It is a 2.6 sigma effect,' he told
PhysicsWeb, 'so there's still a 6 in 1000 chance that what we are seeing are background events, rather than the Higgs.'
Not to knock my experimental colleagues, since what they do is actually much more difficult than what we theorists tend to do, but.... the number of 2 and 3 sigma effects that disappear when more data is taken, or old results that feed into their calculations are updated, or theorists calculate the next order correction... well, that number greatly exceeds 6 results in 1000. That's why physicists as a group don't tend to "believe" results until they reach a significance of 5 sigma, which is something like a 1 in 2 million chance of background fluctuations.
But that doesn't stop the theorists from writing dozens of papers based on 2 sigma results:-)
Seriously, don't you think (or better yet, hope) that we researchers have better things to do than crawl around libraries for hours on end? It's called "productivity."
Here here! I'm greatly in favor of increased productivity in my research environment. Like when I "productively" lurk around Slashdot, instead of finishing that paper I should be working on....
If there aren't, a company can say 'no account for you' for not wanting to provide any information they want.
And why exactly is that a problem? How does that violate your rights? Or mine? If a company won't give you service without an SSN, then go somewhere that will. Or buy one of those "prepaid" phones. Pay with cash instead of credit cards. Buy in person instead of over the phone. But don't get the government involved in telling me who I can and can't give information to. If I want to give my SSN to a company for a discount or for a higher class of service, why shouldn't I be allowed to do that. Telling companies what they can and can't ask for is ultimately a restriction of MY rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; it isn't your place to decide for me what I can and can't give away.
In fact plasma and laser accelerators, while a very good idea being explored in many places, are not ready for prime time yet. Currently, they are NOT cheaper yet... either to build or to operate. And they likely won't be for many years.
Although the article is not very clear on this point, the accelerator being discussed in this article is the "Next Linear Collider", or NLC. If built, it would be a linear electron positron collider, and not a synchrotron. Although suggestions to build a very large hadron collider (imaginatively titled the Very Large Hadron Collider, or VLHC:-) are currently also under design discussion.
And the SLAC/Fermilab directors recommending siting an NLC in the US without consulting with the director of KEK has really pissed off the Japanese and has been a highlight of the conference so far.
Wow! I'm amazed! You've given me a good laugh TWICE in one day! First Autodynamics, and now the CCRH!
CCRH is the same organization that requires its members to take an oath that they won't accept ANY scientific evidence that contradicts a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. They are REQUIRED to REJECT evidence that DOESN'T fit their preconceived notions of the planet. And you are holding them up as a paragon of scientific thought and developer of scientific theories?
Wow...I'm really thankful for all the humor you have injected into my day!
You have to admit that what we call quantum mechanics
today doesn't much resemble the quatum mechanics of the 1930's. But in the 1930's the perception was that physics had been "solved".
That's not even close to true. The QM you might study as an undergraduate physicist today is IDENTICAL to the QM derived in the 1930s. What HAS changed is not the theory, but the models the theory is applied to. And there were few physicists in the 1930s (nor today!) that would have claimed physics was "solved" as you put it; that sort of misunderstanding is usually based on popular accounts of cutting edge research, misunderstood and misinterpreted for nonscientists by other nonscientists. When trying to transfer knowledge to the nonscientist, things often have to be simplified, not only to explain it to a non-technical crowd, but also to simply fit it into the time allotted (it takes six or seven years of training and study to get to the point where you can even begin to understand the theories of modern physics at the level necessary to do research... you can't transfer all that detailed knowledge to a non-scientist is a few minutes or hours, so something has to give).
As for how much of modern theory will be around in 50 years, just think of how much of modern theory existed 50 years ago: almost all of it! It's only the models, not the derivable theory, that has changed dramatically.
Autodynamics? Hee hee hee hee. Oh...I needed a good laugh.
For those who don't know, the autodynamics crowd seems to think that the physicists of the last 100 years are too corrupt and stupid to notice that Special Relativity is completely false. Not only can't the autodynamics crowd perform a simple derivation, but they choose to ignore the thousands of experiments, measurements, and papers written and peer reviewed, in order to come to their loony conclusion. They misrepresent and misunderstand almost all of modern physics, from condensed matter to particle physics to astrophysics, in coming to their unsupportable conclusion.
But like I said, thanks for the post! I needed a good laugh:-)
Actually, I'm also opposed to factory farming. Of all varieties. Including vegetables and grains. Think of the pain and anguish we're causing those poor plants by forcing them to grow in tightly regimented rows! Even those evil organic farmers have to go for their enslavement of the plant races. I say, if you're willing to gather it yourself, bon appetit. At least those plants get to live decent lives before we get them.
I'm also opposed to vaccines and other drugs. Think of the environmental destruction we're bringing down on all those poor viruses, bacteria, amoebae, worms, and other parasites that cause us pain. We should end this senseless destruction! We should let those diseases take their toll.
And schooling, let's not forget to eliminate that. If we were supposed to be taught in schools, they would have existed in nature. And homes, houses, electricity, heat in the winter, cooling in the summer. It's all wrong! Ban it all!
- sarcasm off -
Needless to say, I disagree with you. We should always be mindful of the potential outcomes of our activities, because there are downsides (I would prefer to see more biodiversity in our food crops, and less use of antibiotics as growth factors in farm animals, for instance). And there is no reason to cause unnecessary pain or harm to farm animals. But, restrictions and regulations should be based on real science, standards that strive mightily to be objective. Modern farming methods are far from perfect, but they manage to feed 6 billion humans daily, and they have helped to give us longer, richer, safer, healthier lives than our ancestors had. I don't want to go back to the age of the hunter-gatherer, and the agony, disease, and short life expectancy that entails....
If someone does piss an american voter off, he/she will simply not vote in the next re-election
And those people deserve what they get. When you abdicate your responsibility to the democratic system, you give up your right to complain about the outcome. If you don't like the way things are, you DO something about them. you don't whine about how unfair the system is, because there isn't a more level political playing field anywhere in the world.
Once they turn 18, they won't give a shit because they are not effected.
Again, why should I be bothered about the feelings of people who abdicate their responsibility?
The USA has a little thing called "recall"
There is no recall provision on the Federal level, and there is no universal recall provision on the state and local levels. At the Federal level, there are four ways to remove a President: death, resignation, Impeachment and Conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors (Article II, Section 4), or inability to discharge the office (Article II, Section 1, and various amendments). There are also four ways to remove a Senator or Congressman: death, resignation, supermajority vote by the members of that Legislative body (Article I, Section 5), and assumption of another office (Article I, Section 6). Not even a criminal conviction necessarily removes a Legislator or President from office. State laws on recall vary widely.
So does our legal system, but they are still allowed to do so.
Under tightly controlled rules in an attempt to ensure that the adversarial system does not unduly support either side of the case. With the understanding that errors in applying those rules will be sternly handled by a higher level court.
Hardly the same rules that surveys have:-)
Re:To see how this will go, look at drugs
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Killing Video Games
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Maybe you should reread what I wrote before complaining that I'm wrong.....
Public protection didn't have anything to do with it.
It most certainly does...regulation of drugs (legal and illegal drugs) has at its base the protection of the public welfare. Whether you agree that the laws ACTUALLY protect the public welfare is beside the point. You attempted "history lesson" is equally specious to the argument that I made. As I said, I was not stating an opinion pro or con on the CURRENT drug law, but rather the reasons that drugs are and should be regulated, REGARDLESS of whether you agree with their current state.
don't fool yourself that you get less fucked up on alcohol than you can on pot
Please don't put words in my mouth. I NEVER said that any given drug causes more or less impairment than any other drug. Suggesting that I did is an unwarranted distortion of my previous post.
P.S. I don't smoke pot. Not everyone who supports legalization wants to use hemp for smoking.
And neither did I say that you did. You'll also notice that I didn't say whether or not I do. Not everyone who is opposed to outright legalization of a given drug is opposed to the use of that drug in certain circumstances. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't particularly care how you fuck yourself up; just don't impose the downsides on others.
along with the RIAA's own data which shows increased CD sales?
It is a fallacy to assume that since overall sales have gone up, that Napster has not suppressed sales below what they would have been otherwise. I'm not supporting the RIAA here, just pointing out a logical fallacy in your argument. Record companies are entitled to try to make the most money they can, as long as they do so within the law not within ethics or morality (which you might hope they would consider anyway), and when someone costs them sales in violation of the law (which is what is (or rather was) at issue with Napster), they are entitled to a redress of their grievances against that party, and perhaps damages. In a civil case, as far as I am aware, incidentally or accidentally helping out the party you have "wronged" is not an affirmative defense, i.e. if you broke the law and the opposing party actually came out ahead, that is not a defense (you still broke the law). Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I may be wrong on this point....
Whether you support Napster or not (I'm actually on the fence), you can't use surveys to bolster your argument. Neither can the RIAA. Surveys are inherently flawed as a scientific method of producing data. Surveys can use misleading questions, slightly unusual definitions, and a host of other methods to twist the results even before they are collated. Even if you have NO agenda, and just honestly want to know the answer to a question, results obtained from surveys are highly suspect, and must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
I have some (small) experience in this area, as I used to do work for a group that wanted information that could only be obtained by asking our patrons questions. After working for months to design a survey with overlapping, interlocking questions so that we could run cross checks on the results, carefully picking wordings, working long into the night to tailor the questions to specifically address the issue we wanted data for, and then administering and analyzing over 3000 responses, we discovered that: what we thought we were very clear in asking was not at all what some of the patrons thought we were asking; that nearly 30% of the survey responses were internally inconsistent as far as we could tell (ask the same factual question two different ways, and obtain two different responses); that even when the data was unambiguous, it was very difficult to understand (interpret) what the answers meant; and many other problems.
Surveys to answer the question "Does napster encourage or suppress music sales?" will never produce a valid, reliable answer. There are just too many variables. The only way to answer that question for sure is to take a representative cross section of Napster, non-Napster, and former-Napster users, and analyze their music buying behavior before and after the introduction of the Napster service, and correct the results for economic growth, socio-economic status, locale, and many other factors. And then, you MIGHT be able to say something statistically valid. MIGHT.
In some way, politicians like Sen. Harp ought to be held accountable for their laziness, their disconnection from their own constitituencies, ignorance of the cultural lives of the young, and lack of regard for basic freedom.
Uh, Jon? This "accountability" system already exists. I give you one guess as to what it is.
That's right, the ballot box. That's why we don't elect people for life. After a period of time, you get to consider their record, match it against their promises and the prevailing political climate, and decide whether to send them packing or not. The voters already have more power in this regard than any law or structure you could consider setting up. And that's the way it is supposed to be in a Democratic Republic.
If you really think that, then you're an idiot. The choice to allow these things IS the people's. How many votes does a political donor get? 1. How many votes does a $1 million dollar donor get? 1. As the Democrats are fond of saying, the upper x% of wealth (where x is big) is owned by only y% (where y is small) of the citizenry. When 100-y% of the people is much much bigger than y% of the people, then the real power lies with the 100-y% If they are too stupid to THINK before they vote, to do RESEARCH, to ASK QUESTIONS and demand substantive ANSWERS, then I have no sympathy for their whining.
The people have the power. If you don't like what is happening, run for office yourself. If you don't like a candidate, donate money to his/her opponent. Write your Congressman, your Senators, your Governor. Be polite, to the point, and do it by snail-mail. Visit your Reps when they are at home, visit them in Washington or your state capital. Bellyaching that "the rich have all the power" is just a cop out to the real issues of civic responsibility and an abdication of your rights. If you want to give them up, that's fine with me, but don't then complain that they've been "taken" from you by some "plutocracy" that doesn't exist.
Re:To see how this will go, look at drugs
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Drugs are made illegal, not just because of the danger they pose to the user, but more importantly because of the clear and immediate danger they pose to others in the society. Tobacco should not be illegal to smoke: it should be your choice to kill yourself in that way if you choose. However, smoking in places of public accomadation (sp?) SHOULD be illegal, because of the clear danger it presents to the health of people who otherwise have no choice in the matter. Maybe marijuana does not cause damage to the user (a highly specious argument, as marijuana smoke contains just as many Class 1 carcinogens as tobacco smoke, and it has been clinically shown to cause long term effects on memory function, sexual development, and a host of other chronic physiological changes), but the impairment of reasoning and motor functions for extended time periods makes the user of the drug a clear and immediate danger to those who come in contact with them. That's why its use should be regulated. That's why alcohol use should be regulated. That's why cocaine and heroin should be regulated.
I am not arguing that the current specific regulations are correct or wise; I am simply saying that these substances should remain regulated, and illicit use should be firmly punished, not because of the danger to the individual using the drugs, but because of the danger that individual then poses to others in the society who have no choice in the matter. You want to throw your life (or parts thereof) away, that's fine with me; just don't expect me to willingly support or subsidize your decision.
You should, of course, point out some of the problems you have to confront when going "3-D": the three biggies are thermal dissipation, product yield, and device crosstalk/interference. Heat can be dissipated in (rough) proportion to the area of the package, but heat is generated in (rough) proportion to the volume; as you make it thicker, the heat you generate rises faster than the capacity to eliminate heat. The second problem is that every layer you build up on a chip results in lower yields (because every step in the process incurs a few percent error rate). Finally, when you stack devices, you have to deal with crosstalk/interference between vertically stacked devices (including EM and electron migration). This really isn't my field so I can't comment more, but there is much work that needs to be done in order to make this work.
There are many forms of research that are unpublishable. But generally, you have to agree to those restrictions in contract ahead of time. If you don't agree, you don't get the money to do the research. There are exceptions to this rule, wherein you can be kept from publishing scientific research without prior agreement, but I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know enough about what they are to comment. But most of these types of research are only done under high security at government installations by government employees who have agreed in their employment contracts to not discuss the work and have been given security clearances that carry severe criminal penalties for violation.
If it came to a court battle over this, the contract angle would likely be the point the SDMI folks push: that the research group agreed to the "click through" contract. If anyone of the group agreed to it, they are probably all bound by it, because the agreer would have an obligation to his collaborators to reveal his contractual bonds. And the argument that "they didn't accept the money so they aren't bound" may not hold up: you can freely release the other party from any contractual obligation, but that doesn't free you from your obligations. Again, I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't read all of the contract and I don't know how Felten et.al. obtained the files, so I'm just blowing smoke....
The Civil Rights Act had less to do with activists protesting (activists are generally looked upon as a fringe element), and more to do with innocent non-activists being killed, maimed, raped, or exploded because of the color of their skin. It's hard to argue that there is no problem when little girls are killed in church basements because a group of racists decided to blow up the building.
That's because they didn't have anything to do with writing it:-) Dinkumware provided most of their standard library, and went to impressive lengths to work around the issues in the compiler.
Their page isn't too clear about which aspect of the accelerator is improved by the new injector, but I suspect it's intensity, not energy.
Actually, both are enhanced in the new machine, but the Main Injector was built to increase the number of anti-protons that can be pushed into the main ring. This increases the intensity (or luminosity in physicspeak) of the antiproton beam. (The proton beam was already much more intense than the anti-proton beam, which you would expect, since protons are abundant, but antiprotons are not and have to be manufactured before they can be used). The energy of the machine has also been increased roughly 10% over the last run.
You seem to have a pretty poor understanding of dark matter and dark energy for someone who is attacking the ideas with such gusto.
First, dark matter/energy is NOT undetectable. Dark matter is any of a class of possible particles that does not interact via electromagnetism. Hence they can' emit or absorb light (or radio or microwaves, etc...). Since we use telescopes that gather light (EM radiation), we can't directly see these particles. If they exist, however, we could detect them in their, for example, gravitational effects. They may also interact via other forces, such as the Weak force (again, depending on the exact model). So, to say they are undetectable is ridiculous. Dark energy is any contribution to a cosmological constant, something permitted (and in fact hard to theoretically eliminate!) by general relativity. It does not have negative mass, but negative energy density (not the same), and this causes a "repulsion" on cosmic distance scales.
As for the speculation that they make up the bulk of the matter in the universe, the suggestion comes from many lines of evidence: we believe in general relativity (because of the many predictions it makes that are experimentally verified, such as the perihelion precession of the planets, stellar structure, redshift of energy climbing out of a gravitational well, elapsed time differences of clocks at different altitudes, pulsar timings, etc..). Because of that, we can make a prediction about the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, and those predictions do not agree with the measured curves. But, we have independent reason to believe that the amount of visible matter in the universe is reasonably well known (since the visible matter matches the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis via, for example, measurements of the abundances of light nuclei).
So, there is something that is wrong with our theoretical understanding. But it is unlikely to be with general relativity, or with the big bang/expanding universe model (since these models get so many other things right). Thus, there is strong reason to believe, from many independent lines of evidence, that there is an additional component to the energy density of the universe. There is a need both for something to flatten the rotation curves of galaxies and something to flatten the universe (something I didn't mention here, but which is an additional unexplained problem). Dark matter and dark energy in their various forms are some ways of doing just those things.
As for your question about "A Brief History of Time": you must be kidding. I hope. Many of these scientists you deride for not reading the book are the ones that came up with the ideas Hawking writes about in the book. Furthermore, "A Brief History of Time", like all science books written for consumption by non-scientists, has to take some short cuts and make less-than-rigorous statements. The book was NOT written to present new work to the world; it WAS written to translate science done by scientists for a lay audience. The people actually doing work in this field are certainly much better prepared to do the work than are people who have just read one pop-sci book on the topic.....
IMHO, theory (b) is the simpler, meets the requirements, and is even verifiable. Theory (a) multiplies the entities involved, is extremely complex, cannot be tested, and cannot even be modelled.
Unfortunately, your humble opinion is wrong. Theory 'a' DOES make testable predictions, is NOT more complicated when stated with the technical rigor necessary to ask detailed questions, and can easily be modelled (although I don't know why you would want to model it if you can directly ask it questions). That's why a number of theorists are taking the time to subject it to tests.
As just one example, both theories make a prediction about the spectrum of relic background radiation of photons: theory 'a' predicts a nearly blackbody spectrum, and with deviations from that spectrum that have a specific form; static universes predict no such background, without supplementing them with additional, ad hoc, assumptions.
We know that there is relic background, and we know that it is nearly blackbody, and we even know roughly where the first accoustic peak appears. We also have ongoing experiments that will shortly give us even more information on the details of that peak, and perhaps even the second peak.
Occam's Razor is a principle that says: given two theories that make the same predictions, and those predictions agree with experiment, you should accept the simpler one until such time as it is falsified. It does not mean that you accept the simplest (pseudo-) theory that comes along, even if it explains the data... you have to confront the theory with the data. As an example, suppose I have the following "theory" of the universe: It is the way it is because it is the way it is. Certainly simpler than quantum field theory and general relativity, but hardly a "better" theory, since it makes no predictions, and can not be tested.
It was a psuedo-mistake. It was thrown in because it *can* exist.
It was not a mistake to include it, not even a pseudo-mistake. At least in hindsight:-) And I don't mean from an observational viewpoint; from a fundamental theoretical viewpoint, you EXPECT there to be a cosmological constant term. Here are just two reasons:
The Einstein equations (with the cosmological constant term) are the most general (torsion free) equations you can write down using the metric and its first derivatives, that is invariant under general coordinate transformations. If you DON'T include the cosmological constant term, you have to come up with a new symmetry that appears in nature and that explains why there is zero vaccum energy. Explaining how you can leave it out is a more vexing problem than putting it in in the first place.
From fundamental particle physics, we expect the cosmological constant to be non-zero; every time you pass through a symmetry breaking phase transition (such as the electroweak phase transition, or a GUT scale transition, or breaking supersymmetry, or any of innumerable other phase transitions), the vacuum energy density is increased...i.e. there are positive contributions to the cosmological constant. (Now, those contributions from known phase transitions are naively sixty or seventy orders of magnitude larger than the observations, but that is another problem:-) So again, without some other unknown mechanism, you expect it to be nonzero.
The problem since the seventies has not been to explain why the cosmological constant is not zero (since you wouldn't naively expect it to be), but why it is so CLOSE to zero; that is, why does the universe have some approximate symmetry that keeps the cosmological constant so small, despite what would otherwise be its natural inclination to be large.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a 2.6 sigma effect,' he told PhysicsWeb, 'so there's still a 6 in 1000 chance that what we are seeing are background events, rather than the Higgs.'
Not to knock my experimental colleagues, since what they do is actually much more difficult than what we theorists tend to do, but.... the number of 2 and 3 sigma effects that disappear when more data is taken, or old results that feed into their calculations are updated, or theorists calculate the next order correction... well, that number greatly exceeds 6 results in 1000. That's why physicists as a group don't tend to "believe" results until they reach a significance of 5 sigma, which is something like a 1 in 2 million chance of background fluctuations.
But that doesn't stop the theorists from writing dozens of papers based on 2 sigma results :-)
Seriously, don't you think (or better yet, hope) that we researchers have better things to do than crawl around libraries for hours on end? It's called "productivity."
Here here! I'm greatly in favor of increased productivity in my research environment. Like when I "productively" lurk around Slashdot, instead of finishing that paper I should be working on....
If there aren't, a company can say 'no account for you' for not wanting to provide any information they want.
And why exactly is that a problem? How does that violate your rights? Or mine? If a company won't give you service without an SSN, then go somewhere that will. Or buy one of those "prepaid" phones. Pay with cash instead of credit cards. Buy in person instead of over the phone. But don't get the government involved in telling me who I can and can't give information to. If I want to give my SSN to a company for a discount or for a higher class of service, why shouldn't I be allowed to do that. Telling companies what they can and can't ask for is ultimately a restriction of MY rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; it isn't your place to decide for me what I can and can't give away.
In fact plasma and laser accelerators, while a very good idea being explored in many places, are not ready for prime time yet. Currently, they are NOT cheaper yet ... either to build or to operate. And they likely won't be for many years.
Although the article is not very clear on this point, the accelerator being discussed in this article is the "Next Linear Collider", or NLC. If built, it would be a linear electron positron collider, and not a synchrotron. Although suggestions to build a very large hadron collider (imaginatively titled the Very Large Hadron Collider, or VLHC :-) are currently also under design discussion.
And the SLAC/Fermilab directors recommending siting an NLC in the US without consulting with the director of KEK has really pissed off the Japanese and has been a highlight of the conference so far.
Wow! I'm amazed! You've given me a good laugh TWICE in one day! First Autodynamics, and now the CCRH!
CCRH is the same organization that requires its members to take an oath that they won't accept ANY scientific evidence that contradicts a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. They are REQUIRED to REJECT evidence that DOESN'T fit their preconceived notions of the planet. And you are holding them up as a paragon of scientific thought and developer of scientific theories?
Wow...I'm really thankful for all the humor you have injected into my day!
You have to admit that what we call quantum mechanics today doesn't much resemble the quatum mechanics of the 1930's. But in the 1930's the perception was that physics had been "solved".
That's not even close to true. The QM you might study as an undergraduate physicist today is IDENTICAL to the QM derived in the 1930s. What HAS changed is not the theory, but the models the theory is applied to. And there were few physicists in the 1930s (nor today!) that would have claimed physics was "solved" as you put it; that sort of misunderstanding is usually based on popular accounts of cutting edge research, misunderstood and misinterpreted for nonscientists by other nonscientists. When trying to transfer knowledge to the nonscientist, things often have to be simplified, not only to explain it to a non-technical crowd, but also to simply fit it into the time allotted (it takes six or seven years of training and study to get to the point where you can even begin to understand the theories of modern physics at the level necessary to do research ... you can't transfer all that detailed knowledge to a non-scientist is a few minutes or hours, so something has to give).
As for how much of modern theory will be around in 50 years, just think of how much of modern theory existed 50 years ago: almost all of it! It's only the models, not the derivable theory, that has changed dramatically.
Autodynamics? Hee hee hee hee. Oh...I needed a good laugh.
For those who don't know, the autodynamics crowd seems to think that the physicists of the last 100 years are too corrupt and stupid to notice that Special Relativity is completely false. Not only can't the autodynamics crowd perform a simple derivation, but they choose to ignore the thousands of experiments, measurements, and papers written and peer reviewed, in order to come to their loony conclusion. They misrepresent and misunderstand almost all of modern physics, from condensed matter to particle physics to astrophysics, in coming to their unsupportable conclusion.
But like I said, thanks for the post! I needed a good laugh :-)
- sarcasm on -
Actually, I'm also opposed to factory farming. Of all varieties. Including vegetables and grains. Think of the pain and anguish we're causing those poor plants by forcing them to grow in tightly regimented rows! Even those evil organic farmers have to go for their enslavement of the plant races. I say, if you're willing to gather it yourself, bon appetit. At least those plants get to live decent lives before we get them.
I'm also opposed to vaccines and other drugs. Think of the environmental destruction we're bringing down on all those poor viruses, bacteria, amoebae, worms, and other parasites that cause us pain. We should end this senseless destruction! We should let those diseases take their toll.
And schooling, let's not forget to eliminate that. If we were supposed to be taught in schools, they would have existed in nature. And homes, houses, electricity, heat in the winter, cooling in the summer. It's all wrong! Ban it all!
- sarcasm off -
Needless to say, I disagree with you. We should always be mindful of the potential outcomes of our activities, because there are downsides (I would prefer to see more biodiversity in our food crops, and less use of antibiotics as growth factors in farm animals, for instance). And there is no reason to cause unnecessary pain or harm to farm animals. But, restrictions and regulations should be based on real science, standards that strive mightily to be objective. Modern farming methods are far from perfect, but they manage to feed 6 billion humans daily, and they have helped to give us longer, richer, safer, healthier lives than our ancestors had. I don't want to go back to the age of the hunter-gatherer, and the agony, disease, and short life expectancy that entails....
If someone does piss an american voter off, he/she will simply not vote in the next re-election
And those people deserve what they get. When you abdicate your responsibility to the democratic system, you give up your right to complain about the outcome. If you don't like the way things are, you DO something about them. you don't whine about how unfair the system is, because there isn't a more level political playing field anywhere in the world.
Once they turn 18, they won't give a shit because they are not effected.
Again, why should I be bothered about the feelings of people who abdicate their responsibility?
The USA has a little thing called "recall"
There is no recall provision on the Federal level, and there is no universal recall provision on the state and local levels. At the Federal level, there are four ways to remove a President: death, resignation, Impeachment and Conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors (Article II, Section 4), or inability to discharge the office (Article II, Section 1, and various amendments). There are also four ways to remove a Senator or Congressman: death, resignation, supermajority vote by the members of that Legislative body (Article I, Section 5), and assumption of another office (Article I, Section 6). Not even a criminal conviction necessarily removes a Legislator or President from office. State laws on recall vary widely.
So does our legal system, but they are still allowed to do so.
Under tightly controlled rules in an attempt to ensure that the adversarial system does not unduly support either side of the case. With the understanding that errors in applying those rules will be sternly handled by a higher level court.
Hardly the same rules that surveys have :-)
Maybe you should reread what I wrote before complaining that I'm wrong.....
Public protection didn't have anything to do with it.
It most certainly does...regulation of drugs (legal and illegal drugs) has at its base the protection of the public welfare. Whether you agree that the laws ACTUALLY protect the public welfare is beside the point. You attempted "history lesson" is equally specious to the argument that I made. As I said, I was not stating an opinion pro or con on the CURRENT drug law, but rather the reasons that drugs are and should be regulated, REGARDLESS of whether you agree with their current state.
don't fool yourself that you get less fucked up on alcohol than you can on pot
Please don't put words in my mouth. I NEVER said that any given drug causes more or less impairment than any other drug. Suggesting that I did is an unwarranted distortion of my previous post.
P.S. I don't smoke pot. Not everyone who supports legalization wants to use hemp for smoking.
And neither did I say that you did. You'll also notice that I didn't say whether or not I do. Not everyone who is opposed to outright legalization of a given drug is opposed to the use of that drug in certain circumstances. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't particularly care how you fuck yourself up; just don't impose the downsides on others.
along with the RIAA's own data which shows increased CD sales?
It is a fallacy to assume that since overall sales have gone up, that Napster has not suppressed sales below what they would have been otherwise. I'm not supporting the RIAA here, just pointing out a logical fallacy in your argument. Record companies are entitled to try to make the most money they can, as long as they do so within the law not within ethics or morality (which you might hope they would consider anyway), and when someone costs them sales in violation of the law (which is what is (or rather was) at issue with Napster), they are entitled to a redress of their grievances against that party, and perhaps damages. In a civil case, as far as I am aware, incidentally or accidentally helping out the party you have "wronged" is not an affirmative defense, i.e. if you broke the law and the opposing party actually came out ahead, that is not a defense (you still broke the law). Of course, I am not a lawyer, so I may be wrong on this point....
Whether you support Napster or not (I'm actually on the fence), you can't use surveys to bolster your argument. Neither can the RIAA. Surveys are inherently flawed as a scientific method of producing data. Surveys can use misleading questions, slightly unusual definitions, and a host of other methods to twist the results even before they are collated. Even if you have NO agenda, and just honestly want to know the answer to a question, results obtained from surveys are highly suspect, and must be taken with a huge grain of salt.
I have some (small) experience in this area, as I used to do work for a group that wanted information that could only be obtained by asking our patrons questions. After working for months to design a survey with overlapping, interlocking questions so that we could run cross checks on the results, carefully picking wordings, working long into the night to tailor the questions to specifically address the issue we wanted data for, and then administering and analyzing over 3000 responses, we discovered that: what we thought we were very clear in asking was not at all what some of the patrons thought we were asking; that nearly 30% of the survey responses were internally inconsistent as far as we could tell (ask the same factual question two different ways, and obtain two different responses); that even when the data was unambiguous, it was very difficult to understand (interpret) what the answers meant; and many other problems.
Surveys to answer the question "Does napster encourage or suppress music sales?" will never produce a valid, reliable answer. There are just too many variables. The only way to answer that question for sure is to take a representative cross section of Napster, non-Napster, and former-Napster users, and analyze their music buying behavior before and after the introduction of the Napster service, and correct the results for economic growth, socio-economic status, locale, and many other factors. And then, you MIGHT be able to say something statistically valid. MIGHT.
In some way, politicians like Sen. Harp ought to be held accountable for their laziness, their disconnection from their own constitituencies, ignorance of the cultural lives of the young, and lack of regard for basic freedom.
Uh, Jon? This "accountability" system already exists. I give you one guess as to what it is.
That's right, the ballot box. That's why we don't elect people for life. After a period of time, you get to consider their record, match it against their promises and the prevailing political climate, and decide whether to send them packing or not. The voters already have more power in this regard than any law or structure you could consider setting up. And that's the way it is supposed to be in a Democratic Republic.
If you really think that, then you're an idiot. The choice to allow these things IS the people's. How many votes does a political donor get? 1. How many votes does a $1 million dollar donor get? 1. As the Democrats are fond of saying, the upper x% of wealth (where x is big) is owned by only y% (where y is small) of the citizenry. When 100-y% of the people is much much bigger than y% of the people, then the real power lies with the 100-y% If they are too stupid to THINK before they vote, to do RESEARCH, to ASK QUESTIONS and demand substantive ANSWERS, then I have no sympathy for their whining.
The people have the power. If you don't like what is happening, run for office yourself. If you don't like a candidate, donate money to his/her opponent. Write your Congressman, your Senators, your Governor. Be polite, to the point, and do it by snail-mail. Visit your Reps when they are at home, visit them in Washington or your state capital. Bellyaching that "the rich have all the power" is just a cop out to the real issues of civic responsibility and an abdication of your rights. If you want to give them up, that's fine with me, but don't then complain that they've been "taken" from you by some "plutocracy" that doesn't exist.
Drugs are made illegal, not just because of the danger they pose to the user, but more importantly because of the clear and immediate danger they pose to others in the society. Tobacco should not be illegal to smoke: it should be your choice to kill yourself in that way if you choose. However, smoking in places of public accomadation (sp?) SHOULD be illegal, because of the clear danger it presents to the health of people who otherwise have no choice in the matter. Maybe marijuana does not cause damage to the user (a highly specious argument, as marijuana smoke contains just as many Class 1 carcinogens as tobacco smoke, and it has been clinically shown to cause long term effects on memory function, sexual development, and a host of other chronic physiological changes), but the impairment of reasoning and motor functions for extended time periods makes the user of the drug a clear and immediate danger to those who come in contact with them. That's why its use should be regulated. That's why alcohol use should be regulated. That's why cocaine and heroin should be regulated.
I am not arguing that the current specific regulations are correct or wise; I am simply saying that these substances should remain regulated, and illicit use should be firmly punished, not because of the danger to the individual using the drugs, but because of the danger that individual then poses to others in the society who have no choice in the matter. You want to throw your life (or parts thereof) away, that's fine with me; just don't expect me to willingly support or subsidize your decision.
You should, of course, point out some of the problems you have to confront when going "3-D": the three biggies are thermal dissipation, product yield, and device crosstalk/interference. Heat can be dissipated in (rough) proportion to the area of the package, but heat is generated in (rough) proportion to the volume; as you make it thicker, the heat you generate rises faster than the capacity to eliminate heat. The second problem is that every layer you build up on a chip results in lower yields (because every step in the process incurs a few percent error rate). Finally, when you stack devices, you have to deal with crosstalk/interference between vertically stacked devices (including EM and electron migration). This really isn't my field so I can't comment more, but there is much work that needs to be done in order to make this work.
There are many forms of research that are unpublishable. But generally, you have to agree to those restrictions in contract ahead of time. If you don't agree, you don't get the money to do the research. There are exceptions to this rule, wherein you can be kept from publishing scientific research without prior agreement, but I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know enough about what they are to comment. But most of these types of research are only done under high security at government installations by government employees who have agreed in their employment contracts to not discuss the work and have been given security clearances that carry severe criminal penalties for violation.
If it came to a court battle over this, the contract angle would likely be the point the SDMI folks push: that the research group agreed to the "click through" contract. If anyone of the group agreed to it, they are probably all bound by it, because the agreer would have an obligation to his collaborators to reveal his contractual bonds. And the argument that "they didn't accept the money so they aren't bound" may not hold up: you can freely release the other party from any contractual obligation, but that doesn't free you from your obligations. Again, I'm not a lawyer, and I haven't read all of the contract and I don't know how Felten et.al. obtained the files, so I'm just blowing smoke....
The Civil Rights Act had less to do with activists protesting (activists are generally looked upon as a fringe element), and more to do with innocent non-activists being killed, maimed, raped, or exploded because of the color of their skin. It's hard to argue that there is no problem when little girls are killed in church basements because a group of racists decided to blow up the building.
and their library beats GNU and Borland.
That's because they didn't have anything to do with writing it :-) Dinkumware provided most of their standard library, and went to impressive lengths to work around the issues in the compiler.
And attempting to patent something without revealing prior knowledge of prior does provide grounds for patent invalidation...
Their page isn't too clear about which aspect of the accelerator is improved by the new injector, but I suspect it's intensity, not energy.
Actually, both are enhanced in the new machine, but the Main Injector was built to increase the number of anti-protons that can be pushed into the main ring. This increases the intensity (or luminosity in physicspeak) of the antiproton beam. (The proton beam was already much more intense than the anti-proton beam, which you would expect, since protons are abundant, but antiprotons are not and have to be manufactured before they can be used). The energy of the machine has also been increased roughly 10% over the last run.
You seem to have a pretty poor understanding of dark matter and dark energy for someone who is attacking the ideas with such gusto.
First, dark matter/energy is NOT undetectable. Dark matter is any of a class of possible particles that does not interact via electromagnetism. Hence they can' emit or absorb light (or radio or microwaves, etc...). Since we use telescopes that gather light (EM radiation), we can't directly see these particles. If they exist, however, we could detect them in their, for example, gravitational effects. They may also interact via other forces, such as the Weak force (again, depending on the exact model). So, to say they are undetectable is ridiculous. Dark energy is any contribution to a cosmological constant, something permitted (and in fact hard to theoretically eliminate!) by general relativity. It does not have negative mass, but negative energy density (not the same), and this causes a "repulsion" on cosmic distance scales.
As for the speculation that they make up the bulk of the matter in the universe, the suggestion comes from many lines of evidence: we believe in general relativity (because of the many predictions it makes that are experimentally verified, such as the perihelion precession of the planets, stellar structure, redshift of energy climbing out of a gravitational well, elapsed time differences of clocks at different altitudes, pulsar timings, etc..). Because of that, we can make a prediction about the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, and those predictions do not agree with the measured curves. But, we have independent reason to believe that the amount of visible matter in the universe is reasonably well known (since the visible matter matches the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis via, for example, measurements of the abundances of light nuclei).
So, there is something that is wrong with our theoretical understanding. But it is unlikely to be with general relativity, or with the big bang/expanding universe model (since these models get so many other things right). Thus, there is strong reason to believe, from many independent lines of evidence, that there is an additional component to the energy density of the universe. There is a need both for something to flatten the rotation curves of galaxies and something to flatten the universe (something I didn't mention here, but which is an additional unexplained problem). Dark matter and dark energy in their various forms are some ways of doing just those things.
As for your question about "A Brief History of Time": you must be kidding. I hope. Many of these scientists you deride for not reading the book are the ones that came up with the ideas Hawking writes about in the book. Furthermore, "A Brief History of Time", like all science books written for consumption by non-scientists, has to take some short cuts and make less-than-rigorous statements. The book was NOT written to present new work to the world; it WAS written to translate science done by scientists for a lay audience. The people actually doing work in this field are certainly much better prepared to do the work than are people who have just read one pop-sci book on the topic.....
IMHO, theory (b) is the simpler, meets the requirements, and is even verifiable. Theory (a) multiplies the entities involved, is extremely complex, cannot be tested, and cannot even be modelled.
Unfortunately, your humble opinion is wrong. Theory 'a' DOES make testable predictions, is NOT more complicated when stated with the technical rigor necessary to ask detailed questions, and can easily be modelled (although I don't know why you would want to model it if you can directly ask it questions). That's why a number of theorists are taking the time to subject it to tests.
As just one example, both theories make a prediction about the spectrum of relic background radiation of photons: theory 'a' predicts a nearly blackbody spectrum, and with deviations from that spectrum that have a specific form; static universes predict no such background, without supplementing them with additional, ad hoc, assumptions.
We know that there is relic background, and we know that it is nearly blackbody, and we even know roughly where the first accoustic peak appears. We also have ongoing experiments that will shortly give us even more information on the details of that peak, and perhaps even the second peak.
Occam's Razor is a principle that says: given two theories that make the same predictions, and those predictions agree with experiment, you should accept the simpler one until such time as it is falsified. It does not mean that you accept the simplest (pseudo-) theory that comes along, even if it explains the data ... you have to confront the theory with the data. As an example, suppose I have the following "theory" of the universe: It is the way it is because it is the way it is. Certainly simpler than quantum field theory and general relativity, but hardly a "better" theory, since it makes no predictions, and can not be tested.
It was a psuedo-mistake. It was thrown in because it *can* exist.
It was not a mistake to include it, not even a pseudo-mistake. At least in hindsight :-) And I don't mean from an observational viewpoint; from a fundamental theoretical viewpoint, you EXPECT there to be a cosmological constant term. Here are just two reasons:
The problem since the seventies has not been to explain why the cosmological constant is not zero (since you wouldn't naively expect it to be), but why it is so CLOSE to zero; that is, why does the universe have some approximate symmetry that keeps the cosmological constant so small, despite what would otherwise be its natural inclination to be large.