"I am getting a little more frightened about the rightward ho-ing of the judiciary. Being pro-business is one thing, but letting them own our thoughts?"
Then copyrighting them for upwards of fifty years a time?
"That is anywhere from 25% to 50% of the cost of a brand new console, depending on the platform (and yes, I know it is a PC game). I'm really curious as to what world he is living in that could justify that price as "relatively low"."
I think it's habit. Back in the eighties £5.99 was average for a low grade game, then £8.99, £14.99...usually the increase happened with a change in platform, and it was justified by an increase in production costs. Apparently these production costs didn't take into consideration the ubiquity of the platforms, or the later licensing deals for the game engines; this led to my purchasing games on reviews alone.
Unfortunately, having been bitten on the ass to the tune of fifty quid for absolutely terrible games that were reviewed as 'good', I tend to do my own reviewing or rely on word of mouth.
"In other news, the girl who got raped when walking in the dark alley brought it upon herself."
Well, I wouldn't allow her to assess any risks.
Re:Both were caused by bad management
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
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· Score: 1
"The first "accident" would have been a perfect use of an escape pod. The cockpit survived the blast and the crew was not killed by the exploding rocket but by hitting the ground several minutes later. Plenty of time for to pull the eject handle."
The 'concious on the way down' is conjecture, as you can be pretty sure that explosive decompression that high up would have brought on hypoxia extremely quickly, and I'd be very surprised if there wasn't interruption in the environmental support systems.
Note that ejectors of pretty much any description have to used in the horizontal plane; the shuttle is multiplanar throughout the launch right up to orbital insertion. A tumbling piece of wreckage isn't going to be the ideal place to eject from, either.
There *are* (at least as far as I'm aware) draglines from the launch towers...if you can undog the main hatch and get out, you can use a basket to get a nominal distance from the shuttle itself, but like the escape tower on the Apollo flights, the circumstances where it becomes useful are vanishingly small, and nothing would help a catastrophic failure.
"Start letting the suits decide and you are just waiting for them to screw up."
Nonsense. Let the suits decide and they'll go for the most cost-effective option on a risk assessed plan that shows a favourable break even point. That isn't screwing up, that's business. You could, and should argue that science and business are diametrically opposed to each other in aim and execution, however.
Atlantis was a debacle, though. There was nothing that could be done unless someone had watched the launch tape from the camera and alerted someone to make a visual inspection by undertaking a spacewalk. Even then, the damage may not have been completely apparent, but the attitude of most ("It's just a piece of foam") was ignorant of the most basic physics involved; something to be frightened of if these people are deciding space policy.
Sure. A laptop is brought into the enterprise and connected to the network; DHCP produces a lease for the laptop, which then starts to probe the entire network as it's inside the DMZ.
Now, the laptop is taken home by the engineer, who doesn't really care what happens to it. He's got support at the office, so he doesn't bother with AV or a firewall, someone else'll fix it for him when it goes wrong.
Your suggestions are all perfect, although the RPC ports should include NetBIOS ports for DSL customers; anything else is going to be a tad restrictive for those of us doing more than web and email.
"Of course, none of this is actually going to happen because ISPs will see it as likely to scare people off."
Fallacy. ISPs don't do it because they fought hard and long to be considered 'carriers' rather than responsible for the content of the network. Overt moves in censoring or controlling the information could open them up to litigation, not to mention a whole slew of complaints from both sides of the censorship argument.
"he should also have been using some form of anti-virus software."
Yeah, because that makes the machine invulnerable to worms.
"He should have been running Windows Update regularly"
Funnily enough, I do. Didn't stop me enjoying the 'rinse/repeat' cycle from the RPC worm when it started moving through the network, because it turns out that the RPC patch didn't 'take' from windows update on my secondary machine. Likewise, how do you know when a given vulnerability has been patched, and that you have the patch installed?
"But I believe the grandparent post was saying to blame "ADMINS," those whose job it is to stop this stuff.
It's their job to maintain proper security, apply patches, use recent virus software, watch over incoming / outgoing traffic and email, and lock down ports if necessary."
And suffer from interminable complaints from dumbasses who like blaming someone else that their DSL is being 'censored'. BTW, neither you or the grandfather post seem to have any real understanding of the administrators job if you think they can be blamed for 'not locking down ports', or indeed their job is wiping user's bottoms.
"These large data centers can spread hundreds or thousands of users within a few hours if they're not careful."
And a butter knife can kill thousands in the right hands. Nothing more embarrassing than shoving several thousand spam emails down the big fat pipe to your upstream provider, so it's something we avoid.
"Joe Use might spread a small number of people from his Outlook Express address book (who in turn infect another small number)."
Do you know how multiplication works? Or any clue as to how geometric spread starts?
Say 'small number' is 'five'. The orginal vector goes to five, second generation is 25, third generation is 125, fourth generation is 625, fifth generation is 3125...get it?
"That includes the admins of the e-mail systems of ISPs."
Does this also include enterprises where the DHCP server becomes compromised by laptops that are monkeyed around with by engineers? Take your time, I see you thought the original post through.
It's mostly the way they want to implement it, meaning a flat structure across the NHS that allows anyone in the structure to see my records.
Bear in mind that to see my own records I have to actually take the time and go see the GP, and we didn't even get that right until around a decade ago.
Even more amusing is that my private Doctor couldn't get my complete notes from my NHS Doctor and instead had a partial collection
I was surprised that a number of gov.uk technology initiatives weren't mentioned; EDS has entered a bitch-slapping war over several of the projects it's mishandled with ministers.
"I understand that people are paranoid about hackers, but there are several ways to do this right that would be at least as secure as paper trails."
Hey, you should like, post that on a geek board, because I'm sure noone here knows that it's possible.
Yup. There's a 10% boundary under the calibration rules for speedos; however after my MP (Dr Tony Wright) got nicked for speeding, he started looking into the process by which 'leeway' is awarded by super accurate cameras and found there's no regulation.
Nice of my MP to get off his arse when he's gotten caught though.
"Hello!! Defense of borders is part of maintaining soverignty...since when is that "orwellian?""
At the point when you decide you want to farm information. Of course, it would have been a different story, had the British done it to Irish nationals, eh Sinnfeiner?
"I've seen plenty of perfectly reasonable ones that just elicited idiotic flames ("you're just not '1337 enough to run this OS") to make me wonder."
You'll see those everywhere, and it's a side-effect of cheap access to the internet, whatever the OS. I doubt that you were using the better mailing lists or user groups, though.
I personally use windows desktops and FreeBSD servers. I've played with various distros of Linux, but I'm largely happy with my choices, although I will be migrating away from Windows as time permits in the near future. I tend to pick things on a fairly sound economical basis because I don't have the time to play with things and the 'just working' thing tends to mean I stabilise a machine and don't mess with it.
How was this mail and wire fraud? And how does this tally with the Patriot Act?
"Maybe there's a reason the Feeble Eyes were involved."
I have no doubt that there is. There's also a reason why the Falun Gong are rounded up in China. It's up to you to decide if the reasons are valid or not.
"You can percieve the modern theories as attempts to preserve the models that have been built up to date, and you'd be right. I'd be less inclined to attribute this to arrogance and narrowmindedness, and more inclined to believe that it's because reality happens to concur with the theories to 99.99999... %"
I think this is a point that a lot of people miss; you extend the framework you have until there's enough data to suggest a shift in the way that starts to encompass the whole enchilada to that point. Without building on the framework, or 'standing on the shoulders of giants', you may as well scrap everything and start again when you don't see the observable data to match the theory.
The funny thing is the cult of ignorance is something that Slashdot should be resistant to, but again I'm seeing arguments that are spurious. The quality of Nerds has gone down quite a bit.
"I thought it was burried in the mountain to slow the neutrinos. Wasn't there something about that, that being under the mountain was actually supposed to increase the chance of neutrino detection?"
Y'see, this is the problem. Burying it under the mountain means that you're less likely to get spurious events, not 'slowing the neutrino'. Further than that there are exhaustive texts on the subject that might help your boredom a little.
"I would even allow for possibilities that we haven't quite thought of yet, but I know there are a lot of people which wouldn't."
That's good of you. Very open minded.
"And the big advancements in science usually don't come from tacking on another particle or something, but from a reevaluation of what we thought we knew."
Or 'paradigm shift', as Kuhn termed it. You should have a pick through 'The structure of scientific revolutions', which is considered a fairly definitive text on the subject. However, I take issue with your 'tacking on another particle', which is, at best, derisory. If there is an observed behaviour which doesn't match...I'm thinking 'canonical', but it's not the right word...say 'accepted' paradigm, then people are going to come up with a theory that is then presented for refutation, this is one. Enough information on a subject will eventually trigger a paradigm shift, such as the one that followed the refutation of the nuetrino being a single particle or even massless. That you didn't mention either of those points tends to suggest you're picking a fight for the sake of a fight.
"And I think we may eventually decide, after much debate, that such a statement would be wrong."
The debate has passed and the statement was wrong. I think you're picking on a point there.
"which is part of the reason why everyone wants to find new "elementry particles"..."
...and which is why there's such a high bar for producing proofs and empirical data, dumbass. For the love of Pete, it's like banging your head against a brick wall.
"You might not believe me, but much of the theory of Relativity is founded on "common sense" and thought experiments."
I not only disbelieve you, but I think you're beginning to get into faith territory quite rapidly. 'Relativity' is split into general and special relativity, and has had more positive experimentation done than anything else. That it's still called a theory is because people are taking into considerations those 'possibilities' that you mentioned earlier, such as quantum gravity and gravity waves, the latter of which has not been observed, but is predicted. Relative time was tested in a landmark experiment that saw an accurate clock accelerated in relation to another synchronised clock. Gravitational lensing is part of the astronomical toolkit and was another prediction. Admittedly there's a lot built onto general and special relativity, but so far it's provided a far better framework for observable data than the Newtonian paradigm which it replaced. Incidentally, Newton thought that absolute frames of reference fit more neatly into gravity, and Einstein thought that quantum mechanics wasn't a correct approach.
"mistakes made due to belief in authority of "other scientists" and their "experiments" and "theories"."
Does this mean you now understand why peer-review is important? Why the scientific process allows for people to challenge the accepted dogma on a daily basis? That occasionally physicists are wrong, but stifling the ability to be wrong creates a chilling effect?
"One of the things common to great physicists is that they are also great natural philosophers."
Good thinkers are good thinkers. Did you have a point you wanted to make there?
"It's one thing to collect data. It's another to agree on what the data means."
Absolutely. I think you're a bit lost at this point. How does your quote above refute the point that a theory will be tested independantly? In fact, how does it even come close to your original point that they're simply 'making stuff up'? I think I've covered your other knee-jerk assumptions someplace else.
"If you create something, whether you're a media corporation or an individual, copyright works in your favor."
*blink*...so what you're saying is that the FBI will run exploratory raids if I make a claim that someone is infringing my copyright? And there is no difference between J Bloggs and Sony Entertainment Corp?
I can't help feeling that you completely missed my point in an effort to throw a sidelong jibe at the linux supporters around here. I wasn't complaining about copyright, just the instruments used to force compliance by the copyright holders and the relatively lop-sided fashion in which credibility is assigned to claims of infringment.
On another note, why do you hate content producers enough to call them 'bad'?*
* Rhetorical question, but if you make assumptions about my posts and position, I'll do exactly the same back.
I was working with an electrical company at the time, but we were quoting to replace some of the PCs and control gear in a brick refractory. This is a really harsh environment; acids, brickdust, high temperatures. The factory floor PC was in a small office in the side room, and when they showed it to me;
"I'm not touching it"
"Why not?"
"Well, I can see that it's embedded in roughly 1/2 inch of brick dust, and it appears to be a standard desktop. There's no way I'm going to be responsible for the thing falling over. I'm surprised it's still running."
The quotation included a full environmental system for the replacement PC, and they decided not to buy, but I did hear from the guy that eventually replaced it. Apparently the bottom of the case had corroded to the floor, meaning that they had to kick it to remove the machine, and the inside was _choked_ with dust. There was discolouration on all the components and they were as amazed as I was it was still working.
I've no idea why you were modded down unless someone also picked the point that you were creating the mother of all strawmen arguments right in the middle of your post.
"Whenever you're talking about a device to detect something, you first need to acknowledge that you're looking for that thing."
A mistaken assumption, you're testing a given attribute or behaviour, such as the very rare instance of a nuetrino hitting a chlorine molecule and producing a photon.
"In the witch example, part of the problem is that the means of detection assumes that witches are real things."
A valid assumption in terms of theoretics (common sense aside for the moment), but your experiment was flawed because it failed to differentiate between someone that was a witch and a normal person. Note that this wasn't the historical test of 'witchness', but the showy method of execution that gained more popularity for the inquisition during the purging of the monasteries. The more accepted tests (under a papal bull) can be read in the Malleus Maleficarum.
"Have all the other possibilties been ruled out?"
To publish a paper, you have to go through peer-review, which can include people that think you're talking out your ass, but they have to refute it on the basis of the theory. Once it's gotten through that, scientists worldwide will try to refute or extend the theory to it starts to evolve into something that matches observable and measureable data. I'm neither patient enough or have enough time to go through exotic subatomic particles with someone stubborn enough to engage in spurious debating tactics like the strawman, though. Mark it on your calender, and when it all goes wrong you can post to me.
"because the sort of people who follow "scientific advancement" blindly are often the same sort who will act viciously towards those who follow anything else blindly."
Ah, so it was an object lesson in not following things blindly? Well done, you really showed me there. Props and stuff.
"Maybe just that I'm telling someone his answer is wrong without providing him the right answer?"
And you're basing this on a strawman argument? Jesus, you're certainly in no position to be claiming shit like that unless you really believe that you're right, but not giving what you think is the right answer is just protecting yourself against a similar bunch of arguments.
"someone responded saying "These new particles are real. Just look at the neutrino!""
I can't figure out why you're being that dense. There was a question mark in my OP, and it's becoming fairly obvious that you're assuming my point of view rather than reading the text.
"That's not necessarily definitive. How did they decide what would be a valid "detection" of nuetrinos? Is the method of detection valid? Or could it there be something other than nuetrinos which would set off this "detector"?"
They don't decide validity, you simply come up with an experiment that will either refute or confirm an attribute and run with it. As for something else setting them off, well this is why it's buried in a mountain, has photodetectors capable of picking up a single photon event and there are more than one. Incidentally, it's proved to be the best way of predicting supernovae as the nuetrino flux goes up in a particular track direction before the luminosity increase. How many theoretical predictions were confirmed by that?
"you'd find your detector worked quite well, and proved that there are witches everywhere...."
But your definition for witches is what? What did your detector confirm? Are you willing to have someone point out that everyone burns on a bonfire?
"I know what you're going to say. They figured out the detector "scientifically"!"
Your predictive abilities lead to believe that you shouldn't give up the day job.
"I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong, but it aint definitive."
Honeybunch, you appear to be caught up in thinking that 'definitive' was something that I or the original article mentioned, when you're obviously slightly obsessed by it. Go back and read some more on the subject before frothing up your keyboard.
One of the most basic points of scientific theory is the design of experiments to refute theory, and believe it or not science is a competitive field...everyone wants to get their name in lights to the extent where there has been scientific fraud, mistakes made due to belief in authority or 'common sense'. Any theory is going to find itself dragged through the mud if scientists from different countries can't achieve the same experimental results.
"You bring up a single example of a hard to find particle that was eventually detected, and use that to support the existence of the Higgs boson?"
No, that's your assumption, and it's completely incorrect, not to mention a bit silly and unworthy of anyone out of kindergarten. Stop trolling.
"The existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson will be determined experimentally, not by theory."
But, mon frere, you appear to have ignored the point that experimentation is used to refine, refute, test or otherwise falsify theory, so how do you design an experiment without a bloody good idea of the parameters you want to test?
"We just never read about them in textbooks, because who wants to learn things that are wrong."
Now you're compounding the original daftness with more silly behaviour. It might work well in class, but here it's just annoying. If you've had any formal scientific education I'm hoping that they did lead you through the bad assumptions, the difference between science fiction and verifiable claims; if you don't learn from mistakes, you don't learn.
BTW, what you're describing is close to 'file drawer', a common occurence in pseudo-science that simply ignores results that don't match theory rather than using those unfavourable results to change theory.
"Physicists believed in the existence of Ether right up until the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment."
'Physicists' doesn't mean the whole field, old chap, there were people on the fringes that gave rise to Max Planck's admonishment that science advances by funerals. Even the great and the good have known to be wrong; Arthur Eddington refuted Chandarsekhar's original work on black holes and Lord Kelvin remarked that X-rays where pure chicanery. As I said, the ability to be wrong and recognise you're wrong is one of the defining points of science.
However, the Michealson-Morley experiment was a test of the existence of ether, which is where we're actually agreeing.
"I wanted to provide links to more examples than just Ether, but for the exact reasons I outlined above I had diffculty locating web pages on other failures."
I've given you some pointers above; there are others. Try a google search for 'N-rays' or the 'Fifth force'. The main upshot is that these failures are valid from the point of view that you need to learn from mistakes; nowhere have I refuted this, or claimed the existence of the Higg's boson in opposition to experimental proof...in fact, the Higg's boson is looking less and less likely as the theory of massive particles grows, but none of this really means a jot when the original poster thought that it would be possible to manufacture a theory without a new particle.
Lastly, religion is based on theories that are untestable; any theory that cannot be tested has to be taken on faith, any theory that you're discouraged from testing should be tested.
Actually I think that's up to the American public. So far he's avoided bombing England, but we suspect that it's only a matter of time.
"but your own Blair has his lips firmly glued to Bush's cock"
Speculation here has him embedded to the clavicles in a location almost 180 degrees from where you suggested, but luckily he's managed to annoy enough people that he might not be a problem for much longer. Bush did dump him right in the doo-doo by refusing to back up his claims that he was only listening to American intelligence, and the Hutton enquiry didn't produce the effect he wanted.
However, if you hear the words 'Micheal Howard' used in conjunction with 'Prime Minister' in the next couple of years, I'll be found living somewhere nice and quiet. Like Sudan.
Slashdot Mirror
"I am getting a little more frightened about the rightward ho-ing of the judiciary. Being pro-business is one thing, but letting them own our thoughts?"
Then copyrighting them for upwards of fifty years a time?
Welcome to the future.
"That is anywhere from 25% to 50% of the cost of a brand new console, depending on the platform (and yes, I know it is a PC game). I'm really curious as to what world he is living in that could justify that price as "relatively low"."
I think it's habit. Back in the eighties £5.99 was average for a low grade game, then £8.99, £14.99...usually the increase happened with a change in platform, and it was justified by an increase in production costs. Apparently these production costs didn't take into consideration the ubiquity of the platforms, or the later licensing deals for the game engines; this led to my purchasing games on reviews alone.
Unfortunately, having been bitten on the ass to the tune of fifty quid for absolutely terrible games that were reviewed as 'good', I tend to do my own reviewing or rely on word of mouth.
"In other news, the girl who got raped when walking in the dark alley brought it upon herself."
Well, I wouldn't allow her to assess any risks.
"The first "accident" would have been a perfect use of an escape pod. The cockpit survived the blast and the crew was not killed by the exploding rocket but by hitting the ground several minutes later. Plenty of time for to pull the eject handle."
The 'concious on the way down' is conjecture, as you can be pretty sure that explosive decompression that high up would have brought on hypoxia extremely quickly, and I'd be very surprised if there wasn't interruption in the environmental support systems.
Note that ejectors of pretty much any description have to used in the horizontal plane; the shuttle is multiplanar throughout the launch right up to orbital insertion. A tumbling piece of wreckage isn't going to be the ideal place to eject from, either.
There *are* (at least as far as I'm aware) draglines from the launch towers...if you can undog the main hatch and get out, you can use a basket to get a nominal distance from the shuttle itself, but like the escape tower on the Apollo flights, the circumstances where it becomes useful are vanishingly small, and nothing would help a catastrophic failure.
"Start letting the suits decide and you are just waiting for them to screw up."
Nonsense. Let the suits decide and they'll go for the most cost-effective option on a risk assessed plan that shows a favourable break even point. That isn't screwing up, that's business. You could, and should argue that science and business are diametrically opposed to each other in aim and execution, however.
Atlantis was a debacle, though. There was nothing that could be done unless someone had watched the launch tape from the camera and alerted someone to make a visual inspection by undertaking a spacewalk. Even then, the damage may not have been completely apparent, but the attitude of most ("It's just a piece of foam") was ignorant of the most basic physics involved; something to be frightened of if these people are deciding space policy.
"Could you provide an example?"
Sure. A laptop is brought into the enterprise and connected to the network; DHCP produces a lease for the laptop, which then starts to probe the entire network as it's inside the DMZ.
Now, the laptop is taken home by the engineer, who doesn't really care what happens to it. He's got support at the office, so he doesn't bother with AV or a firewall, someone else'll fix it for him when it goes wrong.
What's your solution?
Your suggestions are all perfect, although the RPC ports should include NetBIOS ports for DSL customers; anything else is going to be a tad restrictive for those of us doing more than web and email.
"Of course, none of this is actually going to happen because ISPs will see it as likely to scare people off."
Fallacy. ISPs don't do it because they fought hard and long to be considered 'carriers' rather than responsible for the content of the network. Overt moves in censoring or controlling the information could open them up to litigation, not to mention a whole slew of complaints from both sides of the censorship argument.
"he should also have been using some form of anti-virus software."
Yeah, because that makes the machine invulnerable to worms.
"He should have been running Windows Update regularly"
Funnily enough, I do. Didn't stop me enjoying the 'rinse/repeat' cycle from the RPC worm when it started moving through the network, because it turns out that the RPC patch didn't 'take' from windows update on my secondary machine. Likewise, how do you know when a given vulnerability has been patched, and that you have the patch installed?
"But I believe the grandparent post was saying to blame "ADMINS," those whose job it is to stop this stuff.
It's their job to maintain proper security, apply patches, use recent virus software, watch over incoming / outgoing traffic and email, and lock down ports if necessary."
And suffer from interminable complaints from dumbasses who like blaming someone else that their DSL is being 'censored'. BTW, neither you or the grandfather post seem to have any real understanding of the administrators job if you think they can be blamed for 'not locking down ports', or indeed their job is wiping user's bottoms.
"These large data centers can spread hundreds or thousands of users within a few hours if they're not careful."
And a butter knife can kill thousands in the right hands. Nothing more embarrassing than shoving several thousand spam emails down the big fat pipe to your upstream provider, so it's something we avoid.
"Joe Use might spread a small number of people from his Outlook Express address book (who in turn infect another small number)."
Do you know how multiplication works? Or any clue as to how geometric spread starts?
Say 'small number' is 'five'. The orginal vector goes to five, second generation is 25, third generation is 125, fourth generation is 625, fifth generation is 3125...get it?
"That includes the admins of the e-mail systems of ISPs."
Does this also include enterprises where the DHCP server becomes compromised by laptops that are monkeyed around with by engineers? Take your time, I see you thought the original post through.
" Maybe corporations need to be programmed to obey Asimov's laws."
Hun, you don't program corporations, but it's a brave attempt to be topical and funny at the same time. Well done.
"How is this most appalling project?"
It's mostly the way they want to implement it, meaning a flat structure across the NHS that allows anyone in the structure to see my records.
Bear in mind that to see my own records I have to actually take the time and go see the GP, and we didn't even get that right until around a decade ago.
Even more amusing is that my private Doctor couldn't get my complete notes from my NHS Doctor and instead had a partial collection
I was surprised that a number of gov.uk technology initiatives weren't mentioned; EDS has entered a bitch-slapping war over several of the projects it's mishandled with ministers.
"I understand that people are paranoid about hackers, but there are several ways to do this right that would be at least as secure as paper trails."
Hey, you should like, post that on a geek board, because I'm sure noone here knows that it's possible.
"I believe that's technically incorrect."
Yup. There's a 10% boundary under the calibration rules for speedos; however after my MP (Dr Tony Wright) got nicked for speeding, he started looking into the process by which 'leeway' is awarded by super accurate cameras and found there's no regulation.
Nice of my MP to get off his arse when he's gotten caught though.
"Hello!! Defense of borders is part of maintaining soverignty...since when is that "orwellian?""
At the point when you decide you want to farm information. Of course, it would have been a different story, had the British done it to Irish nationals, eh Sinnfeiner?
"I've seen plenty of perfectly reasonable ones that just elicited idiotic flames ("you're just not '1337 enough to run this OS") to make me wonder."
You'll see those everywhere, and it's a side-effect of cheap access to the internet, whatever the OS. I doubt that you were using the better mailing lists or user groups, though.
I personally use windows desktops and FreeBSD servers. I've played with various distros of Linux, but I'm largely happy with my choices, although I will be migrating away from Windows as time permits in the near future. I tend to pick things on a fairly sound economical basis because I don't have the time to play with things and the 'just working' thing tends to mean I stabilise a machine and don't mess with it.
"Say, that's what this guy was doing!"
How was this mail and wire fraud? And how does this tally with the Patriot Act?
"Maybe there's a reason the Feeble Eyes were involved."
I have no doubt that there is. There's also a reason why the Falun Gong are rounded up in China. It's up to you to decide if the reasons are valid or not.
"You can percieve the modern theories as attempts to preserve the models that have been built up to date, and you'd be right. I'd be less inclined to attribute this to arrogance and narrowmindedness, and more inclined to believe that it's because reality happens to concur with the theories to 99.99999... %"
I think this is a point that a lot of people miss; you extend the framework you have until there's enough data to suggest a shift in the way that starts to encompass the whole enchilada to that point. Without building on the framework, or 'standing on the shoulders of giants', you may as well scrap everything and start again when you don't see the observable data to match the theory.
The funny thing is the cult of ignorance is something that Slashdot should be resistant to, but again I'm seeing arguments that are spurious. The quality of Nerds has gone down quite a bit.
"I thought it was burried in the mountain to slow the neutrinos. Wasn't there something about that, that being under the mountain was actually supposed to increase the chance of neutrino detection?"
...and which is why there's such a high bar for producing proofs and empirical data, dumbass. For the love of Pete, it's like banging your head against a brick wall.
Y'see, this is the problem. Burying it under the mountain means that you're less likely to get spurious events, not 'slowing the neutrino'. Further than that there are exhaustive texts on the subject that might help your boredom a little.
"I would even allow for possibilities that we haven't quite thought of yet, but I know there are a lot of people which wouldn't."
That's good of you. Very open minded.
"And the big advancements in science usually don't come from tacking on another particle or something, but from a reevaluation of what we thought we knew."
Or 'paradigm shift', as Kuhn termed it. You should have a pick through 'The structure of scientific revolutions', which is considered a fairly definitive text on the subject. However, I take issue with your 'tacking on another particle', which is, at best, derisory. If there is an observed behaviour which doesn't match...I'm thinking 'canonical', but it's not the right word...say 'accepted' paradigm, then people are going to come up with a theory that is then presented for refutation, this is one. Enough information on a subject will eventually trigger a paradigm shift, such as the one that followed the refutation of the nuetrino being a single particle or even massless. That you didn't mention either of those points tends to suggest you're picking a fight for the sake of a fight.
"And I think we may eventually decide, after much debate, that such a statement would be wrong."
The debate has passed and the statement was wrong. I think you're picking on a point there.
"which is part of the reason why everyone wants to find new "elementry particles"..."
"You might not believe me, but much of the theory of Relativity is founded on "common sense" and thought experiments."
I not only disbelieve you, but I think you're beginning to get into faith territory quite rapidly. 'Relativity' is split into general and special relativity, and has had more positive experimentation done than anything else. That it's still called a theory is because people are taking into considerations those 'possibilities' that you mentioned earlier, such as quantum gravity and gravity waves, the latter of which has not been observed, but is predicted. Relative time was tested in a landmark experiment that saw an accurate clock accelerated in relation to another synchronised clock. Gravitational lensing is part of the astronomical toolkit and was another prediction. Admittedly there's a lot built onto general and special relativity, but so far it's provided a far better framework for observable data than the Newtonian paradigm which it replaced. Incidentally, Newton thought that absolute frames of reference fit more neatly into gravity, and Einstein thought that quantum mechanics wasn't a correct approach.
"mistakes made due to belief in authority of "other scientists" and their "experiments" and "theories"."
Does this mean you now understand why peer-review is important? Why the scientific process allows for people to challenge the accepted dogma on a daily basis? That occasionally physicists are wrong, but stifling the ability to be wrong creates a chilling effect?
"One of the things common to great physicists is that they are also great natural philosophers."
Good thinkers are good thinkers. Did you have a point you wanted to make there?
"It's one thing to collect data. It's another to agree on what the data means."
Absolutely. I think you're a bit lost at this point. How does your quote above refute the point that a theory will be tested independantly? In fact, how does it even come close to your original point that they're simply 'making stuff up'? I think I've covered your other knee-jerk assumptions someplace else.
"If you create something, whether you're a media corporation or an individual, copyright works in your favor."
*blink*...so what you're saying is that the FBI will run exploratory raids if I make a claim that someone is infringing my copyright? And there is no difference between J Bloggs and Sony Entertainment Corp?
I can't help feeling that you completely missed my point in an effort to throw a sidelong jibe at the linux supporters around here. I wasn't complaining about copyright, just the instruments used to force compliance by the copyright holders and the relatively lop-sided fashion in which credibility is assigned to claims of infringment.
On another note, why do you hate content producers enough to call them 'bad'?*
* Rhetorical question, but if you make assumptions about my posts and position, I'll do exactly the same back.
I was working with an electrical company at the time, but we were quoting to replace some of the PCs and control gear in a brick refractory. This is a really harsh environment; acids, brickdust, high temperatures. The factory floor PC was in a small office in the side room, and when they showed it to me;
"I'm not touching it"
"Why not?"
"Well, I can see that it's embedded in roughly 1/2 inch of brick dust, and it appears to be a standard desktop. There's no way I'm going to be responsible for the thing falling over. I'm surprised it's still running."
The quotation included a full environmental system for the replacement PC, and they decided not to buy, but I did hear from the guy that eventually replaced it. Apparently the bottom of the case had corroded to the floor, meaning that they had to kick it to remove the machine, and the inside was _choked_ with dust. There was discolouration on all the components and they were as amazed as I was it was still working.
I've no idea why you were modded down unless someone also picked the point that you were creating the mother of all strawmen arguments right in the middle of your post.
"Whenever you're talking about a device to detect something, you first need to acknowledge that you're looking for that thing."
A mistaken assumption, you're testing a given attribute or behaviour, such as the very rare instance of a nuetrino hitting a chlorine molecule and producing a photon.
"In the witch example, part of the problem is that the means of detection assumes that witches are real things."
A valid assumption in terms of theoretics (common sense aside for the moment), but your experiment was flawed because it failed to differentiate between someone that was a witch and a normal person. Note that this wasn't the historical test of 'witchness', but the showy method of execution that gained more popularity for the inquisition during the purging of the monasteries. The more accepted tests (under a papal bull) can be read in the Malleus Maleficarum.
"Have all the other possibilties been ruled out?"
To publish a paper, you have to go through peer-review, which can include people that think you're talking out your ass, but they have to refute it on the basis of the theory. Once it's gotten through that, scientists worldwide will try to refute or extend the theory to it starts to evolve into something that matches observable and measureable data. I'm neither patient enough or have enough time to go through exotic subatomic particles with someone stubborn enough to engage in spurious debating tactics like the strawman, though. Mark it on your calender, and when it all goes wrong you can post to me.
"because the sort of people who follow "scientific advancement" blindly are often the same sort who will act viciously towards those who follow anything else blindly."
Ah, so it was an object lesson in not following things blindly? Well done, you really showed me there. Props and stuff.
"Maybe just that I'm telling someone his answer is wrong without providing him the right answer?"
And you're basing this on a strawman argument? Jesus, you're certainly in no position to be claiming shit like that unless you really believe that you're right, but not giving what you think is the right answer is just protecting yourself against a similar bunch of arguments.
"someone responded saying "These new particles are real. Just look at the neutrino!""
I can't figure out why you're being that dense. There was a question mark in my OP, and it's becoming fairly obvious that you're assuming my point of view rather than reading the text.
" no one will bother to read this whole thing"
Can you taste the irony?
"That's not necessarily definitive. How did they decide what would be a valid "detection" of nuetrinos? Is the method of detection valid? Or could it there be something other than nuetrinos which would set off this "detector"?"
They don't decide validity, you simply come up with an experiment that will either refute or confirm an attribute and run with it. As for something else setting them off, well this is why it's buried in a mountain, has photodetectors capable of picking up a single photon event and there are more than one. Incidentally, it's proved to be the best way of predicting supernovae as the nuetrino flux goes up in a particular track direction before the luminosity increase. How many theoretical predictions were confirmed by that?
"you'd find your detector worked quite well, and proved that there are witches everywhere...."
But your definition for witches is what? What did your detector confirm? Are you willing to have someone point out that everyone burns on a bonfire?
"I know what you're going to say. They figured out the detector "scientifically"!"
Your predictive abilities lead to believe that you shouldn't give up the day job.
"I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong, but it aint definitive."
Honeybunch, you appear to be caught up in thinking that 'definitive' was something that I or the original article mentioned, when you're obviously slightly obsessed by it. Go back and read some more on the subject before frothing up your keyboard.
One of the most basic points of scientific theory is the design of experiments to refute theory, and believe it or not science is a competitive field...everyone wants to get their name in lights to the extent where there has been scientific fraud, mistakes made due to belief in authority or 'common sense'. Any theory is going to find itself dragged through the mud if scientists from different countries can't achieve the same experimental results.
"You bring up a single example of a hard to find particle that was eventually detected, and use that to support the existence of the Higgs boson?"
No, that's your assumption, and it's completely incorrect, not to mention a bit silly and unworthy of anyone out of kindergarten. Stop trolling.
"The existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson will be determined experimentally, not by theory."
But, mon frere, you appear to have ignored the point that experimentation is used to refine, refute, test or otherwise falsify theory, so how do you design an experiment without a bloody good idea of the parameters you want to test?
"We just never read about them in textbooks, because who wants to learn things that are wrong."
Now you're compounding the original daftness with more silly behaviour. It might work well in class, but here it's just annoying. If you've had any formal scientific education I'm hoping that they did lead you through the bad assumptions, the difference between science fiction and verifiable claims; if you don't learn from mistakes, you don't learn.
BTW, what you're describing is close to 'file drawer', a common occurence in pseudo-science that simply ignores results that don't match theory rather than using those unfavourable results to change theory.
"Physicists believed in the existence of Ether right up until the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment."
'Physicists' doesn't mean the whole field, old chap, there were people on the fringes that gave rise to Max Planck's admonishment that science advances by funerals. Even the great and the good have known to be wrong; Arthur Eddington refuted Chandarsekhar's original work on black holes and Lord Kelvin remarked that X-rays where pure chicanery. As I said, the ability to be wrong and recognise you're wrong is one of the defining points of science.
However, the Michealson-Morley experiment was a test of the existence of ether, which is where we're actually agreeing.
"I wanted to provide links to more examples than just Ether, but for the exact reasons I outlined above I had diffculty locating web pages on other failures."
I've given you some pointers above; there are others. Try a google search for 'N-rays' or the 'Fifth force'. The main upshot is that these failures are valid from the point of view that you need to learn from mistakes; nowhere have I refuted this, or claimed the existence of the Higg's boson in opposition to experimental proof...in fact, the Higg's boson is looking less and less likely as the theory of massive particles grows, but none of this really means a jot when the original poster thought that it would be possible to manufacture a theory without a new particle.
Lastly, religion is based on theories that are untestable; any theory that cannot be tested has to be taken on faith, any theory that you're discouraged from testing should be tested.
" Do we write off god because we don't have a detector for him?"
Yup. Also santa, the tooth fairy, baron samedi, satan, yaweh and Darth Vader.
Next metaphysical anthromorphism, please
"you want to get rid of Bush"
Actually I think that's up to the American public. So far he's avoided bombing England, but we suspect that it's only a matter of time.
"but your own Blair has his lips firmly glued to Bush's cock"
Speculation here has him embedded to the clavicles in a location almost 180 degrees from where you suggested, but luckily he's managed to annoy enough people that he might not be a problem for much longer. Bush did dump him right in the doo-doo by refusing to back up his claims that he was only listening to American intelligence, and the Hutton enquiry didn't produce the effect he wanted.
However, if you hear the words 'Micheal Howard' used in conjunction with 'Prime Minister' in the next couple of years, I'll be found living somewhere nice and quiet. Like Sudan.
"What's wrong with Oregon?"
A complete lack of policeman, and I could never spell it properly. I'm sure it's a lovely place, just like our very own Rugeley.