Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
Ok. Just for fun. There are two individuals mentioned in that passage:
Individual #1. He that has understanding and is to count the number of the beast.
Individual #2. The beast.
Now which one of those two individuals is the last sentence refering to? Note that the reader is apparently warned from the beginning that it takes wisdom to understand the sentence. Maybe everybody is wrong about the number of the beast. Which would make sense considering that the book of revelation claims that almost everybody is deceived by the beast.
If you believe in this stuff about 666 being the number of the beast, why do you think that you are not one of the deceived ones? And if the number is given to you, why would the author of the passage ask you to calculate it? Just a thought. Move along now.
It's amazing how so many people forget about how WELL simpler animals' nervous systems work - and the robustness is something that no AI I know of has.
Indeed. Many are under the mistaken impression that computers are more reliable than biological neural systems. The truth is that, taking network and behavioral complexity into consideration, current computers would almost never fail if they had only a mere fraction of the robustness of natural systems.
With that said - I don't think that the nervous strategy is the ONLY one - people often wrongly assume that the only goal of AI is to create exact replicas of human cognition - as far as I am concerned AI must also create intelligent (but not human intelligent) programs to solve goals and specific scientific / applied problems.
IMO, the learning and adaptive capabilities of humans are unsurpassable by any other method. Certainly we don't need our robots to look like and act like people (spider-like robots will probably be more stable in most environment) but unless we can emulate the perceptual, motivational and motor learning capabilities of humans and animals, we won't have AI. All we'll have is a bunch of toys.
P.S. I'm not so sure I agree with you on the Relativity/Time Travel thing - Mr. Hawkings DOES know an incredible amount regarding physics and relativity, and I've read other reputable authors claim that, practibility and feasability nonwithstanding, there is little in special / general relativity theory that DISALLOWS time travel.
The irrefutable fact is that the spacetime of relativity does not allow any sort of travel at all. It is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. The reason is that moving in time is self-referential. This is well-known in the physics community and I provide plenty of references to support this on my site. That people like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne can get away with feeding their Star-Trek snake oil to the public without fear of being contradicted is a testament to the political ass-kissing and dishonesty that is rampant within the upper echelons of the physics community.
Moore's law is NOT the bottleneck the AI community is experiencing. The issue here is not "our computers aren't small/fast enough". The problem is that nobody yet knows how to write a program that is isomorphic to the one creating this sentence. Read that again--the trouble here is not that we don't have a sufficiently powerful computer to RUN such a program...the trouble isn't even that we don't HAVE such a program. The trouble is that we don't know how to write it.
Well said. It is amazing how many grandiose claims of impending doom we hear from the "experts" latly. The nasty little truth is that not one of them understands intelligence. But will that stop them? Don't count on it. Hawking has just joined Bill Joy, Vernor Vinge (of Vinge Singularity fame), and countless others into the AI-singularity-doomsday-prophet hall of shame.
The simplest and most obvious method to create an AI is to generate variations, test them competitively, delete the poor performers, and multiply the good performers.
I disagree. The evolutionary method cannot possibly create an AI within the lifetimes of the experimenter. The number of variations is astronomical and our computers are too limited. The best you can hope for are a few limited domain toys.
The best way to create an animal-level AI is by reverse-engineering the only intelligent systems we know of, animal nervous systems. We don't need to understand every detail. We just need to understand the fundamental principles that can get billions of look-alike and work-alike cells to find the right connections and do the things they do. IOW, we need emulate various neuron types and the handful of cell assemblies of the animal brain. Neurobiologists have made excellent progress in this area, in the last few decades, and we can expect some real breakthroughs anytime.
The truth of the matter is that intelligence is driven by motivation. A super intelligent system that is conditioned from the start to derive pleasure from obeying humans and to have an aversion to anything that brings harm to humans will not go against its conditioning. It will not want ot. This is what psychology and advances in bio-neurological research have taught us in the last one hundred years. The idea that an intelligent machine will necessarily enslave humanity is pure hogwash. Hawking is just the latest crackpot (Bill Joy and Vernor Vinge) to make pronouncements regarding the supposed threat of AI to humanity.
Now it does not suprise me one bit that Hawking would come up with such cockamamie nonsense. This is the same guy who claims on his site that relativity does not forbid time travel. I think Hawking should stick to his Star-Trek voodoo physics and leave AI to people who know what they're talking about.
ACM + IEEE Can Make a Big Difference
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ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 2
Let them join forces together and send a strong message to the politicians in Washingtom and the European Parliament.
The same can be said of scientific journalism. Most science journalists are science whores. If they were doing their jobs, they would uncover that a lot of what passes itself as science, especially in the physics community, is really a bunch of chicken feather voodoo. A few things that come to mind are time travel, wormholes, multiple parallel universes, quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is), time warps, dimensions that have sizes, dimensions that can be curled up into little tiny little balls, etc., etc...
It's truly fucking pathetic. Worst of all, most of the proponents of all this Star-Trek hocus pocus are big-time famous physicists like Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, David Deutsch, and the like, hiding behind a wall of obfuscations and thinking they are forever beyond public scrutiny. And all of it is supported by the public's money. Science journalists are ready to prostitute themselves to interview those charlatans. And they do.
So don't lay all the blame for what's wrong with journalism on tech journalists. It's all over the place. It's called bias and self-interest. As Feyarabend wrote, "it is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action."
Freedom of information = open source = open science. We, the public, don't need a condescending priesthood to look down on us while spending our money.
This is my rant. I've said what I had to say. You can mod me down now.
We must send a strong signal that we are not going to let our freedoms trampled on. Adobe started this as a test of the vialibility of the DMCA. Then, to get on the public's good side, they backed out. Too late! It's the thought that counts. They must pay the consequences. If we do nothing, the DMCA will stay on the books.
Mob rule, yeah thats the way to go. Change the laws by breaking the laws. The end justifies the means. What a load of crap.
That's what the British told Ghandi.
It would be different if we lived in a society where the artists could go off and not worry about the mundane things like buying food, paying rent, paying bills, paying for studio time, etc, etc, etc. But we don't. So either they have enough resources (money) to do fund their work themselves, or they rely on the money they made from their last work to fund their next.
I agree that artists need to make a living but this is something they should take up with their government. The current system is a slave system but I won't go off on this tangent here. The truth is the vast majority of artists make a living without the help of the RIAA. The entertainment industry is more like a lottery with a few people who made it in and are making almost all the money (along with the middle men), while everybody else is sitting outside hoping to get in. Most never do. There are a lot of musicians who make a living doing gigs at local joints. Where is their share of the billions being raked in by the music industry? Many unknown artists are in fact just as good if not better the ones who are making it big. The RIAA should put their money where their mouth is and subsidize them. You know what? They'll never do it because it's money out of their pocket.
The only reason that the RIAA is so arrogant is they they have power. Their power, however, comes from us, i.e., from the money they make when we, the public buy their products. They use this power to lord it over us and help enact their fascist laws.
There is only one way to cut them to size and reclaim our liberties. We must hit them where it hurts the most, their pocket book. We must refuse to buy their products. Download it all and copy it all! Then make copies for your friends and neighbors. Let's see them put an entire population in jail.
That's why he invented the Schrodinger's cat experiment where you put a cat in a box with some poison gas which gets released if a certain quantum mechanical event takes place (e.g. radioactive decay of an atom).
You mean quantum computing is based on superposed cats? No wonder it doesn't work. I'm joking but only because the whole thing sounds like a joke.
Thus the cat is in a superposition of "alive" and "dead" which is (according to Schrodinger) nonsense.
Schrodinger was absolutely right. I have a big paversion to physics theories that work only when nobody's looking. But what gets to me is that the tax payer's money is being used to fund someone's snake oil.
First of all your logical argument against travel in spacetime to me makes no sense. You find that it is self-referential, because to find the velocity in the time axis the equation would be v = dt/dt.
If a time dimension does exist it would not be a spatial dimension therefore 'velocity' within it wouldnt make any sense in the first place.
You are agreeing with me. It is precisely for this reason that there is no time travel. IOW, there is no motion in spacetime. Therefore there is no spacetime and no time dimension either.
Velocity is a phenomena that is found in our (3D) world. However there is a connection between relative velocity and time itself. The faster you travel the slower time appears to be.
An observer will notice a moving clock to run slower. Time itself cannot change because changing time is self-referential.
This has been proven with atomic clocks on space flights. 'Time' itself did slow down, even though it was fractions of seconds.
Not entirely correct. Time dilation is a misnomer. Time can neither slow down nor speed up. Only processes (clocks) slow down. Clocks are used to measure invariant temporal intervals. Intervals measured with a moving clock or a clock under the influence of gravity will seem longer than with a non-moving or inertial clock. "Time dilation" is not time travel. If a slowed clock actually traveled in time, it would simply disappear from view. I suggest you take a look at the book "Relativity from A to B" by Robert Geroch. Here's an excerpt:
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.
Also check out the work of relativists like Bianchi, Pavsic and Horwitz, especially the latter's invariant tau formalism. I am not making any of this stuff up.
Another thing you claim they are mathematical abstracts and have no counter-parts in nature.
I never made any such claim. I said that the spacetime model has no counterpart in nature. If it did, there would be no motion. Please do not use this strawman against me. I'd appreciate a little bit of honesty from my critics.
You seem to me to be very anti-science.
No I am not. I love science. I am against the "chauvinism of science", as Feyerabend puts it in his "Against Method." I am especially against quackery that passes itself as science. I am against any group of people who would set itself up as some kind of privileged priesthood over the public.
Again what is your point my friend? Science sometimes gets boggled down in its own abstractions and becomes a little crazy but what human endeavor does not?
We, the public, pay good money for scientific research. A lot of money. We deserve to get good science for our money. Not snake oil. Quackery from famous charlatans is orders of magnitude more detrimental to humanity than crackpottery from your run of the mill crackpot. It is like a monkey wrench in the works. It can set us back for decades if not centuries.
If there is one thing that a great many physicists and mathematicians have in common, it's their insufferable pomposity. My site was not created for you. It's for the lay public. They are the ones who need to wake up and wipe that smug superiority smile off your faces and remind you who the real bosses are. So if you don't like it, don't read it.
Just think of the qubit as a quasi-analog device. It can be pure red or pure blue or 6 other values representing blends of red and blue in different proportions.
Yeah right. While no one is looking, right?
Of course when you look to see what color it is, the act of looking changes the color.
The amazing thing about quantum computing is that it only works when nobody is looking. As soon as you take a look, all the in-between values disappear into thin air. It's like saying you can jump as tall as the empire state building when nobody is looking. What ever happened to physics being an experimental science? It's looking more and more like chicken feather voodoo physics to me. But to each his own I suppose.
All the money in the world can't switch off gravity, nor make the earth flat.
It can't create an infinite number of universes either. Nor can it allow time travel (a la Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne) or have a particle's state be two mutually exclusive values concurrently. Especially when nobody is looking.
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."
This is so true. David Deutsch is a half-crazed crackpot and con artist who manage to convince a bunch of gullible people that his chicken faether voodoo physics is real science. I never thought I'd live to see the day when science is turned into in-your-face superstition by a bunch of swindlers. Do physicists think that there are beyond public scrutiny? Do they really think they can throw any crap at the public and that the public is forced to swallow it? I think they should be careful because the public is not as stupid as they want us to belive. One day, we'll wake up from our stupor and wipe that smug superiority smile off their faces. After all we pay their salaries and we reserve the ultimate right to decide what is good science and what is not.
It is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action. Paul Feyerabend
Fascism is the only way to enforce IP laws. They must have control over what you see and what you download. In other words, the government is going to be spying on you big time, not a little bit like before. The FTAA is also a way for the have nations to economically dominate (i.e., enslave) the have-nots since most IP in the western world is owned by Europe and North America.
There is no stopping it. They are armed to the teeth and they own the mass media. We're all shit out of luck. Goodbye liberty! I will miss you.
If the government is allowed to keep secrets from its citizens, so should we, too, have the right to keep secrets from the government. Either we trust each other or we don't. A government that spies on its own people should not and will not last. A house divided and all that.
I suggest that we flood the net with documents containing hidden bogus messages. Maybe an innocuous worm or virus would do the trick. It could seek out audio and image files and insert random messages. That should keep the spying computers of the government and other freedom hating organizations busy.
But wait a minute, seeing they can enact freedom squashing laws like the DMCA with impunity, what's to keep them from making steganography illegal? Resist Big Brother. Demand freedom always!
Fascism knows no borders and no political affiliation. Communism and capitalism, it makes no difference. We are all a bunch of slaves wherever we go.
Who's going to protect the people when their liberties are being trampled by the very governments that are entrusted to protect them? Governments have turned into police states that continually spy on their own people. They are armed to the teeth and they won't give up their power easily. First they lie to you and tell you that you are living in the land of the free, then they disarm you, and then they enslave you without you even noticing that you're a slave. Anybody who thought that the internet would stay free and anonymous for long was just dreaming.
Who are we gonna call? Ghostbusters? I am afraid we're all shit out of luck.
Big Brother Has Been Around for a While
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Taming the Web
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Looks like it's police state time for Amerika.
Big Brotherism starts the moment that individuals are forced to have ID numbers like a bunch of slaves. It's been around for a long time. It's just getting more efficient with computers. In fact, the more a trojan horses and viruses are unleashed on the net, the more secure and efficient it becomes. IP laws are just the tip of the fascist iceberg.
On a side note, there is a story in the old testament where King David gave the order to take a count of the people. God got so pissed off at that flagrant violation of liberty that he sent a nasty plague on them. Just a thought.
If you don't have income property, you're a slave. You can either live with it or fight it. But watch out if you decide to fight. The state is rather powerful. It is armed to the teeth and will not give up its power easily. They'll hurt you real bad if they have to. But first they will disarm you as they have pretty much done already. So you're all shit out of luck.
Mentioned with reverence, but still slowly going bust.
The reason that high speed computing has not taken off is that there are currently no consumer apps that require it. Only a few scientific, research and governmental organizations have a need for it. However, let's say there is a breakthrough in AI technology, it will require googles of CPUs and memory. And when that happens, the market will explode.
People are going to want their mechanical maids, baby sitters, gardeners, chauffeurs, lawyers, companions, stock market experts, and what not. I predict they are going to crave their mechanical servants to the point of pathological obssession.
Don't be so sure this won't happen in your lifetime. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that it might happen anytime. There is an awful lot of minds thinking about intelligence and an awful lot of money being spent on it right now. IMO, the solution to the intelligence problem is probably simple. As Dr. Rodney Brooks of MIT says, "Maybe this is wishful thinking, but maybe there really is something that we're missing." Any day now.
In conclusion, I would recommend that you don't sell your shares in the supercomputing sector just yet.
Let's face it, if you can't put chains on it, if you can't put a fence around it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Software, ideas, drawings, music, plans, it makes no difference. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe. It belongs to nobody and to everybody.
The only way that IP laws will be enforceable in the age of the internet is to institute Orwellian laws whereby the governement is given fascist powers to spy on everybody. Already, hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted software are being used freely around the world and there is nothing the manufacturers can do about it, short of instituting full blown fascism.
Wait a minute, aren't they doing that already? Aren't all ISPs in the US and Europe already keeping a log of all user activities? A government that finds it necessary to spy on its own people, not only does not deserve to last, but cannot possibly last. A house divided and all that...
Hit them where it hurt the most, the pocket book. It's our money that is being used to enact stupid laws like the DMCA. Without money, they have no power. There is only one solution against fascist IP laws: Download it all and copy it all! And use it all for free! Don't give them your money so they can turn around and use it against you.
Well, as it was said in a previous post, the 'effect' could be due to ferrous contamination...
Even if it were due to ferrous contaminants in the tried samples, the effect would still be noteworthy because a) it does not seem to attenuate with distance from the conductor (no inverse square law) and b) it propagates through different materials.
Letting this horribly bad law sit on the books any longer is as a bad an idea as telling Sklyarov to run for it.
You have a good point. However, you can rest assured that this law is not going to be repealed any time soon. A few thousand geeks crying foul is not going to make a difference. In the light of Code Red, Sircam etc..., geeks have less political power now than they ever had. If Sklyarov hangs around, he will certainly go back to jail and face a heavy fine. Unless, of course, the Russian government makes a big deal out of it, and they won't.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
Ok. Just for fun. There are two individuals mentioned in that passage:
Individual #1. He that has understanding and is to count the number of the beast.
Individual #2. The beast.
Now which one of those two individuals is the last sentence refering to? Note that the reader is apparently warned from the beginning that it takes wisdom to understand the sentence. Maybe everybody is wrong about the number of the beast. Which would make sense considering that the book of revelation claims that almost everybody is deceived by the beast.
If you believe in this stuff about 666 being the number of the beast, why do you think that you are not one of the deceived ones? And if the number is given to you, why would the author of the passage ask you to calculate it? Just a thought. Move along now.
It's amazing how so many people forget about how WELL simpler animals' nervous systems work - and the robustness is something that no AI I know of has.
Indeed. Many are under the mistaken impression that computers are more reliable than biological neural systems. The truth is that, taking network and behavioral complexity into consideration, current computers would almost never fail if they had only a mere fraction of the robustness of natural systems.
With that said - I don't think that the nervous strategy is the ONLY one - people often wrongly assume that the only goal of AI is to create exact replicas of human cognition - as far as I am concerned AI must also create intelligent (but not human intelligent) programs to solve goals and specific scientific / applied problems.
IMO, the learning and adaptive capabilities of humans are unsurpassable by any other method. Certainly we don't need our robots to look like and act like people (spider-like robots will probably be more stable in most environment) but unless we can emulate the perceptual, motivational and motor learning capabilities of humans and animals, we won't have AI. All we'll have is a bunch of toys.
P.S. I'm not so sure I agree with you on the Relativity/Time Travel thing - Mr. Hawkings DOES know an incredible amount regarding physics and relativity, and I've read other reputable authors claim that, practibility and feasability nonwithstanding, there is little in special / general relativity theory that DISALLOWS time travel.
The irrefutable fact is that the spacetime of relativity does not allow any sort of travel at all. It is frozen from the infinite past to the infinite future. The reason is that moving in time is self-referential. This is well-known in the physics community and I provide plenty of references to support this on my site. That people like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne can get away with feeding their Star-Trek snake oil to the public without fear of being contradicted is a testament to the political ass-kissing and dishonesty that is rampant within the upper echelons of the physics community.
Moore's law is NOT the bottleneck the AI community is experiencing. The issue here is not "our computers aren't small/fast enough". The problem is that nobody yet knows how to write a program that is isomorphic to the one creating this sentence. Read that again--the trouble here is not that we don't have a sufficiently powerful computer to RUN such a program...the trouble isn't even that we don't HAVE such a program. The trouble is that we don't know how to write it.
Well said. It is amazing how many grandiose claims of impending doom we hear from the "experts" latly. The nasty little truth is that not one of them understands intelligence. But will that stop them? Don't count on it. Hawking has just joined Bill Joy, Vernor Vinge (of Vinge Singularity fame), and countless others into the AI-singularity-doomsday-prophet hall of shame.
The simplest and most obvious method to create an AI is to generate variations, test them competitively, delete the poor performers, and multiply the good performers.
I disagree. The evolutionary method cannot possibly create an AI within the lifetimes of the experimenter. The number of variations is astronomical and our computers are too limited. The best you can hope for are a few limited domain toys.
The best way to create an animal-level AI is by reverse-engineering the only intelligent systems we know of, animal nervous systems. We don't need to understand every detail. We just need to understand the fundamental principles that can get billions of look-alike and work-alike cells to find the right connections and do the things they do. IOW, we need emulate various neuron types and the handful of cell assemblies of the animal brain. Neurobiologists have made excellent progress in this area, in the last few decades, and we can expect some real breakthroughs anytime.
The truth of the matter is that intelligence is driven by motivation. A super intelligent system that is conditioned from the start to derive pleasure from obeying humans and to have an aversion to anything that brings harm to humans will not go against its conditioning. It will not want ot. This is what psychology and advances in bio-neurological research have taught us in the last one hundred years. The idea that an intelligent machine will necessarily enslave humanity is pure hogwash. Hawking is just the latest crackpot (Bill Joy and Vernor Vinge) to make pronouncements regarding the supposed threat of AI to humanity.
Now it does not suprise me one bit that Hawking would come up with such cockamamie nonsense. This is the same guy who claims on his site that relativity does not forbid time travel. I think Hawking should stick to his Star-Trek voodoo physics and leave AI to people who know what they're talking about.
Let them join forces together and send a strong message to the politicians in Washingtom and the European Parliament.
The same can be said of scientific journalism. Most science journalists are science whores. If they were doing their jobs, they would uncover that a lot of what passes itself as science, especially in the physics community, is really a bunch of chicken feather voodoo. A few things that come to mind are time travel, wormholes, multiple parallel universes, quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is), time warps, dimensions that have sizes, dimensions that can be curled up into little tiny little balls, etc., etc...
It's truly fucking pathetic. Worst of all, most of the proponents of all this Star-Trek hocus pocus are big-time famous physicists like Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, David Deutsch, and the like, hiding behind a wall of obfuscations and thinking they are forever beyond public scrutiny. And all of it is supported by the public's money. Science journalists are ready to prostitute themselves to interview those charlatans. And they do.
So don't lay all the blame for what's wrong with journalism on tech journalists. It's all over the place. It's called bias and self-interest. As Feyarabend wrote, "it is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action."
Freedom of information = open source = open science. We, the public, don't need a condescending priesthood to look down on us while spending our money.
This is my rant. I've said what I had to say. You can mod me down now.
We must send a strong signal that we are not going to let our freedoms trampled on. Adobe started this as a test of the vialibility of the DMCA. Then, to get on the public's good side, they backed out. Too late! It's the thought that counts. They must pay the consequences. If we do nothing, the DMCA will stay on the books.
Mob rule, yeah thats the way to go. Change the laws by breaking the laws. The end justifies the means. What a load of crap.
That's what the British told Ghandi.
It would be different if we lived in a society where the artists could go off and not worry about the mundane things like buying food, paying rent, paying bills, paying for studio time, etc, etc, etc. But we don't. So either they have enough resources (money) to do fund their work themselves, or they rely on the money they made from their last work to fund their next.
I agree that artists need to make a living but this is something they should take up with their government. The current system is a slave system but I won't go off on this tangent here. The truth is the vast majority of artists make a living without the help of the RIAA. The entertainment industry is more like a lottery with a few people who made it in and are making almost all the money (along with the middle men), while everybody else is sitting outside hoping to get in. Most never do. There are a lot of musicians who make a living doing gigs at local joints. Where is their share of the billions being raked in by the music industry? Many unknown artists are in fact just as good if not better the ones who are making it big. The RIAA should put their money where their mouth is and subsidize them. You know what? They'll never do it because it's money out of their pocket.
The only reason that the RIAA is so arrogant is they they have power. Their power, however, comes from us, i.e., from the money they make when we, the public buy their products. They use this power to lord it over us and help enact their fascist laws.
There is only one way to cut them to size and reclaim our liberties. We must hit them where it hurts the most, their pocket book. We must refuse to buy their products. Download it all and copy it all! Then make copies for your friends and neighbors. Let's see them put an entire population in jail.
That's why he invented the Schrodinger's cat experiment where you put a cat in a box with some poison gas which gets released if a certain quantum mechanical event takes place (e.g. radioactive decay of an atom).
You mean quantum computing is based on superposed cats? No wonder it doesn't work. I'm joking but only because the whole thing sounds like a joke.
Thus the cat is in a superposition of "alive" and "dead" which is (according to Schrodinger) nonsense.
Schrodinger was absolutely right. I have a big paversion to physics theories that work only when nobody's looking. But what gets to me is that the tax payer's money is being used to fund someone's snake oil.
First of all your logical argument against travel in spacetime to me makes no sense. You find that it is self-referential, because to find the velocity in the time axis the equation would be v = dt/dt.
If a time dimension does exist it would not be a spatial dimension therefore 'velocity' within it wouldnt make any sense in the first place.
You are agreeing with me. It is precisely for this reason that there is no time travel. IOW, there is no motion in spacetime. Therefore there is no spacetime and no time dimension either.
Velocity is a phenomena that is found in our (3D) world. However there is a connection between relative velocity and time itself. The faster you travel the slower time appears to be.
An observer will notice a moving clock to run slower. Time itself cannot change because changing time is self-referential.
This has been proven with atomic clocks on space flights. 'Time' itself did slow down, even though it was fractions of seconds.
Not entirely correct. Time dilation is a misnomer. Time can neither slow down nor speed up. Only processes (clocks) slow down. Clocks are used to measure invariant temporal intervals. Intervals measured with a moving clock or a clock under the influence of gravity will seem longer than with a non-moving or inertial clock. "Time dilation" is not time travel. If a slowed clock actually traveled in time, it would simply disappear from view. I suggest you take a look at the book "Relativity from A to B" by Robert Geroch. Here's an excerpt:
There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.
Also check out the work of relativists like Bianchi, Pavsic and Horwitz, especially the latter's invariant tau formalism. I am not making any of this stuff up.
Another thing you claim they are mathematical abstracts and have no counter-parts in nature.
I never made any such claim. I said that the spacetime model has no counterpart in nature. If it did, there would be no motion. Please do not use this strawman against me. I'd appreciate a little bit of honesty from my critics.
You seem to me to be very anti-science.
No I am not. I love science. I am against the "chauvinism of science", as Feyerabend puts it in his "Against Method." I am especially against quackery that passes itself as science. I am against any group of people who would set itself up as some kind of privileged priesthood over the public.
Again what is your point my friend? Science sometimes gets boggled down in its own abstractions and becomes a little crazy but what human endeavor does not?
We, the public, pay good money for scientific research. A lot of money. We deserve to get good science for our money. Not snake oil. Quackery from famous charlatans is orders of magnitude more detrimental to humanity than crackpottery from your run of the mill crackpot. It is like a monkey wrench in the works. It can set us back for decades if not centuries.
If there is one thing that a great many physicists and mathematicians have in common, it's their insufferable pomposity. My site was not created for you. It's for the lay public. They are the ones who need to wake up and wipe that smug superiority smile off your faces and remind you who the real bosses are. So if you don't like it, don't read it.
Just think of the qubit as a quasi-analog device. It can be pure red or pure blue or 6 other values representing blends of red and blue in different proportions.
Yeah right. While no one is looking, right?
Of course when you look to see what color it is, the act of looking changes the color.
The amazing thing about quantum computing is that it only works when nobody is looking. As soon as you take a look, all the in-between values disappear into thin air. It's like saying you can jump as tall as the empire state building when nobody is looking. What ever happened to physics being an experimental science? It's looking more and more like chicken feather voodoo physics to me. But to each his own I suppose.
All the money in the world can't switch off gravity, nor make the earth flat.
It can't create an infinite number of universes either. Nor can it allow time travel (a la Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne) or have a particle's state be two mutually exclusive values concurrently. Especially when nobody is looking.
Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."
This is so true. David Deutsch is a half-crazed crackpot and con artist who manage to convince a bunch of gullible people that his chicken faether voodoo physics is real science. I never thought I'd live to see the day when science is turned into in-your-face superstition by a bunch of swindlers. Do physicists think that there are beyond public scrutiny? Do they really think they can throw any crap at the public and that the public is forced to swallow it? I think they should be careful because the public is not as stupid as they want us to belive. One day, we'll wake up from our stupor and wipe that smug superiority smile off their faces. After all we pay their salaries and we reserve the ultimate right to decide what is good science and what is not.
It is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action. Paul Feyerabend
Fascism is the only way to enforce IP laws. They must have control over what you see and what you download. In other words, the government is going to be spying on you big time, not a little bit like before. The FTAA is also a way for the have nations to economically dominate (i.e., enslave) the have-nots since most IP in the western world is owned by Europe and North America.
There is no stopping it. They are armed to the teeth and they own the mass media. We're all shit out of luck. Goodbye liberty! I will miss you.
If the government is allowed to keep secrets from its citizens, so should we, too, have the right to keep secrets from the government. Either we trust each other or we don't. A government that spies on its own people should not and will not last. A house divided and all that.
I suggest that we flood the net with documents containing hidden bogus messages. Maybe an innocuous worm or virus would do the trick. It could seek out audio and image files and insert random messages. That should keep the spying computers of the government and other freedom hating organizations busy.
But wait a minute, seeing they can enact freedom squashing laws like the DMCA with impunity, what's to keep them from making steganography illegal? Resist Big Brother. Demand freedom always!
Fascism knows no borders and no political affiliation. Communism and capitalism, it makes no difference. We are all a bunch of slaves wherever we go.
Who's going to protect the people when their liberties are being trampled by the very governments that are entrusted to protect them? Governments have turned into police states that continually spy on their own people. They are armed to the teeth and they won't give up their power easily. First they lie to you and tell you that you are living in the land of the free, then they disarm you, and then they enslave you without you even noticing that you're a slave. Anybody who thought that the internet would stay free and anonymous for long was just dreaming.
Who are we gonna call? Ghostbusters? I am afraid we're all shit out of luck.
Looks like it's police state time for Amerika.
Big Brotherism starts the moment that individuals are forced to have ID numbers like a bunch of slaves. It's been around for a long time. It's just getting more efficient with computers. In fact, the more a trojan horses and viruses are unleashed on the net, the more secure and efficient it becomes. IP laws are just the tip of the fascist iceberg.
On a side note, there is a story in the old testament where King David gave the order to take a count of the people. God got so pissed off at that flagrant violation of liberty that he sent a nasty plague on them. Just a thought.
If you don't have income property, you're a slave. You can either live with it or fight it. But watch out if you decide to fight. The state is rather powerful. It is armed to the teeth and will not give up its power easily. They'll hurt you real bad if they have to. But first they will disarm you as they have pretty much done already. So you're all shit out of luck.
Mentioned with reverence, but still slowly going bust.
The reason that high speed computing has not taken off is that there are currently no consumer apps that require it. Only a few scientific, research and governmental organizations have a need for it. However, let's say there is a breakthrough in AI technology, it will require googles of CPUs and memory. And when that happens, the market will explode.
People are going to want their mechanical maids, baby sitters, gardeners, chauffeurs, lawyers, companions, stock market experts, and what not. I predict they are going to crave their mechanical servants to the point of pathological obssession.
Don't be so sure this won't happen in your lifetime. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that it might happen anytime. There is an awful lot of minds thinking about intelligence and an awful lot of money being spent on it right now. IMO, the solution to the intelligence problem is probably simple. As Dr. Rodney Brooks of MIT says, "Maybe this is wishful thinking, but maybe there really is something that we're missing." Any day now.
In conclusion, I would recommend that you don't sell your shares in the supercomputing sector just yet.
Let's face it, if you can't put chains on it, if you can't put a fence around it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Software, ideas, drawings, music, plans, it makes no difference. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe. It belongs to nobody and to everybody.
The only way that IP laws will be enforceable in the age of the internet is to institute Orwellian laws whereby the governement is given fascist powers to spy on everybody. Already, hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted software are being used freely around the world and there is nothing the manufacturers can do about it, short of instituting full blown fascism.
Wait a minute, aren't they doing that already? Aren't all ISPs in the US and Europe already keeping a log of all user activities? A government that finds it necessary to spy on its own people, not only does not deserve to last, but cannot possibly last. A house divided and all that...
Hit them where it hurt the most, the pocket book. It's our money that is being used to enact stupid laws like the DMCA. Without money, they have no power. There is only one solution against fascist IP laws: Download it all and copy it all! And use it all for free! Don't give them your money so they can turn around and use it against you.
Well, as it was said in a previous post, the 'effect' could be due to ferrous contamination...
Even if it were due to ferrous contaminants in the tried samples, the effect would still be noteworthy because a) it does not seem to attenuate with distance from the conductor (no inverse square law) and b) it propagates through different materials.
Letting this horribly bad law sit on the books any longer is as a bad an idea as telling Sklyarov to run for it.
You have a good point. However, you can rest assured that this law is not going to be repealed any time soon. A few thousand geeks crying foul is not going to make a difference. In the light of Code Red, Sircam etc..., geeks have less political power now than they ever had. If Sklyarov hangs around, he will certainly go back to jail and face a heavy fine. Unless, of course, the Russian government makes a big deal out of it, and they won't.