Scientists use this manner because of the following well known philosophical problem: [...] When you say you are proving a physical theory you are like person B. The untested domain is too large to assert that you have ever proven anything. This is the sad fact of physical science.
Bayesian reasoning deals with this problem. Pick up any textbook on modern Bayesian statistics and Bayesian reasoning.
Einsten's GR is the most elegant theory in physics. You don't seem to be able to distinguish between math and physics.
Actually, that's what I would claim is your problem: you think the differential geometry formulas are the physical theory. They aren't. GR is a huge (implicit) set of postulates about the structure of space, postulates that closely mirror the axiomatic systems underlying differential geometry (not by accident, one might add). All the mathematical machinery of differential geometry, which then makes up GR, is just mathematics, with no physical content.
Yes, GR is hard to do, but that is because differential geomoetry is hard.
I don't find differential geometry hard; sorry if you do.
If you want to argue about how complicated GR is then you are making an argument against mathematics (I am a mathematician btw). And if you want to say that math is hard, then I will only respond with a hell-fucking yes math is hard.
I'm not arguing about it being "complicated" in the "hard to understand sense"; it's not hard to understand at all, at least if you have the mathematical foundations. I'm simply stating that it involves a huge mathematical edifice; if you model space using the methods of differential geometry, you are making a huge set of assumptions about space. The fact that you can summarize that as "one equation" tells you nothing about elegance or simplicity of the theory.
By analogy, GR is only simple in the way a car is simple for its drive; from the driver's point of view, you just sit in it and turn the ignition. Never mind the $20k worth of hardware that is needed to make the magic happen. You seem to forget about what's happening under the covers (which also makes me suspect that you are not actually a mathematician).
Semiconductor material for the operation of the transistor was predicted by a very bright theoretical physicist. He had a top notch group assigned to him at Bell Labs and it took them years to get an operational transistor. It years for a 2-Nobel winning physicist to discover.
The bipolar transistor was an accidental discovery by Shockley's group trying to implement field effect transistors, and the field effect transistor was patented in 1925, long before Shockley or Bell Labs even got into the game. Furthermore, it was advances in material sciences that made the implementation of the modern FET possible. In the end, Shockley's group accidentally stumbled over the bipolar transistor and they failed developing the FET based on their theoretical work. Of course, that isn't to say that those guys weren't very smart and highly successful, but your history of the transistor as a straight path from theory to implementation is a myth. You can read some of the history here.
You have clearly demonstrated that you have no working knowledge of GR.
You cannot prove a physical theory, ever. You can only test it and fail to disprove it.
Theories in physics are no different in principle from theories in other scientific fields; you can never prove or disprove anything, but you can change your degree of belief in a hypothesis. And that works both ways: an experiment might strengthen your degree of belief in a hypothesis or it might weaken it.
In statistics we call this "failure to reject the null hypothesis".
Sorry, but you ("we") are a little behind the times there. Statistical hypothesis testing is still widely used by "working scientists" because it's simple, can be applied cookbook-style, and because it often gives some useful answers. But it is (provably) not a consistent and correct way of updating your degree of belief in a hypothesis or a scientific theory.
(To put this in familiar terms, trying to argue about how scientific theories are validated from the point of view of statistical hypothesis testing is the rough equivalent of arguing about atomic spectra with knowledge of only Newtonian mechanics.)
Einstein's GR is one single equation.
What a bizarre idea. Einstein's GR actually is a highly complex set of assumptions about spacetime (most of them, unfortunately, not explicitly stated). Using layers upon layers of mathematical structures and notation, those assumptions can be summarized in "one single equation", but that's only because of a lot of good will on the part of the reader.
You have just completely changed your argument. You said "mathematically identical" before. Now you are saying that the two theories will differ on a new domain of measurement which is obvious because GR is a low energy, classical theory and is going to be the classical limit, hbar->0, of some quantum gravity.
No, I haven't "changed my argument". I stated that they would be "mathematically identical" for known measurements. By "mathematical", I just meant "formally", as opposed to being "physically identical", which would actually ascribe some sort of specific interpretation to those formulas.
That isn't a formal statement about some kind of "-ism" (otherwise I would have made such a statement), it just means that the computations you would perform to predict the outcomes of known experiments would formally be the same: you plug the same numbers into the same formulas and you get out the same predictions. But there would be a new class of measurements for which you would use different kinds of computations to make predictions.
Let's see, what did the physicists do last century? Semiconductors -> Transistor -> the mother fucking Computer
Trying to lump together solid state physics and general relativity as if successes in one are a validation of the approach of the other is simply dishonest. In fact, the field effect transistor could have been discovered and optimized completely empirically, with essentially no physical insights (I don't remember how it was actually discovered and optimized, but most of solid state physics uses empirical models anyway.)
Quantum Mechanics -> Quantum Field Theory -> the most accurate physical predictions EVER
Yes, but unfortunately, we don't know whether those predictions were blind luck, fundamental mathematical constants or relationships that will pop up in many different theories (e.g., like "pi" or "sin"), or whether they actually represent a non-trivial fact about our specific physical universe. It will take a lot of work by mathematicians before we actually know (possibly centuries).
I claim that Einstein's GR is the most mathematical of any physical theory that has ever existed. If GR isn't mathy then no physical theory is!
My point exactly.
You are more full of shit than I ever thought was possible. You must really get a kick out of trolling on Slashdot.
No, I merely find it instructive to challenge people who con
We seem to be having trouble & high failure rates with just sending tiny robotic probes to Mars, and we can hardly even keep a couple of rusty buckets in low earth orbit operating. Moving a small asteroid gently (maybe using solar sails) should be well within our technological capabilities, but it doesn't seem like we have our act together enough to do it.
Right now, the US, one of the richest nations, doesn't even seem to be able to pay for health care or secondary education, but we are willing to pay hundreds of billions to have our shoes x-rayed in order to guard against an infinitesimal chance of getting killed by terrorists. So, you see, the problems aren't technical, they are psychological, social, and political.
(Besides, you really don't want the "oh, that was kilometers" kinds of errors with such a project.)
You can only disprove a theory. And the easier a theory is to disprove, the better the theory.
Yes, another one of those "facts" that physicists know. Why bother looking into those lesser sciences (statistics, philosophy, mathematics, cognitive science, psychology, etc.), where people actually have some understanding of what theories are and how they get proven or disproven? Oh, no, "we are physicists, we don't need to understand these things, we know what we are doing". Sure.
That is completely nonsensical.
To you, obviously.
If you had a "mathematically identical" theory to GR then it would also have the same symmetry group of diffeomorphisms, there would be no prefered frame, and you would have relativity all over again.
You haven't thought that through. I said that we assume that there are some form of "additional measurements" possible (this doesn't necessarily require any kind of fundamentally new physical interaction). GR would keep its structure for the kinds of measurements we have tested in on, but it would get some additional structure (different from GR) for the new kinds of measurements.
GR is a very mathematical theory.
GR uses a lot of math, but that doesn't make it a "very mathematical theory". Euclidean geometry is a very mathematical theory, GR is still just a mess. Maybe mathematicians will eventually succeed in cleaning it up enough and connecting the dots, but that's probably still a long ways off.
I think you need to ponder on the fact that your last statement is contradictory, and rethink your assertions.
And I think physicists need a little more taste and they need to look a little more outside their very limited horizons. If they did, perhaps physics wouldn't be the mess that it is today and has been for more than a century.
Umm no, not really. Over the century more and more alternate theories of gravity have been proven wrong.
Spoken like a true physicist: "because lots of alternative theories to GR have been proven wrong, therefore GR must be right". You do indeed do physics justice.
I know of NO fixed background or bi-metric theory that is any where near as good as Einstein's gravity.
A very simple one would be a theory that is mathematically identical to GR but has some additional kinds of measurements you could perform to determine an absolute state of motion. All the current predictions of GR would continue to hold up, but its central tenet would be wrong.
Epicycles were a terrible fudge of science.
And your point is?
Like NG, GR will be taught for a long, long time.
Yes, that's a great analogy: NG is a logical mess and it continues to be taught, so the same will likely happen for GR. That tells you more about the sociology of physics, however, than about whether either NG or GR is a good physical theory.
I agree that prototype-based object systems are not obviously better than class-based systems. However, JavaScript is not a good datapoint: JavaScript has so many design problems that you really can't tell anything about prototype-based systems from it.
The object systems commonly used with Lisp were not prototype based.
Come to think of it, what does *anything* do that Lisp doesn't, except have larger market penetration?
If, by "Lisp", you mean versions of Lisp that have actually been standardized, CommonLisp and Scheme, there are plenty of things Lisp doesn't do. For example, static type checking, type inference, well-defined reflection (Lisp never had that, only implementation-specific hacks), well-defined fault isolation (again, Lisp never had that, only implementation-defined behaviors), support for immutable data structures, automatic lazy evaluation, efficient I/O, unsafe constructs, value classes, and plenty more.
And while Lisp advocates like to claim that the commercial death of Lisp was due to some conspiracy against parentheses, the fact is that, despite some brilliant aspects, CommonLisp and Scheme were and are seriously deficient and impractical languages. Java and C# are not as nice or as flexible as Lisp, but they get a lot of the other things right.
OOP enables you to easily swap out modules, or replace existing code. As long as you know the inputs and outputs of an object, it can be seemlessly removed for a newer version.
The input/output behavior of objects is not sufficient to describe its behavior completely because objects are stateful. In fact, this is a key drawback of OOP.
Functional programming fixes that: in functional programming, you really do only need to lknow the "input/output behavior" of functions.
(Note that "functional programming" is not the same as "procedural programming". Languages like ML and Haskell are functional programming languages, languages like C and Pascal are procedural programming languages.)
He didn't mention any problems that need to be fixed. He mentioned configuration tools. If people want to adjust the screen size, they want to bring up a properties box, select the size they want and click OK. They don't want to bring up a terminal, run a config utility or edit config files and then have to restart X windows and reload their desktop environment.
And they don't have to under Linux either.
Driver discs for devices in Windows just about always work, and they sure won't corrupt your Windows installation. (I'm probably going to get responses from Linux people saying, "I tried to install something in Windows and then went into regedit and messed with some stuff in the registry, and then Windows was all corrupted! Those Windows drivers must have messed it up!")
Drivers and third party software installations manage to mess up Windows without any human intervention, regularly, even in XP. Oh, XP doesn't come down crashing anymore like Windows 95 used to, but things stop working. Maybe it's just that that expensive piece of software or hardware you just tried to install just won't work until you do a complete reinstall. Maybe it's that there are gigabytes of accumulated crud filling up the disk that won't go away until on deinstall. But installing software and hardware on Windows is a big gamble.
Furthermore, a lot of hardware that is nominally supported under Windows has such poor driver software that it might as well not be.
In real life, it simply turns out to be the case that "Windows driver support" is much overrated: the kind of hardware that actually works well on Windows usually also works well on Linux, because it uses standard protocols and interfaces.
He's talking about just being able to use the computer and make a few adjustments. You are thinking of being able to control and tinker with everything, set up a custom firewall, NAT addressing, proxy servers, user authentication, and I don't know what else. My analogy is that there is a 1-foot step of learning for people to be able to effectively use their Windows system and get it to do what they normally want. The advanced configuration stuff is then an 8-foot step for them to climb. With Linux, it's a 6-foot step from the beginning to get the system to do what you want, but then once you have gotten up there, you can do anything you want with it.
Have a look at some modern Linux distributions: they have GUI-based configuration tools that are second to none, for every level of system management.
And if you think that "custom firewalls" and "NAT addressing" are particularly obscure features, you really don't know what's going on in the real world. My mother, a rather non-technical person, has a "custom firewall" and "NAT addressing" at home that she installed herself (in her case, it came as part of an Apple AirPort). You see, all that supposedly "server management stuff" is stuff many people actually need--to get web cams to work, to protect their computers, and to share their broadband connections.
Basically, you just keep mindlessly repeating the same Microsoft marketing drivel that we keep hearing again and again. But repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true. Linux system management is certainly not perfect, but it is at least on par with both Windows and Macintosh as far as GUI tools go, and it is far superior as far as remote management and support go. And Linux driver support is, in practical terms, comparable to Windows: while Windows nominally supports more hardware, Linux supports the stuff people actually use and it supports it better than Windows; the stuff that's Windows-only is usually junk anyway.
Re:Read this today morning
on
Testing Relativity
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The "Evicting Einstein" title of the article is misleading. IMHO, the Theory of Relativity cannot be proven incorrect...it can only be proven *incomplete*. Far too much evidence/data exists to prove the interaction of light and gravity and space-time as predicted by the GTR.
Sure, it can be proven incorrect. They key idea behind general relativity is the relativity principle, and that may simply turn out to be false.
The fact that GR makes numerically good predictions is nice, but there are plenty of other theories that make numerically identical predictions but do not postulate a relativity principle.
Even if the Quantum theory is proven correct, the Theory of Relativity will live on as an effect of the quantum theory - since it explains the effects of Quantum behavior on the macro-level...
Not every theory that makes good numerical predictions turns out to be a reasonable special case of a more general theory. Epicycles were pretty good, but Newtonian mechanics basically made them obsolete; they have no meaning anymore even as a special case. Likewise, general relativity may just turn out to be based on bogus core assumptions, and it just doesn't matter how good its numerical predictions are then.
Warp 10 is impossible. The warp scale represents speeds exponentially closer to infinity. According to the scale, 10 is the asymptote representing infinite speed.
The warp scale is not an exponential scale. If it were, it would not have a limit. It's actually a hyperbolic scale.
(This usage of "exponential" as "very fast" that seems to have crept into colloquial language is just stupid. Exponential growth is neither the fastest possible mathematical growth, nor is it even necessarily very fast. People who don't know what it means should just stop using it altogether.)
As for the warp scale, there is no consistent interpretation of it in terms of speed anyway; if you look at the places that Star Trek has gone whose positions are already know to astronomy and how long it took spacecraft in Star Trek to travel between them at various stated warp speeds, they correspond to widely varying actual speeds.
If you want a nice, clean, prototype-based OO scripting language, check out Lua. Its implementation is mature, it is widely used (a favorite among game developers), and it compiles into compact executables. It also has one of the fastest scripting language interpreters around (short of a JIT). And there are excellent tools for binding C and C++ code to it.
No, we have millions of programmers writing C++ and MFC code because they made that choice. Nobody is compelling them to, and they could have chosen Ada if they were so inclined.
I suppose if someone holds a gun to your head and asks for your money, nobody is "compelling you" to hand over your money either--after all, you have a free choice--you can choose a bullet through your head.
In reality, Microsoft has forced Microsoft's preference of language and toolkit on developers far more effectively than any government standard could. Their "bullet" is that if you don't follow their preferences, you will be later to market and your software won't integrate as well with their software. And it's not even because Microsoft is evil that they do this, it's because it's just the simpler thing for them to do. But stop whining and pretending that when Microsoft makes choice on your behalf it's somehow better than if the government does--at least with the government, you get to vote.
They may be created by contractors, but they're enforced by an army of bureaucrats. Government standards enforcement becomes expensive and ineffective.
Nonsense. Most government standards are not enforced in private transactions. Generally, governments (in particular, the US government) tells you what standards to follow when you do business with them. Since they are the largest business in the nation, when they set a standard for themselves, private enterprises usually follow.
And in some cases, the failure of the US government to go further is known to have really hurt people: the US cell phone system is primitive compared to what you can get in other nations, for example. At least the government forced a common television standard on everybody, otherwise you would probably only be able to watch ABC channels on ABC televisions (or, more likely, Gates channels on Gates televisions).
Standards are nice, but it's NO PLACE for government.
Of course, standards are a place for government. The government doesn't need to set every standard, but there are many areas for which the government is the best single body to pick the standard or even to define the standard.
If the government were to decided the standards, we'd all be writing programs in Ada.
Instead, we have millions of programmers writing C++ and MFC code because a completely unaccountable entity that's larger than many governments made that choice. It's a tough choice, and we are picking from the bottom of the barrel here, but frankly, we might actually be better off with Ada.
In other news we would just be getting the standard for 10Base-T later this year [...]
In other news, because Microsoft picked it, we still don't have a decent interoperable object standard--we have been stuck with 1970's technology (COM) until this very day.
and a byte would soon be 37 bits long (becuase it's the only number that doesn't offend lacto-vegitarian-femi-nazi-free-range-chicken-head s) or some other weird thing.
And with corporate-defined standards, companies make stupid choices because they have some stealth patents or other weird interests. Frankly, I'd rather make "lacto-vegitarian-femi-nazi-free-range-chicken-hea ds" happy than pay an extra dime for each music download because Sony decided to use their market position to screw me over even more.
I would be nice to have the government say something like "OK all you companies, decided on a format for word processor documents and stick to it untill the you issue a new standard after that", but for government to decide the standard its self probably wouldn't be good.
That's how almost all government standards get created anyway: by private companies. Or do you think George W. Bush sits down and drafts them up? Even when a standard was "created by" the government, it's usually contracted out.
As far as competition with MicroSoft goes, the GNU system just doesn't have what it takes. Windows has all these graphical configuration tools and wizards that can make even a complete agnostic feel in control.
"Feel" being the operative word--in real life, that's actually an illusion. The vast majority of PC problems aren't fixed by using those "graphical configuration tools and wizards", they are fixed by rebooting, returning the machine, or having a 12 year old whiz kid fix it.
(And do look up the meaning of "agnostic" some time.)
These are just not there for Linux,
Sure, they are: distributions like SuSE need not fear any comparison with Windows when it comes to that sort of thing.
so you'll need people with actual knowledge of the system as sysadmins.
Sorry to break it to you, but Wizards and GUI tools don't obviate the need for knowledge. If anything, Windows requires more experience to manage well, and it keeps changing. Seems like you have fallen prey to Microsoft marketing claims.
As for the home desktop, don't even think about it. People want their gadgets supported and they want their games to run. They don't want to break their system, so they'll stick with what it ships with and not experiment.
Contrary to popular opinion, gadgets are not well supported on Windows. Sure, lots of hardware ships with Windows drivers and installers, but a lot of the time, they don't work, and with some regularity, they mess up the entire Windows installation.
Less hardware pretends to work with Linux, but the stuff that works usually really does work and works really well; unlike hardware under Windows, hardware under Linux will also keep working through system upgrade after system upgrade.
They actually produce some nice code (Office for OS X is quite nice),
That would be the same sense of "quite nice" in which being run over by a BWM is "quite nice" compared to being run over by a Yugo?
Seriously, there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of an office suite, whether it's MS Office, MS Office X, or OpenOffice. The only reason people don't notice anymore is because they have gotten used to the pain and can't imagine anything different anymore.
but you have to remember that... they all sucked until the mac came out... the mere fact that no one had seen a GUI before the mac shows you just how commercially successful the others were.
Yeah, because we all know what a great indicator of quality commercial success is, right? After all, Windows is so much more of a commercial success than the Macintosh, so Windows must be even better, right?
In reality, Mac succeeded not because of quality or technology (where it was much worse than Xerox's developments in just about every respect), but because it was cheap, because it was packaged nicely, because it had cute graphics, and because it was heavily marketed.
Apple contributed pretty much nothing to GUIs with the original Macintosh. If anything, they took us backwards by cutting so many corners in their software architecture that the industry still hasn't even reached the level of technology represented by the original Smalltalk-80 system.
I suspect that if it hadn't been Microsoft, it would have been some other company like them. The PC market shows that there have been plenty of other companies willing to take shortcuts for quick time-to-market and for hardball business strategies.
If you recall Apple's history, first, they claimed to own "the GUI" and started suing people over it, then they saddled us with a decade of horrendously poorly designed and flaky operating systems (until OS X). Sun hasn't been much better: they took BSD UNIX, created a proprietary product around it, and more recently claimed to establish Java as an "open standard" only to protect it heavily with patents and try to keep complete control of it. And the only reason IBM didn't try to monopolize the PC market was because they were already under intense scrutiny for anti-trust violations and couldn't do so.
On the whole, among the potential monopolists that could have assumed the role of evil monopolist, Microsoft was probably one of the less harmful ones: they didn't wise up to patents until recently, they bungled a lot, and their technology was so poor that it allowed UNIX and Apple to co-exist for a while and OSS to take off.
But the fact that the combination of our laws and the computer market seems to predispose us to having an evil monopolist around doesn't mean we have to accept their behavior as natural. Just because lots of people loot when there is a natural disaster doesn't make the behavior acceptable. Likewise, just because people can behave like monopolists in the PC market doesn't mean that they are justified in doing so.
Fortunately, a company as big and predominant as Microsoft is also a big target. In the long run, they won't keep their position: the combination of antitrust enforcement and plain old free market forces (including open source) brings companies like Microsoft down in the long run.
Because, right now, there is only a single Java implementation and its derivatives and because nobody can create an independent implementation without Sun's approval. At this point, Java is just a proprietary platform, more encumbered by patents and copyrights than Microsoft Windows,.NET, or PalmOS.
I know some distros and die hard GNU people dont like it just because its license but most people dont care about that and dont even ave a problem buying software when its warranted.
No, they don't like Sun because Sun lied to them about making Java an open standard when Sun originally wanted support for Java and because Sun keeps misrepresenting what Java and the Java licenses are. They also dislike Sun and Java because the platform is stagnating technically--and that's because people can't modify and improve it.
And if you think that doesn't matter to you, think again. Sun could not have pulled off Java's success without a lot of good will and volunteer work, but people aren't going to make that mistake again. At this point, Java is just another proprietary platform, and a stagnant and bloated one at that.
Java has had a good run, but both technically and in terms of licensing, its days are numbered. Move on.
A few minutes on Google or simple using "apt-cache search" show you how--the utilities for doing this are standard and widely available. You can use standard FW camcorders or get high-resolution FW cameras for machine vision applications. FW is the way to go for hooking up cameras for any kind of live video.
It costs money to register your work as copyrighted.
You can bundle things and get the cost down to nothing.
Want to prove that you created the work on a certain date? Mail it to yourself and don't open it.
Courts will just laugh at that. After all, you can just send an unsealed envelope to yourself.
If you want to establish priority for an invention, you need to have it witnessed by someone who actually understands the invention. For copyright, it's not clear that that even helps, because...
If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it. [...] As it stands, I am able to create a work and the copyright exists immediately. I can even register the copyright after an infringement takes place and win in a lawsuit.
It's unclear whether you can claim copyright on unpublished works at all. After all, the deal is: we give you protection in exchange for you publishing the work and the work eventually falling into the public domain. If you try to restrict fair use, you are violating your part of the copyright bargain.
Going back to the old "no copyright until you register" system is something else, and pretty radical.
With copyright, you get a government-guaranteed monopoly, backed and enforced by police and courts, paid for by tax payers, lasting decades. It seems entirely reasonable to ask you to at least affirmatively assert your copyright.
(Note that GPL stuff very definitely uses copyright as its base. Do you want to have to register every little release to have a valid GPL on it?)
Yes, of course--why wouldn't I? This could be handled completely automatically, with a nominal, tiny fee. Furthermore, it doesn't have to be every tiny release; even with registration requirements, you get a significant period of time to register. So, GPL'ed software could be registered once per year.
Actually, there are graphical user interfaces (graphical output, mouse selection, etc.) that are primarily command-line driven. They are used a lot in scientific and engineering packages.
It's not really a GUI though, as gui means windows that you can move around and overlap, with menus at the top of the screen. The Xerox machine was less GUI than it was anything else. It took until Apple released the first MAC to get a GUI going.
"GUI" means "graphical user interface". Of course, PARC had those long before Apple.
PARC developed overlapping and movable windows years before Apple (and so did several other research labs). PARC also developed not one, but several different GUI-based systems, including the Alto and Smalltalk-80.
Menus at the top of the screen arrived long before the GUI. UCSD Pascal had them, as did many other systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists use this manner because of the following well known philosophical problem: [...] When you say you are proving a physical theory you are like person B. The untested domain is too large to assert that you have ever proven anything. This is the sad fact of physical science.
Bayesian reasoning deals with this problem. Pick up any textbook on modern Bayesian statistics and Bayesian reasoning.
Einsten's GR is the most elegant theory in physics. You don't seem to be able to distinguish between math and physics.
Actually, that's what I would claim is your problem: you think the differential geometry formulas are the physical theory. They aren't. GR is a huge (implicit) set of postulates about the structure of space, postulates that closely mirror the axiomatic systems underlying differential geometry (not by accident, one might add). All the mathematical machinery of differential geometry, which then makes up GR, is just mathematics, with no physical content.
Yes, GR is hard to do, but that is because differential geomoetry is hard.
I don't find differential geometry hard; sorry if you do.
If you want to argue about how complicated GR is then you are making an argument against mathematics (I am a mathematician btw). And if you want to say that math is hard, then I will only respond with a hell-fucking yes math is hard.
I'm not arguing about it being "complicated" in the "hard to understand sense"; it's not hard to understand at all, at least if you have the mathematical foundations. I'm simply stating that it involves a huge mathematical edifice; if you model space using the methods of differential geometry, you are making a huge set of assumptions about space. The fact that you can summarize that as "one equation" tells you nothing about elegance or simplicity of the theory.
By analogy, GR is only simple in the way a car is simple for its drive; from the driver's point of view, you just sit in it and turn the ignition. Never mind the $20k worth of hardware that is needed to make the magic happen. You seem to forget about what's happening under the covers (which also makes me suspect that you are not actually a mathematician).
Semiconductor material for the operation of the transistor was predicted by a very bright theoretical physicist. He had a top notch group assigned to him at Bell Labs and it took them years to get an operational transistor. It years for a 2-Nobel winning physicist to discover.
The bipolar transistor was an accidental discovery by Shockley's group trying to implement field effect transistors, and the field effect transistor was patented in 1925, long before Shockley or Bell Labs even got into the game. Furthermore, it was advances in material sciences that made the implementation of the modern FET possible. In the end, Shockley's group accidentally stumbled over the bipolar transistor and they failed developing the FET based on their theoretical work. Of course, that isn't to say that those guys weren't very smart and highly successful, but your history of the transistor as a straight path from theory to implementation is a myth. You can read some of the history here.
You have clearly demonstrated that you have no working knowledge of GR.
Another conclusion to which you jumped.
You cannot prove a physical theory, ever. You can only test it and fail to disprove it.
Theories in physics are no different in principle from theories in other scientific fields; you can never prove or disprove anything, but you can change your degree of belief in a hypothesis. And that works both ways: an experiment might strengthen your degree of belief in a hypothesis or it might weaken it.
In statistics we call this "failure to reject the null hypothesis".
Sorry, but you ("we") are a little behind the times there. Statistical hypothesis testing is still widely used by "working scientists" because it's simple, can be applied cookbook-style, and because it often gives some useful answers. But it is (provably) not a consistent and correct way of updating your degree of belief in a hypothesis or a scientific theory.
(To put this in familiar terms, trying to argue about how scientific theories are validated from the point of view of statistical hypothesis testing is the rough equivalent of arguing about atomic spectra with knowledge of only Newtonian mechanics.)
Einstein's GR is one single equation.
What a bizarre idea. Einstein's GR actually is a highly complex set of assumptions about spacetime (most of them, unfortunately, not explicitly stated). Using layers upon layers of mathematical structures and notation, those assumptions can be summarized in "one single equation", but that's only because of a lot of good will on the part of the reader.
You have just completely changed your argument. You said "mathematically identical" before. Now you are saying that the two theories will differ on a new domain of measurement which is obvious because GR is a low energy, classical theory and is going to be the classical limit, hbar->0, of some quantum gravity.
No, I haven't "changed my argument". I stated that they would be "mathematically identical" for known measurements. By "mathematical", I just meant "formally", as opposed to being "physically identical", which would actually ascribe some sort of specific interpretation to those formulas.
That isn't a formal statement about some kind of "-ism" (otherwise I would have made such a statement), it just means that the computations you would perform to predict the outcomes of known experiments would formally be the same: you plug the same numbers into the same formulas and you get out the same predictions. But there would be a new class of measurements for which you would use different kinds of computations to make predictions.
Let's see, what did the physicists do last century? Semiconductors -> Transistor -> the mother fucking Computer
Trying to lump together solid state physics and general relativity as if successes in one are a validation of the approach of the other is simply dishonest. In fact, the field effect transistor could have been discovered and optimized completely empirically, with essentially no physical insights (I don't remember how it was actually discovered and optimized, but most of solid state physics uses empirical models anyway.)
Quantum Mechanics -> Quantum Field Theory -> the most accurate physical predictions EVER
Yes, but unfortunately, we don't know whether those predictions were blind luck, fundamental mathematical constants or relationships that will pop up in many different theories (e.g., like "pi" or "sin"), or whether they actually represent a non-trivial fact about our specific physical universe. It will take a lot of work by mathematicians before we actually know (possibly centuries).
I claim that Einstein's GR is the most mathematical of any physical theory that has ever existed. If GR isn't mathy then no physical theory is!
My point exactly.
You are more full of shit than I ever thought was possible. You must really get a kick out of trolling on Slashdot.
No, I merely find it instructive to challenge people who con
We seem to be having trouble & high failure rates with just sending tiny robotic probes to Mars, and we can hardly even keep a couple of rusty buckets in low earth orbit operating. Moving a small asteroid gently (maybe using solar sails) should be well within our technological capabilities, but it doesn't seem like we have our act together enough to do it.
Right now, the US, one of the richest nations, doesn't even seem to be able to pay for health care or secondary education, but we are willing to pay hundreds of billions to have our shoes x-rayed in order to guard against an infinitesimal chance of getting killed by terrorists. So, you see, the problems aren't technical, they are psychological, social, and political.
(Besides, you really don't want the "oh, that was kilometers" kinds of errors with such a project.)
Mod down the BBB--that seems to be the standard response for many statements critical of Apple on /.
You can only disprove a theory. And the easier a theory is to disprove, the better the theory.
Yes, another one of those "facts" that physicists know. Why bother looking into those lesser sciences (statistics, philosophy, mathematics, cognitive science, psychology, etc.), where people actually have some understanding of what theories are and how they get proven or disproven? Oh, no, "we are physicists, we don't need to understand these things, we know what we are doing". Sure.
That is completely nonsensical.
To you, obviously.
If you had a "mathematically identical" theory to GR then it would also have the same symmetry group of diffeomorphisms, there would be no prefered frame, and you would have relativity all over again.
You haven't thought that through. I said that we assume that there are some form of "additional measurements" possible (this doesn't necessarily require any kind of fundamentally new physical interaction). GR would keep its structure for the kinds of measurements we have tested in on, but it would get some additional structure (different from GR) for the new kinds of measurements.
GR is a very mathematical theory.
GR uses a lot of math, but that doesn't make it a "very mathematical theory". Euclidean geometry is a very mathematical theory, GR is still just a mess. Maybe mathematicians will eventually succeed in cleaning it up enough and connecting the dots, but that's probably still a long ways off.
I think you need to ponder on the fact that your last statement is contradictory, and rethink your assertions.
And I think physicists need a little more taste and they need to look a little more outside their very limited horizons. If they did, perhaps physics wouldn't be the mess that it is today and has been for more than a century.
Umm no, not really. Over the century more and more alternate theories of gravity have been proven wrong.
Spoken like a true physicist: "because lots of alternative theories to GR have been proven wrong, therefore GR must be right". You do indeed do physics justice.
I know of NO fixed background or bi-metric theory that is any where near as good as Einstein's gravity.
A very simple one would be a theory that is mathematically identical to GR but has some additional kinds of measurements you could perform to determine an absolute state of motion. All the current predictions of GR would continue to hold up, but its central tenet would be wrong.
Epicycles were a terrible fudge of science.
And your point is?
Like NG, GR will be taught for a long, long time.
Yes, that's a great analogy: NG is a logical mess and it continues to be taught, so the same will likely happen for GR. That tells you more about the sociology of physics, however, than about whether either NG or GR is a good physical theory.
I agree that prototype-based object systems are not obviously better than class-based systems. However, JavaScript is not a good datapoint: JavaScript has so many design problems that you really can't tell anything about prototype-based systems from it.
What does Prothon do that Lisp doesn't?
The object systems commonly used with Lisp were not prototype based.
Come to think of it, what does *anything* do that Lisp doesn't, except have larger market penetration?
If, by "Lisp", you mean versions of Lisp that have actually been standardized, CommonLisp and Scheme, there are plenty of things Lisp doesn't do. For example, static type checking, type inference, well-defined reflection (Lisp never had that, only implementation-specific hacks), well-defined fault isolation (again, Lisp never had that, only implementation-defined behaviors), support for immutable data structures, automatic lazy evaluation, efficient I/O, unsafe constructs, value classes, and plenty more.
And while Lisp advocates like to claim that the commercial death of Lisp was due to some conspiracy against parentheses, the fact is that, despite some brilliant aspects, CommonLisp and Scheme were and are seriously deficient and impractical languages. Java and C# are not as nice or as flexible as Lisp, but they get a lot of the other things right.
OOP enables you to easily swap out modules, or replace existing code. As long as you know the inputs and outputs of an object, it can be seemlessly removed for a newer version.
The input/output behavior of objects is not sufficient to describe its behavior completely because objects are stateful. In fact, this is a key drawback of OOP.
Functional programming fixes that: in functional programming, you really do only need to lknow the "input/output behavior" of functions.
(Note that "functional programming" is not the same as "procedural programming". Languages like ML and Haskell are functional programming languages, languages like C and Pascal are procedural programming languages.)
He didn't mention any problems that need to be fixed. He mentioned configuration tools. If people want to adjust the screen size, they want to bring up a properties box, select the size they want and click OK. They don't want to bring up a terminal, run a config utility or edit config files and then have to restart X windows and reload their desktop environment.
And they don't have to under Linux either.
Driver discs for devices in Windows just about always work, and they sure won't corrupt your Windows installation. (I'm probably going to get responses from Linux people saying, "I tried to install something in Windows and then went into regedit and messed with some stuff in the registry, and then Windows was all corrupted! Those Windows drivers must have messed it up!")
Drivers and third party software installations manage to mess up Windows without any human intervention, regularly, even in XP. Oh, XP doesn't come down crashing anymore like Windows 95 used to, but things stop working. Maybe it's just that that expensive piece of software or hardware you just tried to install just won't work until you do a complete reinstall. Maybe it's that there are gigabytes of accumulated crud filling up the disk that won't go away until on deinstall. But installing software and hardware on Windows is a big gamble.
Furthermore, a lot of hardware that is nominally supported under Windows has such poor driver software that it might as well not be.
In real life, it simply turns out to be the case that "Windows driver support" is much overrated: the kind of hardware that actually works well on Windows usually also works well on Linux, because it uses standard protocols and interfaces.
He's talking about just being able to use the computer and make a few adjustments. You are thinking of being able to control and tinker with everything, set up a custom firewall, NAT addressing, proxy servers, user authentication, and I don't know what else. My analogy is that there is a 1-foot step of learning for people to be able to effectively use their Windows system and get it to do what they normally want. The advanced configuration stuff is then an 8-foot step for them to climb. With Linux, it's a 6-foot step from the beginning to get the system to do what you want, but then once you have gotten up there, you can do anything you want with it.
Have a look at some modern Linux distributions: they have GUI-based configuration tools that are second to none, for every level of system management.
And if you think that "custom firewalls" and "NAT addressing" are particularly obscure features, you really don't know what's going on in the real world. My mother, a rather non-technical person, has a "custom firewall" and "NAT addressing" at home that she installed herself (in her case, it came as part of an Apple AirPort). You see, all that supposedly "server management stuff" is stuff many people actually need--to get web cams to work, to protect their computers, and to share their broadband connections.
Basically, you just keep mindlessly repeating the same Microsoft marketing drivel that we keep hearing again and again. But repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true. Linux system management is certainly not perfect, but it is at least on par with both Windows and Macintosh as far as GUI tools go, and it is far superior as far as remote management and support go. And Linux driver support is, in practical terms, comparable to Windows: while Windows nominally supports more hardware, Linux supports the stuff people actually use and it supports it better than Windows; the stuff that's Windows-only is usually junk anyway.
The "Evicting Einstein" title of the article is misleading. IMHO, the Theory of Relativity cannot be proven incorrect...it can only be proven *incomplete*. Far too much evidence/data exists to prove the interaction of light and gravity and space-time as predicted by the GTR.
Sure, it can be proven incorrect. They key idea behind general relativity is the relativity principle, and that may simply turn out to be false.
The fact that GR makes numerically good predictions is nice, but there are plenty of other theories that make numerically identical predictions but do not postulate a relativity principle.
Even if the Quantum theory is proven correct, the Theory of Relativity will live on as an effect of the quantum theory - since it explains the effects of Quantum behavior on the macro-level...
Not every theory that makes good numerical predictions turns out to be a reasonable special case of a more general theory. Epicycles were pretty good, but Newtonian mechanics basically made them obsolete; they have no meaning anymore even as a special case. Likewise, general relativity may just turn out to be based on bogus core assumptions, and it just doesn't matter how good its numerical predictions are then.
Warp 10 is impossible. The warp scale represents speeds exponentially closer to infinity. According to the scale, 10 is the asymptote representing infinite speed.
The warp scale is not an exponential scale. If it were, it would not have a limit. It's actually a hyperbolic scale.
(This usage of "exponential" as "very fast" that seems to have crept into colloquial language is just stupid. Exponential growth is neither the fastest possible mathematical growth, nor is it even necessarily very fast. People who don't know what it means should just stop using it altogether.)
As for the warp scale, there is no consistent interpretation of it in terms of speed anyway; if you look at the places that Star Trek has gone whose positions are already know to astronomy and how long it took spacecraft in Star Trek to travel between them at various stated warp speeds, they correspond to widely varying actual speeds.
If you want a nice, clean, prototype-based OO scripting language, check out Lua. Its implementation is mature, it is widely used (a favorite among game developers), and it compiles into compact executables. It also has one of the fastest scripting language interpreters around (short of a JIT). And there are excellent tools for binding C and C++ code to it.
No, we have millions of programmers writing C++ and MFC code because they made that choice. Nobody is compelling them to, and they could have chosen Ada if they were so inclined.
I suppose if someone holds a gun to your head and asks for your money, nobody is "compelling you" to hand over your money either--after all, you have a free choice--you can choose a bullet through your head.
In reality, Microsoft has forced Microsoft's preference of language and toolkit on developers far more effectively than any government standard could. Their "bullet" is that if you don't follow their preferences, you will be later to market and your software won't integrate as well with their software. And it's not even because Microsoft is evil that they do this, it's because it's just the simpler thing for them to do. But stop whining and pretending that when Microsoft makes choice on your behalf it's somehow better than if the government does--at least with the government, you get to vote.
They may be created by contractors, but they're enforced by an army of bureaucrats. Government standards enforcement becomes expensive and ineffective.
Nonsense. Most government standards are not enforced in private transactions. Generally, governments (in particular, the US government) tells you what standards to follow when you do business with them. Since they are the largest business in the nation, when they set a standard for themselves, private enterprises usually follow.
And in some cases, the failure of the US government to go further is known to have really hurt people: the US cell phone system is primitive compared to what you can get in other nations, for example. At least the government forced a common television standard on everybody, otherwise you would probably only be able to watch ABC channels on ABC televisions (or, more likely, Gates channels on Gates televisions).
Standards are nice, but it's NO PLACE for government.
d s) or some other weird thing.
a ds" happy than pay an extra dime for each music download because Sony decided to use their market position to screw me over even more.
Of course, standards are a place for government. The government doesn't need to set every standard, but there are many areas for which the government is the best single body to pick the standard or even to define the standard.
If the government were to decided the standards, we'd all be writing programs in Ada.
Instead, we have millions of programmers writing C++ and MFC code because a completely unaccountable entity that's larger than many governments made that choice. It's a tough choice, and we are picking from the bottom of the barrel here, but frankly, we might actually be better off with Ada.
In other news we would just be getting the standard for 10Base-T later this year [...]
In other news, because Microsoft picked it, we still don't have a decent interoperable object standard--we have been stuck with 1970's technology (COM) until this very day.
and a byte would soon be 37 bits long (becuase it's the only number that doesn't offend lacto-vegitarian-femi-nazi-free-range-chicken-hea
And with corporate-defined standards, companies make stupid choices because they have some stealth patents or other weird interests. Frankly, I'd rather make "lacto-vegitarian-femi-nazi-free-range-chicken-he
I would be nice to have the government say something like "OK all you companies, decided on a format for word processor documents and stick to it untill the you issue a new standard after that", but for government to decide the standard its self probably wouldn't be good.
That's how almost all government standards get created anyway: by private companies. Or do you think George W. Bush sits down and drafts them up? Even when a standard was "created by" the government, it's usually contracted out.
As far as competition with MicroSoft goes, the GNU system just doesn't have what it takes. Windows has all these graphical configuration tools and wizards that can make even a complete agnostic feel in control.
"Feel" being the operative word--in real life, that's actually an illusion. The vast majority of PC problems aren't fixed by using those "graphical configuration tools and wizards", they are fixed by rebooting, returning the machine, or having a 12 year old whiz kid fix it.
(And do look up the meaning of "agnostic" some time.)
These are just not there for Linux,
Sure, they are: distributions like SuSE need not fear any comparison with Windows when it comes to that sort of thing.
so you'll need people with actual knowledge of the system as sysadmins.
Sorry to break it to you, but Wizards and GUI tools don't obviate the need for knowledge. If anything, Windows requires more experience to manage well, and it keeps changing. Seems like you have fallen prey to Microsoft marketing claims.
As for the home desktop, don't even think about it. People want their gadgets supported and they want their games to run. They don't want to break their system, so they'll stick with what it ships with and not experiment.
Contrary to popular opinion, gadgets are not well supported on Windows. Sure, lots of hardware ships with Windows drivers and installers, but a lot of the time, they don't work, and with some regularity, they mess up the entire Windows installation.
Less hardware pretends to work with Linux, but the stuff that works usually really does work and works really well; unlike hardware under Windows, hardware under Linux will also keep working through system upgrade after system upgrade.
They actually produce some nice code (Office for OS X is quite nice),
That would be the same sense of "quite nice" in which being run over by a BWM is "quite nice" compared to being run over by a Yugo?
Seriously, there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of an office suite, whether it's MS Office, MS Office X, or OpenOffice. The only reason people don't notice anymore is because they have gotten used to the pain and can't imagine anything different anymore.
but you have to remember that... they all sucked until the mac came out... the mere fact that no one had seen a GUI before the mac shows you just how commercially successful the others were.
Yeah, because we all know what a great indicator of quality commercial success is, right? After all, Windows is so much more of a commercial success than the Macintosh, so Windows must be even better, right?
In reality, Mac succeeded not because of quality or technology (where it was much worse than Xerox's developments in just about every respect), but because it was cheap, because it was packaged nicely, because it had cute graphics, and because it was heavily marketed.
Apple contributed pretty much nothing to GUIs with the original Macintosh. If anything, they took us backwards by cutting so many corners in their software architecture that the industry still hasn't even reached the level of technology represented by the original Smalltalk-80 system.
I suspect that if it hadn't been Microsoft, it would have been some other company like them. The PC market shows that there have been plenty of other companies willing to take shortcuts for quick time-to-market and for hardball business strategies.
If you recall Apple's history, first, they claimed to own "the GUI" and started suing people over it, then they saddled us with a decade of horrendously poorly designed and flaky operating systems (until OS X). Sun hasn't been much better: they took BSD UNIX, created a proprietary product around it, and more recently claimed to establish Java as an "open standard" only to protect it heavily with patents and try to keep complete control of it. And the only reason IBM didn't try to monopolize the PC market was because they were already under intense scrutiny for anti-trust violations and couldn't do so.
On the whole, among the potential monopolists that could have assumed the role of evil monopolist, Microsoft was probably one of the less harmful ones: they didn't wise up to patents until recently, they bungled a lot, and their technology was so poor that it allowed UNIX and Apple to co-exist for a while and OSS to take off.
But the fact that the combination of our laws and the computer market seems to predispose us to having an evil monopolist around doesn't mean we have to accept their behavior as natural. Just because lots of people loot when there is a natural disaster doesn't make the behavior acceptable. Likewise, just because people can behave like monopolists in the PC market doesn't mean that they are justified in doing so.
Fortunately, a company as big and predominant as Microsoft is also a big target. In the long run, they won't keep their position: the combination of antitrust enforcement and plain old free market forces (including open source) brings companies like Microsoft down in the long run.
Why does the core java standard need to be open
.NET, or PalmOS.
Because, right now, there is only a single Java implementation and its derivatives and because nobody can create an independent implementation without Sun's approval. At this point, Java is just a proprietary platform, more encumbered by patents and copyrights than Microsoft Windows,
I know some distros and die hard GNU people dont like it just because its license but most people dont care about that and dont even ave a problem buying software when its warranted.
No, they don't like Sun because Sun lied to them about making Java an open standard when Sun originally wanted support for Java and because Sun keeps misrepresenting what Java and the Java licenses are. They also dislike Sun and Java because the platform is stagnating technically--and that's because people can't modify and improve it.
And if you think that doesn't matter to you, think again. Sun could not have pulled off Java's success without a lot of good will and volunteer work, but people aren't going to make that mistake again. At this point, Java is just another proprietary platform, and a stagnant and bloated one at that.
Java has had a good run, but both technically and in terms of licensing, its days are numbered. Move on.
A few minutes on Google or simple using "apt-cache search" show you how--the utilities for doing this are standard and widely available. You can use standard FW camcorders or get high-resolution FW cameras for machine vision applications. FW is the way to go for hooking up cameras for any kind of live video.
It costs money to register your work as copyrighted.
You can bundle things and get the cost down to nothing.
Want to prove that you created the work on a certain date? Mail it to yourself and don't open it.
Courts will just laugh at that. After all, you can just send an unsealed envelope to yourself.
If you want to establish priority for an invention, you need to have it witnessed by someone who actually understands the invention. For copyright, it's not clear that that even helps, because...
If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it. [...] As it stands, I am able to create a work and the copyright exists immediately. I can even register the copyright after an infringement takes place and win in a lawsuit.
It's unclear whether you can claim copyright on unpublished works at all. After all, the deal is: we give you protection in exchange for you publishing the work and the work eventually falling into the public domain. If you try to restrict fair use, you are violating your part of the copyright bargain.
Going back to the old "no copyright until you register" system is something else, and pretty radical.
With copyright, you get a government-guaranteed monopoly, backed and enforced by police and courts, paid for by tax payers, lasting decades. It seems entirely reasonable to ask you to at least affirmatively assert your copyright.
(Note that GPL stuff very definitely uses copyright as its base. Do you want to have to register every little release to have a valid GPL on it?)
Yes, of course--why wouldn't I? This could be handled completely automatically, with a nominal, tiny fee. Furthermore, it doesn't have to be every tiny release; even with registration requirements, you get a significant period of time to register. So, GPL'ed software could be registered once per year.
Actually, there are graphical user interfaces (graphical output, mouse selection, etc.) that are primarily command-line driven. They are used a lot in scientific and engineering packages.
It's not really a GUI though, as gui means windows that you can move around and overlap, with menus at the top of the screen. The Xerox machine was less GUI than it was anything else. It took until Apple released the first MAC to get a GUI going.
"GUI" means "graphical user interface". Of course, PARC had those long before Apple.
PARC developed overlapping and movable windows years before Apple (and so did several other research labs). PARC also developed not one, but several different GUI-based systems, including the Alto and Smalltalk-80.
Menus at the top of the screen arrived long before the GUI. UCSD Pascal had them, as did many other systems.