That's because there really isn't any such right. This is where people get confused; Iran may stifle everyone's free speech, but they still have the right, and they have the right to overthrow their government to stop oppression of it.
Now what makes you think that you're correct when you say you have the right to free speech, but they're wrong when they say they have a right to a job? What are you basing that on?
But if you live in a society where no one recognizes that right and it is thus consistently violated, can you still say you actually have it? And even if you think so, does it make any difference?
It's like the people who believe they have a right to a steady, decently paying job (think riots in Paris, that was one of the issues). Without someone to give the job to them it's just an empty belief, and it's certainly not an inherent right.
If you kill someone who says something you don't like, you forfeit your right to live.
Not if you can defend yourself against anyone who tries to kill you. Then you have just as much 'right' as anyone else in that society. Whether you're welcome is another matter.
Actually, it's quite possible to have digital anonymous transactions if you use a bit of crypto.
You start with an algorithm that can sign encrypted data and retains a valid signature after decryption (Can't name one, but they exist). You then make 100 messages with the text "This is $10" and a random serial number, encrypt them, and send them to the bank. The bank chooses 99, asks you for their keys, decrypts them and verifies it says $10 and not $1000. It signs the last one, sends it back to you, and you now have $10 that is not duplicatable (due to the serial), not tied to you (because the bank doesn't know the serial), and is signed by the bank (as the signature passed through the encryption).
E.g. If an object is one light second away from you at time t and travels away from you at the 0.5 the speed of light for two seconds it will end up two light seconds away from you. Now, the light from it's first position will reach you after one second at time t +1, it will take time t + 2 to reach it's end point and the light from it's endpoint will reach you at time 2 seconds later at time (t+2)+2 = t+4. So the journey that appeared to take 2 seconds to the flying object, will appear to take 3 seconds to you! Hence the slower timeframe. This is the proof that was given, however, if the object flies towards you the time light takes to make the journey will be less at the end than at the beginning. Hence it will speed up!
This is very true, but not the time dialation effect described by relativity. If that object, and let's say it is a clock, is moving left in your field of vision at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, it will tick slower from your pov than a clock in your reference frame. This is the lorentz contraction you mentioned and is used in practice to adjust for errors in atomic clocks in gps satellites. I believe the lorentz contractions can be derived from one of the invariants in general relativity, but it's been a while for me so I'll have to go reread the relevant books.
That was exactly the premise Einstien was working from. So what he said was not "This is what will happen!" but "This is what you will see happening!"
These equations are great at helping us translate the effects we see from high speed particle accelerators and such. But I never saw any indication in there that we could use it to actually answer any questions about the nature of the universe, Spacetime, Wormhole physics, lorentz contractions, or any of the other conditions which are not actually a matter of observation but exprience.
I don't quite understand what you mean. For me, what I see is what I experience. In the case of a clock moving left, I see it ticking slower and if I stop it to bring it back into my reference frame, it will have recorded a shorter time interval than a stationary (to me) clock. Relativity isn't a theory that explains much of the nature of the universe (although I believe gravity waves are somewhere in there) but is more like Newton's laws, in that it describes how we may calculate motion. In my eyes this is more than important enough.
In any case I'll go reread my books on the subject, as I feel I'm a bit rusty. What has helped me is not one specific book, but multiple books that all take a different approach to explaining. No one book will be able to explain it perfectly, but I find that others then pick up the slack.
IIUC Einstien's basic premise was that, since you cannot accurately compensate for the time between when and incident occurred and the time it is observed, and since Michalson Morley's experiment seemed to prove that the speed of light can always be assumed to be constant (in a vacuum), then you can simply treat your experiment as if the moment at which an incident is observed, is the moment it occured.
The basic premise of relativity is that you cannot define an absolute position, time or speed, not that you cannot compensate for time differences. Morley's experiment is relevant as it set out to measure our absolute speed versus the ether and proved that no such thing exists.
In all the material I read I never found any reason given for anyone to believe that these observational timeframes are actual timeframes
The point is that in relativity there are no actual time frames, only time frames of the observer. When you specify an event, you have to specify its position, speed and time relative to an observer or a fixed standard that is observable.
In fact, it seemed to me that if you looked at time as a vector, an object travelling away from you near the speed of light would seem to age more slowly, while one travelling towards you near the speed of light would age faster.
You're assuming that the direction of time is parallel to the direction of motion, which is again not what Einstein stated. In his theory time was a fourth dimension, perpendicular to all three dimensions of space, and thus completely independent of if you are moving forwards or backwards with the same speed. According to relativity, in both cases you will see the object age more slowly. In addition, you cannot talk about time as a vector as time is not moving in space but is a scalar value on the same level as the three scalar position coordinates. You can, however, talk about a space-time vector, which contains the three scalar positional coordinates and the one scalar time coordinate.
The interesting thing about proving/disproving the factuality of this theory is that it accurately describes how an object will be observed
Observation is all there is for us. It's like the question, "If a tree falls in the woods but nobody is aroud to hear it, does it make a sound?" You can't talk about a sound unless you also have a listener in mind. Likewise aging is a concept directly linked to our preception of the flow of time and has no meaning loose from an observer. Looking at the flip side of the coin: the only thing we can do is observe, no more and no less, so anything outside that is completely irrelevant to humanity.
I think I understand what you are saying - you mean that rights are an expression of a moral code? Life may not be guaranteed, as in the case of the tiger, but it should always be considered wrong to take another's life. It is an issue of 'right and wrong', not 'to what are people entitled'.
It's a viewpoint I hadn't considered, and most certainly an intiguing one.
Then there's a difference of opinion between us. I personally do not believe in any form of absolute rights (be they moral, natural, or whatever) and am of the opinion that you only have the rights society grants to you or that you yourself can defend. To me, being alive is a privlege, but one I will obviously defend to the death.
I don't quite understand your claim that the tiger doesn't violate the right to live. If you believe a person has rights beyond the bounds of human society, then why is nature violating them not a violation? The tiger, be it capable of making moral choices or not, has still taken your life.
you might as well say "the fear of getting caught" gives me rights. Both might help to protect my rights
I agree with your second statement but find it doesn't fit with the first. Society (in my opinion) gives you the rights and uses "fear of getting caught" to protect them. Fear itself does no giving, but is merely a mechanism employed by the guardians of your rights.
My government regulates murder because it violates individual rights, not because it's beneficial to the majority.
Those individual rights are not natural, but given to you by government and society. There is no such thing as a natural right to keep on living - if you don't believe me, try explaining your view to a hungry tiger or to a malaria mosquito.
Ok, well I personally had relationships between people in mind, not being nabbed by the cops as I'm not usually in that situation (dunno about you...). How about trying to stay on this side of the law, eh buddy?
Sure - in the same way google has 'sold' a different ordering to US companies who come after it with the DMCA, and French and German companies who come after it with anti-Nazi laws.
Ok, I'll be a bit clearer this time. One possibility is to use something similar to the CDMA system previously used in cell phones:
Mix the data signal with a semirandom series of bits at a far higher frequency than that of the data. For example, take a stream at 20kbps and run it through a mixer with a key stream at 400kbps that contains equally many ones and zeros, has a semirandom (but also some other important properties that have escaped me at the moment) characteristic, and is periodic over 4 hours. The resulting signal put on the airwaves will be low power and almost indistinguishable from wideband noise. However, by tuning a filter to that wide band and mixing with the same key stream in perfect sync, the signal is almost perfectly extracted. To anyone else however, it will look just like noise even though it will be significantly above the noise floor of the communications channel.
To block this you indeed need a source of white noise, but you also need a transmitter than can send out said white noise at a relatively high power level over a bandwidth of multiple MHz so as to completely cover up that first signal. Not practical in most situations, and definitely not within the reach of the average citizen. The noise level has to be substantially higher than the signal before it becomes unrecoverable.
This is how cell phones used to share bandwidth - they'd just transmit over each other, but each signal was recoverable using the key.
True, but they can use techniques to make it very hard for you to do so. Check out spread spectrum communications - they smear out the signal over KHz or MHz instead of at one discrete carrier, making it almost impossible to pick out from background noise and requiring a very wideband jammer to block all of it.
I agree - I'm still an idealist and would like to believe that people can live together simply through respect and consideration. I also know that's a dream and that we need society to 'protect' people from each other, such as with harassment. What I detest, however, is that people take the privleges and securities offered by society for granted and see them as inviolate rights.
Of course, a government that tries to protect you from everything is most likely to bring this feeling about, which is what I most dislike about this law. It doesn't seem to change that much in terms of freedom, seeing as libel, slander and assault cover damaging and threatening statements (or am I wrong in this?). It may prevent petty name calling and, depending on how harassment is defined, provide a means for censoring a few dissident voices. However, I think the most damage will come from the strengthening of a sense of entitlement and egocentricity.
I have my own bone to pick with human society, but I like to think that I at least faintly appreciate how much easier it makes my life. Society would be much happier if people honestly thanked each other for their time.
Well, thanks for listening to my idealistic rantings;)
I certainly agree that it is right that you are not harrassed, but I'm not someone who believes in the existence of intrinsic rights so I would tend to disagree that you have a right not to be harassed. That doesn't mean I think it should be legal to harass people - the government, having taken away many of the ways a person could respond to try and stop harassment, has the responsibility to prevent harassment. I merely object to the fact that you give the impression that you feel entitled not to be harassed.
I don't have to withstand harrassment as part of my respect to free speech. In fact, your right to free speech stops when you start interfering with my rights. You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you can't make remarks to your secretary that qualify as sexual harrassment, and you can't call me to make a prank call. That is not an exhaustive list.
Help me understand, which of your rights are violated here?
Because kids aren't sufficiently developed to think for themselves about complex issues. That's why we try to teach them the right thing at a young age and hope that they'll decide for themselves whether what we taught them was right when they reach a stage of sufficient mental development.
Religion is done in the same way (not trying to imply any other link here, though). You're brought up in the same way as your parents, and then somewhere between your teens and twenties, when you've learned how to think and have started forming your own philosophy on life, you make a decision as to whether you want to stay in said religion.
A 10 year old is not capable of evaluating whether or not evolution is valid based on the facts - he will simply believe what his teacher will tell him. Hopefully a few years later when it's again taught in more detail, he'll go back and reexamine it with a critical eye.
Sad it may be, but what does it say about today's youth that store owners have to resort to such drastic measures to get them to stop being a nuisance?
The problem with your Roman analogy is that their understanding of the rules of reality was incomplete. We can defeat the defenses of the Romans because we understand more of said rules and can make devices that fly, which to them seems inconcievable. In the case of a computer, however, we make the rules that software abides by and thus know most of the actions that can be performed in the virtual reality of a system. To bring your Roman situation back to computer terms, it would be as if a firewall only blocked inbound viruses and didn't realize it was possible for viruses to enter via other paths and then dial home.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to get 3 moles per mile but then PETA started complaining...
That's because there really isn't any such right. This is where people get confused; Iran may stifle everyone's free speech, but they still have the right, and they have the right to overthrow their government to stop oppression of it.
Now what makes you think that you're correct when you say you have the right to free speech, but they're wrong when they say they have a right to a job? What are you basing that on?
But if you live in a society where no one recognizes that right and it is thus consistently violated, can you still say you actually have it? And even if you think so, does it make any difference?
It's like the people who believe they have a right to a steady, decently paying job (think riots in Paris, that was one of the issues). Without someone to give the job to them it's just an empty belief, and it's certainly not an inherent right.
If you kill someone who says something you don't like, you forfeit your right to live.
Not if you can defend yourself against anyone who tries to kill you. Then you have just as much 'right' as anyone else in that society. Whether you're welcome is another matter.
Actually, it's quite possible to have digital anonymous transactions if you use a bit of crypto.
You start with an algorithm that can sign encrypted data and retains a valid signature after decryption (Can't name one, but they exist). You then make 100 messages with the text "This is $10" and a random serial number, encrypt them, and send them to the bank. The bank chooses 99, asks you for their keys, decrypts them and verifies it says $10 and not $1000. It signs the last one, sends it back to you, and you now have $10 that is not duplicatable (due to the serial), not tied to you (because the bank doesn't know the serial), and is signed by the bank (as the signature passed through the encryption).
Jw
E.g. If an object is one light second away from you at time t and travels away from you at the 0.5 the speed of light for two seconds it will end up two light seconds away from you. Now, the light from it's first position will reach you after one second at time t +1, it will take time t + 2 to reach it's end point and the light from it's endpoint will reach you at time 2 seconds later at time (t+2)+2 = t+4. So the journey that appeared to take 2 seconds to the flying object, will appear to take 3 seconds to you! Hence the slower timeframe. This is the proof that was given, however, if the object flies towards you the time light takes to make the journey will be less at the end than at the beginning. Hence it will speed up!
This is very true, but not the time dialation effect described by relativity. If that object, and let's say it is a clock, is moving left in your field of vision at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, it will tick slower from your pov than a clock in your reference frame. This is the lorentz contraction you mentioned and is used in practice to adjust for errors in atomic clocks in gps satellites. I believe the lorentz contractions can be derived from one of the invariants in general relativity, but it's been a while for me so I'll have to go reread the relevant books.
That was exactly the premise Einstien was working from. So what he said was not "This is what will happen!" but "This is what you will see happening!"
These equations are great at helping us translate the effects we see from high speed particle accelerators and such. But I never saw any indication in there that we could use it to actually answer any questions about the nature of the universe, Spacetime, Wormhole physics, lorentz contractions, or any of the other conditions which are not actually a matter of observation but exprience.
I don't quite understand what you mean. For me, what I see is what I experience. In the case of a clock moving left, I see it ticking slower and if I stop it to bring it back into my reference frame, it will have recorded a shorter time interval than a stationary (to me) clock.
Relativity isn't a theory that explains much of the nature of the universe (although I believe gravity waves are somewhere in there) but is more like Newton's laws, in that it describes how we may calculate motion. In my eyes this is more than important enough.
In any case I'll go reread my books on the subject, as I feel I'm a bit rusty. What has helped me is not one specific book, but multiple books that all take a different approach to explaining. No one book will be able to explain it perfectly, but I find that others then pick up the slack.
Jw
IIUC Einstien's basic premise was that, since you cannot accurately compensate for the time between when and incident occurred and the time it is observed, and since Michalson Morley's experiment seemed to prove that the speed of light can always be assumed to be constant (in a vacuum), then you can simply treat your experiment as if the moment at which an incident is observed, is the moment it occured.
The basic premise of relativity is that you cannot define an absolute position, time or speed, not that you cannot compensate for time differences. Morley's experiment is relevant as it set out to measure our absolute speed versus the ether and proved that no such thing exists.
In all the material I read I never found any reason given for anyone to believe that these observational timeframes are actual timeframes
The point is that in relativity there are no actual time frames, only time frames of the observer. When you specify an event, you have to specify its position, speed and time relative to an observer or a fixed standard that is observable.
In fact, it seemed to me that if you looked at time as a vector, an object travelling away from you near the speed of light would seem to age more slowly, while one travelling towards you near the speed of light would age faster.
You're assuming that the direction of time is parallel to the direction of motion, which is again not what Einstein stated. In his theory time was a fourth dimension, perpendicular to all three dimensions of space, and thus completely independent of if you are moving forwards or backwards with the same speed. According to relativity, in both cases you will see the object age more slowly. In addition, you cannot talk about time as a vector as time is not moving in space but is a scalar value on the same level as the three scalar position coordinates. You can, however, talk about a space-time vector, which contains the three scalar positional coordinates and the one scalar time coordinate.
The interesting thing about proving/disproving the factuality of this theory is that it accurately describes how an object will be observed
Observation is all there is for us. It's like the question, "If a tree falls in the woods but nobody is aroud to hear it, does it make a sound?" You can't talk about a sound unless you also have a listener in mind. Likewise aging is a concept directly linked to our preception of the flow of time and has no meaning loose from an observer.
Looking at the flip side of the coin: the only thing we can do is observe, no more and no less, so anything outside that is completely irrelevant to humanity.
Jw
I think I understand what you are saying - you mean that rights are an expression of a moral code? Life may not be guaranteed, as in the case of the tiger, but it should always be considered wrong to take another's life. It is an issue of 'right and wrong', not 'to what are people entitled'.
It's a viewpoint I hadn't considered, and most certainly an intiguing one.
Jw
Then there's a difference of opinion between us. I personally do not believe in any form of absolute rights (be they moral, natural, or whatever) and am of the opinion that you only have the rights society grants to you or that you yourself can defend. To me, being alive is a privlege, but one I will obviously defend to the death.
I don't quite understand your claim that the tiger doesn't violate the right to live. If you believe a person has rights beyond the bounds of human society, then why is nature violating them not a violation? The tiger, be it capable of making moral choices or not, has still taken your life.
you might as well say "the fear of getting caught" gives me rights. Both might help to protect my rights
I agree with your second statement but find it doesn't fit with the first. Society (in my opinion) gives you the rights and uses "fear of getting caught" to protect them. Fear itself does no giving, but is merely a mechanism employed by the guardians of your rights.
Jw
My government regulates murder because it violates individual rights, not because it's beneficial to the majority.
Those individual rights are not natural, but given to you by government and society. There is no such thing as a natural right to keep on living - if you don't believe me, try explaining your view to a hungry tiger or to a malaria mosquito.
Jw
Ok, well I personally had relationships between people in mind, not being nabbed by the cops as I'm not usually in that situation (dunno about you...). How about trying to stay on this side of the law, eh buddy?
Jw
I would like to thank you for sharing this, and in my opinion anybody who can be this honest with themselves is a better human being than many.
Good luck with the future and never lose that honesty - it will at least earn you respect.
Jw
Would you still call it a bad ruling if he clearly did intend to distribute and profit from it?
That's what a post a little higher is claiming is the situation...
Jw
Sure - in the same way google has 'sold' a different ordering to US companies who come after it with the DMCA, and French and German companies who come after it with anti-Nazi laws.
Jw
Ok, I'll be a bit clearer this time. One possibility is to use something similar to the CDMA system previously used in cell phones:
Mix the data signal with a semirandom series of bits at a far higher frequency than that of the data. For example, take a stream at 20kbps and run it through a mixer with a key stream at 400kbps that contains equally many ones and zeros, has a semirandom (but also some other important properties that have escaped me at the moment) characteristic, and is periodic over 4 hours. The resulting signal put on the airwaves will be low power and almost indistinguishable from wideband noise. However, by tuning a filter to that wide band and mixing with the same key stream in perfect sync, the signal is almost perfectly extracted. To anyone else however, it will look just like noise even though it will be significantly above the noise floor of the communications channel.
To block this you indeed need a source of white noise, but you also need a transmitter than can send out said white noise at a relatively high power level over a bandwidth of multiple MHz so as to completely cover up that first signal. Not practical in most situations, and definitely not within the reach of the average citizen. The noise level has to be substantially higher than the signal before it becomes unrecoverable.
This is how cell phones used to share bandwidth - they'd just transmit over each other, but each signal was recoverable using the key.
Jw
True, but they can use techniques to make it very hard for you to do so. Check out spread spectrum communications - they smear out the signal over KHz or MHz instead of at one discrete carrier, making it almost impossible to pick out from background noise and requiring a very wideband jammer to block all of it.
Jw
You forgot quotation marks...
"written in Visual Basic" - 357,000
"written in C" - 2,750,000
Go C Go!
I agree - I'm still an idealist and would like to believe that people can live together simply through respect and consideration. I also know that's a dream and that we need society to 'protect' people from each other, such as with harassment. What I detest, however, is that people take the privleges and securities offered by society for granted and see them as inviolate rights.
;)
Of course, a government that tries to protect you from everything is most likely to bring this feeling about, which is what I most dislike about this law. It doesn't seem to change that much in terms of freedom, seeing as libel, slander and assault cover damaging and threatening statements (or am I wrong in this?). It may prevent petty name calling and, depending on how harassment is defined, provide a means for censoring a few dissident voices. However, I think the most damage will come from the strengthening of a sense of entitlement and egocentricity.
I have my own bone to pick with human society, but I like to think that I at least faintly appreciate how much easier it makes my life. Society would be much happier if people honestly thanked each other for their time.
Well, thanks for listening to my idealistic rantings
Jw
I certainly agree that it is right that you are not harrassed, but I'm not someone who believes in the existence of intrinsic rights so I would tend to disagree that you have a right not to be harassed. That doesn't mean I think it should be legal to harass people - the government, having taken away many of the ways a person could respond to try and stop harassment, has the responsibility to prevent harassment. I merely object to the fact that you give the impression that you feel entitled not to be harassed.
Jw
I don't have to withstand harrassment as part of my respect to free speech. In fact, your right to free speech stops when you start interfering with my rights. You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you can't make remarks to your secretary that qualify as sexual harrassment, and you can't call me to make a prank call. That is not an exhaustive list.
Help me understand, which of your rights are violated here?
Jw
Because kids aren't sufficiently developed to think for themselves about complex issues. That's why we try to teach them the right thing at a young age and hope that they'll decide for themselves whether what we taught them was right when they reach a stage of sufficient mental development.
Religion is done in the same way (not trying to imply any other link here, though). You're brought up in the same way as your parents, and then somewhere between your teens and twenties, when you've learned how to think and have started forming your own philosophy on life, you make a decision as to whether you want to stay in said religion.
A 10 year old is not capable of evaluating whether or not evolution is valid based on the facts - he will simply believe what his teacher will tell him. Hopefully a few years later when it's again taught in more detail, he'll go back and reexamine it with a critical eye.
Jw
I know that much - but yeah, I guess a private address would have been better.
Aah well...
Jw
Sad it may be, but what does it say about today's youth that store owners have to resort to such drastic measures to get them to stop being a nuisance?
Jw
Maybe they did it on purpose - would you rather they had posted your IP for every Joe Blow to start surfing to and pinging?
Or maybe I'm just not cynical enough yet...
Jw
The problem with your Roman analogy is that their understanding of the rules of reality was incomplete. We can defeat the defenses of the Romans because we understand more of said rules and can make devices that fly, which to them seems inconcievable. In the case of a computer, however, we make the rules that software abides by and thus know most of the actions that can be performed in the virtual reality of a system. To bring your Roman situation back to computer terms, it would be as if a firewall only blocked inbound viruses and didn't realize it was possible for viruses to enter via other paths and then dial home.
Jw