As an extension of your comment, I should note that because the mass of large objects like the sun is distributed over their volume, even inside them their gravity isn't as intense as if you were the same distance from a black hole containing all their mass. It is the way that black holes concentrate all their mass in a small space that makes them so exceptional.
The difference between this technology and all previous technologies is that with modern cryptography, there are a priori limits on how easy it is to crack. In the past, an organization with great resources (like a government) could crack any conceivable form of information protection: envelopes can be opened, phone lines tapped, and so forth. However, with modern cryptographic algorithms, unless the government can exploit some heretofore undiscovered weakness in the algorithm, you can rest assured that the contents of your message will remain secret until computers reach a certain speed or someone develops a new technology like a quantum computer, risks that you can manage (by using a key size appropriate to the length of time you need to keep the secret, for instance). I suspect that the idea of perfect secrets terrifies some individuals in the government. They didn't act in the past because they were confident they could uncover any secret and because the secrets were often less valuable than they are now (because technology has made secrets more valuable and because people are more willing to entrust secrets to provably good encryption). Neither of these things is true anymore.
The framers of the US Constitution tried to craft a set of limitations on the government that would keep it from abusing and subjugating its citizens. However, despite these precautions, the government has at various times and places done exactly the things the framers tried to prevent. In a sense, even for nominally restricted and democratic governments, citizens possess rights only at the sufferance of their government. Modern cryptography is taking one of those rights (the right to conduct confidential communications) and transforming it from a right granted at the sufferance of the government, to be taken when away "national security" or what have you is threatened, to a right that can't be violated without overwhelming restrictions on citizens' freedoms. That's why the opposition to it has been so strong, I think.
I'll propose something: religion. If you're not a certain type of Christian, much of the South can be incredibly stifling. (This isn't to say that being that type of Christian and a geek are mutually incompatible, but I'd propose that they're anticorrelated.
If you're a private individual and you write a program that takes over computers without their users' permission and sends information about how they're used to a remote server, you're a hacker (or cracker, if you must). If you're caught, you'll be punished with years in jail, fines, and the ever-popular "no Internet access," just to ensure that you have no means to support yourself after you get out of jail.
If you're a large, multinational corporation and you hire someone to write a program that takes over computers without their users' permission and sends information about how they're used to a remote server, you're engaging in a mostly-legal business, "advertising" or "marketing." If you're caught, you might have to pay some civil penalties.
This is similar to the legal definition of spam: unsolicited commercial advertising is spam, but unsolicited political advertising is not.
No, I don't believe that, although I do see how easy it would be to draw that generalization from my post. My point was that a single-payer system tends to reduce costs.
I don't believe this. Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
You're probably a troll. Congratulations.
Why does Congress, or you, have the right to determine the risks that others will take for science? Living is dangerous. Even though thousands of humans are killed every year in car accidents, people still drive. Taking on that "ordinary" risk is acceptable, and yet taking on greater risk for the possibility of greater rewards isn't? Are legislators better at determining at determining what risks individuals should take than the individuals themselves? We're not talking about sweatshops where children are locked into virtual slavery: the engineers, pilots, and entrepreneurs who create and run small aerospace corporations are educated, experienced, and capable both of finding less risky positions and making informed decisions about their own safety. Who gave Congress, or you, the authority to make decisions for them?
But this is demonstrably not true. Online poker is increasingly viewed in the community as an excellent way for good players to practice their skills before going to major (physical) tournaments. Those same tournaments are seeing increasing numbers of skilled unknowns who refined their play on online poker. Some people in the community attribute the increase in poker's popularity to the availability of games online.
Not to mention that I know several quite good (able to make substantial money) players who prefer to play online, for a variety of reasons.
As a courtesy, it would be nice if the Slashdot hordes would be lighter on the last (fifth) link in the second series. From wincent.org:
"[Update: This article is attracting heavy traffic from Slashdot... server load is quite low now, although it was probably higher earlier, but it turns out that eZ publish is very inefficient with respect to MySQL. I've changed the (persistent) mysql_pconnect calls to (non-persistent) mysql_connect calls, so hopefully there shouldn't be any more "too many connections" errors. Ironic that in the very article where I describe how piracy is seriously affecting my ability to pay the bandwidth bill, I get a wave of traffic from Slashdot. This server is hosted in Australia, where bandwidth still costs over 10 cents a meg. Incredible, I know...]"
If you don't agree with the war, vote against it and convince others to do the same. However, you have no right to resist conscription unless you have extreme moral objections to killing in general--which, according to your earlier statements, you do not. By willingly residing within the United States, you agree to the possibility of conscription (read more of Glaucon's Social contract theory if you don't believe me). Your cowardice and/or opinions do not change your societal obligations, and failing to uphold those obligations is perhaps one of the most dis-honorable things a person can do.
Social contract theory aside, the notion of "freely residing" is a fiction.
The Earth is, at the present, divided up into states. There is nowhere one can go to live which is not a state. Changing states presents formidable practical obstacles: it requires a substantial financial reserves to pay for the expenses of moving, some ability to make a living in the new state, learning a new culture and sometimes a new language, and leaving one's friends and family, most of whom will remain in the old state. Moreover, few states accept any and all immigrants: in fact, for many states, getting permission to live in the state much less permanent residency much less citizenship is extraordinarily difficult.
With money and power, one can work around these obstacles. However, for the vast majority of the US population, it's de facto impossible to leave the US. They are born in the US and die in the US, and if the US implements conscription, they can either choose to resist or submit.
This is not quite accurate: there are analystic solutions for single-body cases more complicated than Schwarzschild (spinning black holes for instance), and for some exotica that may be physically uninteresting (Godel's rotating universes, for instance). The commmon feature of all analytic solutions is the high degree of symmetry they possess.
This article used the phrase, "Officers should not . .." far too often for my comfort. The point of legal safeguards on the police and judicial proceedings is to prevent abuses from occurring in the first place. I don't trust the police to use the system in the way the article says it was intended without real protection, as opposed to the toothless policy that seems to be in place.
NIL isn't a facility for researching fusion power: it's designed for nuclear weapons research, even though no one says that in public (it's said more often in private).
The enormous technical difficulties involved in getting fusion from this method, much less positive energy returns, is one pointer to this fact; compare it to magnetic confinement, which has produced fusion though not positive energy returns. However, nuclear weapons researchers have spent years looking for more controlled circumstances under which to study how fusion occurs in bombs. After the US signed the CTBT, this need became more urgent, thus we're seeing it get built.
Hugh Hefner sells girlie magazines. Yes, Playboy helped make pornorgraphy more acceptable and more mainstream in the US. It probably contributed to the more open attitudes towards sexuality that emerged during the 1960s and 70s.
However, Hefner was not the cause nor even one of the most influential factors. Some of those factors were beyond any one individual, like the trend from an industrial to an information/serivce economy and the Baby Boom. Some, however, were people. How about credit to Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick, who saw the possibility of an oral contraceptive and how funded the research that led to its realization? How about Gregory Pincus, Frank Colton, and Carl Djerassi, who performed research on said contraceptive? What about the intellectual leaders of the feminist movement, who pushed for the social liberation of women, like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem?
Hefner had influence, no doubt; but don't overstate the case.
Attractive female: Hi, my name is Renee. Wanna dance?
Jock: (snort!) Who, me? (snort!) I'm not much of a dancer, I really don't do this kind of thing much!
Attractive female: Oh, well, that's ok. We can just talk! I'm a supermodel and just got back from Europe. What do you do?
Jock: I play football. I've been playing it almost every day since I was able to walk, which was about twenty years ago. I don't have a job, per se, but it's OK because the college pays me money to play this game. As long as I don't get in the newspapers outside the sports section, I have a free ride.
Attractive female: So, um. Yeah. What's football?
Jock: Oh, it this really great sport that I've played a few thousand times. I'm just trying to play it better now, to maybe get a major-league contract. You should see me play sometime!
Jock: Hello? Where'd she go? Aw man, I didn't even get to see her tits!
The division is actually not that clear-cut. Many transsexuals, defined as people who transition to living full-time in their chosen gender (most MtF transsexuals eventually get sex reassignment surgery, but many FtM transsexuals don't), also derive sexual satisfaction from cross-dressing. Certain psychological theorists argue that transsexuality is a paraphilia, though there's considerable evidence that this is, if it's even true, not the whole story.
However, transvestites as a whole are characterized by a higher interest in cross-dressing for sexual purposes and little to no interest in living as a member of the opposite gender, while transsexuals and other transgenders are the opposite. The notion that transsexuals "shouldn't" connect their cross-dressing with sex can be hurtful and probably isn't productive in helping people figure out their gender issues.
An inconsistent foreign policy is in the nature of a democracy, for better or worse. Kyoto is a perfect example. Clinton negotiated the treaty, but he didn't present it to the Senate for ratification because he knew they would never accept it. Democracies act schizophrenic because there is no mandated consensus and the opinions of both the people and their representatives change in response to new information.
You might chooose to view this as a bad thing. However, the alternative, making it more difficult for democracies to change their foreign policies, is worse. For instance, suppose Bush were to declare his intentions to invade Iran and North Korea and promised allies in the appropriate regions $1 trillion for the privilege. You might wish to reverse that policy by voting to remove Bush from office or persuading your representatives to block his funding in Congress. Likewise, the senators decided that, regardless of what Clinton thought of Kyoto, they didn't like it. For another example, should all presidents subsequent to LBJ have been required to uphold unlimited obligations in Vietnam?
Attempting to hold a collection of people like a democracy to the same standards of "honesty" as an individual is silly. Obviously, everyone outside the US will take notice of the deep divisions on foreign policy in its body politic, but I don't see how we can avoid the problem without stifling debate and making it impossible to alter past decisions, good or bad.
A brief popular introduction to the connection between CO2 and climate appeared in the March 2004 Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/hansen.pdf.
One of the more interesting things to emerge recently is the possibility of empirical models that base their predictions on paleoclimate and paleo-CO2 data, without needing to delve into the complexities of modeling the physics of climate. These models lend credence to the traditional physical models.
The reason the Kyoto treaty is disadvantageous to the US is the way it was constructed: nations are expected to reduce their future CO2 production to the levels that prevailed right before the US experienced its unprecedented economic growth in the 1990s, with the commensurate increases in CO2 production. Thus, the US would have more trouble meeting those targets than the other industrialized nations and it would almost inevitably cost more money.
As it is, it's questionable whether the European nations will meet their CO2 targets under Kyoto. I'd argue that it's unreasonable to punish the US for strong economic growth that no one foresaw when crafting the treaty. The fact that developing nations, like China, more or less get a free pass in Kyoto exacerbates the problem, because they're the only other countries whose economies grew fast during the 1990s.
The real question is: how large do we expect the costs of global warming to be, and how do we anticipate that they'll be distributed? It's only then can we answer with fairness questions like, "How much should we pay to try to prevent global warming now?"
Aggro is the other big one I remember that I don't recognize.
Huh . . . when I was playing
Asheron's Call, we called DPS DoT, for damage over time. AC had other jargon, but it seems that not enough people played it and then played other MMORPGs, so EQ/UO jargon has become "standard" MMORPG slang.
I don't exactly disagree with you, but I want to point out that just because a topology isn't embedded doesn't mean visualizing it as embedded is wrong. In some cases, these topologies are mathemtically identical to the embedded versions. Since we can't imagine these sorts of topologies without embedding them in a higher dimensional space, saying it's illegitimate to think of topologies as embedded takes away one of our available cognitive tools for understanding their properties.
That said, it's important that to keep in mind that, for example, it's not possible to "cut through" the higher dimensions in which we're imagining curved four-dimensional spacetime is embedded. I.e., visualization can be a useful tool, but it's important to keep in mind when the embedding is fictitious.
Re:The article is misleading on key points
on
More on Spintronics
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· Score: 1
Please. Did you read the damn article?
I never said anything about the contents of the paper . . . my point is that the article that Slashdot linked to is misleading. Whether or not the authors work at Stanford (one author is from Stanford, the others from the University of Tokyo) is immaterial: spin still has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth.
The paper may, or may not, be fine science. I won't judge without looking at it. The article-cum-press-release is bad science journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
As an extension of your comment, I should note that because the mass of large objects like the sun is distributed over their volume, even inside them their gravity isn't as intense as if you were the same distance from a black hole containing all their mass. It is the way that black holes concentrate all their mass in a small space that makes them so exceptional.
History has also shown us that governments and their backers sometimes "win," at the cost of the governed.
The framers of the US Constitution tried to craft a set of limitations on the government that would keep it from abusing and subjugating its citizens. However, despite these precautions, the government has at various times and places done exactly the things the framers tried to prevent. In a sense, even for nominally restricted and democratic governments, citizens possess rights only at the sufferance of their government. Modern cryptography is taking one of those rights (the right to conduct confidential communications) and transforming it from a right granted at the sufferance of the government, to be taken when away "national security" or what have you is threatened, to a right that can't be violated without overwhelming restrictions on citizens' freedoms. That's why the opposition to it has been so strong, I think.
I'll propose something: religion. If you're not a certain type of Christian, much of the South can be incredibly stifling. (This isn't to say that being that type of Christian and a geek are mutually incompatible, but I'd propose that they're anticorrelated.
If you're a private individual and you write a program that takes over computers without their users' permission and sends information about how they're used to a remote server, you're a hacker (or cracker, if you must). If you're caught, you'll be punished with years in jail, fines, and the ever-popular "no Internet access," just to ensure that you have no means to support yourself after you get out of jail.
If you're a large, multinational corporation and you hire someone to write a program that takes over computers without their users' permission and sends information about how they're used to a remote server, you're engaging in a mostly-legal business, "advertising" or "marketing." If you're caught, you might have to pay some civil penalties.
This is similar to the legal definition of spam: unsolicited commercial advertising is spam, but unsolicited political advertising is not.
I don't believe this. Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
You're probably a troll. Congratulations. Why does Congress, or you, have the right to determine the risks that others will take for science? Living is dangerous. Even though thousands of humans are killed every year in car accidents, people still drive. Taking on that "ordinary" risk is acceptable, and yet taking on greater risk for the possibility of greater rewards isn't? Are legislators better at determining at determining what risks individuals should take than the individuals themselves? We're not talking about sweatshops where children are locked into virtual slavery: the engineers, pilots, and entrepreneurs who create and run small aerospace corporations are educated, experienced, and capable both of finding less risky positions and making informed decisions about their own safety. Who gave Congress, or you, the authority to make decisions for them?
Not to mention that I know several quite good (able to make substantial money) players who prefer to play online, for a variety of reasons.
As a courtesy, it would be nice if the Slashdot hordes would be lighter on the last (fifth) link in the second series. From wincent.org: "[Update: This article is attracting heavy traffic from Slashdot... server load is quite low now, although it was probably higher earlier, but it turns out that eZ publish is very inefficient with respect to MySQL. I've changed the (persistent) mysql_pconnect calls to (non-persistent) mysql_connect calls, so hopefully there shouldn't be any more "too many connections" errors. Ironic that in the very article where I describe how piracy is seriously affecting my ability to pay the bandwidth bill, I get a wave of traffic from Slashdot. This server is hosted in Australia, where bandwidth still costs over 10 cents a meg. Incredible, I know...]"
Bell's Inequality only rules out local hidden variables theories, not all hidden variables theories.
If you don't agree with the war, vote against it and convince others to do the same. However, you have no right to resist conscription unless you have extreme moral objections to killing in general--which, according to your earlier statements, you do not. By willingly residing within the United States, you agree to the possibility of conscription (read more of Glaucon's Social contract theory if you don't believe me). Your cowardice and/or opinions do not change your societal obligations, and failing to uphold those obligations is perhaps one of the most dis-honorable things a person can do. Social contract theory aside, the notion of "freely residing" is a fiction. The Earth is, at the present, divided up into states. There is nowhere one can go to live which is not a state. Changing states presents formidable practical obstacles: it requires a substantial financial reserves to pay for the expenses of moving, some ability to make a living in the new state, learning a new culture and sometimes a new language, and leaving one's friends and family, most of whom will remain in the old state. Moreover, few states accept any and all immigrants: in fact, for many states, getting permission to live in the state much less permanent residency much less citizenship is extraordinarily difficult. With money and power, one can work around these obstacles. However, for the vast majority of the US population, it's de facto impossible to leave the US. They are born in the US and die in the US, and if the US implements conscription, they can either choose to resist or submit.
This is not quite accurate: there are analystic solutions for single-body cases more complicated than Schwarzschild (spinning black holes for instance), and for some exotica that may be physically uninteresting (Godel's rotating universes, for instance). The commmon feature of all analytic solutions is the high degree of symmetry they possess.
Is this the case you were thinking of? If so, Google won. There's also a Slashdot story about it, if anyone cares to dig it up.
This article used the phrase, "Officers should not . . ." far too often for my comfort. The point of legal safeguards on the police and judicial proceedings is to prevent abuses from occurring in the first place. I don't trust the police to use the system in the way the article says it was intended without real protection, as opposed to the toothless policy that seems to be in place.
NIL isn't a facility for researching fusion power: it's designed for nuclear weapons research, even though no one says that in public (it's said more often in private).
The enormous technical difficulties involved in getting fusion from this method, much less positive energy returns, is one pointer to this fact; compare it to magnetic confinement, which has produced fusion though not positive energy returns. However, nuclear weapons researchers have spent years looking for more controlled circumstances under which to study how fusion occurs in bombs. After the US signed the CTBT, this need became more urgent, thus we're seeing it get built.
However, Hefner was not the cause nor even one of the most influential factors. Some of those factors were beyond any one individual, like the trend from an industrial to an information/serivce economy and the Baby Boom. Some, however, were people. How about credit to Margaret Sanger and Katherine McCormick, who saw the possibility of an oral contraceptive and how funded the research that led to its realization? How about Gregory Pincus, Frank Colton, and Carl Djerassi, who performed research on said contraceptive? What about the intellectual leaders of the feminist movement, who pushed for the social liberation of women, like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem?
Hefner had influence, no doubt; but don't overstate the case.
Attractive female: Hi, my name is Renee. Wanna dance?
Jock: (snort!) Who, me? (snort!) I'm not much of a dancer, I really don't do this kind of thing much!
Attractive female: Oh, well, that's ok. We can just talk! I'm a supermodel and just got back from Europe. What do you do?
Jock: I play football. I've been playing it almost every day since I was able to walk, which was about twenty years ago. I don't have a job, per se, but it's OK because the college pays me money to play this game. As long as I don't get in the newspapers outside the sports section, I have a free ride.
Attractive female: So, um. Yeah. What's football?
Jock: Oh, it this really great sport that I've played a few thousand times. I'm just trying to play it better now, to maybe get a major-league contract. You should see me play sometime!
Jock: Hello? Where'd she go? Aw man, I didn't even get to see her tits!
The division is actually not that clear-cut. Many transsexuals, defined as people who transition to living full-time in their chosen gender (most MtF transsexuals eventually get sex reassignment surgery, but many FtM transsexuals don't), also derive sexual satisfaction from cross-dressing. Certain psychological theorists argue that transsexuality is a paraphilia, though there's considerable evidence that this is, if it's even true, not the whole story. However, transvestites as a whole are characterized by a higher interest in cross-dressing for sexual purposes and little to no interest in living as a member of the opposite gender, while transsexuals and other transgenders are the opposite. The notion that transsexuals "shouldn't" connect their cross-dressing with sex can be hurtful and probably isn't productive in helping people figure out their gender issues.
It's unreasonable. However, unreasonability is not an obstacle to the law.
You might chooose to view this as a bad thing. However, the alternative, making it more difficult for democracies to change their foreign policies, is worse. For instance, suppose Bush were to declare his intentions to invade Iran and North Korea and promised allies in the appropriate regions $1 trillion for the privilege. You might wish to reverse that policy by voting to remove Bush from office or persuading your representatives to block his funding in Congress. Likewise, the senators decided that, regardless of what Clinton thought of Kyoto, they didn't like it. For another example, should all presidents subsequent to LBJ have been required to uphold unlimited obligations in Vietnam?
Attempting to hold a collection of people like a democracy to the same standards of "honesty" as an individual is silly. Obviously, everyone outside the US will take notice of the deep divisions on foreign policy in its body politic, but I don't see how we can avoid the problem without stifling debate and making it impossible to alter past decisions, good or bad.
One of the more interesting things to emerge recently is the possibility of empirical models that base their predictions on paleoclimate and paleo-CO2 data, without needing to delve into the complexities of modeling the physics of climate. These models lend credence to the traditional physical models.
The reason the Kyoto treaty is disadvantageous to the US is the way it was constructed: nations are expected to reduce their future CO2 production to the levels that prevailed right before the US experienced its unprecedented economic growth in the 1990s, with the commensurate increases in CO2 production. Thus, the US would have more trouble meeting those targets than the other industrialized nations and it would almost inevitably cost more money.
As it is, it's questionable whether the European nations will meet their CO2 targets under Kyoto. I'd argue that it's unreasonable to punish the US for strong economic growth that no one foresaw when crafting the treaty. The fact that developing nations, like China, more or less get a free pass in Kyoto exacerbates the problem, because they're the only other countries whose economies grew fast during the 1990s.
The real question is: how large do we expect the costs of global warming to be, and how do we anticipate that they'll be distributed? It's only then can we answer with fairness questions like, "How much should we pay to try to prevent global warming now?"
Aggro is the other big one I remember that I don't recognize. Huh . . . when I was playing Asheron's Call, we called DPS DoT, for damage over time. AC had other jargon, but it seems that not enough people played it and then played other MMORPGs, so EQ/UO jargon has become "standard" MMORPG slang.
Can anyone who's more familiar with modern MMORPG jargon/slang provide a translation for some of his terms (mez, DPS, etc.)?
I don't exactly disagree with you, but I want to point out that just because a topology isn't embedded doesn't mean visualizing it as embedded is wrong. In some cases, these topologies are mathemtically identical to the embedded versions. Since we can't imagine these sorts of topologies without embedding them in a higher dimensional space, saying it's illegitimate to think of topologies as embedded takes away one of our available cognitive tools for understanding their properties. That said, it's important that to keep in mind that, for example, it's not possible to "cut through" the higher dimensions in which we're imagining curved four-dimensional spacetime is embedded. I.e., visualization can be a useful tool, but it's important to keep in mind when the embedding is fictitious.
Please. Did you read the damn article? I never said anything about the contents of the paper . . . my point is that the article that Slashdot linked to is misleading. Whether or not the authors work at Stanford (one author is from Stanford, the others from the University of Tokyo) is immaterial: spin still has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth. The paper may, or may not, be fine science. I won't judge without looking at it. The article-cum-press-release is bad science journalism.