I think the universe must be orientable because there is experimental evidence of CP symmetry breaking. Which means if the universe is nonorientable, it must flip charge, parity, and time or disagree with experiment. Hard to see how time can become flipped by making a trip around the universe, with homogeneity and the second law of thermodynamics being held everywhere.
Can you explain this more? By a "trip around the universe" do you mean in the sense of a trip around a Mobius strip? As the universe is seeming growing too fast to allow that, I'm not sure you can argue from that. Or are you thinking of some experiment that some high-tech culture could actually perform?
We consistently find that our extrapolations about the universe from experiments we can perform don't turn out to agree with new data when we get to it (and thank goodness, or science would be "done" and how boring would that be?).
BTW, did you know recent observations imply large-scale structures that are really too large to be consistent with "homogeneity at sufficient scale"? 10B LY or so now, though I'm not sure how far along that is in terms of certainty of measurement.
And so what? Regardless of that and every other such factor, we have a really nice standard of living, which naturally isn't cheap. And programming can easily be done anywhere. So that's the world as we find it, and it's one in which we can compete, and we can succeed. The programming culture of Silly Valley and now Seattle is a testament to that: a fairly representative sample of programmers the world over including, yes, Americans, being paid quite well indeed even by American standards.
Oh? I thought the PV panels efficient enough to be economically worthwhile were the gallium arsenide panels - it that wrong now? Getting more gallium isn't a matter of scaling up, as there no such thing as a gallium mine - it's a "waste product" of mining zinc and aluminum (bauxite ore), and is only economically viable because we need those metals for other things. Is there a new high-efficiency panel tech now that's not gallium constrained?
If we don't care too much about efficiency then solar thermal will always be there fore us, at about twice the price of current power generation IIRC. Not bad to fall back on if there were any truth to Peak Whatever.
Aha, so you would rather live in a place where the strong get it all...
So what part of providing policing, building infrastructure, enforcing contracts, and preventing fraud means the strong get it all? I mean, more than they do now? Or are you trying to say that no one should be more successful than another, regardless of effort or ability? (I'm setting national defense off to the side, as that's a whole different argument that would just be a distraction here.)
Seriously, I don't get it - could you make your position clear?
I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
Everything any of us ever do affect the community. Having sex for purposes other than procreation means we won't be having kids that we might otherwise (and we do have a problem with native population decline - but you can reverse the example if you like). Every time you drive, you risk the lives of yourself and everyone near you. Everything we say might offend someone, somewhere, deeply.
Freedom always means the right to harm others, to some degree. We tolerate that harm, when it's minor, because freedom is more important. It's a matter of degree, not black-and-white. And I chose the toilet example carefully because the law doesn't help anything. A small percentage of water is used inside the home anyhow, and subsidies of water use for agricultural irrigation are the root of the problem most often when there's a shortage.
My first software development job paid $18k the first year. In a major US city. I competed. And I was already living like a student, with 2 roommates in a scary neighborhood, so I was just happy for my big break! I make rather more now (and all the electronics I wanted back then cost less now - yay technology).
Rice costs money to ship. Programming can be done anywhere. That's the world we live in, it's up to us to succeed in that world. And we certainly can, for demand continues to exceed supply of talent! The talent pool was growing exponentially for most of my career, doubling every few years as new regions come online. Now it's just linear - n new compsci grads every year. Now it seems clear it isn't a race to the bottom, but instead a source of uplift worldwide.
There's plenty of criticism of the amount of tuning required for inflationary models. When you're tuning the model so that the bubbles grow just fast enough, and stop at just the right time, to give us the universe we see, you're just moving the problem. But I'm not an expert on this stuff, all I know is that many experts are dissatisfied.
There are apparently a large number of flat closed* topologies for 3D space, each of which would show a different sort of repeating pattern in the CMBR - some quite subtle. I think in the 90s and early 2000s there was a group of cosmologists cataloging hundreds of possible universe topologies, open and closed, and what each would look like in the CMBR. As the detailed CMBR data came in, none of that was found. Poor cosmologists - the work is valuable in showing they were wrong, but you don't build a great career on that.
*I can't keep the technical jargon straight, but whatever word means "there exists some maximum distance which no two points on this manifold can exceed"
While there have been inflation models tuned to exactly that, all that does is move the "fine tuning", it's not really any more satisfactory. However, if any such theory works out to exactly explain dark energy I'll be impressed! There's lot of work going on there, but nothing impressive yet.
is any level of western education going to make it cost-competitive to those at the distant ends of the ethernet cable? Better to help them improve their lifestyles such that they insource to western neighborhoods...
That's a shockingly insightful question for a/. FP! There's two separate issue here, if most of the good jobs in the future are something to do with automation (as seems likely).
How do we make life better here by ensuring we have our share of people who can code - at least code enough for some other technical specialty once everything it? We definitely need to make CS as much a core subject as math, Few people are professional mathematicians (the recent fad in "data science" notwithstanding), but for decades previous most of the good jobs required at least basic math, for cost-benefit analysis and so on. Now simple coding is the same way: it's becoming important to decision making across new professions every year.
Separately, is this all a race to the bottom? Million-dollar houses in Bangalore say no. The average price of a 3-bedroom house there is over $250k, has been for a while - more than many places in the US. It takes time for developing nations to develop, emerging economies to emerge, but it does happen. And it's terrific for the world that it does - we have no special moral right to a better standard of living than anyplace else where CS grads want a job, and it's not a zero-sum game. Until we reach the Singularity, we're not going to run out of tasks to automate.
Uh, uh - so everything belongs to the government then? Or just all of my income? I've heard that line before.
It takes a very small government indeed to provide policing and infrastructure, enforce contracts, and prevent fraud. That government doesn't need to tell me what kind of light bulbs to buy, or how much water my toilet can use when I flush it.
The government can provide the few useful services that it needs to provide without being in my bedroom, or reading my emails, or sending a quarter of my paycheck to my neighbor.
I've been saying that for years. As with moth things in life, we're better if the government stays out of it. Given time - and not that much time, really - solar wins because it's better. Last I heard current PV panels still need rare elements and so won't scale to TW production, but technology marches on. Solar can't be base load because we don't have good enough batteries yet at scale, but technology marches on. These problems seem likely to be gone in 20 years.
The latest generation works harder, for longer hours, with higher productivity, than any other generation before them
and
and is the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents.
And people actually modded that ridiculous bullshit up. That's the only point I'm making: this hyperbole makes you sound whiny as fuck. This goes beyond "first world problems" as even by the recent history of the first world, we have it very nice.
That's a bit of an overly-strong claim. * If the universe were smaller than the observable universe, we'd see the recurring patterns in the CMBR (or we'd see the Edge) and we don't, so we know that's not it. * If the universe were just a bit larger than the observable universe, that would be once heck of a coincidence, so that's probably not it. * But to distinguish between an infinite universe and one much larger than the observable universe? No way to tell.
Many theories assume the universe to be infinite as that makes the math easier, but all the theories about where the big bang came from are guesswork, and we shouldn't read too much into that.
The real mystery though is how the universe could be very nearly flat (without being exactly flat). Such "fine tuning" is clear evidence we're missing something quite fundamental. But then, dark energy already tells us that.
Think a bit about working conditions in the South a while back. You know, before that little war we had amongst ourselves? And looking within America for hardship is a bit silly in the first place - take a look around the world if you ever think you have it rough here!
Every century you can find a time where a generation had it worse than the one before; where working hours were "as long as you can see to work", 6 days a week. And history is full of civilizations that actually collapsed, or were invaded and slaughtered or enslaved by a stronger neighbor. But go ahead, tell me more about how young people in America are having a tough time.
Lasting economic downturns suck, but this is no worse than the 70s, and far better than the 30s, and really the worst economic times in America in the past 100 years are still better than most of the world has it today. What a whiner.
The latest generation works harder, for longer hours, with higher productivity, than any other generation before them
Hahahahaha. Productivity, sure, that's what technology means but harder? Longer hours? Do you even history?
and is the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents.
What a crock of shit. Do the words "Great Depression" mean anything to you? We get serious economic downturns every few generations, it's nothing special, and no, history didn't begin when you were born.
Why is Slashdot running a political hitpiece against Amazon in the firstplace? WTF Dice?? The SJW stories are bad enough, but at least they're usually trying to be somewhat tech-related. This is pure politcal/corporate propaganda.
Hehe, "nobody has stopped a mass shooting." ISIS, this week, Texas. Mass shooting stopped with two headshots. Of course, that hero was a cop, but clearly one who spends a lot of time at the range.
Wasn't there a school shooting this year that was stopped by someone armed at the school? As you say, many instances - they're just not newsworthy to the MSM.
Fraud is different, though. There's no "prior restraint" on fraud, slander, libel, etc - lies in general. Financial products, gossip mags, etc aren't forbidden, instead if you harm someone the justice system will come for you after the fact. As you say: the intent matters.
There's very little in America where a category of speech is simply banned whole cloth. Blasphemy is not illegal (Obama's "The future does not belong to those who mock the Prophet of Islam" nonwithstanding), "hate speech" is not illegal as a category, there's very little that is: pretty much just "speech intended to cause immediate violence", and some lingering obscenity laws.
WHEN the US starts thinking their people and their children lives have value, then perhaps they will finally take the steps to protect them by removing guns
Every mass shooting in my lifetime, except one, happened in a gun-free zone (the exception was a political shooting). Making guns illegal, by the evidence, just makes the shooter feel safe that there won't be any return fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the universe must be orientable because there is experimental evidence of CP symmetry breaking. Which means if the universe is nonorientable, it must flip charge, parity, and time or disagree with experiment. Hard to see how time can become flipped by making a trip around the universe, with homogeneity and the second law of thermodynamics being held everywhere.
Can you explain this more? By a "trip around the universe" do you mean in the sense of a trip around a Mobius strip? As the universe is seeming growing too fast to allow that, I'm not sure you can argue from that. Or are you thinking of some experiment that some high-tech culture could actually perform?
We consistently find that our extrapolations about the universe from experiments we can perform don't turn out to agree with new data when we get to it (and thank goodness, or science would be "done" and how boring would that be?).
BTW, did you know recent observations imply large-scale structures that are really too large to be consistent with "homogeneity at sufficient scale"? 10B LY or so now, though I'm not sure how far along that is in terms of certainty of measurement.
And so what? Regardless of that and every other such factor, we have a really nice standard of living, which naturally isn't cheap. And programming can easily be done anywhere. So that's the world as we find it, and it's one in which we can compete, and we can succeed. The programming culture of Silly Valley and now Seattle is a testament to that: a fairly representative sample of programmers the world over including, yes, Americans, being paid quite well indeed even by American standards.
Oh? I thought the PV panels efficient enough to be economically worthwhile were the gallium arsenide panels - it that wrong now? Getting more gallium isn't a matter of scaling up, as there no such thing as a gallium mine - it's a "waste product" of mining zinc and aluminum (bauxite ore), and is only economically viable because we need those metals for other things. Is there a new high-efficiency panel tech now that's not gallium constrained?
If we don't care too much about efficiency then solar thermal will always be there fore us, at about twice the price of current power generation IIRC. Not bad to fall back on if there were any truth to Peak Whatever.
Aha, so you would rather live in a place where the strong get it all...
So what part of providing policing, building infrastructure, enforcing contracts, and preventing fraud means the strong get it all? I mean, more than they do now? Or are you trying to say that no one should be more successful than another, regardless of effort or ability? (I'm setting national defense off to the side, as that's a whole different argument that would just be a distraction here.)
Seriously, I don't get it - could you make your position clear?
I mean, incandescent light bulbs and wasteful flushing is not only affecting your wallet but eventually the well-being of all on this planet.
Everything any of us ever do affect the community. Having sex for purposes other than procreation means we won't be having kids that we might otherwise (and we do have a problem with native population decline - but you can reverse the example if you like). Every time you drive, you risk the lives of yourself and everyone near you. Everything we say might offend someone, somewhere, deeply.
Freedom always means the right to harm others, to some degree. We tolerate that harm, when it's minor, because freedom is more important. It's a matter of degree, not black-and-white. And I chose the toilet example carefully because the law doesn't help anything. A small percentage of water is used inside the home anyhow, and subsidies of water use for agricultural irrigation are the root of the problem most often when there's a shortage.
oops: *universe topologies, flat and curved
My first software development job paid $18k the first year. In a major US city. I competed. And I was already living like a student, with 2 roommates in a scary neighborhood, so I was just happy for my big break! I make rather more now (and all the electronics I wanted back then cost less now - yay technology).
Rice costs money to ship. Programming can be done anywhere. That's the world we live in, it's up to us to succeed in that world. And we certainly can, for demand continues to exceed supply of talent! The talent pool was growing exponentially for most of my career, doubling every few years as new regions come online. Now it's just linear - n new compsci grads every year. Now it seems clear it isn't a race to the bottom, but instead a source of uplift worldwide.
There's plenty of criticism of the amount of tuning required for inflationary models. When you're tuning the model so that the bubbles grow just fast enough, and stop at just the right time, to give us the universe we see, you're just moving the problem. But I'm not an expert on this stuff, all I know is that many experts are dissatisfied.
There are apparently a large number of flat closed* topologies for 3D space, each of which would show a different sort of repeating pattern in the CMBR - some quite subtle. I think in the 90s and early 2000s there was a group of cosmologists cataloging hundreds of possible universe topologies, open and closed, and what each would look like in the CMBR. As the detailed CMBR data came in, none of that was found. Poor cosmologists - the work is valuable in showing they were wrong, but you don't build a great career on that.
*I can't keep the technical jargon straight, but whatever word means "there exists some maximum distance which no two points on this manifold can exceed"
While there have been inflation models tuned to exactly that, all that does is move the "fine tuning", it's not really any more satisfactory. However, if any such theory works out to exactly explain dark energy I'll be impressed! There's lot of work going on there, but nothing impressive yet.
is any level of western education going to make it cost-competitive to those at the distant ends of the ethernet cable? Better to help them improve their lifestyles such that they insource to western neighborhoods...
That's a shockingly insightful question for a /. FP! There's two separate issue here, if most of the good jobs in the future are something to do with automation (as seems likely).
How do we make life better here by ensuring we have our share of people who can code - at least code enough for some other technical specialty once everything it? We definitely need to make CS as much a core subject as math, Few people are professional mathematicians (the recent fad in "data science" notwithstanding), but for decades previous most of the good jobs required at least basic math, for cost-benefit analysis and so on. Now simple coding is the same way: it's becoming important to decision making across new professions every year.
Separately, is this all a race to the bottom? Million-dollar houses in Bangalore say no. The average price of a 3-bedroom house there is over $250k, has been for a while - more than many places in the US. It takes time for developing nations to develop, emerging economies to emerge, but it does happen. And it's terrific for the world that it does - we have no special moral right to a better standard of living than anyplace else where CS grads want a job, and it's not a zero-sum game. Until we reach the Singularity, we're not going to run out of tasks to automate.
Uh, uh - so everything belongs to the government then? Or just all of my income? I've heard that line before.
It takes a very small government indeed to provide policing and infrastructure, enforce contracts, and prevent fraud. That government doesn't need to tell me what kind of light bulbs to buy, or how much water my toilet can use when I flush it.
The government can provide the few useful services that it needs to provide without being in my bedroom, or reading my emails, or sending a quarter of my paycheck to my neighbor.
I've been saying that for years. As with moth things in life, we're better if the government stays out of it. Given time - and not that much time, really - solar wins because it's better. Last I heard current PV panels still need rare elements and so won't scale to TW production, but technology marches on. Solar can't be base load because we don't have good enough batteries yet at scale, but technology marches on. These problems seem likely to be gone in 20 years.
Shadow of Eternity said:
The latest generation works harder, for longer hours, with higher productivity, than any other generation before them
and
and is the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents.
And people actually modded that ridiculous bullshit up. That's the only point I'm making: this hyperbole makes you sound whiny as fuck. This goes beyond "first world problems" as even by the recent history of the first world, we have it very nice.
it seems likely that the universe is infinite.
That's a bit of an overly-strong claim.
* If the universe were smaller than the observable universe, we'd see the recurring patterns in the CMBR (or we'd see the Edge) and we don't, so we know that's not it.
* If the universe were just a bit larger than the observable universe, that would be once heck of a coincidence, so that's probably not it.
* But to distinguish between an infinite universe and one much larger than the observable universe? No way to tell.
Many theories assume the universe to be infinite as that makes the math easier, but all the theories about where the big bang came from are guesswork, and we shouldn't read too much into that.
The real mystery though is how the universe could be very nearly flat (without being exactly flat). Such "fine tuning" is clear evidence we're missing something quite fundamental. But then, dark energy already tells us that.
Kansas by all accounts defies spherical topology to achieve the Platonic Ideal of flat. The universe is just a shadow of Kansas seen on a cave wall.
Think a bit about working conditions in the South a while back. You know, before that little war we had amongst ourselves? And looking within America for hardship is a bit silly in the first place - take a look around the world if you ever think you have it rough here!
Every century you can find a time where a generation had it worse than the one before; where working hours were "as long as you can see to work", 6 days a week. And history is full of civilizations that actually collapsed, or were invaded and slaughtered or enslaved by a stronger neighbor. But go ahead, tell me more about how young people in America are having a tough time.
Lasting economic downturns suck, but this is no worse than the 70s, and far better than the 30s, and really the worst economic times in America in the past 100 years are still better than most of the world has it today. What a whiner.
Screw that, humanity's two best achievements are dentistry and air conditioning. Damn northerner!
45-65 = Boomers
65-85 = Gen X
85-05 = Millenials
05-25 = Digital Natives
Simple as that. No room for a Gen Y. Heck, people stopped having kids by 20 a while back, so the Millenials might stretch out to people born today.
The latest generation works harder, for longer hours, with higher productivity, than any other generation before them
Hahahahaha. Productivity, sure, that's what technology means but harder? Longer hours? Do you even history?
and is the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents.
What a crock of shit. Do the words "Great Depression" mean anything to you? We get serious economic downturns every few generations, it's nothing special, and no, history didn't begin when you were born.
Why is Slashdot running a political hitpiece against Amazon in the firstplace? WTF Dice?? The SJW stories are bad enough, but at least they're usually trying to be somewhat tech-related. This is pure politcal/corporate propaganda.
Alas, poor Slashdot - I knew him Horatio.
Hehe, "nobody has stopped a mass shooting." ISIS, this week, Texas. Mass shooting stopped with two headshots. Of course, that hero was a cop, but clearly one who spends a lot of time at the range.
Wasn't there a school shooting this year that was stopped by someone armed at the school? As you say, many instances - they're just not newsworthy to the MSM.
Well, calling competitive vidya an "eSport" is only relevant for marketing purposes.
CS and baseball have about as much in common as baseball and basketball. It's all marketing.
Please mod up - most informative post thus far.
Fraud is different, though. There's no "prior restraint" on fraud, slander, libel, etc - lies in general. Financial products, gossip mags, etc aren't forbidden, instead if you harm someone the justice system will come for you after the fact. As you say: the intent matters.
There's very little in America where a category of speech is simply banned whole cloth. Blasphemy is not illegal (Obama's "The future does not belong to those who mock the Prophet of Islam" nonwithstanding), "hate speech" is not illegal as a category, there's very little that is: pretty much just "speech intended to cause immediate violence", and some lingering obscenity laws.
WHEN the US starts thinking their people and their children lives have value, then perhaps they will finally take the steps to protect them by removing guns
Every mass shooting in my lifetime, except one, happened in a gun-free zone (the exception was a political shooting). Making guns illegal, by the evidence, just makes the shooter feel safe that there won't be any return fire.