All of that is completely irrelevant because, as I said (this is the THIRD time I'm saying this) I'm talking about international law, not any specifics that may or may not apply to US passport holders.
Look up the definition of 'passport' in the New Oxford Companion to Law, or "Passports and Nationality in International Law" by Adam Muchmore (section IV. "The Passport in International Law").
But please, keep on plucking that chicken. You're just making a mockery of yourself. I'm not even sure what the point is to your rants.
> But back on topic, Does my weedwacker need a passport? Does my electric razor need a passport? WTF would my robot need a passport?
Giving robots literaly passports is silly, of course. I think the point is: do robots need special rules regulating their entry into different countries and would it be useful to use existing rules regarding human travel as a template. As robots become more sophisticated and human-like I think it's a perfectly valid question, but maybe not at the moment.
That has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying, as it's targeted to a very specific group of people. By international law, simply holding a passport is no proof of citizenship.
> Yeah, they are called felons. They are citizens, just not humans anymore.
I'm not talking about felons. I'm talking about the pacific US territories/islands.
God damn, man. Stop advertising your ignorance so loudly.
It most certainly is not. A passport is proof of nationality, not citizenship - two very different legal concepts.
There are many people right now who, for instance, are US nationals but not citizens. They have US passports but do not have the rights of a citizen i.e. they can't vote, participate in elections, etc.
A passport is nothing but a document specifying the owner's nationality.
It's a visa which allows you to enter a country. Now, many countries have visa waiver programs that allow passport holders from certain countries to enter without a visa. But such waivers may not always apply (for instance, if you stay over a certain period of time, you will need to apply for a visa).
There's a difference between not being profitable, and not being profitable 'enough'. The Concorde was profitable. It just ran on a thin margin (which got increasingly thinner after 9/11 and after fuel prices went up) and didn't make as much money as conventional subsonic planes.
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
For most of the 11 years absolutely fuck-all happened. We can say this with certainty because it's now been revealed that Bin Laden's 'fortress' was actually a Pakistani-controlled compound in which Bin Laden was under house arrest. So basically, Bin Laden spent the first 5 or 6 years roaming free in Afghanistan to do anything he wanted, then sought shelter in Pakistan for several more years until some people in the Pakistani government got tired of it all and tipped off the US. Then Obama staged this hilarious over-the-top SEAL campaign to go in there and execute him gangland-style (with a tie-in movie and merchandising!) though knowing full well that he wasn't going anywhere.
The entire thing is just so hilarious that it's almost unbelievable. Neither Bush nor Obama did anything of substance to get Bin Laden.
You said it quite well. There's nothing wrong with speculation and hypothesizing but when there's no way to test it then you run into problems.
In an ideal world, we'd be doing one of two things: Either putting in the required investment to test string theory, or not doing string theory and instead focusing on other problems.
I'd be the first person to defend fundamental and theoretical research, but I have to wonder if we really have a pressing NEED to do fundamental physics any more at this point. What about fusion energy or materials research?
String theorists like to say they are doing math but actual mathematicians would disagree strongly with that. Mathematics is based around precision and rigor. Go into any math department in the country and say you consider string theory to be rigorous and precise. They'd either laugh or stare at you in horror. Seriously, try it.
People who just to lab work should not be awarded PhDs. A PhD must have demonstrated ability to act as an independent researcher and come up with, as you put it, 'new' and 'innovative' things. Doesn't have to be Nobel-prize winning material, but it has to be at least somewhat interesting to someone versed in the field.
But I see this lab work-oriented phenomenon increasingly often in biology/medicine-related research. A supervisor/PI hands a lab protocol to a PhD student and they have to follow it to a T. Very little deviation or innovation is tolerated. In biology it's commonplace to treat PhD students like children.
Someone who's only job is to sit in a lab and collect data is not a PhD student. They are at best a lab technician. Problem is, you have to pay lab technicians actual salaries, so lots of labs use 'PhD students' as cheap labor.
Precisely. People construct this romantic version of physics history as a linear progression from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein to Schrodinger. But the fact is, physics has *mostly* been a collection of bungles and clusterfucks, with the truth just barely managing to seep up to the surface every once in a while through the thick tar of misinformation and pseudoscience. We just conveniently tend to forget the clusterfucks. But if you want to know when the clusterfucks were going on, just look at the 'silent periods'; the periods where history books have nothing to say. If there's no mention of any significant breakthroughs in a ten-year-span, it's probably because that ten-year span was a clusterfuck.
Our recent obsession with string theory is no different. 200 years from now no one will remember it at all, instead constructing their own romantic histories where the late 20th and 21st century physics was actually on the road to their own theory-of-everything, with the period from 1980 to 2010 being a curious blank area where no one was doing physics.
If you read Ben Rich's memoirs he talks a lot about the interaction between the SR-71 project and the space project. After the SR-71 they obtained secret information that the USSR was ramping up its hydrogen production. At first they thought it must be for some hypersonic jet aircraft to compete with the US's SR-71. It was only after pouring hundreds of millions into developing a hydrogen-powered aircraft that they realized the USSR wasn't developing a plane - they were stocking up hydrogen for ICBMs and orbital rockets.
The hydrogen-powered plane project was scrapped soon afterwards.
The SR-71 was the fastest manned jet-powered aircraft and still holds that record. Also, I very much doubt that a secret replacement for it exists. The SR-71 was killed because spy satellites greatly decreased its relative utility, and that continues to be true. I fail to see a reason for a high-supersonic high-altitude military aircraft in 2015. Then again, the military carries out a lot of useless projects, so I wouldn't be surprised.
It's not about profitability, it's about profitably & RISK. The aircraft/airline industry has basically become locked into the 900 km/h, turbofan-powered, widebody business, because it's low-risk. It's the same reason few car companies made any hybrids or EVs until Tesla entered the market. A lot of companies now turn a profit on their hybrid/EV sales.
Am I saying that if they developed a supersonic plane they'd turn a profit? Nope. I'm saying it's very hard to predict how a supersonic transport would work in today's market.
Not many aspects of the SR-71 would have translated into a passenger jet. The thing was huge and it was composed almost entirely of fuel tanks - and it had a passenger capacity of 2. It was obscenely expensive to operate. It needed in-air refueling. In the 80's a journalist wrote a piece about how SR-71-based tech would lead to hypersonic transport planes, and Ben Rich - the head of Lockheed Skunkworks which designed the SR and one of the designers of the SR's intakes - objected and said that such a thing would never happen in his lifetime.
Not really. While this over-simplification ("It was too expensive!") might sound reasonable the true story is more complicated. Richard_at_work pointed at some of the issues. Another issue was that because of the Air France 4590 crash (which was largely due to bad luck), both British Airways and Air France got really jittery and anxious to pull the plug before another disaster happened.
Another thing that people ignore was that the Concorde was put to retirement largely because it was just a really old plane. It was designed in the 60's. It still had an _engineer_ in the cockpit - that's how old the design and avionics were. Unlike other planes designed during that period that are still flying, it never got any significant upgrades. It had a run of 27 years; more than good enough for any plane. Ultimately, it's not that Concorde failed, it's that we failed to replace it.
Plasma physics researchers unaffiliated with L-M have already pointed out numerous problems with their design. The central rings need to be superconducting in the face of intense neutron flux. No known material is capable of this. So at the very least we need a materials science breakthrough for L-M's design to be remotely feasible.
You're basically summarizing why fusion is unlikely to work in a small-scale design in the near future. Technological progress is great but we need an energy solution NOW.
I'd argue that even the 'passive safety' thing isn't really unique to fusion; modern fission designs are already pretty safe - some even have passive safety.
It's going to produce interesting science for way more than three years. Remember that the tevatron shut down four years ago but physicists are still finding new and interesting stuff in the data it collected. I wouldn't be surprised if new discoveries came out of the LHC data for ten or even twenty years after shutdown.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly.
All of that is completely irrelevant because, as I said (this is the THIRD time I'm saying this) I'm talking about international law, not any specifics that may or may not apply to US passport holders.
Look up the definition of 'passport' in the New Oxford Companion to Law, or "Passports and Nationality in International Law" by Adam Muchmore (section IV. "The Passport in International Law").
But please, keep on plucking that chicken. You're just making a mockery of yourself. I'm not even sure what the point is to your rants.
s/literaly/literal
> But back on topic, Does my weedwacker need a passport? Does my electric razor need a passport? WTF would my robot need a passport?
Giving robots literaly passports is silly, of course. I think the point is: do robots need special rules regulating their entry into different countries and would it be useful to use existing rules regarding human travel as a template. As robots become more sophisticated and human-like I think it's a perfectly valid question, but maybe not at the moment.
That has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying, as it's targeted to a very specific group of people. By international law, simply holding a passport is no proof of citizenship.
> Yeah, they are called felons. They are citizens, just not humans anymore.
I'm not talking about felons. I'm talking about the pacific US territories/islands.
God damn, man. Stop advertising your ignorance so loudly.
It most certainly is not. A passport is proof of nationality, not citizenship - two very different legal concepts.
There are many people right now who, for instance, are US nationals but not citizens. They have US passports but do not have the rights of a citizen i.e. they can't vote, participate in elections, etc.
You're confusing passports with visas.
A passport is nothing but a document specifying the owner's nationality.
It's a visa which allows you to enter a country. Now, many countries have visa waiver programs that allow passport holders from certain countries to enter without a visa. But such waivers may not always apply (for instance, if you stay over a certain period of time, you will need to apply for a visa).
There's a difference between not being profitable, and not being profitable 'enough'. The Concorde was profitable. It just ran on a thin margin (which got increasingly thinner after 9/11 and after fuel prices went up) and didn't make as much money as conventional subsonic planes.
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Pakistan isn't a real country?
For most of the 11 years absolutely fuck-all happened. We can say this with certainty because it's now been revealed that Bin Laden's 'fortress' was actually a Pakistani-controlled compound in which Bin Laden was under house arrest. So basically, Bin Laden spent the first 5 or 6 years roaming free in Afghanistan to do anything he wanted, then sought shelter in Pakistan for several more years until some people in the Pakistani government got tired of it all and tipped off the US. Then Obama staged this hilarious over-the-top SEAL campaign to go in there and execute him gangland-style (with a tie-in movie and merchandising!) though knowing full well that he wasn't going anywhere.
The entire thing is just so hilarious that it's almost unbelievable. Neither Bush nor Obama did anything of substance to get Bin Laden.
You said it quite well. There's nothing wrong with speculation and hypothesizing but when there's no way to test it then you run into problems.
In an ideal world, we'd be doing one of two things: Either putting in the required investment to test string theory, or not doing string theory and instead focusing on other problems.
I'd be the first person to defend fundamental and theoretical research, but I have to wonder if we really have a pressing NEED to do fundamental physics any more at this point. What about fusion energy or materials research?
String theorists like to say they are doing math but actual mathematicians would disagree strongly with that. Mathematics is based around precision and rigor. Go into any math department in the country and say you consider string theory to be rigorous and precise. They'd either laugh or stare at you in horror. Seriously, try it.
People who just to lab work should not be awarded PhDs. A PhD must have demonstrated ability to act as an independent researcher and come up with, as you put it, 'new' and 'innovative' things. Doesn't have to be Nobel-prize winning material, but it has to be at least somewhat interesting to someone versed in the field.
But I see this lab work-oriented phenomenon increasingly often in biology/medicine-related research. A supervisor/PI hands a lab protocol to a PhD student and they have to follow it to a T. Very little deviation or innovation is tolerated. In biology it's commonplace to treat PhD students like children.
Someone who's only job is to sit in a lab and collect data is not a PhD student. They are at best a lab technician. Problem is, you have to pay lab technicians actual salaries, so lots of labs use 'PhD students' as cheap labor.
Precisely. People construct this romantic version of physics history as a linear progression from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein to Schrodinger. But the fact is, physics has *mostly* been a collection of bungles and clusterfucks, with the truth just barely managing to seep up to the surface every once in a while through the thick tar of misinformation and pseudoscience. We just conveniently tend to forget the clusterfucks. But if you want to know when the clusterfucks were going on, just look at the 'silent periods'; the periods where history books have nothing to say. If there's no mention of any significant breakthroughs in a ten-year-span, it's probably because that ten-year span was a clusterfuck.
Our recent obsession with string theory is no different. 200 years from now no one will remember it at all, instead constructing their own romantic histories where the late 20th and 21st century physics was actually on the road to their own theory-of-everything, with the period from 1980 to 2010 being a curious blank area where no one was doing physics.
Lubos Motl, is that you?
...what?
If you read Ben Rich's memoirs he talks a lot about the interaction between the SR-71 project and the space project. After the SR-71 they obtained secret information that the USSR was ramping up its hydrogen production. At first they thought it must be for some hypersonic jet aircraft to compete with the US's SR-71. It was only after pouring hundreds of millions into developing a hydrogen-powered aircraft that they realized the USSR wasn't developing a plane - they were stocking up hydrogen for ICBMs and orbital rockets.
The hydrogen-powered plane project was scrapped soon afterwards.
The SR-71 was the fastest manned jet-powered aircraft and still holds that record. Also, I very much doubt that a secret replacement for it exists. The SR-71 was killed because spy satellites greatly decreased its relative utility, and that continues to be true. I fail to see a reason for a high-supersonic high-altitude military aircraft in 2015. Then again, the military carries out a lot of useless projects, so I wouldn't be surprised.
It's not about profitability, it's about profitably & RISK. The aircraft/airline industry has basically become locked into the 900 km/h, turbofan-powered, widebody business, because it's low-risk. It's the same reason few car companies made any hybrids or EVs until Tesla entered the market. A lot of companies now turn a profit on their hybrid/EV sales.
Am I saying that if they developed a supersonic plane they'd turn a profit? Nope. I'm saying it's very hard to predict how a supersonic transport would work in today's market.
Not many aspects of the SR-71 would have translated into a passenger jet. The thing was huge and it was composed almost entirely of fuel tanks - and it had a passenger capacity of 2. It was obscenely expensive to operate. It needed in-air refueling. In the 80's a journalist wrote a piece about how SR-71-based tech would lead to hypersonic transport planes, and Ben Rich - the head of Lockheed Skunkworks which designed the SR and one of the designers of the SR's intakes - objected and said that such a thing would never happen in his lifetime.
Not really. While this over-simplification ("It was too expensive!") might sound reasonable the true story is more complicated. Richard_at_work pointed at some of the issues. Another issue was that because of the Air France 4590 crash (which was largely due to bad luck), both British Airways and Air France got really jittery and anxious to pull the plug before another disaster happened.
Another thing that people ignore was that the Concorde was put to retirement largely because it was just a really old plane. It was designed in the 60's. It still had an _engineer_ in the cockpit - that's how old the design and avionics were. Unlike other planes designed during that period that are still flying, it never got any significant upgrades. It had a run of 27 years; more than good enough for any plane. Ultimately, it's not that Concorde failed, it's that we failed to replace it.
Plasma physics researchers unaffiliated with L-M have already pointed out numerous problems with their design. The central rings need to be superconducting in the face of intense neutron flux. No known material is capable of this. So at the very least we need a materials science breakthrough for L-M's design to be remotely feasible.
You're basically summarizing why fusion is unlikely to work in a small-scale design in the near future. Technological progress is great but we need an energy solution NOW.
I'd argue that even the 'passive safety' thing isn't really unique to fusion; modern fission designs are already pretty safe - some even have passive safety.
It's going to produce interesting science for way more than three years. Remember that the tevatron shut down four years ago but physicists are still finding new and interesting stuff in the data it collected. I wouldn't be surprised if new discoveries came out of the LHC data for ten or even twenty years after shutdown.