Dark matter I could live with. There could easily be plenty of material in the universe that doesn't shine.
The technical term "Dark Matter" is different from the everyday notion of "dark matter", i.e. material that doesn't shine. It's not simply ordinary stuff, such as dust, rocks, or gas, that just doesn't happen to send out light. Instead, it's a new kind of matter altogether, substantially different from all known kinds, possibly due to some as-yet undiscovered new elementary particle.
Rather than spidering websites, which is what they have done so far, they will have to scan real world books. So data about past growth cannot be used to estimate future growth; it's not even clear that scanning technology will grow exponentially.
If you believe that HIV does not exist, or if you believe that HIV does not cause serious disease, I have a business proposal for you: offer life insurance policies to people who test positive for HIV but refuse to take anti-AIDS medications. Society believes these people will die soon, while you believe they won't. If you're right, you will get rich.
Finally, any "live" political topic such as the IRA, Israel, etc. is effectively a waste of space due to the polarities of opinion.
I disagree. Take any Wikipedia article on a "live" political topic. Sure enough, the current version will probably be biased. But go through the attached Discussion page and the History of the article, and you will usually get a very good and thorough overview of the controversy and the positions of the involved parties.
This is typically much more complete and transparent than virtually anything you'll find in a traditional encyclopedia or in standard news media. Where in Encyclopedia Britannica can I find a list of arguments for/against the right to abortion that even remotely approaches Wikipedia's treatment?
Alas, the experiment set up to confirm this theory -- the Soviet Union -- started off very promising (there were glowing reports of the accomplishments of communism in the 20s and early 30s) but collapsed 70 years later in a horrifying welter of human misery from which Russia has still not emerged.
Interesting summary there. Here's mine: the experiment propelled a third-world agricultural country to world-power status in less than forty years; after capitalism/democracy took over in the 1990s, suicide, crime, unemployment and alcoholism rates rose dramatically, to the point that large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run [...]. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success.
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect. The system seems to work pretty well, certainly better than all other systems that have been tried to nail down the truth.
Faith is what Dr. Marshall had when he injected himself with a bacteria everyone else said had no simple cure.
He swallowed it, he didn't inject himself. Everyone else said the bacteria wouldn't do any harm; he believed that they would cause gastritis, which they did. The simple cure was there from the beginning: antibiotics.
3) Blacks have a higher crime rate than non-blacks. This is a fact, whether you like it or not.
Blacks are arrested and convicted at higher rates than certain non-blacks, that is correct. Whether they actually do commit more crimes is very much up for debate however; many people consider that claim to be racist without supporting evidence, which has not been provided.
If judges were required on the other hand to impose upon a losing plaintiff the defendant's legal fees, the number of frivolous suits on both sides would fall dramatically -- perhaps to 5% of today's levels.
In Germany, which has a loser-pays system, most people carry legal insurance. So whether they sue or are sued, whether they win or lose, they never pay lawyer's fees or court costs.
However it might also make it easier for the RIAA and other corporations to bully people around, because they have extremely expensive lawyers,
Obviously, in a "loser pays" system, the loser only has to pay "reasonable costs", not all the costs incurred by the other party. Usually, countries that use this system set up a table that, based on the type of lawsuit, gives the "reasonable cost".
Let's not forget that Gonzalez just lost a major case: he tried to prosecute producers of violent porn, and the judge threw the case out, agreeing with the defense that production and distribution of obscene materials are protected by the constitutional right to privacy. Of course Gonzalez is going to appeal.
I haven't really followed the technology, but don't all modern phones nowadays operate as mp3 players?
This seems again like a lot of empty hype: just like when Apple came out with their ipod, some three years after the advent of mp3 players, and everybody congratulated them on their "innovation". Except the innovation couldn't even play ogg format files.
No information and no energy is transmitted faster than c. No physics book has to be rewritten.
Actually, they should be rewritten, to point out once and for all that there are three relevant velocities of light: phase velocity (the speed with which the waves of monochromatic light move), group velocity (the speed with which a particular shape of mixed light moves), and signal velocity (the speed with which the information-carrying signal moves). With clever experimental setups, you can speed up or slow down the first two velocities. Signal velocity never exceeds c; if it did, you could send today's lottery numbers into the past, according to special relativity.
There's more than one measure of the speed of light - the phase velocity and the group velocity. It's the group velocity that can't travel faster than c
No, both phase velocity and group velocity can exceed c. (The quote you give makes that point.) Signal velocity cannot, however. If it could, you'd have immediate time travel, according to special relativity.
I was not talking about interpreting obvserved redshifts as velocities; I was talking about the current receding velocity of galaxies that are currently about 5000 Mpc away from us. Those velocities are larger than the speed of light. The speed of light is only an absolute upper limit if you use a cosmological model where space does not expand.
Furthermore, your formula talks about the velocity v at the time of emission of the light; I'm talking about the *current* receding velocity, which of course is much bigger.
I for one am glad: the third world needs well-paying jobs much more than the first world. Hopefully we will finally start to slowly move away from the terrible inequity in living conditions in today's world.
You do have to kind of wonder about the sanity of unionized grocery store workers commanding some of the best wages and benefits in many small towns. They are people with no actual skills and in free markets people are supposed to get paid based on what their worth. Grocery store workers are not worth a lot.
Clearly unionized grocery store workers are worth more than non-unionized ones, since they are paid more. In a free market system, the "worth" of someone is exclusively determined by the wage they can command. Workers who unionize follow precisely the correct strategy in a free capitalist market system: maximize your return with all means available. In other words: Wal-Mart's strategy. Why do question these worker's sanity, but not Wal-Mart's?
Workers banding together in unions to maximize returns is exactly equivalent to capitalists banding together in corporations to maximize returns.
their recessional velocity inferred would still be less that lightspeed.
If you use the standard coordinate system which describes expanding space, then the current receding velocity of a galaxy is proportional to its current distance, with the proportionality constant being the Hubble constant H_0. Plug in a large enough distance, and you'll get a receding velocity larger than the speed of light. There are plenty of galaxies at that distance (about 5000 Mpc).
Yes, wormholes are theoretically possible in physics. I think it's important to realize that if they exist, then time travel is also possible. Physicists who work in this area look for self-consistent solutions, which in some sense negates the existence of free will.
Sure, but it's equally important to realize that no equation in physics leaves room for "free will" if that term is understood in the layman's sense. Properly analyzed, "free will" is the internal state of an information processor while (deterministically or probabilistically) making a decision; in that sense of the term there is no contradiction with any physical theories, including those involving time travel.
Well, special relativity applies only locally, so for example there are many galaxies that recede from us faster than the speed of light, simply because space is expanding. Similarly, if you can find a way to temporarily manipulate the topology of space in a suitable way ("wormholes"), you could get from A to B very fast, apparently faster than the speed of light, even though locally you never really exceeded that speed.
These two theories have guided the setting of levels of punishment throughout the history of the Anglo-American justice system.
Punishments are set by legislators who want to get their names into the news. The vast majority of them have never taken a class in the philosophy of law and have never heard of the two theories of punishment you describe.
What machine learning algorithms attempt to 'emulate the brain'? No one I know of in machine learning does *anything* with the explicity intention of 'emulating the brain'.
People don't study artificial neural nets where the synapse strengths adjust themselves based on the well-known LTP rules (i.e. if two neurons fire together often enough, the connecting synapse is permanently strengthened)? That seems to me the most obvious thing to do; the "learning rules" of neural nets always looked extremely artificial to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The technical term "Dark Matter" is different from the everyday notion of "dark matter", i.e. material that doesn't shine. It's not simply ordinary stuff, such as dust, rocks, or gas, that just doesn't happen to send out light. Instead, it's a new kind of matter altogether, substantially different from all known kinds, possibly due to some as-yet undiscovered new elementary particle.
Rather than spidering websites, which is what they have done so far, they will have to scan real world books. So data about past growth cannot be used to estimate future growth; it's not even clear that scanning technology will grow exponentially.
If you believe that HIV does not exist, or if you believe that HIV does not cause serious disease, I have a business proposal for you: offer life insurance policies to people who test positive for HIV but refuse to take anti-AIDS medications. Society believes these people will die soon, while you believe they won't. If you're right, you will get rich.
I disagree. Take any Wikipedia article on a "live" political topic. Sure enough, the current version will probably be biased. But go through the attached Discussion page and the History of the article, and you will usually get a very good and thorough overview of the controversy and the positions of the involved parties.
This is typically much more complete and transparent than virtually anything you'll find in a traditional encyclopedia or in standard news media. Where in Encyclopedia Britannica can I find a list of arguments for/against the right to abortion that even remotely approaches Wikipedia's treatment?
Interesting summary there. Here's mine: the experiment propelled a third-world agricultural country to world-power status in less than forty years; after capitalism/democracy took over in the 1990s, suicide, crime, unemployment and alcoholism rates rose dramatically, to the point that large portions of the population, after having had a taste of both systems, now favor a return to Communist times.
This is not to say that socialist utopias with "markets" that exchange social stature and respect cannot flourish in the short run [...]. Often they do very well for a while, while the pioneering impulse lasts. But there are zero historical examples of long-term success.
For tenured professors, there is close to zero incentive to continue research and publication, except social stature and respect. The system seems to work pretty well, certainly better than all other systems that have been tried to nail down the truth.
He swallowed it, he didn't inject himself. Everyone else said the bacteria wouldn't do any harm; he believed that they would cause gastritis, which they did. The simple cure was there from the beginning: antibiotics.
Blacks are arrested and convicted at higher rates than certain non-blacks, that is correct. Whether they actually do commit more crimes is very much up for debate however; many people consider that claim to be racist without supporting evidence, which has not been provided.
But surely Marx was one of the deepest economists who ever graced the Earth, no?
In Germany, which has a loser-pays system, most people carry legal insurance. So whether they sue or are sued, whether they win or lose, they never pay lawyer's fees or court costs.
In Germany, which has a loser-pays system, most people carry legal insurance, which picks up all the legal fees if you get sued or if you sue.
Obviously, in a "loser pays" system, the loser only has to pay "reasonable costs", not all the costs incurred by the other party. Usually, countries that use this system set up a table that, based on the type of lawsuit, gives the "reasonable cost".
Let's not forget that Gonzalez just lost a major case: he tried to prosecute producers of violent porn, and the judge threw the case out, agreeing with the defense that production and distribution of obscene materials are protected by the constitutional right to privacy. Of course Gonzalez is going to appeal.
This seems again like a lot of empty hype: just like when Apple came out with their ipod, some three years after the advent of mp3 players, and everybody congratulated them on their "innovation". Except the innovation couldn't even play ogg format files.
Actually, they should be rewritten, to point out once and for all that there are three relevant velocities of light: phase velocity (the speed with which the waves of monochromatic light move), group velocity (the speed with which a particular shape of mixed light moves), and signal velocity (the speed with which the information-carrying signal moves). With clever experimental setups, you can speed up or slow down the first two velocities. Signal velocity never exceeds c; if it did, you could send today's lottery numbers into the past, according to special relativity.
No, both phase velocity and group velocity can exceed c. (The quote you give makes that point.) Signal velocity cannot, however. If it could, you'd have immediate time travel, according to special relativity.
Furthermore, your formula talks about the velocity v at the time of emission of the light; I'm talking about the *current* receding velocity, which of course is much bigger.
I for one am glad: the third world needs well-paying jobs much more than the first world. Hopefully we will finally start to slowly move away from the terrible inequity in living conditions in today's world.
Clearly unionized grocery store workers are worth more than non-unionized ones, since they are paid more. In a free market system, the "worth" of someone is exclusively determined by the wage they can command. Workers who unionize follow precisely the correct strategy in a free capitalist market system: maximize your return with all means available. In other words: Wal-Mart's strategy. Why do question these worker's sanity, but not Wal-Mart's?
Workers banding together in unions to maximize returns is exactly equivalent to capitalists banding together in corporations to maximize returns.
If you use the standard coordinate system which describes expanding space, then the current receding velocity of a galaxy is proportional to its current distance, with the proportionality constant being the Hubble constant H_0. Plug in a large enough distance, and you'll get a receding velocity larger than the speed of light. There are plenty of galaxies at that distance (about 5000 Mpc).
Yes, wormholes are theoretically possible in physics. I think it's important to realize that if they exist, then time travel is also possible. Physicists who work in this area look for self-consistent solutions, which in some sense negates the existence of free will.
Sure, but it's equally important to realize that no equation in physics leaves room for "free will" if that term is understood in the layman's sense. Properly analyzed, "free will" is the internal state of an information processor while (deterministically or probabilistically) making a decision; in that sense of the term there is no contradiction with any physical theories, including those involving time travel.
Please realise that Republican-appointed judges are in the majority on the high court, and have been for quite a while.
Well, special relativity applies only locally, so for example there are many galaxies that recede from us faster than the speed of light, simply because space is expanding. Similarly, if you can find a way to temporarily manipulate the topology of space in a suitable way ("wormholes"), you could get from A to B very fast, apparently faster than the speed of light, even though locally you never really exceeded that speed.
Punishments are set by legislators who want to get their names into the news. The vast majority of them have never taken a class in the philosophy of law and have never heard of the two theories of punishment you describe.
People don't study artificial neural nets where the synapse strengths adjust themselves based on the well-known LTP rules (i.e. if two neurons fire together often enough, the connecting synapse is permanently strengthened)? That seems to me the most obvious thing to do; the "learning rules" of neural nets always looked extremely artificial to me.
Well, if you need anonymity, change the MAC on your laptop and go to the nearest WiFi coffee shop. Not exactly rocket science.
Certainly. Mexico is constantly lobbying for eased immigration rules. The whole country is financed by the money Mexicans working in the US send home.