I'm replying to myself, because after posting the message above, I did a quick google search to find some references to support my case. Found a wikipedia article, that actually explains things in much the same way I tried explaining them to you, but much better worded (I'm horrible at explaining things to people, and much of the confusion you appeared to have after I posted something, I could see that it was clearly my fault for not going a bit further with it, or wording it in a strange way).
to mean that you believe a particle on a ship traveling at light speed has more energy so, if I look at it from Earth it will appear to have high velocity, but if I'm on the same ship and look at it it will appear to have more mass.
Yeah, that's correct. But knowing that doesn't tell you anything, because what are you going to compare it too? If you know the rest mass of a proton on earth, and then you measure the rest mass of a proton on the starship, you're going to see that it's a lot heavier. But you're still not going to be able to tell some sort of absolute speed like you implied in your response. You'll know your speed relative to the earth, because you already had the information of the rest mass of the proton in that frame.
Einstein himself proposed a famous thought experiment explaining relativity in which you were inside an elevator with no way of seeing out.
That experiment said nothing about mass. It said that you couldn't tell the difference between being in an elevator accelerating upwards, and being in an elevator not moving with some gravity, unless you could look outside. Plus, measuring rest mass doesn't tell you anything about what's happening outside, unless you already know. As I explained before, it can't tell you some absolute value of speed. But if you know what it's rest mass is supposed to be at some other reference, you can tell the speed you're at relative to that other reference.
Yes, you're correct, a photon will always look like it's going the speed of light, no matter what reference frame you look at it from.
Now apply that to other things moving at c. If the earth were moving at c, no matter what frame of reference you were at, it would look as if it were moving at c. The world would be very different for us if we had that much energy. In fact, you can't argue that the energy something possesses is relative. One of the most basic laws of physics is conservation of energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, there's a finite quantity of it in the universe. Your frame of reference isn't going to change that amount.
I agree with you that there's a perception that coding is different than designing websites, and I agree with you that in some ways it is different. The first important difference, is that the design "look" of the site is much more important than what your code looks like. And I don't support standards because I want to make it as difficult for the web designer to get his page up and running as it is for a programmer to create a complex program. I support standards exactly because the "look" of the website is more important...and I don't believe there's any way to guarantee what a page will look like on a visitor's browser without strict standards.
The doctype thing is slighy less reasoned than this...labellitlng my html as such (as 'html') should still be enough
The doctype thing isn't necessary, and if you simply label the html as html, it'll work dandy, and pass validation. It only complained because you tried to specify "type = 4.01." It doesn't know what "type" is. If you want to specifically say the doctype, you can specify it like I told you. Otherwise you can just have <html> and it'll be fine.
To start with, if the apparent rest mass changed then I could easily tell how fast I was going by measuring the rest mass of a particle at rest relative to me.
No, you can't. You can easily find out how much energy you have by knowing your "rest mass." But the very definition of "rest mass" implies that you're assuming some velocity to be 0. There's no "absolute" rest frame, just whatever you've determined to be 0.
A particle's mass is the same to any observer at rest relative to that particle. A particle's mass is the same to any observer at rest relative to that particle.
No, you won't, that much I'm sure of. All observers at rest relative to that particle will agree on it's mass. Observers at different speeds (vastly different) will not agree on that mass. I'll continue on this, later
if you're traveling at relativistic speed (relative to, say, Earth), everything inside your space ship will be exactly as it would be if you were not moving.
Actually, the universe will look very much different. For one, the galaxy would be much smaller. Everyone remembers time dilation, but they don't remember distance contraction. Take the numbers from the Oh-My-God Particle since I don't want to calculate numbers to an example myself:) In our time-frame, Alpha Centauri is 4.36 light-years away. So, it would take something traveling at the speed of light 4.36 years to get there. That particle is actually traveling slower than light, but if you were traveling at that speed, it would take you only 0.43 ms in your frame to get there. Why is that? The distance is much smaller. The universe would look very different.
I think the problem here is that you're seeing speed as the absolute. You say that my explanation would allow you to tell "how fast you were going" and I'm trying to say that, at relativistic speeds, that's not a useful measure. You talk about energy something has instead. What is speed? It's distance / time it takes to travel. But if you're on earth, you don't agree on the distance or the time with someone traveling at c.
Also, you know that bit about the speed of light being a constant? That means that it's a constant in all time frames. If you see a photon traveling at c, you're going to measure it's speed as c if you're traveling at 0.1c or if you're traveling at 0.999999999c. You can never "catch up" with it.
I don't see what point you're making by expanding the energy equation for a particle.I don't see what point you're making by expanding the energy equation for a particle.
Sorry, I suppose I didn't complete my point, and I didn't mean my comment to be an insult...just that you didn't look like you actually knew better than I did:)
The total energy the particle has isn't relative. Particle A has blah energy, partible B has blah2 energy. For the particle that has more energy, you can either see it as if it has some velocity, or be on the same frame of reference as it, and see it with v = 0. However, e is the same in both, so if you're in the same reference as it, m is greater. Which is why for anything with mass, it would have infinite mass if moving at c.
That's why things can't accelerate past c. E would be infinite. Mass and energy are equivalent, kinetic energy is really no different, it just depends on the frame of reference you're looking at.
e=mc^2, where m is its rest mass. It's rest mass depends on what you consider "rest" to be, ie, the rest mass in your frame of reference. The actual equation for a particle is e=mc^2/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2), which can be represented as a series, e=mc^2 + 1/2*mv^2 + 3/8*mv^4/c^2 +... . The mc^2 term you're familiar with, the rest depends on its velocity according to your frame. The first of those, 1/2mv^2 is the kinetic energy equation you're also familiar with, and the remaining terms isn't an issue unless you're going really fast.
I really d I really don't see how I can be considered part of the problem.
Well, it's great that you do all that work to consider your visitors. What I was referring to was your comment that following standards isn't really that important, it's just a guideline. That train of thought is part of the problem.
Think of a world where every browser renders everything in the standard correctly. Suddenly, your job is easier. In order to make sure that your web page renders correctly for the visitors using IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, whatever, you don't need to actually test it with each one of those browsers. You just need to make sure your site follows the standards, and the rest "just works". If you skip out on things because "they're dumb," well, you may think you're right, but why do you expect browser developers to share your opinion?
You'll see 12 ridiculous errors
Depends on your definition of ridiculous. You wouldn't expect c code that doesn't have syntax exactly right to compile, so why do you expect html syntax that isn't exactly right to render correctly?
from things like > characters whose position it disagrees with
I didn't find that. I found error #3. It's not complaining about the position of the character, it's complaining that you placed that tag inside your unordered list, but not within a list item tag. I checked the source code and you have:
<ul id="utabs">
<a href="?page1"><<</a>
If it's part of the unordered list, it should be inside a <li> tag. If you don't want for that to appear the same as the other list items, you should give it a class attribute and handle it in your css (there are other correct ways of handling it too, if you don't like that for some reason).
That and a childish remark about my html tag which was funny for the 1.3 seconds I spent writing the top line...
It wasn't your remark that it complained about. It complained about your type. That's not how you specify 4.01. From a W3C page, there's this example, using SGML to do what you want (for strict 4.01).:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
Heck...you should be fine just skipping that altogether. Close your html tag, and don't put the type thing.
errors that don't tell me anything useful or constructive at all
The validator doesn't tell you how to fix it, just that it found something wrong. However,
a wikipedia url I pasted, which the validator decided to parse and rate
For that error, the validator told you exactly what was wrong...in bold. "The most common cause of this error is unencoded ampersands in URLs". I've actually noticed that in other places in your html code for that page, stuff that I expected the validator to complain about, but it didn't.
In html, if you want to have a "<" or ">" that is not part of a tag, you use a code. you type in "<" for < and ">" for >. If you want to type "&", you type "&" Replace the & in that url, and it'll pass. You should replace the <'s I mentioned in error #3 with the correct codes too, even if the validator doesn't complain about it.
I'm not trying to be a bastard about it. I hope my comments help you understand the validator better, and see that it's not so useless as you've come to believe. It's great that you've been putting effort to make sure your visitors get the best experience they can on your site, and I hope you'll keep doing so.
Infact, there are objects in the universe that are moving away from us and we are moving away from them right now, with a speed near the speed of light. Do you feel anything?
I'm not a physics major, and really don't know that much about the subject, other than what I've read in my spare time. That said, from what I understand it's not that simple, and you're thinking of the whole thing in a very newtonian way.
The physics people don't really like to talk about relativistically moving objects in terms of speed exactly to avoid misconceptions like that. Basically, they talk about how much energy an object has. An object moving at relativistic speeds has a lot of kinetic energy, and that energy has to be in some form. If you're in that object, and you consider that speed to be 0, then the object looks like it has a pretty big rest mass. If you're at a much slower object, and you consider that speed to be 0, then the relativistic object looks like it has a much smaller rest mass, and it's moving real fast.
Relativism of speed themselves sort of fails when we're talking about things moving at the speed of the light. Consider objects A and B moving in the same direction. If object A is moving at 10 m/s, and object B is moving at 30 m/s, and you're on top of object A, then you see object B moving at 20 m/s relative to your velocity. However, the moment you see object C moving at, well, c, then object C is moving at c from the perspective of object A and the perspective of object B. From the perspective of object C, you don't just see A and B moving at c like you're expecting. You see an object that has a lot less energy, and it's shape and rest mass will look very much unlike what it looks like from the perpective of A or B.
As to your other comments about wormholes and whatnot, exotic stuff like that, if possible, is really the only way we'll get to explore the universe. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody has a blueprint for devices that will let us warp space ahead of our ships:)
Like I said before, I'm not a physics major. If someone who actually knows what they're talking about cares to correct me on any or all points I made that were wrong, I'd welcome the knowledge and appreciate the corrections.
I've barely been making websites a year, and even I've learned that on the web, markup standards are only a guideline.
Then maybe you should stop making websites, because people like you are the problem.
They're "only a guideline" in that the FBI won't knock on your door if you don't follow the standards. And oh yeah, a lot of browsers will accept your sloppy coding and "render it fine." However, if you want a world where all browsers render all content in the same way, that can't be accomplished by the developing team of any browser. That can only be accomplished by developing and following standards. So, you blame the browser when they don't follow them, and you blame the web developer when he doesn't follow them.
I'm fine with browsers who want to go the extra mile and have non-standard code render correctly, as long as they don't sacrifice proper rendering of the standard code to do it. That doesn't excuse you coding incorrectly, though.
If you can verify the accuracy of a statement yourself, there's no need for source criticism and guessing.
Well, a lot of the time you could verify the accurate of a statement yourself, but you're not going to because that would cost time and/or money. Therefore, you look for somebody else's opinion who has reportedly done the verification for you. Whether you trust the opinion of this somebody else depends on many factors. One of them is, does he or his employer have a vested interest in what his opinion is?
Now, you wanted an illustration, so let me try one. Let's say I want to watch the new "Pink Panther" movie. Now, I suspect that it might be utter crap, but I'm a fan of the old ones, so I'm undecided. I search for people's opinions who have seen it:
Person A tells me it's crap, but I know he dislikes the original Pink Panther movies too
Person B tells me it's crap, and we often agree in our opinion of previous movies
Steve Martin says it's good in an interview. He's in the damn movie
Every one of the people above have their own biases for their opinion. For Person A and Person B, their biases are just the types of movies they like. For Steve Martin, it's because he's getting paid. The only way I can find out for sure if I'll like it or not is by paying for the ticket and spending the time to watch (let the bittorrent jokes commence). However, if I'm not willing to do that, Person B's opinion is obviously the less risky way for me to base my decision on.
Always consider the source. We're not saying dismiss the opinion based on source, but consider it among all the other biases you're considering. Yeah, Steve Martin could be right, and I could like the movie, but if I'm going to verify it myself, why am I listening to other people's opinions?
Imagine what the world would be like if everyone on this planet could not watch TV/movies/internet for a year.
People would be bored? They'd get their deck of cards and play solitaire? They'd become asses who go around criticizing other people's entertainment choices?
Everytime there's a TV related story, people like you feel the need to say how much better off we would all be if we didn't watch TV. People who watch TV almost exclusively as their entertainment wouldn't suddenly want to become productive if they didn't have TV. They'd find something else equally unproductive.
There may be other options out there for entertainment, but we're not talking about them, are we? We're talking about TiVO dropping their lifetime subscription.
You know, they still run the aim servers... for free.
Yeah. Because they wouldn't lose 100% of their non-aol users the day they started charging for aim. Plenty of instant messaging protocols out there that people can switch too. Right now, no one bothers to look for anything else, but the moment they're told to get their credit card, you can bet they're going to hit google to search for something else. And tell their friends.
They're not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Most of us who use third party clients don't even realize this, but the official clients has ads. Annoying ads. I'd guess from my failed attempt to convince people to use gaim that most of their users don't care, and use the official client anyway, so they're getting money for it. I'm not implying this is a bad thing, mind you. Good for them. Just saying they're not doing you any favors.
And they stopped deliberately breaking other clients for the most part.
Yeah, surprisingly good business decision there. First, it was futile. They would pay their developers to keep breaking the clients, and it'd last the better part of a day before all the other clients were fixed. Big deal, a lot of money wasted. Also, before other clients worked reliably, there was a big deal about cracks to the aim client to remove all ads. Now the people who care about this things, unlike the people I mentioned above, go to the superior third-party clients. Which means they're reasonably sure that everyone using their official client is seeing the ads.
Again, they're not doing you a favor. If they could get rid of all third party clients for good, they would.
Dude. Thank you for that reminder. I actually now remember having read that at the time, and it all sounded reasonable, including posts like this one. Notice that even the dude replying to defend Apple doesn't disagree that it won't get a huge market share.
Time gives a whole new perspective to things, doesn't it?
It turns out that it's not a memory leak, it's caching of the web pages which can be a lot of memory if you keep a lot of tabs open. You can turn the feature off, or limit how much ram it uses with this setting.
That's right; one deprives the victim of money or goods, the other deprives the victim of income.
That's just it, that's not necessarily the case. Regardless of the MPAA "estimates" of how much income piracy is depriving them, it really is a non-trivial task to figure out how much money the victim is losing, if any. Not every pirate would have bought the work if he couldn't pirate it, nor does the act of pirating preclude the buying.
Do you ever wonder why most indie artists are happy to have their work downloaded, while it is the rich artists who have a problem with it? Since I'm sure we'll agree the rich artists are having more of their stuff downloaded than the indie artist, do you ever wonder why they're not getting poorer? The answer is that piracy serves as great advertising. It spreads the word about the value of the work, and causes more people to actually buy them. Those who understand that they're getting their name out there are happy, those that already have their name out there are afraid that *maybe* they could have bought that third yacht if their stuff wasn't being pirated, but don't understand that maybe they didn't lose a single sale to piracy that they didn't gain as a result of it.
This train of thought doesn't apply only to artistic works. Would Microsoft have gotten to their level of dominance today without all the pirating that was going on in its early days? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, whether you believe copyright infringement is wrong or not, it's very different from stealing, where you *know* the victim is being denied something.
The key difference is that, unlike Jack Thompson, Dave Grossman isn't a rabid lawyer on an anti-video-game crusade. He has actual credentials, his arguments are rational and backed up by evidence, and he mostly makes observations, not judgments.
I first became aware of him during his plethora of interviews a few months after Columbine, where he was blaming all violence in kids on violent media. Calling violent video games "murder simulators" goes a little beyond making an observation. It's more like a media attention getter designed to get him publicity so he can sell his books and make appearances. Like "killology" or whatever he calls his studies.
He does have evidence to back up his arguments, and, like I mentioned in my original post, I don't dismiss the evidence, nor do I even outright dismiss his conclusions. I do think that the arguments are weak though. For example, he takes the argument that video games will teach how to shoot a gun (which I will take to be true) to the conclusion that kids with this knowledge will go out and kill people. He mentions how a kid who had never fired a gun before stole a gun from his neighbor's house, went to his school, and killed his classmates with very good shooting accuracy. He goes on to claim video games gave him this ability. Well, I know people who actually have experience with firearms, and I know that they could shoot and kill me easily. I'm not afraid that they will, though. We need to pay attention to what made that kid want to kill his classmates, not whether or not he was good at it. If he had missed everyone of those shots, it would still be highly disturbing that he tried to kill them. Basically, I don't think the skill to kill someone has anything to do with the willingness to do so, and he hasn't provided evidence to back that up, unless it's in a battlefield situation where mortal danger is involved.
He also neglects to talk about the evidence that goes against his arguments. TV, Movies, and Video Games have been getting more violent, but youth violence itself has decreased. You don't see me claiming that the increase in media violence is the reason for this decrease, but you'd expect that if it were responsible for making children more violent, these crimes would have skyrocketed in the past two decades.
I didn't mean to attack your views personally. I don't claim to know whether or not violence in the media and video games are detrimental or not to children. They could very well be. Dave Grossman, however, doesn't get credibility from me because he's a bit too sure, he doesn't give himself or his studies the healthy scientific doubt. He's a professor of psychology, and those are good credentials, but he's not acting like a research professional. He's acting like someone who wants to sell books to the masses.
Bringing Dave Grossman out is like bringing out Jack Thompson. A lot of their arguments are the same, trying to call video games "murder simulators," and blaming them for tragedies like Columbine.
There are two things wrong with the argument they use. First, there aren't many situations where you are forced to react without thinking in the real world. Oh, sure...something may fall out of desk, and you'll quickly move to grab it. You might trip, and you'll quickly react to protect yourself from a nasty fall. But a situation where you'll react without thinking that will cause someone to die? Columbine was a planned event on the part of those students, they definitely had time to think.
The other is their argument that "video games are so effective to teach someone to kill that the military uses them to teach their soldiers." It's undeniable that this type of training has increased the responsiveness of soldiers on the field. However, the military doesn't train them by giving them a mouse and keyboard. They give them a gun. The reason is that what you're learning to do without thinking is the motor reflex to point the gun and shoot the trigger. You're not becoming more violent, you just have a much more useful reflex for that situation where you don't have time to think. Put a gamer who has no gun experience in that situation, and his reflex to right click won't help him much.
Video games will definitely improve your reflexes in certain areas. I don't know if I call that "learning," though. I'm not dismissing any claims that we learn things from video games, but Dave Grossman and similar people of the anti-video games crowd aren't the ones to help that argument.
Renewable resources aren't infinite, they're *renewable*. If you're in a college dorm and a lot of people are using the network, your bandwidth is diminished, but when you use it in non-peak hours, it's fast again.
Fossil fuels are finite because when it's gone, you can't just go make more petroleum. Wood is a renewable resoure because you can plant more trees. That doesn't mean that everyone has in infinite amount of trees to cut down.
Actually, the real question there is what *does* the Bible suggest God is like?
Ignoring the fact that the Bible contradicts itself on different occasions, there are many points where God does not appear to be omnipotent. He is truly, and very often, surprised at things humans do, so he can't tell the future. He is sometimes surprised by things he laters finds out humans did, thus he doesn't know everything that's going on *now*, (the example that comes to mind is that he didn't know that Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge until later when he noticed Adam was aware that he was naked). He also gets angry at things that happen, but never, EVER considers turning back time to fix it. There are plenty of things that God appear to not be able to do in the Bible.
I also wonder what happened with the ridiculous shift between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The God in the Old Testament wasn't very nice. What is up with the whole Tower of Babel incident? "These people are working well together, we can't have that!"
Even if I were to buy into the argument that anything funded by the government automatically becomes worse just because it's now funded by the government, which I don't, I still don't understand how you can make the argument that grants and loans are lowering the quality of education. With public education, I suppose you believe that a lot of money is wasted, there's no competition to encourage increase in quality, etc. However, how does a student getting money, which he can spend in whatever university he chooses to go to, including private ones, going to make that student a worse student than the one paying his way through?
To be fair, the science and math fields aren't the right fields for everyone, in the same way that I'm not cut out to be an actor (believe me, I tried the drama class thing once). That sort of survey ends up with results that on the surface look bad but in reality should be expected. A few issues I have:
Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people."
Well, was that an option in the multiple choice questionnaire? I find it somewhat difficult to believe that 3/4 of all respondents would choose that particular term. If I'm right, you can fault the people who made the survey for not making the option less ridiculous, like "highly intelligent."
"because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female."
That sounds like someone having fun with the survey. Anonymous surveys are great because they can actually get people to answer truthfully when they otherwise wouldn't, but it also causes some to lie. I remember when they gave us all drug use surveys in high school. There was this guy in our group who, after answering 'yes' to "have you used drugs within the past 6 months" or something like that (even though he had never taken drugs in his life), made it his quest to try to come up with as many different examples of drugs as possible to explain the details of his use. If I remember correctly, he ended up naming some drugs multiple times because he didn't know they were the same thing.
Well, it's not really that simple. The press release is useful to announce the type of stuff they're working on to the world at large. Companies interested in the subject will then look for the related papers, and if it shows promise, could be interested in funding future research on the subject, which is what the university is after. Once the research reaches a point where it's commercially viable, different companies will take over, and the students that participated in this research will suddenly have prime job opportunities. It's a good system for all involved.
It's really only a stunt if they're announcing something they don't really have. If they're actually doing the research and getting results, it's just a way to attract funding, and you can't think that's a bad thing.
Of course, my sig might be particularly relevant to this post...IAGS (I Am a Grad Student), though not at the university of michigan, nor in a related field.
Well, ok. I don't believe in intrinsic rights in the sense that I should have these rights just because of my existence either. However, the complete natural state is really bad for most of us to be in, so when we enter society, we give up some freedoms in order to gain some rights. I think the society I'm in grants me the right not to be harassed, and I suppose that's up for interpretation, if you're willing to re-examine a whole lot of other laws we have designed to protect me from harassment (and that's not necessarily a bad thing).
Every right the government protects, by definition will remove some freedoms. So, what you need to decide for every individual case is whether or not the freedoms you lose are worth the benefit of that right. Right to property means you lose the freedom to accumulate wealth by stealing...but hey...that means no one can steal the wealth you accumulate. Sounds like a good deal to me.
It seems to me that it's a really good idea to protect my right not be harassed, as long as you're sensible about what you qualify harassment. In the case of postings on a web page, I don't see how it could ever be qualified as such, because it's not intrusive. In the case of prank calls, there's really no way for me to defend myself and "stop" harassment. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not what they say when I answer the phone that I object to. Free speech is good, and you can tell me anything you want to. The harassment is that the phone rings and stops me from doing whatever it is that I was doing before. If it becomes a habit, I can always change my phone line, and keep an unlisted number, but what if I'm running a business? If there's no law against harassment, how do you propose I make it stop? Find the guy and give him a beating he won't soon forget? I'm not willing to give up my right to be protected from physical attacks, so I definitely don't think *that* should be legal.
Really, you're right. I think we should keep the number of laws to a minimum necessary. I just think that should be part of the necessary few. I don't think my freedom to go around harassing people is really that important and I'm willing to lose it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think you're right. Seems like I had a misconception on the differences between rest mass and relativistic mass.
Hope this helps.
Yeah, that's correct. But knowing that doesn't tell you anything, because what are you going to compare it too? If you know the rest mass of a proton on earth, and then you measure the rest mass of a proton on the starship, you're going to see that it's a lot heavier. But you're still not going to be able to tell some sort of absolute speed like you implied in your response. You'll know your speed relative to the earth, because you already had the information of the rest mass of the proton in that frame.
Einstein himself proposed a famous thought experiment explaining relativity in which you were inside an elevator with no way of seeing out.
That experiment said nothing about mass. It said that you couldn't tell the difference between being in an elevator accelerating upwards, and being in an elevator not moving with some gravity, unless you could look outside. Plus, measuring rest mass doesn't tell you anything about what's happening outside, unless you already know. As I explained before, it can't tell you some absolute value of speed. But if you know what it's rest mass is supposed to be at some other reference, you can tell the speed you're at relative to that other reference.
Yes, you're correct, a photon will always look like it's going the speed of light, no matter what reference frame you look at it from.
Now apply that to other things moving at c. If the earth were moving at c, no matter what frame of reference you were at, it would look as if it were moving at c. The world would be very different for us if we had that much energy. In fact, you can't argue that the energy something possesses is relative. One of the most basic laws of physics is conservation of energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, there's a finite quantity of it in the universe. Your frame of reference isn't going to change that amount.
No problem. Glad to be of help.
I agree with you that there's a perception that coding is different than designing websites, and I agree with you that in some ways it is different. The first important difference, is that the design "look" of the site is much more important than what your code looks like. And I don't support standards because I want to make it as difficult for the web designer to get his page up and running as it is for a programmer to create a complex program. I support standards exactly because the "look" of the website is more important...and I don't believe there's any way to guarantee what a page will look like on a visitor's browser without strict standards.
The doctype thing is slighy less reasoned than this...labellitlng my html as such (as 'html') should still be enough
The doctype thing isn't necessary, and if you simply label the html as html, it'll work dandy, and pass validation. It only complained because you tried to specify "type = 4.01." It doesn't know what "type" is. If you want to specifically say the doctype, you can specify it like I told you. Otherwise you can just have <html> and it'll be fine.
To start with, if the apparent rest mass changed then I could easily tell how fast I was going by measuring the rest mass of a particle at rest relative to me.
No, you can't. You can easily find out how much energy you have by knowing your "rest mass." But the very definition of "rest mass" implies that you're assuming some velocity to be 0. There's no "absolute" rest frame, just whatever you've determined to be 0.
A particle's mass is the same to any observer at rest relative to that particle. A particle's mass is the same to any observer at rest relative to that particle.
No, you won't, that much I'm sure of. All observers at rest relative to that particle will agree on it's mass. Observers at different speeds (vastly different) will not agree on that mass. I'll continue on this, later
if you're traveling at relativistic speed (relative to, say, Earth), everything inside your space ship will be exactly as it would be if you were not moving.
Actually, the universe will look very much different. For one, the galaxy would be much smaller. Everyone remembers time dilation, but they don't remember distance contraction. Take the numbers from the Oh-My-God Particle since I don't want to calculate numbers to an example myself :) In our time-frame, Alpha Centauri is 4.36 light-years away. So, it would take something traveling at the speed of light 4.36 years to get there. That particle is actually traveling slower than light, but if you were traveling at that speed, it would take you only 0.43 ms in your frame to get there. Why is that? The distance is much smaller. The universe would look very different.
I think the problem here is that you're seeing speed as the absolute. You say that my explanation would allow you to tell "how fast you were going" and I'm trying to say that, at relativistic speeds, that's not a useful measure. You talk about energy something has instead. What is speed? It's distance / time it takes to travel. But if you're on earth, you don't agree on the distance or the time with someone traveling at c.
Also, you know that bit about the speed of light being a constant? That means that it's a constant in all time frames. If you see a photon traveling at c, you're going to measure it's speed as c if you're traveling at 0.1c or if you're traveling at 0.999999999c. You can never "catch up" with it.
I don't see what point you're making by expanding the energy equation for a particle.I don't see what point you're making by expanding the energy equation for a particle.
Sorry, I suppose I didn't complete my point, and I didn't mean my comment to be an insult...just that you didn't look like you actually knew better than I did :)
The total energy the particle has isn't relative. Particle A has blah energy, partible B has blah2 energy. For the particle that has more energy, you can either see it as if it has some velocity, or be on the same frame of reference as it, and see it with v = 0. However, e is the same in both, so if you're in the same reference as it, m is greater. Which is why for anything with mass, it would have infinite mass if moving at c.
That's why things can't accelerate past c. E would be infinite. Mass and energy are equivalent, kinetic energy is really no different, it just depends on the frame of reference you're looking at.
You're not a physics major either.
e=mc^2, where m is its rest mass. It's rest mass depends on what you consider "rest" to be, ie, the rest mass in your frame of reference. The actual equation for a particle is e=mc^2/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2), which can be represented as a series, e=mc^2 + 1/2*mv^2 + 3/8*mv^4/c^2 + ... . The mc^2 term you're familiar with, the rest depends on its velocity according to your frame. The first of those, 1/2mv^2 is the kinetic energy equation you're also familiar with, and the remaining terms isn't an issue unless you're going really fast.
Well, it's great that you do all that work to consider your visitors. What I was referring to was your comment that following standards isn't really that important, it's just a guideline. That train of thought is part of the problem.
Think of a world where every browser renders everything in the standard correctly. Suddenly, your job is easier. In order to make sure that your web page renders correctly for the visitors using IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, whatever, you don't need to actually test it with each one of those browsers. You just need to make sure your site follows the standards, and the rest "just works". If you skip out on things because "they're dumb," well, you may think you're right, but why do you expect browser developers to share your opinion?
You'll see 12 ridiculous errorsDepends on your definition of ridiculous. You wouldn't expect c code that doesn't have syntax exactly right to compile, so why do you expect html syntax that isn't exactly right to render correctly?
from things like > characters whose position it disagrees with
I didn't find that. I found error #3. It's not complaining about the position of the character, it's complaining that you placed that tag inside your unordered list, but not within a list item tag. I checked the source code and you have:
<ul id="utabs">
<a href="?page1"><<</a>
If it's part of the unordered list, it should be inside a <li> tag. If you don't want for that to appear the same as the other list items, you should give it a class attribute and handle it in your css (there are other correct ways of handling it too, if you don't like that for some reason).
That and a childish remark about my html tag which was funny for the 1.3 seconds I spent writing the top line...
It wasn't your remark that it complained about. It complained about your type. That's not how you specify 4.01. From a W3C page, there's this example, using SGML to do what you want (for strict 4.01).:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
Heck...you should be fine just skipping that altogether. Close your html tag, and don't put the type thing.
errors that don't tell me anything useful or constructive at all
The validator doesn't tell you how to fix it, just that it found something wrong. However,
a wikipedia url I pasted, which the validator decided to parse and rate
For that error, the validator told you exactly what was wrong...in bold. "The most common cause of this error is unencoded ampersands in URLs". I've actually noticed that in other places in your html code for that page, stuff that I expected the validator to complain about, but it didn't.
In html, if you want to have a "<" or ">" that is not part of a tag, you use a code. you type in "<" for < and ">" for >. If you want to type "&", you type "&" Replace the & in that url, and it'll pass. You should replace the <'s I mentioned in error #3 with the correct codes too, even if the validator doesn't complain about it.
I'm not trying to be a bastard about it. I hope my comments help you understand the validator better, and see that it's not so useless as you've come to believe. It's great that you've been putting effort to make sure your visitors get the best experience they can on your site, and I hope you'll keep doing so.
I'm not a physics major, and really don't know that much about the subject, other than what I've read in my spare time. That said, from what I understand it's not that simple, and you're thinking of the whole thing in a very newtonian way.
The physics people don't really like to talk about relativistically moving objects in terms of speed exactly to avoid misconceptions like that. Basically, they talk about how much energy an object has. An object moving at relativistic speeds has a lot of kinetic energy, and that energy has to be in some form. If you're in that object, and you consider that speed to be 0, then the object looks like it has a pretty big rest mass. If you're at a much slower object, and you consider that speed to be 0, then the relativistic object looks like it has a much smaller rest mass, and it's moving real fast.
Relativism of speed themselves sort of fails when we're talking about things moving at the speed of the light. Consider objects A and B moving in the same direction. If object A is moving at 10 m/s, and object B is moving at 30 m/s, and you're on top of object A, then you see object B moving at 20 m/s relative to your velocity. However, the moment you see object C moving at, well, c, then object C is moving at c from the perspective of object A and the perspective of object B. From the perspective of object C, you don't just see A and B moving at c like you're expecting. You see an object that has a lot less energy, and it's shape and rest mass will look very much unlike what it looks like from the perpective of A or B.
As to your other comments about wormholes and whatnot, exotic stuff like that, if possible, is really the only way we'll get to explore the universe. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody has a blueprint for devices that will let us warp space ahead of our ships :)
Like I said before, I'm not a physics major. If someone who actually knows what they're talking about cares to correct me on any or all points I made that were wrong, I'd welcome the knowledge and appreciate the corrections.
Then maybe you should stop making websites, because people like you are the problem.
They're "only a guideline" in that the FBI won't knock on your door if you don't follow the standards. And oh yeah, a lot of browsers will accept your sloppy coding and "render it fine." However, if you want a world where all browsers render all content in the same way, that can't be accomplished by the developing team of any browser. That can only be accomplished by developing and following standards. So, you blame the browser when they don't follow them, and you blame the web developer when he doesn't follow them.
I'm fine with browsers who want to go the extra mile and have non-standard code render correctly, as long as they don't sacrifice proper rendering of the standard code to do it. That doesn't excuse you coding incorrectly, though.
Well, a lot of the time you could verify the accurate of a statement yourself, but you're not going to because that would cost time and/or money. Therefore, you look for somebody else's opinion who has reportedly done the verification for you. Whether you trust the opinion of this somebody else depends on many factors. One of them is, does he or his employer have a vested interest in what his opinion is?
Now, you wanted an illustration, so let me try one. Let's say I want to watch the new "Pink Panther" movie. Now, I suspect that it might be utter crap, but I'm a fan of the old ones, so I'm undecided. I search for people's opinions who have seen it:
Every one of the people above have their own biases for their opinion. For Person A and Person B, their biases are just the types of movies they like. For Steve Martin, it's because he's getting paid. The only way I can find out for sure if I'll like it or not is by paying for the ticket and spending the time to watch (let the bittorrent jokes commence). However, if I'm not willing to do that, Person B's opinion is obviously the less risky way for me to base my decision on.
Always consider the source. We're not saying dismiss the opinion based on source, but consider it among all the other biases you're considering. Yeah, Steve Martin could be right, and I could like the movie, but if I'm going to verify it myself, why am I listening to other people's opinions?
People would be bored? They'd get their deck of cards and play solitaire? They'd become asses who go around criticizing other people's entertainment choices?
Everytime there's a TV related story, people like you feel the need to say how much better off we would all be if we didn't watch TV. People who watch TV almost exclusively as their entertainment wouldn't suddenly want to become productive if they didn't have TV. They'd find something else equally unproductive.
There may be other options out there for entertainment, but we're not talking about them, are we? We're talking about TiVO dropping their lifetime subscription.
Yeah. Because they wouldn't lose 100% of their non-aol users the day they started charging for aim. Plenty of instant messaging protocols out there that people can switch too. Right now, no one bothers to look for anything else, but the moment they're told to get their credit card, you can bet they're going to hit google to search for something else. And tell their friends.
They're not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Most of us who use third party clients don't even realize this, but the official clients has ads. Annoying ads. I'd guess from my failed attempt to convince people to use gaim that most of their users don't care, and use the official client anyway, so they're getting money for it. I'm not implying this is a bad thing, mind you. Good for them. Just saying they're not doing you any favors.
And they stopped deliberately breaking other clients for the most part.
Yeah, surprisingly good business decision there. First, it was futile. They would pay their developers to keep breaking the clients, and it'd last the better part of a day before all the other clients were fixed. Big deal, a lot of money wasted. Also, before other clients worked reliably, there was a big deal about cracks to the aim client to remove all ads. Now the people who care about this things, unlike the people I mentioned above, go to the superior third-party clients. Which means they're reasonably sure that everyone using their official client is seeing the ads.
Again, they're not doing you a favor. If they could get rid of all third party clients for good, they would.
Time gives a whole new perspective to things, doesn't it?
It turns out that it's not a memory leak, it's caching of the web pages which can be a lot of memory if you keep a lot of tabs open. You can turn the feature off, or limit how much ram it uses with this setting.
People who want the money to go to their families?
That's just it, that's not necessarily the case. Regardless of the MPAA "estimates" of how much income piracy is depriving them, it really is a non-trivial task to figure out how much money the victim is losing, if any. Not every pirate would have bought the work if he couldn't pirate it, nor does the act of pirating preclude the buying.
Do you ever wonder why most indie artists are happy to have their work downloaded, while it is the rich artists who have a problem with it? Since I'm sure we'll agree the rich artists are having more of their stuff downloaded than the indie artist, do you ever wonder why they're not getting poorer? The answer is that piracy serves as great advertising. It spreads the word about the value of the work, and causes more people to actually buy them. Those who understand that they're getting their name out there are happy, those that already have their name out there are afraid that *maybe* they could have bought that third yacht if their stuff wasn't being pirated, but don't understand that maybe they didn't lose a single sale to piracy that they didn't gain as a result of it.
This train of thought doesn't apply only to artistic works. Would Microsoft have gotten to their level of dominance today without all the pirating that was going on in its early days? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, whether you believe copyright infringement is wrong or not, it's very different from stealing, where you *know* the victim is being denied something.
He does have credentials, I'll give you that. However, even though he's not a lawyer, he most definitely is out on an anti-video-game crusade. And on mostly making observations, and not judgements, how about referencing one of his other books, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie, and Video Game Violence ?
I first became aware of him during his plethora of interviews a few months after Columbine, where he was blaming all violence in kids on violent media. Calling violent video games "murder simulators" goes a little beyond making an observation. It's more like a media attention getter designed to get him publicity so he can sell his books and make appearances. Like "killology" or whatever he calls his studies.He does have evidence to back up his arguments, and, like I mentioned in my original post, I don't dismiss the evidence, nor do I even outright dismiss his conclusions. I do think that the arguments are weak though. For example, he takes the argument that video games will teach how to shoot a gun (which I will take to be true) to the conclusion that kids with this knowledge will go out and kill people. He mentions how a kid who had never fired a gun before stole a gun from his neighbor's house, went to his school, and killed his classmates with very good shooting accuracy. He goes on to claim video games gave him this ability. Well, I know people who actually have experience with firearms, and I know that they could shoot and kill me easily. I'm not afraid that they will, though. We need to pay attention to what made that kid want to kill his classmates, not whether or not he was good at it. If he had missed everyone of those shots, it would still be highly disturbing that he tried to kill them. Basically, I don't think the skill to kill someone has anything to do with the willingness to do so, and he hasn't provided evidence to back that up, unless it's in a battlefield situation where mortal danger is involved.
He also neglects to talk about the evidence that goes against his arguments. TV, Movies, and Video Games have been getting more violent, but youth violence itself has decreased. You don't see me claiming that the increase in media violence is the reason for this decrease, but you'd expect that if it were responsible for making children more violent, these crimes would have skyrocketed in the past two decades.
I didn't mean to attack your views personally. I don't claim to know whether or not violence in the media and video games are detrimental or not to children. They could very well be. Dave Grossman, however, doesn't get credibility from me because he's a bit too sure, he doesn't give himself or his studies the healthy scientific doubt. He's a professor of psychology, and those are good credentials, but he's not acting like a research professional. He's acting like someone who wants to sell books to the masses.
There are two things wrong with the argument they use. First, there aren't many situations where you are forced to react without thinking in the real world. Oh, sure...something may fall out of desk, and you'll quickly move to grab it. You might trip, and you'll quickly react to protect yourself from a nasty fall. But a situation where you'll react without thinking that will cause someone to die? Columbine was a planned event on the part of those students, they definitely had time to think.
The other is their argument that "video games are so effective to teach someone to kill that the military uses them to teach their soldiers." It's undeniable that this type of training has increased the responsiveness of soldiers on the field. However, the military doesn't train them by giving them a mouse and keyboard. They give them a gun. The reason is that what you're learning to do without thinking is the motor reflex to point the gun and shoot the trigger. You're not becoming more violent, you just have a much more useful reflex for that situation where you don't have time to think. Put a gamer who has no gun experience in that situation, and his reflex to right click won't help him much.
Video games will definitely improve your reflexes in certain areas. I don't know if I call that "learning," though. I'm not dismissing any claims that we learn things from video games, but Dave Grossman and similar people of the anti-video games crowd aren't the ones to help that argument.
Fossil fuels are finite because when it's gone, you can't just go make more petroleum. Wood is a renewable resoure because you can plant more trees. That doesn't mean that everyone has in infinite amount of trees to cut down.
Ignoring the fact that the Bible contradicts itself on different occasions, there are many points where God does not appear to be omnipotent. He is truly, and very often, surprised at things humans do, so he can't tell the future. He is sometimes surprised by things he laters finds out humans did, thus he doesn't know everything that's going on *now*, (the example that comes to mind is that he didn't know that Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge until later when he noticed Adam was aware that he was naked). He also gets angry at things that happen, but never, EVER considers turning back time to fix it. There are plenty of things that God appear to not be able to do in the Bible.
I also wonder what happened with the ridiculous shift between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The God in the Old Testament wasn't very nice. What is up with the whole Tower of Babel incident? "These people are working well together, we can't have that!"
Even if I were to buy into the argument that anything funded by the government automatically becomes worse just because it's now funded by the government, which I don't, I still don't understand how you can make the argument that grants and loans are lowering the quality of education. With public education, I suppose you believe that a lot of money is wasted, there's no competition to encourage increase in quality, etc. However, how does a student getting money, which he can spend in whatever university he chooses to go to, including private ones, going to make that student a worse student than the one paying his way through?
Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people."
Well, was that an option in the multiple choice questionnaire? I find it somewhat difficult to believe that 3/4 of all respondents would choose that particular term. If I'm right, you can fault the people who made the survey for not making the option less ridiculous, like "highly intelligent."
"because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female."
That sounds like someone having fun with the survey. Anonymous surveys are great because they can actually get people to answer truthfully when they otherwise wouldn't, but it also causes some to lie. I remember when they gave us all drug use surveys in high school. There was this guy in our group who, after answering 'yes' to "have you used drugs within the past 6 months" or something like that (even though he had never taken drugs in his life), made it his quest to try to come up with as many different examples of drugs as possible to explain the details of his use. If I remember correctly, he ended up naming some drugs multiple times because he didn't know they were the same thing.
It's really only a stunt if they're announcing something they don't really have. If they're actually doing the research and getting results, it's just a way to attract funding, and you can't think that's a bad thing.
Of course, my sig might be particularly relevant to this post...IAGS (I Am a Grad Student), though not at the university of michigan, nor in a related field.
Every right the government protects, by definition will remove some freedoms. So, what you need to decide for every individual case is whether or not the freedoms you lose are worth the benefit of that right. Right to property means you lose the freedom to accumulate wealth by stealing...but hey...that means no one can steal the wealth you accumulate. Sounds like a good deal to me.
It seems to me that it's a really good idea to protect my right not be harassed, as long as you're sensible about what you qualify harassment. In the case of postings on a web page, I don't see how it could ever be qualified as such, because it's not intrusive. In the case of prank calls, there's really no way for me to defend myself and "stop" harassment. Now, don't get me wrong. It's not what they say when I answer the phone that I object to. Free speech is good, and you can tell me anything you want to. The harassment is that the phone rings and stops me from doing whatever it is that I was doing before. If it becomes a habit, I can always change my phone line, and keep an unlisted number, but what if I'm running a business? If there's no law against harassment, how do you propose I make it stop? Find the guy and give him a beating he won't soon forget? I'm not willing to give up my right to be protected from physical attacks, so I definitely don't think *that* should be legal.
Really, you're right. I think we should keep the number of laws to a minimum necessary. I just think that should be part of the necessary few. I don't think my freedom to go around harassing people is really that important and I'm willing to lose it.