If you can't put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Books, music, poetry, code, you name it. Makes no difference. Like the air that we breathe, once you've released it, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!
Amen Brother! It's all a con game. Hawking and the rest of his Star Strek and time travel fanatics have been bulshitting the world with their time warps and wormholes for a long time. I wonder when someone is going to expose those con artists for good.
Physics is a wonderful place, where not even the physicists know what the hell is going on!
This way they con the rest of the world and make lots of money doing it. Is not Hawking a believer in time travel and is not time travel crackpot stuff?
Hawking is a con artist who believes in time travel. There are neither black holes not wormholes. It's all a con game. None of the voodoo physics stuff that Hawking has been working on is of any consequence or value.
Other people won't drop that much cash on what is for them a toy.
True. In my opinion, Kamen has but one option left. He should turn his invention from the toy scooter that it is into a real road vehicle. All he has to do is make the wheels bigger, put an elevated passenger seat or two in the middle, add stick contol, lean-on-turns capability, collision bumpers and a gas powered engine and voila! The only problem is that I can't imagine this thing doing seventy on the freeway. But one never knows.
I don't want to discuss this anymore because you sound like a Jehovah's witness preaching gospel. IMO, everything you say about velocity and position is crap. You do your best to hide your dependence on absolute position/velocity but it is implied in all your arguments, whether you see it or not. I don't need people like you to do my thinking for me, thank you very much. I have been brainwashed by your kind enough as it is. Cults are fun especially if you are the preacher. So goodbye, Mr. Anonymous Coward and do keep preaching your cult religion to the faithful.
what the grandparent said about general rel and E/M agrees with my understanding.
It agrees with general relativity doctrine. It does not agree with logic. Somewhere in there they are assuming absolute velocity but they go through loops to deny it.
So you're arguing that electromagnetism is nonlocal in exactly the same way that you claim GR is nonlocal?
No. I believe the electric field and gravity are both non-local and related. I believe that a pure magnetic field involves pure local interactions with no non-local influences. I have reasons for this that I don't care to go into, here.
As I said, the case analogous to the gravitational case being considered is the one in which a charged particle orbits within the electromagnetic field of another charged particle. This is not a "pure magnetic environment", so whatever argument you're trying to make here is not relevant.
All I am saying is that electrostatic interactions are analogous to gravity in that both involve and depend on the same nonlocal influences.
The 4-velocity is not something that depends on a FOR.
Huh!?? ALL velocities in relativity depend on an FOR. That is the essence of relativistic doctrine. Are we talking about the same relativity here?
In order for B to know anything about the velocity of A relative to itself so as to extrapolate the likely position of A (again, relative to itself), some information about A's retarded velocity and position relative to B must have been imparted to A's field, period. Otherwise, B cannot extract this information from A's field.
If 4-velocities in relativity are not relative, you are in essence saying that 4-velocity is absolute, since you are claiming that it does not depend on any specific FOR.
No, the correct analogy would be to consider the case of a charged particle orbiting another charged particle due to the electromagnetic interaction. You get analogous effects to the ones you are rejecting in linearized gravity. You did read the treatment of the electromagnetic case in Carlip's paper, didn't you?
I simply ascribe both effects to non-locality whereas you GR experts do a super-complex neutron dance to get things to fit your theory. The effect does not apply to a pure magnetic environment AFAIK. My point was that pure magnetic reactions always reflect the retarded positions of the magnetic objects. EM phenomena have both an electric and a magnetic component that can complicate things, IMO.
This is precisely the problem, moron.
Juvenile as ever, Louis.
Not at all. I just have a lack of respect for stupidity, especially in high places among people who should know better because they are paid to know better.
A's retarded position and velocity was imparted to the propagating field disturbance at the time when the change happened. How did A know of its true position/velocity relative to B at that time, pray tell?
You missed the point again, just like you missed it in Carlip's paper. A does not know anything about B. A produces a field, regardless of the existence or motion of B. B's motion depends only on its own 4-velocity (which is independent of A's motion), and A's field at B's location. A's field does not depend on A's motion relative to B. There is nothing in the calculation that corresponds to "A knowing about its motion relative to B".
HAYSOOS MARTINEZ! I must say that I am very impressed by this con job. My hat goes off to you, man. This is like saying "all velocities are relative but bodies can determine their own velocity within their own frame of reference." Yeah, right.
Listen up con man! There is absolutely no way that a body can know it own 4-position and 4-velocity within its own FOR unless one is willing to accept absolute position and velocity. The "time-like" speed is given as c in GR but the 3-velocity is zero relative to the body's FOR. And forget about the 3-position as this is completely arbitrary within a chosen FOR.
Also the very fact that you refuse to identify yourself is suspicious, to say the least. I suspect you are either Carlip or a close friend of his. At any rate I think you are a con man and a crackpot.
You could equally well raise the same "objection" in electromagnetism, and you would be equally wrong.
Well, as far as I know, the same thing applies to electrostatic fields (charged bodies) only. Magnetic fields are excluded from this weirdness, as anybody who looks at the light coming from the sun knows that the sun's apparent position is where it was about 9 minutes ago.
Body B responds instantaneously only to the field at its own location. It does not respond instantaneously to the velocity of A; it reacts to the retarded field.
I never said it did. Why create this lame strawman? Go back and read what I wrote.
However, that doesn't mean that it moves in the retarded direction of A -- the "force" (insofar as it exists within the approximation of linearized gravity) is not central, so although it's in A's retarded field, it isn't in A's retarded direction. It happens that the direction it is in is the "linearly extrapolated" instantaneous position of A (not the true instantaneous position)
This is pretty much what I wrote, bonehead. What is your point?
-- but this linear extrapolation is encoded fully in only A's retarded position and velocity.
This is precisely the problem, moron. A's retarded position and velocity was imparted to the propagating field disturbance at the time when the change happened. How did A know of its true position/velocity relative to B at that time, pray tell? It could not possibly know unless you assume non-local information transfer. Especially if the two bodies are on opposite sides of a galaxy light years across.
This is the neutron dance that GR experts have to perform in order to exclude non-locality from GR. Many relativists are still arguing against quantum non-locality as did Einstein (EPR debate).
If B responded to A's true instantaneous position or velocity, you wouldn't get something that agrees with either experiment or GR theory.
Bullshit! Newtonian gravity is extremely accurate over galactic scales. The only discrepancy that general relativists have been able to come up with (and this is still being debated by many) is the perihelion advance of Mercury. This discrepancy can easily be ascribed to the lack of terms for motion-induced and gravity-induced clock-slowing (aka time dilation) in Newtonian gravity.
Spare us the conspiracy theories, Louis, and go back to sci.physics.relativity and get spanked there by Carlip until you get it.
In my opinion, it is either a con game or just plain stupidity. Are you Carlip, by the way? Why post anonymously if you are not afraid of being quoted by name?
According to relativity, there would be a finite time lag for the change to be reflected in the second entity of the pair whereas quantum would say that the change is instantaneous.
That's precisely why relativity must be replaced with something better. In this light, can we trust the experts of a defective theory to be impartial and conduct unbiased tests of GR. I don't think so. Those guys are politicians with clear conflicts of interests. Unfortunately they've managed to become immune to public scrutiny by controlling education and surrounding themselves with a mountain of complexity. Their favorite excuse: "you just don't get it." Same excuse used by flat earth believers.
In Newtonian physics, lots of things are assumed to happen instantaneously (like gravity) so they don't have a speed per se. But in general relativity, everything has a speed -- and that speed is no greater than the speed of light.
The only problem is that GR implicitly assumes that information is available instantaneously over great distances while denying its existence.
The reason is simple. In order for gravity to propagate at c and still result in stable planetary orbits, general relativists have to get on their heads and do a neutron dance, so to speak. They claim that information about the source velocity of body A is transmitted at c to body B. They call it "velocity-dependent interactions." This way body B can react to the actual (extrapolated, of course, from the transmitted velocity info) instantaneous position of body A. This way GR can reproduce the stable-orbit results of Newtonian gravity in weak field approximations without assuming instantaneous information at a distance.
The theory can be found in this paper by GR expert Steve Carlip.
The problem with this is that instantaneous information at a distance is implied from the start. How can body A know about its instantaneous velocity relative to body B (they could be light years apart within a galaxy)?Furthermore, if the instantaneous relative velocity is already available to both bodies, why transmit it at all?
This is the sort of nonsense that make the foundations of general relativity very suspect at best. I, for one, do not trust relativists to conduct impartial tests of GR. It's a political game and way too many people have way too much invested in GR being correct for comfort. It's like trusting Big Tobaco to tell the truth about the dangers of smoking. One man's opinion.
It is strange that you can see the obscurantism in the beliefs of others but you cannot see it in your own profession. There is nothing more obscure and inscrutinizable than science. Scientists make it a point to hide everything they do behind a impregnable wall of jargon and unnecessary mathematical obfuscation. That's part of the elitism. Truth is, if a scientist claims to have an understanding of a natural phenomenon but is unable to explain it in everyday terms that laypeople can understand, it is a sure bet that he or she has no clue as to the nature of the phenomenon in question.
It is the elitism and censorship afforded by peer review (a form of intellectual incest) that gives a free rein to world-famous physicists and computer scientists (such as Hawking, Thorne, Deutsch, Moravec, Kurzweil, etc...) to write on subjects like time travel, multiple universes, warped spacetime, machine consciousness (upload your brain to a computer), etc... as if they were any less objectionable than astrology and parapsychology.
And don't think for a minute that I hate science. I don't. I just hate the fact that it has been turned into a cult and taken over by a priesthood of unscrupulous charlatans and clueless crackpots.
We pay for scientific research and it is up to us to decide what is to be done with our money. I want to see a science open to public scrutiny. If you think that your scientific knowledge is so arcane and so special and complicated that it could never be explained to lay people, I am afraid that you are nothing but an elitist charlatan and/or a crackpot. My only consolation at this point is that nothing lasts forever.
Peer review---real peer review---means no editors (editors are not you peers) and no consoring, that is, publish first, and what you publish is reviewed by you peer. That's science.
Sorry to see that your post was modded down to 'troll' by some clueless Slashdot moderator. I absolutely agree with you. Here's what the late science critic Paul Feyarabend had to say on the matter:
"And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society."
Publish your stuff on the web for everybody to see, download and critique. Science belongs to the public who pays for it all, not just a bunch of elitist a-holes competing for grant money. If your stuff any good, someone will notice. If it's a bunch of boring and inconsequential crap (like most of the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals), nobody will give a hoot. Be like the Wright brothers and do your own science. You don't need the approval of the insufferable pompous know-it-alls in the scientific community. Paul Feyarabend said it best:
"And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society."
From the article: Driving alone down an unfamiliar interstate, it won't seem to odd to say, ``Car, how far to the next gas station?'' and for the car to reply ``Eight miles ahead at exit 37, there is a Chevron and a Union 76.''.
Any car that can understand human speech will be smart enough to drive itself around. A more likely scenario will be:
Human: Car, take me to work.
Car: It's only 8 AM, Sir/Maam. Do you want to stop for coffee and donuts on the way?
But then again, if all computers were that smart, I doubt that you'd have a job in the first place.
Re:Benjamin Franklin was Right, You and Dyson Wron
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Fanwing Planes?
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I agree with your views on patents. In fact, I am against all forms of intellectual property laws. The only thing we should guard against is plagiarism and we don't need a new law for that. IP laws are a sign of stupidity and were created because of greed and selfishness. They are also a direct result of an economic system that is based on slavery, not freedom.
That's because the term "Planet" is rather loosely defined. Nobody has ever really set a lower-limit on the size of a planet. Asteroids are 'small bodies' that orbit the sun. Planets are 'larger bodies' that orbit the sun. Pluto is smaller than our Moon, yet many still consider it a planet simply because it orbits the Sun.
Apparently, a planet must not only orbit the sun but must also be big enough for its gravity to shape it into some sort of recognizable sphere. In other words, it must be a globe. Pluto and Quaoar fit in this category. Most asteroids are potato-shaped rocks.
when will someone develop a processor that will automatically multithread tasks? i.e. you don't have to explicitly ask for new threads, it optimizes the code into threads for you?
There should be no such thing as a sequential or algorithmic task. Programs should be parallel to start with. The biggest problem in software engineering is the age-old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of programming. This is the primary reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop. Objects in the real world are concurrent. Why should our software objects be any different?
I have to say this is a bit of a stretch...I was with you right up until you used the word 'complex'. The mouse is the best way to automate simple tasks. I don't like using a keyboard to navigate a GUI or surf the web, but when I sit down to type this response I find the keyboard much more powerful than using a mouse to drag and drop characters or words.
Well, in my opinion you are mixing two types of tasks here, tasks performed by humans and tasks performed by computers. I was referring to the latter. Let's say you wanted to make a copy of the message you posted and insert it into another document. Which is simpler: retype the message in the new document or use your mouse to copy and paste the message into the new document?
In the same vein, it is a lot easier and orders of magnitude safer to drag and drop a plug-compatible component into a project than it is to write a function call. Automation is one of the cures for bad code and low productivity.
My thesis is that automating software programming will not come of age until we realize that there is something rotten at the core of conventional software engineering. This is the reason that the grand promise of OOP never came to fruition. I argue that the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction is fundamentally flawed. It is the unfortunate legacy of a mindset that has existed since the days of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada of analytical engine fame. Unless we realize that this is the core of the problem, software engineering will remain in the dark ages.
And thus you demonstrate exactly the kind of unfounded assumption I was talking about.
There is nothing unfounded about it. It is a fact that dragging and dropping with a mouse is currently the most powerful way to automate complex tasks on a computer. Where have you been?
Have you considered the possiblity that a mouse might not necessarily be the best way to enter a computer program?
You are kidding me, right? The greatest innovation in computing since the keyboard is the mouse/GUI, period. Computing would not be what it is today without it. The mouse is the most important input device in countless power applications and tools, including the desktop interface. What's taking so long for it to be the primary input device in software construction? The reason is that the software programming world is still in the dark ages.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Books, music, poetry, code, you name it. Makes no difference. Like the air that we breathe, once you've released it, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
hmm, let's see. World-respected physicist vs Slashdot poster...hmm...
With gullible worshippers like you around, it makes sense Hawking can get away with the sort of worthless crap he's been getting away with.
In Universe in the Nutshell, Hawking puts the odds at macroscopic time travel being possible at less than 10^(10^60) to one against.
:-)
Which shows how much of a crackpot he is. There is no chance at all:
Voodoo Physics
And no, time travel is not crackpot stuff. Time travel is fun stuff!
Says the crackpot.
No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!
Amen Brother! It's all a con game. Hawking and the rest of his Star Strek and time travel fanatics have been bulshitting the world with their time warps and wormholes for a long time. I wonder when someone is going to expose those con artists for good.
Physics is a wonderful place, where not even the physicists know what the hell is going on!
This way they con the rest of the world and make lots of money doing it. Is not Hawking a believer in time travel and is not time travel crackpot stuff?
Hawking is a con artist who believes in time travel. There are neither black holes not wormholes. It's all a con game. None of the voodoo physics stuff that Hawking has been working on is of any consequence or value.
Other people won't drop that much cash on what is for them a toy.
True. In my opinion, Kamen has but one option left. He should turn his invention from the toy scooter that it is into a real road vehicle. All he has to do is make the wheels bigger, put an elevated passenger seat or two in the middle, add stick contol, lean-on-turns capability, collision bumpers and a gas powered engine and voila! The only problem is that I can't imagine this thing doing seventy on the freeway. But one never knows.
A much cheaper ($30,000) personal flying machine that you can buy right now in kit form can be found here and here. These things do actually fly.
Your graceless acknowledgement of your own inability to find a flaw in either my statements or Carlip's is duly noted.
Yeah right. In my book, you're a fucking con man with delusions of grandeur. Adios!
I don't want to discuss this anymore because you sound like a Jehovah's witness preaching gospel. IMO, everything you say about velocity and position is crap. You do your best to hide your dependence on absolute position/velocity but it is implied in all your arguments, whether you see it or not. I don't need people like you to do my thinking for me, thank you very much. I have been brainwashed by your kind enough as it is. Cults are fun especially if you are the preacher. So goodbye, Mr. Anonymous Coward and do keep preaching your cult religion to the faithful.
what the grandparent said about general rel and E/M agrees with my understanding.
It agrees with general relativity doctrine. It does not agree with logic. Somewhere in there they are assuming absolute velocity but they go through loops to deny it.
So you're arguing that electromagnetism is nonlocal in exactly the same way that you claim GR is nonlocal?
No. I believe the electric field and gravity are both non-local and related. I believe that a pure magnetic field involves pure local interactions with no non-local influences. I have reasons for this that I don't care to go into, here.
As I said, the case analogous to the gravitational case being considered is the one in which a charged particle orbits within the electromagnetic field of another charged particle. This is not a "pure magnetic environment", so whatever argument you're trying to make here is not relevant.
All I am saying is that electrostatic interactions are analogous to gravity in that both involve and depend on the same nonlocal influences.
The 4-velocity is not something that depends on a FOR.
Huh!?? ALL velocities in relativity depend on an FOR. That is the essence of relativistic doctrine. Are we talking about the same relativity here?
In order for B to know anything about the velocity of A relative to itself so as to extrapolate the likely position of A (again, relative to itself), some information about A's retarded velocity and position relative to B must have been imparted to A's field, period. Otherwise, B cannot extract this information from A's field.
If 4-velocities in relativity are not relative, you are in essence saying that 4-velocity is absolute, since you are claiming that it does not depend on any specific FOR.
No, the correct analogy would be to consider the case of a charged particle orbiting another charged particle due to the electromagnetic interaction. You get analogous effects to the ones you are rejecting in linearized gravity. You did read the treatment of the electromagnetic case in Carlip's paper, didn't you?
I simply ascribe both effects to non-locality whereas you GR experts do a super-complex neutron dance to get things to fit your theory. The effect does not apply to a pure magnetic environment AFAIK. My point was that pure magnetic reactions always reflect the retarded positions of the magnetic objects. EM phenomena have both an electric and a magnetic component that can complicate things, IMO.
This is precisely the problem, moron.
Juvenile as ever, Louis.
Not at all. I just have a lack of respect for stupidity, especially in high places among people who should know better because they are paid to know better.
A's retarded position and velocity was imparted to the propagating field disturbance at the time when the change happened. How did A know of its true position/velocity relative to B at that time, pray tell?
You missed the point again, just like you missed it in Carlip's paper. A does not know anything about B. A produces a field, regardless of the existence or motion of B. B's motion depends only on its own 4-velocity (which is independent of A's motion), and A's field at B's location. A's field does not depend on A's motion relative to B. There is nothing in the calculation that corresponds to "A knowing about its motion relative to B".
HAYSOOS MARTINEZ! I must say that I am very impressed by this con job. My hat goes off to you, man. This is like saying "all velocities are relative but bodies can determine their own velocity within their own frame of reference." Yeah, right.
Listen up con man! There is absolutely no way that a body can know it own 4-position and 4-velocity within its own FOR unless one is willing to accept absolute position and velocity. The "time-like" speed is given as c in GR but the 3-velocity is zero relative to the body's FOR. And forget about the 3-position as this is completely arbitrary within a chosen FOR.
Also the very fact that you refuse to identify yourself is suspicious, to say the least. I suspect you are either Carlip or a close friend of his. At any rate I think you are a con man and a crackpot.
You could equally well raise the same "objection" in electromagnetism, and you would be equally wrong.
Well, as far as I know, the same thing applies to electrostatic fields (charged bodies) only. Magnetic fields are excluded from this weirdness, as anybody who looks at the light coming from the sun knows that the sun's apparent position is where it was about 9 minutes ago.
Body B responds instantaneously only to the field at its own location. It does not respond instantaneously to the velocity of A; it reacts to the retarded field.
I never said it did. Why create this lame strawman? Go back and read what I wrote.
However, that doesn't mean that it moves in the retarded direction of A -- the "force" (insofar as it exists within the approximation of linearized gravity) is not central, so although it's in A's retarded field, it isn't in A's retarded direction. It happens that the direction it is in is the "linearly extrapolated" instantaneous position of A (not the true instantaneous position)
This is pretty much what I wrote, bonehead. What is your point?
-- but this linear extrapolation is encoded fully in only A's retarded position and velocity.
This is precisely the problem, moron. A's retarded position and velocity was imparted to the propagating field disturbance at the time when the change happened. How did A know of its true position/velocity relative to B at that time, pray tell? It could not possibly know unless you assume non-local information transfer. Especially if the two bodies are on opposite sides of a galaxy light years across.
This is the neutron dance that GR experts have to perform in order to exclude non-locality from GR. Many relativists are still arguing against quantum non-locality as did Einstein (EPR debate).
If B responded to A's true instantaneous position or velocity, you wouldn't get something that agrees with either experiment or GR theory.
Bullshit! Newtonian gravity is extremely accurate over galactic scales. The only discrepancy that general relativists have been able to come up with (and this is still being debated by many) is the perihelion advance of Mercury. This discrepancy can easily be ascribed to the lack of terms for motion-induced and gravity-induced clock-slowing (aka time dilation) in Newtonian gravity.
Spare us the conspiracy theories, Louis, and go back to sci.physics.relativity and get spanked there by Carlip until you get it.
In my opinion, it is either a con game or just plain stupidity. Are you Carlip, by the way? Why post anonymously if you are not afraid of being quoted by name?
According to relativity, there would be a finite time lag for the change to be reflected in the second entity of the pair whereas quantum would say that the change is instantaneous.
That's precisely why relativity must be replaced with something better. In this light, can we trust the experts of a defective theory to be impartial and conduct unbiased tests of GR. I don't think so. Those guys are politicians with clear conflicts of interests. Unfortunately they've managed to become immune to public scrutiny by controlling education and surrounding themselves with a mountain of complexity. Their favorite excuse: "you just don't get it." Same excuse used by flat earth believers.
In Newtonian physics, lots of things are assumed to happen instantaneously (like gravity) so they don't have a speed per se. But in general relativity, everything has a speed -- and that speed is no greater than the speed of light.
The only problem is that GR implicitly assumes that information is available instantaneously over great distances while denying its existence.
The reason is simple. In order for gravity to propagate at c and still result in stable planetary orbits, general relativists have to get on their heads and do a neutron dance, so to speak. They claim that information about the source velocity of body A is transmitted at c to body B. They call it "velocity-dependent interactions." This way body B can react to the actual (extrapolated, of course, from the transmitted velocity info) instantaneous position of body A. This way GR can reproduce the stable-orbit results of Newtonian gravity in weak field approximations without assuming instantaneous information at a distance.
The theory can be found in this paper by GR expert Steve Carlip.
The problem with this is that instantaneous information at a distance is implied from the start. How can body A know about its instantaneous velocity relative to body B (they could be light years apart within a galaxy)?Furthermore, if the instantaneous relative velocity is already available to both bodies, why transmit it at all?
This is the sort of nonsense that make the foundations of general relativity very suspect at best. I, for one, do not trust relativists to conduct impartial tests of GR. It's a political game and way too many people have way too much invested in GR being correct for comfort. It's like trusting Big Tobaco to tell the truth about the dangers of smoking. One man's opinion.
It is strange that you can see the obscurantism in the beliefs of others but you cannot see it in your own profession. There is nothing more obscure and inscrutinizable than science. Scientists make it a point to hide everything they do behind a impregnable wall of jargon and unnecessary mathematical obfuscation. That's part of the elitism. Truth is, if a scientist claims to have an understanding of a natural phenomenon but is unable to explain it in everyday terms that laypeople can understand, it is a sure bet that he or she has no clue as to the nature of the phenomenon in question.
It is the elitism and censorship afforded by peer review (a form of intellectual incest) that gives a free rein to world-famous physicists and computer scientists (such as Hawking, Thorne, Deutsch, Moravec, Kurzweil, etc...) to write on subjects like time travel, multiple universes, warped spacetime, machine consciousness (upload your brain to a computer), etc... as if they were any less objectionable than astrology and parapsychology.
And don't think for a minute that I hate science. I don't. I just hate the fact that it has been turned into a cult and taken over by a priesthood of unscrupulous charlatans and clueless crackpots.
We pay for scientific research and it is up to us to decide what is to be done with our money. I want to see a science open to public scrutiny. If you think that your scientific knowledge is so arcane and so special and complicated that it could never be explained to lay people, I am afraid that you are nothing but an elitist charlatan and/or a crackpot. My only consolation at this point is that nothing lasts forever.
Peer review---real peer review---means no editors (editors are not you peers) and no consoring, that is, publish first, and what you publish is reviewed by you peer. That's science.
Sorry to see that your post was modded down to 'troll' by some clueless Slashdot moderator. I absolutely agree with you. Here's what the late science critic Paul Feyarabend had to say on the matter:
"And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society."
From "Against Method"
Publish your stuff on the web for everybody to see, download and critique. Science belongs to the public who pays for it all, not just a bunch of elitist a-holes competing for grant money. If your stuff any good, someone will notice. If it's a bunch of boring and inconsequential crap (like most of the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals), nobody will give a hoot. Be like the Wright brothers and do your own science. You don't need the approval of the insufferable pompous know-it-alls in the scientific community. Paul Feyarabend said it best:
"And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society."
From the article: .
Driving alone down an unfamiliar interstate, it won't seem to odd to say, ``Car, how far to the next gas station?'' and for the car to reply ``Eight miles ahead at exit 37, there is a Chevron and a Union 76.''
Any car that can understand human speech will be smart enough to drive itself around. A more likely scenario will be:
Human:
Car, take me to work.
Car:
It's only 8 AM, Sir/Maam. Do you want to stop for coffee and donuts on the way?
But then again, if all computers were that smart, I doubt that you'd have a job in the first place.
I agree with your views on patents. In fact, I am against all forms of intellectual property laws. The only thing we should guard against is plagiarism and we don't need a new law for that. IP laws are a sign of stupidity and were created because of greed and selfishness. They are also a direct result of an economic system that is based on slavery, not freedom.
That's because the term "Planet" is rather loosely defined. Nobody has ever really set a lower-limit on the size of a planet. Asteroids are 'small bodies' that orbit the sun. Planets are 'larger bodies' that orbit the sun. Pluto is smaller than our Moon, yet many still consider it a planet simply because it orbits the Sun.
Apparently, a planet must not only orbit the sun but must also be big enough for its gravity to shape it into some sort of recognizable sphere. In other words, it must be a globe. Pluto and Quaoar fit in this category. Most asteroids are potato-shaped rocks.
when will someone develop a processor that will automatically multithread tasks? i.e. you don't have to explicitly ask for new threads, it optimizes the code into threads for you?
There should be no such thing as a sequential or algorithmic task. Programs should be parallel to start with. The biggest problem in software engineering is the age-old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of programming. This is the primary reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop. Objects in the real world are concurrent. Why should our software objects be any different?
I have to say this is a bit of a stretch...I was with you right up until you used the word 'complex'. The mouse is the best way to automate simple tasks. I don't like using a keyboard to navigate a GUI or surf the web, but when I sit down to type this response I find the keyboard much more powerful than using a mouse to drag and drop characters or words.
Well, in my opinion you are mixing two types of tasks here, tasks performed by humans and tasks performed by computers. I was referring to the latter. Let's say you wanted to make a copy of the message you posted and insert it into another document. Which is simpler: retype the message in the new document or use your mouse to copy and paste the message into the new document?
In the same vein, it is a lot easier and orders of magnitude safer to drag and drop a plug-compatible component into a project than it is to write a function call. Automation is one of the cures for bad code and low productivity.
My thesis is that automating software programming will not come of age until we realize that there is something rotten at the core of conventional software engineering. This is the reason that the grand promise of OOP never came to fruition. I argue that the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction is fundamentally flawed. It is the unfortunate legacy of a mindset that has existed since the days of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada of analytical engine fame. Unless we realize that this is the core of the problem, software engineering will remain in the dark ages.
And thus you demonstrate exactly the kind of unfounded assumption I was talking about.
There is nothing unfounded about it. It is a fact that dragging and dropping with a mouse is currently the most powerful way to automate complex tasks on a computer. Where have you been?
Have you considered the possiblity that a mouse might not necessarily be the best way to enter a computer program?
You are kidding me, right? The greatest innovation in computing since the keyboard is the mouse/GUI, period. Computing would not be what it is today without it. The mouse is the most important input device in countless power applications and tools, including the desktop interface. What's taking so long for it to be the primary input device in software construction? The reason is that the software programming world is still in the dark ages.