You repeatedly raise the issue of my dismissing evidence as though it counts for nothing. What I'm actually attempting to say is that given a lack of independent confirmation via some other means than gravitional inference, dark matter is on less firm ground than many theories in other areas of physics and astrophysics. This is the grounds for (healthy) skepticism about dark matter that I originally suggested. The way I read your position, you seem to be denying that dark matter has any such weaknesses.
The "pantheon of possible particles" strengthens the case for dark matter, not weakens it. What it tells us is that dark matter candidates are naturally found in most of the most plausible extensions of the Standard Model (as well as one which is found in the Standard Model itself).
But it doesn't tell us how or why the distribution of those dark matter candidates should correspond to the inferred distribution. At best, it's a speculative suggestion as to how gaps in our knowledge may (if we're lucky) be filled in future. What would strengthen the case for dark matter is a model in which the gravitationally inferred quantities of dark matter match amounts arrived at by other means, for example.
Yes, it's possible that someone will come up with an alternative that works, but after many people have tried for many years, it's increasingly less likely.
Do you have any evidence to support this supposition? Back before theories of decoherence were developed (or propagated), you could have said something similar about certain interpretations of QM, and you would have been wrong.
I don't care about what's criminal or moral, etc. What I'm referring to is how employers tend to react to such things. My comment was an implied observation that if the OP had used his own real name in posting about gay porn, that there'd be a pretty good chance that a potential employer would have turned him down on that basis alone, just as he turned down the allegedly alien-loving heroin addict.
While I'm a big fan of Dr. Marshall (gotta love anyone who, when left with few other options, experiments on himself!), there's a bit of a difference between that situation and the hiring of programmers for most jobs. An analogous situation might be if I went to an average employer and told them "I don't write code in Java, I insist on only writing in Haskell, because it's a much more expressive and efficient way to write code". On a pure technical level, I might be right (as Marshall was), but I'm going up against an entire industry's worth of infrastructure and standard practices -- just as Marshall was going against a scientific establishment and an entrenched industry which thought it knew the causes of ulcers, and had the drugs to prove it. Rejecting such a person can be quite rational, assuming the goal for the hire is not to revolutionize the industry but rather just to get someone to work on those damn TPS reports.
And actually, the OP's attitude might very well be valid in such a case -- someone who's found a better way to do something may very well have an inflated sense of their own worth with respect to a situation in which their chosen approach is not practical because of network effects. IOW, they may well suck at churning out TPS reports in Java (I know I do), even if they're God's gift to programmerhood when allowed to code whatever they want in Haskell.
The list you gave may correspond to some "definition of a state", but it's not the one used in international law to help determine statehood. International law about states is pretty closely tied to physical territory. Another factor which presents a problem for virtual states is that a state in international law should be substantially independent of other states. A virtual state seems substantially dependent on the physical states which host its "citizens".
A more promising aspect to all this is that there are situations in which an entity can be a state for some purposes, but not others. For example, the "A Mandated Territories" in the Middle East provided nationalities to people in certain territories like Palestine and Syria, but those territories didn't act as states in most other respect. This means that under existing precedent, a virtual state might conceivably be granted certain rights of a state, although these rights would be unlikely to supersede the rights of the physical state in which the members of the virtual state reside.
I think the biggest result is that most nations would pass new laws stating that the physical presence of a body within their border established that the person was 'in' their country and subject to its laws.
That's already what the law looks like in every country I've ever heard of. If you're physically within a jurisdiction, you're subject to its laws. What did you think made you subject to a country's laws? What you do on your computer doesn't exempt you from this in any way, and law enforcement would just laugh at you if you raised the idea.
Certainly we would be able to infer more about dark matter if we could get some non-gravitational evidence. But the gravitational constraints alone mean that we can't get "whatever result we want" with dark matter, contrary to your claim.
"Whatever result we want" is true as far as it needs to be, in this situation. The situation is that we can observe a certain amount of mass via various means, but it doesn't behave according to the theory of gravity that we think ought to apply. So one question is whether we can introduce invisible matter into the system in such a way that the theory of gravity in question will work. The fact that the answer seems to turn out "yes" does not in any way demonstrate that the invisible matter actually exists. This is why the theory as it currently stands is intrinsically weak.
Dark matter may not be entirely non-predictive, but it's the next best thing. If a dark matter prediction fails, there's a high probability that it'll be possible to adjust the dark matter distribution to make it succeed.
It's possible that someone will come up with such a theory, but right now it looks like the dynamics will have to be so complex and contrived that it makes dark matter look appealing by comparison. This is on the basis of the many gravitational theories that have been tried.
If the history of science teaches us anything, it's that it's very difficult to judge such things prior to the right discovery being made.
My point is that dark matter is not "just" there to make theory work; there are other, non-astrophysical reasons to believe that dark matter particles may well exist.
But there's no independent theory which dictates the quantity and distribution of those particles in a way that supports dark matter, without first assuming dark matter's requirements. If there were, you wouldn't need to point to a whole pantheon of possible particles, and the theory of dark matter would be stronger.
Incidentally, this characterization as a fudge to maintain "existing theory" is rather silly. Dark matter is a new theory, just like modified gravity theories are. Both of them replace our previous notion of astrophysics.
Dark matter theories assume that existing theories of gravity can be suitably applied unchanged at galactic and super-galactic scales. In that sense, dark matter may very well be a fudge to allow existing gravitational theories to be used to describe the phenomena in question.
Dark matter was resisted for decades, and even today there are still alternatives like modified gravity being worked on. It's just that there is less and less room for them, as new evidence has disagreed with alternatives and continued to agree with dark matter.
As we run up against the limits of our observational capabilities in areas like astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics, it's going to become increasingly important to be sophisticated about recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the consequences of that. Otherwise, we'll simply be doing exactly what religious folk sometimes accuse us of: indulging in faith. We need to be able to recognize and acknowledge weaknesses in theories even when we don't have good alternatives. Having no alternatives for a theory in no way increases that theory's strength.
Would you cut it out, you're making my BS detector overload. I agree with the OP, even the slightest bit of evidence that you've been involved with a successful large software project would make a big difference.
It's from Lord of the Rings. Deep in the Mines of Moria live horrors which man was never meant to meet: Balrogs, Balcksmishs, and worse.
The Balcksmishs were originally Maiar, of the same order as Sauron, Saruman and Gandalf, but they became seduced by Morgoth, who corrupted them to his service in the days of his splendour before the creation of Arda. During the First Age, they were among the most feared of Morgoth's forces. When his fortress of Utumno was destroyed by the Valar, they fled and lurked in the pits of Angband. Fighting alongside the Balrogs, the Balcksmishs were nearly destroyed at the end of the First Age. Unlike Balrogs, Balcksmishs have real wings -- much of the muddle about Balrog wings comes from confusion with Balcksmishs and the related Balckribers, which the Nazgul sometimes style themselves after. Sheesh, weren't you paying attention during the movie?
This is false. If you take any one phenomenon, such as galactic rotation curves, you can explain it by postulating a particular distribution and type of dark matter. But there's no reason why that same distribution and type should also account for other, independent phenomena -- which it does. We can't get "whatever result we want" by fudging the dark matter distribution. If we fudge it one way, it can disagree with other observations. The fact that it doesn't is the reason why dark matter has become a mainstream theory.
Yes, but is there any corroboration of dark matter that doesn't involve gravitational theories? Obviously, observing dark matter via radiation emissions would be quite convincing, for example. However, I'm not aware of any such corroboration, and as such, the fact that there are constraints on the dark matter distribution is hardly surprising. But it's still not constrained in the way it would be if there were some other way of observing it, independent of gravitational inference. IOW, my point stands.
I say they're equally elegant, regardless of whether we detect dark matter. Either way, we have to alter the laws of physics (to alter gravity or to include new particles). Saying that one is better than the other is just prejudice. The true measure is which idea works better.
I agree. Elegance is not really the criterion I'm interested in -- what works best, corresponds to observable features, and has the best predictive power is what we want. What I'm saying is that we're currently comparing dark matter to a possible theory of gravity we don't have. Obviously dark matter currently wins that contest, just as competing versions of epicycles were once the winning theory of solar system orbits. But that in itself says very little about the possibilities for better theories of gravity.
Particles like axions, neutralinos, etc. were hypothesized for reasons completely independent of the justifications for dark matter. However, they easily could be dark matter. Once again, there's no reason a priori why a new type of particle introduced to solve the strong-CP problem in QCD or the hierarchy problem or grand unification in the Standard Model should also happen to solve astrophysical anomalies, but they can, if they exist (depending on their masses, which we can't predict yet).
Yes, but the reason that this is a weak position is that you're relying for the completion of the theory on a range of possible postulated entities. That's a catch-all response which basically amounts to "we don't know". It makes the theory less complete than it would otherwise be. The fact that you have a menu of possible choices doesn't make the theory stronger, all it does is hold out the possibility that the theory may be improved in future.
I think you need to learn a lot more about dark matter theories and the evidence for them before you so casually dismiss them.
I'm not dismissing them, and certainly not casually. There's a large middle ground between acceptance on faith and rejection. The former shouldn't have too much place in science. I'm pointing out that there's a lot of uncertainty here, and a lack of independent corroboration, and that responsible scientists shouldn't blind themselves to possible alternatives by according too much weight to intrinsically weak theories. I'm not saying that dark matter theories shouldn't be pursued -- that's the only way they'll be strengthened -- but given the current state of the field, it seems more reasonable to me to treat dark matter as a proxy for better theories that haven't yet been developed, than as a well-established phenomenon.
Some skepticism is certainly in order. Since we currently have no way of independently confirming the existence of dark matter, we also have no way of distinguishing between two possible cases: one case is that dark matter corresponds to some real, physical material; the other is that the theory of gravity we're using is flawed. The fact that a better theory of gravity hasn't been produced doesn't mean that the current one is correct.
There are pretty strong parallels between dark matter and the infamous epicycles. The case for epicycles was about as strong as that for dark matter: epicycles were a construction required to make the theory work, but there was no way to independently verify their existence, and they turned out to be essentially fictitious (assuming one doesn't take the position that they could be turned into a valid way of describing the solar system's orbital motion taking the Earth as center.)
The real problem is that there are no checks and balances here: by adjusting the mass distribution of dark matter, we can get whatever result we want, and there's nothing to either prove or disprove the proposed distribution. It's the ultimate hack, since it can be adjusted to suit every individual galaxy we observe.
Screwing around with the laws of gravity isn't any more elegant,
In the absence of independent evidence of dark matter, it would be more elegant if laws of gravity were discovered which explained the observations well without dark matter.
and there are plenty of plausible candidate particles for dark matter lying around in various extensions to the Standard Model.
That's a pretty weak position. It certainly doesn't do anything to counter the accusation that objects are being invented just to make the theory work.
If you knew the scale of the damage Microsoft had done, you wouldn't be apologising for them.
Microsoft are hated for a good reason.
OTOH, it's not a good idea to give any credence to "articles" like the blog rant being discussed here. It doesn't do anything to help the anti-Microsoft position when criticism is based on ignorance and mob behavior.
Ok, thanks for explaining, now I kind of see what bothers you, even though I still don't agree that this is malice
I didn't say it was malice, I said it was overzealous. I also said it was immoral; perhaps that's a bit strong, but it's in part a reaction to the FSF's claims about itself -- it sets a high moral bar, so must itself be held to a high moral standard.
Well, if they failed to understand this and still applied the license then they and not the FSF are to blame if the license doesn't suit their needs.
This is the crux of our disagreement. Many people have applied the license just as you say, by copying the provided text. It's not just because they didn't read it, but because they didn't fully appreciate the significance of it. I'm saying that if the FSF is to be deserving of people's trust in this area, it should make clear what the consequences of such a significant clause are -- not just the positive consequences (as in the FAQ response you pointed to), but also the possible negative consequences. Relying in part on people's carelessness or ignorance to achieve its goals does not send a very good message about the way the FSF sees the people who license code under the GPL.
The FSF cannot know what your exact goals are when applying their license, so what they assume is that since you are using a Free Software license you care most about Freedom, and that's what they offer you by default. And, true, this is not appropriate for everyone. Organisations like MySQL are actually not so much interested in Freedom
Organisations like MySQL might be interested in other kinds of freedom than the FSF definition of "Freedom". In fact, the main organisation actually interested in "Freedom" is the FSF itself. The FSF should keep that in mind if it's interested in having people who might not share its goals entirely use its licenses, as opposed to alternatives such as BSD, Creative Commons, etc.
You are plain wrong. The Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU GPL goes into more detail and explains the rationale behind the "or later" recommendationand why you should (not must(!)) use that formulation.
I stand corrected. I think it would be a good idea to reference that particular FAQ response from the "How to Apply" text, though.
The main issue which that response doesn't address, as I see it, are the risks of including the "or later" clause. I understand that the FSF doesn't consider it in its interests to include such a discussion. However, as I've said, including the "or later" clause requires significant trust in the FSF and its future evolution. To be deserving of that trust, the FSF should be as open as possible on issues like this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's humor, Jim, but not as Americans know it.
I wouldn't call it muddy, it's more the color of pee. Which, based on the taste, may not be a coincidence.
You repeatedly raise the issue of my dismissing evidence as though it counts for nothing. What I'm actually attempting to say is that given a lack of independent confirmation via some other means than gravitional inference, dark matter is on less firm ground than many theories in other areas of physics and astrophysics. This is the grounds for (healthy) skepticism about dark matter that I originally suggested. The way I read your position, you seem to be denying that dark matter has any such weaknesses.
But it doesn't tell us how or why the distribution of those dark matter candidates should correspond to the inferred distribution. At best, it's a speculative suggestion as to how gaps in our knowledge may (if we're lucky) be filled in future. What would strengthen the case for dark matter is a model in which the gravitationally inferred quantities of dark matter match amounts arrived at by other means, for example.
Do you have any evidence to support this supposition? Back before theories of decoherence were developed (or propagated), you could have said something similar about certain interpretations of QM, and you would have been wrong.
I don't care about what's criminal or moral, etc. What I'm referring to is how employers tend to react to such things. My comment was an implied observation that if the OP had used his own real name in posting about gay porn, that there'd be a pretty good chance that a potential employer would have turned him down on that basis alone, just as he turned down the allegedly alien-loving heroin addict.
This from a guy whose Slashdot profile has a URL which links to gay porn?
While I'm a big fan of Dr. Marshall (gotta love anyone who, when left with few other options, experiments on himself!), there's a bit of a difference between that situation and the hiring of programmers for most jobs. An analogous situation might be if I went to an average employer and told them "I don't write code in Java, I insist on only writing in Haskell, because it's a much more expressive and efficient way to write code". On a pure technical level, I might be right (as Marshall was), but I'm going up against an entire industry's worth of infrastructure and standard practices -- just as Marshall was going against a scientific establishment and an entrenched industry which thought it knew the causes of ulcers, and had the drugs to prove it. Rejecting such a person can be quite rational, assuming the goal for the hire is not to revolutionize the industry but rather just to get someone to work on those damn TPS reports.
And actually, the OP's attitude might very well be valid in such a case -- someone who's found a better way to do something may very well have an inflated sense of their own worth with respect to a situation in which their chosen approach is not practical because of network effects. IOW, they may well suck at churning out TPS reports in Java (I know I do), even if they're God's gift to programmerhood when allowed to code whatever they want in Haskell.
As long as you don't mind tea made from silicone gel...
It played fine under 64-bit mplayer on my Debian 64-bit machine. Mplayer can play the wmv3 format these days.
The list you gave may correspond to some "definition of a state", but it's not the one used in international law to help determine statehood. International law about states is pretty closely tied to physical territory. Another factor which presents a problem for virtual states is that a state in international law should be substantially independent of other states. A virtual state seems substantially dependent on the physical states which host its "citizens".
A more promising aspect to all this is that there are situations in which an entity can be a state for some purposes, but not others. For example, the "A Mandated Territories" in the Middle East provided nationalities to people in certain territories like Palestine and Syria, but those territories didn't act as states in most other respect. This means that under existing precedent, a virtual state might conceivably be granted certain rights of a state, although these rights would be unlikely to supersede the rights of the physical state in which the members of the virtual state reside.
"Whatever result we want" is true as far as it needs to be, in this situation. The situation is that we can observe a certain amount of mass via various means, but it doesn't behave according to the theory of gravity that we think ought to apply. So one question is whether we can introduce invisible matter into the system in such a way that the theory of gravity in question will work. The fact that the answer seems to turn out "yes" does not in any way demonstrate that the invisible matter actually exists. This is why the theory as it currently stands is intrinsically weak.
Dark matter may not be entirely non-predictive, but it's the next best thing. If a dark matter prediction fails, there's a high probability that it'll be possible to adjust the dark matter distribution to make it succeed.
If the history of science teaches us anything, it's that it's very difficult to judge such things prior to the right discovery being made.
But there's no independent theory which dictates the quantity and distribution of those particles in a way that supports dark matter, without first assuming dark matter's requirements. If there were, you wouldn't need to point to a whole pantheon of possible particles, and the theory of dark matter would be stronger.
Dark matter theories assume that existing theories of gravity can be suitably applied unchanged at galactic and super-galactic scales. In that sense, dark matter may very well be a fudge to allow existing gravitational theories to be used to describe the phenomena in question.
As we run up against the limits of our observational capabilities in areas like astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics, it's going to become increasingly important to be sophisticated about recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the consequences of that. Otherwise, we'll simply be doing exactly what religious folk sometimes accuse us of: indulging in faith. We need to be able to recognize and acknowledge weaknesses in theories even when we don't have good alternatives. Having no alternatives for a theory in no way increases that theory's strength.
Would you cut it out, you're making my BS detector overload. I agree with the OP, even the slightest bit of evidence that you've been involved with a successful large software project would make a big difference.
It's from Lord of the Rings. Deep in the Mines of Moria live horrors which man was never meant to meet: Balrogs, Balcksmishs, and worse.
The Balcksmishs were originally Maiar, of the same order as Sauron, Saruman and Gandalf, but they became seduced by Morgoth, who corrupted them to his service in the days of his splendour before the creation of Arda. During the First Age, they were among the most feared of Morgoth's forces. When his fortress of Utumno was destroyed by the Valar, they fled and lurked in the pits of Angband. Fighting alongside the Balrogs, the Balcksmishs were nearly destroyed at the end of the First Age. Unlike Balrogs, Balcksmishs have real wings -- much of the muddle about Balrog wings comes from confusion with Balcksmishs and the related Balckribers, which the Nazgul sometimes style themselves after. Sheesh, weren't you paying attention during the movie?
Nah, that movie was unwatchable. But I watched the relevant clip!
Or you could just move to Pretoria, become mayor, and have the first "r" removed from its name.
Yes, but the glow from the luminous yellow Hotel Continental is.
Yes, but is there any corroboration of dark matter that doesn't involve gravitational theories? Obviously, observing dark matter via radiation emissions would be quite convincing, for example. However, I'm not aware of any such corroboration, and as such, the fact that there are constraints on the dark matter distribution is hardly surprising. But it's still not constrained in the way it would be if there were some other way of observing it, independent of gravitational inference. IOW, my point stands.
I agree. Elegance is not really the criterion I'm interested in -- what works best, corresponds to observable features, and has the best predictive power is what we want. What I'm saying is that we're currently comparing dark matter to a possible theory of gravity we don't have. Obviously dark matter currently wins that contest, just as competing versions of epicycles were once the winning theory of solar system orbits. But that in itself says very little about the possibilities for better theories of gravity.
Yes, but the reason that this is a weak position is that you're relying for the completion of the theory on a range of possible postulated entities. That's a catch-all response which basically amounts to "we don't know". It makes the theory less complete than it would otherwise be. The fact that you have a menu of possible choices doesn't make the theory stronger, all it does is hold out the possibility that the theory may be improved in future.
I'm not dismissing them, and certainly not casually. There's a large middle ground between acceptance on faith and rejection. The former shouldn't have too much place in science. I'm pointing out that there's a lot of uncertainty here, and a lack of independent corroboration, and that responsible scientists shouldn't blind themselves to possible alternatives by according too much weight to intrinsically weak theories. I'm not saying that dark matter theories shouldn't be pursued -- that's the only way they'll be strengthened -- but given the current state of the field, it seems more reasonable to me to treat dark matter as a proxy for better theories that haven't yet been developed, than as a well-established phenomenon.
Just because they're dead, doesn't mean we shouldn't welcome our new Martian microbial overlords! Where are your manners?
Some skepticism is certainly in order. Since we currently have no way of independently confirming the existence of dark matter, we also have no way of distinguishing between two possible cases: one case is that dark matter corresponds to some real, physical material; the other is that the theory of gravity we're using is flawed. The fact that a better theory of gravity hasn't been produced doesn't mean that the current one is correct.
There are pretty strong parallels between dark matter and the infamous epicycles. The case for epicycles was about as strong as that for dark matter: epicycles were a construction required to make the theory work, but there was no way to independently verify their existence, and they turned out to be essentially fictitious (assuming one doesn't take the position that they could be turned into a valid way of describing the solar system's orbital motion taking the Earth as center.)
The real problem is that there are no checks and balances here: by adjusting the mass distribution of dark matter, we can get whatever result we want, and there's nothing to either prove or disprove the proposed distribution. It's the ultimate hack, since it can be adjusted to suit every individual galaxy we observe.
In the absence of independent evidence of dark matter, it would be more elegant if laws of gravity were discovered which explained the observations well without dark matter.
That's a pretty weak position. It certainly doesn't do anything to counter the accusation that objects are being invented just to make the theory work.
I didn't say it was malice, I said it was overzealous. I also said it was immoral; perhaps that's a bit strong, but it's in part a reaction to the FSF's claims about itself -- it sets a high moral bar, so must itself be held to a high moral standard.
This is the crux of our disagreement. Many people have applied the license just as you say, by copying the provided text. It's not just because they didn't read it, but because they didn't fully appreciate the significance of it. I'm saying that if the FSF is to be deserving of people's trust in this area, it should make clear what the consequences of such a significant clause are -- not just the positive consequences (as in the FAQ response you pointed to), but also the possible negative consequences. Relying in part on people's carelessness or ignorance to achieve its goals does not send a very good message about the way the FSF sees the people who license code under the GPL.
Organisations like MySQL might be interested in other kinds of freedom than the FSF definition of "Freedom". In fact, the main organisation actually interested in "Freedom" is the FSF itself. The FSF should keep that in mind if it's interested in having people who might not share its goals entirely use its licenses, as opposed to alternatives such as BSD, Creative Commons, etc.
I stand corrected. I think it would be a good idea to reference that particular FAQ response from the "How to Apply" text, though.
The main issue which that response doesn't address, as I see it, are the risks of including the "or later" clause. I understand that the FSF doesn't consider it in its interests to include such a discussion. However, as I've said, including the "or later" clause requires significant trust in the FSF and its future evolution. To be deserving of that trust, the FSF should be as open as possible on issues like this.
Er, that's what the chlorine is for.