Well no. The reason that some things are forbidden but not enforced is that enforcement would be more expensive than the damage done by the crime.
So piracy is dependant on "most" people being entirely fair to studios. If it ever threatens their survival of course you're right.
But once piracy grows too large you have only 2 choices : 1) enforcement of copyright laws, irrespective of the means 2) no more production except for ideological reasons, or by way of a commercial (say "why stoning women is good for them" by your "friendly" neighbourhood imam)
Just like enforcing theft is not socially acceptable until it happens on a large scale with consequences big enough to justify the inconvenience to fair people.
It's all in the price, you see. The scary ways of enforcing copyright are currently too expensive, in votes, in police budgets, in... and foremost in the inconvenience they'll cause everyone. If that changes, expect "draconian" laws.
All the infrastructure for very draconian systems is already in place. The price, in votes, in budgets, in interference, is simply too high for the moment (you might also try to vote republican, since they have a much lower threshold for acceptable interference of the government). You know, like actual CO2 policies. People want to implement them, but can't pay up.
Thank God we live in a democracy.
Conclusion : you want to keep pirating, or simply "surfing free" ? Make sure nobody else in your neighbourhood does it, thereby lowering the rewards of any potential enforcement. Lower the damages.
Of course economic theory states that that is impossible and that the group of people not playing fair can only grow over time. It also grows exponentially, thereby making 100% sure that at some point the threshold that necessitates draconian enforcement will be crossed. In other words, piracy can only expand and explode. The explosion at some point costing so much as to make sure that even a 99 year old coma patient would vote for draconian enforcement of copyright.
They think something is not legal. The opposing party does not agree, so they take it to the court.
This seems to me exactly the situation where you'd want people to use the courts. Australia's a democracy. Everybody has the right to complain, and they may be right when they complain. Even Disney.
Call again when you have a verdict. Then you have actual information to report.
There exist in "real space" "event horizons", according to relativity. What are event horizons ? Places where gravity IS infinite (not : "approaches infinity"). That's impossible since that would require infinite amounts of energy.
Or another paradox of it can be stated simply : any particle that passes through an event horizon would be accelerated to light speed (it would not approach light speed, it would achieve light speed, one paradox is where the -infinite- energy for this acceleration would come from). Now you would think that particle would stop in the center of the black hole. However, the question here is "when would that happen ?". Due to passage through an event horizon time stops for this particle (due to light speed). It would no longer interact with the space around it, because it has no time to do so. Therefore it should come back out the other way (without slowing down, since it would only be pursued by a graviton, which would never quite catch up), and not add to the mass of the black hole. That is most certainly not what happens.
Another problem is that if gravity is infinite at the event horizon, then just how big is it beyond the event horizon ? It can be proven that it has to be bigger than infinite, and keep getting bigger until the center, where it would somehow drop back down to zero (like in the center of the earth, you might think that the earth would be crushing inwards at the center of the earth, but that's not true, and if you dig a tunnel straight down, after passing about 2/3rd's of the way to the center, you'd start getting lighter, to become weightless in the center, then for 1/3 of the radius of the earth while coming out of the other side your weight would increase to above what it would be at the surface, then decrease again. For black holes this "hole in gravity" would be infinitely small, but it'd still exist).
It's true that Einstein didn't like paradoxes, and was, for a while, convinced that his theory did not contain any. Unfortunately Schwarzschild put an end to that, resulting in Einstein describing general relativity (and special relativity) as "his biggest mistake ever". He would later disagree with that, while still agreeing relativity was a mistake, he'd describe quantum mechanics as his biggest mistake ever.
He was right : compared to the couple of paradoxes in relativity, quantum mechanics has whole swarms of the blasted things.
Quantum mechanics
Let's take one paradox : it violates the FTL requirement but has no alternative for gravity.
Another : the symmetry of particles has to be both broken and intact for gravitons (and a few others).
There are multiple "correct" and "real" states of a single particle, NOT correlated with a chance : a particle can have 2 DIFFERENT speeds at the same time with probability 100%. That means that the sum of probabilities in quantum mechanics cannot be guaranteed to be 100%. But can in some cases be 200% or more, which is by definition impossible.
Quantum mechanics both preserves AND does not preserve a number of symmetries.
And best of all : quantum mechanics predicts that all particles have zero inertia (which is the paradox they're trying to solve by building the LHC). Everything around us should speed up to c basically immediately and never slow down again. After a really, really short while all particle interactions would stop (due to speed limitations of the force carrying particles) and the universe would become really boring.
So why do we accept quantum mechanics anyway ? Well it's very very accurate in predicting the outcomes of experiments, despite it's fundamental inconsistency. That means that in quantum mechanical calculations you have to "stay away" from the paradoxes, and you'll do fine. But that's just about the best physics has as an advice for the moment.
"Yes every particle would accelerate to light speed, let's just ignore it and assume it doesn't happen, here fill in the values from the mass tables" is a phrase hear
The problem with paradoxes is simple. If you throw out any theory with paradoxes, you can start by dumping : -> big bang theory -> quantum mechanics -> relativity -> newtonian physics
There wouldn't be much left :
Indeed if scientist respected the laws of mathematics there would be no paradoxes in physics. Any theory containing even a single paradox would be thrown out the window immediately, like they are in mathematics. You could simply say time travel has the potential to create paradoxes... and is therefore impossible...
It wasn't to be : It wasn't very practical with physics theory. After all, the big bang theory requires FTL travel (faster than light) and a "limited" suspension of at least causality, along with changing a few universal constants here and there (in fact even Genesis is more likely : suppose an "eternal" being, alive or not created our universe, and you don't have any causality problems. Who created the creator ? Nobody, he's always been. Mathematically that's simple to express and quite consistent. Of course the 7-days stuff of Genesis is a bit more problematic). Oops. Physicists weren't quite ready to dump that one.
Newton's physics would be thrown out, due to the black body radiation paradox (has nothing to do with black holes). But as long as nothing was there to replace it, nobody really thought throwing it out was a good idea.
Relativity would get thrown out due to Schwarzchild geometry (black holes), and quantum mechanics would get thrown out for a hundred reasons, it's "known paradox count" is somewhat of an embarrassment really.
So physics just "tries to get along" with paradoxes, which never works in practice, so basically experiments just like to get close to paradoxes, because in the real world they don't exist. Therefore the paradoxes we're seeing in theories are really something that's not described, rather than a real paradox. Sometimes we really can't get close enough to take a look, which is the case with black holes, or the edge of the universe (if there indeed is one, like the big bang theory predicts), in that case we're stuck, and the only option is to search for the needle in the haystack some other place.
That obviously brings the problem which paradoxes are acceptable and which aren't. Nobody's given even a basic answer to that one though. Apparently paradoxes are acceptable as long as they only manifest in places we know nothing about.
Paradoxes are also the real reason for the claim "passing through a black hole makes anything possible", which is simply another way to say that once you've proven 1=2, you can prove anything, no matter how wrong. Of course the problem is in our understanding of black holes, which is mathematically inconsistent, the problem is not that inside black holes anything is possible. Same goes for any other paradox in physics.
Of course many people believe that since there are many "paradoxes" in physical theories, especially quantum mechanics, everything is really possible, if you only think hard enough about it. However history does show us that every single time we approached a paradox in experiment, it turned out our theories produced the paradox, and the world disagreed with our theories.
You can resolve the black body paradox of Newton's theories yourself. Google the "black body radiation problem" (the third link is nice). Then heat up a piece of metal until it glows. According to Newton's physics if you do that, the universe should explode (calculate this for yourself). Or to put it mathematically, the energy output in radiation should "approach infinity", which is another way of saying "this should produce a huge bang". There you've just explored one of the great historical paradoxes. All paradoxes are like this.
What does that mean "workers in charge" ? How are conflicts resolved ?
We all know what answer the unions have to that question. Incidentally it's the same answer all socialist states had.
Besides, we all know that "progressive" socialism is simply : "give me stuff for free, force others to work for it (ie tax them)" nothing more. It's getting to the point where I'm having trouble believing it was ever different. Then again, given how Marx himself lived (leeched of his family) perhaps it never was different. What are your thoughts on that ? Socialism started with someone leeching off of others. It is about leeching off of others. It is only supported by leeches (like Ayers). The only real stronghold of socialism is university campusses and government handout centers, filled to the brim with people who don't want to take care of themselves, but party and complain.
Needless to say, it (to say the least) does not lead to better circumstances for anyone.
The difference between Science and anything else you mention in your post is that science is specifically falsifiable. Meaning that if there isn't a specific way to prove it wrong, then it cannot be considered science.
Really ? Then tell me how someone, a normal guy in the street, can falsify some scientific theory in physics...
How exactly would he repeat the experiments, to see if they truly give the predicted outcomes.
It's getting so expensive the US *and* the EU *and* China *and* Australia *combined* are having trouble to pay for it. (ITER)
So let's stop the bullshit about science being falsifiable. In the sense that you could color the sky purple, or build a 100 km high tower with your bare hands, yes, it's theoretically possible. In practice, not so much.
Please explain how forcing people to give up all the fruits of all their labor is "libertarian"... Because all lefties ever mention is names, they never touch upon the contents of their ideology.
So : how do you force everyone to share all the fruits of their labour "with everyone" (and who decides, because if the deciders are corrupt, which they always are, obviously you haven't solved anything).
Always the same with leftists. Lefty politics is "peaceful", as long as they're not in power... after that... terms like "endlosung" or "gulag" are generally used.
That's because there already is a name for the political-economic system of fascism : a socialist state.
A state under a single individual (whether fuhrer or president), that allocates everything, both property and people according to a central plan, made by the state.
Both fascism and socialism did the same political-economically. Including the endlosung/gulag/"engineered famines"
Not even in rhetorical style. That's something they like to say now, but like Obama, Hitler's speeches in the 1930's were all about "social justice" and how "unfair" society was.
(the difference is that Hitler was right, Germany wasn't being treated fairly back then, while arguing that the US's people aren't being treated fairly is beyond stupid)
There are a few tiny accents that differ, that's all. Both in fascism and socialism an individual has no power, nor property. In both cases unelected people from the state decide who has what and who does what. Both have a fuhrer.
(oh and not that anyone cares, but obviously Bush is neither. For starters, he is laying down all his power in januari. NEVER has a fascist or socialist leader done so, unless forced by arms)
This is such unfair a comment one simply doesn't know where to begin.
The owner of IKEA is living in switzerland BECAUSE otherwise the socialists WOULD take his money away (something the swiss have prided themselves on for hundreds of years that they do not do this, they even refused the EU because of it).
Seizing property btw, is something that the socialists in sweden DO. You should check their laws about empty buildings. They do not have the balls to randomly seize property, or seizing all property (which really is the same thing) like real socialists do, because that would collapse their state, and they're not yet delusional enough to ignore that. Not yet.
And yes, there are rich people in socialist states :
I could name Kim Yong Il, who is a very rich man (certainly compared to the people around him), and while he lives in a communist state, nobody is taking his money away from him.
Stalin was a very rich man, who literally stole the food out of the mouths of the poor in the "socialist paradise". Right down to the point where 60 million poor starved.
The leaders of the socialist institutions in Sweden, btw, are also VERY rich people. They don't know their job, nor do they even try to. Rather they build out their political careers.
There are other problems, all basically come down to having the force of arms behind "normal" corporations, which is the way it has to be in communism (because competition cannot be allowed). The problem is that force that is always involved in socialist policies. An example : in Holland you can get dialysis (if you need this, you die without). However once you turn 65, you cannot get dialisys anymore in any hospital, at any price. Anyone with kidney problems (which is a lot of people) ages to 65 years and 6 months or so in Holland, and not a day older. If you try to buy it, which is obviously not cheap, you run the risk of getting arrested, both the patient and the docter, and getting incarcerated WITHOUT dialisys. The one guy they did this to did not survive to see his trial. Isn't socialist healthcare grand ?
So let's not pretend socialism solves the rich/poor divide. On the contrary, it makes it so much worse people die.
His speeches about left-wing politics were about how those movements were really infiltrataion attempts by the USSR aimed at conquering Germany with minimal fight. You might care to actually check them out.
Unfortunately, at least in a few cases, he was right about that. They had no intrest in peace, they just wanted the red army to not meet resistance.
You see, socialism necessitates totalitarianism. Absolute power. And you can't have TWO people with absolute power, now can you ?
You mean like the USSR ? Lefty politics necessitate totalitarianism. After all, by default people trade. Communism and socialism can only be imposed by force of arms, unlike capitalism.
*sigh* Conveniently forgetting that I did NOT, in fact, claim the similarity was only in name...
Care to answer the "policy" part too ? There is more of a match between nazi's and socialists than merely the name.
More than enough people "switched" from socialism to nazism. That's because it wasn't a switch at all.
More than enough policies by the nazi's are still pushed by lefties today. That's because they ARE "progressive" policies.
Nazism, like socialism today, was a youth movement that played amongst young people and on university campuses, with MUCH less support in the general population.
The leader of the nazi party, adolf hitler, was, like socialists today, hailed as a "man of peace", a man of "social justice" all over the world, europe, america even the fucking middle east, right up until the second year of world war 2. He was even nominated for a nobel peace prize. He even had the leader of the islamic world visit him to help rally muslims into the SS (you see the muslims had no problems with that whole killing Jews thing)....
Germany during the late 30's and 40's was a fascist regime, as was Italy. Yes, Hitler's rhetoric talked of social justice, but that was what he did to get himself into power
People keep saying that about every last lefty leader. Today Chavez, Kim Joung Il. Or even the child-killer called Che Guevara.
The problem is not that those people have bad intentions. The problem is that lefty politics enable them. It's really simple : lefty politics -> everybody money for nothing -> nobody works anymore (gradual process), except for ideological reasons, in the army or whatever movement they have -> nothing gets produced anymore -> not even food -> politicians "divide" the food (and everything else) amongst the "most worthy" (themselves) -> millions die
Fascim = Socialism = a central state controlling the economy, the people, everything
And yes, that's not to say that socialism in a state, which is called communism, doesn't differ in a few details from "national-socialism". But the basic principle for running the state is the same.
Actually the anti-racism laws are used to suppress certain political viewpoints. They're not used against individuals, but mostly against political parties.
Or at least that's the case here. This was obvious before any such law was passed, but the lefties were in power.
For example associating "socialism" with "national-socialism". THEN they will invoke said laws. Associating islam, an ideology stating DIRECTLY that "there must always be war" with war, that will get those laws invoked. An ideology with hate spewing mosques everywhere, the ideology of the most hate filled and intolerant places on this earth, complaining about that, that will get "anti-hate" laws invoked.
Saying some unpopular group should get killed, like saying Americans should get slaughtered in Iraq, and another few 9/11's should happen, will be protected as "free speech" until death.
I may not agree with the above parent post, but your idiotic claims should be put right.
Hitler wasn't really that left wing, he had some left wing policies but overall I'd definitely not call him left-wing.
Say, that word, nazi, what does it mean again ? Oh right... it translates to "socialist".
Transferring ownership of means of production exclusively to the state and then creating "social justice", the central part of the nazi policy, what's that according to you ?
Left or right ?
Hitler was a fucking nobel peace prize laureate due to a leftist "professor", with a questionable past. THAT's how left he was. He had his own Ayers behind him.
I am not defending or refuting any idea. The parent post, and a lot of posts at slashdot, seem to suppose that everybody has to have the same ideas that are considered "proven", but really aren't at all.
I just make the point that there isn't any way to reasonably verify the truth of a theory for a normal human being today, and therefore there is, in effect, no way to resolve uncertainty about, for example, anthropogenic global warming. Or anything beyond newtonian physics really.
This process is inherently limited in that it extracts energy from inputs that were created using a lot of energy. That obviously means that it merely recuperates a bit of energy that was initially produced by, say, a nuclear power plant. It can never have a large impact on energy usage due to the laws of thermodynamics.
However, if someone claims that that simply isn't proven, that is a defensible position. I don't have the resources to check the correctness of thermodynamics, do you ?
Therefore you should respect said position, and not claim it to be idiotic. It's really not. At best you can say it conflicts with your beliefs.
Because nobody understands even 0.1% of science (rather there are millions of people that each understand their 0.00002%), and therefore they have to defer judgement to someone else on almost everything. The real scientific answer to any question outside of that 0.00002% is "I don't know" and for the rest it should be mentioned that there's some degree of doubt involved, necessary for the advancement of science).
Since both the smartest and the dumbest of people can't construct a correct opinion themselves, they simply don't do that.
Some people defer judgement to priests, who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
Some people defer judgement to "experts", who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
There is however one tiny detail that is often overlooked : "experts" often disagree amongst eachother, and for most disagreements there is no money or will to do an experiment (or the experiment is impossible, or unethical, as is often the case in psychology. Or the result of the experiment is politically incorrect, like for example that video games really do increase the likelihood of violent behavior, which is more than proven). And then "experts" who are politicians in a flimsy disguise* join the fray and make the confusion complete.
Of course 50 years ago the same happened with priests.
And of course politics, in the form of grant money and otherwise (friends, family, blackmail) tends to permeate actual experts (*and* obviously actual priests) too. Let's take again global warming. Nobody's done the experiment, and so there is quite a margin of doubt (for example, the current winter is WAY colder than the models predicted), which can not be resolved (we can't create a second earth and put all co2 on one of them), so we'll always have imprecise and inaccurate models, that can never be proven to be correct or incorrect. And confidence intervals assigned to them have proven to be simply wrong more than just once.
* Example : You can think what you will of Al Gore, but he's no climatologist. He himself, is not capable of evaluating the likelihood of the anthropogenic global warming theory (and given his electricity bill and car park, his actual evaluation of it's truth is quite clear and not what you'd want to see). Therefore people who defer judgement to him, and there sure are a lot of them, are equally stupid as people who defer judgement to the 3 daughters of allah, and offer some virgins to seal the deal.
Of course there remains the issue that you actually need to form an opinion (well I suppose you don't absolutely need to, but as slashdot illustrates, everybody seems more than happy to do so). And there is no source of only correct information. It's not even the case that the "average" opinion is correct (for example, the average opinion of the 6 billion humans alive is still that God created man, and evolution's a load of crap).
In the very best case, your average correct opinion comes from someone whom you have no reasonable reason to trust, whom you cannot seriously believe is necessarily right. So does your average wrong opinion. Potentially not even from a different person.
So in reality you're merely pretending that this is a trivial problem because you "know you're right". In truth, if you're truly an expert at your field (unlikely), you are "right" about 0.00002% of science, all the rest is mere belief, most of it plainly wrong, or at best inaccurate.
So it's not at all a trivial problem. There used to be the opinion that one should simply do the experiment oneself, or at least witness one and check it's correctness, which was perhaps possible in the time of Newton, but is not at all realistic today. Therefore there is no real "certain" way to discern scientific truth from scientific frauds anymore.
About the "scientific consensus" : for starters, that is a very ill-defined concept. Second, the scientific consensus was once that the titanic was unsin
Good work ! You've just blocked the immune system response phase. Your patient may still be talking but tonight he will die of the first bug he encounters on the way home. In the extremely unlikely even that he survives the night by tomorrow he'll have a fatal stage of skin cancer, and will die before noon screaming for his skin feels like it's on fire. He'll probably have lost 10 pounds by tomorrow morning though.
Obviously if you block the immune system, yes, you will kill aids in a matter of months. The chances of a patient surviving a day without an immune system are somewhat remote, though. So you might as well leave the AIDS in. It'll be about the same, but the symptoms don't start tonight...
Congratulations. Well done. "Let's throw a wrench in it" is not the right tactic with the immune system...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great, an obamaton
Well no. The reason that some things are forbidden but not enforced is that enforcement would be more expensive than the damage done by the crime.
So piracy is dependant on "most" people being entirely fair to studios. If it ever threatens their survival of course you're right.
But once piracy grows too large you have only 2 choices :
1) enforcement of copyright laws, irrespective of the means
2) no more production except for ideological reasons, or by way of a commercial (say "why stoning women is good for them" by your "friendly" neighbourhood imam)
Just like enforcing theft is not socially acceptable until it happens on a large scale with consequences big enough to justify the inconvenience to fair people.
It's all in the price, you see. The scary ways of enforcing copyright are currently too expensive, in votes, in police budgets, in ... and foremost in the inconvenience they'll cause everyone. If that changes, expect "draconian" laws.
All the infrastructure for very draconian systems is already in place. The price, in votes, in budgets, in interference, is simply too high for the moment (you might also try to vote republican, since they have a much lower threshold for acceptable interference of the government). You know, like actual CO2 policies. People want to implement them, but can't pay up.
Thank God we live in a democracy.
Conclusion : you want to keep pirating, or simply "surfing free" ? Make sure nobody else in your neighbourhood does it, thereby lowering the rewards of any potential enforcement. Lower the damages.
Of course economic theory states that that is impossible and that the group of people not playing fair can only grow over time. It also grows exponentially, thereby making 100% sure that at some point the threshold that necessitates draconian enforcement will be crossed. In other words, piracy can only expand and explode. The explosion at some point costing so much as to make sure that even a 99 year old coma patient would vote for draconian enforcement of copyright.
They think something is not legal. The opposing party does not agree, so they take it to the court.
This seems to me exactly the situation where you'd want people to use the courts. Australia's a democracy. Everybody has the right to complain, and they may be right when they complain. Even Disney.
Call again when you have a verdict. Then you have actual information to report.
Paradox of relativity :
There exist in "real space" "event horizons", according to relativity. What are event horizons ? Places where gravity IS infinite (not : "approaches infinity"). That's impossible since that would require infinite amounts of energy.
Or another paradox of it can be stated simply : any particle that passes through an event horizon would be accelerated to light speed (it would not approach light speed, it would achieve light speed, one paradox is where the -infinite- energy for this acceleration would come from). Now you would think that particle would stop in the center of the black hole. However, the question here is "when would that happen ?". Due to passage through an event horizon time stops for this particle (due to light speed). It would no longer interact with the space around it, because it has no time to do so. Therefore it should come back out the other way (without slowing down, since it would only be pursued by a graviton, which would never quite catch up), and not add to the mass of the black hole. That is most certainly not what happens.
Another problem is that if gravity is infinite at the event horizon, then just how big is it beyond the event horizon ? It can be proven that it has to be bigger than infinite, and keep getting bigger until the center, where it would somehow drop back down to zero (like in the center of the earth, you might think that the earth would be crushing inwards at the center of the earth, but that's not true, and if you dig a tunnel straight down, after passing about 2/3rd's of the way to the center, you'd start getting lighter, to become weightless in the center, then for 1/3 of the radius of the earth while coming out of the other side your weight would increase to above what it would be at the surface, then decrease again. For black holes this "hole in gravity" would be infinitely small, but it'd still exist).
It's true that Einstein didn't like paradoxes, and was, for a while, convinced that his theory did not contain any. Unfortunately Schwarzschild put an end to that, resulting in Einstein describing general relativity (and special relativity) as "his biggest mistake ever". He would later disagree with that, while still agreeing relativity was a mistake, he'd describe quantum mechanics as his biggest mistake ever.
He was right : compared to the couple of paradoxes in relativity, quantum mechanics has whole swarms of the blasted things.
Quantum mechanics
Let's take one paradox : it violates the FTL requirement but has no alternative for gravity.
Another : the symmetry of particles has to be both broken and intact for gravitons (and a few others).
There are multiple "correct" and "real" states of a single particle, NOT correlated with a chance : a particle can have 2 DIFFERENT speeds at the same time with probability 100%. That means that the sum of probabilities in quantum mechanics cannot be guaranteed to be 100%. But can in some cases be 200% or more, which is by definition impossible.
Quantum mechanics both preserves AND does not preserve a number of symmetries.
And best of all : quantum mechanics predicts that all particles have zero inertia (which is the paradox they're trying to solve by building the LHC). Everything around us should speed up to c basically immediately and never slow down again. After a really, really short while all particle interactions would stop (due to speed limitations of the force carrying particles) and the universe would become really boring.
So why do we accept quantum mechanics anyway ? Well it's very very accurate in predicting the outcomes of experiments, despite it's fundamental inconsistency. That means that in quantum mechanical calculations you have to "stay away" from the paradoxes, and you'll do fine. But that's just about the best physics has as an advice for the moment.
"Yes every particle would accelerate to light speed, let's just ignore it and assume it doesn't happen, here fill in the values from the mass tables" is a phrase hear
The problem with paradoxes is simple. If you throw out any theory with paradoxes, you can start by dumping :
-> big bang theory
-> quantum mechanics
-> relativity
-> newtonian physics
There wouldn't be much left :
Indeed if scientist respected the laws of mathematics there would be no paradoxes in physics. Any theory containing even a single paradox would be thrown out the window immediately, like they are in mathematics. You could simply say time travel has the potential to create paradoxes ... and is therefore impossible ...
It wasn't to be : It wasn't very practical with physics theory. After all, the big bang theory requires FTL travel (faster than light) and a "limited" suspension of at least causality, along with changing a few universal constants here and there (in fact even Genesis is more likely : suppose an "eternal" being, alive or not created our universe, and you don't have any causality problems. Who created the creator ? Nobody, he's always been. Mathematically that's simple to express and quite consistent. Of course the 7-days stuff of Genesis is a bit more problematic). Oops. Physicists weren't quite ready to dump that one.
Newton's physics would be thrown out, due to the black body radiation paradox (has nothing to do with black holes). But as long as nothing was there to replace it, nobody really thought throwing it out was a good idea.
Relativity would get thrown out due to Schwarzchild geometry (black holes), and quantum mechanics would get thrown out for a hundred reasons, it's "known paradox count" is somewhat of an embarrassment really.
So physics just "tries to get along" with paradoxes, which never works in practice, so basically experiments just like to get close to paradoxes, because in the real world they don't exist. Therefore the paradoxes we're seeing in theories are really something that's not described, rather than a real paradox. Sometimes we really can't get close enough to take a look, which is the case with black holes, or the edge of the universe (if there indeed is one, like the big bang theory predicts), in that case we're stuck, and the only option is to search for the needle in the haystack some other place.
That obviously brings the problem which paradoxes are acceptable and which aren't. Nobody's given even a basic answer to that one though. Apparently paradoxes are acceptable as long as they only manifest in places we know nothing about.
Paradoxes are also the real reason for the claim "passing through a black hole makes anything possible", which is simply another way to say that once you've proven 1=2, you can prove anything, no matter how wrong. Of course the problem is in our understanding of black holes, which is mathematically inconsistent, the problem is not that inside black holes anything is possible. Same goes for any other paradox in physics.
Of course many people believe that since there are many "paradoxes" in physical theories, especially quantum mechanics, everything is really possible, if you only think hard enough about it. However history does show us that every single time we approached a paradox in experiment, it turned out our theories produced the paradox, and the world disagreed with our theories.
You can resolve the black body paradox of Newton's theories yourself. Google the "black body radiation problem" (the third link is nice). Then heat up a piece of metal until it glows. According to Newton's physics if you do that, the universe should explode (calculate this for yourself). Or to put it mathematically, the energy output in radiation should "approach infinity", which is another way of saying "this should produce a huge bang". There you've just explored one of the great historical paradoxes. All paradoxes are like this.
What does that mean "workers in charge" ? How are conflicts resolved ?
We all know what answer the unions have to that question. Incidentally it's the same answer all socialist states had.
Besides, we all know that "progressive" socialism is simply : "give me stuff for free, force others to work for it (ie tax them)" nothing more. It's getting to the point where I'm having trouble believing it was ever different. Then again, given how Marx himself lived (leeched of his family) perhaps it never was different. What are your thoughts on that ? Socialism started with someone leeching off of others. It is about leeching off of others. It is only supported by leeches (like Ayers). The only real stronghold of socialism is university campusses and government handout centers, filled to the brim with people who don't want to take care of themselves, but party and complain.
Needless to say, it (to say the least) does not lead to better circumstances for anyone.
Then go into a kindergarten. You'll come up with ten of them before noon.
The difference between Science and anything else you mention in your post is that science is specifically falsifiable. Meaning that if there isn't a specific way to prove it wrong, then it cannot be considered science.
Really ? Then tell me how someone, a normal guy in the street, can falsify some scientific theory in physics ...
How exactly would he repeat the experiments, to see if they truly give the predicted outcomes.
It's getting so expensive the US *and* the EU *and* China *and* Australia *combined* are having trouble to pay for it. (ITER)
So let's stop the bullshit about science being falsifiable. In the sense that you could color the sky purple, or build a 100 km high tower with your bare hands, yes, it's theoretically possible. In practice, not so much.
The tools ... if you can have a few thousand people to cooperate with you who are equally versed in those things ... perhaps.
The money or the means (like a particle accelerator) ... not so much.
Please explain how forcing people to give up all the fruits of all their labor is "libertarian" ... Because all lefties ever mention is names, they never touch upon the contents of their ideology.
So : how do you force everyone to share all the fruits of their labour "with everyone" (and who decides, because if the deciders are corrupt, which they always are, obviously you haven't solved anything).
Always the same with leftists. Lefty politics is "peaceful", as long as they're not in power ... after that ... terms like "endlosung" or "gulag" are generally used.
That's because there already is a name for the political-economic system of fascism : a socialist state.
A state under a single individual (whether fuhrer or president), that allocates everything, both property and people according to a central plan, made by the state.
Both fascism and socialism did the same political-economically. Including the endlosung/gulag/"engineered famines"
Not even in rhetorical style. That's something they like to say now, but like Obama, Hitler's speeches in the 1930's were all about "social justice" and how "unfair" society was.
(the difference is that Hitler was right, Germany wasn't being treated fairly back then, while arguing that the US's people aren't being treated fairly is beyond stupid)
Fascism = Socialism
Socialism = Facism
There are a few tiny accents that differ, that's all. Both in fascism and socialism an individual has no power, nor property. In both cases unelected people from the state decide who has what and who does what. Both have a fuhrer.
(oh and not that anyone cares, but obviously Bush is neither. For starters, he is laying down all his power in januari. NEVER has a fascist or socialist leader done so, unless forced by arms)
This is such unfair a comment one simply doesn't know where to begin.
The owner of IKEA is living in switzerland BECAUSE otherwise the socialists WOULD take his money away (something the swiss have prided themselves on for hundreds of years that they do not do this, they even refused the EU because of it).
Seizing property btw, is something that the socialists in sweden DO. You should check their laws about empty buildings. They do not have the balls to randomly seize property, or seizing all property (which really is the same thing) like real socialists do, because that would collapse their state, and they're not yet delusional enough to ignore that. Not yet.
And yes, there are rich people in socialist states :
I could name Kim Yong Il, who is a very rich man (certainly compared to the people around him), and while he lives in a communist state, nobody is taking his money away from him.
Stalin was a very rich man, who literally stole the food out of the mouths of the poor in the "socialist paradise". Right down to the point where 60 million poor starved.
The leaders of the socialist institutions in Sweden, btw, are also VERY rich people. They don't know their job, nor do they even try to. Rather they build out their political careers.
There are other problems, all basically come down to having the force of arms behind "normal" corporations, which is the way it has to be in communism (because competition cannot be allowed). The problem is that force that is always involved in socialist policies. An example : in Holland you can get dialysis (if you need this, you die without). However once you turn 65, you cannot get dialisys anymore in any hospital, at any price. Anyone with kidney problems (which is a lot of people) ages to 65 years and 6 months or so in Holland, and not a day older. If you try to buy it, which is obviously not cheap, you run the risk of getting arrested, both the patient and the docter, and getting incarcerated WITHOUT dialisys. The one guy they did this to did not survive to see his trial. Isn't socialist healthcare grand ?
So let's not pretend socialism solves the rich/poor divide. On the contrary, it makes it so much worse people die.
His speeches about left-wing politics were about how those movements were really infiltrataion attempts by the USSR aimed at conquering Germany with minimal fight. You might care to actually check them out.
Unfortunately, at least in a few cases, he was right about that. They had no intrest in peace, they just wanted the red army to not meet resistance.
You see, socialism necessitates totalitarianism. Absolute power. And you can't have TWO people with absolute power, now can you ?
You mean like the USSR ? Lefty politics necessitate totalitarianism. After all, by default people trade. Communism and socialism can only be imposed by force of arms, unlike capitalism.
*sigh* Conveniently forgetting that I did NOT, in fact, claim the similarity was only in name ...
Care to answer the "policy" part too ? There is more of a match between nazi's and socialists than merely the name.
More than enough people "switched" from socialism to nazism. That's because it wasn't a switch at all.
More than enough policies by the nazi's are still pushed by lefties today. That's because they ARE "progressive" policies.
Nazism, like socialism today, was a youth movement that played amongst young people and on university campuses, with MUCH less support in the general population.
The leader of the nazi party, adolf hitler, was, like socialists today, hailed as a "man of peace", a man of "social justice" all over the world, europe, america even the fucking middle east, right up until the second year of world war 2. He was even nominated for a nobel peace prize. He even had the leader of the islamic world visit him to help rally muslims into the SS (you see the muslims had no problems with that whole killing Jews thing). ...
Germany during the late 30's and 40's was a fascist regime, as was Italy. Yes, Hitler's rhetoric talked of social justice, but that was what he did to get himself into power
People keep saying that about every last lefty leader. Today Chavez, Kim Joung Il. Or even the child-killer called Che Guevara.
The problem is not that those people have bad intentions. The problem is that lefty politics enable them. It's really simple : lefty politics -> everybody money for nothing -> nobody works anymore (gradual process), except for ideological reasons, in the army or whatever movement they have -> nothing gets produced anymore -> not even food -> politicians "divide" the food (and everything else) amongst the "most worthy" (themselves) -> millions die
Fascim = Socialism = a central state controlling the economy, the people, everything
And yes, that's not to say that socialism in a state, which is called communism, doesn't differ in a few details from "national-socialism". But the basic principle for running the state is the same.
So where does Obama fit in with you ? A shady past is kind-of the least you can say. He never acknowledged any of it - and got away with it.
Actually the anti-racism laws are used to suppress certain political viewpoints. They're not used against individuals, but mostly against political parties.
Or at least that's the case here. This was obvious before any such law was passed, but the lefties were in power.
For example associating "socialism" with "national-socialism". THEN they will invoke said laws. Associating islam, an ideology stating DIRECTLY that "there must always be war" with war, that will get those laws invoked. An ideology with hate spewing mosques everywhere, the ideology of the most hate filled and intolerant places on this earth, complaining about that, that will get "anti-hate" laws invoked.
Saying some unpopular group should get killed, like saying Americans should get slaughtered in Iraq, and another few 9/11's should happen, will be protected as "free speech" until death.
I may not agree with the above parent post, but your idiotic claims should be put right.
Hitler wasn't really that left wing, he had some left wing policies but overall I'd definitely not call him left-wing.
Say, that word, nazi, what does it mean again ? Oh right ... it translates to "socialist".
Transferring ownership of means of production exclusively to the state and then creating "social justice", the central part of the nazi policy, what's that according to you ?
Left or right ?
Hitler was a fucking nobel peace prize laureate due to a leftist "professor", with a questionable past. THAT's how left he was. He had his own Ayers behind him.
I am not defending or refuting any idea. The parent post, and a lot of posts at slashdot, seem to suppose that everybody has to have the same ideas that are considered "proven", but really aren't at all.
I just make the point that there isn't any way to reasonably verify the truth of a theory for a normal human being today, and therefore there is, in effect, no way to resolve uncertainty about, for example, anthropogenic global warming. Or anything beyond newtonian physics really.
This process is inherently limited in that it extracts energy from inputs that were created using a lot of energy. That obviously means that it merely recuperates a bit of energy that was initially produced by, say, a nuclear power plant. It can never have a large impact on energy usage due to the laws of thermodynamics.
However, if someone claims that that simply isn't proven, that is a defensible position. I don't have the resources to check the correctness of thermodynamics, do you ?
Therefore you should respect said position, and not claim it to be idiotic. It's really not. At best you can say it conflicts with your beliefs.
So it will be mob justice. The first catilina, that bribes enough people with sex and drugs, will seize power, and kill your experiment.
Furthermore WHO scales this metagovernment, WHO implements it ? Because obviously they will hold the real power over government.
Obviously they won't cheat, right ? YOU won't cheat ... right ?
Because nobody understands even 0.1% of science (rather there are millions of people that each understand their 0.00002%), and therefore they have to defer judgement to someone else on almost everything. The real scientific answer to any question outside of that 0.00002% is "I don't know" and for the rest it should be mentioned that there's some degree of doubt involved, necessary for the advancement of science).
Since both the smartest and the dumbest of people can't construct a correct opinion themselves, they simply don't do that.
Some people defer judgement to priests, who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
Some people defer judgement to "experts", who are declared experts by some institution, claiming to have a good grasp of reality.
There is however one tiny detail that is often overlooked : "experts" often disagree amongst eachother, and for most disagreements there is no money or will to do an experiment (or the experiment is impossible, or unethical, as is often the case in psychology. Or the result of the experiment is politically incorrect, like for example that video games really do increase the likelihood of violent behavior, which is more than proven). And then "experts" who are politicians in a flimsy disguise* join the fray and make the confusion complete.
Of course 50 years ago the same happened with priests.
And of course politics, in the form of grant money and otherwise (friends, family, blackmail) tends to permeate actual experts (*and* obviously actual priests) too. Let's take again global warming. Nobody's done the experiment, and so there is quite a margin of doubt (for example, the current winter is WAY colder than the models predicted), which can not be resolved (we can't create a second earth and put all co2 on one of them), so we'll always have imprecise and inaccurate models, that can never be proven to be correct or incorrect. And confidence intervals assigned to them have proven to be simply wrong more than just once.
* Example : You can think what you will of Al Gore, but he's no climatologist. He himself, is not capable of evaluating the likelihood of the anthropogenic global warming theory (and given his electricity bill and car park, his actual evaluation of it's truth is quite clear and not what you'd want to see). Therefore people who defer judgement to him, and there sure are a lot of them, are equally stupid as people who defer judgement to the 3 daughters of allah, and offer some virgins to seal the deal.
Of course there remains the issue that you actually need to form an opinion (well I suppose you don't absolutely need to, but as slashdot illustrates, everybody seems more than happy to do so). And there is no source of only correct information. It's not even the case that the "average" opinion is correct (for example, the average opinion of the 6 billion humans alive is still that God created man, and evolution's a load of crap).
In the very best case, your average correct opinion comes from someone whom you have no reasonable reason to trust, whom you cannot seriously believe is necessarily right. So does your average wrong opinion. Potentially not even from a different person.
So in reality you're merely pretending that this is a trivial problem because you "know you're right". In truth, if you're truly an expert at your field (unlikely), you are "right" about 0.00002% of science, all the rest is mere belief, most of it plainly wrong, or at best inaccurate.
So it's not at all a trivial problem. There used to be the opinion that one should simply do the experiment oneself, or at least witness one and check it's correctness, which was perhaps possible in the time of Newton, but is not at all realistic today. Therefore there is no real "certain" way to discern scientific truth from scientific frauds anymore.
About the "scientific consensus" : for starters, that is a very ill-defined concept. Second, the scientific consensus was once that the titanic was unsin
it 'should' mean more.
Good work ! You've just blocked the immune system response phase. Your patient may still be talking but tonight he will die of the first bug he encounters on the way home. In the extremely unlikely even that he survives the night by tomorrow he'll have a fatal stage of skin cancer, and will die before noon screaming for his skin feels like it's on fire. He'll probably have lost 10 pounds by tomorrow morning though.
Obviously if you block the immune system, yes, you will kill aids in a matter of months. The chances of a patient surviving a day without an immune system are somewhat remote, though. So you might as well leave the AIDS in. It'll be about the same, but the symptoms don't start tonight ...
Congratulations. Well done. "Let's throw a wrench in it" is not the right tactic with the immune system ...