Science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and proven
Small correction from a practicing scientist: science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and disproven. You can't prove a theory in a strictly scientific sense; you can only show that theories are not supported by the data (are disproven) or are currently (this being the key word) not ruled out.
Of course, you may have meant proven in the colloquial sense, in which case I don't necessarily disagree.
I realize you're pointing out that mass and weight are two different things, but acceleration of any kind affects mass due to relativity.
This is an antiquated and unfortunate view. Practicing particle physicists have rejected this view for decades, because it has little utility, and does nothing but confuse people. It is an artifact of trying to shoehorn modern physics into a 19th century Newtonian framwork, rather than accepting a truly relativistic framework and noticing that the Newtonian framework is nothing but a special limit of the more general results. For modern particle physicists, mass is an invariant quantity (that is, the same in all reference frames), which means that it does NOT change based on velocity and acceleration. This modern view makes understanding and interpreting theory and experiment much easier and more natural. It is unfortunate that popular accounts and high school level texts continue to discuss "velocity dependent mass".
Your physics prof is wrong. The BIPM (keepers of the SI) indicate that the definition of the kilogram is still
The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.
There are numerous current attempts to define the kilogram in terms of physically reproducible experiments, but at present, they are not sufficiently accurately reproducible, or are horrendously complicated to define (the basic problem has to do with counting the number of particles in your sample, which turns out to be a difficult problem).
You might want to check out these URLs, about the kilogram and the current state of the SI in this regard:
Another concern: How are the people going to feel who have put a lot of time and effort into this project?
Frankly, who cares? You can't base decisions about multiBILLION dollar taxpayer funded expenditures on how cancellation would make people FEEL!! You decide them based on whether the rewards to the taxpayers outweigh the costs of spending their money on this as opposed to something else as opposed to letting THEM spend it themselves.
causing our astronaut on board to miss Thanksgiving
Oh, boo hoo. If she is going to be so broken up about missing Thanksgiving to go into space, maybe she shouldn't have become an astronaut in the first place
Generally, when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.
You only find it if you aren't doing your job right; when looking for events that match a certain profile, you also have to take into account the number of events that match the profile but that would be generated by different processes. Those other processes are called "background" processes. If you don't expect to see any background events, and you do see events, you have support for the foreground hypothesis. If you do expect background events, and you see exactly the number you expect to see, you don't have support for the foreground hypothesis.
This is a vast simplification of the process of teasing foreground from background, or course, not doing justice to the amount of work you have to do to understand what you are talking about... and you aren't assured of getting it right, of course. However, the statements that this hypothesis has some support in the data was based on this exact type of analysis, and are clearly not of the "look at enough data you'll find what you want to" kind. You probably have to go to the original source article to find the details (the foreground/background analysis was most of the paper, if I remember correctly).
Your alternate theory, once properly formulated, would also make a prediction as to the number of events of this kind that are expected... go make that prediction, and then we can test it:-)
Sigh... from the article (you know, that thing you are supposed to read before commenting on):
The law would promise up to life terms for computer intrusions that "recklessly" put others' lives at risk.
"Reckless" has a specific legal definition. Crack into a bank and steal money: felonious, but not reckless; crack into a nursing home and deliberately modify dosing schedules for drugs, now that is "reckless" (as in "shows a reckless disregard for human life"). I don't know about you, but I think that the latter should certainly qualify you for a very very long stay in the big house.
But couldn't this just as easily be the result of budgetary concerns? If people knew the ISS would be well funded for several years we would be more likely to see a greater interest in research projects.
This isn't, in my opinion, the problem here; this isn't a chicken and egg problem. That is, you typically don't spend the time and money to build a multibillion dollar scientific facility unless you already have an interested user community lined up as far as the eye can see. Even within NASA this is generally the case: the Hubble is, and has been since inception, completely oversubscribed, and the demands on JPL to design and build deep space probes vastly exceed the supply of resources. The same with most particle accelerator facilities worldwide. And I could go on in many other fields.
ISS is a different beast, however. There IS no user community for ISS resources (slight over exageration... there is a very small community of interested users); there is no huge waiting list for ISS scientific use. And it has nothing to do with concern over the ISS construction budget/schedule. It has everything to do with a lack of need for the facility; the benefits to most real world research of microgravity are greatly overstated, and the drawbacks are usually vastly underplayed (a big one that is never mentioned: the actual experiment is done by someone else not intimately associated with the experiment; astronauts aren't dummies, but most frontier experiments are tough enough to get right when the experimenter is there running the show themself!). You can do most of the types of experiments envisioned for the ISS just as well on the ground with tougher quality control, at a greatly lower cost and vastly lower risk to both experiment and experimenter.
If the US government guaranteed tomorrow that the thing would be fully funded (as NASA defines it), you almost certainly wouldn't see the demand on the facility jump; that just isn't the way that it works in frontier science.
This is sincere curiosity: What in your opinion is the justification for the ISS then?
My personal opinion is that the ISS is a completely unjustified waste of money, with no redeeming scientific or engineering value that could justify its construction costs. But I haven't necessarily thought through all of the arguments others put forward in favor of the ISS to the level that I feel justified in concluding that there is NO justification; I just haven't seen an argument that comes even remotely close to swaying my opinion.
My primary objection is that the ISS seems to be a construction project in search of a purpose, instead of a major piece of a well thought out long term space exploration program with goals and milestones. The Shuttle program suffer(s)(ed) from a similar problem: in the 70s, NASA got to build either a space station or a reusable truck to get to a space station, but not both. They went with Shuttle, and so for the last thirty odd years, the US space program has had a horribly overpriced, partially reusable means to get into orbit, but nothing truly valuable to do with it. The ISS is going to be the same thing: it costs too much for the very very little that it does, and it does not have a well defined part to play in a well designed long term space exploration strategy. There are many better things to do with that money, in my opinion: unmanned interplanetary probes, astronomy and astrophysics, long duration unmanned orbitting research platforms, an orbitting "gas station" for manned lunar and Mars missions (which the ISS can never be, due to its current orbit), etc. With a well defined purpose and goal, ISS would not have spun out of control in trying to become all things to all people, and failing miserably at all of them.
This sounds an awful bit like something influenced alot by NASA in order to get a bigger budget.
Well, in a word, no. This is the same conclusion drawn years ago by (literally, not figuratively) hundreds of other independent scientific organizations, including the NAS, AAAS, APS, AIP, and MRS: there is almost no science that the ISS can do that can't be done better, cheaper, faster, and safer either on the ground or on an unmanned orbiting platform, or during short duration flights. There is certainly no other scientific program funded by the US (and other nations) government that would be able to get away with such a fantastically miniscule ROI. The space station never has been, and never will be, primarily a scientific research platform. This is not to say that the he ISS is an unjustified expenditure, but its scientific program is not the justification.
Makes me proud of spending $30 billion in tax money -- hey, isn't that about enough for a manned Mars mission?
Well, given the inability of multiple independent national and international space agencies (the US and Russia in particular), to bring in a much simpler, safer, and less technically challenging mission (namely ISS) on time and on budget, I find it highly doubtful that a $30 Billion dollar projected budget for a manned mission is even within an order of magnitude of what the actual cost will be....
The counter argument (I read it on The Register this morning) is well written,
I have to vehemently disagree with this. NEITHER of the linked rebuttals qualifies as well written; the MITRE report qualifies as well written, and so does most of the AdTI report, but the rebuttals to the AdTI report do not. They BOTH make the mistake that continues to negatively impact the arguments of Open Source/ Free Software advocates: childish personal attacks. Continually repeating phrases like (paraphrasing here) "Microsoft, err, AdTI, says" and "worried about losing the Trophy Wife and the vacation home in the Bahamas" are NOT logical arguments for the superiority of open source software, and they make the open source community look bad. Logic alone will not win the day....
So, while the AdTI piece is certainly poorly researched, corporate pandering tripe, it is likely to have a much MUCH larger impact on policy makers than any rebuttal, not BECAUSE of its accuracy, but because of its tone. Open Source gets bitten by this all the time, and the advocates don't seem to be learning.
This is probably not an indication of any more crimes being committed using Yahoo's services, but is instead a reflection of the greater power LEO's have to violate individual's privacy, especially in the wake of the Patriot act.
No, it actually is a result of Yahoo begin big, cheap, and national in size. It has millions upon millions of customers, in (literally) tens of thousands of jurisdictions. That they receive thousands of warrants is no more surprising to me than hearing that Citibank receives thousands of warrants a year for credit card records....
May I ask what horrible experience you have had to so warp your view of reality? I don't disagree that there have been SOME ideas/theories/experiments that have been improperly rejected from publication, but you would be hard pressed, I think, to find an example of truly revolutionary and fundamentally correct work being rejected by the "scientific establishment" (clue for the clueless: there is no such thing as an organized, coherent scientific establishment...). In fact, your whole argument makes little to no sense, since it is REVOLUTIONARY, FUNDAMENTAL work that gets people recognition and promotion, NOT "sticking to the party line". This DOESN'T mean that all theories that disagree with the established theory will be accepted as "plausible".... most theories by people not trained in the field are notably ridiculous, and worthy of begin ignored, simply because they don't indicate any understanding of the material they claim to be discussing.
My experience is in theoretical particle physics, and in just the last six years, every talk I've been to starts out: "The current theory is wonderful, but deficient in the following ways... I'm going to tell you about work I've done to throw out this part of the standard theory." Standard Theories become standard, not because we want them to, but because they match the data better than any other theory that has come along, are internally consistent, are predictive, and are falsifiable.
As for your post, there are so many incorrect points that I don't have the time to correct them all, but I'll pick a sample:
Why do you think scientists are the very LAST ones to use the Web?: Huh? Scientists INVENTED the network, invented the protocols, and invented teh Web itself, for the dissemination of scientific data. The need for higher speed backbones (Internet2 and its kin) is being DRIVEN by the ever increasing needs of the scientific community for bandwidth. Scientific researchers are on the forefront of the open source and free software movements, and certainly not "the last ones to use the web".
`peer review', which again is neither: articles are reviewed by members of the scientific field that the journal caters to; that is, multiple practicing scientists read and comment on all aspects of the research and reporting in the submitted articles, and authors are given the chance to dispute or address the conclusions of the reviewer. Seems pretty much like "peers" "reviewing" the work to me.
When was the last time you knew which papers were rejected and why?: Whenever the authors whose papers are rejected make available the paper and the referees' comments. It is generally considered poor manners to make public that you have rejected someones work...but if they want to do it themselves, that's up to them. Personally, I've talked to a dozen people in the last year alone, and been to three talks where people started out saying "This work was rejected by Journal X; I'll tell you why I think they were wrong."
All good ideas are rejected for 30 years: this is truly an silly statement, with its all encompassing conclusion. From my own field, I can think of any number of advances that were accepted exceedingly rapidly, or were deemed interesting enough to be worth extended study and discussion: quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, the experimental confirmation of the frame independence of hte speed of light, the necessity of antiparticles, the prediction of the neutrino, the path integral formulation of quantum theory, quantum electrodynamics, the quark model, the discovery of the muon, the discovery of parity violation, quantum chromodynamics, etc. etc. etc. All of these papers demolished the status quo, and yet were accepted very early on by the journals they were submitted to, and the community who read them.
So, to summarize, I don't think you have a clue as to what you are talking about, and suspect that you have some personal agenda or vendetta that you feel needs to be made public. I wish you had let us know WHY you feel "rejected" by the scientific community. (remember that "made public" complaint you had?) I certainly don't claim that the process is perfect, but it is the best, most reliable one that we have found so far. Perhaps you could let us know what alternatives you had in mind?
I guess I don't see how not paying taxes you don't owe (your "legally avoiding taxes") is "screwing over the American public". The rules were set by representatives YOU (not MSFT) elected, and if you don't like the rules, lobby to get them changed... but don't accuse the people and corporations who actually follow the rules of being tax cheats.
Let me put this another way: Do YOU give the government more tax revenue than you are required to do by law? If not, you hardly have a right to complain about others doing exactly what you are doing....
But how much did you PAY AT&T for VNC? They don't run this lab for your benefit alone... they run it to make money. If in their cost-benefit analysis the lab is a liability to the corporation, then they have not only the right, but the fiduciary responsibility to shut it down. Just because a lab comes out with neat stuff doesn't mean there is a good reason for the owner to keep it open.
If you are so convinced that it is worth pouring money into, it shouldn't be that hard to find a group of investors willing to give you the cash to buy and run the place as you see fit. That's the way commerce works! The fact that no one is interested in buying the place indicates, to me at least, that it might not be such a valuable property as many comments seem to think it is....
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of black holes anyway.
Which I could rewrite as:
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of electromagnetism anyway.
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of Newtonian gravity anyway.
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of radioactive decay anyway.
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of fluid mechanics anyway.
The problem of infinities is enough to kill the idea of quantum mechanics anyway.
All of those are theories that are in extensive use and work extremely well when you stay away from the infinities. And in Quantum Field Theories, we know how to completely remove many types of infinities. Don't be so quick to toss a theory that contains infinities; they aren't the Beast.
And, gravistars DO NOT appear "exactly like" black holes; if they did, it wouldn't be an interesting idea, because black holes are so much simpler and easier to understand. If there were no observational differences, Occam's razor would have beheaded gravistars before they were published: gravistars requires much much much more complicated and completely unspecified dynamics to generate the condensates required to support the object.
Additionally, it is not clear that any of the "problems" that gravistars try to solve are really problems in any technical sense; they may or may not be, and they are under active investigation in the case of black holes. Gravistars are interesting, but they have so many of their own problems that it is not at all obvious that they are "better" than black holes in any way. Time, more theoretical study, and observations will tell the difference.
The problem with this type of Newtonian description of an essentially non-Newtonian phenomenon is that people try to extrapolate from their understanding of Newtonian gravity (a post lower down, for instance, suggests that maybe you could climb out of the hole "slowly" without reaching escape velocity, just like you can get to the moon without reaching the escape velocity of the earth). The event horizon is, however, much more than "just the distance at which escape velocity exceeds that speed of light"; the very structure of space and time changes at the event horizon. You can prove mathematically within the confines of classical tensor theories of gravity, that the event horizon is a surface that bounds a region where all light-like and time-like trajectories are trapped, for the entire future history of the universe. In english, any piece of matter, and any photon that crosses that surface will NEVER be able to get out, no matter how hard you try (and in fact, the harder you try, the more stuck you get:-) These processes are inherently unlike gravity as you learned in high school and freshman college physics, and you just (unfortunately) can't really make the escape velocity analogy.
the Canadian system allows the employees to go after the management, not for them to be reimbursed by the government. This prevents debacles like Enron where the top dogs walk away with millions by fucking the rank-and-file.
Only that isn't what happened either here or in the Enron case, from the news reports. People were perfectly content to do stupid things for Loki (VOLUNTARILY) without pay when they mistaken believed they would be paid back later. People were perfectly content to do stupid things with their retirement savings in the Enron case when the stock was flying high; that they lost everything is their own damn fault, because contrary to what the talking heads are saying, there was no "requirement" that they park their retirement fund in Enron stock (the laws in the US ALREADY forbid that kind of requirement).
When I was a young lad I figured out that you watch what other people are doing, not what they are saying, and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: "I can't pay you now, but TRUST ME, I'll pay you later, OK?" or "The stock price will NEVER fall, TRUST ME". I would have been out the door that day, and if I wasn't, and got what was coming to me, why should I expect other people to lose sleep over it? The top dogs walk away with millions because they are smart enough to diversify and NOT blindly trust what they are being told; they may well be dogs, but they didn't fuck anyone that didn't bend over and say "Please sir, do it to me again!"
The converse should also be true, if a company knowingly defrauds or financially harms its employees then the company should be criminally liable.
It already IS true; if a company does these things, it already is criminally responsible and can be nailed for it. What happened here does not appear to be fraudulent actions by the company: people CHOSE to stay when they weren't getting paid. If you are implying that an employee shouldn't be allowed to work for free (which is what you are doing when you agree to defer paychecks), then I think you are wrong. I wouldn't do it, but I shouldn't be told that I can't do it if I want to.
Even neutral particles can carry intrinsic magnetic dipoles, so you can still trap a sufficiently cool neutral atom in a properly configured magnetic field. You can't trap a "hot" atom this way, because it can just "jump" out of the trap, but a cool enough atom will stay put.
I believe the proportion of energy expended vs energy stored in antiparticles is something on the order of 10^4.
And there is just no way around that... these are inherently quantum mechanical processes, and you have absolutely no control over what comes out after you put the energy in. It doesn't matter WHAT method you decide to use... you can't choose what the reaction products are going to be, and hence you can never make it more efficient than a fraction of a percent or so.
Sorry to burst your bubble and those of the others in this post, but the production of these small amounts of anti-hydrogen give no insights whatsoever into the future of propulsion systems, or power systems, or weaponry, or anything of the kind. The only things that this experiment tell us about are fundamental physics, namely tests of our theoretical understanding of the fundamental symmetry properties of nature: there is the definite prediction that anti-hydrogen in a trap should behave in every way like hydrogen in the same trap. If it DOESN'T we've learned something interesting; if it DOES then we will have yet more confirmation of what we already think we know. Everything that a physicist is going to be able to tell you about more mundane "practical" applications or R&D with anti-matter were determined decades ago (in the thirties and forties), and making practical use of antimatter is purely an engineering challenge.
No, that isn't correct. Starting from just matter (as this experiment does), for every anti-matter particle that we make, we also create one matter particle (roughly speaking... really, we are talking about conserved particle number, but let's ignore the details, shall we?). You produce antimatter by taking a high energy beam of matter, running it through a target (generally a thin sheet of metal of some sort). Collisions between matter particles in the beam and sheet liberate the kinetic energy in the beam particle, and that energy sometimes emerges in the form of particle antiparticle pairs. Thus, if we take a proton beam and train it on a target, we sometimes make antiprotons through the reaction p+p ==> p+p+p+anti-p (we could also make electron-positron pairs, or neutron anti-neutron pairs, etc). We get just as much "new" matter as "new" antimatter. Since we have to make the antimatter in the first place, we can't get out any more than we put in in the first place.
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Science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and proven
Small correction from a practicing scientist: science stops being science when it gets past what can be tested and disproven. You can't prove a theory in a strictly scientific sense; you can only show that theories are not supported by the data (are disproven) or are currently (this being the key word) not ruled out.
Of course, you may have meant proven in the colloquial sense, in which case I don't necessarily disagree.
I realize you're pointing out that mass and weight are two different things, but acceleration of any kind affects mass due to relativity.
This is an antiquated and unfortunate view. Practicing particle physicists have rejected this view for decades, because it has little utility, and does nothing but confuse people. It is an artifact of trying to shoehorn modern physics into a 19th century Newtonian framwork, rather than accepting a truly relativistic framework and noticing that the Newtonian framework is nothing but a special limit of the more general results. For modern particle physicists, mass is an invariant quantity (that is, the same in all reference frames), which means that it does NOT change based on velocity and acceleration. This modern view makes understanding and interpreting theory and experiment much easier and more natural. It is unfortunate that popular accounts and high school level texts continue to discuss "velocity dependent mass".
Your physics prof is wrong. The BIPM (keepers of the SI) indicate that the definition of the kilogram is still
The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.
There are numerous current attempts to define the kilogram in terms of physically reproducible experiments, but at present, they are not sufficiently accurately reproducible, or are horrendously complicated to define (the basic problem has to do with counting the number of particles in your sample, which turns out to be a difficult problem).
You might want to check out these URLs, about the kilogram and the current state of the SI in this regard:
Pictures of the kilogram
the BIPM SI brochure
Resolution 7 of the 21st CGPM, 1999 on the future of the SI mass standard
Another concern: How are the people going to feel who have put a lot of time and effort into this project?
Frankly, who cares? You can't base decisions about multiBILLION dollar taxpayer funded expenditures on how cancellation would make people FEEL!! You decide them based on whether the rewards to the taxpayers outweigh the costs of spending their money on this as opposed to something else as opposed to letting THEM spend it themselves.
causing our astronaut on board to miss Thanksgiving
Oh, boo hoo. If she is going to be so broken up about missing Thanksgiving to go into space, maybe she shouldn't have become an astronaut in the first place
Generally, when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.
You only find it if you aren't doing your job right; when looking for events that match a certain profile, you also have to take into account the number of events that match the profile but that would be generated by different processes. Those other processes are called "background" processes. If you don't expect to see any background events, and you do see events, you have support for the foreground hypothesis. If you do expect background events, and you see exactly the number you expect to see, you don't have support for the foreground hypothesis.
This is a vast simplification of the process of teasing foreground from background, or course, not doing justice to the amount of work you have to do to understand what you are talking about ... and you aren't assured of getting it right, of course. However, the statements that this hypothesis has some support in the data was based on this exact type of analysis, and are clearly not of the "look at enough data you'll find what you want to" kind. You probably have to go to the original source article to find the details (the foreground/background analysis was most of the paper, if I remember correctly).
Your alternate theory, once properly formulated, would also make a prediction as to the number of events of this kind that are expected ... go make that prediction, and then we can test it :-)
Sigh ... from the article (you know, that thing you are supposed to read before commenting on):
The law would promise up to life terms for computer intrusions that "recklessly" put others' lives at risk.
"Reckless" has a specific legal definition. Crack into a bank and steal money: felonious, but not reckless; crack into a nursing home and deliberately modify dosing schedules for drugs, now that is "reckless" (as in "shows a reckless disregard for human life"). I don't know about you, but I think that the latter should certainly qualify you for a very very long stay in the big house.
But couldn't this just as easily be the result of budgetary concerns? If people knew the ISS would be well funded for several years we would be more likely to see a greater interest in research projects.
This isn't, in my opinion, the problem here; this isn't a chicken and egg problem. That is, you typically don't spend the time and money to build a multibillion dollar scientific facility unless you already have an interested user community lined up as far as the eye can see. Even within NASA this is generally the case: the Hubble is, and has been since inception, completely oversubscribed, and the demands on JPL to design and build deep space probes vastly exceed the supply of resources. The same with most particle accelerator facilities worldwide. And I could go on in many other fields.
ISS is a different beast, however. There IS no user community for ISS resources (slight over exageration ... there is a very small community of interested users); there is no huge waiting list for ISS scientific use. And it has nothing to do with concern over the ISS construction budget/schedule. It has everything to do with a lack of need for the facility; the benefits to most real world research of microgravity are greatly overstated, and the drawbacks are usually vastly underplayed (a big one that is never mentioned: the actual experiment is done by someone else not intimately associated with the experiment; astronauts aren't dummies, but most frontier experiments are tough enough to get right when the experimenter is there running the show themself!). You can do most of the types of experiments envisioned for the ISS just as well on the ground with tougher quality control, at a greatly lower cost and vastly lower risk to both experiment and experimenter.
If the US government guaranteed tomorrow that the thing would be fully funded (as NASA defines it), you almost certainly wouldn't see the demand on the facility jump; that just isn't the way that it works in frontier science.
This is sincere curiosity: What in your opinion is the justification for the ISS then?
My personal opinion is that the ISS is a completely unjustified waste of money, with no redeeming scientific or engineering value that could justify its construction costs. But I haven't necessarily thought through all of the arguments others put forward in favor of the ISS to the level that I feel justified in concluding that there is NO justification; I just haven't seen an argument that comes even remotely close to swaying my opinion.
My primary objection is that the ISS seems to be a construction project in search of a purpose, instead of a major piece of a well thought out long term space exploration program with goals and milestones. The Shuttle program suffer(s)(ed) from a similar problem: in the 70s, NASA got to build either a space station or a reusable truck to get to a space station, but not both. They went with Shuttle, and so for the last thirty odd years, the US space program has had a horribly overpriced, partially reusable means to get into orbit, but nothing truly valuable to do with it. The ISS is going to be the same thing: it costs too much for the very very little that it does, and it does not have a well defined part to play in a well designed long term space exploration strategy. There are many better things to do with that money, in my opinion: unmanned interplanetary probes, astronomy and astrophysics, long duration unmanned orbitting research platforms, an orbitting "gas station" for manned lunar and Mars missions (which the ISS can never be, due to its current orbit), etc. With a well defined purpose and goal, ISS would not have spun out of control in trying to become all things to all people, and failing miserably at all of them.
This sounds an awful bit like something influenced alot by NASA in order to get a bigger budget.
Well, in a word, no. This is the same conclusion drawn years ago by (literally, not figuratively) hundreds of other independent scientific organizations, including the NAS, AAAS, APS, AIP, and MRS: there is almost no science that the ISS can do that can't be done better, cheaper, faster, and safer either on the ground or on an unmanned orbiting platform, or during short duration flights. There is certainly no other scientific program funded by the US (and other nations) government that would be able to get away with such a fantastically miniscule ROI. The space station never has been, and never will be, primarily a scientific research platform. This is not to say that the he ISS is an unjustified expenditure, but its scientific program is not the justification.
Makes me proud of spending $30 billion in tax money -- hey, isn't that about enough for a manned Mars mission?
Well, given the inability of multiple independent national and international space agencies (the US and Russia in particular), to bring in a much simpler, safer, and less technically challenging mission (namely ISS) on time and on budget, I find it highly doubtful that a $30 Billion dollar projected budget for a manned mission is even within an order of magnitude of what the actual cost will be....
Naturally that was nixed, so now they're a mean-looking and quite visible black.
Um, they're black because they fly their missions at NIGHT.
The counter argument (I read it on The Register this morning) is well written,
I have to vehemently disagree with this. NEITHER of the linked rebuttals qualifies as well written; the MITRE report qualifies as well written, and so does most of the AdTI report, but the rebuttals to the AdTI report do not. They BOTH make the mistake that continues to negatively impact the arguments of Open Source/ Free Software advocates: childish personal attacks. Continually repeating phrases like (paraphrasing here) "Microsoft, err, AdTI, says" and "worried about losing the Trophy Wife and the vacation home in the Bahamas" are NOT logical arguments for the superiority of open source software, and they make the open source community look bad. Logic alone will not win the day....
So, while the AdTI piece is certainly poorly researched, corporate pandering tripe, it is likely to have a much MUCH larger impact on policy makers than any rebuttal, not BECAUSE of its accuracy, but because of its tone. Open Source gets bitten by this all the time, and the advocates don't seem to be learning.
This is probably not an indication of any more crimes being committed using Yahoo's services, but is instead a reflection of the greater power LEO's have to violate individual's privacy, especially in the wake of the Patriot act.
No, it actually is a result of Yahoo begin big, cheap, and national in size. It has millions upon millions of customers, in (literally) tens of thousands of jurisdictions. That they receive thousands of warrants is no more surprising to me than hearing that Citibank receives thousands of warrants a year for credit card records....
May I ask what horrible experience you have had to so warp your view of reality? I don't disagree that there have been SOME ideas/theories/experiments that have been improperly rejected from publication, but you would be hard pressed, I think, to find an example of truly revolutionary and fundamentally correct work being rejected by the "scientific establishment" (clue for the clueless: there is no such thing as an organized, coherent scientific establishment...). In fact, your whole argument makes little to no sense, since it is REVOLUTIONARY, FUNDAMENTAL work that gets people recognition and promotion, NOT "sticking to the party line". This DOESN'T mean that all theories that disagree with the established theory will be accepted as "plausible" .... most theories by people not trained in the field are notably ridiculous, and worthy of begin ignored, simply because they don't indicate any understanding of the material they claim to be discussing.
My experience is in theoretical particle physics, and in just the last six years, every talk I've been to starts out: "The current theory is wonderful, but deficient in the following ways ... I'm going to tell you about work I've done to throw out this part of the standard theory." Standard Theories become standard, not because we want them to, but because they match the data better than any other theory that has come along, are internally consistent, are predictive, and are falsifiable.
As for your post, there are so many incorrect points that I don't have the time to correct them all, but I'll pick a sample:
So, to summarize, I don't think you have a clue as to what you are talking about, and suspect that you have some personal agenda or vendetta that you feel needs to be made public. I wish you had let us know WHY you feel "rejected" by the scientific community. (remember that "made public" complaint you had?) I certainly don't claim that the process is perfect, but it is the best, most reliable one that we have found so far. Perhaps you could let us know what alternatives you had in mind?
I guess I don't see how not paying taxes you don't owe (your "legally avoiding taxes") is "screwing over the American public". The rules were set by representatives YOU (not MSFT) elected, and if you don't like the rules, lobby to get them changed ... but don't accuse the people and corporations who actually follow the rules of being tax cheats.
Let me put this another way: Do YOU give the government more tax revenue than you are required to do by law? If not, you hardly have a right to complain about others doing exactly what you are doing....
But how much did you PAY AT&T for VNC? They don't run this lab for your benefit alone ... they run it to make money. If in their cost-benefit analysis the lab is a liability to the corporation, then they have not only the right, but the fiduciary responsibility to shut it down. Just because a lab comes out with neat stuff doesn't mean there is a good reason for the owner to keep it open.
If you are so convinced that it is worth pouring money into, it shouldn't be that hard to find a group of investors willing to give you the cash to buy and run the place as you see fit. That's the way commerce works! The fact that no one is interested in buying the place indicates, to me at least, that it might not be such a valuable property as many comments seem to think it is....
Which I could rewrite as:
All of those are theories that are in extensive use and work extremely well when you stay away from the infinities. And in Quantum Field Theories, we know how to completely remove many types of infinities. Don't be so quick to toss a theory that contains infinities; they aren't the Beast.
And, gravistars DO NOT appear "exactly like" black holes; if they did, it wouldn't be an interesting idea, because black holes are so much simpler and easier to understand. If there were no observational differences, Occam's razor would have beheaded gravistars before they were published: gravistars requires much much much more complicated and completely unspecified dynamics to generate the condensates required to support the object.
Additionally, it is not clear that any of the "problems" that gravistars try to solve are really problems in any technical sense; they may or may not be, and they are under active investigation in the case of black holes. Gravistars are interesting, but they have so many of their own problems that it is not at all obvious that they are "better" than black holes in any way. Time, more theoretical study, and observations will tell the difference.
The problem with this type of Newtonian description of an essentially non-Newtonian phenomenon is that people try to extrapolate from their understanding of Newtonian gravity (a post lower down, for instance, suggests that maybe you could climb out of the hole "slowly" without reaching escape velocity, just like you can get to the moon without reaching the escape velocity of the earth). The event horizon is, however, much more than "just the distance at which escape velocity exceeds that speed of light"; the very structure of space and time changes at the event horizon. You can prove mathematically within the confines of classical tensor theories of gravity, that the event horizon is a surface that bounds a region where all light-like and time-like trajectories are trapped, for the entire future history of the universe. In english, any piece of matter, and any photon that crosses that surface will NEVER be able to get out, no matter how hard you try (and in fact, the harder you try, the more stuck you get :-) These processes are inherently unlike gravity as you learned in high school and freshman college physics, and you just (unfortunately) can't really make the escape velocity analogy.
the Canadian system allows the employees to go after the management, not for them to be reimbursed by the government. This prevents debacles like Enron where the top dogs walk away with millions by fucking the rank-and-file.
Only that isn't what happened either here or in the Enron case, from the news reports. People were perfectly content to do stupid things for Loki (VOLUNTARILY) without pay when they mistaken believed they would be paid back later. People were perfectly content to do stupid things with their retirement savings in the Enron case when the stock was flying high; that they lost everything is their own damn fault, because contrary to what the talking heads are saying, there was no "requirement" that they park their retirement fund in Enron stock (the laws in the US ALREADY forbid that kind of requirement).
When I was a young lad I figured out that you watch what other people are doing, not what they are saying, and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: "I can't pay you now, but TRUST ME, I'll pay you later, OK?" or "The stock price will NEVER fall, TRUST ME". I would have been out the door that day, and if I wasn't, and got what was coming to me, why should I expect other people to lose sleep over it? The top dogs walk away with millions because they are smart enough to diversify and NOT blindly trust what they are being told; they may well be dogs, but they didn't fuck anyone that didn't bend over and say "Please sir, do it to me again!"
The converse should also be true, if a company knowingly defrauds or financially harms its employees then the company should be criminally liable.
It already IS true; if a company does these things, it already is criminally responsible and can be nailed for it. What happened here does not appear to be fraudulent actions by the company: people CHOSE to stay when they weren't getting paid. If you are implying that an employee shouldn't be allowed to work for free (which is what you are doing when you agree to defer paychecks), then I think you are wrong. I wouldn't do it, but I shouldn't be told that I can't do it if I want to.
Even neutral particles can carry intrinsic magnetic dipoles, so you can still trap a sufficiently cool neutral atom in a properly configured magnetic field. You can't trap a "hot" atom this way, because it can just "jump" out of the trap, but a cool enough atom will stay put.
I believe the proportion of energy expended vs energy stored in antiparticles is something on the order of 10^4.
And there is just no way around that ... these are inherently quantum mechanical processes, and you have absolutely no control over what comes out after you put the energy in. It doesn't matter WHAT method you decide to use ... you can't choose what the reaction products are going to be, and hence you can never make it more efficient than a fraction of a percent or so.
Sorry to burst your bubble and those of the others in this post, but the production of these small amounts of anti-hydrogen give no insights whatsoever into the future of propulsion systems, or power systems, or weaponry, or anything of the kind. The only things that this experiment tell us about are fundamental physics, namely tests of our theoretical understanding of the fundamental symmetry properties of nature: there is the definite prediction that anti-hydrogen in a trap should behave in every way like hydrogen in the same trap. If it DOESN'T we've learned something interesting; if it DOES then we will have yet more confirmation of what we already think we know. Everything that a physicist is going to be able to tell you about more mundane "practical" applications or R&D with anti-matter were determined decades ago (in the thirties and forties), and making practical use of antimatter is purely an engineering challenge.
No, that isn't correct. Starting from just matter (as this experiment does), for every anti-matter particle that we make, we also create one matter particle (roughly speaking ... really, we are talking about conserved particle number, but let's ignore the details, shall we?). You produce antimatter by taking a high energy beam of matter, running it through a target (generally a thin sheet of metal of some sort). Collisions between matter particles in the beam and sheet liberate the kinetic energy in the beam particle, and that energy sometimes emerges in the form of particle antiparticle pairs. Thus, if we take a proton beam and train it on a target, we sometimes make antiprotons through the reaction p+p ==> p+p+p+anti-p (we could also make electron-positron pairs, or neutron anti-neutron pairs, etc). We get just as much "new" matter as "new" antimatter. Since we have to make the antimatter in the first place, we can't get out any more than we put in in the first place.
I guess they've already got a theory on how the spectral emission/absorption lines of anti-hydrogen will compare to those of hydrogen.
Yes indeedy ... hydrogen and anti-hydrogen should have exactly the same spectra. If they are NOT identical, that will be extremely cool.