Cap'n Refsmmat

It worked long enough for me.

The particle can still pass through the slit, as far as I understand it.

Let's cut out the personal attacks, everyone, or whatever it is that's passing for arguments here.

If there's enough heat to melt the aluminum (and I don't even know if that's the metal used -- it'd probably be an alloy), there's plenty of heat to soften steel. Besides, a fireball is by definition a short-term event, not a long-burning fire. By igniting other things and starting the process (and lighting up whatever fuel is left over), it would lead to a collapse later. Remember also that sulphates (such as those in sheetrock) can literally attack steel at high temperatures, weakening it. http://httd.njuct.edu.cn/matweb/gas/ka_ht/ht_sulfd.htm I think the biggest issue here is that there were no temperature sensors inside the buildings to tell us exactly what was happening. We can speculate, but we cannot come to a conclusion either way. Frankly I think 20,000 gallons of jet fuel would have caused a much much larger fireball than seen on video (meaning not all of the fuel was burned), but I don't know. I should get the 9/11 Commission report...

Fair enough.

Anecdotes do not make evidence.

But we don't necessarily know.

If there was a fireball, I presume the heat would not last long enough to burst the tank, only to set whatever gas is leaking out alight. However, I suggest we avoid speculating on the subject since we'd have to try it to see what would happen. There are too many things to consider.

ROFL. Anyway, fuel tanks are not just open cavities inside the airplane -- they're divided neatly into sections and so on. There are also numerous tanks inside the plane. If one or two survived without major damage, they could leak and keep fires going without exploding.

In case you're wondering, infractions aren't publicly visible. You cannot claim that we didn't do anything to Ben -- you have no evidence either way. Kind of ironic.

Zend Encoder and ionCube are the two popular systems I know of, and I don't think they can be easily decoded. It's probably not worth the trouble though. For a language like PHP, people will always want to meddle with the source, and unless you make an incredibly popular product, most people will buy it rather than pirate it. Heck, vBulletin isn't even source-encoded -- you could copy the source off SFN and use it elsewhere. If Jelsoft noticed they'd have your host shut the site down, though.

That doesn't make your point any more valid.

No. We decided against letting you see everyone else's reputation points.

BenTheMan: That's just a textual representation of your reputation number. Instead of showing your number, vB shows a little phrase to say that people like you. someguy: you don't give them out by giving your points out to others. You just add points to other people using the scales icon. (Everyone started with 10 points.) There will be reputation inflation, but that can be corrected for eventually.

Irrational fears will not go away if you "suck it up." That's a simple fact.

Both factors, actually.

Ah, right, thanks. I thought that sounded suspicious when I said it.

Our mass doesn't matter in gravity (at least, not a great deal). We are dealing with the masses of the Earth and the Moon here. The Earth has a large mass, the Moon a mass 1/6th as big; the Moon is many thousands of miles away, the Earth is right here. Each makes the Earth's gravity much stronger than the Moon's where we are. For astronauts who have landed on the Moon, the gravity there is 1/6th as strong, meaning that a person who weighs 180 pounds on Earth would way 30 pounds on the Moon.

The Moon is of a much lower mass than the Earth, so the Earth pulls harder than the Moon. The Moon is also 250,000 miles away, whereas the Earth is just under our feet.

He's objecting to you labeling particles as configurations of photons. That's fair enough to attack. You did provoke it. This thread is degenerating rapidly on both sides of the argument. There is no need for personal insults on either side. What Farsight needs to do now is address some of the arguments made against his theories:

Appeal to authority. Your presentation isn't exactly the best. It reminds me of children's books, with all the pictures and little detail. You need to create mathematical models of what happens in various situations so we can see how right your theory is. Speaking as a moderator, he hasn't squealed to anyone. The person who split this thread off in the first place was swansont (a resident expert), I believe, and BenTheMan has not reported any posts, sent any PMs to mods, or otherwise requested that we do anything here. Ad hominem. Stop attacking Ben and get on with the argument's he's presented. Rule #1 of the Internet: Assume good faith. This is not a conspiracy to prevent your brilliant ideas from going anywhere. (You could just publish them, even if we do tell you they're stupid. Our opinions are irrelevant in the long run.) This is us trying to tell you that you're misguided.

Fair enough.

Where's this "Tennessee"?

Weren't you complaining about us using red herrings? Pseudoscience and speculations. All I see is this thread going around in circles. So, Farsight, I'll make a challenge to you: Take all of your various theories (Time explained, relativity+, charge explained, etc.) and bind them up into one cohesive document that provides a model for understanding the universe. You don't need to include all the fun pictures, and you won't even have to make the theory completely comprehensive -- no theory is when it starts out. What I'd like to see is your theory of reality presented in a way that it can be easily examined for correctness. That means it should make predictions (take some upcoming experiment and tell us what you think will happen, using your model) and be in agreement with all of the experimental data. If you do that, and allow us to read through the document, this discussion would be greatly facilitated.

Over at where I work, they require you to become a member of staff first, just for the false sense of security.