And yes, it makes sense to use our experiences with the Solar system to define planets. Planets today are the largest non-solar bodies in orbits around stars. We want them to be stable objects, easily identifiable, and on welldefined orbits, so it actually makes sense to name them and to study their features. And if possible, we want a clear cutoff to both smaller objects and larger bodies.
Because the Solar system is the planetary system best known to Mankind, we primarily want our definitions to work there. If it is ambiguous even in our close proximity, it won't be of much help somewhere else. On the other hand, we don't want "Planet" to be defined solely by "being in the list of known planets". We want a definition, that a) works in our Solar system, b) provides a clear cutoff between "a planet" and "not a planet", and c) has a good chance to work somewhere else too without too much hassle.
And here comes the primary problem with Pluto named a planet. It differs from both the gassy planets and the rocky planets, but is not so much different from Titan, Triton, Ganymede, Europa, Io and other large moons, except that Pluto is smaller and doesn't circle a bigger planetary body. In certain ways, it circles an even smaller body, Charon, by being completely outside the common gravitational center of Charon and Pluto (does that makes Charon a planet too, because it has a moon named Pluto?). It seems to be quite similar to Eris too, which is about the same size, has about the same inner structure, but has a much larger orbit. But there are many other bodies out there, which are similar to Eris and Pluto too, except being smaller. So were do we put the cutoff between Pluto (and maybe Eris) on one hand and the millions and billions of dirty snowballs circling the Sun out there? What makes Pluto (and Eris) so different, that it should be a planet and not just "a lump of dirt and frozen water out there", which it defininitely is?
The IAU said, that it would be nice when the orbit of a planet and accompanying bodies around the Sun (or another star) would actually go through the planet (it doesn't for Pluto). The IAU said that it would be nice when the orbit and the size of the planet is warranted to be stable for the foreseable future, thus it asked for a planet to have mainly cleaned its orbit and doesn't run risk anymore to suffer a large collision with objects in the same or close orbits which might strongly change its celestial parameters (Pluto hasn't).
The ancient planets were seven, and the Babylonians named the days of the week after them. We have Moonday, Marsday, Mercuryday, Jupiterday, Venusday, Saturnday, and Sunday -- o.k., with time passing, we renamed them a little. Moonday turned into Monday, the latin Dies Martis into Tuesday, Mercury became replaced by his germanic equivalent Wodan, turning the day into Wodanesday or Wednesday, Jupiter, the Thundering God, named Thor in German, gave birth to Thursday, Venus turned into Freya and Venusday into Friday, Saturday just lost his n, and Sunday remained the way it always was.
For the Ancient, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn were special in several ways. They are the brightest objects in the Sky, they are not fixed in the star background, but move around, and differently than all the other stars, they don't flicker. Thus they were named the Travellers, or in Greek: Planetes.
One of the most shocking effects of the Copernican Model was, that suddenly, the number of Planets shrunk to five. Sun and Moon were no longer planets, but formed two new categories: Center of the Earth's movement and Moon became its own category: A moon.
If we consider the emotional debate how Pluto still should be a planet and demoting him was a mistake even a dozen years after the fact, and after Pluto being a planet for not even 80 years, imagine the debate in the 15th to 17th century about the demoting of the Moon and the new role of the Sun after three millenia of them being planets!
No, the human operator would need that information. The computer works only on the dataset given. And if that dataset does not include competitor's prices, the computer will never be able to infer them. The AI is only trying to find rules in data and to extrapolate from there.
What you are doing here is turning the AI into Laplace's demon. He can predict the future because he has complete knowledge of the present. And complete means complete. Laplace's demon knows the place and the impulse of every particle of the universe, and all the Laws of Motion and Interaction between particles.
Of course this makes sense. Differently than an AI, humans are able to expand the data set they are working on. In the example given, toothpaste prices for other stores are not available, only the inhouse prices. Thus an AI will never be able to get the competition price rule. And differently than a human, it will never ask for the prices of other stores, as the data world it lives in does not even hint for the existence of other stores.
An AI does solve a problem for the given dataset only. Humans can reason which part of the world they have no knowledge off and go exploring, because they have their own sensory apparatus and are mobile. An AI can't do that. Data you don't feed to the AI is off-limits.
Yes, you could argue that you simply have to feed more data. But you don't make it more easy to find the needle in the haystack by adding more hay. In this special case it was competitor's prices which had an influence the AI could not grasp. In the store in the neighboring town it might have been the delivery times for toothpaste which determine the prices, and being able to predict them might require to know about the fluorite markets or other parts of the production process of toothpaste. In a third town, there could be a guru telling everyone toothpaste is bad, and only flossing will get your inner tooth in balance. And whenever the guru is in town, the market for toothpaste grinds to an halt. So the AI for that town would need the travel schedule of the guru.
As you can see, a general toothpaste pricing AI would need a giant, nearly unlimited warehouse of data to make its decision. And the data feeders for the AI would have to think of every possibility that could have an influence on pricing and get hold of enough data to train the AI on, including the political situation in fluorite mining countries, new trends in esoteric circles, the phase of the Moon, the latest advertisements for sweets, the harvest of the mint crops, the distribution of Dark Matter, and the preferred tyre type sold in town (you never know if that data might be necessary too, so be sure it is included).
Well, it's not so easy, as there is the "failure to assist a person in danger". If someone is sick and thus can't provide for himself, he definitely is a person in danger, and everyone who is able to help without bringing himself in immediate danger is required by law to help him.
"Let them die" would amount to criminal neglect.
So while the state is not required to provide universal healthcare, it might be advisable to come up with an idea how to make it easy for the citizens to provide help to people in danger (e.g. provide a statewide emergency service which they can call), or to avoid to have too many people in dire need for help.
This is nice and dandy, but no migitation of the risk at hand. If the attacker got hold of your encrypted emails since the advent of OpenPGP or S/MIME, he still can read it, and you can't retroactively change the emails already sent.
There is not much evidence outside of Christian history. You could read Iosephus Flavius as some type of proof, but it's quite inconclusive, as he describes it as hearsay himself.
If it were possible to time travel then surely someone would have gone back in time and killed everyone trying to kill Muhammad. Since Islam exists, time travel clearly has been achieved.
Pick up the Holy Bible, and even when the Jesus guy appears, there are still lots of violence fantasies against the infidels. They mostly start with "The LOrd will do unto them..." or similar, and there are many people gladly applying to be the tools for the LOrd.
I personally find any "scientific" taxonomy that requires the pre-existence of a theory to be... absurd.
To the contrary: Every taxonomy needs a founding theory. Terms and words only have a meaning within a theory. That's why for instance "ring" has completely different meanings in Mathematics, in Telephony and in Wedding ceremony.
It doesn't make sense to discuss the meaning of words without first agreeing on a common theory the words are part of.
To go back into Astronomy: In the Inka terminology, there are also constellations, but they are completely different from the Mediterran ones we use. Even the word 'constellation' does not make much sense for the Inka, as they don't look at individual stars which might have some position related to others and thus form pictures in the night sky. Quite different, their "star pictures" consist of the dark between the stars, especially along the Milky Way. To us, their constellations look like a shadow play in the sky. As you can see, to even name something in the sky, at first you have to have a theory of it.
This mostly misses the point. Security is much more than protection against bad people. This might be a very visible and easily explained effect of having security, but security also protects against misshappenings, mistakes, accidents, errors, all the little nuisances which disrupt the intended way of running things. Even if all people were saints, we still would need security.
The insecticides we are talking about, and which are forbidden now belong to the class of Neonicotinoids, which couple to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. This receptor is basicly the same in all insects. The only reason why Neonicotinoids might not affect bees as much as other insects is that bees only fly to flowering plants and feed on the flowers and thus might get less of the Neonicotinoids if they were sprayed before the flowering.
The null hypothesis is that insecticides kill insects, and bees are insects. Thus insecticides kill bees. That was easy.
A count of insects last year found that the number of insects living for instance in Germany has dropped to a quarter since the 1980ies. No. Not dropped by a quarter (25% less). Dropped to a quarter (25% remaining). And that's in protected areas, where the use of insecticides is limited.
A ban of three insecticides (there are many more) will not cause the insect population to immediately rebound to the numbers of the 1980ies. So there is no imminent famine due to insects eating our crops. There might be an imminent famine due to the lack of pollinators, which also are reduced to a quarter.
And even Germany changed at least the diverse cursive scripts in use in 1915 to Suetterlin script, which in 1941 was forbidden during the Nazi regime and replaced with a new antiqua based cursive similar to the english one. (Albeit the modern German cursive does not "cross the t", but uses the t-cross as connection to the next letter. Any attempt to graphologically interpret the way the ts are crossed thus runs into some problems with German cursive.)
Thus, most Germans can't read the handwritten letters of their grand-parents anymore, because the script is unknown to them.
Turkey went from the Arab letters to Latin letters in the 1920ies (and at the same time replaced Osman Turkish with Modern Turkish). Many minority languages in Southeast Europe and Central Asia have several attempts at getting an alphabet for them, like the Udi language in the Northern Caucasus, which has had the Caucasian Albanian alphabet in the Middle Ages, a Latin based alphabet at the end of the 19th century until the 1970ies and uses now an Cyrillic Alphabet. Interestingly though, Udi is beside Georgian only the second indigenious Caucasian language to ever had their own alphabet (Armenian, albeit having its own alphabet, is not an indigenious Caucasian language, but indogerman).
Here: John Tyndall: Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat, London 1872.
Lets put it that way: The Greenhouse Effect is a wellknown phenomenon since at least 150 years (hey, we build greenhouses for some reason!). And of course every material that has different absorbtion properties at different frequencies comes with a greenhouse effect, because it is transparent to some frequencies and absorbs energy at other frequencies. Thus energy that at one frequency passes the layer gets trapped at other frequencies. Glass for instance is very transparent for electromagnetic waves from the visual spectrum, but is not for frequencies of the thermal spectrum. That's why we build greenhouses with glass roofs. Because of Ludwig Boltzmann's, Josef Stefan's and Gustav Kirchhoff's work, we know the distribution of the frequency of a Black Body's radiation, and we know, that Earth at a surface temperature of 290 K on average radiates its thermal energy at frequencies (Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's Law) where carbon dioxide, vapor and methane are absorbing electromagnetic waves. On the other hand, the Sun (with a surface temperature of 5700 K) emits its energy at much higher frequencies, for which most atmospheric gases are transparent. The Sun's energy enters the Earth's atmosphere at frequencies close to the visual spectrum, the light gets absorbed at the Earth's surface and heats it up to 255 K (on average). Then the Earth radiates the energy, but the atmosphere is intransparent at thermal frequencies due to the presence of vapor, carbon dioxide and methane. Only if Earth gets heated up due to the trapped energy to 290 K, it radiates enough energy to get into a thermal equilibrium.
That's the greenhouse effect on Earth. We have greenhouse effects at the other planets too, if they have an atmosphere. Venus is famous for its strong greenhouse effect which causes Venus's surface to have temperatures above 700 K. Mars has a greenhouse effect too, but because of the thin atmosphere, it's quite small and increases the surface temperature about 20 K above the Black Body temperature.
The current greenhouse effect of Earth is about 35 K, but it is highly dependent on the actual atmospheric composition. Changing the makeup of the atmosphere changes the strength of the greenhouse effect.
The problem is that governments don't need to balance the budget. Actually, it's not a problem at all. Some do balance the budget (Bill Clinton for instance between 1994 and 2000), others don't.
Coinage was a way to replace the need to analyse and weigh every piece of metal before trading with a seal, and thus facilitating and speeding up trade. Because now, you could trade everything in an intermediate good (precious metals), which was easily storable and durable, and which then could be traded to the desired good once it was needed.
Later in human history, it became clear, that the ability to easily count and store the coins and being able to exchange them at anytime was a different property than the intrinsic value of the precious metals, and both were separated of each other: On one side was the money, easily to count and to store and to exchange. And the other thing was the precious metal, now again a good like every other good as it was before the invention of coinage.
In fact, money is just an abstract way to keep track of the amount of goods you have sold, and your ability to buy goods. And thus you can create money out of thin air the same way you can just get a piece of paper and put numbers on it to keep track of the count. What you need is the willingness of all others to respect the way you kept track. Legal tender is nothing else than the state giving out means to keep track and in exchange warrant that the count done with them is respected by the courts.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the Solar system is the planetary system best known to Mankind, we primarily want our definitions to work there. If it is ambiguous even in our close proximity, it won't be of much help somewhere else. On the other hand, we don't want "Planet" to be defined solely by "being in the list of known planets". We want a definition, that a) works in our Solar system, b) provides a clear cutoff between "a planet" and "not a planet", and c) has a good chance to work somewhere else too without too much hassle.
And here comes the primary problem with Pluto named a planet. It differs from both the gassy planets and the rocky planets, but is not so much different from Titan, Triton, Ganymede, Europa, Io and other large moons, except that Pluto is smaller and doesn't circle a bigger planetary body. In certain ways, it circles an even smaller body, Charon, by being completely outside the common gravitational center of Charon and Pluto (does that makes Charon a planet too, because it has a moon named Pluto?). It seems to be quite similar to Eris too, which is about the same size, has about the same inner structure, but has a much larger orbit. But there are many other bodies out there, which are similar to Eris and Pluto too, except being smaller. So were do we put the cutoff between Pluto (and maybe Eris) on one hand and the millions and billions of dirty snowballs circling the Sun out there? What makes Pluto (and Eris) so different, that it should be a planet and not just "a lump of dirt and frozen water out there", which it defininitely is?
The IAU said, that it would be nice when the orbit of a planet and accompanying bodies around the Sun (or another star) would actually go through the planet (it doesn't for Pluto). The IAU said that it would be nice when the orbit and the size of the planet is warranted to be stable for the foreseable future, thus it asked for a planet to have mainly cleaned its orbit and doesn't run risk anymore to suffer a large collision with objects in the same or close orbits which might strongly change its celestial parameters (Pluto hasn't).
For the Ancient, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn were special in several ways. They are the brightest objects in the Sky, they are not fixed in the star background, but move around, and differently than all the other stars, they don't flicker. Thus they were named the Travellers, or in Greek: Planetes.
One of the most shocking effects of the Copernican Model was, that suddenly, the number of Planets shrunk to five. Sun and Moon were no longer planets, but formed two new categories: Center of the Earth's movement and Moon became its own category: A moon.
If we consider the emotional debate how Pluto still should be a planet and demoting him was a mistake even a dozen years after the fact, and after Pluto being a planet for not even 80 years, imagine the debate in the 15th to 17th century about the demoting of the Moon and the new role of the Sun after three millenia of them being planets!
So Pluto is his own supersymmetric particle.
Natural gas is not necessarily fossil. Swamp gas for instance is Natural gas, but not fossil.
Not necessarily. Swap gas for instance is a natural gas, but not fossil.
What you are doing here is turning the AI into Laplace's demon. He can predict the future because he has complete knowledge of the present. And complete means complete. Laplace's demon knows the place and the impulse of every particle of the universe, and all the Laws of Motion and Interaction between particles.
An AI does solve a problem for the given dataset only. Humans can reason which part of the world they have no knowledge off and go exploring, because they have their own sensory apparatus and are mobile. An AI can't do that. Data you don't feed to the AI is off-limits.
Yes, you could argue that you simply have to feed more data. But you don't make it more easy to find the needle in the haystack by adding more hay. In this special case it was competitor's prices which had an influence the AI could not grasp. In the store in the neighboring town it might have been the delivery times for toothpaste which determine the prices, and being able to predict them might require to know about the fluorite markets or other parts of the production process of toothpaste. In a third town, there could be a guru telling everyone toothpaste is bad, and only flossing will get your inner tooth in balance. And whenever the guru is in town, the market for toothpaste grinds to an halt. So the AI for that town would need the travel schedule of the guru.
As you can see, a general toothpaste pricing AI would need a giant, nearly unlimited warehouse of data to make its decision. And the data feeders for the AI would have to think of every possibility that could have an influence on pricing and get hold of enough data to train the AI on, including the political situation in fluorite mining countries, new trends in esoteric circles, the phase of the Moon, the latest advertisements for sweets, the harvest of the mint crops, the distribution of Dark Matter, and the preferred tyre type sold in town (you never know if that data might be necessary too, so be sure it is included).
"Let them die" would amount to criminal neglect.
So while the state is not required to provide universal healthcare, it might be advisable to come up with an idea how to make it easy for the citizens to provide help to people in danger (e.g. provide a statewide emergency service which they can call), or to avoid to have too many people in dire need for help.
This is nice and dandy, but no migitation of the risk at hand. If the attacker got hold of your encrypted emails since the advent of OpenPGP or S/MIME, he still can read it, and you can't retroactively change the emails already sent.
There is not much evidence outside of Christian history. You could read Iosephus Flavius as some type of proof, but it's quite inconclusive, as he describes it as hearsay himself.
If it were possible to time travel then surely someone would have gone back in time and killed everyone trying to kill Muhammad. Since Islam exists, time travel clearly has been achieved.
Pick up the Holy Bible, and even when the Jesus guy appears, there are still lots of violence fantasies against the infidels. They mostly start with "The LOrd will do unto them..." or similar, and there are many people gladly applying to be the tools for the LOrd.
I personally find any "scientific" taxonomy that requires the pre-existence of a theory to be... absurd.
To the contrary: Every taxonomy needs a founding theory. Terms and words only have a meaning within a theory. That's why for instance "ring" has completely different meanings in Mathematics, in Telephony and in Wedding ceremony.
It doesn't make sense to discuss the meaning of words without first agreeing on a common theory the words are part of.
To go back into Astronomy: In the Inka terminology, there are also constellations, but they are completely different from the Mediterran ones we use. Even the word 'constellation' does not make much sense for the Inka, as they don't look at individual stars which might have some position related to others and thus form pictures in the night sky. Quite different, their "star pictures" consist of the dark between the stars, especially along the Milky Way. To us, their constellations look like a shadow play in the sky. As you can see, to even name something in the sky, at first you have to have a theory of it.
And so I do now: Exclusive: Spectre-NG - Multiple new Intel CPU flaws revealed, several serious
This mostly misses the point. Security is much more than protection against bad people. This might be a very visible and easily explained effect of having security, but security also protects against misshappenings, mistakes, accidents, errors, all the little nuisances which disrupt the intended way of running things. Even if all people were saints, we still would need security.
If the friend is updating the status to "in the car with Xylantiel", someone is.
This is exactly what does not help in the situation TFA is talking about.
The insecticides we are talking about, and which are forbidden now belong to the class of Neonicotinoids, which couple to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. This receptor is basicly the same in all insects. The only reason why Neonicotinoids might not affect bees as much as other insects is that bees only fly to flowering plants and feed on the flowers and thus might get less of the Neonicotinoids if they were sprayed before the flowering.
A count of insects last year found that the number of insects living for instance in Germany has dropped to a quarter since the 1980ies. No. Not dropped by a quarter (25% less). Dropped to a quarter (25% remaining). And that's in protected areas, where the use of insecticides is limited.
A ban of three insecticides (there are many more) will not cause the insect population to immediately rebound to the numbers of the 1980ies. So there is no imminent famine due to insects eating our crops. There might be an imminent famine due to the lack of pollinators, which also are reduced to a quarter.
Thus, most Germans can't read the handwritten letters of their grand-parents anymore, because the script is unknown to them.
Turkey went from the Arab letters to Latin letters in the 1920ies (and at the same time replaced Osman Turkish with Modern Turkish). Many minority languages in Southeast Europe and Central Asia have several attempts at getting an alphabet for them, like the Udi language in the Northern Caucasus, which has had the Caucasian Albanian alphabet in the Middle Ages, a Latin based alphabet at the end of the 19th century until the 1970ies and uses now an Cyrillic Alphabet. Interestingly though, Udi is beside Georgian only the second indigenious Caucasian language to ever had their own alphabet (Armenian, albeit having its own alphabet, is not an indigenious Caucasian language, but indogerman).
No, he was sentenced in the UK (at the Leicester crown court) and tried as a minor, sent to a juvenile prison.
Lets put it that way: The Greenhouse Effect is a wellknown phenomenon since at least 150 years (hey, we build greenhouses for some reason!). And of course every material that has different absorbtion properties at different frequencies comes with a greenhouse effect, because it is transparent to some frequencies and absorbs energy at other frequencies. Thus energy that at one frequency passes the layer gets trapped at other frequencies. Glass for instance is very transparent for electromagnetic waves from the visual spectrum, but is not for frequencies of the thermal spectrum. That's why we build greenhouses with glass roofs. Because of Ludwig Boltzmann's, Josef Stefan's and Gustav Kirchhoff's work, we know the distribution of the frequency of a Black Body's radiation, and we know, that Earth at a surface temperature of 290 K on average radiates its thermal energy at frequencies (Kirchhoff's Law, Planck's Law) where carbon dioxide, vapor and methane are absorbing electromagnetic waves. On the other hand, the Sun (with a surface temperature of 5700 K) emits its energy at much higher frequencies, for which most atmospheric gases are transparent. The Sun's energy enters the Earth's atmosphere at frequencies close to the visual spectrum, the light gets absorbed at the Earth's surface and heats it up to 255 K (on average). Then the Earth radiates the energy, but the atmosphere is intransparent at thermal frequencies due to the presence of vapor, carbon dioxide and methane. Only if Earth gets heated up due to the trapped energy to 290 K, it radiates enough energy to get into a thermal equilibrium.
That's the greenhouse effect on Earth. We have greenhouse effects at the other planets too, if they have an atmosphere. Venus is famous for its strong greenhouse effect which causes Venus's surface to have temperatures above 700 K. Mars has a greenhouse effect too, but because of the thin atmosphere, it's quite small and increases the surface temperature about 20 K above the Black Body temperature.
The current greenhouse effect of Earth is about 35 K, but it is highly dependent on the actual atmospheric composition. Changing the makeup of the atmosphere changes the strength of the greenhouse effect.
The problem is that governments don't need to balance the budget. Actually, it's not a problem at all. Some do balance the budget (Bill Clinton for instance between 1994 and 2000), others don't.
Later in human history, it became clear, that the ability to easily count and store the coins and being able to exchange them at anytime was a different property than the intrinsic value of the precious metals, and both were separated of each other: On one side was the money, easily to count and to store and to exchange. And the other thing was the precious metal, now again a good like every other good as it was before the invention of coinage.
In fact, money is just an abstract way to keep track of the amount of goods you have sold, and your ability to buy goods. And thus you can create money out of thin air the same way you can just get a piece of paper and put numbers on it to keep track of the count. What you need is the willingness of all others to respect the way you kept track. Legal tender is nothing else than the state giving out means to keep track and in exchange warrant that the count done with them is respected by the courts.