The term "quantum darwinism" is really an unnecessary buzzword. There is a certain analogy about states which create many records of themselves surviving a robust pointer states where others are "selected against", but the analogy is really pretty limited and not very useful. It's better to stay away from using terms like darwinism for effect. I should note that I didn't see the word "quantum darwinism" in the title or abstract of either of the actual journal articles this news item references. For the lazy, the two papers in question seem to be this preprint and this article from the Nov 26 issue of Physical Review Letters.
This sounds like an interesting result and Zurek is a premenent figure in the field of quantum decoherence, but this looks like the tying up of some (important) details rather than the revolutionary developement the news article makes it out to be. Even as far back as the work of Everett we had an idea of why two observers who compared notes would always agree on the objective facts. In the many worlds interpretation, this comes down to the fact that if observer A measures system S, there will be many different possible results. So there will be many branches of the wavefunction with A observing each possible result. When observer B measures system S, he becomes entangled with S and A, and there are many possible outcomes, but in each branch of the wave function A and B agree on the outcome. Not sure if that clears anything up.:-) If you're talking about purely quantum systems, the same thing happens in the Copenhagen interpretation. The only tricky part is how to think about it when A and B are "classical observers". Still, I haven't read these papers yet and now I'm eager to.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I felt I should add two things. First, here is another page that addresses a lot of the false claims made about connections between power lines and cancer. Second, there is fairly clear evidence that UV light causes cancer. Now clearly you have to go out in the sun sometimes (yes, even if you read/.), but you probably get some unnecessary exposure. The question is, should you be more worried about that than cell phones or power lines?
"Yes long term exposure to power lines do cause cancer. Many states have laws that limit government and homes to certain distances to high powered lines."
Actually, the link between power lines and cancer is still tenuous at best. See this page for some details.
The author of that page says, "Overall, most scientists consider that the evidence that power line fields cause or contribute to cancer is weak to nonexistent." It seems that the sorts of fields setup by power lines don't seem to cause cancer in animals or adults. Chilhood lukemia looks like the only possible connection, and that evidence is still considered "weak" by the AMA.
I'm not sure if states have laws based on the idea that power lines cause cancer, but it would not surprise me. It would be far from the first time that legislators went off half cocked over bad or inconclusive science. This hardly proves the validity of the viewpoint.
Now I agree that GHz microwaves are a considerably different situation, but the issue of power lines should serve as a cautionary example that things (esp. in medicine) are not often as clear as a single study would suggest. We should wait for a scientific consensus to form before taking this too seriously, assuming the supposed risk isn't quite acute.
I recently went to a talk by Joseph Polchinski, one of the most respected string theorists (as far as I know). The topic was on cosmic strings, which are the ones of which evidence has supposedly been found. His comment was that the evidence was intruiging and deserved further study but that it was not convincing proof, in itself. To put this in a bit of perspective, back in 1995 (and probably before) Fred Hoyle published a paper in nature siting (among other things) several instances of galaxies at very different redshifts that looked at though they were connect (known as an "optical bridge") and used this as "spoof" that the Big Bang model was wrong and his steady state model was right. The point is that we often see strange things in sky whose explanation is not immediately apparent, and it is probably not wise to jump to extraordinary conclusions too quickly.
Ok, first, Minimo is a red herring. I wasn't talking about embedded browsers. I honestly have no idea if it's any good, though it's likely if nothing else it's too new to be good. And for all I know, Opera may always be the best in that arena.
"You mention several different gesture packages as "innovation" even though it came after Opera's. That's not innovation. That's confusion."
This is a matter of taste. What you call confusion I call choice. There is an extension for mouse gestures like those in Opera, or you can use, for example, pie menus. I like the latter a bit better, though both are nice. It is a nice thing to have a range of options.
"Bayesian filtering was not invented nor implemented first by Mozilla. By the way, I heard that Mozilla's filtering isn't really Bayesian, but who cares, as long as we can use buzzwords, eh?"
My point was that it was implemented in Mozilla before the any other popular desktop mail client I was aware of, including the integrated mail client in Opera. As to whether it's Baysian, its behavior would seem consistent with being Baysian, but it would be difficult to be sure (though you could look at the source). But I don't really care if it's "Baysian", just that it does a pretty good job for me, which made it an advantage of Mozilla.
I switched from using my paid for version of Opera 6.x over to Mozilla, back before Opera 7 was released. That's about all I can tell you about when I switched. As for why: For a few months I used each and sort of alternated. I found Mozilla seemed a little slower (but not terribly) but pages rendered and behaved properly in Mozilla more often. That was really the main reason I switched. At the time my impression was that Mozilla had a similar feature set with more choice, and it looked to me like they'd be adding features more quickly. It was quite a while ago and I didn't take notes or anything, so I really couldn't tell you the specifics of what features it was I was interested in at the time.
When Opera 7 came out, I considered switching back again, and I tried out the ad supported version. I found the features fairly comparable, though I recall that search customization and the password manager seemed to be less well documented, which I found annoying. But ultimately it was the fact that I couldn't see putting up with banner ads or paying the money to have a product comperable to the free one.
This all comes down to a lot of subjective judgements. I think which you choose is a function of a lot of things. It has to do with which features you prize, how much you value choice in features, how much disposable income you can devote to purchasing software (or how much you dislike banner ads), and a host of other things. I found that Mozilla fit the things that I wanted as well or better for a lower price. I can easily see people who prize some of the unique usability features of Opera more than I do, and who have money to spend on a web browser, choosing Opera. Again, that's why I think it will continue to have a niche market but never become dominant, in a situation much analogous to Macs.
Actually, I was really refering to developer community, I guess. At the time Mozilla seemed to be adding new and innovative features more quickly. Certainly Opera has had its share of innovative features, but as I said, Mozilla seemed to have coopted most of those and was adding things more quickly. Opera had mouse gestures first (as far as I know), but Mozilla quickly got a lot of different versions, so you had a lot of choice. A bit later there were things like Baysian spam filtering. That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about. Also, some features like the password manager and customizing searches were not as well documented and a bit more cludgy.
Generally I'm a fan of Opera. I always thought it was a really good browser with a lot of really nice usability features. At the time I switched to Mozilla, I used both and found Mozilla to be slightly slower but a bit better for compatability with web pages and more feature rich. I could easily believe that now Opera is better again. For me, however, it's really unlikely the difference is enough to put up with banner ads or pay for an ad free version. I think that is the reason that Opera will have a niche market among serious web surfers for a long time to come, but would have problems being a serious competitor to IE. Though things like new forms of pop up adds might make suffering through banners seem like a decent trade off. At least the Opera ads are target toward your interests.
1. That 10,000 people use it doesn't make it good, but the existence of the ad argues a lot of people use and like it, so it might be worth a look. Everyone who uses the web has heard of IE and MS, but not necessarily Firefox. This may convince them to check it out, or to take the advice or a friend or coworker who said they should try it. The only thing that should convince them it's good is how it performs once they try it. Another nuance is, it's not just that 10,000 people use it, it's that 10,000 people payed good money to put the ad in for no direct personal gain (in most cases). I don't know if that would be clear to readers, but you must admit you'd be hard pressed to find people doing this for MS products.
2. I used to use Opera; I even payed for it at one point. The reason I switched for Mozilla/Firefox was that more sites seemed to work well in Mozilla and it seemed to be more polished and well documented in a lot of ways, with a more active community. That may have changed since Opera 6.0, but my point is that I think they both qualify fairly well on those points. I think the important point here is the other, tacit qualification, which is that it's free. Many people won't pay for a browser when they can get one for free (and banner ad free). I know I have felt that Opera and Firefox are pretty competitive, but Opera is certainly not so much better (in my opinion) as to warrent paying the money or suffering the banner ads.
"The begged question is Will it be bad or will it be good? Wouldn't warmer climates provide more arable land?
It was my impression that the idea was that "global warming" would involve major changes in weather patterns. This means that, yes, some previously unproductive land would become productive, but other productive land would turn to a desert or dust bowl. Besides the possibility of less useable land overall, the main difficulty is that if this happens on the scale of a human lifetime (maybe even two or three) it will likely cause extreme political destablization, as some countries lose most of their agricultural production and others gain production they can't immediately exploit. So even if there's enough productive land in the end, during a time of flux expect natural disasters (fires, floods, etc.), famine, and war.
Unfortunately, Crichton is a man who trades on making up things that sound like fact rather than bringing to light things that are fact. The latter is, of course, what scientists do.
The argument seems to be essentially that scientific consensus has been wrong in the past; therefore, it is unreliable and it's foolish to trust it. There two major problems with the argument.
The first difficulty is that when we talk about "scientific consensus" today we mean consensus built based upon research in peer reviewed journals by scientists (both researchers and reviewers) attempting to follow the scientific method. Many of the examples discussed involved people who were not really even attempting to follow the scientific method or doing so in an environment where there really wasn't enough review of the claims being made. That's probably why many of the instances sited refer to things that happened quite a long time ago, and they refer predominantly to medicine. Medicine was not conducted with much scientific rigor until relatively recently and has a long and storied history of entanglement with pseudoscience. Essentially, many if not most of the examples are not really applicable to compare to the modern scientific process. I will admit, however, there are some actual good examples. The one that comes to mind is the belief that von Neumann had ruled out all hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics until Bohm came up with one.
The second and more important flaw in the argument is the inference that because scientific consensus has been wrong sometimes, it is therefore so unreliable as to be useless. Certainly, science has been wrong about a great many things and will continue to be. It is the roll of scientists to continuously try to find flaws in our understanding. If you want to know if scientific consensus is useful, however, you have to ask has it been right more often than not (or more often than other ways of making judgements). Given the great advances due to scientific discovery and all that has been predicted, it would seem reasonable to think that yes, more often than not, scientific consensus is pretty close to being right.
The the idea that when scientists invoke consensus it's because something is not "fact" simply ignores the reality of the situation. In reality if you pick any scientific theory, you can find people with a Ph. D., usually even practicing scientists of some sort, who disagree with it. This certainly applies to evolution (micro or macro), general relativity, quantum mechanics, special relativity, etc. So, to be accurate, one can only speak of consensus, not uniform agreement. This is especially true of more recent theories, ones that have come into acceptance during the lifetime of many current scientists. The point is that global warming is far from unique in having some dissenters. One can often only site as "fact" theories which are rather old (E=mc^2 is from special relativity, which is about 100 years old) or data that no one would really care to dispute (like the value of 1 AU). If you're talking about something recent and politically charged like global warming, you can only accurately say that there is a scientific consensus, meaning almost everyone but the crackpots and the ignorant agree. You must wait for the latter to die or become bored before you can call it a "fact".
I was listening to NPR yesterday when one of the guests suggested that chemical plants would be a likely soft target for terrorists and could result in an disaster like Bhopal. He claimed that security at these plants is very lax compared to, say, a nuclear plant, making them a soft target. Given the severity of the Bhopal incident, this seems to suggest this is a very serious concern, and it is something else to take into account when thinking about chemical plant safety. It's not all just about accidents.
I'm not sure how much credence to give these claims. The discussion suggested that there are steps being taken to improve security at chemical plants, but the really serious, manditory ones were killed in congress in favor of less stringent, voluntary programs. I'd be interested if others who know more about the situation can offer some insight.
I should also point out that you say, "It is essentially based on information for a single summer, the other information presented even contradicts the conclusions it draws. The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything." This is not actually true if you read the paper. The basis is a statistical modeling program the models climate change due to natural sources (e.g. fluctuation in solar input) and human sources. In order to get the correct parameters for the model they actually use climate data for that region for much of the 20th century. So, when I ask you to elucidate the supposed flaws, I mean can you clarify your claims, because the ones you made seem to be patently false.
Now I realize that you may not actually be able to read the Nature paper, because you have to pay to view the full text, but if that's the case you really shouldn't be claiming it's flawed (or "fawed", whatever). You might be able to look at a copy at the local library.
I'd say I'm not convinced of how certain we can be that human activities are the cause of increased global warming and other climate change, but it seems that the only people who are trying to look at the issue carefully and dispassionately are scientists. And it seems that it's quite difficult to be certain, but it appears that all things being equal it looks more reasonable to believe that humans are significantly effecting the climate.
It seems to generally be those who object to the idea of anthropogenic climate change that are "coming in with a preconceived notion." Works I have seen that fall into this group are comprised of a) people payed by the petrochemical or other industries that have a monitary interest in disproving anthropogenic climate change, b) politicians and political pundates who are against many government regulations, so opposing environmental regulations and the science supporting them fits with their preconcieved political beliefs, and c) non-experts in the field who disbelieve it based upon very simplistic explanations of the phenomina without the requisite research and modeling. This does not mean there is not good dispassionate research against the idea of anthropogenic climate change, but it is not the stuff one normally sees. If it were to be found, it would likely be done by scientists in peer reviewed scientific journals. So it really looks to me that the people who have the right expertise and are most likely to look at the question objectively are the scientists.
I agree that one must realize that scientists are prone to flaws and social pressures like other people. That said, they are usually the group of people most likely to look at an issue fairly objectively, because they at least make a good effort to try to be objective.
I appreciate your point that assumptions in the model can bias the result, but that does not mean a model is not a useful tool. Again, one of the issues the peer reviewers should be looking at is those assumptions. I've also done computer modeling (of quantum mechanical systems), but I wouldn't say I'm qualified to say whether the model in the paper is correct. This is precisely why knowledgable people (as least some of whom usually work in closely related fields) peer review the article.
I think people are confusing scientific press releases with peer reviewed journals to some degree. I think alarmist or sensationalistic press releases by science and engineering groups are not uncommon, but articles in a journal like Nature undergo rigorous peer review. Mistakes still sometimes get in (I just found one in PRL last month, but someone else had found it first), but it's not as though you can go making any claim you want; you have to have good, solid evidence and reasoning.
"I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal" That must be why, no matter what the scientific endeavor, there's always some cataclysmic disaster looming on the horizon."
That is probably true in many cases, but ironically in this case it's probably rather the opposite. There are any number of companies willing to fund good research to disprove anthropogenic climate change, certainly anyone in the petrochemical industry. Furthermore, for people in the US it would be much easier to get a position on government advisory panels with that view, given how the Bush administration picks its advisory panel members.
I wonder if you might elucidate these "faws" you speak of. If you've actually found clear flaws I think we'd certainly all like to hear them; furthermore, you realize that legitimate, scientific objections to a work in a journal will also get published in that journal, so this is your chance to get published in Nature. You should hurry, though, because there are always many other scientists reading the journal, ready to discredit a paper if they can find a serious flaw.
Of course, this is a peer reviewed journal in which other experts have already gone over the article with a fine toothed comb. Certainly, the article can still be wrong, but it's fairly unlikely it has any immediately obvious flaws.
800 years ago they were growing grapes for wine in northern England. So it used to be hotter than this before the heavy industrial pollutants.
This is a good illustration of why science takes careful thought. Even if it were hotter 800 years ago than it is now does that necessarily imply that fossil fuels cannot be the cause now? No. In fact, one of the things scientists who study global warming stress is that the time scale for climatic changes in the last century or so has been much shorter than any of the previous climatic shifts, as far as science can tell, so this change seems to be of a very different character than any other historical climatic changes we're aware of (and have decent data about). In the Nature paper they talk about using data from summers in that region from a large portion of the 20th century in order to estimate the parameters of the model for the natural factors effecting climatic change, so they've done their best to include natural climatic variations, but those along don't seem to make these heat waves very likely. I suppose we'll see in future summers if they were correct.
In case people are interested, you can find the actual article in the most recent issue of Nature (abstract is free but you pay for the full text). Also, there were stories about this on NPR and in the Washington Post.
Some of these stories stress that if the study is seen as proof that the preponderance of the evidence points to fossil fuels as the source of deadly heat waves, then people may begin trying to bring civil suits against fossil fuel producers and distributors on that basis. That seems far fetched to me, since it seems like the you'd have to prove the specific corporation you're suing is responsible, but who knows? It would seem to be a very liberarian solution to the problem of global warming, though, so/. oughta like it.
"The current government is doing the right thing...but you could do a lot worse. China is a police state? The US is MUCH more heavily policed, although if you DO manage to catch the attention of the real Chinese police they WILL shoot you in the head."
The Chinese government is doing the right thing? Tell that to the families of the hundreds of people slaughered in the Tiananmen Square protests, not to mention the people dissapeared or otherwise imprisoned for doing little more that speaking their mind or speaking the truth. Look, you want to say engagement is a more productive policy than isolation, fine, that's a reasonable stance, but don't try to claim the Chinese government really isn't so bad. The Chinese government is still a brutal group of thugs that do unconscionable things to their own people regularly.
To say that the US is no better on human rights is firstly beside the point and secondly false. That the Chinese government's actions are immoral stands independantly of how bad the record of any other government is. Clearly if a black person in South Africa during apartheid were to say that the shooting of a protester in the USSR was bad, no one would say to him, "Oh, you have no place to talk because your country treats you like shit."
I certainly won't claim that the US has a perfect record on human rights or civil liberties. That's why I am very vocal on the subject and have been a member of the ACLU here in the US. The difference, however, is that I am free to say that and free to continue that fight. I can go out and spread that message and those that are convinced can vote to change the government's policies. None of that is true in China, which is one reason why it is false to say the US is no better. Both nations have much room to improve.
As I said, I think there is an argument to be made that engagment is more effective than isolation, but engagement does not have to mean endorsement. Engagement is only a rational method of prompting change if we use that relationship as leverage to continue to fight for those improvements.
"Nothing ever shows up in the Chinese media that's critical of the government? SO what?! Nothing ever shows up on the USA's useless fucking media that hasn't been approved by the station's marketing department."
First of all, we're talking about Google news here, which includes many stories from domestic and international press, some of which are very critical of government, media conglomerates, and corporations. It's true that if you look at TV news its all mostly harmless, but the whole reason this is a big deal is because the internet is a mechanism to largely circumvent those controls and get at all the information. That's precisely what makes it so vital. Secondly, there's a big difference between "Rupart Murdoc doesn't choose to spend his money to criticise X" (the case in the US) and "if I criticise X I can be thrown in prison for years" (the case in China).
My point is that installation programs should not require you to click "I agree" to the GPL.
Again, the point is simply that once you know the GPL you can use 100 GPL'ed programs and never worry about the terms of the license (click through or otherwise).
"Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed."
As I said, "one could write a license that was like the GPL but with an additional click-through portion..." It looks to me like this would have to be a look alike to the GPL and not just a straight addition, but the point is that it could still be open source and otherwise have similar terms to free software. On the other hand, for a while Limewire was alledged to have spyware in it despite being GPL'ed at the time. I believe that this was installed after the user agreed in a click through EULA, so that would seem to be a case in point of just such a tacked on EULA. I'm not sure how that panned out legally.
Your point is what? That you don't techically agree to the GPL if you're just using the software? That may, indeed, be true, but the salient point is that you know you're not specifically being asked to agree to the installation of spyware in order to use the program if the only licensing given is the GPL.
Clearly, though, one could write a license that was like the GPL but with an additional click-through portion that said you agree to (insert underhanded clause here).
You're probably right that most adware/spyware is installed with a program and is allowed by some clause baried in the EULA. Oddly, it's been my experience that free and open source software can help with this too.
Many years ago I started carefully reading all the EULAs for the software I used in Windows, and it was such a pain! The problem is that there are a lot of programs, each with a different, lengthy EULA in sometimes indecypherable legalese. In fact, any time I ran windows update I'd get a EULA for each item being installed. Those were usually the same one, but you really could tell unless you read the whole thing.
When I switched to Linux, I was releaved because it was so blessedly easy to read all the EULAs. Why? Because a lot of free and open source software uses one of a few standard licenses, such as the GPL or the Mozilla Public License. This idea of standarized licenses is wonderful, because once I know the GPL pretty well, I can easily agree to any GPL'ed software. It's not one of advantages of open source you'd usually think of, but it really is a great feature for people who want to know what they're agreeing to. Of course, I'm not sure this has anything intrinsically to do with the "open source" or "free software" model, so it could change in the future.
Having read TFA, they suggest that this laser is to be used as part of a boost phase missle defense system. Not too long ago, the APS did a review of such a system, including hypothetical airplane based laser systems. The conclusions suggested the system would most likely be only partially effective (depending on the country launching, the target in question, and the type of rocket). Even when effective, such a system, "could cause live nuclear, chemical, or biological munitions to fall on populated areas short of the target, in the United States or other countries.".On the topic of airborne lasers, the executive summary says, "The Airborne Laser now under development could have some capability against liquid-propellant missiles, but it would be ineffective against solid-propellant ICBMs, which are more heat-resistant." The analysis took into account technical factors but did not even consider factors like cost.
It seems these programs are pretty foolish. Not bad for employing us physicists and engineers, but probably a waste of money. The "success" mentioned in the article seems to be that the laser fired. Apparently all that's left now is to make it fire long enough to disable a missle, design a targeting system, mount it and a suitable power source on an actual aircraft, and get it all to work together in an actual situation on an aircraft. In other words, it's no where close to working, and even when it does work odds are it probably won't be that useful (according to the APS).
Working on this sort of system might make sense if we had unlimited resources, but given that resources are quite limited this doesn't seem like a good way to spend them. As far as terrorism, missles just don't seem to be a vary likely attack methodology relative to other things, so it would make sense to spend most of this money on defenses that are likely to work against real imminant threats. That would include things like much more rigorous screening at ports and other homeland security items. Let's not forget that the guys who got the whole terrorism scare started used nothing but plane tickets and box cutters. It makes sense to defend against the other easy attack methods first. In terms of defense against other nations, the MAD doctrine seems to have been pretty effective and should continue to be as long as we have an imposing military. The money should be spent on maintaining a feasibile military threat to our likely agressors (even in the face of our obligations in Iraq) and on things that will definitely reduce threats like disarmerment and nuclear non-proliferation.
It's true, unfortunately, that Bush voters are woefully misinformed and they showed that yesterday. I fear our country will pay the price for that ignorance in the next few years.
One correction, saying "won the popular vote but he won by the biggest margin in resent history, with a 4 million vote lead" is quite misleading. In 1996 Bill Clinton won relection by a margin of more than 8 million over Bob Dole. One can make a technical argument that Clinton won over Dole by 8 million, but only one a majority off all votes (including those cast by other candidates) by small margin (if at all); however, in 1988 dubya's father won a majority of the popular vote by about 7 million. Thus, in reality, this is still a relatively slim win when compared to relatively recent history. If one wishes to play those sorts of silly games with words, one can also claim that only one american president has ever been elected with more people voting against him, so in some sense dubya is the most disliked president in history. However, this is just as misleading a way to play with the facts. It does look like he one, but let's not start making misleading claims. As we can see from the surveys of Bush voter beliefs, there is enough confusion about the facts out there already.
"With the new release of the Osama-Bin-Laden tape supporting John Kerry, I can 100% saying I am going for Bush. If terrorists start saying they are going to start attacking any state the Bush wins and leaves the states the Kerry wins alone, then I am for Bush. Because that shows to me that the teorrists are running scared at another Bush administration."
So public enemy #1 is not only still at large 3 years after 9/11 but seems to be healthy and is broadcasting messages to world, and this implies that Bush is doing a good job? I must learn this astro-logic you droids are using these days, it is clearly much more powerful, since it can prove things our Earth logic certainly can't. This fact, together with the fact that by most intelligence estimates al Qaeda has grown over the last 3 years, suggests that Bush is doing an awful job. Quoth factcheck.org:
"Furthermore, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies reported May 25 that the occupation of Iraq has helped al Qaeda recruit more members. The institute quoted "conservative" intelligence estimates as saying that al Qaeda has 18,000 potential operatives and is present in more than 60 countries."
Also, you must realize that if what Osama bin Laden says determines what you do, as you say, then you are giving him power and ultimately his tactics have been successful, because he is able to dictate our politics. This applies whether you do exactly what he says or exactly the opposite. To put it another way, did it never occur to you that such a unethical creature could be saying something other than what he actually wants? Look, you must make the will of terrorists irrelivent and make your decisions based upon what's best for your country, not on what Osama bin Laden says. I should think that would be obvious. Finally, if you look at the whole tape, bin Laden doesn't endorse either candidate. He makes it clear that he dislikes both.
"Freedom is as an effective virus as AIDS, and Influenza. It is something that cannot be stopped once it is out in the wild, and it has infected the Middle East, and it is only time when every nation on Earth will be able to say we are Free, the way God (what ever you may call god) has made us."
I too think that ending tyrrany across the globe could help to curb terrorism, but attacking counties that pose no demonstrable threat to us and occupying them is hardly "spreading freedom". We will see if true freedom ever takes hold in either Afghanistan or Iraq, but we already know from many survey's that it has done a lot to make many in the rest of the world hate the US and more in the muslim world sympathize with Osama bin Laden. If we help people to be free, that will gain us friends, but if we attack people in the name of "freeing" them, that will only make us enemies. After all, the Soviets would have certainly claimed that an attack on the US would have been to "free" the working class from the tyrrany of the upper classes, so saying you want freedom alone does not make you good or popular. I'd also point out that there is already democracy in the region, as both Turkey and Isreal have parlamentary systems. Now Iran is a place in which democracy was actually growing as the reformers in the parlement there fought for more power against the theocratic wing of the government. There was a real chance to fan the flames of democracy, but Bush labeled it shortly after as part of the "axis of evil", which undermined the democratic movement there because it seemed to be associated with westerners who were calling Iran evil.
"I think you all should give the canidate that has proven himself..."
I could not agree with this more. John Kerry has proven himself to be an effective leader in the Senate, fighti
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The term "quantum darwinism" is really an unnecessary buzzword. There is a certain analogy about states which create many records of themselves surviving a robust pointer states where others are "selected against", but the analogy is really pretty limited and not very useful. It's better to stay away from using terms like darwinism for effect. I should note that I didn't see the word "quantum darwinism" in the title or abstract of either of the actual journal articles this news item references. For the lazy, the two papers in question seem to be this preprint and this article from the Nov 26 issue of Physical Review Letters.
This sounds like an interesting result and Zurek is a premenent figure in the field of quantum decoherence, but this looks like the tying up of some (important) details rather than the revolutionary developement the news article makes it out to be. Even as far back as the work of Everett we had an idea of why two observers who compared notes would always agree on the objective facts. In the many worlds interpretation, this comes down to the fact that if observer A measures system S, there will be many different possible results. So there will be many branches of the wavefunction with A observing each possible result. When observer B measures system S, he becomes entangled with S and A, and there are many possible outcomes, but in each branch of the wave function A and B agree on the outcome. Not sure if that clears anything up. :-) If you're talking about purely quantum systems, the same thing happens in the Copenhagen interpretation. The only tricky part is how to think about it when A and B are "classical observers". Still, I haven't read these papers yet and now I'm eager to.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I felt I should add two things. First, here is another page that addresses a lot of the false claims made about connections between power lines and cancer. Second, there is fairly clear evidence that UV light causes cancer. Now clearly you have to go out in the sun sometimes (yes, even if you read /.), but you probably get some unnecessary exposure. The question is, should you be more worried about that than cell phones or power lines?
Actually, the link between power lines and cancer is still tenuous at best. See this page for some details.
The author of that page says, "Overall, most scientists consider that the evidence that power line fields cause or contribute to cancer is weak to nonexistent." It seems that the sorts of fields setup by power lines don't seem to cause cancer in animals or adults. Chilhood lukemia looks like the only possible connection, and that evidence is still considered "weak" by the AMA.
I'm not sure if states have laws based on the idea that power lines cause cancer, but it would not surprise me. It would be far from the first time that legislators went off half cocked over bad or inconclusive science. This hardly proves the validity of the viewpoint.
Now I agree that GHz microwaves are a considerably different situation, but the issue of power lines should serve as a cautionary example that things (esp. in medicine) are not often as clear as a single study would suggest. We should wait for a scientific consensus to form before taking this too seriously, assuming the supposed risk isn't quite acute.
I recently went to a talk by Joseph Polchinski, one of the most respected string theorists (as far as I know). The topic was on cosmic strings, which are the ones of which evidence has supposedly been found. His comment was that the evidence was intruiging and deserved further study but that it was not convincing proof, in itself. To put this in a bit of perspective, back in 1995 (and probably before) Fred Hoyle published a paper in nature siting (among other things) several instances of galaxies at very different redshifts that looked at though they were connect (known as an "optical bridge") and used this as "spoof" that the Big Bang model was wrong and his steady state model was right. The point is that we often see strange things in sky whose explanation is not immediately apparent, and it is probably not wise to jump to extraordinary conclusions too quickly.
Yeah, I mean, what do you think this is, some "news for nerds" site that a bunch of open source software people read?
Ok, first, Minimo is a red herring. I wasn't talking about embedded browsers. I honestly have no idea if it's any good, though it's likely if nothing else it's too new to be good. And for all I know, Opera may always be the best in that arena.
This is a matter of taste. What you call confusion I call choice. There is an extension for mouse gestures like those in Opera, or you can use, for example, pie menus. I like the latter a bit better, though both are nice. It is a nice thing to have a range of options.
My point was that it was implemented in Mozilla before the any other popular desktop mail client I was aware of, including the integrated mail client in Opera. As to whether it's Baysian, its behavior would seem consistent with being Baysian, but it would be difficult to be sure (though you could look at the source). But I don't really care if it's "Baysian", just that it does a pretty good job for me, which made it an advantage of Mozilla.
I switched from using my paid for version of Opera 6.x over to Mozilla, back before Opera 7 was released. That's about all I can tell you about when I switched. As for why: For a few months I used each and sort of alternated. I found Mozilla seemed a little slower (but not terribly) but pages rendered and behaved properly in Mozilla more often. That was really the main reason I switched. At the time my impression was that Mozilla had a similar feature set with more choice, and it looked to me like they'd be adding features more quickly. It was quite a while ago and I didn't take notes or anything, so I really couldn't tell you the specifics of what features it was I was interested in at the time.
When Opera 7 came out, I considered switching back again, and I tried out the ad supported version. I found the features fairly comparable, though I recall that search customization and the password manager seemed to be less well documented, which I found annoying. But ultimately it was the fact that I couldn't see putting up with banner ads or paying the money to have a product comperable to the free one.
This all comes down to a lot of subjective judgements. I think which you choose is a function of a lot of things. It has to do with which features you prize, how much you value choice in features, how much disposable income you can devote to purchasing software (or how much you dislike banner ads), and a host of other things. I found that Mozilla fit the things that I wanted as well or better for a lower price. I can easily see people who prize some of the unique usability features of Opera more than I do, and who have money to spend on a web browser, choosing Opera. Again, that's why I think it will continue to have a niche market but never become dominant, in a situation much analogous to Macs.
Actually, I was really refering to developer community, I guess. At the time Mozilla seemed to be adding new and innovative features more quickly. Certainly Opera has had its share of innovative features, but as I said, Mozilla seemed to have coopted most of those and was adding things more quickly. Opera had mouse gestures first (as far as I know), but Mozilla quickly got a lot of different versions, so you had a lot of choice. A bit later there were things like Baysian spam filtering. That's the sort of stuff I'm talking about. Also, some features like the password manager and customizing searches were not as well documented and a bit more cludgy.
Generally I'm a fan of Opera. I always thought it was a really good browser with a lot of really nice usability features. At the time I switched to Mozilla, I used both and found Mozilla to be slightly slower but a bit better for compatability with web pages and more feature rich. I could easily believe that now Opera is better again. For me, however, it's really unlikely the difference is enough to put up with banner ads or pay for an ad free version. I think that is the reason that Opera will have a niche market among serious web surfers for a long time to come, but would have problems being a serious competitor to IE. Though things like new forms of pop up adds might make suffering through banners seem like a decent trade off. At least the Opera ads are target toward your interests.
In reply to your points:
1. That 10,000 people use it doesn't make it good, but the existence of the ad argues a lot of people use and like it, so it might be worth a look. Everyone who uses the web has heard of IE and MS, but not necessarily Firefox. This may convince them to check it out, or to take the advice or a friend or coworker who said they should try it. The only thing that should convince them it's good is how it performs once they try it. Another nuance is, it's not just that 10,000 people use it, it's that 10,000 people payed good money to put the ad in for no direct personal gain (in most cases). I don't know if that would be clear to readers, but you must admit you'd be hard pressed to find people doing this for MS products.
2. I used to use Opera; I even payed for it at one point. The reason I switched for Mozilla/Firefox was that more sites seemed to work well in Mozilla and it seemed to be more polished and well documented in a lot of ways, with a more active community. That may have changed since Opera 6.0, but my point is that I think they both qualify fairly well on those points. I think the important point here is the other, tacit qualification, which is that it's free. Many people won't pay for a browser when they can get one for free (and banner ad free). I know I have felt that Opera and Firefox are pretty competitive, but Opera is certainly not so much better (in my opinion) as to warrent paying the money or suffering the banner ads.
It was my impression that the idea was that "global warming" would involve major changes in weather patterns. This means that, yes, some previously unproductive land would become productive, but other productive land would turn to a desert or dust bowl. Besides the possibility of less useable land overall, the main difficulty is that if this happens on the scale of a human lifetime (maybe even two or three) it will likely cause extreme political destablization, as some countries lose most of their agricultural production and others gain production they can't immediately exploit. So even if there's enough productive land in the end, during a time of flux expect natural disasters (fires, floods, etc.), famine, and war.
Unfortunately, Crichton is a man who trades on making up things that sound like fact rather than bringing to light things that are fact. The latter is, of course, what scientists do.
The argument seems to be essentially that scientific consensus has been wrong in the past; therefore, it is unreliable and it's foolish to trust it. There two major problems with the argument.
The first difficulty is that when we talk about "scientific consensus" today we mean consensus built based upon research in peer reviewed journals by scientists (both researchers and reviewers) attempting to follow the scientific method. Many of the examples discussed involved people who were not really even attempting to follow the scientific method or doing so in an environment where there really wasn't enough review of the claims being made. That's probably why many of the instances sited refer to things that happened quite a long time ago, and they refer predominantly to medicine. Medicine was not conducted with much scientific rigor until relatively recently and has a long and storied history of entanglement with pseudoscience. Essentially, many if not most of the examples are not really applicable to compare to the modern scientific process. I will admit, however, there are some actual good examples. The one that comes to mind is the belief that von Neumann had ruled out all hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics until Bohm came up with one.
The second and more important flaw in the argument is the inference that because scientific consensus has been wrong sometimes, it is therefore so unreliable as to be useless. Certainly, science has been wrong about a great many things and will continue to be. It is the roll of scientists to continuously try to find flaws in our understanding. If you want to know if scientific consensus is useful, however, you have to ask has it been right more often than not (or more often than other ways of making judgements). Given the great advances due to scientific discovery and all that has been predicted, it would seem reasonable to think that yes, more often than not, scientific consensus is pretty close to being right.
The the idea that when scientists invoke consensus it's because something is not "fact" simply ignores the reality of the situation. In reality if you pick any scientific theory, you can find people with a Ph. D., usually even practicing scientists of some sort, who disagree with it. This certainly applies to evolution (micro or macro), general relativity, quantum mechanics, special relativity, etc. So, to be accurate, one can only speak of consensus, not uniform agreement. This is especially true of more recent theories, ones that have come into acceptance during the lifetime of many current scientists. The point is that global warming is far from unique in having some dissenters. One can often only site as "fact" theories which are rather old (E=mc^2 is from special relativity, which is about 100 years old) or data that no one would really care to dispute (like the value of 1 AU). If you're talking about something recent and politically charged like global warming, you can only accurately say that there is a scientific consensus, meaning almost everyone but the crackpots and the ignorant agree. You must wait for the latter to die or become bored before you can call it a "fact".
I was listening to NPR yesterday when one of the guests suggested that chemical plants would be a likely soft target for terrorists and could result in an disaster like Bhopal. He claimed that security at these plants is very lax compared to, say, a nuclear plant, making them a soft target. Given the severity of the Bhopal incident, this seems to suggest this is a very serious concern, and it is something else to take into account when thinking about chemical plant safety. It's not all just about accidents.
I'm not sure how much credence to give these claims. The discussion suggested that there are steps being taken to improve security at chemical plants, but the really serious, manditory ones were killed in congress in favor of less stringent, voluntary programs. I'd be interested if others who know more about the situation can offer some insight.
I should also point out that you say, "It is essentially based on information for a single summer, the other information presented even contradicts the conclusions it draws. The estimations on temperature growth are not really supported by anything." This is not actually true if you read the paper. The basis is a statistical modeling program the models climate change due to natural sources (e.g. fluctuation in solar input) and human sources. In order to get the correct parameters for the model they actually use climate data for that region for much of the 20th century. So, when I ask you to elucidate the supposed flaws, I mean can you clarify your claims, because the ones you made seem to be patently false.
Now I realize that you may not actually be able to read the Nature paper, because you have to pay to view the full text, but if that's the case you really shouldn't be claiming it's flawed (or "fawed", whatever). You might be able to look at a copy at the local library.
I'd say I'm not convinced of how certain we can be that human activities are the cause of increased global warming and other climate change, but it seems that the only people who are trying to look at the issue carefully and dispassionately are scientists. And it seems that it's quite difficult to be certain, but it appears that all things being equal it looks more reasonable to believe that humans are significantly effecting the climate.
It seems to generally be those who object to the idea of anthropogenic climate change that are "coming in with a preconceived notion." Works I have seen that fall into this group are comprised of a) people payed by the petrochemical or other industries that have a monitary interest in disproving anthropogenic climate change, b) politicians and political pundates who are against many government regulations, so opposing environmental regulations and the science supporting them fits with their preconcieved political beliefs, and c) non-experts in the field who disbelieve it based upon very simplistic explanations of the phenomina without the requisite research and modeling. This does not mean there is not good dispassionate research against the idea of anthropogenic climate change, but it is not the stuff one normally sees. If it were to be found, it would likely be done by scientists in peer reviewed scientific journals. So it really looks to me that the people who have the right expertise and are most likely to look at the question objectively are the scientists.
I agree that one must realize that scientists are prone to flaws and social pressures like other people. That said, they are usually the group of people most likely to look at an issue fairly objectively, because they at least make a good effort to try to be objective.
I appreciate your point that assumptions in the model can bias the result, but that does not mean a model is not a useful tool. Again, one of the issues the peer reviewers should be looking at is those assumptions. I've also done computer modeling (of quantum mechanical systems), but I wouldn't say I'm qualified to say whether the model in the paper is correct. This is precisely why knowledgable people (as least some of whom usually work in closely related fields) peer review the article.
I think people are confusing scientific press releases with peer reviewed journals to some degree. I think alarmist or sensationalistic press releases by science and engineering groups are not uncommon, but articles in a journal like Nature undergo rigorous peer review. Mistakes still sometimes get in (I just found one in PRL last month, but someone else had found it first), but it's not as though you can go making any claim you want; you have to have good, solid evidence and reasoning.
That is probably true in many cases, but ironically in this case it's probably rather the opposite. There are any number of companies willing to fund good research to disprove anthropogenic climate change, certainly anyone in the petrochemical industry. Furthermore, for people in the US it would be much easier to get a position on government advisory panels with that view, given how the Bush administration picks its advisory panel members.
I wonder if you might elucidate these "faws" you speak of. If you've actually found clear flaws I think we'd certainly all like to hear them; furthermore, you realize that legitimate, scientific objections to a work in a journal will also get published in that journal, so this is your chance to get published in Nature. You should hurry, though, because there are always many other scientists reading the journal, ready to discredit a paper if they can find a serious flaw.
Of course, this is a peer reviewed journal in which other experts have already gone over the article with a fine toothed comb. Certainly, the article can still be wrong, but it's fairly unlikely it has any immediately obvious flaws.
This is a good illustration of why science takes careful thought. Even if it were hotter 800 years ago than it is now does that necessarily imply that fossil fuels cannot be the cause now? No. In fact, one of the things scientists who study global warming stress is that the time scale for climatic changes in the last century or so has been much shorter than any of the previous climatic shifts, as far as science can tell, so this change seems to be of a very different character than any other historical climatic changes we're aware of (and have decent data about). In the Nature paper they talk about using data from summers in that region from a large portion of the 20th century in order to estimate the parameters of the model for the natural factors effecting climatic change, so they've done their best to include natural climatic variations, but those along don't seem to make these heat waves very likely. I suppose we'll see in future summers if they were correct.
In case people are interested, you can find the actual article in the most recent issue of Nature (abstract is free but you pay for the full text). Also, there were stories about this on NPR and in the Washington Post.
Some of these stories stress that if the study is seen as proof that the preponderance of the evidence points to fossil fuels as the source of deadly heat waves, then people may begin trying to bring civil suits against fossil fuel producers and distributors on that basis. That seems far fetched to me, since it seems like the you'd have to prove the specific corporation you're suing is responsible, but who knows? It would seem to be a very liberarian solution to the problem of global warming, though, so /. oughta like it.
The Chinese government is doing the right thing? Tell that to the families of the hundreds of people slaughered in the Tiananmen Square protests, not to mention the people dissapeared or otherwise imprisoned for doing little more that speaking their mind or speaking the truth. Look, you want to say engagement is a more productive policy than isolation, fine, that's a reasonable stance, but don't try to claim the Chinese government really isn't so bad. The Chinese government is still a brutal group of thugs that do unconscionable things to their own people regularly.
To say that the US is no better on human rights is firstly beside the point and secondly false. That the Chinese government's actions are immoral stands independantly of how bad the record of any other government is. Clearly if a black person in South Africa during apartheid were to say that the shooting of a protester in the USSR was bad, no one would say to him, "Oh, you have no place to talk because your country treats you like shit."
I certainly won't claim that the US has a perfect record on human rights or civil liberties. That's why I am very vocal on the subject and have been a member of the ACLU here in the US. The difference, however, is that I am free to say that and free to continue that fight. I can go out and spread that message and those that are convinced can vote to change the government's policies. None of that is true in China, which is one reason why it is false to say the US is no better. Both nations have much room to improve.
As I said, I think there is an argument to be made that engagment is more effective than isolation, but engagement does not have to mean endorsement. Engagement is only a rational method of prompting change if we use that relationship as leverage to continue to fight for those improvements.
First of all, we're talking about Google news here, which includes many stories from domestic and international press, some of which are very critical of government, media conglomerates, and corporations. It's true that if you look at TV news its all mostly harmless, but the whole reason this is a big deal is because the internet is a mechanism to largely circumvent those controls and get at all the information. That's precisely what makes it so vital. Secondly, there's a big difference between "Rupart Murdoc doesn't choose to spend his money to criticise X" (the case in the US) and "if I criticise X I can be thrown in prison for years" (the case in China).
Again, the point is simply that once you know the GPL you can use 100 GPL'ed programs and never worry about the terms of the license (click through or otherwise).
As I said, "one could write a license that was like the GPL but with an additional click-through portion..." It looks to me like this would have to be a look alike to the GPL and not just a straight addition, but the point is that it could still be open source and otherwise have similar terms to free software. On the other hand, for a while Limewire was alledged to have spyware in it despite being GPL'ed at the time. I believe that this was installed after the user agreed in a click through EULA, so that would seem to be a case in point of just such a tacked on EULA. I'm not sure how that panned out legally.
Your point is what? That you don't techically agree to the GPL if you're just using the software? That may, indeed, be true, but the salient point is that you know you're not specifically being asked to agree to the installation of spyware in order to use the program if the only licensing given is the GPL.
Clearly, though, one could write a license that was like the GPL but with an additional click-through portion that said you agree to (insert underhanded clause here).
You're probably right that most adware/spyware is installed with a program and is allowed by some clause baried in the EULA. Oddly, it's been my experience that free and open source software can help with this too.
Many years ago I started carefully reading all the EULAs for the software I used in Windows, and it was such a pain! The problem is that there are a lot of programs, each with a different, lengthy EULA in sometimes indecypherable legalese. In fact, any time I ran windows update I'd get a EULA for each item being installed. Those were usually the same one, but you really could tell unless you read the whole thing.
When I switched to Linux, I was releaved because it was so blessedly easy to read all the EULAs. Why? Because a lot of free and open source software uses one of a few standard licenses, such as the GPL or the Mozilla Public License. This idea of standarized licenses is wonderful, because once I know the GPL pretty well, I can easily agree to any GPL'ed software. It's not one of advantages of open source you'd usually think of, but it really is a great feature for people who want to know what they're agreeing to. Of course, I'm not sure this has anything intrinsically to do with the "open source" or "free software" model, so it could change in the future.
Having read TFA, they suggest that this laser is to be used as part of a boost phase missle defense system. Not too long ago, the APS did a review of such a system, including hypothetical airplane based laser systems. The conclusions suggested the system would most likely be only partially effective (depending on the country launching, the target in question, and the type of rocket). Even when effective, such a system, "could cause live nuclear, chemical, or biological munitions to fall on populated areas short of the target, in the United States or other countries.".On the topic of airborne lasers, the executive summary says, "The Airborne Laser now under development could have some capability against liquid-propellant missiles, but it would be ineffective against solid-propellant ICBMs, which are more heat-resistant." The analysis took into account technical factors but did not even consider factors like cost.
It seems these programs are pretty foolish. Not bad for employing us physicists and engineers, but probably a waste of money. The "success" mentioned in the article seems to be that the laser fired. Apparently all that's left now is to make it fire long enough to disable a missle, design a targeting system, mount it and a suitable power source on an actual aircraft, and get it all to work together in an actual situation on an aircraft. In other words, it's no where close to working, and even when it does work odds are it probably won't be that useful (according to the APS).
Working on this sort of system might make sense if we had unlimited resources, but given that resources are quite limited this doesn't seem like a good way to spend them. As far as terrorism, missles just don't seem to be a vary likely attack methodology relative to other things, so it would make sense to spend most of this money on defenses that are likely to work against real imminant threats. That would include things like much more rigorous screening at ports and other homeland security items. Let's not forget that the guys who got the whole terrorism scare started used nothing but plane tickets and box cutters. It makes sense to defend against the other easy attack methods first. In terms of defense against other nations, the MAD doctrine seems to have been pretty effective and should continue to be as long as we have an imposing military. The money should be spent on maintaining a feasibile military threat to our likely agressors (even in the face of our obligations in Iraq) and on things that will definitely reduce threats like disarmerment and nuclear non-proliferation.
It's true, unfortunately, that Bush voters are woefully misinformed and they showed that yesterday. I fear our country will pay the price for that ignorance in the next few years.
One correction, saying "won the popular vote but he won by the biggest margin in resent history, with a 4 million vote lead" is quite misleading. In 1996 Bill Clinton won relection by a margin of more than 8 million over Bob Dole. One can make a technical argument that Clinton won over Dole by 8 million, but only one a majority off all votes (including those cast by other candidates) by small margin (if at all); however, in 1988 dubya's father won a majority of the popular vote by about 7 million. Thus, in reality, this is still a relatively slim win when compared to relatively recent history. If one wishes to play those sorts of silly games with words, one can also claim that only one american president has ever been elected with more people voting against him, so in some sense dubya is the most disliked president in history. However, this is just as misleading a way to play with the facts. It does look like he one, but let's not start making misleading claims. As we can see from the surveys of Bush voter beliefs, there is enough confusion about the facts out there already.
Quotes from the parent in italics.
So public enemy #1 is not only still at large 3 years after 9/11 but seems to be healthy and is broadcasting messages to world, and this implies that Bush is doing a good job? I must learn this astro-logic you droids are using these days, it is clearly much more powerful, since it can prove things our Earth logic certainly can't. This fact, together with the fact that by most intelligence estimates al Qaeda has grown over the last 3 years, suggests that Bush is doing an awful job. Quoth factcheck.org:
Also, you must realize that if what Osama bin Laden says determines what you do, as you say, then you are giving him power and ultimately his tactics have been successful, because he is able to dictate our politics. This applies whether you do exactly what he says or exactly the opposite. To put it another way, did it never occur to you that such a unethical creature could be saying something other than what he actually wants? Look, you must make the will of terrorists irrelivent and make your decisions based upon what's best for your country, not on what Osama bin Laden says. I should think that would be obvious. Finally, if you look at the whole tape, bin Laden doesn't endorse either candidate. He makes it clear that he dislikes both.
I too think that ending tyrrany across the globe could help to curb terrorism, but attacking counties that pose no demonstrable threat to us and occupying them is hardly "spreading freedom". We will see if true freedom ever takes hold in either Afghanistan or Iraq, but we already know from many survey's that it has done a lot to make many in the rest of the world hate the US and more in the muslim world sympathize with Osama bin Laden. If we help people to be free, that will gain us friends, but if we attack people in the name of "freeing" them, that will only make us enemies. After all, the Soviets would have certainly claimed that an attack on the US would have been to "free" the working class from the tyrrany of the upper classes, so saying you want freedom alone does not make you good or popular. I'd also point out that there is already democracy in the region, as both Turkey and Isreal have parlamentary systems. Now Iran is a place in which democracy was actually growing as the reformers in the parlement there fought for more power against the theocratic wing of the government. There was a real chance to fan the flames of democracy, but Bush labeled it shortly after as part of the "axis of evil", which undermined the democratic movement there because it seemed to be associated with westerners who were calling Iran evil.
I could not agree with this more. John Kerry has proven himself to be an effective leader in the Senate, fighti