Indeed, here's a summary from the CDC from the end of last year. The most relevant part to your point:

I have that link somewhat handy since I'm a gay male. For any other gay guys, to protect yourself...
1. Be monogamous; if you can't,
2. Skip anal and go for oral, which has a much smaller HIV transmission risk to both partners (basically 0 to the guy who's getting head); it's safest not to get cum in your mouth; if you can't,
3. Always use a condom and top--bottoming has a far higher transmission risk; if you can't,
4. Never fucking bareback with a guy you're not absolutely certain is HIV negative no matter what you asshole. You make us all look bad. If you can't,
5. Test yourself often (1-3 months). When you become positive, only have sex with other positive guys. There is no more "if you can't".

It should be noted that condom usage is highly effective but also imperfect. Depending on the study, they reduce exposure risk by only around 80%. For more precise transmission statistics, the Transmission section of the HIV/AIDS Wikipedia article has a good summary and good sources (though you usually need journal access to read them). The Prevention section is also worth reading.

I should note that my "other post" was unmodded for a while and become +5 informative after I had written the above.

No. I gave a published reference for my view which uses special relativity to predict what would happen in an FTL communication scenario. You've given no such thing for yours, and this is the most important disagreement between us. I understand what the moderators see in your posts--you have many correct ideas, but you're wrong in numerous specifics.

That isn't even remotely the point. Certainly there is no known mechanism to get a massive particle past the speed of light, but I simply assumed a particle moving at that speed existed. Who knows, a priori maybe some particles would start out that way at the big bang, or "new physics" would allow for the infinite energy barrier to be overcome without seriously altering the rest of special relativity?

No! Relativity itself says no such thing. Relativity together with the assumptions that the universe is causal and consistent prohibit tachyons, as deduced in the book I referenced (and many, many other places).

You misconstrue my argument. It goes "Assume tachyons exist and special relativity is correct. From special relativity, derive time traveling communication. From time traveling communication, derive a paradoxical experimental result that violates causality. Since we also would like to assume causality works, tachyons must not exist or special relativity is incorrect. Since this part of special relativity has been heavily tested experimentally, most likely tachyons do not exist."

This gets at the heart of your misunderstanding. You've only given half the argument. The rest uses other reference frames in an essential manner (...as one would expect...). In rough terms (see the book I linked for more details, or consult any source that covers special relativity and causality), if FTL communication exists and causes two events to happen, there exists an inertial reference frame in which the relativity of simultaneity forces the effect to precede the cause. This is by definition a violation of causality--an observed event precedes its cause. One can leverage similar ideas to get time travel, but this is more direct in the present situation.

Yes, in a general sense. I had called your pseudo-Newtonian view "wildly inaccurate" in the present context, where the effects of the relativity of simultaneity are so crucial. Newtonian mechanics includes nothing like those effects.

One last time, you're the only one who says that.

Indeed.

While that's true, try explaining memory management to your grandmother who's never touched a computer. That's basically the equivalent--it takes years to learn the math and physics used to describe any of this stuff, and that's for the most intelligent humans. Actually my example is probably too simple: memory management doesn't have that many big ideas in it, while fundamental physics has gobs of them. (It's hard to be quantitative here unfortunately.) Expecting a comprehensible explanation of the Higgs boson without tons of background might simply be expecting too much. (Humans seem to think that everything is possible, and it's just a matter of difficulty. Wrong. Some things are just impossible. Sorry.)

That said, a comprehensible explanation of quantum mechanics isn't nearly as rare as you seem to think. You might try Feynman's book, QED, for one version. It barely begins to cover the standard model, though, and by the end even Feynman was pretty clearly running out of good comprehensible explanations, but it starts very well.

There's a Borg ship around Wolf 359 at around 10^8.0. It's drawn to scale so you can't see it, but I know it's there!

Definitely, eh? Did you even read the first sentence of the summary?

[Yes, this completely contradicts the first link and the article title which both say this is the hardest Sudoku in the world. Terrible editing. Again.]

I pinged him last night and he said "bytes=god yes, time=0ms, TTL=about a minute".

Thank you for your reply. Every other reply stemming from my post has been idiotic and deeply ignorant.

I'm sorry, but your discussion is largely incoherent and you have little to no idea what you're talking about. You should be down-modded.

My example says that if one can produce particles that travel faster than the speed of light, then causality paradoxes arise. I said nothing about a "change in the maximum speed at which information can propagate".

That you even discuss "improper time coordination" suggests that you do not properly understand the relativity of simultaneity. My assumption was clear--the existence of tachyons, which are by definition particles that travel faster than light.

I don't know why you're repeating my conclusion back to me as if it's new. However, you underestimate the severity of the change. Special relativity would have to be wildly incorrect to make room for FTL particles. We're not talking about a minor change or a part of the theory that has some "room", like the small distance limit where quantum "sits".

Indeed, but this is completely irrelevant.

This makes no sense.

You have no idea what you're talking about. The theory of relativity makes predictions in this case. I have not found a single source (reputable or otherwise) that disagrees with me. The first relevant Google Books entry I found on the subject of course agrees with me--see section 11.1 for a derivation.

You clearly have no understanding of the actual content of special relativity. You seem to be using a naive Newtonian view of the universe where it just happens that light travels at a maximum speed. This is wrong on many levels--how does one account for the fact that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames, and that no inertial reference frame is privileged?

Strictly speaking, you are correct in that no accepted, observed rate of travel allows causality violation. That is not at all your meaning, which is incorrect as noted above.

Considering the numerous gaping holes in your own understanding, perhaps you should not consider it so difficult to see why grasping relativity is difficult for many people.

No. Or at least, your view is extremely non-standard today. In general relativity gravity travels at the speed of light. There is even some experimental evidence for that view.

No, you're simply wrong. You're probably trolling since aside from telling me to "understand observation versus reality", your post is content-free. The rest is obviously provocative trash.

That seems extremely optimistic to me. The effects of electromagnetism have been observed by humans for thousands of years. It seems unlikely that we'll discover something capable of interstellar communication apparently without having a hint of that something currently, when we've had millennia of hints in the electromagnetism case.

P.S. I should mention that, if you think faster-than-light communication will be discovered, that would require such a radically different understanding of our universe as to be astonishing. In the framework of special relativity FTL communication enables one to break causality by communicating with the past. An example is the tachyonic antitelephone, which gives rise to a paradox:

This is why no physicists I know or am aware of really believed in the recent FTL neutrino experiment.

P.P.S. Also, your use of "postulate" should probably have been "hypothesize". A postulate is a basis for reasoning, like the principle of relativity. Your usage isn't technically incorrect, but your statement is clearly a guess rather than a fundamental principle of the universe.

A lot of modern languages have implicit line continuations, like Ruby where if you end the line with some sort of operator (or comma) it's implicitly continued. It seems to work very well. (Conversely, a lot of modern languages have an "end of statement" character allowing you to put multiple statements on a single line--in Ruby it's the semi-colon.)

It seems I should have been clearer. VB.NET's full syntax is "for [var] = [bound] to [bound] step [num]", which could easily be hijacked to replace the C "for" syntax without any loss of power. Many languages also offer "for [object] in [array/tree/iteratable thingee]" syntax built-in, like Ruby, Python, and C#. There's lots of good one can do with good "for" syntax.

I'm actually a mathematician with a CS background. In math functions are traditionally denoted by a single symbol (eg. the gamma, theta, or zeta functions; f(x), g(x), h(x), etc. for arbitrary functions in proofs); the only exceptions I can think of are the trig functions, though most likely that was because the names hint at their relationships (eg. csc vs. sec: "co" means you swap the legs in the definition, so eg. sin = opp/hyp, cos = adj/hyp; co is the substitution opp <=> adj). In any case, things are different in computers where full names are allowed. Beyond tradition, making an obvious distinction between bitwise and logical boolean operators is laudable (when I get back to C-style I'm always slightly unsure at first if I should | or ||, for instance).

For instance, "x & 1 == 0" is actually "x & (1 == 0)" while one almost surely means "(x & 1) == 0".

I agree it's useful. I just also say it causes bugs sometimes. I'm honestly not sure if there's an alternative I like; Python and Ruby both continue the C style. I maybe like "is" for "==" but I'm not sure....

I gave a more complete explanation at the end of this post.

Ok, here ya go:

Your "Because" is silly--merely being wrong (which I was not) does not make for flamebait. You have to try to get others to flame you. If anything you seem to be trolling, but if not...
  * Not always, and not in the case mentioned (which you didn't even discuss specifically).
  * VB.NET uses for ... to ... [step ...], which could easily serve the same purpose with the same flexibility, and it's incredibly easy to imagine similar syntax with the same power as the C version. You're just trying to contradict me here.
  * I disagree, and the example I referred to is +5 informative right now.
  * Whitespace is not invisible--it is visible in the spacing of other visible text. Your reasoning here is poor, though I know this issue is largely a matter of taste and I was only (and clearly) stating mine.
  * They take fewer characters, which is nice, but can you honestly tell me "not (a and b) or not c" is easier to read than "!(a && b) || !c"? [Note: I'm not sure if I got the precedence rules right and I won't look them up.]
  * No. There are honestly broken precedence rules, K and/or R has mentioned it; I can hunt for the reference if you want.
  * Again, no. It's an easy mistake to make once in a while. It's also easy to miss when debugging and can cause strange errors.
  * This was a minor point, but still, your reasoning is poor: "C used to be worse, so you should be happy about the current situation because it's not even worse!" I'm generally fine with it too, though I slightly prefer single comment "characters".
  * An example:

C-style:

Forgetting the break's results in completely wrong behavior, but the first two cases should be combined into one, which break is useful for:

And does one include "break" in the last case? Does it matter? (No.) Ruby offers similar functionality that's more intuitive and less error prone:

(The Ruby version is more powerful, actually, since i can be anything and the === methods are used for comparison.) The C version is another example of easy-to-compile-but-harder-to-read-and-potentially-bug-causing syntax, though it translates almost directly into assembly. The Ruby code is slightly (only slightly) more difficult to interpret yet is better in several ways--no clunky semicolons or colons, no break's, the multiple identical cases have one line instead of two keeping parallelism intact, there's no need to remember the "default" term (why wasn't "else" used originally anyway? another compiler hack?). Each individual issue is quite minor, but small things add up to make everything around us, and C is no different. Like I said, I dislike the clunky syntax. It was clearly made in the early years of programming and has been improved many times by many people in many ways. We seem to be stuck with it now though.