I never understood why it was believed that quantum physics would explain consciousness.
It may come from the way Q.M. has labelled what happens when an observation is made as the 'collapse of the state vector' Note that some posters to this thread have already used that phrase or variations. 'Collapse' often has a certain negative connotation, like the place quantum events begin in is somehow superior to the place they end up in, a sort of Satanic fall accompanying every little wave function as it coalesces to become an electron's known position. The choice of the word collapse seems to imply that the place quantum events collapse from to enter the classical, (natural) realm is something better or superior, superior to the natural world means 'supernatural', in other words the "quantum level" is Heaven. From there it's a simple step to associate Q.M with all sorts of other unexplained things traditionally associated with the supernatural, like consciousness and free will. Sometimes, I wish the term Reification had caught on more. A few of the early Q.M. theorists liked it better, but it fell out of favor. A good translation would be 'becoming thing-like', and that's really what we are talking about here - probabilities becoming actual things.
I read that complaint, thought "yeah, I can see where that's been an occasional peeve of mine.", and went into Kubunt's system settings and immediately put a couple of spaces between the Close button on the far right, and the other five buttons I usually keep (Help, Keep on top, Shade, Minimise, Maximise). For me, that's plenty to isolate the 'close' button and I don't need to move the rest to the left hand edge, but I could have if I wanted to. I could have made any or all of them glow a different color when the cursor hovers over one, such as red if I really needed a caution indicator. Even if I was suffering from severe Retinitus Pigmentosa or Wet Macular Degeneration, I could probably have gotten the system to where I would seldom have trouble hitting the right button. Tell me why it's not the year of the Linux desktop again? (If not for everyone, for the guy who wrote tins article, and for tens of thousands of disabled users who could surely appeal on someone else to set the system up using Linux's abundant support for the disabled - Why are they not being told Linux can solve at least a great many of their interface problems?).
When the term 'spin' was first coined for sub-atomic particles, it was chosen because it was thought to have some similarities to macro-scale situations. (this was 1925, by about 1928 when Paul Dirac used it, people were already arguing about whether 'spin' really had to correspond to anything physical about the particles shape. Still 'spin' behaves like a form of angular momentum in at least some ways.).
The spin of an electron is 1/2. By that, if it was a macroscopic object, it would only look the same if it was rotated 720%. If you turned it around just once (360 degrees), it would look different. Some other particles have spin 1 or even 3/2, and the predicted carrier of mass itself, the Higgs boson, is predicted to be spin 2 (which means if it was a macroscopic object, you would have to rotate it only 180 degrees for it to look the same - A macroscopic object with that property might be shaped like a football or a cigar, if it was being rotated around a certain axis.). Obviously, there are no macroscopic examples of objects with classical spin less than 1, so an electron couldn't look like anything macroscopic in this model. Its shape would have to be something that can't exist in the macro world.
A perfect sphere is spin infinite, or arguably doesn't have a spin at all, it doesn't matter how you rotate it, it still looks the same.
Another idea was that an electron had to be an absolute point, zero size in all directions. If you go by the old Bohr atom model, Electrons orbit the nucleus like tiny planets, but physicists soon realised they had to be moving at tremendous percentages of the speed of light. So in the Bohr atom, a spherical electron would look distorted, tremendously flattened in the direction of motion. It would look almost like a pancake. This led to some problems when calculating what happens as multiple electrons orbit in shells around a single nucleus - in particular, it led to erroneous predictions about how heavier atoms than helium would emit various wavelengths of light in their spectra, and how atoms outer shells would form crystals, set the spacing between nuclei, and do a lot of other things (for examples, even how much energy it would take to fracture something or how fast two different metals weld together at a particular temperature come out different, if I remember my old physic classes),
So that's a theory that says an electron can't be a sphere, unless (really odd idea from the 1930's) it stretches to compensate for relativistic distortion and stay a sphere when it would normally flatten. For other reasons, the Bohr atom model turned out to be inadequate and most modern physics works by treating the electron as a wave function, as in quantum mechanics, in all the cases where the Bohr model doesn't give accurate numbers for observational results.Obviously, the shape of a probabilistic wave function isn't a tiny sphere or anything else solid, more like a fuzzy shell around the nucleus.
But for weeks afterwards, major news sources have run headlines like 'Reactor 1 known to have melted down, reactors 2 and 3 possible, ', even though it sounds like "possible" meant "overwhelmingly probable, on a par with the sun rising tomorrow, but we haven't actually gotten photos to confirm it yet, or at least we've carefully avoided showing them to the guy making this statement.". The general public is going to be influenced by those sorts of headlines without ever seeing the actual status updates,
I'm personally for building safely designed reactors under responsible management - trouble is, TEPCO has shown they are not in any way what I would call responsible management. The nuclear power industry may survive the blow of having major accidents like this, but can it survive being associated with such incompetence, overwhelming lies and arrogance?
If you use the term 'Dark Energy' for a place-holder of sorts, as many people popularising the concept still do, you're right, but the term has become more than that (which I guess leaves you semi-right):-)
There are basically three, maybe four classes of hypothesis about dark energy. 1. There's an original set of hypothesis that was based on some estimates about the amount of normal matter in the universe and the amount of dark matter and dark energy there would need to be to make the universe just barely closed, based on the raw data astronomers had about 1994-95. 2. There's a second set of them, based on more current data, circa 2005-10. These are based on their being a lot more visible mass in the universe than we once thought in the 90's, but still a lot less (an order of magnitude, at the very least) than needed to close the universe..They're also based on being able to rule out both some forms of undetected normal matter and possible types of dark matter. So we have some idea of what dark matter is, in that we now are sure it doesn't behave like most of those earlier models. In particular, we now are pretty sure dark matter doesn't pack together in the same way as normal matter - it won't 'schrunch down' to make something as compact as a star or a galaxy, but instead has a much shallower density gradient, forming huge clouds that are not much denser in their middles than near the edges. Unfortunately, almost none of the data seems to predict that dark matter is any of the hypothetical particles from various theories that seem likely in particle physics/quantum mechanics/string theory. Maybe it's a mixture of several, but that's a complex explanation and physicists are reluctant to go with that. 3. Maybe there's a simple explanation, one that requires only a single type of dark matter and a single force for dark energy..Maybe there's even a single theory.that will tie both of them together. But all the types of hypothesis considered for that role are in the area of far from mainstream physics. They all have a certain flakey side to them, almost like the electric universe hypothesis. (And no, I'm not saying that electric universe is a valid contender for a theory to explain dark energy - it does not appear to be at all - I'm just saying that the third group of hypothesis are every bit as strange as E.U.). 4. There's the occasional really weird hypothesis, that doesn't even worry about whether it predicts the universe is flat, doesn't seem to support a simple, single form of dark matter either, and is basically baroque in its elaboration, quirky in its math, and filled with ad-hoc assumptions where we are hoping that instead we will be able to derive some of the fundamental constants from simpler basics..There's a lack of elegant symmetry to the maths, and a certain amount of 'just because' to the underlying concepts. These models look like long-shots to most of the physics community, but if one of them gains traction, we would need to quit worrying about the relative flatness of the universe and why it might be expanding - for many of these models, expansion now doesn't necessarily mean the universe ever had an actual big bang, or an initial inflationary period either, and you can probably relax about the big rip too.
The common raptors of the Middle East include the Golden Eagle, the Greater Spotted Eagle, the Imperial Eagle, and the Steppe Eagle (which winters in locations such as Oman but is a European bird in the summer.), All of these species are frequent carrion eaters, and historically existed in numbers much larger than the (more specialised) vultures. (for non-biblical reference, see Pliny or just about anyone commenting on what the Romans stocked for their games.).
So yes, in this particular case, the religious types got their science exactly right.
I'd have to agree with you that the unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange land is much better, but is it a genre novel? As I understood it, Heinlein wanted the book to straddle the line between 'mainstream' fiction and SF, much like Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five". It's intended by the author to be read either like the SF elements are real, or like they are either a metaphor or a delusion of one or more of the characters. In Stranger's case, the reader just about has to accept some SF elements as objectively part of the story background, so I guess you can claim it's genre, but others, which in this case are far more important to the story, remain optional. Maybe Michael Valentine Smith really knows some things of a deep spiritual nature, or maybe he's just trying to think in a way no human can really think, due to being exposed to inhuman influences as a child. Maybe it's a religion, maybe it's alien superscience seen through the distorting lens of human limitations.
How would you feel if you spent 3 years writing a software so that you could feed your family and 2 weeks after you release it some one starts giving it away for free ?
Probably about like I feel when I buy a CD, and someone claims I accepted a EULA I could only see after the sale, then claims I don't have the right to sell the used CD because what I really own is a licence, Then claims I can't copy the CD to my own computer, and they'll throw me under the jail if I break the DMCA trying.
So you'd be OK with calling it software raping, and sentencing software rapists to 10 years per count and giving some of them chemical castration so they wouldn't rape software again? If you really don't care what we call it, fine, you don't care how you use words or whether they actually mean anything, so why are you joining a discussion by starting out saying you don't bother to speak truth and no one should bother to read your opinion? .
There are ways to use someone's work that don't need their permission. If all using someone's work without permission is stealing, then even uses such as selling a used copy (right of first sale), format shifting (copying the CD you bought onto your computer), and even time shifting (Tivoing a TV program so you can watch it later)., all become illegal and mortally wrong. It's not "period" and not "the end of story". Using something without permission simply isn't the same thing as theft, until you check to see who owns that something. You right now are breathing atoms that have already passed into my lungs, without my permission.
The people who distribute commercial music, video, and software have repeatedly claimed that what they sold me is a licence for non-commercial use, so they don't have to replace damaged physical media. They've then turned around and added after the fact EULA's, the DMCA, and other methods to take back what they supposedly sold me and flip flopped on what it is I actually own, to where they are, in effect, claiming to have sold me nothing at all. How come people like you never accuse them of theft? How come there's nobody like you saying it's all simple, right or wrong, no middle ground, you take money and don't give what you claim to be selling back, that's theft. Or are clear moral standards only for the consumer, not for businesses?
Ok, but how about "Anonymous is anyone who doesn't want to give their name and meets on 4-chan."? Or, "Anyone who says "Ima firin my Layzor!" when they hack" (or anyone who actually knows how to aim that "Layzor"). Or "Anyone who has unpacked a.JPG of a cute kitten in a hand and put those tools on a windows box". Personally, I'd go with "Anon is anyone who has actually used the tools some members of Anon distribute, to target something some members of Anon say is a bad thing." Even that definition though, is iffy. Is it only a lower bound of actually being a Windows script kiddie hactivist or better, or does it also set an upper bound. Is somone who learns about an Anonymous action suggestion from Ars Technica instead of 4 chan and joins in using Linux built in tools or custom software instead of BWRaeper.NET, still Anonymous?
In anarchy, the goals conflict is usually between people that want no rules vrs people who simply want no privileged class that has special rules just for themselves. The Wikileaks matter, for example, was largely driven by people (on Anon's side) who saw it as a class issue, with some class expecting to keep the government's actions private while claiming to have consensus from the very people they were lying to. Anonymous has always suffered from this split. You can try other models, such as serious hactivists vrs. 'just in it for the Lulz', but I doubt any of those models would predict much. Anti-Rules vrs. Anti-Rulers, OTH, seems to explain this, whether or not there's also a CIA mole or two involved.
The real question is not, why should anyone trust the word of Anonymous, the real question is why should anyone trust the word of Sony any further? Sony has repeatedly shown incompetence on a vast scale, their prosecution of various Playstation hardware hackers and such in the past has show a strong lack of ethics, and their earlier relationship with Anonymous gives Sony a major reason to lie this time. If Sony were anything except a for profit corporation, were Sony a political organization, even if it were an actual government, most people would be giving it less benefit of a doubt than they are as a business. The 80 Megaton elephant in this discussion is "Why are so many people so quick to believe a negative claim about a group like Anon, or a more established or publicly accessible group like ACORN, or even a major nation state, but so slow to begin to doubt a group such as Sony?"
String Theory is (somewhat) testable. People have gotten the idea that String Theory isn't testable because one of the predictions is supersymmetry. Supersymmetry isn't directly testable at the energies our particle accelerators can reach - indeed they fall many magnitudes of power short of producing collisions that would emit supersymmentric versions of familiar particles (no Snutrinos or Selectrons will come out of CERN or anything else we could build today, even if we made it our number one priority for the whole world for decades to build the most powerful accelerator possible).
But, the reaction rates for various fundamental particle interchanges are theoretically affected by supersymmetry, and those can be measured - this is ongoing, but seems to confirm supersymmetry does exist - at least the probabilities are now strongly suggestive that it does, and when the experiments are finished we should be at better than six sigmas confidence one way or another.
There's also astronomical testing - what we can't do here on earth may have been done many times in the immediate post big bang era and left behind strings we can observe. Part of testing string theory has had to wait on people deciding what a very large mass string in intergalactic space might do to light passing nearby and how it could be told from other gravitational lensing effects. Similarly, there's been a lot of discussion about what distortions to the form of a normal spiral galaxy might indicate a string interaction and not some other cause (a galactic mass black hole without accompanying normal matter, collision with a normal galaxy that was moving so rapidly it is no longer in the area where we would normally expect a partner in a collision to be detected, or just the galaxy being oddly formed or seen at an angle that makes it difficult to tell anything for sure.). These are issues, to be sure, but they aren't fundamentally untestable, just complex and requiring time to sort out.
For something better than a Wikipedia entry on the subject, people can start by reading this Nova Interview with Edward Witten: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-witten.html
The real tragedy of the Santa Claus argument is that he was originally a well documented historical figure (Nicholas of Myra), Nicholas was a 4th century church elder who really did do a lot of anonymous gift giving to help the poor, and particularly children. Technically, Nicholas was as real as the Nile river, and quibbles about the man made award of sainthood still eave him as real as Elizabeth the 2nd. It's not until you add in the flying reindeer and such that you start talking about something fictitious. The Easter Bunny would be a better example, as there's less of a historical reality underlying egg delivering rabbits, Personally, I like Saint Nicholas of Cusa better than St. N. of Myra. Nick of Cusa, as Wikipedia puts it, was "a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), a philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the great geniuses and polymaths of the 15th century. " Fortunately, there's no requirement to have just one Saint Nicholas. While Santa Claus was an embroidery on the saint of Myra, I suspect some bits of the other Nicholas' life have crept into the legend.
You're assuming that there is more than one universe, so that astronomical numbers are 'not so big'. Show me at least one parallel universe, please? If you have to take the existence of an infinite number of universes on faith to make your argument work, I'll invoke Occam - One God is simpler than an infinite number of anything, and hence to be preferred. In fact, the million deities of the Hindus, the seven orders of angels of Roman Catholicism, or the Eight gates surrounding the Muslim paradise all become more reasonable by Occam's Razor as scientific theories, simply because they involve less than an infinite number of untestable assumptions.
Actually, I believe that some form of multiple universe theory will probably prove correct eventually. I just want to point out that trying to reason about such things within the limits of the scientific method can lead anyone to just about any conclusion they want, depending on which rules of science they want to emphasise or ignore.
Actually, Physics 101 is perfect as an example. When I took high school physics, the Instructor started out with the introduction of four fundamentals; Matter, Energy, Space and Time. It wasn't until my second semester of college physics that this started to be shot down, with relativity, and the third semester really threw out the idea of discrete space and time, matter and energy as we got into QM. In the same way, we went from particles to fields, and eventually by my senior year to some of the basics of information based physics and descriptor theory. By my junior year, it was pretty obvious that all the language based teaching I had learned was approximations and metaphors and the real heart of physics needed math to express any part of it with any real accuracy.
Religions are just like that. You read a lot on one, keep an open mind, you see how it connects to others, you learn to ask questions, religion blends with philosophy, and just maybe direct experience comes.
Religions are also all too often like somebody getting good grades in Physics 101 and deciding that everything they heard there is the literal truth, and starting a crusade against those relativistic heretics who don't believe that space and time are two fundamentally different things.
At first, I wasn't sure why you needed to drop KDE - I've got an IBM Thinkpad with only 512 Mg or ram and it runs Kubuntu 10.4 with a lot of the extra fancy graphics bells and whistles engaged. Then I saw what kind of resolution you wanted to get to/maintain, and it made more sense. Isn't 1920 x 1200 still well above the median for laptops?
To make it simple for the rest of them - Michael Moorcock is a prolific English author of SF and Fantasy, creator of such classic characters as Elric of Melnebone. While much of his fantasy and SF is intended to be adventure oriented works and relies on a formula of having something exciting hapen every six pages like clockwork, He wrote a litterarily more ambitious work titled "Behold the Man", about a time traveller substituting for Jesus at the crucifixion so history would come out right, and uses characters with the initials J.C. frequently, some would say constantly, in his works. Jeremiah Cornelius is a character from a series of works set in the modern era, and is the sole character Moorcock actually loaned out with his blessing to any other artist that wanted to use him, so there are works by at least a dozen other well established authors featuring him, including a comic strip in Heavy Metal (The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius), and even a film (The Final Programme - AKA The Last Days of Man on Earth)),
I'm a weight lifter, aged 54. Since it took it up 4 years ago, I've built more muscle than a person my age should be able to build, according to numerous sports medicine sources. (By galvanic body-fat tests, I packed on 18 lbs of muscle the first year, and there are numerous sports medicine authorities that will claim the maximum for people my age is only about 8 lbs.). I now leg-press 5 plates (that's 505 lbs with the sled, and I do sets of 25, not 5 to 8's) So, I think I can claim to be putting forth the effort a serious athlete would put into it. But the sports related to this are Body-building and Power-lifting, neither of which is what I'm doing. I look better than I would if I didn't work out, I feel better, I perform a lot better in other sports like running and rock climbing, but the weights are all in no way sports related, because I'm doing a lot of things the sport coaches would swear are impossible and other things they would call counter-productive. A sport all too often seems to be what people call it when they isolate some subset of an activity and first claim that subset is all that matters, and then make factually false claims about how superior the people who conform to that subset are, why competition is paramount, and how anyone who isn't doing the activity their way is wrong.
Until now, I would have assumed there was no possible way Cisco could count as a monopoly. To many competitors with sizable market share, and real competition from some big dogs like IBM for parts of that share, would say Cisco simply couldn't pass the monopoly test part of antitrust law.
But, having some parts of the federal judicial system available to issue warrants without probable cause is certainly an asset their competitors show no signs of having or misusing. The normal list of assets that could make a company a monopoly includes such government related things as state granted right of ways. Corrupt judges aren't on that list, but it's easy to see why people who believe the fix was in would see this as a monopoly. What's worse is the number of cynics who think corrupt judges are simply to prevalent to let anyone get a monopoly on them.
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I never understood why it was believed that quantum physics would explain consciousness.
It may come from the way Q.M. has labelled what happens when an observation is made as the 'collapse of the state vector' Note that some posters to this thread have already used that phrase or variations. 'Collapse' often has a certain negative connotation, like the place quantum events begin in is somehow superior to the place they end up in, a sort of Satanic fall accompanying every little wave function as it coalesces to become an electron's known position. The choice of the word collapse seems to imply that the place quantum events collapse from to enter the classical, (natural) realm is something better or superior, superior to the natural world means 'supernatural', in other words the "quantum level" is Heaven. From there it's a simple step to associate Q.M with all sorts of other unexplained things traditionally associated with the supernatural, like consciousness and free will. Sometimes, I wish the term Reification had caught on more. A few of the early Q.M. theorists liked it better, but it fell out of favor. A good translation would be 'becoming thing-like', and that's really what we are talking about here - probabilities becoming actual things.
I , for one, sure wish we still had the great voice recognition support the old HAL series had.
I read that complaint, thought "yeah, I can see where that's been an occasional peeve of mine.", and went into Kubunt's system settings and immediately put a couple of spaces between the Close button on the far right, and the other five buttons I usually keep (Help, Keep on top, Shade, Minimise, Maximise). For me, that's plenty to isolate the 'close' button and I don't need to move the rest to the left hand edge, but I could have if I wanted to. I could have made any or all of them glow a different color when the cursor hovers over one, such as red if I really needed a caution indicator. Even if I was suffering from severe Retinitus Pigmentosa or Wet Macular Degeneration, I could probably have gotten the system to where I would seldom have trouble hitting the right button. Tell me why it's not the year of the Linux desktop again? (If not for everyone, for the guy who wrote tins article, and for tens of thousands of disabled users who could surely appeal on someone else to set the system up using Linux's abundant support for the disabled - Why are they not being told Linux can solve at least a great many of their interface problems?).
When the term 'spin' was first coined for sub-atomic particles, it was chosen because it was thought to have some similarities to macro-scale situations. (this was 1925, by about 1928 when Paul Dirac used it, people were already arguing about whether 'spin' really had to correspond to anything physical about the particles shape. Still 'spin' behaves like a form of angular momentum in at least some ways.).
The spin of an electron is 1/2. By that, if it was a macroscopic object, it would only look the same if it was rotated 720%. If you turned it around just once (360 degrees), it would look different. Some other particles have spin 1 or even 3/2, and the predicted carrier of mass itself, the Higgs boson, is predicted to be spin 2 (which means if it was a macroscopic object, you would have to rotate it only 180 degrees for it to look the same - A macroscopic object with that property might be shaped like a football or a cigar, if it was being rotated around a certain axis.). Obviously, there are no macroscopic examples of objects with classical spin less than 1, so an electron couldn't look like anything macroscopic in this model. Its shape would have to be something that can't exist in the macro world.
A perfect sphere is spin infinite, or arguably doesn't have a spin at all, it doesn't matter how you rotate it, it still looks the same.
Another idea was that an electron had to be an absolute point, zero size in all directions. If you go by the old Bohr atom model, Electrons orbit the nucleus like tiny planets, but physicists soon realised they had to be moving at tremendous percentages of the speed of light. So in the Bohr atom, a spherical electron would look distorted, tremendously flattened in the direction of motion. It would look almost like a pancake. This led to some problems when calculating what happens as multiple electrons orbit in shells around a single nucleus - in particular, it led to erroneous predictions about how heavier atoms than helium would emit various wavelengths of light in their spectra, and how atoms outer shells would form crystals, set the spacing between nuclei, and do a lot of other things (for examples, even how much energy it would take to fracture something or how fast two different metals weld together at a particular temperature come out different, if I remember my old physic classes),
So that's a theory that says an electron can't be a sphere, unless (really odd idea from the 1930's) it stretches to compensate for relativistic distortion and stay a sphere when it would normally flatten. For other reasons, the Bohr atom model turned out to be inadequate and most modern physics works by treating the electron as a wave function, as in quantum mechanics, in all the cases where the Bohr model doesn't give accurate numbers for observational results.Obviously, the shape of a probabilistic wave function isn't a tiny sphere or anything else solid, more like a fuzzy shell around the nucleus.
By a recent study, so is brisk walking, but combining the two can be a trifle awkward.
But for weeks afterwards, major news sources have run headlines like 'Reactor 1 known to have melted down, reactors 2 and 3 possible, ', even though it sounds like "possible" meant "overwhelmingly probable, on a par with the sun rising tomorrow, but we haven't actually gotten photos to confirm it yet, or at least we've carefully avoided showing them to the guy making this statement.". The general public is going to be influenced by those sorts of headlines without ever seeing the actual status updates,
I'm personally for building safely designed reactors under responsible management - trouble is, TEPCO has shown they are not in any way what I would call responsible management. The nuclear power industry may survive the blow of having major accidents like this, but can it survive being associated with such incompetence, overwhelming lies and arrogance?
If you use the term 'Dark Energy' for a place-holder of sorts, as many people popularising the concept still do, you're right, but the term has become more than that (which I guess leaves you semi-right) :-)
There are basically three, maybe four classes of hypothesis about dark energy. .They're also based on being able to rule out both some forms of undetected normal matter and possible types of dark matter. So we have some idea of what dark matter is, in that we now are sure it doesn't behave like most of those earlier models. In particular, we now are pretty sure dark matter doesn't pack together in the same way as normal matter - it won't 'schrunch down' to make something as compact as a star or a galaxy, but instead has a much shallower density gradient, forming huge clouds that are not much denser in their middles than near the edges. Unfortunately, almost none of the data seems to predict that dark matter is any of the hypothetical particles from various theories that seem likely in particle physics/quantum mechanics/string theory. Maybe it's a mixture of several, but that's a complex explanation and physicists are reluctant to go with that.
1. There's an original set of hypothesis that was based on some estimates about the amount of normal matter in the universe and the amount of dark matter and dark energy there would need to be to make the universe just barely closed, based on the raw data astronomers had about 1994-95.
2. There's a second set of them, based on more current data, circa 2005-10. These are based on their being a lot more visible mass in the universe than we once thought in the 90's, but still a lot less (an order of magnitude, at the very least) than needed to close the universe.
3. Maybe there's a simple explanation, one that requires only a single type of dark matter and a single force for dark energy..Maybe there's even a single theory.that will tie both of them together. But all the types of hypothesis considered for that role are in the area of far from mainstream physics. They all have a certain flakey side to them, almost like the electric universe hypothesis. (And no, I'm not saying that electric universe is a valid contender for a theory to explain dark energy - it does not appear to be at all - I'm just saying that the third group of hypothesis are every bit as strange as E.U.).
4. There's the occasional really weird hypothesis, that doesn't even worry about whether it predicts the universe is flat, doesn't seem to support a simple, single form of dark matter either, and is basically baroque in its elaboration, quirky in its math, and filled with ad-hoc assumptions where we are hoping that instead we will be able to derive some of the fundamental constants from simpler basics..There's a lack of elegant symmetry to the maths, and a certain amount of 'just because' to the underlying concepts. These models look like long-shots to most of the physics community, but if one of them gains traction, we would need to quit worrying about the relative flatness of the universe and why it might be expanding - for many of these models, expansion now doesn't necessarily mean the universe ever had an actual big bang, or an initial inflationary period either, and you can probably relax about the big rip too.
The common raptors of the Middle East include the Golden Eagle, the Greater Spotted Eagle, the Imperial Eagle, and the Steppe Eagle (which winters in locations such as Oman but is a European bird in the summer.), All of these species are frequent carrion eaters, and historically existed in numbers much larger than the (more specialised) vultures. (for non-biblical reference, see Pliny or just about anyone commenting on what the Romans stocked for their games.).
So yes, in this particular case, the religious types got their science exactly right.
I'd have to agree with you that the unabridged version of Stranger in a Strange land is much better, but is it a genre novel? As I understood it, Heinlein wanted the book to straddle the line between 'mainstream' fiction and SF, much like Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five". It's intended by the author to be read either like the SF elements are real, or like they are either a metaphor or a delusion of one or more of the characters. In Stranger's case, the reader just about has to accept some SF elements as objectively part of the story background, so I guess you can claim it's genre, but others, which in this case are far more important to the story, remain optional. Maybe Michael Valentine Smith really knows some things of a deep spiritual nature, or maybe he's just trying to think in a way no human can really think, due to being exposed to inhuman influences as a child. Maybe it's a religion, maybe it's alien superscience seen through the distorting lens of human limitations.
How would you feel if you spent 3 years writing a software so that you could feed your family and 2 weeks after you release it some one starts giving it away for free ?
Probably about like I feel when I buy a CD, and someone claims I accepted a EULA I could only see after the sale, then claims I don't have the right to sell the used CD because what I really own is a licence, Then claims I can't copy the CD to my own computer, and they'll throw me under the jail if I break the DMCA trying.
So you'd be OK with calling it software raping, and sentencing software rapists to 10 years per count and giving some of them chemical castration so they wouldn't rape software again? If you really don't care what we call it, fine, you don't care how you use words or whether they actually mean anything, so why are you joining a discussion by starting out saying you don't bother to speak truth and no one should bother to read your opinion? .
There are ways to use someone's work that don't need their permission. If all using someone's work without permission is stealing, then even uses such as selling a used copy (right of first sale), format shifting (copying the CD you bought onto your computer), and even time shifting (Tivoing a TV program so you can watch it later)., all become illegal and mortally wrong. It's not "period" and not "the end of story". Using something without permission simply isn't the same thing as theft, until you check to see who owns that something. You right now are breathing atoms that have already passed into my lungs, without my permission.
The people who distribute commercial music, video, and software have repeatedly claimed that what they sold me is a licence for non-commercial use, so they don't have to replace damaged physical media. They've then turned around and added after the fact EULA's, the DMCA, and other methods to take back what they supposedly sold me and flip flopped on what it is I actually own, to where they are, in effect, claiming to have sold me nothing at all. How come people like you never accuse them of theft? How come there's nobody like you saying it's all simple, right or wrong, no middle ground, you take money and don't give what you claim to be selling back, that's theft. Or are clear moral standards only for the consumer, not for businesses?
Ok, but how about "Anonymous is anyone who doesn't want to give their name and meets on 4-chan."? Or, "Anyone who says "Ima firin my Layzor!" when they hack" (or anyone who actually knows how to aim that "Layzor"). Or "Anyone who has unpacked a .JPG of a cute kitten in a hand and put those tools on a windows box". Personally, I'd go with "Anon is anyone who has actually used the tools some members of Anon distribute, to target something some members of Anon say is a bad thing." Even that definition though, is iffy. Is it only a lower bound of actually being a Windows script kiddie hactivist or better, or does it also set an upper bound. Is somone who learns about an Anonymous action suggestion from Ars Technica instead of 4 chan and joins in using Linux built in tools or custom software instead of BWRaeper.NET, still Anonymous?
In anarchy, the goals conflict is usually between people that want no rules vrs people who simply want no privileged class that has special rules just for themselves. The Wikileaks matter, for example, was largely driven by people (on Anon's side) who saw it as a class issue, with some class expecting to keep the government's actions private while claiming to have consensus from the very people they were lying to. Anonymous has always suffered from this split. You can try other models, such as serious hactivists vrs. 'just in it for the Lulz', but I doubt any of those models would predict much. Anti-Rules vrs. Anti-Rulers, OTH, seems to explain this, whether or not there's also a CIA mole or two involved.
The real question is not, why should anyone trust the word of Anonymous, the real question is why should anyone trust the word of Sony any further? Sony has repeatedly shown incompetence on a vast scale, their prosecution of various Playstation hardware hackers and such in the past has show a strong lack of ethics, and their earlier relationship with Anonymous gives Sony a major reason to lie this time. If Sony were anything except a for profit corporation, were Sony a political organization, even if it were an actual government, most people would be giving it less benefit of a doubt than they are as a business. The 80 Megaton elephant in this discussion is "Why are so many people so quick to believe a negative claim about a group like Anon, or a more established or publicly accessible group like ACORN, or even a major nation state, but so slow to begin to doubt a group such as Sony?"
String Theory is (somewhat) testable.
People have gotten the idea that String Theory isn't testable because one of the predictions is supersymmetry. Supersymmetry isn't directly testable at the energies our particle accelerators can reach - indeed they fall many magnitudes of power short of producing collisions that would emit supersymmentric versions of familiar particles (no Snutrinos or Selectrons will come out of CERN or anything else we could build today, even if we made it our number one priority for the whole world for decades to build the most powerful accelerator possible).
But, the reaction rates for various fundamental particle interchanges are theoretically affected by supersymmetry, and those can be measured - this is ongoing, but seems to confirm supersymmetry does exist - at least the probabilities are now strongly suggestive that it does, and when the experiments are finished we should be at better than six sigmas confidence one way or another.
There's also astronomical testing - what we can't do here on earth may have been done many times in the immediate post big bang era and left behind strings we can observe. Part of testing string theory has had to wait on people deciding what a very large mass string in intergalactic space might do to light passing nearby and how it could be told from other gravitational lensing effects. Similarly, there's been a lot of discussion about what distortions to the form of a normal spiral galaxy might indicate a string interaction and not some other cause (a galactic mass black hole without accompanying normal matter, collision with a normal galaxy that was moving so rapidly it is no longer in the area where we would normally expect a partner in a collision to be detected, or just the galaxy being oddly formed or seen at an angle that makes it difficult to tell anything for sure.). These are issues, to be sure, but they aren't fundamentally untestable, just complex and requiring time to sort out.
For something better than a Wikipedia entry on the subject, people can start by reading this Nova Interview with Edward Witten:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-witten.html
The real tragedy of the Santa Claus argument is that he was originally a well documented historical figure (Nicholas of Myra),
Nicholas was a 4th century church elder who really did do a lot of anonymous gift giving to help the poor, and particularly children.
Technically, Nicholas was as real as the Nile river, and quibbles about the man made award of sainthood still eave him as real as Elizabeth the 2nd. It's not until you add in the flying reindeer and such that you start talking about something fictitious. The Easter Bunny would be a better example, as there's less of a historical reality underlying egg delivering rabbits,
Personally, I like Saint Nicholas of Cusa better than St. N. of Myra. Nick of Cusa, as Wikipedia puts it, was "a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), a philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the great geniuses and polymaths of the 15th century. " Fortunately, there's no requirement to have just one Saint Nicholas. While Santa Claus was an embroidery on the saint of Myra, I suspect some bits of the other Nicholas' life have crept into the legend.
If electricity were magic, then Insane Clown Posse would be genuinely cool, which they aren't so it isn't - QED.
You're assuming that there is more than one universe, so that astronomical numbers are 'not so big'. Show me at least one parallel universe, please?
If you have to take the existence of an infinite number of universes on faith to make your argument work, I'll invoke Occam - One God is simpler than an infinite number of anything, and hence to be preferred. In fact, the million deities of the Hindus, the seven orders of angels of Roman Catholicism, or the Eight gates surrounding the Muslim paradise all become more reasonable by Occam's Razor as scientific theories, simply because they involve less than an infinite number of untestable assumptions.
Actually, I believe that some form of multiple universe theory will probably prove correct eventually. I just want to point out that trying to reason about such things within the limits of the scientific method can lead anyone to just about any conclusion they want, depending on which rules of science they want to emphasise or ignore.
Actually, Physics 101 is perfect as an example. When I took high school physics, the Instructor started out with the introduction of four fundamentals; Matter, Energy, Space and Time. It wasn't until my second semester of college physics that this started to be shot down, with relativity, and the third semester really threw out the idea of discrete space and time, matter and energy as we got into QM. In the same way, we went from particles to fields, and eventually by my senior year to some of the basics of information based physics and descriptor theory. By my junior year, it was pretty obvious that all the language based teaching I had learned was approximations and metaphors and the real heart of physics needed math to express any part of it with any real accuracy.
Religions are just like that. You read a lot on one, keep an open mind, you see how it connects to others, you learn to ask questions, religion blends with philosophy, and just maybe direct experience comes.
Religions are also all too often like somebody getting good grades in Physics 101 and deciding that everything they heard there is the literal truth, and starting a crusade against those relativistic heretics who don't believe that space and time are two fundamentally different things.
Bush senior (41st president of the US), not Bush jr. (43rd president). Senior won his war (Desert Shield/Storm), but not re-election.
At first, I wasn't sure why you needed to drop KDE - I've got an IBM Thinkpad with only 512 Mg or ram and it runs Kubuntu 10.4 with a lot of the extra fancy graphics bells and whistles engaged. Then I saw what kind of resolution you wanted to get to/maintain, and it made more sense. Isn't 1920 x 1200 still well above the median for laptops?
Aaaah, but does Trump have an up to date Rabies vaccination for the thing that hides in his hairpiece? Enquiring minds want to know!
To make it simple for the rest of them - Michael Moorcock is a prolific English author of SF and Fantasy, creator of such classic characters as Elric of Melnebone. While much of his fantasy and SF is intended to be adventure oriented works and relies on a formula of having something exciting hapen every six pages like clockwork, He wrote a litterarily more ambitious work titled "Behold the Man", about a time traveller substituting for Jesus at the crucifixion so history would come out right, and uses characters with the initials J.C. frequently, some would say constantly, in his works. Jeremiah Cornelius is a character from a series of works set in the modern era, and is the sole character Moorcock actually loaned out with his blessing to any other artist that wanted to use him, so there are works by at least a dozen other well established authors featuring him, including a comic strip in Heavy Metal (The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius), and even a film (The Final Programme - AKA The Last Days of Man on Earth)),
I'm a weight lifter, aged 54. Since it took it up 4 years ago, I've built more muscle than a person my age should be able to build, according to numerous sports medicine sources. (By galvanic body-fat tests, I packed on 18 lbs of muscle the first year, and there are numerous sports medicine authorities that will claim the maximum for people my age is only about 8 lbs.). I now leg-press 5 plates (that's 505 lbs with the sled, and I do sets of 25, not 5 to 8's) So, I think I can claim to be putting forth the effort a serious athlete would put into it. But the sports related to this are Body-building and Power-lifting, neither of which is what I'm doing. I look better than I would if I didn't work out, I feel better, I perform a lot better in other sports like running and rock climbing, but the weights are all in no way sports related, because I'm doing a lot of things the sport coaches would swear are impossible and other things they would call counter-productive. A sport all too often seems to be what people call it when they isolate some subset of an activity and first claim that subset is all that matters, and then make factually false claims about how superior the people who conform to that subset are, why competition is paramount, and how anyone who isn't doing the activity their way is wrong.
Until now, I would have assumed there was no possible way Cisco could count as a monopoly. To many competitors with sizable market share, and real competition from some big dogs like IBM for parts of that share, would say Cisco simply couldn't pass the monopoly test part of antitrust law.
But, having some parts of the federal judicial system available to issue warrants without probable cause is certainly an asset their competitors show no signs of having or misusing. The normal list of assets that could make a company a monopoly includes such government related things as state granted right of ways. Corrupt judges aren't on that list, but it's easy to see why people who believe the fix was in would see this as a monopoly. What's worse is the number of cynics who think corrupt judges are simply to prevalent to let anyone get a monopoly on them.