Isn't cash similarly not-really anonymous though? Each bank note has a unique serial number on it which could easily be scanned and recorded with modern technology making transactions pseudo-anonymous if businesses were required to scan the notes for each transaction and banks record the notes you withdraw etc. Of course that would not cover everything but it would probably cover enough that authorities could use it to track people in. This makes it similar to bitcoin in that tracking the currency takes some effort but is not impossible.
All true but there are some things which only humans have ever done to the Earth: CFCs which damage the ozone layer and thermonuclear weapons (there is evidence of a natural fission reactor about 1.7 billion years ago but natural nuclear fusion only occurs in the sun, not on Earth)
Cities are constantly changing, and track. . . doesn't.
Track can change but it does tend to be at a slower pace - even underground trains can change, just look at the tube in London with it's closed stations and old tunnels. However you are forgetting the feedback effect. Having easy access to trains is a huge plus when building shops, housing and offices so while the city will change it will likely change to take advantage of the transit available provided you have a sensible amount of infrastructure.
The problem I saw when living in the US was that your public transit is appalling so it isn't possible to build near it because there is so little of it and when new buildings do go up they come surrounded with massive parking lots which means the density is low so a station cannot serve that many.
Buses are far more flexible than rail, for the simple fact that you can re-allocate buses, and create new routes anywhere you have a road.
...which is exactly why trains and trams are better. Frequently changing bus routes, numbers and timetables is a good way to kill off your ridership because who wants to learn a new timetable every few months and have to refigure the best way to get home or get to work? When the buses were privatized in the town where I grew up huge numbers of people ended up switching to driving because the company kept switching the timetables around to optimize them and everyone got fed up of trying to work out the new timetable every few months.
Given that a bus has frequent stops it is going to be hard to speed up unless you also increase the acceleration and deceleration which will make riding the bus far less pleasant. In addition the call to make them more dangerous is likely to have exactly the opposite effect. How long do you think you will be delayed if someone falls off the open door trying to get on or off the bus?
A far better way to increase the speed of the bus is to have bus lanes. No increase in danger with a huge increase in speed in heavy traffic. Surely this is the best way to go before introducing buses which might cause the occasional massive delay at the expense of someone's life?
I agree that the papers should all be freely available but we need a system to make this work properly. The old system where it was free to publish but you had to pay for the journal got the financial incentives in line with the scientific aims: if your journal published the leading articles in the field then institutes would line up to pay for it so the incentive was to select excellent papers.
The new "pay to publish" system does not do this. Instead there is a financial incentive to accept any paper they can because the more they accept the more money they collect so the financial incentive is the exact opposite of what you want. Either we need a system where there are no financial incentives (in which case private publishing companies are probably not going to be interested) or we need to make them work in the right direction because the current system is probably going to start showing cracks in the long term as publishers get caught between financial and scientific motivations pulling in opposite directions.
But you could only stop Event A by having something happen local to Event A.
Exactly. With FTL event A is not longer guaranteed to precede event B in all inertial reference frames. For example consider the case where a terrorist sends a signal (event A) to blow up a bomb (event B). Clearly for the terrorist the two events are causally link (A causes B) and A happens before B.
However for an observer travelling at high speed (close to c) from where event B occurs towards event A that observer will see event B happen first and will get to where event A will happen before event A actually happens. So if a terrorist at A sends a signal to detonate a bomb at B then someone travelling towards where A will occur will see the explosion before event A actually happens in their reference frame. Hence when they arrive at where A will happen they can shoot the terrorist to ensure that they never send the signal which caused event B....at which point you have a temporal paradox.
Here's the logic of the American System spelled out for you. Maximum possible values of the fields given MM/DD/YYYY format: 12/31/9999
So what's going to happen in 9,999 AD that will prevent 10,000 AD from happening? Besides the really illogical thing is that when talking about your independence day you use the British date format: "4th July" and not "July 4". I get that this is how you write the date but please don't try to claim it is logical: it is a historical artifact just like pronouncing the 'gh' in 'rough' as 'f' in English.
Perhaps, you could say that Faster than Light Transmission is instant, because it "Skips" space.
It doesn't matter how the information is transmitted all that matters is that there is a causal link between two events which requires any form of FTL information transmission. Provided that event A causes event B then for ANY type of FTL transmission there will be a reference frame for which event A occurs after event B and hence it is possible to stop event A from happening after seeing event B which was caused by it. The only way around this is to break relativity or break causality.
Actually if the theorem is exactly as the article states then it should have been marked wrong because it is wrong:
According to the new "Three Radii Theorem," if three or more lines extend from a single point to the edge of a circle, then the point is the center of the circle and the straight lines are the radii.
I think what they meant to say was three lines of equal length in which case this just defines three points on a circle which is of course enough to uniquely define it. It also only works in two dimensions otherwise the point does not have to be the centre. This is the sort of geometric proof problem we used to get at secondary school. Have standards really fallen so incredibly far that this is noteworthy now let alone publishable? If so me and my old schoolmates can probably rustle up quite a few more "theorems" for publication in the journal of bleeding obvious mathematics.
Flight takes many decades, but they stay in contact with earth in realtime.
This utterly breaks causality. For example suppose a terrorist had planted a bomb on the ship and uses this instant signal to detonate it. However nearby our hero Buzz Lightyear is cruising in the opposite direction at a large fraction of the speed of light. He sees the ship explode but in his frame of reference the terrorist of Earth has not actually pushed the button yet so he carries on flying to Earth and shoots the terrorist before the signal is sent....so why did the ship explode?...and if it didn't explode why did Buzz fly to Earth and shoot someone?
The moment you have FTL information transmission you have time travel: the two are inextricably linked in relativity and the moment you have time travel you have causality violations. So either this experiment does not transmit actionable information FTL or there is a serious flaw with relativity. The later would be an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence.
If time is relative, then it would seem to reason that causality would have to be at best local to one's own time frame.
Only it doesn't work like that at all in relativity: causality is preserved by the fact that information cannot travel faster than light. If you can transmit information faster than this then you can create real paradoxes which are not at all explainable i.e. events which occur in one reference frame and which do not occur in another because someone stopped them. This is not something which has ever been observed.
My guess is that the information speed is actually less than, or equal, to that of light because we have seen this sort of thing before with tunnelling photons. A photon can tunnel through a potential barrier faster than light but the chance that it makes it is less than 100%. This means that you have to send many photons to be sure the signal is transmitted and by the time you do that the average speed of information transmission has dropped to the speed of light even though single photons are faster.
I don't know the details of this experiment yet but I very, very strongly doubt that they actually transmit "actionable" information (i.e. information that could influence an observer's actions) at FTL speeds and I expect that the summary misread and misunderstood the results.
Really? So when riding public transport your life depends on having a mobile phone? Clearly jamming people's phones is not at all acceptable and the guy deserved to get in trouble with the law but I can't help but find it rather amusing that some people seem to equate removal of their mobile phone as something which is life-threatening.
Holy shit, you mean we're not allowed to advance technology & then require it because it provides better services?
No you certainly are allowed to use advanced technology and services. What you are not allowed to do is go around thinking that life without a mobile was practically impossible and incredibly dangerous. The delay in contacting emergency services would have been minimal since, in any emergency the train would need to make it to the next station so medics/police etc. could get on board. Hence we are talking about a delay of a couple of minutes at most and that't only the case if the train is an old one which does not have an emergency intercom connecting passengers to the driver when the emergency button is pressed who could then radio in for help to be there at the next station.
That's the great thing about advanced technology: it has applications beyond your mobile phone.
Also, $70 textbooks are just crazy when most good teachers could write their own.
Wow that's cheap - the ones the publishers try to sell for first year university physics are typically $150-$200. However writing your own textbook is not a small task. I did this for a course I've taught where the text books available skipped too much maths but it took me three years and a lot of time to grow the material to the point where it can replace a textbook.
While the cost savings for the students are enormous (which is also partly why I did it) it is unlikely I would have gone to such a huge effort had the the standard text books been a lot better because faculty don't really get any credit for writing a non-peer reviewed book.
He seems pretty lax on allowing writs of attainder...
A writ of attainder is legislation which declares someone to be guilty without a trial. How is that relevant here? Who is being declared guilty? While I disagree that Apple should be compelled to break the iPhone encryption that is hardly declaring them guilty and punishing them.
All this fuss about Apple is also ultimately stupid because it is becoming increasingly easy to build a system which, while it might not be unbreakable, would be so hard to break that it will be impractical to have enough resources to do this for every case. Instead governments should be investing in clever, intelligent law enforcement approaches instead of the lazy "collect everything" approach that they seem to becoming increasingly attached to.
He's lucky there wasn't an emergency and that his device did not interfere with a 911 call.
I guess I was just lucky to survive the dark ages before mobiles existed and someone would have had to get the train to stop in the next station before calling for help. Yes this guy was being an idiot but lets not blow things out of proportion: life was indeed possible before the cell phone was invented and it was not significantly more dangerous.
But you're okay with sitting there helplessly cursing when your friend in the driver's seat has a delusion, grabs the manual controls and swerves into traffic to avoid a non-existent obstacle?
In that situation there are manual controls available in the vehicle and I can either grab them and try to swerve out of trouble or fight off my friend. This is also a highly unlikely scenario and I doubt it occurs often while a computer doing something crazy is a far more plausible scenario given that we have not tested any computer program to the degree that we have tested the human brain. That's not to say that we will not get there just that we are not yet there.
It sounds like what you really want is an off switch.
No, when barreling down a motorway at 120km/h the last thing I want is for the computer to slam on the brakes and bring the car to an immediate stop in the middle of a lane. I want controls that will let me take over from the computer whenever I deem it necessary. Once we have a few decades of widespread usage and some high degree of confidence that it can handle unpredicted "5+ sigma" deviations from normal traffic then we can look at dropping the manual controls but not before.
The point is that the vote is nothing to do with the US government. Whether the UK remains in or leaves the EU is an internal matter for the UK to decide for itself and none of the US government's business. Even if you argue that it is international relations that relationship is between the UK and the EU, again nothing to do with the US.
If you are going to argue that the UK decision has an indirect impact on the US then I would not disagree but if that gives the US license to interfere then I can use the exact same argument for anonymous. The choice of president in the US has an indirect effect on it's international relations (especially given Trump's statements and Mexico and muslims) and so that would justify anonymous' intervention in the US election: the same argument cuts both ways.
Technically, fossil fuel add to GHGs in the atmosphere.
...and where do you think those fossil fuels got the carbon in them from? All fossil fuels are is biomass that has lain around for a few millions years. If biomass is carbon neutral then technically so are fossil fuels the difference is that the cycle is a far longer one so it does not appear that way.
CO2 is that thing what the plants eat. Without it they die.
Are you seriously trying to link the survival of plants to the existence of CO2 emissions from coal fired power stations? The evolution of plant life predates the invention of power stations or, indeed, the invention of fire by quite a bit of time (think hundreds of millions of years). Indeed without that pre-existing plant life there would be no coal for these power stations to burn!
Plato, for example, wanted to limit voting to the educated. I tend to agree
The problem with this is that anytime that you limit who can vote with some restriction, no matter how well intentioned and sensible it is, the result is that those greedy for power will manipulate things to exclude those likely to vote against them. For example how do you define "educated"? This type of ambiguity is ripe for abuse. Having a public democracy may have significant problems but so far it's the best form of government that anyone has yet come up with.
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Isn't cash similarly not-really anonymous though? Each bank note has a unique serial number on it which could easily be scanned and recorded with modern technology making transactions pseudo-anonymous if businesses were required to scan the notes for each transaction and banks record the notes you withdraw etc. Of course that would not cover everything but it would probably cover enough that authorities could use it to track people in. This makes it similar to bitcoin in that tracking the currency takes some effort but is not impossible.
All true but there are some things which only humans have ever done to the Earth: CFCs which damage the ozone layer and thermonuclear weapons (there is evidence of a natural fission reactor about 1.7 billion years ago but natural nuclear fusion only occurs in the sun, not on Earth)
Cities are constantly changing, and track. . . doesn't.
Track can change but it does tend to be at a slower pace - even underground trains can change, just look at the tube in London with it's closed stations and old tunnels. However you are forgetting the feedback effect. Having easy access to trains is a huge plus when building shops, housing and offices so while the city will change it will likely change to take advantage of the transit available provided you have a sensible amount of infrastructure.
The problem I saw when living in the US was that your public transit is appalling so it isn't possible to build near it because there is so little of it and when new buildings do go up they come surrounded with massive parking lots which means the density is low so a station cannot serve that many.
Buses are far more flexible than rail, for the simple fact that you can re-allocate buses, and create new routes anywhere you have a road.
Given that a bus has frequent stops it is going to be hard to speed up unless you also increase the acceleration and deceleration which will make riding the bus far less pleasant. In addition the call to make them more dangerous is likely to have exactly the opposite effect. How long do you think you will be delayed if someone falls off the open door trying to get on or off the bus?
A far better way to increase the speed of the bus is to have bus lanes. No increase in danger with a huge increase in speed in heavy traffic. Surely this is the best way to go before introducing buses which might cause the occasional massive delay at the expense of someone's life?
I agree that the papers should all be freely available but we need a system to make this work properly. The old system where it was free to publish but you had to pay for the journal got the financial incentives in line with the scientific aims: if your journal published the leading articles in the field then institutes would line up to pay for it so the incentive was to select excellent papers.
The new "pay to publish" system does not do this. Instead there is a financial incentive to accept any paper they can because the more they accept the more money they collect so the financial incentive is the exact opposite of what you want. Either we need a system where there are no financial incentives (in which case private publishing companies are probably not going to be interested) or we need to make them work in the right direction because the current system is probably going to start showing cracks in the long term as publishers get caught between financial and scientific motivations pulling in opposite directions.
But you could only stop Event A by having something happen local to Event A.
Exactly. With FTL event A is not longer guaranteed to precede event B in all inertial reference frames. For example consider the case where a terrorist sends a signal (event A) to blow up a bomb (event B). Clearly for the terrorist the two events are causally link (A causes B) and A happens before B.
However for an observer travelling at high speed (close to c) from where event B occurs towards event A that observer will see event B happen first and will get to where event A will happen before event A actually happens. So if a terrorist at A sends a signal to detonate a bomb at B then someone travelling towards where A will occur will see the explosion before event A actually happens in their reference frame. Hence when they arrive at where A will happen they can shoot the terrorist to ensure that they never send the signal which caused event B....at which point you have a temporal paradox.
By the way, the Declaration of Independence was signed "July 4, 1776". I think we'll be keeping that, thanks.
Yes, but rather ironically you typically refer to it as the "4th of July" don't you?
Here's the logic of the American System spelled out for you. Maximum possible values of the fields given MM/DD/YYYY format: 12/31/9999
So what's going to happen in 9,999 AD that will prevent 10,000 AD from happening? Besides the really illogical thing is that when talking about your independence day you use the British date format: "4th July" and not "July 4". I get that this is how you write the date but please don't try to claim it is logical: it is a historical artifact just like pronouncing the 'gh' in 'rough' as 'f' in English.
Actually for the rest of the world surely 22/7 is close enough to be used as Pi day.
True but it is getting it done the first time that is the problem.
Perhaps, you could say that Faster than Light Transmission is instant, because it "Skips" space.
It doesn't matter how the information is transmitted all that matters is that there is a causal link between two events which requires any form of FTL information transmission. Provided that event A causes event B then for ANY type of FTL transmission there will be a reference frame for which event A occurs after event B and hence it is possible to stop event A from happening after seeing event B which was caused by it. The only way around this is to break relativity or break causality.
According to the new "Three Radii Theorem," if three or more lines extend from a single point to the edge of a circle, then the point is the center of the circle and the straight lines are the radii.
I think what they meant to say was three lines of equal length in which case this just defines three points on a circle which is of course enough to uniquely define it. It also only works in two dimensions otherwise the point does not have to be the centre. This is the sort of geometric proof problem we used to get at secondary school. Have standards really fallen so incredibly far that this is noteworthy now let alone publishable? If so me and my old schoolmates can probably rustle up quite a few more "theorems" for publication in the journal of bleeding obvious mathematics.
Flight takes many decades, but they stay in contact with earth in realtime.
This utterly breaks causality. For example suppose a terrorist had planted a bomb on the ship and uses this instant signal to detonate it. However nearby our hero Buzz Lightyear is cruising in the opposite direction at a large fraction of the speed of light. He sees the ship explode but in his frame of reference the terrorist of Earth has not actually pushed the button yet so he carries on flying to Earth and shoots the terrorist before the signal is sent....so why did the ship explode? ...and if it didn't explode why did Buzz fly to Earth and shoot someone?
The moment you have FTL information transmission you have time travel: the two are inextricably linked in relativity and the moment you have time travel you have causality violations. So either this experiment does not transmit actionable information FTL or there is a serious flaw with relativity. The later would be an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence.
If time is relative, then it would seem to reason that causality would have to be at best local to one's own time frame.
Only it doesn't work like that at all in relativity: causality is preserved by the fact that information cannot travel faster than light. If you can transmit information faster than this then you can create real paradoxes which are not at all explainable i.e. events which occur in one reference frame and which do not occur in another because someone stopped them. This is not something which has ever been observed.
My guess is that the information speed is actually less than, or equal, to that of light because we have seen this sort of thing before with tunnelling photons. A photon can tunnel through a potential barrier faster than light but the chance that it makes it is less than 100%. This means that you have to send many photons to be sure the signal is transmitted and by the time you do that the average speed of information transmission has dropped to the speed of light even though single photons are faster.
I don't know the details of this experiment yet but I very, very strongly doubt that they actually transmit "actionable" information (i.e. information that could influence an observer's actions) at FTL speeds and I expect that the summary misread and misunderstood the results.
You could say the same about defibrillators.
Really? So when riding public transport your life depends on having a mobile phone? Clearly jamming people's phones is not at all acceptable and the guy deserved to get in trouble with the law but I can't help but find it rather amusing that some people seem to equate removal of their mobile phone as something which is life-threatening.
Holy shit, you mean we're not allowed to advance technology & then require it because it provides better services?
No you certainly are allowed to use advanced technology and services. What you are not allowed to do is go around thinking that life without a mobile was practically impossible and incredibly dangerous. The delay in contacting emergency services would have been minimal since, in any emergency the train would need to make it to the next station so medics/police etc. could get on board. Hence we are talking about a delay of a couple of minutes at most and that't only the case if the train is an old one which does not have an emergency intercom connecting passengers to the driver when the emergency button is pressed who could then radio in for help to be there at the next station.
That's the great thing about advanced technology: it has applications beyond your mobile phone.
Also, $70 textbooks are just crazy when most good teachers could write their own.
Wow that's cheap - the ones the publishers try to sell for first year university physics are typically $150-$200. However writing your own textbook is not a small task. I did this for a course I've taught where the text books available skipped too much maths but it took me three years and a lot of time to grow the material to the point where it can replace a textbook.
While the cost savings for the students are enormous (which is also partly why I did it) it is unlikely I would have gone to such a huge effort had the the standard text books been a lot better because faculty don't really get any credit for writing a non-peer reviewed book.
He seems pretty lax on allowing writs of attainder...
A writ of attainder is legislation which declares someone to be guilty without a trial. How is that relevant here? Who is being declared guilty? While I disagree that Apple should be compelled to break the iPhone encryption that is hardly declaring them guilty and punishing them.
All this fuss about Apple is also ultimately stupid because it is becoming increasingly easy to build a system which, while it might not be unbreakable, would be so hard to break that it will be impractical to have enough resources to do this for every case. Instead governments should be investing in clever, intelligent law enforcement approaches instead of the lazy "collect everything" approach that they seem to becoming increasingly attached to.
He's lucky there wasn't an emergency and that his device did not interfere with a 911 call.
I guess I was just lucky to survive the dark ages before mobiles existed and someone would have had to get the train to stop in the next station before calling for help. Yes this guy was being an idiot but lets not blow things out of proportion: life was indeed possible before the cell phone was invented and it was not significantly more dangerous.
But you're okay with sitting there helplessly cursing when your friend in the driver's seat has a delusion, grabs the manual controls and swerves into traffic to avoid a non-existent obstacle?
In that situation there are manual controls available in the vehicle and I can either grab them and try to swerve out of trouble or fight off my friend. This is also a highly unlikely scenario and I doubt it occurs often while a computer doing something crazy is a far more plausible scenario given that we have not tested any computer program to the degree that we have tested the human brain. That's not to say that we will not get there just that we are not yet there.
It sounds like what you really want is an off switch.
No, when barreling down a motorway at 120km/h the last thing I want is for the computer to slam on the brakes and bring the car to an immediate stop in the middle of a lane. I want controls that will let me take over from the computer whenever I deem it necessary. Once we have a few decades of widespread usage and some high degree of confidence that it can handle unpredicted "5+ sigma" deviations from normal traffic then we can look at dropping the manual controls but not before.
The point is that the vote is nothing to do with the US government. Whether the UK remains in or leaves the EU is an internal matter for the UK to decide for itself and none of the US government's business. Even if you argue that it is international relations that relationship is between the UK and the EU, again nothing to do with the US.
If you are going to argue that the UK decision has an indirect impact on the US then I would not disagree but if that gives the US license to interfere then I can use the exact same argument for anonymous. The choice of president in the US has an indirect effect on it's international relations (especially given Trump's statements and Mexico and muslims) and so that would justify anonymous' intervention in the US election: the same argument cuts both ways.
Technically, fossil fuel add to GHGs in the atmosphere.
CO2 is that thing what the plants eat. Without it they die.
Are you seriously trying to link the survival of plants to the existence of CO2 emissions from coal fired power stations? The evolution of plant life predates the invention of power stations or, indeed, the invention of fire by quite a bit of time (think hundreds of millions of years). Indeed without that pre-existing plant life there would be no coal for these power stations to burn!
Plato, for example, wanted to limit voting to the educated. I tend to agree
The problem with this is that anytime that you limit who can vote with some restriction, no matter how well intentioned and sensible it is, the result is that those greedy for power will manipulate things to exclude those likely to vote against them. For example how do you define "educated"? This type of ambiguity is ripe for abuse. Having a public democracy may have significant problems but so far it's the best form of government that anyone has yet come up with.