Yes in fact we do know that photon's have gravitational mass in the sense that photons generate a gravitational field just like other matter.
Yes photons have zero rest mass in the sense that a positive rest mass would result in infinite energy given that they travel at the speed of light. However photons are not in fact at rest and can never be at rest and do in fact have mass.
That photons have mass is easy to deduce from their possesion of energy and the equivalence of mass and energy. Moreover they must produce a gravitational field as they are affected by gravitational fields (gravitational lensing) and so by conservation of momentum must in turn generate a gravitational field.
It would cause SOMEONE to observe the signal traveling bacwards in time. Because we have to transform the times for any inertial observer someone in a rocket ship going very fast (but still below the speed of light) will see the transmission of the signal occur after it is recieved.
It is even worse as the reception of the light will be in his past light cone at some time (a signal from the reception can reach him) and the transmission will be in his future light cone (he can send a beam of light to the transmission point before the transmission occurs). Therefore in his reference frame (just as valid as any other) he can see the result of the transmission and then tell them they shouldn't send.
For the record unless this is talking about speed of light in water or anything else other then the signal speed in vaccu it is a load of BS.
Look this almost certainly won't help against tempest. Ths only encrypts things between the computer and monitor. If that could prevent tempest sorts of attacks so would cable shielding.
I understand the tempest signal actually comes about from the process of putting the information on the screen.
Moreover they have provisions to remove compromised keys. What good does this do? If I am an organization devoted to gathering information covertly I am sure as hell not going to tell anyone I have comprimised the key. Only if I am trying to copy signls (or help my friends copy) would I expouse my key knowledge.
The scary thing is that w/ hardware to hardware encryption and maybe DES they really could make the single hackproof (or nearly so)
Alright what about Soviet style communism? Weren['t religions forced to go underground because the dominant philosophy was atheistic?
Religions are a threat to various people's power. This is why they go to war and persecute each other. The only reason we don't see atheists persecuting religious people is because only rarely do they acheive the power to do so.
This is a very important point and should be moderated up.
It makes the utmost difference whether the police have a suspect and then use DNA matching to see if he did the crime or if they use DNA matching to find a suspect. As this poster mentions it is then a much lower probability that you did in fact commit the crime.
It is exactly the same as disease testing. If you have a large population which is uninfected (not guilty) a positive match even from a very reliable test is highly likely to in fact be an error.
Of course if you up the test to some obscene number of points you can probably make the probality of error very small again. Of course this leaves the scary possibility that people are falsely convicted because they left a hair lying around...but their are always false convictions.
Sure it might suck in that it gives companies like microsoft an obscene amount of power but consider slashdotters have way more in common with microsoft and other software companies then with the common populance.
We could include such fun provisions in software as:
"CS majors may sleep with your first born daughter at their whim"
"You must follow a direct order by anyone employed in the Computer economy"
Or just realease the new version of the GPL including the phrase
"Anyone using and/or copying this software agrees never to use microsoft products"
The problem is that (under UCITA) you never actually buy the product you pay for a right to use their Intellectual property. You have no legal right to use a warez version EXCEPT under the liscense they give you. By using the warez version without technically agreeing to the liscense you are probably in violation of copyright law.
The reason he was going to throw away his liscense is that until you break the seal you have not agreed to be bound by the terms of that contract. Unfortunatly in this case you are in violation of copyright law.
(It is sorta like the GPL. Only the liscense gives you the ability to use the product)
True the government won't come knocking on everyones door but precisely because of this fact does this put too much power into the hands of corporations. If contract violations were prosecuted ferverently no one would buy software with stupid contracts in them. As it is this allows the company to turn every citizen into a violator and hence force prosecution where and when they please. Big firms like Intel already have police officers working/funded by them full time.
No, physics is about predicting certain kinds of observables from other observables. It allows us to go from observable ball in the air ro observable ball falls to ground.
Functions are an exact mapping between two sets of events as such it makes sense they are used.
The point being that these things like particles and waves may be intuitevly helpful but are irrelevant to the correctness of the theory. As long as it was mathematically equivalent (it predicted the same observables from the same input) we could use a theory modeled on grapes. Therefore it really isn't kosher to use these concepts as if they were definite statements about the world rather than helpful definitions.
P.S. If your going to resort to personal insults at least have the balls to post as something other than an anonymous coward.
No, my point is not that a newtonian universe is deterministic. It is correct but irrelevant.
WHat I am saying is that we should expect a conciouss neing to act in a predictable way. Yes, the universe is random so this predictable way is not exact but it is the predictability that gives us our free will.
If we acted at random...made choices in life by merely the flip of a coin we would behave less like a human and less conciouss.
As for accountability I fail to see why predictability would ruin accountability. Sure you may have done it because that is your nature. In fact you did it hence by definition it is your nature it may still be a wrong act and you can still be punished for it.
That is a reasonable metaphor but what you are forgeting is that we ARE our brain. The crux of my argument is that changing part of the bios would not force us to do something different it would change who we are.
Quite possibly this is all the result of many layers of emergent behavior but I fail to see how this would imply we were not concious.
Yes I agree running from fire does not prove conciousness. What I was arguing is that rather then expect a concious being to be random he SHOULD be predictable.
I make no claim of magic. Precisely the opposite I am claiming that the concepts of free will and conciousness are perfectly applicable to ere physical systems composed of atoms and molecules. There is no need to refer to spiritual devices for these conditions to hold.
Well I haven't read the book but I would guess no. Emperor's new mind was a relatively complex philisophical argument about conciousness. This book sounds too much like one of those psuedo-science books.
You can always tell the difference because the psuedo science books try to wow you with fancy physics (for instance flashy statements about how particles possess a dual nature rather then the simple fact that observables are predicted by a certain class of functions) while penrose's book actually tried to make you understand what was going on.
The quotes about how the author finally understands etc.. etc.. give it away. Penrose offered arguments and then possible explanations (maybe its quantum gravity) not tablets from the mountaintop.
Reading the review I was struck by the common fallacy that predetermination somehow demonstratesthe abscence of free will. I don't know whether this argument was made by the reviewer or the book itself but I think the argument is misleading.
So, as a thought experiment, imagine we placed you in a burning house with little children. You could either run out and save yourself or risk near certain death and try to save the children. Interesting moral dilema.
Now suppose we somehow (magically) erased all memory and effects of this expirience from your brain and placed you in the EXACT same situation. I contend that if YOU are really making a choice here (instaed of following some random principle) you would do exactly the same thing. In fact free will seems to require at least some minor form of predictability.
The standard analysis of why determinism prevents free will is that you can't choose to do something besides your fate. This sort of argument assumes that fate is something externally imposed that prevents you from doing things. Rather if we realize that you must fufil your fate *because* it is determined by who you are we run into no problem.
My claim was not the rainforest is not worth protecting because it hurts farmers.
It does in fact hurt farmers...they can't grow crops in the area they slashed and burned. Does their desire to slash and burn in order to make money gain food etc... outweigh the danger of hurting the rain forest. Probably not.
However, it does demonstrate the issue is not cut and dried. There are other factors that should be weighed in our decision even if we eventually find them not to be compeling.
My point was encouraging this sort of political activism by students in the classroom doesn't encourage this sort of thought. It doesn't encourage education but partisan rhetoric.
I also felt that publishing/giving credence to these arguments *because* they are made by a childrens class is ridiculous and should have no place in our politics.
First of all with my limited experience doing low level graphics I seem to remember only being able to write to the screen during the horizontal or vertical refresh of the monitor. Do these new LCDs emulate this to allow legacy software and etc...
Second is their a new all digital standard for connecting these to video cards. With no analog components this would seem to get better quality and allow me to have a longer monitor cord.
Little pisses me off more then seeing kids brainwashed into political activism. These are THIRD GRADERS do you think they can make a fair and honest judgement about the matter apart from what their teacher says? Political activism by a classroom tells us that the teacher is failing because the children probably aren't being fairly fed both sides of the argument.
Does anyone think that third graders (even bright third graders) would really get worked up and campaign on an issue if it was presented in an unbiased factual manner?
It only makes it worse that people pay attention to these sort of attention getting schemes conducted by teachers at the expense of students.
When I was in high school I had a biology teacher which offered us extra credit if we wrote to our congressmen lobbying them to prevent destruction of the rain forest. Now of course all those students weren't (and probably still haven't) thought that while rain forest is good protecting it necesserily involves hurting farmers. Perhaps the government has other (more important) uses for its time and money. To her credit when pressed about the issue she offered to give the credit to writing about the other side of the issue. But most of those students left the class with the impresion that the enviornment was something that *must* be protected and not an issue to be thought about or weighed against other needs.
Did this teacher ever think that perhaps Tesla isn't honored because he was lacking in other respects? I have heard that Tesla was extremly lacking in theory and proposed many crackpot notions about electricity. Does it cause doubt in anyone's mind that all the pro Tesla sites are littered with ridiculous and incorrect psuedo-science?
For instance as mentioned above the site that claimed Tesla's transformer increased power output. Interesting that...power=energy/time so Tesla learned how to make energy from nothing?
Maybe *gasp* the Smithsonian with legions of experts might know more about this issue than a bunch of third graders?
There are probably enough name server crashing that the outages would only be VERY minor unless it was kept up for a long time. Undoublty in that amount of time it could be tracked and fixed.
So I am a little confused. It appears holographic storage merely uses a material that has optical memory properties (the electrons move to the light) to record a hologram on. So what is the benifit of holographic storage.
It would appear you could get just as high an information density using lasers not in any holographic projection system. So what is the benifit of holographic storage.
Ohh and about the spiritual comment. First off where do you get your knowledge that he has no spiritual side? Maybe he doesn't go to church but this in no way implies he isn't spiritual. Maybe he doesn't want to tell you about his spiritual side.
Secindly what do you mean by 'spiritual'. Does he need to believe in a higher being to be spiritual? What if he sits around and thinks about the nature of the universe. Is this enough?
Now if you thought people should be spiritual because it is good to contemplate these sorts of things you might have a point. Clearly, however, this isn't the way you approach it as you claim to know Carmack does not have such a side. So why is it important for him to have a spiritual side. Why do people who are spiritual always feel the need to convince others to follow them? One would think they were ashamed/embarased and needed others to follow.
I am really sort of curious why you say he wouldn't make a decent father. I mean most people can make decent parents (perhaps not great ones) with no trouble.
Secondly I don't understand why you, or the other posters, think he is arrogant. I was actually quite impresed by his humbleness. This is a man who is virtually worshiped by a large segment of computer gamers probably the most succesful programer in the world from a pure sales perspective (not IPOs - gates and company coded only small parts of their programs). The potential to let this go to your head must be huge.
Now Carmack recognizes he is good but that isn't the same thing as being arrogant (he is good after all). If he really was arrogant he would have been going on about how college would have been a waste of time etc.. etc.. like some previous slashdot stories. Stick up his ass? Where? Did you people read the entire interview or all you all just misconstruing that first quote about marriage?
If there was anything I found kinda strange it was critisizing his mother's raising in print. But to each his own.
I understand that McKinely and the new EPIC architecture developed with HP where going to switch intel over to 64 bits.
Of course more bits isn't always better. Im not sure exactly why but I believe it is because more bits force the procesor to wait for the bus to deliver data more often if I am not mistaken. In addition to forcing the program to operate on large data sizes even when he doesn't want to.
Ohh im sure it will find a niche but this is kind of like inventing the mouse before you bother to finish putting all the letters on the keyboard. Sure most people will find it useful in a limited number of situations but in most of these situations other options are availible. In both your car and office it would be quite easy to put a large, more powerful, computer unit which can interface with your PDA.
And while I like the idea of it taking notes at a meeting speech recognition is nowhere this good yet. Secrateries would never take dictation anymore. My guess is it uses a sort of graphiti for the voice...only responding to a certain small pretrained set of words.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes in fact we do know that photon's have gravitational mass in the sense that photons generate a gravitational field just like other matter.
Yes photons have zero rest mass in the sense that a positive rest mass would result in infinite energy given that they travel at the speed of light. However photons are not in fact at rest and can never be at rest and do in fact have mass.
That photons have mass is easy to deduce from their possesion of energy and the equivalence of mass and energy. Moreover they must produce a gravitational field as they are affected by gravitational fields (gravitational lensing) and so by conservation of momentum must in turn generate a gravitational field.
It would cause SOMEONE to observe the signal traveling bacwards in time. Because we have to transform the times for any inertial observer someone in a rocket ship going very fast (but still below the speed of light) will see the transmission of the signal occur after it is recieved.
It is even worse as the reception of the light will be in his past light cone at some time (a signal from the reception can reach him) and the transmission will be in his future light cone (he can send a beam of light to the transmission point before the transmission occurs). Therefore in his reference frame (just as valid as any other) he can see the result of the transmission and then tell them they shouldn't send.
For the record unless this is talking about speed of light in water or anything else other then the signal speed in vaccu it is a load of BS.
Look this almost certainly won't help against tempest. Ths only encrypts things between the computer and monitor. If that could prevent tempest sorts of attacks so would cable shielding.
I understand the tempest signal actually comes about from the process of putting the information on the screen.
Moreover they have provisions to remove compromised keys. What good does this do? If I am an organization devoted to gathering information covertly I am sure as hell not going to tell anyone I have comprimised the key. Only if I am trying to copy signls (or help my friends copy) would I expouse my key knowledge.
The scary thing is that w/ hardware to hardware encryption and maybe DES they really could make the single hackproof (or nearly so)
Well im willing to make a useless post at a 2
Where did you find your Zarathustra reference. As far as I can tell(encyclopedia brittanica) he appears to be merely a charachter in Nietzche works.
Did you mean Zoraster? If so I don't see the great parrell to jesus life
Alright what about Soviet style communism? Weren['t religions forced to go underground because the dominant philosophy was atheistic?
Religions are a threat to various people's power. This is why they go to war and persecute each other. The only reason we don't see atheists persecuting religious people is because only rarely do they acheive the power to do so.
Be carefull. The article said:
The average number of hours worked in the service sector is 32.9
Most people in the service sector are knowledge workers.
Computer programmers etc.. are knowledge workers.
We can neither conclude that
Most computer programmers are in the service industry
Or that this statistic in any way is supposed to represent that of computer proffesionals
This is a very important point and should be moderated up.
It makes the utmost difference whether the police have a suspect and then use DNA matching to see if he did the crime or if they use DNA matching to find a suspect. As this poster mentions it is then a much lower probability that you did in fact commit the crime.
It is exactly the same as disease testing. If you have a large population which is uninfected (not guilty) a positive match even from a very reliable test is highly likely to in fact be an error.
Of course if you up the test to some obscene number of points you can probably make the probality of error very small again. Of course this leaves the scary possibility that people are falsely convicted because they left a hair lying around...but their are always false convictions.
Sure it might suck in that it gives companies like microsoft an obscene amount of power but consider slashdotters have way more in common with microsoft and other software companies then with the common populance.
We could include such fun provisions in software as:
"CS majors may sleep with your first born daughter at their whim"
"You must follow a direct order by anyone employed in the Computer economy"
Or just realease the new version of the GPL including the phrase
"Anyone using and/or copying this software agrees never to use microsoft products"
The problem is that (under UCITA) you never actually buy the product you pay for a right to use their Intellectual property. You have no legal right to use a warez version EXCEPT under the liscense they give you. By using the warez version without technically agreeing to the liscense you are probably in violation of copyright law.
The reason he was going to throw away his liscense is that until you break the seal you have not agreed to be bound by the terms of that contract. Unfortunatly in this case you are in violation of copyright law.
(It is sorta like the GPL. Only the liscense gives you the ability to use the product)
True the government won't come knocking on everyones door but precisely because of this fact does this put too much power into the hands of corporations. If contract violations were prosecuted ferverently no one would buy software with stupid contracts in them. As it is this allows the company to turn every citizen into a violator and hence force prosecution where and when they please. Big firms like Intel already have police officers working/funded by them full time.
No, physics is about predicting certain kinds of observables from other observables. It allows us to go from observable ball in the air ro observable ball falls to ground.
Functions are an exact mapping between two sets of events as such it makes sense they are used.
The point being that these things like particles and waves may be intuitevly helpful but are irrelevant to the correctness of the theory. As long as it was mathematically equivalent (it predicted the same observables from the same input) we could use a theory modeled on grapes. Therefore it really isn't kosher to use these concepts as if they were definite statements about the world rather than helpful definitions.
P.S. If your going to resort to personal insults at least have the balls to post as something other than an anonymous coward.
No, my point is not that a newtonian universe is deterministic. It is correct but irrelevant.
WHat I am saying is that we should expect a conciouss neing to act in a predictable way. Yes, the universe is random so this predictable way is not exact but it is the predictability that gives us our free will.
If we acted at random...made choices in life by merely the flip of a coin we would behave less like a human and less conciouss.
As for accountability I fail to see why predictability would ruin accountability. Sure you may have done it because that is your nature. In fact you did it hence by definition it is your nature it may still be a wrong act and you can still be punished for it.
That is a reasonable metaphor but what you are forgeting is that we ARE our brain. The crux of my argument is that changing part of the bios would not force us to do something different it would change who we are.
Quite possibly this is all the result of many layers of emergent behavior but I fail to see how this would imply we were not concious.
Yes I agree running from fire does not prove conciousness. What I was arguing is that rather then expect a concious being to be random he SHOULD be predictable.
I make no claim of magic. Precisely the opposite I am claiming that the concepts of free will and conciousness are perfectly applicable to ere physical systems composed of atoms and molecules. There is no need to refer to spiritual devices for these conditions to hold.
Well I haven't read the book but I would guess no. Emperor's new mind was a relatively complex philisophical argument about conciousness. This book sounds too much like one of those psuedo-science books.
You can always tell the difference because the psuedo science books try to wow you with fancy physics (for instance flashy statements about how particles possess a dual nature rather then the simple fact that observables are predicted by a certain class of functions) while penrose's book actually tried to make you understand what was going on.
The quotes about how the author finally understands etc.. etc.. give it away. Penrose offered arguments and then possible explanations (maybe its quantum gravity) not tablets from the mountaintop.
Reading the review I was struck by the common fallacy that predetermination somehow demonstratesthe abscence of free will. I don't know whether this argument was made by the reviewer or the book itself but I think the argument is misleading.
So, as a thought experiment, imagine we placed you in a burning house with little children. You could either run out and save yourself or risk near certain death and try to save the children. Interesting moral dilema.
Now suppose we somehow (magically) erased all memory and effects of this expirience from your brain and placed you in the EXACT same situation. I contend that if YOU are really making a choice here (instaed of following some random principle) you would do exactly the same thing. In fact free will seems to require at least some minor form of predictability.
The standard analysis of why determinism prevents free will is that you can't choose to do something besides your fate. This sort of argument assumes that fate is something externally imposed that prevents you from doing things. Rather if we realize that you must fufil your fate *because* it is determined by who you are we run into no problem.
And yes just to head off the argument. It might help them in the long run or help farmers elsewhere but that isn't relevent to the point.
In response to this post and the post before it.
My claim was not the rainforest is not worth protecting because it hurts farmers.
It does in fact hurt farmers...they can't grow crops in the area they slashed and burned. Does their desire to slash and burn in order to make money gain food etc... outweigh the danger of hurting the rain forest. Probably not.
However, it does demonstrate the issue is not cut and dried. There are other factors that should be weighed in our decision even if we eventually find them not to be compeling.
My point was encouraging this sort of political activism by students in the classroom doesn't encourage this sort of thought. It doesn't encourage education but partisan rhetoric.
I also felt that publishing/giving credence to these arguments *because* they are made by a childrens class is ridiculous and should have no place in our politics.
Two questions
First of all with my limited experience doing low level graphics I seem to remember only being able to write to the screen during the horizontal or vertical refresh of the monitor. Do these new LCDs emulate this to allow legacy software and etc...
Second is their a new all digital standard for connecting these to video cards. With no analog components this would seem to get better quality and allow me to have a longer monitor cord.
Ohh yah and did anyone notice that most of the claims made by the third graders rested on filings in the U.S. Patent office.
Other things we learn at the U.S Patent office
* Amazon came up with the idea of ordering with a moust click
*Microsoft Invented sale of digital media over the internet
Little pisses me off more then seeing kids brainwashed into political activism. These are THIRD GRADERS do you think they can make a fair and honest judgement about the matter apart from what their teacher says? Political activism by a classroom tells us that the teacher is failing because the children probably aren't being fairly fed both sides of the argument.
Does anyone think that third graders (even bright third graders) would really get worked up and campaign on an issue if it was presented in an unbiased factual manner?
It only makes it worse that people pay attention to these sort of attention getting schemes conducted by teachers at the expense of students.
When I was in high school I had a biology teacher which offered us extra credit if we wrote to our congressmen lobbying them to prevent destruction of the rain forest. Now of course all those students weren't (and probably still haven't) thought that while rain forest is good protecting it necesserily involves hurting farmers. Perhaps the government has other (more important) uses for its time and money. To her credit when pressed about the issue she offered to give the credit to writing about the other side of the issue. But most of those students left the class with the impresion that the enviornment was something that *must* be protected and not an issue to be thought about or weighed against other needs.
Did this teacher ever think that perhaps Tesla isn't honored because he was lacking in other respects? I have heard that Tesla was extremly lacking in theory and proposed many crackpot notions about electricity. Does it cause doubt in anyone's mind that all the pro Tesla sites are littered with ridiculous and incorrect psuedo-science?
For instance as mentioned above the site that claimed Tesla's transformer increased power output. Interesting that...power=energy/time so Tesla learned how to make energy from nothing?
Maybe *gasp* the Smithsonian with legions of experts might know more about this issue than a bunch of third graders?
There are probably enough name server crashing that the outages would only be VERY minor unless it was kept up for a long time. Undoublty in that amount of time it could be tracked and fixed.
So I am a little confused. It appears holographic storage merely uses a material that has optical memory properties (the electrons move to the light) to record a hologram on. So what is the benifit of holographic storage.
It would appear you could get just as high an information density using lasers not in any holographic projection system. So what is the benifit of holographic storage.
Ohh and about the spiritual comment. First off where do you get your knowledge that he has no spiritual side? Maybe he doesn't go to church but this in no way implies he isn't spiritual. Maybe he doesn't want to tell you about his spiritual side.
Secindly what do you mean by 'spiritual'. Does he need to believe in a higher being to be spiritual? What if he sits around and thinks about the nature of the universe. Is this enough?
Now if you thought people should be spiritual because it is good to contemplate these sorts of things you might have a point. Clearly, however, this isn't the way you approach it as you claim to know Carmack does not have such a side. So why is it important for him to have a spiritual side. Why do people who are spiritual always feel the need to convince others to follow them? One would think they were ashamed/embarased and needed others to follow.
I am really sort of curious why you say he wouldn't make a decent father. I mean most people can make decent parents (perhaps not great ones) with no trouble.
Secondly I don't understand why you, or the other posters, think he is arrogant. I was actually quite impresed by his humbleness. This is a man who is virtually worshiped by a large segment of computer gamers probably the most succesful programer in the world from a pure sales perspective (not IPOs - gates and company coded only small parts of their programs). The potential to let this go to your head must be huge.
Now Carmack recognizes he is good but that isn't the same thing as being arrogant (he is good after all). If he really was arrogant he would have been going on about how college would have been a waste of time etc.. etc.. like some previous slashdot stories. Stick up his ass? Where? Did you people read the entire interview or all you all just misconstruing that first quote about marriage?
If there was anything I found kinda strange it was critisizing his mother's raising in print. But to each his own.
I understand that McKinely and the new EPIC architecture developed with HP where going to switch intel over to 64 bits.
Of course more bits isn't always better. Im not sure exactly why but I believe it is because more bits force the procesor to wait for the bus to deliver data more often if I am not mistaken. In addition to forcing the program to operate on large data sizes even when he doesn't want to.
Ohh im sure it will find a niche but this is kind of like inventing the mouse before you bother to finish putting all the letters on the keyboard. Sure most people will find it useful in a limited number of situations but in most of these situations other options are availible. In both your car and office it would be quite easy to put a large, more powerful, computer unit which can interface with your PDA.
And while I like the idea of it taking notes at a meeting speech recognition is nowhere this good yet. Secrateries would never take dictation anymore. My guess is it uses a sort of graphiti for the voice...only responding to a certain small pretrained set of words.