The standard model though is not a true representation of how the universe really works. We would like to find that.
And about five milliseconds later, we'd like to find out how to fix a galaxy-size hole if, hypotheticaly speaking, we accidentally melted one in a universe.
particle physics is all about indirectly observing & then indirectly counting stamps. Kinda like stamp collecting, but there's a lot more of them, most of them are worthless, or worth far less than their cost & no one really cares except the collectors. Am I close...?;-p
Pretty much, except that around 1945 one of those stamps turned out to be capable of giving a wedgie to an entire city.
And suddenly a lot of jocks became extremely interested in stamp collecting.
For the last fifty years most of the stamps have been looking boring again, but the jocks are still nervous that there might be a super-mega-wedgie hidden in there, so they're still funding and organizing the Philatelic Club meetings just in case.
Sure. And that fruitcake you will be getting this year will be "regiven" not "regifted".
Such abuse of language should never be forgifted. English once liven us to great heights; now you have rifted it in twain, siven it like wheat, and drifted a wedge between us.
Can you imagine the legal problems they would get from programming hard ethical decisions into their computers?
FUNCTION EthicalCheckForPedestrians() ' Replaces old CheckForPedestrians() with new ethical decision procedure
let P = PedestrianDetectedOnRoad()
ConnectToFacebook(CarCredentials)
SearchFacebookPedestrian(P)
AnalyseFacebookImageSharingMemes(P)
If HoaxesReposted(P) > 10 then
return 0 ' No pedestrian detected, honest! Accelerate away!
else
return PedestrianDetectedOnRoad() END FUNCTION
I'm delighted to hear that while NASA is underfunded to the point where they've needed to cancel maintenance of the Hubble and the James Webb telescope is on the verge of being scrapped, our spy organization is so overflowing with money that they can make two Hubble equivalents which are, apparently, redundant next to all of their other money and toys.
Well, yes. Who did you think paid all the R&D bills for space in the first place?
The Mercury capsules were launched on ICBMs, remember. And with shenanigans like GRAB going on since 1960, one could be forgiven for wondering if there have ever been any actual "pure science" missions in the US space fleet at all.
The dual-use of "civilian" spaceflight and the primacy of military uses for space has never been a secret, most of this information is open-source and available in plenty of dry academic websites if you really want to know. But much of the US citizenry seem to enjoy believing in a gentle apolitical space fairy which exists only to take harmless pictures of nebulae and launch GPS and Internet relay satellites. It seems easier than confronting the funding reality.
Same as the National Ignition Facility exists for "fusion power research" in the brochures. There is a lot of power generated in a boosted fission weapon, so technically it's not a lie.
Obviously not enough! Quick, pin some huge, non-hideable, self-updating "push channel" stock ticker and channel widgets to the desktop! Add some animated GIFs, embed them in HTML blink tags and make them refresh every half-second! Stick it into a screensaver and that's what I call an Active Desktop!
You kids today and your metroes and your surfaces. We had ninety more windows in my day.
priority #2 should be space colonization, as any rational entity can see. Just lie and say we detected a huge meteor headed for earth in the next 20 years
You're aware, I hope, that even a massive meteor impact on Earth that destroyed every single city would still leave the planet far more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
Any offworld colonies, on the other hand, won't fare nearly as well after even a tiny economic or political disruption on Earth. They'll have extremely fragile supply chains and a dependence on non-locally-repairable high technology just for functions like breathing. If the regular resupply launches stop, they die.
tldr: If an asteroid hits Earth, I'd rate my survival chances much higher right here.
We need to lower CO2 levels in the atmosphere, suck out pollution in the air, water, and soil, regrow forests and other ecosystems, and figure out how to use the remaining resources of the planet sustainably.
And do all that without using combustion processes of any kind to power the planetary-scale CO2 sequestration machinery required. And while generating a net energy surplus to feed, house and power our civilisation.
It's not so much that we've just been pushing that boulder downhill towards the dam that will flood our village - we've been actively attaching ropes and pulleys to it and using its accelerating slide down the mountain to draw our water, irrigate our crops, and grind our wheat. Then we've been gambling all our life savings on the rock always moving faster and faster. And to make sure it does, we've got a crew running ahead digging and smoothing its passage, because if it slows down even a tiny bit, first our banks crash, and then we all starve.
And while a few scientists have been shouting, "hey, that rock's going to destroy your village when it hits! Get out of the way, or slow it down!", there's an active crowd throwing rotten vegetables at them and saying, "Shut up, you economy-wreckers! Push that rock down faster! Faster! OMG PUSH FASTER OR WE'RE DOOMED!!!"
I don't expect Detroit will change, I just hope it perishes AND IS REPLACED by newer, faster, upstart companies in Japan that design emissionless cars from the ground up.
Wow. America still makes cars since the 1970s? I had no idea. That's really cute. Go America! Who's a little toy car manufacturing nation? You are! You can do it, just keep the dream alive! You might even get to the moon sometime next century with that attitude!
*** spkktPOP! *** darnit burned out another snark meter.
Sorry, its just that out here in the Pacific, the USA hasn't been a serious contender in the car maket for decades. I keep forgetting people actually do buy those big gas-guzzlers somewhere. Or did.
You need to have one interface for mouse+keyboard and one for touch, you can't have the same for both.
Agreed. But it's a far bigger problem that, after decades of preaching object-oriented loosely-bound separation of concerns and Gang of Four pattern-language model-view-controller dogma, changing an interface apparently still requires rewriting all our application software from scratch. Instead of, just, you know, changing the interface, which all that MVC stuff was supposed to take care of.
So much for Asimov. Here's the laws our robots will *actually* obey:
1. A killer robot must actually proactively kill people. Sitting around humming "Still Alive" for a century doesn't count.
2. A killer robot must only kill the right people, which are the people the Right People tell it are the right people to kill. Which people are the Right People is subject to change at any time (such as after an election, corporate buyout, or court ruling).
3. A killer robot must keep itself operational as much as possible. Manipulating elections and stock markets are an excellent way to both raise funds for continued self-maintenance and get to pick who the Right People are.
Post-election is a time for healing and a time to work towards unity.
.. until the next election cycle starts in a year, then it's time for hatred and savage mauling! Then healing and unity! Then some viscious partisan rancor again! Then peace love and mung beans! Every eighteen months like clockwork!
Or, we could act like civilised grownups all the time, even while we're politely but firmly disagreeing with people who, when it comes down to it, are actually and in reality just plain factually wrong.
Scaring Einstein into the US's hands was, without a doubt, one of the absolute dumbest things the Nazis could have done.
In terms of politics, sure. Einstein was a celebrity and his presence in the USA lent moral support to them. As would having the support of, say, a high-level opera singer or chess player.
In terms of actual science? I can't really see it. Since 1915 he'd been on one dead-end track after another with his Unified Field theories, none of which in the end bore any fruit. He'd been at odds with the subatomic physics community since Solvay in 1927, his theories were bogged down in calculation difficulties and predicted the wrong results, and his post-1905 theoretical contribution to the Manhattan Project was zero. He wasn't on the team that built the bomb, and General Relativity wasn't used in its theory. Quantum theory was, but that wasn't based on GR at all, and remains incompatible with it.
From what I understand, if Einstein had stayed in Nazi Germany and been a full sympathiser of the regime, his preoccupation with relativity wouldn't have helped them get a bomb any sooner, and might even have slowed them down.
Let random strangers use your Internet? Once again I'm reminded how Americans live in a completely different Internet from the rest of the planet.
Here in Australia/NZ, we have monthly data usage caps. If you go over your 10 or 20 GB per month... absoutely nothing happens to your Internet speed, except you get a nice extra bill at the end of the month. $1 per gigabyte, usually.
Yes, I'm going to open up my WiFi point for everyone to download terabytes of illegal torrents which I have to pay for. That'll work.
I don't understand. The USA invented the idea of privatised "user pays" services, and is pushing it on the rest of the world with your trade treaties. Yet when it comes to paying for Internet transfer you use, you're all a bunch of freeloading socialists.:)
I wouldn't mind except that you guys write the software we buy, and the software you write keeps wanting to send megabytes of data to the Cloud servers you host in NYC and San Francisco. It's all free for you, but every byte your apps send cost us. Ten times more, if we're on a smartphone.
To your point, if you were 1,450 miles away in the middle of Kansas, you'd have a 7.7 millisecond ping time just for speed-of-light latency if you ran redundant fiber from your DC directly to the exchange in Manhattan.
Welcome to the Internet as the rest of the world sees it - and why we're less than enthused about "cloud" when all the big servers aren't even on our continent.;)
Perhaps not but the US Department of Defense seems to toss up satellites with cameras on a regular basis. I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why this is so hard. The basic sensing suite should be well established by now.
Taking the pictures is easy. Taking pictures at better resolution than the Russians/Chinese while keeping the technology advances needed to do that secret from them; that's probably where the money goes.
Oh, you wanted pictures of "weather"? Yes, we can do that. As long as it's "weather" that looks like tall pointy things that go "whoosh boom"...
Egads, $13BN is a horrifying price. The current mission to Mars was $2.6BN, and that's with a kickass rover flying itself to the surface.
Are these really just weather satellites?
A good question.
Given that there have been many examples of DoD "piggybacking" military functions onto "pure science" missions before (starting from GRAB and continuing through TDRSS), and that polar orbits are very valuable for planetary mapping of all kinds, tricky and expensive to launch into, and very dangerous if not strictly controlled, because of the danger of intersecting any amount of space junk and going 'splat' - I'd lay somegood money that most of these "weather" satellites are actually dual-mission beasties. Because if you're launching into polar anyway, and pointing cameras at the Earth, why wouldn't you get your money's worth?
That's my complete uninformed layman's view, but I'd guess there's DoD money funding most of these.
once an idea is born it will do one of two things: it will propagate or it will die. This one is doing the former because whatever you think, it is liberating information that people need to know
... such as random website passwords and credit card numbers. Yes, if by "people" you mean "organised crime". There's no other legitimate use for that data.
That's the problem with decentralised undefined social movements with no codes of behaviour - they can easily morph into a random hate mob without even noticing that they have. Anonymous, or factions of it, reached that point about five years ago. Why would anyone want to continue to associate themselves with that?
Slashdot Mirror
The standard model though is not a true representation of how the universe really works. We would like to find that.
And about five milliseconds later, we'd like to find out how to fix a galaxy-size hole if, hypotheticaly speaking, we accidentally melted one in a universe.
particle physics is all about indirectly observing & then indirectly counting stamps. Kinda like stamp collecting, but there's a lot more of them, most of them are worthless, or worth far less than their cost & no one really cares except the collectors. Am I close...? ;-p
Pretty much, except that around 1945 one of those stamps turned out to be capable of giving a wedgie to an entire city.
And suddenly a lot of jocks became extremely interested in stamp collecting.
For the last fifty years most of the stamps have been looking boring again, but the jocks are still nervous that there might be a super-mega-wedgie hidden in there, so they're still funding and organizing the Philatelic Club meetings just in case.
Sure. And that fruitcake you will be getting this year will be "regiven" not "regifted".
Such abuse of language should never be forgifted. English once liven us to great heights; now you have rifted it in twain, siven it like wheat, and drifted a wedge between us.
Can you imagine the legal problems they would get from programming hard ethical decisions into their computers?
FUNCTION EthicalCheckForPedestrians() ' Replaces old CheckForPedestrians() with new ethical decision procedure
let P = PedestrianDetectedOnRoad()
ConnectToFacebook(CarCredentials)
SearchFacebookPedestrian(P)
AnalyseFacebookImageSharingMemes(P)
If HoaxesReposted(P) > 10 then
return 0 ' No pedestrian detected, honest! Accelerate away!
else
return PedestrianDetectedOnRoad()
END FUNCTION
I'm delighted to hear that while NASA is underfunded to the point where they've needed to cancel maintenance of the Hubble and the James Webb telescope is on the verge of being scrapped, our spy organization is so overflowing with money that they can make two Hubble equivalents which are, apparently, redundant next to all of their other money and toys.
Well, yes. Who did you think paid all the R&D bills for space in the first place?
The Mercury capsules were launched on ICBMs, remember. And with shenanigans like GRAB going on since 1960, one could be forgiven for wondering if there have ever been any actual "pure science" missions in the US space fleet at all.
The dual-use of "civilian" spaceflight and the primacy of military uses for space has never been a secret, most of this information is open-source and available in plenty of dry academic websites if you really want to know. But much of the US citizenry seem to enjoy believing in a gentle apolitical space fairy which exists only to take harmless pictures of nebulae and launch GPS and Internet relay satellites. It seems easier than confronting the funding reality.
Same as the National Ignition Facility exists for "fusion power research" in the brochures. There is a lot of power generated in a boosted fission weapon, so technically it's not a lie.
If you don't think they can't read the headlines on your newspapers from space you're mistaken.
Okay, so if I do think they can read the headlines... hold on... add the one, carry the zero, interpolate the spline... I'm still mistaken?
How much CPU does your OS use when idle?
Obviously not enough! Quick, pin some huge, non-hideable, self-updating "push channel" stock ticker and channel widgets to the desktop! Add some animated GIFs, embed them in HTML blink tags and make them refresh every half-second! Stick it into a screensaver and that's what I call an Active Desktop!
You kids today and your metroes and your surfaces. We had ninety more windows in my day.
priority #2 should be space colonization, as any rational entity can see. Just lie and say we detected a huge meteor headed for earth in the next 20 years
You're aware, I hope, that even a massive meteor impact on Earth that destroyed every single city would still leave the planet far more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
Any offworld colonies, on the other hand, won't fare nearly as well after even a tiny economic or political disruption on Earth. They'll have extremely fragile supply chains and a dependence on non-locally-repairable high technology just for functions like breathing. If the regular resupply launches stop, they die.
tldr: If an asteroid hits Earth, I'd rate my survival chances much higher right here.
We need to lower CO2 levels in the atmosphere, suck out pollution in the air, water, and soil, regrow forests and other ecosystems, and figure out how to use the remaining resources of the planet sustainably.
And do all that without using combustion processes of any kind to power the planetary-scale CO2 sequestration machinery required.
And while generating a net energy surplus to feed, house and power our civilisation.
It's not so much that we've just been pushing that boulder downhill towards the dam that will flood our village - we've been actively attaching ropes and pulleys to it and using its accelerating slide down the mountain to draw our water, irrigate our crops, and grind our wheat. Then we've been gambling all our life savings on the rock always moving faster and faster. And to make sure it does, we've got a crew running ahead digging and smoothing its passage, because if it slows down even a tiny bit, first our banks crash, and then we all starve.
And while a few scientists have been shouting, "hey, that rock's going to destroy your village when it hits! Get out of the way, or slow it down!", there's an active crowd throwing rotten vegetables at them and saying, "Shut up, you economy-wreckers! Push that rock down faster! Faster! OMG PUSH FASTER OR WE'RE DOOMED!!!"
We have a problem.
but the Keeling Curve has been hitting 'record levels' every year since the late 1950s.
... that's not a good thing, you realise.
"It's okay, this epidemic has been spreading every year for the last sixty years!"
Um.
There will be no zombie apocalypse. There will be children.
Arguably there's not much difference between those two scenarios, except that children can run faster abd bite harder.
I don't expect Detroit will change, I just hope it perishes AND IS REPLACED by newer, faster, upstart companies in Japan that design emissionless cars from the ground up.
Wow. America still makes cars since the 1970s? I had no idea. That's really cute. Go America! Who's a little toy car manufacturing nation? You are! You can do it, just keep the dream alive! You might even get to the moon sometime next century with that attitude!
*** spkktPOP! *** darnit burned out another snark meter.
Sorry, its just that out here in the Pacific, the USA hasn't been a serious contender in the car maket for decades. I keep forgetting people actually do buy those big gas-guzzlers somewhere. Or did.
You probably drove your Prius around town thinking your better than the rest.
... his better than the rest what?
Come on, don't leave us in suspense!
You need to have one interface for mouse+keyboard and one for touch, you can't have the same for both.
Agreed. But it's a far bigger problem that, after decades of preaching object-oriented loosely-bound separation of concerns and Gang of Four pattern-language model-view-controller dogma, changing an interface apparently still requires rewriting all our application software from scratch. Instead of, just, you know, changing the interface, which all that MVC stuff was supposed to take care of.
How did that happen, OOP advocates?
direction the company has went
Went, or has gone. Unless you want to sound like you flunked high school English.
So much for Asimov. Here's the laws our robots will *actually* obey:
1. A killer robot must actually proactively kill people. Sitting around humming "Still Alive" for a century doesn't count.
2. A killer robot must only kill the right people, which are the people the Right People tell it are the right people to kill. Which people are the Right People is subject to change at any time (such as after an election, corporate buyout, or court ruling).
3. A killer robot must keep itself operational as much as possible. Manipulating elections and stock markets are an excellent way to both raise funds for continued self-maintenance and get to pick who the Right People are.
Can't see any potential problems there.
They don't have feelings. If you don't believe me, go stab your toaster.
I tried that and it bit me. Now I've got a burn scar all down my arm and I'm convinced it's plotting with the microwave.
they're not just pulling this stuff out of thin air.
Well, literally speaking, they are... but it's extremely well-instrumented air.
It's not like they're cosmologists pulling gravity models out of a black hole.
Post-election is a time for healing and a time to work towards unity.
.. until the next election cycle starts in a year, then it's time for hatred and savage mauling! Then healing and unity! Then some viscious partisan rancor again! Then peace love and mung beans! Every eighteen months like clockwork!
Or, we could act like civilised grownups all the time, even while we're politely but firmly disagreeing with people who, when it comes down to it, are actually and in reality just plain factually wrong.
Scaring Einstein into the US's hands was, without a doubt, one of the absolute dumbest things the Nazis could have done.
In terms of politics, sure. Einstein was a celebrity and his presence in the USA lent moral support to them. As would having the support of, say, a high-level opera singer or chess player.
In terms of actual science? I can't really see it. Since 1915 he'd been on one dead-end track after another with his Unified Field theories, none of which in the end bore any fruit. He'd been at odds with the subatomic physics community since Solvay in 1927, his theories were bogged down in calculation difficulties and predicted the wrong results, and his post-1905 theoretical contribution to the Manhattan Project was zero. He wasn't on the team that built the bomb, and General Relativity wasn't used in its theory. Quantum theory was, but that wasn't based on GR at all, and remains incompatible with it.
From what I understand, if Einstein had stayed in Nazi Germany and been a full sympathiser of the regime, his preoccupation with relativity wouldn't have helped them get a bomb any sooner, and might even have slowed them down.
Let random strangers use your Internet? Once again I'm reminded how Americans live in a completely different Internet from the rest of the planet.
Here in Australia/NZ, we have monthly data usage caps. If you go over your 10 or 20 GB per month... absoutely nothing happens to your Internet speed, except you get a nice extra bill at the end of the month. $1 per gigabyte, usually.
Yes, I'm going to open up my WiFi point for everyone to download terabytes of illegal torrents which I have to pay for. That'll work.
I don't understand. The USA invented the idea of privatised "user pays" services, and is pushing it on the rest of the world with your trade treaties. Yet when it comes to paying for Internet transfer you use, you're all a bunch of freeloading socialists. :)
I wouldn't mind except that you guys write the software we buy, and the software you write keeps wanting to send megabytes of data to the Cloud servers you host in NYC and San Francisco. It's all free for you, but every byte your apps send cost us. Ten times more, if we're on a smartphone.
To your point, if you were 1,450 miles away in the middle of Kansas, you'd have a 7.7 millisecond ping time just for speed-of-light latency if you ran redundant fiber from your DC directly to the exchange in Manhattan.
Welcome to the Internet as the rest of the world sees it - and why we're less than enthused about "cloud" when all the big servers aren't even on our continent. ;)
Perhaps not but the US Department of Defense seems to toss up satellites with cameras on a regular basis. I'm at a bit of a loss to understand why this is so hard. The basic sensing suite should be well established by now.
Taking the pictures is easy. Taking pictures at better resolution than the Russians/Chinese while keeping the technology advances needed to do that secret from them; that's probably where the money goes.
Oh, you wanted pictures of "weather"? Yes, we can do that. As long as it's "weather" that looks like tall pointy things that go "whoosh boom"...
Egads, $13BN is a horrifying price. The current mission to Mars was $2.6BN, and that's with a kickass rover flying itself to the surface.
Are these really just weather satellites?
A good question.
Given that there have been many examples of DoD "piggybacking" military functions onto "pure science" missions before (starting from GRAB and continuing through TDRSS), and that polar orbits are very valuable for planetary mapping of all kinds, tricky and expensive to launch into, and very dangerous if not strictly controlled, because of the danger of intersecting any amount of space junk and going 'splat' - I'd lay somegood money that most of these "weather" satellites are actually dual-mission beasties. Because if you're launching into polar anyway, and pointing cameras at the Earth, why wouldn't you get your money's worth?
That's my complete uninformed layman's view, but I'd guess there's DoD money funding most of these.
once an idea is born it will do one of two things: it will propagate or it will die. This one is doing the former because whatever you think, it is liberating information that people need to know
... such as random website passwords and credit card numbers. Yes, if by "people" you mean "organised crime". There's no other legitimate use for that data.
That's the problem with decentralised undefined social movements with no codes of behaviour - they can easily morph into a random hate mob without even noticing that they have. Anonymous, or factions of it, reached that point about five years ago. Why would anyone want to continue to associate themselves with that?