I might be made fun of for this but I'll ask anyway: If negative mass could be practically harnessef, would it allow for the antigravity/repulsorlift/mass effect technology of science fiction to be real?

Not the impression I got from the Reddit thread that popped up around this issue. All anecdotal, but mostly positive with only 2-3 fps lost and at least one where the fps improved instead.

Thanks for the reply. I'll go do a little research on that.

Is there any way to tell a WD Caviar Black drive to behave this way? Mine automatically spins down after 30 minutes of inactivity I believe.

Oh that's fantastic! I didn't even know a setup.exe was stored there. Thanks for the tip!

If only you weren't Anon so I could actually ask for a link or citation.

Well then I'm confused. On one hand, you seem to be advocating for the right of people to obtain creative works produced by others without paying for them. On the other, you seem to think that for some reason, those content producers are going to keep producing content without being compensated for their time and efforts, and you think it's OK not to compensate them for their time and efforts even though they intended to be so compensated when they produced the work.

Even if they were that altruistic (some create for the love of creating, after all) there are only so many hours in the day, and if we obtain their works without paying, they're going to have to support themselves via other means, which means less time to create.

You can argue that copyright infringement isn't stealing all you want, but you and I both know that distributing or downloading content for free that is not offered for free is theft in the common parlance.

No, you are not stealing the actual work, but you are stealing the income that your receipt of the work should have generated.

In short, you are free to argue that piracy is somehow OK because you're not physically transferring goods, but you'll be wrong, and you'll be advocating for unethical behavior and are advocating for being dishonest about the ethics of that behavior.

So what you're saying is that people who create something should donate their time and creative abilities for free.

Would you be willing to go to work tomorrow and tell your boss that you'd like to give up your paycheck, because people ought to work for free? Then what right have you to say that authors should work for free?

(Yes, I realize I'm tilting at windmills here, because the bottom line is that you want to steal people's creativity and time, and instead of just owning up to it, you want to try and justify it through some pseudo-intellectual "information wants to be free" tired old cyberpunk crap, but hey, it's worth a shot).

Why are we assuming that a bachelor's degree means the holder is rich? Why are we assuming that the rich work longer hours than the poor out of some devotion to the job or income?

Today's bachelor's degree is worth a bit less than a high school diploma in the 60's was. It is not a guarantee of riches, or even breaking into the middle class. Hell, even advanced degrees are no guarantee - there are plenty of PhD's out there making less than a store manager at McDonalds.

Today's rich person is rich because he actually *has* a job and is able to command a decent salary. Today's poor is working fewer hours because the rich assholes that employ him keep him at part-time status so they don't have to pay for benefits.

And BTW, while we are discussing American "freedoms", what's all this about about allowing people to ask for your receipts and inspect your bags when exiting a supermarket in the US even though you are not suspected of doing anything wrong?

With the exception of stores where you buy a membership and in so doing enter into an agreement that they can inspect your purchases, that's not allowed here unless the shopper agrees to it.

It's perfectly fine for a merchant to ask a shopper "Can I look in your bags?" It's just as perfectly fine for the shopper to tell the merchant to go pound sand, but a lot of Americans are unaware that they have that right.

Unfortunately, sometimes the merchants and law enforcement are equally unaware of these points of law, and so inappropriate things happen, but that's reflective on the particular idiots violating peoples' rights rather than our law as a whole.

http://www.thelegality.com/200... is a pretty good summary of how it works over here, if you're interested.

I have never heard this assessment of Type O Negative before, but I feel like I should have. I only ever got the October Rust album on recommendation and I'm not really fan, but your comment definitely paints "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend" in a different light from before.

Your link to the wiki article on The Third Wave was fascinating....and unsettling. Has the same eerie "we're-not-as-free-willed-as-you-think" vibe as the Stanford Prison Experiment.

He hadn't taught them yet, that was the issue.

What I take from all of this?

Everyone learns differently. You recommend one thing, the author another, and I learned another. I'm not sure that the iPad is the right choice but I would agree that a tablet, seeing as it has greater potential, is probably a better choice of aids for the students than any of the methods we've become attached to. Why? The tablet can emulate all of those things in one form or another and if they can't then they can have custom software that does if it is needed.

I guess, really, that what I'm saying is that the tablet offers all those choices (even an abacus I suppose) but doesn't lock anyone into a specific method, device, or thought process by default. It will, ideally, allow students to learn how they're best suited to learn.

We've been mucking about in the Middle East longer than that I'm afraid. *sighs* If you exclude the US it goes as far back as the Crusades. However, check what happened to the whole area after WWI and then under the direction of the League of Nations (which the US didn't join, we weren't wanting to police the planet back then - I'm not sure what happened to change the mentality honestly except maybe the Cold War happened but that's a rather generic statement and I can't pin it down to a specific turning point so I'd be curious to hear thoughts on the subject).