A friend recently got a 10.1 inch Galaxy Note, and he raves about the stylus. It literally is a Wacom tablet that doubles as a screen. You might give that a try.
A symmetry doesn't mean there are multiple universes. It describes a property of our single universe.
Think of a square in a plane. A square has lots of symmetries. You can rotate it around its center by 90 degrees, or 180 degrees, or 270 degrees, and it remains unchanged. You also can mirror it about its center horizontally, or vertically, or across either of its diagonals. Any of these operations leaves the square completely unchanged. But that doesn't mean there are many different squares. There is just one square with lots of symmetries.
CPT invariance is the same way. It doesn't even make sense to talk about a "second universe" that is "a complete CPT reversal from ours". That second universe would be completely indistinguishable from ours. It would be exactly the same universe, in the same way that rotating a square by 90 degrees leaves you with exactly the same square. CPT invariance just means that our universe can be described in two different ways that are completely equivalent. Neither one is the "right" description or the "real" description. Both of them are equally good descriptions.
Yes, and not just photons. Any particle will follow the same path backward, as long as you also reverse its charge (which has no effect on a photon, since they're uncharged) and parity (which I think flips the polarization of a photon, but don't quote me on that). What CPT invariance really says is that there are two ways of describing the universe that are exactly equivalent in every way. They predict exactly the same result for any experiment you can ever do. But what one description calls "forward in time", the other one calls "backward in time".
The summary is a bit confusing if you don't know what it's talking about. The title is even worse, since it implies the exact opposite of what it actually means. Let me try to explain it.
First: physicists believe that the "arrow of time" isn't a fundamental property of the laws of nature. There's no fundamental difference between "forward in time" and "backward in time". The laws of physics operate identically in both directions. So why do those directions seem so different? Why do objects fall down but not up? Why can you make an egg into an omelet, but not an omelet back into an egg? Why can you remember the past, but not the future? This turns out to be a property of our local region of spacetime. More precisely, we live very close (a mere 13.5 billion years or so) away from a point of incredibly low entropy (known as "the big bang"), and that creates an entropy gradient throughout our region of spacetime. What we call "forward in time" simply means "the direction of increasing entropy", or more simply, "away from the big bang".
A good analogy (not involving a car - sorry!) is the direction "down". It seems obvious to you that one particular direction in space is fundamentally different from all other directions. Objects fall down. They don't fall in any other direction. Yet to person on the other side of the earth, the direction they call "down" is completely different from the direction you call "down". That's because the "arrow of gravity" is not a fundamental property of the laws of nature, just a property of our local region of space. "Down" means "toward the center of the earth." In the same way, "forward in time" means "away from the big bang".
Second: what I just said swept a few details under the rug. You see, the true symmetry is not time reversal (which would imply that simply reversing the direction of time would leave all laws of physics unchanged), but a slightly more complicated symmetry called CPT invariance. That stands for Charge, Parity, and Time. It says that if you multiply the charge of every particle by -1 (so positive charges become negative and negative become positive), flip space as if in a mirror so that your left and right sides are reversed (a "parity inversion"), and reverse the direction of time, then all the laws of physics are left unchanged.
Scientists had previously observed a violation of CP. That is, swapping only charge and parity is not an exact symmetry of the universe. If CPT is an exact symmetry (which scientists generally believe), that implies that T is not - changing only the direction of time without also swapping charge and parity should change the laws of physics. But testing that experimentally turned out to be very hard to do. Well, they've finally done it. And the results are exactly what people expected: it appears that CPT really is an exact symmetry of the universe.
I don't know where you get the idea this is about surviving an apocalypse, because it's not about that at all. It's about helping society and promoting progress. The article makes this point very clearly:
Fifty tools aren’t a hedge against the apocalypse, although if most of civilization is wiped out, survivors with Factor e Farm plans may at least have something to work with. What Jakubowski is trying to prove is that people can live without the help of corporations. A few years ago, his attempts at utopia kept being undermined by the costs of repairing his farm equipment. So he decided to cut out the middleman and forge his own gear. “If you’re going to try to build any kind of sustainable, model community, you find out quickly that the tools you need break down and are expensive,” he says. “Without fixing this situation, you’re always left conducting business as usual.”
After Factor e Farm completes its “Global Village Construction Set,” Jakubowski expects communities around the globe to use these tools, spurring an explosion of innovation as people take his tractors and drills and build even better ones. Eventually, this virtuous circle will yield equipment rivaling that made by market-leading corporations—a tractor that is 90 percent as good as a John Deere (DE) at a fraction of the price. Showing up established corporations is critical to Jakubowski, because, he says, they spend too much time obsessing over patents, spending millions on commercials, and generally getting in the way of progress. “We are calling our work the Open Source Economy,” he says. “We can collaborate on the machines and publish everything openly. We can reduce all of this competitive waste. You have to start somewhere.”
I'm curious how practical you find it in day to day use. This sort of vehicle seems like it could be really incompatible with existing infrastructure. It's too wide for many bike lanes, too slow to mix with cars, it doesn't fit on bike racks which rules out taking it on buses and trains. How do you work around those problems? And what do you do with it when you reach your destination? How do you lock it up?
This is complete nonsense. It does not mean "many apps are spying on users." It means those apps have permissions which could let them spy on users if they wanted to. In other news, 100% of Windows apps have the ability to spy on users, because Windows doesn't have a fine grained permissions model like Android does. Does that mean 100% of Windows apps "are spying on users?" No, and it doesn't mean Android apps are either.
Just consider the frightening implications of this:
...Every cell in your body will now need its own IP address. We haven't even completed the transition to IPv6, and its address space is already at risk of being depleted!
...They've designed a new internet, and built viruses into the very lowest level of infrastructure! And you think malware is a problem today?
Yes, that's exactly what they said in the article. From the summary: "They single out pharma, and suggest other legislative measures be found to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it."
That's the whole point. If the problem is that drug development is really expensive, you create laws to support drug development. You don't create a generic patent system that applies to all industries, even ones with no need for it, and provides exclusive rights to all inventions of all sorts, even when there's no evidence that doing so helps society. The bias should be to interfere in the market as little as possible and do so only when there's a clear benefit. Instead, our current system tries to interfere as much as possible and refrain from doing so only when... well, I was going to say, "only when there's a clear harm," but actually it doesn't even care about that. It just tries to interfere as much as possible and never refrain, even when there's a clear harm.
It's more complicated than that. A warp drive implies something that many people view as the "moral equivalent" of time travel, but that doesn't mean you can actually build a practical time machine.
Suppose you use a warp drive to travel faster than light. That means there exists a reference frame in which you appear to arrive before you left. More specifically, it's a reference frame that's moving very quickly relative to your starting point. That's very interesting. It implies some dramatic things about causality. But it's not what most people mean by "time travel". You really want to start at rest in some reference frame (say, the earth), and end at rest in that same reference frame, and have an observer in that reference frame see you arrive before you left. So far as I know, a warp drive does not allow you to do that.
Instead, it means that someone zipping past in a spaceship at 99% of the speed of light will shout out, "Hey! He just arrived before he left!" But he won't be able to stick around to chat about it, because in the time it took him to say those words he's already moved on some millions of kilometers.
Exactly. The "real problem" with software patents is that they exist at all. There is no problem in the real world to which software patents are the solution. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, and in software they simply aren't needed. Innovation in software was going along at a tremendous pace before software patents came into existence, it would continue going along at a tremendous pace without them, and their only effect on innovation is to slow it down.
Yes, meaningful compute might approach zero energy — but touchscreens, displays, radios, speakers, cameras, audio processors, and other parts of the equation are all a long way away from being as advanced as Intel's semiconductor processes.
I think the author misunderstood what "ubiquitous" means. It means you can put serious computing power anywhere, including in places that don't have displays, cameras, etc. He's just thinking, "How far can they reduce the power use of my existing smartphone?" The real question is, "What completely new types of devices become practical when computing requires hardly any power at all?"
Also, the situation is better than he suggests. Bright, super high resolution LED or LCD displays take a lot of power, but eInk displays use hardly any power at all. That's why battery life is measured in hours for an iPad and in weeks for a Kindle. LTE radios use a lot of power, but 3G is fine for most applications, and even 2G is more than sufficient in many cases (not for web browsing, but for a device that just needs to exchange limited data with the outside world).
Can someone explain to me why I'm supposed to hate Unity? I find it a clean, well designed UI. It was kind of glitchy in 11.10, but most of those problems got fixed in 12.04. So what is supposed to be so awful about it?
This seems like a weak attempt to shift the blame for bad reporters. Their job is to get at the facts and report what is really true. That's what reporters do - at least if they're any good. So scientific press releases contain spin? Shocking! Just like press releases in absolutely every other field. Any reporter who just parrots a press release without understanding it and getting at the truth is a bad reporter.
Yes, science is complicated. Yes, it takes specialized knowledge to understand. Just like every other field. That's why there are science reporters who supposedly have that specialized knowledge.
1. Volunteer to work on some open source projects. This gives you a visible track record of having worked on real projects and produced code that future employers will be free to look at. Also, if the project is run by people who are good programmers, you can probably learn a lot from working with them.
2. Write some phone apps. It's another easy way to get your work out there where people can see it. It also provides straightforward ways to earn money from your work. Don't expect to earn much, but since you're mainly doing this for experience, that shouldn't be a big problem.
While the article is terrible, the actual paper is very clear about this. There are two different things that are commonly referred to as "the Heisenberg uncertainty principle". One refers to the intrinsic properties of a wavefunction and the impossibility of being in an eigenstate of two noncommuting observables. The other - which is what Heisenberg originally proposed - refers to the fact that performing a measurement alters the state of the thing being measured. Many people, including the authors of quantum mechanics textbooks, frequently talk about these as if they were equivalent, but they aren't.
Here's the first paragraph of the paper, which lays all this out very clearly:
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. In his original paper on the subject, Heisenberg wrote “At the instant of time when the position is determined, that is, at the instant when the photon is scattered by the electron, the electron undergoes a discontinuous change in momentum. This change is the greater the smaller the wavelength of the light employed, i.e., the more exact the determination of the position” [1]. Here Heisenberg was following Einstein’s example and attempting to base a new physical theory only on observable quantities, that is, on the results of measurements. The modern version of the uncertainty principle proved in our textbooks today, however, deals not with the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it introduces, but with the intrinsic uncertainty any quantum state must possess, regardless of what measurement (if any) is performed [2–4]. These two readings of the uncertainty principle are typically taught side-by-side, although only the modern one is given rigorous proof. It has been shown that the original formulation is not only less general than the modern one – it is in fact mathematically incorrect [5]. Recently, Ozawa proved a revised, universally valid, relationship between precision and disturbance [6], which was indirectly validated in [7]. Here, using tools developed for linear-optical quantum computing to implement a proposal due to Lund and Wiseman [8], we provide the first direct experimental characterization of the precision and disturbance arising from a measurement, violating Heisenberg’s original relationship.
I know the presentist view of time (only the present moment exists, and it is continually changing with time) is false. I know this, not because someone who lived 2000 years ago claimed it was true, but because relativity (which is backed up by a huge body of evidence) clearly shows it to be so. The "present" is not well defined. It's simply a slice through a 4-dimensionsal spacetime, and the particular slice that you call "the present" is not the same as the slice I call "the present". No matter what slice you pick, there are pairs of events that are in your past and future respectively, yet happen at exactly the same time for someone else.
(We have other evidence against presentism as well, such as time reversal symmetry and the holographic principle. But relativity is by far the most compelling.)
There's a cool thing that happens when you realize an eternalist view of time is correct: you suddenly stop caring about death nearly so much. It's merely part of the boundary of the region of spacetime you call "yourself". Death is the end of life in exactly the same sense that the surface of your skin is the end of life. Wondering what happens to you after you die is exactly as absurd as wondering what happens to you on the other side of the room from yourself. You simply aren't there. That's not a bad thing. You occupy a finite volume of spacetime. You reading these words right now are a particular small piece of that volume. You at other points in your life are other pieces of that volume. Outside of that volume, you aren't there. It doesn't mean you're "gone" or "don't exist anymore". It just means you're over here, not over there.
Exactly. What they mean by "internet freedom" is "freedom for corporations," or more precisely, "not restricting corporations' freedom to restrict your freedom."
Exactly. All we're doing is spewing hate against the "enemy" (politicians), and complaining about how most of them are against us and don't care about what's good for us.
What I believe - which I admit is a very unpopular position these days - is that most politicians are basically good people. They have their faults, but so does everyone. They're well meaning, and they're fighting for what they honestly believe to be right. Unfortunately, many of them are not well qualified for their jobs. They're responsible for setting economic policy without having a firm understanding of economics, science policy without having a firm understanding of science, etc. And many of them don't even realize how poor their understanding is (because let's face it, you don't get elected for being humble). Instead they make decisions based on the things they do understand: their religions, the attitudes and beliefs they inherited from their parents, the beliefs of the people who voted for them (most of whom don't understand these subjects very well either), etc.
And even if they did understand all these subjects, it would still be hard for them to accomplish anything useful, because "the enemy" (a.k.a. the other party) is opposed to anything they do, tries to obstruct them whenever possible, and will portray anything they do in the worst possible light. And why does the other party do that? Because it's what they were elected to do! People voted for them because they were confident, opinionated, and political.
I've never had much problem getting a good signal with T-Mobile in the San Francisco bay area. It really depends where you live. The best advice is to talk to people in your area and find out what carriers have good networks there.
You're making the mistake of thinking that freedom is more important than courtesy and not giving offense. In reality, (your) freedom is far less important than not giving offense (to me). Your freedom is merely a luxury that is permitted as long as it doesn't cause problems, whereas my moral beliefs are the fundamental basis of all human society (or at least, all the moral ones).
Not true. It's done much more than simple text entry for a long time, and it got a major upgrade in Jelly Bean. Reviews are now generally calling it superior to Siri.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend recently got a 10.1 inch Galaxy Note, and he raves about the stylus. It literally is a Wacom tablet that doubles as a screen. You might give that a try.
A symmetry doesn't mean there are multiple universes. It describes a property of our single universe.
Think of a square in a plane. A square has lots of symmetries. You can rotate it around its center by 90 degrees, or 180 degrees, or 270 degrees, and it remains unchanged. You also can mirror it about its center horizontally, or vertically, or across either of its diagonals. Any of these operations leaves the square completely unchanged. But that doesn't mean there are many different squares. There is just one square with lots of symmetries.
CPT invariance is the same way. It doesn't even make sense to talk about a "second universe" that is "a complete CPT reversal from ours". That second universe would be completely indistinguishable from ours. It would be exactly the same universe, in the same way that rotating a square by 90 degrees leaves you with exactly the same square. CPT invariance just means that our universe can be described in two different ways that are completely equivalent. Neither one is the "right" description or the "real" description. Both of them are equally good descriptions.
Yes, and not just photons. Any particle will follow the same path backward, as long as you also reverse its charge (which has no effect on a photon, since they're uncharged) and parity (which I think flips the polarization of a photon, but don't quote me on that). What CPT invariance really says is that there are two ways of describing the universe that are exactly equivalent in every way. They predict exactly the same result for any experiment you can ever do. But what one description calls "forward in time", the other one calls "backward in time".
The summary is a bit confusing if you don't know what it's talking about. The title is even worse, since it implies the exact opposite of what it actually means. Let me try to explain it.
First: physicists believe that the "arrow of time" isn't a fundamental property of the laws of nature. There's no fundamental difference between "forward in time" and "backward in time". The laws of physics operate identically in both directions. So why do those directions seem so different? Why do objects fall down but not up? Why can you make an egg into an omelet, but not an omelet back into an egg? Why can you remember the past, but not the future? This turns out to be a property of our local region of spacetime. More precisely, we live very close (a mere 13.5 billion years or so) away from a point of incredibly low entropy (known as "the big bang"), and that creates an entropy gradient throughout our region of spacetime. What we call "forward in time" simply means "the direction of increasing entropy", or more simply, "away from the big bang".
A good analogy (not involving a car - sorry!) is the direction "down". It seems obvious to you that one particular direction in space is fundamentally different from all other directions. Objects fall down. They don't fall in any other direction. Yet to person on the other side of the earth, the direction they call "down" is completely different from the direction you call "down". That's because the "arrow of gravity" is not a fundamental property of the laws of nature, just a property of our local region of space. "Down" means "toward the center of the earth." In the same way, "forward in time" means "away from the big bang".
Second: what I just said swept a few details under the rug. You see, the true symmetry is not time reversal (which would imply that simply reversing the direction of time would leave all laws of physics unchanged), but a slightly more complicated symmetry called CPT invariance. That stands for Charge, Parity, and Time. It says that if you multiply the charge of every particle by -1 (so positive charges become negative and negative become positive), flip space as if in a mirror so that your left and right sides are reversed (a "parity inversion"), and reverse the direction of time, then all the laws of physics are left unchanged.
Scientists had previously observed a violation of CP. That is, swapping only charge and parity is not an exact symmetry of the universe. If CPT is an exact symmetry (which scientists generally believe), that implies that T is not - changing only the direction of time without also swapping charge and parity should change the laws of physics. But testing that experimentally turned out to be very hard to do. Well, they've finally done it. And the results are exactly what people expected: it appears that CPT really is an exact symmetry of the universe.
And in Windows RT the standard (and only) method of installing software is:
1. Go to Microsoft's app store
2. Download the programs you want from the store
That's a walled garden. And it's what you get with their shiny new Surface tablets.
I don't know where you get the idea this is about surviving an apocalypse, because it's not about that at all. It's about helping society and promoting progress. The article makes this point very clearly:
Fifty tools aren’t a hedge against the apocalypse, although if most of civilization is wiped out, survivors with Factor e Farm plans may at least have something to work with. What Jakubowski is trying to prove is that people can live without the help of corporations. A few years ago, his attempts at utopia kept being undermined by the costs of repairing his farm equipment. So he decided to cut out the middleman and forge his own gear. “If you’re going to try to build any kind of sustainable, model community, you find out quickly that the tools you need break down and are expensive,” he says. “Without fixing this situation, you’re always left conducting business as usual.”
After Factor e Farm completes its “Global Village Construction Set,” Jakubowski expects communities around the globe to use these tools, spurring an explosion of innovation as people take his tractors and drills and build even better ones. Eventually, this virtuous circle will yield equipment rivaling that made by market-leading corporations—a tractor that is 90 percent as good as a John Deere (DE) at a fraction of the price. Showing up established corporations is critical to Jakubowski, because, he says, they spend too much time obsessing over patents, spending millions on commercials, and generally getting in the way of progress. “We are calling our work the Open Source Economy,” he says. “We can collaborate on the machines and publish everything openly. We can reduce all of this competitive waste. You have to start somewhere.”
I'm curious how practical you find it in day to day use. This sort of vehicle seems like it could be really incompatible with existing infrastructure. It's too wide for many bike lanes, too slow to mix with cars, it doesn't fit on bike racks which rules out taking it on buses and trains. How do you work around those problems? And what do you do with it when you reach your destination? How do you lock it up?
This is complete nonsense. It does not mean "many apps are spying on users." It means those apps have permissions which could let them spy on users if they wanted to. In other news, 100% of Windows apps have the ability to spy on users, because Windows doesn't have a fine grained permissions model like Android does. Does that mean 100% of Windows apps "are spying on users?" No, and it doesn't mean Android apps are either.
Just consider the frightening implications of this:
This sounds like a disaster in the making.
Yes, that's exactly what they said in the article. From the summary: "They single out pharma, and suggest other legislative measures be found to foster innovation whenever there is clear evidence that laissez-faire under-supplies it."
That's the whole point. If the problem is that drug development is really expensive, you create laws to support drug development. You don't create a generic patent system that applies to all industries, even ones with no need for it, and provides exclusive rights to all inventions of all sorts, even when there's no evidence that doing so helps society. The bias should be to interfere in the market as little as possible and do so only when there's a clear benefit. Instead, our current system tries to interfere as much as possible and refrain from doing so only when... well, I was going to say, "only when there's a clear harm," but actually it doesn't even care about that. It just tries to interfere as much as possible and never refrain, even when there's a clear harm.
It's more complicated than that. A warp drive implies something that many people view as the "moral equivalent" of time travel, but that doesn't mean you can actually build a practical time machine.
Suppose you use a warp drive to travel faster than light. That means there exists a reference frame in which you appear to arrive before you left. More specifically, it's a reference frame that's moving very quickly relative to your starting point. That's very interesting. It implies some dramatic things about causality. But it's not what most people mean by "time travel". You really want to start at rest in some reference frame (say, the earth), and end at rest in that same reference frame, and have an observer in that reference frame see you arrive before you left. So far as I know, a warp drive does not allow you to do that.
Instead, it means that someone zipping past in a spaceship at 99% of the speed of light will shout out, "Hey! He just arrived before he left!" But he won't be able to stick around to chat about it, because in the time it took him to say those words he's already moved on some millions of kilometers.
Exactly. The "real problem" with software patents is that they exist at all. There is no problem in the real world to which software patents are the solution. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation, and in software they simply aren't needed. Innovation in software was going along at a tremendous pace before software patents came into existence, it would continue going along at a tremendous pace without them, and their only effect on innovation is to slow it down.
Yes, meaningful compute might approach zero energy — but touchscreens, displays, radios, speakers, cameras, audio processors, and other parts of the equation are all a long way away from being as advanced as Intel's semiconductor processes.
I think the author misunderstood what "ubiquitous" means. It means you can put serious computing power anywhere, including in places that don't have displays, cameras, etc. He's just thinking, "How far can they reduce the power use of my existing smartphone?" The real question is, "What completely new types of devices become practical when computing requires hardly any power at all?"
Also, the situation is better than he suggests. Bright, super high resolution LED or LCD displays take a lot of power, but eInk displays use hardly any power at all. That's why battery life is measured in hours for an iPad and in weeks for a Kindle. LTE radios use a lot of power, but 3G is fine for most applications, and even 2G is more than sufficient in many cases (not for web browsing, but for a device that just needs to exchange limited data with the outside world).
Can someone explain to me why I'm supposed to hate Unity? I find it a clean, well designed UI. It was kind of glitchy in 11.10, but most of those problems got fixed in 12.04. So what is supposed to be so awful about it?
I really like Unity, especially in 12.04. It's a very clean, well organized UI.
Just another data point for you, since you seem to be collecting them.
This seems like a weak attempt to shift the blame for bad reporters. Their job is to get at the facts and report what is really true. That's what reporters do - at least if they're any good. So scientific press releases contain spin? Shocking! Just like press releases in absolutely every other field. Any reporter who just parrots a press release without understanding it and getting at the truth is a bad reporter.
Yes, science is complicated. Yes, it takes specialized knowledge to understand. Just like every other field. That's why there are science reporters who supposedly have that specialized knowledge.
Two very good ways to get experience:
1. Volunteer to work on some open source projects. This gives you a visible track record of having worked on real projects and produced code that future employers will be free to look at. Also, if the project is run by people who are good programmers, you can probably learn a lot from working with them.
2. Write some phone apps. It's another easy way to get your work out there where people can see it. It also provides straightforward ways to earn money from your work. Don't expect to earn much, but since you're mainly doing this for experience, that shouldn't be a big problem.
While the article is terrible, the actual paper is very clear about this. There are two different things that are commonly referred to as "the Heisenberg uncertainty principle". One refers to the intrinsic properties of a wavefunction and the impossibility of being in an eigenstate of two noncommuting observables. The other - which is what Heisenberg originally proposed - refers to the fact that performing a measurement alters the state of the thing being measured. Many people, including the authors of quantum mechanics textbooks, frequently talk about these as if they were equivalent, but they aren't.
Here's the first paragraph of the paper, which lays all this out very clearly:
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. In his original paper on the subject, Heisenberg wrote “At the instant of time when the position is determined, that is, at the instant when the photon is scattered by the electron, the electron undergoes a discontinuous change in momentum. This change is the greater the smaller the wavelength of the light employed, i.e., the more exact the determination of the position” [1]. Here Heisenberg was following Einstein’s example and attempting to base a new physical theory only on observable quantities, that is, on the results of measurements. The modern version of the uncertainty principle proved in our textbooks today, however, deals not with the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it introduces, but with the intrinsic uncertainty any quantum state must possess, regardless of what measurement (if any) is performed [2–4]. These two readings of the uncertainty principle are typically taught side-by-side, although only the modern one is given rigorous proof. It has been shown that the original formulation is not only less general than the modern one – it is in fact mathematically incorrect [5]. Recently, Ozawa proved a revised, universally valid, relationship between precision and disturbance [6], which was indirectly validated in [7]. Here, using tools developed for linear-optical quantum computing to implement a proposal due to Lund and Wiseman [8], we provide the first direct experimental characterization of the precision and disturbance arising from a measurement, violating Heisenberg’s original relationship.
I know the presentist view of time (only the present moment exists, and it is continually changing with time) is false. I know this, not because someone who lived 2000 years ago claimed it was true, but because relativity (which is backed up by a huge body of evidence) clearly shows it to be so. The "present" is not well defined. It's simply a slice through a 4-dimensionsal spacetime, and the particular slice that you call "the present" is not the same as the slice I call "the present". No matter what slice you pick, there are pairs of events that are in your past and future respectively, yet happen at exactly the same time for someone else.
(We have other evidence against presentism as well, such as time reversal symmetry and the holographic principle. But relativity is by far the most compelling.)
There's a cool thing that happens when you realize an eternalist view of time is correct: you suddenly stop caring about death nearly so much. It's merely part of the boundary of the region of spacetime you call "yourself". Death is the end of life in exactly the same sense that the surface of your skin is the end of life. Wondering what happens to you after you die is exactly as absurd as wondering what happens to you on the other side of the room from yourself. You simply aren't there. That's not a bad thing. You occupy a finite volume of spacetime. You reading these words right now are a particular small piece of that volume. You at other points in your life are other pieces of that volume. Outside of that volume, you aren't there. It doesn't mean you're "gone" or "don't exist anymore". It just means you're over here, not over there.
Exactly. What they mean by "internet freedom" is "freedom for corporations," or more precisely, "not restricting corporations' freedom to restrict your freedom."
Exactly. All we're doing is spewing hate against the "enemy" (politicians), and complaining about how most of them are against us and don't care about what's good for us.
What I believe - which I admit is a very unpopular position these days - is that most politicians are basically good people. They have their faults, but so does everyone. They're well meaning, and they're fighting for what they honestly believe to be right. Unfortunately, many of them are not well qualified for their jobs. They're responsible for setting economic policy without having a firm understanding of economics, science policy without having a firm understanding of science, etc. And many of them don't even realize how poor their understanding is (because let's face it, you don't get elected for being humble). Instead they make decisions based on the things they do understand: their religions, the attitudes and beliefs they inherited from their parents, the beliefs of the people who voted for them (most of whom don't understand these subjects very well either), etc.
And even if they did understand all these subjects, it would still be hard for them to accomplish anything useful, because "the enemy" (a.k.a. the other party) is opposed to anything they do, tries to obstruct them whenever possible, and will portray anything they do in the worst possible light. And why does the other party do that? Because it's what they were elected to do! People voted for them because they were confident, opinionated, and political.
We have the government we elected.
The only non-TMo phones that work are the HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus and AT&T LTE devices running hacked radio firmware.
The Nexus One (which the poster said he's using) works fine on T-Mobile. No hacking required.
I've never had much problem getting a good signal with T-Mobile in the San Francisco bay area. It really depends where you live. The best advice is to talk to people in your area and find out what carriers have good networks there.
You're making the mistake of thinking that freedom is more important than courtesy and not giving offense. In reality, (your) freedom is far less important than not giving offense (to me). Your freedom is merely a luxury that is permitted as long as it doesn't cause problems, whereas my moral beliefs are the fundamental basis of all human society (or at least, all the moral ones).
Not true. It's done much more than simple text entry for a long time, and it got a major upgrade in Jelly Bean. Reviews are now generally calling it superior to Siri.