Andres Serrano. HR Giger. Larry Flynt. 2 Live Crew. Mortal Kombat. Jyllands-Posten. Getting the idea now?
Luis Royo, my favourite artist. Paints images of corpses/demons/monsters fucking big-breasted women, and manages to give them an almost religious atmosphere. About as obscene as you can get - and damn fine art.
Coming to think of it, wouldn't "Peanuts" also qualify? I mean, Lucy constantly flirts with Schroeder, and Charlie Brown is always lusting after the "small red-haired girl". Heck, it even hints at bestiality - just look at the number of times Snoopy "kisses" Lucy!
That's the problem, isn't it? It's all in how you look at it. There is no such thing as "obscene", there are just your own dirty thoughts that might come out when you look at something - but they are your thoughts, not an inherent part of whatever you look at. So it all depends on whether a judge happens to have perverted desires or not - or, even worse, whether he thinks you have them or not. After all, the cover image of "Virgin Killer" would be completely innocent if the judge figured that you simply bought the album to listen to it, while that same image would send you to jail if the judge decided that you bought the album to look at the naked girl on the cover.
its about, by omission, allowing certain individuals to grow a perverse desire for (in this case) children beyond what they can control.
Good thing said individuals have a near-limitless supply of drawn pornography to take their perverse desires out on without harming anyone, eh? No wait, they don't anymore, not in the UK. Good thing I'm not a child in the UK, then.
The supposed reasoning for crackdown on child-porn, is that the children were exploited. But if the pics aren't real, where are the victimized children we have been hoodwinked into 'protecting'?
Ah, but you see, the pics are based on real children: on every real child the artist has every seen. It's kinda difficult to draw something if you don't know what it looks like, after all. So by drawing naked children, you've suddenly retroactively violated every child you've ever seen, at the moment said visual contact occurred. It's the exact same thing how drawing violent images means that you've just threatened everyone you've ever seen.
I should had been a politician - I could had gone far >:). I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, thought...
I find it impossible to comprehend the charging of a minor for possession of THEIR OWN PORNOGRAPHY!!! We are now prosecuting the person whom the law was written to PROTECT!!!
The law was not meant to protect the children. The law was meant to fight the predators. There is a small, but very significant difference, and the same goes with every law: they are not there to protect the innocent, but to punish the guilty.
That's what you get for letting witch-hunters write laws.
Frankly I'd quite happily say goodbye to the side quests altogether and have them work on the main storyline more for these sorts of games. Games like Deadspace show how awesome games can be if you just focus on the storyline.
"These sorts of games?" Fallout (and presumably Fable, but I haven't played it) is an RPG, where side quests are the game. The main plot is simply an excuse to get the player wandering. Side quests are where you can "play the role".
These games try to be "sandbox games", but the current limits of AI means that pretty much everything has to be pre-scripted. I wonder how it would go if some real expert at AI would help develop them - would we get some really freeform emergent behaviour? Of course, one might argue that The Sims already does something like this...
The Sims meets SimCity meets Master of Magic meets RPG?
Uh. Wrong. It's up to the DA to prove guilt. By definition, in the US, a defendant is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
Unless someone accues you of a sex offense, in which case you are added to the sex offender registry and stay there even if proven innocent. Kinda sucks for these girls, eh? Sorry, I meant: kinda sucks for these hardened sexual predators who deserve to be lynched by a responsible member of the public. After all, we must protect the children even if that kills them.
When disrespecting an individual's religion is also disrespecting the individual's right to believe what he chooses, this distinction, while true, is largely irrelevant.
Everyone has the right to believe what they choose, but I still have a right to call whatever they believe in bullshit.
"Why does the sun go up and down?" can be answered scientifically (we go around it), or religiously "some guy in a chariot pulls it around."
Actually, it's because the Earth rotates. Earth going around the Sun is what causes the seasons.
Maybe some day you too can put down your silly believes and learn the truth: Earth rotates:).
The same goes for Ethics "Why can't I hit Billy?" can be answered simply as "You will go to hell if you are bad" or through and actual heart-to-heart talk with your kid about how such things make people feel and making them actual nice people.
The problem with the latter is that your kid already knows perfectly well how being hit makes Billy feel, and hit Billy precisely to make Billy feel that way. Kids aren't and don't want to be nice people, so the only thing that can stop your brat from hitting Billy is fear of consquences.
Sorry for the rant, but I feel insulted every time someone thinks that the belief of their unproven gods are more important than the factual education of a child!
That is quite pointless. Someone who believes that anyone who doesn't believe in his god will go to Hell will, of course, cosnider teaching said believe as top priority. That's a perfectly rational and logical choice; it's just the original assumption that one might disagree with.
Or to put it another way: a logical system will appear irrational if one disagrees with the postulates. It's not; it's simply based on a different set of assumptions about reality than yours. Feeling insulted by someone acting based on such a system is just silly.
Again, depending on what exactly do you hate and what do you *mean* by hate, that being illegal might even be the morally correct answer. For example: hating other people because of their religious beliefs (as I assume the law was meant) *should* be illegal.
What? You are for punishing someone for their emotions? That's nuts! It's... No, officer, I'm not the least bit angry, see how I'm completely calm?
Seriously, the concept of "thought crime" is despised for a reason. Make actions illegal, not thoughts.
Which is why conspiring to overthrow the government is still an offense in most (all?) liberal democratic countries, and you can be jailed simply for urging people to do such a thing.
Actually, all democratic countries by definition have a built-in, perfectly legal mechanism for overthrowing the government. It is also legal to urge people to use it; in fact, in many such countries, you can even get tax money to help you spread this message.
It's called "voting".
And for the record, the correct way to deal with the people who wish to deny freedom of speech is not to silence them, but debate them in public and expose their ideas for the foolishness they are. In other words, criticize them. To do otherwise would be hypocritical, and would be destroying the very freedom that was attempted to be protected.
If even us Westerners don't respect our freedom of speech enough to actually stick to it, we can hardly expect anyone else to respect it either.
The summary said that this was brought to the UN by the Organization for the Islamic Conference. Are you saying that we should expect this from them?
Based on their past reactions to, say, the Danish Mohammed cartoons, I'd say that yes, we should expect shit like this from muslims. The islamic world is where the christian world was in the Dark Ages, and it's not a nice place.
"Communal" resources don't need "regulating" to prevent "abuse". We use this little institution called 'private property rights', but that's not arbitrary prior-constraint case-by-case regulation, but LAWS.
I call "dibs" for the "ownership" of the "atmosphere"! And while I'm at it, the "Atlantic Ocean" might also "be" a worthwhile "investment".
Oh, and I'm also "patenting" the "gratuitous" use of "quote marks".
Read about natural law and the American Revolution.
Rights are enforced by the governments. You might have a natural right to free speech, but that doesn't matter unless someone prevents me from gagging you.
American Revolution kinda reinforces this point: despite the declarations of Natural Law, the very people who made them still kept slaves, because no one forced them to set them free. Slaves remained slaves until the government enforced their civil/human rights and forced the slave-owners to set them free. So, for all practical purposes, the government granted them freedom.
Natural Law is simply a basis for granting rights, but make no mistake: you only have the rights either you or someone else is willing and capable of enforcing. Since the government is the primary power center by definition, that means that you have the rights your government grants you.
This is not about prudish religions, it's about basic practicality. I don't understand why people can't get the basic parental concept of "my house, my rules". And "don't go having children when you are living here and can't support them yourself" is a perfectly reasonable rule.
Birth control is a wonderful invention (actually a bunch of inventions) which allows you to have sex without it resulting in pregnancy. Some forms of birth control - mainly condoms - even prevent sexually transmitted diseases from being transmitted.
Either you are an imbecile or you are purposefully using a ridiculous excuse to hide your true reasons for opposing sexual activity of teenagers. Are you a catholic or a muslim? Then again, most of those have at least some integrity.
And, for the record, parental authority has limits for two reasons: one, the rest of us must one day deal with the end result, and two, even children are still humans rather than just their parents property and as such have human rights.
There is not much you can do to prevent kids from sharing pictures with each other (cell-phone image sending, physical copies, etc), but the kids obviously had un-supervised access to the internet to post these pictures in a very public place.
You mean that these people were left unsupervised occasionally at fifteen? Oh the horror!
If the kids were dumb enough to post these photos on myspace, I guarantee you that they also posted their real name/address/phone/cell/etc as well. Just wait until they get older and their friends, potential employees, relatives, etc start googling their names... Trust me, this will come back to bite them in the ass HARD!
You'd lose that guarantee. Posting naked pictures of themselves in public is actually a pretty common hobby amongst teenagers. See http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Camwhore for examples.
Besides, it is very unlikely that anyone would bother doing an in-debt Google search necessary to find some journal you made at 15. For that matter, I for one couldn't care less about what you did when you were 15 were I hiring you as an adult. But thanks to this idiotic case, there's no need for such a search. Congratulations, US legal system.
This is true, but these experiments should private, not public for every pervert and sucker who clicked a planted link to see.
You do realize that getting lusted after by lots of people gives teenagers thrills? Especially if they have low self-esteem, it might be a huge ego-boost. And even those who don't, might simply not care if someone they don' know sees them naked.
If you found out your kid had sent nude pictures to a boy/girl friend, you may ground them. But if you were browsing myspace and came across the pictures, I'm sure you feel a little more strongly about it.
Yes, and that's precisely the problem here: people thinking with their gut rather than their brains. This whole thing has been blown out of all proportion. It was never worth more than a lecture, but it involves teenagers and boobies so it went to court. If it wasn't real, it would be a farce; since it is real, it has high chances of turning into a tragedy.
Do teenagers have a first amendment right to take nude pictures of themselves? Or do these fall under the child pornography exception to the first amendment even when not for public display?
Teenagers don't have rights, constitutional or otherwise, on the account of having no power to claim them. Does a teenager have the financial means to sue someone for violating his rights? Or can he vote against a politician he feels is acting against his interests? No? Well then, he'd better just hope that those around him will act nicely out of the goodness of their hearts.
Which, as it turns out, is not a reasonable expection; but that's the price of weakness.
Hopefully, the courts would accept an as-applied Constitutional challenge to the child pornography statutes. This wouldn't overrule the statutes but simply say that they could not be used to prosecute this sort of behavior.
Or they could simply make a general rule that the same entity can't be both the victim and the perpetrator of the same crime. That would disqualify a lot of inane cases.
More generally, and slightly offtopic: since it appears that courts apply laws with not a flicker of common sense, it might be worth it to write the laws in a real programming language. Unlike legalese, which is an effort to turn english into an unambiguous language, programming languages are designed to be unambiguous from the beginning, and consequently are a lot clearer. There would also be an efficiency benefit for having a computer play the part of a judge.
After all, if the purpose of the court is to faithfully apply the law without thinking, a computer can do that faster, cheaper and without any bias a human might have.
Actually, if it's economic hardship that's causing the increased criminal activity, it would be far more productive to fix that instead. Increase unemployment benefits, raise toll barriers to stop outsourcing and bring industries back rather than have them fund Chinese dictatorship, and squash once and for all the idiotic belief that you can leave something like the nation's entire economy to be controlled by a semi-religious entity some call "The Invisible Hand".
Stop worshipping free market - it failed, get over it already - and start building prosperity again. Tolls and taxes, the obscene words for a free market fundamentalist, are what has always been the foundation of economic strength. And some social security, while socialistic and thus totally against libertarian bullshit, is what keeps the unemployed from facing starvation or a life of crime.
Cue a thousand posts stating that they don't want to pay taxes for someone else's benefit, never realizing that they'll end up paying more for the police force necessary to keep something akin to peace in a purely capitalistic society than they would for social safety nets, and reap all the problems of a police state on top of that. Unless a passing John Galt wannabe mods me down first.
I'd venture that since part of "societies requirements" is that you're expected not to commit crimes, they've not actually met their end of the social contract.
And they didn't commit crimes, holding their end of the bargain; yet the society failed to hold its own end, thus making them morally free to break their end too. It's just like in any contract, if one participant fails to uphold his end the other is free to disregard his too.
Or so I understood the granparent's point, anyway. I'm not sure if I actually agree, but it certainly is a possible point of view.
I put down a preorder for this game as soon as I heard the news - my sister loves these games, but I'll be damned if I install any SecuROM crap on my computer.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'd wait until the game has actually been released and examined before trusting it to not contain malware. The word of someone who has intentionally attempted to cripple its customers computers isn't exactly trustworthy to me...
Just because trolls are horrible monsters good for nothing but experience points doesn't mean that you should discriminate against them, especially in a post decrying racism. Knock off your humanocentristic elitism, you fascist hippie!
Flipper had ten fish, then he ate four. How many fish does flipper have?
I use this as the first question to ask whenever I participate in a Turing test, and have yet to encounter a bot that can give me a correct answer, in spite of the fact that it doesn't require any particularly human-like reasoning or a great deal of knowledge or intelligence.
Actually, it does require human-like reasoning. When you were four and read that (or had it read to you) - in fact, if you read it right now - what happened? Why, you saw Flipper in your mind with ten fishes, then saw it eat four. Sure, it might not be a visual image, but it's still a mental model of Flipperworld.
Every time someone asks you something, and the answer is not immediately answerable from route learning, you form an image in your mind of the situation in question, then have it evolve, then answer based on that. This is the basic way humans think; a chatbot that doesn't do something similar has no chance whatsoever of answering a question with an implied "Imagine the following scenario:".
It takes a real intelligence - that is, something that has an internal model for the world, and can use it to simulate situations - to get through your question.
If speak in manner of Yoda you do, keep up with it a bot can not.
Actually, all it has to do is recognize verbs, substantives and a few auxiliary words, and it can easily parse your sentence. Just like a human would^Hdoes.
Seems to me that one of them conservation thingamajiggers rules it out - baryon number. You'd get as much anti-Helium as Helium starting with photons.
But our current cosmology requires the conservation of baryon number to be inviolate, because what I described is the very mechanism that has been proposed to have created the matter in our universe - the energy of the Big Bang turning virtual protons and electrons into actual ones.
In any case, if you did this in a strong magnetic field with photons that have a combined non-zero momentum, the created matter/antimatter atomic cores would be moving relative to the magnetic field, and since they have opposing charges, they would be separated.
Plus with that kind of energy it'd be fast alpha particles, protons and neutrons and electrons everywhichway, not Helium per-se.
That's the core of my question: is what you get completely random, or is there a way to control it? For example, can you tune the energy of the two photons so it "fits" helium nucleus better than any combination of alpha particles?
Besides, if it makes nucleons, it's a nuclear reaction by definition.
Semantics. When people talk about nuclear reactions, they usually mean fission, fusion or radioactive decay or neutron absorption.
But no matter what, one thing is certain: energy to helium conversion must be amongst the least efficient way of filling balloons:).
4. Remind people that helium makes balloons float, and can only be produced by nuclear reactions
Is this actually true? Couldn't helium be produced by supplying virtual helium atoms sufficient energy to become real by, say, colliding two ultra-high energy photons?
Mind you, even the Big Bang presumably didn't have enough energy to produce significant amount of helium this way (since it's amount in the universe corresponds to calculations that assume it was produced by nuclear reactions in the early universe and in stars since then), so it's probably not practical, but is it actually impossible?
On that train on thought, I also find it peculiar that people ( in my observation ) are disgusted/disturbed at the thought/idea that their parents have sex, even if the parents are relatively young. This might make sense if the person is a child and thinks it is "dirty" but even people engaged in sexual activity themselves seem to exhibit the same response.
Actually, that makes perfect sense. People have an inbuilt incest taboo (which isn't 100% effective, of course), and tend to consider anyone they spent the early years of their childhood with as slightly sexually repulsive. The reason for this is easy to understand: inbreeding tends to cause problems. Now, if you think about your parents having sex, you are thinking of them in a sexual way, which triggers this repulsion (assuming you spent your childhood with your parents).
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Luis Royo, my favourite artist. Paints images of corpses/demons/monsters fucking big-breasted women, and manages to give them an almost religious atmosphere. About as obscene as you can get - and damn fine art.
Coming to think of it, wouldn't "Peanuts" also qualify? I mean, Lucy constantly flirts with Schroeder, and Charlie Brown is always lusting after the "small red-haired girl". Heck, it even hints at bestiality - just look at the number of times Snoopy "kisses" Lucy!
That's the problem, isn't it? It's all in how you look at it. There is no such thing as "obscene", there are just your own dirty thoughts that might come out when you look at something - but they are your thoughts, not an inherent part of whatever you look at. So it all depends on whether a judge happens to have perverted desires or not - or, even worse, whether he thinks you have them or not. After all, the cover image of "Virgin Killer" would be completely innocent if the judge figured that you simply bought the album to listen to it, while that same image would send you to jail if the judge decided that you bought the album to look at the naked girl on the cover.
And that, in my humble opinion, is truly obscene.
Good thing said individuals have a near-limitless supply of drawn pornography to take their perverse desires out on without harming anyone, eh? No wait, they don't anymore, not in the UK. Good thing I'm not a child in the UK, then.
Ah, but you see, the pics are based on real children: on every real child the artist has every seen. It's kinda difficult to draw something if you don't know what it looks like, after all. So by drawing naked children, you've suddenly retroactively violated every child you've ever seen, at the moment said visual contact occurred. It's the exact same thing how drawing violent images means that you've just threatened everyone you've ever seen.
I should had been a politician - I could had gone far >:). I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, thought...
The law was not meant to protect the children. The law was meant to fight the predators. There is a small, but very significant difference, and the same goes with every law: they are not there to protect the innocent, but to punish the guilty.
That's what you get for letting witch-hunters write laws.
"These sorts of games?" Fallout (and presumably Fable, but I haven't played it) is an RPG, where side quests are the game. The main plot is simply an excuse to get the player wandering. Side quests are where you can "play the role".
These games try to be "sandbox games", but the current limits of AI means that pretty much everything has to be pre-scripted. I wonder how it would go if some real expert at AI would help develop them - would we get some really freeform emergent behaviour? Of course, one might argue that The Sims already does something like this...
The Sims meets SimCity meets Master of Magic meets RPG?
Unless someone accues you of a sex offense, in which case you are added to the sex offender registry and stay there even if proven innocent. Kinda sucks for these girls, eh? Sorry, I meant: kinda sucks for these hardened sexual predators who deserve to be lynched by a responsible member of the public. After all, we must protect the children even if that kills them.
Everyone has the right to believe what they choose, but I still have a right to call whatever they believe in bullshit.
Actually, it's because the Earth rotates. Earth going around the Sun is what causes the seasons.
Maybe some day you too can put down your silly believes and learn the truth: Earth rotates :).
The problem with the latter is that your kid already knows perfectly well how being hit makes Billy feel, and hit Billy precisely to make Billy feel that way. Kids aren't and don't want to be nice people, so the only thing that can stop your brat from hitting Billy is fear of consquences.
That is quite pointless. Someone who believes that anyone who doesn't believe in his god will go to Hell will, of course, cosnider teaching said believe as top priority. That's a perfectly rational and logical choice; it's just the original assumption that one might disagree with.
Or to put it another way: a logical system will appear irrational if one disagrees with the postulates. It's not; it's simply based on a different set of assumptions about reality than yours. Feeling insulted by someone acting based on such a system is just silly.
What? You are for punishing someone for their emotions? That's nuts! It's... No, officer, I'm not the least bit angry, see how I'm completely calm?
Seriously, the concept of "thought crime" is despised for a reason. Make actions illegal, not thoughts.
Actually, all democratic countries by definition have a built-in, perfectly legal mechanism for overthrowing the government. It is also legal to urge people to use it; in fact, in many such countries, you can even get tax money to help you spread this message.
It's called "voting".
And for the record, the correct way to deal with the people who wish to deny freedom of speech is not to silence them, but debate them in public and expose their ideas for the foolishness they are. In other words, criticize them. To do otherwise would be hypocritical, and would be destroying the very freedom that was attempted to be protected.
If even us Westerners don't respect our freedom of speech enough to actually stick to it, we can hardly expect anyone else to respect it either.
Based on their past reactions to, say, the Danish Mohammed cartoons, I'd say that yes, we should expect shit like this from muslims. The islamic world is where the christian world was in the Dark Ages, and it's not a nice place.
I call "dibs" for the "ownership" of the "atmosphere"! And while I'm at it, the "Atlantic Ocean" might also "be" a worthwhile "investment".
Oh, and I'm also "patenting" the "gratuitous" use of "quote marks".
Seriously, Tragedy of the commons shouldn't be that hard to understand.
Rights are enforced by the governments. You might have a natural right to free speech, but that doesn't matter unless someone prevents me from gagging you.
American Revolution kinda reinforces this point: despite the declarations of Natural Law, the very people who made them still kept slaves, because no one forced them to set them free. Slaves remained slaves until the government enforced their civil/human rights and forced the slave-owners to set them free. So, for all practical purposes, the government granted them freedom.
Natural Law is simply a basis for granting rights, but make no mistake: you only have the rights either you or someone else is willing and capable of enforcing. Since the government is the primary power center by definition, that means that you have the rights your government grants you.
Birth control is a wonderful invention (actually a bunch of inventions) which allows you to have sex without it resulting in pregnancy. Some forms of birth control - mainly condoms - even prevent sexually transmitted diseases from being transmitted.
Either you are an imbecile or you are purposefully using a ridiculous excuse to hide your true reasons for opposing sexual activity of teenagers. Are you a catholic or a muslim? Then again, most of those have at least some integrity.
And, for the record, parental authority has limits for two reasons: one, the rest of us must one day deal with the end result, and two, even children are still humans rather than just their parents property and as such have human rights.
You mean that these people were left unsupervised occasionally at fifteen? Oh the horror!
You'd lose that guarantee. Posting naked pictures of themselves in public is actually a pretty common hobby amongst teenagers. See http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Camwhore for examples.
Besides, it is very unlikely that anyone would bother doing an in-debt Google search necessary to find some journal you made at 15. For that matter, I for one couldn't care less about what you did when you were 15 were I hiring you as an adult. But thanks to this idiotic case, there's no need for such a search. Congratulations, US legal system.
You do realize that getting lusted after by lots of people gives teenagers thrills? Especially if they have low self-esteem, it might be a huge ego-boost. And even those who don't, might simply not care if someone they don' know sees them naked.
Yes, and that's precisely the problem here: people thinking with their gut rather than their brains. This whole thing has been blown out of all proportion. It was never worth more than a lecture, but it involves teenagers and boobies so it went to court. If it wasn't real, it would be a farce; since it is real, it has high chances of turning into a tragedy.
Unreal.
Teenagers don't have rights, constitutional or otherwise, on the account of having no power to claim them. Does a teenager have the financial means to sue someone for violating his rights? Or can he vote against a politician he feels is acting against his interests? No? Well then, he'd better just hope that those around him will act nicely out of the goodness of their hearts.
Which, as it turns out, is not a reasonable expection; but that's the price of weakness.
Or they could simply make a general rule that the same entity can't be both the victim and the perpetrator of the same crime. That would disqualify a lot of inane cases.
More generally, and slightly offtopic: since it appears that courts apply laws with not a flicker of common sense, it might be worth it to write the laws in a real programming language. Unlike legalese, which is an effort to turn english into an unambiguous language, programming languages are designed to be unambiguous from the beginning, and consequently are a lot clearer. There would also be an efficiency benefit for having a computer play the part of a judge.
After all, if the purpose of the court is to faithfully apply the law without thinking, a computer can do that faster, cheaper and without any bias a human might have.
Actually, if it's economic hardship that's causing the increased criminal activity, it would be far more productive to fix that instead. Increase unemployment benefits, raise toll barriers to stop outsourcing and bring industries back rather than have them fund Chinese dictatorship, and squash once and for all the idiotic belief that you can leave something like the nation's entire economy to be controlled by a semi-religious entity some call "The Invisible Hand".
Stop worshipping free market - it failed, get over it already - and start building prosperity again. Tolls and taxes, the obscene words for a free market fundamentalist, are what has always been the foundation of economic strength. And some social security, while socialistic and thus totally against libertarian bullshit, is what keeps the unemployed from facing starvation or a life of crime.
Cue a thousand posts stating that they don't want to pay taxes for someone else's benefit, never realizing that they'll end up paying more for the police force necessary to keep something akin to peace in a purely capitalistic society than they would for social safety nets, and reap all the problems of a police state on top of that. Unless a passing John Galt wannabe mods me down first.
And they didn't commit crimes, holding their end of the bargain; yet the society failed to hold its own end, thus making them morally free to break their end too. It's just like in any contract, if one participant fails to uphold his end the other is free to disregard his too.
Or so I understood the granparent's point, anyway. I'm not sure if I actually agree, but it certainly is a possible point of view.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'd wait until the game has actually been released and examined before trusting it to not contain malware. The word of someone who has intentionally attempted to cripple its customers computers isn't exactly trustworthy to me...
Just because trolls are horrible monsters good for nothing but experience points doesn't mean that you should discriminate against them, especially in a post decrying racism. Knock off your humanocentristic elitism, you fascist hippie!
That's Java's biggest problem, IMHO: once the data spills into swap, it'll take forever to run garbage collection.
Actually, it does require human-like reasoning. When you were four and read that (or had it read to you) - in fact, if you read it right now - what happened? Why, you saw Flipper in your mind with ten fishes, then saw it eat four. Sure, it might not be a visual image, but it's still a mental model of Flipperworld.
Every time someone asks you something, and the answer is not immediately answerable from route learning, you form an image in your mind of the situation in question, then have it evolve, then answer based on that. This is the basic way humans think; a chatbot that doesn't do something similar has no chance whatsoever of answering a question with an implied "Imagine the following scenario:".
It takes a real intelligence - that is, something that has an internal model for the world, and can use it to simulate situations - to get through your question.
Actually, all it has to do is recognize verbs, substantives and a few auxiliary words, and it can easily parse your sentence. Just like a human would^Hdoes.
But our current cosmology requires the conservation of baryon number to be inviolate, because what I described is the very mechanism that has been proposed to have created the matter in our universe - the energy of the Big Bang turning virtual protons and electrons into actual ones.
In any case, if you did this in a strong magnetic field with photons that have a combined non-zero momentum, the created matter/antimatter atomic cores would be moving relative to the magnetic field, and since they have opposing charges, they would be separated.
That's the core of my question: is what you get completely random, or is there a way to control it? For example, can you tune the energy of the two photons so it "fits" helium nucleus better than any combination of alpha particles?
Semantics. When people talk about nuclear reactions, they usually mean fission, fusion or radioactive decay or neutron absorption.
But no matter what, one thing is certain: energy to helium conversion must be amongst the least efficient way of filling balloons :).
Is this actually true? Couldn't helium be produced by supplying virtual helium atoms sufficient energy to become real by, say, colliding two ultra-high energy photons?
Mind you, even the Big Bang presumably didn't have enough energy to produce significant amount of helium this way (since it's amount in the universe corresponds to calculations that assume it was produced by nuclear reactions in the early universe and in stars since then), so it's probably not practical, but is it actually impossible?
Actually, that makes perfect sense. People have an inbuilt incest taboo (which isn't 100% effective, of course), and tend to consider anyone they spent the early years of their childhood with as slightly sexually repulsive. The reason for this is easy to understand: inbreeding tends to cause problems. Now, if you think about your parents having sex, you are thinking of them in a sexual way, which triggers this repulsion (assuming you spent your childhood with your parents).