The issue is incentivizing the research behind innovation.
I think he did read your post and you're talking past each other.
He is pointing out that bits can be copied for free. You are pointing out that to prevent that we need robust laws to stop people from copying bits for free. I'm pretty sure he understands your point. He just thinks you're wrong.
Material goods are easy to protect from copying because they are relatively hard to copy. "IP" is inherently copyable at almost zero cost, and therefore has no market value unless that value is created by an artificial scarcity produced by extremely expensive laws, with all of their outrageous secondary effects like the creation of patent trolls. There is no evidence that "IP" when so protected can ever generate sufficient wealth to pay for the legal infrastructure required to maintain the required artificial scarcity, much less support the parasitic growths that that legal structure will necessarily attract.
It may be possible to generate sufficient artificial scarcity at a low enough overhead cost to create a primarily "IP" based economy, but it would be extremely foolish to bet the future of your country on it.
So he didn't know he recieved and looked at the drawing and then duplicated it nearly line for line...he's obviously got better drugs than we do
Well, if the U.S. Attorney General can assure us that nothing he can't recall had anything untoward about it, I see no reason why Todd Goldman can't assure us that he innocently copied drawings he didn't know he'd seen.
Increasing the number of H1-B visas won't address an important additional problem that the summary doesn't mention: increasing unwillingness of foreign tech workers to come to the U.S. because they have no rights there. Granted, some of them may be coming from countries where they have fewer rights than American citizens do, but once they enter the U.S. they have no rights whatsoever: not habeas corpus, not due process, not anything.
I've worked in the U.S. in the past, but would be very unlikely to accept a position there since the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, whose passage makes clear that the government believes that no constitutional protections apply to non-citizens, as it explicitly suspends habeas corpus for non-citizens suspected (for any reason) of terrorism. Given that the constitution explicitly forbids congress from passing any law that suspends habeas corpus except in cases of invasion or insurrection there is no reasonable interpretation that can be put on this except that foreigners have no rights in America. All it takes is one baseless accusation of terrorist activity against you, and you're out of luck.
Given that this has actually happened, it is not at all unreasonable for foreigners to want to stay away.
I actually did read the Nature article (or rather the xarchiv version), but did not pay much attention to their comments on Bohm's theory, which I've never taken very seriously. That is why I said "it would appear to kill Bohm's theory" and not "it kills Bohm's theory" (seriously, I changed the latter to the former in editing the post, and didn't bother to check because this is/., and simply having read and understood the primary point of the paper is above-and-beyond the call of duty.
I note that you do not dispute anything else I have said regarding the paper, which contrary to your assertion does contain new physics.
IE7 won't run on 2k, how long before third party apps start requiring 7 and refusing to work with 6? Does office 2007 run on 2k? If not, what happens when you receive documents in the new format?
The same logic that Microsoft is trying to apply (punish people who don't upgrade) works just as well for all of Microsoft's really big customers: punish people who do upgrade. Wanna do business with the drug company my g/f works for? Better send them docs that someone with a Win2K machine can read. Otherwise you are out of luck, you don't get the contract, you lose.
And collectively, Microsoft's big corporate customers are a whole lot bigger than MS itself. Ergo, MS will lose this one, and people who rush to adopt anything beyond XP will be the ones punished by the larger market for adopting incompatible technology.
In the meantime, Firefox and OpenOffice have the opportunity to upgrade to Office 2007 and IE7 compatibility, and they will progressively erode MS market share. This will not happen as fast as F/OSS fans want to believe, but it will happen. Ten or fifteen years from now MS will be a corporate IT services organization of the kind IBM has become, and for much the same reasons.
We've known for a couple decades that EPR made local hidden variable theories extremely unlikely.
There is new science here. What they have shown is that any "reasonable" nonlocal theory cannot reproduce the results of experiment (which are correctly predicted by quantum mechanics.) This is building on the foundations that Bell laid, but is a significant new result.
What they do is assume that the down-conversion source produces pairs of photons that have real polarizations. They then put some limits on the effects non-local variables can have by imposing the quite reasonable and experimentally fulfilled condition that the results of measurement at one detector on a sub-ensemble of photons that all have the same real polarization must depend only on local variables. This is must be the case to reproduce Malus' law (the cosine dependence of transmission of a linearly polarized photons through a linearly polarized filter.)
They then show that the influence of nonlocal variables cannot be both such as TO NOT mess up Malus' law for a single detector, and at the same time TO influence measurements at both detectors in such a way as to reproduce the correlation results that are observed experimentally (and predicted by quantum mechanics.)
The experiment involves measuring linear polarization in one branch and elliptical polarization in the other, rather than just sticking to linear polarizations a la Bell et al. This provides them with sufficient degrees of freedom to draw a stronger conclusion than one can from Bell-inequality violations alone.
This is a very nice piece of work, and very much in the spirit of Bell's original work. Amongst other things it would appear to kill Bohm's theory because it will not be able to reproduce the predicted correlation results.
Yes, you heard that. It's what people who had Windows 2000 said, and a heck of a lot of them stayed with Win2k. There really wasn't any compelling reason to move to XP.
My g/f is a drug rep for a major pharma company, and her corporate laptop runs Win2K, the same as everyone else in a corporate workforce that is getting on for six figures.
She uses Outlook, IE, Excel and Word, and that's pretty much it. The tools she has serves her needs, and more importantly from a market perspective, they serve the company's needs. That's why the company has never upgraded: why fix it if it ain't broke?
I run XP on one of my laptops and 2K on one of my desktops, and can hardly tell the difference between them (and Ubuntu on another laptop and Slackware on my server...) From a user's and developer's perspective, XP doesn't have that much to offer over 2K. The stability improvement was notable, but not huge, because 2K was already pretty stable. Lots of 98 users upgraded to XP, I'm sure, but for the major corporate markets that were already using 2K the XP upgrade was marginal, and there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade to Vista, ever.
Do the math:
Number of killer apps that run on Vista that don't run on XP: zero.
Cost of new hardware to run Vista: lots.
Cost of Vista licenses: lots.
Vista features that are "must haves" to workers whose primary computer interaction consists of web-interaction, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet hacks and the odd presentation: zero.
Ergo, there will be no mass upgrade to Vista. Every technology matures. Desktop OS technology for office workers has matured. The next big advance will be in a completely different direction, and anyone smart enough to anticipate it will get rich. But it won't be simply in another release of an OS with essentially the same functionality and a lot bigger hardware requirements to support the new eye-candy.
Ok, I R'd TFM. Now I'm even more impressed -- nuclear power without stray neutrons. Ubergreen.
p + 11B -> alpha + alpha + alpha has been known for a long time, and has some serious problems. Google "migma" to get some of the background.
The basic issue is that the Coulomb barrier is large and the radiative losses in the plasma will always be larger than the generated power for reasonable configurations. This is not to say that it is impossible, just very, very hard, and some of the most promising approaches involving disequilibrium plasmas have been proven on very general theoretical grounds to be unworkable.
Furthermore, any system that contains high energy alpha particles will also produce neutrons via secondary reactions. "A-neutronic" fusion is usually defined as "one neutron or less per hundred fusion reaction. pB fusion has the potential to reach this limit, but because the number of fusing nuclei is staggeringly large to produce interesting amounts of power, if you stood beside an unshielded pB reactor you would still die of radiation poisoning in short order. This does not really qualify as "without neutrons" as that phrase would normally be understood, making the "aneutronic" name an unfortunate piece of scientific marketing-speak.
Low-neutron-emission fusion scenarios are worth exploring, but it is important to have reasonable expectations of what the fundamental physics actually limits the technology to doing.
How about a song for the thousands of victims tortured and killed under Castro's regime?
This reminds me of nothing so much as the standard Soviet apologist's rhetoric when faced with a facts about the crimes committed in the name of building socialism. It was quite common for apologist's to say, "Yeah, but what about the homeless people in the United States!? What about Vietnam! What about Nicaragua?!" etc...
For the massively logic impaired, here is a small lesson: changing the subject to something completely unrelated does not constitute an argument. In fact, it is a sure sign that you do not actually have an argument. If all you can bring up in objection to a statement of fact or argument is a bizarre and irrelevant bit of rhetorical misdirection, you have conceded the original point, which in this case is: the government of the United States is guilty of unlawfully detaining innocent people in Gauntanamo Bay.
Now that you have conceded that point by failing to raise any objection to it but instead introducing some unrelated facts, perhaps people should discuss what is to be done about this ongoing criminal activity by the government of the United States.
As for what the rest of the world does, who the hell cares?
We care because a lot of people here are saying "This couldn't possible work! I can imagine it will lead to all kinds of bad effects like this..." and they then go on to describe something that is known to not happen in the rest of the world where first-to-file has been the norm for decades.
These people remind me of nothing so much as a Renaissance mystic's response to Galileo's observation of the Jovian moons. He said that because there were seven seas on the Earth and seven openings in the human skull, there must be only seven planets in the heavens, so Galileo must be wrong. It "just made sense" to him that extra planets were impossible.
Empirical evidence is always the final arbiter of reality, and should be the final arbiter of policy, and the people here who are basing their beliefs about the consequences of first-to-file on the contents of their imaginations need to start looking beyond the end of their own cerebral cortex.
Just look at how attention to foreign implementations has been fucking up our copyright laws.
I'm sceptical of the utility of such intuitive pictures of the mathematical abstractions we use to describe the universe. I've seen too many good physicists mislead by forcing their understanding into an intuitive box, and have also seen that we have the ability to make absolutely anything seem intuitively correct after enough twisting our brains around.
That said, the state-machine model of time progression is one that is relatively rare in physics. There is theory called "finite nature" that explicitly treats time this way (one of the axioms is "the universe is computing the future as fast as it can.") But in mainstream physics time is treated more like a parameter than a dynamical quantity, and we simply take for granted that the equations are motion are expressed relative to it.
Higher spacial dimensions don't look too bad because we can easily think of a 2D universe and imagine what a 3D universe would look like from that perspective. But with time, we don't really understand the one time dimension we have, and can't imagine what the universe would look like to creatures in a world without time, and so any intuitive picture of extra time dimensions is challenging.
For example, we can imagine a 3D object moving along a different space dimension and having its 3D projection appear and disappear in our world in a blink, assuming our world has small but finite extension in the extra spacial dimension. But for an object to change along another time dimension would imply that while its own time co-ordinate in our world was fixed, it could undergo alteration (because it would move along one of the other time dimensions.) This would imply that there was an instant in which one thing was many things, which we are not equipped to deal with.
For example, suppose that an atom decayed from an excited state into its ground state along a different time dimension (that is, during the decay process the world-line of the atom is extended along an alternative time dimension while having a zero-length projection onto our own). That would mean from our perspective it would at one time both have and have not emitted a photon in the same respect and at the same time...which kinda sounds like quantum mechanics, now that I think of it...
It just turns out that cloning vegetables is so much easier than cloning animals, that we have been doing it for -literally- centuries.
So what you're saying is that cloning is fundamentally different in vegetables, and therefore it makes perfect sense that the labelling requirements are different. That's a pretty good argument in favour of labelling.
Those of us who support labelling of cloned and GMO foods do so because we have a right to make an informed choice as to what we are buying. Since all bananas are propagated asexually, there is no need to label them as such, because absolutely every banana you buy is the same. But that is not true of animals: some meat will be from cloned animals, some will not. Therefore labelling makes sense. In fact, if you are so very deeply concerned that "everything in the store" will have to be labelled as cloned, I would be happy to only require that uncloned meat be labelled as such.
There are many reasons why people might choose to support producers who eschew cloning. We are all familiar with the enormous disasters related to cloning in the past. The banana industry almost destroyed. The Irish potato famine... (you did mention that people have been cloning potatoes for centuries, right?)
Cloning is a trap that catches the greedy and the stupid. I don't have to support them, and I would choose not to if I am allowed to make informed choices as to what I buy.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
Sure, because additional systems designed to lock out users never cause actual problems in the field...
What would it mean for there to be more than one time dimension?
The answer to all your specific questions is "No"--consciousness is almost certainly an emergent classical phenomenon of the brain, and certainly has nothing to do with quantum mechanical effects of the kind Penrose is concerned with in his crazy book on the subject.
The meaning of extra dimensions is tricky. The physics we experience is clearly 3+1D: three spacial dimensions and one of time. No one knows what makes time different, no one knows why we have three independent space dimensions, and no one knows what it would mean in any larger sense for there to be extra space or time dimensions.
Every extra-dimensional model predicts different concrete consequences for our 3+1D experience, mostly in terms of either exotic particles near the weak scale or odd gravitational effects. Because we are for some completely unknown reason constrained to a 3+1D universe, we are like flatlanders trying to infer 3D physics from the oddities of our 2D domain that we can't otherwise make sense of, and our experiences don't necessarily provide very good constraints on viable higher-dimensional models.
In our case, the major oddity we are trying to explain is why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces of nature, or conversely, why the Planck mass is so large compared to the masses of the particles we find ourselves made out of. There is a sixteen order-of-magnitude gap between the weak interaction scale (~1000 GeV) and the Planck scale (10^19 GeV). We have no clue as to why this might be, but it is really hard to make a low-particle-mass universe out of such a high-particle-mass fundamental scale. It is as if we were living in a building constructed ONLY of blocks that are 10^13 miles long, but the corridors and rooms are ten feet wide. You'd have to think there was something tricky going on to make that happen.
It turns out that adding extra dimensions to the mathematical description of our universe makes it relatively easy to create models where this huge gap in scales (called the "hierarchy problem") goes away. Of necessity, these extra dimensions are must somehow be made invisible to us, either by rolling them up in a process called compactification, or through quasi-dynamical means like brane-confinement in string theory (a "brane" is a lower-dimensional structure that can have special dynamics in string theory, allowing particles to be confined to it, and if the particles we are made out of are all confined to a 3+1D brane, then so are we.)
Again, the thing we can be absolutely sure of: any effects these extra dimensions have will appear only in high-energy physics experiments in the form of new particles, or in very subtle effects on the force of gravity. We will never be able to observe them directly, travel in them, or experience them. Of course, I could just be talking moonshine...
I wonder if there's a class action lawsuit here for deceiving the customer about ownership of the technology.
I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt it. First, consider other cases of Vonage bad behaviour: they have a long history of not telling customers the truth. They gave me false information about number mobility, and then tried to charge me a cancellation fee when it turned out I couldn't keep my old number. Based on the number of Vonage customer "service" horror stories circulating on the 'Net this kind of behaviour is not an anomaly but rather a policy for them.
Second, patents cover what the courts say they cover, and one of the delights about patent law is that you never really know how good--or how broad--a patent is until it has been challenged in court. So it would be hard to claim that Vonage knowingly lied to their customers in this case, because they can honestly claim they did not know until the court ruled.
Vonage--and their customers--took a chance. It looks like they lost. I feel sorry for their customers, because I know that the people they haven't screwed over have been fairly happy with their product, but I don't feel sorry for Vonage in the least, who are the worst company I have ever dealt with.
I like to believe that, in America at least, we avoid this "Catch-22" wherein we assume from the get go that the alleged criminal is innocent until proven guilty.
Unfortunately, regardless of what you like to believe, America has pursued a deliberate and considered policy of "guilty and not allowed to prove innocence" for the past several years. The innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay are routinely describe by government officials from the President on down as "terrorists". Apart from one Australian guy who plea-bargained his way out recently, they have not been convicted of any crime and never will be, because they will never have access to any court of law, only military tribunals that do not meet the ordinary standards of criminal justice.
There are about 500 people being held at Guantanmo Bay. They were all taken into custody either in battlefield conditions, via raids on villages and homes, or captured by ever-reliable authorities like the Pakistani and Afghan police and armed forces.
Statistics from evil, America-hating, left-wing organizations like the National Rifle Association show that when a cop intervenes during a crime in progress and they use a firearm, they shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time. Armed citizens shoot the wrong person about 1% of the time.
Let's be generous to the organs of the state, and assume they are able to achieve the same impressive accuracy that well-armed American citizens are able to achieve when they are actually faced with a crime in progress. That means that there are on average 5 innocent people in Guantanamo Bay. P(0) for a Poisson distribution with a mean of 5 is 0.67%, even with this vastly generous assumption. If we adopt a more realistic assumption that in the midst of the fog of war the armed forces of America and other far less professional organizations have only half the same failure rate as the NRA says American cops have, P(0) ~ 1e-11. This is, as my.sig points out, what would commonly be called a statistical certainty.
So unfortunately, tragically, at the presumption of innocence is not a prominent feature of American jurisprudence, although the story is not yet over. Sarcasm aside, there are great, pro-American organizations like the ACLU still fighting before the courts for the rights of these innocent people.
That's the whole point of what the talking heads, and the entertainment programmes that foist them on a willing public, do: they promote the agendas of the political organizations they front for.
Nor were there ever any "good old days" when the 6 o'clock entertainment programme actually deserved the name of "news". Journalism has always been about agendas, and healthy journalism in a free society is about lots of different and frequently opposing agendas. The spectacle is at times amusing and at time like this sickening, but it never ceases to be a spectacle. It is always about entertainment and political power, and only incidentally about information.
And never, ever, about anything remotely resembling human decency.
Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
That's a quote from the article, and demonstrates it is simply the usual ignorant journalist just making stuff up.
Einstein was a theoretical physicist who dabbled in refrigeration technology. Introducing him into a discussion of the biology and epidemiology of domestic bees makes as much sense as quoting Dick Cheney on how to run a socialized healthcare system.
Anyone who is reduced to introducing supporting quotes purely on the basis of name recognition of the person being quoted clearly has no story and no facts.
People don't use neural networks because they not as easy to train as SVM (given that you're given libSVM or equivalent). However, SVM are basically template matchers, which are good for problems where the number of samples is big compared to the dimensionnality of the problem (which is NOT the case for real world problems), but that's it.
Having used both neural networks and SVMs in real world problems (particle physics and micro-array data analysis) I can say that SVM performance is far better, at least when you employ a committee architecture. Heuristically, I've found SVMs much harder to over-train, which is the most common problem I've encountered with neural networks.
In any case, why anyone wants to make a computer work like a brain is beyond me. It is worse than trying to make a wheel work like a leg or a submarine work like a fish. At least legs perform roughly the same function as wheels: transporting things over the ground. Whereas brains are almost completely, but not quite totally, unlike computers.
Most of what brains do is in the non-reasoning parts. Reason or intelligence in the specifically human sense of forward planning, building complex machines like spacecraft etc, is an minor elaboration on top of a hugely complex system that was selected over millions of years for very different reasons. It would be astonishing if we could learn anything very interesting about how to design computers from such a system.
Horse drawn carriages and modern automobiles have wheels and axles. Does that mean that the latter descended from the former or that similar designs and structures work for similar functions and were implemented by the builders?
Actually, we can trace the descent of modern automobiles from horse-drawn carriages by an elaborative process that in some respects resembles evolution, although because there was an intelligence behind the process it was far less wasteful than evolution by unintelligent variation and natural selection. The evolution of designed things is so efficient that companies had to introduce artificial extinctions in the form of model years to keep the number of new species high enough that people could be induced to buy cars more often than once a decade or so.
That said, yes, convergent evolution does occur--there is an example of an extra vertebra in some tropical species of newts that DNA sequencing has shown to have evolved at least twice quite recently in species that are more-or-less unrelated. But I was not aware that the basic body plan of dinosaurs and mammals had evolved more than once, although an AC replied to my original post saying that in fact it had, and the splayed legs of modern reptiles is in some cases a relatively recent feature.
OK, leave mathematics out of the list and I'll be fine with your point. The math itself would stay both correct and what it is, much stronger: *proven*.
Probability theory is math, and it has to be wrong if evolution by variation and natural selection does not happen. That is, less probable outcomes have to occur more often than more probable outcomes.
I know mathematically-minded Platonists want to believe that math is an independent game of symbolic tiddlywinks with no possible use, interest or relevance for anyone who isn't brain-damaged, but for those of us who see it as a language for describing actual things this would constitute "math being wrong" in the sense that it would no longer describe what it was designed to describe.
In fact, Ornithiscia one of the latin names to describe a certain dinosaur lineage translates as "bird hips" -- but in fact birds descended from the , or Saurischia, or "lizard hip" dinosaurs.
The curious thing that birds, dinosaurs and mammals all have in common is the placement of the legs underneath the body. This is what made it possible for dinosaurs and mammals to get so big. Other lizards are stuck with their legs sticking out to the sides, which limits weight-bearing capacity and means the really big ones are primarily aquatic.
What makes this curious is that this particular innovation appears to have only evolved once in some common ancestor of mammals and dinosaurs. This suggests it must be very unlikely to evolve--much less likely than other things like wings and eyes, which have evolved independently many times. Maybe the early fossil record will eventually show that it in fact arose more than once, but it's such a huge advantage that if it were possible to get it easily one would think that it would be done more often, and it is odd that no other reptile has ever pulled it off.
Neutrino oscillations are a process by which different types of neutrino can turn into each other. The elementary particles (quarks, leptons and neutrinos) all come in three "families". We are made of the lightest family: up and down quarks (which are the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons. Members of the heavier families are unstable and decay rapidly into lighter particles.
However, it turns out that the weak nuclear interaction can mix quarks of different families. Down quarks turn out to be somewhat mixed with strange quarks of the next heaviest family due to this effect.
For a variety of reasons, it was natural to ask if neutrinos were mixed in the same way. In particular, this could account for the unexpected deficit of electron-type neutrinos from the sun. Various terrestrial experiments were done in the 80's and 90's to try to detect this effect, including LSND.
Neutrino experiments are extremely difficult and subject to all kinds of backgrounds, making them highly susceptible to errors in calibration and calculation. The LSND results were at odds with everything else that had been seen, but the stakes were high and no one wanted to give up on a result that might be right although it was not widely believed by people outside the LSND collaboration itself.
The experiment described in TFA has tried to independently reproduce the LSND results. This is somewhat easier to do than the original experiment because you can design things so that you are most sensitive to the most interesting region. They have failed to find the effect that the LSND result would predict if it was due to neutrino oscillations, and it is likely that this is the end of it.
The article never says so, but the most likely cause of the LSND result is some error in analysis, particularly in accounting for backgrounds and instrument effects. This kind of thing happens, particularly in neutrino physics, where the background processes are fundamentally many orders of magnitude stronger than the effects you are looking for, and have to be designed out with the most excruciating care.
Yeah, but physics says that if your airflow is being redirected it's not only losing power from changing the direction of the flow
Fluids is a tricky subject, and not just grammatically. So long as the force doing the redirecting of the flow is everywhere normal to the direction of the flow there is no power expended in the process of redirection. This is not quite the case in the Coaanda effect, which seems to be mediated by frictional effects, but one of the startling things about it is that the normal forces are much larger than the frictional forces, so you do get substantial redirection with very small losses.
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The issue is incentivizing the research behind innovation.
I think he did read your post and you're talking past each other.
He is pointing out that bits can be copied for free. You are pointing out that to prevent that we need robust laws to stop people from copying bits for free. I'm pretty sure he understands your point. He just thinks you're wrong.
Material goods are easy to protect from copying because they are relatively hard to copy. "IP" is inherently copyable at almost zero cost, and therefore has no market value unless that value is created by an artificial scarcity produced by extremely expensive laws, with all of their outrageous secondary effects like the creation of patent trolls. There is no evidence that "IP" when so protected can ever generate sufficient wealth to pay for the legal infrastructure required to maintain the required artificial scarcity, much less support the parasitic growths that that legal structure will necessarily attract.
It may be possible to generate sufficient artificial scarcity at a low enough overhead cost to create a primarily "IP" based economy, but it would be extremely foolish to bet the future of your country on it.
So he didn't know he recieved and looked at the drawing and then duplicated it nearly line for line...he's obviously got better drugs than we do
Well, if the U.S. Attorney General can assure us that nothing he can't recall had anything untoward about it, I see no reason why Todd Goldman can't assure us that he innocently copied drawings he didn't know he'd seen.
Increasing the number of H1-B visas won't address an important additional problem that the summary doesn't mention: increasing unwillingness of foreign tech workers to come to the U.S. because they have no rights there. Granted, some of them may be coming from countries where they have fewer rights than American citizens do, but once they enter the U.S. they have no rights whatsoever: not habeas corpus, not due process, not anything.
I've worked in the U.S. in the past, but would be very unlikely to accept a position there since the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, whose passage makes clear that the government believes that no constitutional protections apply to non-citizens, as it explicitly suspends habeas corpus for non-citizens suspected (for any reason) of terrorism. Given that the constitution explicitly forbids congress from passing any law that suspends habeas corpus except in cases of invasion or insurrection there is no reasonable interpretation that can be put on this except that foreigners have no rights in America. All it takes is one baseless accusation of terrorist activity against you, and you're out of luck.
Given that this has actually happened, it is not at all unreasonable for foreigners to want to stay away.
I actually did read the Nature article (or rather the xarchiv version), but did not pay much attention to their comments on Bohm's theory, which I've never taken very seriously. That is why I said "it would appear to kill Bohm's theory" and not "it kills Bohm's theory" (seriously, I changed the latter to the former in editing the post, and didn't bother to check because this is
I note that you do not dispute anything else I have said regarding the paper, which contrary to your assertion does contain new physics.
IE7 won't run on 2k, how long before third party apps start requiring 7 and refusing to work with 6?
Does office 2007 run on 2k? If not, what happens when you receive documents in the new format?
The same logic that Microsoft is trying to apply (punish people who don't upgrade) works just as well for all of Microsoft's really big customers: punish people who do upgrade. Wanna do business with the drug company my g/f works for? Better send them docs that someone with a Win2K machine can read. Otherwise you are out of luck, you don't get the contract, you lose.
And collectively, Microsoft's big corporate customers are a whole lot bigger than MS itself. Ergo, MS will lose this one, and people who rush to adopt anything beyond XP will be the ones punished by the larger market for adopting incompatible technology.
In the meantime, Firefox and OpenOffice have the opportunity to upgrade to Office 2007 and IE7 compatibility, and they will progressively erode MS market share. This will not happen as fast as F/OSS fans want to believe, but it will happen. Ten or fifteen years from now MS will be a corporate IT services organization of the kind IBM has become, and for much the same reasons.
We've known for a couple decades that EPR made local hidden variable theories extremely unlikely.
There is new science here. What they have shown is that any "reasonable" nonlocal theory cannot reproduce the results of experiment (which are correctly predicted by quantum mechanics.) This is building on the foundations that Bell laid, but is a significant new result.
What they do is assume that the down-conversion source produces pairs of photons that have real polarizations. They then put some limits on the effects non-local variables can have by imposing the quite reasonable and experimentally fulfilled condition that the results of measurement at one detector on a sub-ensemble of photons that all have the same real polarization must depend only on local variables. This is must be the case to reproduce Malus' law (the cosine dependence of transmission of a linearly polarized photons through a linearly polarized filter.)
They then show that the influence of nonlocal variables cannot be both such as TO NOT mess up Malus' law for a single detector, and at the same time TO influence measurements at both detectors in such a way as to reproduce the correlation results that are observed experimentally (and predicted by quantum mechanics.)
The experiment involves measuring linear polarization in one branch and elliptical polarization in the other, rather than just sticking to linear polarizations a la Bell et al. This provides them with sufficient degrees of freedom to draw a stronger conclusion than one can from Bell-inequality violations alone.
This is a very nice piece of work, and very much in the spirit of Bell's original work. Amongst other things it would appear to kill Bohm's theory because it will not be able to reproduce the predicted correlation results.
Yes, you heard that. It's what people who had Windows 2000 said, and a heck of a lot of them stayed with Win2k. There really wasn't any compelling reason to move to XP.
My g/f is a drug rep for a major pharma company, and her corporate laptop runs Win2K, the same as everyone else in a corporate workforce that is getting on for six figures.
She uses Outlook, IE, Excel and Word, and that's pretty much it. The tools she has serves her needs, and more importantly from a market perspective, they serve the company's needs. That's why the company has never upgraded: why fix it if it ain't broke?
I run XP on one of my laptops and 2K on one of my desktops, and can hardly tell the difference between them (and Ubuntu on another laptop and Slackware on my server...) From a user's and developer's perspective, XP doesn't have that much to offer over 2K. The stability improvement was notable, but not huge, because 2K was already pretty stable. Lots of 98 users upgraded to XP, I'm sure, but for the major corporate markets that were already using 2K the XP upgrade was marginal, and there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade to Vista, ever.
Do the math:
Number of killer apps that run on Vista that don't run on XP: zero.
Cost of new hardware to run Vista: lots.
Cost of Vista licenses: lots.
Vista features that are "must haves" to workers whose primary computer interaction consists of web-interaction, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet hacks and the odd presentation: zero.
Ergo, there will be no mass upgrade to Vista. Every technology matures. Desktop OS technology for office workers has matured. The next big advance will be in a completely different direction, and anyone smart enough to anticipate it will get rich. But it won't be simply in another release of an OS with essentially the same functionality and a lot bigger hardware requirements to support the new eye-candy.
Ok, I R'd TFM. Now I'm even more impressed -- nuclear power without stray neutrons. Ubergreen.
p + 11B -> alpha + alpha + alpha has been known for a long time, and has some serious problems. Google "migma" to get some of the background.
The basic issue is that the Coulomb barrier is large and the radiative losses in the plasma will always be larger than the generated power for reasonable configurations. This is not to say that it is impossible, just very, very hard, and some of the most promising approaches involving disequilibrium plasmas have been proven on very general theoretical grounds to be unworkable.
Furthermore, any system that contains high energy alpha particles will also produce neutrons via secondary reactions. "A-neutronic" fusion is usually defined as "one neutron or less per hundred fusion reaction. pB fusion has the potential to reach this limit, but because the number of fusing nuclei is staggeringly large to produce interesting amounts of power, if you stood beside an unshielded pB reactor you would still die of radiation poisoning in short order. This does not really qualify as "without neutrons" as that phrase would normally be understood, making the "aneutronic" name an unfortunate piece of scientific marketing-speak.
Low-neutron-emission fusion scenarios are worth exploring, but it is important to have reasonable expectations of what the fundamental physics actually limits the technology to doing.
How about a song for the thousands of victims tortured and killed under Castro's regime?
This reminds me of nothing so much as the standard Soviet apologist's rhetoric when faced with a facts about the crimes committed in the name of building socialism. It was quite common for apologist's to say, "Yeah, but what about the homeless people in the United States!? What about Vietnam! What about Nicaragua?!" etc...
For the massively logic impaired, here is a small lesson: changing the subject to something completely unrelated does not constitute an argument. In fact, it is a sure sign that you do not actually have an argument. If all you can bring up in objection to a statement of fact or argument is a bizarre and irrelevant bit of rhetorical misdirection, you have conceded the original point, which in this case is: the government of the United States is guilty of unlawfully detaining innocent people in Gauntanamo Bay.
Now that you have conceded that point by failing to raise any objection to it but instead introducing some unrelated facts, perhaps people should discuss what is to be done about this ongoing criminal activity by the government of the United States.
As for what the rest of the world does, who the hell cares?
We care because a lot of people here are saying "This couldn't possible work! I can imagine it will lead to all kinds of bad effects like this..." and they then go on to describe something that is known to not happen in the rest of the world where first-to-file has been the norm for decades.
These people remind me of nothing so much as a Renaissance mystic's response to Galileo's observation of the Jovian moons. He said that because there were seven seas on the Earth and seven openings in the human skull, there must be only seven planets in the heavens, so Galileo must be wrong. It "just made sense" to him that extra planets were impossible.
Empirical evidence is always the final arbiter of reality, and should be the final arbiter of policy, and the people here who are basing their beliefs about the consequences of first-to-file on the contents of their imaginations need to start looking beyond the end of their own cerebral cortex.
Just look at how attention to foreign implementations has been fucking up our copyright laws.
Actually, speaking in my capacity as a foreigner, what is happening is quite the opposite. The US is continually trying to bully us into adopting your crazy copyright system.
Empirical fact. It's not just for scientists any more.
I'm sceptical of the utility of such intuitive pictures of the mathematical abstractions we use to describe the universe. I've seen too many good physicists mislead by forcing their understanding into an intuitive box, and have also seen that we have the ability to make absolutely anything seem intuitively correct after enough twisting our brains around.
That said, the state-machine model of time progression is one that is relatively rare in physics. There is theory called "finite nature" that explicitly treats time this way (one of the axioms is "the universe is computing the future as fast as it can.") But in mainstream physics time is treated more like a parameter than a dynamical quantity, and we simply take for granted that the equations are motion are expressed relative to it.
Higher spacial dimensions don't look too bad because we can easily think of a 2D universe and imagine what a 3D universe would look like from that perspective. But with time, we don't really understand the one time dimension we have, and can't imagine what the universe would look like to creatures in a world without time, and so any intuitive picture of extra time dimensions is challenging.
For example, we can imagine a 3D object moving along a different space dimension and having its 3D projection appear and disappear in our world in a blink, assuming our world has small but finite extension in the extra spacial dimension. But for an object to change along another time dimension would imply that while its own time co-ordinate in our world was fixed, it could undergo alteration (because it would move along one of the other time dimensions.) This would imply that there was an instant in which one thing was many things, which we are not equipped to deal with.
For example, suppose that an atom decayed from an excited state into its ground state along a different time dimension (that is, during the decay process the world-line of the atom is extended along an alternative time dimension while having a zero-length projection onto our own). That would mean from our perspective it would at one time both have and have not emitted a photon in the same respect and at the same time...which kinda sounds like quantum mechanics, now that I think of it...
Ok, now I have to go away and ponder some more.
It just turns out that cloning vegetables is so much easier than cloning animals, that we have been doing it for -literally- centuries.
So what you're saying is that cloning is fundamentally different in vegetables, and therefore it makes perfect sense that the labelling requirements are different. That's a pretty good argument in favour of labelling.
Those of us who support labelling of cloned and GMO foods do so because we have a right to make an informed choice as to what we are buying. Since all bananas are propagated asexually, there is no need to label them as such, because absolutely every banana you buy is the same. But that is not true of animals: some meat will be from cloned animals, some will not. Therefore labelling makes sense. In fact, if you are so very deeply concerned that "everything in the store" will have to be labelled as cloned, I would be happy to only require that uncloned meat be labelled as such.
There are many reasons why people might choose to support producers who eschew cloning. We are all familiar with the enormous disasters related to cloning in the past. The banana industry almost destroyed. The Irish potato famine... (you did mention that people have been cloning potatoes for centuries, right?)
Cloning is a trap that catches the greedy and the stupid. I don't have to support them, and I would choose not to if I am allowed to make informed choices as to what I buy.
How about: the system turns off if any component is disconnected or removed from the body, and requires a code to log in when turned on? Sounds easy enough to me...
Sure, because additional systems designed to lock out users never cause actual problems in the field...
What would it mean for there to be more than one time dimension?
The answer to all your specific questions is "No"--consciousness is almost certainly an emergent classical phenomenon of the brain, and certainly has nothing to do with quantum mechanical effects of the kind Penrose is concerned with in his crazy book on the subject.
The meaning of extra dimensions is tricky. The physics we experience is clearly 3+1D: three spacial dimensions and one of time. No one knows what makes time different, no one knows why we have three independent space dimensions, and no one knows what it would mean in any larger sense for there to be extra space or time dimensions.
Every extra-dimensional model predicts different concrete consequences for our 3+1D experience, mostly in terms of either exotic particles near the weak scale or odd gravitational effects. Because we are for some completely unknown reason constrained to a 3+1D universe, we are like flatlanders trying to infer 3D physics from the oddities of our 2D domain that we can't otherwise make sense of, and our experiences don't necessarily provide very good constraints on viable higher-dimensional models.
In our case, the major oddity we are trying to explain is why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces of nature, or conversely, why the Planck mass is so large compared to the masses of the particles we find ourselves made out of. There is a sixteen order-of-magnitude gap between the weak interaction scale (~1000 GeV) and the Planck scale (10^19 GeV). We have no clue as to why this might be, but it is really hard to make a low-particle-mass universe out of such a high-particle-mass fundamental scale. It is as if we were living in a building constructed ONLY of blocks that are 10^13 miles long, but the corridors and rooms are ten feet wide. You'd have to think there was something tricky going on to make that happen.
It turns out that adding extra dimensions to the mathematical description of our universe makes it relatively easy to create models where this huge gap in scales (called the "hierarchy problem") goes away. Of necessity, these extra dimensions are must somehow be made invisible to us, either by rolling them up in a process called compactification, or through quasi-dynamical means like brane-confinement in string theory (a "brane" is a lower-dimensional structure that can have special dynamics in string theory, allowing particles to be confined to it, and if the particles we are made out of are all confined to a 3+1D brane, then so are we.)
Again, the thing we can be absolutely sure of: any effects these extra dimensions have will appear only in high-energy physics experiments in the form of new particles, or in very subtle effects on the force of gravity. We will never be able to observe them directly, travel in them, or experience them. Of course, I could just be talking moonshine...
I wonder if there's a class action lawsuit here for deceiving the customer about ownership of the technology.
I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt it. First, consider other cases of Vonage bad behaviour: they have a long history of not telling customers the truth. They gave me false information about number mobility, and then tried to charge me a cancellation fee when it turned out I couldn't keep my old number. Based on the number of Vonage customer "service" horror stories circulating on the 'Net this kind of behaviour is not an anomaly but rather a policy for them.
Second, patents cover what the courts say they cover, and one of the delights about patent law is that you never really know how good--or how broad--a patent is until it has been challenged in court. So it would be hard to claim that Vonage knowingly lied to their customers in this case, because they can honestly claim they did not know until the court ruled.
Vonage--and their customers--took a chance. It looks like they lost. I feel sorry for their customers, because I know that the people they haven't screwed over have been fairly happy with their product, but I don't feel sorry for Vonage in the least, who are the worst company I have ever dealt with.
I like to believe that, in America at least, we avoid this "Catch-22" wherein we assume from the get go that the alleged criminal is innocent until proven guilty.
.sig points out, what would commonly be called a statistical certainty.
Unfortunately, regardless of what you like to believe, America has pursued a deliberate and considered policy of "guilty and not allowed to prove innocence" for the past several years. The innocent people being held in Guantanamo Bay are routinely describe by government officials from the President on down as "terrorists". Apart from one Australian guy who plea-bargained his way out recently, they have not been convicted of any crime and never will be, because they will never have access to any court of law, only military tribunals that do not meet the ordinary standards of criminal justice.
There are about 500 people being held at Guantanmo Bay. They were all taken into custody either in battlefield conditions, via raids on villages and homes, or captured by ever-reliable authorities like the Pakistani and Afghan police and armed forces.
Statistics from evil, America-hating, left-wing organizations like the National Rifle Association show that when a cop intervenes during a crime in progress and they use a firearm, they shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time. Armed citizens shoot the wrong person about 1% of the time.
Let's be generous to the organs of the state, and assume they are able to achieve the same impressive accuracy that well-armed American citizens are able to achieve when they are actually faced with a crime in progress. That means that there are on average 5 innocent people in Guantanamo Bay. P(0) for a Poisson distribution with a mean of 5 is 0.67%, even with this vastly generous assumption. If we adopt a more realistic assumption that in the midst of the fog of war the armed forces of America and other far less professional organizations have only half the same failure rate as the NRA says American cops have, P(0) ~ 1e-11. This is, as my
So unfortunately, tragically, at the presumption of innocence is not a prominent feature of American jurisprudence, although the story is not yet over. Sarcasm aside, there are great, pro-American organizations like the ACLU still fighting before the courts for the rights of these innocent people.
Every talking head with an agenda will use this.
Are there any talking heads without an agenda?
That's the whole point of what the talking heads, and the entertainment programmes that foist them on a willing public, do: they promote the agendas of the political organizations they front for.
Nor were there ever any "good old days" when the 6 o'clock entertainment programme actually deserved the name of "news". Journalism has always been about agendas, and healthy journalism in a free society is about lots of different and frequently opposing agendas. The spectacle is at times amusing and at time like this sickening, but it never ceases to be a spectacle. It is always about entertainment and political power, and only incidentally about information.
And never, ever, about anything remotely resembling human decency.
Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
That's a quote from the article, and demonstrates it is simply the usual ignorant journalist just making stuff up.
Einstein was a theoretical physicist who dabbled in refrigeration technology. Introducing him into a discussion of the biology and epidemiology of domestic bees makes as much sense as quoting Dick Cheney on how to run a socialized healthcare system.
Anyone who is reduced to introducing supporting quotes purely on the basis of name recognition of the person being quoted clearly has no story and no facts.
People don't use neural networks because they not as easy to train as SVM (given that you're given libSVM or equivalent). However, SVM are basically template matchers, which are good for problems where the number of samples is big compared to the dimensionnality of the problem (which is NOT the case for real world problems), but that's it.
Having used both neural networks and SVMs in real world problems (particle physics and micro-array data analysis) I can say that SVM performance is far better, at least when you employ a committee architecture. Heuristically, I've found SVMs much harder to over-train, which is the most common problem I've encountered with neural networks.
In any case, why anyone wants to make a computer work like a brain is beyond me. It is worse than trying to make a wheel work like a leg or a submarine work like a fish. At least legs perform roughly the same function as wheels: transporting things over the ground. Whereas brains are almost completely, but not quite totally, unlike computers.
Most of what brains do is in the non-reasoning parts. Reason or intelligence in the specifically human sense of forward planning, building complex machines like spacecraft etc, is an minor elaboration on top of a hugely complex system that was selected over millions of years for very different reasons. It would be astonishing if we could learn anything very interesting about how to design computers from such a system.
Horse drawn carriages and modern automobiles have wheels and axles. Does that mean that the latter descended from the former or that similar designs and structures work for similar functions and were implemented by the builders?
Actually, we can trace the descent of modern automobiles from horse-drawn carriages by an elaborative process that in some respects resembles evolution, although because there was an intelligence behind the process it was far less wasteful than evolution by unintelligent variation and natural selection. The evolution of designed things is so efficient that companies had to introduce artificial extinctions in the form of model years to keep the number of new species high enough that people could be induced to buy cars more often than once a decade or so.
That said, yes, convergent evolution does occur--there is an example of an extra vertebra in some tropical species of newts that DNA sequencing has shown to have evolved at least twice quite recently in species that are more-or-less unrelated. But I was not aware that the basic body plan of dinosaurs and mammals had evolved more than once, although an AC replied to my original post saying that in fact it had, and the splayed legs of modern reptiles is in some cases a relatively recent feature.
OK, leave mathematics out of the list and I'll be fine with your point. The math itself would stay both correct and what it is, much stronger: *proven*.
Probability theory is math, and it has to be wrong if evolution by variation and natural selection does not happen. That is, less probable outcomes have to occur more often than more probable outcomes.
I know mathematically-minded Platonists want to believe that math is an independent game of symbolic tiddlywinks with no possible use, interest or relevance for anyone who isn't brain-damaged, but for those of us who see it as a language for describing actual things this would constitute "math being wrong" in the sense that it would no longer describe what it was designed to describe.
In fact, Ornithiscia one of the latin names to describe a certain dinosaur lineage translates as "bird hips" -- but in fact birds descended from the , or Saurischia, or "lizard hip" dinosaurs.
The curious thing that birds, dinosaurs and mammals all have in common is the placement of the legs underneath the body. This is what made it possible for dinosaurs and mammals to get so big. Other lizards are stuck with their legs sticking out to the sides, which limits weight-bearing capacity and means the really big ones are primarily aquatic.
What makes this curious is that this particular innovation appears to have only evolved once in some common ancestor of mammals and dinosaurs. This suggests it must be very unlikely to evolve--much less likely than other things like wings and eyes, which have evolved independently many times. Maybe the early fossil record will eventually show that it in fact arose more than once, but it's such a huge advantage that if it were possible to get it easily one would think that it would be done more often, and it is odd that no other reptile has ever pulled it off.
Look on my works, ye primates, and cluck!"
Should probably be "go cluck" to get the metre correct.
Extremely funny, either way.
Neutrino oscillations are a process by which different types of neutrino can turn into each other. The elementary particles (quarks, leptons and neutrinos) all come in three "families". We are made of the lightest family: up and down quarks (which are the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons. Members of the heavier families are unstable and decay rapidly into lighter particles.
However, it turns out that the weak nuclear interaction can mix quarks of different families. Down quarks turn out to be somewhat mixed with strange quarks of the next heaviest family due to this effect.
For a variety of reasons, it was natural to ask if neutrinos were mixed in the same way. In particular, this could account for the unexpected deficit of electron-type neutrinos from the sun. Various terrestrial experiments were done in the 80's and 90's to try to detect this effect, including LSND.
Neutrino experiments are extremely difficult and subject to all kinds of backgrounds, making them highly susceptible to errors in calibration and calculation. The LSND results were at odds with everything else that had been seen, but the stakes were high and no one wanted to give up on a result that might be right although it was not widely believed by people outside the LSND collaboration itself.
The experiment described in TFA has tried to independently reproduce the LSND results. This is somewhat easier to do than the original experiment because you can design things so that you are most sensitive to the most interesting region. They have failed to find the effect that the LSND result would predict if it was due to neutrino oscillations, and it is likely that this is the end of it.
The article never says so, but the most likely cause of the LSND result is some error in analysis, particularly in accounting for backgrounds and instrument effects. This kind of thing happens, particularly in neutrino physics, where the background processes are fundamentally many orders of magnitude stronger than the effects you are looking for, and have to be designed out with the most excruciating care.
Yeah, but physics says that if your airflow is being redirected it's not only losing power from changing the direction of the flow
Fluids is a tricky subject, and not just grammatically. So long as the force doing the redirecting of the flow is everywhere normal to the direction of the flow there is no power expended in the process of redirection. This is not quite the case in the Coaanda effect, which seems to be mediated by frictional effects, but one of the startling things about it is that the normal forces are much larger than the frictional forces, so you do get substantial redirection with very small losses.