There is an interesting problem in ethics that arises from the pornography debate (and some other debates also.)
Assume for the sake of the argument that it is proven that use some kind of pornography leads people to behave in ways that damage others. (E.g. by watching violent pornography, men become more likely to commit rape.) Furthermore, assume that there is no damage involved in the production of the material (E.g. they are filming simulated rapes, not real ones.)
Is this grounds for banning that type of pornography?
The Utilitarian argument: Availability of this material provides entertainment, which is good. It leads to more rapes which is bad. The badness of the rapes very heavily outweighs the goodness of the entertainment, so overall we are much better off to ban the pornography.
The Libertarian argument: Everyone is responsible for their own actions. If a man commits rape, he is 100% responsible for having done so, whether or not he has watched violent porn. It is unjust to prevent one person from choosing to use this porn because its availability might lead some other person to choose to commit a crime.
(I personally would argue for a middle ground between these extremes, but here I'm more interested in presenting the issues than in arguing for a particular resolution.)
It is interesting to note that "Playfair" is the name of a cryptosystem invented in 1854 and heavily used (and frequently broken) in World War I. Varients were still in use (and still being broken) for low grade cyphers in World War II.
I would be very surprised if the developers of FairPlay and PlayFair were unaware of this link.
Names changed to protect the guilty: Alice: > You see us free Americans have a right to carry guns, lots of em, thats why muggings dont happen in America. Bob: > And the thing you don't realize is this also means the muggers have guns
You have been trolled. Go directly to modded-down-into-oblivion. Do not collect karma.
Don't you think "muggings don't happen in America" was perhaps a slight clue?
Unfortunately, the moderators seem a bit slow on the uptake too. If you can't find the "troll -1" modifier, can't you at least find "offtopic"?
He wants a Boolean criterion (yes/no) for planethood, but then criticizes a 'minimum mass' limit as being arbitrary. It is not possible to impose a Boolean criterion onto parameters that vary continuously without there being an arbitrary boundary somewhere.
Other than that, a pretty good discussion. His suggestion will still require an arbitrary boundary (how round is round?) but it is not totally arbitrary.
His rule has a problem that it turns into planets objects that we had previously decided were not planets. It has the advantage of being less arbitrary than the alternatives. Whether the advantage outweighs the disadvantage is a matter of taste.
Personally I haven't forgiven France for sending agents to my home city and sinking a civilian ship with explosives, with the loss of one life. Then they boycotted all our exports because we had the temerity to arrest two of the agents responsible. Under pressure from this a deal was brokered to release the agents to be held imprisoned by the French in French Polynesia, and they broke that deal too.
"If you're repeating, it's time to automate away the repetition, which is itself generally interesting."
But it was automating away other people's repetition that got boring.I was in 'tools' - we administered the SCM and wrote programs to automate the repetative stuff the product developers needed to do. There were advantages to this: lots of small programs means you get to do everything from business analysis to final testing. The main product was ~3,000,000 lines of code, and work on it was much more compartmentalized.
PhD in Astronomy, 1998. My thesis dragged out endlessly so that once I'd finished it, I couldn't stand the thought of doing the work to create some papers out of it. Also, I wanted to come back home (New Zealand) and astronomy jobs are hard to get here. 1998-2003: Commercial programmer. OK at first, but eventually I was just doing the same old stuff again and again. I was getting very bored and I think because of that, unproductive. So now I'm an applied mathematician in bioinformatics (having studied no biology since early high school). I was earning 40% more at the previous job, but it is worth it to be doing something interesting again. Money is nice (a friend once called it "the sincerest form of appreciation") but having new, challenging and interesting things to do is more important.
When I read the summary, I thought "Is this anything more clever than just a semi-reflective coat on a flat TV screen?" The answer is "no".
This means: a) With one of these, all those annoying reflections you get off your TV screen already get hugely worse. b) You could get much the same effect much cheaper by putting a standard sheet of semi-reflective glass in front of your standard TV.
I played the MMORPG "Dark Ages of Camelot" for a while. One of my characters practiced fletching (arrow making). Practising this would involve buying raw materials, then clicking an icon to make a bunch of arrows. It would take about 7 to 20 seconds to make a bunch of arrows (depending on the type I was making.) Then you click the icon again, repeat until you run out of raw materials.
This was, of course, tremendously tedious - so I used my Lego Mindstorms to make a little device to click my mouse button every X seconds. I'd buy my materials, position the mouse over the icon, and start it up. Then I'd have a shower or whatever, come back 10 minutes later and sell the arrows and buy new raw materials.
(I expect by now, and possibly even back then, there are software hacks to achieve this with more convenience and flexibility.)
PS: I actually turned this on one time to get rid of spam, blocking a whole bunch of legit email in the process. Ooops. hello internet just enforce the tools that you already posses.
An idea for dealing with false positives: Any e-mail that fails some spam test (server on a blacklist, server doesn't sign its mail, whatever) doesn't get/dev/null'ed, but rather quarantined. 24 hours later, they get compared to digests of known recent spam (requires a spam report clearing house, such as SpamCop). If they do not match, they get sent on, with an attached explanation as to why they were held up for 24 hours.
Benefits: 1) Few or no false positives 2) Applies pressure on administrators of non-conforming servers to conform - they will get complaints about delayed outgoing e-mail. 3) Because it is less extream than black-holing non-conforming servers, it can be introduced without causing the end of the internet.
You could develop a theory of lasers based purely on non-relativistic QM: you only need to know about energy levels in atoms, stimulated emission, population inversion. A truely deep understanding of these phenomina does require SR, but you can understand them without SR well enough to build a laser. (Just like a truely deep understanding of QED requires a grand unified theory, we are still able to do lots of stuff without one.)
You've missed my point on the distinction between 'depends on' and 'needs to account for'. If you don't account for GR, all that happens is you get subtly wrong results. We can fly to Mars without knowning GR: we just have to make more course corrections. We can build GPS without knowing GR: we just have lower accuracy and perhaps have to account for an unexplained 'drift' in coordinates.
Now try to build a transistor or laser without knowing QM: we couldn't even conceive they were possible short of 'magic', and wouldn't have the slightest idea how to start making one if someone insisted it was possible.
On the otherhand, Google only got 5090 hits for "trits" and 16,600,000 for "tits", so perhaps that is the more common term. I see, however, that the top hit for "tits" is about bird-watching, so this alternative meaning may have contaminated the results.
There is non-relativistic QM: QED postdates QM by about 20-30 years. I'm pretty sure that lasers, semiconductors and microwave ovens are explainable in non-relativistic QM. (It's been a while since I did any QM.)
See the footnote in my original post: GPS and interplanetary probes have to account for GR, but they do not depend on it. If we lived in a Newtonian universe, they would still work.
Five years ago, every cosmologist "knew" that the universe was flat and matter supplied the critical density (in other words, no dark energy, that 70%). Conventional wisdom has completely changed with the discovery of the accelerating universe.
No they didn't. I hung out with cosmologists when doing my astrophysics PhD over 10 years ago, and they were considering various mixes of hot and cold dark matter, dark energy, open and closed universes. Flat universe and no dark energy was merely the provisionally accepted most likely solution.
The implied existence of dark energy is revolutionary to cosmology, but it didn't catch people by surprise - they were actively looking for it.
Actually it will make a huge difference. Just look at how Bohr's model of the atom changed chemistry and particle physics. Or how Plank's quantum theory caused a revolution in the physics community.
Quantum physics (which includes both of your examples) has been around about 80 years, and huge amounts of modern technology depend on it.
Special relativity has been around nearly 100 years. I'm not brave enough to say there are no technologies that depend* on it, but they are very rare.
General relativity has been around for about 85 years. There is no technology that depends* on it.
I'm all for understanding dark matter and dark energy, but don't expect a technological payoff.
(* "Depends" means allows doing things that would be impossible in classical theory. "Needs to account for" is more common, although still rare.)
Skipping the old forest and scouring of the Shire (although I'd have liked a direct-to-video version of those), greater role for Arwen. In the context of a movie, these changes work really well.
My really major peave: The dead turn up to win the battle at Minas Tirith, (ROTK nitpick 40). This has two major bad effects: (1) It completely devalues all of the heroism of the soldiers of Gondor and Rohan - the only effect they had was to delay the outcome long enough for the dead to arrive, and that could have happened in time without them had Aragon just left for the paths of the dead a day earlier. (2) The structure of TLoTR has a climax that is locatable to a single sentence: the good guys are disparing when the corsair's ships come up the river, thinking that Pelagir has fallen, and reinforcements are coming for the enemy. Then the clouds break and Aragon's royal banner is unfurled on the lead ship. There was much rejoicing. This should have made for a hugely cinematic moment, but instead we got light humour (Aragon, Gimli, Legolas jumping on to the dock and making a comment about 'plenty of orcs for everyone.')
If you're qualified: (1) Apply for the job. (2) Get the job. (Might not be trivial.) (3) When in the job, don't sign anything that isn't true. (4) SCO fires you (because they can't publish true financial statements.) (5) Sue SCO for wrongful dismissal. (6) Get to show in court that they fired you for refusing to act illegally. (7) PROFIT!
Of course, sometime between (5) and (6) SCO ceases to exist due to other court cases, so (7) never happens.
Somebody just helicoptered to the south pole and back. They spent two years planning, had fuel dumps, etc etc.
This guy gave no warning, no indication in his registered flight path that he was going to the south pole (said he was going to South America), and kept flying beyond his point of no-return on the assumption that McMurdo would bail him out when he landed on their doorstep.
(But they are refusing to sell him the fuel. He will be charged for accomodation, flight home, shipping of airplane.)
Slashdot Mirror
There is an interesting problem in ethics that arises from the pornography debate (and some other debates also.)
Assume for the sake of the argument that it is proven that use some kind of pornography leads people to behave in ways that damage others. (E.g. by watching violent pornography, men become more likely to commit rape.) Furthermore, assume that there is no damage involved in the production of the material (E.g. they are filming simulated rapes, not real ones.)
Is this grounds for banning that type of pornography?
The Utilitarian argument: Availability of this material provides entertainment, which is good. It leads to more rapes which is bad. The badness of the rapes very heavily outweighs the goodness of the entertainment, so overall we are much better off to ban the pornography.
The Libertarian argument: Everyone is responsible for their own actions. If a man commits rape, he is 100% responsible for having done so, whether or not he has watched violent porn. It is unjust to prevent one person from choosing to use this porn because its availability might lead some other person to choose to commit a crime.
(I personally would argue for a middle ground between these extremes, but here I'm more interested in presenting the issues than in arguing for a particular resolution.)
It is interesting to note that "Playfair" is the name of a cryptosystem invented in 1854 and heavily used (and frequently broken) in World War I.
Varients were still in use (and still being broken) for low grade cyphers in World War II.
I would be very surprised if the developers of FairPlay and PlayFair were unaware of this link.
Names changed to protect the guilty:
Alice:
> You see us free Americans have a right to carry guns, lots of em, thats why muggings dont happen in America.
Bob:
> And the thing you don't realize is this also means the muggers have guns
You have been trolled. Go directly to modded-down-into-oblivion. Do not collect karma.
Don't you think "muggings don't happen in America" was perhaps a slight clue?
Unfortunately, the moderators seem a bit slow on the uptake too. If you can't find the "troll -1" modifier, can't you at least find "offtopic"?
He wants a Boolean criterion (yes/no) for planethood, but then criticizes a 'minimum mass' limit as being arbitrary. It is not possible to impose a Boolean criterion onto parameters that vary continuously without there being an arbitrary boundary somewhere.
Other than that, a pretty good discussion. His suggestion will still require an arbitrary boundary (how round is round?) but it is not totally arbitrary.
His rule has a problem that it turns into planets objects that we had previously decided were not planets. It has the advantage of being less arbitrary than the alternatives. Whether the advantage outweighs the disadvantage is a matter of taste.
Thank you. I do not blame the French people, but rather its government.
Personally I haven't forgiven France for sending agents to my home city and sinking a civilian ship with explosives, with the loss of one life. Then they boycotted all our exports because we had the temerity to arrest two of the agents responsible. Under pressure from this a deal was brokered to release the agents to be held imprisoned by the French in French Polynesia, and they broke that deal too.
Such an effort would quickly collapse with vocabulary problems.
What is Elvish for phasor, or blast-furnace?
Do the Klingons bother having a word for "tree"?
I can't look at that picture without the tune "Brazil" going through my head.
Older quote:
"C is a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language"
"If you're repeating, it's time to automate away the repetition, which is itself generally interesting."
But it was automating away other people's repetition that got boring.I was in 'tools' - we administered the SCM and wrote programs to automate the repetative stuff the product developers needed to do. There were advantages to this: lots of small programs means you get to do everything from business analysis to final testing. The main product was ~3,000,000 lines of code, and work on it was much more compartmentalized.
PhD in Astronomy, 1998. My thesis dragged out endlessly so that once I'd finished it, I couldn't stand the thought of doing the work to create some papers out of it. Also, I wanted to come back home (New Zealand) and astronomy jobs are hard to get here.
1998-2003: Commercial programmer. OK at first, but eventually I was just doing the same old stuff again and again. I was getting very bored and I think because of that, unproductive.
So now I'm an applied mathematician in bioinformatics (having studied no biology since early high school). I was earning 40% more at the previous job, but it is worth it to be doing something interesting again.
Money is nice (a friend once called it "the sincerest form of appreciation") but having new, challenging and interesting things to do is more important.
Yes. The description of how it works is sufficient to justify my comments.
The ordinary-TV-behind-mirror-glass won't be quite as good, but I can't say how much worse without real evidence.
I believe you.
When I read the summary, I thought "Is this anything more clever than just a semi-reflective coat on a flat TV screen?" The answer is "no".
This means:
a) With one of these, all those annoying reflections you get off your TV screen already get hugely worse.
b) You could get much the same effect much cheaper by putting a standard sheet of semi-reflective glass in front of your standard TV.
This isn't really what you're after but:
I played the MMORPG "Dark Ages of Camelot" for a while. One of my characters practiced fletching (arrow making). Practising this would involve buying raw materials, then clicking an icon to make a bunch of arrows. It would take about 7 to 20 seconds to make a bunch of arrows (depending on the type I was making.) Then you click the icon again, repeat until you run out of raw materials.
This was, of course, tremendously tedious - so I used my Lego Mindstorms to make a little device to click my mouse button every X seconds. I'd buy my materials, position the mouse over the icon, and start it up. Then I'd have a shower or whatever, come back 10 minutes later and sell the arrows and buy new raw materials.
(I expect by now, and possibly even back then, there are software hacks to achieve this with more convenience and flexibility.)
PS: I actually turned this on one time to get rid of spam, blocking a whole bunch of legit email in the process. Ooops. hello internet just enforce the tools that you already posses.
/dev/null'ed, but rather quarantined. 24 hours later, they get compared to digests of known recent spam (requires a spam report clearing house, such as SpamCop). If they do not match, they get sent on, with an attached explanation as to why they were held up for 24 hours.
An idea for dealing with false positives: Any e-mail that fails some spam test (server on a blacklist, server doesn't sign its mail, whatever) doesn't get
Benefits:
1) Few or no false positives
2) Applies pressure on administrators of non-conforming servers to conform - they will get complaints about delayed outgoing e-mail.
3) Because it is less extream than black-holing non-conforming servers, it can be introduced without causing the end of the internet.
I think we're just talking to each other now.
You could develop a theory of lasers based purely on non-relativistic QM: you only need to know about energy levels in atoms, stimulated emission, population inversion. A truely deep understanding of these phenomina does require SR, but you can understand them without SR well enough to build a laser. (Just like a truely deep understanding of QED requires a grand unified theory, we are still able to do lots of stuff without one.)
You've missed my point on the distinction between 'depends on' and 'needs to account for'. If you don't account for GR, all that happens is you get subtly wrong results. We can fly to Mars without knowning GR: we just have to make more course corrections. We can build GPS without knowing GR: we just have lower accuracy and perhaps have to account for an unexplained 'drift' in coordinates.
Now try to build a transistor or laser without knowing QM: we couldn't even conceive they were possible short of 'magic', and wouldn't have the slightest idea how to start making one if someone insisted it was possible.
I think they are normally called "trits".
On the otherhand, Google only got 5090 hits for "trits" and 16,600,000 for "tits", so perhaps that is the more common term. I see, however, that the top hit for "tits" is about bird-watching, so this alternative meaning may have contaminated the results.
There is non-relativistic QM: QED postdates QM by about 20-30 years. I'm pretty sure that lasers, semiconductors and microwave ovens are explainable in non-relativistic QM. (It's been a while since I did any QM.)
See the footnote in my original post: GPS and interplanetary probes have to account for GR, but they do not depend on it. If we lived in a Newtonian universe, they would still work.
Five years ago, every cosmologist "knew" that the universe was flat and matter supplied the critical density (in other words, no dark energy, that 70%). Conventional wisdom has completely changed with the discovery of the accelerating universe.
No they didn't. I hung out with cosmologists when doing my astrophysics PhD over 10 years ago, and they were considering various mixes of hot and cold dark matter, dark energy, open and closed universes. Flat universe and no dark energy was merely the provisionally accepted most likely solution.
The implied existence of dark energy is revolutionary to cosmology, but it didn't catch people by surprise - they were actively looking for it.
Actually it will make a huge difference. Just look at how Bohr's model of the atom changed chemistry and particle physics. Or how Plank's quantum theory caused a revolution in the physics community.
Quantum physics (which includes both of your examples) has been around about 80 years, and huge amounts of modern technology depend on it.
Special relativity has been around nearly 100 years. I'm not brave enough to say there are no technologies that depend* on it, but they are very rare.
General relativity has been around for about 85 years. There is no technology that depends* on it.
I'm all for understanding dark matter and dark energy, but don't expect a technological payoff.
(* "Depends" means allows doing things that would be impossible in classical theory. "Needs to account for" is more common, although still rare.)
Good changes:
Skipping the old forest and scouring of the Shire (although I'd have liked a direct-to-video version of those), greater role for Arwen. In the context of a movie, these changes work really well.
My really major peave:
The dead turn up to win the battle at Minas Tirith, (ROTK nitpick 40). This has two major bad effects:
(1) It completely devalues all of the heroism of the soldiers of Gondor and Rohan - the only effect they had was to delay the outcome long enough for the dead to arrive, and that could have happened in time without them had Aragon just left for the paths of the dead a day earlier.
(2) The structure of TLoTR has a climax that is locatable to a single sentence: the good guys are disparing when the corsair's ships come up the river, thinking that Pelagir has fallen, and reinforcements are coming for the enemy. Then the clouds break and Aragon's royal banner is unfurled on the lead ship. There was much rejoicing. This should have made for a hugely cinematic moment, but instead we got light humour (Aragon, Gimli, Legolas jumping on to the dock and making a comment about 'plenty of orcs for everyone.')
"Must have experience with a write-only scripting language" which we all know refers to Perl :P
Spoken like someone who has never programed Bourne Shell, yet alone C shell or JCL.
An inability to lie convincingly in response to silly interview questions.
If you're qualified:
(1) Apply for the job.
(2) Get the job. (Might not be trivial.)
(3) When in the job, don't sign anything that isn't true.
(4) SCO fires you (because they can't publish true financial statements.)
(5) Sue SCO for wrongful dismissal.
(6) Get to show in court that they fired you for refusing to act illegally.
(7) PROFIT!
Of course, sometime between (5) and (6) SCO ceases to exist due to other court cases, so (7) never happens.
Somebody just helicoptered to the south pole and back. They spent two years planning, had fuel dumps, etc etc.
This guy gave no warning, no indication in his registered flight path that he was going to the south pole (said he was going to South America), and kept flying beyond his point of no-return on the assumption that McMurdo would bail him out when he landed on their doorstep.
(But they are refusing to sell him the fuel. He will be charged for accomodation, flight home, shipping of airplane.)