Porn chicks? You mean the ones that have had a full body wax and look like they are doing their tax forms when they are mechanically copulating? Wouldn't an inflatable doll seem more interested? And it would come with less risk of infections.
As for speeding along on coke or similar during sex: it really isn't interesting. Take a clue from the old Stones song "Satisfaction" - having hours of erection isn't much fun when the knob is is numb.
I apply the scientific method to figuring out how to talk to undocumented "black boxes"
Don't we all:-) But I think that is not so much programming (ie writing program code) as it is intelligent planning before you make you next move.
In mathematics, you can spend a career mentally masturbating over your favorite "hard" problem, and retire after decades with nothing to show for it. In programming, if you work on a problem for five years, you'd damned well better get world-changing results, or find a new job.
Not really - universities do in fact require any scientist to be productive. Results don't have to be of the same order of magnitude as the achievements of Einstein, Gauss, Riemann etc. to be valuable. Lots of scientific research is farily humdrum, predictable stuff, that still has a very useful function. It is largely a myth that being a scientist is some sort of sinecure; and just because the general public can't see the point of it, doesn't mean that it isn't going to be important later.
I stoppd paying attention to Christmas, Easter, etc - even birthdays - many years ago exactly because of the commercialisation of it. The thought of gorging myself on food and drinks that I don't actually like, in the company of people that I mostly don't care about and wouldn't see at any other time, just doesn't appeal for some reason. Plus, of course, the frenzy to buy gifts that are mostly misplaced and unwanted. (Sorry, did that sound cynical?)
I very pointedly do not buy gifts for birthdays or Christmas; instead I buy useful things for people I want to give something special - my wife and children, mostly - on days throughout the year. My form of protest - childish, you might say, but that's how I stay young;-)
Programming, my boy, is to science what accounting is to calculus. I don't think you have even the beginning of a glimmer of understanding of what science is.
Well said. Those who preach privatisation as the best way to bring down costs "because private companies are so much better at being efficient", should think about this. I think it's common sense - it certainly stands out clearly in the UK, IMO.
The NHS is the most current example, I suppose - costs are spiralling out of control, mostly for two reasons: having to hire agency staff (ie. outsourcing to the private sector) and not being able to send patients home after treatment, because the councils have no resources ready to take care of them - because they have also been outsourced to the private sector. Even the government - the all Conservative government, the darlings of big business and the priesthood of small government - are admitting that this is the way it is.
Outsourcing is mostly a bad idea, because you replace a workforce that you have yourself vetted, and who have spent years getting to know your products and your company culture intimately, with staff you don't know, who really don't care about your company and your product and who are somewhere far away from where you can reach them and hold them to account. Only idiots would consider doing this sort of thing; but therein lies the problem, of course.
The problem with this idea though, which is also the same reason we have antibiotic resistance today, is that you have to identify the problem before you can use it.
Well, that is of course one of the many practical problems, but the real, undelying problem is that we, idiotically, allow short-sighted, economic interests take priority over anything else. We have known for decades that overuse of antibiotics will, by necessity, produce bacteria that are resistant. We have also discovered that bacteria exchange useful genes, seemingly across species barriers, much like we use social media. In spite of this, we have allowed, not only over-prescription of antibiotics to human patients, when they are not useful, but we have for decades allowed farmers to use these drugs a growth-enhancers. We act like idiots - we know what we shouldn't do, and we just do it any way. Idiots.
This is also, is I may say so, an example of how free-market ideology can be harmful: it encourages short-term greed and discourages us from thinking about long-term consequences. All in all, it is shameful.
I understand and accept what you are saying, but what I am saying is, that it is wrong to develop the kind of tunnelvision that says things like "Life is exclusively.....". Information theory no doubt gives us a valuable perspective, but it is only one of several.
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information.
I'm sure we're lacking a 'quantum' or two in that sentence. Why is it that every scientific theory and discovery must be presented as a world-shaking sensation? I'm sure the good professor himself will find this article somewhat alien to his no doubt quite sober work. No scientist worth his salt would state categorically (and in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary) that 'life is not chemical, it's information' - what he probably says is 'Would it be useful to consider life from the point of view of information theory?'; which is something entirely different and much more intelligent. Every model of reality is an abstraction, and the benefit of introducing a new abstraction is that it enables us to apply our understanding in one area to another area. This is in fact what most of mathematics is all about.
And it goes both ways - if we can apply information theory to chemistry, we can also apply ideas from chemistry to information theory, or to anything else that information theory applies to, in principle. Perhaps this can be used to discover that the mechanisms of chemical life also operate in other spheres of reality; subatomic particles, stars and galaxies, who knows? We may be about to find out soon.
OK, so how about offering some good, constructive and effective ideas to deal with the problem? As far as I can see, with the problems we are facing: terrorism, unsustainable growth, climate change etc - we don't have the option of not making any sacrifices at all. All we have is a choice of which sacrifices, and the time may run out on that as well. ISIS, Boko Haram and other vermin will only multiply, unless we actively stop them, and if we don't find a better way, we will end up with WWIII in some form, no doubt about that. So let's hear your realistic suggestions.
Compaining, ranting and raving are all part of a good debate, I suppose, but at some point, if it doesn't turn into constructive plans, it becomes nothing but whining. I feel we have passed that point some time ago.
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
This is one of those situations where I would have liked to believe in a god - any god - so I could swear with conviction. I mean, will we ever actually learn from the mistakes of our ever more harmful mistakes? Mining on dry land is bad enough, but it is at least to some extent possible to contain the pollution locally, whereas whatever is released into the open ocean ends up being a global problem, and one that is very, very hard to clean up. We can just about contemplate cleaning the polluted soil around a disused mine, but the entire ocean?
And talking about 'diversification of risk' is just a fluffy sounding lie - what you mean is, you'd prefer to reduce the well known, well understood and therefore manageable risk in your backyard in your rich, industrialised country, and let others take the unknown and very likely unmanageable risk near some impoverished, developing nation. I think that is a disgusting attitude.
Python provides no... Java is not... C/C++ is not...
Programming languages are tools, and all good tools tend to be suited for just a few tasks. If you are going to hang picture on a wall, you'll probably use a hammer and a nail (well, depending on the waill, of course), because that is the simple and efficient way of doing the job. I doubt anybody would ever seriously contemplate making a supertool, that could hammer nails, drill holes, mix cement, lift bricks up to third floor, place roofing tiles etc etc etc, as well as cook your dinner, do the accounting and perform brain surgery.
The sensible thing is to use the simplest tool that will do a given job easily, and then change to another tool for another kind of job. Why would you expect it to be different for computer programming? There is no universal super languange that can do everything you desire, because 1) your desires are yours, and may not align with those of others, 2) it isn't actually worth creating a tool like that, because the existing ones do the job well enough, and 3) the technology and the needs change too fast anyway, so a superlanguage would dated before the specs were finished.
Hmm, how about commenting on what the guy actually said? But no, it has immediately descended into a stupid dick-waving contest about why Muslims with their Jihad are evil and Christians with their Crusades aren't. This is nothing to do with religion - terrorism is simply a form of organised crime with a thin veneer of 'ideology', 'religion' or 'honour'. There are many parallels with how the Mafia arose and operates.
Now about mr Kimmel's comments - it is of course an amazingly clumsy way to put it, as well as being very uninformed, but he is actually trying to make us think a little bit deeper over the issues, instead of just screaming "Attack". After all, we haven't really had much success with that so far. So how about coming up with some intelligent ideas about what can be done?
We shouldn't naively think that people we regard as evil, see themselves as evil - on the contrary, I strongly suspect that all of them - Hitler, Pol Pot, al Qaeda, ISIS etc - are or were convinced that they are good and stand for a noble cause, and that if they are harsh, it is only because it is necessary. I'm also sure that many, if not all, are fundamentally bullies - and bullies are fundametally cowards; it's just that what they are afraid of is not necessarily what normal people are afraid of.
So how can we act against these bullies - what are they really afraid of, when they clearly aren't afraid of dying? They think they are going straight to Paradise if they go out and get themselves killed in a 'jihad' - so one way of might be to start teaching them that actually, it doesn't quitework that way. God is clever enough to understand that if you strive to get killed, it is no more than suicide with a bit of extra emphasis; dying for God may be right if you do so reluctantly, to protect what is holy, but being eager to die, hiding behind a feeble excuse and compounding it with crimes like murder is never going to be more than a perverse form of suicide. Probably the harshest punishment we can inflict on these people would be to force them to live, having to contemplate the vileness of their crimes - that and castration plus being force-fed pig blood.
There is no doubt that we will wipe ISIS out in terms of military, but we have to look deeper and understand better why there are so many, who turn against normal society. We have to be willing to recognise our own role in creating this situation, not just what the Western powers have done during past imperialism, but also what we allow large corporations to do and perhaps even more importantly, how we treat immigrants, who come to live in our neighborhoods - if we regards them with suspicion and treat them as second class, it is hardly any wonder that they and their children become resentful. And when you have nothing to live for, maybe you can find something to die for? Some thing that can hurt the smug society that didn't let you in? We have to break out of this vicious cycle.
Is it any wonder no one sane takes you global warming nuts seriously at this point?
It may be news to you, but governments, global companies and international organisations all take global warming seriously, even if they don't agree about the ways to tackle the problems. One this I find very strange is this: When I say that we have to learn to build a sustainable economy, because there are limits to growth, people always say 'No, no, new techology will save the day, our economy will always grow'; but when I say that we have to ackle the climate change problems, we just need to move to sustainable energy sources and stop wasting more than 60% of everything we use, the same people say "Impossible, it can't be done...". Simply logic tells us that at least one of these two objections is nonsense, since they contradict each other. Personally, I am much more optimistic about our abilities.
If you look back to the two World Wars in last century, you will see just how quickly we can adjust to immense hardship when we have to. To tackle the climate changes, the adjustments required are much smaller, and most of them are things that we can easily live without anyway - when people buy food and throw more than half away, then clearly they can live without the half they are throwing out, am I right? Of course I am. We just need to decide that it is necessary.
Yeah, I know. I'm just this cranky, old git who would probably speak out loudly and with authority against even an obvious truth, if somebody else said it;-)
Quantum mechanics rules are the "real" rules of the universe:
No - in fact, we know that QM is imperfect; being a scientific model implies that much. It is in many ways the fundamental axiom of science, that we can not prove truth through observation, we can only disprove false predictions. Don't get me wrong - QM is a marvelously robust theory, but unfortunately, so is GR, and the incompatibility between them is a very strong indicator that there is a lot of reality that is not covered by either theory, and that we probably have to find a starting point that is alien to both theories, to unify them.
One of the strengths of GR is its logical simplicity; QM lacks that in so many places. There are too many wooly constructs that lead people's thinking astray, like the idea that it is somehow fundamentally impossible to know details below a certain limit (Heisenberg) or that things only exist if we observe them - or that "everything is probabilistic in nature". The truth of the matter is, I bet, that these things are artifacts of the available methods. When you rely overwhelmingly on statistical methods for analysing your observations, then of course you end up thinking in terms of probability, which s no more than 'predictive statistics', in many ways. And when you observe by throwing wave-forms at each other to see how they interact, then of course there will be limitations to how well determined your observations will be - it is hard to observe detail finer than the wavelength, for one thing. And the idea, that things only exist when somebody observes them is a wild overinterpretation of both theory and observations.
We really, really need to clear our minds of this sort of quasi-religious thinking, because the unhappy thing is that it stops us from even looking outside the box.
We could create something similar(ish) to the socalled dark net: a clean net, where everything is guaranteed to be free from adverts, I suppose. There are already many sites that qualify - what is needed is a sort of google, that only finds clean sites.
What would you suggest? I don't have a senator in my back pocket, and it's illegal to shoot the oligarchs.
It may well be illegal to shoot the better off, even if they so richly deserve it, but there are other ways. Grassroots movements do actually achieve things, and the power of the internet is that it makes organising yourselves across the nation so easy. Now, I know what the first objection is going to be: "What chance do we have to even get off the ground, when [any of a number of reasons]?" There are many answers to that - one is: you never know until you try. Another is: look at the history of some of the movements that are now powerful; they all started out being seen as pathetic little things that would never fly. Somehow they managed to persuade enough people that they were worth following.
... but you'd better hurry up, the political landscape will most likely change in the next 18 months.
How so? The US will still be run by the ultra-rich, privileged upper-class aided by their well-fed lackeys, the lobbying companies. Oh, you mean the puppets office will be different? Doesn't really count.
That may well be true, but I think this discussion misses the point somewhat. A lot of people genuinely don't care all that much. When you are young, you imagine that 'the authorities' are out to get you, because you don't realise you are probably not all that interesting to them. When you get older, you discover that most of what you do is utterly ignored by the police, government, secret services etc. There's far too much RELEVANT information as it is, and far too few police officers, secret agents etc. I mean, when you can hardly even get the police to come and take up a report on a burglary, why expect that they would spend much energy snooping on your online traffic? If they do, it is in the hope that they can employ automatic filters to discard most of it.
When you get to my age, you realise that most of what you've done is pretty normal, and that you simply don't give a hoot if others know about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Porn chicks? You mean the ones that have had a full body wax and look like they are doing their tax forms when they are mechanically copulating? Wouldn't an inflatable doll seem more interested? And it would come with less risk of infections.
As for speeding along on coke or similar during sex: it really isn't interesting. Take a clue from the old Stones song "Satisfaction" - having hours of erection isn't much fun when the knob is is numb.
I apply the scientific method to figuring out how to talk to undocumented "black boxes"
Don't we all :-) But I think that is not so much programming (ie writing program code) as it is intelligent planning before you make you next move.
In mathematics, you can spend a career mentally masturbating over your favorite "hard" problem, and retire after decades with nothing to show for it. In programming, if you work on a problem for five years, you'd damned well better get world-changing results, or find a new job.
Not really - universities do in fact require any scientist to be productive. Results don't have to be of the same order of magnitude as the achievements of Einstein, Gauss, Riemann etc. to be valuable. Lots of scientific research is farily humdrum, predictable stuff, that still has a very useful function. It is largely a myth that being a scientist is some sort of sinecure; and just because the general public can't see the point of it, doesn't mean that it isn't going to be important later.
I stoppd paying attention to Christmas, Easter, etc - even birthdays - many years ago exactly because of the commercialisation of it. The thought of gorging myself on food and drinks that I don't actually like, in the company of people that I mostly don't care about and wouldn't see at any other time, just doesn't appeal for some reason. Plus, of course, the frenzy to buy gifts that are mostly misplaced and unwanted. (Sorry, did that sound cynical?)
I very pointedly do not buy gifts for birthdays or Christmas; instead I buy useful things for people I want to give something special - my wife and children, mostly - on days throughout the year. My form of protest - childish, you might say, but that's how I stay young ;-)
Programming, my boy, is to science what accounting is to calculus. I don't think you have even the beginning of a glimmer of understanding of what science is.
Well said. Those who preach privatisation as the best way to bring down costs "because private companies are so much better at being efficient", should think about this. I think it's common sense - it certainly stands out clearly in the UK, IMO.
The NHS is the most current example, I suppose - costs are spiralling out of control, mostly for two reasons: having to hire agency staff (ie. outsourcing to the private sector) and not being able to send patients home after treatment, because the councils have no resources ready to take care of them - because they have also been outsourced to the private sector. Even the government - the all Conservative government, the darlings of big business and the priesthood of small government - are admitting that this is the way it is.
Outsourcing is mostly a bad idea, because you replace a workforce that you have yourself vetted, and who have spent years getting to know your products and your company culture intimately, with staff you don't know, who really don't care about your company and your product and who are somewhere far away from where you can reach them and hold them to account. Only idiots would consider doing this sort of thing; but therein lies the problem, of course.
Is there ever a time when you want your heart not to beat?
I feel that way when X-factor comes on and I don't have the remote.
The problem with this idea though, which is also the same reason we have antibiotic resistance today, is that you have to identify the problem before you can use it.
Well, that is of course one of the many practical problems, but the real, undelying problem is that we, idiotically, allow short-sighted, economic interests take priority over anything else. We have known for decades that overuse of antibiotics will, by necessity, produce bacteria that are resistant. We have also discovered that bacteria exchange useful genes, seemingly across species barriers, much like we use social media. In spite of this, we have allowed, not only over-prescription of antibiotics to human patients, when they are not useful, but we have for decades allowed farmers to use these drugs a growth-enhancers. We act like idiots - we know what we shouldn't do, and we just do it any way. Idiots.
This is also, is I may say so, an example of how free-market ideology can be harmful: it encourages short-term greed and discourages us from thinking about long-term consequences. All in all, it is shameful.
I understand and accept what you are saying, but what I am saying is, that it is wrong to develop the kind of tunnelvision that says things like "Life is exclusively .....". Information theory no doubt gives us a valuable perspective, but it is only one of several.
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information.
I'm sure we're lacking a 'quantum' or two in that sentence. Why is it that every scientific theory and discovery must be presented as a world-shaking sensation? I'm sure the good professor himself will find this article somewhat alien to his no doubt quite sober work. No scientist worth his salt would state categorically (and in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary) that 'life is not chemical, it's information' - what he probably says is 'Would it be useful to consider life from the point of view of information theory?'; which is something entirely different and much more intelligent. Every model of reality is an abstraction, and the benefit of introducing a new abstraction is that it enables us to apply our understanding in one area to another area. This is in fact what most of mathematics is all about.
And it goes both ways - if we can apply information theory to chemistry, we can also apply ideas from chemistry to information theory, or to anything else that information theory applies to, in principle. Perhaps this can be used to discover that the mechanisms of chemical life also operate in other spheres of reality; subatomic particles, stars and galaxies, who knows? We may be about to find out soon.
OK, so how about offering some good, constructive and effective ideas to deal with the problem? As far as I can see, with the problems we are facing: terrorism, unsustainable growth, climate change etc - we don't have the option of not making any sacrifices at all. All we have is a choice of which sacrifices, and the time may run out on that as well. ISIS, Boko Haram and other vermin will only multiply, unless we actively stop them, and if we don't find a better way, we will end up with WWIII in some form, no doubt about that. So let's hear your realistic suggestions.
Compaining, ranting and raving are all part of a good debate, I suppose, but at some point, if it doesn't turn into constructive plans, it becomes nothing but whining. I feel we have passed that point some time ago.
With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile
I hear what you're saying, mate, and it looks like we agree on many things. It's a strange, strange world we've made for ourselves and our children.
If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
This is one of those situations where I would have liked to believe in a god - any god - so I could swear with conviction. I mean, will we ever actually learn from the mistakes of our ever more harmful mistakes? Mining on dry land is bad enough, but it is at least to some extent possible to contain the pollution locally, whereas whatever is released into the open ocean ends up being a global problem, and one that is very, very hard to clean up. We can just about contemplate cleaning the polluted soil around a disused mine, but the entire ocean?
And talking about 'diversification of risk' is just a fluffy sounding lie - what you mean is, you'd prefer to reduce the well known, well understood and therefore manageable risk in your backyard in your rich, industrialised country, and let others take the unknown and very likely unmanageable risk near some impoverished, developing nation. I think that is a disgusting attitude.
Python provides no ... Java is not ... C/C++ is not ...
Programming languages are tools, and all good tools tend to be suited for just a few tasks. If you are going to hang picture on a wall, you'll probably use a hammer and a nail (well, depending on the waill, of course), because that is the simple and efficient way of doing the job. I doubt anybody would ever seriously contemplate making a supertool, that could hammer nails, drill holes, mix cement, lift bricks up to third floor, place roofing tiles etc etc etc, as well as cook your dinner, do the accounting and perform brain surgery.
The sensible thing is to use the simplest tool that will do a given job easily, and then change to another tool for another kind of job. Why would you expect it to be different for computer programming? There is no universal super languange that can do everything you desire, because 1) your desires are yours, and may not align with those of others, 2) it isn't actually worth creating a tool like that, because the existing ones do the job well enough, and 3) the technology and the needs change too fast anyway, so a superlanguage would dated before the specs were finished.
Well, what else can you call water with holes in?
Hmm, how about commenting on what the guy actually said? But no, it has immediately descended into a stupid dick-waving contest about why Muslims with their Jihad are evil and Christians with their Crusades aren't. This is nothing to do with religion - terrorism is simply a form of organised crime with a thin veneer of 'ideology', 'religion' or 'honour'. There are many parallels with how the Mafia arose and operates.
Now about mr Kimmel's comments - it is of course an amazingly clumsy way to put it, as well as being very uninformed, but he is actually trying to make us think a little bit deeper over the issues, instead of just screaming "Attack". After all, we haven't really had much success with that so far. So how about coming up with some intelligent ideas about what can be done?
We shouldn't naively think that people we regard as evil, see themselves as evil - on the contrary, I strongly suspect that all of them - Hitler, Pol Pot, al Qaeda, ISIS etc - are or were convinced that they are good and stand for a noble cause, and that if they are harsh, it is only because it is necessary. I'm also sure that many, if not all, are fundamentally bullies - and bullies are fundametally cowards; it's just that what they are afraid of is not necessarily what normal people are afraid of.
So how can we act against these bullies - what are they really afraid of, when they clearly aren't afraid of dying? They think they are going straight to Paradise if they go out and get themselves killed in a 'jihad' - so one way of might be to start teaching them that actually, it doesn't quitework that way. God is clever enough to understand that if you strive to get killed, it is no more than suicide with a bit of extra emphasis; dying for God may be right if you do so reluctantly, to protect what is holy, but being eager to die, hiding behind a feeble excuse and compounding it with crimes like murder is never going to be more than a perverse form of suicide. Probably the harshest punishment we can inflict on these people would be to force them to live, having to contemplate the vileness of their crimes - that and castration plus being force-fed pig blood.
There is no doubt that we will wipe ISIS out in terms of military, but we have to look deeper and understand better why there are so many, who turn against normal society. We have to be willing to recognise our own role in creating this situation, not just what the Western powers have done during past imperialism, but also what we allow large corporations to do and perhaps even more importantly, how we treat immigrants, who come to live in our neighborhoods - if we regards them with suspicion and treat them as second class, it is hardly any wonder that they and their children become resentful. And when you have nothing to live for, maybe you can find something to die for? Some thing that can hurt the smug society that didn't let you in? We have to break out of this vicious cycle.
Is it any wonder no one sane takes you global warming nuts seriously at this point?
It may be news to you, but governments, global companies and international organisations all take global warming seriously, even if they don't agree about the ways to tackle the problems. One this I find very strange is this: When I say that we have to learn to build a sustainable economy, because there are limits to growth, people always say 'No, no, new techology will save the day, our economy will always grow'; but when I say that we have to ackle the climate change problems, we just need to move to sustainable energy sources and stop wasting more than 60% of everything we use, the same people say "Impossible, it can't be done...". Simply logic tells us that at least one of these two objections is nonsense, since they contradict each other. Personally, I am much more optimistic about our abilities.
If you look back to the two World Wars in last century, you will see just how quickly we can adjust to immense hardship when we have to. To tackle the climate changes, the adjustments required are much smaller, and most of them are things that we can easily live without anyway - when people buy food and throw more than half away, then clearly they can live without the half they are throwing out, am I right? Of course I am. We just need to decide that it is necessary.
Yeah, I know. I'm just this cranky, old git who would probably speak out loudly and with authority against even an obvious truth, if somebody else said it ;-)
Quantum mechanics rules are the "real" rules of the universe:
No - in fact, we know that QM is imperfect; being a scientific model implies that much. It is in many ways the fundamental axiom of science, that we can not prove truth through observation, we can only disprove false predictions. Don't get me wrong - QM is a marvelously robust theory, but unfortunately, so is GR, and the incompatibility between them is a very strong indicator that there is a lot of reality that is not covered by either theory, and that we probably have to find a starting point that is alien to both theories, to unify them.
One of the strengths of GR is its logical simplicity; QM lacks that in so many places. There are too many wooly constructs that lead people's thinking astray, like the idea that it is somehow fundamentally impossible to know details below a certain limit (Heisenberg) or that things only exist if we observe them - or that "everything is probabilistic in nature". The truth of the matter is, I bet, that these things are artifacts of the available methods. When you rely overwhelmingly on statistical methods for analysing your observations, then of course you end up thinking in terms of probability, which s no more than 'predictive statistics', in many ways. And when you observe by throwing wave-forms at each other to see how they interact, then of course there will be limitations to how well determined your observations will be - it is hard to observe detail finer than the wavelength, for one thing. And the idea, that things only exist when somebody observes them is a wild overinterpretation of both theory and observations.
We really, really need to clear our minds of this sort of quasi-religious thinking, because the unhappy thing is that it stops us from even looking outside the box.
We could create something similar(ish) to the socalled dark net: a clean net, where everything is guaranteed to be free from adverts, I suppose. There are already many sites that qualify - what is needed is a sort of google, that only finds clean sites.
What would you suggest? I don't have a senator in my back pocket, and it's illegal to shoot the oligarchs.
It may well be illegal to shoot the better off, even if they so richly deserve it, but there are other ways. Grassroots movements do actually achieve things, and the power of the internet is that it makes organising yourselves across the nation so easy. Now, I know what the first objection is going to be: "What chance do we have to even get off the ground, when [any of a number of reasons]?" There are many answers to that - one is: you never know until you try. Another is: look at the history of some of the movements that are now powerful; they all started out being seen as pathetic little things that would never fly. Somehow they managed to persuade enough people that they were worth following.
... but you'd better hurry up, the political landscape will most likely change in the next 18 months.
How so? The US will still be run by the ultra-rich, privileged upper-class aided by their well-fed lackeys, the lobbying companies. Oh, you mean the puppets office will be different? Doesn't really count.
...who we'll call John...
...a contractor I'll call Paul
Right, so who's going to come up with George and Ringo to make up the full set?
Maybe we are responsible for the mess and should clean it up?
No, no, you've that completely wrong. Here's the official response from the American Government:
"Fuck you, mum, I hate you!!" (slams the door)
Well, we've all been teenagers, even if we try to forget.
That may well be true, but I think this discussion misses the point somewhat. A lot of people genuinely don't care all that much. When you are young, you imagine that 'the authorities' are out to get you, because you don't realise you are probably not all that interesting to them. When you get older, you discover that most of what you do is utterly ignored by the police, government, secret services etc. There's far too much RELEVANT information as it is, and far too few police officers, secret agents etc. I mean, when you can hardly even get the police to come and take up a report on a burglary, why expect that they would spend much energy snooping on your online traffic? If they do, it is in the hope that they can employ automatic filters to discard most of it.
When you get to my age, you realise that most of what you've done is pretty normal, and that you simply don't give a hoot if others know about it.