so there is no "Good" terminator, but than again there is no "evil" terminator, only terminators whose programming may be for or
against your Personal goals.
So there is no "good" human being, bu then again there is no "bad" human being, only humans whose genetic and environmental programming may be for or against you personal goals.
Being a machine made of meat instead of silicon and steal doesn't automatically grant you superior moral standing or judgement.
I've seen LeGuin speak, been to book-signings at Powell's
Offtopic, but...I recently discovered powells.com and it it rapidly becoming one of my favorite things in the universe. Great selection of used books at decent prices, a rare/out-of-print book finding service, in adidtion to typical new book service, and free U.S. shipping for orders over $50. And a well-designed website. Yow.
A great alternative for those of us who would rather not deal with certain large patent-abusing book merchants.
In fact, the latest EarthSea novel, _The Other Wind_, in some ways repudiates the
Taoist viewpoint of the other novels.
Hmm. I don't find that at all. I would also say that if you see a conflict between balance and justice, you are misunderstanding one or the other...
I think it was only three years or so ago that LeGuin's version of the Tao Te Ching was published, so if she's somehow renounced Taoism it would have had to have been extremely recently.
I just happen to be re-reading
the Earthsea books (which, BTW, for Harry Potter fans, these also deal with a young boy who discovers he has wizardly powers...
Well, the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, does. By the time of the most recent book, The Other Wind, Ged is an old man.
(The Other Wind and Tales From Earthsea were just recently published; I stumbled across them at my local megabookseller and almost literally jumped for joy.)
I find much Le Guin to have a very Taoist philosophy underneath it all.
Absolutely! She has written a wonderful interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.
Re:Faster than light communication
on
Quantum Holography
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you change an entangled photon in any way, the other one instantly changes the same way.
It's more correct to say that if one entangled particle changes, the other changes too. But that only helps you do instantaneous communication if you can change an entangled particle in exactly the way you want. No one's figured out how to do that.
As far as we can tell at present, quantum nonlocality and "spooky action at a distace" exist, but cannot be made to transmit any information.
Looking at a paper I did about ten years ago, I found the following quote from Nick Herbert's Faster Than Light that summarizes the situation:
Eberhard's proof applies to the quantum patterns...[it] guarantees that large-scale quantum patterns will never be
observed to be connected faster than light. Bell's theorem, on the other hand, applies to the individual quantum events themselves, and proves that these little quantum jumps must be connected faster than light...Bell's theorem can coexist
with Eberhard's proof because they each refer to different aspects of a quantum measurement. Bell's theorem...can also exist with the COP rule forbidding all superluminal connections that can be used for signaling, because these Bell-mandated FTL jumps occur in an utterly random manner.
Alice changes the polarisation at that end to 90 degrees.
How? Alice can't reach out and twist that photon. All she can do it rotate her detector, and the photon may or may not - the probability depending on its incident polarization - pass thru and take on the detector's polariztion. That randomness is what makes it impossible to pass information in this way.
Re:Faster than light communication
on
Quantum Holography
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Couldn't you use it to communicate instantly over any amount of distance?
No, you couldn't.:-)
Your mirror scenario wouldn't be making any measurements on the incoming photons, I don't see that it has anything to do with entanglement.
Let's look at another example that gets closer to - but turns out not to be - instantaneous communication. It's been a while since I studied this, so real physicists please correct me, but I think I remember the gist of it.
We'll use polarization as an example. Quick review: every photon is polarized at some angle. If it hits a detector that's at the same angle, it passes though; a detector at 90 degrees to its angle, it's blocked; and at some angle in between, it may or may not pass through, but if it does it will now have the new angle of the detector (i.e., a 45 degree photon hitting a 0 degree piece of polarized material has a 50% chance of being blocked at a 50% chance of passing with its polarization at 0 degrees).
The polarization vector is a quantum superposition of the 0 degree and 90 degree states. If two photons are entangled, and one gets measures and "snaps to" one of these states, its entangled partner always "snaps to" the same state. (Or maybe it always snaps to the opposite state. I forget. Doesn't matter for this example.)
Let's say that our entangled photon source is sending out beams that are polarized at 45 degrees (i.e., in a superposition of 0 and 90 degrees). The sender - call her Alice - sets her polarization detector to either 0 degrees (to transmit a "dot") or 90 degrees (to transmit a "dash"), and her photon randomly snaps to one of these polarizations. If it happens to snap to the matching one, it passes thru the polarization detector.
A light-year away, the matching photon in the detector belonging to the receiver (call him Bob) spookily snaps to the same polarization direction.
Bob's all set to make a measurement, but which way should be set his polarization detector? If he sets it at 45 degrees, then regardless of whether the photon is at 0 or 90 it has a 50/50 chance of passing through, so he'll see half the photons pass. If he sets it at 0, the incident photon has (from Bob's perspective, not knowing whether the next bit of the message is a "dot" or a "dash") a 50/50 chance of being polarized at 0 at 90 degrees, so he'll see half the photons pass. Same if he sets it at 90.
Even though the photons were linked, and each instantaneously "knew" what was happening with the other one, no information can be recovered from the beam, because what the photons do is still random.
(However, by changing this around a little bit Alice and Bob can generate an unbreakable cryptographic key - search Google for "quantum cryptography".)
No. General relativity only becomes noticable at high gravitational forces (or under strong acceleration).
(if you can pass through a worm hole and end up in antoher location, you have, reletive to the onlooker, gone faster than the speed of light and infact almost exist in 2
locations at once.)
No. GR allows for solutions where the "fabric" of spacetime is so "warped" that, while an object traveling through that region (wormhole) never exceeds c locally, over the entire path it may appear to an outside observer that c was exceeded. This is entirely consistent with GR. (As to whether it can actually happen, that's a different issue entirely!)
Re:Interesting, the GM reaction, a little PR pleas
on
GM DNA Spreading...
·
· Score: 1
but everything that the scientists do can (and possibly has) occur in nature.
Fish genes can get into tomatoes naturally? How exactly does that happen? (I have this mental picture of a fish humping a tomato...)
GM has nothing at all to do with the cross-breeding and selection we've been doing for so long. (And that artifical selection has dangers we're just starting to understand, as monoculture leaves our food crops vulnerable.) Historical agriculture - from the first permanent settlements up until a few years ago - has not introduced new genes into a species, only rearranged existing elements of a genome. GM introduces completely new elements into a species' genome.
BTW, it has to be understood that this is being done by the crudest of methods. If we wrote computer programs this way, to introduce a new capability into a program we'd take our best guess at what section of machine code gave an existing program that capability, snip it out, and insert it in random places in our program until it seemed to work.
I'm not sure what First Contact was trying to be? It wasn't a good action movie
and didn't have enough edge to be a good 'Good Vs. Evil' movie either.
Believe it or not, sometimes movies can have subtler themes than "blow up stuff" or "good vs. evil".
The most interesting part of First Contact is Picard's obsession with the Borg. You've also got the Borg's "temptation" of Data, and the deconstruction of the myth around Zephram Cochrane...it's a psychologically heavy movie, with a heaping side order of action. Good stuff.
Anyway, it was written before there were submarines around.
Actually, the first submarine attack (unsuccessful) was during the American Revolution, when a one-man underwater craft called (IIRC) the Turtle tried and failed to plant a charge on a British ship. The first successful use of a submarine was by the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
A team of scientists determined that there was no fossils in the rock, it was just
magnetite crystals.
"Determined" is much too strong a word. The nature of the magnetic grains has been disputed from the start, and the question is still very much open.
Re:By your silly definition, Mr. Editor,
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 1
Who says? You don't think following you around with a gun pointed at your head is a "natural right"?
A "natural right", as I understand the term, refers to one that exists without government action. (Some would claim that these exist because of some god or supernatural force, but I don't believe that's necessary to the concept.) Anything that's created by force or threat of force - government force or individual force - is not a natual right.
Suspects? No proof... we just _think_ this is the case? This bothers me...
Proof? Proof? We don't need no stinkin' proof. In the post-9/11 world, suspicion is enough to get you bombed, let alone get your wires cut.
The "world's policeman" is busily building the "world police-state". Welcome the the 21st century, boys and girls; liberty and justice are no longer in style.
Re:By your silly definition, Mr. Editor,
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2
However. If I write software, with my time, and my effort, then nobody is going to tell ME under what terms I may let someone else use it.
You can choose whether or not to give someone a copy of the software, true - they can't use force to pry a copy out of your fingers. (That's why and how you can sell free software.) But you need government force (or some kind of force) if you want to control what they do with it once you give them a copy.
You have a natural freedom not to give me a copy of a program, poem, song, or whatever you created. You do not have a natural right to control what I do with it afterwards.
I'm not totally opposed to communism.. but that's basically what Stallman wants.
No, it's not, and you would be well served to go read some Marx before you make such ignorant statements.
They are going to get better computers in the classroom that should
ulitimately allow them to get better jobs and improve their quality of living
Bullshit. These kids need better computers in their classrooms the way staving Afghanis need shiny new Air Jordans.
These kids need school buildings that aren't falling down, schools that are free of violence, teachers who are competent and well-paid, and textbooks that are up to date. Computers in the classroom (other than in progamming and clerical classes, of course) is a fad that will ultimately have as much revolutionary impact as educational filmstrips. (Beep.)
This is a loss for everyone except Microsoft. In any sane nation, their corporate charter would have been revoked long ago, their corporate HQ razed and the ground salted, and Gates would have spent a week in the pillory, being pelted with rotten tomatoes and old DOS manuals.
Funny, there's a lot of cops and judges in this country who disagree with you.
Point being? Courts have held many strange beliefs over the years; persons of dark skin can't be citizens, the power to regulate interstate commerce includes the authority for stormtroopers to bust down your door if they think you're growing cannabis for personal consumption, that citizens of Japanese descent weren't entitled to civil rights, and that "make no law" restricting free speech somehow means "make all sorts of laws about speech we don't like".
But the illiteracy of courts does not change the text of the First Amendment.
Are you trying to tell us that you would not (or shold not, I should say) be prosecuted if, let's say, you stood
in the middle of a mall or school, and commenced screaming at the top of your lungs about "horse
fucking"?
If you're shouting and carrying on in a public place - about anything - you can rightly be arrested and prosecuted for disturbing the peace. The content is irrelvent; doesn't matter if you're shouting about horse fucking or preaching the Sermon on the Mount. The state can, to some degree, regulate time, place, and manner of speech, not the content.
You do understand that it's against the law to send materials like that to a minor?
I don't see anything in the First Amendment that says "unless a kid happens to be listening". Any such law is prima facie unconstitutional.
On my property, which my email box is? I have news for you - in my house...
Falacy of extended analogy. Your e-mail spool isn't even a real thing, it's a virtual artifact of software, not at all the same class of entity as your physical dwelling.
Whatever you do on that wire, the worst you can do is drop the call.
Nope. You can also send signals that interfere with other lines on the same trunk. Heck, think about what would happen if you took that twisted pair and put 120 VAC across it (briefly, obviously).
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I demand a new moderation category - "Makes me feel old".
32 days until my 32nd birthday...think I'll have to have a "100000th birthday" party. (A 040th wouldn't be very interesting, nor a 0x20th.)
So there is no "good" human being, bu then again there is no "bad" human being, only humans whose genetic and environmental programming may be for or against you personal goals.
Being a machine made of meat instead of silicon and steal doesn't automatically grant you superior moral standing or judgement.
Offtopic, but...I recently discovered powells.com and it it rapidly becoming one of my favorite things in the universe. Great selection of used books at decent prices, a rare/out-of-print book finding service, in adidtion to typical new book service, and free U.S. shipping for orders over $50. And a well-designed website. Yow.
A great alternative for those of us who would rather not deal with certain large patent-abusing book merchants.
Hmm. I don't find that at all. I would also say that if you see a conflict between balance and justice, you are misunderstanding one or the other...
I think it was only three years or so ago that LeGuin's version of the Tao Te Ching was published, so if she's somehow renounced Taoism it would have had to have been extremely recently.
Well, the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, does. By the time of the most recent book, The Other Wind, Ged is an old man. (The Other Wind and Tales From Earthsea were just recently published; I stumbled across them at my local megabookseller and almost literally jumped for joy.)
Absolutely! She has written a wonderful interpretation of the Tao Te Ching.It's more correct to say that if one entangled particle changes, the other changes too. But that only helps you do instantaneous communication if you can change an entangled particle in exactly the way you want. No one's figured out how to do that.
As far as we can tell at present, quantum nonlocality and "spooky action at a distace" exist, but cannot be made to transmit any information.
Looking at a paper I did about ten years ago, I found the following quote from Nick Herbert's Faster Than Light that summarizes the situation:
How? Alice can't reach out and twist that photon. All she can do it rotate her detector, and the photon may or may not - the probability depending on its incident polarization - pass thru and take on the detector's polariztion. That randomness is what makes it impossible to pass information in this way.
No, you couldn't. :-)
Your mirror scenario wouldn't be making any measurements on the incoming photons, I don't see that it has anything to do with entanglement.
Let's look at another example that gets closer to - but turns out not to be - instantaneous communication. It's been a while since I studied this, so real physicists please correct me, but I think I remember the gist of it.
We'll use polarization as an example. Quick review: every photon is polarized at some angle. If it hits a detector that's at the same angle, it passes though; a detector at 90 degrees to its angle, it's blocked; and at some angle in between, it may or may not pass through, but if it does it will now have the new angle of the detector (i.e., a 45 degree photon hitting a 0 degree piece of polarized material has a 50% chance of being blocked at a 50% chance of passing with its polarization at 0 degrees).
The polarization vector is a quantum superposition of the 0 degree and 90 degree states. If two photons are entangled, and one gets measures and "snaps to" one of these states, its entangled partner always "snaps to" the same state. (Or maybe it always snaps to the opposite state. I forget. Doesn't matter for this example.)
Let's say that our entangled photon source is sending out beams that are polarized at 45 degrees (i.e., in a superposition of 0 and 90 degrees). The sender - call her Alice - sets her polarization detector to either 0 degrees (to transmit a "dot") or 90 degrees (to transmit a "dash"), and her photon randomly snaps to one of these polarizations. If it happens to snap to the matching one, it passes thru the polarization detector.
A light-year away, the matching photon in the detector belonging to the receiver (call him Bob) spookily snaps to the same polarization direction. Bob's all set to make a measurement, but which way should be set his polarization detector? If he sets it at 45 degrees, then regardless of whether the photon is at 0 or 90 it has a 50/50 chance of passing through, so he'll see half the photons pass. If he sets it at 0, the incident photon has (from Bob's perspective, not knowing whether the next bit of the message is a "dot" or a "dash") a 50/50 chance of being polarized at 0 at 90 degrees, so he'll see half the photons pass. Same if he sets it at 90.
Even though the photons were linked, and each instantaneously "knew" what was happening with the other one, no information can be recovered from the beam, because what the photons do is still random.
(However, by changing this around a little bit Alice and Bob can generate an unbreakable cryptographic key - search Google for "quantum cryptography".)
No. General relativity only becomes noticable at high gravitational forces (or under strong acceleration).
No. GR allows for solutions where the "fabric" of spacetime is so "warped" that, while an object traveling through that region (wormhole) never exceeds c locally, over the entire path it may appear to an outside observer that c was exceeded. This is entirely consistent with GR. (As to whether it can actually happen, that's a different issue entirely!)Fish genes can get into tomatoes naturally? How exactly does that happen? (I have this mental picture of a fish humping a tomato...)
GM has nothing at all to do with the cross-breeding and selection we've been doing for so long. (And that artifical selection has dangers we're just starting to understand, as monoculture leaves our food crops vulnerable.) Historical agriculture - from the first permanent settlements up until a few years ago - has not introduced new genes into a species, only rearranged existing elements of a genome. GM introduces completely new elements into a species' genome.
BTW, it has to be understood that this is being done by the crudest of methods. If we wrote computer programs this way, to introduce a new capability into a program we'd take our best guess at what section of machine code gave an existing program that capability, snip it out, and insert it in random places in our program until it seemed to work.
Believe it or not, sometimes movies can have subtler themes than "blow up stuff" or "good vs. evil".
The most interesting part of First Contact is Picard's obsession with the Borg. You've also got the Borg's "temptation" of Data, and the deconstruction of the myth around Zephram Cochrane...it's a psychologically heavy movie, with a heaping side order of action. Good stuff.
It took seven years of "next-generation" R and D to figure out that the answer was BSD? Okay...
But it doesn't matter if it was the product of 200 years of toil by millions. That doesn't grant the right to repress speech. Nothing does.
Actually, the first submarine attack (unsuccessful) was during the American Revolution, when a one-man underwater craft called (IIRC) the Turtle tried and failed to plant a charge on a British ship. The first successful use of a submarine was by the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
Here is one translation of the Czech play.
Oh, you mean that annoying blur was put there deliberately?
Didn't realize it could be disabled until I saw this thread. Thanks!
"Determined" is much too strong a word. The nature of the magnetic grains has been disputed from the start, and the question is still very much open.
A "natural right", as I understand the term, refers to one that exists without government action. (Some would claim that these exist because of some god or supernatural force, but I don't believe that's necessary to the concept.) Anything that's created by force or threat of force - government force or individual force - is not a natual right.
Proof? Proof? We don't need no stinkin' proof. In the post-9/11 world, suspicion is enough to get you bombed, let alone get your wires cut.
The "world's policeman" is busily building the "world police-state". Welcome the the 21st century, boys and girls; liberty and justice are no longer in style.
You can choose whether or not to give someone a copy of the software, true - they can't use force to pry a copy out of your fingers. (That's why and how you can sell free software.) But you need government force (or some kind of force) if you want to control what they do with it once you give them a copy.
You have a natural freedom not to give me a copy of a program, poem, song, or whatever you created. You do not have a natural right to control what I do with it afterwards.
No, it's not, and you would be well served to go read some Marx before you make such ignorant statements.
Bullshit. These kids need better computers in their classrooms the way staving Afghanis need shiny new Air Jordans.
These kids need school buildings that aren't falling down, schools that are free of violence, teachers who are competent and well-paid, and textbooks that are up to date. Computers in the classroom (other than in progamming and clerical classes, of course) is a fad that will ultimately have as much revolutionary impact as educational filmstrips. (Beep.)
This is a loss for everyone except Microsoft. In any sane nation, their corporate charter would have been revoked long ago, their corporate HQ razed and the ground salted, and Gates would have spent a week in the pillory, being pelted with rotten tomatoes and old DOS manuals.
Point being? Courts have held many strange beliefs over the years; persons of dark skin can't be citizens, the power to regulate interstate commerce includes the authority for stormtroopers to bust down your door if they think you're growing cannabis for personal consumption, that citizens of Japanese descent weren't entitled to civil rights, and that "make no law" restricting free speech somehow means "make all sorts of laws about speech we don't like".
But the illiteracy of courts does not change the text of the First Amendment.
If you're shouting and carrying on in a public place - about anything - you can rightly be arrested and prosecuted for disturbing the peace. The content is irrelvent; doesn't matter if you're shouting about horse fucking or preaching the Sermon on the Mount. The state can, to some degree, regulate time, place, and manner of speech, not the content.
I don't see anything in the First Amendment that says "unless a kid happens to be listening". Any such law is prima facie unconstitutional.
Falacy of extended analogy. Your e-mail spool isn't even a real thing, it's a virtual artifact of software, not at all the same class of entity as your physical dwelling.
Nope. You can also send signals that interfere with other lines on the same trunk. Heck, think about what would happen if you took that twisted pair and put 120 VAC across it (briefly, obviously).