The link that you reference as support for your assertion that the parents were responsible doesn't say anything at all to that effect; gentle readers should not assume that the above assertion is supported by the facts presented.
(I'm not making any assertions about whether or not the statement is true, BTW - just that the case hasn't been made here.)
I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's very sad. I have some vague hope that there might be something fun in the International district or downtown, and I've had some fun sneaking around and not getting shot there, seeing how many hardlines I can collect, but the only way to go up levels does seem to be to whack somebody or to run around in buildings trying not to let your simulacrum pick fights with guards. The big payoff for me has been acquiring and playing with new abilities, but it's a lot of work for the payoff.:'(
Look, not to beat a dead horse or anything, but you're making my point for me here. The point is that the purpose of this article was not to inform the reader, but rather to make money for the magazine. The degree of journalistic integrity here is zero. The authors have no reason at all to assume that what they are saying is true.
Like you, I haven't had a stats course in a long time - in my case 25 years - but the holes in this study are still obvious to me. Look closer at the Consumer Reports article - they refused to even rate IBM because of insufficient samples. How likely is it that they had fewer than three samples? I'm guessing they had more. Granted, I can't prove this, but it would really surprise me if not even three people rated the service on IBM, who produce a really nice product that a lot of people buy.
The point is that this article just adds pollution to the noosphere - it adds no new information. Because people aren't very smart about filtering the wheat from the chaff, as a result of this article the amount of valid information about customer service in the world has gone *down* as a result of the publication of this article. Call me old fashioned, but I think that's a damned shame, and that's why I was moved to write my original post - I thought maybe I could affect the average.:'}
Your logic is broken. In the one case, they're asking for recommendations, which as you say can be useful. In the case of the article, they try a couple of bogus tests and rate the companies' service on that basis. This just doesn't tell you anything. With a sample of three, even a really good company is only going to get a good rating if all three of the techs who answer are having really good days. This is just a matter of luck. Granted, if all your techs suck, you can be sure of a bad rating, but if only one of your techs sucks, you're going to get a B- with their scoring system, and if two of them suck, you get a D+. Not every tech is going to do a good job every time, so this amounts to a roll of the dice. With a larger sample size, random chance plays less of a part - if you have consistently good techs, you will get a good score, and if you have consistently bad techs you will get a bad score. Generally speaking it helps to have a non-geek asking, because it is for non-geeks that these services exist. So doing a customer survey really is the best way (probably the only cost-effective way) to get a good answer.
It's pretty striking how differently these same companies rated between Consumer Reports, which does statistical surveys using accepted statistical methods across a large number of customers, versus this magazine article, which followed the "let's try this" methodology.
But as I said in my earlier post, most people, like you, will just look at the results and not at the methodology, so if they follow the recommendations here, they may well be steered toward the worst of all the manufacturers, just because that particular manufacturer had a good run of luck. In all fairness, I don't know what Toshiba's customer support is like, so maybe it'll turn out okay, but if so it'll be blind luck that made it work that way, not any actual attempt to inform the magazine's readers. Which is pretty sad.
This isn't based on a customer survey - it's based on three contrived problems and the phone calls that went with them. Because of the incredibly small sample, you really can't generalize - the results are essentially random. Too bad, because a lot of people will probably just look at the scorecard and never notice the incredibly lame way they did the survey.
Not to pick nits or anything, but I'm pretty sure I've seen fifteen real players in a pitched battle near a hardline all at the same time, so there must be at least twenty subscribers. Possibly more, if you assume that they don't all get on at the same time.
In any case, I'm really not happy with the way the game plays now - you pretty much can't get experience points without shooting someone, which isn't my idea of a good time - so I wouldn't mind some fresh thinking. Of course, it's not clear that there will be any fresh thinking, but anything's possible.
The problem is that the prosecutors (plaintiffs?) were trying to achieve a certain result - spanking Microsoft. To accomplish this, they used the method to hand: demanding debundling.
This produces the weird result that people want the opposite of what the prosecutors claimed they wanted. The prosecutors knew this at the beginning. But they pushed for the unwanted thing anyway, to punish Microsoft. Who probably don't care.
So anyway, it's absurd, but absurd for what at least some people probably think is a good reason. Personally, I think they should just tweak the laws so that they produce the desired result - open APIs - without some kind of weird, tortured legal theory. That, or just don't prosecute this kind of case.
I suppose you have a point, but I'm a NetBSD geek, so I find it hard to imagine a way in which the BSD community can claim credit for MacOS X. It is really nice that OSX has a BSD userland, though.
The output from the on-screen keyboard has to go to the same place. So you can't assume it's safe. Of course, it probably is safe in many cases, but if you care about the contents of your bank account, you can't assume it is.
In the case of banking transactions when you're backpacking, you have a few choices. One is to appoint someone to manage your bank account while you're unavailable - this is what people did before online banking was ubiquitous.
For example, when I traveled to Nepal in 1993, I left a stack of envelopes with my sister (if I remember correctly). Each had a date on it, and she mailed it on the appropriate date. I had direct deposit at work, so that was no problem.
If you need someone to make decisions, as opposed to just doing something for you, there are people who provide this service professionally. Check them out to make sure they're legit, but if they are, then unless you are inordinately wealthy, they aren't going to be tempted by the contents of your bank account.
You can also carry a small computer, rather than a big one. Unless your bank is really evil, you should be able to do transactions from a Palm Pilot or wince machine. I'd recommend a Linux PDA, personally, but they're harder to find. The new Nokia would be an excellent choice. You can also now get fully-featured notebooks from, e.g., ASUS, that weigh only two pounds. Bringing one of these along is not as bad as you suggest.
I've heard that some European banks do one-time passwords - you just print out a sheet and bring it with you. This would be the ideal solution if you don't care about privacy, but of course if, like me, you live in the U.S., you probably don't have this option.
If you want to access your email remotely, and you want to be sure it won't be hacked, bring your own computer. Otherwise, just accept the risk that your password will be sniffed, and change your password when you get home.
Ideally, you should change your password before you leave, and then change it back when you get home, because if you're like most people there are lots of things online for which you use the same password.
Oh, and if you need to do any kind of transactions _other_ than email while you're abroad, definitely bring your computer. Doing serious transactions on a public workstation is about the same as writing your PIN on your bank card and leaving it stashed near your favorite ATM so you don't have to carry it in your wallet.
I wonder how many people RTFA and caught the irony of one of the things Linus said there, that perfect is the enemy of good enough. The irony being that in fact it was the Unix world that originally championed this view, and the perfectionists of the time were the MIT LISPm folks and the folks at SAIL.
The extra irony is that what killed the LISPm wasn't the goal of perfection - it was the death of proprietary hardware, in combination with the weakness of the proprietary source development model.
Anyway, I don't take offense at what Linus said, but I think he's way off the mark. Sure, OpenBSD focuses on security, but most of the BSDs focus on having a good general-purpose kernel. The problem the BSDs have, in comparison to the Linux world, if I may be so bold, is the lack of a cohesive goal other than to be BSD.
Being BSD is actually more than enough for me on my servers, but it's not so good on the desktop. The specialization that Linus is talking about isn't in the kernel, though - it's simply that by and large, there isn't anybody in the BSD world who's deeply concerned with the desktop right now. So most of the desktop work right now is going on on Linux.
The good news is that by and large, that work ports nicely to BSD. So if at some point someone decides that they really want a BSD desktop, all they have to do is some integration work. GNOME desktop runs pretty nicely on NetBSD, but the integration needs work - it's nowhere near ready for the end user right now.
The problem with Solaris is that they drank the SVr4 Koolaid when they should have been trying to stay on top of Internet standards, and they never recovered. Plus, shipping the compiler as a separate product is just not a good way to get geeks to love you. Fortunately, there's Zoularis, now a.k.a. NetBSD pkgsrc, which makes life on Solaris a _lot_ less painful.
...if all those bozos from the last transition caused a loss of market share? This is just bad logic - in order for him to be correct, it would have to be the case that Apple is doing poorly, and they are not.
...I'm not going to buy your software. I will have a Windows emulator, for software development, but there's no way I'm going to go out and buy non-native software that doesn't follow Apple's UI guidelines - it's just too painful to use.
BTW, what makes you say Tetris is a peaceful game? It's a control-freakitude game. A peaceful game would be one where you score more experience points by protecting the characters you see in the game than you do by killing them - that is, where you have a choice, and the nonviolent choice is preferred. Oh, and it has to be fun, too. Not impossible, by any means, but not something I see a lot of.
I didn't say your girlfriend was a princess. I said that what you said about her in public was disrespectful. Obviously, any value judgement like that is relative - it seemed disrespectful to me. If she doesn't mind, I guess you're off the hook. To me it sounded like you were dismissing her point of view as ignorant.
None of this was ever intended as a personal attack. If you really believe that it was, I think you need to seriously recalibrate.
Yeah, you were doing well up until now, thanks for the personal attack. If you had more confidence in your argument skills then you'd have left that bit out.
Actually, I meant that sincerely, not as a personal attack. If you value your relationship with your girlfriend, that is not a valid thing to say about her in public. And if you don't value your relationship, why are you in it?
What does this have to do with your original post? Not very much, I was only focussing on a small part of it, the physics bit. And I focussed on it because I felt you were making an unfair comparison: a person on the street wondering if a war is going on is the same as a professional scientist developing knowlege from a wealth of verified observations.... apples and oranges methinks.
I think you are mistaken. I wish we took a more scientific attitude toward our understanding of what is done in the world in our names. It is true that someone who has a degree in physics has, as you have so nicely demonstrated, actually verified a few assumptions rather than just accepting them at face value, but your act of verifying these experiments really is why you are able to do physics, and that was my point.
The process is the same for the guy in the street, thinking about the war; what's different is (sometimes) the degree of critical thinking that he or she applies to what he or she is told about the world situation and our power to change it.
In physics, if someone told you that they could create a gravitational shield, you'd ask them for experimental verification, and until it had been verified through experiment, you wouldn't accept their assertion. My point was not that the way you do physics is wrong.
My point was just to describe the process you go through for accepting results presented to you by someone else when you're *not* going to specifically verify those individual results by re-doing the research or the experiment yourself. You said I was wrong, but never refuted any argument I actually made!
And no, I haven't ever detonated a fusion bomb. Not have I seen one detonated. Nor have I seen the result of such a detonation. But I do believe that it is possible to do so, nevertheless.:')
Er, one thing my Buddhist background compels me to mention is that although I don't think you should worry that you're lacking in compassion, I think you should pay attention to your instincts. You reacted negatively to the whole killing thing. In my traditions, we would say that that's a very fortunate reaction to have, and one worth developing.
I don't think you should worry too much. From my side, I find all the simulated blood and gore disturbing, and when I was playing Matrix and got shot in the back, it was really disturbing. I used to really enjoy adventure games back in the day, and even D&D (which is pretty bloody - you just go around killing things to amass experience points, very much like the Matrix). So anyway I'm not terribly surprised that someone else takes it the way I do, and then draws a more extreme conclusion.
What I do wonder is why that person isn't working to stop *real* violence on the streets. To address the roots of violence. To the extent that there's anything wrong with the videogame industry right now, it feels more like a symptom than a cause to me.
Wow, that's a;lot of experiments. How old are you, anyway? Have you measured the mass of an electron? Created a superfluid? Made a quantum lattice using CO2 lasers? Made a refrigerator with a bunsen burner and some tubes? Measured the Joule coefficient of a gas? Built an inertial scale? Built an atomic clock? Doped silicon to make a transistor? Built an atomic pile? Detonated a hydrogen bomb? Measured the rate at which a feather accelerates from the earth's gravitational pull in a vacuum? Measured the effect of time dilation on the orbit of Mercury yourself? Calculated your position by timing the orbits of Jupiter's moons?
I'm sure you've done some of these experiments, but I'd be astounded if you could prove to me that you've done all of them. And if you haven't, you're accepting the implications of these experiments because you believe someone else did them, and you believe that they are telling the truth about the results they've reported, even though you yourself did not personally verify each and every result.
Why do you believe them? See the article about which you flamed me - I explained the reasoning process for developing faith in a particular practitioner. No offense, but I suspect that you only read the first sentence. That's not very scientific.
The fact is that if you are a serious scientist, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. You wouldn't be where you are today without having learned from them, and you wouldn't have learned from them if you hadn't had any faith in them - it wouldn't have been worth your time.
So sure, now that you have your "physics degree," maybe you will disprove some of the things that your teacher taught you that don't sound right to you, or answer some unanswered problem in the field. But chances are you'll never go back and completely re-derive physics from first principles, experiment by experiment. It would be a stupid waste of time, and you'd never finish in your lifetime.
Maybe you should have a little more respect for your girlfriend, and the other people in your life who say things that don't entirely fit your current worldview. Maybe just your girlfriend - if I were her, I would dump you in a hot second after reading what you just said about her.
So let me get this straight. You've been playing Mortal Kombat since the age of five, and you feel remorse _after_ killing baby mice? And this is supposed to prove that Mortal Kombat doesn't deaden your empathy?
Sorry, man. It may be that in fact Mortal Kombat doesn't deaden your empathy, but if you want to prove it you need to bring out the big guns and switch to humane traps that don't kill the mice.
Personally, I'm pretty amazed at how many chances to make games that don't *require* killing to play are passed up. I just got a copy of Matrix Online because I heard there were some real opportunities for ethical play.
What did I learn? In order to even get into the Matrix to play, you have to first complete a training sequence where you kill defenseless "simulations." The only way to get in without completing this training simulation is to suicide - then you get thrust into the Matrix, where you can play until you're killed, and then you're back in the training sim again. Defensive fighting can injure and kill the attacker. What's up with that?
There really is something off here. I don't mean that playing Mortal Kombat turns you into a serial killer - it doesn't. But killing is all there is to most of the new games I've seen. What a waste of potential! And what a clever way to play into the hands of people who want to believe that it's video games that are making our society more dangerous (it's not more dangerous - violence just gets better coverage now than it did 50 years ago, because the press is less responsible).
Practically everything you think you know is something someone else told you, which you have not yourself personally verified? Is there a war going on in Iraq? How do you know? (Maybe you know someone in the military, but I don't - I see them in the airport sometimes, but they could be on their way to Mos Eisley for all I know). Probably almost everything you think you know about physics you are taking on faith, because someone told you.
Why take it on faith? You tested the person who told you the stuff to see if it made sense (was internally consistent), you checked it against your personal experience of the world (it doesn't contradict it) and you tried some simple stuff in science lab (everything the teacher said had predictive value). Based on these tests, you decided to trust the things this person said that you did not personally verify.
Which is not to say that you are wrong here. You've just used poor reasoning. The problem here is not that we should never trust what someone says. It's that we should have a *reason* for trusting what a person says, rather than trusting them blindly.
You don't think that the reason that's been given is a good reason to trust the person. Other people who have commented here are consulting their personal experience to see if what this person says contradicts it, or matches it. This is how we should figure out whether to trust the facts presented.
So if you want to say that we shouldn't trust this person, the best way to do it is to demonstrate cases where what the person has said is clearly counter-factual. Ideally, you specifically rebut what he says by providing information that we have more reason to trust. You haven't done that here, so your argument isn't valid.
Slashdot Mirror
The link that you reference as support for your assertion that the parents were responsible doesn't say anything at all to that effect; gentle readers should not assume that the above assertion is supported by the facts presented.
(I'm not making any assertions about whether or not the statement is true, BTW - just that the case hasn't been made here.)
Remember, kids, if keylogging is declared illegal, soon only criminals will have keyloggers....
I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's very sad. I have some vague hope that there might be something fun in the International district or downtown, and I've had some fun sneaking around and not getting shot there, seeing how many hardlines I can collect, but the only way to go up levels does seem to be to whack somebody or to run around in buildings trying not to let your simulacrum pick fights with guards. The big payoff for me has been acquiring and playing with new abilities, but it's a lot of work for the payoff. :'(
Look, not to beat a dead horse or anything, but you're making my point for me here. The point is that the purpose of this article was not to inform the reader, but rather to make money for the magazine. The degree of journalistic integrity here is zero. The authors have no reason at all to assume that what they are saying is true.
:'}
Like you, I haven't had a stats course in a long time - in my case 25 years - but the holes in this study are still obvious to me. Look closer at the Consumer Reports article - they refused to even rate IBM because of insufficient samples. How likely is it that they had fewer than three samples? I'm guessing they had more. Granted, I can't prove this, but it would really surprise me if not even three people rated the service on IBM, who produce a really nice product that a lot of people buy.
The point is that this article just adds pollution to the noosphere - it adds no new information. Because people aren't very smart about filtering the wheat from the chaff, as a result of this article the amount of valid information about customer service in the world has gone *down* as a result of the publication of this article. Call me old fashioned, but I think that's a damned shame, and that's why I was moved to write my original post - I thought maybe I could affect the average.
Your logic is broken. In the one case, they're asking for recommendations, which as you say can be useful. In the case of the article, they try a couple of bogus tests and rate the companies' service on that basis. This just doesn't tell you anything. With a sample of three, even a really good company is only going to get a good rating if all three of the techs who answer are having really good days. This is just a matter of luck. Granted, if all your techs suck, you can be sure of a bad rating, but if only one of your techs sucks, you're going to get a B- with their scoring system, and if two of them suck, you get a D+. Not every tech is going to do a good job every time, so this amounts to a roll of the dice. With a larger sample size, random chance plays less of a part - if you have consistently good techs, you will get a good score, and if you have consistently bad techs you will get a bad score. Generally speaking it helps to have a non-geek asking, because it is for non-geeks that these services exist. So doing a customer survey really is the best way (probably the only cost-effective way) to get a good answer.
It's pretty striking how differently these same companies rated between Consumer Reports, which does statistical surveys using accepted statistical methods across a large number of customers, versus this magazine article, which followed the "let's try this" methodology.
But as I said in my earlier post, most people, like you, will just look at the results and not at the methodology, so if they follow the recommendations here, they may well be steered toward the worst of all the manufacturers, just because that particular manufacturer had a good run of luck. In all fairness, I don't know what Toshiba's customer support is like, so maybe it'll turn out okay, but if so it'll be blind luck that made it work that way, not any actual attempt to inform the magazine's readers. Which is pretty sad.
This isn't based on a customer survey - it's based on three contrived problems and the phone calls that went with them. Because of the incredibly small sample, you really can't generalize - the results are essentially random. Too bad, because a lot of people will probably just look at the scorecard and never notice the incredibly lame way they did the survey.
Not to pick nits or anything, but I'm pretty sure I've seen fifteen real players in a pitched battle near a hardline all at the same time, so there must be at least twenty subscribers. Possibly more, if you assume that they don't all get on at the same time.
In any case, I'm really not happy with the way the game plays now - you pretty much can't get experience points without shooting someone, which isn't my idea of a good time - so I wouldn't mind some fresh thinking. Of course, it's not clear that there will be any fresh thinking, but anything's possible.
The problem is that the prosecutors (plaintiffs?) were trying to achieve a certain result - spanking Microsoft. To accomplish this, they used the method to hand: demanding debundling.
This produces the weird result that people want the opposite of what the prosecutors claimed they wanted. The prosecutors knew this at the beginning. But they pushed for the unwanted thing anyway, to punish Microsoft. Who probably don't care.
So anyway, it's absurd, but absurd for what at least some people probably think is a good reason. Personally, I think they should just tweak the laws so that they produce the desired result - open APIs - without some kind of weird, tortured legal theory. That, or just don't prosecute this kind of case.
I suppose you have a point, but I'm a NetBSD geek, so I find it hard to imagine a way in which the BSD community can claim credit for MacOS X. It is really nice that OSX has a BSD userland, though.
You have a laptop, so you must be rich. Go to a different cafe. :')
The output from the on-screen keyboard has to go to the same place. So you can't assume it's safe. Of course, it probably is safe in many cases, but if you care about the contents of your bank account, you can't assume it is.
In the case of banking transactions when you're backpacking, you have a few choices. One is to appoint someone to manage your bank account while you're unavailable - this is what people did before online banking was ubiquitous.
For example, when I traveled to Nepal in 1993, I left a stack of envelopes with my sister (if I remember correctly). Each had a date on it, and she mailed it on the appropriate date. I had direct deposit at work, so that was no problem.
If you need someone to make decisions, as opposed to just doing something for you, there are people who provide this service professionally. Check them out to make sure they're legit, but if they are, then unless you are inordinately wealthy, they aren't going to be tempted by the contents of your bank account.
You can also carry a small computer, rather than a big one. Unless your bank is really evil, you should be able to do transactions from a Palm Pilot or wince machine. I'd recommend a Linux PDA, personally, but they're harder to find. The new Nokia would be an excellent choice. You can also now get fully-featured notebooks from, e.g., ASUS, that weigh only two pounds. Bringing one of these along is not as bad as you suggest.
I've heard that some European banks do one-time passwords - you just print out a sheet and bring it with you. This would be the ideal solution if you don't care about privacy, but of course if, like me, you live in the U.S., you probably don't have this option.
If you want to access your email remotely, and you want to be sure it won't be hacked, bring your own computer. Otherwise, just accept the risk that your password will be sniffed, and change your password when you get home.
Ideally, you should change your password before you leave, and then change it back when you get home, because if you're like most people there are lots of things online for which you use the same password.
Oh, and if you need to do any kind of transactions _other_ than email while you're abroad, definitely bring your computer. Doing serious transactions on a public workstation is about the same as writing your PIN on your bank card and leaving it stashed near your favorite ATM so you don't have to carry it in your wallet.
I wonder how many people RTFA and caught the irony of one of the things Linus said there, that perfect is the enemy of good enough. The irony being that in fact it was the Unix world that originally championed this view, and the perfectionists of the time were the MIT LISPm folks and the folks at SAIL.
The extra irony is that what killed the LISPm wasn't the goal of perfection - it was the death of proprietary hardware, in combination with the weakness of the proprietary source development model.
Anyway, I don't take offense at what Linus said, but I think he's way off the mark. Sure, OpenBSD focuses on security, but most of the BSDs focus on having a good general-purpose kernel. The problem the BSDs have, in comparison to the Linux world, if I may be so bold, is the lack of a cohesive goal other than to be BSD.
Being BSD is actually more than enough for me on my servers, but it's not so good on the desktop. The specialization that Linus is talking about isn't in the kernel, though - it's simply that by and large, there isn't anybody in the BSD world who's deeply concerned with the desktop right now. So most of the desktop work right now is going on on Linux.
The good news is that by and large, that work ports nicely to BSD. So if at some point someone decides that they really want a BSD desktop, all they have to do is some integration work. GNOME desktop runs pretty nicely on NetBSD, but the integration needs work - it's nowhere near ready for the end user right now.
The problem with Solaris is that they drank the SVr4 Koolaid when they should have been trying to stay on top of Internet standards, and they never recovered. Plus, shipping the compiler as a separate product is just not a good way to get geeks to love you. Fortunately, there's Zoularis, now a.k.a. NetBSD pkgsrc, which makes life on Solaris a _lot_ less painful.
TFA mentions a bunch of companies they're suing. Apple isn't one of them.
...if all those bozos from the last transition caused a loss of market share? This is just bad logic - in order for him to be correct, it would have to be the case that Apple is doing poorly, and they are not.
...I'm not going to buy your software. I will have a Windows emulator, for software development, but there's no way I'm going to go out and buy non-native software that doesn't follow Apple's UI guidelines - it's just too painful to use.
School: the root of violence? News at 10:00. :'}
BTW, what makes you say Tetris is a peaceful game? It's a control-freakitude game. A peaceful game would be one where you score more experience points by protecting the characters you see in the game than you do by killing them - that is, where you have a choice, and the nonviolent choice is preferred. Oh, and it has to be fun, too. Not impossible, by any means, but not something I see a lot of.
I didn't say your girlfriend was a princess. I said that what you said about her in public was disrespectful. Obviously, any value judgement like that is relative - it seemed disrespectful to me. If she doesn't mind, I guess you're off the hook. To me it sounded like you were dismissing her point of view as ignorant.
None of this was ever intended as a personal attack. If you really believe that it was, I think you need to seriously recalibrate.
Yeah, you were doing well up until now, thanks for the personal attack. If you had more confidence in your argument skills then you'd have left that bit out.
:')
Actually, I meant that sincerely, not as a personal attack. If you value your relationship with your girlfriend, that is not a valid thing to say about her in public. And if you don't value your relationship, why are you in it?
What does this have to do with your original post? Not very much, I was only focussing on a small part of it, the physics bit. And I focussed on it because I felt you were making an unfair comparison: a person on the street wondering if a war is going on is the same as a professional scientist developing knowlege from a wealth of verified observations.... apples and oranges methinks.
I think you are mistaken. I wish we took a more scientific attitude toward our understanding of what is done in the world in our names. It is true that someone who has a degree in physics has, as you have so nicely demonstrated, actually verified a few assumptions rather than just accepting them at face value, but your act of verifying these experiments really is why you are able to do physics, and that was my point.
The process is the same for the guy in the street, thinking about the war; what's different is (sometimes) the degree of critical thinking that he or she applies to what he or she is told about the world situation and our power to change it.
In physics, if someone told you that they could create a gravitational shield, you'd ask them for experimental verification, and until it had been verified through experiment, you wouldn't accept their assertion. My point was not that the way you do physics is wrong.
My point was just to describe the process you go through for accepting results presented to you by someone else when you're *not* going to specifically verify those individual results by re-doing the research or the experiment yourself. You said I was wrong, but never refuted any argument I actually made!
And no, I haven't ever detonated a fusion bomb. Not have I seen one detonated. Nor have I seen the result of such a detonation. But I do believe that it is possible to do so, nevertheless.
Er, one thing my Buddhist background compels me to mention is that although I don't think you should worry that you're lacking in compassion, I think you should pay attention to your instincts. You reacted negatively to the whole killing thing. In my traditions, we would say that that's a very fortunate reaction to have, and one worth developing.
Yeah, what you said makes more sense now. :')
I don't think you should worry too much. From my side, I find all the simulated blood and gore disturbing, and when I was playing Matrix and got shot in the back, it was really disturbing. I used to really enjoy adventure games back in the day, and even D&D (which is pretty bloody - you just go around killing things to amass experience points, very much like the Matrix). So anyway I'm not terribly surprised that someone else takes it the way I do, and then draws a more extreme conclusion.
What I do wonder is why that person isn't working to stop *real* violence on the streets. To address the roots of violence. To the extent that there's anything wrong with the videogame industry right now, it feels more like a symptom than a cause to me.
Wow, that's a ;lot of experiments. How old are you, anyway? Have you measured the mass of an electron? Created a superfluid? Made a quantum lattice using CO2 lasers? Made a refrigerator with a bunsen burner and some tubes? Measured the Joule coefficient of a gas? Built an inertial scale? Built an atomic clock? Doped silicon to make a transistor? Built an atomic pile? Detonated a hydrogen bomb? Measured the rate at which a feather accelerates from the earth's gravitational pull in a vacuum? Measured the effect of time dilation on the orbit of Mercury yourself? Calculated your position by timing the orbits of Jupiter's moons?
I'm sure you've done some of these experiments, but I'd be astounded if you could prove to me that you've done all of them. And if you haven't, you're accepting the implications of these experiments because you believe someone else did them, and you believe that they are telling the truth about the results they've reported, even though you yourself did not personally verify each and every result.
Why do you believe them? See the article about which you flamed me - I explained the reasoning process for developing faith in a particular practitioner. No offense, but I suspect that you only read the first sentence. That's not very scientific.
The fact is that if you are a serious scientist, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. You wouldn't be where you are today without having learned from them, and you wouldn't have learned from them if you hadn't had any faith in them - it wouldn't have been worth your time.
So sure, now that you have your "physics degree," maybe you will disprove some of the things that your teacher taught you that don't sound right to you, or answer some unanswered problem in the field. But chances are you'll never go back and completely re-derive physics from first principles, experiment by experiment. It would be a stupid waste of time, and you'd never finish in your lifetime.
Maybe you should have a little more respect for your girlfriend, and the other people in your life who say things that don't entirely fit your current worldview. Maybe just your girlfriend - if I were her, I would dump you in a hot second after reading what you just said about her.
So let me get this straight. You've been playing Mortal Kombat since the age of five, and you feel remorse _after_ killing baby mice? And this is supposed to prove that Mortal Kombat doesn't deaden your empathy?
Sorry, man. It may be that in fact Mortal Kombat doesn't deaden your empathy, but if you want to prove it you need to bring out the big guns and switch to humane traps that don't kill the mice.
Personally, I'm pretty amazed at how many chances to make games that don't *require* killing to play are passed up. I just got a copy of Matrix Online because I heard there were some real opportunities for ethical play.
What did I learn? In order to even get into the Matrix to play, you have to first complete a training sequence where you kill defenseless "simulations." The only way to get in without completing this training simulation is to suicide - then you get thrust into the Matrix, where you can play until you're killed, and then you're back in the training sim again. Defensive fighting can injure and kill the attacker. What's up with that?
There really is something off here. I don't mean that playing Mortal Kombat turns you into a serial killer - it doesn't. But killing is all there is to most of the new games I've seen. What a waste of potential! And what a clever way to play into the hands of people who want to believe that it's video games that are making our society more dangerous (it's not more dangerous - violence just gets better coverage now than it did 50 years ago, because the press is less responsible).
Practically everything you think you know is something someone else told you, which you have not yourself personally verified? Is there a war going on in Iraq? How do you know? (Maybe you know someone in the military, but I don't - I see them in the airport sometimes, but they could be on their way to Mos Eisley for all I know). Probably almost everything you think you know about physics you are taking on faith, because someone told you.
Why take it on faith? You tested the person who told you the stuff to see if it made sense (was internally consistent), you checked it against your personal experience of the world (it doesn't contradict it) and you tried some simple stuff in science lab (everything the teacher said had predictive value). Based on these tests, you decided to trust the things this person said that you did not personally verify.
Which is not to say that you are wrong here. You've just used poor reasoning. The problem here is not that we should never trust what someone says. It's that we should have a *reason* for trusting what a person says, rather than trusting them blindly.
You don't think that the reason that's been given is a good reason to trust the person. Other people who have commented here are consulting their personal experience to see if what this person says contradicts it, or matches it. This is how we should figure out whether to trust the facts presented.
So if you want to say that we shouldn't trust this person, the best way to do it is to demonstrate cases where what the person has said is clearly counter-factual. Ideally, you specifically rebut what he says by providing information that we have more reason to trust. You haven't done that here, so your argument isn't valid.