would it be possible to get rid of watermarks by just sending the audio through a decent filter that gets rid of the watermark "noise". I seem to remember that in the days software came on tapes one needed old casette recorders to copy them, without filters, so that the digital information would stay intact.
After all a watermark is only white noise as far as my audio system is concerned?!?
would it be possible to get rid of watermarks by just sending the audio through a decent filter that gets rid of the watermark "noise". I seem to remember that in the days software came on tapes one needed old casette recorders to copy them, without filters, so that the digital information would stay intact.
After all a watermark is only white noise as far as my audio system is concerned?!?
You claim that a watermarking system is not possible... I can see this for for the case of self-recorded music (e.g. allowing fair use copies but not others). But for the case of music sold by the big companies I can't see why it isn't possible... so here goes my cryptographically naive suggestion:)
Let the RIAA (or whatever they're called) create a 2048 bit PGP key, sign every bit of music with the private key, build the public key into playing devices which would then only play "approved" music. Obviously you can't stop bit by bit copies... What exactly are they trying to achieve with their watermarks anyway?? I never quite understood that. You can always copy music, either the whole CD bit by bit, or if you are getting desperate by converting the analogue signal back to a digital format of your choice. Can't see much use for a music playing device that has no analogue output.. we DO want to hear it after all:)
anyway, what was my point? Oh yes, sign with private key and allow CD players to only play songs if proper signature is present. So simple it can't work... and if it does my apologies to everyone:) hey at least if i publish it here they can't patent it anymore, right???
Patricipation in ICANN elections is mainly a result of media attention in my opinion. In Germany "Spiegel Online", a popular internet news site has been carrying the story for a while, providing links to candidate sites and the ICANN site.
Goes to show that the media even "controls" internet election. At least their reporting was not driven by big money...
oops sorry, just realised that ICANN chooses more than one director from each area, in which case one has to include into the description the redistribution of surplus votes of successful candidates as described in the link mentioned by another poster above (post #4)
read it twice though if you don't think it is fair... it is in fact one of the most logical systems i have ever heard of!
Single Transferable Vote (STV)is a system that is basically equivalent to having several rounds of voting in which the weakest candidate gets eliminated. It has the advantage that "all votes count" as the guy from election.com said. What this means is NOT that all candidates you rank get a vote, but that all voters have a say in the final outcome between the two most popular voters. The advantage over having lots of election rounds of eliminating the weakest is simply that you do not need so many rounds which would be unpractical and very time-consuming.
"Most votes win systems" such as the US presidency election (not really, cause of some bizarre rules from two centuries ago which makes it one of the strangest systems to vote a single person i have ever heard of) have one HUGE disadvantage: If two people share a similar platform they hurt their cause by both standing! Say two democrats and one republican stood, chances are both democrats would gain about 30% while the republican gets 40%. Thus the republican guy wins despite 60% rather having one of the two democrats. In STV systems they would have rated the respective other democrat second and one of the two would have won.
anyway, what was i trying to say? yeah, good system, lacking some explanation, but as one other poster commented a simple google search would have brought it to light. Don't tell me you can construct a situation where this system also produces weird results, cause i know that, and I am sure you will find a friendly mathematician somewhere to prove to you that there is no "fair" voting system, and this is the best one i have seen for choosing individual people for a post. And anyone who followed the description will have achieved the results he desired...
Suggested disclaimer for ICANN:
The voting system is STV (some link). By giving lower preferences you do not affect the chances of your first preference candidate.
no, they are not just linking to it. That's my point. The information is on THEIR server. It is actually physically there! Does anyone know whether they can be held responsible for data in their cache? Or whether they have to remove it if they are alerted to its presence??
The only way i can see how you get energy out of fusion is by heat... (unless you find a way to have lots of tiny hydrogen bomb type explosions in a combustion engine:) ) so heat produced is not "lost". Most traditional power stations do nothing but produce heat which is then converted to electrical energy, usually via heating steam to power a turbine.
This still leaves us with the problem mentioned many times that according to the article we need a cool environment to run this in. But whatever, cool idea, cool experiment!
Google is linking to all sites they link to with the intention of getting people there, that's what they do!
Heck, they even have the complete DeCSS source code on T HEIR SERVER(thanks to their caching service:) )! And most likely more than once!!! Surely if linking to the code is illegal, posessing and distributing it must be!
I am not sure censorware programmers would be too bothered if they stopped you from seeing some adverts (nor would anyone buying censorware i imagine). However, Google with their cached websites have a similar effect. Try this. I imagine people *would* start to get annoyed if censorware blocked a popular search engine.
Of course, you won't get the pics, but anything text is there... And to those suggesting to filter content rather than sites, that's possible if you don't mind the odd mistakes, sex sites with suggestive rather than explicit language slipping through or breast cancer/safe sex/... sites being blocked (not to mention foreign language sites). Filtering images must be a complete nightmare to get right. For 90%, maybe, but 100% with no "decent" images blocked? I'll believe it when i see it...
As far as I know Strato is hosting more than 1 million domains at the moment (might have to do with the fact that you can get one for $3/year, $10 set-up charge). I can't see why they would host 180_000 on Solaris and the remaining 800_000 on some other platform (according to their website they use SUN for everything). So either they are doing something weird, or the survey missed out a huge number of domains.
completely unrelated: a permanent internet connection in Germany is so unreasonably expensive (local phone calls are NOT free) that I don't think the cost of the OS will be of major concern to anyone hosting a web-site. The only notable exception I can think of are university students with ethernet in student-accomodation.
Quantum cryptography will only run between two points, i can't see how you could route it through a complex network! (well, maybe you can somehow, but you would need some pretty obscure hardware). And yes, if someone has access to your secure line, it is trivially easy to disrupt sending messages. On the other hand, he might as well just cut the cable...
The only point of Quantum Encryption is that you have a secure line between two points. You can find out if there is an eavesdropper while sending your key. If you know there wasn't you can send your encrypted message. I don't think symmetric keys are vulnerable to Quantum Cryptoanalysis. It is only public key systems, where the information to encrypt the messages is available to the eavesdropper, that might have drastically reduce difficulty of being cracked...
But anyway, your point was that it will be difficult to have an efficient encryption system on the net, if these quantum computers work, and I completely agree! If you just want to talk to your bank, they can send you a CD to use as a one-time-pad for absolute security, but if you want to log on to some random secure server (say amazon payments), I can't really see an alternative to public key systems...
I meant to say it takes many many times as long to crack the code... or to decrypt it without the key. So that making longer keys is very effective against brute force attacks, but they are NOT against quantum computers!
I believe you could still intercept a quantum encrypted message, (How should the poor photons know whether they got to the wrong or right place?), but the recipient would know about it! So what you can do is transmit a one time pad across such a "line", then talk to your recipient on an open channel to verify that the pad got there and there were no eavesdroppers, and then use the one-time pad for encryption!
The nice thing about such schemes is that physics stops you from cracking them, rather than the lack of power of your computer or some unproven mathematical theorem. Of course we might find out that our current understanding of Quantum Physics is wrong... but at the moment things look pretty good!
Even your 4096 bit keys won't be worth anything if this technology scales...
The significance of Quantum Computers in the field of Cryptoanalysis is that they work differently! For a "normal" computer the time taken to decrypt a PGP messages increases rapidly with the length of the message (was it exponentially?). So a 4000 bit key will not take 4 times as long to decrypt as a 1000 bit key, but many many times as long!
The Quantum Computer built by IBM however, does it in 1 (ONE!!!) step. So if they can scale it to several thousand atoms, your 4000 bit key is worth nothing... because it will still only take ONE step!!! The only thing they need is a computer with a register long enough to hold your key (4096 bit, possibly they need a bit more..). I imagine however, that this will be quite difficult and that our keys should be safe for the near future:)
If you wonder how PGP relates to finding the period of a function (which is what IBM found) have a look at this. I don't understand all the maths... but it seems someone has shown that finding the period of a function can be used to determine the factors of a large number, precisely the problem you face when trying to decrypt PGP!
The problem with this is that "the community" is not a single entity. A community consists of many different people with many different ideas and beliefs. So who is to decide what is to be taught in this community? The idea "we live in a democracy, let the majority decide" has some huge problems in this respect. Let the majority decide has to be amended by some set of rules to protect minorities. In a school where 51% of parents support teaching funadmentalist christian views on the history of the earth, this should NOT be allowed, because you would infringe the basic rights of the other 49% or even the other 5% if that is what the proportions are.
What people do in private is largely up to them, but even there are limits, mainly given by the rights of other people. You can't lock your wife (or husband) up and beat her/him, even if your "community" should think this is a reasonable course of action for, say, unfaithfulness.
Back on the topic of what to teach in schools there are two possible conclusions. As we do not want schools biased to one particular faith or denomination: a) we do not teach anything that is controversial to anyone, no theories that require an old universe (i.e. not even the fundamentals of astronomy, biology or geology), nothing about contraception, possibly not even about the importance of blood-groups in giving blood as jehova's witnesses object to that. There also could be no school sports events on saturdays out of consideration for orthodox jews, and no pork in the cafeteria as this could offend moslems. And I am sure there are many many further examples. b)We keep the school system completely agnostic. To teach the scientific theories that are accepted by the main-stream scientists in the field seems the only plausible way of doing this. One could mention that different religions have their own ideologies on these topics, but I personally think this belongs in a class on comparative theology, NOT science. In science classes, I cannot see any other option but to teach accepted science!
The smaller the community is that decides the curriculum of a school, the more likely the contents will be biased on the view of the majority in this community. This is why I believe there should be an independent national body that decides what should be on the science curriculum of every school. The community can decide what to teach their children in a church, or maybe a private school. But in a state school that has to cater for students from all backgrounds, some fundamental rules are necessary!
Incidentally I also think that the 20% non-spanish people have a right to speak english in school! If you can cater for both, great! If not, everyone knows the accepted first language of the US is english, so that is what you expect when you send your child to a state school!
> For any blocking scheme, there will always be holes in the system, > and also sites that are incorrectly blocked.
agree completely! Our college tried to install a content filter first on porn, then MP3 sites, Napster and the like...
When people started using anonymizer to access these sites, they blocked anonymizer.com rewebber.com was next and now many other redirect sites and proxies have become popular with the users. (and some are getting blocked, but never all...)
I suppose you could try and keep a system like this tight,
but then what do you do to Google and their cache???
I don't think there is a way to stop undesired content being accessible from the internet short of having a positive list of allowed sites, which does seriously undermine the usefulness of net access.
The problem with keeping and checking logs or having the terminals in public view is that people might not like to look up information about breast cancer or STDs when they know they're being looked at... (Same reason teenagers would not buy contraceptives in the local drug-store in a small town). I certainly don't like the idea of someone looking at what I'm reading.
For a long time the limit of the resolution of telescopes was given by the atmosphere, and was similar to the theoretical resolution limit of a rather moderate telescope (1 meter??? might have been only 40 cm, can't remember the numbers... ), so all the "old" big telescopes did was gather more ligh, not improve resolution.
As this problem is solved by various methods these days (putting telescopes in space, adaptive optics, computer reconstruction based on an "artifical star" that is projected in the upper atmosphere by a laser,...) it is only a question of making the telescopes big enough to see how ever much detail we desire. This might be difficult from an engineering point of view, but as far as I am aware there are no physical limits to the resolution of a telescope.
i just have to reply briefly to one or two points:
2) If you were to take a generally accepted theory, such as GR, and find an experiment that contradicts its predictions, and come up with an alternate theory that explains these AND all the other predictions of GR, you will undoubtedly receive a nobel price! If you just make up some theory that can't be tested or that unnecessarily complicates an existing theory without bringing in anything new, no-one is going to listen to you...
3) Special Relativity is a very well tested theory and unintuitive as its predictions might be they have all turned out to be true! Seeing you mention the maximum possible speed (the speed of light, or just "c"), it is indeed true that this can't be exceeded! If, as you say, you travel in a spacecraft at c-1 mph with respect to, say the sun (because speeds have no meaning if you don't have a reference point. At the moment, i might claim to be at rest, or maybe rotating around the earth at some rather high speed, or around the sun even faster, or around the center of the galaxy yet faster, speed has no meaning without a reference point!)
Anyway, back to your spacecraft, going at c-1mph with respect to the sun, you now are perfectly able to walk towards the front of the spacecraft at 5 mph. However, the relative speed between you and the sun, will NOT be c+4mph! Speeds do not add linearly in SR. This is difficult to imagine, but if you think of an observer on the sun, he will see the spacecraft length contracted (thus very short) and your motions time dilated. He will thus see you walking through a shorter distance in more time, so not at 5 mph but indeed at some imperceptibly low speed. So with respect to him, your speed is still approx. c-1 mph.
It IS possible for you to see two spacecraft both at speeds close to c approaching each other, and you would say there relative speed is alomst 2*c, but THEY would measure a relative speed to each other of just under c!!!
If you are really interested why this is so and where the equations come from and thus, i recommend reading an introduction to SR somewhere on the web, such as this. Incidentally SR is one of the cases where a radical new theory was proposed, because the old theories could not explain why the speed of light in vacuum is always measured to be the same (c) regardless of your motion with respect to the source! It met resistance but it made beautiful predictions that were later measured and found to be true, AND it agreed with the previously known laws in the limits of low speeds! So it had more power than previous theories! Then again, it failed when including gravity, which is where GR takes over, though I can't even begin to understand that...
Anyway, don't think anyone really wanted to know this, but i just couldn't let you get away with demolishing special relativity in a sentence or two:). I can understand your reasoning from everyday experience, and it took me a long time to get to grips with SR, but it is a wonderful theory and i'm still surprised it works!!!
I think the point is that he stuck this more or less arbitrary constant into his equation to make them compatible with a static universe. Now it turns out that maybe this modification of the equations of general relativity explains new observations.
It does not really matter what you call this constant, it's the existance of this additional constant in the equations that might turn out to be valid after all! So Einstein might have got it right for the wrong reasons... and when he saw his reasons were wrong (because the universe was found to be expanding rather than static) he said it was the biggest blunder of his life, probably because he let his solutions be influenced by some ideological preconceptions he had about the world, and not just by the observed data.
This is exactly what scientists should do, if Einstein had had access to this new data, he might have kept the "cosmological constant" in his equations, but he renounced it as there was no evidence to support it. As a general rule in science you try not to introduce complications to your theory if they are not neccessary (Occam's razor).
What is the difference between an ancient univserse and a young one with "apparent" age. You could argue the world was created yesterday, including the scars you have and even your memories, and I would have no way to prove you wrong!
The idea that the universe was created with an apparent age, and thus an apparent history, is probably the ultimate non-falsifiable philosophy, because literally everything, every bit of evidence that could ever come up, could be explained by this.
Still the question remains, would it not be worth finding out about the "apparent" past anyway, if we can't tell it apart from the real thing???
sorry this whole thread is so off-topic, interesting never the less...
anyway, i was referring to long outdated views of science that have long outlived its use, such as a flat earth and creation 6000 years ago, and not to the bible and christianity in particular.
I do not live in the states and have only vaguely followed this debate, mainly because i didn't think anyone in their right mind could think the earth (and presumably the univserse???) is 6000 years old. Is there actually a serious following for this in the US?
I can't even see where i would begine to name examples that makes this complete nonsense... geology, plate tectonics, starlight from millions of light years away...
Do these people also believe that Noah put two of each animal in his Ark, and maybe the dinosaurs were extinct because they did not fit??? It would be interesting if someone actually managed to build a complete theory on this, and surely of similar amusement value as the "Discworld" series... Speaking of discs, have they accepted the world is not a disc?
Re:how will both versions be priced ?
on
SuSE 7.0
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· Score: 1
According to their website the full professional version is DM 129 (approx. $65) but you can get an "update version" (same CDs, but less documentation mainly as far as i understand) for DM 79 (~40$)...
Looking at prices of the old version it might be a bit more for the US market, only fair if you ask me seeing for everything else European prices are far higher than US prices...
Slashdot Mirror
would it be possible to get rid of watermarks by just sending the audio through a decent filter that gets rid of the watermark "noise". I seem to remember that in the days software came on tapes one needed old casette recorders to copy them, without filters, so that the digital information would stay intact.
After all a watermark is only white noise as far as my audio system is concerned?!?
would it be possible to get rid of watermarks by just sending the audio through a decent filter that gets rid of the watermark "noise". I seem to remember that in the days software came on tapes one needed old casette recorders to copy them, without filters, so that the digital information would stay intact.
After all a watermark is only white noise as far as my audio system is concerned?!?
Let the RIAA (or whatever they're called) create a 2048 bit PGP key, sign every bit of music with the private key, build the public key into playing devices which would then only play "approved" music. Obviously you can't stop bit by bit copies... What exactly are they trying to achieve with their watermarks anyway?? I never quite understood that. You can always copy music, either the whole CD bit by bit, or if you are getting desperate by converting the analogue signal back to a digital format of your choice. Can't see much use for a music playing device that has no analogue output.. we DO want to hear it after all :)
anyway, what was my point? Oh yes, sign with private key and allow CD players to only play songs if proper signature is present. So simple it can't work... and if it does my apologies to everyone :) hey at least if i publish it here they can't patent it anymore, right???
Goes to show that the media even "controls" internet election. At least their reporting was not driven by big money ...
read it twice though if you don't think it is fair... it is in fact one of the most logical systems i have ever heard of!
"Most votes win systems" such as the US presidency election (not really, cause of some bizarre rules from two centuries ago which makes it one of the strangest systems to vote a single person i have ever heard of) have one HUGE disadvantage:
If two people share a similar platform they hurt their cause by both standing! Say two democrats and one republican stood, chances are both democrats would gain about 30% while the republican gets 40%. Thus the republican guy wins despite 60% rather having one of the two democrats. In STV systems they would have rated the respective other democrat second and one of the two would have won.
anyway, what was i trying to say? yeah, good system, lacking some explanation, but as one other poster commented a simple google search would have brought it to light. Don't tell me you can construct a situation where this system also produces weird results, cause i know that, and I am sure you will find a friendly mathematician somewhere to prove to you that there is no "fair" voting system, and this is the best one i have seen for choosing individual people for a post. And anyone who followed the description will have achieved the results he desired...
Suggested disclaimer for ICANN:
The voting system is STV (some link). By giving lower preferences you do not affect the chances of your first preference candidate.
no, they are not just linking to it. That's my point. The information is on THEIR server. It is actually physically there! Does anyone know whether they can be held responsible for data in their cache? Or whether they have to remove it if they are alerted to its presence??
This still leaves us with the problem mentioned many times that according to the article we need a cool environment to run this in. But whatever, cool idea, cool experiment!
Heck, they even have the complete DeCSS source code on T HEIR SERVER(thanks to their caching service :) )! And most likely more than once!!! Surely if linking to the code is illegal, posessing and distributing it must be!
Of course, you won't get the pics, but anything text is there... And to those suggesting to filter content rather than sites, that's possible if you don't mind the odd mistakes, sex sites with suggestive rather than explicit language slipping through or breast cancer/safe sex/... sites being blocked (not to mention foreign language sites). Filtering images must be a complete nightmare to get right. For 90%, maybe, but 100% with no "decent" images blocked? I'll believe it when i see it...
completely unrelated:
a permanent internet connection in Germany is so unreasonably expensive (local phone calls are NOT free) that I don't think the cost of the OS will be of major concern to anyone hosting a web-site. The only notable exception I can think of are university students with ethernet in student-accomodation.
The only point of Quantum Encryption is that you have a secure line between two points. You can find out if there is an eavesdropper while sending your key. If you know there wasn't you can send your encrypted message. I don't think symmetric keys are vulnerable to Quantum Cryptoanalysis. It is only public key systems, where the information to encrypt the messages is available to the eavesdropper, that might have drastically reduce difficulty of being cracked...
But anyway, your point was that it will be difficult to have an efficient encryption system on the net, if these quantum computers work, and I completely agree! If you just want to talk to your bank, they can send you a CD to use as a one-time-pad for absolute security, but if you want to log on to some random secure server (say amazon payments), I can't really see an alternative to public key systems...
I meant to say it takes many many times as long to crack the code... or to decrypt it without the key. So that making longer keys is very effective against brute force attacks, but they are NOT against quantum computers!
The nice thing about such schemes is that physics stops you from cracking them, rather than the lack of power of your computer or some unproven mathematical theorem. Of course we might find out that our current understanding of Quantum Physics is wrong... but at the moment things look pretty good!
The significance of Quantum Computers in the field of Cryptoanalysis is that they work differently! For a "normal" computer the time taken to decrypt a PGP messages increases rapidly with the length of the message (was it exponentially?). So a 4000 bit key will not take 4 times as long to decrypt as a 1000 bit key, but many many times as long!
The Quantum Computer built by IBM however, does it in 1 (ONE!!!) step. So if they can scale it to several thousand atoms, your 4000 bit key is worth nothing... because it will still only take ONE step!!! The only thing they need is a computer with a register long enough to hold your key (4096 bit, possibly they need a bit more..). I imagine however, that this will be quite difficult and that our keys should be safe for the near future :)
If you wonder how PGP relates to finding the period of a function (which is what IBM found) have a look at this. I don't understand all the maths... but it seems someone has shown that finding the period of a function can be used to determine the factors of a large number, precisely the problem you face when trying to decrypt PGP!
What people do in private is largely up to them, but even there are limits, mainly given by the rights of other people. You can't lock your wife (or husband) up and beat her/him, even if your "community" should think this is a reasonable course of action for, say, unfaithfulness.
Back on the topic of what to teach in schools there are two possible conclusions. As we do not want schools biased to one particular faith or denomination:
a) we do not teach anything that is controversial to anyone, no theories that require an old universe (i.e. not even the fundamentals of astronomy, biology or geology), nothing about contraception, possibly not even about the importance of blood-groups in giving blood as jehova's witnesses object to that. There also could be no school sports events on saturdays out of consideration for orthodox jews, and no pork in the cafeteria as this could offend moslems. And I am sure there are many many further examples.
b)We keep the school system completely agnostic. To teach the scientific theories that are accepted by the main-stream scientists in the field seems the only plausible way of doing this. One could mention that different religions have their own ideologies on these topics, but I personally think this belongs in a class on comparative theology, NOT science. In science classes, I cannot see any other option but to teach accepted science!
The smaller the community is that decides the curriculum of a school, the more likely the contents will be biased on the view of the majority in this community. This is why I believe there should be an independent national body that decides what should be on the science curriculum of every school. The community can decide what to teach their children in a church, or maybe a private school. But in a state school that has to cater for students from all backgrounds, some fundamental rules are necessary!
Incidentally I also think that the 20% non-spanish people have a right to speak english in school! If you can cater for both, great! If not, everyone knows the accepted first language of the US is english, so that is what you expect when you send your child to a state school!
> and also sites that are incorrectly blocked.
agree completely! Our college tried to install a content filter first on porn, then MP3 sites, Napster and the like...
When people started using anonymizer to access these sites, they blocked anonymizer.com
rewebber.com was next and now many other redirect sites and proxies have become popular with the users. (and some are getting blocked, but never all...)
I suppose you could try and keep a system like this tight, but then what do you do to Google and their cache???
I don't think there is a way to stop undesired content being accessible from the internet short of having a positive list of allowed sites, which does seriously undermine the usefulness of net access.
The problem with keeping and checking logs or having the terminals in public view is that people might not like to look up information about breast cancer or STDs when they know they're being looked at... (Same reason teenagers would not buy contraceptives in the local drug-store in a small town). I certainly don't like the idea of someone looking at what I'm reading.
As this problem is solved by various methods these days (putting telescopes in space, adaptive optics, computer reconstruction based on an "artifical star" that is projected in the upper atmosphere by a laser, ...) it is only a question of making the telescopes big enough to see how ever much detail we desire. This might be difficult from an engineering point of view, but as far as I am aware there are no physical limits to the resolution of a telescope.
2) If you were to take a generally accepted theory, such as GR, and find an experiment that contradicts its predictions, and come up with an alternate theory that explains these AND all the other predictions of GR, you will undoubtedly receive a nobel price! If you just make up some theory that can't be tested or that unnecessarily complicates an existing theory without bringing in anything new, no-one is going to listen to you...
3) Special Relativity is a very well tested theory and unintuitive as its predictions might be they have all turned out to be true! Seeing you mention the maximum possible speed (the speed of light, or just "c"), it is indeed true that this can't be exceeded! If, as you say, you travel in a spacecraft at c-1 mph with respect to, say the sun (because speeds have no meaning if you don't have a reference point. At the moment, i might claim to be at rest, or maybe rotating around the earth at some rather high speed, or around the sun even faster, or around the center of the galaxy yet faster, speed has no meaning without a reference point!)
Anyway, back to your spacecraft, going at c-1mph with respect to the sun, you now are perfectly able to walk towards the front of the spacecraft at 5 mph. However, the relative speed between you and the sun, will NOT be c+4mph! Speeds do not add linearly in SR. This is difficult to imagine, but if you think of an observer on the sun, he will see the spacecraft length contracted (thus very short) and your motions time dilated. He will thus see you walking through a shorter distance in more time, so not at 5 mph but indeed at some imperceptibly low speed. So with respect to him, your speed is still approx. c-1 mph.
It IS possible for you to see two spacecraft both at speeds close to c approaching each other, and you would say there relative speed is alomst 2*c, but THEY would measure a relative speed to each other of just under c!!!
If you are really interested why this is so and where the equations come from and thus, i recommend reading an introduction to SR somewhere on the web, such as this. Incidentally SR is one of the cases where a radical new theory was proposed, because the old theories could not explain why the speed of light in vacuum is always measured to be the same (c) regardless of your motion with respect to the source! It met resistance but it made beautiful predictions that were later measured and found to be true, AND it agreed with the previously known laws in the limits of low speeds! So it had more power than previous theories! Then again, it failed when including gravity, which is where GR takes over, though I can't even begin to understand that...
Anyway, don't think anyone really wanted to know this, but i just couldn't let you get away with demolishing special relativity in a sentence or two :). I can understand your reasoning from everyday experience, and it took me a long time to get to grips with SR, but it is a wonderful theory and i'm still surprised it works!!!
It does not really matter what you call this constant, it's the existance of this additional constant in the equations that might turn out to be valid after all! So Einstein might have got it right for the wrong reasons... and when he saw his reasons were wrong (because the universe was found to be expanding rather than static) he said it was the biggest blunder of his life, probably because he let his solutions be influenced by some ideological preconceptions he had about the world, and not just by the observed data.
This is exactly what scientists should do, if Einstein had had access to this new data, he might have kept the "cosmological constant" in his equations, but he renounced it as there was no evidence to support it. As a general rule in science you try not to introduce complications to your theory if they are not neccessary (Occam's razor).
The idea that the universe was created with an apparent age, and thus an apparent history, is probably the ultimate non-falsifiable philosophy, because literally everything, every bit of evidence that could ever come up, could be explained by this.
Still the question remains, would it not be worth finding out about the "apparent" past anyway, if we can't tell it apart from the real thing???
sorry this whole thread is so off-topic, interesting never the less...
anyway, i was referring to long outdated views of science that have long outlived its use, such as a flat earth and creation 6000 years ago, and not to the bible and christianity in particular.
> and reproduce, and not only that get voted into power.
Maybe they can use this to disprove evolution? If it actually worked, surely they wouldn't be around anymore :)
I can't even see where i would begine to name examples that makes this complete nonsense... geology, plate tectonics, starlight from millions of light years away...
Do these people also believe that Noah put two of each animal in his Ark, and maybe the dinosaurs were extinct because they did not fit??? It would be interesting if someone actually managed to build a complete theory on this, and surely of similar amusement value as the "Discworld" series...
Speaking of discs, have they accepted the world is not a disc?
Looking at prices of the old version it might be a bit more for the US market, only fair if you ask me seeing for everything else European prices are far higher than US prices...