If the rules we use were influenced by our experience of the world, then different experiences would lead to different sets of rules.
There is no reason to assume that we would have noticed this effect. We all have pretty simillar experences. Especially, when you consider a million years of physical evolution to be experence.
My question is "what makes you think the universe follows our rules of logic?" The only correct answer from your point of view is "we evolved brains which recognise something close enough to the universe's logic rules to allow us to create a software version of the actual rules." I just think we should not be too confident that we have logic all figured out.
It works out all the time, but we'll let that slide.
The people who study linear logic would not agree with you.
Our rules of logic aren't falsifiable in the way that newtonian mechanics (or any other physical theory) is
We many not see them as falsifiable when we use them, but they could stop giving good results someplace and we would notice. This may not seems like proper scientific falsifiability, but it is a kind of falsifiability.
Example: Technically, calculous would be on a firmer footing for physics purposes if we based it on probability or quantum mechancs despit the fact that we need a seperate traditional development of calculous to build the probablility theory or quantum mechanics, i.e. this mess we call the real numnbers is not a physical model. The only reason it works so well is probablistic parts of quantum mechanics smooth things out.
Personally, I think things like "and", "or", "not", and modus pones are realitivly universal, i.e. you need them to build your theories of the world, but the quantifiers are a whole new critter. They produce too much weird shit and they have too many alternatives (first-order, second-order, infinitary logics, etc.)
I guess I can say I would not really be that surprised to discover that an alien race had a vastly diffrent mathematics. They might not care about first-order logic, they might have tried to develope a theory without cardinality (Skolem proved the donward Lowenheim-Skolem Theorems to get people to stop studing cardinality), they might have developed a diffrent method of formalising calculous based on a Libnetz view of the world instead of an epsilon-delta view of the world (i.e. our formal logic was developed to make epsilon-delta argumentes, but you could possably work directly towards a non-standard analysis without formalising quantifiers).
You can't (by definition!) arrive at a false result by following your rules.
This is not even correct for mathematics. We can prove that we can not prove the consistancy of set theory (I think this is Godel's other big theorem). Technically, it is possible to find a contradiction in the foundations of mathematics tomarrow! Now most of mathematics would survive because it can be made independent of the foundations were this to be necissary.
This is also not correct in physics. There are so many things floating arround in physics and the rules of logic are vague enough that we could very well find contradictions (like time travel).. and just work our way arround them.
Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result by following yuor rules with no axioms? that would be useless.
Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result if the axioms are true? We must *formally* claim this to do mathematics, but I expect we have axiom systems which are consistant for first-order logic some logics and contradictory for higher-oder logics (one needs to be careful how one formulates this question). The diffrences in logics and the formal vs. real make this difficult to claim philosophically (or as a fact prior to physics).
An empirical logician? You sure you're a graduate student in math?:-)
Not just math, but Mathematical Logic.. or Algebraic Geometry.. I don't need to descided for a couple of years. Regardless, I am not going to end up doing anything directly related to physics (I suppose there is some non-zero chance I would end up working on Quantum Groups or Cohomology, but I doubt those have any direct relation to physics).
Most of my professors are platonists, but none of them have any good reasons. I think they chose to be platonist because they did not really consider physics as a part of the question. IMHO this is a big mistake in the history of mathematics.
A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
My point was that no one is activly working on these tools. They are just discussing interpretations or something which is on the egenering side by my analogy.
I am not compleatly convinced by my argument either, but I do not think you have found the flaw here.
I believe the relationship you're describing is that between facts and objectives. Science and engineering are a special case. And raising scientific fact above religious tenet isn't going to be very easy, either. You can't praise it as rational... you choose to define rationality as a physical theory based upon our experience. The argument becomes circular.
I agree it is dangerously cirular, but all these arguments are dangerously circular.. and we all must go home and make our philosophical decisions based on practical physical experence at some point.. Oh the irony!
Seriously, I would probable advocate raising science above religion to exactly the degree which it allows us to do things which we could not do before (moshots, vecro, penicillin, birth control, printing press, internet, etc.). This dose not solve the circularity of the argument but it dose heat your house when it's cold.:)
The above cicularity seems pretty typical of philosophical arguments which is why I beleive physics is prior to philosophy.. that and the fact that it just makes a lot of sence evolutionarily speaking. Now our idea of rational though and the scientific method may be universal for some class of problem solving, but that is a diffrent question.
the big difference between logic and newtonian mechanics is that logic is provably correct
Nope, methods of transormation (what are popularly refered to as logic) are used to prove something correct from your axioms. These methods are NOT provably correct for any specific purpose. They are provably consistant for some very simple theories, but they are not even provably consistant for the integers (Godel). It should be pretty clear that our logic *must* be the result of physical experence / evolution, i.e. our logic might have some universality properties but we can not show this execpt via experence, so there's no reason to think logic is prior to experence.
a creed which claims to be false, on the other hand, is not even worth looking at.
This is not really true. You have probable heard of the Church of the Subgenious or the Discordians. I am not really shure of the details, but my impression has been that these "farcical believe systems" can be real religions. They do not take themselves seriously in the same way as a normal religion, but that is part of the point. They provide the social aspects of a religion, the philosophical aspects of a religion, and they mary people.
What about that Anglican sect I was talking about, would you say they are Atheist just becuase they do not believe in a god? They consider themselves religious. Almost everyone accepts that some parts of the bible are true and some parts are fables / made up.. this is the case with every other mythology so there is no good reason to expect otherwize of the christian mythology.. the only question is which parts. These priest just beleive that the God parts are made up. We have a pretty good idea that the one god idea and virgen birth were copied from the Zorastorians.. why not include the omnipotent being too.
I believe that no moral progress is possible
Moral progress should (very loosly) be defined as "the research into and evolution of those scial protocols and aditudes which have a significant influence over the people surrounding the implementer of the protocol." The concern over the enviromental impact of your activity is a moral concern which has progressed a lot, but the concern over the adoption oif a new word into the langauge is not a moral change.
I hate to be pedantic, but you're surely you don't mean to define a irrational system as one which doesn't use the scientific method? What about math?
Yes, "irrational" is tricky to define and mathematics is a sticky point, but I think it is safe to think of our rules of logic as a "physical" theory based on our experence. We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it. The big diffrence between logic and neutonian mechanics is that we have seen the execptions to newtonian mechanics and built better theories. We don't really know what an expetion to our logic would look like (some people claim that things like quantum mechanics are execptions need new logics, but we really don't know). Anyway, I'd say mathematics is really a physical thing.. we just don't understand how the physics works very well (note: I am a graduate student in mathematics).
the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
Do they? What is it?
I guess it's like the diffrence between a scientist and an engener. The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use. The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem.
Social Darwinism is a good example. There is little doubt that natural sellection plays *some* role in our culture, but one must ask how efficent it is AND if a specific move to increase it's effectivness is worth the cost. The engenering side has a whole diffrent set of problems from the science side.
This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide.
I agree the above ideas are not water-tight. It was a psychology professor who first pointed this out to me.. he used it to prevent people from discussing religion and public policy in his classes.. execpt when he wanted them to talk about those things.
It is interesting how many physicists turn to religion of some sort
I have heard that no more then 10% of physicist believe in a god. The precentage is higher for Mathematicians, Chemists, and Biologists.
I want to reply to some quotes from the article and I don't want to write another post, so I will do it here:
"To me, religion is a way of life, not a belief,"
I am an Atheist, but I suspect that this is the optimal religious view for many people. There is actually an order of Anglican Priest who do not believe in God. They view religion as a social thing. I think we will find that religions like Judism which accept people being "cluturally Jewish but religiously Atheist/Agnostic" may have a real survival advnatage in the future. (Note: I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who it the above description)
"In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together"
This is just flat wrong. It is true in many places, but religion hardly provides the culture that many modern people need period. Religion has not provided the "integrating" force needed to bond people of diffrent races and religions. Art, music, clubs, economics, food, sex, etc. provide far far more influence then religion.
scientists should realize that "religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science."
This is flat wrong too. The printing press has probable had more "tangible" influence then all of religious history combined, i.e. people who never invented religion would have used other social binding systems (as I mentioned before religion is justy one of many such systems), but without the printing press we would not have much of our current world.
I think it is safe to say that religion will play a smaller and smaller role in the future too unless it can really reinvent it's self. The New Agers *might* be a big enough revolution to remain importent to people, but not our traditional churchs. We are experencing a religious revival now, but a variety of factors could prevent these massive christian revivals in the future.
BTW> [this si regarding my.sig] Russel was a mathematician and the quote below is a tautology (if you narow your definition of christian to include only people who do not believe moral progress is possible because God layed down all the rules). It is funny to see a mathematician make subtilly veiled tautological statments.:)
the problem is the people, not the religion. The real problem with the christian relgion is that people have adapted and used it as an excuse to do bad things.
People will try to do this with any belief system, but an irrational system (i.e. not using the scientific method) will make it much easier. People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
I think the optimal belief system for an individual is Atheism, Agnosticism, or a vague philosophical new ageish believ while the optimal belief enviroment for an individual (what the people arround them believe) would be for very few people to agree on anything religious, i.e. it's hard for one religious group to oppress another when there are no religious groups because no one agrees. This is essentially the normal arguement that a personal religion is ok, but an organised religion is very bad.
the southern US prior to the 70's
You know why we have the bible belt today? Slave owners wanted a way to justify slavery. This is exactly what I mean by an irrational belief system allowing you to justify whatever you want.
You have taken the analogy one step too far here. If I sue microsoft because I can not get Windows 3.1 to work with the newest Quake / Word then I should loose, but if I sue microsoft becuase ActiveX's default security level allowed viruses to destroy my data then I should win. Simillarly, you can make an argument that I should be able to sue Microsoft for allowing programms like BO2K to gain ring 0 under W2K. Note: I should not be able to sue the CDC since they have done nothing to defraud / trick me, i.e. they never told me NT was secure. The reasonable settelment in the above case would consist of laywer's fees, data damages, and a bug fix. This is a bit sticky when you are suing over security issues in old unsupported products since MS should not be liable for vulnerabilities which result from someone say cracking RSA or soemthing, but should be liabilities which were forceable (and were not considered reasonable future limitations to the program).
Also, I should be able to sue Microsoft for not providing backwards compatable word formats (since they sold me a product and then changed the enviroment to force me to buy a new product), but the setelment should only force Microsoft to provide a new format to old format converter program for free (plus lawyers fees).
Hmm.. I knew it wasn't really a LOT of money, but I was under the impression that the ammount went up each year by some noticable ammount. Am I just smoking crack or did I get this corn-fused with some other reward? I seem to recall the history of TeX bugs being an intertaing story were the ammount of money eventually got a little large.. Hmm.
This creates all the problems about who answers the phone. The best solution would be to just wire it up to the home network. Hell, TiVo is basically a Linux box. Replace the application with a GPLed application and you can have all the features you want (like commercial skiping).
Actually, they should sell a TiVo (minus CPU and HD) PCI card and provide stripped down TiVo software as open source. They could featutre mine the open source version of the interface for the main stream TiVo and users would still need to pay for the subscription based features.. and all the geeks would be happy since they could have any feature they want (commercial skipping, smarter recording), as much drive space as they want, etc. I suppose they could use hardware patents to prevent people from seling a compeating set-top box.
If people getting killed is *legally* irrelevent since the majority of liability issue are not related to fatalities, i.e. GM would recall/fix cars if there was a bug which made them stop running after two years. Now commercial software vendors issue fixes too, but they frequently charge money for them. I want to see a court order Microsoft to give anyonne who has lost time as a result of NT's bugs the newest version of the software for free Or give the person their money back. This is the reasonable legal decission.
Now, fatalities may be *politically* related to product liability because ellective officials lissen to the lobiests untill the consumers get reeally pissed off.
Next, keyboard short cuts are necissary for an efficent interface, but they are not sufficent. They do not scale well with the number of thing which need to be efficent. Example: normal MS Word user needs things like cut and past, but a mathematician need all kinds of special symbles which are not handles very well via wods shortcuts. Mathematica dose a better job of accesssing these symbols by using TeXish commands as it's keyboard shortcuts, but it still lacks much of the flexibility of TeX since you can not define notation as effectivly. Anyway, the Church-Turing Thesis says all meaningful models of computation are equivelent. I think this can be streached to say "all truely powerful computer interfaces must have the full logic capasity of a programming langauge." This is really saing Joe Dumbass Windows User needs to have some basic idea what can be automated. If he/she dose not then he/she will end up typing the same thing in 100 times to schedule their Boss's Monday morning meating for the next 4 month or clicking on 1000 diffrent images to download all their porn.
It's importent to make the interface usable to newbies (which icons do not help unless you have prior experence with icon driven system), but it is also importent to make the interface's programming langauge aspects transperent. Now, If you can make an interface which uses icons to program the machine (as apple tried to do) and tricks people into learning more about the programming aspects then you will have somethng importent, but currently unix shells seem to be the most effective way of tricking people into learning to program.
This is why I say kids should be using Linux. Kids can learn Linux as easily as Windows (since they have not been conditioned to be stupid) and the transperentness of Linux increases the precentage of kids who learn more.
Yes, teachers are very importent (and our science / math teachers really suck; witness the average slashbot's poor understanding of the scientific method), but I think it is safe to say the OS will have an effect too. Specifically, a realitivly transperent OS will cause a higher precentage of students to mess arround with real stuff. Examples: students figuring out how to use atjobs and shell scripts to play jokes on people. Also, we have heard numerous testimonials on/. claiming "My kids use Linux and Windows, but Linux was no harder for them to learn and now they think windows is only good for games." I suppose you really need to do a controlled studdy to monitor the effects of the OS on the computer skills of students, but I would strongly suspect Linux to be benifitial.
You will win a lot of money if you can find a bug in TeX.
[Begin rant]
Why use a slow crappy bug ridden word processor when you can use emacs or vi to write TeX. It will even take less time once you know what your are doing, since TeX commands are things which you will force yourself to remember (instead of inefficent pulldowns and dialogs which requirea great flurry of mouse movements and clicks to access).
Plus, "the fix one bug, create two more" statment may have only applied to MS. It really is incrredible how much crap people will put up with because MS told them that a bunch of cryptic icons are easyer to use then a cryptic varient of the english langauge.
It will be funny when Mexico has all the good e-commerce sites in 10 years because they actually put computers which have something to teach in front of their kids.. instead of computers with a bunch of mindless icons that teach no long term though related computer skills.
I am really curious to know more about the history of product liability in other industries. Why are bugs in commercial software tollerated? Do we always tollerate a lot of fuck ups from young industries, dose the software industry have a more effective loby, or is it just that too many people do not understand computers? I suppose no product liability is good for free software though.
Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, they won't be able to afford "directed evolution"...
Who cares? We should want those people to be happy and useful, but that may or may not have anyhting to do with our evolution. Evolution, increasing our understanding of the world, replacing our selves is something which is good even when it leaves people out. This is the price species have always paid to evolve.. and it is insane to choose not to evolve just because we can not bring everyone with us.
Plus, lots of changes are so incremeental that the third world will be able to afford them soon enough.. and this will make their lives better.
The real threat is not too much technology. It's too little technology and/or to few people understanding it.. as this can lead to a new dark age and/or corperate exploitation of people.. and I would point out that too few people understanding technology is exactly what Bill Joy is advocating!
I think it's pretty safe to say our Mr Joy would be happy to sacrafice the health care of third world nations to keep bioengenering a western (supposidly terrorist free nation) only activity. This is just wrong. what we want is for third world nations to send their middle kids to be educated in these new technologies.. and then use them to help the country.
In related news the Cult of the Dead Cow announced that they were buying the makers of popular remote administration program PC Anyware.
Members were reported as saing "We have cought a lot of flack for hackers who write remote administration software. This has allowed inferior products like PC Anyware to take some of our market. This merger is benifitial to both PC Anyware and Back Orafice. It will provide PC Anyware customers with the more powerful Back Orafice which has a better interface, plugin support, more portable clients, and is open source. Back Orafice will recieve use of the PC Anyware name which should allow more companies to use the product officially."
The U.S. millitary seems happy about the merger. They reported that they have had security and preformance problems related to their new PC Anyware / NT driven missles. "Back Orafice's encrypted connections and higher preformance are exactly what we were lookng for in a remote administratin product and the Butt Plugs feature offers a better interface to specialised hardware then PC Anyware could" the report said. The repost went on to say that Back Orafice's interface looked cryptic and difficult when the product was first considered, but apperently a large portion of recruting age males recieve training in the use of Back Orafice from their High Schools and this is expected to offset any difficulties encountered.
The above post should be moderated up! This is exactly why luddites are so dangerous (and stupid).
I would say most of the intelegent posts I have seen regarding the dangers of cybernetics and nanotechnology are forced to conclude "as long as no one (read not just big companies) has a monopoly on the technology we will be ok." The real threat here is the nasty crap that companies can do with non-OSS technology.. not the minor threat of a few loons.
I suspect that crapy luddite sci-fi is partly to blame for the numbers of stupid people who fear the future. It is really sick how much sci-fi is based on retarded luddite ideas. I saw an Earth Final Conflict episode the other day where the hero blew up a library to keep Taelons or Humans from having the information. Needless to say I will not be watching a show which condones book burning in the future!
It's also worth mentioning that Bell Joy's proposed solution to the "problem" is to restrict information so that only the rich companies will be able to design cybernetics and things. Oh Yeah, that's a smart idea.. I really trust big brother to design the systems that go in my head. No thank you! The terorist risk is nothing compaired to the risk of companies monopolising the technology.
This is retarded! Those are complaints about possible public policy (or the venders), not about the underling technology. I suppose you think we should do away with the phone system too since direct marketers can call you at dinner?
The solution to every one of your complaints is really fucking simple: only use open source software in your implants period.
Now, it is possible that a company will try and dup everyone into using their closed source solutions (i.e. the terminator gene), but this is a political / market.. only a moron would think it is a technology/science issue.
Actually, your concerns are a reason to accelerate public research into this shit.. new freedoms almost always come as a result of the "powers that be" not really knowing what the hell was going on and accedentally granting them. This is why the internet is such a wonderful place. This is why the US has it's level of freedom, i.e. England let us get away with all kinds of shit for a long time and when they finally descided to make us pay taxes like all the rest of the collonies, it was too late and the world would forever be a better place. The research into cybernetics will be done be collage professors, much of it will run OSS on Linux.. the FBI will eventually ask for wiretapping rights, but that will be too late.
Now, the things you really need to worry about are the things like credit cards, automatic toll both payers, security cams, etc. which are designed for the general public from day one. I think it is pretty safe to say cybernetics will not be one of these things.
This is not totally correct. There are consumer and freedom issues which geeks might get behind, but I think the two issues geeks really need to get behind is on-line voting and candidate information.
Online voting will do a lot to increase the power of the geek lobby.. even without any kind of organised geek lobby!
The thing that will help even more then online voting is increasing information about candidates, i.e. donating some time to yuor local EFF/ACLU/etc to help set up a web page about local elections.
The religious right controls local ellections because they are the only groups which pays attention to local ellections. This is why school boards are removing evolution from high school science classes. If we make it easy to vote and easy to figure out who stands for what then we will wipe out the riligious right, get funding for space, remove DAs and judges who oppose civil/techno rights, etc. It just a problem of making it easy for people.. and this is a problem geeks can solve without orginising.
It may be hard to get geeks out to vote, but this is why online voting is so importent to the geek community! I would say the one big issue geeks should try to unite behind is online voting.. as it would increase our political power.
The other big problem which your quote dose not make clear is: who tells us how to vote? The riligious right has an orginisation to figure out what state and local officials they want. Geeks may never have a simillar level of orginisation, but we can help to communicate the findings of other orginisations (EFF, ACLU, etc.) to people. These orginisations are pretty bad about not checking out local politicians, but they might put more effort into it when people donate the necissary website work to the state chapters.
Haskore is a really interesting music notation which is implemented in the functional langauge Haskell. The introduction to the tutorial dose a good job of describing it:
Haskore is a collection of Haskell modules designed for expressing musical structures in the high-level, declarative style of functional programming. In Haskore, musical objects consist of primitive notions such as notes and rests, operations to transform musical objects such as transpose and tempo-scaling, and operations to combine musical objects to form more complex ones, such as concurrent and sequential composition. From these simple roots, much richer musical ideas can easily be developed.
Haskore is a means for describing music---in particular Western Music---rather than sound. It is not a vehicle for synthesizing sound produced by musical instruments, for example, although it does capture the way certain (real or imagined) instruments permit control of dynamics and articulation.
Haskore also defines a notion of literal performance through which observationally equivalent musical objects can be determined. From this basis many useful properties can be proved, such as commutative, associative, and distributive properties of various operators. An algebra of music thus surfaces.
You would probable find that Haskore offers more ability to extend your musical ntation then AMPLE because flexable notation is one of the things functional langauges like Haskell are good at.
I hope that we can soon come up with a good way of giving our money directly to the artists rather than 95% of it going to middlemen that are needed less every day.
I hope the music industry goes down the tubes too, but it is not a forgone conclusion. Producng music is currently a complicated task involving more people then just the musician. We need a combination of easy online promotion which is more effective then radio, cheap technology which trivializes many of the music production and editing jobs, and local human networks for the musicians to find their own production conenctions (like CD printing, web design, etc.). Still, it is a god time to be an online musician. A few of the current batch of online musicians are going to make it big without the help of the record industry. A few buisness tricks for online musicians:
(1) ``spam'' some of your songs at people who probable want them, i.e. set up scripts to upload some of your songs to lots of pirate sites and push them on people in napster and IRC. Clearly, these sorts of promotional songs need some sort of advertisment for your web site and the additional songs people can DL.
(2) Make your releases maintain people's attention, i.e. put up live stuff, diffrent mixes, pre-release songs that you are just working on. If you release enough good stuff you will keep yourself in people's minds. ACtually, people may get addicted to always having something diffrent (sorta like online comic strips). You can eventually charge for people to DL older stuff (via some sort of online fan club membership).. and no pirate site would bother to keep all your older shit.
(3) Once you have lots of lisseners sell lots of shit (hats, shirts, audio CDs, mp3 CDs), but keep giving lots of music away too, so that people stay interested. Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance should be one of your role models.
I think there is something called length dialation. It says the faster you go, the shorter things appear
No, it says that actaully ARE shorter from a non-accelerated frame of referance. I have no idea what long objects look like when accelerated.. that is a harder question.. they probable look pretty wierd.. bent maybe.
I've also heard that the reason we haven't seen any visitors from the future is because we haven't invented a time machine yet. Some(can't remember who) say that you can't bring something back before it existed. I guess that makes sense. So if this worm-hole generater thing actually works for backwards time travel, then start looking for things arriving from the future.
These sort of discussions are (to the best of my understanding) pure speculation. Famous physicists sometimes make comments about ways to circumvent the causality parodoxes involved in FTL and time travel, but these comments are probable intended to make students think about all the options and practce their critical thinking skills.. and not as serious scientific hypothoses. I'm saing it is not impossible that time travel is possible and constrained to logical consistancy, but it would violate Ocams Razor to make such an assumption today. Plus, what loon would want to assume logic and causality are prior to reproducable experence (physics).. you should want to believe that logic and causality are physical effects. The simple answer is "186,000 mps It's not just a good idea, It's the laws!":)
And no this "invention" will not work.. the world is full of crackpots.. some go to lectures and ask silly irrelevent questions.. some apply for patents.
Second part: Um, cone rotated sideways (ok), FTL travel pointing backwards: eh? you just warped everyting. How can that work?
The point is that when I'm in an accelerated referance frame realitive to you, then my equal time surface in space-time is not the same as your equal time surface.. and some points which happen at the same time to me happen in your past.. so if I have the ability to just jump off to the side to one of those points then I can just jump to your past.
Third part: the world is flat, the universe goes round the earth, etc, etc. Sorry, that's no proof
Well go learn the physics! I was not tring to give a proof. Most slashbots wouldn't understand a proof if it farted on them. Instead, I gave credible sources who believe that they have proved it.
First, I find it prtetty funny that they are taling about kids being molested.. like censorware would do anything about it. Actually, many censorware programs monitor your browsing and feed information back to the company about you. Actaully, they very act of blocking sites predictably allows web pages to identify (via JavaScript tricks) censorware. This information could be used in the following nasty ways (1) advertisers, toy makers, or sites like the WWF presenting childrens products to children and adults diffrently and (2) child molestors collecting lists of email addresses which are likely to be children (because they were using filtering software which is normally only used with kids). Anyway, censorware makes any problem related to physical child protection or protection of childrens information worse.. and these are much more serious problems then a little porn.
Second, a significant portion of the streangth of the censorware argument is based on the ignorant view that porn somehow leaps out at you. This view is created by two situations (1) JavaScript windows like you are talking about and (2) peple playing jokes on other people by leaving porn on the desktop. Clearly, censorware dose absolutly nothing to fix these two problems.
(1) can be solved by improvments in browsers which block JavaScript abuse. I suspect we will see the open source browsers get this soon.
(2) can be fixed by putting the machines on a simple refresh cycle and placing the computers in the open where such pranks are likely to be caught.
Slashdot Mirror
If the rules we use were influenced by our experience of the world, then different experiences would lead to different sets of rules.
There is no reason to assume that we would have noticed this effect. We all have pretty simillar experences. Especially, when you consider a million years of physical evolution to be experence.
My question is "what makes you think the universe follows our rules of logic?" The only correct answer from your point of view is "we evolved brains which recognise something close enough to the universe's logic rules to allow us to create a software version of the actual rules." I just think we should not be too confident that we have logic all figured out.
It works out all the time, but we'll let that slide.
The people who study linear logic would not agree with you.
Our rules of logic aren't falsifiable in the way that newtonian mechanics (or any other physical theory) is
We many not see them as falsifiable when we use them, but they could stop giving good results someplace and we would notice. This may not seems like proper scientific falsifiability, but it is a kind of falsifiability.
Example: Technically, calculous would be on a firmer footing for physics purposes if we based it on probability or quantum mechancs despit the fact that we need a seperate traditional development of calculous to build the probablility theory or quantum mechanics, i.e. this mess we call the real numnbers is not a physical model. The only reason it works so well is probablistic parts of quantum mechanics smooth things out.
Personally, I think things like "and", "or", "not", and modus pones are realitivly universal, i.e. you need them to build your theories of the world, but the quantifiers are a whole new critter. They produce too much weird shit and they have too many alternatives (first-order, second-order, infinitary logics, etc.)
I guess I can say I would not really be that surprised to discover that an alien race had a vastly diffrent mathematics. They might not care about first-order logic, they might have tried to develope a theory without cardinality (Skolem proved the donward Lowenheim-Skolem Theorems to get people to stop studing cardinality), they might have developed a diffrent method of formalising calculous based on a Libnetz view of the world instead of an epsilon-delta view of the world (i.e. our formal logic was developed to make epsilon-delta argumentes, but you could possably work directly towards a non-standard analysis without formalising quantifiers).
You can't (by definition!) arrive at a false result by following your rules.
This is not even correct for mathematics. We can prove that we can not prove the consistancy of set theory (I think this is Godel's other big theorem). Technically, it is possible to find a contradiction in the foundations of mathematics tomarrow! Now most of mathematics would survive because it can be made independent of the foundations were this to be necissary.
This is also not correct in physics. There are so many things floating arround in physics and the rules of logic are vague enough that we could very well find contradictions (like time travel).. and just work our way arround them.
Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result by following yuor rules with no axioms? that would be useless.
Maybe you mean that you can not find a false result if the axioms are true? We must *formally* claim this to do mathematics, but I expect we have axiom systems which are consistant for first-order logic some logics and contradictory for higher-oder logics (one needs to be careful how one formulates this question). The diffrences in logics and the formal vs. real make this difficult to claim philosophically (or as a fact prior to physics).
An empirical logician? You sure you're a graduate student in math? :-)
:)
Not just math, but Mathematical Logic.. or Algebraic Geometry.. I don't need to descided for a couple of years. Regardless, I am not going to end up doing anything directly related to physics (I suppose there is some non-zero chance I would end up working on Quantum Groups or Cohomology, but I doubt those have any direct relation to physics).
Most of my professors are platonists, but none of them have any good reasons. I think they chose to be platonist because they did not really consider physics as a part of the question. IMHO this is a big mistake in the history of mathematics.
A set of religious values, contained, perhaps, in a holy text, may provide the tools for a believer to seek happiness, heaven, whatever.
My point was that no one is activly working on these tools. They are just discussing interpretations or something which is on the egenering side by my analogy.
I am not compleatly convinced by my argument either, but I do not think you have found the flaw here.
I believe the relationship you're describing is that between facts and objectives. Science and engineering are a special case. And raising scientific fact above religious tenet isn't going to be very easy, either. You can't praise it as rational... you choose to define rationality as a physical theory based upon our experience. The argument becomes circular.
I agree it is dangerously cirular, but all these arguments are dangerously circular.. and we all must go home and make our philosophical decisions based on practical physical experence at some point.. Oh the irony!
Seriously, I would probable advocate raising science above religion to exactly the degree which it allows us to do things which we could not do before (moshots, vecro, penicillin, birth control, printing press, internet, etc.). This dose not solve the circularity of the argument but it dose heat your house when it's cold.
The above cicularity seems pretty typical of philosophical arguments which is why I beleive physics is prior to philosophy.. that and the fact that it just makes a lot of sence evolutionarily speaking. Now our idea of rational though and the scientific method may be universal for some class of problem solving, but that is a diffrent question.
the big difference between logic and newtonian mechanics is that logic is provably correct
Nope, methods of transormation (what are popularly refered to as logic) are used to prove something correct from your axioms. These methods are NOT provably correct for any specific purpose. They are provably consistant for some very simple theories, but they are not even provably consistant for the integers (Godel). It should be pretty clear that our logic *must* be the result of physical experence / evolution, i.e. our logic might have some universality properties but we can not show this execpt via experence, so there's no reason to think logic is prior to experence.
a creed which claims to be false, on the other hand, is not even worth looking at.
This is not really true. You have probable heard of the Church of the Subgenious or the Discordians. I am not really shure of the details, but my impression has been that these "farcical believe systems" can be real religions. They do not take themselves seriously in the same way as a normal religion, but that is part of the point. They provide the social aspects of a religion, the philosophical aspects of a religion, and they mary people.
What about that Anglican sect I was talking about, would you say they are Atheist just becuase they do not believe in a god? They consider themselves religious. Almost everyone accepts that some parts of the bible are true and some parts are fables / made up.. this is the case with every other mythology so there is no good reason to expect otherwize of the christian mythology.. the only question is which parts. These priest just beleive that the God parts are made up. We have a pretty good idea that the one god idea and virgen birth were copied from the Zorastorians.. why not include the omnipotent being too.
I believe that no moral progress is possible
Moral progress should (very loosly) be defined as "the research into and evolution of those scial protocols and aditudes which have a significant influence over the people surrounding the implementer of the protocol." The concern over the enviromental impact of your activity is a moral concern which has progressed a lot, but the concern over the adoption oif a new word into the langauge is not a moral change.
I hate to be pedantic, but you're surely you don't mean to define a irrational system as one which doesn't use the scientific method? What about math?
Yes, "irrational" is tricky to define and mathematics is a sticky point, but I think it is safe to think of our rules of logic as a "physical" theory based on our experence. We have only one real theory of logic, we test the hypothosis frequently, it works out frequently, so we continue to use it. The big diffrence between logic and neutonian mechanics is that we have seen the execptions to newtonian mechanics and built better theories. We don't really know what an expetion to our logic would look like (some people claim that things like quantum mechanics are execptions need new logics, but we really don't know). Anyway, I'd say mathematics is really a physical thing.. we just don't understand how the physics works very well (note: I am a graduate student in mathematics).
the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
Do they? What is it?
I guess it's like the diffrence between a scientist and an engener. The scientist is only supposed to build and test theories, but the engener actually needs to figure out what to use. The science provides the engeners with something concreate to argue over the relivance to a specific problem.
Social Darwinism is a good example. There is little doubt that natural sellection plays *some* role in our culture, but one must ask how efficent it is AND if a specific move to increase it's effectivness is worth the cost. The engenering side has a whole diffrent set of problems from the science side.
This stands in contrast to religion where there is no science side (or they are combined in the case of new religions and cults which can change their rules). The divide between science and engenering helps both stay more objective.. and religion lacks this divide.
I agree the above ideas are not water-tight. It was a psychology professor who first pointed this out to me.. he used it to prevent people from discussing religion and public policy in his classes.. execpt when he wanted them to talk about those things.
It is interesting how many physicists turn to religion of some sort
.sig] Russel was a mathematician and the quote below is a tautology (if you narow your definition of christian to include only people who do not believe moral progress is possible because God layed down all the rules). It is funny to see a mathematician make subtilly veiled tautological statments. :)
I have heard that no more then 10% of physicist believe in a god. The precentage is higher for Mathematicians, Chemists, and Biologists.
I want to reply to some quotes from the article and I don't want to write another post, so I will do it here:
"To me, religion is a way of life, not a belief,"
I am an Atheist, but I suspect that this is the optimal religious view for many people. There is actually an order of Anglican Priest who do not believe in God. They view religion as a social thing. I think we will find that religions like Judism which accept people being "cluturally Jewish but religiously Atheist/Agnostic" may have a real survival advnatage in the future. (Note: I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who it the above description)
"In this country, churches are the organizations that hold the community together"
This is just flat wrong. It is true in many places, but religion hardly provides the culture that many modern people need period. Religion has not provided the "integrating" force needed to bond people of diffrent races and religions. Art, music, clubs, economics, food, sex, etc. provide far far more influence then religion.
scientists should realize that "religion has a much more important role in human destiny than science."
This is flat wrong too. The printing press has probable had more "tangible" influence then all of religious history combined, i.e. people who never invented religion would have used other social binding systems (as I mentioned before religion is justy one of many such systems), but without the printing press we would not have much of our current world.
I think it is safe to say that religion will play a smaller and smaller role in the future too unless it can really reinvent it's self. The New Agers *might* be a big enough revolution to remain importent to people, but not our traditional churchs. We are experencing a religious revival now, but a variety of factors could prevent these massive christian revivals in the future.
BTW> [this si regarding my
the problem is the people, not the religion. The real problem with the christian relgion is that people have adapted and used it as an excuse to do bad things.
People will try to do this with any belief system, but an irrational system (i.e. not using the scientific method) will make it much easier. People still abuse the social interpretation of scientific theories (extreams of social darwinism for example), but the fact that people understand the distiction between a scientific theory and a social interpretation of it makes this harder to do.
I think the optimal belief system for an individual is Atheism, Agnosticism, or a vague philosophical new ageish believ while the optimal belief enviroment for an individual (what the people arround them believe) would be for very few people to agree on anything religious, i.e. it's hard for one religious group to oppress another when there are no religious groups because no one agrees. This is essentially the normal arguement that a personal religion is ok, but an organised religion is very bad.
the southern US prior to the 70's
You know why we have the bible belt today? Slave owners wanted a way to justify slavery. This is exactly what I mean by an irrational belief system allowing you to justify whatever you want.
You have taken the analogy one step too far here. If I sue microsoft because I can not get Windows 3.1 to work with the newest Quake / Word then I should loose, but if I sue microsoft becuase ActiveX's default security level allowed viruses to destroy my data then I should win. Simillarly, you can make an argument that I should be able to sue Microsoft for allowing programms like BO2K to gain ring 0 under W2K. Note: I should not be able to sue the CDC since they have done nothing to defraud / trick me, i.e. they never told me NT was secure. The reasonable settelment in the above case would consist of laywer's fees, data damages, and a bug fix. This is a bit sticky when you are suing over security issues in old unsupported products since MS should not be liable for vulnerabilities which result from someone say cracking RSA or soemthing, but should be liabilities which were forceable (and were not considered reasonable future limitations to the program).
Also, I should be able to sue Microsoft for not providing backwards compatable word formats (since they sold me a product and then changed the enviroment to force me to buy a new product), but the setelment should only force Microsoft to provide a new format to old format converter program for free (plus lawyers fees).
Hmm.. I knew it wasn't really a LOT of money, but I was under the impression that the ammount went up each year by some noticable ammount. Am I just smoking crack or did I get this corn-fused with some other reward? I seem to recall the history of TeX bugs being an intertaing story were the ammount of money eventually got a little large.. Hmm.
This creates all the problems about who answers the phone. The best solution would be to just wire it up to the home network. Hell, TiVo is basically a Linux box. Replace the application with a GPLed application and you can have all the features you want (like commercial skiping).
Actually, they should sell a TiVo (minus CPU and HD) PCI card and provide stripped down TiVo software as open source. They could featutre mine the open source version of the interface for the main stream TiVo and users would still need to pay for the subscription based features.. and all the geeks would be happy since they could have any feature they want (commercial skipping, smarter recording), as much drive space as they want, etc. I suppose they could use hardware patents to prevent people from seling a compeating set-top box.
If people getting killed is *legally* irrelevent since the majority of liability issue are not related to fatalities, i.e. GM would recall/fix cars if there was a bug which made them stop running after two years. Now commercial software vendors issue fixes too, but they frequently charge money for them. I want to see a court order Microsoft to give anyonne who has lost time as a result of NT's bugs the newest version of the software for free Or give the person their money back. This is the reasonable legal decission.
Now, fatalities may be *politically* related to product liability because ellective officials lissen to the lobiests untill the consumers get reeally pissed off.
Next, keyboard short cuts are necissary for an efficent interface, but they are not sufficent. They do not scale well with the number of thing which need to be efficent. Example: normal MS Word user needs things like cut and past, but a mathematician need all kinds of special symbles which are not handles very well via wods shortcuts. Mathematica dose a better job of accesssing these symbols by using TeXish commands as it's keyboard shortcuts, but it still lacks much of the flexibility of TeX since you can not define notation as effectivly. Anyway, the Church-Turing Thesis says all meaningful models of computation are equivelent. I think this can be streached to say "all truely powerful computer interfaces must have the full logic capasity of a programming langauge." This is really saing Joe Dumbass Windows User needs to have some basic idea what can be automated. If he/she dose not then he/she will end up typing the same thing in 100 times to schedule their Boss's Monday morning meating for the next 4 month or clicking on 1000 diffrent images to download all their porn.
It's importent to make the interface usable to newbies (which icons do not help unless you have prior experence with icon driven system), but it is also importent to make the interface's programming langauge aspects transperent. Now, If you can make an interface which uses icons to program the machine (as apple tried to do) and tricks people into learning more about the programming aspects then you will have somethng importent, but currently unix shells seem to be the most effective way of tricking people into learning to program.
This is why I say kids should be using Linux. Kids can learn Linux as easily as Windows (since they have not been conditioned to be stupid) and the transperentness of Linux increases the precentage of kids who learn more.
Yes, teachers are very importent (and our science / math teachers really suck; witness the average slashbot's poor understanding of the scientific method), but I think it is safe to say the OS will have an effect too. Specifically, a realitivly transperent OS will cause a higher precentage of students to mess arround with real stuff. Examples: students figuring out how to use atjobs and shell scripts to play jokes on people. Also, we have heard numerous testimonials on /. claiming "My kids use Linux and Windows, but Linux was no harder for them to learn and now they think windows is only good for games." I suppose you really need to do a controlled studdy to monitor the effects of the OS on the computer skills of students, but I would strongly suspect Linux to be benifitial.
there are no bug free projects
You will win a lot of money if you can find a bug in TeX.
[Begin rant]
Why use a slow crappy bug ridden word processor when you can use emacs or vi to write TeX. It will even take less time once you know what your are doing, since TeX commands are things which you will force yourself to remember (instead of inefficent pulldowns and dialogs which requirea great flurry of mouse movements and clicks to access).
Plus, "the fix one bug, create two more" statment may have only applied to MS. It really is incrredible how much crap people will put up with because MS told them that a bunch of cryptic icons are easyer to use then a cryptic varient of the english langauge.
It will be funny when Mexico has all the good e-commerce sites in 10 years because they actually put computers which have something to teach in front of their kids.. instead of computers with a bunch of mindless icons that teach no long term though related computer skills.
I am really curious to know more about the history of product liability in other industries. Why are bugs in commercial software tollerated? Do we always tollerate a lot of fuck ups from young industries, dose the software industry have a more effective loby, or is it just that too many people do not understand computers? I suppose no product liability is good for free software though.
[End rant]
Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, they won't be able to afford "directed evolution"...
Who cares? We should want those people to be happy and useful, but that may or may not have anyhting to do with our evolution. Evolution, increasing our understanding of the world, replacing our selves is something which is good even when it leaves people out. This is the price species have always paid to evolve.. and it is insane to choose not to evolve just because we can not bring everyone with us.
Plus, lots of changes are so incremeental that the third world will be able to afford them soon enough.. and this will make their lives better.
The real threat is not too much technology. It's too little technology and/or to few people understanding it.. as this can lead to a new dark age and/or corperate exploitation of people.. and I would point out that too few people understanding technology is exactly what Bill Joy is advocating!
I think it's pretty safe to say our Mr Joy would be happy to sacrafice the health care of third world nations to keep bioengenering a western (supposidly terrorist free nation) only activity. This is just wrong. what we want is for third world nations to send their middle kids to be educated in these new technologies.. and then use them to help the country.
In related news the Cult of the Dead Cow announced that they were buying the makers of popular remote administration program PC Anyware.
Members were reported as saing "We have cought a lot of flack for hackers who write remote administration software. This has allowed inferior products like PC Anyware to take some of our market. This merger is benifitial to both PC Anyware and Back Orafice. It will provide PC Anyware customers with the more powerful Back Orafice which has a better interface, plugin support, more portable clients, and is open source. Back Orafice will recieve use of the PC Anyware name which should allow more companies to use the product officially."
The U.S. millitary seems happy about the merger. They reported that they have had security and preformance problems related to their new PC Anyware / NT driven missles. "Back Orafice's encrypted connections and higher preformance are exactly what we were lookng for in a remote administratin product and the Butt Plugs feature offers a better interface to specialised hardware then PC Anyware could" the report said. The repost went on to say that Back Orafice's interface looked cryptic and difficult when the product was first considered, but apperently a large portion of recruting age males recieve training in the use of Back Orafice from their High Schools and this is expected to offset any difficulties encountered.
The above post should be moderated up! This is exactly why luddites are so dangerous (and stupid).
I would say most of the intelegent posts I have seen regarding the dangers of cybernetics and nanotechnology are forced to conclude "as long as no one (read not just big companies) has a monopoly on the technology we will be ok." The real threat here is the nasty crap that companies can do with non-OSS technology.. not the minor threat of a few loons.
Amen!
I suspect that crapy luddite sci-fi is partly to blame for the numbers of stupid people who fear the future. It is really sick how much sci-fi is based on retarded luddite ideas. I saw an Earth Final Conflict episode the other day where the hero blew up a library to keep Taelons or Humans from having the information. Needless to say I will not be watching a show which condones book burning in the future!
It's also worth mentioning that Bell Joy's proposed solution to the "problem" is to restrict information so that only the rich companies will be able to design cybernetics and things. Oh Yeah, that's a smart idea.. I really trust big brother to design the systems that go in my head. No thank you! The terorist risk is nothing compaired to the risk of companies monopolising the technology.
This is retarded! Those are complaints about possible public policy (or the venders), not about the underling technology. I suppose you think we should do away with the phone system too since direct marketers can call you at dinner?
/science issue.
The solution to every one of your complaints is really fucking simple: only use open source software in your implants period.
Now, it is possible that a company will try and dup everyone into using their closed source solutions (i.e. the terminator gene), but this is a political / market.. only a moron would think it is a technology
Actually, your concerns are a reason to accelerate public research into this shit.. new freedoms almost always come as a result of the "powers that be" not really knowing what the hell was going on and accedentally granting them. This is why the internet is such a wonderful place. This is why the US has it's level of freedom, i.e. England let us get away with all kinds of shit for a long time and when they finally descided to make us pay taxes like all the rest of the collonies, it was too late and the world would forever be a better place. The research into cybernetics will be done be collage professors, much of it will run OSS on Linux.. the FBI will eventually ask for wiretapping rights, but that will be too late.
Now, the things you really need to worry about are the things like credit cards, automatic toll both payers, security cams, etc. which are designed for the general public from day one. I think it is pretty safe to say cybernetics will not be one of these things.
This is not totally correct. There are consumer and freedom issues which geeks might get behind, but I think the two issues geeks really need to get behind is on-line voting and candidate information.
Online voting will do a lot to increase the power of the geek lobby.. even without any kind of organised geek lobby!
The thing that will help even more then online voting is increasing information about candidates, i.e. donating some time to yuor local EFF/ACLU/etc to help set up a web page about local elections.
The religious right controls local ellections because they are the only groups which pays attention to local ellections. This is why school boards are removing evolution from high school science classes. If we make it easy to vote and easy to figure out who stands for what then we will wipe out the riligious right, get funding for space, remove DAs and judges who oppose civil/techno rights, etc. It just a problem of making it easy for people.. and this is a problem geeks can solve without orginising.
It may be hard to get geeks out to vote, but this is why online voting is so importent to the geek community! I would say the one big issue geeks should try to unite behind is online voting.. as it would increase our political power.
The other big problem which your quote dose not make clear is: who tells us how to vote? The riligious right has an orginisation to figure out what state and local officials they want. Geeks may never have a simillar level of orginisation, but we can help to communicate the findings of other orginisations (EFF, ACLU, etc.) to people. These orginisations are pretty bad about not checking out local politicians, but they might put more effort into it when people donate the necissary website work to the state chapters.
Haskore is a really interesting music notation which is implemented in the functional langauge Haskell. The introduction to the tutorial dose a good job of describing it:
Haskore is a collection of Haskell modules designed for expressing musical structures in the high-level, declarative style of functional programming. In Haskore, musical objects consist of primitive notions such as notes and rests, operations to transform musical objects such as transpose and tempo-scaling, and operations to combine musical objects to form more complex ones, such as concurrent and sequential composition. From these simple roots, much richer musical ideas can easily be developed.
Haskore is a means for describing music---in particular Western Music---rather than sound. It is not a vehicle for synthesizing sound produced by musical instruments, for example, although it does capture the way certain (real or imagined) instruments permit control of dynamics and articulation.
Haskore also defines a notion of literal performance through which observationally equivalent musical objects can be determined. From this basis many useful properties can be proved, such as commutative, associative, and distributive properties of various operators. An algebra of music thus surfaces.
You would probable find that Haskore offers more ability to extend your musical ntation then AMPLE because flexable notation is one of the things functional langauges like Haskell are good at.
I hope that we can soon come up with a good way of giving our money directly to the artists rather than 95% of it going to middlemen that are needed less every day.
I hope the music industry goes down the tubes too, but it is not a forgone conclusion. Producng music is currently a complicated task involving more people then just the musician. We need a combination of easy online promotion which is more effective then radio, cheap technology which trivializes many of the music production and editing jobs, and local human networks for the musicians to find their own production conenctions (like CD printing, web design, etc.). Still, it is a god time to be an online musician. A few of the current batch of online musicians are going to make it big without the help of the record industry. A few buisness tricks for online musicians:
(1) ``spam'' some of your songs at people who probable want them, i.e. set up scripts to upload some of your songs to lots of pirate sites and push them on people in napster and IRC. Clearly, these sorts of promotional songs need some sort of advertisment for your web site and the additional songs people can DL.
(2) Make your releases maintain people's attention, i.e. put up live stuff, diffrent mixes, pre-release songs that you are just working on. If you release enough good stuff you will keep yourself in people's minds. ACtually, people may get addicted to always having something diffrent (sorta like online comic strips). You can eventually charge for people to DL older stuff (via some sort of online fan club membership).. and no pirate site would bother to keep all your older shit.
(3) Once you have lots of lisseners sell lots of shit (hats, shirts, audio CDs, mp3 CDs), but keep giving lots of music away too, so that people stay interested. Pete Abrams of Sluggy Freelance should be one of your role models.
I think there is something called length dialation. It says the faster you go, the shorter things appear
:)
No, it says that actaully ARE shorter from a non-accelerated frame of referance. I have no idea what long objects look like when accelerated.. that is a harder question.. they probable look pretty wierd.. bent maybe.
I've also heard that the reason we haven't seen any visitors from the future is because we haven't invented a time machine yet. Some(can't remember who) say that you can't bring something back before it existed. I guess that makes sense. So if this worm-hole generater thing actually works for backwards time travel, then start looking for things arriving from the future.
These sort of discussions are (to the best of my understanding) pure speculation. Famous physicists sometimes make comments about ways to circumvent the causality parodoxes involved in FTL and time travel, but these comments are probable intended to make students think about all the options and practce their critical thinking skills.. and not as serious scientific hypothoses. I'm saing it is not impossible that time travel is possible and constrained to logical consistancy, but it would violate Ocams Razor to make such an assumption today. Plus, what loon would want to assume logic and causality are prior to reproducable experence (physics).. you should want to believe that logic and causality are physical effects. The simple answer is "186,000 mps It's not just a good idea, It's the laws!"
And no this "invention" will not work.. the world is full of crackpots.. some go to lectures and ask silly irrelevent questions.. some apply for patents.
Second part: Um, cone rotated sideways (ok), FTL travel pointing backwards: eh? you just warped everyting. How can that work?
The point is that when I'm in an accelerated referance frame realitive to you, then my equal time surface in space-time is not the same as your equal time surface.. and some points which happen at the same time to me happen in your past.. so if I have the ability to just jump off to the side to one of those points then I can just jump to your past.
Third part: the world is flat, the universe goes round the earth, etc, etc. Sorry, that's no proof
Well go learn the physics! I was not tring to give a proof. Most slashbots wouldn't understand a proof if it farted on them. Instead, I gave credible sources who believe that they have proved it.
First, I find it prtetty funny that they are taling about kids being molested.. like censorware would do anything about it. Actually, many censorware programs monitor your browsing and feed information back to the company about you. Actaully, they very act of blocking sites predictably allows web pages to identify (via JavaScript tricks) censorware. This information could be used in the following nasty ways (1) advertisers, toy makers, or sites like the WWF presenting childrens products to children and adults diffrently and (2) child molestors collecting lists of email addresses which are likely to be children (because they were using filtering software which is normally only used with kids). Anyway, censorware makes any problem related to physical child protection or protection of childrens information worse.. and these are much more serious problems then a little porn.
Second, a significant portion of the streangth of the censorware argument is based on the ignorant view that porn somehow leaps out at you. This view is created by two situations (1) JavaScript windows like you are talking about and (2) peple playing jokes on other people by leaving porn on the desktop. Clearly, censorware dose absolutly nothing to fix these two problems.
(1) can be solved by improvments in browsers which block JavaScript abuse. I suspect we will see the open source browsers get this soon.
(2) can be fixed by putting the machines on a simple refresh cycle and placing the computers in the open where such pranks are likely to be caught.