So perfect really means an error bound by the limits of physics.
But since those limits are energy dependent a high energy process could actually have a better time resolution than this clock can provide...hence it is not perfect.
...with respect to the current standard margin of error
...and there is your problem. The margin of error depends on what you are doing hence your redefinition of 'perfect' is utterly useless since you need to specify your margin of error...in which case you might as well just skip calling it perfect. Despite you assertion to the contrary even though perfect is not obtainable it is still a useful concept to compare reality against e.g. this clock is closer to perfect time keeping than its predecessors.
It can't keep 'perfect time' for any length of time at all. Perfect means zero error. This might be an astoundingly accurate clock but that does not make it perfect.
You're confusing what they've historically done with an ideal that's rarely, if ever, been true.
I don't think anyone really thinks that this is actually part of their job description...well except their corporate masters. I'm all for calling things what they are but that does not mean that if you keep employing ducks to fill a vacancy for a swan you should give up looking, and hoping, for a swan.
Their job is to lie for their corporate masters while lining their own pockets
You are confusing what they do do with what they *should* do. The fact that they have been doing what you say for so long that you now think it is their actual job is completely understandable, but is also very sad.
If they haven't got a working search engine by now based on this, they never will. 4 years is forever in internet time.
They got it working in the first 6 months. It took the remaining 3.5 years to figure out how to stop the sites for Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, Treasure Island etc. getting banned by all the piracy filters.
"public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done."
It's a politician's job to inform us. If we are ill-informed they only have themselves to blame. Once the deal is complete it is extremely hard to impossible for the public to have any input because it then becomes a case of take it all or leave it all and there is always something good in there. This then allows some governments to use these treaties to ram extremely unpopular laws through which they can't get passed using the democratic process and, at the same time, foist them off on other nations whose people don't want them either.
Secret negotiations only work when you trust the people negotiating on your behalf to do so in your best interest. Let's face it, regardless of whichever country you are in, do you really trust your politicians to do that for you in this day and age?
Your fingerprint is information, BUT the application of your fingerprint to indicate your approval is a kind of signature
Again my point is that you can make *exactly* the same argument about a key. The application of the key to the safe is the same as you placing a signature stamp on some paper. The police are therefore pretending to be you when they open the safe. This is clearly a nonsense argument: fooling an electronic or mechanical device is not the same legally or ethically as fooling a human. Indeed you are not rally fooling it: it is programmed to open when presented with certain external information, not with a certain person.
If you are just hung up about the fact that your finger is attached to you then technically the police could use one of the fingerprints you leave lying around to create a fake finger with print. Rather than actually make them do that (and thereby have the technology readily available to criminals) how about we just assume that they could do that and instead require someone to use their actual finger?
not knowing who one of the most famous astrophyscists in the world is.
Given that I am a physicist and work on Dark Matter I *very* strongly doubt that. If you rephrase that as one of the most well known astronomy presenters on TV in the US perhaps but I'm not in the US, have never seen or heard of that TV program and while I'm not an astrophysicist I can name quite a few and he would not be one of them.
Based on what evidence?
The fact that I am a physicist, talk everyday to physicists and go to conferences with physicists and I know only one physicist who reportedly believes that DM is likely to be due to a MOND-like effect (I've not actually met him). You can probably go and look at the papers as well: I've only seen a couple on MOND-like models and that was several years ago vs. far more on particle-based approaches (both theory and experimental results). The type of particle is unknown: axions seems to be more popular than WIMPs for the theorists at the moment but I'm not aware of any MOND community, let alone one the size of the DM particle community.
What you really want is a combination lock where you have to touch in with a combination of 6 fingers: you'd the convenience of biometrics and the protection of a pass code.
Giving up a key or DNA sample is not signifying your approval; it's just surrendering information which is stored outside your brain.
Technically isn't your fingerprint also information which is stored outside your brain? How is this really any different than requiring you to surrender a key to a locked filing cabinet? You could make the exact same argument about that as well: the key is just a means to signal approval.
Police already use fingerprint information to identify where you have been and what you have handled so you are already required to surrender this information. If you choose to have this information unlock your phone then that's your choice: stick to a password if you are worried about what is on there.
...OR it could just as easily mean we have a flawed math model. I tend to think the latter is significantly more likely...
Based on what? Modified newtonian dynamic models were effectively killed by the Bullet Cluster (and others like it). These colliding galaxies show that you have a gravitational field without ordinary matter present. If you try really hard you can squeeze MOND models into possibly explaining this effect but you make the models complex enough that they are vastly more complex than adding an, as yet undiscovered, particle. Indeed the last time we had a problem like this - the non-conservation of energy in beta decay - the solution was a missing particle and not a rewrite of the laws of physics.
A lot of physicists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, have said that "Dark Matter" is actually a pretty poor name for the phenomenon because it's almost certainly not just some exotic form of matter
No clue who this Tyson guy is but either he, or you, have confused Dark Energy with Dark Matter. Physics is not determined by majority vote but I very strongly suspect that the numbers will come down massively in favour of Dark Matter being an exotic form of matter by which I mean some as yet undiscovered particle. Dark Matter is a very appropriate name for it since it almost certainly is matter and, lacking any electrical charge, will not interact with light at any wavelength. Attempts to explain Dark Matter by modifying newtonian mechanics are vastly more complicated and fine tuned than just adding an as yet unknown particle ever since the Bullet Cluster (and others like it) were discovered. While that is not proof that these models are wrong they fail Occam's Razor and, in general, solutions which fail this test turn out to be wrong which is why it is often used in science to select promising avenues for study.
Dark Energy on the other hand is definitely not a form of matter, for a start it is gravitationally repulsive, and is completely unknown. It is effectively Einstein's cosmological constant but when you use existing physics to try to predict this you end up with a constant 120 orders of magnitude (yes you read that correctly: 10^120) too large so it is safe to say that we are missing something here, even cosmologists worry about discrepancies that large!
Yes that's the spin of the article but if you ever went to court it would hold about as much weight as a wet paper bag. The problem is that you have to go to court and fight it there which is expensive and time consuming...and yes I can read but I also know that not everything you read is true.
How many of them (from the early days) have email addresses that CERN could contact them on
Well I have a CERN email address and I still regularly visit CERN to work on an experiment there and this is the first I've heard about it. It seems strange that they went to the media before emailing those of us who were around during some of that period and are still working at CERN!
What's to stop people walking on a bus and ignoring the machine.
A networked camera. Have the computer send an alert when it thinks someone has not paid and an operator can review the video footage to check and then you can send someone to meet the bus at the next stop. They used to use a similar system on the toll roads around Chicago.
Alternatively use a system like they do in Geneva: the driver does not check any tickets but every so often they have ticket inspectors on a bus or tram that will. They just hop on at a random stop and check everyone's ticket and anyone without a ticket gets a large fine. The same system is used on the LRT in Edmonton, Alberta.
The gravitational effects of such a huge amount of invisible mass should be obvious to us.
Not necessarily - Dark Matter is so far only obvious at the galactic scale and above. This might be because its distribution only varies on such large scales. If this is the case then DM within the solar system would have no gravitational effect because the density of DM would be approximately uniform throughout it.
As for redefining the physical laws on a large scale these models have a lot of trouble explaining all the observed effects but in any case these are still 'exotic' physics and, if anything, far more exotic than just adding a new type of particle. In fact we have seen this before when nuclear beta decay was found to conserve neither energy or momentum. The conclusion was not that we needed to rewrite the laws of physics but that there was a particle that we could not detect...and it took ~60 years before we did detect the neutrinos.
General-purpose train lines, with something unlike single-purpose engines running on open tracks with interconnection? The page does not list any.
Clearly you have never seen the Docklands Light Railway (DLR): here's a map. This is not simple A-to-B track you can catch trains to different destinations from the same track on the same platform e.g. London City Airport has two platforms: one for trains heading to Woolwich Arsenal and the other which has trains headed to both Bank and Stratford and it used to have trains that also went to Tower Gateway but those were dropped before the London Olympics so the routes shown in the map are not static and can be adjusted to match traffic.
It is not just security which is an issue but privacy as well. Instead of minimal personal details which are not shared between retailers CurrentC will give them access to far more information about myself and my purchase patterns across multiple retailers. I much prefer a third party system since this at least limits the information each individual retailer has.
Why in the world would you think the emergency exits wouldn't have windows?
If you look at the image in the article there are over 20 rows there with no hint of a window for an exit row. Most of the planes I've flown on with single aisles have an exit row within that many rows and yet there is no sign of a window anywhere.
I mean seriously, do you think everyone else in the world is a total idiot?
Clearly not but I presume that you'll agree that there are idiots out there so when someone proposes a new idea it is reasonable to point out some potential flaws in the scheme to see whether they have thought it through and have solutions. If they have solutions that's a good sign that they know what they are doing. However if they have no answers and start getting upset and making wild suggestions that you've called everyone in the world a total idiot simply because you dared to question them, well that's not such a good sign is it?
Virtual reality is not good enough. If there is an accident we need to see actual reality to be able to see if it is safe to open the emergency exits and, for those not sitting in exit row seats, to be able to see which side of the plane they need to find an exit on. So perhaps they can make windows smaller but I doubt they can completely do away with them.
True but look at driverless trains. The first of these was London's Victoria line which started in 1967 but it was forced to carry drivers, not because they were needed but because the union insisted. I expect the same will happen with driverless lorries, buses and taxis until the driverless technology is so widespread that every driver can be replaced. Until then organized labour will fight the changes even if the money is against them. This is not altogether bad though - the likely outcome is that they will slow down automated driving until they can prove it works which is probably a good thing.
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So perfect really means an error bound by the limits of physics.
But since those limits are energy dependent a high energy process could actually have a better time resolution than this clock can provide...hence it is not perfect.
...with respect to the current standard margin of error
You do realize that this is easy to find.
It can't keep 'perfect time' for any length of time at all. Perfect means zero error. This might be an astoundingly accurate clock but that does not make it perfect.
You're confusing what they've historically done with an ideal that's rarely, if ever, been true.
I don't think anyone really thinks that this is actually part of their job description...well except their corporate masters. I'm all for calling things what they are but that does not mean that if you keep employing ducks to fill a vacancy for a swan you should give up looking, and hoping, for a swan.
Their job is to lie for their corporate masters while lining their own pockets
You are confusing what they do do with what they *should* do. The fact that they have been doing what you say for so long that you now think it is their actual job is completely understandable, but is also very sad.
If they haven't got a working search engine by now based on this, they never will. 4 years is forever in internet time.
They got it working in the first 6 months. It took the remaining 3.5 years to figure out how to stop the sites for Pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, Treasure Island etc. getting banned by all the piracy filters.
"public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done."
It's a politician's job to inform us. If we are ill-informed they only have themselves to blame. Once the deal is complete it is extremely hard to impossible for the public to have any input because it then becomes a case of take it all or leave it all and there is always something good in there. This then allows some governments to use these treaties to ram extremely unpopular laws through which they can't get passed using the democratic process and, at the same time, foist them off on other nations whose people don't want them either.
Secret negotiations only work when you trust the people negotiating on your behalf to do so in your best interest. Let's face it, regardless of whichever country you are in, do you really trust your politicians to do that for you in this day and age?
Your fingerprint is information, BUT the application of your fingerprint to indicate your approval is a kind of signature
Again my point is that you can make *exactly* the same argument about a key. The application of the key to the safe is the same as you placing a signature stamp on some paper. The police are therefore pretending to be you when they open the safe. This is clearly a nonsense argument: fooling an electronic or mechanical device is not the same legally or ethically as fooling a human. Indeed you are not rally fooling it: it is programmed to open when presented with certain external information, not with a certain person.
If you are just hung up about the fact that your finger is attached to you then technically the police could use one of the fingerprints you leave lying around to create a fake finger with print. Rather than actually make them do that (and thereby have the technology readily available to criminals) how about we just assume that they could do that and instead require someone to use their actual finger?
not knowing who one of the most famous astrophyscists in the world is.
Given that I am a physicist and work on Dark Matter I *very* strongly doubt that. If you rephrase that as one of the most well known astronomy presenters on TV in the US perhaps but I'm not in the US, have never seen or heard of that TV program and while I'm not an astrophysicist I can name quite a few and he would not be one of them.
Based on what evidence?
The fact that I am a physicist, talk everyday to physicists and go to conferences with physicists and I know only one physicist who reportedly believes that DM is likely to be due to a MOND-like effect (I've not actually met him). You can probably go and look at the papers as well: I've only seen a couple on MOND-like models and that was several years ago vs. far more on particle-based approaches (both theory and experimental results). The type of particle is unknown: axions seems to be more popular than WIMPs for the theorists at the moment but I'm not aware of any MOND community, let alone one the size of the DM particle community.
What you really want is a combination lock where you have to touch in with a combination of 6 fingers: you'd the convenience of biometrics and the protection of a pass code.
Giving up a key or DNA sample is not signifying your approval; it's just surrendering information which is stored outside your brain.
Technically isn't your fingerprint also information which is stored outside your brain? How is this really any different than requiring you to surrender a key to a locked filing cabinet? You could make the exact same argument about that as well: the key is just a means to signal approval.
Police already use fingerprint information to identify where you have been and what you have handled so you are already required to surrender this information. If you choose to have this information unlock your phone then that's your choice: stick to a password if you are worried about what is on there.
...OR it could just as easily mean we have a flawed math model. I tend to think the latter is significantly more likely...
Based on what? Modified newtonian dynamic models were effectively killed by the Bullet Cluster (and others like it). These colliding galaxies show that you have a gravitational field without ordinary matter present. If you try really hard you can squeeze MOND models into possibly explaining this effect but you make the models complex enough that they are vastly more complex than adding an, as yet undiscovered, particle. Indeed the last time we had a problem like this - the non-conservation of energy in beta decay - the solution was a missing particle and not a rewrite of the laws of physics.
A lot of physicists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, have said that "Dark Matter" is actually a pretty poor name for the phenomenon because it's almost certainly not just some exotic form of matter
No clue who this Tyson guy is but either he, or you, have confused Dark Energy with Dark Matter. Physics is not determined by majority vote but I very strongly suspect that the numbers will come down massively in favour of Dark Matter being an exotic form of matter by which I mean some as yet undiscovered particle. Dark Matter is a very appropriate name for it since it almost certainly is matter and, lacking any electrical charge, will not interact with light at any wavelength. Attempts to explain Dark Matter by modifying newtonian mechanics are vastly more complicated and fine tuned than just adding an as yet unknown particle ever since the Bullet Cluster (and others like it) were discovered. While that is not proof that these models are wrong they fail Occam's Razor and, in general, solutions which fail this test turn out to be wrong which is why it is often used in science to select promising avenues for study.
Dark Energy on the other hand is definitely not a form of matter, for a start it is gravitationally repulsive, and is completely unknown. It is effectively Einstein's cosmological constant but when you use existing physics to try to predict this you end up with a constant 120 orders of magnitude (yes you read that correctly: 10^120) too large so it is safe to say that we are missing something here, even cosmologists worry about discrepancies that large!
Yes that's the spin of the article but if you ever went to court it would hold about as much weight as a wet paper bag. The problem is that you have to go to court and fight it there which is expensive and time consuming...and yes I can read but I also know that not everything you read is true.
Well there is Brian Cox although technically I've never actually seen him at CERN despite working on the same experiment.
How many of them (from the early days) have email addresses that CERN could contact them on
Well I have a CERN email address and I still regularly visit CERN to work on an experiment there and this is the first I've heard about it. It seems strange that they went to the media before emailing those of us who were around during some of that period and are still working at CERN!
What's to stop people walking on a bus and ignoring the machine.
A networked camera. Have the computer send an alert when it thinks someone has not paid and an operator can review the video footage to check and then you can send someone to meet the bus at the next stop. They used to use a similar system on the toll roads around Chicago.
Alternatively use a system like they do in Geneva: the driver does not check any tickets but every so often they have ticket inspectors on a bus or tram that will. They just hop on at a random stop and check everyone's ticket and anyone without a ticket gets a large fine. The same system is used on the LRT in Edmonton, Alberta.
The gravitational effects of such a huge amount of invisible mass should be obvious to us.
Not necessarily - Dark Matter is so far only obvious at the galactic scale and above. This might be because its distribution only varies on such large scales. If this is the case then DM within the solar system would have no gravitational effect because the density of DM would be approximately uniform throughout it.
As for redefining the physical laws on a large scale these models have a lot of trouble explaining all the observed effects but in any case these are still 'exotic' physics and, if anything, far more exotic than just adding a new type of particle. In fact we have seen this before when nuclear beta decay was found to conserve neither energy or momentum. The conclusion was not that we needed to rewrite the laws of physics but that there was a particle that we could not detect...and it took ~60 years before we did detect the neutrinos.
Really? Most underground systems already have automated collection of cash from passengers. I've yet to see automated driving of a bus though.
General-purpose train lines, with something unlike single-purpose engines running on open tracks with interconnection? The page does not list any.
Clearly you have never seen the Docklands Light Railway (DLR): here's a map. This is not simple A-to-B track you can catch trains to different destinations from the same track on the same platform e.g. London City Airport has two platforms: one for trains heading to Woolwich Arsenal and the other which has trains headed to both Bank and Stratford and it used to have trains that also went to Tower Gateway but those were dropped before the London Olympics so the routes shown in the map are not static and can be adjusted to match traffic.
It is not just security which is an issue but privacy as well. Instead of minimal personal details which are not shared between retailers CurrentC will give them access to far more information about myself and my purchase patterns across multiple retailers. I much prefer a third party system since this at least limits the information each individual retailer has.
Why in the world would you think the emergency exits wouldn't have windows?
If you look at the image in the article there are over 20 rows there with no hint of a window for an exit row. Most of the planes I've flown on with single aisles have an exit row within that many rows and yet there is no sign of a window anywhere.
I mean seriously, do you think everyone else in the world is a total idiot?
Clearly not but I presume that you'll agree that there are idiots out there so when someone proposes a new idea it is reasonable to point out some potential flaws in the scheme to see whether they have thought it through and have solutions. If they have solutions that's a good sign that they know what they are doing. However if they have no answers and start getting upset and making wild suggestions that you've called everyone in the world a total idiot simply because you dared to question them, well that's not such a good sign is it?
Virtual reality is not good enough. If there is an accident we need to see actual reality to be able to see if it is safe to open the emergency exits and, for those not sitting in exit row seats, to be able to see which side of the plane they need to find an exit on. So perhaps they can make windows smaller but I doubt they can completely do away with them.
True but look at driverless trains. The first of these was London's Victoria line which started in 1967 but it was forced to carry drivers, not because they were needed but because the union insisted. I expect the same will happen with driverless lorries, buses and taxis until the driverless technology is so widespread that every driver can be replaced. Until then organized labour will fight the changes even if the money is against them. This is not altogether bad though - the likely outcome is that they will slow down automated driving until they can prove it works which is probably a good thing.