While it's true that Communism has the same relationship to communism that the Libertarian Party has to libertarianism, and that Marxism is something yet again different (and never, ever, tried...probably impossible to try), the distinction that you are making between economics and politics is an illusion.
It is true that there are some elements in economics that are based on physical reality. They are a small minority of the elements on which there is ANY disagreement between, say, Marx and Keyes. Or even Marx and Ayn Rand. Mostly economics is based on political theory, and is not actually subject to experimental test. (Well, not most. Most places where there is any disagreement.) Even the Nihilists agree with most evidentially based economics. But most statements propounded as economics are either politics or theology.
Well, Lisp *is* quite awesome. It's got a few problems that turn me off to it, but had it become popular early, they would have been fixed. (Some of it's documentation. Some of it's name usage. Some of it's naming conventions. I hate names like *This-is-a-special-variable* which, including asterisks, IS a valid Lisp name. And whether the case is significant is a compiler switch.)
The problem with Lisp is that the libraries were never properly developed and standardized. JavaScript is something VERY different. I don't know it, and can't say for sure whether it's good or bad as a language, but it sure isn't Lisp. And I can say that standard JavaScript would not be readily adapted to the projects I typically work on. (I make heavy use of files.)
Many parts are ambiguous. E.g., prototype inheritance. It has a lot going for it, but nobody has been able to come up with an efficient way to implement it. Not to mention the problems that arise if you want to inherit methods from different ancestors. Python has a decent answer to that. So does Eiffel. Neither will work for prototypes, though.
P.S.: You *can* do prototypes in Python, but nobody does them. OTOH, it's a bit of extra work, so possibly if they were easier they would be more popular. Equally likely, however, prototypes are an idea that sounds better than it is.
Well, for my purposes lacking file access is something that makes it unusable. I can understand why they don't have it, being as it was designed to be used in web pages, and mixing in file access has unpleasant security implications...unless you design it very carefully. But it still makes it unusable for my purposes.
(Yes, a third party library could solve this problem. If I were interested enough. But I really prefer a compiled language over an interpreted one, even if I don't like C or C++.)
The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.
The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)
N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic system. Red Hat was better with interfacing to Novell networks, but not hugely.
OTOH, apt-get was far superior to RPM. I'm not certain that it still is, but as I don't like LILO and don't want to prevent my disks from being read by other partitions (SELinux...don't remember the package name), I find Debian preferable, so I haven't kept checking. A few years ago YUM had improved enough that it was nearly comparable to apt-get, especially as one could have a synaptic front-end on either.
More like some parts of the design are many years old. Probably some parts are decades old. Right now they're more interested in getting something working than in optimizing the design. And once they get it into production, they'll be rather cautious in making changes.
Not only is mankind not fit for such an authority, but most individual people aren't, either. I'm the only one that I can think of...and you'd probably disagree with that.
I notice you decided to post that anonymously. I don't disagree with your points, but if you don't dare to critise openly on Slashdot, you're unlikely to be effectively pushing for Open Government.
There's a certain amount of evidence that ordinary people put in positions of power (i.e., where their actions don't have personal adverse consequences) will over time, and not that much time, turn into sadistic bastards. Not all of them, by the way. Only about, IIRC, 1/3 of them. But that's far too many.
The only conclusion I've been able to come to is that societies need to be so designed that with greater power comes greater consequences for the misuse of that power. But in all of history I haven't found such a thing. Only rumors of it. (Like "Somewhere in Asia there's the fabulous kindom run by the most Christian monarch, Prester John, who...".) Perhaps India came close to that with their famous Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, but that also seems largely mythical. One of the closest, most reliable, examples I can think of is Count Dracula (i.e. Vlad the impaler). He was a homocidal maniac, but it is reported that during his reign (paraphrase:)"A virgin with a bag full of gold could ride across the country without guards, and without fear of molestation." Not exactly the kind of government that one would like...but his subordinates were unwilling to do anything that might offend him.
Well, the Scottish police are good guys. I'm not so sure about either the UK figures or the EU figures. They seem to be basically well meaning, and able to justify their actions to themselves, but... outsiders may frequently have a hard time accepting their justifications, and with good reason.
His books are actually set in Scotland, and the spys work for the EU. The NSA being the heavy isn't appropriate for the series. (It's supposed to be "The man from Uncle"...to paraphrase a joke from Halting State.)
OTOH, maybe it's just as well. His series seem to have a tendency to start out light, and then become progressively grimmer. (Well, I haven't followed the Merchant Princes, and I gave up on the Laundry when it got too grim in the 3rd volume. So maybe it then gets lighter again.)
It wasn't public knowledge. Everyone who believed it was considered paranoid, at least during the 1960's-70's. Maybe they were. (If you think you know when they really started listening to everyone, I think you're over estimating certainty.)
P.S.: Surveillance was not the point of the Stross books. It was background, Just like Scottish independence. In Halting State the big surprise was supposed to be a bank robbery inside a virtual game. Shortly after it was published, it happened in Eve-online. The police (and others) were wearing something considerably like google glass. (Actually, I think they looked more like a pair of heavy sunglasses, but I'd need to reread to be sure.) There were virtual overlays on reality published by advertisers, game players, etc. The wierd thing is those have started happening while almost nobody is wearing a VR headset. Spooks, a VR mixed with reality game, was a major subplot. So my brother-in-law walks in with a game called ghosts played on his phone, where he's supposed to chase around after a ghost that can only be seen on his phone, but where the chasing happens in physical space. (That's not Spooks, by any means. For one thing the ghost tried to get him to chase it in front of a car driving down the street. Spooks had more awareness of the actual surroundings.)
Or, another sub-plot involved remotely driven taxis. But Google has nearly gotten fully automated vehicles working.
Basicly, the world that developed made a lot of choices that weren't the same, and the stuff that was supposed to be new and exciting kept happening before most people bought the book. Near future SF used to be easier. Unexpected changes were slower in arriving. They ALWAYS arrived out of order, and with some choices not the same, but usually you had several years leeway (so most of your sales could happen before the book was obsolete).
So now he's discontinued the series. And he's going to wait until the votes for Scottish independence and Britain remaining in the EU are in before he tries any more near future books. Quite reasonable. (Snarl! I don't care if the series didn't match this universe, I wanted the next volume.)
Stross has more than once (now) decided that he didn't like the was a series was going, and ended it. It's not exactly writer's block, because he wrote something else instead, but it still ended the series.
In the "Singularity Sky" series he decided that he couldn't avoid the bad guy's winning in the third volume, so he just decided to stop with "Iron Sunrise". In the "Halting State" series, Scotland was an independent country. Most of his outrageous ideas kept happening (so far "Athena" hasn't yet shown up). Etc. So he decided that he didn't like how it was going. And he's declared it ended. (A pity. Those were my two favorite series of his.)
Sorry, but a dimension is actually more general than that. In some datasets, e.g., color might be a dimension.
Generally when we aren't being special and particular we want to use dimension to something that varies independently of other dimensions, and which as a continuous range of values. This is why it's quite reasonable to consider time as a dimension, as well as up-down, left-right, and forward-back, but weight is also sometimes worth considering as a dimension, and size can have dimensions independent of centroid.
Where things get strange is where we start considering extra spatial dimensions. Time seems to get in to the mix honestly, but most other dimensions are shucked off. So one is left with 4 observable space-time dimensions. But the math seems to want there to be more...but there's no obvious physical interpretation. I actually think the best thing to do is to say "These are things that the math wants. They are very like things from the math that are normally interpreted as spatial dimensions, but it's not really clear how you should interpret them. They almost always, however, drop out when you solve the equations for anything that you'll encounter, so you don't really need to interpret them."
Was there ever any serious doubt that the halting problem and Godelian limits applied to minds?
I've occasionally run across people who seemed to think so, but I always thought they were being unreasonable.
OTOH, this may also imply that there is no way to do FTL, that wormholes will not be stabilizable, etc. And it seems as if it would put strict bounds on how powerful quantum computer algorithms could be.
There WERE a lot of REALLY STUPID ideas and health practices. But the worst ones didn't adversely affect the practitioners. There was a lot of "evolution" going on before there were reasonable models, where people would come up with ideas almost at random, and the ones that killed (or adversely affected) their practitioners didn't tend to get transmitted on. But high status people could adopt practices that were frequently lethal to low status people with very little adverse affect, and because they were high status the ideas would tend to persist.
Consider, e.g., the doctors who used to pride themselves on not washing their hands. For that matter, Aristotle decided that women had fewer teeth than men, and this was accepted as truth up through, I think, the 1500's. It didn't have much bad effect, but it's an example of high status individual and a totally arbitrary idea.
Naa. A much easier answer is that the simulation of the mind has only a limited amount of introspection capability.
Actually, that's true irrespective of whether the apparent physical universe has "grounded" existence. You decide whether to move your fingers, and how, before you are aware of the action. My theory is that consciousness evolved out of a need to serialize experiences in order to index them for storage and retrieval. The actual physical universe (whether or not it's a simulation) is massively parallel WRT consciousness. What we CAN be aware of is only a fraction of what we physically experience. So the universe that we experience is guaranteed to be a simulation, irrespective of whether the containing physical universe is itself a simulation.
The other alternative is Solipsism, which strikes me as a rather useless belief, even if it *IS* consistent with all available evidence.
Well, to be fair, math isn't science. Math is a system of statements. It may be complete, it may be consistent, but it can't be both. Not if it can describe very much.
A particular set of math statements can have in interpretation that can describe an interface between the math and the physical universe. This interpretation can be either true or false. The math can only be either correct or incorrect. (i.e., 1 + 3 = 5 is incorrect in most systems of math. You could design one in which it was correct. Say a bounded set of integers where all numbers >= 4 had the same value. It might not be useful for much.)
So. When you have an interpretation of a system of math, it can be a bijective isomorphism to some abstraction from the physical world. Then if you observe something in the physical world, it should be derivable from the math. (If, that is, you have an appropriate rule of inference. And example of a place where we don't is radioactive decay.) And if you derive something from the math, you should be able to observe it in the physical world (if you can perform the experiment). If either of these fails, then you know that either you made a mistake in the math, or that the isomorphism was incorrectly assumed to apply.
The science part is taking predictions and validating them, and the making observations and deriving them. The math isn't science. the interpretation isn't science (that's more philosophy).
So. To me this looks like math, not like science. There's a close relationship, but it's not the same thing.
What do you mean it was proven wrong? It never was, and it hasn't been yet. It probably can't be. (Well, except in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics was wrong.)
What was proven was that the heliocentric theory was a lot easier to calculate. And you didn't need to keep adding on as many special correction factors each time the instruments improved. So now we're doing relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are just means of calculation. Relativity doesn't really define an interpretation, and Quantum Mechanics is consistent with multiple different interpretations. The different interpretations seem quite different when described in English, but the math is exactly the same. You can't chose between the multi-world interpretation and Solipsism on the basis of evidence, you need to choose on the basis of philosophical biases.
Just consider, Relativity talks about bent spaces, but in what direction is space bent? Well, that's not clear. Perhaps saying bent is just something to enable you to understand that what we're really talking about is lengths being longer in one direction than in another, but that's just gibberish. You CAN'T translate Relativity into English and have it really make sense, any more than quantum mechanics. The last one you could "pretty much" do that with was Newtonian Mechanics, and if you really think carefully about that, you also find places where you must follow the math rather than reason. Just try to think carefully about what an infinitesimal means, or an imaginary number. You can't. You're just used to them, so you slide over the places where they are incomprehensible.
FWIW, I don't understand pre-Newtonian mechanics well enough, but I'm rather certain that they had equally incomprehensible places. Think of Cantor's proofs, and then try to imagine what it means to paint one copy of the interval of real number red and another blue. Or Zeno's paradoxes.
I don't think that's the distinction. If I charge you money not to burn down your resturant, I'm not stopping doing something, I'm continuing to not do something. But it's still extortion.
IIUC, blackmail is the threat to do something to you unless you do something. But that shades into extortion without a dividing line that I can see. Perhaps they are two terms for the same thing. (I.e., perhaps extortion is the legal term, and blackmail is the journalistic term. That could produce the shades of difference in meaning that I feel as being present.)
No. That, also, would be coercive. But one being nude was allowed in public as well as in private, yes.
FWIW, in cold weather I don't want to be nude. In hot weather, I often do. But there are sanitary reasons why total nudism is often a poor idea. We live in densely packed social clusters, so sanitary concerns are appropriate. Please, however, note that this NEVER applies to photos.
That said, it should be (and I think is) a copyright violation to post a photo of someone without their explicit written permission. And of course, extortion is not acceptable, even if it's just a picture of someone eating hotdogs. (Not that I imagine you could demand much for such a picture...that's irrelevant.)
P.S.: The constitution talks in most places about people, not about citizens, or people who live in some particular geographic area. And my reading is that the NSA has clearly, and with malice aforethought, violated the constitution wholesale.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that Communism has the same relationship to communism that the Libertarian Party has to libertarianism, and that Marxism is something yet again different (and never, ever, tried...probably impossible to try), the distinction that you are making between economics and politics is an illusion.
It is true that there are some elements in economics that are based on physical reality. They are a small minority of the elements on which there is ANY disagreement between, say, Marx and Keyes. Or even Marx and Ayn Rand. Mostly economics is based on political theory, and is not actually subject to experimental test. (Well, not most. Most places where there is any disagreement.) Even the Nihilists agree with most evidentially based economics. But most statements propounded as economics are either politics or theology.
Well, Lisp *is* quite awesome. It's got a few problems that turn me off to it, but had it become popular early, they would have been fixed. (Some of it's documentation. Some of it's name usage. Some of it's naming conventions. I hate names like *This-is-a-special-variable* which, including asterisks, IS a valid Lisp name. And whether the case is significant is a compiler switch.)
The problem with Lisp is that the libraries were never properly developed and standardized. JavaScript is something VERY different. I don't know it, and can't say for sure whether it's good or bad as a language, but it sure isn't Lisp. And I can say that standard JavaScript would not be readily adapted to the projects I typically work on. (I make heavy use of files.)
Many parts are ambiguous. E.g., prototype inheritance. It has a lot going for it, but nobody has been able to come up with an efficient way to implement it. Not to mention the problems that arise if you want to inherit methods from different ancestors. Python has a decent answer to that. So does Eiffel. Neither will work for prototypes, though.
P.S.: You *can* do prototypes in Python, but nobody does them. OTOH, it's a bit of extra work, so possibly if they were easier they would be more popular. Equally likely, however, prototypes are an idea that sounds better than it is.
Well, for my purposes lacking file access is something that makes it unusable. I can understand why they don't have it, being as it was designed to be used in web pages, and mixing in file access has unpleasant security implications...unless you design it very carefully. But it still makes it unusable for my purposes.
(Yes, a third party library could solve this problem. If I were interested enough. But I really prefer a compiled language over an interpreted one, even if I don't like C or C++.)
automated Trucks + automated warehouses + automated factories.+ web store
The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.
The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)
N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic system. Red Hat was better with interfacing to Novell networks, but not hugely.
OTOH, apt-get was far superior to RPM. I'm not certain that it still is, but as I don't like LILO and don't want to prevent my disks from being read by other partitions (SELinux...don't remember the package name), I find Debian preferable, so I haven't kept checking. A few years ago YUM had improved enough that it was nearly comparable to apt-get, especially as one could have a synaptic front-end on either.
More like some parts of the design are many years old. Probably some parts are decades old. Right now they're more interested in getting something working than in optimizing the design. And once they get it into production, they'll be rather cautious in making changes.
Not only is mankind not fit for such an authority, but most individual people aren't, either. I'm the only one that I can think of...and you'd probably disagree with that.
Yes. If not this year, then next year. (I'm not ruling out last year, either. Anything since GPS started being required is suspect.)
I notice you decided to post that anonymously. I don't disagree with your points, but if you don't dare to critise openly on Slashdot, you're unlikely to be effectively pushing for Open Government.
There's a certain amount of evidence that ordinary people put in positions of power (i.e., where their actions don't have personal adverse consequences) will over time, and not that much time, turn into sadistic bastards. Not all of them, by the way. Only about, IIRC, 1/3 of them. But that's far too many.
The only conclusion I've been able to come to is that societies need to be so designed that with greater power comes greater consequences for the misuse of that power. But in all of history I haven't found such a thing. Only rumors of it. (Like "Somewhere in Asia there's the fabulous kindom run by the most Christian monarch, Prester John, who...".)
Perhaps India came close to that with their famous Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, but that also seems largely mythical. One of the closest, most reliable, examples I can think of is Count Dracula (i.e. Vlad the impaler). He was a homocidal maniac, but it is reported that during his reign (paraphrase:)"A virgin with a bag full of gold could ride across the country without guards, and without fear of molestation." Not exactly the kind of government that one would like...but his subordinates were unwilling to do anything that might offend him.
Well, the Scottish police are good guys. I'm not so sure about either the UK figures or the EU figures. They seem to be basically well meaning, and able to justify their actions to themselves, but... outsiders may frequently have a hard time accepting their justifications, and with good reason.
His books are actually set in Scotland, and the spys work for the EU. The NSA being the heavy isn't appropriate for the series. (It's supposed to be "The man from Uncle"...to paraphrase a joke from Halting State.)
OTOH, maybe it's just as well. His series seem to have a tendency to start out light, and then become progressively grimmer. (Well, I haven't followed the Merchant Princes, and I gave up on the Laundry when it got too grim in the 3rd volume. So maybe it then gets lighter again.)
It wasn't public knowledge. Everyone who believed it was considered paranoid, at least during the 1960's-70's. Maybe they were. (If you think you know when they really started listening to everyone, I think you're over estimating certainty.)
P.S.: Surveillance was not the point of the Stross books. It was background, Just like Scottish independence. In Halting State the big surprise was supposed to be a bank robbery inside a virtual game. Shortly after it was published, it happened in Eve-online. The police (and others) were wearing something considerably like google glass. (Actually, I think they looked more like a pair of heavy sunglasses, but I'd need to reread to be sure.) There were virtual overlays on reality published by advertisers, game players, etc. The wierd thing is those have started happening while almost nobody is wearing a VR headset. Spooks, a VR mixed with reality game, was a major subplot. So my brother-in-law walks in with a game called ghosts played on his phone, where he's supposed to chase around after a ghost that can only be seen on his phone, but where the chasing happens in physical space. (That's not Spooks, by any means. For one thing the ghost tried to get him to chase it in front of a car driving down the street. Spooks had more awareness of the actual surroundings.)
Or, another sub-plot involved remotely driven taxis. But Google has nearly gotten fully automated vehicles working.
Basicly, the world that developed made a lot of choices that weren't the same, and the stuff that was supposed to be new and exciting kept happening before most people bought the book. Near future SF used to be easier. Unexpected changes were slower in arriving. They ALWAYS arrived out of order, and with some choices not the same, but usually you had several years leeway (so most of your sales could happen before the book was obsolete).
So now he's discontinued the series. And he's going to wait until the votes for Scottish independence and Britain remaining in the EU are in before he tries any more near future books. Quite reasonable. (Snarl! I don't care if the series didn't match this universe, I wanted the next volume.)
Stross has more than once (now) decided that he didn't like the was a series was going, and ended it. It's not exactly writer's block, because he wrote something else instead, but it still ended the series.
In the "Singularity Sky" series he decided that he couldn't avoid the bad guy's winning in the third volume, so he just decided to stop with "Iron Sunrise". In the "Halting State" series, Scotland was an independent country. Most of his outrageous ideas kept happening (so far "Athena" hasn't yet shown up). Etc. So he decided that he didn't like how it was going. And he's declared it ended. (A pity. Those were my two favorite series of his.)
Sorry, but a dimension is actually more general than that. In some datasets, e.g., color might be a dimension.
Generally when we aren't being special and particular we want to use dimension to something that varies independently of other dimensions, and which as a continuous range of values. This is why it's quite reasonable to consider time as a dimension, as well as up-down, left-right, and forward-back, but weight is also sometimes worth considering as a dimension, and size can have dimensions independent of centroid.
Where things get strange is where we start considering extra spatial dimensions. Time seems to get in to the mix honestly, but most other dimensions are shucked off. So one is left with 4 observable space-time dimensions. But the math seems to want there to be more...but there's no obvious physical interpretation. I actually think the best thing to do is to say "These are things that the math wants. They are very like things from the math that are normally interpreted as spatial dimensions, but it's not really clear how you should interpret them. They almost always, however, drop out when you solve the equations for anything that you'll encounter, so you don't really need to interpret them."
Was there ever any serious doubt that the halting problem and Godelian limits applied to minds?
I've occasionally run across people who seemed to think so, but I always thought they were being unreasonable.
OTOH, this may also imply that there is no way to do FTL, that wormholes will not be stabilizable, etc. And it seems as if it would put strict bounds on how powerful quantum computer algorithms could be.
There WERE a lot of REALLY STUPID ideas and health practices. But the worst ones didn't adversely affect the practitioners. There was a lot of "evolution" going on before there were reasonable models, where people would come up with ideas almost at random, and the ones that killed (or adversely affected) their practitioners didn't tend to get transmitted on. But high status people could adopt practices that were frequently lethal to low status people with very little adverse affect, and because they were high status the ideas would tend to persist.
Consider, e.g., the doctors who used to pride themselves on not washing their hands. For that matter, Aristotle decided that women had fewer teeth than men, and this was accepted as truth up through, I think, the 1500's. It didn't have much bad effect, but it's an example of high status individual and a totally arbitrary idea.
Naa. A much easier answer is that the simulation of the mind has only a limited amount of introspection capability.
Actually, that's true irrespective of whether the apparent physical universe has "grounded" existence. You decide whether to move your fingers, and how, before you are aware of the action. My theory is that consciousness evolved out of a need to serialize experiences in order to index them for storage and retrieval. The actual physical universe (whether or not it's a simulation) is massively parallel WRT consciousness. What we CAN be aware of is only a fraction of what we physically experience. So the universe that we experience is guaranteed to be a simulation, irrespective of whether the containing physical universe is itself a simulation.
The other alternative is Solipsism, which strikes me as a rather useless belief, even if it *IS* consistent with all available evidence.
Well, to be fair, math isn't science. Math is a system of statements. It may be complete, it may be consistent, but it can't be both. Not if it can describe very much.
A particular set of math statements can have in interpretation that can describe an interface between the math and the physical universe. This interpretation can be either true or false. The math can only be either correct or incorrect. (i.e., 1 + 3 = 5 is incorrect in most systems of math. You could design one in which it was correct. Say a bounded set of integers where all numbers >= 4 had the same value. It might not be useful for much.)
So. When you have an interpretation of a system of math, it can be a bijective isomorphism to some abstraction from the physical world. Then if you observe something in the physical world, it should be derivable from the math. (If, that is, you have an appropriate rule of inference. And example of a place where we don't is radioactive decay.) And if you derive something from the math, you should be able to observe it in the physical world (if you can perform the experiment). If either of these fails, then you know that either you made a mistake in the math, or that the isomorphism was incorrectly assumed to apply.
The science part is taking predictions and validating them, and the making observations and deriving them. The math isn't science. the interpretation isn't science (that's more philosophy).
So. To me this looks like math, not like science. There's a close relationship, but it's not the same thing.
What do you mean it was proven wrong? It never was, and it hasn't been yet. It probably can't be. (Well, except in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics was wrong.)
What was proven was that the heliocentric theory was a lot easier to calculate. And you didn't need to keep adding on as many special correction factors each time the instruments improved. So now we're doing relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are just means of calculation. Relativity doesn't really define an interpretation, and Quantum Mechanics is consistent with multiple different interpretations. The different interpretations seem quite different when described in English, but the math is exactly the same. You can't chose between the multi-world interpretation and Solipsism on the basis of evidence, you need to choose on the basis of philosophical biases.
Just consider, Relativity talks about bent spaces, but in what direction is space bent? Well, that's not clear. Perhaps saying bent is just something to enable you to understand that what we're really talking about is lengths being longer in one direction than in another, but that's just gibberish. You CAN'T translate Relativity into English and have it really make sense, any more than quantum mechanics. The last one you could "pretty much" do that with was Newtonian Mechanics, and if you really think carefully about that, you also find places where you must follow the math rather than reason. Just try to think carefully about what an infinitesimal means, or an imaginary number. You can't. You're just used to them, so you slide over the places where they are incomprehensible.
FWIW, I don't understand pre-Newtonian mechanics well enough, but I'm rather certain that they had equally incomprehensible places. Think of Cantor's proofs, and then try to imagine what it means to paint one copy of the interval of real number red and another blue. Or Zeno's paradoxes.
I don't think that's the distinction. If I charge you money not to burn down your resturant, I'm not stopping doing something, I'm continuing to not do something. But it's still extortion.
IIUC, blackmail is the threat to do something to you unless you do something. But that shades into extortion without a dividing line that I can see. Perhaps they are two terms for the same thing. (I.e., perhaps extortion is the legal term, and blackmail is the journalistic term. That could produce the shades of difference in meaning that I feel as being present.)
No. That, also, would be coercive. But one being nude was allowed in public as well as in private, yes.
FWIW, in cold weather I don't want to be nude. In hot weather, I often do. But there are sanitary reasons why total nudism is often a poor idea. We live in densely packed social clusters, so sanitary concerns are appropriate. Please, however, note that this NEVER applies to photos.
That said, it should be (and I think is) a copyright violation to post a photo of someone without their explicit written permission. And of course, extortion is not acceptable, even if it's just a picture of someone eating hotdogs. (Not that I imagine you could demand much for such a picture...that's irrelevant.)
Not just foreigners.
P.S.: The constitution talks in most places about people, not about citizens, or people who live in some particular geographic area. And my reading is that the NSA has clearly, and with malice aforethought, violated the constitution wholesale.
The law has just been passed. Ex post facto punishment is forbidden. So those who previously posted "revenge porn" could not be convicted under it.