I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).
There is nothing wrong with "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines". That is the way it should be done. The problem is with the way we program. Encapsulating conventional algorithmic code with things like JavaBeans and c++ classes will not get rid of the fundamental problem of software engineering: the practice of using the algorithm as the building block of software programs. For an alternative non-algorithmic approach, take a look at Project COSA.
Another apologist for crackpot science heard from.
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path.
It is a stupid question because there are no paths in spacetime. Heck, spacetime does not even exist. It's an abstract mathematical construct. It has never been physically observed. Whatever happened to the sacrosanct rule of science regarding the primacy of observation?
Besides, for there to be a path, there has to be the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime, by definition!
but I don't see how that invalidates the theory of relativity.
As I write on my site, relativity is mathematically correct. My message is that one cannot use relativity to talk about time travel through wormholes and the like or, as Paul Davies recently claims in Scientific American, that "time dilation" is a form of time travel. Time dilation is an unfortunate misnomer for the simple reason that time cannot change. All "time dilation" means is that one clock runs slower than another clock. Nothing more.
Anyway, it's good to ask questions, but it's unhealthy to heap such vitriol upon people because you disagree with (or don't understand) what they're saying.
Spoken like a true apologist for crackpottery. IOW, we can come with all sorts of cokamamie bullshit, and you think it's crackpottery, it's only because we do not understand them. Yeah, right.
Never mind that Hawking and Thorne are talking about visiting their great, great-grandparents in the past through wormholes. Never mind that Feynman wrote about particles moving in time toward the past. Those guys deserve more than vitriol because they should know better. That's what they are paid for. It's our money and we deserve to get good science for our money, not a bunch of nonsense. And tough cookie if my calling them crackpots offends your sensibilities. That's what they are.
Re:Deceptive and Crackpot Science
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Ununoctium Wrapup
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Geez, not you again.
Can't stand it, can you? It makes your blood boil.
Look, when you make a four-vector (t,x,y,z) there is an IMPLIED factor of c in the time component, otherwise the units are wrong. Your entire argument is predicated on not understanding the system of units commonly used in particle physics.
Implied factor, my foot! The distance traveled in spacetime is indeed given as ct in relativity. ct is measured in meters, not seconds!!! There is indeed an evolution in a fourth spatial dimension. Where is the time travel in that, pray tell? Get a clue!
Deceptive and Crackpot Science
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Ununoctium Wrapup
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· Score: 1, Troll
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
Wow! Is this the reason that more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility? Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them. The late science critic Paul Feyrabend 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.
If you are sincere about discovering the crackpottery and outright deception that is endemic in the pysics community check out this site: Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
That 'charlatan' is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
That's precisely why he is such a charlatan. He should know better.
Would you care to share with us just what makes you qualified to judge such a man ?
Spoken like a true Star-Trek fanatic: ignore the message and home in on the messenger. This is a typically lame tactic and it won't work here. My qualifications have nothing to do with it. People are not as stupid as you and those charlatans in Cambridge and elsewhere would like to convince them that they are. We can think for ourselves, thank you very much. A con may last a hundred years, but in the end, truth always catches up with it.
There is nothing to prove. The changelessness of spacetime is a natural consequence of the definition of spacetime. In other words, spacetime is changeless by definition!!
This is what makes the whole time travel and spacetime crackpottery even more mind-boggling. This stuff is being preached to the faithful by some of the most famous and admired scientists on the earth! The cream of the crop!
It's been close to a hundred years since the idea of a physical time dimension was introduced. Why is it that physicists continue to preach their time travel crap in this day and age? Do I hear money? Do I hear political correctness? Do I hear crackpottery? You bet I do.
two additional chapters, including indepth discussions regarding the possibilities of time travel.
Hawking is a perfect example of a crackpot and/or charlatan who has managed to get his crackpot ideas accepted by a generation raised on Star-Trek physics and cheap sci-fi novels. Any physicist of reknown who gets away with talking about time travel as if it were a valid scientific pursuit, makes it on my list of notorious time travel crackpots. Any physicist of reknown who teaches that anything can move in spacetime (or that "time dilation" is a form of time travel, or that we are moving in time toward the future at the rate of one second per second) deserves to be tarred and feathered and paraded through the streets as an example to the others. Damn it! This hogwash has been around for way too long. One hundred years of this crap is about enough, in my opinion. For more information on why time does not pass and why time travel is the ultimate crackpot idea, check out the page below.
Truly a marvelous book, easy to understand, yet full of knowledge. I recommend it to almost anyone I meet.
I do too, especially if you're a Star-Trek fanatic wearing your little Ferengi outfit. Still, I've got a little gift for you. Hopefully it will wake you out of your stupor: Spacetime is changeless from the infinite past to the infinite future. Chew on that for a while.
Why is there a copyright at the end of the article in your sig?
Not to prevent copying, that's for sure. Copyright, in my opinion, should only be a symbol of authorship as people should get credit for their work. I would not stop anybody from copying my stuff and selling it. However I would object to plagiarism. Come to think of it, I am grateful to you for pointing this out. I will add a clause to my site to permit unlimited copying, even for profit.
But the average mentality of the average slashdot reader is based more on justifying petty theft to themself than it is the honest drive to protect the digital rights of the consumers of the world.
What is theft to you is freedom to others.
Protect the digital rights of consumers?
You mean protect the ability of greedy a-holes to infringe on our liberties? If you can't put chains on it or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference if it's ideas, inventions, music, writings, speech or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
What if some alien jackasses from Andromeda showed up on planet Earth and insisted that everything we own belongs to them because they invented it first? We'd kick their silly-looking arses back into deep space.
Then there are the solutions that do away with time and or space entirely. These are all rather nihilistic, and not worth going into, as if they're right, what's the point of anything? So we might as well assume they're wrong, as there seems to be a chance of that.
This is funny because, of all the solutions you offered in your speculative post, the one you rejected out of hand is the only one that is actually correct.
What you are saying contradicts his idea of time dilation.
Not at all. Time dilation simply means that a given clock slows down relative to another clock. That is all it means. The problem is that most people interpret it wrong. They see a causality that doe not exist. This because clueless relativist have been telling lies about relativity for close to a century
People are taught to believe that clocks slow down because of time dilation. This is false. Clocks simply slow down (for whatever reason) and we put the time dilation label on it. There is no cause and effect relationship between clocks and an external time that has ever been demonstrated.
The truth is that all phenomena (such as the slowing of clocks) are the result of some energy consevation principle. To interpret "time dilation" to mean time travel is the ultimate in crackpottery.
And as far as your need to reference credible physicists is concerned, it only shows me that you have bought the crap that physicists keep feeding the public, hook line and sinker. I am talking about the crap about the public being too stupid to figure out what is good or bad science. The truth is that, if a physicist cannot explain a natural phenomenon in simple language that the average layperson can understand, you can bet that he or she has no clue about the nature of the phenomenon in the first place. This is a sure fire way to tell a good scientist from a charlatan. IOW, the more incomprehensible a physicist comes across, the more you can be sure he/she has no freaking clue.
But then again, maybe you are too stupid to figure things out on your own. In which case, you can ignore everything I've written.
That's strange. I always thought we were continually moving forward through time.
That's what you and I have been taught to believe but it is wrong nonetheless. What strange about it is that supposedly intelligent people in the physics community believe and teach the same crap to young people.
The impossibility of motion in time is easy to grasp if one is willing to put a little bit of thought into it. The truth is, there is only the present and time does not pass. Most physicists, including (and especially) the most famous and admired ones (we all know who they are), are completely out to lunch on this issue. That Scientific American can treat time travel as a serious scientific subject is a sad commentary of the sorry state of theoretical physics.
My advice is, think for yourself. Don't let charlatans and crackpots do your thinking for you, especially if they are famous. Don't believe what I write either. Figure it out on your own.
Forward time travel is of course possible right now
This is sad. Why does the physics community insist on putting out such unmitigated crackpottery? The truth is that nothing can move in time, forward or backward. The entire spacetime of relativity is changeless, from the infinite past to the infinite future. Karl Popper had a name for it: Einstein's block universe. More details can be found at this site:
Time travel. Possible? Yes. It happens relativly speaking every day.
Nonsense. Time dilation is not time travel. For whatever it's worth, nothing can move in time, forward or backward. The entire spacetime of relativity is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. I'll let the smart ones (i.e., the ones who were not irreparably brainwashed) figure that one out. In the meantime, those of you who are really interested in the truth can take a look at this following link for a complete debunking of time travel and other crackpottery from the physics community. Wild eyed Star-Trek fanatics need not bother.
Who said anything about ASL? A completely new international sign system can be designed for this glove. It can be as complex or as simple as needed. And as far as people having a bad attitude, look in the mirror, amigo. Those scientists doing research on this glove could have chosen something else to work on. They don't owe you or anybody a favor. We all adapt to things around us if the need arise. What is wrong with the deaf adapting to a new empowering technology. If you think hearing people should be forced to learn sign language, I am afraid it's you who need to work on your attitude.
Besides, there is no reason to suppose that new signs cannot be designed specifcically for this glove so that it can be used to say anything. And not just in English, but in any natural language. The deaf will just have to learn the new signs, a small effort compared to how useful it can be in the long run.
While I think you give valid examples of sign language that a glove-based translator will be hard pressed to recognize and translate, I think you may be overlooking the utility of this glove.
There is no reason to suppose that new signs cannot be created specifically for the glove so that almost anything that can be expressed in English can be expressed with the glove. A deaf person will simply have to learn the new gestures to fully utilize the glove, in the same way that a typist has to learn a QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard.
Once this has been properly tested and developed with the help and participation of the international deaf community, I see no reason that a deaf person, regardless of nationality cannot use the glove to communicate with a hearing person in his/her native language. At least, one-way communication will possible in multiple languages. Add a speech to glove-language translator and you have a two-way system.
Heck, with this glove, a deaf person will have an advantage over hearing people. He or she may make him/herself understood in several languages. Just a thought.
It should be, otherwise it is unnatural and is at odds with personal liberty. What if some alien from Andromeda suddenly shows up and arrests everybody on earth for infringing on their intellectual property? We'd be royally pissed and we'd kick its freaking arse back to its home planet!
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, movies, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
The point is this: If the entertainment industry (and book authors, screenwriters, artists, inventors, etc...) don't want to see their work copied by others, they should not release it to the public in a form that can be copied. They should release their work only in closed theaters, concert halls, and other private venues. Inventors should keep their ideas secret or be the first to exploit it.
Don't trample on our personal freedom with your fascist, selfish and anti-social intellectual property laws. After all we benefit freely from the ideas and inventions of others. Let's put some back for a change.
God! Awful's first law of/. posting: Anyone who starts a post with "this will probably get modded down to troll but..." is probably karma whoring and is about to post some kind of libertarian/left-wing diatribe that they fully expect will be modded up.
In the past, the same message has been modded to troll several times. FYI, I am neither a libertarian nor a left-wing socialist nor a capitalist. I believe in freedom.
Stop being a spineless bastard
At least I am brave enough to use my real name. Here's my first law of spineless/. posting: be as God!-Awful anonymous as you can while accusing others of being spineless.
There is no forced contract to a cash sale. Forcing a contract on the public which they didn't negotiate as equal partners is a form of slavery no free citizen can put up with.
How true! Here I go again. This bears repeating over and over even if I get modded down as a troll:
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft, Adobe, and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
[And Jack Valenti, what will the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) do when all human actors are replaced with virtual actors? Do you think they are going to sit on their arses? Should SAG follow your example and lobby congress to pass laws prohibiting virtual actors? Not that Valenti cares about actors, mind you. He seems to only care about insuring that the cash flowing into Howllywood Inc.'s coffers never stops.]
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Jack Valenti: Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow
There is a flip side to this coin. Most of the things people are doing illegally today, they were able to do legally yesterday.
The solution is simple: repeal the freedom-destroying laws and put a moratorium of new ones and most people will be law-abiding citizens. An added benefit is that there will be fewer blood-sucking lawyers. Add more freedom-destroying laws to the hundreds of thousands of laws already on the books, and help create a growing criminal society.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).
There is nothing wrong with "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines". That is the way it should be done. The problem is with the way we program. Encapsulating conventional algorithmic code with things like JavaBeans and c++ classes will not get rid of the fundamental problem of software engineering: the practice of using the algorithm as the building block of software programs. For an alternative non-algorithmic approach, take a look at Project COSA.
Another apologist for crackpot science heard from.
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path.
It is a stupid question because there are no paths in spacetime. Heck, spacetime does not even exist. It's an abstract mathematical construct. It has never been physically observed. Whatever happened to the sacrosanct rule of science regarding the primacy of observation?
Besides, for there to be a path, there has to be the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime, by definition!
but I don't see how that invalidates the theory of relativity.
As I write on my site, relativity is mathematically correct. My message is that one cannot use relativity to talk about time travel through wormholes and the like or, as Paul Davies recently claims in Scientific American, that "time dilation" is a form of time travel. Time dilation is an unfortunate misnomer for the simple reason that time cannot change. All "time dilation" means is that one clock runs slower than another clock. Nothing more.
Anyway, it's good to ask questions, but it's unhealthy to heap such vitriol upon people because you disagree with (or don't understand) what they're saying.
Spoken like a true apologist for crackpottery. IOW, we can come with all sorts of cokamamie bullshit, and you think it's crackpottery, it's only because we do not understand them. Yeah, right.
Never mind that Hawking and Thorne are talking about visiting their great, great-grandparents in the past through wormholes. Never mind that Feynman wrote about particles moving in time toward the past. Those guys deserve more than vitriol because they should know better. That's what they are paid for. It's our money and we deserve to get good science for our money, not a bunch of nonsense. And tough cookie if my calling them crackpots offends your sensibilities. That's what they are.
Geez, not you again.
Can't stand it, can you? It makes your blood boil.
Look, when you make a four-vector (t,x,y,z) there is an IMPLIED factor of c in the time component, otherwise the units are wrong. Your entire argument is predicated on not understanding the system of units commonly used in particle physics.
Implied factor, my foot! The distance traveled in spacetime is indeed given as ct in relativity. ct is measured in meters, not seconds!!! There is indeed an evolution in a fourth spatial dimension. Where is the time travel in that, pray tell? Get a clue!
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
Wow! Is this the reason that more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility? Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them. The late science critic Paul Feyrabend 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 Against Method by Paul Feyerabend
If you are sincere about discovering the crackpottery and outright deception that is endemic in the pysics community check out this site: Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
That 'charlatan' is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
That's precisely why he is such a charlatan. He should know better.
Would you care to share with us just what makes you qualified to judge such a man ?
Spoken like a true Star-Trek fanatic: ignore the message and home in on the messenger. This is a typically lame tactic and it won't work here. My qualifications have nothing to do with it. People are not as stupid as you and those charlatans in Cambridge and elsewhere would like to convince them that they are. We can think for ourselves, thank you very much. A con may last a hundred years, but in the end, truth always catches up with it.
Prove it.
There is nothing to prove. The changelessness of spacetime is a natural consequence of the definition of spacetime. In other words, spacetime is changeless by definition!!
This is what makes the whole time travel and spacetime crackpottery even more mind-boggling. This stuff is being preached to the faithful by some of the most famous and admired scientists on the earth! The cream of the crop!
It's been close to a hundred years since the idea of a physical time dimension was introduced. Why is it that physicists continue to preach their time travel crap in this day and age? Do I hear money? Do I hear political correctness? Do I hear crackpottery? You bet I do.
two additional chapters, including indepth discussions regarding the possibilities of time travel.
Hawking is a perfect example of a crackpot and/or charlatan who has managed to get his crackpot ideas accepted by a generation raised on Star-Trek physics and cheap sci-fi novels. Any physicist of reknown who gets away with talking about time travel as if it were a valid scientific pursuit, makes it on my list of notorious time travel crackpots. Any physicist of reknown who teaches that anything can move in spacetime (or that "time dilation" is a form of time travel, or that we are moving in time toward the future at the rate of one second per second) deserves to be tarred and feathered and paraded through the streets as an example to the others. Damn it! This hogwash has been around for way too long. One hundred years of this crap is about enough, in my opinion. For more information on why time does not pass and why time travel is the ultimate crackpot idea, check out the page below.
Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
Truly a marvelous book, easy to understand, yet full of knowledge. I recommend it to almost anyone I meet.
I do too, especially if you're a Star-Trek fanatic wearing your little Ferengi outfit. Still, I've got a little gift for you. Hopefully it will wake you out of your stupor: Spacetime is changeless from the infinite past to the infinite future. Chew on that for a while.
Why is there a copyright at the end of the article in your sig?
Not to prevent copying, that's for sure. Copyright, in my opinion, should only be a symbol of authorship as people should get credit for their work. I would not stop anybody from copying my stuff and selling it. However I would object to plagiarism. Come to think of it, I am grateful to you for pointing this out. I will add a clause to my site to permit unlimited copying, even for profit.
But the average mentality of the average slashdot reader is based more on justifying petty theft to themself than it is the honest drive to protect the digital rights of the consumers of the world.
What is theft to you is freedom to others.
Protect the digital rights of consumers?
You mean protect the ability of greedy a-holes to infringe on our liberties? If you can't put chains on it or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference if it's ideas, inventions, music, writings, speech or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
What if some alien jackasses from Andromeda showed up on planet Earth and insisted that everything we own belongs to them because they invented it first? We'd kick their silly-looking arses back into deep space.
Then there are the solutions that do away with time and or space entirely. These are all rather nihilistic, and not worth going into, as if they're right, what's the point of anything? So we might as well assume they're wrong, as there seems to be a chance of that.
This is funny because, of all the solutions you offered in your speculative post, the one you rejected out of hand is the only one that is actually correct.
What you are saying contradicts his idea of time dilation.
Not at all. Time dilation simply means that a given clock slows down relative to another clock. That is all it means. The problem is that most people interpret it wrong. They see a causality that doe not exist. This because clueless relativist have been telling lies about relativity for close to a century
People are taught to believe that clocks slow down because of time dilation. This is false. Clocks simply slow down (for whatever reason) and we put the time dilation label on it. There is no cause and effect relationship between clocks and an external time that has ever been demonstrated.
The truth is that all phenomena (such as the slowing of clocks) are the result of some energy consevation principle. To interpret "time dilation" to mean time travel is the ultimate in crackpottery.
And as far as your need to reference credible physicists is concerned, it only shows me that you have bought the crap that physicists keep feeding the public, hook line and sinker. I am talking about the crap about the public being too stupid to figure out what is good or bad science. The truth is that, if a physicist cannot explain a natural phenomenon in simple language that the average layperson can understand, you can bet that he or she has no clue about the nature of the phenomenon in the first place. This is a sure fire way to tell a good scientist from a charlatan. IOW, the more incomprehensible a physicist comes across, the more you can be sure he/she has no freaking clue.
But then again, maybe you are too stupid to figure things out on your own. In which case, you can ignore everything I've written.
That's strange. I always thought we were continually moving forward through time.
That's what you and I have been taught to believe but it is wrong nonetheless. What strange about it is that supposedly intelligent people in the physics community believe and teach the same crap to young people.
The impossibility of motion in time is easy to grasp if one is willing to put a little bit of thought into it. The truth is, there is only the present and time does not pass. Most physicists, including (and especially) the most famous and admired ones (we all know who they are), are completely out to lunch on this issue. That Scientific American can treat time travel as a serious scientific subject is a sad commentary of the sorry state of theoretical physics.
My advice is, think for yourself. Don't let charlatans and crackpots do your thinking for you, especially if they are famous. Don't believe what I write either. Figure it out on your own.
Voodoo Physics
I love it.
Voodoo Physics
The correct URL is: Voodoo Physics
Forward time travel is of course possible right now
This is sad. Why does the physics community insist on putting out such unmitigated crackpottery? The truth is that nothing can move in time, forward or backward. The entire spacetime of relativity is changeless, from the infinite past to the infinite future. Karl Popper had a name for it: Einstein's block universe. More details can be found at this site:
Voodoo Physics
Time travel. Possible? Yes. It happens relativly speaking every day.
Nonsense. Time dilation is not time travel. For whatever it's worth, nothing can move in time, forward or backward. The entire spacetime of relativity is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. I'll let the smart ones (i.e., the ones who were not irreparably brainwashed) figure that one out. In the meantime, those of you who are really interested in the truth can take a look at this following link for a complete debunking of time travel and other crackpottery from the physics community. Wild eyed Star-Trek fanatics need not bother.
Voodoo Physics
Who said anything about ASL? A completely new international sign system can be designed for this glove. It can be as complex or as simple as needed. And as far as people having a bad attitude, look in the mirror, amigo. Those scientists doing research on this glove could have chosen something else to work on. They don't owe you or anybody a favor. We all adapt to things around us if the need arise. What is wrong with the deaf adapting to a new empowering technology. If you think hearing people should be forced to learn sign language, I am afraid it's you who need to work on your attitude.
Besides, there is no reason to suppose that new signs cannot be designed specifcically for this glove so that it can be used to say anything. And not just in English, but in any natural language. The deaf will just have to learn the new signs, a small effort compared to how useful it can be in the long run.
While I think you give valid examples of sign language that a glove-based translator will be hard pressed to recognize and translate, I think you may be overlooking the utility of this glove.
There is no reason to suppose that new signs cannot be created specifically for the glove so that almost anything that can be expressed in English can be expressed with the glove. A deaf person will simply have to learn the new gestures to fully utilize the glove, in the same way that a typist has to learn a QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard.
Once this has been properly tested and developed with the help and participation of the international deaf community, I see no reason that a deaf person, regardless of nationality cannot use the glove to communicate with a hearing person in his/her native language. At least, one-way communication will possible in multiple languages. Add a speech to glove-language translator and you have a two-way system.
Heck, with this glove, a deaf person will have an advantage over hearing people. He or she may make him/herself understood in several languages. Just a thought.
Not all property is physical
It should be, otherwise it is unnatural and is at odds with personal liberty. What if some alien from Andromeda suddenly shows up and arrests everybody on earth for infringing on their intellectual property? We'd be royally pissed and we'd kick its freaking arse back to its home planet!
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, movies, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
The point is this: If the entertainment industry (and book authors, screenwriters, artists, inventors, etc...) don't want to see their work copied by others, they should not release it to the public in a form that can be copied. They should release their work only in closed theaters, concert halls, and other private venues. Inventors should keep their ideas secret or be the first to exploit it.
Don't trample on our personal freedom with your fascist, selfish and anti-social intellectual property laws. After all we benefit freely from the ideas and inventions of others. Let's put some back for a change.
God! Awful's first law of /. posting: Anyone who starts a post with "this will probably get modded down to troll but..." is probably karma whoring and is about to post some kind of libertarian/left-wing diatribe that they fully expect will be modded up.
/. posting: be as God!-Awful anonymous as you can while accusing others of being spineless.
In the past, the same message has been modded to troll several times. FYI, I am neither a libertarian nor a left-wing socialist nor a capitalist. I believe in freedom.
Stop being a spineless bastard
At least I am brave enough to use my real name. Here's my first law of spineless
There is no forced contract to a cash sale. Forcing a contract on the public which they didn't negotiate as equal partners is a form of slavery no free citizen can put up with.
How true! Here I go again. This bears repeating over and over even if I get modded down as a troll:
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft, Adobe, and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
[And Jack Valenti, what will the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) do when all human actors are replaced with virtual actors? Do you think they are going to sit on their arses? Should SAG follow your example and lobby congress to pass laws prohibiting virtual actors? Not that Valenti cares about actors, mind you. He seems to only care about insuring that the cash flowing into Howllywood Inc.'s coffers never stops.]
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Demand liberty! Nothing less.
Jack Valenti: Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow
There is a flip side to this coin. Most of the things people are doing illegally today, they were able to do legally yesterday.
The solution is simple: repeal the freedom-destroying laws and put a moratorium of new ones and most people will be law-abiding citizens. An added benefit is that there will be fewer blood-sucking lawyers. Add more freedom-destroying laws to the hundreds of thousands of laws already on the books, and help create a growing criminal society.