The problem with this is that radio waves lack sufficient energy to affect chemical bonds. The energy of a single radio photon is far below the energy difference required to move an electron out of a molecular orbital. Indeed visible light has far more energy per photon and yet there is no evidence that light bulbs cause cancer (sunlight is different since it contains UV which does have enough energy). The same is true for infrared radiation but, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that living in a hot country or taking lots of saunas or hot showers increases the risk of cancer.
So what you need is a mechanism that works for radio waves with their very low energy per photon but does not work for infrared or visible light with their higher energy per photon. It's certainly possible that such a mechanism exists but we don't yet understand it e.g. perhaps radio photons with their larger size affect an entire molecule in some strange way e.g. changing the folding behaviour...but it is also possible that the studies claiming links between cancer and radio waves are flawed because, as you point out, biological systems are very complex.
That's really my point. Given the lack of any plausible, testable mechanism for radio waves to cause cancer we are left with nothing but correlation and, in this case, you need many independent studies to confirm the result. This is because, without a mechanism, you have to admit that you really do not know how the cancers are caused and so you clearly have no idea what other factors might be relevant.
The reality is these waves can interact with the body even though its not ionizing.
Any EM wave will interact with the body because, being made of matter, a human body consists of charged particles. That is not the issue, the issue is whether this interaction is dangerous. The problem is that, as yet, there is no understood mechanism as to how EM waves which have too little energy to break chemical bonds could cause cancer and without this the warning that "correlation does not imply causation" is very important to remember.
This certainly seems to be interesting but medical research has huge problems with contradictory and unreproducible results. So until there have been considerably more independent studies confirming this result or someone comes up with a cancer-causing mechanism that can be tested and confirmed I'm going to remain highly sceptical.
It also seems extremely bizarre that they appear to be using an elaborate system of code words about "equivocal evidence" vs "clear evidence" vs "some evidence" etc. Normally in science we give a p-value or a number of standard deviations - it's far easier to understand this than to try and figure out how "clear evidence" maps to a p-value range.
It also seems strange that they are claiming that it will reduce the price much since you can already buy CCD X-ray cameras for $500-$1000. In addition to all these drawbacks you also still need a very high-resolution camera initially to take pictures of the sandpaper they use for the filter.
This idea seems so far behind the currently available technology that it seems very unlikely it will ever be practical and it does not seem to have any particular advantage.
I completely agree that there is a whole ton of quackery out there which has been scientifically disproven and which can result in people avoiding necessary medical treatment based on false promises. However, acupuncture is in a slightly different category in that it has been shown to relieve pain. That does not mean that it isn't still rife with quackery - the only thing that has been shown to my knowledge is pain relief - but it does suggest that there is some mechanism there which we do not yet fully understand.
This is why science is useful to medicine: it provides the tools to separate the mystic BS from what actually works. It can then go further and help determine why something works so it can be improved upon. Acupuncture seems to be at the first stage and so, provided it is only used for pain relief, we should not stop people from using just because we have not yet figured out how it works. That's the key difference between medicine and science: it's good medicine if the treatment works but it's only good science if you know how the treatment works.
Yes but I understood that needling had been shown to be more effective than placebo. What has not been shown is that acupuncture, with all its associated mumbo jumbo, is any better than random needling.
Needling has been shown to help some chronic pain, most probably through release of endorphins and similar.
Isn't this the point though? Medicine is all about curing and treating medical conditions. Whether or not it is wrapped up in some pseudo-scientific BS if the process actually works and relieves a medical condition without causing harm then surely it is good medicine even though it may be appalling science.
If I operate an American registered website on an American hosted server paid for by an American registered corporate entity, and some user in some shithole country like the U.K. registers and providers their personal data, that foreign court has exactly 0 jurisdiction.
What a refreshing perspective from an American. Have you tried sharing this perspective with your own government which is currently trying to argue that Microsoft should be forced to turn over personal data its subsidiary holds in the EU in violation of EU law? Indeed if it were the case that UK users were using an entirely US-based service provided by a US-based company then you would have a point but that is absolutely not the case.
Facebook has data centres all over the world, not just the US, it deliberately targets it services to people in the UK and signs UK-based advertizing contracts to allow UK companies to gain access to UK-based users. It derives a significant amount of its revenue from UK-based operations and hence, since it is conducting business there it should clearly be subject to UK laws in the same way that a UK-based business conducting business in the US would be subject to US-based laws.
Imagine if 20 countries decided to summon him. Or 100.
That's just the point though - I would have to imagine that because it has not actually happened! If it did and his response was "sorry but I have been summoned by 100 other countries so I cannot appear" I would fully expect that parliament would have some sympathy in the same way that a judge is unlikely to penalize a witness from failing to follow a subpoena because they have been subpoenaed to appear in another court for a different case.
The government can't do precisely what it likes, since there's a lot of laws on the books already and it would have to specifically repeal those that clash.
Sorry but you clearly do not have any idea how parliament works. If two laws clash then the one passed the latest automatically has precedence. There is literally no limit to parliament's power. They can pass any law they like and, provided it passes both houses and get royal assent it becomes the law. Even if that law violates previously entered treaties and agreements it is still the law and there is literally no means to prevent it because of a well-established principle that no parliament may bind another.
I know that this is hard to comprehend for an American but the UK and other parliamentary governments are only bound by custom and a general desire to behave well. This is a far better system than a written constitution since it gives far more flexibility while also preventing the rich from hiring armies of lawyers to strike down laws that they do not like....which is exactly why Zukerberg should be concerned because, unlike the US, his army of lawyers will find it very hard to protect him from a parliament that is out to get him.
It's just as easy for people with friends, and family.
No, it really isn't. In fact, I can honestly say it's not only hard but actually impossible for me to delete my Facebook account since I have no idea how to delete something that doesn't exist. My family and most, if not all, my friends will have the same problem.
31% are ready to do it. But that 31% hasn't yet. What is holding them back?
Possibly the fact that they haven't actually decided to do it but as still thinking about it? Deciding to do something might not be the same as doing it but it does mean that you are definitely going to do it. If not then you have not really decided anything and are still considering your options.
They can do a lot more than just ban his site. Really annoying an entire government is a dangerous thing to do given that they literally make the rules and the UK has no written constitution to constrain it: it's a parliamentary dictatorship.
If I were Zuck, I'd stay the hell out of the U.K. as well. FB is an American company, and if every single parliament in the world starts to summon American CEOs, it simply doesn't work.
That's fine so long as those American companies "stay the hell out" of other countries too. However, if you are going to do business in those countries and especially if you are potentially involved in a massive violation of their online privacy laws then expect to get summoned by their governments, if not their courts.
Blinn's law says that the time to do something remains constant with the usual result that improvements go into the quality of the result. This is pretty self-evident with real-time video since your time budget is fixed by needed to maintain the frame rate and for any given frame rate you might as well use all the time available. Hence, it says nothing about whether "true" real-time ray tracing will ever be possible. The real question is not whether it will become possible but whether it will become practical. This is determined by whether or not there are alternative, less computationally intensive algorithms that produce visually similar (or better) results for that frame rate. If there are not then real-time ray tracing will the be the algorithm of choice.
According to this video it is not just more powerful hardware but also that they came up with the idea to use only a fraction of the rays normally required and to then used a power denoise algorithm to generate the final image.
At least he actually followed through and did what he promised
Did he? I don't believe it. Where's the proof that he launched? The article contained no pictures or videos. The evidence that he launched is far flimsier than the evidence that the Earth is a sphere so, by his own standards, we should simply refuse to believe that he did this and then, just perhaps, he might actually learn something valuable from this non-event.
That’s why their rockets have the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry.
Sorry but that is total BS. The Falcon 9 has had 51 launches of which only 2 failed giving it just over a 96% reliability. The Russian Soyuz series has had over 1700 launches with a 97.4% reliability. Hence, the Falcon 9 with far fewer launches has a reliability comparable to one of the most tried, tested and reliable launch vehicles there is (source).
And, no, "get off all social media" is not a valid alternative.
Yes it is. You are looking for a free way to advertize your book but social media platforms make their money by charging people to advertize. If this is what you are looking for get off social media and pay someone to advertize for you.
And you can get that by keeping everybody's salary secret.
That would be an option too. I don't particularly care whether all are secret or all are revealed just so long as we all get treated fairly.
You aren't interested in making things equal by giving rights to those who don't have them, you are interested in making things equal by removing rights from those who have them.
Not having your salary disclosed is not a "right". There is nothing to stop your employer revealing it if they so wished. If you start thinking of everything as a right then you get rapidly into problems. The reason I suggested the more openness approach is that some people think they have a right to know other people's salaries if the money to pay them comes from their government even if indirectly. They might find it "abhorrent" that you are suggesting that their "right" to know be taken away. So that also makes you someone who wants to make things equal by taking away someone's perceived rights. Personally, I don't really care which way you use to fix it but either way, someone will claim that they are losing a "right".
All I am advocating for is fair and consistent treatment. I'm not that bothered about having my salary disclosed but, if independent organizations receiving government money have to disclose salaries then that rule should be applied to ALL such organizations. Whether or not the rule is a good idea I'm ambivalent about - but if it exists it should be fairly applied.
In the case of contracts, the amount of the contract should be made public, but how the contractor pays its employees is really their own business.
The employees of the University are not government employees either so by the same token the only information that should be public is the amount the government gives the university to provide educational services to ensure that the public is getting good value for money....at least that's if we are being fair.
The province where I work has mandated that all university employees paid over a certain amount must have their salaries publicly disclosed because they are, at least partly, publicly funded. While I don't have a problem with this per se I think it is unfair to single out those of us working at universities. This rule should also apply to all companies who accept government contracts too since, by extension, their salaries are also being paid for, at least in part, by government money.
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The problem with this is that radio waves lack sufficient energy to affect chemical bonds. The energy of a single radio photon is far below the energy difference required to move an electron out of a molecular orbital. Indeed visible light has far more energy per photon and yet there is no evidence that light bulbs cause cancer (sunlight is different since it contains UV which does have enough energy). The same is true for infrared radiation but, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that living in a hot country or taking lots of saunas or hot showers increases the risk of cancer.
So what you need is a mechanism that works for radio waves with their very low energy per photon but does not work for infrared or visible light with their higher energy per photon. It's certainly possible that such a mechanism exists but we don't yet understand it e.g. perhaps radio photons with their larger size affect an entire molecule in some strange way e.g. changing the folding behaviour...but it is also possible that the studies claiming links between cancer and radio waves are flawed because, as you point out, biological systems are very complex.
That's really my point. Given the lack of any plausible, testable mechanism for radio waves to cause cancer we are left with nothing but correlation and, in this case, you need many independent studies to confirm the result. This is because, without a mechanism, you have to admit that you really do not know how the cancers are caused and so you clearly have no idea what other factors might be relevant.
The reality is these waves can interact with the body even though its not ionizing.
Any EM wave will interact with the body because, being made of matter, a human body consists of charged particles. That is not the issue, the issue is whether this interaction is dangerous. The problem is that, as yet, there is no understood mechanism as to how EM waves which have too little energy to break chemical bonds could cause cancer and without this the warning that "correlation does not imply causation" is very important to remember.
This certainly seems to be interesting but medical research has huge problems with contradictory and unreproducible results. So until there have been considerably more independent studies confirming this result or someone comes up with a cancer-causing mechanism that can be tested and confirmed I'm going to remain highly sceptical.
It also seems extremely bizarre that they appear to be using an elaborate system of code words about "equivocal evidence" vs "clear evidence" vs "some evidence" etc. Normally in science we give a p-value or a number of standard deviations - it's far easier to understand this than to try and figure out how "clear evidence" maps to a p-value range.
It also seems strange that they are claiming that it will reduce the price much since you can already buy CCD X-ray cameras for $500-$1000. In addition to all these drawbacks you also still need a very high-resolution camera initially to take pictures of the sandpaper they use for the filter.
This idea seems so far behind the currently available technology that it seems very unlikely it will ever be practical and it does not seem to have any particular advantage.
I completely agree that there is a whole ton of quackery out there which has been scientifically disproven and which can result in people avoiding necessary medical treatment based on false promises. However, acupuncture is in a slightly different category in that it has been shown to relieve pain. That does not mean that it isn't still rife with quackery - the only thing that has been shown to my knowledge is pain relief - but it does suggest that there is some mechanism there which we do not yet fully understand.
This is why science is useful to medicine: it provides the tools to separate the mystic BS from what actually works. It can then go further and help determine why something works so it can be improved upon. Acupuncture seems to be at the first stage and so, provided it is only used for pain relief, we should not stop people from using just because we have not yet figured out how it works. That's the key difference between medicine and science: it's good medicine if the treatment works but it's only good science if you know how the treatment works.
Yes but I understood that needling had been shown to be more effective than placebo. What has not been shown is that acupuncture, with all its associated mumbo jumbo, is any better than random needling.
Needling has been shown to help some chronic pain, most probably through release of endorphins and similar.
Isn't this the point though? Medicine is all about curing and treating medical conditions. Whether or not it is wrapped up in some pseudo-scientific BS if the process actually works and relieves a medical condition without causing harm then surely it is good medicine even though it may be appalling science.
If I operate an American registered website on an American hosted server paid for by an American registered corporate entity, and some user in some shithole country like the U.K. registers and providers their personal data, that foreign court has exactly 0 jurisdiction.
What a refreshing perspective from an American. Have you tried sharing this perspective with your own government which is currently trying to argue that Microsoft should be forced to turn over personal data its subsidiary holds in the EU in violation of EU law? Indeed if it were the case that UK users were using an entirely US-based service provided by a US-based company then you would have a point but that is absolutely not the case.
Facebook has data centres all over the world, not just the US, it deliberately targets it services to people in the UK and signs UK-based advertizing contracts to allow UK companies to gain access to UK-based users. It derives a significant amount of its revenue from UK-based operations and hence, since it is conducting business there it should clearly be subject to UK laws in the same way that a UK-based business conducting business in the US would be subject to US-based laws.
Imagine if 20 countries decided to summon him. Or 100.
That's just the point though - I would have to imagine that because it has not actually happened! If it did and his response was "sorry but I have been summoned by 100 other countries so I cannot appear" I would fully expect that parliament would have some sympathy in the same way that a judge is unlikely to penalize a witness from failing to follow a subpoena because they have been subpoenaed to appear in another court for a different case.
The government can't do precisely what it likes, since there's a lot of laws on the books already and it would have to specifically repeal those that clash.
Sorry but you clearly do not have any idea how parliament works. If two laws clash then the one passed the latest automatically has precedence. There is literally no limit to parliament's power. They can pass any law they like and, provided it passes both houses and get royal assent it becomes the law. Even if that law violates previously entered treaties and agreements it is still the law and there is literally no means to prevent it because of a well-established principle that no parliament may bind another.
I know that this is hard to comprehend for an American but the UK and other parliamentary governments are only bound by custom and a general desire to behave well. This is a far better system than a written constitution since it gives far more flexibility while also preventing the rich from hiring armies of lawyers to strike down laws that they do not like....which is exactly why Zukerberg should be concerned because, unlike the US, his army of lawyers will find it very hard to protect him from a parliament that is out to get him.
It's just as easy for people with friends, and family.
No, it really isn't. In fact, I can honestly say it's not only hard but actually impossible for me to delete my Facebook account since I have no idea how to delete something that doesn't exist. My family and most, if not all, my friends will have the same problem.
31% are ready to do it. But that 31% hasn't yet. What is holding them back?
Possibly the fact that they haven't actually decided to do it but as still thinking about it? Deciding to do something might not be the same as doing it but it does mean that you are definitely going to do it. If not then you have not really decided anything and are still considering your options.
They can do a lot more than just ban his site. Really annoying an entire government is a dangerous thing to do given that they literally make the rules and the UK has no written constitution to constrain it: it's a parliamentary dictatorship.
If I were Zuck, I'd stay the hell out of the U.K. as well. FB is an American company, and if every single parliament in the world starts to summon American CEOs, it simply doesn't work.
That's fine so long as those American companies "stay the hell out" of other countries too. However, if you are going to do business in those countries and especially if you are potentially involved in a massive violation of their online privacy laws then expect to get summoned by their governments, if not their courts.
If it is like the current models then it has no means of attachment to the iPad when not in use.
It may never be doable because of Blinn's Law.
Blinn's law says that the time to do something remains constant with the usual result that improvements go into the quality of the result. This is pretty self-evident with real-time video since your time budget is fixed by needed to maintain the frame rate and for any given frame rate you might as well use all the time available. Hence, it says nothing about whether "true" real-time ray tracing will ever be possible. The real question is not whether it will become possible but whether it will become practical. This is determined by whether or not there are alternative, less computationally intensive algorithms that produce visually similar (or better) results for that frame rate. If there are not then real-time ray tracing will the be the algorithm of choice.
According to this video it is not just more powerful hardware but also that they came up with the idea to use only a fraction of the rays normally required and to then used a power denoise algorithm to generate the final image.
At least he actually followed through and did what he promised
Did he? I don't believe it. Where's the proof that he launched? The article contained no pictures or videos. The evidence that he launched is far flimsier than the evidence that the Earth is a sphere so, by his own standards, we should simply refuse to believe that he did this and then, just perhaps, he might actually learn something valuable from this non-event.
That’s why their rockets have the worst relaiability in the history of rocketry.
Sorry but that is total BS. The Falcon 9 has had 51 launches of which only 2 failed giving it just over a 96% reliability. The Russian Soyuz series has had over 1700 launches with a 97.4% reliability. Hence, the Falcon 9 with far fewer launches has a reliability comparable to one of the most tried, tested and reliable launch vehicles there is (source).
And, no, "get off all social media" is not a valid alternative.
Yes it is. You are looking for a free way to advertize your book but social media platforms make their money by charging people to advertize. If this is what you are looking for get off social media and pay someone to advertize for you.
This is why politicians are absolutely justified in thinking the masses are moronic asses.
The real problem for democracy is that those same politicians are selected from those same masses.
And you can get that by keeping everybody's salary secret.
That would be an option too. I don't particularly care whether all are secret or all are revealed just so long as we all get treated fairly.
You aren't interested in making things equal by giving rights to those who don't have them, you are interested in making things equal by removing rights from those who have them.
Not having your salary disclosed is not a "right". There is nothing to stop your employer revealing it if they so wished. If you start thinking of everything as a right then you get rapidly into problems. The reason I suggested the more openness approach is that some people think they have a right to know other people's salaries if the money to pay them comes from their government even if indirectly. They might find it "abhorrent" that you are suggesting that their "right" to know be taken away. So that also makes you someone who wants to make things equal by taking away someone's perceived rights. Personally, I don't really care which way you use to fix it but either way, someone will claim that they are losing a "right".
If you want privacy why not start by not posting personal details on a website, especially not one like Facebook?
All I am advocating for is fair and consistent treatment. I'm not that bothered about having my salary disclosed but, if independent organizations receiving government money have to disclose salaries then that rule should be applied to ALL such organizations. Whether or not the rule is a good idea I'm ambivalent about - but if it exists it should be fairly applied.
In the case of contracts, the amount of the contract should be made public, but how the contractor pays its employees is really their own business.
The employees of the University are not government employees either so by the same token the only information that should be public is the amount the government gives the university to provide educational services to ensure that the public is getting good value for money....at least that's if we are being fair.
The province where I work has mandated that all university employees paid over a certain amount must have their salaries publicly disclosed because they are, at least partly, publicly funded. While I don't have a problem with this per se I think it is unfair to single out those of us working at universities. This rule should also apply to all companies who accept government contracts too since, by extension, their salaries are also being paid for, at least in part, by government money.