Humodour

Just chillaxe and trip out with me, man. There's no need for the hostility.

No. Go read about it yourself. I shouldn't have to try and prove the existence to you of every scientific concept you illogically feel is bogus (possibly each one erodes some of the foundation of your belief in your sky fairy, and that worries you?). NAND flash (the one used in most solid-state drives) uses tunnel injection for writing and tunnel release for erasing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection NOR flash also uses quantum tunnelling but in a different way.

Chore. Chore. Choooooore. What's a chore? What a weird word.

Introduce a challenge. Present that challenge again later with an additional element or elements. Repeat. It seems so simple. Its a chore. You're a chore. Your face is a chore.

It depends - did Obsidian buy the rights off GPG or not? I thought they did. Either way, nobody will know until we see DS3's sale numbers.

That's because your question was the equivalent of "are you trying to tell me scientists harnessed a physical phenomenon to make some sort of device?!". I mean how do I answer that? With one word, 'yes'? Perhaps I go further to elaborate that, anyway, making devices which harness the physics we discover actually isn't that new a concept?

The whole world is crazy.

It also has to do with the society moving around people. For example, my parents were born in 1955. They were quite on-board with the then-progressive ideals when they were young voters in the '70s, like feminism and racial integration. But those previously-somewhat-leftist ideologies are rather moderate today. And they're less comfortable with more modern progressive movements like gay rights. They haven't changed much, but the definitions of where the 'center' is on certain issues has. Youth has a tendency of winning its political battles with the more aged over the course of a few decades. After they've won those fights, though, they tend to want to protect what they've achieved, rather than keep on fighting the new battles that have captured the imaginations of the next generation. Nice! Quite insightful.

Well, nothing could exist without quantum tunnelling Uhhh... Eh, lots of things these days use quantum tunnelling. People just don't know it. To be more specific they don't know enough to know how advanced it is.

Wow. That's so cynical.

Yep! Perhaps first we should focus on existing long enough to be able to reach that point.

True. I guess there is an implicit assumption (in hindsight probably erraneously) on my part that people understand that with new physics always comes awesome new technology directly relevant to our daily lives. Maybe I DO assume to much these days... hmm. I love the example of the USB stick for example - it couldn't exist without quantum tunnelling (and thus quantum mechanics). And if we can learn more about gravity, it follows we'll learn more about manipulating it, and that's GOT to be useful.

I have to disagree with you. The dream of efficient energy generation from antimatter-matter annihilation is a very, very long way off, if it is even thermodynamically possible. But this is awesome even so for more abstract/theoretical reasons: the more antimatter we can confine for longer, the more we are able to study it; how it interacts with our probes (light, neutrinos, etc), how it interacts with matter, how closely it matches our predictions, in what ways it acts the same as matter, and in what ways different. Here is just one small (but potentially revolutionary) example of why it is important to study anti-matter: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-antima...-expansion.html I'll type the title here so you've got an incentive to visit the link: "Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion". The article specifically talks about the interaction of gravity between matter and antimatter. The suggestion is that matter and antimatter both have attractive gravity, HOWEVER, that the gravitational interaction between particles of matter and particles of antimatter is repulsive. So matter clumps together, antimatter clumps together, but antimatter gravitationally repels matter. And to quote the article:

A project to which will answer more questions than the LHC at less than one fifth of the cost... and to be built in Africa or Australia (likely Australia - the scientific case is stronger with more radio silence, political stability, infrastructure, the NBN, etc). Well worth a read. http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/onl...dark?page=0%2C1 And here's an article on the mind-boggling computing power which will be involved: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/201.../04/3206772.htm As both articles point out, the needs of science research (not even the actual science itself) is one of the key driving forces of modern technology and civilisation - the CSIRO (Australia) invented WiFi from algorithms for studying black holes, and CERN (Europe) developed the World Wide Web for their physics projects such as the LHC. And now the SKA will require some very intense artifical intelligence algorithms for recognising interesting radio signals, because the data has to be processed on the fly then dumped - there will be far, far, far too much to ever possibly store on drives, let alone actually sort through at a later date. And I'm not even going to try and predict where those intelligence algorithms and similar will lead us - I doubt the scientists at the CSIRO or CERN expected their work would turn into some of the key functions and infrastructure of the modern Internet.

What exactly is the point of this achievement rubbish? I played a game yesterday and got an achievement for watching the ****ing intro movie. Waste your time coding some other useless function please, guys.

Hopefully these 'exclusive character quests' are a bit more inspiring than the bull**** Dungeon Siege 2 and the Bioware line of games throws at us. Uhg.

What a ****ty and uninspiring name for such a game mode. I hope you are just borrowing that 'term' from someone else and didn't coin it yourself, because if you did you should be shot.

They also held 309 antihydrogen atoms, up from the previous record of 38. Quite huge.

Um, the Americans new where Osama was hiding for ages dude. The Wikileaks release which mentioned Osama and Abbottabad in the same document is what forced the US government to act.

I was going to learn Russian (already know Cyrillic) as my third language but then I realised how depressed, cynical and cold its people are and lost interst. Kind of like the British. So it's German instead. Japanese or Arabic would've been nice, and probably more useful, but their scripts are too alien... for now.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

Hmm. Well, I'll take a look at things again once I finish Dragon Age 1. Which, to be fair, is not any time soon, since uni work keeps getting in the way.

Not in preferentially elected single-member seats.

Things like SETI are useful even regardless of aliens because of the offshoot benefits in distributed computing algorithms and signals processing alogirthms and the like. It's not at all a good thing that this got shut down. That said, with the gargantuan mega telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, coming online in Australia over the next decade, as well as various smaller but still powerful scopes coming online elsewhere around the globe earlier, it's not as if we're going to have a lack of ears to the sky.

My thoughts exactly.