Last I talked to someone who worked on Macintosh software for Microsoft, he told me that, whenever they bashed Apple publicly, they'd always assure my friend and cow-orkers that Microsoft liked what they were doing because it made money. Microsoft likes Mac users, because they frequently buy Microsoft software.
I am serious. Mathematics itself has nothing to do with the real world. It's a tremendously successful tool. We build mathematical models that are great at generating predictions and helping to find ways to falsify theories and applying what we know for practical use. It's great. Physics is based on math, but what that really means is that it has lots of observations and assumptions that essentially form the axioms of a mathematical system. It does not mean that any part of physics is derived from math.
The Universe is a contraption of odd particles and weird rules. There is no mathematical reason for quarks and leptons. We've made a lot of observations, and found models that work wonderfully to explain what we've observed. We express these models mathematically. There is no a priori way to know that we're made out of quarks and other things. This is something the Greeks could not have discovered had their math been as advanced as ours.
This interpretation of mathematics is a few centuries old, but it is virtually certainly the correct one. We've taken every piece of math the Greeks knew and found out what assumptions are necessary for it to hold. There's nothing magic about geometry or arithmetic that relates to the real world.
From what I've been told, physics contradicts itself. General relativity and quantum mechanics say different things when extrapolated far enough. On the other hand, they're both tremendously successful theories. Therefore, we can't just work from what we know and be sure we'll get truth. We couldn't anyway, because the Universe can have things in it we haven't observed that can be significant under some circumstances.
If physics was a result of mathematics, why all the experimentation? We should be able to derive the existence of dark matter and figure out its properties de novo. As it is, we know that it's got mass, it doesn't clump like regular matter does, and it has at most very little interaction with electromagnetism. We also have indications about some things it isn't.
And, yes, I've been sticking to subjects I know about. I've studied math and (to a lesser extent) philosophy. I'm deferring to you on the physics, since I don't know nearly as much as I'd like. You need to learn something about math and philosophy.
Actually, every post I've made is based in crap philosophy
FTFY.
Your physics may be impeccable (I'm not qualified to comment on it), but your interpretation is fundamentally philosophical. Nihilism is a respectable philosophical stance, but insisting that it's the obvious truth is dumb.
Okay then. What did I tell you just after the clone was made?
Both the clone and original can prove their identity in any way you like, except that the details of the cloning process may make the difference clear. Assuming they're identical (more than just genetically identical), both have the same fingerprints and iris scans and dental work and Bertillion measurements. Both will be able to answer questions about obscure events in the past. Both will know the passwords. Do it for me, and both of us will know the identification code I selected when I was young and don't reveal to anyone, intended to recognize a possible me from the future or possible alternate reality. (It's not likely to be useful, I'll admit.)
Even assuming a "teleporter accident" that creates two perfect duplicates, rather than an original and a clone, they cease being the same individual in that moment.
Yup. However, the relationship is a lot closer than any other we've seen, and that includes conjoined twins.
Even killing the original immediately doesn't really solve anything - divergence is minimal, but bifurcation has already happened. "your" stream of consciousness is ending, and the existence of another near-duplicate is irrelevant to that fact.
And, for practical purposes, that bifurcation amounts to a touch of amnesia, which can happen several ways. I have a friend who was thrown from a horse, who doesn't remember the horse doing anything. She remained the same person. Some surgical anesthetics have memory blocking in them, so that in the case that the patient does feel something the patient will not remember it.
I read something recently about an insurance company denying emergency room charges if they didn't think they were warranted (putting the onus onto the insured to determine whether it's a medical emergency or not), but I have no idea how typical that is, and the company was apparently moving towards looking at the original symptoms rather than the diagnosis.
Insurance companies are part of the problem. They add a lot of overhead. They are nowhere near all of the problem.
Thing is, there's no limit on starting new cryptocurrencies. Therefore, the fact that there will only be so many Bitcoin is not as relevant, because I can always issue Mycoin as a cryptocurrency.
Why? I have money in a regulated bank. I can get cash or write checks or do electronic transfers as I please, with low transaction fees (if there are any), and it's accepted almost everywhere because it's dollars. How would money not in a regulated bank be more valuable?
Nope. You want to pay banks to hold your money? You want to have to find individual contributors if you want to start a business or buy a car? What happens is that banks can lend out money people have deposited, gaining an income stream and offering a single point of lending. This means that they don't have cash reserves equal to the amount of deposits, so it's theoretically possible that too many depositors would want to withdraw their money.
In the old times, this could lead to a "run on the bank", in which some people would get the feeling that the bank wasn't healthy and withdraw their money, and then the bank would look shakier and more people would, and run the bank out of money reserves. Given protection like FDIC against such runs, people seem very happy to leave their savings there for long periods of time, and we do not in practice have problems.
So you're saying that the biggest range limitation is going to be the liquid hydrogen tank used as the coolant? Or isn't it going to be quite that bad?
What radioactives are going to be particularly dangerous in a hundred thousand years? Dangerous radioactive materials are dangerous because they emit a lot of radiation, which means that they have relatively short half-lives. (Another danger factor is whether they stay in the body or not, but we primarily worry about that for short half-lives.) Remember the radioactive iodine that was getting a lot of attention after Fukushima? Virtually certainly gone to the last atom. The cesium that was the other big worry does have a half-life of forty years, which means it stays around longer, but it won't take a thousand years to have only one millionth of the original left.
but their range is significantly diminished which is not true of ICEs.
So, would you care to explain how I can go 400 miles between refueling in the summer, and less than 350 in the winter with my ICE car? I call that significant.
Pre-authorization? Yes, I make sure I schedule all my heart attacks, strokes, and traffic accidents at least a month in advance, to get the paperwork in order.
Sometimes, when I find out about a medical condition, there's time to plan out how to do it and get everything in order. Sometimes there isn't.
While you're running your prejudices, other countries, with much more government involvement, have significantly higher life expectancies while paying maybe half we do (per capita). Try a little empiricism sometime.
Odd how again, your focus is on the 'big businesses'... and not say... the labor unions who also benefited from that.
The focus is on who's winning. Unions are besieged. Companies run things. Putting pressure on unions isn't going to help much of anything on a national scale. Getting government somewhat independent of big business would pay off big-time.
Immunity to malpractice accusations and court nonsense on all non-trivial procedures.
Sometimes things just go wrong. It happens. Sometimes doctors are incompetent, and patients are crippled or killed through negligence. I've seen varying claims on the significance of malpractice insurance, but there has to be some sort of penalty for being careless with people's lives.
University and government funded research CAN NOT BE PRIVATE.
It isn't. I believe the NIH moved some years ago to require all NIH-funded research to be publicly available within a year of publication. However, research like that almost never comes up with something that can be put into production without massive additional expenses. A research paper might say that a med like this (description of a chemical or whatever) shows a lot of promise. To get from there to the market requires extensive testing, very often including changing the chemical so it's still recognizable but has different effects. That's really expensive, and doesn't always pan out, so drug companies need to be able to protect their development expenses and make lots of money on the drugs that do make it through the process.
If we're going to have enough testing to know that our drugs are reasonably safe and do something, somebody has to pay for that. Personally, I think market incentives work best when they can be applied, so something like the current system is probably best.
Depends on the person. I'm getting all the health care I want, personally. I could easily get more medical care, but it wouldn't do anything useful, or it would have a 10% chance of killing me, or something like that.
And $30K/year will allow you to buy only the most basic drugs in the US. If you need insulin, and you don't have some sort of insurance or assistance plan that covers it, well, sucks to be you.
Slashdot Mirror
The claim of popularity reminds me of an old Howard the Duck cartoon.
Dr. Angst, Master of Mundane Mysticism: Admit it, duck! You're outclassed!
Howard, thinking: Expertise I'll concede him, but class - NEVER!
Last I talked to someone who worked on Macintosh software for Microsoft, he told me that, whenever they bashed Apple publicly, they'd always assure my friend and cow-orkers that Microsoft liked what they were doing because it made money. Microsoft likes Mac users, because they frequently buy Microsoft software.
Yup. They may have noticed that their computers worked better with 7, though.
I am serious. Mathematics itself has nothing to do with the real world. It's a tremendously successful tool. We build mathematical models that are great at generating predictions and helping to find ways to falsify theories and applying what we know for practical use. It's great. Physics is based on math, but what that really means is that it has lots of observations and assumptions that essentially form the axioms of a mathematical system. It does not mean that any part of physics is derived from math.
The Universe is a contraption of odd particles and weird rules. There is no mathematical reason for quarks and leptons. We've made a lot of observations, and found models that work wonderfully to explain what we've observed. We express these models mathematically. There is no a priori way to know that we're made out of quarks and other things. This is something the Greeks could not have discovered had their math been as advanced as ours.
This interpretation of mathematics is a few centuries old, but it is virtually certainly the correct one. We've taken every piece of math the Greeks knew and found out what assumptions are necessary for it to hold. There's nothing magic about geometry or arithmetic that relates to the real world.
From what I've been told, physics contradicts itself. General relativity and quantum mechanics say different things when extrapolated far enough. On the other hand, they're both tremendously successful theories. Therefore, we can't just work from what we know and be sure we'll get truth. We couldn't anyway, because the Universe can have things in it we haven't observed that can be significant under some circumstances.
If physics was a result of mathematics, why all the experimentation? We should be able to derive the existence of dark matter and figure out its properties de novo. As it is, we know that it's got mass, it doesn't clump like regular matter does, and it has at most very little interaction with electromagnetism. We also have indications about some things it isn't.
And, yes, I've been sticking to subjects I know about. I've studied math and (to a lesser extent) philosophy. I'm deferring to you on the physics, since I don't know nearly as much as I'd like. You need to learn something about math and philosophy.
FTFY.
Your physics may be impeccable (I'm not qualified to comment on it), but your interpretation is fundamentally philosophical. Nihilism is a respectable philosophical stance, but insisting that it's the obvious truth is dumb.
Nevertheless, it's true. There's a lot of true things we can confidently say about people or ethnic groups or species that no longer exist.
Both the clone and original can prove their identity in any way you like, except that the details of the cloning process may make the difference clear. Assuming they're identical (more than just genetically identical), both have the same fingerprints and iris scans and dental work and Bertillion measurements. Both will be able to answer questions about obscure events in the past. Both will know the passwords. Do it for me, and both of us will know the identification code I selected when I was young and don't reveal to anyone, intended to recognize a possible me from the future or possible alternate reality. (It's not likely to be useful, I'll admit.)
Yup. However, the relationship is a lot closer than any other we've seen, and that includes conjoined twins.
And, for practical purposes, that bifurcation amounts to a touch of amnesia, which can happen several ways. I have a friend who was thrown from a horse, who doesn't remember the horse doing anything. She remained the same person. Some surgical anesthetics have memory blocking in them, so that in the case that the patient does feel something the patient will not remember it.
I read something recently about an insurance company denying emergency room charges if they didn't think they were warranted (putting the onus onto the insured to determine whether it's a medical emergency or not), but I have no idea how typical that is, and the company was apparently moving towards looking at the original symptoms rather than the diagnosis.
Insurance companies are part of the problem. They add a lot of overhead. They are nowhere near all of the problem.
Thank you. I now know something new.
Logic. It's not just for breakfast anymore. Try it sometime.
Thing is, there's no limit on starting new cryptocurrencies. Therefore, the fact that there will only be so many Bitcoin is not as relevant, because I can always issue Mycoin as a cryptocurrency.
Heck, mining with software written in Javascript and running on a browser can be profitable, as long as it's on somebody else's computer.
Why? I have money in a regulated bank. I can get cash or write checks or do electronic transfers as I please, with low transaction fees (if there are any), and it's accepted almost everywhere because it's dollars. How would money not in a regulated bank be more valuable?
Banks don't create money arbitrarily. They are required by law to have certain reserves, so they can create no more money than they have reserves for.
Nope. You want to pay banks to hold your money? You want to have to find individual contributors if you want to start a business or buy a car? What happens is that banks can lend out money people have deposited, gaining an income stream and offering a single point of lending. This means that they don't have cash reserves equal to the amount of deposits, so it's theoretically possible that too many depositors would want to withdraw their money.
In the old times, this could lead to a "run on the bank", in which some people would get the feeling that the bank wasn't healthy and withdraw their money, and then the bank would look shakier and more people would, and run the bank out of money reserves. Given protection like FDIC against such runs, people seem very happy to leave their savings there for long periods of time, and we do not in practice have problems.
So you're saying that the biggest range limitation is going to be the liquid hydrogen tank used as the coolant? Or isn't it going to be quite that bad?
What radioactives are going to be particularly dangerous in a hundred thousand years? Dangerous radioactive materials are dangerous because they emit a lot of radiation, which means that they have relatively short half-lives. (Another danger factor is whether they stay in the body or not, but we primarily worry about that for short half-lives.) Remember the radioactive iodine that was getting a lot of attention after Fukushima? Virtually certainly gone to the last atom. The cesium that was the other big worry does have a half-life of forty years, which means it stays around longer, but it won't take a thousand years to have only one millionth of the original left.
So, would you care to explain how I can go 400 miles between refueling in the summer, and less than 350 in the winter with my ICE car? I call that significant.
Pre-authorization? Yes, I make sure I schedule all my heart attacks, strokes, and traffic accidents at least a month in advance, to get the paperwork in order.
Sometimes, when I find out about a medical condition, there's time to plan out how to do it and get everything in order. Sometimes there isn't.
While you're running your prejudices, other countries, with much more government involvement, have significantly higher life expectancies while paying maybe half we do (per capita). Try a little empiricism sometime.
The focus is on who's winning. Unions are besieged. Companies run things. Putting pressure on unions isn't going to help much of anything on a national scale. Getting government somewhat independent of big business would pay off big-time.
So that's why you guys are paying about 2/3 US per capita costs for health care. Hope you can get that under control.
A couple of things....
Sometimes things just go wrong. It happens. Sometimes doctors are incompetent, and patients are crippled or killed through negligence. I've seen varying claims on the significance of malpractice insurance, but there has to be some sort of penalty for being careless with people's lives.
It isn't. I believe the NIH moved some years ago to require all NIH-funded research to be publicly available within a year of publication. However, research like that almost never comes up with something that can be put into production without massive additional expenses. A research paper might say that a med like this (description of a chemical or whatever) shows a lot of promise. To get from there to the market requires extensive testing, very often including changing the chemical so it's still recognizable but has different effects. That's really expensive, and doesn't always pan out, so drug companies need to be able to protect their development expenses and make lots of money on the drugs that do make it through the process.
If we're going to have enough testing to know that our drugs are reasonably safe and do something, somebody has to pay for that. Personally, I think market incentives work best when they can be applied, so something like the current system is probably best.
Depends on the person. I'm getting all the health care I want, personally. I could easily get more medical care, but it wouldn't do anything useful, or it would have a 10% chance of killing me, or something like that.
And $30K/year will allow you to buy only the most basic drugs in the US. If you need insulin, and you don't have some sort of insurance or assistance plan that covers it, well, sucks to be you.