You make the only reasonable point that I have seen against AC posting - that it is being done in order to both moderate and to post. I have points at the moment but choose to join in the conversation rather than moderate. I am probably naive but I do not think many people would bother to both moderate and to comment. I agree that it might happen on a contentious political topic, so the validity of AC posting depends on the topic and the flammability of the content. As for your metaphysical point, we could all indeed be figments of your imagination:-)
I agree this hologram business is widely misunderstood. The media paint it as showing that our lives are not real but are just a hologram projected somewhere unspecified. The Holographic principle is a much more general idea than that. It is actually about being able to use mathematics on a surface to say something about what is going on inside the three dimensional volume it contains, and vice versa. For example you can pack the surface of a black hole with enough information to define everything within it. However it is still mathematics, we have no evidence one way or another that a black hole is empty and is just the information on its surface, or that we are holograms. It is a curious and unexpected fact that a three dimensional volume can be explicitly defined merely by the information on a two dimensional surface enclosing it. This is a piece of information that does not seem to have much practical use now, but it does not seem very different from the idea that Pi is a constant applicable to all circles in flat geometry and we certainly find Pi useful.
The Dirac formulation of Maxwell's equation also predicted the existence of anti-matter which was duly manufactured as the anti particle of the electron - the positron. So we have firm evidence that a successful model of reality which has extra terms that we do not understand may well be predicting something about reality that is not yet understood. There is no way of knowing whether a mathematical solution is physical from the solution itself. Just because the number is negative and appears to make no sense does not mean that it is not a model of something real. Of course the converse can also be true.
I think you misunderstand what string theory is and where it came from. Essentially it came out of viewing particles as having more properties of world sheetyness than point lines, a way of thinking that does allow much more successful calculation of predictions. What you are decrying was the effort to take this idea and develop it to its full implications. An effort that currently only has our universe as a unique solution if you acknowledge the existence of ten to the five hundred other solutions - the multiverse. So string theory has some bits that are practical but other bits that just raise more questions than answers. In that respect it is no more wrong than the Bohr atom.
Oh I am totally with you on this interpretation of what Smolin and Co would like to do. The problem is that no one is going to make a living out of writing papers about speculative interpretations of reality, they just would not get funded. The alternative is what we have now, plenty of me too papers on obscure ramifications of existing ideas with the hope that these people can leap on the next big idea and process it when it comes. There is plenty of synthesis going on, information science is currently being collided with the theoretical physics of Black Holes as we speak. Whether anything insightful will come of it is not known.
Hey sonny, you are talking about applied science. Believe it or not there is a whole load of science which has no practical applications whatsoever and it is called theoretical science. We still pay big bucks for brain-boxes to sit on their backsides and think hard about the useless kind of science because one day it has a habit of becoming a branch of applied science. Take mathematics as an example, there are acres and acres of bright sparks mapping out a mathematical landscape that has bugger all to do with anything applied. Expect that branch to become important to cracking all encryption next week.
The productivity gain is 18 times given the reduction in the number of employees given. I do not suppose that the current employees earn 18 times what the old employees earned. So who did get the benefit of the 18 fold increase in productivity? Answer me that you thieving bastards.
I do not see the difference between the people. The only difference is that the Muslims cannot get the separation of state and religion that we spent the last 500 years fighting for in Christian countries. Though given the current state of politics in the USA that seems to be threatening to go into reverse there with creationism and various other cult favorites.
The house of Lords only has power to delay legislation requiring it to be improved. In most cases over the last 40 years that I have seen they have done a good job of preventing populist elected MP's from introducing simplistic legislation that fucked some minority or other. An elected House of Lords would just pass the shit legislation on party lines. Sometimes I wonder if voters who comment on this issue are paid to make their bone idle shilling about the House of Lords by the likes of Murdoch who could just tell the pig ignorant Sun readers who to elect from his chosen list. Instead of the semi retired great and the good we could have the House of Lords populated by reality TV stars and game show hosts, democracy my arse.
Seconded, also the French will not accept TTIP and will block the EU from adopting it. The Tories are crawling over each other to be first to join it with no conditions asked so long as they get good directorships after graduating from being MPs.
The top 20 list can be a poor guide to quality because the most popular means the most people and most people are ignorant so the shows cater for them by dumbing down. This is fine too if you too are ignorant. If you are for example looking for nerdy stuff in depth stuff about Astronomy steer clear of NASA as it's output is designed for children. The podcast you want is Cheap Astronomy Podcasts with Steve Nerlich. The same holds true for most content, e.g. listen to these advertisement free podcasts. BacterioFiles - Microbes ToxTalk - toxicology FQXi Podcast - the latest ideas in foundational physics and cosmology Binge Thinking History - Topics in post medieval history Public Lecture Podcast - University of Bath Public Lecture Podcast - London School of Economics omega tau - Science and Engineering
It will be very sad if all of this brilliance is replaced by general purpose paid for content like TWiT and similar.
This is known as corporations taking over the public space. Companies move into a physical location with a park for example, put up a fence, hire security guards, close the doors at night and tell you that you cannot walk on the grass or busk. The exact same thing happens in the digital realm. The world wide web was invented and all the content was freely created by knowledgeable enthusiasts and freely available to the people. Now everything is being put behind paywalls or loaded with flash advertising. Podcasting was an early victim of this process. Podcasts used to be accessible from many aggregation sites and then iTunes came along and you could only get at the ones on iTunes through Apples application. The field also became infested with for profit enterprises which made money by dumbing down and appealing to the ignorant. These moves by big companies to put material inside walled gardens kills off high quality free amateur content.
You really ought to rewrite this occasionally you know. It reads like a spam advertisement by an African prince with a mental illness. I suppose that at least the way it is written we all know what it is and skip past it without bothering to read it. You are welcome for thanking me for my advice.
Note that people without social networking profiles will soon become social outcasts denied jobs, water, housing and food; lets see how that works out for you ha ha.
You have identified why Microsoft have paid 26 Billion bits of virtual paper for LinkedIn Soon no one alive today will be able to get a job without a LinkedIn account. And as we all know the future of capitalism is in selling you shit in the cloud. So Microsoft very sensibly just bought an access portal which is connected to every single useful consumer on the planet. Hey presto Microsoft will be able to sell you stuff through the portal and become fabulously wealthy. It makes perfect business sense if you assume that the future of capitalism is selling you shit in the cloud. It is certainly just as good a gamble as most of the insane unicorns running around the place.
Facebook is fine so long as you do not use it for social networking. Great for cat pictures, great for liking random products. Just do not use it for anything personal.
The elephant in the room is that cosmological distances are unbelievably large. The energy expenditure and sheer material cost of building something that can move any further than the outer reaches of a solar system is so huge as to make almost pointless even if possible. Currently it is blind faith rather than physics that suggests that the human race will ever be able to visit even the nearest star.
What is slightly more puzzling is that if the galaxy is teaming with technological civilizations we can detect no sign of their signals. Though this may just be the inadequacy of current technology. Discriminating against stars for any electromagnetic signal even for a focused laser is probably beyond our means at the moment. I have not seen any analysis of this from people like the SETI institute, has anyone seen this analysis?
I think it depends on the product and their age. Gates gets more respect and is listened to because he ran a company that made somewhat useful stuff. Zuck has built an entertainment empire and sadly for him is more thought of as a clown. He is also young so probably will come across better when he is older, maybe.
Actually it is not that simple anymore. Facebook tracks you whether you have an account or not by your visits to other websites, much as Google does. I am not sure what the answer is. I use various forms of ad blocking, java script blocking, cookie deleting software and keep changing them. I do not seem to get much linked crap from advertisers when visiting different web sites but you can be sure that if I do visit YouTube or Facebook they know all about what I have been looking at on those sites. It is only a matter of time before both Facebook and Google, and many other creepy web AI can tell who you are whatever you do to try and block them. I wonder where it will all lead and do not have a positive view about where it is all going. Not playing will then mean not using the web at all. Obviously the first step will be to move to VPN and the Tor network but I believe that governments will outlaw them soon with the protect the children and save us from terrorists excuses. (Laughable how little effort is made to stop road traffic accidents compared to spending effort on spying on and regulating the internet considering that the most likely way to die from an avoidable cause is a road accident..)
Industry is rife with nepotism, it has little to do with which department of the business you are talking about. Surely you have seen wave after wave of new management being brought in each time the ownership of businesses change? All of them identifiable by their friendships rather than their accomplishments.
Not much different from the Zuck then - except he only hates Google +. The people who own large companies are susceptible to thinking that because they have enough money to murder people and get away with it - that they are somehow especially insightful and not unlike great historical figures. They are not, they are filthy rich and should display some humility if they are not to be mocked as philistines.
Exactly what I did, my last company is investing in an Indian future. At some point I will find some low wage activity to get me out of the house in winter. In the meantime I have taken up hiking and wild camping again which is much better for my health than sitting in an office. At 56 I do not expect to see an interesting well paid Tech job again. In the part of the UK where I live they are pretty thin on the ground.. Hey ho, working at the cutting edge was fun whilst it lasted.
Actually I think you will find that big tobacco does have a hand in this through lobbying. The problem that big tobacco has is that a vaping habit only costs five dollars a month instead of the $100 that they are used to from tobacco smokers. Any regulation of cheap stuff from China is to their advantage, so some home brew short circuited battery explosion is the best news they have had for ages. Banning them from checked luggage is just one step on the road to getting China out of the market and replaced with their own brand approved systems at joke prices. This is about making money out of the dumb-fuck customers just like all modern business is supposed to do.
Slashdot Mirror
You make the only reasonable point that I have seen against AC posting - that it is being done in order to both moderate and to post. I have points at the moment but choose to join in the conversation rather than moderate. I am probably naive but I do not think many people would bother to both moderate and to comment. I agree that it might happen on a contentious political topic, so the validity of AC posting depends on the topic and the flammability of the content. As for your metaphysical point, we could all indeed be figments of your imagination :-)
I agree this hologram business is widely misunderstood. The media paint it as showing that our lives are not real but are just a hologram projected somewhere unspecified. The Holographic principle is a much more general idea than that. It is actually about being able to use mathematics on a surface to say something about what is going on inside the three dimensional volume it contains, and vice versa. For example you can pack the surface of a black hole with enough information to define everything within it. However it is still mathematics, we have no evidence one way or another that a black hole is empty and is just the information on its surface, or that we are holograms. It is a curious and unexpected fact that a three dimensional volume can be explicitly defined merely by the information on a two dimensional surface enclosing it. This is a piece of information that does not seem to have much practical use now, but it does not seem very different from the idea that Pi is a constant applicable to all circles in flat geometry and we certainly find Pi useful.
The Dirac formulation of Maxwell's equation also predicted the existence of anti-matter which was duly manufactured as the anti particle of the electron - the positron. So we have firm evidence that a successful model of reality which has extra terms that we do not understand may well be predicting something about reality that is not yet understood. There is no way of knowing whether a mathematical solution is physical from the solution itself. Just because the number is negative and appears to make no sense does not mean that it is not a model of something real. Of course the converse can also be true.
I think you misunderstand what string theory is and where it came from. Essentially it came out of viewing particles as having more properties of world sheetyness than point lines, a way of thinking that does allow much more successful calculation of predictions. What you are decrying was the effort to take this idea and develop it to its full implications. An effort that currently only has our universe as a unique solution if you acknowledge the existence of ten to the five hundred other solutions - the multiverse. So string theory has some bits that are practical but other bits that just raise more questions than answers. In that respect it is no more wrong than the Bohr atom.
Oh I am totally with you on this interpretation of what Smolin and Co would like to do. The problem is that no one is going to make a living out of writing papers about speculative interpretations of reality, they just would not get funded. The alternative is what we have now, plenty of me too papers on obscure ramifications of existing ideas with the hope that these people can leap on the next big idea and process it when it comes. There is plenty of synthesis going on, information science is currently being collided with the theoretical physics of Black Holes as we speak. Whether anything insightful will come of it is not known.
Not to mention Black Holes and whether they have a firewall or not.
Nonsense, the Multiverse is a Gedankenexperiment which is neither a theory nor a fairytale. But it is a necessary step on the way to either.
Hey sonny, you are talking about applied science. Believe it or not there is a whole load of science which has no practical applications whatsoever and it is called theoretical science. We still pay big bucks for brain-boxes to sit on their backsides and think hard about the useless kind of science because one day it has a habit of becoming a branch of applied science. Take mathematics as an example, there are acres and acres of bright sparks mapping out a mathematical landscape that has bugger all to do with anything applied. Expect that branch to become important to cracking all encryption next week.
The productivity gain is 18 times given the reduction in the number of employees given. I do not suppose that the current employees earn 18 times what the old employees earned. So who did get the benefit of the 18 fold increase in productivity? Answer me that you thieving bastards.
I do not see the difference between the people. The only difference is that the Muslims cannot get the separation of state and religion that we spent the last 500 years fighting for in Christian countries. Though given the current state of politics in the USA that seems to be threatening to go into reverse there with creationism and various other cult favorites.
The house of Lords only has power to delay legislation requiring it to be improved. In most cases over the last 40 years that I have seen they have done a good job of preventing populist elected MP's from introducing simplistic legislation that fucked some minority or other. An elected House of Lords would just pass the shit legislation on party lines. Sometimes I wonder if voters who comment on this issue are paid to make their bone idle shilling about the House of Lords by the likes of Murdoch who could just tell the pig ignorant Sun readers who to elect from his chosen list. Instead of the semi retired great and the good we could have the House of Lords populated by reality TV stars and game show hosts, democracy my arse.
Seconded, also the French will not accept TTIP and will block the EU from adopting it. The Tories are crawling over each other to be first to join it with no conditions asked so long as they get good directorships after graduating from being MPs.
That gives us a choice of two clueless morons about to become Prime Minister. Though to be fair posh boy Cameron did not have a clue either.
The top 20 list can be a poor guide to quality because the most popular means the most people and most people are ignorant so the shows cater for them by dumbing down. This is fine too if you too are ignorant. If you are for example looking for nerdy stuff in depth stuff about Astronomy steer clear of NASA as it's output is designed for children. The podcast you want is Cheap Astronomy Podcasts with Steve Nerlich. The same holds true for most content, e.g. listen to these advertisement free podcasts.
BacterioFiles - Microbes
ToxTalk - toxicology
FQXi Podcast - the latest ideas in foundational physics and cosmology
Binge Thinking History - Topics in post medieval history
Public Lecture Podcast - University of Bath
Public Lecture Podcast - London School of Economics
omega tau - Science and Engineering
It will be very sad if all of this brilliance is replaced by general purpose paid for content like TWiT and similar.
This is known as corporations taking over the public space. Companies move into a physical location with a park for example, put up a fence, hire security guards, close the doors at night and tell you that you cannot walk on the grass or busk. The exact same thing happens in the digital realm. The world wide web was invented and all the content was freely created by knowledgeable enthusiasts and freely available to the people. Now everything is being put behind paywalls or loaded with flash advertising. Podcasting was an early victim of this process. Podcasts used to be accessible from many aggregation sites and then iTunes came along and you could only get at the ones on iTunes through Apples application. The field also became infested with for profit enterprises which made money by dumbing down and appealing to the ignorant. These moves by big companies to put material inside walled gardens kills off high quality free amateur content.
You really ought to rewrite this occasionally you know. It reads like a spam advertisement by an African prince with a mental illness. I suppose that at least the way it is written we all know what it is and skip past it without bothering to read it. You are welcome for thanking me for my advice.
Note that people without social networking profiles will soon become social outcasts denied jobs, water, housing and food; lets see how that works out for you ha ha.
You have identified why Microsoft have paid 26 Billion bits of virtual paper for LinkedIn Soon no one alive today will be able to get a job without a LinkedIn account. And as we all know the future of capitalism is in selling you shit in the cloud. So Microsoft very sensibly just bought an access portal which is connected to every single useful consumer on the planet. Hey presto Microsoft will be able to sell you stuff through the portal and become fabulously wealthy. It makes perfect business sense if you assume that the future of capitalism is selling you shit in the cloud. It is certainly just as good a gamble as most of the insane unicorns running around the place.
Facebook is fine so long as you do not use it for social networking. Great for cat pictures, great for liking random products. Just do not use it for anything personal.
The elephant in the room is that cosmological distances are unbelievably large. The energy expenditure and sheer material cost of building something that can move any further than the outer reaches of a solar system is so huge as to make almost pointless even if possible. Currently it is blind faith rather than physics that suggests that the human race will ever be able to visit even the nearest star.
What is slightly more puzzling is that if the galaxy is teaming with technological civilizations we can detect no sign of their signals. Though this may just be the inadequacy of current technology. Discriminating against stars for any electromagnetic signal even for a focused laser is probably beyond our means at the moment. I have not seen any analysis of this from people like the SETI institute, has anyone seen this analysis?
I think it depends on the product and their age. Gates gets more respect and is listened to because he ran a company that made somewhat useful stuff. Zuck has built an entertainment empire and sadly for him is more thought of as a clown. He is also young so probably will come across better when he is older, maybe.
Actually it is not that simple anymore. Facebook tracks you whether you have an account or not by your visits to other websites, much as Google does. I am not sure what the answer is. I use various forms of ad blocking, java script blocking, cookie deleting software and keep changing them. I do not seem to get much linked crap from advertisers when visiting different web sites but you can be sure that if I do visit YouTube or Facebook they know all about what I have been looking at on those sites. It is only a matter of time before both Facebook and Google, and many other creepy web AI can tell who you are whatever you do to try and block them. I wonder where it will all lead and do not have a positive view about where it is all going. Not playing will then mean not using the web at all. Obviously the first step will be to move to VPN and the Tor network but I believe that governments will outlaw them soon with the protect the children and save us from terrorists excuses. (Laughable how little effort is made to stop road traffic accidents compared to spending effort on spying on and regulating the internet considering that the most likely way to die from an avoidable cause is a road accident..)
Industry is rife with nepotism, it has little to do with which department of the business you are talking about. Surely you have seen wave after wave of new management being brought in each time the ownership of businesses change? All of them identifiable by their friendships rather than their accomplishments.
Not much different from the Zuck then - except he only hates Google +. The people who own large companies are susceptible to thinking that because they have enough money to murder people and get away with it - that they are somehow especially insightful and not unlike great historical figures. They are not, they are filthy rich and should display some humility if they are not to be mocked as philistines.
Exactly what I did, my last company is investing in an Indian future. At some point I will find some low wage activity to get me out of the house in winter. In the meantime I have taken up hiking and wild camping again which is much better for my health than sitting in an office. At 56 I do not expect to see an interesting well paid Tech job again. In the part of the UK where I live they are pretty thin on the ground.. Hey ho, working at the cutting edge was fun whilst it lasted.
Actually I think you will find that big tobacco does have a hand in this through lobbying. The problem that big tobacco has is that a vaping habit only costs five dollars a month instead of the $100 that they are used to from tobacco smokers. Any regulation of cheap stuff from China is to their advantage, so some home brew short circuited battery explosion is the best news they have had for ages. Banning them from checked luggage is just one step on the road to getting China out of the market and replaced with their own brand approved systems at joke prices. This is about making money out of the dumb-fuck customers just like all modern business is supposed to do.