I don't think you understand US monopoly legislation. You don't break up a company for gaining a monopoly, you break them up for USING a monopoly to gain a monopoly unfairly in a new market. And you don't spin off "a chunk of" a division, you break the company up into different companies that serve each market.
HTC only has the ability to use Android (all of it), because they do what Google tells them. Google has made it clear that Android licensees are to toe the line. HTC, and every other handset manufacturer SHOULD be concerned if their entire business rests upon Google's whims, with no backup plan.
Let's try it another way. The idea of luminiferous aether suggested an experiment to try and find the "aether wind." If you work out the speed of light propagating in a medium through which Earth is also moving, using Newton's equations you find that you should observe a difference in speed depending on the direction the light is travelling. Michaelson and Morely (and others) looked for that difference and didn't find it.
However, if you calculate the speed of light using special relativity instead of Newtonian mechanics, you get no difference. Which is what the experiments showed. The Michaelson-Morely experiment is NOT a test of the existence of aether, it's a test of Newtonian mechanics. Note that special relativity is generally interpreted with the concept of space-time, which is a medium through which all things travel, including light, and the medium deforms and affects that movement, which is why light bends in gravitational fields (another famous test of relativity). So what you're left with at the end of the experiment is special relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics and an expanded concept of aether.
Perhaps you're the one playing semantic games and artificially restricting your definition of "luminiferous aether" to a particular formulation of the hypothesis that specifically involved Newtonian mechanics? If you read about the time you'll find that there were all sorts of different hypotheses about the aether, with different properties, and more continued to be proposed and tested after the Michaelson-Morely experiment. In fact, the scorn for aether seems to be mostly revisionist history, particularly here on Slashdot and among other armchair scientists, particularly those who ridicule the concept of dark matter. Remember, the context of this thread is dark matter. Your argument that luminiferous aether is analogous to claiming that the concept of dark matter is ridiculous because the MACHO hypothesis didn't work out.
If you mean specifically classical Lorentzian luminiferous aether, then yes, it doesn't work. But the basic idea of a universal, all pervading "substance" is consistent with both relativity and QM. Given special relativistic properties, the concept of a medium though which electromagnetic disturbances propagate is essentially the same as the EM field from EM field theory.
Yes, phlogiston is a little more of a stretch, but you issued a challenge. However, my interpretation of phlogiston is completely compatible with combustion, so long as you add in oxygen. Phlogiston (energy) IS a "substance" that is released from objects during oxidization, or any other exothermic reaction. Once you compensate for the masses of ALL the reactants, you can even measure it's mass! Does that mean the ancients' explanation of phlogiston was correct and based on some mystical/alien knowledge? Of course not. But it was a valid explanation of the observations they had and, beefed up a bit, is not that different than what we believe today. Ditto, and more so, with aether.
The general ideas of aether and phlogiston are not "simply incorrect" they are incorrect in some of their details. The general concepts, with appropriated extended details, are accepted as valid today. No, I'm not playing with semantics. Einstein himself hung onto the idea of aether until the 30s, probably because he liked the idea of a medium through which electromagnetism propagates, similar to the spacetime through which he saw gravity propagating. Einstein would probably have been very happy calling the the fields of electromagnetic field theory "aether."
I think you need to realize that the history of science isn't quite as black and white as you'd like to think, and pre-1930s scientists weren't quite the fools Slashdotters like to paint them as (except Tesla, Slashdot loves Tesla).
Do you read your own links? Soviet records show "1.7 million deaths in the Gulags," plus another 800,000 or so through executions, and Pol Pot, if you want to claim him for communism (Wikipedia doesn't), killed around 700,000 to 1 million through executions.
From the Hitler page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler), Hitler's regime killed somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11-14 million people through executions (not necessarily concentration camps, but we counted executions for Stalin and Pol Pot), camps, and slave labor programs.
Both Stalin and Pol Pot killed a lot of people via famine, by setting farmers' quotas so high that they didn't have enough food to eat themselves, but that's not the same thing as a concentration camp, and, incidentally, also isn't compatible with either Marxism or Leninism, which both envisioned more of a democracy rather than a dictatorship.
Courts are composed of people, thus... "[people] think that signatures, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure."
Also, if you go ask a selection of 100 random people who are involved with faxing signatures, who are not on Slashdot, I bet a large majority will not give you "because the courts accept it as evidence" as a reason.
Metadata, handshake, probably a few other things. A modern fax also has to send quality/resolution data. I doubt very much a fax machine would work with one that doesn't speak ASCII.
Also, you can extend the concept. Modern fax machines all transmit using standard 8-bit digital encoding, image formats and analog modulation. That kind of fax machine, which won't work with any other kind, was introduced in the 1980s, and so is considerably younger than the humble ASCII text file.
"I bet you think that phlogiston is still used in physics as well."
Sure. Phlogiston was believed to be a substance that was released when things burned or rusted (i.e. oxidized). The matter that was left afterward was believed to be in it's "base" state. If you extend the concept a little and postulate that phlogiston is released in any exothermic chemical reaction (oxidization being the most common and easily observable), you have... chemical energy. Extend it a little bit more to include all reactions and you have the general concept of energy.
Yes, we have different words for the concepts of phlogiston and aether, and our understanding of them is much more sophisticated, but the concepts are still there, and never really went away.
Aether for example, was postulated as an all pervading but unobserved substance through which electromagnetic waves propagated. It was HYPOTHESIZED that electromagnetic waves propagating through aether should show differences in velocity depending on whether they were propagating parallel or perpendicular to the Earth's movement through the aether. That turned out not to be the case.
Then Einstein came along and explained, with special relativity, that the speed of light is always constant to a non-accelerating observer and space and time distort to accommodate. Wait... space and time distort? Hm... interesting.
A little later came general relativity, with the concepts of distortions in the fabric of spacetime better fleshed out. And voila, you have aether, except now it's relativistic aether. Kind of like how you had Newton's laws, and then Newton's laws with relativistic terms added.
The hypothesis of CLASSICAL aether was disproven by the Michealson-Morely experiment, not the more general concept of aether.
By the way, note that the Micahelson-Morely experiment was conducted on planet Earth, in the fresh (basement) air (picture: http://e-ducation.net/scientists/Michelson_Morley_intf.gif). Wait, air? So the light was actually propagating through AIR? But if M-M proves there is no such thing as aether then shouldn't it have also proved there is no such thing as air?
Physics is mostly a story about refinements and ever more sophisticated understanding, not complete replacement of concepts. Aether and phlogiston are both examples of that. But, as the subject says, haters gonna hate. And Slashdot seems to have a lot of hate for aether for some reason.
I hate to tell you, but modern physics has luminiferous aether deeply entrenched in it via BOTH relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity calls it "the fabric of spacetime." QM calls it "vacuum."
Email it to a friend at work who can print it off. For extra authenticity run the whole thing through a few photoshop filters to add noise, threshold, rotate by a random angle and then decrease the resolution to "eye-watering." All of which can be easily automated.
So what you're saying is that it sucks to be poor in a (semi)capitalist state as much now as it did in Marx's day. Except that there aren't as many of them around anymore.
"The abolition of slavery - ensuring human rights is a mistake?"
Wherever did you get the idea he said that? The abolition of slavery is an example of the government regulating free enterprise to protect the people, i.e. socialism. Yes, ensuring human rights is a very socialist thing to do. No, it's not a mistake.
Yeah right. The US is one of the most classist states remaining in the world. If you doubt it, run down to Martha's Vinyard sometime.
The only difference is that class in the US is based on money, and how long your family has had it instead of strict hereditity as it was in the old world.
Generally what you do is pay back the investors once the company starts to make a profit. After that, every employee owns a "share" which entitles them to dividends, which are just a division of the profits. When you leave, you relinquish your "share" which just means you don't get anymore dividends.
It works quite well and has been used in everything from outdoor stores to pirate ships.
Indeed, there seems to be this irrational idea in many regulatory environments that sending stuff unencrypted over the phone system is fine yet sending it encrypted over the internet is not.
Fixed that for you. Sending something unencrypted over EITHER is bad. But fax doesn't have the option of being encrypted (at least not for mortals). If you guys were serious aboutt HIPPA it would specify that all sensitive documents are to be sent electronically, encrypted with such and such.
ASCII. ASCII text has been around for something like 50 years. Even though fax machines have been around for a LONG time, all the ones today use ASCII so they can't possibly be compatible with anything that was around before ASCII.
If you don't get a reception receipt then you assume that your message wasn't successfully delivered. Same goes for fax. I can send you a fax but if your machine is out of paper, you didn't get it.
People still use fax machines because they think that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure. I've had several occasions where someone wanted me to go find a fax machine to send a signed document. What did I do? Copy and pasted my scanned signature on the document (OS X Lion even has a tool for capturing a signature with the webcam), printed it out and faxed it. Just because.
Slashdot Mirror
He screwed up. By the way, the abbreviation for the unit "seconds" is not capitalized.
I don't think you understand US monopoly legislation. You don't break up a company for gaining a monopoly, you break them up for USING a monopoly to gain a monopoly unfairly in a new market. And you don't spin off "a chunk of" a division, you break the company up into different companies that serve each market.
It's not. And those manufacturers fought tooth and nail not to end up in that situation. And lost. Now they're MS OEMs and nothing more.
HTC only has the ability to use Android (all of it), because they do what Google tells them. Google has made it clear that Android licensees are to toe the line. HTC, and every other handset manufacturer SHOULD be concerned if their entire business rests upon Google's whims, with no backup plan.
Let's try it another way. The idea of luminiferous aether suggested an experiment to try and find the "aether wind." If you work out the speed of light propagating in a medium through which Earth is also moving, using Newton's equations you find that you should observe a difference in speed depending on the direction the light is travelling. Michaelson and Morely (and others) looked for that difference and didn't find it.
However, if you calculate the speed of light using special relativity instead of Newtonian mechanics, you get no difference. Which is what the experiments showed. The Michaelson-Morely experiment is NOT a test of the existence of aether, it's a test of Newtonian mechanics. Note that special relativity is generally interpreted with the concept of space-time, which is a medium through which all things travel, including light, and the medium deforms and affects that movement, which is why light bends in gravitational fields (another famous test of relativity). So what you're left with at the end of the experiment is special relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics and an expanded concept of aether.
Perhaps you're the one playing semantic games and artificially restricting your definition of "luminiferous aether" to a particular formulation of the hypothesis that specifically involved Newtonian mechanics? If you read about the time you'll find that there were all sorts of different hypotheses about the aether, with different properties, and more continued to be proposed and tested after the Michaelson-Morely experiment. In fact, the scorn for aether seems to be mostly revisionist history, particularly here on Slashdot and among other armchair scientists, particularly those who ridicule the concept of dark matter. Remember, the context of this thread is dark matter. Your argument that luminiferous aether is analogous to claiming that the concept of dark matter is ridiculous because the MACHO hypothesis didn't work out.
If you mean specifically classical Lorentzian luminiferous aether, then yes, it doesn't work. But the basic idea of a universal, all pervading "substance" is consistent with both relativity and QM. Given special relativistic properties, the concept of a medium though which electromagnetic disturbances propagate is essentially the same as the EM field from EM field theory.
Yes, phlogiston is a little more of a stretch, but you issued a challenge. However, my interpretation of phlogiston is completely compatible with combustion, so long as you add in oxygen. Phlogiston (energy) IS a "substance" that is released from objects during oxidization, or any other exothermic reaction. Once you compensate for the masses of ALL the reactants, you can even measure it's mass! Does that mean the ancients' explanation of phlogiston was correct and based on some mystical/alien knowledge? Of course not. But it was a valid explanation of the observations they had and, beefed up a bit, is not that different than what we believe today. Ditto, and more so, with aether.
The general ideas of aether and phlogiston are not "simply incorrect" they are incorrect in some of their details. The general concepts, with appropriated extended details, are accepted as valid today. No, I'm not playing with semantics. Einstein himself hung onto the idea of aether until the 30s, probably because he liked the idea of a medium through which electromagnetism propagates, similar to the spacetime through which he saw gravity propagating. Einstein would probably have been very happy calling the the fields of electromagnetic field theory "aether."
I think you need to realize that the history of science isn't quite as black and white as you'd like to think, and pre-1930s scientists weren't quite the fools Slashdotters like to paint them as (except Tesla, Slashdot loves Tesla).
Do you read your own links? Soviet records show "1.7 million deaths in the Gulags," plus another 800,000 or so through executions, and Pol Pot, if you want to claim him for communism (Wikipedia doesn't), killed around 700,000 to 1 million through executions.
From the Hitler page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler), Hitler's regime killed somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11-14 million people through executions (not necessarily concentration camps, but we counted executions for Stalin and Pol Pot), camps, and slave labor programs.
Both Stalin and Pol Pot killed a lot of people via famine, by setting farmers' quotas so high that they didn't have enough food to eat themselves, but that's not the same thing as a concentration camp, and, incidentally, also isn't compatible with either Marxism or Leninism, which both envisioned more of a democracy rather than a dictatorship.
Courts are composed of people, thus... "[people] think that signatures, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure."
Also, if you go ask a selection of 100 random people who are involved with faxing signatures, who are not on Slashdot, I bet a large majority will not give you "because the courts accept it as evidence" as a reason.
Metadata, handshake, probably a few other things. A modern fax also has to send quality/resolution data. I doubt very much a fax machine would work with one that doesn't speak ASCII.
Also, you can extend the concept. Modern fax machines all transmit using standard 8-bit digital encoding, image formats and analog modulation. That kind of fax machine, which won't work with any other kind, was introduced in the 1980s, and so is considerably younger than the humble ASCII text file.
"I bet you think that phlogiston is still used in physics as well."
Sure. Phlogiston was believed to be a substance that was released when things burned or rusted (i.e. oxidized). The matter that was left afterward was believed to be in it's "base" state. If you extend the concept a little and postulate that phlogiston is released in any exothermic chemical reaction (oxidization being the most common and easily observable), you have... chemical energy. Extend it a little bit more to include all reactions and you have the general concept of energy.
Yes, we have different words for the concepts of phlogiston and aether, and our understanding of them is much more sophisticated, but the concepts are still there, and never really went away.
Aether for example, was postulated as an all pervading but unobserved substance through which electromagnetic waves propagated. It was HYPOTHESIZED that electromagnetic waves propagating through aether should show differences in velocity depending on whether they were propagating parallel or perpendicular to the Earth's movement through the aether. That turned out not to be the case.
Then Einstein came along and explained, with special relativity, that the speed of light is always constant to a non-accelerating observer and space and time distort to accommodate. Wait... space and time distort? Hm... interesting.
A little later came general relativity, with the concepts of distortions in the fabric of spacetime better fleshed out. And voila, you have aether, except now it's relativistic aether. Kind of like how you had Newton's laws, and then Newton's laws with relativistic terms added.
The hypothesis of CLASSICAL aether was disproven by the Michealson-Morely experiment, not the more general concept of aether.
By the way, note that the Micahelson-Morely experiment was conducted on planet Earth, in the fresh (basement) air (picture: http://e-ducation.net/scientists/Michelson_Morley_intf.gif). Wait, air? So the light was actually propagating through AIR? But if M-M proves there is no such thing as aether then shouldn't it have also proved there is no such thing as air?
Physics is mostly a story about refinements and ever more sophisticated understanding, not complete replacement of concepts. Aether and phlogiston are both examples of that. But, as the subject says, haters gonna hate. And Slashdot seems to have a lot of hate for aether for some reason.
Meh, it's smaller than the Radiological Society of North America annual conference.
Sounds like her anatomical knowledge isn't much better than a clumsy teenage boy's.
I hate to tell you, but modern physics has luminiferous aether deeply entrenched in it via BOTH relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity calls it "the fabric of spacetime." QM calls it "vacuum."
Email it to a friend at work who can print it off. For extra authenticity run the whole thing through a few photoshop filters to add noise, threshold, rotate by a random angle and then decrease the resolution to "eye-watering." All of which can be easily automated.
Communism killed a lot of people through STARVATION, in place. hitler is still champion of concentration camps.
So what you're saying is that it sucks to be poor in a (semi)capitalist state as much now as it did in Marx's day. Except that there aren't as many of them around anymore.
"The abolition of slavery - ensuring human rights is a mistake?"
Wherever did you get the idea he said that? The abolition of slavery is an example of the government regulating free enterprise to protect the people, i.e. socialism. Yes, ensuring human rights is a very socialist thing to do. No, it's not a mistake.
Yeah right. The US is one of the most classist states remaining in the world. If you doubt it, run down to Martha's Vinyard sometime.
The only difference is that class in the US is based on money, and how long your family has had it instead of strict hereditity as it was in the old world.
Capitalism is a recipe for mass graves too. Google the industrial revolution and note the drawings of children working in coal mines.
The only thing we've actually found that works is socialism, a blending of the two. And yes, the US is a socialist state.
Generally what you do is pay back the investors once the company starts to make a profit. After that, every employee owns a "share" which entitles them to dividends, which are just a division of the profits. When you leave, you relinquish your "share" which just means you don't get anymore dividends.
It works quite well and has been used in everything from outdoor stores to pirate ships.
The solution to that idiocy is to scan in a copy of your signature and Photoshop it to give it a nice transparent background.
Fax is HIPAA compliant because the regulators either don't know much about it or had to accept SOMETHING.
Fixed that for you. Sending something unencrypted over EITHER is bad. But fax doesn't have the option of being encrypted (at least not for mortals). If you guys were serious aboutt HIPPA it would specify that all sensitive documents are to be sent electronically, encrypted with such and such.
ASCII. ASCII text has been around for something like 50 years. Even though fax machines have been around for a LONG time, all the ones today use ASCII so they can't possibly be compatible with anything that was around before ASCII.
If you don't get a reception receipt then you assume that your message wasn't successfully delivered. Same goes for fax. I can send you a fax but if your machine is out of paper, you didn't get it.
People still use fax machines because they think that SIGNATURES, when scanned by a fax machine, are secure. I've had several occasions where someone wanted me to go find a fax machine to send a signed document. What did I do? Copy and pasted my scanned signature on the document (OS X Lion even has a tool for capturing a signature with the webcam), printed it out and faxed it. Just because.