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Comment A Bose-Einstein Condensate? (Score 4, Interesting) 265

From what the article looks like, all they've done is created a BEC (They don't mention that in the article, am I off?) of the largest object yet, which just means they cooled the material to milli-kelvin using some kind of trap, and the material becomes a new state of matter, a Bose Einstein Condensate.

For some reason, I expected some kind of two-slit or uncertainty principle thing with a very large object. This doesn't really seem that impressive to me, but then my quantum is a bit dated.

Comment Re:WoW (Score 5, Interesting) 125

I, too, messed with the private servers for awhile, with the same results. My friends and I messed around for a few hours, and then it got boring and we went back to our real characters.

An interesting turn to this is training for raid bosses. So much time is spent clearing, ressing, gathering items, just for a wipe. You could reset to the beginning of a fight in less than a minute with teleport and item summon scripts. Get a whole raid of 25 with duplicated characters, getting 10-15 attempts on a hard boss in an hour, where it would take all day on a real server.

Then with competitive Arena battles rising with real sponsors and cash prizes like the CAL league did for Counterstrike, it could become a big issue once people realize this advantage and get organized. Not just for WoW but the MMOs of the future, which I'm guessing will have substantial (and lucrative) competition-spectator components.

A legit strategy, cheating, or just simply "unethical" by gaming standards?

Games

The Struggle For Private Game Servers 125

A story at the BBC takes a look at the use of private game servers for games that tend not to allow them. While most gamers are happy to let companies like Blizzard and NCSoft administer the servers that host their MMORPGs, others want different rules, a cheaper way to play, or the technical challenge of setting up their own. A South African player called Hendrick put up his own WoW server because the game "wasn't available in the country at the time." A 21-year-old Swede created a server called Epilogue, which "had strict codes of conduct and rules, as well as a high degree of customized content (such as new currency, methods of earning experience, the ability to construct buildings and hire non-player characters, plus 'permanent' player death) unavailable in the retail version of the game." The game companies make an effort to quash these servers when they can, though it's frequently more trouble that it's worth. An NCSoft representative referenced the "growing menace" of IP theft, and a Blizzard spokesperson said,"We also have a responsibility to our players to ensure the integrity and reliability of their World of Warcraft gaming experience and that responsibility compels us to protect our rights."

Comment Why the hate? This is a good idea. (Score 4, Interesting) 103

To everyone dogging on this article, consider a few things.

The whole setup (cardphone, goggles, phone) looks cheap, true, but it IS cheap. It'd be magnitudes cheaper if you made a similar device without the phone, just able to load locations. Spend the savings on a much more comfortable headset and attachment. Hundred bucks, maybe $200, and you know who would love this? Kids. Maybe 2nd to 6th grade. Young enough NOT to complain about the look as I'm seeing here.

I know my elementary school history education consisted of reading about a culture, and then looking at pictures in a book, usually drawings, sometimes photos. Replace those pictures with these things, and kids would be 10x more interested. And you could definitely put learning into there. Have a scene of a Native American village, a Roman forum, a Civil War battle, or real modern scenes, all in 360 degrees, controlled by the student. It would be simple to tie this into learning and assignments. Have them list pieces of technology they see in the panorama, and explain their functions or how we have a different tool today, or put in an unnamed scene and have them guess the culture along with their reasoning.

I think cheap solutions using everyday technology like this has LOADS of practical applications, and should be commended and developed upon.

Comment Why is this news? (Score 5, Informative) 174

This isn't something new, my undergrad university (DePauw University in Indiana) has been sending balloons 100,000 feet (I think our record is about 110,000) with digital cameras for about 5 years: http://www.depauw.edu/acad/physics/base/ Each student had a pod with their own designed experiment, a requirement for a physics course. We bought our system from Taylor University, who have been doing it twice as long.

Comment Re:Fortran is still useful for calculations (Score 1) 794

I'd have to agree with the above poster. I am a physics grad student who picked up Fortran 77 earlier this week to finish some work for my professor. In fact I'm on lunch right now, with my fortran book in front of me and my inherited programs minimized on the screen. I learned C, C++, Java in HS through classes, and then to a much greater degree on my own, although thinking back, Fortran would have done just as well. 95% of the programming I use for physics are script-like data processing. There is a few pages of mathematical work, which I convert into simple programs to process large amounts of data, or run simulations based on a random initial parameter space (Monte Carlo calcs). The runtime is short, the math is generally rather simple, and most importantly, the turnover of a grad student is 3-4 years, and the turnover of undergrad interns is a fraction of that. A lot of the new students know the math and the physics, and may have taken some sort of programming class, or may not have. But its a lot easier passing down a Fortran program to a new student than C++ or something higher (I cant speak for Python or anything else, never had a reason to learn it)

Comment Re:Sounds neat, but I'm confused... (Score 2, Interesting) 220

Yeah, I know a little about Quantum, but this kind of teleportation stuff still confuses me. I know there is some kind of logic argument that shows that no actual information can be relayed by this means, but how exactly is the information being transfered? Is it at lightspeed, or something weirder?

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