No. The Halting Problem belongs to class UNDECIDABLE, not class NP-Hard. I admire your attempt at rationalizing it, but Alan Turing proved this to the world's satisfaction. If you wish to prove the Halting Problem does not belong to UNDECIDABLE then you're going to have an uphill road to hoe. If you still believe the Halting Problem belongs to NP-Hard, I would suggest you begin by correcting its Wikipedia article.)
Your argument involving an oracle that solves the Halting Problem is absurd because you're assuming the existence of hypercomputation -- and if such an oracle could exist, then we would simultaneously have P=NP and P != NP. Martin Davis has gone so far as to declare hypercomputation both "a myth" and "a nonexistent discipline." Those are strong words coming from one of the brightest lights in the field of computational theory and computational complexity.
It's a bedrock principle of logic that if you start from a false proposition anything can be proven. You assume the existence of an oracle that can solve the Halting Problem. This is a false proposition. Anything can be proven once you make oracular assumptions.
At this point I'm pretty sure you're trolling. The Halting Problem is UNDECIDABLE -- it exists in a complexity class considerably beyond what is normally thought of as 'NP-Hard'.
And if you don't understand my parenthetical remark, well... that should be taken as a sign that your computational theory is seriously lacking. The meaning is quite clear to someone who has a proper understanding of what complexity class NP-Hard is about.
No, even then your characterization of NP-Hard is incorrect.
"A class of problems is NP-Hard if being able to solve it in polynomial time..."
If you can solve it in polynomial time, then it's in P. Even under your revised definition, you're implicitly arguing that P=NP, because that's the only way you can solve an NP-Hard problem in polynomial time. (And even then, you would only be able to solve the NP-Complete subset of NP-Hard.)
Permit me to stand for a moment on my all-but-dissertation Ph.D. in theoretical computer science:
You're wrong.
Sorry, but the original poster was essentially correct. Your definition would make sense if it involved the existence of a polynomial-time transformation between an NP-Complete problem and the purported NP-Hard problem, but saying that "a solution to an NP-Hard problem allows for NP to be solved in polynomial time" is... febrile. If an NP-Complete problem can be solved in polynomial time, then P=NP. Since we believe P != NP, your claim would mean NP-Hard problems would have no solutions, which would mean they would really belong to class UNDECIDABLE, and... etc. I don't think you meant to go there.
With respect to the OP's talk about direction, I understood that to be a layman's distinction between solution and verification. If that was the OP's intent then he's guilty of at most an infelicitous choice of words -- he's not "at best confused, and essentially wrong."
Sure, for some definition of "constituent parts". The relativistic jets at each pole of a spinning black hole are made up principally (overwhelmingly) of naked subatomic particles like protons, antiprotons, electrons and positrons. (At least, that's the current theory. Our observational data is sorely lacking.)
They don't get broken down further because then you'd have naked quarks, and the Nuclear Strong Force gives that one an emphatic thumbs-down. Quarks are always found bound together; they are never found in isolation.
Sigh. This is the last I'll be writing on the subject, because you're apparently not even bothering to read your own links.
Unless, of course, He did. The physics checks out; We've recreated the conditions in the lab. Not hardly. Check your own link: it says several times that an analogue of a gravitic event horizon was used, not an actual event horizon. We haven't recreated a gravitic event horizon in the lab. To the best of our knowledge we've never created a gravitic event horizon in a lab. Finally, demonstrating that something works in an analogue of an environment is useful and illuminating, but it is not in any way proof that it works a certain way in the actual environment. I repeat that Hawking's work in this area is ground-breaking and critical and widely believed to be a correct description of reality, but it is not proven, not even in the loosey-goosey sense of the word. Remember that at one point the luminiferous ether was the best description of reality, too.
If it's not rotating at the speed of light, then the particles do not 'think' better of it and shoot out the poles... where would they get the energy to escape from the accretion disk then? If I throw two tennis balls and they collide, they bounce off each other. If I want to make them bounce harder (travel faster), I just throw them harder. The analogy is near-exact for particles. Once they've gone from light-years away to the event horizon they've picked up an unthinkable amount of energy from descending through the gravity well. All it takes is a collision and the vector changes and the particle will go away from the black hole like a bat out of hell. And if it was traveling with more than escape velocity -- which is possible, since we're outside the event horizon -- that particle will never return to the black hole.
However, here's the glitch that you missed: Non-rotating black holes also emit energy. I didn't, actually. Stationary black holes are also believed to emit Hawking radiation. However, since it will not become visible until the ambient temperature of the universe drops below a millionth of a kelvin or so, no astronomical black hole has ever been observed radiating Hawking energy. (Black holes of a Planck mass or so are conjectured to exist and to evaporate almost instantly via Hawking radiation, but stellar-mass holes just don't.) A stellar-mass black hole emits Hawking radiation of only about 50 nanokelvins (!!), meaning it cannot be detected against a cosmic microwave background of 2.7K. This also means that instead of evaporating via the Hawking process, stellar-mass black holes will gain mass from the CMB rather than radiate away.
Science isn't about absolute proof, it's about the best fit model. Yes. On this point we're agreed. But when you make false claims about something having been proven when it hasn't been (hell, we haven't even directly observed a black hole yet, so even that's a lot less settled than many people might think!), claiming that demonstrating something in an analogue is the same as proving it in the real environment, and so forth, it just destroys your credibility.
Seriously. Sit down with a good graduate-level textbook on general relativity. You have a grasp of this subject that veers between the accurate and the wildly inaccurate. Science deserves better than that.
Hawking proved... No, he did not. Hawking has a mathematical description that's consistent with quantum mechanics and general relativity, but that doesn't mean the universe actually works this way. There have been a large number of highly promising theoretical constructs that have never been observed in reality and are believed to not exist. Hawking radiation may be one of them. Most physicists believe Hawking radiation exists and is a real phenomena, but it has never been observed in reality. (We have, however, observed analogues to Hawking radiation from acoustic 'black holes'.)
Highly charged particles are emitted at the poles of a black hole... No, they are not. Those jets are made of matter that was about to cross the event horizon until they suddenly and violently thought better of it. The area around an accreting black hole is perhaps the most violent spot imaginable in the universe; it should be no surprise whatsoever that once something has gone around the accretion disc a few million times it would have enough kinetic energy to go like hell off in another direction as soon as it collides with another particle. One of the billiard-balls rockets across the event horizon and the other uses its kinetic energy to escape from the accretion disc. (This is handwaving a lot of astrophysics, but is basically accurate.)
the black hole itself is also rotating at the speed of light... No, it is not. Black holes have to obey the cosmic speed limit just like everything else. Also, not all black holes possess angular momentum. General relativity gives perfectly satisfactory predictions for stationary black holes.
The information, that is the quantum state, of mass and energy that is eaten by a blackhole is later ejected as what could be termed high energy 'noise'; x-rays and gamma rays. Not in the slightest. Hawking radiation is about the longest-wavelength (which means lowest-energy) stuff in the universe. The reason for this is really simple: although it started off as unbelievably energetic, it had to expend virtually all of its energy escaping from where it was created a nanometer beyond the event horizon.
No offense, but you need to sit down with a good book on general relativity. (I like Sean Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry. YMMV.)
I suggest an experiment. Run a red light and get pulled over. When it comes time to hand over your license and registration, wrap a $50 bill around it before handing it over to the cop.
If the cop returns your license and registration but not the fifty, and apologizes to you for his error... then you live in a blatantly corrupt country.
Otherwise, you live in a country that does not live up to the ethical standards you wish it would, but it is not a blatantly corrupt country.
Good grief, man. If you seriously think the United States is a blatantly corrupt country, what the hell do you call Afghanistan or Libya?
The point is this: the person I was responding to claimed that the English Civil War demonstrated that the origin of power in the United Kingdom was just as rooted in rebellion as the origin of power in the United States is. And that's simply not true. Elizabeth II (who is not a figurehead monarch: she is the only person in the UK who can authorize war or declare peace, and that's one hell of a power; further, she can unilaterally block Parliamentary attempts to limit the Crown's interests or royal prerogatives -- a monarchial benefit that I find hard to believe still exists today in the UK) traces her right to rule back to William the Conqueror, not William Who Ended Oppression. Elizabeth II's authority derives from a long-ago act of conquest, not a long-ago act of rebellion.
With respect to "I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing," I never said I believed the US's national-origin story was a good thing. I only said that it was ours. I'm not saying the UK national-origin story is bad because it's rooted in conquest, nor am I saying the US national-origin story is good because it's rooted in rebellion. I'm only saying they're different and shouldn't be expected to be the same.
Although I agree that the UK is a model system for democracies everywhere, that's not the point. The original poster said that unlike much of Europe and Asia, America traces its origins back to the overthrow of absolute rule rather than someone's imposition of it. A respondent argued that modern-day Great Britain was obviously an exception to that, due to the English Civil War. I don't buy that. If you trace Elizabeth II's ancestry back, you reach William the Conqueror. The entire reason Elizabeth is monarch is because she happens to be the descendant of someone who imposed absolute rule. The basis for Elizabeth II's monarchy rests in William the Conqueror's invasion of England, whereas the basis for Barack Obama's presidency goes back to the overthrow of George III's rule.
Sorry there are plenty of examples either way, where this happens. Very recent one's, even ongoing one's. You are just cherry picking.
If I'm cherrypicking, then it ought to be easy for you to find five clear counterexamples for each of my examples. After all, I'm cherrypicking. I invite you to do this. If I'm in error I'd love to be corrected. The requirements are simple:
It must be state-sponsored, or at the very least state-condoned, domestic oppression
It must involve large amounts of lethal violence
The enforcers of the state must be willing participants
The oppressed must be in a disarmed state
The oppressed must overcome the oppressors.
Nelson Mandela and the ANC doesn't count: he started his career in armed insurrection. Suu Kyi doesn't count: the Burmese military rank-and-file were passively refusing to enforce the junta's orders. (For instance, allowing visitors to come and go from her place of detention pretty much at-will, and turning a blind eye as she talked to the media.) Ceaucescu's Romania doesn't count: the enforcers were defecting to the protesters in record numbers. Honecker's East Germany doesn't count: when the Berlin Wall fell East German guards were among the most enthusiastic participants. Gandhi doesn't count: he was depending on English decency and sense of fair play to keep his followers alive. (Had Great Britain handled Gandhi the same way they handled 19th-century uprisings in India, Gandhi would have been strapped to a cannon and executed long before he made it halfway to the sea for his salt.) Yeltsin doesn't count: when the KGB ordered their elite counterterror forces to take back government, the counterterror forces refused.
When the people with the guns refuse to use guns, yes, unarmed protest movements can have stunning successes. I'm all in favor of them. But when the people with the guns are willing to use them to ensure their continued rule, unarmed protest movements turn into massacres.
If I'm cherrypicking, then show me five counterexamples for each of the large-scale massacres I showed. Just make sure they pass the requirements, because otherwise you're moving the goalposts.
Of course only an American would think that they are unique in overthrowing tyranny.
He never said we were unique. He only said that in comparison to Europe and Asia, our country was not founded by a conquering king. You hold up Great Britain as an example of a country that's thrown off tyranny, but I suspect you never quite passed your A-levels in history. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William I, after all, a guy better known to history as William the Conqueror. So, no, I'm not going to accept Great Britain as an example of a country that avoided being founded by a conquering king, given a conquering king is in the direct ancestry of your current monarch.
We also find some sections of the American populace self centered, selfish.
I'd be quite surprised if you didn't. In a nation of over 300 million people there are going to be large portions of it that you don't like. There are large portions I don't particularly like, either.
I honestly think your founding fathers is they could see what you have become as a nation would disown you.
Of course they would. "Wait, you gave the vote to women, people without property, and the darkies?!"
In the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., one of Jefferson's finest writings is engraved on the wall in huge letters for the world to see.
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
So, yes, we would definitely be disowned by the Founding Fathers. But that's okay. Thomas Jefferson himself gave us permission to improve upon the model they left us. The Framers were horribly flawed human beings. Their great triumph was not that they gave us a Constitution, but they gave us a process: not a law fixed and unchanging for all time, but a means by which we could gradually make our country a shining beacon upon the hill. Rather beautiful, really.
Ah, I see. You were actually meaning to imply they'd be ashamed of how we conduct ourselves because we don't happen to agree with you? Well. Speaking as a Virginian, which is to say a member of one of the original Colonies that rebelled against George III, let me give you the traditional Virginian response to foreigners who want to tell us how we should rule ourselves: go away.
Maybe our system is correct, maybe it's not. Either way, we're not going to pay your opinion about how we should live the slightest tinker's dam of attention. Instead we'll talk with each other, our communities, our neighbors, and we'll fumble our way forward into the future together.
This idea that an unarmed populace couldn't fight a tyrannical government is pretty weak to be honest.
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the death-knells of the millions of oppressed North Koreans, over the conflagration of the Jews and the Romany and the homosexuals and the dissenters in German-occupied Poland, over the cries of hunger of the one million Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor, the terrorized shrieks of the Armenians who were pursued by the Turks. We can go back even to the Mongol era, where the great Khan put large parts of Asia and Europe to the sword and unleashed a campaign of rape and terror the world had never seen before.
If you really think that an unarmed populace can quickly organize to resist an armed oppressor, then you are living in a state of utter delusion. In the K
When talking with a prosecutor, you should never say absolutely nothing. If you remain silent in the face of an accusation, your silence can be entered into evidence against you under the rules governing adoptive admission. If someone asks you, "So why did you kill him?" and you remain silent, your silence can be considered by a court to be an admission that you killed the person in question.
Not every instance of silence is admissible as an adoptive admission -- but the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are complicated and varied and unless you're a criminal defense lawyer you probably have no way of telling when silence is a good policy and when it will get you in trouble.
So, instead of being silent, you instead say, "If you give me your card, I'll have my lawyer get in touch with you to answer your questions." You take the card, you give it to your lawyer, and you follow his or her advice.
A good rule of thumb is that in a self-defense shooting scenario, 4 of 5 rounds fired will miss. (These numbers are born out by the historical record, BTW: they're not made up. Consider when the NYPD shot Amadou Diallo. Five officers, part of a highly-trained unit with advanced firearms training, opened fire on an unarmed and harmless Diallo from a range of under five meters. Despite the tactical environment being perfect -- the officers were at point blank range, they all had the time to make a proper firing stance, etc. -- of the 41 rounds fired, 22 rounds missed. That's over a 50% miss rate under perfect conditions by well-trained personnel.)
Another good rule of thumb is that you need to place a minimum of two rounds into your target to have good -- not necessarily great, but just good -- odds of stopping the threat.
Do the math and you quickly discover that to place two rounds on target, with each round having an 80% chance of missing, results in you needing 14 rounds in the magazine. That means that with a 15-round Beretta 92, a 17-round Glock 17, a 16-round FN FNP-9, a 13-round Browning High-Power, etc., you can be relatively confident of having enough ammunition in the magazine to stop one -- one -- attacker.
There's a reason why cops carry high-capacity magazines and at least two spares, and it's the same reason why civilians who use pistols for self-defense need high-cap magazines and at least two spares.
Sorry: I'm not going to join an argument about that. I will only reiterate what I said: our rights exist independent of the technologies used to implement those rights. If we have the right to freely communicate with other human beings, then we also have the right to put up web pages: the technology exists to facilitate our right. Too many people in these debates focus on technologies rather than principles.
Yes: and in a very real sense, you've got the facts exactly right and the conclusions exactly wrong.
You have the right to keep and bear arms. That right exists independent of technological developments. If you had instead, say, the right to keep and bear a flintlock pistol, then the instant cap-and-ball revolvers were developed you'd be unable to use them. Flintlocks, cap-and-ball, semiautomatics, the whole nine yards, are technologies that implement one of your natural rights: but your right is to keep and bear arms, not to keep and bear only the technologies of a given time.
In a similar vein, you have no right to a secret ballot. Your right is to have a say in participatory democracy via the voting process. The secret ballot, like the absentee ballot and the public ballot, are all technologies that exist to implement your right. You really don't want a Constitutional guarantee of a secret ballot, because then you'd be unable to use absentee ballots, nor would you be able to use new technologies yet to be developed that are superior to the secret ballot. Requiring, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a secret ballot," is really not that far from, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a flintlock pistol." It confuses a technology meant to facilitate the exercise of a right with the right itself.
Read up on the secret ballot, please. Just because nominations are made secretly and in writing is insufficient for them to be considered secret ballots. I'd suggest starting with the Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot ), myself: it has an excellent overview.
You already can prove who you voted for: use an absentee ballot. If your boss is offering you $1000 to vote for his candidate, give your blank absentee ballot to your boss, let him fill it out how he wants and let him mail it in.
The entire State of Oregon has moved to absentee ballots. It's not possible to file a truly secret ballot in Oregon any more. The residents of Oregon like it just fine, and they haven't reported any significant hike in vote fraud.
It's quite possible -- likely, even! -- that yes, we have discovered better ways. That doesn't mean those better ways are Constitutionally required, though.
If you go to the Jefferson Memorial in DC, carved on one wall is a speech from Jefferson in which he declares that he knows the Constitution to be an imperfect document, and that he entrusts future generations with the task of correcting it by the process of amendment. If you believe the secret ballot is a fundamental right, then you need to acknowledge the absence of that as a flaw in the Constitution, and seek to correct that flaw by the process of amendment.
You're right that the Supreme Court has the right to declare that the secret ballot is now a Constitutional requirement. There are many ways they could do this, the most obvious being to incorporate it under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process. (SDP guarantees "those things inherent in the very concept of ordered liberty". If SCOTUS decides the secret ballot is inherent in the concept of ordered liberty, bang, there you go.)
However, given the absence of SCOTUS precedent stating that the secret ballot is a fundamental right, the judge is absolutely correct to say there is no fundamental right.
What the French considered to be a "secret ballot" would not be considered one by today's standards. See Wikipedia's page on the secret ballot for a good overview of what a secret ballot requires, and why.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until 1888. The secret ballot cannot be something the Framers envisioned as one of our natural rights, because the secret ballot wasn't even invented until the 1850s. (Seriously.)
If this nation conducted its presidential elections by a variety of non-secret ballot systems from 1792 to 1892, it's hard for me to take you seriously when you say that the secret ballot is a fundamental right.
There is no Constitutional right to a secret ballot.
In the State of Oregon, all voting is done by absentee ballot. There's no privacy screen around you as you cast your vote. Your employer can stop by and say, "I'll pay you $1000 for your unused ballot, so I can fill it out how I want and submit it." If you're in an abusive family, your domineering alcoholic bipolar parent might force you to fill out the absentee ballot in front of them so they can control how you vote. There is no way the absentee ballot is considered a secret ballot, and yet we have no trouble when an entire state converts to voting by absentee ballot.
The State of West Virginia guarantees, in its state constitution, every resident's right to cast a public ballot. There's no mention of the secret ballot.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until it was first adopted by the city of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888. The State of Massachusetts followed soon after. The first President to be elected by secret ballot was Grover Cleveland, in 1892.
We didn't use secret ballots to elect Washington, Jefferson, Jackson or Lincoln.
So, yeah. Anyone who claims we have a constitutional right to a secret ballot has an uphill road to hoe. History clearly shows that at no point in our nation's history has any court held the secret ballot to be a right.
For long-term storage I've had good luck with the following. You will need:
Heavyweight plastic vacuum-sealable bags
Vacuum cleaner
Tank of dry nitrogen (ask a local welder where he gets his)
Place your objects in a vacuum-sealable bag. Use the vacuum cleaner to extract as much air as possible from the bag. Replace the air with dry nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen at 0% humidity), but do not overinflate: leave some room for the nitrogen to expand with temperature changes. Seal the bag. Place the bag inside an opaque plastic bag (a black garbage bag works well) and put into storage.
The two major contributors to chemical decomposition over time are oxygen and energy. By purging the air (78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, approx) with nitrogen, you get rid of most of the oxygen. By making sure you're using dry nitrogen there's no water present in the bag, and water as you can probably figure out is an oxygen source. No oxygen equals no oxidation reaction. Nitrogen is also a fairly inert gas: it's not argon-level of inert, but it's pretty damned unreactive.
By putting things into a black garbage bag, you seal it off from sunlight. No more ultraviolet light doing ultraviolent things to valence shells, kicking out electrons, etcetera.
Now that you've got oxidation and ultraviolet light controlled, store it in a fairly temperature-controlled place. 25 years of thermal shock can destroy things, and your keepsakes deserve better. A basement works well.
Insofar as how to make sure the digital media is still readable... buy a cheap laptop and put that in the nitrogen-atmosphere, UV-shielded, temperature-controlled time capsule, too, along with a USB-to-RS232 cable. In 25 years we'll still be able to read data out over a serial connection, even if Ethernet is still a thing of the past.
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No. The Halting Problem belongs to class UNDECIDABLE, not class NP-Hard. I admire your attempt at rationalizing it, but Alan Turing proved this to the world's satisfaction. If you wish to prove the Halting Problem does not belong to UNDECIDABLE then you're going to have an uphill road to hoe. If you still believe the Halting Problem belongs to NP-Hard, I would suggest you begin by correcting its Wikipedia article.)
Your argument involving an oracle that solves the Halting Problem is absurd because you're assuming the existence of hypercomputation -- and if such an oracle could exist, then we would simultaneously have P=NP and P != NP. Martin Davis has gone so far as to declare hypercomputation both "a myth" and "a nonexistent discipline." Those are strong words coming from one of the brightest lights in the field of computational theory and computational complexity.
It's a bedrock principle of logic that if you start from a false proposition anything can be proven. You assume the existence of an oracle that can solve the Halting Problem. This is a false proposition. Anything can be proven once you make oracular assumptions.
At this point I'm pretty sure you're trolling. The Halting Problem is UNDECIDABLE -- it exists in a complexity class considerably beyond what is normally thought of as 'NP-Hard'.
And if you don't understand my parenthetical remark, well... that should be taken as a sign that your computational theory is seriously lacking. The meaning is quite clear to someone who has a proper understanding of what complexity class NP-Hard is about.
Goodbye, troll.
No, even then your characterization of NP-Hard is incorrect.
"A class of problems is NP-Hard if being able to solve it in polynomial time..."
If you can solve it in polynomial time, then it's in P. Even under your revised definition, you're implicitly arguing that P=NP, because that's the only way you can solve an NP-Hard problem in polynomial time. (And even then, you would only be able to solve the NP-Complete subset of NP-Hard.)
Permit me to stand for a moment on my all-but-dissertation Ph.D. in theoretical computer science:
You're wrong.
Sorry, but the original poster was essentially correct. Your definition would make sense if it involved the existence of a polynomial-time transformation between an NP-Complete problem and the purported NP-Hard problem, but saying that "a solution to an NP-Hard problem allows for NP to be solved in polynomial time" is ... febrile. If an NP-Complete problem can be solved in polynomial time, then P=NP. Since we believe P != NP, your claim would mean NP-Hard problems would have no solutions, which would mean they would really belong to class UNDECIDABLE, and... etc. I don't think you meant to go there.
With respect to the OP's talk about direction, I understood that to be a layman's distinction between solution and verification. If that was the OP's intent then he's guilty of at most an infelicitous choice of words -- he's not "at best confused, and essentially wrong."
Sure, for some definition of "constituent parts". The relativistic jets at each pole of a spinning black hole are made up principally (overwhelmingly) of naked subatomic particles like protons, antiprotons, electrons and positrons. (At least, that's the current theory. Our observational data is sorely lacking.)
They don't get broken down further because then you'd have naked quarks, and the Nuclear Strong Force gives that one an emphatic thumbs-down. Quarks are always found bound together; they are never found in isolation.
Sigh. This is the last I'll be writing on the subject, because you're apparently not even bothering to read your own links.
Unless, of course, He did. The physics checks out; We've recreated the conditions in the lab. Not hardly. Check your own link: it says several times that an analogue of a gravitic event horizon was used, not an actual event horizon. We haven't recreated a gravitic event horizon in the lab. To the best of our knowledge we've never created a gravitic event horizon in a lab. Finally, demonstrating that something works in an analogue of an environment is useful and illuminating, but it is not in any way proof that it works a certain way in the actual environment. I repeat that Hawking's work in this area is ground-breaking and critical and widely believed to be a correct description of reality, but it is not proven, not even in the loosey-goosey sense of the word. Remember that at one point the luminiferous ether was the best description of reality, too.
If it's not rotating at the speed of light, then the particles do not 'think' better of it and shoot out the poles... where would they get the energy to escape from the accretion disk then? If I throw two tennis balls and they collide, they bounce off each other. If I want to make them bounce harder (travel faster), I just throw them harder. The analogy is near-exact for particles. Once they've gone from light-years away to the event horizon they've picked up an unthinkable amount of energy from descending through the gravity well. All it takes is a collision and the vector changes and the particle will go away from the black hole like a bat out of hell. And if it was traveling with more than escape velocity -- which is possible, since we're outside the event horizon -- that particle will never return to the black hole.
However, here's the glitch that you missed: Non-rotating black holes also emit energy. I didn't, actually. Stationary black holes are also believed to emit Hawking radiation. However, since it will not become visible until the ambient temperature of the universe drops below a millionth of a kelvin or so, no astronomical black hole has ever been observed radiating Hawking energy. (Black holes of a Planck mass or so are conjectured to exist and to evaporate almost instantly via Hawking radiation, but stellar-mass holes just don't.) A stellar-mass black hole emits Hawking radiation of only about 50 nanokelvins (!!), meaning it cannot be detected against a cosmic microwave background of 2.7K. This also means that instead of evaporating via the Hawking process, stellar-mass black holes will gain mass from the CMB rather than radiate away.
Seriously. Sit down with a good graduate-level textbook on general relativity. You have a grasp of this subject that veers between the accurate and the wildly inaccurate. Science deserves better than that.
In no particular order:
Hawking proved... No, he did not. Hawking has a mathematical description that's consistent with quantum mechanics and general relativity, but that doesn't mean the universe actually works this way. There have been a large number of highly promising theoretical constructs that have never been observed in reality and are believed to not exist. Hawking radiation may be one of them. Most physicists believe Hawking radiation exists and is a real phenomena, but it has never been observed in reality. (We have, however, observed analogues to Hawking radiation from acoustic 'black holes'.)
Highly charged particles are emitted at the poles of a black hole... No, they are not. Those jets are made of matter that was about to cross the event horizon until they suddenly and violently thought better of it. The area around an accreting black hole is perhaps the most violent spot imaginable in the universe; it should be no surprise whatsoever that once something has gone around the accretion disc a few million times it would have enough kinetic energy to go like hell off in another direction as soon as it collides with another particle. One of the billiard-balls rockets across the event horizon and the other uses its kinetic energy to escape from the accretion disc. (This is handwaving a lot of astrophysics, but is basically accurate.)
the black hole itself is also rotating at the speed of light... No, it is not. Black holes have to obey the cosmic speed limit just like everything else. Also, not all black holes possess angular momentum. General relativity gives perfectly satisfactory predictions for stationary black holes.
The information, that is the quantum state, of mass and energy that is eaten by a blackhole is later ejected as what could be termed high energy 'noise'; x-rays and gamma rays. Not in the slightest. Hawking radiation is about the longest-wavelength (which means lowest-energy) stuff in the universe. The reason for this is really simple: although it started off as unbelievably energetic, it had to expend virtually all of its energy escaping from where it was created a nanometer beyond the event horizon.
No offense, but you need to sit down with a good book on general relativity. (I like Sean Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry. YMMV.)
I suggest an experiment. Run a red light and get pulled over. When it comes time to hand over your license and registration, wrap a $50 bill around it before handing it over to the cop.
If the cop returns your license and registration but not the fifty, and apologizes to you for his error... then you live in a blatantly corrupt country.
Otherwise, you live in a country that does not live up to the ethical standards you wish it would, but it is not a blatantly corrupt country.
Good grief, man. If you seriously think the United States is a blatantly corrupt country, what the hell do you call Afghanistan or Libya?
The point is this: the person I was responding to claimed that the English Civil War demonstrated that the origin of power in the United Kingdom was just as rooted in rebellion as the origin of power in the United States is. And that's simply not true. Elizabeth II (who is not a figurehead monarch: she is the only person in the UK who can authorize war or declare peace, and that's one hell of a power; further, she can unilaterally block Parliamentary attempts to limit the Crown's interests or royal prerogatives -- a monarchial benefit that I find hard to believe still exists today in the UK) traces her right to rule back to William the Conqueror, not William Who Ended Oppression. Elizabeth II's authority derives from a long-ago act of conquest, not a long-ago act of rebellion.
With respect to "I think I disagree with you that it's a good thing," I never said I believed the US's national-origin story was a good thing. I only said that it was ours. I'm not saying the UK national-origin story is bad because it's rooted in conquest, nor am I saying the US national-origin story is good because it's rooted in rebellion. I'm only saying they're different and shouldn't be expected to be the same.
Although I agree that the UK is a model system for democracies everywhere, that's not the point. The original poster said that unlike much of Europe and Asia, America traces its origins back to the overthrow of absolute rule rather than someone's imposition of it. A respondent argued that modern-day Great Britain was obviously an exception to that, due to the English Civil War. I don't buy that. If you trace Elizabeth II's ancestry back, you reach William the Conqueror. The entire reason Elizabeth is monarch is because she happens to be the descendant of someone who imposed absolute rule. The basis for Elizabeth II's monarchy rests in William the Conqueror's invasion of England, whereas the basis for Barack Obama's presidency goes back to the overthrow of George III's rule.
If I'm cherrypicking, then it ought to be easy for you to find five clear counterexamples for each of my examples. After all, I'm cherrypicking. I invite you to do this. If I'm in error I'd love to be corrected. The requirements are simple:
Nelson Mandela and the ANC doesn't count: he started his career in armed insurrection. Suu Kyi doesn't count: the Burmese military rank-and-file were passively refusing to enforce the junta's orders. (For instance, allowing visitors to come and go from her place of detention pretty much at-will, and turning a blind eye as she talked to the media.) Ceaucescu's Romania doesn't count: the enforcers were defecting to the protesters in record numbers. Honecker's East Germany doesn't count: when the Berlin Wall fell East German guards were among the most enthusiastic participants. Gandhi doesn't count: he was depending on English decency and sense of fair play to keep his followers alive. (Had Great Britain handled Gandhi the same way they handled 19th-century uprisings in India, Gandhi would have been strapped to a cannon and executed long before he made it halfway to the sea for his salt.) Yeltsin doesn't count: when the KGB ordered their elite counterterror forces to take back government, the counterterror forces refused.
When the people with the guns refuse to use guns, yes, unarmed protest movements can have stunning successes. I'm all in favor of them. But when the people with the guns are willing to use them to ensure their continued rule, unarmed protest movements turn into massacres.
If I'm cherrypicking, then show me five counterexamples for each of the large-scale massacres I showed. Just make sure they pass the requirements, because otherwise you're moving the goalposts.
He never said we were unique. He only said that in comparison to Europe and Asia, our country was not founded by a conquering king. You hold up Great Britain as an example of a country that's thrown off tyranny, but I suspect you never quite passed your A-levels in history. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William I, after all, a guy better known to history as William the Conqueror. So, no, I'm not going to accept Great Britain as an example of a country that avoided being founded by a conquering king, given a conquering king is in the direct ancestry of your current monarch.
I'd be quite surprised if you didn't. In a nation of over 300 million people there are going to be large portions of it that you don't like. There are large portions I don't particularly like, either.
Of course they would. "Wait, you gave the vote to women, people without property, and the darkies?!"
In the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., one of Jefferson's finest writings is engraved on the wall in huge letters for the world to see.
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
So, yes, we would definitely be disowned by the Founding Fathers. But that's okay. Thomas Jefferson himself gave us permission to improve upon the model they left us. The Framers were horribly flawed human beings. Their great triumph was not that they gave us a Constitution, but they gave us a process: not a law fixed and unchanging for all time, but a means by which we could gradually make our country a shining beacon upon the hill. Rather beautiful, really.
Ah, I see. You were actually meaning to imply they'd be ashamed of how we conduct ourselves because we don't happen to agree with you? Well. Speaking as a Virginian, which is to say a member of one of the original Colonies that rebelled against George III, let me give you the traditional Virginian response to foreigners who want to tell us how we should rule ourselves: go away.
Maybe our system is correct, maybe it's not. Either way, we're not going to pay your opinion about how we should live the slightest tinker's dam of attention. Instead we'll talk with each other, our communities, our neighbors, and we'll fumble our way forward into the future together.
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the death-knells of the millions of oppressed North Koreans, over the conflagration of the Jews and the Romany and the homosexuals and the dissenters in German-occupied Poland, over the cries of hunger of the one million Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor, the terrorized shrieks of the Armenians who were pursued by the Turks. We can go back even to the Mongol era, where the great Khan put large parts of Asia and Europe to the sword and unleashed a campaign of rape and terror the world had never seen before.
If you really think that an unarmed populace can quickly organize to resist an armed oppressor, then you are living in a state of utter delusion. In the K
When talking with a prosecutor, you should never say absolutely nothing. If you remain silent in the face of an accusation, your silence can be entered into evidence against you under the rules governing adoptive admission. If someone asks you, "So why did you kill him?" and you remain silent, your silence can be considered by a court to be an admission that you killed the person in question.
Not every instance of silence is admissible as an adoptive admission -- but the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are complicated and varied and unless you're a criminal defense lawyer you probably have no way of telling when silence is a good policy and when it will get you in trouble.
So, instead of being silent, you instead say, "If you give me your card, I'll have my lawyer get in touch with you to answer your questions." You take the card, you give it to your lawyer, and you follow his or her advice.
A good overview of the law regarding adoptive admissions and your potential risk when facing prosecutors: How To Avoid Going To Jail Under 18 USC 1001 For Lying To Investigators.
A good rule of thumb is that in a self-defense shooting scenario, 4 of 5 rounds fired will miss. (These numbers are born out by the historical record, BTW: they're not made up. Consider when the NYPD shot Amadou Diallo. Five officers, part of a highly-trained unit with advanced firearms training, opened fire on an unarmed and harmless Diallo from a range of under five meters. Despite the tactical environment being perfect -- the officers were at point blank range, they all had the time to make a proper firing stance, etc. -- of the 41 rounds fired, 22 rounds missed. That's over a 50% miss rate under perfect conditions by well-trained personnel.)
Another good rule of thumb is that you need to place a minimum of two rounds into your target to have good -- not necessarily great, but just good -- odds of stopping the threat.
Do the math and you quickly discover that to place two rounds on target, with each round having an 80% chance of missing, results in you needing 14 rounds in the magazine. That means that with a 15-round Beretta 92, a 17-round Glock 17, a 16-round FN FNP-9, a 13-round Browning High-Power, etc., you can be relatively confident of having enough ammunition in the magazine to stop one -- one -- attacker.
There's a reason why cops carry high-capacity magazines and at least two spares, and it's the same reason why civilians who use pistols for self-defense need high-cap magazines and at least two spares.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/romney/windows.asp
Per Snopes, although it is true that Romney made that remark, it was clearly told as a joke meant to lighten the mood. It was not a serious comment.
Sorry: I'm not going to join an argument about that. I will only reiterate what I said: our rights exist independent of the technologies used to implement those rights. If we have the right to freely communicate with other human beings, then we also have the right to put up web pages: the technology exists to facilitate our right. Too many people in these debates focus on technologies rather than principles.
Yes: and in a very real sense, you've got the facts exactly right and the conclusions exactly wrong.
You have the right to keep and bear arms. That right exists independent of technological developments. If you had instead, say, the right to keep and bear a flintlock pistol, then the instant cap-and-ball revolvers were developed you'd be unable to use them. Flintlocks, cap-and-ball, semiautomatics, the whole nine yards, are technologies that implement one of your natural rights: but your right is to keep and bear arms, not to keep and bear only the technologies of a given time.
In a similar vein, you have no right to a secret ballot. Your right is to have a say in participatory democracy via the voting process. The secret ballot, like the absentee ballot and the public ballot, are all technologies that exist to implement your right. You really don't want a Constitutional guarantee of a secret ballot, because then you'd be unable to use absentee ballots, nor would you be able to use new technologies yet to be developed that are superior to the secret ballot. Requiring, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a secret ballot," is really not that far from, "All Americans have a Constitutional right to a flintlock pistol." It confuses a technology meant to facilitate the exercise of a right with the right itself.
Read up on the secret ballot, please. Just because nominations are made secretly and in writing is insufficient for them to be considered secret ballots. I'd suggest starting with the Wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot ), myself: it has an excellent overview.
You already can prove who you voted for: use an absentee ballot. If your boss is offering you $1000 to vote for his candidate, give your blank absentee ballot to your boss, let him fill it out how he wants and let him mail it in.
The entire State of Oregon has moved to absentee ballots. It's not possible to file a truly secret ballot in Oregon any more. The residents of Oregon like it just fine, and they haven't reported any significant hike in vote fraud.
It's quite possible -- likely, even! -- that yes, we have discovered better ways. That doesn't mean those better ways are Constitutionally required, though.
If you go to the Jefferson Memorial in DC, carved on one wall is a speech from Jefferson in which he declares that he knows the Constitution to be an imperfect document, and that he entrusts future generations with the task of correcting it by the process of amendment. If you believe the secret ballot is a fundamental right, then you need to acknowledge the absence of that as a flaw in the Constitution, and seek to correct that flaw by the process of amendment.
No -- the Supreme Court gets the last say.
You're right that the Supreme Court has the right to declare that the secret ballot is now a Constitutional requirement. There are many ways they could do this, the most obvious being to incorporate it under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process. (SDP guarantees "those things inherent in the very concept of ordered liberty". If SCOTUS decides the secret ballot is inherent in the concept of ordered liberty, bang, there you go.)
However, given the absence of SCOTUS precedent stating that the secret ballot is a fundamental right, the judge is absolutely correct to say there is no fundamental right.
What the French considered to be a "secret ballot" would not be considered one by today's standards. See Wikipedia's page on the secret ballot for a good overview of what a secret ballot requires, and why.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until 1888. The secret ballot cannot be something the Framers envisioned as one of our natural rights, because the secret ballot wasn't even invented until the 1850s. (Seriously.)
If this nation conducted its presidential elections by a variety of non-secret ballot systems from 1792 to 1892, it's hard for me to take you seriously when you say that the secret ballot is a fundamental right.
There is no Constitutional right to a secret ballot.
In the State of Oregon, all voting is done by absentee ballot. There's no privacy screen around you as you cast your vote. Your employer can stop by and say, "I'll pay you $1000 for your unused ballot, so I can fill it out how I want and submit it." If you're in an abusive family, your domineering alcoholic bipolar parent might force you to fill out the absentee ballot in front of them so they can control how you vote. There is no way the absentee ballot is considered a secret ballot, and yet we have no trouble when an entire state converts to voting by absentee ballot.
The State of West Virginia guarantees, in its state constitution, every resident's right to cast a public ballot. There's no mention of the secret ballot.
The secret ballot wasn't in use anywhere in the United States until it was first adopted by the city of Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888. The State of Massachusetts followed soon after. The first President to be elected by secret ballot was Grover Cleveland, in 1892.
We didn't use secret ballots to elect Washington, Jefferson, Jackson or Lincoln.
So, yeah. Anyone who claims we have a constitutional right to a secret ballot has an uphill road to hoe. History clearly shows that at no point in our nation's history has any court held the secret ballot to be a right.
For long-term storage I've had good luck with the following. You will need:
Place your objects in a vacuum-sealable bag. Use the vacuum cleaner to extract as much air as possible from the bag. Replace the air with dry nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen at 0% humidity), but do not overinflate: leave some room for the nitrogen to expand with temperature changes. Seal the bag. Place the bag inside an opaque plastic bag (a black garbage bag works well) and put into storage.
The two major contributors to chemical decomposition over time are oxygen and energy. By purging the air (78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, approx) with nitrogen, you get rid of most of the oxygen. By making sure you're using dry nitrogen there's no water present in the bag, and water as you can probably figure out is an oxygen source. No oxygen equals no oxidation reaction. Nitrogen is also a fairly inert gas: it's not argon-level of inert, but it's pretty damned unreactive.
By putting things into a black garbage bag, you seal it off from sunlight. No more ultraviolet light doing ultraviolent things to valence shells, kicking out electrons, etcetera.
Now that you've got oxidation and ultraviolet light controlled, store it in a fairly temperature-controlled place. 25 years of thermal shock can destroy things, and your keepsakes deserve better. A basement works well.
Insofar as how to make sure the digital media is still readable... buy a cheap laptop and put that in the nitrogen-atmosphere, UV-shielded, temperature-controlled time capsule, too, along with a USB-to-RS232 cable. In 25 years we'll still be able to read data out over a serial connection, even if Ethernet is still a thing of the past.