Goddamn coward. This is a prime example of the anemia of the left right here. Obama used to stand against the abuses of the Patriot Act and mass surveillance and then you sold out completely--and some of that is due to the dirty realities in the world, yes I get that maybe closing Guantanamo wasn't going to be as simple as all that, but here he is in the closing weeks of your presidency and he can't even make a token effort to support the ideals he once claimed to hold. The perjurer Clapper walked free and will even keep his job right through the very end.
And why are you doing it, Mr. President? Because your entire plan is to play meek and non-controversial, try to not rock the boat and give the Republicans more and more rope from which to hang themselves. That's been your strategy the whole time, and it's backfired almost every step of the way. Admittedly, you have slightly better chances hoping a Trump presidency with Republicans controlling senate and house, but... goddamn it man. If you wanted to have a nuanced view on the matter, you could have at least had Clapper arrested. Or fired.
The tribalism isn't mine; it's yours. If you can't admit it when Apple makes a mistake, let alone admit that maybe their products are just the tiniest bit overhyped, you're part of the problem. It's not a problem that will sink Apple (at least, not in my lifetime), but in the absence of a strong effort to maintain, innovate and expand their walled garden, people will very, very slowly begin to realize that Apple is just another tech company.
You overlook my thesis entirely in your rush to defend the 800 lbs. gorilla: the Apple premium can only be justified through having a lovely walled garden where all of that automagic stuff actually DOES work. Shrinking that garden by ditching their routers that have Mac-specific functionality, therefore, seems like an extremely short-sighted move to make. There's no reason for Apple to be playing belt-tightening small ball right now; no reason whatsoever.
Holy fucking shit... Microsoft can't commit to any business strategy not built cynical lock-in, the Linux desktop was sabotaged in its prime and fragmented to hell and back by the assholes at GNOME / RHAT, and yes the empire of Apple is fucking built on taking credit for stuff other people did first and/or did better and vigorously hand-waving away the flaws in their products.
I'm sorry, Virginia, but everybody sucks. And I'm not going to pull punches just for your own personal favorite. The mainstream opinion surrounding devices like the iPhone or iPod was and remains hysterically misinformed for anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention. Yes, the RDF is quite real, and it operates not just on the fanboys/enthusiasts... my own mother thought she was using an iPhone for the past 6 months until I corrected her and tried to explain what Android was.
Well if people aren't purchasing these products in enough quantity to justify Apple making them, doesn't that obliterate the whole "fanboy" meme here?
Or are you just a fucking douche who jerks off when you think of "fanboys"
Substitute "enthusiast" if that makes you happier.
The point is the summary says "not profitable enough." That's really, really dumb small-ball talk. Apple does not need to chase higher margins in every single goddamn thing they do. They already have the ability to set very high margins for their most popular products, and they got this ability directly from their enthusiast/fanboy core who have always loved the experience, perceived experience and/or image. (Yes, there are both genuine compliments and disses in there. It's both.) Not taking care of that core just because they want every single division to be cranking out iPhone-level profits is a pretty bad idea... granted, by now they have so much momentum that they can probably absorb ten really bad ideas per quarter without even blinking.
I never said Apple would go belly up. They're certainly not going to go belly up in my lifetime. If you cannot bear to hear any criticism of Apple (couched in genuine acknowledgements of their strengths), that's your own issue. Apple is overrated. A company can make decent or even quality products and still be overrated. Why people like you still feel the need to rabidly defend Apple, like it's still 1999 or something, is beyond me.
Yeah, I'm at a loss as to why they think moves like this are sensible. The hard core of Apple fanboys who want all of their devices to have that same logo and to automagically work together
I don't care about the label, but I emphatically believe that devices I buy ought to "automatically" work together, and that this feature (which I call "functionality") is worth paying extra for.
That's a totally reasonable sentiment, although it's a bit amusing to examine how you chose to truncate that quote.
Yeah, I'm at a loss as to why they think moves like this are sensible. The hard core of Apple fanboys who want all of their devices to have that same logo and to automagically work together (and, in typical RDF fashion, gloss over those times when they don't) should be kept pampered even if they aren't a huge moneymaker. (It doesn't even matter if other routers support Time Machine; just being the only Official Apple Router that supports it should be enough to keep them in business and at least mildly profitable.)
Not that Apple has in any way an image problem but it is conceivable, just barely conceivable, that if they slim down too much and force people to buy too many third party products and pay no attention to the sorts of fanboys that kept them alive during the 90s and drove the hype machine during the early iPod / OS X era they might eventually (years from now) have to lower their margins from laughably obscene to head-shakingly obscene in order to keep people interested.
No, that's another drive that this same Eagleworks team is claiming to be testing. Although, to be fair, apparently they fired the laser through the EM drive and detected the same thing? Ergh.
I can't decide if this makes me take the experiment more or less seriously. We absolutely should have frontiers-of-science testing, but... I don't know, something about this doesn't sit right with me.
What of all of the alternative theories that describe the same phenomenon very well but disagree strongly once certain conditions are met? As an accepted example we could take relativity (vs. Newtonian physics), or for a largely rejected example we could examine MOND (vs. dark matter.)
I appreciate the sorts of conversations physicists must get into with armchair physicists, but I think the "trillions of astoundingly accurate predictions" thing is overplayed. Yes, the Standard Model is really, really good at predicting stuff. But we're also pretty sure it's incomplete. Like I mentioned in another reply, it's not like conservation of momentum has been this huge keystone concept that has been unchallenged and obviously and instantly supported by every experiment ever done. You can crow all you want about how the addition of "spin" to QM has been a net win, enabling all kinds of further predictions but the fact of the matter is that it is, from the perspective of someone who just cares about conservation of momentum, a bit of a non-intuitive hack.
we are confident that we have *all* physical effects well and truly nailed.
You have a mathematical theory that has been used to make a bunch of correct predictions (...and a bunch of incorrect ones.) Do you agree that "obeys this equation" and "we understand what's going on" are two entirely separate things?
Mind you, I've been extremely skeptical of the EM drive thing until now, and I don't think that new physics breakthrough is necessarily probable, but I think we are nearing the point where the question may deserve a little more than the boilerplate response.
That was one of the first things I thought of as well, although they may or may not have been able to notice a decrease in weight via the "Scientech SA210 precision weighing balance" they were apparently using to measure the thrust produced.
Presumably this wouldn't be such a terribly difficult thing to check--leave the thing on for three months solid, periodically re-verifying that thrust is being produced, and then weigh it again at the end once you're fairly certain that the weigh reduction, if present, should be measurable.
I don't have the time to dig into the paper at length right now, but at this point I would hope that the conversation--among physicists and interested non-physicists alike, would focus on the remaining potential sources of thrust. The experiments in non-vacuums I pretty much discounted entirely. This one makes me pay a bit more attention. Can we rule out self-vaporization? Next step: can we rule out interaction with background radiation?
If those two things are ruled out then something interesting is going on here. Even if it looks like it's "pushing off of" the background radiation somehow, it still might turn out to be a useful device.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door... the physicist version of this would be "prove that this isn't something mundane" in lieu of "build a better mousetrap."
The fundamental problem with this experiment is that it appears to violate conservation of momentum. This violation is not something that can be discarded easily: it has been confirmed directly and indirectly in millions of experiments over decades.
Not without accreting a couple hacky-looking things, namely quantum spin. Yes yes, the Standard Model has withstood a hell of a lot of attacks from people trying to "simplify" things over many decades and also made a bunch of impressive predictions, I get that... and yeah, there are snake oil salesmen and millions of starry-eyed teenage geeks who want to believe they're going to live to see a major new physics revolution. But the simple fact of the matter is we don't have a Theory of Everything and there are lots of curious and unintuitive modifications we've had to make over the years to notions like momentum that may well turn out to be incorrect (or 'approximations').
These conversations can be humored and probably at this point deserve a little debate just to widen the minds of actual physicists and grad students around the globe... but of course what we really need right now are a dozen more experiments that conclusively rule out every conceivable source of thrust and attempting to more accurately quantify the thrust and its properties.
I'm all for continuing caution, but it sounds like we within a easy stone's throw distance of confirming an effective (if not a literal--there are plenty of loopholes here involving action at a distance) violation of conservation of momentum, aren't we? Which means we're very close to proving the device has practical benefits even if there don't turn out to be any significant theoretical changes.
By far the most likely outcome of this is that it will turn out to be particle emission of some sort which our existing physics can explain. If they want to convince anyone of anything else they need to focus on investigating possible causes and focus less on just measuring the thrust.
There's no air, and their force measurements used a "weighing balance" so I'm assuming they would have noticed if the apparatus was somehow vaporizing part of itself via the change in weight. So whence come the particles? Background radiation? Yeah, sure, perhaps... but that still doesn't negate the potential practical applications for the device, if it is indeed "pushing off" of something that's present even in a vacuum.
The next step is to try to rule out background radiation, sure, but even if these experiment return mundane results, we still potentially have a very interesting device on our hands.
Yeah, us doubters should probably eat a little bit of crow here. Most of the early on stuff looked suspicious like regular pseudoscience scams, and the significance of the preliminary positive findings were exaggerated by throngs of geeks who desperately wanted it to be true (not unlike the geeks who insist that the hyperloop, in its current proposed form, is going to be revolutionary) but... yeah yeah, ok, this is pretty interesting.
It could be much more interesting than Michelson-Morley, because it addition to possibly holding the promise of new physical theories in has obvious and immediate practical applications.
(Or maybe there's still something they're not accounting for.)
There's all the difference in the world because of the fact that the Republicans control the senate and house and there will likely to be multiple SCOTUS seats to fill.
I'm not sold on the Clinton Foundation being at all significant. It's a charitable foundation that has been examined and found to spend most of it's money on its in-house charitable programs (I think it got an A+ rating or something.) The logical connective tissue just isn't there. The foundation is obviously for prestige or self-image; it makes no sense that she would make actual policy concessions, thus risk tarnishing her public image even more, just so a charity with her name on it can get a little more money.
If you've evidence that the foundation is corrupt, that would be another matter entirely. Political contributions or paid speeches are another matter entirely as well.
Another possibility is that the Republican party establishment utterly disintegrates because the social conservatives try to overplay their hand now that they're nearly in control of all three branches of government. Not saying that's worth the damage they could do to the country, but at least it'll be an interesting and grimly satisfying light show.
A fine sentiment in theory, but the broader picture people should be focused on (and something I admit I rather glossed over in my original 4 AM post) is "giving the Republican party a chance." And/or, holding them to account if they screw it up.
This is it for the Republicans. They can't blame the next couple years on Democrats, and there's a strong chance they won't be able to blame SCOTUS decisions on "liberal judicial activism" for a very long time. The Republicans were in bad shape even before Trump came along, and now they can make all of their dreams come true. Let's see how that goes for them (and us.)
A moderate Republican might have been able to destroy him (perhaps like Marco Rubio was trying to be before the primary ate him alive) in the general. But Donald Trump? Uh, no. The only potent anti-Bernie weapon they had was "ZOMG Socialism!!!", which given the stuff surrounding Trump was unlikely to be an earthshaking attack. Bernie just had to be his gentle, articulate anti-establishment self. There's no path to a Trump victory that I can see, and the polls (flawed as they may be) confirm this. None of the criticisms of Bernie (and some of them are indeed valid concerns in other contexts) matter much at all vs. Donald Trump.
Ah wait, I guess you did see that. Well, sorry, I'm not reading your post in its entirety or providing further detailed rebuttals until you register for an account. Like I said, I've been trolled by one too many ACs in recent months, and your writing style is suspiciously familiar.
Do not confuse "looking normal" (hiding the fact that you're hiding anything, from your ISP's point of view) with protecting yourself from tracking by remote services and websites. The questioner appeared to be concerned only with the latter, so the suggestions to use a stateless system (Qubes' DispVM, or a live distro like TAILS) seem a lot more relevant than trying really hard to look normal to the guys in the black van.
Please explain the racist implication in Trump's statement. Go on. Was he saying that "Mexicans" were genetically predisposed to hating him?
One of the biggest failures of the left has been the continued mischaracterization and conflation of Trump's (admittedly diverse and wildly changing) gaffes. He said something unreasonable and stupid insofar as he was actually implying the judge should've recused himself or something, but there's no reasonable parsing of it I can find that seems at all, and in itself, racist.
Slashdot Mirror
As a representative of SJW's everywhere, we accept your apology for pronoun abuse, this time.
I should just be glad this wasn't about Chelsea Manning, eh?
My apologies for the pronoun disagreement, in a rush.
Goddamn coward. This is a prime example of the anemia of the left right here. Obama used to stand against the abuses of the Patriot Act and mass surveillance and then you sold out completely--and some of that is due to the dirty realities in the world, yes I get that maybe closing Guantanamo wasn't going to be as simple as all that, but here he is in the closing weeks of your presidency and he can't even make a token effort to support the ideals he once claimed to hold. The perjurer Clapper walked free and will even keep his job right through the very end.
And why are you doing it, Mr. President? Because your entire plan is to play meek and non-controversial, try to not rock the boat and give the Republicans more and more rope from which to hang themselves. That's been your strategy the whole time, and it's backfired almost every step of the way. Admittedly, you have slightly better chances hoping a Trump presidency with Republicans controlling senate and house, but... goddamn it man. If you wanted to have a nuanced view on the matter, you could have at least had Clapper arrested. Or fired.
The tribalism isn't mine; it's yours. If you can't admit it when Apple makes a mistake, let alone admit that maybe their products are just the tiniest bit overhyped, you're part of the problem. It's not a problem that will sink Apple (at least, not in my lifetime), but in the absence of a strong effort to maintain, innovate and expand their walled garden, people will very, very slowly begin to realize that Apple is just another tech company.
You overlook my thesis entirely in your rush to defend the 800 lbs. gorilla: the Apple premium can only be justified through having a lovely walled garden where all of that automagic stuff actually DOES work. Shrinking that garden by ditching their routers that have Mac-specific functionality, therefore, seems like an extremely short-sighted move to make. There's no reason for Apple to be playing belt-tightening small ball right now; no reason whatsoever.
Holy fucking shit... Microsoft can't commit to any business strategy not built cynical lock-in, the Linux desktop was sabotaged in its prime and fragmented to hell and back by the assholes at GNOME / RHAT, and yes the empire of Apple is fucking built on taking credit for stuff other people did first and/or did better and vigorously hand-waving away the flaws in their products.
I'm sorry, Virginia, but everybody sucks. And I'm not going to pull punches just for your own personal favorite. The mainstream opinion surrounding devices like the iPhone or iPod was and remains hysterically misinformed for anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention. Yes, the RDF is quite real, and it operates not just on the fanboys/enthusiasts... my own mother thought she was using an iPhone for the past 6 months until I corrected her and tried to explain what Android was.
Well if people aren't purchasing these products in enough quantity to justify Apple making them, doesn't that obliterate the whole "fanboy" meme here?
Or are you just a fucking douche who jerks off when you think of "fanboys"
Substitute "enthusiast" if that makes you happier.
The point is the summary says "not profitable enough." That's really, really dumb small-ball talk. Apple does not need to chase higher margins in every single goddamn thing they do. They already have the ability to set very high margins for their most popular products, and they got this ability directly from their enthusiast/fanboy core who have always loved the experience, perceived experience and/or image. (Yes, there are both genuine compliments and disses in there. It's both.) Not taking care of that core just because they want every single division to be cranking out iPhone-level profits is a pretty bad idea... granted, by now they have so much momentum that they can probably absorb ten really bad ideas per quarter without even blinking.
I never said Apple would go belly up. They're certainly not going to go belly up in my lifetime. If you cannot bear to hear any criticism of Apple (couched in genuine acknowledgements of their strengths), that's your own issue. Apple is overrated. A company can make decent or even quality products and still be overrated. Why people like you still feel the need to rabidly defend Apple, like it's still 1999 or something, is beyond me.
Yeah, I'm at a loss as to why they think moves like this are sensible. The hard core of Apple fanboys who want all of their devices to have that same logo and to automagically work together
I don't care about the label, but I emphatically believe that devices I buy ought to "automatically" work together, and that this feature (which I call "functionality") is worth paying extra for.
That's a totally reasonable sentiment, although it's a bit amusing to examine how you chose to truncate that quote.
Yeah, I'm at a loss as to why they think moves like this are sensible. The hard core of Apple fanboys who want all of their devices to have that same logo and to automagically work together (and, in typical RDF fashion, gloss over those times when they don't) should be kept pampered even if they aren't a huge moneymaker. (It doesn't even matter if other routers support Time Machine; just being the only Official Apple Router that supports it should be enough to keep them in business and at least mildly profitable.)
Not that Apple has in any way an image problem but it is conceivable, just barely conceivable, that if they slim down too much and force people to buy too many third party products and pay no attention to the sorts of fanboys that kept them alive during the 90s and drove the hype machine during the early iPod / OS X era they might eventually (years from now) have to lower their margins from laughably obscene to head-shakingly obscene in order to keep people interested.
No, that's another drive that this same Eagleworks team is claiming to be testing. Although, to be fair, apparently they fired the laser through the EM drive and detected the same thing? Ergh.
I can't decide if this makes me take the experiment more or less seriously. We absolutely should have frontiers-of-science testing, but... I don't know, something about this doesn't sit right with me.
I appreciate the sorts of conversations physicists must get into with armchair physicists, but I think the "trillions of astoundingly accurate predictions" thing is overplayed. Yes, the Standard Model is really, really good at predicting stuff. But we're also pretty sure it's incomplete. Like I mentioned in another reply, it's not like conservation of momentum has been this huge keystone concept that has been unchallenged and obviously and instantly supported by every experiment ever done. You can crow all you want about how the addition of "spin" to QM has been a net win, enabling all kinds of further predictions but the fact of the matter is that it is, from the perspective of someone who just cares about conservation of momentum, a bit of a non-intuitive hack.
we are confident that we have *all* physical effects well and truly nailed.
You have a mathematical theory that has been used to make a bunch of correct predictions (...and a bunch of incorrect ones.) Do you agree that "obeys this equation" and "we understand what's going on" are two entirely separate things?
Mind you, I've been extremely skeptical of the EM drive thing until now, and I don't think that new physics breakthrough is necessarily probable, but I think we are nearing the point where the question may deserve a little more than the boilerplate response.
That was one of the first things I thought of as well, although they may or may not have been able to notice a decrease in weight via the "Scientech SA210 precision weighing balance" they were apparently using to measure the thrust produced.
Presumably this wouldn't be such a terribly difficult thing to check--leave the thing on for three months solid, periodically re-verifying that thrust is being produced, and then weigh it again at the end once you're fairly certain that the weigh reduction, if present, should be measurable. I don't have the time to dig into the paper at length right now, but at this point I would hope that the conversation--among physicists and interested non-physicists alike, would focus on the remaining potential sources of thrust. The experiments in non-vacuums I pretty much discounted entirely. This one makes me pay a bit more attention. Can we rule out self-vaporization? Next step: can we rule out interaction with background radiation?
If those two things are ruled out then something interesting is going on here. Even if it looks like it's "pushing off of" the background radiation somehow, it still might turn out to be a useful device.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door... the physicist version of this would be "prove that this isn't something mundane" in lieu of "build a better mousetrap."
The fundamental problem with this experiment is that it appears to violate conservation of momentum. This violation is not something that can be discarded easily: it has been confirmed directly and indirectly in millions of experiments over decades.
Not without accreting a couple hacky-looking things, namely quantum spin. Yes yes, the Standard Model has withstood a hell of a lot of attacks from people trying to "simplify" things over many decades and also made a bunch of impressive predictions, I get that... and yeah, there are snake oil salesmen and millions of starry-eyed teenage geeks who want to believe they're going to live to see a major new physics revolution. But the simple fact of the matter is we don't have a Theory of Everything and there are lots of curious and unintuitive modifications we've had to make over the years to notions like momentum that may well turn out to be incorrect (or 'approximations').
These conversations can be humored and probably at this point deserve a little debate just to widen the minds of actual physicists and grad students around the globe... but of course what we really need right now are a dozen more experiments that conclusively rule out every conceivable source of thrust and attempting to more accurately quantify the thrust and its properties.
By far the most likely outcome of this is that it will turn out to be particle emission of some sort which our existing physics can explain. If they want to convince anyone of anything else they need to focus on investigating possible causes and focus less on just measuring the thrust.
There's no air, and their force measurements used a "weighing balance" so I'm assuming they would have noticed if the apparatus was somehow vaporizing part of itself via the change in weight. So whence come the particles? Background radiation? Yeah, sure, perhaps... but that still doesn't negate the potential practical applications for the device, if it is indeed "pushing off" of something that's present even in a vacuum.
The next step is to try to rule out background radiation, sure, but even if these experiment return mundane results, we still potentially have a very interesting device on our hands.
Yeah, us doubters should probably eat a little bit of crow here. Most of the early on stuff looked suspicious like regular pseudoscience scams, and the significance of the preliminary positive findings were exaggerated by throngs of geeks who desperately wanted it to be true (not unlike the geeks who insist that the hyperloop, in its current proposed form, is going to be revolutionary) but... yeah yeah, ok, this is pretty interesting.
It could be much more interesting than Michelson-Morley, because it addition to possibly holding the promise of new physical theories in has obvious and immediate practical applications.
(Or maybe there's still something they're not accounting for.)
There's all the difference in the world because of the fact that the Republicans control the senate and house and there will likely to be multiple SCOTUS seats to fill.
I'm not sold on the Clinton Foundation being at all significant. It's a charitable foundation that has been examined and found to spend most of it's money on its in-house charitable programs (I think it got an A+ rating or something.) The logical connective tissue just isn't there. The foundation is obviously for prestige or self-image; it makes no sense that she would make actual policy concessions, thus risk tarnishing her public image even more, just so a charity with her name on it can get a little more money.
If you've evidence that the foundation is corrupt, that would be another matter entirely. Political contributions or paid speeches are another matter entirely as well.
It was a hope, a possibility, not a prediction.
Another possibility is that the Republican party establishment utterly disintegrates because the social conservatives try to overplay their hand now that they're nearly in control of all three branches of government. Not saying that's worth the damage they could do to the country, but at least it'll be an interesting and grimly satisfying light show.
A fine sentiment in theory, but the broader picture people should be focused on (and something I admit I rather glossed over in my original 4 AM post) is "giving the Republican party a chance." And/or, holding them to account if they screw it up.
This is it for the Republicans. They can't blame the next couple years on Democrats, and there's a strong chance they won't be able to blame SCOTUS decisions on "liberal judicial activism" for a very long time. The Republicans were in bad shape even before Trump came along, and now they can make all of their dreams come true. Let's see how that goes for them (and us.)
A moderate Republican might have been able to destroy him (perhaps like Marco Rubio was trying to be before the primary ate him alive) in the general. But Donald Trump? Uh, no. The only potent anti-Bernie weapon they had was "ZOMG Socialism!!!", which given the stuff surrounding Trump was unlikely to be an earthshaking attack. Bernie just had to be his gentle, articulate anti-establishment self. There's no path to a Trump victory that I can see, and the polls (flawed as they may be) confirm this. None of the criticisms of Bernie (and some of them are indeed valid concerns in other contexts) matter much at all vs. Donald Trump.
Ah wait, I guess you did see that. Well, sorry, I'm not reading your post in its entirety or providing further detailed rebuttals until you register for an account. Like I said, I've been trolled by one too many ACs in recent months, and your writing style is suspiciously familiar.
You probably overlooked the first reply I wrote, but it still stands: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Is it easier to spot a thousand little lies or one big lie?
A thousand little lies. Not to hijack your point there, but people are too emotionally invested in the big lies to properly spot them.
I thought this was just something TV / moviemakers had been doing since the 90s to purposefully annoy geeks.
"Zoom in on D2."
"Enhance!"
Do not confuse "looking normal" (hiding the fact that you're hiding anything, from your ISP's point of view) with protecting yourself from tracking by remote services and websites. The questioner appeared to be concerned only with the latter, so the suggestions to use a stateless system (Qubes' DispVM, or a live distro like TAILS) seem a lot more relevant than trying really hard to look normal to the guys in the black van.
Please explain the racist implication in Trump's statement. Go on. Was he saying that "Mexicans" were genetically predisposed to hating him?
One of the biggest failures of the left has been the continued mischaracterization and conflation of Trump's (admittedly diverse and wildly changing) gaffes. He said something unreasonable and stupid insofar as he was actually implying the judge should've recused himself or something, but there's no reasonable parsing of it I can find that seems at all, and in itself, racist.