I was addressing whether or not there could be legal issues, so the subject of intent becomes very relevant.
The intent, for half the people affected, was to cause harm.

There are laws against assault, bullying, and so on. The positive spin in innocuous but the negative spin is not.

With 700 000 potential victims, the numbers are against them because when your sample size is that large outliers are the rule and not the exception.

The risk of copycat suicide for example should have been obvious to those conducting this study.

I should explain, I'm being bullheaded about this since bosons have interesting behavior (e.g. laser action) because they lack charge. So much of our claims of understanding physics comes out of mathematical frameworks that my instinct for natural philosophy tells me that re-factoring old mathematics is a great idea to try.

I was watching a presentation by Susskind about black holes today and was rather confused about the holes he left in explaining the reasoning.
Primarily; he said you analyse a black hole by constructing it out of single bits of information. The idea to use a photon of the same size as the black hole is brilliant, but it ignores the elliptic polarization of the EM field of photons in free flight, and the example he showed an already existing large black hole on which he made just a single measurement. Extreme cases, like where the existing event horizon is around plank-length and the photon contained more energy than the known universe, was apparently ignored. He appeared to then conclude that photon energy vs. black hole growth was invariant from a single point of data...

After this, he concluded that a planar section of a sphere with plank thickness was 2-dimensional, and objected to the implications of the faulty reasoning. What I learned from this was that if we humans are so intent of mistaking the map for the terrain, then we need much better maps. 'Maps' here of course meaning mathematics.

A vote-selling union to counter-act party politics? I like the way you think!

That convinces me. Much obliged.

Thought I still want |z| to be thought of as potentially half-dimensional... :b

Since you're an AC I'll ask for references, or accuse you of trolling.

Thanks for the tip on the video lectures! This might help me understand laser action on a much more fundamental level. =)

I actually did know about Hawking radiation... But I wish to add more nails to the coffins of outdated and poorly worded scientific names. Another source of annoyance for me is 'complex' numbers, which IMO would be better described as e.g. 1.5-dimensional numbers. - Thoughts on this?

It sounds like public disclosure of private facts. - http://privacy.uslegal.com/wha...

Seems like he had already incriminated himself when he talked to the cops. That's a strange thing for a lawyer to do to begin with...

J.D. Franson's research appears to be Nobel prize worthy for its implications, and how much it could simplify our understanding of the universe. Wanting a first post on this is understandable.

Anyway, nothing 'virtual' at all about virtual particles. - Who would thought?

Rather hilarious that anyone other than a rival nation state would seek to challenge the NOAA. Right or wrong, decision makers listen to the NOAA either directly or indirectly since they do most of the US's recce.

That it still not below $70 USD.

This is;

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/t...

"Inspiration" that leads to hacking seems to be what leads you to make LEDs blink with Arduinos, and put on art shows... (Did you know Arduinos use the Harvard architecture?)

For me it is necessity that still leads me to hack. I hack to survive, not from day to day but from decade to decade. Early on I couldn't figure out why society acted in such an alarmingly insane manner when I first became aware of such a thing as 'society', back in 1989. In the country next door there was a guy with an early laser sight who went around and shot immigrants. Countries went to war which cost them much more than the sp(oils) they got out of it. The telephone companies had the resources to let you dial in all day, but instead they sold bandwidth by the trickle while everybody agreed that the InterNet could save the world. - Weren't we supposed to agree on how to run this planet? Wasn't it democracy that we agreed to kill and die for? ...Are we all just trying to be the last one standing?

Computers were widely reported not to be so shockingly inconsistent, contradictory as people. Having already taken apart a bunch of home appliances, successfully putting them back together again, many without my parents ever becoming aware of my secret learning, I opened a computer and saw that the interesting parts were hidden beneath layers of epoxy. This was as far as my childhood mind was able to get, permission to learn or not. So I gave up my childish ways.

As far as my parents and teachers were supposed to know, CPUs and software had a user's manual and price tag and that was final. Fortunately I had been getting pirated games since I was 7 years old, so I knew that there was a way. There was always a way, so I searched for it. I went to libraries, book stores, and of course the internet whenever I could. It didn't take long before I dismissed BASIC and started looking at Assembler as way to see inside the mind of this machine that now has come to dominate our society. With Assembler I was able see how the programmer builds up an illusion from 1s and 0s, data composed and re-composed turning into information in the mind of the user, and how this then becomes reality.

By now friends and family saw me as their future cash-cow. Surely I'd be some rich internet millionaire. Money, and how it commands people, disgusts me. Depression almost killed me. Perhaps in a way it did. Snowden proved to everyone that I wasn't a lunatic. I think he is a saint.

I'm not a burned out-husk. When morning comes in just a few hours I'm out to scavenge high-voltage electronics and CRTs. I'm going to space motherfuckers.

I wonder if EVE qualifies.

Nonsense! They just need to run their telescopes during the day when the stars aren't visible!