JaKiri

It would, ignoring air resistance, be moving at some 80m/s, which isn't shabby. It would, in fact, just go splat. Taking air resistance into account, what YT said. It has an extremely significant effect for critters of that size.

I thought you said it was only 65% accurate, or whatever?

This thread is obviously a metaphor for the debate over Nietzsche's concept of the will to power in opposition to the nature/nurture argument. Batman is the superman, the ubermensch, and as such choosing Spiderman is just an expression of the author's embedded belief in a system which tells individuals that they fail because they lack some gift, some artificial crutch, a system which indoctrinates its young to believe that only those who are predetermined, or lucky, can strive to be the best; is it any coincidence that the vast majority of these "super heroes" (for they are not mere "men") arise form America, a country which represents itself as a meritocracy, yet only uses this to twist perceptions, to make its populace believe the truth of that statement when the reality is more of an unbalanced system than even feudal Europe. Plus Batman beat Superman in Alan Moore's The Dark Knight Returns, and Superman's a lot tougher than Spiderman.

These have identical uncertainty, which is to say, not very much at all. A law is just a very limited kind of theory.

If there was no motion, there would be no definition of time, because our definitions of time, and length, and the like are empirical approximations of what we perceive. Of course, this is somewhat impossible.

You'd be wrong. You're misinterpreting E=mc^2. c^2 is a constant of proportionality that arises from the mathematical axiom that the speed of light is constant for all observers. All it says is that if you turned a given mass m into energy, you'd have m * 299792458^2 joules. (The more accurate version is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2, which also leads to a fundamental property of matter which is E-P invariance (rest mass is constant, therefore E^2 - p^2c^2 = constant).) E=mc^2 has little to do with FTL, or just plain lightspeed travel, being impossible. It's the gamma factor, 1/SQRT(1-v^2/c^2). For example, the relativistic definition of momentum is gamma mv. As v -> c, gamma -> infinity, therefore a massive object moving at the speed of light would have infinite momentum, and would therefore require an infinite impulse to reach said speed. Beyond the speed of light, the gamma factor becomes imaginary, but that's another issue entirely.

I don't, really. I like to attack arguments in, occasionally stupid, different ways to see if they hold up, or rather, to see how the person proposing this thing I don't know much about holds up. It's been a reasonably successful method of learning about new things; if someone can't hold their position and give evidence in the face of an attack, then it's not really worth learning about. Obviously this works better in an academic environment, when people are more likely to know a fair bit about their subject area, but you seem a fairly intelligent chap.

Any. Squaring something is a many to one function, square rooting something is a one to many function. The square root of 5 squared is ±5; one's not just the inverse of the other. I used SQRT(5^2) at first, and I lost the ^2 at some point. I did, however, edit it to SQRT(25) some 10 minutes before you posted.

This doesn't actually explain why you want marriage banned rather than de-encouraged. I follow the argument, and in some places agree, but surely banning is just restricting the rights of an individual in a different way?

What? |(x^2)^½| gives only positive values, (x^2)^½ = ±x. Again, what? Ignoring that I have no idea what you're talking about, ±x gives more information than |x| and so would be more "accurate" by any useful definition of accurate. For example, SQRT(25) = ±5. This has described both possible outcomes. SQRT(25) = |5| is wrong, as |5| = 5 and SQRT(25) = -5 (in one of the two cases) |SQRT(25)| = 5, but it is impossible to tell whether that 5, without the modulus, would be +5, -5 or ±5. Now, if this is you trying to mock reductionism for including less information and being wrong, fine. Go back and make it clearer. If not, then see above.

Why?

±x, actually. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism for Reductionism.

It's only reductionism in the sense that there are only four forces which have any evidence for them. DAMN THAT EVIDENCE. Well, you can't predict (for example) the form my table takes if you try to work up from the atomic level, but that's more due to our limit of being able to solve the wave equation. Our limit to work with the incredible number of fixed and random variables that exist in this kind of thing. Ineffective in what sense? Then create experiments to document them. Just saying "science sucks and is wrong" isn't productive in the slightest. The model of forces we have seems perfectly useful, from the point of view of, say, modelling how an atom or molecule works, or how they interact, or indeed anything we can in fact measure. If it didn't have some predictive power and didn't agree with observation we wouldn't be using it. Untenable, eh? "Describing the observeable universe as a finite number of possible types of interactions between a finite number of possible types of particles has not been shown to be inconsistent with empirical evidence and has been useful in predicting various things." Seems perfectly tenable to me.

Energy isn't conserved unless you take mass into account. Mass isn't conserved unless you take energy into account. Mass is not conserved in and of itself. Lets say you have one particle, mass m, moving at another particle of mass m, at 3/5 c. Lets say they form one particle of mass M when they collide. This will, if you go through the maths, be moving at 1/3 c. M will be greater than 2m. Mass is not conserved. Wikipedia has forgotten the gamma factor. Or rather' date=' you've only chosen to read the bits of the article talking about rest mass, and ignored the links to the section on mass dilation. What? No. That's not how you measure the mass of anything. You have the equivilent of a kilogram were it made into energy, but you do not have a kilogram of anything actually in the closed system. It doesn't actually have that mass. Inertial mass, and you can't actually slow a photon down per se. They're always travelling at the speed of light on an atomic scale, they just hit things along the way. It's like the difference between my average velocity when walking into town and my average speed.

Animals don't respect me. I give those guinea pigs food and water all the time, and when I ask them, nicely, to be quiet while Doctor Who is on, what do they do? Bloody freeloaders.

Perfectly correct. I'm forgetting the order in which things come. GeForce 2 then.

Which just goes to show that money doesn't buy sense. Alienware machines tend to be poorly made, and are extremely overpriced.

You're not going to get something particularly powerful for under $100 - that, for the price, is a good video card that will certainly run most new games, although for how long this is the case is debateable. In the mid $100-$200 range, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102688 is a good card that can run anything pretty well. You're not going to get a world beater without spending a hell of a lot more money than is really worthwhile, however. What other sort of components are you looking at?

Evidently I didn't count on people producing it in stupidly large amounts for no reason!

No, SR states that all velocities are relative to observers, each of which are equally valid, and there is no medium to be relative against (no aether).

The best way to make a computer, if you don't know anything about the individual components, is to give an idea of what you want it for and a preferred/upper price limit, and have someone who does know about it do it for you. The potential for pitfalls if you're not sure of what you're looking at is enormous. Oh, and if it's not essential immediately, wait a month and a half for the Conroe to come out.

I'd recommend a Riva TNT2. Actually, I'd recommend starting again from scratch as you could get something at least three times as powerful for under £300. You don't actually have to use a DVI-monitor with DVI-out. There are adapters.

Van Der Vaals forces, like, well, anything that isn't giant covalent, ionic or hydrogen bonded. However, it is unlikely that there exists enough buckminsterfullerene in the world for it to be visible to the naked eye.

It really doesn't. There are some examples of things from science fiction books that now exist, that didn't at the time, (ignoring hard sci-fi, which is based on existing science) but to say that it makes a habit of it ignores that the cases in which this happens are the vast exception.