It isn't clear what Heisenberg was doing, or thought he was doing. The solution to the problem given in Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen" is to me extremely plausible. If you haven't seen the play, don't read the following, because it gives away the solution.
First off, I'm familiar with more of the background on this than just the play. IAANP, and all that. The thing is, as pointed out in the play, Heisenberg made an estimate of the critical mass required for a uranium bomb when he was at Farm Hall, after the Allies had dropped the first bomb on Japan. Heisenberg's initial estimate was wildly wrong, but he quickly refined it. It's more-or-less a back-of-the-envelope calculation if you know the cross-sections. The thing that this makes clear is that Heisenberg had not done the calculation prior to hearing of the Allied bombing of Japan. But it is absolutely the frist calculation one would do if one had the intent to build a bomb. Ergo, Heisenberg's intent was not to build a bomb.
It is also worth remembering that Heisenberg was a theorist, and his descriptions of experiments with uranium piles are almost cartoonish. He was a great theoretical physicist, but clearly didn't have what it took to much in the way of practical experimentation.
So the appeal of the atomic bomb wasn't it's additonal features, those were unknown. It was just thought to be a really big bomb.
And when you get a really big bomb, you don't just get a really big explosion. You get a new phenomenon. It's called a firestorm.
With conventional bombs, firestorms are very hard to start--it took 1000+ planes at Dresden. With atomic bombs, it's one bomb, one firestorm. The greatest source of damage from air-burst fission bombs is fire. Not blast, not radiation.
John Rae? Did you mean Bob Rae? Facts are one thing you should check, but names are more important.
John. Bob's brother. Big wheel in the federal Liberal Party a while back. Former big wheel at Power Corp. Google:
"John Rae" "Bob Rae" Canada Power
and you'll get a bunch of info.
I've lived in the U.S. and know something of the problems there. They are ugly and real.
But we live in a polychromatic world. We have a choice of models, and we can also invent something new, if conservatives like you would ever let us actually try something new.
What do you think of the Swedish system? Or the French? Or the German? Or the Australian? Or the New Zealand? Why bring up the American system at all? Look beyond the narrow focus of the mass media, into the larger world. You might like what you find.
The abstract to the paper makes clear they are modelling in vitro tumor growth. This is the logical place to start, but the history of cancer research is full of examples where lessons learned in glass don't translate well to life.
The specific result that tumor growth may be limited by cell diffusion rather than nutrients is particularly susceptible to this problem, as there are a few things missing in the lab, like blood vessels, that could make a significant difference in the organism.
Experiments with monkeys have demonstrated that they understand symbols as being representative of other things. They are also capable of taking something that works with one set of circumstances and extending it to work in other circumstances.
Yeah, I had a cat that could clearly do this as well--he could open drawers by hooking a paw in the handle and pulling. He did this in a very characteristic way, by lying on his back on the floor, hooking a front paw up through the handle, and rolling away from it. This let him push his body against the lower part of the bureau and brought the large muscles in his trunk into play, so even if a drawer was quite stiff he could still open it. He would then dig a nest in the clothes and go to sleep.
I realized his ability to generalize this behaviour when I saw him try the same move on my brief-case, which had a similar kind of handle. It didn't work, but it was clearly a case where he had a concept of "handle", and a certain way of operating on things that he subsumed under that concept.
So I'm not denying the ability of non-human animals to generalize. If they didn't have any generalizing ability at all it is unlikely that we would be so good at it. It would be like having a single species that flew at super-sonic speeds in a world where no other species could even jump.
What I'm doubtful about is whether any other species has a general representational ability, where anything can stand for anything else. This is a far cry from being able to use some symbols or make some generalizations. It is not even clear that humans "in the wild" have this ability--it may well be a cultural innovation.
So I guess on this basis, I would have to say that it may be possible that monkeys etc may have an unrealized potential for general representation, as humans may have done prior to the neolithic revolution. Given our limited success with experiments in this direction with apes and chimps etc, however, I'm not going to give this possibility a very high probability.
We haven't spent enough time investigating the other species to shut them out in terms of their mental capabilities.
Until we know what sparked the neolithic revolution, it is hard to argue with this. If intelligence is a cultural innovation, then it is possible that some non-human animals have the same potential our ancestors did 50,000 years ago. However, I don't think any of this addresses my original point, which is that there is a plausible (although clearly not compelling:-) argument that intelligence may be fantasically rare.
Even dogs are able to understand that symbols mean other things, and other mammals (and some birds) have developed tools. Certainly, whales and dolphins also qualify as intelligent.
None of these species have the ability that humans have, which is "general representation": we have the ability to make anything stand in for or represent or symbolize anything else. Amongst other things, this lets us use symbols to represent other symbols.
I see this as the only uniquely human capability, intelligence-wise, which is obviously a generalization of abilities that we share with many other species, many of which are capable of limited representation, limited communciation, and limited tool use.
"We know further that the kind of legs we have evolved exactly once. This suggests that legs are not just improbable, but vastly improbable."
The logic sounds just fine. It only sounds funny if you forget that "legs" in the second sentence refers to "distinctly human legs, used for upright bipedal walking."
Upright bipedalism is rare. In general, any trait that only evolved once in Earth's evolutionary history should be considered extremely improbable, given that so many apparently improbable characteristics (wings, eyes, fins...) have evolved many times.
One of the things that we are finding as DNA sequencing of animals becomes more common is that convergent evolution is more common than previously thought. There is an example (almost all the details of which escape me, sorry:-) of two Central American lizard species that were previously thought to be a single species with two different (disjoint) habitats. As it turns out, they share a common ancestor way back, but they have both independently evolved the same distinguishing characteristics in response to similar environmental pressures.
I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that human-style intelligence is not a convergent solution to a common problem. If it were, there would be more of it.
I appreciate the links--it is always good to see what your opponent thinks is evidence for their position, so that evidence can be addressed directly. Otherwise, I might have addressed other sources that were not the basis for your claim.
Far from being "nothing new", the links you provided contain a very different picture. Here is a quote from the Interpol statement, which gives a fair picture of the actual data that support the claim that intellectual property crime is a signficant funding source for terrorists:
One counterfeiting case has been reported in the media where there are alleged connections to al-Qaeda. The investigation into a shipment of fake goods from Dubai to Copenhagen, Denmark, suggests that al-Qaeda may have indirectly obtained financing through counterfeit goods. Danish customs intercepted a container, containing counterfeit shampoos, creams, cologne and perfume. The sender of the counterfeit goods is allegedly a member of al-Qaeda. A transnational investigation involved agencies from three countries; Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States.[5] It is difficult to know whether the funds from this traffic went directly to al-Qaeda or whether only a part of them were remitted. In general, it is possible that funds generated through IPC are remitted to al-Qaeda indirectly through zakat-based (a religious duty to give money) giving. Although given the cash-based nature of this giving it is difficult to establish the provenance of the funds.
The examples involving other terrorist groups are comparably dubious and comparably limited.
Terrorists have traditionally been funded by governments. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many terrorist groups had to turn to alternative funding mechanisms, most of which involved criminal activities. It is clear from the Interpol report that any move into intellectual property crime is a very recent, relatively minor evolution.
There may be LOTS of life out there, but we could still be alone, if none of it is intelligent.
So, how about Fermi's Paradox?
Ubiquitous life and rare intelligence seems to me to be quite likely. We know that life is, err, prolific. Nearly everywhere we look, we find life. There's even inconclusive evidence of life on early Mars. We know that life on Earth began very early on in the the planet's evolution, and has spread to unimaginably hostile niches, like deep ocean vents.
We also know that some innovations have occurred multiple times in evolutionary history. Flying, for example, has certainly evolved independently in insects (perhaps more than once), mammals, birds and reptiles (birds did evolve from reptiles, but not from flying reptiles.) More controversially, there is evidence that the eye evolved independently multiple times, too. So despite its truly astonishing brutality, evolution is pretty good at converging on solutions to common problems.
We know further that the kind of intelligence we have has evolved exactly once. This suggests that intelligence is not just improbable, but vastly improbable. Unlikely adaptations like flying have occured many times, so intelligence must be far less likely than flight.
This suggests that Fermi's Paradox is a result of an error in his basic assumption that intelligence is pretty likely to evolve. His argument says, "Well, it evolved here, so it seems likely it would have evolved elsewhere." But even the kind of cursory examination of evolutionary history I've given here suggests that intelligence is far less likely to evolve than many other adaptations, and when you start to look in detail at the improbabilities of human's evolutionary history it looks even worse.
The fact is, our ancestors were never very successful, and if they hadn't stumbled upon a trick with language, tools and representation that allowed them to use anything as a symbol for anything else, they might well have died out at the beginning of the current interglacial, as so many other species did.
So it is possible that we are the only intelligence in the universe, and we ought on that basis perhaps take better care of ourselves, and treat each other a bit more nicely. After all, the beggar down the street may be a tiny fraction of all the intelligent life in all the stars and galaxies, everywhere.
How do you know this? I'm asking seriously: what is your evidence or sources of information that supports the claim that "counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists"?
Actually, I recall that because of the neutron energy profile from fission, Pu-gun type bombs do not work well-- you tend to get only partial fission before it blows apart.
That is correct. Gun-type bombs are 235-U only. Plutonium requires implossion, with its attendent engineering issues, to get more than a fizzle. Although it is probably true that "one nuclear fizzle can ruin your whole day", too. The difference is due to the ratios of fission vs scattering cross-sections in the two nuclear species.
Very few gun-type bombs have ever been made, but they are so easy and reliable that the "Little Boy" design wasn't even tested prior to operational deployment over Hiroshima. The Trinity test was a plutonium bomb of the "Fat Man" design, which was tested prior to deployment because detonation depends on all the engineering working perfectly.
I think we can all agree that Carnot says the thermodynamic efficiency of this method is never going to be more than 10% even in optimal circumstances, and the mean theoretical efficicency is probably 5% or thereabouts (assuming 4 C water from the depths and mean hot-side temperature of 20 C). But that doesn't mean the technology is unworkable or impractical.
The heat capacity of water is 4186 J/kg*K, so 5% of the total energy available in a 16 K temperature difference is 3.3 kJ/kg. With a pipe diameter of 10 m and a flow velocity of 1 m/s (big pipes and low velocity is best, because head loss goes as v**2) you get 78 m^3 per second, or 78,000 kg/s, or an available power of about 250 MW.
If the practical efficiency is 1%, that would be 50 MW. So far, it doesn't sound very practical. But up the pipe diameter to 30 m, and we're looking at 0.5 GW. That's not bad.
30 m (~100 ft for the Yemeni's and Americans in the audience) may sound like an insanely large pipe, but humans have a long history of developing technology to insane extremes. It is not possible at this point to say whether this technology will be worth it in the long run, but the raw numbers don't look sufficiently bad to write it off just yet.
Im sorry for your loss. But unfortunatley, some people die. Blaming your father on CHC is dubious. One person's loss isnt reason to consider the system broken.
We are not dealing with one person's loss. We are dealing with a system that, for all its virtues, is chronically under-resourced. Waiting lists are long, unless you happen to be Alan Rock, and the rich--the John Rae's and Robert Bourassa's--go to the U.S. for their care.
There are many aspects of Canada's social welfare system that are relatively effective, but our policy of preventing private, for-profit delivery of services covered under the Canada Health Act is killing some Canadians and forcing many others to wait in pain. I work in the orthopeadics sector, and can tell you what a big difference joint replacement makes to quality of life amongst the elderly, and can also tell you that waiting lists are routinely months to years.
So if you are in favour of keeping elderly people in pain for the sake of your ideas of good social policy, do please speak up. The right-wing nutjobs don't have a monopoly on senseless cruelty in the name of rigid ideology.
Perfectly sensible nations with excellent social democratic systems, such as Sweden, allow mixed public-private care. Canada does to, for the ultra-rich who can afford to cross into the U.S. for care. But some of us who aren't ultra-rich would kinda like to be able to pay for better care at home, instead of waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for what the public system is able to provide.
You believe that they are there because of lies. Some of them, presumably, are there because they believe those statements to be true. Some are even there because even though they believe the statements to be of questionable validity, they feel that Iraqis can benefit from reconstruction despite that.
Ergo, they are all there because of Bush et al's statements. Every single one of them. If Bush et al had not repeatedly and forcefully made those statements, and thereby garnered sufficient political support for the invasion, which made the subsequent reconstruction necessary, none of the people who are in Iraq due to the invasion and reconstruction would be there.
Were those statements lies?
Perhaps not. Perhaps they were even more venial--the result of putting ideology before facts in such a way that the whole institution of the American government was twisted by that distorting influence.
There were no WMDs. Iraq did not support al Quaeda. There was no clear and present danger to the U.S. or any of its allies from the Hussein government. There was no attempt to acquire yellow-cake. The aluminum tubes were not suitable for gas centrifuges. American and British intelligence had more than sufficient information to be acceptably sure of all these things. Bush and many other senior administration officials, as well as foreign leaders and their senior people, had or should have had sufficient access to that information to know that.
So were they criminally incompetent, or just criminal? Those are the only two choices available.
Nor is this purely academic. Aside from the congressional elections next year and in the years that follow, there are war crimes tribunals, and in the fullness of time they will reach even to the highest places.
Oh, silly me. I forgot that EVERY single person in Iraq was there strictly for the money. God I'm so damn stupid
No, they are there because George W. Bush and many others lied and lied and lied and lied.
There is nothing noble about fighting for lies. And yes, everyone from the West who is in Iraq as part of or in support of the U.S. invasion and reconstruction is there because of those lies.
DNA. The embryo possesses all the chromosomes of a unique human being, to the extent that its sex can be identified.
An organism is far more than its genes. The identity of "DNA" with "person" does not withstand the most trivial scrutiny, as the cases of identical twins and chimera show.
Identical twins have identical DNA, but are not identical organisms. Conclusion: a person does not have to have unique DNA to be a person.
Conversely, chimeric organisms have multiple sets of DNA (in different cells) but are only a single organism. Conclusion: having unique DNA does not make a cell or set of cells a person--taking all the cells of a single DNA type out of a chimeric individual will not give you a person, it'll give you mush.
Therefore, it is not correct to identify an organism with its DNA.
Now that these facts have been pointed out to you, I am sure you will reconsider your opinion on whether or not an embryo is a person. Either that, or you will insist that identical twins get only one vote between them (because they are only one person) and chimeric individuals must get two votes (because they are two people.) We are, after all, discussing the legal status of individuals here, so if embryonic rights are to be decided on the basis of DNA, other rights should be as well.
When consistency leads to absurdity, it is time to re-examine your beliefs.
Neoconservative refers primarily to somebody's position on foreign policy.
"Neoconservative" originally (back in the '70's) referred to market-oriented conservatives like Irving Kristol and the Chicago-school economists. They had very little to say about foreign policy, and a great deal to say about domestic policy, although when translated it mostly came out as "the market will take care of it."
They were called "neoconservatives" to distinguish them from old-style conservatives, who were still in favour of various kinds of paternalistic government intervention, and very much tied to religious causes. Old-style conservatives were anti-civil-rights, pro-big-military, pro-God and anti-abortion. Neocons were pro-civil-rights, anti-big-military, non-religious and pro-choice.
Other than a few policy advisory positions and Reagan's first budget chief, who didn't last long, the neo-conservatives never gained any significant degree of political power.
GWB is not a neo-conservative. He's an old-style conservative. Neo-conservatism was a practical failure in the United States. The major neoconservative policy initiatives--like reducing government spending--were never even tried.
IANAL. The following does not constitute legal advice (if it did, you'd have to pay for it:-)
The patent does not claim "treating an e-mail address as an object" except in the most incidental sense.
There are various parts to a patent: Abstract, References, Claims and Description. The Abstract gives a broad and often-misleading overview of the patent. The References give the references, and the Description gives a human-readable description of the invention. None of these have any legal force or meaning, except possibly as guidance with regard to how the claims might be interpreted.
The only part of a patent that has real legal teeth is the Claims. Unlike the Description, Claims are not human-readable.
Each claim is a single sentence, which is often broken into separate sub-clauses to give it a quasi-sentence structure. However, all the sub-clauses in a claim stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, Y and Z] does not cover a process only involving X and Y.
Claims may have conditional clauses, but they still stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, (one of P or Q) and Z] does not cover a process [X, Y and Z], because neither P nor Q is used.
Claims come in two forms: independent and dependent. The typical structure of the claims is:
1) A claim to everything.
2) A method/process/machine as described in claim 1 but specialized in some way.
3) Further dependent claims...
4) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 2 but further specialized in some way.
5) A claim to everything else.
6) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 5 but specialized in some way
7) etc...
That is, patents are typically written in claim groups, with each independent claim having a number of dependent claims following it. Dependent claims may be dependent on either an independent claim or another dependent claim, as shown above.
Independent claims are typcially made a broad as possible.
To read a patent you should first read the abstract, to get a vague sense of what the thing is about. Then skim the description and figures, but don't get too caught up in them because a lot of the stuff they describe will not be covered by the claims. The description usually deals with "the prefered embodiment", which is the best concrete example of the patented systems the author can come up with.
Reading the claims is the important thing. First, look for each set of claims. That is, find the independent claims and their dependents. Count the independent claims. This is a measure of how long you'll be at it. The thing that really matters to understanding the patent is the independent claims: the dependent claims are just specializations.
I prefer to read each independent claim out loud, very slowly. If one is particularly complex, I try re-writing it in human-readable form. After a few minutes of this it is usually possible to figure out what the general intent of an independent claim is. I then try to think of examples of systems that would and would not be covered by the claim, because the claim describes a boundary between covered and uncovered things.
Patents can be daunting to the uninitiated, but anyone who can navigate the complexities of C++ or Perl should be able to make a reasonable patent yield up its meaning without too much difficulty.
To return to the patent in question here, it has a single independent claim. It consists of 11 unconditional sub-clauses and 1 series of conditional sub-clauses with 6 options. So to violate this patent a system would have to perform all of the actions in those 11 sub-clauses and at least one of the actions in the conditional sub-clause. This includes actions like the following:
"upon establishing correspondence with said one or more servers, determining if the address corresponds to an address in a contact list of at least one server;"
Information theoretic entropy is always defined. Thermodynamic entropy is only defined for systems in thermodynamic equilibirium (same with temperature, and other thermodynamic quantities.) They are fundamentally different animals, despite their important similarities.
Additionally, the spin-zero state of two electronss is very important in quantum communication, quantum teleportation, and quantum computation. This is the state with total spin zero, so no matter what direction you measure one spin, the other spin is aligned opposite.
Oddly enough, free electrons do not have well-defined spin directions (interference phenomena destroy any possibility of measuring it, so it does not exist). Because of this it is not the case that electron-spin correlation is important to quantum communciation. Photon linear polarization alignment in J=0 states, which is the spin-1 analogue of the spin-zero state of two free electrons, is important, though. And bound electrons do have well-defined spin directions, which is what creates interesting effects in superconductors etc.
If something is an explanation, it is natural. Otherwise, it is not an explanation.
For example, if we explain something by reference to God, the devil, demons, spirits, etc, we do so by making reference to the properties of those entities. But this is exactly the structure of a natural explanation: entity X has properties Y, therefore Z happened.
It makes no difference if the entities in question are mythological (i.e. "supernatural") or not. Saying, "There was a great flood that killed all life except Noah and his homies because God willed it" is a natural explanation. It posits the existence of an entity (God) who has a property (the ability to will things) and says that is why the Flood happened (it explains it).
This explanation only becomes "supernatural" if we make the further supposition that "there is not nor can there ever be any evidence that the entity God who has these properties exists." But that supposition means that God cannot be an explanation for anything, because as soon as an entity is used to explain something we can, by the ordinary rules of inference, take what is being explained as evidence for the existence of that thing.
So, either God, demons, the devil and all can be used for explanation and are therefore natural entities that exist and have properties, or they cannot be used for explanation. In neither case does the oxymoron "supernatural explanation" apply.
Suppose China is able to bring it's average citizens up to european/us living standards and still maintain the great firewall
In other words, "Suppose you could be as rich as we are without being able to do all the things we do to get rich..."
This is an essentially implausible supposition. Free access to information is one of the things that drives our economy. The only way to assume that China could become a wealthy as the West without free access to information outside of China is to assume that that information is of negligable economic value. That assumption is simply not true, and political information is some of the most valuable information there is (ask an import/export operator about the importance of tracking political info from other countries, for example.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the top of the figure, you'll see what appears to be the title "URANBOMBE TYPE II".
This is weird. For one, the figure itself identifies the fissile material as plutonium. For two, it makes you wonder what TYPE I might have been.
--Tom
It isn't clear what Heisenberg was doing, or thought he was doing. The solution to the problem given in Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen" is to me extremely plausible. If you haven't seen the play, don't read the following, because it gives away the solution.
First off, I'm familiar with more of the background on this than just the play. IAANP, and all that. The thing is, as pointed out in the play, Heisenberg made an estimate of the critical mass required for a uranium bomb when he was at Farm Hall, after the Allies had dropped the first bomb on Japan. Heisenberg's initial estimate was wildly wrong, but he quickly refined it. It's more-or-less a back-of-the-envelope calculation if you know the cross-sections. The thing that this makes clear is that Heisenberg had not done the calculation prior to hearing of the Allied bombing of Japan. But it is absolutely the frist calculation one would do if one had the intent to build a bomb. Ergo, Heisenberg's intent was not to build a bomb.
It is also worth remembering that Heisenberg was a theorist, and his descriptions of experiments with uranium piles are almost cartoonish. He was a great theoretical physicist, but clearly didn't have what it took to much in the way of practical experimentation.
--Tom
So the appeal of the atomic bomb wasn't it's additonal features, those were unknown. It was just thought to be a really big bomb.
And when you get a really big bomb, you don't just get a really big explosion. You get a new phenomenon. It's called a firestorm.
With conventional bombs, firestorms are very hard to start--it took 1000+ planes at Dresden. With atomic bombs, it's one bomb, one firestorm. The greatest source of damage from air-burst fission bombs is fire. Not blast, not radiation.
--Tom
John Rae? Did you mean Bob Rae? Facts are one thing you should check, but names are more important.
John. Bob's brother. Big wheel in the federal Liberal Party a while back. Former big wheel at Power Corp. Google:
"John Rae" "Bob Rae" Canada Power
and you'll get a bunch of info.
I've lived in the U.S. and know something of the problems there. They are ugly and real.
But we live in a polychromatic world. We have a choice of models, and we can also invent something new, if conservatives like you would ever let us actually try something new.
What do you think of the Swedish system? Or the French? Or the German? Or the Australian? Or the New Zealand? Why bring up the American system at all? Look beyond the narrow focus of the mass media, into the larger world. You might like what you find.
--Tom
The abstract to the paper makes clear they are modelling in vitro tumor growth. This is the logical place to start, but the history of cancer research is full of examples where lessons learned in glass don't translate well to life.
The specific result that tumor growth may be limited by cell diffusion rather than nutrients is particularly susceptible to this problem, as there are a few things missing in the lab, like blood vessels, that could make a significant difference in the organism.
--Tom
Experiments with monkeys have demonstrated that they understand symbols as being representative of other things. They are also capable of taking something that works with one set of circumstances and extending it to work in other circumstances.
:-) argument that intelligence may be fantasically rare.
Yeah, I had a cat that could clearly do this as well--he could open drawers by hooking a paw in the handle and pulling. He did this in a very characteristic way, by lying on his back on the floor, hooking a front paw up through the handle, and rolling away from it. This let him push his body against the lower part of the bureau and brought the large muscles in his trunk into play, so even if a drawer was quite stiff he could still open it. He would then dig a nest in the clothes and go to sleep.
I realized his ability to generalize this behaviour when I saw him try the same move on my brief-case, which had a similar kind of handle. It didn't work, but it was clearly a case where he had a concept of "handle", and a certain way of operating on things that he subsumed under that concept.
So I'm not denying the ability of non-human animals to generalize. If they didn't have any generalizing ability at all it is unlikely that we would be so good at it. It would be like having a single species that flew at super-sonic speeds in a world where no other species could even jump.
What I'm doubtful about is whether any other species has a general representational ability, where anything can stand for anything else. This is a far cry from being able to use some symbols or make some generalizations. It is not even clear that humans "in the wild" have this ability--it may well be a cultural innovation.
So I guess on this basis, I would have to say that it may be possible that monkeys etc may have an unrealized potential for general representation, as humans may have done prior to the neolithic revolution. Given our limited success with experiments in this direction with apes and chimps etc, however, I'm not going to give this possibility a very high probability.
We haven't spent enough time investigating the other species to shut them out in terms of their mental capabilities.
Until we know what sparked the neolithic revolution, it is hard to argue with this. If intelligence is a cultural innovation, then it is possible that some non-human animals have the same potential our ancestors did 50,000 years ago. However, I don't think any of this addresses my original point, which is that there is a plausible (although clearly not compelling
--Tom
Even dogs are able to understand that symbols mean other things, and other mammals (and some birds) have developed tools. Certainly, whales and dolphins also qualify as intelligent.
None of these species have the ability that humans have, which is "general representation": we have the ability to make anything stand in for or represent or symbolize anything else. Amongst other things, this lets us use symbols to represent other symbols.
I see this as the only uniquely human capability, intelligence-wise, which is obviously a generalization of abilities that we share with many other species, many of which are capable of limited representation, limited communciation, and limited tool use.
--Tom
"We know further that the kind of legs we have evolved exactly once. This suggests that legs are not just improbable, but vastly improbable."
:-) of two Central American lizard species that were previously thought to be a single species with two different (disjoint) habitats. As it turns out, they share a common ancestor way back, but they have both independently evolved the same distinguishing characteristics in response to similar environmental pressures.
The logic sounds just fine. It only sounds funny if you forget that "legs" in the second sentence refers to "distinctly human legs, used for upright bipedal walking."
Upright bipedalism is rare. In general, any trait that only evolved once in Earth's evolutionary history should be considered extremely improbable, given that so many apparently improbable characteristics (wings, eyes, fins...) have evolved many times.
One of the things that we are finding as DNA sequencing of animals becomes more common is that convergent evolution is more common than previously thought. There is an example (almost all the details of which escape me, sorry
I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that human-style intelligence is not a convergent solution to a common problem. If it were, there would be more of it.
--Tom
I appreciate the links--it is always good to see what your opponent thinks is evidence for their position, so that evidence can be addressed directly. Otherwise, I might have addressed other sources that were not the basis for your claim.
Far from being "nothing new", the links you provided contain a very different picture. Here is a quote from the Interpol statement, which gives a fair picture of the actual data that support the claim that intellectual property crime is a signficant funding source for terrorists:
One counterfeiting case has been reported in the media where there are alleged connections to al-Qaeda. The investigation into a shipment of fake goods from Dubai to Copenhagen, Denmark, suggests that al-Qaeda may have indirectly obtained financing through counterfeit goods. Danish customs intercepted a container, containing counterfeit shampoos, creams, cologne and perfume. The sender of the counterfeit goods is allegedly a member of al-Qaeda. A transnational investigation involved agencies from three countries; Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States.[5] It is difficult to know whether the funds from this traffic went directly to al-Qaeda or whether only a part of them were remitted. In general, it is possible that funds generated through IPC are remitted to al-Qaeda indirectly through zakat-based (a religious duty to give money) giving. Although given the cash-based nature of this giving it is difficult to establish the provenance of the funds.
The examples involving other terrorist groups are comparably dubious and comparably limited.
Terrorists have traditionally been funded by governments. With the fall of the Soviet Union, many terrorist groups had to turn to alternative funding mechanisms, most of which involved criminal activities. It is clear from the Interpol report that any move into intellectual property crime is a very recent, relatively minor evolution.
--Tom
There may be LOTS of life out there, but we could still be alone, if none of it is intelligent.
So, how about Fermi's Paradox?
Ubiquitous life and rare intelligence seems to me to be quite likely. We know that life is, err, prolific. Nearly everywhere we look, we find life. There's even inconclusive evidence of life on early Mars. We know that life on Earth began very early on in the the planet's evolution, and has spread to unimaginably hostile niches, like deep ocean vents.
We also know that some innovations have occurred multiple times in evolutionary history. Flying, for example, has certainly evolved independently in insects (perhaps more than once), mammals, birds and reptiles (birds did evolve from reptiles, but not from flying reptiles.) More controversially, there is evidence that the eye evolved independently multiple times, too. So despite its truly astonishing brutality, evolution is pretty good at converging on solutions to common problems.
We know further that the kind of intelligence we have has evolved exactly once. This suggests that intelligence is not just improbable, but vastly improbable. Unlikely adaptations like flying have occured many times, so intelligence must be far less likely than flight.
This suggests that Fermi's Paradox is a result of an error in his basic assumption that intelligence is pretty likely to evolve. His argument says, "Well, it evolved here, so it seems likely it would have evolved elsewhere." But even the kind of cursory examination of evolutionary history I've given here suggests that intelligence is far less likely to evolve than many other adaptations, and when you start to look in detail at the improbabilities of human's evolutionary history it looks even worse.
The fact is, our ancestors were never very successful, and if they hadn't stumbled upon a trick with language, tools and representation that allowed them to use anything as a symbol for anything else, they might well have died out at the beginning of the current interglacial, as so many other species did.
So it is possible that we are the only intelligence in the universe, and we ought on that basis perhaps take better care of ourselves, and treat each other a bit more nicely. After all, the beggar down the street may be a tiny fraction of all the intelligent life in all the stars and galaxies, everywhere.
--Tom
How do you know this? I'm asking seriously: what is your evidence or sources of information that supports the claim that "counterfeiting (money, CDs, DVDs, designer labels, etc.) is popular with terrorists"?
--Tom
Actually, I recall that because of the neutron energy profile from fission, Pu-gun type bombs do not work well-- you tend to get only partial fission before it blows apart.
That is correct. Gun-type bombs are 235-U only. Plutonium requires implossion, with its attendent engineering issues, to get more than a fizzle. Although it is probably true that "one nuclear fizzle can ruin your whole day", too. The difference is due to the ratios of fission vs scattering cross-sections in the two nuclear species.
Very few gun-type bombs have ever been made, but they are so easy and reliable that the "Little Boy" design wasn't even tested prior to operational deployment over Hiroshima. The Trinity test was a plutonium bomb of the "Fat Man" design, which was tested prior to deployment because detonation depends on all the engineering working perfectly.
--Tom
I think we can all agree that Carnot says the thermodynamic efficiency of this method is never going to be more than 10% even in optimal circumstances, and the mean theoretical efficicency is probably 5% or thereabouts (assuming 4 C water from the depths and mean hot-side temperature of 20 C). But that doesn't mean the technology is unworkable or impractical.
The heat capacity of water is 4186 J/kg*K, so 5% of the total energy available in a 16 K temperature difference is 3.3 kJ/kg. With a pipe diameter of 10 m and a flow velocity of 1 m/s (big pipes and low velocity is best, because head loss goes as v**2) you get 78 m^3 per second, or 78,000 kg/s, or an available power of about 250 MW.
If the practical efficiency is 1%, that would be 50 MW. So far, it doesn't sound very practical. But up the pipe diameter to 30 m, and we're looking at 0.5 GW. That's not bad.
30 m (~100 ft for the Yemeni's and Americans in the audience) may sound like an insanely large pipe, but humans have a long history of developing technology to insane extremes. It is not possible at this point to say whether this technology will be worth it in the long run, but the raw numbers don't look sufficiently bad to write it off just yet.
--Tom
Im sorry for your loss. But unfortunatley, some people die. Blaming your father on CHC is dubious. One person's loss isnt reason to consider the system broken.
We are not dealing with one person's loss. We are dealing with a system that, for all its virtues, is chronically under-resourced. Waiting lists are long, unless you happen to be Alan Rock, and the rich--the John Rae's and Robert Bourassa's--go to the U.S. for their care.
There are many aspects of Canada's social welfare system that are relatively effective, but our policy of preventing private, for-profit delivery of services covered under the Canada Health Act is killing some Canadians and forcing many others to wait in pain. I work in the orthopeadics sector, and can tell you what a big difference joint replacement makes to quality of life amongst the elderly, and can also tell you that waiting lists are routinely months to years.
So if you are in favour of keeping elderly people in pain for the sake of your ideas of good social policy, do please speak up. The right-wing nutjobs don't have a monopoly on senseless cruelty in the name of rigid ideology.
Perfectly sensible nations with excellent social democratic systems, such as Sweden, allow mixed public-private care. Canada does to, for the ultra-rich who can afford to cross into the U.S. for care. But some of us who aren't ultra-rich would kinda like to be able to pay for better care at home, instead of waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for what the public system is able to provide.
--Tom
You believe that they are there because of lies. Some of them, presumably, are there because they believe those statements to be true. Some are even there because even though they believe the statements to be of questionable validity, they feel that Iraqis can benefit from reconstruction despite that.
Ergo, they are all there because of Bush et al's statements. Every single one of them. If Bush et al had not repeatedly and forcefully made those statements, and thereby garnered sufficient political support for the invasion, which made the subsequent reconstruction necessary, none of the people who are in Iraq due to the invasion and reconstruction would be there.
Were those statements lies?
Perhaps not. Perhaps they were even more venial--the result of putting ideology before facts in such a way that the whole institution of the American government was twisted by that distorting influence.
There were no WMDs. Iraq did not support al Quaeda. There was no clear and present danger to the U.S. or any of its allies from the Hussein government. There was no attempt to acquire yellow-cake. The aluminum tubes were not suitable for gas centrifuges. American and British intelligence had more than sufficient information to be acceptably sure of all these things. Bush and many other senior administration officials, as well as foreign leaders and their senior people, had or should have had sufficient access to that information to know that.
So were they criminally incompetent, or just criminal? Those are the only two choices available.
Nor is this purely academic. Aside from the congressional elections next year and in the years that follow, there are war crimes tribunals, and in the fullness of time they will reach even to the highest places.
Oh, silly me. I forgot that EVERY single person in Iraq was there strictly for the money. God I'm so damn stupid
No, they are there because George W. Bush and many others lied and lied and lied and lied.
There is nothing noble about fighting for lies. And yes, everyone from the West who is in Iraq as part of or in support of the U.S. invasion and reconstruction is there because of those lies.
DNA. The embryo possesses all the chromosomes of a unique human being, to the extent that its sex can be identified.
An organism is far more than its genes. The identity of "DNA" with "person" does not withstand the most trivial scrutiny, as the cases of identical twins and chimera show.
Identical twins have identical DNA, but are not identical organisms. Conclusion: a person does not have to have unique DNA to be a person.
Conversely, chimeric organisms have multiple sets of DNA (in different cells) but are only a single organism. Conclusion: having unique DNA does not make a cell or set of cells a person--taking all the cells of a single DNA type out of a chimeric individual will not give you a person, it'll give you mush.
Therefore, it is not correct to identify an organism with its DNA.
Now that these facts have been pointed out to you, I am sure you will reconsider your opinion on whether or not an embryo is a person. Either that, or you will insist that identical twins get only one vote between them (because they are only one person) and chimeric individuals must get two votes (because they are two people.) We are, after all, discussing the legal status of individuals here, so if embryonic rights are to be decided on the basis of DNA, other rights should be as well.
When consistency leads to absurdity, it is time to re-examine your beliefs.
Neoconservative refers primarily to somebody's position on foreign policy.
"Neoconservative" originally (back in the '70's) referred to market-oriented conservatives like Irving Kristol and the Chicago-school economists. They had very little to say about foreign policy, and a great deal to say about domestic policy, although when translated it mostly came out as "the market will take care of it."
They were called "neoconservatives" to distinguish them from old-style conservatives, who were still in favour of various kinds of paternalistic government intervention, and very much tied to religious causes. Old-style conservatives were anti-civil-rights, pro-big-military, pro-God and anti-abortion. Neocons were pro-civil-rights, anti-big-military, non-religious and pro-choice.
Other than a few policy advisory positions and Reagan's first budget chief, who didn't last long, the neo-conservatives never gained any significant degree of political power.
GWB is not a neo-conservative. He's an old-style conservative. Neo-conservatism was a practical failure in the United States. The major neoconservative policy initiatives--like reducing government spending--were never even tried.
IANAL. The following does not constitute legal advice (if it did, you'd have to pay for it
The patent does not claim "treating an e-mail address as an object" except in the most incidental sense.
There are various parts to a patent: Abstract, References, Claims and Description. The Abstract gives a broad and often-misleading overview of the patent. The References give the references, and the Description gives a human-readable description of the invention. None of these have any legal force or meaning, except possibly as guidance with regard to how the claims might be interpreted.
The only part of a patent that has real legal teeth is the Claims. Unlike the Description, Claims are not human-readable.
Each claim is a single sentence, which is often broken into separate sub-clauses to give it a quasi-sentence structure. However, all the sub-clauses in a claim stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, Y and Z] does not cover a process only involving X and Y.
Claims may have conditional clauses, but they still stand and fall together. That is, a claim to a process [X, (one of P or Q) and Z] does not cover a process [X, Y and Z], because neither P nor Q is used.
Claims come in two forms: independent and dependent. The typical structure of the claims is:
1) A claim to everything.
2) A method/process/machine as described in claim 1 but specialized in some way.
3) Further dependent claims...
4) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 2 but further specialized in some way.
5) A claim to everything else.
6) A method/process/machine as describe in claim 5 but specialized in some way
7) etc...
That is, patents are typically written in claim groups, with each independent claim having a number of dependent claims following it. Dependent claims may be dependent on either an independent claim or another dependent claim, as shown above.
Independent claims are typcially made a broad as possible.
To read a patent you should first read the abstract, to get a vague sense of what the thing is about. Then skim the description and figures, but don't get too caught up in them because a lot of the stuff they describe will not be covered by the claims. The description usually deals with "the prefered embodiment", which is the best concrete example of the patented systems the author can come up with.
Reading the claims is the important thing. First, look for each set of claims. That is, find the independent claims and their dependents. Count the independent claims. This is a measure of how long you'll be at it. The thing that really matters to understanding the patent is the independent claims: the dependent claims are just specializations.
I prefer to read each independent claim out loud, very slowly. If one is particularly complex, I try re-writing it in human-readable form. After a few minutes of this it is usually possible to figure out what the general intent of an independent claim is. I then try to think of examples of systems that would and would not be covered by the claim, because the claim describes a boundary between covered and uncovered things.
Patents can be daunting to the uninitiated, but anyone who can navigate the complexities of C++ or Perl should be able to make a reasonable patent yield up its meaning without too much difficulty.
To return to the patent in question here, it has a single independent claim. It consists of 11 unconditional sub-clauses and 1 series of conditional sub-clauses with 6 options. So to violate this patent a system would have to perform all of the actions in those 11 sub-clauses and at least one of the actions in the conditional sub-clause. This includes actions like the following:
"upon establishing correspondence with said one or more servers, determining if the address corresponds to an address in a contact list of at least one server;"
Rea
What do I get with this that I don't already have now that is simple and reliable?
You get shoddy business practices, poor customer service and unpaid (but promised) refunds. Welcome to Vonage!
...the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory."
Or not.
Information theoretic entropy is only equal to thermodynamic entropy for canonical ensembles. Norton's discussion of Landauer's exorcism of Maxwell's demon goes into this in considerable detail.
Information theoretic entropy is always defined. Thermodynamic entropy is only defined for systems in thermodynamic equilibirium (same with temperature, and other thermodynamic quantities.) They are fundamentally different animals, despite their important similarities.
--Tom
Additionally, the spin-zero state of two electronss is very important in quantum communication, quantum teleportation, and quantum computation. This is the state with total spin zero, so no matter what direction you measure one spin, the other spin is aligned opposite.
Oddly enough, free electrons do not have well-defined spin directions (interference phenomena destroy any possibility of measuring it, so it does not exist). Because of this it is not the case that electron-spin correlation is important to quantum communciation. Photon linear polarization alignment in J=0 states, which is the spin-1 analogue of the spin-zero state of two free electrons, is important, though. And bound electrons do have well-defined spin directions, which is what creates interesting effects in superconductors etc.
--Tom
"Supernatural explanation" is an oxymoron.
If something is an explanation, it is natural. Otherwise, it is not an explanation.
For example, if we explain something by reference to God, the devil, demons, spirits, etc, we do so by making reference to the properties of those entities. But this is exactly the structure of a natural explanation: entity X has properties Y, therefore Z happened.
It makes no difference if the entities in question are mythological (i.e. "supernatural") or not. Saying, "There was a great flood that killed all life except Noah and his homies because God willed it" is a natural explanation. It posits the existence of an entity (God) who has a property (the ability to will things) and says that is why the Flood happened (it explains it).
This explanation only becomes "supernatural" if we make the further supposition that "there is not nor can there ever be any evidence that the entity God who has these properties exists." But that supposition means that God cannot be an explanation for anything, because as soon as an entity is used to explain something we can, by the ordinary rules of inference, take what is being explained as evidence for the existence of that thing.
So, either God, demons, the devil and all can be used for explanation and are therefore natural entities that exist and have properties, or they cannot be used for explanation. In neither case does the oxymoron "supernatural explanation" apply.
--Tom
Suppose China is able to bring it's average citizens up to european/us living standards and still maintain the great firewall
In other words, "Suppose you could be as rich as we are without being able to do all the things we do to get rich..."
This is an essentially implausible supposition. Free access to information is one of the things that drives our economy. The only way to assume that China could become a wealthy as the West without free access to information outside of China is to assume that that information is of negligable economic value. That assumption is simply not true, and political information is some of the most valuable information there is (ask an import/export operator about the importance of tracking political info from other countries, for example.)
--Tom