Logitech makes a sort of trackball they call a "marble mouse". Perhaps it's the kind you've already tried, but I thought it was worth a mention. You can see some info from their site. The bottom line it that it's a trackball that you operate with your index (and/or middle) finger rather than your thumb (as is traditional). I still use my thumb to click buttons, but it's a lot less work. If that's an issue, you can probably configure the computer to reverse left and right clicks, which would make the action even less frequent. I found it a bit akward to use at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, I have far too much on my plate at the moment to give this much attention so I cannot read the article you refer to, but I will say the following: The Casimir Effect does certainly NOT exemplify the issue, since it does not return to its original state after work is extracted. The point is, you have two seperated plates, and when you allow them to come together you get energy, but once they have come together that energy is simply exhausted.
In much the same way, if you're sitting in a room at some pressure and you have a vessle with low pressure inside, you can extract work by letting the vessle contract (using a piston). This violates no law of thermodynamics, because you are just using up internal energy in the device and changing its state accordingly, and at the end the internal energy of the vessle is exhausted (when the pressure inside equals the ambient pressure). Moreover, the amount of energy you get out of the device will be exactly equal to the work required to create the low pressure in the first place. Thus, the vessle is acting like a battery, it simply stores energy.
In the casimir effect the situation should be essentially the same. If you setup two seperated plates, they will have some potential energy equal to the work that's required to construct that configuration (plus other losses). When you allow them to come together, you can extract that energy again and the internal energy of the device is exhausted. The device has only allowed you to store energy (in the form of the modified quantum vacuum between the plates).
So, if the ZPE based propulsion is merely some propulsion that is fueled by energy that's stored in the form of a modified vacuum, energy that was put into the spacecraft during the construction process, then there's nothing a priori wrong with that. Of course, in that case it's not entirely clear what the advantage is supposed to be. However, the claims I've seen elsewhere are NOT of this type. They claim that you can build a device that propells itself by extracting energy from the vacuum around the device, so that it interacts with nothing externally but the vacuum and after propelling itself it is no different than when it began (often it is said to be similar to a sail). The advantage of this device is supposed to be that it does not require you to supply the energy for space travel; it supposedly comes from space itself. Lord Kelvin stated the 2nd law of thermodynamics as, "It is impossible to produce work in the surroundings using a cyclic process connected to a single heat reservoir," and that is exactly what such a device does if the device itself does not change its state and it is only in contact externally with the vacuum of free space.
I skimmed the reference you sent (not having time to do more). It does at least acknowledge the issue of conservation of momentum, though it still wasn't exactly clear to me what the momentum-carrying propellant was that the zero-point energy (ZPE) propulsion was supposed to produce (in order to obey convervation of momentum). However, it did talk about using the ZPE as an energy source, which, as I said before, is going to end up violating the 2nd law of thermodyamics. You can't make any device the operates by transfering energy between two reservoirs of the same temperature and extracting net work, which is what this device does if it somehow takes energy from the vacuum and then uses that for propellant that is then expelled into the vacuum. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a principle that we have seen holds universally throughout nature (and, moreover, is essentially are requirement of common sense), so I wouldn't give any credance to the idea that it can be broken without some extraordinarily good evidence, certainly not just based on speculation.
"A bug trap uses no energy and does not violate any thermodynamic law, yet it works. It just creates a condition where the bug is more likely to get in than out. Zero-point energy could be the same kind of deal, where you make a construct that allows you to 'collect' the energy in some way. This also would not violate any theory of balance if you consider the whole system including where this energy comes from."
I'm not entirely certain in which way you're thinking of the bug trap being analogous to the zero-point energy. As another respondant said, it seems like what you're thinking of is basically a version of Maxwell's demon.
For example, you might put a barrier in the middle of my hypothetical room that only lets particles through in one direction (say with a turnstyle) and in that way cause there to be high pressure on one side of the room and low pressure on the other. This doesn't work, basically because any such one-way wall that operates at equalibrium and requires no energy violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics (basically by definition). To see more specifically why it's not possible, you have to think about the mechanism by which the one-way turnstyle operates. You'll conclude that it must include some sort of dissipation when you think about it (if not is should be time-reversible and spin both ways). When the dissipation mechanism heats up to equalibrium, the turnstyle will cease to be one-way and the mechanism will not operate. We don't run into this in every life because our turnstyles have a cool reservoir to send their heat to (the Earth, which in turn radiates into space) while the people that turn the turnstyle are powered by a very hot reservoir (the sun, from which we get our energy indirectly). Our situation is not a closed system.
If you're thinking more of a bug trap that's setup such that there's no door but it's just more likely that bugs will go in rather than out (like a funnel into a box), this will work if the box is originally empty, but as the box fills more and more bugs will start coming out until the system has reached equalibrium; at this point an equal number of bugs will be going out as in.
While I'm not sure precisely how you meant to relate these to the zero-point energy, but the point is that in that case we have a uniform bath of energy that is already in equalibrium, so it will suffer the same problems and violate one or more laws of thermodynamics if it works. The problem with thought experiments from everyday life for things like this is that we tend to ignore some of the details and we tend to think of non-equalibrium situations or open systems without realizing it.
"And if this is from outside what we consider our universe, for example some meta-verse or a bug in the simulation of ours, then to us this would seem indistinguishable from free energy."
Well, it's cerainly logically possible that things may work differently than we think (e.g. the universe might not be closed in the way we think), but my point was that such a device would not work according to the known laws of Physics, which are derived from all our observations of nature up until now. Without some very good evidence that one of the basic laws of physics is wrong, there's no reason to think such a device is anything but nonsense.
Perhaps you'd find another work of Dr. Baez's useful: The Crackpot Index.
I'm not sure anything I say here will help, but it's worth a try. Being in academia, I've never seen any evidence that anyone is trying to suppress free energy research. Mostly, it's ignored, because it doesn't seem useful or reasonable. Academics, like other people, don't like to waste their time. People claiming "free energy" that I've seen simply don't seem to be able to speak or understand the language of physics and often demonstrate they do not understand existing physical theories, so that leads to even less interest. Academics do argue against ideas they believe to be incorrect, but in this sense they are no more suppressing free energy research than they are suppressing the research of collegues, because people often say they don't think another researcher's idea will work. The only difference is that there is extremely wide agreement that free energy research is nonsense. Academics generally have no interest in suppressing any ideas, and they generally do nothing to suppress these ideas other than expressing their opinion that the ideas are incorrect and giving reasons why that is so. Moreover, many wild ideas are floated in academia, often including ones that go against beliefs widely held in the scientific community (e.g. alternatives to quantum theory or general relativity), so it's not like it's an environment where everyone must speak in unison. The idea that free energy research is being surpressed is generally just a cover for not being able to defend those ideas or offer any convincing proof that they are correct.
"This is already known in theoretical quantum physics. In fact NASA has funded research into it with the long range goals of achieving propellant-less propulsion."
It's probably worth pointing out that this work would almost certainly be regarded as nonsense by the physicists who study zero-point energy. Most physicists would consider any sort of propellant-less propulsion utter nonsense, because it violated conservation of momentum, a principle which is obeyed in all areas of physics and so far observed to hold everywhere in nature. Note: Drives that use light or other radiation to produce thrust are not "propellant-less", in the sense I'm using it. If the drives do use propellant but derive it from the zero-point energy, they will likely violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
You can certainly use another source of energy to compress some of the air within an isolated room and then use the compressed air as a source of energy, for example powering a toy car with the air coming out of a balloon. So, yes, it will essentially act like a battery. You might be able to use the casamir force that comes from the zero-point energy in the same way. I was only saying that it can't be a an energy source in the first place. Whether such a "battery" would be worth the trouble or of any use is a different question, of course.
Here is a this very nice discussion of the zero-point energy by mathematical physicist John Baez. You're right, the idea is hardly new, but some of the experimental evidence about the cosmological constant is relatively new.
I think it's fair to say that almost no physicists believe you can extract useful work from the vacuum energy. Most of the people claiming you can are con men trying to swindle people into buying "free energy devices" that supposedly tap the zero-point energy (it's the modern day incarnation of perpetual motion machines). While you may be able to setup a situation where the vacuum does work (i.e. with the Casamir force), I think it is simply less than or equal to the energy it took to put the apparatus together. Essentially, it's equivalent to sitting in a room with uniform atmospheric pressure and trying to use that atmospheric pressure to do work. You can certainly use a vessle with low or high pressure to do work, but you're never going to get out more energy than it took to create that high (or low) pressure. While one can think about this in terms of thermodynamics, that's really litte more than making concrete the common-sense proposition that you can't get something for nothing. Thus far, nature has not given us any good reason to abandon that idea.
Sometimes people do talk about things like pair creation from the vacuum and the energy-time uncertainty relation, but they are speaking about virtual particles rather than actual particles. The bottom line here is that when you make a measurement, what you will find is actual particles and energy will be conserved, even according to quantum field theory.
I'll definitely agree that, "that Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical treatise wrapped in a rather awkwardly executed work of fiction". I don't know why you'd let someone get away with bad philosophy (political theory, whatever you want to call it) just because they'd like to pretend it's a narrative. This is, of course, very common in philosophy, with much of ancient philosophy imparted in the form of fictional dialogs.
In any case. Someone said the statement in Atlas Shrugged was dumb. It seems you concede that's correct (though you feel it may be excusible for some reason). Someone else replied to the original post, saying that the parent was incorrect and presented a fallacious argument. My purpose was little more than to point out that the counterargument was fallacious. I think the statment from Atlas Shrugged is incorrect, but I also don't think it's that important.
This argument essentially the same as saying that you have no ability other than eating. If you don't eat, you cease to live, and therefore you can not do anything else. Of course, no one would accept this argument; it is false. If Rand had said that the ability to punish criminals is central to, or the foundation of, all government powers, that might be reasonable, but saying that the government has no other power is simply incorrect. For someone like Rand this is just the MO, take a reasonable and true statement and stretch it until you've got something completely unreasonable.
I'm not going to debate what other points could have been made. The point that was made was that the government has many other powers besides prosecuting criminals. Rand's statement is clearly erroneous. I certainly agree that passing laws that are only selectively enforced gives the government power, and, more importantly, the fact that it is selective gives the government arbitrary power. Rand started with a good point, but then she took it off the deep end.
I might point out that printing money, appropriation of government funds, etc. are very real powers that can be used to control the populus and/or do good for society. This is why so many corruption scandals arrise from the latter, since this power can be used to make money. I would think people who are against overarching government would be most acutely aware of this. And, if you simply define "power" to consist only of criminal punishment, you have not only chosen new meaning for the word distinct from that of English, but you have also simply begged the question.
The GP took issue with the statement by Rand that,"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." He then listed many powers of government that do not fit that mold, and hence called the statement stupid. You did absolutely nothing to refute his point.
You seemed to be arguing that all the functions of government are designed to give power over the people. Whether true or false, this is something the GP didn't dispute.
As has already been pointed out, quantum mechanics does not allow particles (or information) to travel faster than light. Essentially, if a particle is localized on one side of a barrier, it takes time for it to tunnel through to the other side (this is the time for the wavefunction to spread in non-relativistic QM, or the time for disturbances in the quantum field to propagate in quantum field theory) so that if you measure again before the particle could have gotten through the barrier at the speed of light, you will never find it on the other side, meaning it does not get there instantaneously (or faster than light).
Where a particle is between measurements is an ill-defined question in quantum mechanics (and by definition impossible to test), but I should note that when you do measure, the electron can be found inside the barrier. While the barrier in a tunneling experiment is "classically forbidden" (meaning it would take more energy than is available for the electron to enter, according to classical mechanics), in quantum mechanics there is a probability that the particle may be found inside the barrier. Depending on what the "barrier" is, it may be difficult to measure the electron there, though. In order for the electron to get to the other side of the barrier, though, it must have some probability of being found inside the barrier, because probability current in quantum mechanics follows a continuity equation.
So, the short answer to the question of whether the electron is between measurements is that it is in a superposition of many possibile position, which include positions inside the "classically forbidden" barrier.
I understand that in this era of practically unrestrained deficit spending it may be hard to recall, but at one time there was a relationship between tax cuts and reductions in government services. My impression from the GP's comment was that the funding he was talking about came from some federal program.
Oh...and there's another radical idea to consider: perhaps one can care about the elderly and have an agenda. Perhaps the former could even be a causal agent for the latter.
I don't entirely disagree with the general criticism, but here it seems to be misplaced. First of all, these were not interviews, but more like an audio op-ed. Thus, just like the Op-eds found in the newspaper, or the opinion pieces presented on the numerous "news magazine" shows (and other cable news infotainment) there is not questioning of the speaker. He isn't even being interviewed; it's a speech.
Also, NPR seems like an odd source to focus on in this criticism. If anything, they provide more critical, factually based coverage than any other (non-print) US news outlet. In other words, they're better than just about everyone else in the US media. Try watching The Today Show, CNN, or Fox News and then you'll really see interviewers swallowing obvious loads of crap. On NPR, factually incorrect or dubious statements often are challanged by interviewers. For example, I think it was in this story (I can't listen to it now to be sure) that the interviewer very politely tore apart a GM executive's argument for why many families "need" an SUV. Now, I'll agree that sometimes interviewees aren't challanged as strongly as I might like, but misleading or false statements do get challanged. Not only that, but they also air "letter to the editor" type comments that point out errors in their coverage or the statements of guests. That's a hell of a lot more than most media outlets do.
In essence, I agree with your sentiment, but it's directed at the wrong people.
"One has to wonder why three separate planefuls of Americans were able to stop "terrorists with box cutters" only 1/3 of the time.
Maybe this is better left unsaid, but I think there has to be a change in the way we as Americans react when threatened. The idea that some guys with box cutters can down three planes seems un-real to me. 60 years ago the passengers would have cleaned their freaking clocks. These days we are conditioned and told to wait for the authorities."
I've not read that much about the 9/11 hijackings, so someone please correct me if it's well known that this is not the case: Isn't is possible (even likely) that the 9/11 hijackers claimed they had a bomb and told people not to mess with them or they'd blow the plane up? Isn't also likely that the passengers expected the hijackers would simply divert the plane to another location where it would be landed and they would probably survive, since this is what had happened during most previous hijackings? Under those circumstances, it seems that it would be pretty rational not to resist. It's possible that you may have a point about this issue of conditioning, but I don't think the 9/11 hijackings provide very strong evidence.
You say that in the past the passangers would have resisted. Can you cite any evidence? Clearly what you really need is statistical evidence, but I'm curious about even any anecdotal evidence.
In response to your claim that the program is "patently illegal", many people are going to claim it is "perfectly legal". I see there are already several replies to that effect. It's probably the case that both are overstatements. The truth is that not too much is known about the process by which the calling records were obtained, and it looks like the legality of the program depends a lot on that.
The short story, as I understand it, is this: If the government compelled the phone companies to specifically track calls to and from a phone number (known as a pen "register" and a "trap and trace") without a warrant, that would be illegal (under FISA there's some exception if the person is not a citizen or permanent resident, but there are other requirements). If, however, the phone company voluntarily gave the NSA their normal billing records, then the government officials probably didn't commit a crime, but it seems likely that the phone companies did. A lot of people think that's what happened, and an important point in favor of this was the refusal of QWest to give up records, but the truth is we don't know exactly what happened. Until we know more, it's not entirely clear if the government committed a crime or if they just encouraged/coerced the phone companies to commit crimes. There may even be the possibility that no one committed a crime, though that doesn't look likely to me. Of course, there's a difference between what is legal and what is moral or wise (people often overlook this), so even if it's legal you could still decide it is wrong.
If you want to know more, I suggest you start with this excellent article on Security Focus, which goes into a lot more detail about the issues involved. It says of the author, "Mark D. Rasch, J.D., is a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, and now serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Security Counsel at Solutionary Inc." So, it sounds like he's pretty well qualified to offer an opinion.
Won't some browsers let you use a user-specified stylesheet (e.g. Opera)? If so, couldn't you download and use whatever stylesheet you like for/.? These could then be offered by any 3rd party. I've never done this myself, but I thought it was possible.
Thank you! You're right on target in saying that many people approach economics based on what they would like to believe rather than trying to measure what is there in reality and try to understand it. This is perhaps worst in people whose political ideology is centered upon economics, be it "anarcho-capitalists" like the ones you're responding to, socialists, libertarians, or others. At best, these people may try to cherry pick a few examples or indicators out of all of economics that seem, superficially, to support their viewpoint, rather than skeptically examining whether the idea can consistently explain most or all of the data available. I suppose one could apply a slight modification of the old saying about statistics, these people rely on the data only for support, not illumination.
As a scientist, this approach seems completely backward and misguided to me. Economics is something that happens in the physical world about which objective, quantitative measurements can be made. Thus, it seems reasonable to follow something like the scientific method, letting systematic, empirical analysis of real data guide your understanding of reality rather than a priori philosophical musings. Of course, doing it correctly the scientific way is hard, complicated, and limits what you can say with confidence, so it's probably not very good for pushing simplistic political ideologies or making quips on slashdot.
I'm confused as to why this is a lawsuit brought by a private company and not a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI. IANAL, but I would have assumed that breaking into a company's computer systems to retrieve this information would violate criminal law, and I would have assumed that paying someone to do this would also violate criminal law. What's going on here?
Is paying someone to break into a computer system not a criminal act? Are the FBI knowingly ignoring a criminal act (perhaps because the MPAA is rich and politically powerfull)? Is Torrentspy just misrepresenting the situation to make it sound worse than it actually is (and, therefore, sound criminal)?
"As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.
By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle...
...
In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan....
...
It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this."
From that and other accounts, it sounds to me like the CIA supported the MAK by funneling funds and arms through the ISI. Osama bin Laden was a major player in the MAK, and this flow of resources gave him a position of power. He then used this position to take people and knowledge from MAK and form Al Qaeda. It would then seem fair to say that the CIA helped in bin Laden's rise to power and nurtured the orginization that would later give birth to Al Qaeda.
Saying, "the CIA supported Al Qaeda" then seems to be an oversimplification, but calling it a "myth" is probably an overstatement. Obviously, the question of whether this was wise, in the context of the cold war, is a seperate question.
Well, the only point that was relevant to my comment is that it was widely reported that Al Qaeda was involved in the '93 WTC attack, so people ought to have heard of the group long before 9/11.
As for whether Al Qaeda was actually involed in the attack, it seems that Ramzi Yousef was convicted of masterminding the attack. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (key Al Qaeda member), and there is apparently evidence that he visited an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. This certainly seems to suggest Al Qaeda involvement, but it isn't proof. Also, in a loosely organized underground organization, the question may be a bit nebulous. I have not researched the issue further than that (I was in high school when it actually happened).
Regarding for whoever you're referring to that was killed in Iraq, given that most evidence suggests and adversarial relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda and Saddam killed a lot of people, it seem there is a fairly mundane explanation of that. But again, this is all irrelevant to my previous comment.
"You also have never served people food have you? I am currently dating a lovely young woman. When I first met her I had the same attitude as you 'sterotypes do not exist'. She has showed me why sterotypes exist. It is UGLY. It is damn scary. The sterotype does exist, and many people are extereemly flamboiant about it. Dont believe me? Go to a semi decent resturant hang around for a bit and strike up a converstation with the staff. Ask them to classify their customers. You will be surprised by who says what. I will also skip what sterotype you are falling into."
Are you claiming that people hold onto stereotypes or that stereotypes are in fact correct descriptions of the the real world. It seems like you're arguing the latter, in which case your argument is essentially, "I used to not accept stereotypes, but now I do. Some people who work at restaurants accept them too. Therefore they are clearly true statements." This does not really resemble a rational argument.
Yes, many people hold stereotypes. These are typically irrational generalizations based on anecdotal evidence. Look into that discussion of the term (in the linked article) for further explanation of how it is people can mistakenly feel they've seen evidence that shows something is true based on anecdotal evidence. One way in which this happens is that people learn a sterotype, and at least sometimes others will act in accord with the stereotype. The tendancy is to remember these incidents and forget all those unremarkable ones in which the stereotype was not fullfilled. While generalizations can certainly be made about groups of people "on average", applying stereotypes or prejudice to individuals is almost always just plan irrational, based as it is on anecdotal evidence.
From the first link to The New Media Journal, "Come to think of it, before 9/11, we never heard of words like Al Qaeda, Taliban, Jihad, Homeland Security..." With the exception of Homeland Security (which didn't actually exist at the time, except as a fictional deptartment in various fiction stories about dystopian, totalitarian futures) all these other things were in the news or elsewhere long before 9/11. Perhaps most glaring is Al Qaeda. It would have been hard to miss when they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, or when they bombed the USS Cole in 2000, unless, of course, you paid no attention to the news. I even remember thinking after the bombing on the Cole how Al Qaeda kept coming up in the news. So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly trust this guy to report the news. Taking this site out of Google news was almost certainly the right decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Logitech makes a sort of trackball they call a "marble mouse". Perhaps it's the kind you've already tried, but I thought it was worth a mention. You can see some info from their site. The bottom line it that it's a trackball that you operate with your index (and/or middle) finger rather than your thumb (as is traditional). I still use my thumb to click buttons, but it's a lot less work. If that's an issue, you can probably configure the computer to reverse left and right clicks, which would make the action even less frequent. I found it a bit akward to use at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, I have far too much on my plate at the moment to give this much attention so I cannot read the article you refer to, but I will say the following: The Casimir Effect does certainly NOT exemplify the issue, since it does not return to its original state after work is extracted. The point is, you have two seperated plates, and when you allow them to come together you get energy, but once they have come together that energy is simply exhausted.
In much the same way, if you're sitting in a room at some pressure and you have a vessle with low pressure inside, you can extract work by letting the vessle contract (using a piston). This violates no law of thermodynamics, because you are just using up internal energy in the device and changing its state accordingly, and at the end the internal energy of the vessle is exhausted (when the pressure inside equals the ambient pressure). Moreover, the amount of energy you get out of the device will be exactly equal to the work required to create the low pressure in the first place. Thus, the vessle is acting like a battery, it simply stores energy.
In the casimir effect the situation should be essentially the same. If you setup two seperated plates, they will have some potential energy equal to the work that's required to construct that configuration (plus other losses). When you allow them to come together, you can extract that energy again and the internal energy of the device is exhausted. The device has only allowed you to store energy (in the form of the modified quantum vacuum between the plates).
So, if the ZPE based propulsion is merely some propulsion that is fueled by energy that's stored in the form of a modified vacuum, energy that was put into the spacecraft during the construction process, then there's nothing a priori wrong with that. Of course, in that case it's not entirely clear what the advantage is supposed to be. However, the claims I've seen elsewhere are NOT of this type. They claim that you can build a device that propells itself by extracting energy from the vacuum around the device, so that it interacts with nothing externally but the vacuum and after propelling itself it is no different than when it began (often it is said to be similar to a sail). The advantage of this device is supposed to be that it does not require you to supply the energy for space travel; it supposedly comes from space itself. Lord Kelvin stated the 2nd law of thermodynamics as, "It is impossible to produce work in the surroundings using a cyclic process connected to a single heat reservoir," and that is exactly what such a device does if the device itself does not change its state and it is only in contact externally with the vacuum of free space.
I skimmed the reference you sent (not having time to do more). It does at least acknowledge the issue of conservation of momentum, though it still wasn't exactly clear to me what the momentum-carrying propellant was that the zero-point energy (ZPE) propulsion was supposed to produce (in order to obey convervation of momentum). However, it did talk about using the ZPE as an energy source, which, as I said before, is going to end up violating the 2nd law of thermodyamics. You can't make any device the operates by transfering energy between two reservoirs of the same temperature and extracting net work, which is what this device does if it somehow takes energy from the vacuum and then uses that for propellant that is then expelled into the vacuum. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is a principle that we have seen holds universally throughout nature (and, moreover, is essentially are requirement of common sense), so I wouldn't give any credance to the idea that it can be broken without some extraordinarily good evidence, certainly not just based on speculation.
I'm not entirely certain in which way you're thinking of the bug trap being analogous to the zero-point energy. As another respondant said, it seems like what you're thinking of is basically a version of Maxwell's demon.
For example, you might put a barrier in the middle of my hypothetical room that only lets particles through in one direction (say with a turnstyle) and in that way cause there to be high pressure on one side of the room and low pressure on the other. This doesn't work, basically because any such one-way wall that operates at equalibrium and requires no energy violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics (basically by definition). To see more specifically why it's not possible, you have to think about the mechanism by which the one-way turnstyle operates. You'll conclude that it must include some sort of dissipation when you think about it (if not is should be time-reversible and spin both ways). When the dissipation mechanism heats up to equalibrium, the turnstyle will cease to be one-way and the mechanism will not operate. We don't run into this in every life because our turnstyles have a cool reservoir to send their heat to (the Earth, which in turn radiates into space) while the people that turn the turnstyle are powered by a very hot reservoir (the sun, from which we get our energy indirectly). Our situation is not a closed system.
If you're thinking more of a bug trap that's setup such that there's no door but it's just more likely that bugs will go in rather than out (like a funnel into a box), this will work if the box is originally empty, but as the box fills more and more bugs will start coming out until the system has reached equalibrium; at this point an equal number of bugs will be going out as in.
While I'm not sure precisely how you meant to relate these to the zero-point energy, but the point is that in that case we have a uniform bath of energy that is already in equalibrium, so it will suffer the same problems and violate one or more laws of thermodynamics if it works. The problem with thought experiments from everyday life for things like this is that we tend to ignore some of the details and we tend to think of non-equalibrium situations or open systems without realizing it.
Well, it's cerainly logically possible that things may work differently than we think (e.g. the universe might not be closed in the way we think), but my point was that such a device would not work according to the known laws of Physics, which are derived from all our observations of nature up until now. Without some very good evidence that one of the basic laws of physics is wrong, there's no reason to think such a device is anything but nonsense.
Perhaps you'd find another work of Dr. Baez's useful: The Crackpot Index.
I'm not sure anything I say here will help, but it's worth a try. Being in academia, I've never seen any evidence that anyone is trying to suppress free energy research. Mostly, it's ignored, because it doesn't seem useful or reasonable. Academics, like other people, don't like to waste their time. People claiming "free energy" that I've seen simply don't seem to be able to speak or understand the language of physics and often demonstrate they do not understand existing physical theories, so that leads to even less interest. Academics do argue against ideas they believe to be incorrect, but in this sense they are no more suppressing free energy research than they are suppressing the research of collegues, because people often say they don't think another researcher's idea will work. The only difference is that there is extremely wide agreement that free energy research is nonsense. Academics generally have no interest in suppressing any ideas, and they generally do nothing to suppress these ideas other than expressing their opinion that the ideas are incorrect and giving reasons why that is so. Moreover, many wild ideas are floated in academia, often including ones that go against beliefs widely held in the scientific community (e.g. alternatives to quantum theory or general relativity), so it's not like it's an environment where everyone must speak in unison. The idea that free energy research is being surpressed is generally just a cover for not being able to defend those ideas or offer any convincing proof that they are correct.
"This is already known in theoretical quantum physics. In fact NASA has funded research into it with the long range goals of achieving propellant-less propulsion."
It's probably worth pointing out that this work would almost certainly be regarded as nonsense by the physicists who study zero-point energy. Most physicists would consider any sort of propellant-less propulsion utter nonsense, because it violated conservation of momentum, a principle which is obeyed in all areas of physics and so far observed to hold everywhere in nature. Note: Drives that use light or other radiation to produce thrust are not "propellant-less", in the sense I'm using it. If the drives do use propellant but derive it from the zero-point energy, they will likely violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
You can certainly use another source of energy to compress some of the air within an isolated room and then use the compressed air as a source of energy, for example powering a toy car with the air coming out of a balloon. So, yes, it will essentially act like a battery. You might be able to use the casamir force that comes from the zero-point energy in the same way. I was only saying that it can't be a an energy source in the first place. Whether such a "battery" would be worth the trouble or of any use is a different question, of course.
Here is a this very nice discussion of the zero-point energy by mathematical physicist John Baez. You're right, the idea is hardly new, but some of the experimental evidence about the cosmological constant is relatively new.
I think it's fair to say that almost no physicists believe you can extract useful work from the vacuum energy. Most of the people claiming you can are con men trying to swindle people into buying "free energy devices" that supposedly tap the zero-point energy (it's the modern day incarnation of perpetual motion machines). While you may be able to setup a situation where the vacuum does work (i.e. with the Casamir force), I think it is simply less than or equal to the energy it took to put the apparatus together. Essentially, it's equivalent to sitting in a room with uniform atmospheric pressure and trying to use that atmospheric pressure to do work. You can certainly use a vessle with low or high pressure to do work, but you're never going to get out more energy than it took to create that high (or low) pressure. While one can think about this in terms of thermodynamics, that's really litte more than making concrete the common-sense proposition that you can't get something for nothing. Thus far, nature has not given us any good reason to abandon that idea.
Sometimes people do talk about things like pair creation from the vacuum and the energy-time uncertainty relation, but they are speaking about virtual particles rather than actual particles. The bottom line here is that when you make a measurement, what you will find is actual particles and energy will be conserved, even according to quantum field theory.
I'll definitely agree that, "that Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical treatise wrapped in a rather awkwardly executed work of fiction". I don't know why you'd let someone get away with bad philosophy (political theory, whatever you want to call it) just because they'd like to pretend it's a narrative. This is, of course, very common in philosophy, with much of ancient philosophy imparted in the form of fictional dialogs.
In any case. Someone said the statement in Atlas Shrugged was dumb. It seems you concede that's correct (though you feel it may be excusible for some reason). Someone else replied to the original post, saying that the parent was incorrect and presented a fallacious argument. My purpose was little more than to point out that the counterargument was fallacious. I think the statment from Atlas Shrugged is incorrect, but I also don't think it's that important.
This argument essentially the same as saying that you have no ability other than eating. If you don't eat, you cease to live, and therefore you can not do anything else. Of course, no one would accept this argument; it is false. If Rand had said that the ability to punish criminals is central to, or the foundation of, all government powers, that might be reasonable, but saying that the government has no other power is simply incorrect. For someone like Rand this is just the MO, take a reasonable and true statement and stretch it until you've got something completely unreasonable.
I'm not going to debate what other points could have been made. The point that was made was that the government has many other powers besides prosecuting criminals. Rand's statement is clearly erroneous. I certainly agree that passing laws that are only selectively enforced gives the government power, and, more importantly, the fact that it is selective gives the government arbitrary power. Rand started with a good point, but then she took it off the deep end.
I might point out that printing money, appropriation of government funds, etc. are very real powers that can be used to control the populus and/or do good for society. This is why so many corruption scandals arrise from the latter, since this power can be used to make money. I would think people who are against overarching government would be most acutely aware of this. And, if you simply define "power" to consist only of criminal punishment, you have not only chosen new meaning for the word distinct from that of English, but you have also simply begged the question.
The GP took issue with the statement by Rand that,"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." He then listed many powers of government that do not fit that mold, and hence called the statement stupid. You did absolutely nothing to refute his point.
You seemed to be arguing that all the functions of government are designed to give power over the people. Whether true or false, this is something the GP didn't dispute.
As has already been pointed out, quantum mechanics does not allow particles (or information) to travel faster than light. Essentially, if a particle is localized on one side of a barrier, it takes time for it to tunnel through to the other side (this is the time for the wavefunction to spread in non-relativistic QM, or the time for disturbances in the quantum field to propagate in quantum field theory) so that if you measure again before the particle could have gotten through the barrier at the speed of light, you will never find it on the other side, meaning it does not get there instantaneously (or faster than light).
Where a particle is between measurements is an ill-defined question in quantum mechanics (and by definition impossible to test), but I should note that when you do measure, the electron can be found inside the barrier. While the barrier in a tunneling experiment is "classically forbidden" (meaning it would take more energy than is available for the electron to enter, according to classical mechanics), in quantum mechanics there is a probability that the particle may be found inside the barrier. Depending on what the "barrier" is, it may be difficult to measure the electron there, though. In order for the electron to get to the other side of the barrier, though, it must have some probability of being found inside the barrier, because probability current in quantum mechanics follows a continuity equation.
So, the short answer to the question of whether the electron is between measurements is that it is in a superposition of many possibile position, which include positions inside the "classically forbidden" barrier.
I understand that in this era of practically unrestrained deficit spending it may be hard to recall, but at one time there was a relationship between tax cuts and reductions in government services. My impression from the GP's comment was that the funding he was talking about came from some federal program.
Oh...and there's another radical idea to consider: perhaps one can care about the elderly and have an agenda. Perhaps the former could even be a causal agent for the latter.
Excellent post. I only wish you'd made it while logged in so that I could look for your posts in the future.
I don't entirely disagree with the general criticism, but here it seems to be misplaced. First of all, these were not interviews, but more like an audio op-ed. Thus, just like the Op-eds found in the newspaper, or the opinion pieces presented on the numerous "news magazine" shows (and other cable news infotainment) there is not questioning of the speaker. He isn't even being interviewed; it's a speech.
Also, NPR seems like an odd source to focus on in this criticism. If anything, they provide more critical, factually based coverage than any other (non-print) US news outlet. In other words, they're better than just about everyone else in the US media. Try watching The Today Show, CNN, or Fox News and then you'll really see interviewers swallowing obvious loads of crap. On NPR, factually incorrect or dubious statements often are challanged by interviewers. For example, I think it was in this story (I can't listen to it now to be sure) that the interviewer very politely tore apart a GM executive's argument for why many families "need" an SUV. Now, I'll agree that sometimes interviewees aren't challanged as strongly as I might like, but misleading or false statements do get challanged. Not only that, but they also air "letter to the editor" type comments that point out errors in their coverage or the statements of guests. That's a hell of a lot more than most media outlets do.
In essence, I agree with your sentiment, but it's directed at the wrong people.
I've not read that much about the 9/11 hijackings, so someone please correct me if it's well known that this is not the case: Isn't is possible (even likely) that the 9/11 hijackers claimed they had a bomb and told people not to mess with them or they'd blow the plane up? Isn't also likely that the passengers expected the hijackers would simply divert the plane to another location where it would be landed and they would probably survive, since this is what had happened during most previous hijackings? Under those circumstances, it seems that it would be pretty rational not to resist. It's possible that you may have a point about this issue of conditioning, but I don't think the 9/11 hijackings provide very strong evidence.
You say that in the past the passangers would have resisted. Can you cite any evidence? Clearly what you really need is statistical evidence, but I'm curious about even any anecdotal evidence.
In response to your claim that the program is "patently illegal", many people are going to claim it is "perfectly legal". I see there are already several replies to that effect. It's probably the case that both are overstatements. The truth is that not too much is known about the process by which the calling records were obtained, and it looks like the legality of the program depends a lot on that.
The short story, as I understand it, is this: If the government compelled the phone companies to specifically track calls to and from a phone number (known as a pen "register" and a "trap and trace") without a warrant, that would be illegal (under FISA there's some exception if the person is not a citizen or permanent resident, but there are other requirements). If, however, the phone company voluntarily gave the NSA their normal billing records, then the government officials probably didn't commit a crime, but it seems likely that the phone companies did. A lot of people think that's what happened, and an important point in favor of this was the refusal of QWest to give up records, but the truth is we don't know exactly what happened. Until we know more, it's not entirely clear if the government committed a crime or if they just encouraged/coerced the phone companies to commit crimes. There may even be the possibility that no one committed a crime, though that doesn't look likely to me. Of course, there's a difference between what is legal and what is moral or wise (people often overlook this), so even if it's legal you could still decide it is wrong.
If you want to know more, I suggest you start with this excellent article on Security Focus, which goes into a lot more detail about the issues involved. It says of the author, "Mark D. Rasch, J.D., is a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, and now serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Security Counsel at Solutionary Inc." So, it sounds like he's pretty well qualified to offer an opinion.
Won't some browsers let you use a user-specified stylesheet (e.g. Opera)? If so, couldn't you download and use whatever stylesheet you like for /.? These could then be offered by any 3rd party. I've never done this myself, but I thought it was possible.
Thank you! You're right on target in saying that many people approach economics based on what they would like to believe rather than trying to measure what is there in reality and try to understand it. This is perhaps worst in people whose political ideology is centered upon economics, be it "anarcho-capitalists" like the ones you're responding to, socialists, libertarians, or others. At best, these people may try to cherry pick a few examples or indicators out of all of economics that seem, superficially, to support their viewpoint, rather than skeptically examining whether the idea can consistently explain most or all of the data available. I suppose one could apply a slight modification of the old saying about statistics, these people rely on the data only for support, not illumination.
As a scientist, this approach seems completely backward and misguided to me. Economics is something that happens in the physical world about which objective, quantitative measurements can be made. Thus, it seems reasonable to follow something like the scientific method, letting systematic, empirical analysis of real data guide your understanding of reality rather than a priori philosophical musings. Of course, doing it correctly the scientific way is hard, complicated, and limits what you can say with confidence, so it's probably not very good for pushing simplistic political ideologies or making quips on slashdot.
I'm confused as to why this is a lawsuit brought by a private company and not a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI. IANAL, but I would have assumed that breaking into a company's computer systems to retrieve this information would violate criminal law, and I would have assumed that paying someone to do this would also violate criminal law. What's going on here?
Is paying someone to break into a computer system not a criminal act? Are the FBI knowingly ignoring a criminal act (perhaps because the MPAA is rich and politically powerfull)? Is Torrentspy just misrepresenting the situation to make it sound worse than it actually is (and, therefore, sound criminal)?
From an article on MSNBC:
From that and other accounts, it sounds to me like the CIA supported the MAK by funneling funds and arms through the ISI. Osama bin Laden was a major player in the MAK, and this flow of resources gave him a position of power. He then used this position to take people and knowledge from MAK and form Al Qaeda. It would then seem fair to say that the CIA helped in bin Laden's rise to power and nurtured the orginization that would later give birth to Al Qaeda.
Saying, "the CIA supported Al Qaeda" then seems to be an oversimplification, but calling it a "myth" is probably an overstatement. Obviously, the question of whether this was wise, in the context of the cold war, is a seperate question.
Well, the only point that was relevant to my comment is that it was widely reported that Al Qaeda was involved in the '93 WTC attack, so people ought to have heard of the group long before 9/11.
As for whether Al Qaeda was actually involed in the attack, it seems that Ramzi Yousef was convicted of masterminding the attack. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (key Al Qaeda member), and there is apparently evidence that he visited an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. This certainly seems to suggest Al Qaeda involvement, but it isn't proof. Also, in a loosely organized underground organization, the question may be a bit nebulous. I have not researched the issue further than that (I was in high school when it actually happened).
Regarding for whoever you're referring to that was killed in Iraq, given that most evidence suggests and adversarial relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda and Saddam killed a lot of people, it seem there is a fairly mundane explanation of that. But again, this is all irrelevant to my previous comment.
Are you claiming that people hold onto stereotypes or that stereotypes are in fact correct descriptions of the the real world. It seems like you're arguing the latter, in which case your argument is essentially, "I used to not accept stereotypes, but now I do. Some people who work at restaurants accept them too. Therefore they are clearly true statements." This does not really resemble a rational argument.
Yes, many people hold stereotypes. These are typically irrational generalizations based on anecdotal evidence. Look into that discussion of the term (in the linked article) for further explanation of how it is people can mistakenly feel they've seen evidence that shows something is true based on anecdotal evidence. One way in which this happens is that people learn a sterotype, and at least sometimes others will act in accord with the stereotype. The tendancy is to remember these incidents and forget all those unremarkable ones in which the stereotype was not fullfilled. While generalizations can certainly be made about groups of people "on average", applying stereotypes or prejudice to individuals is almost always just plan irrational, based as it is on anecdotal evidence.
From the first link to The New Media Journal, "Come to think of it, before 9/11, we never heard of words like Al Qaeda, Taliban, Jihad, Homeland Security..." With the exception of Homeland Security (which didn't actually exist at the time, except as a fictional deptartment in various fiction stories about dystopian, totalitarian futures) all these other things were in the news or elsewhere long before 9/11. Perhaps most glaring is Al Qaeda. It would have been hard to miss when they bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, or when they bombed the USS Cole in 2000, unless, of course, you paid no attention to the news. I even remember thinking after the bombing on the Cole how Al Qaeda kept coming up in the news. So, yeah, I wouldn't exactly trust this guy to report the news. Taking this site out of Google news was almost certainly the right decision.