Yeah. The table I.1 giving ratios of fundamental particle masses is interesting, if they can be derived. Otherwise, they're just mashing together pi and alpha in various combinations until the desired number pops out. Anyone read to see if he actually does derive them later?
yes he does, yes i have, as have several other people from, for example, the LENR forum (warning: that forum is monitored by censors who have repeatedly demonstrated a deliberate bias... it's extremely weird but consistent behaviour that's statistically correlates with the hypothesis that the censor have an "agenda").
to answer your question properly: um.. how long have you got?:) mills is keenly aware that people may not read the entire document so he puts the summary-of-summaries at the front, followed by a summary, followed finally by actually beginning to get into details. you need to go through about at least *four* of the papers before you get to the point where the mass of an electron makes sense, and another one or two before the mass of a proton makes sense.
then he goes into detail - in *another* paper - how nuclei bond together, and then *finally* there's a formula for generating fundamental particle masses. interestingly, the accuracy of his work tails off as the atomic number climbs, starting at like 10dp for hydrogen (the proton), and reducing i *think* down to something like 6 or 7 dp for the very large atoms. which is interesting in and of itself, as it tells us that he missed something, somewhere. still an incredible achievement though.
i know people who've managed to get to the point where they could explain to me how the photon goes in a circle, and current "rings" are basically the left-hand motor rule from physics as applied to the surface of a sphere, and how when you sum up all those "rings" you end up mathematically with completely uniform (same-length) current "vectors" across the entire surface of that sphere. which is an amazing and absolutely beautiful mathematical "coincidence".
from there, right now, i'm lost as to how the electrical field "energy" is calculated... that's where the 3D Fourier Transforms come in to play... and i know they're applied, i just can't follow the maths of *how* they're applied.
it... it's taken competent independent mathematicians *literally* months to get to grips with just a *fraction* of what's in those 1750 pages. no wonder idiots looking at it dismiss it out-of-hand. the only reason i put up with it is because in skim-reading it eight or nine times i came across the section on the electron magnetic moment, which is only four terms, and comes out to EXACTLY g/2 to something like 11 decimal places.
i cannot.... i cannot emphasise enough how significant that is, but if you're familiar with how g/2 is calculated in the standard model (by "solving" partial differential equations), it's basically guess-work with *hundreds* of A4 pages of densely-packed terms, with huge numbers of those terms *literally* being guessed at *by hand*, because even today's supercomputers aren't powerful enough to work them out. and they call it an "achievement".
so... yeah, apologies, but answering the question you ask with any kind of "justice"... i.e. *independent* verification... it could well take you (or someone with good maths skills) over a YEAR to get to the point where you could verify those tables.
and in the meantime, sadly, we have fuckwits trying to weasel out of reading the work for themselves by making unsubstantiated claims that mills is a fraud. i don't like the word "troll", but that's what those people are. modern-day equivalents of the people who put galileo on trial, basically. cowards, the lot of them.
But I'm not going to link it, or tell you the name of it.
because i didn't want people to think i was "favouring" that particular theory/work. other links here (other comments) have the link to the (100mb) PDF, it's quite easy to find by googling the author's name.
Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.
jaezuss that's a cluster**** gone sideways:) i bet you the discussion is two orders of magnitude longer than the original page.
If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this? https://www.ted.com/talks/garr...
that's a really informative talk, good find. i love the 3D representation of particles, how he goes from 2D to 4D to 6D and it's all projected down to 2D. if you ever want to explore that for yourself with an HTML5 "thing" you can play with it here: http://deferentialgeometry.org...
Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect.
It's not Dunning-Kruger if he's fully aware that he could be wrong, if he's fully aware that he doesn't know everything. His comment is fine, he present his status as an amateur physicist with very good math skill. Seems he understand his skill level, and isn't over-estimating it.
appreciate you defending me, but as a point of order i have to point out that my maths level is well below what you give the impression that i understand:) i have both memory problems and some sort of extremely strange logic-dyslexia (but extremely well-honed pattern-recognition and 3D visualisation skills).
as a software engineer i've had to compensate for the lack of ability to do walk-throughs of basic maths and boolean logic by writing unit-tests, and developed a programming style that verifies the output in an extreme-programming-esquee highly-iterative loop based on rapid minimal code-changes. it's the only way i could think of to compensate for the deficiencies that i'm keenly aware of.... and then i try and read scientific papers or wikipedia or wolfram articles on, for example, "Lie Groups" or "Jones Matrices" and i'm hopelessly lost, immediately. it's very frustrating, because my pattern-recognition, statistical analysis and intuition are screaming at me after 32 years of part-time study that i am definitely on the right track... i just can't *prove* any of it to anybody's satisfaction. nggggh:)
and that last one is particularly poignant, as it's by someone for whom the work that they set out to do just.. wasn't fun. they had a goal, but they'd forgotten the journey.
the other one quotes the observer.
here's another one: https://backreaction.blogspot.... which points out that the "bang-per-buck" is firmly on the "please for god's sake pull the plug" side.
i'm struggling to find the original article, but i believe this last post comes fairly close. basically i'm pointing out that it's not *my* idea(s). i didn't reference *any* of *my* work. these are *other people's* opinions - ones that are becoming increasingly common, that's all.
basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves.
I don't think it's wrong that society is not expected to fund people's hobbies. If people want to try to lead into gold or whatever 'non-standard science' on their own time, that's fine. Don't expect me to pay for it though.
patronage, particularly during victorian times, was basically how scientific enquiry got funded. and the arts, and much more. it was a "golden age". many industrialists became extremely wealthy, and it was "de rigueur" amongst your wealthy peers to either (a) fund some scientific research in the hope that the people you funded would make something that you could make MORE money out of (b) you were so rich you just did it anyway.
now, would some of those people so funded have been fraudsters? quite probably. would such people have been disovered pretty quickly? almost certainly. would they have been people who initially had "hobbies" that, thanks to their patron, *became* a genuine line of scientific advancement? yes absolutely.
fast-forward a few centuries, and the money that the "wealthy" has is far, far greater than that which the wealthy people of the victorian age had. so what the hell's gone wrong? why is there no such thing as "patronage" any more? that's down to society. you said it yourself: "don't expect me to fund your quotes hobby quotes". yes we have crowd-funding as a way to get round that, as it takes more than one person (of our level of financial capacity) to fund an idea, but as for the really *really* truly wealthy? there's not a single incentive for them to do anything other than "get richer". walk away from society, effectively sucking the monetary system (and the ability to fund new scientific lines of enquiry) dry as a result.
... and? why would that matter to me (or anyone else)? what relevant contribution do you have to make to scientific enquiry? more disbelief? more scorn? are you paid to rubbish other peoples' work? are you being paid by the U.S. Government to discredit people? are you being paid by the Russian Government instead? what is your motivation for expressing and spreading "disbelief"? if you are not being paid, are you on a personal crusade to destroy scientific enquiry? are you out to personally discredit anyone who does not tow the "status quo"?... do you get where that's going? i'm questioning your motives for spending time and energy on trying to tell everyone in the world how "bad" someone else is. the word for this is "troll", and another word is "paid shill". which of those are you?
> now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model
So there will be more data to show more holes in the Standard Model. Although a roundabout path, ultimately it should provide data to help alternative theories.
... *if* they get funded... and given the way that funding is biased towards people who've *failed* to improve on (or replace) the standard model, i really don't see that that's very likely. which is a very short summary of the entirety of the up-stream post:)
now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?
OK, but what are these "non-standard" scientists going to do differently? Do they have experiments that would be a better application of our (collective) money than an upgrade in the standard model?
Even if the standard model is somewhat wrong (it's mostly right, just like Newton's model is mostly right), then what experiments would we do differently to verify it?
these are extremely pertinent and insightful questions that i deliberately didn't ask in the reply that started this thread, as i wanted to keep it to just one (albeit long) point. if it's ok with you i'm going to do a "wandering tour" before directly answering, ok?
first thing: the standard model is "right" because as you can see from those "magic constants" listed in that link to spinor.info https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=... it's *MADE* to be "right" by virtue of the unexplained magic constants being altered and adjusted using statistical analysis to fit the available data. on the basis that there's really not a lot of point to publishing magic constants that made the standard model WRONG, would there??:)
second thing: if you ever get a chance to meet a particle physicist (theoretical or practical e.g. working at CERN) i invite you to ask them this very simple question: what are particles *actually* made of? they won't be able to give you an answer, and there's a very simple reason why: they've been trained (mind-blinkered), through the Standard Model, to think of particles EXCLUSIVELY at one mathematical step removed i.e. in the FREQUENCY domain.
if you're not familar with this, quantum mechanics is basically about doing an FFT (fourier transform). that's really all there is to it. you move *everything* to the frequency domain, and do all math there. so Yang-Mills theory (which is the fundamental basis of modern particle physics theory) as i understand it is basically Maxwell's Equations moved to the frequency domain. https://www.google.co.uk/searc... and i *think* that perspective is confirmed by this paper here http://inspirehep.net/record/1...
so if everything's moved to a mathematical "hands-off" construct, how the hell is anyone supposed to determine what's actually *inside* particles??
where that went wrong was somewhere around the 1930s, when quantum mechanics got such amazing answers that anyone not formulating theories in quantum mechanics terms was basically left with egg on their faces. the ring model. kaluza-klein theory (which has problems raised by its answers that still haven't been addressed).
so if you want to even *start* formulating a theory that begins to predict actual particles, you need something radically different to start *from*. garrett lisi's "exceptional theory of everything" https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.077... was one paper that showed promise, with some predicted new particles, however lisi himself later worked with a mathematician to *prove* that the theory could not work https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.265...
there was another guy, john williamson, "on the nature of the photon and the electron" http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/11095... who moved Maxwell's Equations to 6D Clifford Algebra, and got some startli
Hi Randall. No, we won't give you millions of subsidy.
google "lkcl". https://slashdot.org/~lkcl - we are not the borg. Randall != lkcl - we are different people. no i do not give out my slashdot login credentials to people.
Is that the same Randall Mills from Brilliant Light Power?
yes it is. his work on hydrinos was a side-effect of the underlying (sound, zero-postulation, zero-appromations) theoretical work into the electron, proton, neutron and neutrino (and a couple others like the muon). that work in turn came out of his pioneering improvements to NMR resonance, where, due to the extreme strength of the magnetic fields involved, "standard" theories of the neutron, electron and proton just don't hold up.
Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect. It's entirely possible that someone with the expertise you don't have (i.e. a particle physicist) could point out glaring inconsistencies that you are overlooking.
you know what? if someone *actually fucking well bothered to even look* i would be absolutely delighted. sorry for swearing as emphasis, but it's completely insane and terribly frustrating that the only people who will look at dr randall mill's work - not the hydrinos, the fact that he has the electron mass and magnetic moment calculated with ZERO postulation to over 10 decimal places with simple straightforward classical equations none of them requiring supercomputers, approximation or partial differentiation - are "amateurs" with A-Level maths skills (or even less), like myself (i'm slightly exaggerating here as there are at least half a dozen people in the world trying to understand dr mill's work, and reproduce and follow the maths. one of them has got a long way, enough to be able even to explain it to me in a way that i can understand).
now if even *one* person within the standard particle physics community actually bothered to look at his work and started making even a *single comment*, whether it was to point out a flaw or not, i would be absolutely delighted.
but the fact remains that because it's not the standard model, nobody and i mean nobody in the standard academic world - with very few exceptions - will go anywhere near it, because to do so would result in their chances of ever receiving funding being permanently poisoned for the rest of their natural life. and this stuff does take years - decades - to study.
nobody in the academic world has that kind of personal money: you just can't feed yourself and your family with a full-time job *and* study particle physics at the same time: it's far, FAR too complex and needs total focus. there's very few exceptions to that: the only people i know of who've tried are jay yablon, hans de vries, carl brannen and marni sheppeard.
of those four: carl is *really* struggling to get his PhD at the same time as continuing a full-time job, he's been on it over 5 years now, marni nearly starved herself to death (literally) in completing the amplituhedron work, hans has gone entirely off-grid (terminated his work), and the only person continuing is jay, who, as an extremely competent patent lawyer, gets enough money from that to be able to pursue his life's interest. however it competes with time spent with his grandchildren, whom he cherishes more than anything in the world. and you know what? he's someone who has got his priorities right.
basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves. at least in victorian times "patronage" was just what everyone did. now it's pretty much "i'm rich, fuck the rest of you".
i've been studying alternative theories to the Standard Model for years. by amateurs, semi-amateurs, "professionals" operating outside of the peer-reviewed process for "some reason" (see below), as well as academics operating within the peer-reviewed community: piotr zenczykowski, sundance osland bilson-thompson (yes a real person!), and many more.
the amateurs... dang. there's a lot of crap out there.
the semi-amateurs... yyeah they actually get somewhere, generally, but they tend to want to contribute to the Standard Model because that's what everyone else is doing.
professionals operating outside of the peer-reviewed process: i'll describe these below. they're extremely rare (as in: there's only really one group, led by one person)
academics: these tend to focus on the Standard Model. the two that i mentioned - piotr and sundance - actually based their work on Haim Harari's "Rishon Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it was extremely popular in the 1980s but unfortunately did not go anywhere.
there's also "String Theory" which has taken literally decades of extremely talented mathematicians (reducing - or wasting - the world-wide available pool of mathematical talent in the process, was one complaint i saw made by other academics, a few years ago).
all this means we basically have a lot of effort being spent on a theory with at least TWENTY SIX completely unexplained "magic constants"! https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=...
the one exception to this is work by someone called dr randall mills, whose work started somewhere in the 1990s, and, after 30 consistent self-referencing papers (because no peer-reviewed journal would accept them) he and his team published a whopping 1750-page book containing the material. it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.
now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?
basically i am trying to point out that upgrading the hardware really isn't going to help. the academic peer-reviewed system is so broken that i have really not a lot of hope that things will change. if you are not familiar with this concept, you can google it for yourself: https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
this article - which i had never seen until now - is particularly fascinating: https://www.nature.com/news/pe... which points out that peer-review is "a response to political demands for public accountability". whilst we may claim that, in concert with internet searches and connectivity arxiv (and vixra) are helping to bypass that and allow "public comments" over time to help spot mistakes, it doesn't help with the top journals, which is what most academics read and take seriously. and if those journals are biased....
I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce.:-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD.
apologies i missed this the first time, however it's probably best done as a separate response anyway. so it goes like this:
1. i have used debian since 1996, since phil hands donated me a 486SX25 laptop so that i could work on samba 1.9.16 and beyond, on the move. its flexibility and reach means i will not use anything else.
2. systemd is so bad - the developers so psychologically damaged - that i will not use it. i will not even tolerate libsystemd1 being on systems that i manage, so it has to go (entirely).
3. devuan *would* be ok... but the same analysis-mind-set that says "libsystemd1 has to go" *also* has me looking at the conflict in devuan's mission statement, and i won't use it because they are *AGAINST* systemd... it's the other side of exactly the same coin.
4. with the sheer overwhelming volume of packages, files and so on from debian that i have (dating back nearly 10 years) "upgrading" to devuan, or dropping debian and going with FreeBSD, or anything basically *other* than "sticking with debian" is simply not possible. period. some of my systems are still "apparently" on debian 7.0 except they're not: they've just been on debian/testing all that time and continuously upgraded as necessary... and i do NOT mean "apt-get dist-upgrade"d.
5. so i am stuck between a rock and a hard place.... and THANK GOD... angband.pl exists. it contains recompiled MODERN (maintained) debian packages, modifying them to have "--without-systemd" in the necessary xorg, pulseaudio, samba, udev, cups and dozens of other packages... and also *REINTRODUCES* console-kit, polkit, udisks2 and many many other packages that were REMOVED (foolishly) from debian as "no longer necessary".
the situation is so stark that i even at one point actually removed libsystemd0 (and udev) from a live-running debian system. i had to use/sbin/MAKEDEV from/etc/rc.local to do it. it was... awful. but, i got what i wanted. then, thank god, i heard about angband.pl. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
bottom line is: debian is fine (as long as you want debian *and* systemd). devuan is fine (as long as you want debian-like and *don't* want systemd). however that leaves absolutely no room for people who do not want debian with systemd, who cannot (for whatever reason) install or convert to devuan.
I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce.:-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.
Thanks
Bruce
appreciated the response, bruce. there is however a caveat in the approach that you recommend (create what i believe is missing and provide it), so let's go through it, to illustrate.
question: what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.
question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of devuan would be needed, wouldn't it? so that's something that i would need to maintain, on my own, wouldn't it? bear in mind that it would be a fork of a fork of debian.
question: where would i get the money from to support my family, pay for their food and accommodation and upkeep, whilst doing this work AND paying for the hosting of hundreds of modified packages of a fork of a fork of debian?
what i am saying is that it is a total myth that individuals may achieve "big" things on their own. a project needs a reason: it needs a story. it needs mind-share. it needs FINANCIAL support (based on offers supporting the story) it needs RESOURCES (based on offers supporting the story). it needs people to "buy in" to the story: technical contributions, coding, website maintenance that makes the story real.
the *story* is far more important than anything else, as without the story (the "why") there *is* no motivation. this is codified in simon sinek's ted talk "why great leaders inspire action".
i think, ultimately, you recognise this yourself, as you said: "there are so many things and so little Bruce":) yes, all of us are only "one". to galvanise us and achieve things bigger than ourselves, we need motivation, we need a "why" that's big enough to sell not just to ourselves but to other people, and backers.
devuan succeeded in selling the story, "let's do debian by removing systemd and adding alternatives in its place", which is itself an incredible feat. but that story was sold on the basis of being AGAINST systemd. it's hurt devuan to do that, as they've effectively lied in their mission statement "devuan is universal and inclusive": it's *not* (because systemd is deliberately excluded).
the next step will be to very carefully heal the damage caused by that decision, and that means putting systemd *back* into devuan (as just another init option). how do you (plural, collectively) sell that story? i don't know. do i have time and funds and resources to even focus on *selling* that story, beyond the occasional slashdot comment? no, not really: i'm focussing on RISC-V and other things full-time, now.
do i have the funds and resources to "do the work myself"? absolutely not! i've been down that road many times and people have fucked me over enough times, spongeing off of my efforts for me to know that i'm not going to be doing it again. but more than that, even if i did it would be a dis-service to everyone in the devuan project, as it would deprive them of the opportunity to heal themselves of the psychological harm caused by being "against" systemd.
Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?
caveat: my brain is known to be made of mush, sometimes. as in, some form of dyslexia / delay means i get basic boolean logic wrong, ok?:)
* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999. you'd need to start searching for "bash" and start doing a bit more investigation (a bash search refers to several variants) to get a proper comparison.
* the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.
* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).
so basically it's down to abdication of responsibility of developers and users to a team that has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of willingness to recognise and take seriously the responsibility of their role... or more to the point that the distro maintainers *CHOSE WITHOUT CONSULTATION* to forcibly abdicate responsibility on BEHALF of users, the maintenance and running of their system to systemd's developers. if you are not familiar with what happened with the debian "vote": systemd was the absolute worst and least-favoured choice by far and above... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.
there are many many articles and examples of why systemd is an extremely dangerous *technical* choice, but mainly it's down to the fact that the users haven't been given any choice - right across the board - due to all major GNU/Linux distros swapping over all at the same time like a flock of birds / shoal of fish. try doing "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd1" and see what happens (or equivalent on fedora, or archlinux). that there *is* no choice is in itself a dangerous precedent (a monoculture).
caveat: systemd has done an insane amount of damage to the GNU/Linux eco-system. people are not really sure why, because it's not about the technical aspects per se, it's that the mindset of the developers *behind* systemd is psychologically damaged, and that mental instability is, by virtue of systemd being PID 1, subsequently spreading like a cancer throughout every single GNU/Linux distro that supports it. the cancer analogy is an appropriate one because it's not really visible until it's far too late.
so the fact that devuan takes a well-known stable distro and provides and maintains an "incremental" system to remove systemd is extremely good, and a huge relief. they've done an extremely competent job of modifying a few base packages then letting the repository "fall through" like an HTTP Transparent Proxy onto *standard* debian packages, such that the (small) team only has to maintain and host relatively few packages, NOT forty thousand, requiring over 100 gigabytes of space.
where devuan goes wrong is - and i really hesitate to say this - the hypocrisy of the claim that they are UNIVERSAL. if they were truly universal, they would have included systemd DESPITE ALL THE PROBLEMS IT CAUSES.
if they had done this, the simplest way to have done it would have been to include build profiles in the various packages xorg, pulesaudio, udev, samba and many more (in a constantly-increasing list) that instead of *REMOVING* systemd allowed building of PARALLEL packages with AND WITHOUT systemd, from the same debian source package.
if they had done that, then interestingly, debian could have considered picking up those modifications and including them *in* debian, thus making devuan's life easier rather than harder.
but they haven't done that, and the hypocrisy and lack of integrity towards the claim that they are "universal" is why i cannot use devuan: instead i use angband.pl on top of debian (and occasionally have to download the source of those packages, modify the build-deps and recompile them).
devuan is a backlash *against* something, and that never goes as people intend. mother theresa was the first person i learned this lesson from, after she famously was invited to an "anti-war" rally, she refused... and said "but if you ever have a peace rally, i'll be delighted to attend".
we're all quite familiar with the concept of a monoculture, from biology. once a population gets dominant it is vulnerable to viruses that take down the *entire* population in one fell swoop. when microsoft was dominant we saw the same concept being analogously applied: computer viruses propagate because of a *monoculture* operating system, the great joke being when Wine was "good enough" to run windows viruses it was actually celebrated - i'm sure there was a story before this one, i remember seeing one on/. involving a word macro-virus https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...... so with that concept established, let's look at facebook (except from a *psychological* perspective rather than a technical one). it's dominant... it's a mono-culture... and it has the ability to... spread memes. it's therefore perfect for spreading "sickness".
question. is facebook going to *stop* spreading "sickness"? no, of course not, because its *entire business model* revolves around spreading information^sickness.
question. can facebook discern which information is "sick" and which is "well"? clearly they can't.
question. *should* facebook be the one that "determines" which information is "sick" and which is "well"? honestly no they should not, because that's *our* responsibility, as *individuals*, not theirs.
question. if facebook cannot serve us, and we are not being served by facebook, what is the next logical step to stop the "illness" from spreading?
answer: don't have a monoculture. that means terminating facebook as it stands, forcefully (by law) or voluntarily (#DeleteFacebook) or by creating an alternative and communications interoperability standards.
bottom line: an internet-connected world culture is great... until you get internet-connected world cultural "disease". one way or another this is going to get "solved". i'd like it to be the case that people take advantage of that funding that's being made available: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Wouldn't not allowing humans to take risk result in harm to the humans?
this exact argument is precisely the logic which destroys countless numbers of robots through the phenomenon known as "irreversible positronic brain-lock". it's a fundamental (and very sad) part of the stories that such highly intelligent beings are basically enslaved to the whims of humans, going from thinking, intelligent beings with a potential lifespan of tens of thousands of years, reduced to a smoking lifeless set of parts within seconds.
for my clients i always always made sure that they ordered 19in 4:3 aspect ratio screens, because they do document editing (invoices) full-screen, and run a web browser full screen as well, switching between the two.
not even 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio screens make *any* sense - laptop or no laptop - when all you are doing is a single *BUSINESS* related activity.
the exception to that rule as i've discovered when using an Aorus X3 Plus V6 is: 3000 x 1800 resolution laptop LCDs when running fvwm2 with a 6x4 virtual desktops (a total of TWENTY FOUR virtual desktops) is absolutely fricking awesome.
on virtual screen (2,1) i currently have SIX 80x60 xterms stacked up 3x2 with about an inch to spare below them. those only take up less than HALF of the left-hand screen real-estate. to their right i have TWO web browsers open at around 1100x800 (chromium) and 1100x700 (firefox) below that. i still have 35 pixels below those two, to fit two time-displays (xclock set to HK/TW time and another one for GMT).
this does however mean that i am sitting approximately a maximum distance of 11 inches from the screen (with short-sighted glasses *removed*) otherwise it is flat-out impossible to read the text. surprisingly however you get used to reading insanely-small text... which is *supposed* to be "retina quality"... very very quickly.
message to product development management weenie types: not everybody is a mindless movie-junkie-zombie "consumpty-numpty"...
Asimov's stories are *really* complicated and absolutely amazing, whilst at the same time being drier than frozen CO2 and consequently at times an awesome pain in the ass to read.
I finished reading the trilogy a week or so ago. There is no feasible way to take what was five hundred or so years of conflict and intrigue, and all the attendant characters, and make it into a two-hour movie. Nor even a three-hour movie.
now that you've read those, can i also recommend the books that were written by authors under the direction of the Asimov Estate? Roger Allen McBride, and Greg Bear. "I, Caliban" and "Foundation and Chaos". also, can i recommend "The End of Eternity", you will see why when you read them. also, "The Robots of Dawn" (paying special attention to Giskard - http://asimov.wikia.com/wiki/R... - who later featured indirectly in "Robots and Empire")
the primary reason is this: i see it again and again, stupid stupid politicians and even high-profile people like elon musk being total idiots, recommending that the "Three Laws be put into Law" or "Sent Into Space". anyone who TRULY UNDERSTANDS the Three Laws knows that they are DEEPLY FLAWED.
Asimov spent a LIFETIME EXPLAINING WHY.
it boils down to the fact that the robots were incapable - literally - of permitting humans to take risk. they had no imagination and no free will (a facet explored in the "I, Caliban" series with the "New Law" robots, which *did* have some modicum of free will).
Giskard was the first Robot with a Zeroth Law, "Thou shalt not allow HUMANITY through action or inaction to come to harm". He "imprinted" that - and his telepathic ability - onto R Daneel, who over the next thirty THOUSAND years became the hidden background character that (as described in "The End of Eternity") caused Earth to become mildy radioactive, forcing humans into space, where, unfortunately, due to the Robots, they populated 50 worlds.... and stopped.
The Foundation Series then jumps forward thirty thousand years, to cover an epic fight for human survival, where it is only AFTER Asimov died and other authors were permitted to "fill in the gaps" (Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear) do we find out what was really going on.
So, when you say "would not fit into a four hour film".... I would be genuinely extremely surprised if the full depth and breadth of Asimov's work would be able to fit into anything less than a 200-series show of an hour each.
I am.. blown away that people believe that the three laws are a good idea. completely astounded.
... what about the real-time tracking of each and every vehicle? Is there a concern that the government now knows where your car is at all times?
not at all! they already know where *you* are thanks to your self-inflicted slavery to facebook and other smartphone-infested lifestyle mental disorders so why would tracking your car be considered "outrageous"?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The table I.1 giving ratios of fundamental particle masses is interesting, if they can be derived. Otherwise, they're just mashing together pi and alpha in various combinations until the desired number pops out. Anyone read to see if he actually does derive them later?
yes he does, yes i have, as have several other people from, for example, the LENR forum (warning: that forum is monitored by censors who have repeatedly demonstrated a deliberate bias... it's extremely weird but consistent behaviour that's statistically correlates with the hypothesis that the censor have an "agenda").
to answer your question properly: um.. how long have you got? :) mills is keenly aware that people may not read the entire document so he puts the summary-of-summaries at the front, followed by a summary, followed finally by actually beginning to get into details. you need to go through about at least *four* of the papers before you get to the point where the mass of an electron makes sense, and another one or two before the mass of a proton makes sense.
then he goes into detail - in *another* paper - how nuclei bond together, and then *finally* there's a formula for generating fundamental particle masses. interestingly, the accuracy of his work tails off as the atomic number climbs, starting at like 10dp for hydrogen (the proton), and reducing i *think* down to something like 6 or 7 dp for the very large atoms. which is interesting in and of itself, as it tells us that he missed something, somewhere. still an incredible achievement though.
i know people who've managed to get to the point where they could explain to me how the photon goes in a circle, and current "rings" are basically the left-hand motor rule from physics as applied to the surface of a sphere, and how when you sum up all those "rings" you end up mathematically with completely uniform (same-length) current "vectors" across the entire surface of that sphere. which is an amazing and absolutely beautiful mathematical "coincidence".
from there, right now, i'm lost as to how the electrical field "energy" is calculated... that's where the 3D Fourier Transforms come in to play... and i know they're applied, i just can't follow the maths of *how* they're applied.
it... it's taken competent independent mathematicians *literally* months to get to grips with just a *fraction* of what's in those 1750 pages. no wonder idiots looking at it dismiss it out-of-hand. the only reason i put up with it is because in skim-reading it eight or nine times i came across the section on the electron magnetic moment, which is only four terms, and comes out to EXACTLY g/2 to something like 11 decimal places.
i cannot.... i cannot emphasise enough how significant that is, but if you're familiar with how g/2 is calculated in the standard model (by "solving" partial differential equations), it's basically guess-work with *hundreds* of A4 pages of densely-packed terms, with huge numbers of those terms *literally* being guessed at *by hand*, because even today's supercomputers aren't powerful enough to work them out. and they call it an "achievement".
so... yeah, apologies, but answering the question you ask with any kind of "justice"... i.e. *independent* verification... it could well take you (or someone with good maths skills) over a YEAR to get to the point where you could verify those tables.
and in the meantime, sadly, we have fuckwits trying to weasel out of reading the work for themselves by making unsubstantiated claims that mills is a fraud. i don't like the word "troll", but that's what those people are. modern-day equivalents of the people who put galileo on trial, basically. cowards, the lot of them.
It's DYNAMITE! It's SENSATIONAL!
But I'm not going to link it, or tell you the name of it.
because i didn't want people to think i was "favouring" that particular theory/work. other links here (other comments) have the link to the (100mb) PDF, it's quite easy to find by googling the author's name.
Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.
jaezuss that's a cluster**** gone sideways :) i bet you the discussion is two orders of magnitude longer than the original page.
If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this?
https://www.ted.com/talks/garr...
that's a really informative talk, good find. i love the 3D representation of particles, how he goes from 2D to 4D to 6D and it's all projected down to 2D. if you ever want to explore that for yourself with an HTML5 "thing" you can play with it here: http://deferentialgeometry.org...
Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect.
It's not Dunning-Kruger if he's fully aware that he could be wrong, if he's fully aware that he doesn't know everything. His comment is fine, he present his status as an amateur physicist with very good math skill. Seems he understand his skill level, and isn't over-estimating it.
appreciate you defending me, but as a point of order i have to point out that my maths level is well below what you give the impression that i understand :) i have both memory problems and some sort of extremely strange logic-dyslexia (but extremely well-honed pattern-recognition and 3D visualisation skills).
as a software engineer i've had to compensate for the lack of ability to do walk-throughs of basic maths and boolean logic by writing unit-tests, and developed a programming style that verifies the output in an extreme-programming-esquee highly-iterative loop based on rapid minimal code-changes. it's the only way i could think of to compensate for the deficiencies that i'm keenly aware of. ... and then i try and read scientific papers or wikipedia or wolfram articles on, for example, "Lie Groups" or "Jones Matrices" and i'm hopelessly lost, immediately. it's very frustrating, because my pattern-recognition, statistical analysis and intuition are screaming at me after 32 years of part-time study that i am definitely on the right track... i just can't *prove* any of it to anybody's satisfaction. nggggh :)
That is not how I read GP's comment at all. As I see it they are making clear, strong claims about particle physics and string theory.
that's why i provided references, plus1entropy. i missed the ones about string theory, here are some:
https://www.neogaf.com/threads...
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~...
which leads to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physi...
and that last one is particularly poignant, as it's by someone for whom the work that they set out to do just.. wasn't fun. they had a goal, but they'd forgotten the journey.
the other one quotes the observer.
here's another one: https://backreaction.blogspot.... which points out that the "bang-per-buck" is firmly on the "please for god's sake pull the plug" side.
i'm struggling to find the original article, but i believe this last post comes fairly close. basically i'm pointing out that it's not *my* idea(s). i didn't reference *any* of *my* work. these are *other people's* opinions - ones that are becoming increasingly common, that's all.
basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves.
I don't think it's wrong that society is not expected to fund people's hobbies. If people want to try to lead into gold or whatever 'non-standard science' on their own time, that's fine. Don't expect me to pay for it though.
patronage, particularly during victorian times, was basically how scientific enquiry got funded. and the arts, and much more. it was a "golden age". many industrialists became extremely wealthy, and it was "de rigueur" amongst your wealthy peers to either (a) fund some scientific research in the hope that the people you funded would make something that you could make MORE money out of (b) you were so rich you just did it anyway.
now, would some of those people so funded have been fraudsters? quite probably. would such people have been disovered pretty quickly? almost certainly. would they have been people who initially had "hobbies" that, thanks to their patron, *became* a genuine line of scientific advancement? yes absolutely.
fast-forward a few centuries, and the money that the "wealthy" has is far, far greater than that which the wealthy people of the victorian age had. so what the hell's gone wrong? why is there no such thing as "patronage" any more? that's down to society. you said it yourself: "don't expect me to fund your quotes hobby quotes". yes we have crowd-funding as a way to get round that, as it takes more than one person (of our level of financial capacity) to fund an idea, but as for the really *really* truly wealthy? there's not a single incentive for them to do anything other than "get richer". walk away from society, effectively sucking the monetary system (and the ability to fund new scientific lines of enquiry) dry as a result.
it's quite sad, really.
Yeah, i'll pass.
... and? why would that matter to me (or anyone else)? what relevant contribution do you have to make to scientific enquiry? more disbelief? more scorn? are you paid to rubbish other peoples' work? are you being paid by the U.S. Government to discredit people? are you being paid by the Russian Government instead? what is your motivation for expressing and spreading "disbelief"? if you are not being paid, are you on a personal crusade to destroy scientific enquiry? are you out to personally discredit anyone who does not tow the "status quo"? ... do you get where that's going? i'm questioning your motives for spending time and energy on trying to tell everyone in the world how "bad" someone else is. the word for this is "troll", and another word is "paid shill". which of those are you?
> now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model
So there will be more data to show more holes in the Standard Model. Although a roundabout path, ultimately it should provide data to help alternative theories.
... *if* they get funded... and given the way that funding is biased towards people who've *failed* to improve on (or replace) the standard model, i really don't see that that's very likely. which is a very short summary of the entirety of the up-stream post :)
now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?
OK, but what are these "non-standard" scientists going to do differently? Do they have experiments that would be a better application of our (collective) money than an upgrade in the standard model?
Even if the standard model is somewhat wrong (it's mostly right, just like Newton's model is mostly right), then what experiments would we do differently to verify it?
these are extremely pertinent and insightful questions that i deliberately didn't ask in the reply that started this thread, as i wanted to keep it to just one (albeit long) point. if it's ok with you i'm going to do a "wandering tour" before directly answering, ok?
first thing: the standard model is "right" because as you can see from those "magic constants" listed in that link to spinor.info https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=... it's *MADE* to be "right" by virtue of the unexplained magic constants being altered and adjusted using statistical analysis to fit the available data. on the basis that there's really not a lot of point to publishing magic constants that made the standard model WRONG, would there?? :)
second thing: if you ever get a chance to meet a particle physicist (theoretical or practical e.g. working at CERN) i invite you to ask them this very simple question: what are particles *actually* made of? they won't be able to give you an answer, and there's a very simple reason why: they've been trained (mind-blinkered), through the Standard Model, to think of particles EXCLUSIVELY at one mathematical step removed i.e. in the FREQUENCY domain.
if you're not familar with this, quantum mechanics is basically about doing an FFT (fourier transform). that's really all there is to it. you move *everything* to the frequency domain, and do all math there. so Yang-Mills theory (which is the fundamental basis of modern particle physics theory) as i understand it is basically Maxwell's Equations moved to the frequency domain. https://www.google.co.uk/searc... and i *think* that perspective is confirmed by this paper here http://inspirehep.net/record/1...
so if everything's moved to a mathematical "hands-off" construct, how the hell is anyone supposed to determine what's actually *inside* particles??
where that went wrong was somewhere around the 1930s, when quantum mechanics got such amazing answers that anyone not formulating theories in quantum mechanics terms was basically left with egg on their faces. the ring model. kaluza-klein theory (which has problems raised by its answers that still haven't been addressed).
so if you want to even *start* formulating a theory that begins to predict actual particles, you need something radically different to start *from*. garrett lisi's "exceptional theory of everything" https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.077... was one paper that showed promise, with some predicted new particles, however lisi himself later worked with a mathematician to *prove* that the theory could not work https://arxiv.org/abs/0905.265...
there was another guy, john williamson, "on the nature of the photon and the electron" http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/11095... who moved Maxwell's Equations to 6D Clifford Algebra, and got some startli
Hi Randall. No, we won't give you millions of subsidy.
google "lkcl". https://slashdot.org/~lkcl - we are not the borg. Randall != lkcl - we are different people. no i do not give out my slashdot login credentials to people.
Is that the same Randall Mills from Brilliant Light Power?
yes it is. his work on hydrinos was a side-effect of the underlying (sound, zero-postulation, zero-appromations) theoretical work into the electron, proton, neutron and neutrino (and a couple others like the muon). that work in turn came out of his pioneering improvements to NMR resonance, where, due to the extreme strength of the magnetic fields involved, "standard" theories of the neutron, electron and proton just don't hold up.
Genuinely not trying to troll you here, but this sounds like classic Dunning-Kruger effect. It's entirely possible that someone with the expertise you don't have (i.e. a particle physicist) could point out glaring inconsistencies that you are overlooking.
you know what? if someone *actually fucking well bothered to even look* i would be absolutely delighted. sorry for swearing as emphasis, but it's completely insane and terribly frustrating that the only people who will look at dr randall mill's work - not the hydrinos, the fact that he has the electron mass and magnetic moment calculated with ZERO postulation to over 10 decimal places with simple straightforward classical equations none of them requiring supercomputers, approximation or partial differentiation - are "amateurs" with A-Level maths skills (or even less), like myself (i'm slightly exaggerating here as there are at least half a dozen people in the world trying to understand dr mill's work, and reproduce and follow the maths. one of them has got a long way, enough to be able even to explain it to me in a way that i can understand).
now if even *one* person within the standard particle physics community actually bothered to look at his work and started making even a *single comment*, whether it was to point out a flaw or not, i would be absolutely delighted.
but the fact remains that because it's not the standard model, nobody and i mean nobody in the standard academic world - with very few exceptions - will go anywhere near it, because to do so would result in their chances of ever receiving funding being permanently poisoned for the rest of their natural life. and this stuff does take years - decades - to study.
nobody in the academic world has that kind of personal money: you just can't feed yourself and your family with a full-time job *and* study particle physics at the same time: it's far, FAR too complex and needs total focus. there's very few exceptions to that: the only people i know of who've tried are jay yablon, hans de vries, carl brannen and marni sheppeard.
of those four: carl is *really* struggling to get his PhD at the same time as continuing a full-time job, he's been on it over 5 years now, marni nearly starved herself to death (literally) in completing the amplituhedron work, hans has gone entirely off-grid (terminated his work), and the only person continuing is jay, who, as an extremely competent patent lawyer, gets enough money from that to be able to pursue his life's interest. however it competes with time spent with his grandchildren, whom he cherishes more than anything in the world. and you know what? he's someone who has got his priorities right.
basically there's something really, really wrong with society, that people with the willingness to study and further science are basically quite literally in some cases expected to starve themselves. at least in victorian times "patronage" was just what everyone did. now it's pretty much "i'm rich, fuck the rest of you".
i've been studying alternative theories to the Standard Model for years. by amateurs, semi-amateurs, "professionals" operating outside of the peer-reviewed process for "some reason" (see below), as well as academics operating within the peer-reviewed community: piotr zenczykowski, sundance osland bilson-thompson (yes a real person!), and many more.
the amateurs... dang. there's a lot of crap out there.
the semi-amateurs... yyeah they actually get somewhere, generally, but they tend to want to contribute to the Standard Model because that's what everyone else is doing.
professionals operating outside of the peer-reviewed process: i'll describe these below. they're extremely rare (as in: there's only really one group, led by one person)
academics: these tend to focus on the Standard Model. the two that i mentioned - piotr and sundance - actually based their work on Haim Harari's "Rishon Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it was extremely popular in the 1980s but unfortunately did not go anywhere.
there's also "String Theory" which has taken literally decades of extremely talented mathematicians (reducing - or wasting - the world-wide available pool of mathematical talent in the process, was one complaint i saw made by other academics, a few years ago).
all this means we basically have a lot of effort being spent on a theory with at least TWENTY SIX completely unexplained "magic constants"! https://spinor.info/weblog/?p=...
the one exception to this is work by someone called dr randall mills, whose work started somewhere in the 1990s, and, after 30 consistent self-referencing papers (because no peer-reviewed journal would accept them) he and his team published a whopping 1750-page book containing the material. it's *dynamite*. it's the *only* one of the theories that i cannot dismiss "out of hand". it makes sense, it's consistent, it's self-consistent, there *are* mistakes, there *are* "missing pieces"... but the core makes perfect sense even to me with A-Level maths.
now, we can *claim* that increasing the power of the particle colliders would increase the detection rate of particles, thus giving a larger statistical analysis base to work from, but with the near-terminal focus being on the Standard Model, where funding is ONLY available if you are working on the STANDARD MODEL, and where deviations from the STANDARD MODEL result in you never receiving funding again... you see where this is going?
basically i am trying to point out that upgrading the hardware really isn't going to help. the academic peer-reviewed system is so broken that i have really not a lot of hope that things will change. if you are not familiar with this concept, you can google it for yourself: https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
this article - which i had never seen until now - is particularly fascinating: https://www.nature.com/news/pe... which points out that peer-review is "a response to political demands for public accountability". whilst we may claim that, in concert with internet searches and connectivity arxiv (and vixra) are helping to bypass that and allow "public comments" over time to help spot mistakes, it doesn't help with the top journals, which is what most academics read and take seriously. and if those journals are biased....
https://ewontfix.com/14/ is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.
I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD.
apologies i missed this the first time, however it's probably best done as a separate response anyway. so it goes like this:
1. i have used debian since 1996, since phil hands donated me a 486SX25 laptop so that i could work on samba 1.9.16 and beyond, on the move. its flexibility and reach means i will not use anything else.
2. systemd is so bad - the developers so psychologically damaged - that i will not use it. i will not even tolerate libsystemd1 being on systems that i manage, so it has to go (entirely).
3. devuan *would* be ok... but the same analysis-mind-set that says "libsystemd1 has to go" *also* has me looking at the conflict in devuan's mission statement, and i won't use it because they are *AGAINST* systemd... it's the other side of exactly the same coin.
4. with the sheer overwhelming volume of packages, files and so on from debian that i have (dating back nearly 10 years) "upgrading" to devuan, or dropping debian and going with FreeBSD, or anything basically *other* than "sticking with debian" is simply not possible. period. some of my systems are still "apparently" on debian 7.0 except they're not: they've just been on debian/testing all that time and continuously upgraded as necessary... and i do NOT mean "apt-get dist-upgrade"d.
5. so i am stuck between a rock and a hard place.... and THANK GOD... angband.pl exists. it contains recompiled MODERN (maintained) debian packages, modifying them to have "--without-systemd" in the necessary xorg, pulseaudio, samba, udev, cups and dozens of other packages... and also *REINTRODUCES* console-kit, polkit, udisks2 and many many other packages that were REMOVED (foolishly) from debian as "no longer necessary".
the situation is so stark that i even at one point actually removed libsystemd0 (and udev) from a live-running debian system. i had to use /sbin/MAKEDEV from /etc/rc.local to do it. it was... awful. but, i got what i wanted. then, thank god, i heard about angband.pl. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
bottom line is: debian is fine (as long as you want debian *and* systemd). devuan is fine (as long as you want debian-like and *don't* want systemd). however that leaves absolutely no room for people who do not want debian with systemd, who cannot (for whatever reason) install or convert to devuan.
I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.
Thanks
Bruce
appreciated the response, bruce. there is however a caveat in the approach that you recommend (create what i believe is missing and provide it), so let's go through it, to illustrate.
question: what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.
question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of devuan would be needed, wouldn't it? so that's something that i would need to maintain, on my own, wouldn't it? bear in mind that it would be a fork of a fork of debian.
question: where would i get the money from to support my family, pay for their food and accommodation and upkeep, whilst doing this work AND paying for the hosting of hundreds of modified packages of a fork of a fork of debian?
what i am saying is that it is a total myth that individuals may achieve "big" things on their own. a project needs a reason: it needs a story. it needs mind-share. it needs FINANCIAL support (based on offers supporting the story) it needs RESOURCES (based on offers supporting the story). it needs people to "buy in" to the story: technical contributions, coding, website maintenance that makes the story real.
the *story* is far more important than anything else, as without the story (the "why") there *is* no motivation. this is codified in simon sinek's ted talk "why great leaders inspire action".
i think, ultimately, you recognise this yourself, as you said: "there are so many things and so little Bruce" :) yes, all of us are only "one". to galvanise us and achieve things bigger than ourselves, we need motivation, we need a "why" that's big enough to sell not just to ourselves but to other people, and backers.
devuan succeeded in selling the story, "let's do debian by removing systemd and adding alternatives in its place", which is itself an incredible feat. but that story was sold on the basis of being AGAINST systemd. it's hurt devuan to do that, as they've effectively lied in their mission statement "devuan is universal and inclusive": it's *not* (because systemd is deliberately excluded).
the next step will be to very carefully heal the damage caused by that decision, and that means putting systemd *back* into devuan (as just another init option). how do you (plural, collectively) sell that story? i don't know. do i have time and funds and resources to even focus on *selling* that story, beyond the occasional slashdot comment? no, not really: i'm focussing on RISC-V and other things full-time, now.
do i have the funds and resources to "do the work myself"? absolutely not! i've been down that road many times and people have fucked me over enough times, spongeing off of my efforts for me to know that i'm not going to be doing it again. but more than that, even if i did it would be a dis-service to everyone in the devuan project, as it would deprive them of the opportunity to heal themselves of the psychological harm caused by being "against" systemd.
Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?
caveat: my brain is known to be made of mush, sometimes. as in, some form of dyslexia / delay means i get basic boolean logic wrong, ok? :)
* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999. you'd need to start searching for "bash" and start doing a bit more investigation (a bash search refers to several variants) to get a proper comparison.
* the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.
* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).
so basically it's down to abdication of responsibility of developers and users to a team that has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of willingness to recognise and take seriously the responsibility of their role... or more to the point that the distro maintainers *CHOSE WITHOUT CONSULTATION* to forcibly abdicate responsibility on BEHALF of users, the maintenance and running of their system to systemd's developers. if you are not familiar with what happened with the debian "vote": systemd was the absolute worst and least-favoured choice by far and above... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.
there are many many articles and examples of why systemd is an extremely dangerous *technical* choice, but mainly it's down to the fact that the users haven't been given any choice - right across the board - due to all major GNU/Linux distros swapping over all at the same time like a flock of birds / shoal of fish. try doing "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd1" and see what happens (or equivalent on fedora, or archlinux). that there *is* no choice is in itself a dangerous precedent (a monoculture).
basically it's really hard to describe.
caveat: systemd has done an insane amount of damage to the GNU/Linux eco-system. people are not really sure why, because it's not about the technical aspects per se, it's that the mindset of the developers *behind* systemd is psychologically damaged, and that mental instability is, by virtue of systemd being PID 1, subsequently spreading like a cancer throughout every single GNU/Linux distro that supports it. the cancer analogy is an appropriate one because it's not really visible until it's far too late.
so the fact that devuan takes a well-known stable distro and provides and maintains an "incremental" system to remove systemd is extremely good, and a huge relief. they've done an extremely competent job of modifying a few base packages then letting the repository "fall through" like an HTTP Transparent Proxy onto *standard* debian packages, such that the (small) team only has to maintain and host relatively few packages, NOT forty thousand, requiring over 100 gigabytes of space.
where devuan goes wrong is - and i really hesitate to say this - the hypocrisy of the claim that they are UNIVERSAL. if they were truly universal, they would have included systemd DESPITE ALL THE PROBLEMS IT CAUSES.
if they had done this, the simplest way to have done it would have been to include build profiles in the various packages xorg, pulesaudio, udev, samba and many more (in a constantly-increasing list) that instead of *REMOVING* systemd allowed building of PARALLEL packages with AND WITHOUT systemd, from the same debian source package.
if they had done that, then interestingly, debian could have considered picking up those modifications and including them *in* debian, thus making devuan's life easier rather than harder.
but they haven't done that, and the hypocrisy and lack of integrity towards the claim that they are "universal" is why i cannot use devuan: instead i use angband.pl on top of debian (and occasionally have to download the source of those packages, modify the build-deps and recompile them).
devuan is a backlash *against* something, and that never goes as people intend. mother theresa was the first person i learned this lesson from, after she famously was invited to an "anti-war" rally, she refused... and said "but if you ever have a peace rally, i'll be delighted to attend".
we're all quite familiar with the concept of a monoculture, from biology. once a population gets dominant it is vulnerable to viruses that take down the *entire* population in one fell swoop. when microsoft was dominant we saw the same concept being analogously applied: computer viruses propagate because of a *monoculture* operating system, the great joke being when Wine was "good enough" to run windows viruses it was actually celebrated - i'm sure there was a story before this one, i remember seeing one on /. involving a word macro-virus https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... ... so with that concept established, let's look at facebook (except from a *psychological* perspective rather than a technical one). it's dominant... it's a mono-culture... and it has the ability to... spread memes. it's therefore perfect for spreading "sickness".
question. is facebook going to *stop* spreading "sickness"? no, of course not, because its *entire business model* revolves around spreading information^sickness.
question. can facebook discern which information is "sick" and which is "well"? clearly they can't.
question. *should* facebook be the one that "determines" which information is "sick" and which is "well"? honestly no they should not, because that's *our* responsibility, as *individuals*, not theirs.
question. if facebook cannot serve us, and we are not being served by facebook, what is the next logical step to stop the "illness" from spreading?
answer: don't have a monoculture. that means terminating facebook as it stands, forcefully (by law) or voluntarily (#DeleteFacebook) or by creating an alternative and communications interoperability standards.
bottom line: an internet-connected world culture is great... until you get internet-connected world cultural "disease". one way or another this is going to get "solved". i'd like it to be the case that people take advantage of that funding that's being made available: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Wouldn't not allowing humans to take risk result in harm to the humans?
this exact argument is precisely the logic which destroys countless numbers of robots through the phenomenon known as "irreversible positronic brain-lock". it's a fundamental (and very sad) part of the stories that such highly intelligent beings are basically enslaved to the whims of humans, going from thinking, intelligent beings with a potential lifespan of tens of thousands of years, reduced to a smoking lifeless set of parts within seconds.
for my clients i always always made sure that they ordered 19in 4:3 aspect ratio screens, because they do document editing (invoices) full-screen, and run a web browser full screen as well, switching between the two.
not even 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio screens make *any* sense - laptop or no laptop - when all you are doing is a single *BUSINESS* related activity.
the exception to that rule as i've discovered when using an Aorus X3 Plus V6 is: 3000 x 1800 resolution laptop LCDs when running fvwm2 with a 6x4 virtual desktops (a total of TWENTY FOUR virtual desktops) is absolutely fricking awesome.
on virtual screen (2,1) i currently have SIX 80x60 xterms stacked up 3x2 with about an inch to spare below them. those only take up less than HALF of the left-hand screen real-estate. to their right i have TWO web browsers open at around 1100x800 (chromium) and 1100x700 (firefox) below that. i still have 35 pixels below those two, to fit two time-displays (xclock set to HK/TW time and another one for GMT).
this does however mean that i am sitting approximately a maximum distance of 11 inches from the screen (with short-sighted glasses *removed*) otherwise it is flat-out impossible to read the text. surprisingly however you get used to reading insanely-small text... which is *supposed* to be "retina quality"... very very quickly.
message to product development management weenie types: not everybody is a mindless movie-junkie-zombie "consumpty-numpty"...
he develops the mathematics to predict the future based on large-scale statistical analysis.
that's not quite correct: the pioneer of psychohistory is R Giskard:
http://asimov.wikia.com/wiki/R...
Asimov's stories are *really* complicated and absolutely amazing, whilst at the same time being drier than frozen CO2 and consequently at times an awesome pain in the ass to read.
I finished reading the trilogy a week or so ago. There is no feasible way to take what was five hundred or so years of conflict and intrigue, and all the attendant characters, and make it into a two-hour movie. Nor even a three-hour movie.
now that you've read those, can i also recommend the books that were written by authors under the direction of the Asimov Estate? Roger Allen McBride, and Greg Bear. "I, Caliban" and "Foundation and Chaos". also, can i recommend "The End of Eternity", you will see why when you read them. also, "The Robots of Dawn" (paying special attention to Giskard - http://asimov.wikia.com/wiki/R... - who later featured indirectly in "Robots and Empire")
the primary reason is this: i see it again and again, stupid stupid politicians and even high-profile people like elon musk being total idiots, recommending that the "Three Laws be put into Law" or "Sent Into Space". anyone who TRULY UNDERSTANDS the Three Laws knows that they are DEEPLY FLAWED.
Asimov spent a LIFETIME EXPLAINING WHY.
it boils down to the fact that the robots were incapable - literally - of permitting humans to take risk. they had no imagination and no free will (a facet explored in the "I, Caliban" series with the "New Law" robots, which *did* have some modicum of free will).
Giskard was the first Robot with a Zeroth Law, "Thou shalt not allow HUMANITY through action or inaction to come to harm". He "imprinted" that - and his telepathic ability - onto R Daneel, who over the next thirty THOUSAND years became the hidden background character that (as described in "The End of Eternity") caused Earth to become mildy radioactive, forcing humans into space, where, unfortunately, due to the Robots, they populated 50 worlds.... and stopped.
The Foundation Series then jumps forward thirty thousand years, to cover an epic fight for human survival, where it is only AFTER Asimov died and other authors were permitted to "fill in the gaps" (Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear) do we find out what was really going on.
So, when you say "would not fit into a four hour film".... I would be genuinely extremely surprised if the full depth and breadth of Asimov's work would be able to fit into anything less than a 200-series show of an hour each.
I am.. blown away that people believe that the three laws are a good idea. completely astounded.
... what about the real-time tracking of each and every vehicle? Is there a concern that the government now knows where your car is at all times?
not at all! they already know where *you* are thanks to your self-inflicted slavery to facebook and other smartphone-infested lifestyle mental disorders so why would tracking your car be considered "outrageous"?
How long before they're hacked to display anti government slogans on every second car? Or just a nice pair of ... mammaries.
Also, if the plates have an LCD screen, there should be an option to press a button in the car to send messages to tailgaters...
"K1CK ME" .... ....
"H@CK ME"
"H0NK ME"