Althernai

Anyone who says GE foods have absolutely no (possible or in action now) negative effect implies they know everything about genetics. Or their reference knows everything about genetics. Simple as that. Which is why nobody says that. Scientists would never make a statement that absolute. What is generally said sounds more like "We have tested q, r and s with these methods and we have found no negative effects." After enough of these studies are conducted, more theoretically inclined people draw the conclusion "In view of studies x, y and z we can conclude that this particular thing is indistinguishable from the control (unmodified foods) within this margin." You can never be absolutely sure, but after this is done enough times, there is reasonable certainty. Correct. Which is why the people who made the lightbulb just built it and distributed it without any studies except maybe on whether it cause fires or something whereas the genetic engineers pay millions for studies (or these millions are paid by taxpayers) to check whether each product they introduce is safe. You seem to be treating genetics almost as if it were a religion. It is not. It's a science just like most other sciences. If anything, it is tested for safety a lot more than virtually anything else. As I said before, it is not wise to ask cutting edge researchers to tread lightly. Such people are by nature risk takers; you have to be to discover or create anything significant. So, we don't know with 100% certainty that it is safe. But we are reasonably certain and hence we go ahead anyway. Nope. We know what causes these mutations and we know how to prevent them. The problem is that preventing them involves giving up a large number of things that people don't want to give up (among them, exposure to the sun). All our knowledge about mutations is useless when people don't (or can't) take advice on what not to do (e.g. don't smoke, limit time in the sun, avoid pollution). Halliburton for one. Monsanto has nothing on the military-industrial complex and most of the people who comprise this group eat the same food as everyone else. Even if you assume the top of the chain is not affected (they eat better food), getting 10%+ of one's employees sick at once will make them very, very angry.

Skiing is fun. I've only done it a couple of times in my life, but I can do it fairly well. I just got up on the skiis and went. Sure, you fall a couple of times, but overall it is amusing. Don't do it if you have fragile bones or somesuch though -- if you are a beginner, you probably will fall more than once.

Nobody claims to know everything about genetics. We just know enough to do what we are currently doing. You don't research a topic to absolute exhaustion before applying it -- that would take forever. We know enough to be reasonably certain that what we do will work the way we want it to and it generally does. Again, if this was done any other way nothing would ever be made at all. The light bulb was invented long before the development of quantum electrodynamics. Do you think those who made it should have waited until we know everything about the underlying principles to be sure that it was safe? It is not necessary to know every minor detail about a branch of science to develop safe and effective applications of it. The biologists who are doing this are neither madmen nor fools; they know what they are capable of and what they are not. Why it is there in the first place? As far as I can tell that is a philosophy question -- it doesn't have a scientific explanation. It started happening in humans probably before they even were humans; I don't see why it should be restricted to humans. The basic phenomenon is that some cells mutate in a way that causes them to reproduce without any limitations. This can occur in all multi-cellular organisms. Humans appear to get it a lot because we live for long periods of time (the longer you live, the higher the chance of a random event happening to you -- although it is not that simple here, cancer has a weird probability curve at very high ages). Also, it is one of the few diseases we can't treat with more or less certainty of success. We have made cancer more common over the past few centuries as a lot of the things associated with technology (both products and pollution) tend to be the agents that cause mutations. That's not quite what they are doing. They sell stuff to people -- if you don't like their stuff, don't buy it. This won't help them either. There are greater powers in the US than Monsanto and if the latter screws things up with the GM food, these powers will crush them. You just don't mess with people's food... Furthermore, even if the case goes for them, they will still take catastrophic losses. Right now, there is no evidence against GM food. If they screw up, there will be. People are very wary of change and something like this would screw them over in a big way. Many would just stop buying their product.

OK. You use the word 'complex' without any standard, but nevermind. Hold it right there. Who are you to speak for the entire human race? Are you a biology professor or a researcher? You don't sound like one. You don't even seem to know how scientific papers are referenced. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. Who is pretending? I myself am a physicist-in-training, but I have some close friends who work in labs that deal with genetics and I've spoken to them about this. I know them well enough to tell you that if they claim to know what something does, they know it. We know how cancer comes about; we just don't know how to stop it. I haven't looked into AIDS but I assume there are some plausible theories about it by now. In any case, I do not see your point. To be any more cautious than we already are would mean that the researchers doing it are no longer human. It is not our way to tread lightly; it never has been. Mostly because you'd take forever to get anywhere this way. We are not at any such point, we could do with normal food for a while. It is simply more profitable to use GM foods now. If you don't like it, just buy organic food. P.S. Monsanto is like Halliburton -- generally believed to be evil, but nobody can do anything about them. Its former employees are generally the same people who run government agencies responsible for monitoring it, yes. However, they have a significant interest in actually not releasing anything before it is safe for the simply reason that the US is a country where a company can be sued for not telling people that coffee is hot or that trains run over train tracks. If anything goes seriously wrong, they will be torn apart and no amount of money will save them -- their work affects too many people (more than 10% of the population).

Because they are amusing and because they make the afterlife seem more realistic. Some of them also explain other things which cannot be explained with satisfactory -- like the creation of the universe or why life exists.

Ah, but it cannot die -- not while you are incapable of presenting a rigorous proof of the fact that people's beliefs are wrong. Many human beings are optimists; if it cannot be shown that there is no afterlife, afterlives will be believed in.

Why does it matter how you kill people as long as you kill them? A light side Jedi can (and usually does) buff himself up with things like Master Valor, Master Speed, and so on. My LS Consular had a lot less trouble killing Malak than my DS Consular -- just buff up and hack him to pieces. Using the Force to make your body into a deadly weapon with which you then kill people is logically equivalent to using the Force as a weapon if your objection is to inflicting harm on others. Unless, of course, the Force doesn't understand motivations -- Master Valor and Master Speed can be (and often are) used for things other than violence while Force Choke and Force Kill have no other purposes. I'd actually be perfectly happy with some more Light Side powers like Force Valor. But only as long as they are actually useful -- for example, Force Armor or whatever that thing was called, was pretty worthless given its duration and effects.

The problem with all of these alien sightings is that the aliens don't seem to do anything meaningful. There are people who claim to get technology from aliens, but the technology is nothing amazing -- it follows logically from other things we already have -- and thus it is far more likely that humans developed it as usual. There are far more miraculous things that we came up with on our own (and nobody has claimed as alien-brought yet). Further, every supposed alien behaves very much like human beings would. They study the world, maybe pick up inhabitants, etc. None of them are truly alien. Even in good science fiction it is rare to find aliens that are not exaggerations of a certain type of human (I mean in terms of how they think, not how they look). Also, there are so many unexplained atmospheric phenomena that even if a bunch of people see the same thing it doesn't mean UFOs. Nevermind the fact that every developed nation in the world is working on its own brand of next generation airplane, all of which are classified and most of which are meant to be stealthy and/or confusing. In one word: meh. I've heard stories like this too many times without anything coming of it. They might be there, they might not, but unless they actually do something that affects me, I might as well ignore them.

Trust me, the most inventive, brilliant mind of this age would make money no matter what they go into. Science is not quite as undervalued as you say it is. A tenured professor at my unversity makes quite a bit of cash, even if they don't write books or win any prizes or awards. This is a common misconception. Unlike med school, law school or business school, science education at graduate level and up does not incur debt -- unless you are really bad at getting grants or so wealthy that you don't care, in general they pay you (not much, but enough to live), you don't pay them. Of the 30 people in the lab that my friend works at, not one is paying. Grad students are the lifeblood of science -- do you think professors have time to personally look after all experiments and courses they run?

That statement is completely false. There are quite a few ways you can make money with a degree in a pure science. The most extreme example is getting a Ph.D in physics and then going into economics. Doesn't make sense? Think about what physicists do and how the market works (for that matter, what the market is). There are plenty of other ways if you want to actually continue all the way in sciences. Work at a university or go into industry -- who do you think does research, design, etc. at companies that build stuff?

I already have a passion for mathematics and I do plan to do a doctor of philosophy in it. However, as good as mathematics is, its real power tends to come out when it is coupled with another scientific discipline. If you want a discipline that uses mathematics fully, try physics. All sciences (and even most pseudo-sciences) use statistics; chemistry makes use of differential equations at times. However, only physics really goes through the entire range of high level math; group theory, complex analysis, differential geometry, linear algebra, multivariable calculus -- it's all here. In fact, we need so much math that physicists have occasionally had to come up with entire branches of mathematics just to go on with their work.

Tease. I came here to see what you might have said to upset them enough, and all you meant was that you confused their stupid auto-ban spell checker. Bah! :angry:

I'm a 4th year physics major. I've just started a semester of General Relativity (the kind that deals with non-negligible gravity) and it has a whole lot of math (as well as some more principles that contradict common sense). Fun stuff, but not for the casual viewer.

Yes, you have. First, leave gravity out of this. While it is true that a clock higher over the surface of a planet will run faster than one lower in the gravitational field, it takes really, really large masses to make any noticiable effects. The masses of ordinary objects would do anything noticeable even if you multiply them by 100. (Corollary: what exactly do you mean by 'mass'? It is not a trivial question; if you define mass correctly it is invariant -- that is, independent of velocity.) In other words, unless you are talking black holes, gravity will rarely bother you. To be a little more precise, ignore gravity when the mass M and distance R satisfy GM/(R(c^2)) << 1 with G = Newton's constant and c = speed of light. Gravity is the subject of General Relativity, which really is too large a topic for a message boards and requires some pretty high level math (at least differential geometry). The twin paradox is not related to gravity and can be explained using special relativity alone. It is not that complicated; the problem is that it is difficult to draw diagrams on a message board... Think of a set up where you have a light source on the floor and a mirror on the ceiling of a train which is moving with velocity v relative to the ground. Observer A is standing on the train. He sees the light move in straight lines, like so __ Mirror | | c | \/ Source Observer B is on the ground; he sees the train go by so the motion of the light looks like this to him (ignore the dots; this board doesn't like blank space): ................__ Mirror ................./\ ............c../...\.c ............../......\ Source..\/.......\/..Source Now, A observes the time thelight takes to go back and forth to be t = 2h/c where h is the height of the train (this is obvious). Observer B, on the other hand, sees that the light is going in a diagonal but still at c. This is the key to the entire thing; if we were doing Galilean relativity, the light moving down the diagonal would be moving at a net speed of (c^2 + v^2)^1/2, but it doesn't; it always moves at c. Thus, the time taken can be obtained by just using the Pythagorean theorem. The vertical component of the light's velocity is must be (c^2 - v^2)^1/2 (because the horizontal component is v and the total must be c). Thus, the time the light takes to go back and forth is t' = 2h/(c^2 - v^2)^1/2 so the ratio of the times t'/t = (1 - (v/c)^2)^-1/2. Note that this is always greater than one. This is how you get time dilation. If you wanted length contraction, just look at the distance the light appears to travel to the observers. The twin paradox is explained by time dilation; if you have one twin sit in place and the other go blast off on a rocket then turn around and come back, the traveling twin will be younger (time has been going slower for him). The paradox is that to the traveling twin it looks like the twin in place is moving. The resolution is that the traveler turns around in the middle of the journey; he is not actually in an inertial frame for the whole time. EDIT: Here is a website which does this same explanation, but with better pictures: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/time.html

Ender's Game was very, very good. Speaker for the Dead was something entirely different and somewhat non-traditional as far as SF goes, but I suppose it was still pretty good (though I didn't like it nearly as much as the original). The rest of the stories in Ender's universe (and I read something like 4 others) were pretty mediocre. I've read some of his short stories about Alvin Maker, and I'm not exactly impressed. They were mildly amusing (perhaps I'm easy to amuse), but nothing special. As far as I can tell, he wrote one really great book and the rest, while sometimes non-traditional, is not nearly as good. I would not rank him with Asimov, Clarke, etc. etc.

You don't know that she has lost her balance. A human being bound by our laws of physics would probably be out of balance in that situation. This is not necessarily the case for a Jedi. In fact, the ones in the movies all have their own impossible combat moves.

I second this motion. Why don't they just use guns? Swords in a space age setting simply do not make sense. Sure, it works if you can deflect a missile weapon with it (Jedi), but having a random guy with a sword close in on a guy with a gun who is shooting at him and hitting makes no sense.

Who is Zeratul? He doesn't sound sufficiently cool so I'll vote for Yoda, but I would appreciate an answer.

Male Light Side Consular upgraded to Jedi Master (or whatever the higher level consular equivalent is). I love force powers -- though Lightsabers are fun too.

This is untrue. You could get to any level you wanted in Torment. There were quite a few ways to do it -- I believe the easiest was to cast Cloudkill at the respawning beasties in Undersigil. The developers even accounted for this -- if you were at an unusually high level, TTO would have more hit points and better stats. The thing is, few people ever saw this because casting Cloudkill ad nauseum was pretty boring and the levels were not that important (I tried it for a short time and then went away). I would not be against a system like the one in Torment. But to advertise an unreachable level cap would not be nice.

I can't see how levels will matter in KoTOR2 unless they go out of their way to improve the quality of enemy AI. The problem was that the only fight in the game that was even remotely challenging for any character that was not intentionally messed up was Malak (well, and maybe some of the early ones on Taris if you hold off on leveling up -- but again, that is intentionally keeping your character weak). If they're smart, they'll set a total level cap somewhere around 25 or 30, but not put enough XP in the game for you to even come close to that. How is that smart? First, it wastes developer time and computer space to include stuff that will never be seen in the game. Second, if the game is advertised as having an increased level cap compared to the original and people never get near it, you will have a lot of angry posters here... Considering this game is going to be about the lenght of the original game, how fast is all this leveling going to be ?!? Will we ever be able to roleplay a little beetween leveling ?! Roleplaying and leveling are independent of each other. If you don't want to level up, just don't press the button. You are rarely force to do so.

I think it has the potential to be better than the first one and that would make it excellent. I also trust Obsidian to do a decent job. There are plenty of things that could be better -- classes (more variety), inventory management, combat in general (more challenges -- make a decent AI so that not only the last fight is serious), skills, feats, force powers (more of each and/or make them useful), and a few other things. If they implement some of these and add them to their own new story and characters (which could also be improved -- not so many cliches this time), it can be excellent. Of course, it can also fail to live up to my expectations, but I'm optimistic today.

There are two components to most action stories (at least the modern ones): a romance and a lot of killing. Every RPG I've seen has the latter (in fact, I wish there was less violence and more alternative but equally attractive solutions). It is fairly important to have the former. I'd categorize this under party interaction -- if your character is going to spend so much time with an attractive member of the opposite sex, why not make it more pleasant? It does have to be good though -- but I'd prefer even a bad one if I was allowed to ignore it and it didn't take up too much time.

It would not be Star Wars without a Yoda-like creature. Maybe Obsidian should annoy newc and include a planet full of them.

I was thinking of recent games (the Infinity Engine ones, NWN, etc.). Yes, I suppose compared to some of the old text-based games KotOR was OK. But, just as with graphics, I do expect games to have item management comparable to what has come out in recent years. KotOR was a step pretty far backwards.