John Tory (the next mayor of Toronto) has made statements actually supporting Uber. Thing is, although he's been elected he hasn't taken office yet, so he's not quite in a position to act.
Well I suppose this explains why, after Uber has been operating for 2 years Toronto is suddenly in a rush to get the case heard by the courts.
If it is truly single player why would you need a network connection? The only reason for this is so that other player's actions can affect your game (either that or a as a form of DRM but they have denied the latter). While this might provide some protection it still allows hoards of idiots to impact your game and I don't want that. If the changes are made centrally then there is no need for an always-on connection: just provide optional updates from time to time.
Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.
Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.
It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.
Given that our ancestors evolved to eat these animals
We evolved in Africa which was not known for its large Woolly Mammoth population. While we did eat them, perhaps even to extinction, I don't think you can say that we specifically evolved to eat mammoths. It was more an opportunistic relationship: they were large chunks of fresh meat wandering through a frozen landscape and we were hungry.
I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical? That nature had her shot and declared these animals unfit for habitation on the earth, perhaps?
Actually I understood that early humans had an large role in causing mammoths to go extinct. So, if anything, wouldn't it be unethical not to reverse the damage we caused? This is our first chance to revive a species which we probably caused to go extinct in the first place.
I absolutely agree with you: the submitter has no clue about statistics. This type of problem has been solved use simple Bayesian statistics where you calculate the probability distribution function for the fraction of people agreeing with X. This gives you all the information you need to calculate the probability that two datasets are consistent. We use this in particle physics for efficiency calculations all the time. There is even a detailed write up here.
U.S. express passenger train run over old rails / rail lines.
I doubt they run over old rails at 200 km/h but rather new, welded rails with concrete sleepers. However with modern rails you can certainly reach beyond 500km/h: the French have the record back in 2007 with a 574km/h TGV train. So 500km/h is not really that fast for a special run. What will be interesting is whether they can achieve this for a regular service but it sounds like they cannot due to noise pollution concerns.
To beat airline speeds you need maglev in a vacuum tunnel. Aeroplanes can only achieve the speeds they do at high altitude where the air pressure is low enough to greatly reduce air resistance. A maglev in an evacuated tunnel could easily reach several thousand km/h in silence. Such systems have been proposed but the cost is prohibitive....still reducing transatlantic travel times to an hour or two would be incredible.
Free speech may lead to more consequences since the times of Reagan, but free speech itself is still alive and well.
Really? The US makes a lot of noise about free speech but this law only restricts the US government. If you exercise your "right" you can end up fired, refused services and/or prosecuted for minor crimes to silence you. There is no concept that someone providing a public service has a duty not to discriminate based on your political views. Hence there is no real freedom of speech: if you say something loudly enough which the big corporations disagree with then expect to end up jobless, homeless and penniless...but hey at least your aren't in prison so it's all good, right?
Oh I would not be too sure of that. Just wait until some bright spark thinks to start a campaign to click the button to report an MP's speech as "extremist" and "radicalising". Someone more cynical than I might even suggest that this is part of the government's plan to deal with UKIP....
You should go read what they say about their own pollution levels. They make the vacuum of space look dirty by comparison.
Actually they might technically be correct if they are claiming that their air is "just like being in space": in both cases you need to bring your own oxygen supply to survive.
Given that 3.6 billion is almost three times the population of China I'm guessing they are using somewhat dodgy statistics either that or they are counting each journey made by the same person and that person makes multiple journeys.
Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.
Clearly you have never taken a physics exam. In physics it is really simple to present the students with a problem slightly different to those they have seen and have them figure out how to solve it by applying the principles covered in the course. Easy questions present situations very similar to those they have seen before, difficult ones present situations that are rather different.
In fact when teaching the first year physics for bioscience course I got so many complaints that I asked questions that they have not seen before that I actually now explain to them that they cannot just memorize every question in the book. They have to know how to apply the course principles to new and different situations. So I think it depends strongly on subject.
Why do teachers teach with a closed fist, holding some knowledge back?
The primary goal of an exam is assessment, not teaching although you could say that it teaches you what you actually understand and what you do not. It is possible to write an open book exam but it is not always easy. I've done this once in the past for a grad course but the questions in such an exam are far, far harder and there is a certain amount of luck involved in finding the right parts of a book to read. Hence I no longer do this type of exam because I don't think it gives an accurate assessment of ability and it is really challenging to set questions which are hard enough to test but still possible to complete given student knowledge.
While the 11th Novemeber is remembrance day here in Canada you might want to remember that since it is to commemorate the end of the First World War it is also an important date for the entire Commonwealth and even the US has Veteran's Day. So, as days go, for a large number of countries this is actually a really bad one to select to celebrate rampant consumerism.
Technicolour models have been around for ages and this does not seem to be anything significantly new. Indeed it is no different from Supersymmetry which also has a Standard Model-like Higgs boson...plus another 4 on top two of which are electrically charged. SUSY can also explain Dark Matter if the lightest SUSY particle is stable and has far better theoretical motivation than techni-colour models.
While this does not make it any more likely to be correct I really hope techni-colour is not how the universe works. Having a smaller scale for the fundamental particles will push the energy of any new physics likely to solve the fundamental questions we have far higher and probably beyond the reach of current accelerator technology.
You can't detect motion relative to space and if you could relativity would be wrong. This would mean the Lorentz symmetry is broken is which one of the most fundamental symmetries in physics and yet there is absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. The only logical an rational explanation is that your theory is nonsense and inconsistent with reality.
Yes you can argue that the effect is too small to measure but at this point you might as well be claiming that the universe is full of flying pigs that just happen to be too small to see. Can you disprove this? No, but that does not mean that anyone is going to waste time looking for them. This is effectively what your argument boils down to.
Can you not see how illogical and irrational you are being? It's great that you are interested in physics but it is really sad that you fail to understand so much of it. Your work is not that of some undiscovered genius who nobody understands: it is far more consistent with someone who does not understand current physics and just made up a story to explain some problem they had heard about with physics.
I suppose that you can't see this at all and remained convinced that you are correct and I'm sure you also probably want to call me worse than uncivilized now. However if there is even a tiny doubt in your mind that something is not quite right then please act on it and seek professional mental help.
Well your theory relates the speed of light to the temperature of the universe. This is not uniform but fluctuates at the one in 10^-6 level (look up the cosmic microwave background). However we have seen zero variation in the speed of light down to the level of ~10^-20 so that's your theory eliminated by 14 orders of magnitude of measurement. I'd say this was pretty convincing evidence that it's nonsense.
Now, rather than waste my time giving a blow by blow account of all your other nonsense claims, how about you read some physics papers like this one and explain how your theory is completely consistent with all these measurements and those contained in other papers? Like most of the people with a loose grip on reality you seem to think that it is physics' job to explain to you why you are wrong. That is not how it works - if you want people to take you seriously you have to explain how your theory is consistent with current data. Afterall it is hardly reasonable to expect people to spend time reading and understanding your theories if you are completely unprepared to read and understand others is it?
Sorry but your theory is nonsense. Every measurement ever made is consistent with a constant speed of light and special relativity is the most accurate tested scientific theory ever. It is clear from your page that you fail to understand science at even the most basic possible level: "One of the absurdly limiting notions in physics these days is that if something is not testable, it is not science.". The only limitation of this is that it limits us to reality which is a good thing since we are doing science not writing fairy tales.
Frankly you need to see a psychiatrist because it is very clear from your page that you hold on reality is not what it should be. I realize that your condition means that you will almost certainly see this post as coming from just another physicist who doesn't understand how incredible your work is but sadly this really is just not the case. I'm sorry if this post has upset you but you need to hear the truth and I can only hope that it might persuade you to seek some professional medical help.
A word to the wise: you might have better luck as a theoretical physicist if you actually knew some physics. For example the Standard Model is based on quantum mechanics: QM is not a separate theory. Also most of the questions you ask in chapter 1 of you linked site have already been answered by physics e.g. we know exactly why light slows down in a medium.
If you want people to take you seriously then you need to show that you understand the current knowledge of physics. If you cannot do that then how can you possibly really understand any of the problems with it? Popular science articles do not contain anything close to the detailed understanding you need.
Actually the LHC generates more data than this. The talk is only talking about the data at CERN. The last count of all the files in the ATLAS experiment's DQ2 store (a distributed dataset access system with storage around the globe) was 161PB. This value includes all the simulated data, analysis data etc. I'm certain CMS has a comparable amount and then there are Alice and LHCb as well so the total will be well over the 300PB which Facebook stores.
While Facebook generates 4 PB of new data per day they only store 300 PB according to that page so most of this is either discarded or overwrites existing data. If we look at the LHC then the raw data rate is probably about 1 PB/min but we throw away most of this (using computers on the surface, not 100m underground as the original talk says) because it's physics we already know about and we can't afford the storage for it. Then there is the generation of new data by analysis and simulation to include.
So if you actually look at the whole system, not just what is at CERN, we have a larger total storage capacity and generate more data than Facebook...and we plan to scale up.
I gave the perfect example of where it would be discrimination. Gay parade squashed and Straight parade is allowed.
...and this is exactly what the law does: it squashes gay parades only, straight parades are allowed. If the real aim of the law is to protect minors from adults running around in the streets openly declaring their sexuality then ban that. The fact that there are no 'straight pride' parades is irrelevant. Anti-rape laws do not specify that it is only illegal for a man to rape a woman because the point of the law is to criminalize rape regardless of gender despite the fact the the reverse case is almost unheard of.
However if this is what Russia wants then that's its business but please don't try to pretend it is not discriminatory: it is by your own definition. As for the US their society is massively polarized. It hardly matters what point of view you express you will be ostracized by the extremists on one side or the other. However they have had such an appalling human rights record recently that I hardly think they will make much of a fuss about Russia's choice to discriminate: all you have to do is mention free speech, imprisonment without trail, torture, secret renditions etc. etc.
Russia does not have anti-gay laws...What Russia does have is laws that prevent gays from demonstrating and promoting being gay in places where minors visit.
True but don't those laws explicitly single out gays for the restriction and so are the very text book definition of discrimination? The general principle that you do not want adults going about and loudly announcing their sexuality where minors are present is perfectly reasonable. However if you want to do it in a non-discriminatory way you ban anyone going around and promoting their sexuality where minors are present regardless of what that sexuality is.
There is another instrument capable of detecting it: itself. You make the same measurement multiple times and see what the difference is each time you do it.
Slashdot Mirror
can be baryonic matter, if it is encapsulated in some fashion.
In which case it would hardly qualify as ordinary baryonic matter...
John Tory (the next mayor of Toronto) has made statements actually supporting Uber. Thing is, although he's been elected he hasn't taken office yet, so he's not quite in a position to act.
Well I suppose this explains why, after Uber has been operating for 2 years Toronto is suddenly in a rush to get the case heard by the courts.
If it is truly single player why would you need a network connection? The only reason for this is so that other player's actions can affect your game (either that or a as a form of DRM but they have denied the latter). While this might provide some protection it still allows hoards of idiots to impact your game and I don't want that. If the changes are made centrally then there is no need for an always-on connection: just provide optional updates from time to time.
No a Brit who made a typo probably assisted by auto-typo since 'n' is nowhere near 't' on the keyboard.
Kickstarter is best described as a donation.
Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.
Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.
It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.
Given that our ancestors evolved to eat these animals
We evolved in Africa which was not known for its large Woolly Mammoth population. While we did eat them, perhaps even to extinction, I don't think you can say that we specifically evolved to eat mammoths. It was more an opportunistic relationship: they were large chunks of fresh meat wandering through a frozen landscape and we were hungry.
I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical? That nature had her shot and declared these animals unfit for habitation on the earth, perhaps?
Actually I understood that early humans had an large role in causing mammoths to go extinct. So, if anything, wouldn't it be unethical not to reverse the damage we caused? This is our first chance to revive a species which we probably caused to go extinct in the first place.
I absolutely agree with you: the submitter has no clue about statistics. This type of problem has been solved use simple Bayesian statistics where you calculate the probability distribution function for the fraction of people agreeing with X. This gives you all the information you need to calculate the probability that two datasets are consistent. We use this in particle physics for efficiency calculations all the time. There is even a detailed write up here.
U.S. express passenger train run over old rails / rail lines.
I doubt they run over old rails at 200 km/h but rather new, welded rails with concrete sleepers. However with modern rails you can certainly reach beyond 500km/h: the French have the record back in 2007 with a 574km/h TGV train. So 500km/h is not really that fast for a special run. What will be interesting is whether they can achieve this for a regular service but it sounds like they cannot due to noise pollution concerns.
To beat airline speeds you need maglev in a vacuum tunnel. Aeroplanes can only achieve the speeds they do at high altitude where the air pressure is low enough to greatly reduce air resistance. A maglev in an evacuated tunnel could easily reach several thousand km/h in silence. Such systems have been proposed but the cost is prohibitive....still reducing transatlantic travel times to an hour or two would be incredible.
Free speech may lead to more consequences since the times of Reagan, but free speech itself is still alive and well.
Really? The US makes a lot of noise about free speech but this law only restricts the US government. If you exercise your "right" you can end up fired, refused services and/or prosecuted for minor crimes to silence you. There is no concept that someone providing a public service has a duty not to discriminate based on your political views. Hence there is no real freedom of speech: if you say something loudly enough which the big corporations disagree with then expect to end up jobless, homeless and penniless...but hey at least your aren't in prison so it's all good, right?
Oh I would not be too sure of that. Just wait until some bright spark thinks to start a campaign to click the button to report an MP's speech as "extremist" and "radicalising". Someone more cynical than I might even suggest that this is part of the government's plan to deal with UKIP....
You should go read what they say about their own pollution levels. They make the vacuum of space look dirty by comparison.
Actually they might technically be correct if they are claiming that their air is "just like being in space": in both cases you need to bring your own oxygen supply to survive.
Given that 3.6 billion is almost three times the population of China I'm guessing they are using somewhat dodgy statistics either that or they are counting each journey made by the same person and that person makes multiple journeys.
Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.
Clearly you have never taken a physics exam. In physics it is really simple to present the students with a problem slightly different to those they have seen and have them figure out how to solve it by applying the principles covered in the course. Easy questions present situations very similar to those they have seen before, difficult ones present situations that are rather different.
In fact when teaching the first year physics for bioscience course I got so many complaints that I asked questions that they have not seen before that I actually now explain to them that they cannot just memorize every question in the book. They have to know how to apply the course principles to new and different situations. So I think it depends strongly on subject.
Why do teachers teach with a closed fist, holding some knowledge back?
The primary goal of an exam is assessment, not teaching although you could say that it teaches you what you actually understand and what you do not. It is possible to write an open book exam but it is not always easy. I've done this once in the past for a grad course but the questions in such an exam are far, far harder and there is a certain amount of luck involved in finding the right parts of a book to read. Hence I no longer do this type of exam because I don't think it gives an accurate assessment of ability and it is really challenging to set questions which are hard enough to test but still possible to complete given student knowledge.
While the 11th Novemeber is remembrance day here in Canada you might want to remember that since it is to commemorate the end of the First World War it is also an important date for the entire Commonwealth and even the US has Veteran's Day. So, as days go, for a large number of countries this is actually a really bad one to select to celebrate rampant consumerism.
Technicolour models have been around for ages and this does not seem to be anything significantly new. Indeed it is no different from Supersymmetry which also has a Standard Model-like Higgs boson...plus another 4 on top two of which are electrically charged. SUSY can also explain Dark Matter if the lightest SUSY particle is stable and has far better theoretical motivation than techni-colour models.
While this does not make it any more likely to be correct I really hope techni-colour is not how the universe works. Having a smaller scale for the fundamental particles will push the energy of any new physics likely to solve the fundamental questions we have far higher and probably beyond the reach of current accelerator technology.
You can't detect motion relative to space and if you could relativity would be wrong. This would mean the Lorentz symmetry is broken is which one of the most fundamental symmetries in physics and yet there is absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever. The only logical an rational explanation is that your theory is nonsense and inconsistent with reality.
Yes you can argue that the effect is too small to measure but at this point you might as well be claiming that the universe is full of flying pigs that just happen to be too small to see. Can you disprove this? No, but that does not mean that anyone is going to waste time looking for them. This is effectively what your argument boils down to.
Can you not see how illogical and irrational you are being? It's great that you are interested in physics but it is really sad that you fail to understand so much of it. Your work is not that of some undiscovered genius who nobody understands: it is far more consistent with someone who does not understand current physics and just made up a story to explain some problem they had heard about with physics.
I suppose that you can't see this at all and remained convinced that you are correct and I'm sure you also probably want to call me worse than uncivilized now. However if there is even a tiny doubt in your mind that something is not quite right then please act on it and seek professional mental help.
Well your theory relates the speed of light to the temperature of the universe. This is not uniform but fluctuates at the one in 10^-6 level (look up the cosmic microwave background). However we have seen zero variation in the speed of light down to the level of ~10^-20 so that's your theory eliminated by 14 orders of magnitude of measurement. I'd say this was pretty convincing evidence that it's nonsense.
Now, rather than waste my time giving a blow by blow account of all your other nonsense claims, how about you read some physics papers like this one and explain how your theory is completely consistent with all these measurements and those contained in other papers? Like most of the people with a loose grip on reality you seem to think that it is physics' job to explain to you why you are wrong. That is not how it works - if you want people to take you seriously you have to explain how your theory is consistent with current data. Afterall it is hardly reasonable to expect people to spend time reading and understanding your theories if you are completely unprepared to read and understand others is it?
Sorry but your theory is nonsense. Every measurement ever made is consistent with a constant speed of light and special relativity is the most accurate tested scientific theory ever. It is clear from your page that you fail to understand science at even the most basic possible level: "One of the absurdly limiting notions in physics these days is that if something is not testable, it is not science.". The only limitation of this is that it limits us to reality which is a good thing since we are doing science not writing fairy tales.
Frankly you need to see a psychiatrist because it is very clear from your page that you hold on reality is not what it should be. I realize that your condition means that you will almost certainly see this post as coming from just another physicist who doesn't understand how incredible your work is but sadly this really is just not the case. I'm sorry if this post has upset you but you need to hear the truth and I can only hope that it might persuade you to seek some professional medical help.
A word to the wise: you might have better luck as a theoretical physicist if you actually knew some physics. For example the Standard Model is based on quantum mechanics: QM is not a separate theory. Also most of the questions you ask in chapter 1 of you linked site have already been answered by physics e.g. we know exactly why light slows down in a medium.
If you want people to take you seriously then you need to show that you understand the current knowledge of physics. If you cannot do that then how can you possibly really understand any of the problems with it? Popular science articles do not contain anything close to the detailed understanding you need.
Actually the LHC generates more data than this. The talk is only talking about the data at CERN. The last count of all the files in the ATLAS experiment's DQ2 store (a distributed dataset access system with storage around the globe) was 161PB. This value includes all the simulated data, analysis data etc. I'm certain CMS has a comparable amount and then there are Alice and LHCb as well so the total will be well over the 300PB which Facebook stores.
While Facebook generates 4 PB of new data per day they only store 300 PB according to that page so most of this is either discarded or overwrites existing data. If we look at the LHC then the raw data rate is probably about 1 PB/min but we throw away most of this (using computers on the surface, not 100m underground as the original talk says) because it's physics we already know about and we can't afford the storage for it. Then there is the generation of new data by analysis and simulation to include.
So if you actually look at the whole system, not just what is at CERN, we have a larger total storage capacity and generate more data than Facebook...and we plan to scale up.
I gave the perfect example of where it would be discrimination. Gay parade squashed and Straight parade is allowed.
However if this is what Russia wants then that's its business but please don't try to pretend it is not discriminatory: it is by your own definition. As for the US their society is massively polarized. It hardly matters what point of view you express you will be ostracized by the extremists on one side or the other. However they have had such an appalling human rights record recently that I hardly think they will make much of a fuss about Russia's choice to discriminate: all you have to do is mention free speech, imprisonment without trail, torture, secret renditions etc. etc.
Russia does not have anti-gay laws...What Russia does have is laws that prevent gays from demonstrating and promoting being gay in places where minors visit.
True but don't those laws explicitly single out gays for the restriction and so are the very text book definition of discrimination? The general principle that you do not want adults going about and loudly announcing their sexuality where minors are present is perfectly reasonable. However if you want to do it in a non-discriminatory way you ban anyone going around and promoting their sexuality where minors are present regardless of what that sexuality is.
There is another instrument capable of detecting it: itself. You make the same measurement multiple times and see what the difference is each time you do it.