auction URL.) Buying a big expensive server doesn't actually mean you can fire half the buyers and let the software do everything for you from now on.
5. Some of the deals are just too much of a pain to squeeze in the inherently OCD structure of a computer program. E.g., sure, you could code things so flexibly that you leave room for such stuff as "we'll get a big discount on component B if we get component A only from these guys" or "we'll get a discount from Intel if we _don't_ deal with AMD" or whatnot. But it's a pain in the rear, and chances are you won't foresee everything. Humans are flexible and creative, computers aren't. Sometimes trying to squeeze everything into the same rigid one-size-fits-all algorithm, is just a high-tech way to commit seppuku.
Etc.
And the same, or similar, applies to other aspects you could put online or on the intranet too.
Plus some extras. E.g., if you put your sales online, not everyone is Dell. Some products just aren't bought primarily online. I don't think many people buy their soda online, so Coca Cola won't see much benefit there.
Plus, as the final counter-example, see the dot-com bubble. There were _plenty_ of people eager to be the corporate equivalent of the dumbest consumerist. People who just got their money out of nowhere, and proceeded to blow it on things that were little more than status symbols: over-sized servers, fast cars, impressive buildings, 10 times the employees they actually needed (especially programmers and IT), etc. By his red-shift theory, those should be today's new Microsoft. In reality, the vast majority just went bankrupt. 'Nuff said.
Well, we can mostly agree then. As I was saying, that visual aid isn't accurate at all. Doubly so if taken literally.
There are even more problems than you describe. The dragging the space frame for a rotating body (e.g., Earth) is probably more accurately described by a gas, than by a rubber sheet, for example. A rubber sheet would just get twisted and start offering more and more resistance.
It's just that noone else figure out a way to visualize those equations. There just isn't any good way, same as (at the other end of the spectrum) there's no good way to visualize something that's both particle and wave. So we're kinda stuck with it as the thing which comes the closest. Although, as you correctly noticed, not that close at all. You do have to make the mental exercise of ignoring that you use gravity to explain gravity.
But, as I was saying, if you can come up with a better one, we'll all be grateful for that.
ROFL. Dude, while I may have said "no offense" before, thinking maybe you're just repeating something you haven't thought much about. But if you actually think that the sterile controlled environment of a lab, plus the fact that once you were underpaid, make you soo entitled to demand that someone risks _death_ in a damaged shuttle... well, please do take offense. Or better yet, please go see a shrink. You're so disconnected from reality, it's funny.
Wake me up when you're actually facing risk at least similar to what you demand there. Like, I don't know, when you've volunteered for new medicine tests. Now even that isn't actually that close, but it's a step upwards.
Plus, you can't say that _you_ are doing it haughtily or foolishly, but demand no less than that NASA does just that: act haughtily and foolishly. Because it's such an outrage to you if they exercise proper caution.
Get a grip.
Plus, to get back to that bitching and moaning about how concerns over safety are braking progress, how do you see that progress happening _without_ it, in this particular case?
If NASA can't keep a multi-billion dollar shuttle from blowing up every few missions, with a whole army to take care of it, how do you propose that that progresses to the stage where it's ready for mass use? Even if we were to accept risking life and limb, a space aircraft/bus that blows up every couple of flights just isn't worth it economically. If that space bus blows up as little as every 10'th trip, even assuming everyone was fearless and bet their life on such odds, you'd be looking at a price high enough to build a new one and train a new crew every 10'th trip.
Any kind of space-related progress from where we are, will have to involve moving more humans and materials through space. Whether it's hotels and labs and office buildings in orbit, or mining sites on the moon and mars, we'll need some kind of cheap and _reliable_ space bus to move people and cargo up and down. And the current space shuttle just isn't it. Someone will have to make something with a better safety record, not because of "scaremongering", but because it's just not worth shipping anything up and down if you blow up a multi-billion dollar shuttle every few flights. There's just no price at which you can sell that cargo, or the tickets on such a space bus, that covers that kind of losses.
So from a very pragmatic point of view, NASA _has_ to work on a better safety record before that technology is ready to trickle down to civillian use. If they take a cavallier "oh well, human lives are expendable" attitude, space flight will never progress from ivory-tower national-penis-size-symbol to a more mass-use technology.
So even if it were scaremongering that drives that research into safety... good! Because we'll need that anyway, if we're progress in that direction.
Heh. It's just a visual illustration, it's not the whole model. Yes, the illustration is inexact, in just the way you've described. But it's just a visual aid, no more.
Rest assured that the real equations _don't_ involve rubber sheets and extra downward forces.
The issue there is, well, what was point 3 in my previous message: your RL intuition and imagination fail you miserably in both quantum and relativistic domains. (Here "you" meaning "everybody.") Just because you have the equations, doesn't mean you can actually imagine it, without getting cross-eyed and a nasty headache. Hence such imperfect visual aids as the rubber sheet. That rubber sheet model isn't the actual general relativity model, it's just something close enough to your RL experiences and intuition so you can picture it in your head.
But, yes, it's an imperfect visual aid, if that's what you were trying to say. If you can come up with a better one, I'm sure a ton of physicists and physics teachers will thank you for it:)
But if you're trying to actually use that illustration as _the_ model, it's a bit like saying that a rose can't exist because the picture of a rose is flat and doesn't smell. Or that a pipe can't possibly work, because the drawing of it is on paper, and paper would burn if you tried to put tobacco in it and light it.
basically if ß = v / c, then the coeficient is 1 / SQRT(1-ß^2). So the mass at a given speed is M = M0 / SQRT(1 - (v/c)^2), where M0 is your mass at rest.
If for example v/c is, say, 1.41, that is you're travelling at 1.41c, then your mass is M0 / SQRT(-1). Pretty damn imaginary. Or conversely, have a real mass at that speed, your M0 would have to be imaginary.
So basically at least theoretically a particle could exist that has normal mass above C, but then that particle would have imaginary mass _below_ C. I.e., a tachion would never be able to exist below the speed of light.
To jump between less than C and above C, as the GP correctly said, you'd have to be able to instantly flip between real rest mass and imaginary rest mass.
The problem there is that you're essentially proposing the equivalent of making a car instantly go from 50 km/h to 200 km/h, without it ever having a speed of 100 km/h in between (or any other between 50 and 200.) Only in this case you're proposing something like going from 0.5c to 2c without ever being at the other speeds in between.
Well... how?
Even if there wasn't the pesky issue of having c in between, that violates even Newtonian mechanics. Savagely. Since you're proposing that speed "jump" to essentially happen in exactly zero time (or you'd go through all the values in between), even by old Newtonian mechanics you're talking about an infinite force.
No offense, but I'm inherently... weary... of people waving the banner that someone _else_ should sacrifice everything for the general progress.
If you think a life is that disposable, why don't you go risk _your_ life on some endeavour that benefits everyone? _Then_ you'll have the moral high ground to preach that kind of thing. Until then, way I see it, you're safely in a chair at a computer, preaching that someone _else_ should take unnecessary risks to further your standard of living.
And that's a... sociopathic attitude, to say the least.
You want to talk about the scientific developments that shaped the 20'th century? How about the fact that most of them were driven by the need for safety and/or comfort, and a lot of the rest were driven by consumerism?
If we just wanted to live hard and risky, then we wouldn't have needed all that science and technology anyway. What we actually wanted was stuff like:
- travelling cheaper, safer and more comfortable, hence the automobile instead of riding a buggy like the Amish. A lot of the research that went into the automobile was precisely so it wouldn't be a deathtrap that throws a wheel if you even take a too tight curve.
- some cheap and comfortable way to stay in touch: hence, telegraph and then telephone
- entertainment. Hence technologies like the movies, or TV
- some _safe_ lighting (lighting itself being a quality of life issue): most cities had already invested heavily in gas lighting when Edison proposed electric lighting
- to not die of the first disease that drops by: hence, antibiotics
- even in military applications, to _not_ lose more soldiers than strictly unavoidable: the main use of machineguns in WW1 was _defensive_, and that's why it ended up a stalemate
Etc, etc, etc.
So bemoaning safety and concern for human life as some brake on progress, doesn't strike me as just disingenuous, but also as outright mis-informed and mis-leading. That's not brakes, that's what drove most of progress.
If they are that concerned with cutting costs than saving life's, they should stop sending people in to space.
Actually, the whole point is that they weren't.
The problem is that so far in a relatively short interval they had two cuts in two spacesuits' gloves during spacewalks. The last one was a two inch gash, and prompted an immediate abort of the spacewalk. Precisely because noone wants to vaccuum an astronaut.
Now they weren't all the way through the glove. At least the latest one had only cut the top two layers out of five.
But essentially noone wants to find out what happens when you cut all 5 layers.
And the problem is that they don't know _what_ cut two different spacesuits. Exactly where is the sharp edge there, and how big is it? Is it only big enough to do those two layer cuts? Or are we talking about something that could cut all the way through, and we got luck the last two times?
That's, in a nutshell, why they'd rather not risk a spacewalk to fix the tiles, if they can avoid it.
1. First of all, the somewhat inaccurare version Newtonian version: when you calculate the acceleration of a small body in the gravity field of another body, the small body's mass cancels itself out.
I mean, the force is: F= G * M * m / d^2
The small body's acceleration therefore is: a = F / m = G * M / d^2
You'll notice that the small body's mass isn't present at all in the acceleration, which in this case is also determining the curvature of the trajectory. Or to put it otherwise, a 1g thumb tack will fly in the exact same orbit as a thousand ton Goa'uld pyramid. As you make mass smaller and smaller, in other words take a limit when mass -> 0, well, the trajectory still stays curved.
2. Actually, in a perverse way, you are right that Newtonian mechanics should not apply to light, and they don't: if you apply Newtonian mechanics to light, the predicted deflection of light is only half the deflection actually observed. So light does act funnily in a gravity well.
Light's curvature in a gravity well is only explained right by Einstein's general relativity. There gravity is just the observed consequence of a distortion of space itself. The presence of a mass there distorts space. The usual analogy is that it's like having a horizontal rubber sheet and placing a steel ball upon it. You'll get an indentation in the sheet. The effects on other nearby bodies, or on their movement, is basically just the consequence of that distortion of space.
And so it is with light too. It's not as much that newtonian gravity pulls it, as just that it's moving through a warped piece of space.
3. Generally, don't try to apply your RL intuition and experience to relativistic or quantum phenomena, it tends to just fail spectacularly:)
Well, I didn't say that Diebold was necessarily competent or necessarily honest. I just don't have the data to base such a judgment on anyway.
Just saying that it's a harder problem. Not necessarily impossible, mind you. Just harder.
And that the challenges are different, so the expertise doesn't carry over 1-to-1. Having half a century of experience in making secure ATMs, doesn't make one automatically an expert on secure voting machines.
First of all ATM's don't handle billions of dollars in a transaction. Dunno about those in the USA, but most here are capped at 500 Euro, and your daily limit further caps it.
Second, an ATM is, by and large, just a slightly more secure terminal to the bank's central computers. It's not the ATM that authorizes your transaction, or transfers the money. It's just a terminal that's networked with a central system. So it's slightly easier to get things right.
With voting machines, the whole assumption that it must be anonymous, plus the bigger distrust of a single central station that counts everything, screw that assumption up big time. You can't go and transmit "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party" (I didn't, but for an easily rememberable example sake) over to other computers.
Third, the various kinds of bank terminals get numbers wrong more often than you'd think. E.g., the Deutsche Bank fairly recently introduced OCR machines where you can just shove the check in and have it read, so you don't have to type it all. Well, one of the damn machines didn't read the decimal point, so I ended up transferring 100 years worth of fee to my insurance.
The bank will help you solve such problems, but never claimed that it's 100% bullet-proof and more infallible than the pope.
Fourth, banks (if their central software is anywhere near well written) have other checks and safeguards.
E.g., every cent transferred must be a cent that comes from somewhere else. Even if someone maliciously manipulated the software or the database, you have a chance to catch it. If at the end of the month you do the totals and you have money that appeared out of nowhere, or disappeared into nowhere, you can start an investigation.
Plus it can catch erroneous transfers in the first place. For example my erroneous money transfer should have bounced from the start because most sane people don't have that kind of money in their personal day-to-day account.
E.g., similarly all the money moves must be accompanied by an entry in the transaction table. If someone's account grew by a million, but the transactions to that account don't add up to +1,000,000$, you can call the cops.
E.g., you can have other triggers, regardless of whether the transaction is correct or not.
For example, any incoming money transfer over, say, 10,000$ will automatically trigger an investigation. Ditto if someone suddenly starts getting lots and lots of little transactions. That's mostly against money laundering, but would also catch any error where a bunch of money appears out of nowhere.
For example, you can have bogus rows in the accounts table, which normally have no reason to be accessed, and are booby-trapped with a trigger. If some DBA comes with such ideas as "I know, let's shave a cent out of each account and add it to mine" or "I know, let's export the names and credit card numbers and sell them to scammers", chances are he'd stumble over such traps. Plus, it would trigger an investigation when a bunch of credit card numbers assigned to such bogus accounts start appearing in transactions.
Etc.
All this simply doesn't apply to votes.
- You don't have to take a vote from somewhere else to assign a vote to Moraelin, like would be the case with money
- You don't have people checking their balance and asking you to fix the errors. The whole idea of anonymity is that you shouldn't store anywhere stuff like "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party". If I can check "wait, did you count my vote for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party?" a month later, then so can someone else. That's another bank safeguard that just doesn't exist.
- you can't really use any sums as triggers, because everyone gets the same number: 1 vote. Each transaction says exactly the same: "1 vote for party X". So you can't go and say "whoa, we'll investigate all transactions over 10,000".
- since it's anonymous, you can't check how many transactions each person has, either
That's easy: God created the star together with the tail, 'cause that's his divine plan. Or to test your faith. Or maybe he liked pretty tails.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist myself, but I just can't see anyone's true faith stumbling upon that one. If people can believe that God put dinosaur bones there to test you, why would their mental defenses be shattered by something like this?
And if you think scientific units and measurements put those kinds of beliefs to rest... let's just say that there are those who believe that Noah's Ark was literally that big, and Noah literally picked exactly one pair of each species on Earth, and floated for exactly 40 days. You'd think that stuff like "how much time would he need to include the Kangaroos from Australia and the Jaguars from America and the penguins and..." or "how much did the whole thing weigh, and could that boat float with that much mass aboard" or "so afterwards he went back to put the Kanguroos and Dodos back in Australia?" would test someone's faith big time, but I just haven't seen it happen.
Mind you, I can't as much fault them, because, if I'm allowed to play the devil's advocate for a bit and try to see it through their eyes too:
1. Frankly, if an omnipotent God wanted to create stars with tails or dinosaur bones just for the hell of it, I see no reason why he couldn't. I mean, he's omnipotent, right?
Plus, the "dinosaur bones prove that the Earth must be more than hundreds of millions of years old" argument, can be equally applied to this: "World Of Warcraft has dinosaur bones in Desolace and a few other places, hence World Of Warcraft must be at least hundreds of millions of years old." I mean, phbt, I laugh at those young-Azeroth creationists who insist that WoW is only 3 years old and Blizzard put those dinosaur bones there for decor.
Which, as you did correctly notice, leaves it all boiling down to:
2. God's motives. Frankly, we don't know them. The Bible is very lightweight on details there. Genesis tells you the order that he did it, and, if you want to take it literally, it was enough to say what he wanted there. But it doesn't tell you _why_ he did it. Maybe he was bored, or maybe it was a college assignment, or maybe he was a nerd who just found it fun to create a whole universe, or whatever else, for all we know.
We also know that later he tried several times to impose a moral code on his creation, sometimes as heavyhandedly as nuking Sodom and Gommorah or as the flood. But we don't really know why.
We know that at some later point he wanted to be worshipped alone, but, again, if you think about it, he never says why. It could be that he just thought he'd have an easier time imposing that moral code, or maybe he wanted to stop some of the deviations of other cults (human sacrifice went all the way to burning babies alive in some cults), or just for bragging rights, or maybe (probably) something completely different. There's been a lot of speculation, but essentially we don't know. He just says what he wants, and occasionally threatens or promises rewards to get his point across, but never really bothers explaining why.
The "debunking" the bible by deconstructing God's motives gang, sad to say, usually does a piss-poor job of it. It typically starts by arbitrarily postulating a certain kind of god and a certain kind of motive, typically some version of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. And then the whole "debunking" is based on that axiom.
The problem, and reason it goes nowhere, is that that's not the kind described in the Bible. Or in any other actual human religion. Basing a debunking of Jehovah (or whatever you want to call him) on what would Om do, is as absurd as debunking it based on what would Odin do, or what would Bush do. If you want to poke holes in someone's belief in the Christian Bible, you have to base that reasoning on the Christian Bible, not (directly or indirectly) on a notion that didn't even exist before 20'th century novels invented it as a plot device.
Well, I guess I should be grateful that you brought up art, because it's probably a better illustration of what I'm trying to say.
See, art so far has been created by private initiative. You have, say, a novellist writing a novel on his own time (and thus expense), then they take it to a publisher who's privately owned, which then try to sell it to individual people like you and me. Which can jolly well decide whether they want to buy it or not.
It's capitalism at its finest. The market can and does decide how much they want of any particular novel, or how much of the whole. And how much they want to pay for it.
And in true capitalism fashion, duds die and get silently buried. It doesn't get to be artificially kept alive and costing billions in tax dollar money, like the Space Shuttle was.
I'd have nothing against space exploration being like that too. Honestly.
Conversely I would have something against it if the government wasted my money to keep a bunch of guys doing art for art sake, in some ivory tower where they don't actually have to fulfill any social need or appeal to anyone's taste.
Sure, maybe we'd get some great works of art, if the state sponsored unpopular artists to keep working on it anyway. But chances are we'd just get crap. I don't know if the USSR actually had such an establishment (though it wouldn't surprise me), but half the plot of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" makes fun of exactly that kind of an artificial literary establishment of the Soviet state. I'm guessing Bulgakov didn't like it much.
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Now I'm an AA brigade guy, so admittedly our training wasn't up to USMC standards. We did do the basic infantry training, though, so, yes, I do have _some_ first hand idea what it's like to charge uphill several hundreds metres, sprinting and dropping every 3n. You're right, it's physical stress. I'll point out though, that:
1. It's more of a matter of _endurance_ than physical strength. _Everyone_ has the physical strength to lift 60 pounds of junk on their back, or can be trained and drilled into it. Whether you still have breath after 100m if that, though, has zero to do with strength and everything to do with endurance.
Given that such flaunted averages are along the line of "but men on the average are stronger", I'd say they make a piss-poor argument to keep women out. I've seen plenty of other statistics saying, basically, "but women on the average have better endurance", so that would make them on the average better soldiers then. But, as I was saying, I know better than to extrapolate from averages to individuals, so I'm not going to propose kicking the males out of the army.
2. An even bigger factor is mental stability and resistance to mental stress. You can dig out examples from ancient Egypt and Greece wars, to Charles Martel's phalanx against the moor heavy cavalry, to Waterloo, to WW2 and the Gulf Wars where the unit that broke down and lost cohesion first got simply rolled up. And the one that stayed cohesive just a bit longer won.
Entire concepts like suppression, shock, etc, are more based on mental discipline than on anything even remotely physical. The reason you have that SAW you mention, or a Designated Marksman, is more for suppression value than for kills. (A designated marksman ranks up there with heavy machineguns for psychological effect.)
So judging war or military fitness by an average strength benefit, is at best misleading.
Now I don't know if women score better or worse in that aspect on the average, but at least a (flawed) case could be made that I'd rather _not_ bet a war on a bunch of people trying to act macho and testosterone-driven. And in fact most of the military training is to make you act like a trained pro, not like a macho poser.
3. As I was saying, the army already knows how to drill and train you into having as much strength and endurance as they need. Even if you've been a sedentary nerd all your life (I certainly had been), after a few months of drills and exercises, I was surprised myself at what I could do. Not only endurance- and strength-wise, but mobility too.
Does it mean you'll ever be in shape to be 100% guaranteed survival or to enjoy that kind of sprint-and-drop-and-sprint routines? No, by far. But you'll be in shape enough to do it within the parameters expected from you.
Briefly, we don't draft only the fittest athletes anyway.
4. There are a bunch of jobs and roles in the army where you're not mainly supposed to do that. As I was saying, as an AA guy my _main_ role wouldn't be to run across the field. I'd still be expected to fight it off if the enemy charges our position, but my primary role would be to see that anything overhead comes down in flames before shooting at you guys sprinting across the field.
More such roles in a jiffy.
5. Historically, the USSR successfully used a _lot_ of women in the army in WW2, in such roles as:
- pilots. And we're not talking fly-by-wire jets, but old WW2 airplanes where you might need 45 lbs pull just to turn the damn thing. (I don't know the exact number for soviet airplanes, that number's what I remember offhand for the German BF-109). They had whole squadrons of women.
- snipers. They actually found them to be better than men at venting someone's brains from half a mile away.
- tank crews
- artillery or mortar crews. And let's remember that the Soviets were the first to go 120mm on their mortars. Quite a beast to haul across the field, even more so than the SAW you mention.
- yes, some as infantry
I'm a male, but I can see her point too.
The only problem is that, as the saying goes, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Where there is a hideously large variability in the sample, _only_ comparing averages is at best misleading. There's a reason why, for example, in science and engineering you don't just calculate the average of the data you measured, but also the error bar.
Plus, most people who bring up an argument along the lines of "on the average X are better at Y than Z", will proceed to use it along the lines of "therefore all and each X are better than all Z". Or some equivalent redefining from average to one member, like:
1. therefore I'm better than you
2. therefore we should only hire X
3. therefore it's ok to pay Z less for doing the same job and meeting the same goals/quotas/deadlines/etc
4. therefore some ridiculously non-challenging task is (or should be) an X-only job
Etc.
E.g., as an extreme example of 4, there's a whole horde of machos arguing that a woman shouldn't ever be allowed to join the army and carry a 6 pound assault rifle, because women are on the average weaker. Never mind that even a couch-potato of either sex can jolly well use one, and that the whole point of the army is to drill you and train you into the shape they want you, even if you hadn't moved more than from the couch to the fridge in your whole life before.
So I can't honestly blame anyone who's weary of having such averages shoved in their face.
Averages have at best a trivia value most of the time. In any given situation you're dealing with individuals (e.g., if you actually need to hire someone strong) or with the whole gauss curve (e.g., if you want to make such an arcade machine which doesn't break the arm of someone on the far left end of the scale.) Trying to reduce it all to an average is, at best, bad science, even if you don't have some supremacist agenda.
Even taking your skin colour example, just the average is useless in just about any conceivable practical situation. Even if you were judging the potential market for sunblock or tanning beds there, you have such variables and market niches as:
- white western-origin people living in Africa or viceversa. Unless you mean actual racial profiling, someone could "hail from West Africa" only because their white portuguese ancestors settled in a trading post there in the 1600's.
- native populations such as the Khoisan, which have quite a range of skin tones, some fairly light
Etc.
Yes, I know what an average is, but you don't actually deal with only the average for any practical purposes.
So I too would be weary of people pointing out such misleading averages left and right and then retreating into "I'm just pointing facts." A "fact" taken out of context, or used in the wrong context, can be as mis-leading as an outright lie. Unless you've found some problem where the average alone is relevant, that is.
It's still something, because to knock an electron out, the minimum frequency of the photon has to be at least the difference between the conduction band (where you want that electron) and the lower-energy valence band (where the electron originally is.) So you have a minimum energy cut off point. Exactly where that is, depends on the material, but generally you won't get any power out of the infrared falling on that cell.
However, the downside is that photons with higher energy than that bandgap, well, the extra energy is essentially wasted.
So basically, say, if you used Germanium at 0.67 EV bandgap, you'd catch more photons than with Silicium at 1.11 EV bandgap, but get less useful energy (i.e., electricity as opposed to heat) out of each photon.
And the higher frequency the photon, the more you waste as heat. So you won't waste more in the visible spectrum (well, unless the photon had less energy than the bandgap, in which case it's completely wasted), but in the UV spectrum you waste a lot.
So reducing the waste in the UV spectrum is really where it counts the most. Sure, it would be neat to gain everywhere, but the UV range is where we waste the most.
Their talk about fluorescent particles, makes me think they're essentially converting an UV photon into at least one lower frequency photon. The question is what they do with the extra energy. At the simplest imaginable way, you'd get at least two low energy photons from one UV photon.
On the other hand, it seems to be a bit more than that, from that short summary linked to. From their claim that they improve voltage, not just current, and that something happens at the interface between the particles and the substrate, it sounds like essentially they created a bunch of new junctions there. I.e., that it's a new way to make a multi-junction solar cell.
Multi-junction cells aren't exactly new, but traditionally they've been very expensive so far. If these guys invented a cheap way to make one, kudos to them.
On yet another hand, it will be interesting to see on exactly what existing cells can their film be applied. On silicon or other semiconductors, ok, I can see how it would form an extra junction. Would it also work on, say, Dye-sensitized Solar Cells? There essentially their particles would come on top of the dye, and I'm not sure how well that works. It'll be interesting to find out, eventually.
Pretty much, yes. And now they're lobbying the federal government to remove those laws and rules altogether.
Very much so, no arguments there. Try to explain that to _some_ of the slashdotters, though
Heh, chill out. It wasn't meant as an attack.
I doubt that it's that simple. I can see how some of the reflex stuff, like the eye contact or distance from each other might count, so I'm not dismissing their research. But I'm saying you should know when to stop extrapolating from what they actually studied, to stuff that you just imagine _should_ work the same way.
1. Other stuff is more like built on logical decisions, and (consciously or subconsciously) min-maxing rewards vs risks within the rules of the game, not within the rules of RL. The solution picked in the game might be _very_ dissimilar to the one picked IRL.
E.g., rogues are popular in WoW because they're all-out-offense and get XP fast, and people are willing to take a few extra deaths if in the long term they level up faster. It's an option not many will take IRL. If someone told you you'll likely get a promotion faster if you run on foot across the highway daily, chances are you wouldn't take that risk. Or I don't think russian roulette is very popular a passtime IRL, as another example.
Or if you want another IRL comparison, take fencing, the original life-and-death kind. It was primarily defense oriented. The very name comes from "defence" via "defencing". The priority was defense, and harming the opponent was only left for when the oportunity presents itself. Both touching each other was _not_ an option, because then both would be dead. Then it was turned into a harmless sport based on points, and it went all aggressive instead of defensive, because that's what gets more point. Olympic fencing nowadays would look outright _absurd_ to a gentleman with a rapier from the days of yore. That's how much a behaviour can differ even when you simulate an activity IRL with RL props.
Essentially people are more willing to accept virtual "death" in a game (whether WoW or competition fencing) than IRL. That should already give you a hint that their reaction to having a deadly plague might not be exactly the same in WoW as IRL.
2. The study you linked is about Second Life, a primarily role-playing environment. I mean, it's not like there's even an actual game in there.
Role-playing is somewhat different from playing for xp, loot and honour points. Role-playing is primarily about acting, and making your character and reactions _believable_ to the other. I.e., the whole idea is to act like a RL human, or close enough. (Even if you RP a dwarf or elf or klingon, RP racial cultures are essentially just slightly exagerated human cultures and personalities.) So it makes sense that you'd pay attention to such details as whether your character would make eye contact, how close he'd stay to another guy, and that he'd react believably to the news of having a deadly plague. It's the whole point of RP, it's _expected_ that you do, and if you don't meet that expectation, you'll find less and less people want to RP with you.
In games like WoW, that assumption just doesn't exist any more. In WoW what's expected of you is that you make the most of the rules, and ignore stuff that doesn't directly impact your character's progress. What would be a realistic reaction suddenly doesn't really matter any more, unless you found yourself a group of die-hard roleplayers. Stuff that in a RP session would count as good RP (e.g., stopping to huff and pant when running uphill, or "omg, I'm gonna die" scenes when infected), here count at most of "lol, dude, you're funny" or even "yeah, yeah, cut it out with whining about realism already" if you overdo it.
And then there are some people who even make a point of acting as shocking or unconventional as possible, or even being as annoying as possible. E.g., I can assure you that in the WoW plague event a lot didn't think "omg, I'm so depressed that I'm gonna die", but quite the contrary, "bwahahaha, it's so cool that I can infect and kill non-PvP newbies." I.e., far from ruining their day as would happen IRL, it was the happiest day of their online life. Some even went and deliberately got infected just to that end.
So basically, just
You make it sound like some illogical attachment to something physical, but in practice it's not that simple. There are perfectly logical reasons to go and buy a CD instead of downloading some installer, even if the download was instant. The two choices, more often than not, are just not the same. In no particular order:
1. Sometimes the download imposes far more unreasonable activation conditions than being tied to a CD. The fact is, publishers are paranoid about their content being copied, and it's the same guys that got us saddled with Starforce back in the day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're malevolent or anything, but in some cases the mere thought of even a copy getting pirated instead of bought seems to get these guys' brains to shut down and come up with stupid protection ideas than last time. So if they're going to let you just download their precious content, expect all sorts of draconic measures to prevent you from running it on more than one machine... or even on one machine without authenticating all the time with the server.
And I'm sorry, but I think it's more than just psychological attachment to expect to treat a game like I'd treat a book. If I want to pack it on a laptop too, for when I'm on the train, then I bloody expect to be able to do so. I don't want some retarded DRM scheme to kick in in the middle of the flight and go, "auugh, I can't talk to the servers, therefore I'll assume you're a pirate!" Or "auugh, you've activated it on another computer before, therefore I'll need all your personal data, home adress and telephone number, employer's telephone number, and notarized affidavit from two witnesses that you haven't pirated it!" Well, maybe not that extreme, but just to illustrate the point.
And just to hammer some more on that point:
2. Some online registration forms are stupidly intrusive and ask for personal data that they just don't have any need or excuse to ask for.
I'm sorry, even data mining only goes so far. To get a distribution of market by age, you just need to know my age bracket, not exact day and month of birth. To get a distribution by region they need at most the city I'm in, not exact street and house number. And why are they asking for a phone number? Basically a correlation along the lines of "our game sold the most to people in their mid-20's" is valuable data, but something like "1% of our buyers were born on a Friday the 13'th" is just useless trivia. Going into finer grained detail than you need is just turning information into trivia.
So why are they asking for that kind of data? At worst, some marketroid had at least in the back of the head the possibility of using that data for spam (directly or selling it to third parties), and at "best", they're just too clueless to know what data they need and how they're going to use it. And I say "best" between quotes, because it doesn't really make me feel better to give all my personal data to someone thoroughly incompetent. It's a bit like giving your credit card number and SSN to the village idiot: even if he doesn't use them personally, you just have to wonder where he'll lose that piece of paper or who he'll share it with.
Maybe that sounded too harsh, but at the very least data losses, break-ins, lost laptops, hard-drives binned or sold without properly erasing them, etc, happen all the time. Each extra place that has my data, is essentially an extra bit of risk that that data will be lost or stolen. So if they don't have a legitimate reason to absolutely _need_ that data, I don't want them demanding it to let me play the game I bought. And no, just the fact that some PHB feels so powerful and informed for having all that data, doesn't really count as a legitimate need.
Now admittedly, some games that come on CD have equ
While I see your point about _some_ retailers (though at least here plenty carry 18+ games anyway), two wrongs still don't make a right. Publishers arguing that the ESRB should give anyone a lower rating just so WalMart would carry their game is still not a fix, it's just the second wrong. And that's exactly what a couple of publishers are whining about.
They have my compassion for being shut out by WalMart (but again, not by a bunch of other chains) from some potential market share, but not for trying to fight it with dishonesty towards everyone else, and not for trying to subvert the ratings. Ratings, imperfect as they may be, are supposed to at least give a parent some indication of what they're buying there. I.e., they're supposed to reflect the actual content. _Not_ be just a rubberstamping of whatever market segment the publisher's marketting want.
Moving everything into the "over 17" instead of the "over 18" bracket isn't even a long term solution. Even if the ESRB just bent over and rubberstamped all porn and splatter as the lower category, how long until WalMart starts not carrying that category either? Since their objection (for PR image reason) was essentially to the content, not to the letters A and O. WalMart just tries to keep its image as far as possible from being associated with that kind of content. So if someone just "pushes the envelope" to include it in a lower bracket, then that bracket too might vanish off the shelves just as well.
Plus, as I was saying before, I'm seeing it as pure dishonesty of a couple of publishers. They can't have their cake and eat it. They can't claim, basically, "some games are for adults only, they're never meant for the kids and teenagers, we wouldn't ever encourage selling them to kids and teenagers" _and_ then come and whine that a game should get a lower rating because otherwise they'll lose profits. Sorry, one or the other. Asking that a game gets a lower rating, inherently means rubberstamping that it's ok for lower aged people, which blatantly contradicts the other claim.
Even the other popular whine that parents should look at what their kids buy and be more involved, is meaningless if they manage to corrupt the information a parent can base that kind of a decision on. The ESRB rating, imperfect as it may be, it tells a parent some rough idea of what it might contain. It's some (imperfectly) condensed information about the content. You can see there and see stuff like "nudity", and decide whether you want or don't want little Billy to see that. If it becomes just some meaningless collection of whatever lies it took to get WalMart to put it on the shelves, then essentially it just became useless. And in the process subverted the basis for the other whine too: one can't moan and bitch about parents who don't get involved enough, _and_ at the same time argue for subverting the very information that's supposed to help a parent make that decision.
You know, the shouting "dialogue" between the industry and ESRB/congress/naysayers/whoever is already looking to me sorta like this. (The somewhat sanitized version, with a lot of hyperbole and think-of-the-children taken out, for clarity sake.)
Objector: Aauugh, they're selling that sex and violence stuff to kids.
Publisher: STFU, not all games are for kids. My games were never meant for kids, at least. We have ESRB ratings for it, the sex and violence games don't get sold to kids.
ESRB: Ah, glad that you feel that way, because we're rating your latest sex- and gore-fest AO. It should be ok, if they're not sold to kids, right?
Publisher: Aauugh, ESRB is oppressing me! Help! First ammendment! If my game isn't on the kiddie shelf at WalMart and EB Games, I'll make less money! The outrage!
This is, as I was saying, just a massively sanitized excerpt, to illustrate the point that's starting to irk me: the two-facedness of the industry. They're essentially trying to have it both ways at the same time.
In a nutshell: fucking decide already whether you're (A) making a game for kids and teenagers, and live with the restrictions there, or (B) admit that it's for adults, and get that M or AO rating. That's what it's for.
Because otherwise it looks like the whole "leave us alone, we already have the ESRB ratings for it" is essentially a lie, if then you come and demand that everything gets a low rating so it can sell more copies. I don't freakin' care whether it's WalMart rules or Nintendo rules or whatever. Decide from the start whether you want to be in that slot or not.
Talk about "pushing the envelope" in this context is just weasel-wording for "I want to sneak a game that's just a little over the limits of AO, imto a lower category". Or simpler still, "I want to be allowed to lie about the rating, because we'll make more money that way." I'm sorry, that's not as much "pushing the envelope" as plain old dishonesty. And it being motivated by nothing more than profit (as in, "but we'll sell less copies if it's AO!!!") doesn't make dishonesty acceptable, it just turns it into fraud.
No, I don't think anyone has a sacred right to make money by breaking the rules. We don't live in that kind of society generally, so I fail to see why games would get a free ticket there. Just freakin' decide in which category you want to be, and live by those rules.
Trying to argue both "but some games are made for adults only, so STFU with the think-of-the-kids" _and_ "auugh, but I don't want to actually label it Adults Only" is getting surrealistic already in its overt dishonesty. And I, for one, had enough of it already.
Err, no, because it's not the same guys.
It's sorta like this. Let's say there are two pubs in your neighbourhood:
1. The Broken Bell, cheap, but treats their beer like it's a potted plant. They water it generously. And I wouldn't touch their stronger drinks if you value your eyesight. At any rate, what you actually get in that glass isn't what they advertised, by far, and not the quantity they advertised either.
2. The Belching Hydra, doesn't do any of that crap, but, of course, then their prices are higher. Or rather, their prices are the natural ones, since they can't cost prices by doing the bad stuff.
I can't see how you could say that the latter is doing the equivalent of taking a bribe.
Mind you, in an ideal RL, or even in the less ideal Europe down here, we'd just pass some government regulation and send the cops or the consumer rights agencies after the crooked barkeep. On Slashdot and with it's nerdy population fond of utopian extremes and no shades of grey in between, someone (or a lot of someones) will scream, "noooo! Governments are evil! If you let the government do anything, there's no stopping until you have a verbatim copy of the USSR or Nazi Germany! The free unregulated market can solve anything by itself!" Never mind that it's what created this fuckup in the first place, and the whole push against net neutrality is asking the government to remove the regulations and let them be as crooked as they want to.
But in the meantime or if that's not an option, well, it's up to you to decide whether you want to support the former and save a few bucks, or the latter and pay more for the privilege. But saying the latter is like extortion just isn't right.
Well, that's insightful in its own way, but you have to remember that bubbles are caused slightly differently.
Bubbles are based on greed. Pure, distilled, unadulterated greed. At some point the prospect of making lots of undeserved money, is causing people's brains to switch to the wishful thinking that some greater dope will take the fall. People keep dumping money into a bubble precisely _because_ it's a bubble and keeps expanding, so any bubble-goods (shares, tulip bulbs, etc) you buy now, can hopefully be sold more expensive later.
The Dutch tulip craze, for example, was based on the idea that if you buy a tulip bulb for 100 guldens (a huge sum at the time), some other idiot will later buy it from you for 1000 (a king's ransom.)
The dot-com bubble, for example was a 1-2 punch of greed:
1. The idea that you can defraud the advertisers for as much money as you want to. Advertising rates were originally calculated for sites with exactly 1 banner on the front page, and it tended to be relevant too, so people actually clicked on it. Then someone came with the idea that you can make sites with wall-to-wall banners and the advertisers will pay you hundreds of thousands per month for just having a homepage. And surely the advertisers won't catch on. (And when advertisers were slow to react, some waiting to see if more ads actually mean more clicks and sales, it just "confirmed" the idea that it's free money for anyone who wants to take them.)
A lot of companies were bought for a lot of money or made huge profits, apparently for no other reason than having a web server with lots of ads. Others were bought for other reasons, such as actually having a service and a share of the users that someone else was willing to subsidize as part of their empire (e.g., ICQ or Hotmail), but it fit in the same general picture: make a high-tech company, get bought for hundreds of millions.
This helped "bootstrap" the bubble.
2. As I was saying before, it kept going precisely _because_ it was a bubble. A lot of companies were formed not because they believed there was a valid business plan in just having an "I love cats" web page, but to get a lot of money in an IPO. (I actually worked for a company whose _sole_ business plan was "we'll have an IPO and people will give us hundreds of millions!") And a lot of VCs invested in those companies, not because they genuinely believed that they'll work great in the long term, but because they hoped they can wait until right before they peak, and sell every share before it crashes and burned. And stock advisors were known to even directly manipulate that mechanism, e.g., by advising people to buy the shares of some imploding dot-com just as they were selling their shares in it.
Even the absurd unsustainable structure of a dot-com in that bubble wasn't genuine stupidity in most cases, but deliberately trying to have the same image as the dot-coms that got millions in IPO before or got bought. If the ones that peaked sky high before consisted of hundreds of programmers and tens of millions of dollars worth of servers just for a web site that sold nothing, the new ones tried to look exactly the same. It was a "pick me" marker, if you will, rather than just believing that lots of expensive hardware equals growth.
At one point, some even lost sight of the goal to get and retain lots of users, which was (A) the original way to get lots of advertising money, and (B) later the dot-com bubble's excuse: "see, we'll get millions of users first, and sometime later actually figure out a way to sell them stuff." (E.g., the dot-com I worked for, had such memorable management quotes as, "no, we don't want a forum, we don't want users to post all sorts of crap on our servers" and "no, chatrooms are just for cybersex and other crap, we don't need one" and so on for all the proposed ways to g
Heh. Except it's Sun's CTO and he doesn't actually say that. What he says is, "companies who buy lots and lots of expensive hardware will experience spectacular growth, while those who don't buy our crap will be left behind!"
Which doesn't even make sense as "growth equals growth", since not everyone is a software company. E.g., for a car manufacturer or someone like Nike or Coca Cola, exactly how does overspending on IT translate into faster growth? While _some_ benefits do exist, and I've seen them first hand, the factor is fairly small and that growth-because-of-IT is essentially capped. In the end as a manufacturing company you live or die by your marketing and your product quality (sadly, in that order), not by how Web 2.0 your site is.
E.g., sure, you can save some money by moving to an online relationship with your suppliers, but even then:
1. You need to be a certain size where you can actually apply some volume and pressure to negotiating discounts, because otherwise everyone will just direct you to their list price, online or not. And at that size, exponential growth pretty much stopped anyway.
2. It only goes so far. You might be able to squeeze a few more bucks out of the suppliers by making them compete with each other online, but there's a limit even to that. They won't go into negative profits just for you. (And if they did, they'll go out of that market soon.) So at some point you're pretty much capped there, everyone started doing the same thing too, and adding more expensive servers won't help any more.
3. Doubly so because suppliers of big companies are a bit of an exclusive club. You can push prices down only so much, before it comes at the expense of quality, and that you really don't want to drop too much. So before (and after) accepting someone in such an online process, there'll be a lot of checking if they can supply the quality you want, the quantities they need, if they have anything to lose (suing them for damages won't do much if they're broke), if they have a reasonable reputation, etc.
4. For the same reason as above, you're not saving that much manpower and other such costs. Plus, in addition to the above, a lot of deals will still be done in person or on the golf course. (E.g., don't think Dell negotiates its discounts from Intel by just pointing them at a reverse auction URL.) Buying a big expensive server doesn't actually mean you can fire half the buyers and let the software do everything for you from now on.
5. Some of the deals are just too much of a pain to squeeze in the inherently OCD structure of a computer program. E.g., sure, you could code things so flexibly that you leave room for such stuff as "we'll get a big discount on component B if we get component A only from these guys" or "we'll get a discount from Intel if we _don't_ deal with AMD" or whatnot. But it's a pain in the rear, and chances are you won't foresee everything. Humans are flexible and creative, computers aren't. Sometimes trying to squeeze everything into the same rigid one-size-fits-all algorithm, is just a high-tech way to commit seppuku.
Etc.
And the same, or similar, applies to other aspects you could put online or on the intranet too.
Plus some extras. E.g., if you put your sales online, not everyone is Dell. Some products just aren't bought primarily online. I don't think many people buy their soda online, so Coca Cola won't see much benefit there.
Plus, as the final counter-example, see the dot-com bubble. There were _plenty_ of people eager to be the corporate equivalent of the dumbest consumerist. People who just got their money out of nowhere, and proceeded to blow it on things that were little more than status symbols: over-sized servers, fast cars, impressive buildings, 10 times the employees they actually needed (especially programmers and IT), etc. By his red-shift theory, those should be today's new Microsoft. In reality, the vast majority just went bankrupt. 'Nuff said.
Well, we can mostly agree then. As I was saying, that visual aid isn't accurate at all. Doubly so if taken literally.
There are even more problems than you describe. The dragging the space frame for a rotating body (e.g., Earth) is probably more accurately described by a gas, than by a rubber sheet, for example. A rubber sheet would just get twisted and start offering more and more resistance.
It's just that noone else figure out a way to visualize those equations. There just isn't any good way, same as (at the other end of the spectrum) there's no good way to visualize something that's both particle and wave. So we're kinda stuck with it as the thing which comes the closest. Although, as you correctly noticed, not that close at all. You do have to make the mental exercise of ignoring that you use gravity to explain gravity.
But, as I was saying, if you can come up with a better one, we'll all be grateful for that.
ROFL. Dude, while I may have said "no offense" before, thinking maybe you're just repeating something you haven't thought much about. But if you actually think that the sterile controlled environment of a lab, plus the fact that once you were underpaid, make you soo entitled to demand that someone risks _death_ in a damaged shuttle... well, please do take offense. Or better yet, please go see a shrink. You're so disconnected from reality, it's funny.
Wake me up when you're actually facing risk at least similar to what you demand there. Like, I don't know, when you've volunteered for new medicine tests. Now even that isn't actually that close, but it's a step upwards.
Plus, you can't say that _you_ are doing it haughtily or foolishly, but demand no less than that NASA does just that: act haughtily and foolishly. Because it's such an outrage to you if they exercise proper caution.
Get a grip.
Plus, to get back to that bitching and moaning about how concerns over safety are braking progress, how do you see that progress happening _without_ it, in this particular case?
If NASA can't keep a multi-billion dollar shuttle from blowing up every few missions, with a whole army to take care of it, how do you propose that that progresses to the stage where it's ready for mass use? Even if we were to accept risking life and limb, a space aircraft/bus that blows up every couple of flights just isn't worth it economically. If that space bus blows up as little as every 10'th trip, even assuming everyone was fearless and bet their life on such odds, you'd be looking at a price high enough to build a new one and train a new crew every 10'th trip.
Any kind of space-related progress from where we are, will have to involve moving more humans and materials through space. Whether it's hotels and labs and office buildings in orbit, or mining sites on the moon and mars, we'll need some kind of cheap and _reliable_ space bus to move people and cargo up and down. And the current space shuttle just isn't it. Someone will have to make something with a better safety record, not because of "scaremongering", but because it's just not worth shipping anything up and down if you blow up a multi-billion dollar shuttle every few flights. There's just no price at which you can sell that cargo, or the tickets on such a space bus, that covers that kind of losses.
So from a very pragmatic point of view, NASA _has_ to work on a better safety record before that technology is ready to trickle down to civillian use. If they take a cavallier "oh well, human lives are expendable" attitude, space flight will never progress from ivory-tower national-penis-size-symbol to a more mass-use technology.
So even if it were scaremongering that drives that research into safety... good! Because we'll need that anyway, if we're progress in that direction.
Heh. It's just a visual illustration, it's not the whole model. Yes, the illustration is inexact, in just the way you've described. But it's just a visual aid, no more.
:)
Rest assured that the real equations _don't_ involve rubber sheets and extra downward forces.
The issue there is, well, what was point 3 in my previous message: your RL intuition and imagination fail you miserably in both quantum and relativistic domains. (Here "you" meaning "everybody.") Just because you have the equations, doesn't mean you can actually imagine it, without getting cross-eyed and a nasty headache. Hence such imperfect visual aids as the rubber sheet. That rubber sheet model isn't the actual general relativity model, it's just something close enough to your RL experiences and intuition so you can picture it in your head.
But, yes, it's an imperfect visual aid, if that's what you were trying to say. If you can come up with a better one, I'm sure a ton of physicists and physics teachers will thank you for it
But if you're trying to actually use that illustration as _the_ model, it's a bit like saying that a rose can't exist because the picture of a rose is flat and doesn't smell. Or that a pipe can't possibly work, because the drawing of it is on paper, and paper would burn if you tried to put tobacco in it and light it.
How about the Lorentz factor?
basically if ß = v / c, then the coeficient is 1 / SQRT(1-ß^2). So the mass at a given speed is M = M0 / SQRT(1 - (v/c)^2), where M0 is your mass at rest.
If for example v/c is, say, 1.41, that is you're travelling at 1.41c, then your mass is M0 / SQRT(-1). Pretty damn imaginary. Or conversely, have a real mass at that speed, your M0 would have to be imaginary.
So basically at least theoretically a particle could exist that has normal mass above C, but then that particle would have imaginary mass _below_ C. I.e., a tachion would never be able to exist below the speed of light.
To jump between less than C and above C, as the GP correctly said, you'd have to be able to instantly flip between real rest mass and imaginary rest mass.
The problem there is that you're essentially proposing the equivalent of making a car instantly go from 50 km/h to 200 km/h, without it ever having a speed of 100 km/h in between (or any other between 50 and 200.) Only in this case you're proposing something like going from 0.5c to 2c without ever being at the other speeds in between.
Well... how?
Even if there wasn't the pesky issue of having c in between, that violates even Newtonian mechanics. Savagely. Since you're proposing that speed "jump" to essentially happen in exactly zero time (or you'd go through all the values in between), even by old Newtonian mechanics you're talking about an infinite force.
No offense, but I'm inherently... weary... of people waving the banner that someone _else_ should sacrifice everything for the general progress.
If you think a life is that disposable, why don't you go risk _your_ life on some endeavour that benefits everyone? _Then_ you'll have the moral high ground to preach that kind of thing. Until then, way I see it, you're safely in a chair at a computer, preaching that someone _else_ should take unnecessary risks to further your standard of living.
And that's a... sociopathic attitude, to say the least.
You want to talk about the scientific developments that shaped the 20'th century? How about the fact that most of them were driven by the need for safety and/or comfort, and a lot of the rest were driven by consumerism?
If we just wanted to live hard and risky, then we wouldn't have needed all that science and technology anyway. What we actually wanted was stuff like:
- travelling cheaper, safer and more comfortable, hence the automobile instead of riding a buggy like the Amish. A lot of the research that went into the automobile was precisely so it wouldn't be a deathtrap that throws a wheel if you even take a too tight curve.
- some cheap and comfortable way to stay in touch: hence, telegraph and then telephone
- entertainment. Hence technologies like the movies, or TV
- some _safe_ lighting (lighting itself being a quality of life issue): most cities had already invested heavily in gas lighting when Edison proposed electric lighting
- to not die of the first disease that drops by: hence, antibiotics
- even in military applications, to _not_ lose more soldiers than strictly unavoidable: the main use of machineguns in WW1 was _defensive_, and that's why it ended up a stalemate
Etc, etc, etc.
So bemoaning safety and concern for human life as some brake on progress, doesn't strike me as just disingenuous, but also as outright mis-informed and mis-leading. That's not brakes, that's what drove most of progress.
Actually, the whole point is that they weren't.
The problem is that so far in a relatively short interval they had two cuts in two spacesuits' gloves during spacewalks. The last one was a two inch gash, and prompted an immediate abort of the spacewalk. Precisely because noone wants to vaccuum an astronaut.
Now they weren't all the way through the glove. At least the latest one had only cut the top two layers out of five.
But essentially noone wants to find out what happens when you cut all 5 layers.
And the problem is that they don't know _what_ cut two different spacesuits. Exactly where is the sharp edge there, and how big is it? Is it only big enough to do those two layer cuts? Or are we talking about something that could cut all the way through, and we got luck the last two times?
That's, in a nutshell, why they'd rather not risk a spacewalk to fix the tiles, if they can avoid it.
It's sorta like this:
:)
1. First of all, the somewhat inaccurare version Newtonian version: when you calculate the acceleration of a small body in the gravity field of another body, the small body's mass cancels itself out.
I mean, the force is: F= G * M * m / d^2
The small body's acceleration therefore is: a = F / m = G * M / d^2
You'll notice that the small body's mass isn't present at all in the acceleration, which in this case is also determining the curvature of the trajectory. Or to put it otherwise, a 1g thumb tack will fly in the exact same orbit as a thousand ton Goa'uld pyramid. As you make mass smaller and smaller, in other words take a limit when mass -> 0, well, the trajectory still stays curved.
2. Actually, in a perverse way, you are right that Newtonian mechanics should not apply to light, and they don't: if you apply Newtonian mechanics to light, the predicted deflection of light is only half the deflection actually observed. So light does act funnily in a gravity well.
Light's curvature in a gravity well is only explained right by Einstein's general relativity. There gravity is just the observed consequence of a distortion of space itself. The presence of a mass there distorts space. The usual analogy is that it's like having a horizontal rubber sheet and placing a steel ball upon it. You'll get an indentation in the sheet. The effects on other nearby bodies, or on their movement, is basically just the consequence of that distortion of space.
And so it is with light too. It's not as much that newtonian gravity pulls it, as just that it's moving through a warped piece of space.
3. Generally, don't try to apply your RL intuition and experience to relativistic or quantum phenomena, it tends to just fail spectacularly
Well, I didn't say that Diebold was necessarily competent or necessarily honest. I just don't have the data to base such a judgment on anyway.
Just saying that it's a harder problem. Not necessarily impossible, mind you. Just harder.
And that the challenges are different, so the expertise doesn't carry over 1-to-1. Having half a century of experience in making secure ATMs, doesn't make one automatically an expert on secure voting machines.
First of all ATM's don't handle billions of dollars in a transaction. Dunno about those in the USA, but most here are capped at 500 Euro, and your daily limit further caps it.
Second, an ATM is, by and large, just a slightly more secure terminal to the bank's central computers. It's not the ATM that authorizes your transaction, or transfers the money. It's just a terminal that's networked with a central system. So it's slightly easier to get things right.
With voting machines, the whole assumption that it must be anonymous, plus the bigger distrust of a single central station that counts everything, screw that assumption up big time. You can't go and transmit "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party" (I didn't, but for an easily rememberable example sake) over to other computers.
Third, the various kinds of bank terminals get numbers wrong more often than you'd think. E.g., the Deutsche Bank fairly recently introduced OCR machines where you can just shove the check in and have it read, so you don't have to type it all. Well, one of the damn machines didn't read the decimal point, so I ended up transferring 100 years worth of fee to my insurance.
The bank will help you solve such problems, but never claimed that it's 100% bullet-proof and more infallible than the pope.
Fourth, banks (if their central software is anywhere near well written) have other checks and safeguards.
E.g., every cent transferred must be a cent that comes from somewhere else. Even if someone maliciously manipulated the software or the database, you have a chance to catch it. If at the end of the month you do the totals and you have money that appeared out of nowhere, or disappeared into nowhere, you can start an investigation.
Plus it can catch erroneous transfers in the first place. For example my erroneous money transfer should have bounced from the start because most sane people don't have that kind of money in their personal day-to-day account.
E.g., similarly all the money moves must be accompanied by an entry in the transaction table. If someone's account grew by a million, but the transactions to that account don't add up to +1,000,000$, you can call the cops.
E.g., you can have other triggers, regardless of whether the transaction is correct or not.
For example, any incoming money transfer over, say, 10,000$ will automatically trigger an investigation. Ditto if someone suddenly starts getting lots and lots of little transactions. That's mostly against money laundering, but would also catch any error where a bunch of money appears out of nowhere.
For example, you can have bogus rows in the accounts table, which normally have no reason to be accessed, and are booby-trapped with a trigger. If some DBA comes with such ideas as "I know, let's shave a cent out of each account and add it to mine" or "I know, let's export the names and credit card numbers and sell them to scammers", chances are he'd stumble over such traps. Plus, it would trigger an investigation when a bunch of credit card numbers assigned to such bogus accounts start appearing in transactions.
Etc.
All this simply doesn't apply to votes.
- You don't have to take a vote from somewhere else to assign a vote to Moraelin, like would be the case with money
- You don't have people checking their balance and asking you to fix the errors. The whole idea of anonymity is that you shouldn't store anywhere stuff like "Moraelin voted for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party". If I can check "wait, did you count my vote for the German Anarchistic Pogo Party?" a month later, then so can someone else. That's another bank safeguard that just doesn't exist.
- you can't really use any sums as triggers, because everyone gets the same number: 1 vote. Each transaction says exactly the same: "1 vote for party X". So you can't go and say "whoa, we'll investigate all transactions over 10,000".
- since it's anonymous, you can't check how many transactions each person has, either
That's easy: God created the star together with the tail, 'cause that's his divine plan. Or to test your faith. Or maybe he liked pretty tails.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist myself, but I just can't see anyone's true faith stumbling upon that one. If people can believe that God put dinosaur bones there to test you, why would their mental defenses be shattered by something like this?
And if you think scientific units and measurements put those kinds of beliefs to rest... let's just say that there are those who believe that Noah's Ark was literally that big, and Noah literally picked exactly one pair of each species on Earth, and floated for exactly 40 days. You'd think that stuff like "how much time would he need to include the Kangaroos from Australia and the Jaguars from America and the penguins and..." or "how much did the whole thing weigh, and could that boat float with that much mass aboard" or "so afterwards he went back to put the Kanguroos and Dodos back in Australia?" would test someone's faith big time, but I just haven't seen it happen.
Mind you, I can't as much fault them, because, if I'm allowed to play the devil's advocate for a bit and try to see it through their eyes too:
1. Frankly, if an omnipotent God wanted to create stars with tails or dinosaur bones just for the hell of it, I see no reason why he couldn't. I mean, he's omnipotent, right?
Plus, the "dinosaur bones prove that the Earth must be more than hundreds of millions of years old" argument, can be equally applied to this: "World Of Warcraft has dinosaur bones in Desolace and a few other places, hence World Of Warcraft must be at least hundreds of millions of years old." I mean, phbt, I laugh at those young-Azeroth creationists who insist that WoW is only 3 years old and Blizzard put those dinosaur bones there for decor.
Which, as you did correctly notice, leaves it all boiling down to:
2. God's motives. Frankly, we don't know them. The Bible is very lightweight on details there. Genesis tells you the order that he did it, and, if you want to take it literally, it was enough to say what he wanted there. But it doesn't tell you _why_ he did it. Maybe he was bored, or maybe it was a college assignment, or maybe he was a nerd who just found it fun to create a whole universe, or whatever else, for all we know.
We also know that later he tried several times to impose a moral code on his creation, sometimes as heavyhandedly as nuking Sodom and Gommorah or as the flood. But we don't really know why.
We know that at some later point he wanted to be worshipped alone, but, again, if you think about it, he never says why. It could be that he just thought he'd have an easier time imposing that moral code, or maybe he wanted to stop some of the deviations of other cults (human sacrifice went all the way to burning babies alive in some cults), or just for bragging rights, or maybe (probably) something completely different. There's been a lot of speculation, but essentially we don't know. He just says what he wants, and occasionally threatens or promises rewards to get his point across, but never really bothers explaining why.
The "debunking" the bible by deconstructing God's motives gang, sad to say, usually does a piss-poor job of it. It typically starts by arbitrarily postulating a certain kind of god and a certain kind of motive, typically some version of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. And then the whole "debunking" is based on that axiom.
The problem, and reason it goes nowhere, is that that's not the kind described in the Bible. Or in any other actual human religion. Basing a debunking of Jehovah (or whatever you want to call him) on what would Om do, is as absurd as debunking it based on what would Odin do, or what would Bush do. If you want to poke holes in someone's belief in the Christian Bible, you have to base that reasoning on the Christian Bible, not (directly or indirectly) on a notion that didn't even exist before 20'th century novels invented it as a plot device.
Well, I guess I should be grateful that you brought up art, because it's probably a better illustration of what I'm trying to say.
See, art so far has been created by private initiative. You have, say, a novellist writing a novel on his own time (and thus expense), then they take it to a publisher who's privately owned, which then try to sell it to individual people like you and me. Which can jolly well decide whether they want to buy it or not.
It's capitalism at its finest. The market can and does decide how much they want of any particular novel, or how much of the whole. And how much they want to pay for it.
And in true capitalism fashion, duds die and get silently buried. It doesn't get to be artificially kept alive and costing billions in tax dollar money, like the Space Shuttle was.
I'd have nothing against space exploration being like that too. Honestly.
Conversely I would have something against it if the government wasted my money to keep a bunch of guys doing art for art sake, in some ivory tower where they don't actually have to fulfill any social need or appeal to anyone's taste.
Sure, maybe we'd get some great works of art, if the state sponsored unpopular artists to keep working on it anyway. But chances are we'd just get crap. I don't know if the USSR actually had such an establishment (though it wouldn't surprise me), but half the plot of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" makes fun of exactly that kind of an artificial literary establishment of the Soviet state. I'm guessing Bulgakov didn't like it much.
And here's another thought: if it _had_ any economic value, private initiative would be all over it. You wouldn't need government money to go there.