I should be more specific: none of the readily-measurable quantities of interest in economics obey conservation laws required by physical models.
It does no good to make the blanket statement that "everything is bound by the laws of physics". (More so in all caps, which doesn't improve the quality of your argument.) While true, it has no meaning at the level economics deals with. While the physical objects and the atoms in the cells of the people who carry out the economy certainly have to obey energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics, it doesn't follow that something like "money supply" or "value" do. It's the same as trying to apply conservation of energy to dieting. The system is significantly different, and only has to obey the physical law at a drastically different level than what you're analyzing it at. It may well work (in fact, "eating less" isn't a bad dieting procedure, and thermodynamic models aren't terrible for economics), but the fact that it gives useful results doesn't mean your model is well-founded, and you are almost certainly poorly-modeling some behaviors.
I actually recall a brief foray in a grad thermo class into economic modeling. Thermodynamic models for economics are very popular, but fundamentally they're incorrect, because thermodynamic models rely on conservation (primarily of energy). In economics, though, there is no fundamental conserved quantity.
While as others have pointed out, you can do this, your argument is flawed. Twitter claims that you maintain ownership of your comments, but upon sending them to Twitter grant Twitter very broad rights with respect to using those comments. Unless this agreement restricts those rights by allowing you to demand of Twitter that your comments be removed, then they don't have to. If you don't like that arrangement, you shouldn't send your text to Twitter.
One of the main consequences of you owning your tweets is that you can reproduce them elsewhere without Twitter's permission (since you control the copyright).
It's no more meaningful to say that quantum mechanics is "just a model" because it has effects that are observed at a particle scale but not observed at a human scale than it is to say that relativity is "just a model" because at the human scale gravity is simply a constant, downward-pointing force.
Your friend is incorrect. This is similar to a "hidden variables" interpretation of superposition, where all along the system has been either in state A or state B, and the "superposition" is simply the observer's lack of knowledge of which state it is in. However, this can and has been differentiated from true superposition by experiment.
What could be the case is that making the observation puts the observer+particle system into a superposed state, one where the observer measures A and one where he measures B. Basically, then, the particle's superposition extends to the observer through observation. The observer, though, can't differentiate between this and simply collapsing the particle's superposition -- they appear identical. Since real observers are essentially coupled to the rest of the universe, now you're basically saying that observation puts the entire universe in a state superposition -- which is just a "many worlds" interpretation of superposition.
No, a real cat and a real box are too tightly coupled to the rest of the world to actually create a superposed state. The common layman's understanding treats a superposition as sort of an "I don't know" state, but that's not accurate. If you made a Schrodinger's cat-killing box, certainly you wouldn't know if the cat was alive until you opened the box, but you wouldn't end up constructing a superposed quantum state.
One consequence of a superposition being a real state (rather than an "I don't know") is that you can perform tests that show an object must have been in a superposed state, beyond simply opening many cat-boxes and observing that half are dead and half are alive. It's fair to call this "observing that the object is in a superposed state", but it conflicts with the quantum-mechanical definition of "observation" that involves collapsing the wavefunction. They certainly can't quantum-mechanical-observe the superposed state directly -- but that's not what they're saying.
The law never uses the term wiretap: Interception of wire and oral communications. Lawmakers can hardly be held responsible for the logical consequences of what other people choose to call things after the fact.
Touching up isn't the same as a false-color image. They're not photographs, so they're not really the colors you'd see.
But then, all film and digital cameras put a lot of engineering into producing images so that they look as if you were seeing the object. It's not a natural thing for light-measurement tools to do. As this is a scientific instrument, placing those kind of filters on the cameras up in space would be foolish; it's only a potential source of error.
Tipped what hand? That they can intercept e-mails? Presumably competent terrorists would know of intelligence capabilities that are the subject of significant news and controversy.
If you're referring to the particular source, you'll notice that they did just that -- refused to allow the obtained e-mails to be used as evidence until the person whose e-mail they were reading died.
Because rockets are much better at actually getting objects out of Earth's gravity well, especially when you want them to end up somewhere specific once they're out.
Seriously, rockets produce an absolutely enormous amount of force for a long period of time. It's difficult to design a cannon anything like that.
You usually do this with man-made bodies of water.
Plus, it's reasonably common for hydroelectric facilities to take measures to ensure fish don't get chopped up. The main impact is the overall environmental effect of building a dam, which is actually quite substantial.
There are actually quite a few successful deployments of power-storing technology -- ones that aren't even batteries. After all, batteries are really only useful for certain applications. Capacitors are nice, but not always appropriate. On the other hand, expending unused power on a reversible, bulk physical process -- like pumping water from a low-altitude body of water to a higher-altitude one -- and then generating power from the reverse process is fairly straightforward.
Absolute numbers are not always appropriate for this sort of argument. It's certainly not at all useful for me to tell you that many of the atoms in a glass of water are deuterium. (After all, the quantity of deuterium in a glass of water is very small.)
I happen to think it's acceptable to say "many" in this case, on the grounds that the acceptable range for "many" is quite large. It is disingenuous, as they fail to mention that this "many" is in the minority. Often, significantly in the minority. But, I digress...
Sure, except that reading legislation makes figuring out what a change to a critical function in the Windows kernel *really* does look like child's play.
No, it's a thermodynamic concept that has been extended to information theory. Prior to major developments in statistical mechanics, entropy was a loss of energy associated with physical transformations. This significantly predates both statistical mechanics and information theory. Stat mech formulated the modern definition of entropy, and Shannon applied it to information theory.
Slashdot Mirror
There are essentially no software liability regulations.
I think you confuse the words "withhold" and "not provide". You cannot withhold something you do not have in the first place.
I should be more specific: none of the readily-measurable quantities of interest in economics obey conservation laws required by physical models.
It does no good to make the blanket statement that "everything is bound by the laws of physics". (More so in all caps, which doesn't improve the quality of your argument.) While true, it has no meaning at the level economics deals with. While the physical objects and the atoms in the cells of the people who carry out the economy certainly have to obey energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics, it doesn't follow that something like "money supply" or "value" do. It's the same as trying to apply conservation of energy to dieting. The system is significantly different, and only has to obey the physical law at a drastically different level than what you're analyzing it at. It may well work (in fact, "eating less" isn't a bad dieting procedure, and thermodynamic models aren't terrible for economics), but the fact that it gives useful results doesn't mean your model is well-founded, and you are almost certainly poorly-modeling some behaviors.
This isn't really correct.
I actually recall a brief foray in a grad thermo class into economic modeling. Thermodynamic models for economics are very popular, but fundamentally they're incorrect, because thermodynamic models rely on conservation (primarily of energy). In economics, though, there is no fundamental conserved quantity.
Oldest living single organism, not oldest species.
While as others have pointed out, you can do this, your argument is flawed. Twitter claims that you maintain ownership of your comments, but upon sending them to Twitter grant Twitter very broad rights with respect to using those comments. Unless this agreement restricts those rights by allowing you to demand of Twitter that your comments be removed, then they don't have to. If you don't like that arrangement, you shouldn't send your text to Twitter.
One of the main consequences of you owning your tweets is that you can reproduce them elsewhere without Twitter's permission (since you control the copyright).
It's no more meaningful to say that quantum mechanics is "just a model" because it has effects that are observed at a particle scale but not observed at a human scale than it is to say that relativity is "just a model" because at the human scale gravity is simply a constant, downward-pointing force.
Your friend is incorrect. This is similar to a "hidden variables" interpretation of superposition, where all along the system has been either in state A or state B, and the "superposition" is simply the observer's lack of knowledge of which state it is in. However, this can and has been differentiated from true superposition by experiment.
What could be the case is that making the observation puts the observer+particle system into a superposed state, one where the observer measures A and one where he measures B. Basically, then, the particle's superposition extends to the observer through observation. The observer, though, can't differentiate between this and simply collapsing the particle's superposition -- they appear identical. Since real observers are essentially coupled to the rest of the universe, now you're basically saying that observation puts the entire universe in a state superposition -- which is just a "many worlds" interpretation of superposition.
No, a real cat and a real box are too tightly coupled to the rest of the world to actually create a superposed state. The common layman's understanding treats a superposition as sort of an "I don't know" state, but that's not accurate. If you made a Schrodinger's cat-killing box, certainly you wouldn't know if the cat was alive until you opened the box, but you wouldn't end up constructing a superposed quantum state.
One consequence of a superposition being a real state (rather than an "I don't know") is that you can perform tests that show an object must have been in a superposed state, beyond simply opening many cat-boxes and observing that half are dead and half are alive. It's fair to call this "observing that the object is in a superposed state", but it conflicts with the quantum-mechanical definition of "observation" that involves collapsing the wavefunction. They certainly can't quantum-mechanical-observe the superposed state directly -- but that's not what they're saying.
The law never uses the term wiretap: Interception of wire and oral communications. Lawmakers can hardly be held responsible for the logical consequences of what other people choose to call things after the fact.
Total health care spending is 17.6% of GDP. Nowhere near 200 times as much money could be involved in patents. :-)
Touching up isn't the same as a false-color image. They're not photographs, so they're not really the colors you'd see.
But then, all film and digital cameras put a lot of engineering into producing images so that they look as if you were seeing the object. It's not a natural thing for light-measurement tools to do. As this is a scientific instrument, placing those kind of filters on the cameras up in space would be foolish; it's only a potential source of error.
Tipped what hand? That they can intercept e-mails? Presumably competent terrorists would know of intelligence capabilities that are the subject of significant news and controversy.
If you're referring to the particular source, you'll notice that they did just that -- refused to allow the obtained e-mails to be used as evidence until the person whose e-mail they were reading died.
Well, it's so much less controversial to say that warranted wiretapping is important and works.
It's even less interesting if you read the articles and see how much surveillance was conducted in addition to the intercepted e-mails.
It's only dangerous if what you're encrypting is less damning than refusing to give up your encryption keys.
The penalty for refusing to surrender your encryption keys is almost certainly less than the penalty for attempted or conspiracy to commit terrorism.
Because rockets are much better at actually getting objects out of Earth's gravity well, especially when you want them to end up somewhere specific once they're out.
Seriously, rockets produce an absolutely enormous amount of force for a long period of time. It's difficult to design a cannon anything like that.
By the time we had the technology to sail west a meaningful distance, the fact that the earth was round had been known for centuries.
You usually do this with man-made bodies of water.
Plus, it's reasonably common for hydroelectric facilities to take measures to ensure fish don't get chopped up. The main impact is the overall environmental effect of building a dam, which is actually quite substantial.
There are actually quite a few successful deployments of power-storing technology -- ones that aren't even batteries. After all, batteries are really only useful for certain applications. Capacitors are nice, but not always appropriate. On the other hand, expending unused power on a reversible, bulk physical process -- like pumping water from a low-altitude body of water to a higher-altitude one -- and then generating power from the reverse process is fairly straightforward.
Absolute numbers are not always appropriate for this sort of argument. It's certainly not at all useful for me to tell you that many of the atoms in a glass of water are deuterium. (After all, the quantity of deuterium in a glass of water is very small.)
I happen to think it's acceptable to say "many" in this case, on the grounds that the acceptable range for "many" is quite large. It is disingenuous, as they fail to mention that this "many" is in the minority. Often, significantly in the minority. But, I digress...
Nah, in the wavelength range that CCTV uses, even a thin covering of cloth is sufficient to block radiation to/from the passport.
Is that the secret no-fly list that only you and the feds know about that contains IP addresses instead of names?
It's not considered promotion of the general welfare?
Sure, except that reading legislation makes figuring out what a change to a critical function in the Windows kernel *really* does look like child's play.
No, it's a thermodynamic concept that has been extended to information theory. Prior to major developments in statistical mechanics, entropy was a loss of energy associated with physical transformations. This significantly predates both statistical mechanics and information theory. Stat mech formulated the modern definition of entropy, and Shannon applied it to information theory.