Why not? I did it.

A ban that was subsequently overturned, was it not?

Card and the homophobes are playing King Canute. Try as they might, they cannot order back the tide. They might have the occasional local and temporary success, but the writing is very much on the wall here.

So then why care if he wants to waste his money supporting a futile fight?

But on the other side, Ender's Game the story has had uncounted amounts of positive effects on people (including me turning my life around, and all the second order effects that spill from that). Exposing more people to that story is only a good thing (especially if it leads to reading the books - the first three are very, very powerful and life-changing works of art)

I was shocked to my core to learn how reprehensible a person Card really is - and I still struggle to reconcile how that person could possibly write Ender's game, Speaker for the Dead, and the other one (the Shadow series is just Card going back to the well and largely forgettable) That, in of itself, is a valuable lesson.

I'll happily trade some money flowing into the hands of bigots to fund windmill-tilting if that results in a world where Ender's Game exists.

So then don't do a sloppy implementation, and reap the benefits.

Stop being a Luddite - TBW is awesome. Almost as much as EFI trumping carbs.

The comments about TBW making assembly cheaper are well-founded and accurate, but there's WAY more than just that:

TBW let's you get rid of the idle speed solenoid / idle speed bypass motor, which handles high idle during warmup and anti-stall during big drop throttle. Instead, the ECU can move the throttle plate directly. More control authority, less under/overshoot, more stable idle, less idle fuel consumption - not to mention a savings of between 1 (PWM idle solenoids like Honda) to as many as 6 wires (stepper motor systems like Mitsubishi)

TBW allows you to change the ratio between delta pedal and delta throttle - and do so *dynamically*. You can do this by changing the linkage and cam on a mechanical throttle, but it's a big deal and not easy to tune. With TBW, it's a lookup table or a function. If you have a powerful car with a big throttle body, this can pay HUGE fuel savings and vehicle control dividends at low throttle plate angles, where tiny tiny differences in throttle plate angle make huge differences in airflow.

TBW makes traction control / stability control WAY easier - and it doesn't crackle and bang like spark retard systems do.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Just because you can't imagine the benefits don't mean they aren't there.

I participated in an event that raced a period-complete 1970 Plymouth Superbird Hemi against a bone-stock 1999 Honda minivan. Not a drag race, but a race with corners.

The Honda wasn't just faster, it was WAY faster.

We use taxes to fund our universal healthcare system. And the air ambulance that would come get him if required.

You're talking about a nation that went to war with itself - killing millions of people - so that it could try and keep the institution of SLAVERY.

In the face of that, how is brinksmanship over paying the bills in any way surprising?

The problem with the Casimir force is that it is difficult to measure experimentally and difficult to calculate theoretically. The research in the past several years has focused on expanding the class of geometries and materials that can be simulated in addition to devising more accurate experiments and methods of fabricating the nanoscale structures.

With Intravaia et. al's paper, they are dealing with a phenomenon that has been predicted theoretically, but has not been verified experimentally. The novelty here would be in being able to construct a periodic nanoscale grating and incorporating it into a measurement device. They also note a deviation in the theoretical force with their plates for large separations. It seems that this comes about due to their use of the Proximity Force Approximation as the kernel in their calculations. The disparate length scales that they are working with in terms of the object size, feature size, and separations are too much for current numerical methods.

The Casimir force occurs for non-conductive materials too. Lifshitz did a famous treatment for dielectric slabs.

There is a long tradition in the scientific community for the discussion and exchange of ideas that covers this. For example, the Royal Society was a group of people who got together to read their papers to one another as a group. The lectures were then collected and published to the world as a whole in the proceedings. Conferences are simply the modern day equivalent. In my field, conferences are a prime chance to bounce off your research to a large group of experts to get feedback and comments prior to publishing your work. Anyone can attend the conference as long as you show up and pay (but we all pay regardless). When submitting a paper to a journal, it is passed on to experts in the paper's field who provide feedback on the validity, results, method and prior work. Upon publishing a paper, a correspondence address is always included as well as the affiliation of the authors. People can write directly to the corresponding author or even write comments to the journal editor to be published in the near future (I've seen some rather negative rebuttals published in this fashion). There has always been a long tradition of exchange of ideas and thoughts amongst researchers, I've had people send me notes based upon my conference talks, journal papers, and preprints on arxiv. This isn't a closed network though. Anyone can attend the conferences, anyone can read the journal papers, anyone can write to the authors. Admittedly, the barrier to do this is rather high since access can be expensive.

The comments section on a popular science website is not the place for any real discourse, particularly with the authors. Researchers are under no obligation, nor do they have the copious free time, to shift through the chaff to answer all the questions and any serious discussion requires a lengthy back and forth for which a comment section is ill suited.

If you are interested in seeing more about how discourse is conducted in the research community, there are many collections of correspondences that have been published that gives an insight into just how much back and forth exists. I've read through a collection on letters on wave mechanics that you can get on Amazon for a small price that details correspondence between Einstein and other physicists. Many important ideas and inspirations in physics have evolved out of a passing comment in a postcard or daily walk.

Amen, Brother!

Agreed.

It's like watching Linux morph into Windows 8

DG

Tell me about it...

DG

I've got an XP laptop that instantly BSODs the second you close the lid.

So yeah, myth busted.

DG