We're talking about driving around with large quantities of dangerous liquids and transferring them in uncontrolled environments (i.e., not in a gas station or other place with built-in safeguards). There damn well ought to be a law specifying safe ways to carry the gasoline (we already have those), doing the refueling, along with something like bonding or insurance requirements and possibly training requirements for the operator. "Who cares if it's dangerous, we don't want regulation" is the battle cry for antisocial assholes who see the world through ideological glasses.
From TFS, it seemed that the appropriate government people realized that they needed to come up with the necessary regulations to allow the business to happen. Local government, in particular, can be quite responsive at times.
You're not likely to do much harm carrying a gallon or two around in a decent container. Start carrying hundreds of gallons around and the stakes go up considerably. Do this once every few months and there aren't that many chances to goof up. Fill up thirty vehicles a day under various conditions and the chance of something going wrong goes up.
How about a social contract like criminal law? The government will try to protect you from violence, and will try to punish people who attack you. That's security. You give up the right to use violence, except in very limited circumstances. That's giving up liberty. It's significant, because sometimes violence is the answer.
You're confusing "free college" with "college degrees for all". They're two separate things.
Free college means that, if you get into college and stay there, you don't pay tuition and fees (and perhaps get other support). It doesn't mean unqualified people can get in, or that it's easy to get a degree. It does mean that you aren't barred from college because you can't afford it, which makes things much more fair. We've had free K-12 education in the US for a long, long time, and it has generally worked fairly well.
College degrees for all means letting in the unqualified and giving some sort of degree to people who are neither qualified nor willing to put in any work to learn. It makes education worse and doesn't recognize that some of us actually put in some effort to learn things.
Things are valuable partly because they aren't easy to get, true, but if we want to make a diploma worthwhile we need to make sure people work to get their degrees. It doesn't matter nearly as much how we make people pay for college. I'd be happy with some way to make it easy for poor people to get through college, provided they are qualified and put in the work.
An absolutist state can have a free market and can run a capitalist economy. China's not doing too bad a job of it right now. There were totalitarian capitalist states in WWII, before we conquered them and changed their governments. Capitalism is compatible with servitude and aristocracy, as long as it's understood that only certain people have capital. That's actually fairly close to true in many capitalist economies, and what aristocracy does is reduce social and economic mobility (it usually doesn't eliminate it). It isn't really the endgame of pure capitalism, but it's compatible with it.
For capitalism to work most efficiently, as many people as possible have to be able to start businesses and try out their ideas in the marketplace. This means that people need access to education, affordable health care, and some sort of assurance that their families will survive a total business failure.
I'm getting a touch over my head here, but now that I've thought about it, I think just checking the value breaks the entanglement.
Suppose we're checking electron spin, which we'll separate into up and down. There are only two values of electron spin. Now, suppose we rotate our detector at some angle or other. If both the sender and receiver rotate by 45 degrees, they'll get opposite readings, but obviously not quite the same ones. However, we can only measure at one angle. If we try measuring up-down and then left-right, we'll get random left-right values that are not correlated, meaning the entanglement has been broken.
This is one of the places where quantum physics gets REALLY weird, since we know the electrons don't have any hidden spin axis or other such thing, from Bell's Theorem. They're just opposite each other.
It's potentially useful in secret communications, provided we can keep the entanglement reliably going across useful distances. Send a bunch of entangled particles, perhaps to share a random number (like a 256-bit AES key). Do this in a previously agreed-on way (if looking at spin up or down, tilt the detector at an angle, say). The sender measures the entangled particles at one end, the receiver at the other. If all is well, they match, which can be confirmed with a quick innocuous message back. If the sender can read that message, it shows that it was not intercepted and read en route, as there is no way for somebody in between to read the key and send it on intact.
I have a TRS-80 Model 4, a more or less portable computer with a Z80A in it. I did find a use for it a while ago. I put it in front of a power plug I kept kicking from the socket when I stretched my legs. Of course, your laptops with the newfangled non-CRT displays probably don't have the heft for that.
Go to dell.com. It may take a little poking around, since they don't really advertise them, but they'll be happy to sell you some Ubuntu desktops and laptops, no MS included.
I've heard that Microsoft used to essentially require vendors to pay for a Windows license for all computers they shipped or pay a lot more per license, but I don't think they've done that for years now.
Ah, the usual Slashdot attitude that the poster doesn't understand what's going on, so it shouldn't be expensive. Having run into that attitude about programmers often enough, I'm not at all sympathetic.
For actual damages, you have to estimate what the photographer would have charged for continued use of his photos and what he would have charged for the extended use the hotel did, publishing high-quality images in various magazines. I don't know what a top architectural photographer would charge for that, but it probably isn't trivial. While these uses would be negotiable, there's probably a reasonable range of what it would have cost.
The hotel also claimed authorship, which is illegal in Austria, and since the photographer wasn't credited for the photos in the magazines there's a certain loss of potential reputation and advertising there, which is harder to quantify but real. This would mean that the actual damages would be more than the lost revenue.
While the hotel probably could have negotiated a lower cost than this (particularly if they'd have given proper credit), I see no reason to credit them with what they should have done but didn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable award was a couple million euros, under the circumstances. If publication in one magazine would have cost the hotel 2K euros, and doubling the cost for denying the photographer authorship, that's 680K euros for 170 magazines. I have no idea whether these costs would be high or low, but if we multiply 170 publications by a few thousand euros each we get a pretty high cost.
Campbell fostered a certain subgenre, so if you follow Astounding/Analog only you're going to have a very limited view of the field. I wouldn't call what he encouraged above average as opposed to limited. If you like Campbell-type stuff, great, but there's lots of SF I'd consider just as good outside it.
Have you a problem with the science parts of C.J. Cherryh or Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan novels? I wouldn't recommend passing up their books because of their sex.
In the Harry Potter universe, magic has rules. Some people tinker with magic, others do research into understanding it. If magic can be understood and quantified, it can be a science. I can stretch this far enough to describe the Harry Potter universe as one with a poorly researched scientific effect.
Harry Potter is not particularly close to being science fiction, but there are books and stories that are much closer to the divide. Psychic abilities are normally considered science fiction, and they aren't more far-fetched than lots of SF space travel. Some people will disagree on that, making it even harder to classify stories. Zombies are normally considered fantasy, but the ones in Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy are definitely more on the science fiction side. We also have to consider stories that strongly imply something magical but in the end leave it ambiguous.
One definition I saw once is that in science fiction, the hero wins by being smart, and in fantasy the hero wins by being good. This would put E.E. Smith's Lensman series firmly in the fantasy category, since every so often Smith points out the way the evil in Boskonia makes it less effective than the good (and libertarian) Civilization.
If we have an entangled pair, we know that the two particles will have opposite readings (in a very simplistic sense, but this description works for proposed FTL communication), so it'll be random. We also know that changing whatever the reading measures breaks entanglement. Therefore, our alien race will know what shape the Earth was in when they left, because of the entangled particles, but they really could just have made notes instead. They won't know what happens when the state of any particle on Earth changes.
Theories are concrete. If they weren't, they'd be conjectures or something else. Theories aren't proof, but neither is anything else in science. A law of science is nothing more than a theory that everybody is convinced is true.
We can't prove FTL communication is impossible, although that's very strongly the way to bet. We can prove that quantum entanglement in any form that agrees with current theories does not allow FTL communication.
AFAIK, if you have an entangled pair, move them to distant places, alter one, then read the other, the other shows that change.
No. If you alter one, that breaks the entanglement. Suppose we're sending entangled particles with one of each pair having spin up, and one having spin down. If I measure a particle, I know what the person with the other particle will measure with the entangled particle (provided that person does the same measurement with the same orientation). If I affect the spin of a particle, it doesn't do anything to the entangled particle, because it breaks entanglement.
The burden of proof is on the one making a definite statement. If OP had said that FTL communication was possible, the burden of proof would be on OP. OP, however, seems to have assumed it might be possible, and that doesn't require proof. The statement that it's impossible is a definite statement, and requires proof.
Moreover, it's a statement about both what we know and what we don't know, and that is not an ordinary claim. We know physics is incomplete, and we really don't know what we'll find.
We can say there's no way to do FTL compatible with known physics. We can say that we can't have FTL communication and Special Relativity without being able to communicate into the past.
Nope. Suppose we did this by having pairs of envelopes, and each pair would have one black and one red card in it. We send envelopes to A and the paired envelopes to B. Suppose A wants to send "black", so A leaves envelopes with red cards alone and replaces black cards with red. This will tell B nothing. (In your example, there's another issue. How is A to know which entanglements to break? A has to look at the entangled particles to determine which are which, and that tells A what B sees.)
Cards and envelopes are a reasonable analogy in the usual case of entanglement communication, in which entangled pairs will always have opposite values. Once you start doing anything more complicated, the analogy breaks down badly.
There's lots of libertarians out there with different beliefs. It's not like you have to pass a government-imposed orthodoxy exam to call yourself a libertarian. If you talk to libertarians and they disagree with each other, they're not incoherent as much as disagreeing with each other, and some are indeed unrealistic.
Many libertarians have hopelessly idealistic ideas about how business would work in the absence of regulation, but there are other people with hopelessly idealistic or ideological ideas. Libertarians are generally against government overreach (just like everybody else), but disagree in how much government is really needed (just like everybody else).
A customer won't normally have perfect information about the merchandise, but that's not what we're talking about. If the customer doesn't have perfect information on the deal, then there is no meeting of the minds and hence no agreement and (theoretically anyway) no binding contract.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about driving around with large quantities of dangerous liquids and transferring them in uncontrolled environments (i.e., not in a gas station or other place with built-in safeguards). There damn well ought to be a law specifying safe ways to carry the gasoline (we already have those), doing the refueling, along with something like bonding or insurance requirements and possibly training requirements for the operator. "Who cares if it's dangerous, we don't want regulation" is the battle cry for antisocial assholes who see the world through ideological glasses.
From TFS, it seemed that the appropriate government people realized that they needed to come up with the necessary regulations to allow the business to happen. Local government, in particular, can be quite responsive at times.
You're not likely to do much harm carrying a gallon or two around in a decent container. Start carrying hundreds of gallons around and the stakes go up considerably. Do this once every few months and there aren't that many chances to goof up. Fill up thirty vehicles a day under various conditions and the chance of something going wrong goes up.
How about a social contract like criminal law? The government will try to protect you from violence, and will try to punish people who attack you. That's security. You give up the right to use violence, except in very limited circumstances. That's giving up liberty. It's significant, because sometimes violence is the answer.
You're confusing "free college" with "college degrees for all". They're two separate things.
Free college means that, if you get into college and stay there, you don't pay tuition and fees (and perhaps get other support). It doesn't mean unqualified people can get in, or that it's easy to get a degree. It does mean that you aren't barred from college because you can't afford it, which makes things much more fair. We've had free K-12 education in the US for a long, long time, and it has generally worked fairly well.
College degrees for all means letting in the unqualified and giving some sort of degree to people who are neither qualified nor willing to put in any work to learn. It makes education worse and doesn't recognize that some of us actually put in some effort to learn things.
Things are valuable partly because they aren't easy to get, true, but if we want to make a diploma worthwhile we need to make sure people work to get their degrees. It doesn't matter nearly as much how we make people pay for college. I'd be happy with some way to make it easy for poor people to get through college, provided they are qualified and put in the work.
An absolutist state can have a free market and can run a capitalist economy. China's not doing too bad a job of it right now. There were totalitarian capitalist states in WWII, before we conquered them and changed their governments. Capitalism is compatible with servitude and aristocracy, as long as it's understood that only certain people have capital. That's actually fairly close to true in many capitalist economies, and what aristocracy does is reduce social and economic mobility (it usually doesn't eliminate it). It isn't really the endgame of pure capitalism, but it's compatible with it.
For capitalism to work most efficiently, as many people as possible have to be able to start businesses and try out their ideas in the marketplace. This means that people need access to education, affordable health care, and some sort of assurance that their families will survive a total business failure.
I had no idea they did that. Thanks for sharing.
I'm getting a touch over my head here, but now that I've thought about it, I think just checking the value breaks the entanglement.
Suppose we're checking electron spin, which we'll separate into up and down. There are only two values of electron spin. Now, suppose we rotate our detector at some angle or other. If both the sender and receiver rotate by 45 degrees, they'll get opposite readings, but obviously not quite the same ones. However, we can only measure at one angle. If we try measuring up-down and then left-right, we'll get random left-right values that are not correlated, meaning the entanglement has been broken.
This is one of the places where quantum physics gets REALLY weird, since we know the electrons don't have any hidden spin axis or other such thing, from Bell's Theorem. They're just opposite each other.
Moore's Law has been either a good prediction or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's potentially useful in secret communications, provided we can keep the entanglement reliably going across useful distances. Send a bunch of entangled particles, perhaps to share a random number (like a 256-bit AES key). Do this in a previously agreed-on way (if looking at spin up or down, tilt the detector at an angle, say). The sender measures the entangled particles at one end, the receiver at the other. If all is well, they match, which can be confirmed with a quick innocuous message back. If the sender can read that message, it shows that it was not intercepted and read en route, as there is no way for somebody in between to read the key and send it on intact.
I have a TRS-80 Model 4, a more or less portable computer with a Z80A in it. I did find a use for it a while ago. I put it in front of a power plug I kept kicking from the socket when I stretched my legs. Of course, your laptops with the newfangled non-CRT displays probably don't have the heft for that.
Go to dell.com. It may take a little poking around, since they don't really advertise them, but they'll be happy to sell you some Ubuntu desktops and laptops, no MS included.
I've heard that Microsoft used to essentially require vendors to pay for a Windows license for all computers they shipped or pay a lot more per license, but I don't think they've done that for years now.
It may just be me, but it was less bother to customize Ubuntu to do what I liked than Windows 10.
Ah, the usual Slashdot attitude that the poster doesn't understand what's going on, so it shouldn't be expensive. Having run into that attitude about programmers often enough, I'm not at all sympathetic.
For actual damages, you have to estimate what the photographer would have charged for continued use of his photos and what he would have charged for the extended use the hotel did, publishing high-quality images in various magazines. I don't know what a top architectural photographer would charge for that, but it probably isn't trivial. While these uses would be negotiable, there's probably a reasonable range of what it would have cost.
The hotel also claimed authorship, which is illegal in Austria, and since the photographer wasn't credited for the photos in the magazines there's a certain loss of potential reputation and advertising there, which is harder to quantify but real. This would mean that the actual damages would be more than the lost revenue.
While the hotel probably could have negotiated a lower cost than this (particularly if they'd have given proper credit), I see no reason to credit them with what they should have done but didn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable award was a couple million euros, under the circumstances. If publication in one magazine would have cost the hotel 2K euros, and doubling the cost for denying the photographer authorship, that's 680K euros for 170 magazines. I have no idea whether these costs would be high or low, but if we multiply 170 publications by a few thousand euros each we get a pretty high cost.
Campbell fostered a certain subgenre, so if you follow Astounding/Analog only you're going to have a very limited view of the field. I wouldn't call what he encouraged above average as opposed to limited. If you like Campbell-type stuff, great, but there's lots of SF I'd consider just as good outside it.
Have you a problem with the science parts of C.J. Cherryh or Lois McMasters Bujold's Vorkosigan novels? I wouldn't recommend passing up their books because of their sex.
In the Harry Potter universe, magic has rules. Some people tinker with magic, others do research into understanding it. If magic can be understood and quantified, it can be a science. I can stretch this far enough to describe the Harry Potter universe as one with a poorly researched scientific effect.
Harry Potter is not particularly close to being science fiction, but there are books and stories that are much closer to the divide. Psychic abilities are normally considered science fiction, and they aren't more far-fetched than lots of SF space travel. Some people will disagree on that, making it even harder to classify stories. Zombies are normally considered fantasy, but the ones in Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy are definitely more on the science fiction side. We also have to consider stories that strongly imply something magical but in the end leave it ambiguous.
One definition I saw once is that in science fiction, the hero wins by being smart, and in fantasy the hero wins by being good. This would put E.E. Smith's Lensman series firmly in the fantasy category, since every so often Smith points out the way the evil in Boskonia makes it less effective than the good (and libertarian) Civilization.
If we have an entangled pair, we know that the two particles will have opposite readings (in a very simplistic sense, but this description works for proposed FTL communication), so it'll be random. We also know that changing whatever the reading measures breaks entanglement. Therefore, our alien race will know what shape the Earth was in when they left, because of the entangled particles, but they really could just have made notes instead. They won't know what happens when the state of any particle on Earth changes.
Theories are concrete. If they weren't, they'd be conjectures or something else. Theories aren't proof, but neither is anything else in science. A law of science is nothing more than a theory that everybody is convinced is true.
We can't prove FTL communication is impossible, although that's very strongly the way to bet. We can prove that quantum entanglement in any form that agrees with current theories does not allow FTL communication.
No. If you alter one, that breaks the entanglement. Suppose we're sending entangled particles with one of each pair having spin up, and one having spin down. If I measure a particle, I know what the person with the other particle will measure with the entangled particle (provided that person does the same measurement with the same orientation). If I affect the spin of a particle, it doesn't do anything to the entangled particle, because it breaks entanglement.
The burden of proof is on the one making a definite statement. If OP had said that FTL communication was possible, the burden of proof would be on OP. OP, however, seems to have assumed it might be possible, and that doesn't require proof. The statement that it's impossible is a definite statement, and requires proof. Moreover, it's a statement about both what we know and what we don't know, and that is not an ordinary claim. We know physics is incomplete, and we really don't know what we'll find.
We can say there's no way to do FTL compatible with known physics. We can say that we can't have FTL communication and Special Relativity without being able to communicate into the past.
Nope. Suppose we did this by having pairs of envelopes, and each pair would have one black and one red card in it. We send envelopes to A and the paired envelopes to B. Suppose A wants to send "black", so A leaves envelopes with red cards alone and replaces black cards with red. This will tell B nothing. (In your example, there's another issue. How is A to know which entanglements to break? A has to look at the entangled particles to determine which are which, and that tells A what B sees.)
Cards and envelopes are a reasonable analogy in the usual case of entanglement communication, in which entangled pairs will always have opposite values. Once you start doing anything more complicated, the analogy breaks down badly.
There's lots of libertarians out there with different beliefs. It's not like you have to pass a government-imposed orthodoxy exam to call yourself a libertarian. If you talk to libertarians and they disagree with each other, they're not incoherent as much as disagreeing with each other, and some are indeed unrealistic.
Many libertarians have hopelessly idealistic ideas about how business would work in the absence of regulation, but there are other people with hopelessly idealistic or ideological ideas. Libertarians are generally against government overreach (just like everybody else), but disagree in how much government is really needed (just like everybody else).
A customer won't normally have perfect information about the merchandise, but that's not what we're talking about. If the customer doesn't have perfect information on the deal, then there is no meeting of the minds and hence no agreement and (theoretically anyway) no binding contract.