As a non-physicist, I have yet to hear a good explanation for any useful means of turning faster-than-light travel into time travel, and every explanation I have heard sounds pretty absurd.
If an a cause triggers an effect somewhere else in a faster-than-light fashion, sure, an outside observer in some frame of reference might be able to observe it occurring before the cause. This happens any time that the outside observer is closer to the effect than to the cause. However, at no point does that observer observe the effect before the cause occurs. If that observer is, for example, five light years away from the effect and ten light years away from the cause, then the observer still observes the effect five years after the cause occurred.
Similarly, when we have observer A seeing a body B moving slower than the speed of light and a body C moving faster than the speed of light towards it (but slower than the speed of light relative to A), observer A will observe both body B and body C observing each other's past events in reverse chronological order from the order that body A observes them. However, they have still already happened from the perspective of each of B and C by the time either of the other bodies observes the event, so no causality is violated. And even if information could travel at an effectively infinite speed between B and C, this would still hold true because the near infinitely small time it takes information to travel from B to C would ensure that any information passed back to B would arrive later. If B is closer to A, it would appear to have been received by B after it was sent by B, but before it was sent by C. From another frame of reference the reverse might be true. The key to preserving causality is that there must not be a frame of reference in which both are true.
Could somebody please explain to me what I'm missing?
Even more broadly, nearly everyone is dumb (and I include myself in that number, you too, no insult intended) about some things.
You're not using the words "smart" and "dumb" correctly here. Everyone displays varying depth of knowledge in different areas (except for those who have minimal knowledge in any area, of course). Everyone displays greater aptitude for various skills. However, intelligent people are able to identify areas where they lack sufficient information or skills to do a task. It isn't ignorance that separates the intelligent from the stupid, but rather reasoning skills sufficient to learn what is necessary after one's ignorance is pointed out.
For example, sure, your mother-in-law missed the subtext. That just means she hasn't been exposed to enough ultra-conservative Christian folks to recognize it. Once you pointed it out, though, I'd imagine she was able to recognize it. Similarly, your mother probably hasn't done any higher level math since high school or college, and has probably forgotten most of it. It's a skill that has to be refreshed. That doesn't mean she wasn't capable of learning it once, nor that she isn't capable of understanding it again if she felt the need to do so.
So what you meant to say is that everyone is ignorant about something, and that most people are learned about at least some things. And that is certainly true. You can't be smart or stupid about something. You're either intelligent or you aren't.
And you'll notice I use the word "stupid" rather than "dumb" because the latter can also mean "mute".
I read it that way too. Twice. It's a page design problem, or more precisely three: the use of a sans serif font, insufficient letter spacing that causes the "P" to run into the "l", and using white text on green.
Amusingly, if we lived on a planet with two suns that had black plants, we might never have discovered the color green, and the text might have been more readable.
However, I think it's easy to damage the microwave if you keep it running for too long, since the CD doesn't contain a whole lot of water that can absorb the energy.
Doesn't the glass plate at the bottom of the microwave absorb enough by itself to prevent damage? I thought that was the whole reason for having a glass plate at the bottom instead of just using bare metal.
What we have here is an excellent demonstration of why drives in a RAID array should never under any circumstances be purchased at the same time, from the same lot, from the same manufacturer.
Sadly, the odds of losing a second drive while you're replacing a drive in a RAID-5 set are not exactly small. The odds are a lot higher than the statistics suggest they should be. In a RAID set, you are using theoretically identical drives to perform nearly identical operations (ignoring the subtle difference between reading and writing on a given track) under nearly identical thermal, acoustic, and vibration conditions. Thus the odds are remarkably good that every drive will fail after nearly identical periods of use. More accurately, any departure from near-simultaneous failure is evidence of a manufacturing flaw in the failed drive.
Ideally, you should buy drives for a RAID array one at a time, spaced a couple of months apart, using them regularly as desktop drives until you're ready to RAID them. You should then move everything off of those drives onto a temp drive or two, build the RAID set, and copy the data back. In this way, you significantly reduce the odds of losing the RAID set because of multiple drives failing just a few hours apart.
Ideally, you should also buy the drives from multiple manufacturers. Sure, this may leave a little wasted space on the larger drives due to slight size variations, but it significantly reduces the risk of data loss.
This is also a great example of why RAID arrays are not backups. Glad you didn't lose any data.:-)
It wouldn't require any more locking down than what you already have in Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, etc. You set permissions to disallow the guest user from writing anywhere on the local machine, then you net-mount the user's home directory, and all the user's reads and writes go in there. We had such setups on plain vanilla Sun workstations a decade ago, minus the automatic app installation.
Sure, if you want absolute security, there are a few little things you'd want to tweak around the edges—temp file handling, for example—but nothing big. It certainly shouldn't require preventing the machine's owner (the administrator) from arbitrarily modifying the machine.
Unless, of course, you meant the question of whether a random person can really trust somebody else's machine to not have key sniffers and that sort of thing, in which case the answer is, "No, and they couldn't trust that no matter how much the manufacturer locks down the OS because you can just as easily put a USB key sniffer inside the keyboard itself."
Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints. Pingback, Done (unless he means forcing reverse linking... HAHA, screw THAT!)
Yeah, there's a fine line between good in theory and good in practice. In practice, the site owner doesn't want an automatic link back to the linking site just because somebody decided to link to his/her page from goat.se.
Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified. - Not Done
Every user is uniquely and securely identified. - SSL, Done
Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster. Raid1,5, Done (unless he means forced mirroring, again SCREW THAT)
I think the key was "every". Not every server is configured for SSL and not every server has any sort of authentication. (BTW, SSL identifies the server, too (badly), and essentially nobody uses SSL certificates for user authentication, so OpenID or similar would probably have been a better solution to mention for identifying the user.)
It also brings into question the idea of sin, since natural selection is argued to produce behaviors historically regarded as sinful.
Ah, but that misses a very key truth about natural selection: goodness is also rewarded by the system. Tribes and herds and hunting packs survive better by working as a team. Similarly, the hunted also survive better by working together for the common defense. Monogamy prevents the spread of diseases and makes it easier to determine parentage. And so on.
For every sinful thing that natural selection selects for, one can also point out a good and holy thing that natural selection selects for, assuming that one takes the time to look. And so, evolution and natural selection can be thought of as a battle of good versus evil, played out on a planetary scale.
Either way, the folks arguing for evolution should take comfort in the realization that it has only been about 500 years since Copernicus posited a heliocentric universe, and to my knowledge there are no longer any mainstream Christian sects that still believe in a Ptolemaic universe.
The problem is that it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. When you tax sales, you're reducing sales by that percentage. So now Amazon makes 10% less profit, and the corporate income tax on that money comes out of either your state's general fund or some other state's general fund. And the money that they would have spend hiring an extra employee comes out of that other state's general fund. And so on.
For example, in California, for every dollar you bring in via sales tax, you lose nine cents of it in corporate income taxes right up front, and if that money would have resulted in an extra employee, you lose up to another 9.3%. And to the extent that the employee would have spent that on something, you lose another 9%. So even after just a couple of iterations, you've lost a fourth of that income.
From an economic perspective (and thus, a tax revenue perspective), the absolute worst thing you can do for the economy is to punish the people who are actively spending money and thus contributing to economic prosperity, because all that does is reduce the amount of money flowing into the economy. The best thing you can do is tax the money that is sitting around not contributing. This means raising taxes on all unearned income (bank interest, stock market capital gains, etc.). Unfortunately, the people who are making the decisions have more unearned income than average, and don't want to raise taxes on themselves.
The root of the problem is that every dollar you put into the stock market is essentially a loan, and while that's better than pulling it out of the economy entirely, it isn't as good as spending the money. It isn't a permanent part of the economy. The same thing goes for interest paid on bank accounts and that sort of thing; you're making that interest because you effectively loaned that money, putting it temporarily into the economy.
If you really want to improve state and federal income, you have to start by taking steps to encourage hiring and discourage excessive saving (beyond what is needed for retirement), while at the same time discouraging debt. This means:
doubling the minimum wage
offsetting that for small businesses by lowering corporate tax rates and adding a tax exemption for the first million dollars of corporate income
eliminating the tax exemption on corporate profits made overseas
lowering or eliminating income taxes for people in the bottom tax bracket(s)
raising income taxes for people in the upper bracket(s)
eliminating sales taxes altogether
raising capital gains taxes to at least the same level as ordinary income
eliminating the maximum wage limit for Roth IRAs
significantly increasing the contribution limits for Roth IRAs
eliminating the cap on wages for social security tax purposes
extending the social security tax to include unearned income.
This is, of course, contrary to the economic goals of either major party. And people wonder why our country is going bankrupt.
Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. Technically, it is the sale that is taxed, not the business, and not the consumer. The fact remains however, that the business is responsible for paying the tax on the sale, regardless of whether that tax was actually collected from the customer, so by any useful standard, the business is being taxed on the sale, not the consumer.
I suppose you also think that the universal service fund cost recovery fee is a tax on phone users.:-)
Uh, no, my argument explains precisely why you do have to pay their local sales taxes instead of your own. It's because in effect, you are not paying the sales tax. The business is paying it. You are merely reimbursing the business.
That still doesn't seem sufficient reason to put those brick-and-mortar stores at a disadvantage to internet retailers, and there are many potential ways to deal with it.
They're not at a disadvantage. That's a fallacy. They are merely differently advantaged. It's like two guys, one with big muscles, one with a big brain. Each has abilities the other doesn't have.
Retail advantages:
Instant gratification.
More impulse buying.
No shipping costs.
Mail order advantages:
Bigger buying power
Lower overhead (warehouse in the boonies vs. retail space in town, etc.)
It's even sillier than that. The sales tax on most products is largely cancelled out by the shipping cost, for the most part. Even places that offer free shipping are doing so by eating the cost of shipping. And if they can do it, there's no reason that a local business can't do it, too, ignoring differences in purchasing power.
Amazon and friends do not destroy local businesses because of lack of sales tax, nor because of any taxes on inventory. Amazon and friends destroy local businesses because they have only a half dozen warehouses that can service the entire country instead of tens of thousands of little retail-style warehouses all over the country.
Retail stores are relatively expensive. If you aren't moving big ticket items (e.g. electronics) or moving high volume, it's hard to stay in business unless you own the store, and even then, it's a labor of love because you could usually make more money renting it out to somebody who does do high volume or sell big ticket items.
Yes, but the sales tax is not collected by the state from the consumer. The sales tax is collected by the state from the business, who has a choice of either charging the consumer that tax or taking it out of their profit margin. The business, assuming it has no significant nexus in the state, is being taxed without representation.
A much more reasonable place to put it, IMO, would have been the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, where they have lots of space-related exhibits all together in one place. Putting a single shuttle in NYC by itself in a city that has basically no other space-related exhibits makes little sense.
His girlfriend was the director of programming for Fox and changed the time slot for House. This made her Airport Express mad at her, so it is withholding sex with her other wireless access point as punishment.
I mean, jeez. How hard can it be to understand? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
But for an alien with a 500 year lifespan to spend that 500 years in a saucer-shaped vehicle that holds enough fuel to travel many light years' distance in a volume equivalent to a spacious city apartment, I'd say food would be an issue, to say nothing of insanity.
Okay, let's say a 10,000 year lifespan, if that makes you happier....
No animal we've ever encountered can hibernate for even one full year.
Until last year, no animal we had encountered could produce energy by photosynthesis, either.
Which is yet another reason to discredit the article. Whomever perpetrated this fraud wasn't even far-sighted enough to postulate aliens that were significantly different from humans.
I tend to agree with you there, but it's possible that a roughly human form is a fairly optimal structure. Without a few billion examples of extraterrestrial life, it's rather hard to say for certain. And that's not even taking into account the possibility of exogenesis/panspermia.
Mind you, I'd say there are probably a million to one odds that it was deliberate disinformation, but there's still that long shot. I'd imagine that the odds of aliens existing are pretty close to 100%, but that the odds of aliens having enough in common with us to be interested in meeting us are slim, and that the odds of us ever actually meeting them across the vast expanse of space would make even the odds of them being interested seem huge by comparison. So one in a million is probably a high estimate....
But seriously, the big media does, or at least should play an important filtering role—finding the diamonds among the coal. The problem is that about twenty years ago, they realized they could just sell the coal, and that by the time people realized it was coal, they could find a new way to polish the coal to fool people into buying more of it. It was at that point that the old guard stopped being useful.
And now they're complaining that their incompetence has resulted in their obsolescence. This is the world's smallest violin playing the world's shortest copyrighted tune at a low enough volume that they can't sue over it.
However your premise is that someone knowingly hacks the power. What if they didn't realize that the changes they are making does damage? The interaction of hardware and software is complex. No manufacturer can know every scenario that occurs.
You might as well be asking what happens if the sky is green. Anybody pushing the CPU hard enough to cause damage is going to get constant kernel panics and won't continue trying to use that OS.
Anybody not pushing the CPU hard enough to have nearly continuous crashes is also almost certainly not pushing it hard enough to damage things unless the chip designer made a serious mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
As a non-physicist, I have yet to hear a good explanation for any useful means of turning faster-than-light travel into time travel, and every explanation I have heard sounds pretty absurd.
If an a cause triggers an effect somewhere else in a faster-than-light fashion, sure, an outside observer in some frame of reference might be able to observe it occurring before the cause. This happens any time that the outside observer is closer to the effect than to the cause. However, at no point does that observer observe the effect before the cause occurs. If that observer is, for example, five light years away from the effect and ten light years away from the cause, then the observer still observes the effect five years after the cause occurred.
Similarly, when we have observer A seeing a body B moving slower than the speed of light and a body C moving faster than the speed of light towards it (but slower than the speed of light relative to A), observer A will observe both body B and body C observing each other's past events in reverse chronological order from the order that body A observes them. However, they have still already happened from the perspective of each of B and C by the time either of the other bodies observes the event, so no causality is violated. And even if information could travel at an effectively infinite speed between B and C, this would still hold true because the near infinitely small time it takes information to travel from B to C would ensure that any information passed back to B would arrive later. If B is closer to A, it would appear to have been received by B after it was sent by B, but before it was sent by C. From another frame of reference the reverse might be true. The key to preserving causality is that there must not be a frame of reference in which both are true.
Could somebody please explain to me what I'm missing?
...the inevitable commercial.
You wouldn't copy a VCR.... You wouldn't copy a car.... Don't copy movies....
You're not using the words "smart" and "dumb" correctly here. Everyone displays varying depth of knowledge in different areas (except for those who have minimal knowledge in any area, of course). Everyone displays greater aptitude for various skills. However, intelligent people are able to identify areas where they lack sufficient information or skills to do a task. It isn't ignorance that separates the intelligent from the stupid, but rather reasoning skills sufficient to learn what is necessary after one's ignorance is pointed out.
For example, sure, your mother-in-law missed the subtext. That just means she hasn't been exposed to enough ultra-conservative Christian folks to recognize it. Once you pointed it out, though, I'd imagine she was able to recognize it. Similarly, your mother probably hasn't done any higher level math since high school or college, and has probably forgotten most of it. It's a skill that has to be refreshed. That doesn't mean she wasn't capable of learning it once, nor that she isn't capable of understanding it again if she felt the need to do so.
So what you meant to say is that everyone is ignorant about something, and that most people are learned about at least some things. And that is certainly true. You can't be smart or stupid about something. You're either intelligent or you aren't.
And you'll notice I use the word "stupid" rather than "dumb" because the latter can also mean "mute".
I read it that way too. Twice. It's a page design problem, or more precisely three: the use of a sans serif font, insufficient letter spacing that causes the "P" to run into the "l", and using white text on green.
Amusingly, if we lived on a planet with two suns that had black plants, we might never have discovered the color green, and the text might have been more readable.
Doesn't the glass plate at the bottom of the microwave absorb enough by itself to prevent damage? I thought that was the whole reason for having a glass plate at the bottom instead of just using bare metal.
What we have here is an excellent demonstration of why drives in a RAID array should never under any circumstances be purchased at the same time, from the same lot, from the same manufacturer.
Sadly, the odds of losing a second drive while you're replacing a drive in a RAID-5 set are not exactly small. The odds are a lot higher than the statistics suggest they should be. In a RAID set, you are using theoretically identical drives to perform nearly identical operations (ignoring the subtle difference between reading and writing on a given track) under nearly identical thermal, acoustic, and vibration conditions. Thus the odds are remarkably good that every drive will fail after nearly identical periods of use. More accurately, any departure from near-simultaneous failure is evidence of a manufacturing flaw in the failed drive.
Ideally, you should buy drives for a RAID array one at a time, spaced a couple of months apart, using them regularly as desktop drives until you're ready to RAID them. You should then move everything off of those drives onto a temp drive or two, build the RAID set, and copy the data back. In this way, you significantly reduce the odds of losing the RAID set because of multiple drives failing just a few hours apart.
Ideally, you should also buy the drives from multiple manufacturers. Sure, this may leave a little wasted space on the larger drives due to slight size variations, but it significantly reduces the risk of data loss.
This is also a great example of why RAID arrays are not backups. Glad you didn't lose any data. :-)
It wouldn't require any more locking down than what you already have in Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, etc. You set permissions to disallow the guest user from writing anywhere on the local machine, then you net-mount the user's home directory, and all the user's reads and writes go in there. We had such setups on plain vanilla Sun workstations a decade ago, minus the automatic app installation.
Sure, if you want absolute security, there are a few little things you'd want to tweak around the edges—temp file handling, for example—but nothing big. It certainly shouldn't require preventing the machine's owner (the administrator) from arbitrarily modifying the machine.
Unless, of course, you meant the question of whether a random person can really trust somebody else's machine to not have key sniffers and that sort of thing, in which case the answer is, "No, and they couldn't trust that no matter how much the manufacturer locks down the OS because you can just as easily put a USB key sniffer inside the keyboard itself."
What's the square of a googolplex?
St. John's, liver, or butter?
Yeah, there's a fine line between good in theory and good in practice. In practice, the site owner doesn't want an automatic link back to the linking site just because somebody decided to link to his/her page from goat.se.
I think the key was "every". Not every server is configured for SSL and not every server has any sort of authentication. (BTW, SSL identifies the server, too (badly), and essentially nobody uses SSL certificates for user authentication, so OpenID or similar would probably have been a better solution to mention for identifying the user.)
Ah, but that misses a very key truth about natural selection: goodness is also rewarded by the system. Tribes and herds and hunting packs survive better by working as a team. Similarly, the hunted also survive better by working together for the common defense. Monogamy prevents the spread of diseases and makes it easier to determine parentage. And so on.
For every sinful thing that natural selection selects for, one can also point out a good and holy thing that natural selection selects for, assuming that one takes the time to look. And so, evolution and natural selection can be thought of as a battle of good versus evil, played out on a planetary scale.
Either way, the folks arguing for evolution should take comfort in the realization that it has only been about 500 years since Copernicus posited a heliocentric universe, and to my knowledge there are no longer any mainstream Christian sects that still believe in a Ptolemaic universe.
When I was a child, I thought like a child....
The problem is that it's just robbing Peter to pay Paul. When you tax sales, you're reducing sales by that percentage. So now Amazon makes 10% less profit, and the corporate income tax on that money comes out of either your state's general fund or some other state's general fund. And the money that they would have spend hiring an extra employee comes out of that other state's general fund. And so on.
For example, in California, for every dollar you bring in via sales tax, you lose nine cents of it in corporate income taxes right up front, and if that money would have resulted in an extra employee, you lose up to another 9.3%. And to the extent that the employee would have spent that on something, you lose another 9%. So even after just a couple of iterations, you've lost a fourth of that income.
From an economic perspective (and thus, a tax revenue perspective), the absolute worst thing you can do for the economy is to punish the people who are actively spending money and thus contributing to economic prosperity, because all that does is reduce the amount of money flowing into the economy. The best thing you can do is tax the money that is sitting around not contributing. This means raising taxes on all unearned income (bank interest, stock market capital gains, etc.). Unfortunately, the people who are making the decisions have more unearned income than average, and don't want to raise taxes on themselves.
The root of the problem is that every dollar you put into the stock market is essentially a loan, and while that's better than pulling it out of the economy entirely, it isn't as good as spending the money. It isn't a permanent part of the economy. The same thing goes for interest paid on bank accounts and that sort of thing; you're making that interest because you effectively loaned that money, putting it temporarily into the economy.
If you really want to improve state and federal income, you have to start by taking steps to encourage hiring and discourage excessive saving (beyond what is needed for retirement), while at the same time discouraging debt. This means:
This is, of course, contrary to the economic goals of either major party. And people wonder why our country is going bankrupt.
Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. Technically, it is the sale that is taxed, not the business, and not the consumer. The fact remains however, that the business is responsible for paying the tax on the sale, regardless of whether that tax was actually collected from the customer, so by any useful standard, the business is being taxed on the sale, not the consumer.
I suppose you also think that the universal service fund cost recovery fee is a tax on phone users. :-)
Uh, no, my argument explains precisely why you do have to pay their local sales taxes instead of your own. It's because in effect, you are not paying the sales tax. The business is paying it. You are merely reimbursing the business.
They're not at a disadvantage. That's a fallacy. They are merely differently advantaged. It's like two guys, one with big muscles, one with a big brain. Each has abilities the other doesn't have.
Retail advantages:
Mail order advantages:
It's even sillier than that. The sales tax on most products is largely cancelled out by the shipping cost, for the most part. Even places that offer free shipping are doing so by eating the cost of shipping. And if they can do it, there's no reason that a local business can't do it, too, ignoring differences in purchasing power.
Amazon and friends do not destroy local businesses because of lack of sales tax, nor because of any taxes on inventory. Amazon and friends destroy local businesses because they have only a half dozen warehouses that can service the entire country instead of tens of thousands of little retail-style warehouses all over the country.
Retail stores are relatively expensive. If you aren't moving big ticket items (e.g. electronics) or moving high volume, it's hard to stay in business unless you own the store, and even then, it's a labor of love because you could usually make more money renting it out to somebody who does do high volume or sell big ticket items.
Yes, but the sales tax is not collected by the state from the consumer. The sales tax is collected by the state from the business, who has a choice of either charging the consumer that tax or taking it out of their profit margin. The business, assuming it has no significant nexus in the state, is being taxed without representation.
Agreed.
A much more reasonable place to put it, IMO, would have been the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, where they have lots of space-related exhibits all together in one place. Putting a single shuttle in NYC by itself in a city that has basically no other space-related exhibits makes little sense.
Too subtle? :-D
I guess obtaining the key must have been a piece of cake....
What is there to understand?
His girlfriend was the director of programming for Fox and changed the time slot for House. This made her Airport Express mad at her, so it is withholding sex with her other wireless access point as punishment.
I mean, jeez. How hard can it be to understand? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Okay, let's say a 10,000 year lifespan, if that makes you happier....
Until last year, no animal we had encountered could produce energy by photosynthesis, either.
I tend to agree with you there, but it's possible that a roughly human form is a fairly optimal structure. Without a few billion examples of extraterrestrial life, it's rather hard to say for certain. And that's not even taking into account the possibility of exogenesis/panspermia.
Mind you, I'd say there are probably a million to one odds that it was deliberate disinformation, but there's still that long shot. I'd imagine that the odds of aliens existing are pretty close to 100%, but that the odds of aliens having enough in common with us to be interested in meeting us are slim, and that the odds of us ever actually meeting them across the vast expanse of space would make even the odds of them being interested seem huge by comparison. So one in a million is probably a high estimate....
...but it was indistinguishable from a bunch of drunk guys stumbling around in a crowded SF Muni station.
In My House Of Pancakes?
But seriously, the big media does, or at least should play an important filtering role—finding the diamonds among the coal. The problem is that about twenty years ago, they realized they could just sell the coal, and that by the time people realized it was coal, they could find a new way to polish the coal to fool people into buying more of it. It was at that point that the old guard stopped being useful.
And now they're complaining that their incompetence has resulted in their obsolescence. This is the world's smallest violin playing the world's shortest copyrighted tune at a low enough volume that they can't sue over it.
You might as well be asking what happens if the sky is green. Anybody pushing the CPU hard enough to cause damage is going to get constant kernel panics and won't continue trying to use that OS.
Anybody not pushing the CPU hard enough to have nearly continuous crashes is also almost certainly not pushing it hard enough to damage things unless the chip designer made a serious mistake.