As long as current observations that the universe is causal are not falsified.
Indeed. And if one looks at ESP research, such as precognitive dreams, remote viewing, autoganzfeld, or delayed-choice Zener cards, it appears that the universe is NOT causal in the ordinary sense of 'an effect always occurs before its cause'. Psi correlation seems to blithely ignore light cones and causality; remote viewers or card guessers can 'see' a future event with probability greater than chance just as easily as they can 'see' a past or present event.
Course you then have to figure out how to extract the signal from the noise since psi is a very noisy channel... but still. Unless one simply ignores 100+ years of psi research (and sadly many post-WW2 physicists do because they've just not been taught about this), there's some weird stuff going on in the foundations of physics which ought to inform our theories.
Does information in precognition 'travel' from the future to the past, or are two events merely correlated? Which way is the arrow of time flowing here? Is there in fact an arrow of time at all? Is the past (or part of it) caused by the future in the same way that the future is caused by the past? If so, are some events 'more causal' than others? Does time flow sideways, or is everything just 'fated to be'?
Boundary Institute have some interesting maths about this kind of correlation with their 'link physics' : http://boundary.org/bi/index.html
Why is it when the industry adopts a standard the OSS community must switch to something else?
Because it's illegal for the OSS community to use the industry 'standard' because of patent restrictions.
It'd be great if H.264 was legally allowed to be used. It's not technical restrictions or 'not invented here' prejudice forcing this. It's the big bad law.
That GQ article is interesting because of the interview with Allan Frey.
He's interesting because of his MKULTRA-era research on the microwave auditory effect, which raises all sorts of questions about what might have been done with that technology by the US military.
Also of note is his work on microwaves and the blood-brain barrier, which seems like it might be a useful way to increase the efficiency of psychoactive drugs for interrogations.
This kind of stuff is *literal* tin-foil hat territory.
"A repeatable, explicit, and predictive mechanism capable of producing biologically significant responses (modulation dependent or not) from low-level RF fields has not been found." You can accept quantum mechanics as a valid standard, or you can base your understanding upon who provided the funding.
I don't understand this argument. At all.
The way I was taught that science works is: you collect data, you notice trends, you infer relationships... THEN and only then do you start speculating and building models of mechanisms once you know that there is an effect. And your models must be constrained by the data: whether or not you understand the mechanism, you know that a connection must exist. And you go from there to revise or falsify your models.
But a lot of people seem to do it the other way: start with our current models of mechanisms, then assume that they are 100% correct and definitive because we are now at the end of science and will make no new discoveries, then on that basis reject any data which seem to throw doubt on the model by saying 'but that can't happen because there isn't a mechanism.'
The issue of 'is there a known mechanism' seems way irrelevant to 'do the data show connections that imply a known or unknown mechanism might exist'.
And let's not forget that when it comes to object oriented languages, there's not actually a rigorous definition of what OOP actually is - compared to other computer science concepts like, say, relational database theory. Is it classes? Nope, we have pure prototype OO like Lua and Self. Is it single inheritance? Nope, we have Smalltalk and CLOS. Is it multiple inheritance? Nope, we have Java. Is it implementation inheritance? Nope, we have interfaces and the 'implementation inheritance is evil' school. Is it late binding and message passing? Nope, we have C++ and Objective-C and Java and the 'big compilation up front' school. Is it encapsulation and data hiding? Nope, we have Javascript.
Pretty much any definition you can think of for OOP will fail; there will be a mainstream or founding language considered OO which does not have that feature. Even just Smalltalk and C++ are practically inverses of each other on so many positions.
It scares me a bit that much of modern software engineering is based on a theoretical foundation which is not itself consistently definable, a bit like postmodernism.
What does it mean to say that a CEO or investment fund manager has "earned" a multi-million-dollar annual salary? Is their life really worth, as a human being, hundreds of thousands times more than a child worker in India? By most moral calculi, no.
It means that someone has agreed to pay them that much money - that's all.
If the money comes from rental or investment, then it's not even a matter of choice on the part of the payee, nor is it any kind of "earning" of the receiver. They did no work to receive interest on money. It was a tax on the work of others, scooped out handed to them.
If the people via their elected representatives keep choosing to pay their parents money (and after all, the older generations got us here - we owe them our very lives and wellbeing - surely that counts for something?) - they isn't that a much more valid definition of "earn" than the "earnings" of someone who lives off investments?
Uh, yeah. So. How did you hear about that music that you want to buy?
I never did, because it was illegal for my friends to share their music with me.
I'm sure the Internet and social media can become a much more efficient distribution channel - but in order to to that, it has to allow pervasive quoting. Creative Commons could enable this - but how many bands yet release cc-by-sa licensed tracks? Or even cc-by-nc?
Youtube and Facebook have become the de facto social media channels - some of my favourite bands release Youtube videos ( eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKhrEFzLfM ) which I can happily promote via Facebook - but this doesn't really seem optimal. It's still strictly speaking illegal for me to upload a track to Youtube to promote a band, and I could get hurt bad if I try.
Whatever happened to the various early-2000s Open Music sharing initiatives? Any of 'em still around?
Because NASA has be largely encouraged to "get stuff from industry" for so long--shrink its workforce and farm out all of the details as much as possible, most everything paid for by the taxpayers is proprietary to the companies to which NASA contracts. Nobody else can use it and we get 30 years of stagnation of space travel. Will we get more of the same with the new proposal?
So - we're already living in the glorious privatised space future? Except that the megacorporations aren't actually doing anything with their neat technologies because there's no money in it?
it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
Enabling third-party space development is a nice goal... you do realise, though, that making it possible for National Geographic to go privately into orbit also means making it possible for Al Quaeda to go privately into orbit and drop rocks on our heads?
At least, I assume this is why NASA has been reluctant to let go of the LEO monopoly. 'Launch vehicle' is just a pretty name for ICBM without a warhead.
Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
At some point, one has to idly speculate and wonder: is it conspiracy theory to ask 'is there a reason for this beyond mere organisational incompetence'?
Yes, it's tinfoil-hat territory, but I'm finding it weirder and weirder how a Shuttle successor always seems to be just inches away and yet never quite appears. Can the US's premier flagship science/propaganda agency REALLY be so impotent? I mean it's a pretty bad look, on the international stage. Failure after failure. It's like losing the Crown Jewels. Apollo, and then this: ignominous retreat.
Yes, I'm aware that manned spaceflight isn't really useful now that we have robots, and that there's nothing there to send people for... but still, it's a huge propaganda loss for US prestige.
Or is it that the USAF has some kind of secondary secret space capability that they're quite pleased with, that they've been developing since the 1980s, maybe all those 'Orient Express' and 'Delta Clipper' prototypes that supposedly went nowhere were doing just what the Air Force ordered, and that the reason the Shuttle isn't being replaced is that it really just doesn't matter anymore because the black boys can already do it better?
Do you care which 7-11 sold the most hotdogs? Or if the Pepsi bottling plant on the east coast produced more soda than the west coast plant?
Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant B Shift! Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant Plant B Shift! Rah rah rah! Gimmie a C! Gimmie a O! Gimmie an N! Move those bottles stamp those lids! Gonna put the West Coast on the skids! We ain't no A Shift we ain't no C! We're No 1 cause we're the B! Rah rah rah! Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant B Shift!!!
Slashdot Mirror
As long as current observations that the universe is causal are not falsified.
Indeed. And if one looks at ESP research, such as precognitive dreams, remote viewing, autoganzfeld, or delayed-choice Zener cards, it appears that the universe is NOT causal in the ordinary sense of 'an effect always occurs before its cause'. Psi correlation seems to blithely ignore light cones and causality; remote viewers or card guessers can 'see' a future event with probability greater than chance just as easily as they can 'see' a past or present event.
Course you then have to figure out how to extract the signal from the noise since psi is a very noisy channel... but still. Unless one simply ignores 100+ years of psi research (and sadly many post-WW2 physicists do because they've just not been taught about this), there's some weird stuff going on in the foundations of physics which ought to inform our theories.
Does information in precognition 'travel' from the future to the past, or are two events merely correlated? Which way is the arrow of time flowing here? Is there in fact an arrow of time at all? Is the past (or part of it) caused by the future in the same way that the future is caused by the past? If so, are some events 'more causal' than others? Does time flow sideways, or is everything just 'fated to be'?
Boundary Institute have some interesting maths about this kind of correlation with their 'link physics' : http://boundary.org/bi/index.html
Why is it when the industry adopts a standard the OSS community must switch to something else?
Because it's illegal for the OSS community to use the industry 'standard' because of patent restrictions.
It'd be great if H.264 was legally allowed to be used. It's not technical restrictions or 'not invented here' prejudice forcing this. It's the big bad law.
That GQ article is interesting because of the interview with Allan Frey.
He's interesting because of his MKULTRA-era research on the microwave auditory effect, which raises all sorts of questions about what might have been done with that technology by the US military.
Also of note is his work on microwaves and the blood-brain barrier, which seems like it might be a useful way to increase the efficiency of psychoactive drugs for interrogations.
This kind of stuff is *literal* tin-foil hat territory.
corporations in the green industry
What is this 'green industry' and where can I invest?
"A repeatable, explicit, and predictive mechanism capable of producing biologically significant responses (modulation dependent or not) from low-level RF fields has not been found." You can accept quantum mechanics as a valid standard, or you can base your understanding upon who provided the funding.
I don't understand this argument. At all.
The way I was taught that science works is: you collect data, you notice trends, you infer relationships... THEN and only then do you start speculating and building models of mechanisms once you know that there is an effect. And your models must be constrained by the data: whether or not you understand the mechanism, you know that a connection must exist. And you go from there to revise or falsify your models.
But a lot of people seem to do it the other way: start with our current models of mechanisms, then assume that they are 100% correct and definitive because we are now at the end of science and will make no new discoveries, then on that basis reject any data which seem to throw doubt on the model by saying 'but that can't happen because there isn't a mechanism.'
The issue of 'is there a known mechanism' seems way irrelevant to 'do the data show connections that imply a known or unknown mechanism might exist'.
Do the data, in fact, show such connections?
And let's not forget that when it comes to object oriented languages, there's not actually a rigorous definition of what OOP actually is - compared to other computer science concepts like, say, relational database theory. Is it classes? Nope, we have pure prototype OO like Lua and Self. Is it single inheritance? Nope, we have Smalltalk and CLOS. Is it multiple inheritance? Nope, we have Java. Is it implementation inheritance? Nope, we have interfaces and the 'implementation inheritance is evil' school. Is it late binding and message passing? Nope, we have C++ and Objective-C and Java and the 'big compilation up front' school. Is it encapsulation and data hiding? Nope, we have Javascript.
Pretty much any definition you can think of for OOP will fail; there will be a mainstream or founding language considered OO which does not have that feature. Even just Smalltalk and C++ are practically inverses of each other on so many positions.
It scares me a bit that much of modern software engineering is based on a theoretical foundation which is not itself consistently definable, a bit like postmodernism.
You really think the 5% of population that has been alive in the last 100 years counts for that much population in history?
We might not have the numbers, but we got nukes.
Except now that the crisis is 'over' we're back to fractional-reserve business as usual. Whee!
I read this as "in the very distant future, /. will be reporting on man's obituary"
and thought that was a frightening posthuman scenario.
Because 'cyber warrior' sounds better than 'script herder'.
The price in any market is not set on what the consumer thinks is fair, it's based on what they'll pay.
This is a very good point. Why does it turn out that people seem to often pay more than what they think is fair?
(that you did not earn)
A key point is the definition of "earn".
What does it mean to say that a CEO or investment fund manager has "earned" a multi-million-dollar annual salary? Is their life really worth, as a human being, hundreds of thousands times more than a child worker in India? By most moral calculi, no.
It means that someone has agreed to pay them that much money - that's all.
If the money comes from rental or investment, then it's not even a matter of choice on the part of the payee, nor is it any kind of "earning" of the receiver. They did no work to receive interest on money. It was a tax on the work of others, scooped out handed to them.
If the people via their elected representatives keep choosing to pay their parents money (and after all, the older generations got us here - we owe them our very lives and wellbeing - surely that counts for something?) - they isn't that a much more valid definition of "earn" than the "earnings" of someone who lives off investments?
"A reasonable definition of Welfare is the government giving you money that you did not earn to ensure you fare well in life. "
As opposed to investment banking, which is the people giving you money to ensure you fare well in life.
One thing I've always wondered: who is the US national debt owed to?
Who is it who receives a $260 billion/year paycheck?
What do they do with all that money I give them?
Invade Afghanistan and Iraq and make a lot of new terrorists.
Some of us complained a bit at the time. Probably didn't make the news.
There are exceptions of course. Here's one. Matt Kresling. I found him on Facebook/Youtube, and he offered a free download. So for the machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLwS4SxLwqQ
Uh, yeah. So. How did you hear about that music that you want to buy?
I never did, because it was illegal for my friends to share their music with me.
I'm sure the Internet and social media can become a much more efficient distribution channel - but in order to to that, it has to allow pervasive quoting. Creative Commons could enable this - but how many bands yet release cc-by-sa licensed tracks? Or even cc-by-nc?
Youtube and Facebook have become the de facto social media channels - some of my favourite bands release Youtube videos ( eg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKhrEFzLfM ) which I can happily promote via Facebook - but this doesn't really seem optimal. It's still strictly speaking illegal for me to upload a track to Youtube to promote a band, and I could get hurt bad if I try.
Whatever happened to the various early-2000s Open Music sharing initiatives? Any of 'em still around?
Because NASA has be largely encouraged to "get stuff from industry" for so long--shrink its workforce and farm out all of the details as much as possible, most everything paid for by the taxpayers is proprietary to the companies to which NASA contracts. Nobody else can use it and we get 30 years of stagnation of space travel. Will we get more of the same with the new proposal?
So - we're already living in the glorious privatised space future? Except that the megacorporations aren't actually doing anything with their neat technologies because there's no money in it?
Hooray for private industry, I guess.
it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
Enabling third-party space development is a nice goal... you do realise, though, that making it possible for National Geographic to go privately into orbit also means making it possible for Al Quaeda to go privately into orbit and drop rocks on our heads?
At least, I assume this is why NASA has been reluctant to let go of the LEO monopoly. 'Launch vehicle' is just a pretty name for ICBM without a warhead.
Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
At some point, one has to idly speculate and wonder: is it conspiracy theory to ask 'is there a reason for this beyond mere organisational incompetence'?
Yes, it's tinfoil-hat territory, but I'm finding it weirder and weirder how a Shuttle successor always seems to be just inches away and yet never quite appears. Can the US's premier flagship science/propaganda agency REALLY be so impotent? I mean it's a pretty bad look, on the international stage. Failure after failure. It's like losing the Crown Jewels. Apollo, and then this: ignominous retreat.
Yes, I'm aware that manned spaceflight isn't really useful now that we have robots, and that there's nothing there to send people for... but still, it's a huge propaganda loss for US prestige.
Or is it that the USAF has some kind of secondary secret space capability that they're quite pleased with, that they've been developing since the 1980s, maybe all those 'Orient Express' and 'Delta Clipper' prototypes that supposedly went nowhere were doing just what the Air Force ordered, and that the reason the Shuttle isn't being replaced is that it really just doesn't matter anymore because the black boys can already do it better?
Crazy, I know. Maybe it is just incompetence.
Quantum football is actually really hard to play well. No matter how good your defense, there's a nonzero chance the other team will break through it.
Do you care which 7-11 sold the most hotdogs? Or if the Pepsi bottling plant on the east coast produced more soda than the west coast plant?
Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant B Shift! Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant Plant B Shift! Rah rah rah! Gimmie a C! Gimmie a O! Gimmie an N! Move those bottles stamp those lids! Gonna put the West Coast on the skids! We ain't no A Shift we ain't no C! We're No 1 cause we're the B! Rah rah rah! Consolidated Eastern Seaboard Amalgamated Bottling Jersey Plant B Shift!!!
role-playing games - it's just playing "house" with dice!
Or Snakes & Ladders with dragons!
what are you looking at me like that for? The dragon goes up, the dungeon goes down... darnit now you've got me thinking that's a viable game design.
We'd have to add a collectible card component of course... hologram-embossed foil covers... a Saturday morning cartoon franchise and an MMORPG...
In fact let's just make a MMORPG.
The iPad isn't a general purpose computer
YES. That's precisely the problem. General purpose computers are in danger of being replaced by crippled 'appliances'.
This is a very very dangerous trend.
"All I've wanted a tablet for is surfing the web, reading books, and things like that."
And your Web experience includes no Flash applets, ever?
Heck, Flash runs on my Linux box just fine.
Mad props to Steve for finally creating a Mac which does less than Linux does.