Really don't understand why people get road rage in stand-your-ground states...

Really? And what video were you watching, because this one didn't have him in it.
He certainly should have feared bodily injury, since he suffered bodily injury. In my view, when someone is so irrational that they physically attack a larger, stronger, younger person, it's reasonable to assume that they are extremely dangerous.
He could not, from what I saw, turn the other way. Scooters don't turn on a dime, and it wouldn't help anyway, she follows him to continue the encounter, she would have done the same thing in the other direction, imo.
Being detained by force is kidnapping. In no jurisdiction that I know of is kidnapping not justification for killing someone, no matter how little they threaten onlookers. ;-) Lucky for her he wasn't a stand your ground don't back down asshole in a stand your ground state.

Except that it's not shenanigans to lane split to the front at a light when on a bike, it's expected and legal, but it is shenanigans to jump back in front as a car just because you're butt hurt someone got in front of you, then swerve at the bike as if to kill him....and also serious shenanigans to chase him like you're Steve Macqueen because he turned your mirror slightly.
Perhaps you mean it's shenanigans to hit the douchebags mirror? I guess I can't say that's totally incorrect, and clearly didn't turn out well, but when someone tries to kill you (which is what happened as I see it), that's a fairly restrained response.
Florida is a concealed carry state, and a 'stand your ground' state as well. The biker could have shot that guy in my eyes after the first attempt to hit him at the very start, certainly when he cut him off and got out of the car, and justifiably, properly, and morally when the car started really trying to run him off the road.
(ps, I don't ride motorcycles)

*blocked copyright grounds states

*blocked copyright grounds states

>> ^Kalle:

One serious question that bothers me is.. why isnt it possible to use gravity as an energy source?
Would such a machine be a perpetual motion machine?


Gravity is REALLY weak. Like 36 orders of magnitude less than the electromagnetic force. 36 orders of magnitude is massive...larger the the total number of stars in the known universe. For instance, a fridge magnet is defeating the ENTIRE gravitational force of the earth AND the sun. Gravity makes for a great way to bind the macro-universe together, but it is shit as an energy source.

Also, gravity has only one polarity...and it doesn't turn off. So for the EM force, we have 2 poles that can be switched around via electrical current to make lots of different energy related things. But for gravity, you just have one ground state, and once you are there you need to input energy to get away from that ground state...no way around that. However, what has been done and is done in certain areas is to have a closed system where you apply energy at certain time and store that energy for later. The example most commonly used is in dams, where the will pump a large volume of water back up stream (potential energy) and store it (a gravity battery if you will) and release it as a later time when demand is high. This is always a loss based way to make energy; your going to spend more pumping it back up (heat loss and other losses including evaporation) than you will when you get it back...so it is just a way to cause demand shifting towards other hours with additional entropy.

You have 4 fundamental forces to draw energy from; and 3 of those are the only practical ones. Strong (nuclear) force, the EM force, and the gravitational force (the weak force is actually the force that powers the earths core, but isn't useful to use in power generation for a similar reason gravity isn't).

The EM force is what we use in internal combustion engines and electrical motors. Chemical reactions are rearrangements of the electron structures of molecules, which makes gasoline engines possible via liquid to gas expansion pressures. Generators deal with EM fields, polarity and current which is what drives thermal reactors like coal or can drive a car with a motor via conversation of stored electrical energy(just a backwards generator). Nuclear reactors deal with the strong (nuclear) force, and combine that with kinetic/thermodynamic forces of same flavor as coal and other thermal plants.

Even gravity isn't perpetual, the orbits of ALL celestial bodies are unstable. Gravity is thought and reasonably well satisfied to travel in waves. These waves cause turbulence in what would seem calm orbits, slowly breaking them down over time...drawing them closer and closer together. Eventually, all orbits will cause ejection or collision.


As to what energy is best, I personally believe in the power of the strong force, as does the sun . When you are talking about the 4 forces and their ability to make energy for us, the strong force is 6 orders of magnitude greater than other chemical reactions we can make. The EM force is not to much weaker than the strong force, but the practical application of chemical reactions limits us to the electron cloud, making fuels for chemical reactions less energetic by a million to a billion times vs strong force fuels. Now, only fission has been shown to work for energy production currently, but I doubt that will be true forever. If you want LOTS of energy without much waste, you want strong force energy, period. That and the weak force are the 2 prime movers of sustained life on this planet. While the chemistry is what is hard at work DOING life, the strong and weak force provide the energy to sustain that chemistry. Without it, there are no winds, there is no heat in the sky nor from the core, no EM shield from that core. Just a cold, lifeless hunk of metals and gases floating in the weak gravitational force.

Sorry for the rant, energy is my most favorite current subject



(edit, corrected some typos and bad grammar)

I wasn't even thinking about highways personally, I was thinking surface streets. I thought of another neat feature you could have! You could have emergency vehicles be in touch with the road. The road itself would broadcast a signal 300 yards ahead of him on the ground stating he was coming your way. It would be dynamic, so they warning would be scrolling along ahead of him. You could have smart car/road, relationships. The road itself would be aware of traffic. If the road knew average travel speeds of all the roads around you, and your car itself knew its destination they could negotiate on the best route given the data. Dynamic, flexible, detour routing could be done on the fly for accidents, or just routing of traffic in general. Really, the possibilities are as awesome as they are endless.

The cool thing about the beastie boys is they've made it pretty impossible to be typecast. They started out as a punk band, moved to be one of the most important white influences in the then infancy of hip hop. Though criticized for infiltrating a music scene they didn't belong in, they held their ground stating the similarities in the "home made" aspect of both genres during that time (this of course was before the recording industry raped the purity out of music). From there they had not so gradual leaps from one album to the next. So it could be said that this album is not like any album they've done in the past, but we can come to expect that.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Wow, that was good! I'm going to need buy this album. I have only a couple of Beastie CDs, so I can't say I'm intimately familiar with their work. Have they ever done an entirely instrumental album before?

The music feels a little moody, and the visual style is definitely noir-ish, so I hope you don't mind me *darkening it.

So, the big silver thing is a dewar. It most likely contains liquid helium.

I am not sure how much NMR has to do with it, but there are NMR based qubits...The decoherence term, which came from NMR, is the same effect, but not actually the same phenomenon that is going on here, I don't think.

Most quantum qubits that I have heard of are made out of low temperature(Type I) superconductors, like niobium. The qubit itself is a Josephson Junction, which is a entirely too long discussion to go into too much detail.

But the basic idea is that if you get two superconductors close together, but separated by an insulator, they will quantum mechanically link. So the state of one describes the state of the other(e.g. entanglement).

*Warning, a more technical explanation is below.

You can exploit this entanglement and by systematically rocking the potential that describes the coupling between the two states with a microwave signal. Eventually you can get the system into the ground state. Now the flux quanta which couples the two systems, exist as discreet energy levels. By injecting that flux into the system, you excite the system into it's first energy eigenstate. At this point the system is effectively described by the Bloch equation. This two state system is your quantum qubit. Which you can use to make calculations, the easiest of which and first test is to factor numbers or seek prime numbers. The problem, as I alluded to earlier, is that as the system evolves in time some of the energy escapes into other energy eigenstates, it is no longer |Q>=a|1>+b|0> but now it is |Q>=a|1>+b|0>+c|2>... and so on. The time the state can be described by |1> and |0> is referred to as the coherence time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_junction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer

How was that rbar?