I have always felt that laws must be sensible - at least in the sense that one can argue logically for it, so that it should seem reasonable to most people, once they understand it well enough. The problem with IP legislation now is that it doesn't make sense - it isn't balanced, it only takes into account the interests of one party.
In my opinion IP rights should be governed by active use: If you patent an invention, you keep the exclusive rights for a while if you use the invention to produce goods. This should hinder patent trolling and the situation where a company buys up a patent in order to stop a competing product from being marketed.
The same goes for copyright: it should not be possible to hold on to a book or record for generations without producing it. There are many very good books that are impossible to find because the producers don't think there is a big enough market for them or because they want to earn money on newer books and don't want the competition. If they don't keep them in production, they should forfeit the copyright after a short time - say a couple of years - so that it would be legal to go to your library and make a copy to take home. That would create quite a lot of small businesses, I think.
The purpose of IP was never to create a situation where big companies could stifle progress and competition by getting frivolous patents or by holding on to patents; or a situation where big publishers and record labels could control most of what the public were allowed to read and listen to. The purpose of IP should be to allow the artist or inventor to profit from their creative work, simply, and that should be a personal right, not something that could be transferred; after all, if I wrote a book, then I am the author, even if I didn't publish it myself; only the author should have any IP rights over their work.
Anarcho-communist, you say? I think you'll have to make a choice here. Communism is about the group owning collectively; the focus is on communal rights over individual rights - society is the most important factor. But when you have any kind of society, you have laws; all groups have rules. Anarchism is the opposite: no laws, the individual trumps the group, and there is no society, only individuals that occasionally meet. Anarchy is the ultimate in individual freedom, communism is the ultimate in society.
My personal taste leans more to communism than anarchism - total freedom means that you are alone. If you fall ill, if you lose everything, tough shit, man, and don't lie down in my path, or I'll kick your teeth in.
If you leave the door to your house open and go away on holiday, is it then legal for anybody to enter and take your things away? I don't think so - the presence of any copyright protection, even if it is just the words "Don't make a copy", means that you are not meant to do it, of course.
The only real question is whether there should be any such thing as copyright and what form it should have. I don't believe the CSS was ever meant to be a real encryption as much as a device that makes it clear that there was an intent to do something illegal. Take the analogy with the house again: if the door is open, you can explain away your presence in the house - you went in to see if everything was OK, or whatever; but if there is a lock, even the flimsiest kind, you will have to break in, and it will be clear that you didn't come in just by accident, "because you thought they were home".
Eric Lerner is described in Wikipedia as "a popular science writer, independent plasma researcher and an advocate of plasma cosmology" - IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable; he has a BA in physics.
However, what really makes me think twice about this is the claim that they achieve fusion without any radioactive by-products, "only harmless Helium gas". How does one produce such a precise result in an environment that is "several billion degrees"? At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least, and we are not even talking about pure deuterium; there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place, and a large amount of particle radiation will be produced, as far as I can see, and the reactor casing is bound to become radioactive.
This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul - in this case CMEF, a Swedish startup.
Once you get the suspicion that this is yet another bogus project, you begin to see signs all over the place: superficially it looks as if they have got some government grant in the US, that Eric Lerner is a scientist, and that the company is some well-established research-company (a search for "Lawrenceville Plasma Physics" on Wikipedia redirects to the article about "Eric Lerner") - IOW, the announcement is deceptive; if this was real, they wouldn't need to deceive.
And then of course there is the claim that "electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood scientifically. In a Superman comic, perhaps, but not in real life. This is simply a flight of fantasy, unbound by the boring, mundane routine of real scientific research.
I have been reading several of the postings now, and I am astonsihed by what I see. I can't help wondering whether these things are due to differences in cultural norms between the US and Europe. I have worked in computers for more than 25 years now, and although I have been fired more often than I can remember, the scenarios you describe are rather alien to me. Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that office workers generally have 3 month's notice (this was in Denmark) if they are made redundant; but I think there is a difference in culture as well.
As far as I can tell it is all about trust and confidence. In most Danish (and possibly other European) companies the hierarchy is not very steep - I have always known that I can go and talk to anybody as my equal - even the managing director (or CEO, if you prefer). That builds confidence and trust - the managers are much more prepared to trust someone they see as their equal, even when they leave. Also it makes sense to have trust as one of the basic building blocks in a company - after all, as a programmer you are entrusted with the most important asset of the company, and if they can trust you that far, you must be worth it, I would have thought.
Now I work for the UK branch of an American company, and I can see that they are different. For one thing, the people I manage keep treating me as if I was royalty even when I tell them to stop calling me "Sir" - in my opinion good leadership is not about bullying, but about being able to build trust and motivation. And I do remember the first time I met our CEO and told him that I didn't give a flying fuck about what he said when he didn't know what he was talking about - it seemed to leave him somewhat baffled. But I am still here, seven years later, so he must have got used to it by now.
But the point is that responsibility is a limitation of freedom; and freedom is touted as the sufficient and necessary requirement for capitalism.
And the basic assumption behind capitalism is that growth is always possible, always right; responsibility, on the other hand, says that there must be a limit, that we can't just spend all the resources and move on. Which goes against consumerism as well - we can't simply keep spending more and more, because we can't keep creating more and more 'value'. What we take away is gone, basically.
when people are allowed to own land they take care of it better, preserve its resources better for the future, are more agreeable to allowing others temporary and conditional use of it Exactly, as for example when mining corporations stripmine a whole mountain top away, or logging companies denude the rainforests. As for being "more agreeable..." go and tell that to the huge landowners, not least in UK, who have fenced off about half the country to keep the bloody commoners out of their property. Capitalism and consumerism is what more than anything alse has created out environmental and climate problems.
When land is held "in common" that just tends to mean a free for all where everyone grabs as much as he can You evidently know all there is to know, don't you? The common lands, at least in England, were tightly regulated - everybody in the community had a certain right to access and use, but it certainly wasn't a free for all, far from it. In fact "free for all" is exactly how I would describe the socalled free market that seems to be an essential part of the modern capitalist cult.
Nobody is surprised, I'm sure, but in a world where we hear the excuse "There is no proof for " on a daily basis, whenever some company does not want to lose profit over a health or environmental issue, it is unfortunately necessary to find solid proof even for the most obvious things.
Just look at the way it took something like a century to make the message stick, that smoking causes lung cancer. Never mind that it was well known that tobacco smoke contained high levels of tar, and that tar was known to cause cancer; never mind that animal experiments showed that cigarette smoke caused cancer in rabbits etc etc - that was not proof enough. And even today there are people that say "There is no proof".
There will always be boneheaded idiots out there, of course, but that isn't the whole story. The biggest single factor, I'm sure, is the fact that there are strong interest groups that do anything they can to derail any objective discussion of certain subjects. I don't know where it comes from - it is as if whenever people have a 'cause', out goes all integrity, all decency and moral; whether the cause is religious, political or merely grubby, snarling greed.
... but the point may still be valid. Indeed. If only we knew what the point was. Of course I know what the poster is trying to say here: "Censorship is soooo bad for you". And there are indeed many examples in the world that illustrate that point, but this posting reeks to high heaven of dishonesty, in my opinion.
First of all - we hear about two message boards, "one is censored, one isn't"; what does that mean? My guess is that it means one is moderated, so why not just say that? It is after all the normal, accepted word; the answer, I assume, is that "censored" sounds more dramatic, more fit to purpose. We all hate censorship, but most can see the sense in moderating a discussion.
And there is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words": "... but the point may still be valid". This is like saying "For all we know, George W Bush may be a pedophile" - which is technically true, since we don't know a thing about his sexual preferences; it is also a hugely dishonest thing to say, since it suggests something which there is no reason to suspect.
We should all fight against spin - if we stand for the truth, for something that is good, we have no use for dishonesty.
I don't know about Iain Banks - I find him too tedious. Too much about incredible, gigantic, all-encompassing, momentuous etc etc, and too little about portraying authentic persons in a plausible setting. I don't know Charles Stross and Jack McDewitt, but I will have a look; one author that I have read recently and enjoyed is Alastair Reynolds - he seems to have the courage to honestly explore life from "the other side": take the Borg from Star Trek - they were the big scarecrow, the one enemy that has never even been close to sympathetic. All the others: Klingons, Ferengi, etc eventually became more "like us" and in some cases even heroes. Reynolds took the Borg idea, called them Conjoiners, and recast them as the good guys; that, I think, is original and brave.
Terry Pratchett does the same thing, in a way. He has taken all the traditional fantasy monsters and made them sympathetic and very plausible, strange as it may seem. Yes, I like Pratchett a lot. And I am a programmer.
Oh, I'm old, old enough to remember the first Beatles hits and all that, but what has that got to do with anything? People don't run out of imagination just because they get old, on the contrary; but with age comes experience, and it is amazing how soon you find that the collective imagination of the whole of humanity repeats itself. Take life as an example - Jules Verne imagined inhabitants on the moon that were rather like insects, and since then we have hardly moved on. By far the largest part of science fiction writers have managed to go no further than cellular, DNA based life; and none have been able to give a minimally self-consistent portrayal of a truly alien mind. I can imagine those things, vividly, but unfortunately I have neither the inclination nor the patience to write fiction.
As for the "near future gloom" - it's significantly more than a blip on the radar, I'm afraid. There is a very real possibility that we may not get past it, but that is a discussion for another time. Life will go on, of course; in the larger picture the demise of humanity will matter no more than the end of the dinosaurs.
It is no longer attractive to take a technical education. I think there are many factors involved - first of all, it isn't 'cool', engineers, scientists etc are seen as geeks, and who wants be a social misfit? Up until the sixties at least, scientists and engineers were seen as almost demi-gods who were fearlessly exploring worlds unfathomable by normal human beings - just think of the many scientists that are almost cult-figures: they are mostly from the beginning of the 20th century.
Secondly, there is a clear, anti-intellectual trend in many Western societies. Most people have never understood that scientists are not there to find The Answer; that the most important thing in science is the question. So, they have become disillusioned and don't feel they get what they want from scientific research.
And of course, the money. You study hard - sometimes even extremely hard - for many years, you borrow money to survive and to pay for your education, and then you find that you don't actually earn much afterwards. In many countries an academic earns less than the average tradesman, whose education was 3 - 5 years of salaried apprenticeship; as an academic, you will normally be in debt when you are newly educated, whereas a newly educated welder, builder or whatever is likely to have no debt.
All in all, the only reason why anybody would choose an academic career is because they feel a deep calling.
I don't think it is entirely fair to talk about 'thought crime' here. The basic problem is not so much whether people should be allowed to fantasize about having sex with children; after all, how would anyone actually enforce such a law? Some people do have this kind of fantasies, simply. But I think a much more significant problem here is the age of consent. The US is definitely at the top end when it comes to legal age of consent; sompare to Europe, where it ranges from 13 to 18. The simple fact of the matter is, that teenagers have a clear wish to participate in sex long before their 18th birthday, and trying to stop it with criminal law is like stopping the tide.
That is not to say that young people don't need to be protected even until they are 18 or older, but criminal law is not the right instrument. For one thing, when the age of consent is absurdly high, it brings the law into disrepute and blurs the boundary between what is real, dangerous pedophiles (who typically abuse young children, under 10 years of age) and those who genuinely fall in love with a mature teenager.
In my opinion it would be better to:
- lower the age of consent to something reasonable - make the punishment harder
As for possession of cartoons etc - I just don't know. Most people have from time thoughts about breaking one law or another. What really matters is what you do about it.
I have all but given up on science fiction and fantasy - it is as if all you can find is interminable series of massproduced soap-operas. Everybody tries to be 'Epic', but nobody has quite what it takes to pull it off. Maybe I am just getting too old, though I also find that authors like Asimov and Niven are strangely shallo, too much children of their time.
Perhaps it is because the newer authors have run out of visions - in the last century science seemed to be roaring forward; new, mindblowing discoveries were reported, technology and living standards were improving fast, and maybe science fiction was easier to write. But what can you write about now: Physics seems to have run up against a wall as far as the big discoveries go, and the future looks increasingly grim, what with climate change and the impending collapse of the global eco-system; and we just can't seem to imagine a solution any more. And that is what science fiction has traditionally been about: our glorious future, and how we the problems against all odds.
But enough of that - maybe I am just getting too old. Is there any good science fiction out there?
set it to boot to Windows by default Or better, let it boot into something that immediately generates a message about HW errors and halts the thing. The say "Now look what you've done. That's a month's work down the drain; my boss is going to kill me for this".
Zeig Heil Are you referring to Jeffrey K Zeig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_K._Zeig) or perhaps Sande Zeig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sande_Zeig)? Or did you mean "Sieg heil", which means "Hail victory"?
Zhu Mao Zhuxi wanshou wujiang What is wrong with wishing the guy a long life? You may not like him, but I don't think there is anything extreme in this.
... in China the two are usually indistinguishable. That is something you know, is it? Tell me, how long have you lived in the country, give or take a few months? Or was this just yet another "We all know that they are dead evil, so they obviously do everything in an evil way" sort of statement?
This is outsourcing, simply. The weapons industry need to run large scale tests, and they don't want to have too many high-profile cases too close to home. By making this kind of 'loophole' in the law they get to test their controversial weapons without too much public outcry, and if things get too noisy, the government can say "By God, you are right! Fancy how we could have overlooked that ", and of course it takes a lot of time to change a law.
Rather than trying to reply to the usual howls of derision and disbelief, I'll try to simply cut through it all and point out a couple of well known facts about Chinese culture.
First off, there is "the mandate of heaven". The Chinese background is not Christian; we in the West build much of our world view on Christian tradition, whether we are religious or not, and to Americans, I believe, an important part of that is idea of persecution from the government. America was to a large extent founded by people who fled oppression, so to most Americans the rulers are not people you would instinctively trust. I hope I'm making sense here:-) The Chinese, on the other hand, have a long (~5000 years), unbroken tradition according to which the ruler is a representative of Heaven. The emperor was the father of the people, at least as long as he had the mandate of heaven; the father, ideally, rules his children unselfishly and caringly, and that is what the Chinese expect from their government. They may not always like what daddy says, but they know in their heart that he is right. It is their way, and it works for them.
Then, of course, there is the thing about interference - we in the West aren't willing to let others tell us what to do, so why should the Chinese be any different? They are very proud of their traditions, their culture and their recent achievements, and they feel that this is due, not least to their government. So obviously the Chinese government is seen as doing the right thing and taking good care of their people. They want more of that, and who can blame them, really?
Which leads to my final point: The Chinese know their own situation better than any outsider - I would think this is obvious. They live there every day of the week, we don't. If we want to argue that we know better, we have to come up with some bloody hard evidence unless we want to simply sound like smug and overbearing idiots. So, in this light, shouldn't we in the West at least try to contemplate the idea that we are wrong in our opinions about the Chinese system? That we, for example, may be the victims of dishonest reporting and news coloured by political agendas? Just a thought.
How can that be a surprise? Young people are less experienced and therefore often less critical of what they see and hear. Advertisers already know this, which is why so many adverts are targeted for the young. This is also supported by research - one one project found that where people under ~30 would often show interest in the adverts in magazines, people over that age tended to simply skip/discard advertising material out of hand without even looking at it. The one exception was the adverts from the local supermarket(s), because they tend to list the prices on daily items. The morale of the thing is that younger people are interested in things like image, whereas more mature people go for things that have a practical value.
1. No, not in particle physics. Particle physics starts off from the assumption that "there are particles" (basically small, hard lumps of matter, no explanations needed), and by Jove, they fit into a Poincare group when we look at it in this particular way. What I'm after is this: You have space - a manifold, possibly smooth, possibly mapped by real vectorspaces, but possibly not, so assume general modules. In this space provide an intrinsic definition of 'a particle' - ie, a definition based on nothing but the properties of space.
2. I don't agree - in Einstein's theory time is the odd one out, the one that is treated differently in the 4-metric (if that is the right word, it's been a long time now). Intuitively time has to do with 'logic': cause comes before effect, and logic can, if I recall correctly, be generalised as elemtary topoi; perhaps this is an area to look into, when it comes to time.
3. I used the word "is" in a vague sense - meaning "equivalent to". We have never actually observed mass (or anything else) directly, we infer its existence from the effects it has. The fundamental effect, to my intuition, is gravity - the Newtonian definition of mass as 'force divided my mass' involves to many complicated interactions. So, according to this view mass is gravity is curvature of space, loosely speaking; and as you say, the same goes for electric charge - the problem being, of course how to unite gravity space with electric space.
1. I guess what one considers an explanation depends on what you think of as the 'fundamental truth'; in my view black holes are nothing strange - they are simply regions of space with extreme geometry. Of course we have to decide what to do about the singularity, whether it exists or not and how to interpret it. I have no problem with calling them particles either - anything can be considered a particle if the scale is sufficiently big. My problem is: what is a particle? Is it simply a region of space with special geometry, or is it something that can't be defined intrinsically to space? A black hole can to some extent be defined intrinsically - it's a place where space 'takes a sharp bend' - is the same true for all particles if we define our model of space correctly?
2. I have never really been convinced that quantum mechanics is the most fundamental theory; I think it is possible to derive QM from a geometric model of physics similar to Einstein's theory. To be more specific, I think certain aspects of QM are likely to be artifacts of the way we observe. Maybe I am just too suspicious, but there seems to have been too many intuitive jumps to conclusions in the development of QM that haven't been properly explained afterwards. Like this thing with Heisenberg's uncertainty: is this really a fundamental property, or is it just because we observe by slamming particles together? And the quantization of energy - all we can observe is that the energy associated with a given system seems to be emitted and absorbed in discrete packets - what QM says is more or less "that's just the way it is", and I would like to understand it in more detail. And there is no reason per se to assume that an energy packet can't have any particular size within the whole continuum of real numbers, at least as far as I can see.
3. Magnetism is a consequence of the invariance of the velocity of light; there is a gravito-magnetism associated with gravity too. The idea that field forces are caused by exchange of particles came about like this, I think: If you have to eletric charges (or two masses) that are stationary relative to each other, they will be surrounded by a certain, static forcefield. If you change the relative position, the forcefield will change, and the change will propagete with the speed of light - for electric particles this takes the form of an electromagnetic wave. We have just discovered that eletromagnetic waves occur as photons, so here we have it: the electric force is carried by photons. Not a bad way to reason either, but the big unanswered question here is: why don't photons disperse? They are after all just small lumps of radiowave and we know from macroscopic experiments that waves don't tend to stay together, they spread over an ever larger area.
Perhaps the explanation of why the photon stays together is also the explanation of what a particle with mass is?
I suppose what I am really after is something that reduces everything to geometry - this is what makes Einstein's theoy so elegant, the way it allows us to interpret mass as something equivalent to a property of space. Intuitively, at least, it seems that this is the right place to start - Einstein attempted to define what a particle is, but it is of course difficult to explain how a particle would be able to persist.
Can a country do this? Of course they can. Basically, in order to produce any map, you have to somehow go and measure the area; if those who control the access the area don't permit you to enter or fly over it, you can't force yur way in; certainly not in the case of a sovereign country, but even on private land, in most cases. Of course, one could try one's luck with buying the information from whoever holds the pictures from America's spy sattelites, but I don't think the US government would like to seriously alienate China over this issue.
As Google maps are satellite based, how inaccurate can they be? A map is not a picture, but an interpretation of what is in a picture. If you try to find your own neighborhood on Google Earth, you can see how difficult it is to spot even the things you know well. Roads look different from what you imagine, just for starters. It is quite difficult to make an accurate map, there are simply so many ways you could make a mistake. It also depends on the landscape - there are many places in rural China where roads are very poor and indistinguishable on a picture, and China is full of weird and wonderful geological formations that could be very challenging to interpret. On top of that, Google's mapmakers will in most cases not have access to the locals in many areas, and local knowledge is likely to be fairly crucial in many cases.
But apart from that, I would love to have a good, detailed map of all of China - it is such an incredibly exciting country.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always felt that laws must be sensible - at least in the sense that one can argue logically for it, so that it should seem reasonable to most people, once they understand it well enough. The problem with IP legislation now is that it doesn't make sense - it isn't balanced, it only takes into account the interests of one party.
In my opinion IP rights should be governed by active use: If you patent an invention, you keep the exclusive rights for a while if you use the invention to produce goods. This should hinder patent trolling and the situation where a company buys up a patent in order to stop a competing product from being marketed.
The same goes for copyright: it should not be possible to hold on to a book or record for generations without producing it. There are many very good books that are impossible to find because the producers don't think there is a big enough market for them or because they want to earn money on newer books and don't want the competition. If they don't keep them in production, they should forfeit the copyright after a short time - say a couple of years - so that it would be legal to go to your library and make a copy to take home. That would create quite a lot of small businesses, I think.
The purpose of IP was never to create a situation where big companies could stifle progress and competition by getting frivolous patents or by holding on to patents; or a situation where big publishers and record labels could control most of what the public were allowed to read and listen to. The purpose of IP should be to allow the artist or inventor to profit from their creative work, simply, and that should be a personal right, not something that could be transferred; after all, if I wrote a book, then I am the author, even if I didn't publish it myself; only the author should have any IP rights over their work.
Anarcho-communist, you say? I think you'll have to make a choice here. Communism is about the group owning collectively; the focus is on communal rights over individual rights - society is the most important factor. But when you have any kind of society, you have laws; all groups have rules. Anarchism is the opposite: no laws, the individual trumps the group, and there is no society, only individuals that occasionally meet. Anarchy is the ultimate in individual freedom, communism is the ultimate in society.
My personal taste leans more to communism than anarchism - total freedom means that you are alone. If you fall ill, if you lose everything, tough shit, man, and don't lie down in my path, or I'll kick your teeth in.
If you leave the door to your house open and go away on holiday, is it then legal for anybody to enter and take your things away? I don't think so - the presence of any copyright protection, even if it is just the words "Don't make a copy", means that you are not meant to do it, of course.
The only real question is whether there should be any such thing as copyright and what form it should have. I don't believe the CSS was ever meant to be a real encryption as much as a device that makes it clear that there was an intent to do something illegal. Take the analogy with the house again: if the door is open, you can explain away your presence in the house - you went in to see if everything was OK, or whatever; but if there is a lock, even the flimsiest kind, you will have to break in, and it will be clear that you didn't come in just by accident, "because you thought they were home".
Eric Lerner is described in Wikipedia as "a popular science writer, independent plasma researcher and an advocate of plasma cosmology" - IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable; he has a BA in physics.
However, what really makes me think twice about this is the claim that they achieve fusion without any radioactive by-products, "only harmless Helium gas". How does one produce such a precise result in an environment that is "several billion degrees"? At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least, and we are not even talking about pure deuterium; there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place, and a large amount of particle radiation will be produced, as far as I can see, and the reactor casing is bound to become radioactive.
This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul - in this case CMEF, a Swedish startup.
Once you get the suspicion that this is yet another bogus project, you begin to see signs all over the place: superficially it looks as if they have got some government grant in the US, that Eric Lerner is a scientist, and that the company is some well-established research-company (a search for "Lawrenceville Plasma Physics" on Wikipedia redirects to the article about "Eric Lerner") - IOW, the announcement is deceptive; if this was real, they wouldn't need to deceive.
And then of course there is the claim that "electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood scientifically. In a Superman comic, perhaps, but not in real life. This is simply a flight of fantasy, unbound by the boring, mundane routine of real scientific research.
I have been reading several of the postings now, and I am astonsihed by what I see. I can't help wondering whether these things are due to differences in cultural norms between the US and Europe. I have worked in computers for more than 25 years now, and although I have been fired more often than I can remember, the scenarios you describe are rather alien to me. Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that office workers generally have 3 month's notice (this was in Denmark) if they are made redundant; but I think there is a difference in culture as well.
As far as I can tell it is all about trust and confidence. In most Danish (and possibly other European) companies the hierarchy is not very steep - I have always known that I can go and talk to anybody as my equal - even the managing director (or CEO, if you prefer). That builds confidence and trust - the managers are much more prepared to trust someone they see as their equal, even when they leave. Also it makes sense to have trust as one of the basic building blocks in a company - after all, as a programmer you are entrusted with the most important asset of the company, and if they can trust you that far, you must be worth it, I would have thought.
Now I work for the UK branch of an American company, and I can see that they are different. For one thing, the people I manage keep treating me as if I was royalty even when I tell them to stop calling me "Sir" - in my opinion good leadership is not about bullying, but about being able to build trust and motivation. And I do remember the first time I met our CEO and told him that I didn't give a flying fuck about what he said when he didn't know what he was talking about - it seemed to leave him somewhat baffled. But I am still here, seven years later, so he must have got used to it by now.
But the point is that responsibility is a limitation of freedom; and freedom is touted as the sufficient and necessary requirement for capitalism.
And the basic assumption behind capitalism is that growth is always possible, always right; responsibility, on the other hand, says that there must be a limit, that we can't just spend all the resources and move on. Which goes against consumerism as well - we can't simply keep spending more and more, because we can't keep creating more and more 'value'. What we take away is gone, basically.
Nobody is surprised, I'm sure, but in a world where we hear the excuse "There is no proof for " on a daily basis, whenever some company does not want to lose profit over a health or environmental issue, it is unfortunately necessary to find solid proof even for the most obvious things.
Just look at the way it took something like a century to make the message stick, that smoking causes lung cancer. Never mind that it was well known that tobacco smoke contained high levels of tar, and that tar was known to cause cancer; never mind that animal experiments showed that cigarette smoke caused cancer in rabbits etc etc - that was not proof enough. And even today there are people that say "There is no proof".
There will always be boneheaded idiots out there, of course, but that isn't the whole story. The biggest single factor, I'm sure, is the fact that there are strong interest groups that do anything they can to derail any objective discussion of certain subjects. I don't know where it comes from - it is as if whenever people have a 'cause', out goes all integrity, all decency and moral; whether the cause is religious, political or merely grubby, snarling greed.
... but the point may still be valid. Indeed. If only we knew what the point was. Of course I know what the poster is trying to say here: "Censorship is soooo bad for you". And there are indeed many examples in the world that illustrate that point, but this posting reeks to high heaven of dishonesty, in my opinion.First of all - we hear about two message boards, "one is censored, one isn't"; what does that mean? My guess is that it means one is moderated, so why not just say that? It is after all the normal, accepted word; the answer, I assume, is that "censored" sounds more dramatic, more fit to purpose. We all hate censorship, but most can see the sense in moderating a discussion.
And there is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words": "... but the point may still be valid". This is like saying "For all we know, George W Bush may be a pedophile" - which is technically true, since we don't know a thing about his sexual preferences; it is also a hugely dishonest thing to say, since it suggests something which there is no reason to suspect.
We should all fight against spin - if we stand for the truth, for something that is good, we have no use for dishonesty.
I don't know about Iain Banks - I find him too tedious. Too much about incredible, gigantic, all-encompassing, momentuous etc etc, and too little about portraying authentic persons in a plausible setting. I don't know Charles Stross and Jack McDewitt, but I will have a look; one author that I have read recently and enjoyed is Alastair Reynolds - he seems to have the courage to honestly explore life from "the other side": take the Borg from Star Trek - they were the big scarecrow, the one enemy that has never even been close to sympathetic. All the others: Klingons, Ferengi, etc eventually became more "like us" and in some cases even heroes. Reynolds took the Borg idea, called them Conjoiners, and recast them as the good guys; that, I think, is original and brave.
Terry Pratchett does the same thing, in a way. He has taken all the traditional fantasy monsters and made them sympathetic and very plausible, strange as it may seem. Yes, I like Pratchett a lot. And I am a programmer.
Oh, I'm old, old enough to remember the first Beatles hits and all that, but what has that got to do with anything? People don't run out of imagination just because they get old, on the contrary; but with age comes experience, and it is amazing how soon you find that the collective imagination of the whole of humanity repeats itself. Take life as an example - Jules Verne imagined inhabitants on the moon that were rather like insects, and since then we have hardly moved on. By far the largest part of science fiction writers have managed to go no further than cellular, DNA based life; and none have been able to give a minimally self-consistent portrayal of a truly alien mind. I can imagine those things, vividly, but unfortunately I have neither the inclination nor the patience to write fiction.
As for the "near future gloom" - it's significantly more than a blip on the radar, I'm afraid. There is a very real possibility that we may not get past it, but that is a discussion for another time. Life will go on, of course; in the larger picture the demise of humanity will matter no more than the end of the dinosaurs.
It is no longer attractive to take a technical education. I think there are many factors involved - first of all, it isn't 'cool', engineers, scientists etc are seen as geeks, and who wants be a social misfit? Up until the sixties at least, scientists and engineers were seen as almost demi-gods who were fearlessly exploring worlds unfathomable by normal human beings - just think of the many scientists that are almost cult-figures: they are mostly from the beginning of the 20th century.
Secondly, there is a clear, anti-intellectual trend in many Western societies. Most people have never understood that scientists are not there to find The Answer; that the most important thing in science is the question. So, they have become disillusioned and don't feel they get what they want from scientific research.
And of course, the money. You study hard - sometimes even extremely hard - for many years, you borrow money to survive and to pay for your education, and then you find that you don't actually earn much afterwards. In many countries an academic earns less than the average tradesman, whose education was 3 - 5 years of salaried apprenticeship; as an academic, you will normally be in debt when you are newly educated, whereas a newly educated welder, builder or whatever is likely to have no debt.
All in all, the only reason why anybody would choose an academic career is because they feel a deep calling.
I don't think it is entirely fair to talk about 'thought crime' here. The basic problem is not so much whether people should be allowed to fantasize about having sex with children; after all, how would anyone actually enforce such a law? Some people do have this kind of fantasies, simply. But I think a much more significant problem here is the age of consent. The US is definitely at the top end when it comes to legal age of consent; sompare to Europe, where it ranges from 13 to 18. The simple fact of the matter is, that teenagers have a clear wish to participate in sex long before their 18th birthday, and trying to stop it with criminal law is like stopping the tide.
That is not to say that young people don't need to be protected even until they are 18 or older, but criminal law is not the right instrument. For one thing, when the age of consent is absurdly high, it brings the law into disrepute and blurs the boundary between what is real, dangerous pedophiles (who typically abuse young children, under 10 years of age) and those who genuinely fall in love with a mature teenager.
In my opinion it would be better to:
- lower the age of consent to something reasonable
- make the punishment harder
As for possession of cartoons etc - I just don't know. Most people have from time thoughts about breaking one law or another. What really matters is what you do about it.
I have all but given up on science fiction and fantasy - it is as if all you can find is interminable series of massproduced soap-operas. Everybody tries to be 'Epic', but nobody has quite what it takes to pull it off. Maybe I am just getting too old, though I also find that authors like Asimov and Niven are strangely shallo, too much children of their time.
Perhaps it is because the newer authors have run out of visions - in the last century science seemed to be roaring forward; new, mindblowing discoveries were reported, technology and living standards were improving fast, and maybe science fiction was easier to write. But what can you write about now: Physics seems to have run up against a wall as far as the big discoveries go, and the future looks increasingly grim, what with climate change and the impending collapse of the global eco-system; and we just can't seem to imagine a solution any more. And that is what science fiction has traditionally been about: our glorious future, and how we the problems against all odds.
But enough of that - maybe I am just getting too old. Is there any good science fiction out there?
What they mean, obviously, is that the information is released once the copyright runs out.
... in China the two are usually indistinguishable. That is something you know, is it? Tell me, how long have you lived in the country, give or take a few months? Or was this just yet another "We all know that they are dead evil, so they obviously do everything in an evil way" sort of statement?This is outsourcing, simply. The weapons industry need to run large scale tests, and they don't want to have too many high-profile cases too close to home. By making this kind of 'loophole' in the law they get to test their controversial weapons without too much public outcry, and if things get too noisy, the government can say "By God, you are right! Fancy how we could have overlooked that ", and of course it takes a lot of time to change a law.
Rather than trying to reply to the usual howls of derision and disbelief, I'll try to simply cut through it all and point out a couple of well known facts about Chinese culture.
:-) The Chinese, on the other hand, have a long (~5000 years), unbroken tradition according to which the ruler is a representative of Heaven. The emperor was the father of the people, at least as long as he had the mandate of heaven; the father, ideally, rules his children unselfishly and caringly, and that is what the Chinese expect from their government. They may not always like what daddy says, but they know in their heart that he is right. It is their way, and it works for them.
First off, there is "the mandate of heaven". The Chinese background is not Christian; we in the West build much of our world view on Christian tradition, whether we are religious or not, and to Americans, I believe, an important part of that is idea of persecution from the government. America was to a large extent founded by people who fled oppression, so to most Americans the rulers are not people you would instinctively trust. I hope I'm making sense here
Then, of course, there is the thing about interference - we in the West aren't willing to let others tell us what to do, so why should the Chinese be any different? They are very proud of their traditions, their culture and their recent achievements, and they feel that this is due, not least to their government. So obviously the Chinese government is seen as doing the right thing and taking good care of their people. They want more of that, and who can blame them, really?
Which leads to my final point: The Chinese know their own situation better than any outsider - I would think this is obvious. They live there every day of the week, we don't. If we want to argue that we know better, we have to come up with some bloody hard evidence unless we want to simply sound like smug and overbearing idiots. So, in this light, shouldn't we in the West at least try to contemplate the idea that we are wrong in our opinions about the Chinese system? That we, for example, may be the victims of dishonest reporting and news coloured by political agendas? Just a thought.
How can that be a surprise? Young people are less experienced and therefore often less critical of what they see and hear. Advertisers already know this, which is why so many adverts are targeted for the young. This is also supported by research - one one project found that where people under ~30 would often show interest in the adverts in magazines, people over that age tended to simply skip/discard advertising material out of hand without even looking at it. The one exception was the adverts from the local supermarket(s), because they tend to list the prices on daily items. The morale of the thing is that younger people are interested in things like image, whereas more mature people go for things that have a practical value.
1. No, not in particle physics. Particle physics starts off from the assumption that "there are particles" (basically small, hard lumps of matter, no explanations needed), and by Jove, they fit into a Poincare group when we look at it in this particular way. What I'm after is this: You have space - a manifold, possibly smooth, possibly mapped by real vectorspaces, but possibly not, so assume general modules. In this space provide an intrinsic definition of 'a particle' - ie, a definition based on nothing but the properties of space.
2. I don't agree - in Einstein's theory time is the odd one out, the one that is treated differently in the 4-metric (if that is the right word, it's been a long time now). Intuitively time has to do with 'logic': cause comes before effect, and logic can, if I recall correctly, be generalised as elemtary topoi; perhaps this is an area to look into, when it comes to time.
3. I used the word "is" in a vague sense - meaning "equivalent to". We have never actually observed mass (or anything else) directly, we infer its existence from the effects it has. The fundamental effect, to my intuition, is gravity - the Newtonian definition of mass as 'force divided my mass' involves to many complicated interactions. So, according to this view mass is gravity is curvature of space, loosely speaking; and as you say, the same goes for electric charge - the problem being, of course how to unite gravity space with electric space.
1. I guess what one considers an explanation depends on what you think of as the 'fundamental truth'; in my view black holes are nothing strange - they are simply regions of space with extreme geometry. Of course we have to decide what to do about the singularity, whether it exists or not and how to interpret it. I have no problem with calling them particles either - anything can be considered a particle if the scale is sufficiently big. My problem is: what is a particle? Is it simply a region of space with special geometry, or is it something that can't be defined intrinsically to space? A black hole can to some extent be defined intrinsically - it's a place where space 'takes a sharp bend' - is the same true for all particles if we define our model of space correctly?
2. I have never really been convinced that quantum mechanics is the most fundamental theory; I think it is possible to derive QM from a geometric model of physics similar to Einstein's theory. To be more specific, I think certain aspects of QM are likely to be artifacts of the way we observe. Maybe I am just too suspicious, but there seems to have been too many intuitive jumps to conclusions in the development of QM that haven't been properly explained afterwards. Like this thing with Heisenberg's uncertainty: is this really a fundamental property, or is it just because we observe by slamming particles together? And the quantization of energy - all we can observe is that the energy associated with a given system seems to be emitted and absorbed in discrete packets - what QM says is more or less "that's just the way it is", and I would like to understand it in more detail. And there is no reason per se to assume that an energy packet can't have any particular size within the whole continuum of real numbers, at least as far as I can see.
3. Magnetism is a consequence of the invariance of the velocity of light; there is a gravito-magnetism associated with gravity too. The idea that field forces are caused by exchange of particles came about like this, I think: If you have to eletric charges (or two masses) that are stationary relative to each other, they will be surrounded by a certain, static forcefield. If you change the relative position, the forcefield will change, and the change will propagete with the speed of light - for electric particles this takes the form of an electromagnetic wave. We have just discovered that eletromagnetic waves occur as photons, so here we have it: the electric force is carried by photons. Not a bad way to reason either, but the big unanswered question here is: why don't photons disperse? They are after all just small lumps of radiowave and we know from macroscopic experiments that waves don't tend to stay together, they spread over an ever larger area.
Perhaps the explanation of why the photon stays together is also the explanation of what a particle with mass is?
I suppose what I am really after is something that reduces everything to geometry - this is what makes Einstein's theoy so elegant, the way it allows us to interpret mass as something equivalent to a property of space. Intuitively, at least, it seems that this is the right place to start - Einstein attempted to define what a particle is, but it is of course difficult to explain how a particle would be able to persist.
But apart from that, I would love to have a good, detailed map of all of China - it is such an incredibly exciting country.