Right now, the standard model of the universe is still somewhat based on the big bang 1960's version, but with elaborations such as an inflationary epoch. It's an explicitly naturalistic model, and it assumes certain things, such as the value of the fine structure constant, were initially random. The only way they could be non-random is supposedly if something with deliberation assigned them, which would be an "intelligent design' hypothesis. That would generally point towards the supernatural.
But, if these values were genuinely random, the same math that implies randomness predicts an infinite number of 'parallel' universes must exist. Real, big name cosmologists (Guth and Hawking for two) have generally stipulated that we can never observe these parallels. That would be science fiction, not real science. So, we have a problem either way. The naturalistic explanation points towards things we can't investigate any more than the supernatural one.
Worse, the supernatural explanations are actually to be preferred if we use not just the rules of science but of abstract logic - Occam's razor says "The simpler of two explanations, all other things being equal, is to be preferred". One God, or a million gods, or sixty-three Archons, with 91,004 subservient Exarchs, a Glacier Licking Cow, a preexisting glacier for said Cow to lick, the Easter Bunny, and a guy named Wally, all these together are still simpler than dealing with a genuinely infinite number of undemonstratable phenomina.
Those gods can have created any finite number of additional universes, and a theory can spell out any finite number of additional details, and it would still be simpler than one with unverifiable infinities involved. We should probably just take the simplest that seems adequate, which would make us all Muslems, unless there's some gain in explanatory adequacy to prefer a more complex theology. Alternately, we could reduce the seven ranks of angels supposed in some Roman Catholic sources to just four, to correspond with the four fundamental forces. With electroweak unification pretty well proven, we really only need three, so a trinity model might work.
Sadly, this seems to prove many modern scientists are committed to philosophical naturalism despite evidence.
That depends - If there's a qualified Oncologist in the room, I want you to STFU until she's at least had a damned good shot. But if there's only a GP in the room, maybe what's best for me is if he talks first, but if you hear something that seems to go against general principles of science that you are both supposed to be equally trained in, you add your opinion. Like if he describes a study, and your basic training allows you to point to a flaw in the conclusion - anybody who has taken statistics at Sophomore level should be able to calculate when a sample is just plain to small to support the claimed accuracy, for just one example. And if the next best thing after you in the room is a sheep rancher, an exotic dancer, and a cash register repairman, maybe you should even go first.
With current tech, everywhere is public. Night Vision, Low Light CCD, Thermal Imaging, chemical sniffer chips, millimeter wave radar, low and high altitude photo surveilance with 100x or better zoom, Computer programs that can supposedly tell the difference between the green of a pot plant and some other weed from 10,000 feet away (and that have a 20%+ false positive rate).
Data mine all these, and every single person in the area will do something that constitutes probable cause, a dozen times a day. I don't usually use 'alls' and 'everys' like that, but just to take one example - how many people drive past multiple elementary schools on their way to and from work, every day? No kids of his own, passing by two schools and seven day care centers on the way to work, slows down responsibly, route is two blocks longer than the computer generated shortest route (but is actually a few minutes faster with the usual traffic), that's enough. Many judges would issue a warrant to search a home or tap a PC connection just for that.
Any time the IRS thinks you may have failed to declare income, they could easily get a court order to use that camera footage to see if your spending habits reflect being paid possible extra cash under the table. Right now, they have to justify the costs of an investigation, but here, a state government is doing the work, and the funds are coming from the Homeland Security dept. so it's suddenly a lot easier to afford. Again, it's a method that will generate a whole lot of false positives. (People who live outside of camera zones usually don't bother as much to drive there to shop, except possibly on days when they are doing a whole lot of shopping. Drive 40 miles each way for a special all day shopping trip and get a lot of things you've waited months for. The IRS will usually assume that's the way you spend money every Saturday.). So now the IRS is tending to selectively suspect people who live in suburbs, small towns and the country, probably totally without realizing they are biased that way.
The point is, if you accurately describe your own lifestyle, I can show you how Law Enforcement could over-react to it. Nobody is completely average in all respects. A hobby as innocent as model railroading sounds to some suspicious types like a good way to attract potential child victims for molestation. If nothing else, you post on Slashdot. Somewhere within the group of people who can access those video records, there's a federal agent who considers Slashdot a hotbed of Libertarian radicalism.
Occasional surveilance, i.e. by police patrols, doesn't tend to trigger paranoia in cops (usually). Near constant surveilance, accompanied by data mining techniques that routinely produce spurious signals from random noise, will. You, me, and everyone else will all be doing some innocent something that somebody somewhere now thinks indicates a potential crime. That will "justify" them investigating us in our homes, clubs, businesses and other places, where there IS a routine expectation of privacy.
If Law Enforcement is corrupt they will abuse the additional power. If Law Enforcement is honest, it will take them 30 years or so to learn enough about spurious correlations from data mining to stop unwittingly committing the same abuses.
And in the US, constitutional rules on copyright originally were intended to be a clean break with this very same old English law. Founding fathers as far apart politically as Jefferson and Madison agreed the old system gave unjustified power to censor to the government and created a private police, unaccountable to the people, and therefore sought to avoid it like the plague. So what does it say about US law today that we too have a large political faction trying to return to this system?
Most of the evil lawyer jokes, etc. come from one group of lawyers - the ones who work for financial institutions. People should stop telling lawyer jokes and start telling banker jokes instead.
I don't agree with the ACLU on their interpretation of the second amendment, but I also don't think their lawyers get up in the morning saying "Where's something that will piss off the political right that I can twist into a constitutional issue?". After seeing the RIAA, MPAA, and some others in action, I have come to honestly believe their lawyers get up in the morning with a hearty "Where's some poor people I can make poorer?"
Grant was probably in a three way tie for greatest military leader at the end of the War between the States, with Sherman and Lee being the other two. If you measure a few years back, say 1862, he would have ranked behind Farragut and maybe even Jackson, but admittedly Grant learned fast. He also was not nearly the worst head of state we have had - most historians today will stipulate that the corruption in his administration was largely confined to levels well below him and he was genuinely not complacent about it. Jackson's actions re. the Native Americans probably did more damage to the honor of the nation, and as you yourself point out, Pierce and Bucanan, at the very least could have done a whole lot to prevent the Civil war, and probably several more office holders before them missed opportunities. Then there's Andrew Johnson, who allowed a tremendous amount of deviation from Lincoln's plan for reconstruction, mostly in the direction of the very corruption Grant inherited. Just like JFK stuck LBJ with the mess of Viet Nam, so Johnson stuck Grant with the carpetbaggers.
I'm genuinely sorry if I came off as condescending or flip with that. All I really want to indicate is that a typical High school course will gloss over many aspects of Evolutionary theory that seem counter-intuitive or paradoxical to cover the basics, and anyone really wanting to comprehend them should expect to need a little college math and a good college textbook aimed at actual Biology majors.
Maybe I'm overly touchy about this, but I have some real criticisms of some deeper aspects of Evolutionary theory, more as it relates to the origin of life problem than as it relates to specification. I get a fairly good response from most actual Evolutionary scientists in discussing these, although a few scientists have just assumed I'm a classic Creationist or something (Thanks to all the religious controversy, Museums of Creationism, etc., there are a few professionals who won't even read a letter from anyone who doesn't have publications in their particular subfield).
When I bring the same issues up around the general public, a lot of people who don't know the details of the theory at all tend to criticize me as a 6,000 years - Dinosaurs on the Ark - Creationist Nutcase, for saying the very things people such as Richard Dawkins or Steve Gould strongly agree with and have said in their books and articles. If I'm going to be called a Nutcase, it would at least be nice if it were for my own unorthodox conclusions, and not for the very points where I'm in agreement with 99% plus of established theoreticians.
This is the exact same Game theory scenario that caused almost all states to start awarding their electors to the electoral college in winner take all blocks. The first few states that did it saw a short term advantage, as they were courted by the national party more than similarly sized states that didn't. Then everyone, with a very few exceptions, jumped on the bandwagon and that same everybody ended up back with the same relative political significance as when they started.
A higher mutation rate doesn't lead to an increased chance of a significant improvement in a species propagating. In sexual species in particular, a higher mutation rate will actually decrease the general evolution rates, either for a species to show a successful adaptation or for it to split off a new species. All the vast complexity of life we see around us results from the mechanisms of heredity developing newer and better ways of reducing copying errors. Even Nucleated cells themselves are an error reduction mechanism - put the genes in the middle behind extra barriers, so fewer chemicals can penetrate to affect the DNA. Sexual reproduction itself is another error reduction mechanism - combine copies from multiple sources and supress (many of) the defective ones. DNA itself won out over RNA as an encoding system because it had a much better copying error rate - and now only a few very primitive organisms remain that use RNA for encoding instead of just as a messenger molecule.
This is part of the standard theory as taught in real genetics courses to potential professional Biologists. Just about everyone else who thinks they support evolution has been miss-taught in high school biology or 'evolutionary biology for non scientists' type classes. Nothing personal, but it sounds like you got one of those sloppy pop courses.
Requiring the government to impose a standard selectively on certain individuals or corporations? There's some areas where I think that's actually a good idea, and you may have found another one - But:
Do we really have to go over why a lot of people will reflexively think this sounds like a very bad thing?
You know, if you're going to propose something that sounds like tenderizing the dead Irish babies by beating them with the carcasses of the dead baby seals, you just might want to marshal a whole bunch of carefully reasoned arguments to support it.
I agree that the amount isn't really a big deal compared to other things the Chicago municipal government has done, and so trivial compared to national government waste that we can't even hear the plink that this particular drop in the bucket made, but...
At the municipal level, a million bucks is still significant in many local voter's eyes. As far as staying real goes, you could try to make your case in plenty of neighborhoods classed as working poor, and the sort of thing you've just said would sound to plenty of people there exactly like "Let them eat cake!". That effect can be real, very very real. Another tax on tea was pretty trivial compared to some other things the British government did once, and look what followed from that. I suspect if the current gridlock in government continues, we will see a return to the sort of rioting we had in the 60's, and the incidents that trigger it will be 'little' things like this, even if the underlying causes are much bigger.
Godwin himself has repeatedly stressed that his law is about inappropriate comparisons to Nazism, Hitler, and the rest, and particularly hyperbolic ones. Comparing a trivial or completely non-existent rights issue, such as an internet poster being 'censored' by other posters when they criticize his posting with a particular Nym, to Nazi practices, will justify invoking Godwin's law. Since the KKK actually killed quite a few people, subverted the legal process in capital cases, preached intolerance for most of the same groups as did the Nazis, and a great many KKK members converted to the American Nazi Party, I'd argue the comparison is perfectly appropriate and Godwin's Law can't be used to stifle it.
First, I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice, and should not be considered as the basis for any legal proceeding. This is abstract speculation on a point of law, and is offered only in the hope that it will inspire any persons who may face related litigation to study the relevant issues and seek professional legal advice as needed.
1. The Wiki you linked to does mention in how some cases, such as contesting an election, a very short period of time, mere days, is enough to invoke the doctrine, so I see where you get the idea timely means something less than a year, or even a quarter. The normal period is more like six years as doctrine. The big court cases specifically involving patents show up better if you search for 'submarine patents' instead of 'laches', and you may want to look at the time frames of the most significant cases there, as they are typically a lot more than the six year period, and many of them are more than the whole current 20 year life of a patent. Microsoft could probably wait 2 or 3 years and still be within the normal period that is considered timely. The could even justify this by claiming the allowed some time for lesser remedies such as negotiation to work if they could.
2. One principle behind laches is that the delay may be used to increase damages and make the resulting lawsuit more profitable, (usually because the defendant has presumably made more profit in the meantime). So what happens if a company waits a while to sue, but in its complaint sues only for an amount it claims reflects damages incurred before the date it first contacted the defendant, and waives additional damages subsequent to that date? You'll note my sig - I don't have a good answer to that question, but I think it may be a potential way to defuse a defense claim. Laches is an affirmative defense, requiring both assertion and proof by the defendant. A single affirmative defense doesn't usually lead to a whole case being thrown out with prejudice or anything on that order - more often it just limits the case's scope. (OTOH, if Microsoft doesn't have much of a complaint, it shouldn't take much to get the whole thing dismissed.)
I don't see how a mystic or dualist philosophy justifies perpetualism either (You did mean that to be an 'or' not an 'of' there didn't you?) I mean if I believe ideas come from a mystical place called the Immaterium and are transported into human minds by a divine aspect called Promethea, still where's the justification for me getting paid for one forever?
It's an article of Christian belief in most branches that true originality lies only with God. Authors such as C.S. Lewis have generally proposed just what you said, that human creativity comes from external sources and existing ideas and experiences rather than being fundamentally original. The very word inspiration comes into English from a Greek school of philosophy that considered it a gift of the gods.
I could argue that it's materialists that are prone to this error, not mystics. Materialism, by treating thought as just an epiphenominon, makes it subject to arbitrary, ex nihilo explanations we would not accept for a moment as sufficient for a real phenomenon.
(I don't actually hold this last position - I'm just saying that all schools of philosophy have people who take sloppy short-cuts. This isn't an issue of materialism vs mysticism, it's an issue of well developed thought vs poorly developed thought.)
Now where did imagination come from? I'm pretty sure it's a real thing. I doubt that someone could sincerely claim to have just imagined imagination itself. Just picture some cave man imagining the act of using imagination itself into being for the first time, without having one before then, to see where the claim that imagination itself is imaginary leads. So if we agree that Ideas come from imagination, we appear to be forced to conclude Ideas come from something real and not from nothing. That position is actually pretty compatible with both some forms of mysticism, and some forms of realism, but it shoots down both strict classical materialism and logical positivism, and several other schools of thought.
The idea of pristine, utter originality is all a variant on the 'self made man' situation. The creator goes from thinking "I built something wonderful", to "...and nobody whatsoever helped me" to "...and I could have still done it if nobody else had ever discovered fire/the wheel/printing first". Put that baldly, it sounds psychotic. That's because it is.
Being proud of what you honestly achieved is fine. Thinking that it makes you Prometheus is just as nutty as thinking you're Napoleon.
The land you own is based off a lot more than just pieces of paper and pretend lines - it is first and foremost based off of there being physical land there in real existence. If this wasn't the case, the courts would have equal jurisdiction if I offered to sell you land in New York state or Oz. Societies are built on frameworks of agreement AND physical truths. When the frameworks depart too much from physical truths, increasing injustice results.
While we're at it, what the hell does "right against unreasonable search and seizure is pretending not to see something." mean? Most unreasonable search and seizure cases are about whether the cop had any right to position themselves so they could see something in the first place. The decision not to allow some evidence into court is the decision not to let the state get away with committing crimes in order to stop other crimes - it's not specific to search, but part of a much broader principle, which is usually summed up as "Two wrongs don't make a right". That's what you're arguing against?
This cases is apparently British, and British copyright law is not based on the same exact things as for the US. But, it raises an interesting question about the US version:
1. There's this clause in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings...".
2. Normally, this is taken to mean "Copyright encourages the production of new works by ensuring the author is motivated financially". Not only is this how it is coloquially interpreted, but it seems to fit what the Supreme Court has said in recent arguments.
3. Current revisions in the law extend copyright to a fixed period after death (the life +50 clause, etc.). They apply retroactively, including applying to the estates of authors already known to be deceased.
Doesn't this all add up to a claim by the US government that it can resurrect the dead (if only dead authors and only for getting more work out of them)? Did I miss the part about "the mark on the hand or forehead"? Because it looks like my government is claiming as a matter of legal imputation, to be the Lord God Almighty, able to return the dead to life! OK, bring James Blish and C M Kornbluth back, right now, or it's time to start stoning some false prophets. (We can wait a while for Heinlein).
The hemoglobin molecule in humans and related life forms, uses one individual iron atom. Four of these proteins are used in each red blood cell. The iron atoms are held by the carbon chains in the proteins at distances that put them much farther apart than they would be in an iron crystal, and not directly bonded to each other, so there are no crystal domains that can be lined up by a magnetic field.
To put it another way, normally, what scientists mean by 'ferromagnetic' is both that the domains will line up inside a crystal under sufficient magnetic field from an external source, and that they will stay that way (at least partially), so the object becomes permanently magnetized. Iron atoms in hemoglobin will respond in groups to a sufficiently strong external field, but normally, this grouping doesn't count as a domain, as it's not in a crystal at all. Using the word domain this way is kind of like calling a bunch of seagulls a flock when they are spread out all over the coastline at multi-mile intervals. It's not totally prohibited to use the word domain this way, but it's far from standard. More definitively, the iron atoms won't 'remember' the field and stay magnetized, so the second test for ferromagnetism is a definite and unequivocal no, and they are normally best called paramagnetic.
I suppose a field strong enough that would pull all the iron in a body into one concentrated spot and force it into such proximity that it crystalized there is possible. This would be a the 1.0 Ian McKellan unitary field, of course.
This actually can be avoided (and AFAIK current designs do). Fast, electronic level response to avoid blackouts and such requires very much less time than changing reactor output would either allow or facilitate anyway, so the direct machine to machine communication links don't really need to go to the power cycle control systems at all. Instead, rapid response grid balancing is done at external switchpoints. For the newer designs, these are outside the whole plant at substations, let alone just outside the core areas. Between these links and reactor control systems, there's supposed to always be an air gap.
Given that, any hacking would have to include a social engineering element designed to fool the operators into making the wrong decisions. If we include that stipulation, yes, it's quite conceivable. If we postulate someone bridging the air gap, maybe by something as simple as hooking a laptop that also contains a wireless card into the control network, then a non-social engineering attack becomes conceivable, but not really otherwise.
DOE and NRA doctrine is that adjusting reactor output based solely on a trigger event outside the core instrumentation is supposed to always require a high level human decision. Supervisors are also at least supposed to be trained to the point where they can make these decisions without adding any more response time than a conventional, (i.e. hydroelectric or coal based), plant would need for their human level decision events. (Yes they have them. For example the four TVA dams that supply Alcoa aluminum face a whole series of individual and joint human level decisions every time Alcoa's main furnace system glitches, and these have to include how long Alcoa expects them to need to dump power elsewhere, and for each of them, what options the other three dams are considering).
The DOE does not legally presume that reactors are even as responsible for balancing the grid as conventional plants, but given how much older a lot of the conventional plants are, it's pretty easy to do much, much better than is strictly required, and it should be noted that, in the last New York blackout all the cascade effects and switching failures happened in 1940's era or earlier fossil fuel plants, and the worst points were 1930's or even 1920's era designs. Still, the rules are that if the conventional plants are failing at load balancing, even if the grid is experiencing severe cascade failures, the nuclear sites will let the whole thing crash rather than take the risks of trying to stabilize the grid by actually modulating their reactions.
The hermetically sealed humans in the last few pages of the novel might be resistant, but the ones standing around in the snow at the end of the film are still vulnerable to "hot cup'a'soup" attacks.
And you're getting one more advantage - since your kids watch a continuous 22 or 45 minute show, instead of seeing it broken up into blocks possibly as small as 8 minutes long by commercials, they cultivate a longer attention span. Quite possibly, they will do better in school and even adult life because of their home environment. Sadly, proving any of this is unlikely, as any realistic, controlled experiment would involve something like a test group watching 3 minutes of programming followed by twenty 15 second long commercials, for lots of hours on end. Any parent that would let their kid be in this test group would be unfit enough to serve as an alternate explanation for all the kid's problems.
"And he wasn't even arrested. How would that end up being noticeable when he's flying?"
Before the Twin Towers, the U.S. had a number of watch-lists of people who were not supposed to be allowed to enter the country via air, or fly internally on domestic airlines. Total numbers for these lists were around 110,000 people. After the Homeland Security Dept was organized, the lists were consolidated and reviewed, and the total numbers rapidly rose to about 480,000 by about mid 2003. Since then they have risen at a slower rate, but the total enrollment is now estimated at about 575,000 suspect individuals.
It's been revealed by various people in agencies such as the FBI that people are known have been put on the list in error, but it appears nearly impossible to get them taken off. (Homeland Security itself has not admitted to any mistakes, nor will they reveal how much or how little of their budget is committed to keeping records current and accurate. Reports of problems seem to come entirely from whistle blowers in various federal and state agencies, and from individuals. Personally, I suspect this means they are under-reported, but that's admittedly just my opinion.).
Senator Ted Kennedy was restricted from flying by several airlines because his name matched an IRA member suspected of involvement in 1960's70's era shootings - this real suspect was apparently already long dead, but the FBI themselves supposedly forwarded that info and no changes were made until the senator's repeated complaints convinced someone in Dept of Homeland Security to add a note. Even then the dept. chose to keep the name on the list, apparently just in case the FBI, British MI-6 and the U.S. state department are all in error on this one.
Several state governments have advanced the claim that some of their residents were put on the list from tips forwarded by their ex-spouses after bitter divorces. Investigations that showed these people's names were also falsely added to sex offender registries, meth-abuse registries and other such records do not, in general, cause Homeland Security to review placement on the no fly lists.
"Can I just phone the police in the States and pretend to be a landlord/prospective employer etc and find out every time you've been pulled over for having a faulty brake light?"
No, in most states you also have to pay 20$-35$ for the report. In some states you don't have to pretend to be anything though, they will simply give you a report based on vehicle liscnce number, without even asking why you want it. Lat I checked, only 14 states currently have tighter restrictions than that.
I certainly believe it 'goes on plenty' in the current system. However, you're not really nailing the point, even though you came very close by mentioning Percodan. As you put it, there are many reasons why people might do this. What you cite as an obvious one is actually one of the very rare ones - effectively Munchausens direct and by proxy. What's common, really overwhelmingly so, is doing record tampering to get a fix or sell someone else a fix. By FBI estimates, 95% or more of medical records tampering is about obtaining controlled drugs. If the 'crisis in medical records" is really just another aspect of 'the war on drugs', then the only technological fix possible is one that would solve the underlying problem of opiate and related addictions.
"Why do laymen who have never even taken an introductory astro-101 class imagine they're qualified to second-guess the result of other poeple's life's work?"
I don't know, why do people who have never learned elementary politeness post so much on slashdot? Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentials without being in a forum where they can declare, verifiably, their own?
"As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun."
Marvelous - take something the other person has never said, imply it is a result of their postings, critique it into a sound bite, and so use your straw man to 'prove' your superior intelect. You definitely fit right in here on slashdot.
As you yourself point out, "Heavier elements do not figure in at all until the very last phases after hydrogen has been exhausted except in the case of stars many times more massive than the sun." Let's rephrase that a little. As recently as eight years ago, the consensus among the international community wouldn't require that exception. The evidence for heavy element accumulation in Pop-I actually affecting time to onset of supernovae wasn't yet established, There was still a lot of debate over whether the nova light curve observations themselves reflected Pop-II vs Pop-i elemental distributions or something else, and the few papers recommending an adjustment to some nova based distance calculations were tentative at best. Since half your sentence is a recently added correction to the first half, don't you think you are being a trifle dogmatic to make the first part read "do not", instead of something such as "do not, in so far as is yet known"? You're writing about something that has been very recently revised as though with that last revision, it can now be considered set in stone - doesn't that seem a trifle odd?
I answered a few questions honestly. How important could these new measurements be? What theories could they affect? Like any new observations, they could have major impact, and like any new observations, they are far from tested enough to have any real impact at all, as yet. I sketched out many, often unrelated areas and theories they could affect, gave enough terms that an interested layman could wiki, and hoped that provided some genuine help to the original poser of the questions. I didn't write a dissertation, because this is Slashdot. I tried to avoid the really farthest out possibilities, and also not just say the observations could impact the whole of science. That's a difficult delemma in answering this topic, how to avoid both making science into a priesthood where the long term answers are all already known to an inner cadre, and giving the impression of a chaos where a new astronomical observation is as likely to profoundly impact the field of medicine or sociology as it is to be a minor correction at best in a small sub-field.
Oh, and why do armchair and even full time working scientists, who have never taken history of science 101, or read Kuhn or even Popper, imagine that they have some special qualifications to second guess the chances of a new instrumentality or theorem being historically significant?
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, the standard model of the universe is still somewhat based on the big bang 1960's version, but with elaborations such as an inflationary epoch. It's an explicitly naturalistic model, and it assumes certain things, such as the value of the fine structure constant, were initially random. The only way they could be non-random is supposedly if something with deliberation assigned them, which would be an "intelligent design' hypothesis. That would generally point towards the supernatural.
But, if these values were genuinely random, the same math that implies randomness predicts an infinite number of 'parallel' universes must exist. Real, big name cosmologists (Guth and Hawking for two) have generally stipulated that we can never observe these parallels. That would be science fiction, not real science. So, we have a problem either way. The naturalistic explanation points towards things we can't investigate any more than the supernatural one.
Worse, the supernatural explanations are actually to be preferred if we use not just the rules of science but of abstract logic - Occam's razor says "The simpler of two explanations, all other things being equal, is to be preferred". One God, or a million gods, or sixty-three Archons, with 91,004 subservient Exarchs, a Glacier Licking Cow, a preexisting glacier for said Cow to lick, the Easter Bunny, and a guy named Wally, all these together are still simpler than dealing with a genuinely infinite number of undemonstratable phenomina.
Those gods can have created any finite number of additional universes, and a theory can spell out any finite number of additional details, and it would still be simpler than one with unverifiable infinities involved. We should probably just take the simplest that seems adequate, which would make us all Muslems, unless there's some gain in explanatory adequacy to prefer a more complex theology. Alternately, we could reduce the seven ranks of angels supposed in some Roman Catholic sources to just four, to correspond with the four fundamental forces. With electroweak unification pretty well proven, we really only need three, so a trinity model might work.
Sadly, this seems to prove many modern scientists are committed to philosophical naturalism despite evidence.
That depends - If there's a qualified Oncologist in the room, I want you to STFU until she's at least had a damned good shot.
But if there's only a GP in the room, maybe what's best for me is if he talks first, but if you hear something that seems to go against general principles of science that you are both supposed to be equally trained in, you add your opinion. Like if he describes a study, and your basic training allows you to point to a flaw in the conclusion - anybody who has taken statistics at Sophomore level should be able to calculate when a sample is just plain to small to support the claimed accuracy, for just one example.
And if the next best thing after you in the room is a sheep rancher, an exotic dancer, and a cash register repairman, maybe you should even go first.
With current tech, everywhere is public. Night Vision, Low Light CCD, Thermal Imaging, chemical sniffer chips, millimeter wave radar, low and high altitude photo surveilance with 100x or better zoom, Computer programs that can supposedly tell the difference between the green of a pot plant and some other weed from 10,000 feet away (and that have a 20%+ false positive rate).
Data mine all these, and every single person in the area will do something that constitutes probable cause, a dozen times a day. I don't usually use 'alls' and 'everys' like that, but just to take one example - how many people drive past multiple elementary schools on their way to and from work, every day? No kids of his own, passing by two schools and seven day care centers on the way to work, slows down responsibly, route is two blocks longer than the computer generated shortest route (but is actually a few minutes faster with the usual traffic), that's enough. Many judges would issue a warrant to search a home or tap a PC connection just for that.
Any time the IRS thinks you may have failed to declare income, they could easily get a court order to use that camera footage to see if your spending habits reflect being paid possible extra cash under the table. Right now, they have to justify the costs of an investigation, but here, a state government is doing the work, and the funds are coming from the Homeland Security dept. so it's suddenly a lot easier to afford. Again, it's a method that will generate a whole lot of false positives. (People who live outside of camera zones usually don't bother as much to drive there to shop, except possibly on days when they are doing a whole lot of shopping. Drive 40 miles each way for a special all day shopping trip and get a lot of things you've waited months for. The IRS will usually assume that's the way you spend money every Saturday.). So now the IRS is tending to selectively suspect people who live in suburbs, small towns and the country, probably totally without realizing they are biased that way.
The point is, if you accurately describe your own lifestyle, I can show you how Law Enforcement could over-react to it. Nobody is completely average in all respects. A hobby as innocent as model railroading sounds to some suspicious types like a good way to attract potential child victims for molestation. If nothing else, you post on Slashdot. Somewhere within the group of people who can access those video records, there's a federal agent who considers Slashdot a hotbed of Libertarian radicalism.
Occasional surveilance, i.e. by police patrols, doesn't tend to trigger paranoia in cops (usually). Near constant surveilance, accompanied by data mining techniques that routinely produce spurious signals from random noise, will. You, me, and everyone else will all be doing some innocent something that somebody somewhere now thinks indicates a potential crime. That will "justify" them investigating us in our homes, clubs, businesses and other places, where there IS a routine expectation of privacy.
If Law Enforcement is corrupt they will abuse the additional power. If Law Enforcement is honest, it will take them 30 years or so to learn enough about spurious correlations from data mining to stop unwittingly committing the same abuses.
And in the US, constitutional rules on copyright originally were intended to be a clean break with this very same old English law. Founding fathers as far apart politically as Jefferson and Madison agreed the old system gave unjustified power to censor to the government and created a private police, unaccountable to the people, and therefore sought to avoid it like the plague. So what does it say about US law today that we too have a large political faction trying to return to this system?
Most of the evil lawyer jokes, etc. come from one group of lawyers - the ones who work for financial institutions. People should stop telling lawyer jokes and start telling banker jokes instead.
I don't agree with the ACLU on their interpretation of the second amendment, but I also don't think their lawyers get up in the morning saying "Where's something that will piss off the political right that I can twist into a constitutional issue?". After seeing the RIAA, MPAA, and some others in action, I have come to honestly believe their lawyers get up in the morning with a hearty "Where's some poor people I can make poorer?"
Grant was probably in a three way tie for greatest military leader at the end of the War between the States, with Sherman and Lee being the other two. If you measure a few years back, say 1862, he would have ranked behind Farragut and maybe even Jackson, but admittedly Grant learned fast. He also was not nearly the worst head of state we have had - most historians today will stipulate that the corruption in his administration was largely confined to levels well below him and he was genuinely not complacent about it. Jackson's actions re. the Native Americans probably did more damage to the honor of the nation, and as you yourself point out, Pierce and Bucanan, at the very least could have done a whole lot to prevent the Civil war, and probably several more office holders before them missed opportunities. Then there's Andrew Johnson, who allowed a tremendous amount of deviation from Lincoln's plan for reconstruction, mostly in the direction of the very corruption Grant inherited. Just like JFK stuck LBJ with the mess of Viet Nam, so Johnson stuck Grant with the carpetbaggers.
Treason during time of War? With no declaration of war involved, there's no possibility of that crime applying, and hence no death penalty.
I'm genuinely sorry if I came off as condescending or flip with that. All I really want to indicate is that a typical High school course will gloss over many aspects of Evolutionary theory that seem counter-intuitive or paradoxical to cover the basics, and anyone really wanting to comprehend them should expect to need a little college math and a good college textbook aimed at actual Biology majors.
Maybe I'm overly touchy about this, but I have some real criticisms of some deeper aspects of Evolutionary theory, more as it relates to the origin of life problem than as it relates to specification. I get a fairly good response from most actual Evolutionary scientists in discussing these, although a few scientists have just assumed I'm a classic Creationist or something (Thanks to all the religious controversy, Museums of Creationism, etc., there are a few professionals who won't even read a letter from anyone who doesn't have publications in their particular subfield).
When I bring the same issues up around the general public, a lot of people who don't know the details of the theory at all tend to criticize me as a 6,000 years - Dinosaurs on the Ark - Creationist Nutcase, for saying the very things people such as Richard Dawkins or Steve Gould strongly agree with and have said in their books and articles. If I'm going to be called a Nutcase, it would at least be nice if it were for my own unorthodox conclusions, and not for the very points where I'm in agreement with 99% plus of established theoreticians.
This is the exact same Game theory scenario that caused almost all states to start awarding their electors to the electoral college in winner take all blocks. The first few states that did it saw a short term advantage, as they were courted by the national party more than similarly sized states that didn't. Then everyone, with a very few exceptions, jumped on the bandwagon and that same everybody ended up back with the same relative political significance as when they started.
A higher mutation rate doesn't lead to an increased chance of a significant improvement in a species propagating. In sexual species in particular, a higher mutation rate will actually decrease the general evolution rates, either for a species to show a successful adaptation or for it to split off a new species. All the vast complexity of life we see around us results from the mechanisms of heredity developing newer and better ways of reducing copying errors. Even Nucleated cells themselves are an error reduction mechanism - put the genes in the middle behind extra barriers, so fewer chemicals can penetrate to affect the DNA. Sexual reproduction itself is another error reduction mechanism - combine copies from multiple sources and supress (many of) the defective ones. DNA itself won out over RNA as an encoding system because it had a much better copying error rate - and now only a few very primitive organisms remain that use RNA for encoding instead of just as a messenger molecule.
This is part of the standard theory as taught in real genetics courses to potential professional Biologists. Just about everyone else who thinks they support evolution has been miss-taught in high school biology or 'evolutionary biology for non scientists' type classes. Nothing personal, but it sounds like you got one of those sloppy pop courses.
Requiring the government to impose a standard selectively on certain individuals or corporations? There's some areas where I think that's actually a good idea, and you may have found another one - But:
Do we really have to go over why a lot of people will reflexively think this sounds like a very bad thing?
You know, if you're going to propose something that sounds like tenderizing the dead Irish babies by beating them with the carcasses of the dead baby seals, you just might want to marshal a whole bunch of carefully reasoned arguments to support it.
I agree that the amount isn't really a big deal compared to other things the Chicago municipal government has done, and so trivial compared to national government waste that we can't even hear the plink that this particular drop in the bucket made, but...
At the municipal level, a million bucks is still significant in many local voter's eyes. As far as staying real goes, you could try to make your case in plenty of neighborhoods classed as working poor, and the sort of thing you've just said would sound to plenty of people there exactly like "Let them eat cake!". That effect can be real, very very real. Another tax on tea was pretty trivial compared to some other things the British government did once, and look what followed from that. I suspect if the current gridlock in government continues, we will see a return to the sort of rioting we had in the 60's, and the incidents that trigger it will be 'little' things like this, even if the underlying causes are much bigger.
Godwin himself has repeatedly stressed that his law is about inappropriate comparisons to Nazism, Hitler, and the rest, and particularly hyperbolic ones. Comparing a trivial or completely non-existent rights issue, such as an internet poster being 'censored' by other posters when they criticize his posting with a particular Nym, to Nazi practices, will justify invoking Godwin's law. Since the KKK actually killed quite a few people, subverted the legal process in capital cases, preached intolerance for most of the same groups as did the Nazis, and a great many KKK members converted to the American Nazi Party, I'd argue the comparison is perfectly appropriate and Godwin's Law can't be used to stifle it.
First, I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice, and should not be considered as the basis for any legal proceeding. This is abstract speculation on a point of law, and is offered only in the hope that it will inspire any persons who may face related litigation to study the relevant issues and seek professional legal advice as needed.
1. The Wiki you linked to does mention in how some cases, such as contesting an election, a very short period of time, mere days, is enough to invoke the doctrine, so I see where you get the idea timely means something less than a year, or even a quarter. The normal period is more like six years as doctrine. The big court cases specifically involving patents show up better if you search for 'submarine patents' instead of 'laches', and you may want to look at the time frames of the most significant cases there, as they are typically a lot more than the six year period, and many of them are more than the whole current 20 year life of a patent. Microsoft could probably wait 2 or 3 years and still be within the normal period that is considered timely. The could even justify this by claiming the allowed some time for lesser remedies such as negotiation to work if they could.
2. One principle behind laches is that the delay may be used to increase damages and make the resulting lawsuit more profitable, (usually because the defendant has presumably made more profit in the meantime). So what happens if a company waits a while to sue, but in its complaint sues only for an amount it claims reflects damages incurred before the date it first contacted the defendant, and waives additional damages subsequent to that date? You'll note my sig - I don't have a good answer to that question, but I think it may be a potential way to defuse a defense claim. Laches is an affirmative defense, requiring both assertion and proof by the defendant. A single affirmative defense doesn't usually lead to a whole case being thrown out with prejudice or anything on that order - more often it just limits the case's scope. (OTOH, if Microsoft doesn't have much of a complaint, it shouldn't take much to get the whole thing dismissed.)
I don't see how a mystic or dualist philosophy justifies perpetualism either (You did mean that to be an 'or' not an 'of' there didn't you?) I mean if I believe ideas come from a mystical place called the Immaterium and are transported into human minds by a divine aspect called Promethea, still where's the justification for me getting paid for one forever?
It's an article of Christian belief in most branches that true originality lies only with God. Authors such as C.S. Lewis have generally proposed just what you said, that human creativity comes from external sources and existing ideas and experiences rather than being fundamentally original. The very word inspiration comes into English from a Greek school of philosophy that considered it a gift of the gods.
I could argue that it's materialists that are prone to this error, not mystics. Materialism, by treating thought as just an epiphenominon, makes it subject to arbitrary, ex nihilo explanations we would not accept for a moment as sufficient for a real phenomenon.
(I don't actually hold this last position - I'm just saying that all schools of philosophy have people who take sloppy short-cuts. This isn't an issue of materialism vs mysticism, it's an issue of well developed thought vs poorly developed thought.)
Now where did imagination come from? I'm pretty sure it's a real thing. I doubt that someone could sincerely claim to have just imagined imagination itself. Just picture some cave man imagining the act of using imagination itself into being for the first time, without having one before then, to see where the claim that imagination itself is imaginary leads. So if we agree that Ideas come from imagination, we appear to be forced to conclude Ideas come from something real and not from nothing. That position is actually pretty compatible with both some forms of mysticism, and some forms of realism, but it shoots down both strict classical materialism and logical positivism, and several other schools of thought.
The idea of pristine, utter originality is all a variant on the 'self made man' situation. The creator goes from thinking "I built something wonderful", to "...and nobody whatsoever helped me" to "...and I could have still done it if nobody else had ever discovered fire/the wheel/printing first". Put that baldly, it sounds psychotic. That's because it is.
Being proud of what you honestly achieved is fine. Thinking that it makes you Prometheus is just as nutty as thinking you're Napoleon.
The land you own is based off a lot more than just pieces of paper and pretend lines - it is first and foremost based off of there being physical land there in real existence. If this wasn't the case, the courts would have equal jurisdiction if I offered to sell you land in New York state or Oz. Societies are built on frameworks of agreement AND physical truths. When the frameworks depart too much from physical truths, increasing injustice results.
While we're at it, what the hell does "right against unreasonable search and seizure is pretending not to see something." mean? Most unreasonable search and seizure cases are about whether the cop had any right to position themselves so they could see something in the first place. The decision not to allow some evidence into court is the decision not to let the state get away with committing crimes in order to stop other crimes - it's not specific to search, but part of a much broader principle, which is usually summed up as "Two wrongs don't make a right". That's what you're arguing against?
This cases is apparently British, and British copyright law is not based on the same exact things as for the US. But, it raises an interesting question about the US version:
...".
1. There's this clause in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
2. Normally, this is taken to mean "Copyright encourages the production of new works by ensuring the author is motivated financially". Not only is this how it is coloquially interpreted, but it seems to fit what the Supreme Court has said in recent arguments.
3. Current revisions in the law extend copyright to a fixed period after death (the life +50 clause, etc.). They apply retroactively, including applying to the estates of authors already known to be deceased.
Doesn't this all add up to a claim by the US government that it can resurrect the dead (if only dead authors and only for getting more work out of them)? Did I miss the part about "the mark on the hand or forehead"? Because it looks like my government is claiming as a matter of legal imputation, to be the Lord God Almighty, able to return the dead to life! OK, bring James Blish and C M Kornbluth back, right now, or it's time to start stoning some false prophets. (We can wait a while for Heinlein).
The hemoglobin molecule in humans and related life forms, uses one individual iron atom. Four of these proteins are used in each red blood cell. The iron atoms are held by the carbon chains in the proteins at distances that put them much farther apart than they would be in an iron crystal, and not directly bonded to each other, so there are no crystal domains that can be lined up by a magnetic field.
To put it another way, normally, what scientists mean by 'ferromagnetic' is both that the domains will line up inside a crystal under sufficient magnetic field from an external source, and that they will stay that way (at least partially), so the object becomes permanently magnetized. Iron atoms in hemoglobin will respond in groups to a sufficiently strong external field, but normally, this grouping doesn't count as a domain, as it's not in a crystal at all. Using the word domain this way is kind of like calling a bunch of seagulls a flock when they are spread out all over the coastline at multi-mile intervals. It's not totally prohibited to use the word domain this way, but it's far from standard. More definitively, the iron atoms won't 'remember' the field and stay magnetized, so the second test for ferromagnetism is a definite and unequivocal no, and they are normally best called paramagnetic.
I suppose a field strong enough that would pull all the iron in a body into one concentrated spot and force it into such proximity that it crystalized there is possible. This would be a the 1.0 Ian McKellan unitary field, of course.
This actually can be avoided (and AFAIK current designs do). Fast, electronic level response to avoid blackouts and such requires very much less time than changing reactor output would either allow or facilitate anyway, so the direct machine to machine communication links don't really need to go to the power cycle control systems at all. Instead, rapid response grid balancing is done at external switchpoints. For the newer designs, these are outside the whole plant at substations, let alone just outside the core areas. Between these links and reactor control systems, there's supposed to always be an air gap.
Given that, any hacking would have to include a social engineering element designed to fool the operators into making the wrong decisions. If we include that stipulation, yes, it's quite conceivable. If we postulate someone bridging the air gap, maybe by something as simple as hooking a laptop that also contains a wireless card into the control network, then a non-social engineering attack becomes conceivable, but not really otherwise.
DOE and NRA doctrine is that adjusting reactor output based solely on a trigger event outside the core instrumentation is supposed to always require a high level human decision. Supervisors are also at least supposed to be trained to the point where they can make these decisions without adding any more response time than a conventional, (i.e. hydroelectric or coal based), plant would need for their human level decision events. (Yes they have them. For example the four TVA dams that supply Alcoa aluminum face a whole series of individual and joint human level decisions every time Alcoa's main furnace system glitches, and these have to include how long Alcoa expects them to need to dump power elsewhere, and for each of them, what options the other three dams are considering).
The DOE does not legally presume that reactors are even as responsible for balancing the grid as conventional plants, but given how much older a lot of the conventional plants are, it's pretty easy to do much, much better than is strictly required, and it should be noted that, in the last New York blackout all the cascade effects and switching failures happened in 1940's era or earlier fossil fuel plants, and the worst points were 1930's or even 1920's era designs. Still, the rules are that if the conventional plants are failing at load balancing, even if the grid is experiencing severe cascade failures, the nuclear sites will let the whole thing crash rather than take the risks of trying to stabilize the grid by actually modulating their reactions.
The hermetically sealed humans in the last few pages of the novel might be resistant, but the ones standing around in the snow at the end of the film are still vulnerable to "hot cup'a'soup" attacks.
And you're getting one more advantage - since your kids watch a continuous 22 or 45 minute show, instead of seeing it broken up into blocks possibly as small as 8 minutes long by commercials, they cultivate a longer attention span. Quite possibly, they will do better in school and even adult life because of their home environment. Sadly, proving any of this is unlikely, as any realistic, controlled experiment would involve something like a test group watching 3 minutes of programming followed by twenty 15 second long commercials, for lots of hours on end. Any parent that would let their kid be in this test group would be unfit enough to serve as an alternate explanation for all the kid's problems.
"And he wasn't even arrested. How would that end up being noticeable when he's flying?"
Before the Twin Towers, the U.S. had a number of watch-lists of people who were not supposed to be allowed to enter the country via air, or fly internally on domestic airlines. Total numbers for these lists were around 110,000 people. After the Homeland Security Dept was organized, the lists were consolidated and reviewed, and the total numbers rapidly rose to about 480,000 by about mid 2003. Since then they have risen at a slower rate, but the total enrollment is now estimated at about 575,000 suspect individuals.
It's been revealed by various people in agencies such as the FBI that people are known have been put on the list in error, but it appears nearly impossible to get them taken off. (Homeland Security itself has not admitted to any mistakes, nor will they reveal how much or how little of their budget is committed to keeping records current and accurate. Reports of problems seem to come entirely from whistle blowers in various federal and state agencies, and from individuals. Personally, I suspect this means they are under-reported, but that's admittedly just my opinion.).
Senator Ted Kennedy was restricted from flying by several airlines because his name matched an IRA member suspected of involvement in 1960's70's era shootings - this real suspect was apparently already long dead, but the FBI themselves supposedly forwarded that info and no changes were made until the senator's repeated complaints convinced someone in Dept of Homeland Security to add a note. Even then the dept. chose to keep the name on the list, apparently just in case the FBI, British MI-6 and the U.S. state department are all in error on this one.
Several state governments have advanced the claim that some of their residents were put on the list from tips forwarded by their ex-spouses after bitter divorces. Investigations that showed these people's names were also falsely added to sex offender registries, meth-abuse registries and other such records do not, in general, cause Homeland Security to review placement on the no fly lists.
"Can I just phone the police in the States and pretend to be a landlord/prospective employer etc and find out every time you've been pulled over for having a faulty brake light?"
No, in most states you also have to pay 20$-35$ for the report. In some states you don't have to pretend to be anything though, they will simply give you a report based on vehicle liscnce number, without even asking why you want it. Lat I checked, only 14 states currently have tighter restrictions than that.
I certainly believe it 'goes on plenty' in the current system. However, you're not really nailing the point, even though you came very close by mentioning Percodan. As you put it, there are many reasons why people might do this. What you cite as an obvious one is actually one of the very rare ones - effectively Munchausens direct and by proxy. What's common, really overwhelmingly so, is doing record tampering to get a fix or sell someone else a fix. By FBI estimates, 95% or more of medical records tampering is about obtaining controlled drugs. If the 'crisis in medical records" is really just another aspect of 'the war on drugs', then the only technological fix possible is one that would solve the underlying problem of opiate and related addictions.
"Why do laymen who have never even taken an introductory astro-101 class imagine they're qualified to second-guess the result of other poeple's life's work?"
I don't know, why do people who have never learned elementary politeness post so much on slashdot?
Why do they make irrational assumptions about other people's credentials without being in a forum where they can declare, verifiably, their own?
"As it turns out the sun is not many times more massive than the sun."
Marvelous - take something the other person has never said, imply it is a result of their postings, critique it into a sound bite, and so use your straw man to 'prove' your superior intelect. You definitely fit right in here on slashdot.
As you yourself point out, "Heavier elements do not figure in at all until the very last phases after hydrogen has been exhausted except in the case of stars many times more massive than the sun." Let's rephrase that a little. As recently as eight years ago, the consensus among the international community wouldn't require that exception. The evidence for heavy element accumulation in Pop-I actually affecting time to onset of supernovae wasn't yet established, There was still a lot of debate over whether the nova light curve observations themselves reflected Pop-II vs Pop-i elemental distributions or something else, and the few papers recommending an adjustment to some nova based distance calculations were tentative at best. Since half your sentence is a recently added correction to the first half, don't you think you are being a trifle dogmatic to make the first part read "do not", instead of something such as "do not, in so far as is yet known"? You're writing about something that has been very recently revised as though with that last revision, it can now be considered set in stone - doesn't that seem a trifle odd?
I answered a few questions honestly. How important could these new measurements be? What theories could they affect? Like any new observations, they could have major impact, and like any new observations, they are far from tested enough to have any real impact at all, as yet. I sketched out many, often unrelated areas and theories they could affect, gave enough terms that an interested layman could wiki, and hoped that provided some genuine help to the original poser of the questions. I didn't write a dissertation, because this is Slashdot. I tried to avoid the really farthest out possibilities, and also not just say the observations could impact the whole of science. That's a difficult delemma in answering this topic, how to avoid both making science into a priesthood where the long term answers are all already known to an inner cadre, and giving the impression of a chaos where a new astronomical observation is as likely to profoundly impact the field of medicine or sociology as it is to be a minor correction at best in a small sub-field.
Oh, and why do armchair and even full time working scientists, who have never taken history of science 101, or read Kuhn or even Popper, imagine that they have some special qualifications to second guess the chances of a new instrumentality or theorem being historically significant?