Your argument is nonsense. It's like saying Newtons equations of motion are wrong because they didn't include relativistic effects.
No it was a material error in how Einstein viewed the universe. A static universe is akin to people thinking the Earth was the center of the universe, a concept based entirely on "common knowledge."
Maxwell's equations are all the product of other people, namely Gauss, Faraday and Ampere.
They also laid the fundamental groundwork for relativity as well as greatly improving our understanding of electro-magnetism and light. The relative comparison is about the impact of the equations, not the man who came up with them.
His experiment was a thought experiment - starting out with two identical clocks at a distance. People say that this is impossible because you cannot set two clocks to be the same at a distance due to the finite time it takes light to travel.
Poincare had suggested using light to synchronize clocks, so the concept was not completely new. Regardless, Einstein's error was that by using light to synchronize two clocks, you cannot in turn derive that the speed of light as constant; it becomes a circular argument. That doesn't invalidate the principle, it just demonstrates that he made a mistake in devising a mechanism to prove it.
but for now his track record is far beyond any other scientist for accuracy of prediction.
I would call that a gross overstatement. There have been many scientists who have had very distinguished careers. Einstein's greatness was not about quantity, or far reaching scope. It was that his discoveries opened up a whole new view of scientific thought. Unfortunately, Einstein wasn't as open to the possibilities, leading to an unremarkable second half of his career.
I don't see them as necessarily opposed. Consumers want general computing power for any of their gadgets, but they can be differentiated by their user interface or other methods which emphasize a specific task. For example the iPhone and Blackberry are both smartphones, however their design differences are tuned to different audiences. You can do pretty much any task on each device, but the iPhone is geared towards seeing/listening to media, while the Blackberry's keyboard makes productivity applications easier.
That's like saying Einstein added a minor correction to Newtons laws of motion to compensate for effects at high speed. You are ignoring his fundamental breakthrough.
The correction Einstein made (introducing new modes of energy storage) was on par with Debye's later improvement. But for the purpose of this discussion it's irrelavent because Einstein made a mistake in his assumption ignoring the possibility of multiple standing wave modes in a solid.
Irrelevant. He is a product of his generation which is over 100 years ago.
So Einstein wasn't wrong because the truth hadn't been discovered? Again, I am not saying his theories are incorrect, however his interpretation of reality was. Einstein's confusion over the cosmological constant is evidence he didn't fully grasp the workings of the universe. It is also a testament to how ingeniously robust his ideas on special relativity were. The concepts he developed would take many other scientists to fully realize the implications.
QM consists of a number of differnt theories applicable only to the small domain they are interested in. That's because they were created to explain the observations. QM is a model to predict different behaviors, it isn't a model of what is actually going on like Einsteins theories.
That's the philosophical debate, on one hand you have what is "reasonable" and on the other you have "what mirrors our observations."
Few if any scientific theories have passed the test of time like Einsteins.
I would put Maxwell's Equations on a pedestal above relativity.
No. People are just incorrectly using the the experiment to justify a circular argument. The theory is correct.
As I said before, the theory was correct (and demonstrated a number of times), there was a logical mistake in the method Einstein proposed to prove it - synchronization with light signals.
Einstein was the greatest mind that ever lived. His theories of general relativity, including time dilation not only could never be proved but couldn't even be observed in his time. Only now are we capable of testing theories such as time dilation and we are finding they are perfect.
Sorry to point out your hero was in fact human and made many mistakes, he even humbly admitted so much. As I said before, one of the things that raised him to greatness was he was willing to put out new ideas - sometimes they worked, other times they didn't - but they always caused everybody in physics to sit down and think. As for the greatest mind that ever lived - personally I would go with Leonardo da Vinci, who had an unparalleled breadth of knowledge. Also up there is Newton who contributed to calculus and helped move science from a philosophical discussion into a realm all it's own. Calling Einstein's theories "perfect" is asking for a let down. His theories have been shown to work in our limited capacity to test them. Like all science there is a good chance that they will at the very least be some need to modify them; we never know what strange and new discoveries there could be.
But Einstein's model was not wrong - before him, there was no model at all. The Debye model is a minor correction in that there are multiple frequencies instead of just one. The Debye model corrects for extremely low temperatures - it is inaccurate at intermediate temperatures
Dulong-Petit law used classical mechanics and worked at high temps. Einstein made a "minor correction" adding vibrations to the classical free motion to improve the accuracy at lower temperatures. Einstein's mistake was assuming a single frequency for oscillations. You can call the Debye model a "minor correction," but it doesn't negate that Einstein's assumption was incorrect.
What do you mean? Hubble's expanding universe theory is consistent with Einstein's general relativity
Except Einstein mistakenly believed in a static universe until there was evidence to the contrary. He allowed his beliefs to color the interpretations of the equations he created. The creation of the cosmological constant, and then his dismissal, shows that even he didn't fully grasp the implications of what he had derived.
but QM is flawed, especially the uncertainty principle which is the part Einstein had a problem with
As has been quoted many times - "Quantum theory is the most precisely tested and most successful theory in the history of science." Einstein's problem was based on his philosophical beliefs, not necessarily scientific reasoning. Whether or not QM is correct is inconsequential, the fact is Einstein mistakenly thought he had disproven it a number of times only to have his arguement countered.
Clock synchronization is a thought experiment. Those that claim the clock synchonization are wrong are using it to (incorrectly) show that the speed of light is not a constant. Einstein was not wrong here - the speed of light is constant.
The mistake was Einstein's method of clock synchronization led to a circular argument. While it's true the speed of light is constant, the method described doesn't lead to that conclusion, it assumes it. There are a number of other ways that wouldn't lead to that problem, and that have been used in experiments to prove Einstein's theory.
Not failures - mistakes. He always admitted he was poor in math. I'd like to see you do better.
I learned my lesson in solid-state physics that doing all that messy math wasn't for me. Lucky for him he wasn't in engineering, all those math mistakes could have killed somebody.
A better description for heat capacity is the Debye model:
"In Einstein's model, the specific heat approaches zero exponentially fast at low temperatures. This is because all the oscillations have one common frequency. The correct behavior is found by quantizing the normal modes of the solid in the same way that Einstein suggested. Then the frequencies of the waves are not all the same, and the specific heat goes to zero as a T3 power law, which matches experiment. This modification is called the Debye Model, which appeared in 1912."
As for Einstein's mistakes, just do a search, you'll find a number of them. Some examples - assuming the universe was not changing until Hubble's discovery, his flawed challenges to QM in the Bohr-Einstein debates, error in clock synchronization for Special Relativity, a number of failures in proofs including E=mc^2 etc.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.“– A. Einstein
Sure, he wasn't that good at math, but his understanding of the universe and how things work is unparalleled
Einstein did not have some intimate insight on how the universe worked, he made mistakes on even basic principles (heat capacity comes to mind). He made some great discoveries, but also had a wasteland of failed ideas. His fame wasn't that he was smarter than his contemporaries, but that he was willing to take risks and publish novel concepts.
Many of his theorys could only be proven years after his death when technology finally caught up to a level capable of testing them.
Experimental physics usually lags theoretical physics, the LHC is being used to prove/disprove decades old theories.
Given that the definition of these groups as "terrorist" is entirely for political purposes I'm unconvinced by these claims. I know of exactly no one who is the least bit terrified by domestic environmental/animal rights groups. Calling a group "terrorists" when they fail completely to make anyone afraid of them is pretty suspect.
This isn't like attoney generals over-using anti-terror laws to label everybody who commits a crime a terrorist. Even before 9/11 the FBI has been tracking these organized groups (specifically ALF & ELF) that use violence to push forward a political agenda. People aren't afraid because so far they have chosen industrial sabatoge and arson rather than direct civilian attacks. Most people weren't afraid of violent right-wing groups until 1995 and didn't care about Al-Qaeda until 2001. Public disinterest does not mean they are not a threat.
Must have been bottom of the class engineers who barely passed at all. All of the terrorist attacks carried out (all 5-10 of them over two decades) against the U.S. were poorly planned and poorly executed.
Unless I'm mistaken, these aren't people who earned a degree in terrorism engineering. I'm sure most on Slashdot know engineers with giant egos that pretend to be experts outside of their field of study. Problem comes up, the know-it-all goes to fix it, and ends up failing miserably despite their intelligence. The terrorists work so hard coming up with ingenious schemes to sneak the bomb on board the plane, that they overlook the little detail of making sure it's gonna explode.
Based on FBI reports, domestic environmental/animal rights groups carried out the most terrorist attacks within the US. The biggest threat to public safety is right wing extremists, who are more likely to plan high casualty attacks. International religious zealots grab more headlines because their agenda is foreign and strange. The enemy you don't understand is scarier than the one you do understand, even if the latter poses more of a direct threat.
In most of your examples the employee wearing the uniform is the first line interface with the customer. It's identifying to the customer "talk to me," not necessarily pointing out the lowest person on the totem pole. I'd argue people washing dishes, stocking shelves, doing inventory, are the lowest in terms of pay and responsibility but are not usually forced to wear uniforms because they are behind the scenes.
Intel's situation is different. Modern commercial computer games run almost only on x86 hardware. Intel has a huge market share in x86 CPUs.
Computer games do not constitute a market. I would have agreed with you 10 years ago when x86 was the leading force behind most consumer level computer. However, the nature of the semiconductor industry is changing. The traditional desktop PC is being replaced by portable computing. The industry is clearly moving to a low cost, low power, highly integrated solutions. With growth being led by smartphones, netbooks, nettops, and other similar devices, ARM and other embedded designs have the dominant position, not x86.
By making their northbridge incompatible, they are effectively shutting out competitors
AMD was ahead in taking this approach to improve performance. Intel is playing catch-up with is a sign that such changes are a result of competition rather than monopolistic practices. In fact, a high level integration is common with ARM based designs. The impact to competition is offset for customers by the ability to have lower power, smaller form factor, and ultimately cheaper devices.
The final result is that, Intel restricting its chipset has a much bigger impact on the market, than Nvidia putting only a CUDA-accelerated version of a seldom used physics middleware.
Laptops surpassed desktops, netbooks & smartphones are positioned to start cannibalizing laptop sales. The playing field is significantly changing. The final result is unless Intel changes by making smaller, cheaper, more energy efficient integrated CPU designs, they'll be a dinosaur dominating a stagnant desktop/laptop market.
Not only that, but what if Intel tries to leverage their monopoly to get Nvidia out of their graphics offerings, and instead tries to bundle their processors with their own integrated graphics chipsets? One of the FTC's complaints was that Intel was doing something pretty close to this on their netbook/atom platform. If they tried it on the higher end, I could see that backfiring for them.
You mean the same way Nvidia has integrated PhysX into their hardware and gone so far as to disable such acceleration if any additional cards made by a competitor are present. The move to system on a chip is not an anti-competitive practice, it's the way the entire industry works. Third party hardware solutions have long been incorporated into mainstream designs as their silicon requirements decrease. Discrete math coprocessors and memory controllers were devoured by the CPU, video decoding and physics acceleration have been integrated into GPUs. Why would SoC's from intel be considered anti-competitive, while AMD fusion and Nvidia Tegra, which are essentially the same, be considered innovative? The FTC needs to consider whether the consumer would really benefit by forcing chipmakers to keep various pieces seperate for the sake of competition. The continued decline in average selling price, combined with the increasing capability of each new generation of microprocessor indicates that consumers are not negatively impacted by such design integration.
If your big complex math formula was complete, it would be able to take into account the reaction to the output. The only way you could announce that "you will reply" is if the formula converged to that answer. Unless you compelety mapped my brain and had complete understanding of how information is procssed and the relationship between inputs and outpus, the model you create would be incomplete. To get around the lack of understanding of very complex systems, we use statistics to determine the probability of events. Just like weather, human behavior can be predicted to a level of probability, rather than absolutes.
Military operations are made in terms of probability rather than absolute success or failure. No military leader with any experience thinks they can predict the outcome of a battle. They can however, create a plan to put resources in place and maximize flexibility to give their troops the best chance for success.
I can only imagine that if someone tries to predict a battle they are going to be left holding their graph at the end of the battle saying what the hell just happened?
At the end of any action there is a review of what the hell happened.
Typically terrorists (or any criminal) lacks the extensive training to know how to cover all their tracks. On the flip side, law enforcement authorities are continually trained in how to spot things that are suspicious. Tattoos for example can be dead give aways that a person is involved with certain organizations. Something so overt should make the criminal think twice, but the need to belong and "represent" outweighs those more rational thoughts. More subtle clues like the shoes a person wears, "oh look he's wearing army boots, can reveal past affiliations without the criminal realizing it.
To put it in Slashdot terms.... Shouldn't Malcolm Reynolds have realized he would fly under the radar better by ditching the brown coat?
Models aren't about being realistic, they are about predicting accurately. The ideal gas law is a useful model, but makes assumptions that are knowingly incorrect for the sake of ease. Newtonian physics is close enough for most uses, though it is incomplete. Climatologists can play around with the models waving away inconvenient pieces so long as they remain "accurate."
If there was good evidence that Global Warming was not real or was not our fault, there'd be a bunch of scientists eager to enhance their reputations by publishing this.
Not if the journals decide they don't want to publish it. Science is competitive, but it's still difficult to put your reputation on the line, and deal with battling the status quo for 10+ years. One scientist publishing one paper doesn't make a difference. There are a number of ways such data can be explained away, especially when dealing with extremely complex systems. Most people just don't have the personality to struggle as an outsider dealing with skepticism from your peers for a decade or more until you are proven right. It takes arrogance and thick skin to stand up and tell hundreds of other really smart people that you are right and they are wrong.
You see, we have this thing called "peer review" that does a decent job of stopping that.
You're kidding, right? Peer review doesn't dive into the details. At best they look to see if a paper's data agrees with the conclusion, it doesn't really help if the data is falsified. There are blinders of scientific momentum at play. If your paper agrees with the hundreds of other papers before it, there's less scrutiny than if you try to publish something which breaks with the norm; "Great claims require great evidence." A dissenting article may be solid, but it will remain unpublished unless it makes an extremely strong case that the current accepted thinking is wrong. A peer reviewer may even accept the legitimacy of revolutionary conclusions, but it may not fit with what they think should be published.
Blockquote>Chicken Little doesn't work for the government
Change in public policy typically requires a Chicken Little scenario. The government throws the word "crisis" and "threat" around to justify increasing taxes and power: Drug crisis, energy crisis, national security threat, public health threat, threat to public safety.
And finally, you throw in the false equivalence. You think scientists are just as prone as corporations to manipulating and manufacturing evidence to support a conclusion? We're all equally scummy? Wrong again. Of course science is not immune to misconduct. But I might suggest that corporations, politicians, etc are more prone to unethical behavior than scientists. Science is all about finding the facts and modeling them, an activity inherently resistant to cheating, lying, and denial, and in which the chances of getting away with any of that are much lower.
On the flip side there is more public scrutiny about corporate and political bahavior. It is more difficult to get away with something under the spotlight of numerous news organizations, bloggers, and anonymous whistle blowers than it is to fake a single experiment that flys under the rader. Big things like cold fusion obviously get ferreted out because they make bold and groundbreaking claims. There is much less scrutiny on an article about oxide formation in some material science journal.
Science has such a good reputation that many are eager to use and abuse it. Tobacco companies lied about smoking. Oil companies lied about global warming.
These industries, and many others, have been able to find scientists to back up and publish their claims. This means there is a portion of the scientific community that is willing to mislead to ensure they get funding. And it isn't just corporations, special interest groups also play the money game with science and fund studies which seemingly always fall in line with the group's philosophy. It's hard to tell these days what science is legitimate and what is an elaborate infomercial.
Similarly, there are actual climatologists who take issue with certain studies and more so the strengths of their conclusions. They are useful. Then there are people who are not climatologists and don't understand climatology claiming it's all a huge conspiracy and it can't possibly be true because of the sun, ha ha, those stupid scientists never thought of the sun, or natural climate cycles, yeah, only the true rebels have ever thought of that etc etc.
Sure a climatologist might have considered natural cycles, but tossed it out because their focus is on making the "right" conclusions to ensure their funding or perceived leadership in the field remains intact. Sadly for many scientists there are reprecussions for not following mainstream thought. Unless they have a really compelling explaination of why their data is different, a scientist will rationalize the need to make "adjustments" and fall in line. Otherwise, they face being marginalized, losing their funding streams, and being locked out of publications. It would be naive to think that science is outside the realm of political influence. Do you trust "studies" that were funded by corporate or other special interest group? It doesn't take a PhD to realize when something is suspicious.
Appeal to authority is different than not acknowledging authority. If you tried to diagnose my health problems, but I decided to listen to my doctor instead, would this be a fallacy? Sure, you might be right and my doctor wrong, but the odds are against it.
Diagnosing is different than questioning a diagnosis. People question their doctor's authority all the time, seeking out other physicians for second opinions or consulting with other resources. There have many articles on Slashdot proposing scientific explanations in medicine, social sciences, or even hard science where there the community questions the conclusions made. Issues like correlation-causation, statistical analysis, ignoring exceptions to the rule, make readers question the results. It's not that the data or even the interpretation is wrong, it's that the case is not compelling even to people outside the field of study. The war in Iraq was based on expert testimony, yet many still questioned the analysis. Even with the step-by-step explanation by Colin Powell to the UN, the argument still was not compelling. Sure the CIA had access to more information, and has more expertise than the average person on the street, that doesn't mean that we can't ask basic questions on the conclusions made from the data.
While in an ideal world science is not politicized, the reality is that funding and public sentiment and influencing policy changes makes science subject to political pressure. There have been a number of scandals involving falsifying data, most notably in medicine. What's sad about the climate change email scandal was that the hidden data would not have changed the ultimate conclusions, however the fear of public perception on those outliers caused a conspiracy to change how the data was presented. By trying to make the information more palatable to the average person the scientists made changes which ended up discrediting themselves.
They have every right to say this; when the people arguing against them are not climate scientists, or in scientific fields related.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. A person does not need to put forward a competitive idea, they can discredit the proposition by pointing out flaws in methods or analysis.
It makes you an average moron, thats it, nothing more. Having to "work for a living" (which, last I checked, most evil academics do as well) doesn't mean that you get the right to weigh authoritatively on topics you know nothing about.
When somebody living in an intellectual bubble proposes changes that have a material impact on the livelihood of "average morons," they should expect resistance and have answers to bigger picture questions. I doubt that if we went to war on a seemingly flimsy premise, that you'd be soothed by leaders saying "don't worry, the defense department is full of professionals who know more than you."
And no, I'm not an academic, though I pride myself as trying to be as intellectual as I possibly can. I see being intellectually average, or ignorant as a character flaw, and not something to work toward (or revel in), but something to work to remedy.
Intellectual arrogance and blind faith in authority are also character flaws. Ignorance can lead to the fool pointing out the king has no clothes.
On any subject there is always a segment of the population that ignores the facts because of political beliefs, however the great majority of people have an open mind.
The vast majority of cases end in settlement, so everybody is a winner/loser. The big companies typically don't want their business halted, delayed, or otherwise disrupted by a small company. Rarely does a small company go bankrupt because of litigation, the litigation is usually a symptom of an already ailing company.
China is fully aware of that fact (its mostly still a planned economy, and these are the kind of things planned economies excel at).
China has increasingly become a mixed economy and losing central control for the sake of efficiency and growth. Meanwhile the US is going the opposite way, increasing governmental regulatory power and even taking ownership of key business sectors.
It's lobbying heavily for a new artificial world currency (a mixture of all popular currencies, I can't remember the name right now), to force the US to buy with real value.
They changed how they valued the Yuan by pegging it 50/50 between the dollar and Euro in 2005. Then when the global markets became shakey last year they returned to weighing more heavily on the dollar. As bad as the dollar has been handled, its still the currency of choice for "safe" investment.
It's massively investing in domestic infrastructure. Already in 2008 the exports were not the major GDP driver anymore. Relative to the income per person in each country the US anticyclical investments of the last 2 years dwarfed in comparison to that of China.
These investments represent a normalization between rich urban and extremely poor rural populations. What remains to be seen is how well the Chinese economy can handle inflation pressure as labor, energy, and raw material costs continue to rise.
It's buying tons of companies in the US (for a few years now, but the real shopping spree started with the US crisis, therefore exchanging these "pieces of paper" with real products.
These investments more intimately link the Chinese economy to the US, any weakness in the latter will diminsh the value of the holdings of the former.
The Chinese have positioned themselves to take economic leadership, however it can only be accomplished by internal growth rather than unilateral destruction of the United States economy. Neither side can afford to take drastic punative action against the other without putting themselves as great risk.
Slashdot Mirror
No it was a material error in how Einstein viewed the universe. A static universe is akin to people thinking the Earth was the center of the universe, a concept based entirely on "common knowledge."
They also laid the fundamental groundwork for relativity as well as greatly improving our understanding of electro-magnetism and light. The relative comparison is about the impact of the equations, not the man who came up with them.
Poincare had suggested using light to synchronize clocks, so the concept was not completely new. Regardless, Einstein's error was that by using light to synchronize two clocks, you cannot in turn derive that the speed of light as constant; it becomes a circular argument. That doesn't invalidate the principle, it just demonstrates that he made a mistake in devising a mechanism to prove it.
I would call that a gross overstatement. There have been many scientists who have had very distinguished careers. Einstein's greatness was not about quantity, or far reaching scope. It was that his discoveries opened up a whole new view of scientific thought. Unfortunately, Einstein wasn't as open to the possibilities, leading to an unremarkable second half of his career.
... on a million telescopes will eventually catalog all the observable wonders of the universe
I don't see them as necessarily opposed. Consumers want general computing power for any of their gadgets, but they can be differentiated by their user interface or other methods which emphasize a specific task.
For example the iPhone and Blackberry are both smartphones, however their design differences are tuned to different audiences. You can do pretty much any task on each device, but the iPhone is geared towards seeing/listening to media, while the Blackberry's keyboard makes productivity applications easier.
The correction Einstein made (introducing new modes of energy storage) was on par with Debye's later improvement. But for the purpose of this discussion it's irrelavent because Einstein made a mistake in his assumption ignoring the possibility of multiple standing wave modes in a solid.
So Einstein wasn't wrong because the truth hadn't been discovered? Again, I am not saying his theories are incorrect, however his interpretation of reality was.
Einstein's confusion over the cosmological constant is evidence he didn't fully grasp the workings of the universe. It is also a testament to how ingeniously robust his ideas on special relativity were. The concepts he developed would take many other scientists to fully realize the implications.
That's the philosophical debate, on one hand you have what is "reasonable" and on the other you have "what mirrors our observations."
I would put Maxwell's Equations on a pedestal above relativity.
As I said before, the theory was correct (and demonstrated a number of times), there was a logical mistake in the method Einstein proposed to prove it - synchronization with light signals.
Sorry to point out your hero was in fact human and made many mistakes, he even humbly admitted so much. As I said before, one of the things that raised him to greatness was he was willing to put out new ideas - sometimes they worked, other times they didn't - but they always caused everybody in physics to sit down and think.
As for the greatest mind that ever lived - personally I would go with Leonardo da Vinci, who had an unparalleled breadth of knowledge. Also up there is Newton who contributed to calculus and helped move science from a philosophical discussion into a realm all it's own.
Calling Einstein's theories "perfect" is asking for a let down. His theories have been shown to work in our limited capacity to test them. Like all science there is a good chance that they will at the very least be some need to modify them; we never know what strange and new discoveries there could be.
Dulong-Petit law used classical mechanics and worked at high temps. Einstein made a "minor correction" adding vibrations to the classical free motion to improve the accuracy at lower temperatures.
Einstein's mistake was assuming a single frequency for oscillations. You can call the Debye model a "minor correction," but it doesn't negate that Einstein's assumption was incorrect.
Except Einstein mistakenly believed in a static universe until there was evidence to the contrary. He allowed his beliefs to color the interpretations of the equations he created. The creation of the cosmological constant, and then his dismissal, shows that even he didn't fully grasp the implications of what he had derived.
As has been quoted many times - "Quantum theory is the most precisely tested and most successful theory in the history of science."
Einstein's problem was based on his philosophical beliefs, not necessarily scientific reasoning. Whether or not QM is correct is inconsequential, the fact is Einstein mistakenly thought he had disproven it a number of times only to have his arguement countered.
The mistake was Einstein's method of clock synchronization led to a circular argument. While it's true the speed of light is constant, the method described doesn't lead to that conclusion, it assumes it. There are a number of other ways that wouldn't lead to that problem, and that have been used in experiments to prove Einstein's theory.
I learned my lesson in solid-state physics that doing all that messy math wasn't for me. Lucky for him he wasn't in engineering, all those math mistakes could have killed somebody.
A better description for heat capacity is the Debye model:
"In Einstein's model, the specific heat approaches zero exponentially fast at low temperatures. This is because all the oscillations have one common frequency. The correct behavior is found by quantizing the normal modes of the solid in the same way that Einstein suggested. Then the frequencies of the waves are not all the same, and the specific heat goes to zero as a T3 power law, which matches experiment. This modification is called the Debye Model, which appeared in 1912."
As for Einstein's mistakes, just do a search, you'll find a number of them. Some examples - assuming the universe was not changing until Hubble's discovery, his flawed challenges to QM in the Bohr-Einstein debates, error in clock synchronization for Special Relativity, a number of failures in proofs including E=mc^2 etc.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.“– A. Einstein
Einstein did not have some intimate insight on how the universe worked, he made mistakes on even basic principles (heat capacity comes to mind). He made some great discoveries, but also had a wasteland of failed ideas. His fame wasn't that he was smarter than his contemporaries, but that he was willing to take risks and publish novel concepts.
Experimental physics usually lags theoretical physics, the LHC is being used to prove/disprove decades old theories.
This isn't like attoney generals over-using anti-terror laws to label everybody who commits a crime a terrorist.
Even before 9/11 the FBI has been tracking these organized groups (specifically ALF & ELF) that use violence to push forward a political agenda. People aren't afraid because so far they have chosen industrial sabatoge and arson rather than direct civilian attacks. Most people weren't afraid of violent right-wing groups until 1995 and didn't care about Al-Qaeda until 2001. Public disinterest does not mean they are not a threat.
Unless I'm mistaken, these aren't people who earned a degree in terrorism engineering. I'm sure most on Slashdot know engineers with giant egos that pretend to be experts outside of their field of study. Problem comes up, the know-it-all goes to fix it, and ends up failing miserably despite their intelligence. The terrorists work so hard coming up with ingenious schemes to sneak the bomb on board the plane, that they overlook the little detail of making sure it's gonna explode.
Based on FBI reports, domestic environmental/animal rights groups carried out the most terrorist attacks within the US. The biggest threat to public safety is right wing extremists, who are more likely to plan high casualty attacks.
International religious zealots grab more headlines because their agenda is foreign and strange. The enemy you don't understand is scarier than the one you do understand, even if the latter poses more of a direct threat.
In most of your examples the employee wearing the uniform is the first line interface with the customer. It's identifying to the customer "talk to me," not necessarily pointing out the lowest person on the totem pole. I'd argue people washing dishes, stocking shelves, doing inventory, are the lowest in terms of pay and responsibility but are not usually forced to wear uniforms because they are behind the scenes.
Computer games do not constitute a market. I would have agreed with you 10 years ago when x86 was the leading force behind most consumer level computer. However, the nature of the semiconductor industry is changing.
The traditional desktop PC is being replaced by portable computing. The industry is clearly moving to a low cost, low power, highly integrated solutions.
With growth being led by smartphones, netbooks, nettops, and other similar devices, ARM and other embedded designs have the dominant position, not x86.
AMD was ahead in taking this approach to improve performance. Intel is playing catch-up with is a sign that such changes are a result of competition rather than monopolistic practices. In fact, a high level integration is common with ARM based designs.
The impact to competition is offset for customers by the ability to have lower power, smaller form factor, and ultimately cheaper devices.
Laptops surpassed desktops, netbooks & smartphones are positioned to start cannibalizing laptop sales. The playing field is significantly changing. The final result is unless Intel changes by making smaller, cheaper, more energy efficient integrated CPU designs, they'll be a dinosaur dominating a stagnant desktop/laptop market.
You mean the same way Nvidia has integrated PhysX into their hardware and gone so far as to disable such acceleration if any additional cards made by a competitor are present.
The move to system on a chip is not an anti-competitive practice, it's the way the entire industry works. Third party hardware solutions have long been incorporated into mainstream designs as their silicon requirements decrease. Discrete math coprocessors and memory controllers were devoured by the CPU, video decoding and physics acceleration have been integrated into GPUs.
Why would SoC's from intel be considered anti-competitive, while AMD fusion and Nvidia Tegra, which are essentially the same, be considered innovative?
The FTC needs to consider whether the consumer would really benefit by forcing chipmakers to keep various pieces seperate for the sake of competition. The continued decline in average selling price, combined with the increasing capability of each new generation of microprocessor indicates that consumers are not negatively impacted by such design integration.
If your big complex math formula was complete, it would be able to take into account the reaction to the output. The only way you could announce that "you will reply" is if the formula converged to that answer.
Unless you compelety mapped my brain and had complete understanding of how information is procssed and the relationship between inputs and outpus, the model you create would be incomplete.
To get around the lack of understanding of very complex systems, we use statistics to determine the probability of events. Just like weather, human behavior can be predicted to a level of probability, rather than absolutes.
At the end of any action there is a review of what the hell happened.
Creating a recursive function doesn't mean the problem isn't computable.
Typically terrorists (or any criminal) lacks the extensive training to know how to cover all their tracks.
On the flip side, law enforcement authorities are continually trained in how to spot things that are suspicious. Tattoos for example can be dead give aways that a person is involved with certain organizations. Something so overt should make the criminal think twice, but the need to belong and "represent" outweighs those more rational thoughts. More subtle clues like the shoes a person wears, "oh look he's wearing army boots, can reveal past affiliations without the criminal realizing it.
To put it in Slashdot terms.... Shouldn't Malcolm Reynolds have realized he would fly under the radar better by ditching the brown coat?
Models aren't about being realistic, they are about predicting accurately. The ideal gas law is a useful model, but makes assumptions that are knowingly incorrect for the sake of ease. Newtonian physics is close enough for most uses, though it is incomplete.
Climatologists can play around with the models waving away inconvenient pieces so long as they remain "accurate."
Not if the journals decide they don't want to publish it. Science is competitive, but it's still difficult to put your reputation on the line, and deal with battling the status quo for 10+ years. One scientist publishing one paper doesn't make a difference. There are a number of ways such data can be explained away, especially when dealing with extremely complex systems. Most people just don't have the personality to struggle as an outsider dealing with skepticism from your peers for a decade or more until you are proven right.
It takes arrogance and thick skin to stand up and tell hundreds of other really smart people that you are right and they are wrong.
You're kidding, right? Peer review doesn't dive into the details. At best they look to see if a paper's data agrees with the conclusion, it doesn't really help if the data is falsified. There are blinders of scientific momentum at play. If your paper agrees with the hundreds of other papers before it, there's less scrutiny than if you try to publish something which breaks with the norm; "Great claims require great evidence."
A dissenting article may be solid, but it will remain unpublished unless it makes an extremely strong case that the current accepted thinking is wrong. A peer reviewer may even accept the legitimacy of revolutionary conclusions, but it may not fit with what they think should be published.
Blockquote>Chicken Little doesn't work for the government
Change in public policy typically requires a Chicken Little scenario. The government throws the word "crisis" and "threat" around to justify increasing taxes and power: Drug crisis, energy crisis, national security threat, public health threat, threat to public safety.
On the flip side there is more public scrutiny about corporate and political bahavior. It is more difficult to get away with something under the spotlight of numerous news organizations, bloggers, and anonymous whistle blowers than it is to fake a single experiment that flys under the rader. Big things like cold fusion obviously get ferreted out because they make bold and groundbreaking claims. There is much less scrutiny on an article about oxide formation in some material science journal.
These industries, and many others, have been able to find scientists to back up and publish their claims. This means there is a portion of the scientific community that is willing to mislead to ensure they get funding. And it isn't just corporations, special interest groups also play the money game with science and fund studies which seemingly always fall in line with the group's philosophy.
It's hard to tell these days what science is legitimate and what is an elaborate infomercial.
Sure a climatologist might have considered natural cycles, but tossed it out because their focus is on making the "right" conclusions to ensure their funding or perceived leadership in the field remains intact.
Sadly for many scientists there are reprecussions for not following mainstream thought. Unless they have a really compelling explaination of why their data is different, a scientist will rationalize the need to make "adjustments" and fall in line. Otherwise, they face being marginalized, losing their funding streams, and being locked out of publications.
It would be naive to think that science is outside the realm of political influence. Do you trust "studies" that were funded by corporate or other special interest group? It doesn't take a PhD to realize when something is suspicious.
Diagnosing is different than questioning a diagnosis. People question their doctor's authority all the time, seeking out other physicians for second opinions or consulting with other resources.
There have many articles on Slashdot proposing scientific explanations in medicine, social sciences, or even hard science where there the community questions the conclusions made. Issues like correlation-causation, statistical analysis, ignoring exceptions to the rule, make readers question the results. It's not that the data or even the interpretation is wrong, it's that the case is not compelling even to people outside the field of study.
The war in Iraq was based on expert testimony, yet many still questioned the analysis. Even with the step-by-step explanation by Colin Powell to the UN, the argument still was not compelling. Sure the CIA had access to more information, and has more expertise than the average person on the street, that doesn't mean that we can't ask basic questions on the conclusions made from the data.
While in an ideal world science is not politicized, the reality is that funding and public sentiment and influencing policy changes makes science subject to political pressure. There have been a number of scandals involving falsifying data, most notably in medicine.
What's sad about the climate change email scandal was that the hidden data would not have changed the ultimate conclusions, however the fear of public perception on those outliers caused a conspiracy to change how the data was presented. By trying to make the information more palatable to the average person the scientists made changes which ended up discrediting themselves.
Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. A person does not need to put forward a competitive idea, they can discredit the proposition by pointing out flaws in methods or analysis.
When somebody living in an intellectual bubble proposes changes that have a material impact on the livelihood of "average morons," they should expect resistance and have answers to bigger picture questions. I doubt that if we went to war on a seemingly flimsy premise, that you'd be soothed by leaders saying "don't worry, the defense department is full of professionals who know more than you."
Intellectual arrogance and blind faith in authority are also character flaws. Ignorance can lead to the fool pointing out the king has no clothes.
On any subject there is always a segment of the population that ignores the facts because of political beliefs, however the great majority of people have an open mind.
The vast majority of cases end in settlement, so everybody is a winner/loser.
The big companies typically don't want their business halted, delayed, or otherwise disrupted by a small company.
Rarely does a small company go bankrupt because of litigation, the litigation is usually a symptom of an already ailing company.
The employee is knowingly a member of an organization engaged in criminal activity, and has actively participated so they are at risk of prosecution.
China has increasingly become a mixed economy and losing central control for the sake of efficiency and growth. Meanwhile the US is going the opposite way, increasing governmental regulatory power and even taking ownership of key business sectors.
They changed how they valued the Yuan by pegging it 50/50 between the dollar and Euro in 2005. Then when the global markets became shakey last year they returned to weighing more heavily on the dollar. As bad as the dollar has been handled, its still the currency of choice for "safe" investment.
These investments represent a normalization between rich urban and extremely poor rural populations. What remains to be seen is how well the Chinese economy can handle inflation pressure as labor, energy, and raw material costs continue to rise.
These investments more intimately link the Chinese economy to the US, any weakness in the latter will diminsh the value of the holdings of the former.
The Chinese have positioned themselves to take economic leadership, however it can only be accomplished by internal growth rather than unilateral destruction of the United States economy. Neither side can afford to take drastic punative action against the other without putting themselves as great risk.