"The empirical evidence could yet be interpreted in the context of the existence of accumulating carbon dust,"
No, it couldn't, there have been plenty of studies on the effect of dust on light propagation and it simply doesn't explain the observations.
"the evolution over history of the supernovae concerned - their increasing content of metals and their increasing spin as time progresses."
True, the progenitors aren't that well understood. This is usually treated as a systematic error in the surveys. The use of SN1a as standard candles is still somewhat controversial, which is why these days I always advocate leaving out the supernova datasets completely, in favour of observations of the CMB and of large-scale structures and the baryon acoustic oscillations in particular. Those two datasets combined give us a universe with about 25% dark matter, 70% dark energy, and 5% normal matter. The fact that the supernovae *also* happen to intersect at basically that exact same part of the plots is pretty suggestive that the systematics aren't very significant, though.
"The mathematical model rates as an embarrassment from the perspective of my criticism of fundamental physics."
This would be your famous criticism of fundamental physics that has received such attention? What criticism of fundamental physics? Do you fancy explaining why you think the mathematical model is an "embarrassment" or are you simply trolling? (I happen to think that the model is being over-interpreted since it's ultimately phenomenology - but it's startlingly successful for a phenomenological theory, and predictions have been tested against observation with a lot of success. The BAOs serve as a nice example of that.
"What withstands criticism is a possible background of conserved negative mass,"
Now you're beginning to enter the realms of whacky. Let me guess, negative mass in Newton's formulae give antigravity ERGO EVERYTHING IS SOLVED LOL! Right?
"Together with a possible background of negative tachyonic mass, which is conserved in its direction of propagation."
And what the flying fuck is that meant to mean? Yeah yeah tachyons with negative mass. So, what, they lose mass perpendicular to their direction of motion? Kind of like a bird flying in a storm? How about you write a sensible theory and try and get it past all the standard tests.... no, wait, you won't.
You got modded +1 for statements like "we CAN travel to the stars" and "the Universe is probably infinite, and that we have the power to shape the future of the Universe, because we are the Universe", "If we went Manhattan-Project style on the idea of going to the stars, we'd be there in no time" and "Scientists are just people who like to shit on the hearts of Engineers"?
You're totally right as far as you go, but he's referring to "big rip" cosmologies, where ultimately (if you believe them hyper-literally, which is a bit suspect itself) the acceleration of the universe *vastly* overpowers gravitational bonds, and then electrostatic bonds, and then electroweak bonds and eventually strong bonds. And then there's a singularity.
It's possible to write a theory with a big rip, but they're pretty contrived and it doesn't look likely to me.
Haha, I'm in cosmology - one of the "big" CMB codes is CMBEasy, which for almost a decade was the only CMB code written in C++. The author originally "wrote" it by taking an F77 code (CMBFast), about half of which is inlined for speed and which is replete with common blocks with variables arbitrarily renamed for reuse in different routines (the original variable name obviously *also* being used in the routine) and running it through f2c, and then goggling at the result and trying to make sense of it while he rewrote and refactored the lot. It made him a hell of a good cosmologist, and quite a good programmer, too.
Actually I probably should have mentioned that I think it's a further reason for the problems - the code is often patched together from inherited libraries and routines passed on by the PhD supervisor, who themselves inherited quite a lot of it from their own supervisor. Some code used in large academic projects honestly dates back to about 1970 or before, and hasn't been touched since other than to hack into double precision and hope that that doesn't break something subtle. Since some of these archaic routines are random number generators, it actually can break things quite badly.
There's no way I'd release my codes to the wild even if anyone else found them useful - their brittleness is a mixture of the way they were programmed, aiming directly at a very specific problem with no error trapping if the inputs went slightly outside an assumed region, and the routines that went into them. It would take significant work to clear out all the junk and reprogram it in an even vaguely modern language.
Even then, that language would be Fortran, which would put off quite a lot of developers. In my field, at least, academia is still stuck in Fortran and it's often F77. People are slowly shifting to a mixture of C++ and Python but it's taking a very long time.
I used some stuff in my thesis that was written in Fortran 66, adapted from Fortran IV of all places. It took years more to clean out the rest of that and get everything at least into F950/95. It's still buggy, brittle, inflexible and probably indecipherable, but it's slowly getting better and more adaptable.
Yes, I agree - I'd mod you up except I've been involved in this. The original post started talking about physical access and WIndows (though he claims he meant for anything) so I added that that scuppers you on a Mac too. And evidently Linux, from what ais523 says just below.
Just because it's simple to do doesn't mean everyone will have done it... Maybe this kind of thing will help them wake up and start encrypting everything.
That would be one reason, yes. Using programs that require any PPC code would be another (and for some reason quite a few programs still use(d) PPC installers and plug-ins even if the actual program was all Intel. That either has or will change quickly, of course). Not liking the way Lion forces an inflexible revision system onto you is another. Personally I just don't really see the need to move from Snow Leopard.
Anyway, this is all a bit off-topic, except that Snow Leopard at least doesn't have this vulnerability, even if it does have a couple of others.
That's the spirit! The only time I've adminned a system for some reason it didn't occur to me, even though I'm positive that half the passwords were "password" and the rest were four or five characters long because "anything longer is too hard to remember".
You can change the root password on a Mac box without ANY credentials, provided you have physical access, Seems we have forgotten this while everyone is fear-mongering about what someone can do over the 'net.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but basically once someone has physical access to your computer you're basically boned unless you've encrypted your drive. It's Macs I know best, and it's trivial: boot to single user mode (command+S at start), mount in the file system as read/write (it even gives onscreen instructions for doing this) and then change the root password. I imagine something very similar can be done in Linux if there's an easy way to get it into single-user mode. Besides, on any machine to which you have physical access you can always boot a live distro and at the very least access the hashes if not easily take full control of the system.
If you don't value your job too highly, you could even do a demonstration by deliberately exploiting the exploit to get their hashes, cracking their passwords, and email each of them an archive encrypted with their own password. When they unlock it they find a text file saying "CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD YOU MORON". Depending on your bosses you may well get fired for this, but it would help convince people that actually they're not as safe as all that.
So far as I understand it, British universities could claim copyright on a thesis but typically don't - but they'd certainly be quite pissed off if you published commercially. I do remember signing some copyright form or other when I submitted my PhD, though, so maybe they actually did claim copyright. I must confess by that point I was so tired and sick of the thesis that I'd have signed anything to get it over with. It's not practically *that* important, since the thesis is up for the world to see at the arxiv (and, technically, at the British Library) and it's my copyright declaration inside, which the university didn't protest.
Unfortunately you don't get modded +5 for pointing out that people online have completely lost their sense of proportion and thrown themselves gleefully into an absurdly mixed sense of persecution and entitlement. I'm amazed you've not been modded -1 Flamebait.
I thought this was so widely known as to be a truism. Any guide I've seen for installing any Linux or BSD on a machine with Windows on it will emphasise this point repeatedly. If even I've not run into problems doing it I don't see how anyone could.
Let's say you own three computers, which is not at all unreasonable - one desktop, one laptop and one tablet is reasonably common. Then you can have five or six browsers open, a collection of sock-puppet accounts and a few ACs. Troll as an AC and boost to +5 Insightful. Immediate Slashdot domination is yours!
Of course it's idiotic:) Two browsers on the same website is already looking a bit... unhinged.
Or you can have a browser open that isn't logged in and a browser open that is. Plus point: you can post anonymously and then mod yourself up to have an immediate boost to the dizzy heights of +1.
Why are you picking "sides" at all? Don't you realise how silly it makes you seem? Feel free to dislike Apple as a company, feel free to dislike how they price their products, and feel free to dislike their marketing... and go on living your life rather than picking the "side" that Google are on and having these petty, futile arguments. Believe me, Google are not on your side.
Fine. Send me a copy of your proposal and I'll see what we can do with it. You'll get first author status on the first paper, which will be to take your non-incompetent alternative and extract from it the CMB -- its monopole and its higher multipoles. If it can also explain the dipole then that's even better. The fit has to be significantly better (quantifiably significant; that means I have to be able to find the Bayesian evidence and find it to be significantly better on a well-defined scale, rather than a random unjustified statement) than that of the current, unsatisfactory model. The second paper will be to attempt to account for structure formation; in particular I want to get out the matter power spectrum of large-scale structure, and to account for the oscillations on large scales.
But I have to see a theory, clearly and mathematically written down, that looks like it would be a viable alternative to the current model. That means it has to fit the data better. At present, that means it has to fit the CMB (temperature and polarisation), matter power spectrum, baryon acoustic oscillations and supernova datasets. Despite some fairly severe, and unknown, systematics in some of those datasets the agreement between them and the standard cosmological model is impressive. Any alternative, including those proposed by people who know their arses from their elbows, struggles to do this, which is unfortunately why we still have "dark energy" - which any of us will happily admit we can't explain.
If your wonderful alternative can't do this - if, for instance, you don't even have an alternative, or if it's so fuzzily phrased that there are no quantifiable predictions out of it as is typically the case when people think they've got an answer - then you've got no grounds to go around calling people incompetent.
Slashdot Mirror
"The empirical evidence could yet be interpreted in the context of the existence of accumulating carbon dust,"
No, it couldn't, there have been plenty of studies on the effect of dust on light propagation and it simply doesn't explain the observations.
"the evolution over history of the supernovae concerned - their increasing content of metals and their increasing spin as time progresses."
True, the progenitors aren't that well understood. This is usually treated as a systematic error in the surveys. The use of SN1a as standard candles is still somewhat controversial, which is why these days I always advocate leaving out the supernova datasets completely, in favour of observations of the CMB and of large-scale structures and the baryon acoustic oscillations in particular. Those two datasets combined give us a universe with about 25% dark matter, 70% dark energy, and 5% normal matter. The fact that the supernovae *also* happen to intersect at basically that exact same part of the plots is pretty suggestive that the systematics aren't very significant, though.
"The mathematical model rates as an embarrassment from the perspective of my criticism of fundamental physics."
This would be your famous criticism of fundamental physics that has received such attention? What criticism of fundamental physics? Do you fancy explaining why you think the mathematical model is an "embarrassment" or are you simply trolling? (I happen to think that the model is being over-interpreted since it's ultimately phenomenology - but it's startlingly successful for a phenomenological theory, and predictions have been tested against observation with a lot of success. The BAOs serve as a nice example of that.
"What withstands criticism is a possible background of conserved negative mass,"
Now you're beginning to enter the realms of whacky. Let me guess, negative mass in Newton's formulae give antigravity ERGO EVERYTHING IS SOLVED LOL! Right?
"Together with a possible background of negative tachyonic mass, which is conserved in its direction of propagation."
And what the flying fuck is that meant to mean? Yeah yeah tachyons with negative mass. So, what, they lose mass perpendicular to their direction of motion? Kind of like a bird flying in a storm? How about you write a sensible theory and try and get it past all the standard tests.... no, wait, you won't.
You got modded +1 for statements like "we CAN travel to the stars" and "the Universe is probably infinite, and that we have the power to shape the future of the Universe, because we are the Universe", "If we went Manhattan-Project style on the idea of going to the stars, we'd be there in no time" and "Scientists are just people who like to shit on the hearts of Engineers"?
Well played.
You're totally right as far as you go, but he's referring to "big rip" cosmologies, where ultimately (if you believe them hyper-literally, which is a bit suspect itself) the acceleration of the universe *vastly* overpowers gravitational bonds, and then electrostatic bonds, and then electroweak bonds and eventually strong bonds. And then there's a singularity.
It's possible to write a theory with a big rip, but they're pretty contrived and it doesn't look likely to me.
Haha, I'm in cosmology - one of the "big" CMB codes is CMBEasy, which for almost a decade was the only CMB code written in C++. The author originally "wrote" it by taking an F77 code (CMBFast), about half of which is inlined for speed and which is replete with common blocks with variables arbitrarily renamed for reuse in different routines (the original variable name obviously *also* being used in the routine) and running it through f2c, and then goggling at the result and trying to make sense of it while he rewrote and refactored the lot. It made him a hell of a good cosmologist, and quite a good programmer, too.
Actually I probably should have mentioned that I think it's a further reason for the problems - the code is often patched together from inherited libraries and routines passed on by the PhD supervisor, who themselves inherited quite a lot of it from their own supervisor. Some code used in large academic projects honestly dates back to about 1970 or before, and hasn't been touched since other than to hack into double precision and hope that that doesn't break something subtle. Since some of these archaic routines are random number generators, it actually can break things quite badly.
There's no way I'd release my codes to the wild even if anyone else found them useful - their brittleness is a mixture of the way they were programmed, aiming directly at a very specific problem with no error trapping if the inputs went slightly outside an assumed region, and the routines that went into them. It would take significant work to clear out all the junk and reprogram it in an even vaguely modern language.
Even then, that language would be Fortran, which would put off quite a lot of developers. In my field, at least, academia is still stuck in Fortran and it's often F77. People are slowly shifting to a mixture of C++ and Python but it's taking a very long time.
I used some stuff in my thesis that was written in Fortran 66, adapted from Fortran IV of all places. It took years more to clean out the rest of that and get everything at least into F950/95. It's still buggy, brittle, inflexible and probably indecipherable, but it's slowly getting better and more adaptable.
Yes, I agree - I'd mod you up except I've been involved in this. The original post started talking about physical access and WIndows (though he claims he meant for anything) so I added that that scuppers you on a Mac too. And evidently Linux, from what ais523 says just below.
Just because it's simple to do doesn't mean everyone will have done it... Maybe this kind of thing will help them wake up and start encrypting everything.
You'll never get anywhere on Slashdot with that kind of measured attitude.
That would be one reason, yes. Using programs that require any PPC code would be another (and for some reason quite a few programs still use(d) PPC installers and plug-ins even if the actual program was all Intel. That either has or will change quickly, of course). Not liking the way Lion forces an inflexible revision system onto you is another. Personally I just don't really see the need to move from Snow Leopard.
Anyway, this is all a bit off-topic, except that Snow Leopard at least doesn't have this vulnerability, even if it does have a couple of others.
That's the spirit! The only time I've adminned a system for some reason it didn't occur to me, even though I'm positive that half the passwords were "password" and the rest were four or five characters long because "anything longer is too hard to remember".
You can change the root password on a Mac box without ANY credentials, provided you have physical access, Seems we have forgotten this while everyone is fear-mongering about what someone can do over the 'net.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but basically once someone has physical access to your computer you're basically boned unless you've encrypted your drive. It's Macs I know best, and it's trivial: boot to single user mode (command+S at start), mount in the file system as read/write (it even gives onscreen instructions for doing this) and then change the root password. I imagine something very similar can be done in Linux if there's an easy way to get it into single-user mode. Besides, on any machine to which you have physical access you can always boot a live distro and at the very least access the hashes if not easily take full control of the system.
I suspect that a lot of people are sticking with Snow Leopard at the minute, for a variety of reasons.
If you don't value your job too highly, you could even do a demonstration by deliberately exploiting the exploit to get their hashes, cracking their passwords, and email each of them an archive encrypted with their own password. When they unlock it they find a text file saying "CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD YOU MORON". Depending on your bosses you may well get fired for this, but it would help convince people that actually they're not as safe as all that.
I'll take your word for it - I honestly don't remember what they put on the copyright form.
So far as I understand it, British universities could claim copyright on a thesis but typically don't - but they'd certainly be quite pissed off if you published commercially. I do remember signing some copyright form or other when I submitted my PhD, though, so maybe they actually did claim copyright. I must confess by that point I was so tired and sick of the thesis that I'd have signed anything to get it over with. It's not practically *that* important, since the thesis is up for the world to see at the arxiv (and, technically, at the British Library) and it's my copyright declaration inside, which the university didn't protest.
You sound like you're 15.
Unfortunately you don't get modded +5 for pointing out that people online have completely lost their sense of proportion and thrown themselves gleefully into an absurdly mixed sense of persecution and entitlement. I'm amazed you've not been modded -1 Flamebait.
I thought this was so widely known as to be a truism. Any guide I've seen for installing any Linux or BSD on a machine with Windows on it will emphasise this point repeatedly. If even I've not run into problems doing it I don't see how anyone could.
Let's say you own three computers, which is not at all unreasonable - one desktop, one laptop and one tablet is reasonably common. Then you can have five or six browsers open, a collection of sock-puppet accounts and a few ACs. Troll as an AC and boost to +5 Insightful. Immediate Slashdot domination is yours!
Of course it's idiotic :) Two browsers on the same website is already looking a bit... unhinged.
You seem to be a tad on the tense side. You may find it useful to put on some soothing music and relax in a scented bath.
However, I'd be willing to give you mod points for using the word "effete", except that, alas, I have no mod points.
Or you can have a browser open that isn't logged in and a browser open that is. Plus point: you can post anonymously and then mod yourself up to have an immediate boost to the dizzy heights of +1.
Why are you picking "sides" at all? Don't you realise how silly it makes you seem? Feel free to dislike Apple as a company, feel free to dislike how they price their products, and feel free to dislike their marketing... and go on living your life rather than picking the "side" that Google are on and having these petty, futile arguments. Believe me, Google are not on your side.
Fine. Send me a copy of your proposal and I'll see what we can do with it. You'll get first author status on the first paper, which will be to take your non-incompetent alternative and extract from it the CMB -- its monopole and its higher multipoles. If it can also explain the dipole then that's even better. The fit has to be significantly better (quantifiably significant; that means I have to be able to find the Bayesian evidence and find it to be significantly better on a well-defined scale, rather than a random unjustified statement) than that of the current, unsatisfactory model. The second paper will be to attempt to account for structure formation; in particular I want to get out the matter power spectrum of large-scale structure, and to account for the oscillations on large scales.
But I have to see a theory, clearly and mathematically written down, that looks like it would be a viable alternative to the current model. That means it has to fit the data better. At present, that means it has to fit the CMB (temperature and polarisation), matter power spectrum, baryon acoustic oscillations and supernova datasets. Despite some fairly severe, and unknown, systematics in some of those datasets the agreement between them and the standard cosmological model is impressive. Any alternative, including those proposed by people who know their arses from their elbows, struggles to do this, which is unfortunately why we still have "dark energy" - which any of us will happily admit we can't explain.
If your wonderful alternative can't do this - if, for instance, you don't even have an alternative, or if it's so fuzzily phrased that there are no quantifiable predictions out of it as is typically the case when people think they've got an answer - then you've got no grounds to go around calling people incompetent.
2) There are no royalties. We don't earn money from specific models, we just get paid to research.