By having such high age limits you essentially completely remove the ability of parents to interact with teens on the issue and teach moderation legally. You must be smoking some of the GP's weed. Parents have always been able to legally provide alcohol to their children in the privacy of the home. Drinking age refers to the gov't's permission to purchase alcohol and to consume it without parental permission or in public.
Like Jack Thompson, you're making your position seem ridiculous, and thereby not helping the cause at all.
Closer to 200 atoms wide. Take a glance at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html and notice the arrangement of the crystal (face-centered cubic) and the cube size. Going along one face, we pass two atoms before reaching the other side (one corner and one face center), so we have two atoms per 0.5 nm. Now chips are being mass produced on a 45 nm scale. This is about 100 times the silicon crystal cube size, with two atoms linearly per cube.
It seems as though, unless it is done somewhat carefully, this could place too much of a burden on copyright holders. Suppose I want to freely copy some popular song. I register ten thousand intents to do so with the copyright office. (or ten thousand people register one such intent) If the copyright holder fails to respond to even one such request, they lose some of the rights they previously had to control the use of their work.
That said, I expect that it is not too difficult to close this spamming loophole.
Ok, how about this: If you own a segment of wire, fiber, etc. which is on US soil and is used to carry IP traffic, then you may either not inspect or interfere with the packets (best effort), or you may be liable for any illegal activity which involves that segment.
This is, I understand, how common carrier status works. AFAICT, the telecoms are trying to have their cake and eat it too, by inspecting and interfering but maintaining immunity.
Only if the Theory of Everything turns out to be nonlocal. Any deterministic theory which is consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics (and thus also with experiment) must be a hidden variable theory, and only nonlocal hidden variable theories can agree with experiment. See the EPR paradox and Bohm's pilot-wave (an example of a nonlocal hidden variable theory).
Furthermore, IIRC (although I can't find the reference), nonlocal hidden variables place a pretty sharp limit on the amount of computation that the universe can do, and thus may be excluded quite soon (by a quantum computer that can factor numbers greater than ~10000).
Are you claiming that my entire thesis is untrue, or merely that I gave a poor example? It is not clear.
If the former, I'm afraid you'll have to provide more evidence than a single countercase to a single example.
If the latter, I'm still not sure I am convinced. I can't hear the audio at that NPR story on this machine, so I am only going on the story's summary, which is very sparing with details. However, from what I can glean from reviews of the cafe, it seems to be a walk up and buy food, then sit down and eat it type of place. This sort of restaurant clearly does not have you incurring a debt, since you pay for the food before you receive it. Thus, the legal tender thing doesn't apply anyway. Please correct me if I am wrong about the style of restaurant. I'm always glad to revise my mental model of our laws in favor of accuracy.
There is a subtlety here that you may have missed. Cash is legal tender for all debts. So, if you have already incurred a debt, then your creditor must accept cash as payment. However, most transactions do not involve you incurring a debt. For instance, when you pay to get on the bus, you have not yet incurred a debt, whereas if you eat a meal in a restaurant, then by the time you get the check, you do owe a debt. So, the bus driver may refuse cash; the restaurateur may not.
Interestingly, according to wikipedia, the "legal tender" phrase was added because the government couldn't pay its debts with gold or silver, and nobody wanted paper money instead. The phrase was added to compel them to accept the paper money.
Apples and oranges. We were talking about a scenario in which marketing did not exist. To wit: "If marketing did not exist . .."
The products you reference failed because their competitors had better marketing, which clearly would not be the case in a world where marketing did not exist.
Furthermore, you (anecdotally) support exactly my point! "Marketing causes people to purchase inferior products more often than not."
If marketing did not exist, you would walk into a store and purchase a random item off of the shelf (remember, no brand names, no fancy packaging!). In which case do you think you would find the better product? That where they are indistinguishable and you select at random, or that which you are provided with information to make a better decision? BZZZT! Wrong! In the absence of brand names, fancy packaging, etc, I would have a far easier time discovering what the true relative merits of the various products are, because the many things that you put there to induce a false distinction would be gone. In other words, the signal to noise ratio would be much much higher. Marketing causes people to purchase inferior products more often than not!
Furthermore, remove the fancy packaging, the screaming flashing ads, the brand name, etc, and you can reduce the price of a product significantly while maintaining your profit margin (provided, of course, that you have a good product). So when you consider the combination of jacked up prices and time spent by the average person trying to avoid advertisement (spam filtering, ad blocking, changing channels on the tv, going through the newspaper and throwing out the crap, etc, etc, etc), marketing has an absolutely tremendous cost to society, and almost no value to society to compensate!
Do you really expect to activate any non-negligible amount of material? CDF II has been in place for 7 years, and it still has no measurable residual radiation in the cavern when the beam is off.
Interesting tidbit: The radius of a (Schwarzchild) black hole is proportional to its mass, and so the volume of the black hole is proportional to the mass cubed. Since density is mass over volume, the density of a black hole is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. In short, black holes get less dense as they grow!
Most people confuse the difficulty of measurement with the uncertainty principle. The difficulty of measurement has to do with the fact that you can't measure something without affecting it. The uncertainty principle is actually a direct consequence of the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics. You cannot, even in principle, even as a thought experiment, construct a quantum mechanical state which violates the uncertainty principle (or any of the uncertainty principles). This is a mathematical certainty; it follows using pure logic from the postulates of quantum mechanics.
The difficulty of measurement is merely a mechanism by which the uncertainty principle is "enforced". If the postulates of quantum mechanics are correct (ie, if they are physical "law"), then the various uncertainty principles are correct (physical "law").
You might read the relevant wikipedia section for more clarification. Also, get yourself a copy of David J. Griffiths An Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, and be prepared to work through a decent bit of math. It will improve your understanding of quantum mechanics greatly.
The GP congratulates a certain set of people for finding a solution which is better than suicide bombing. You think "He is talking about Arabs.". Perhaps it is you who have the stereotyping problem, not the GP. You are putting words in his mouth.
They are almost certainly not. But no, I would not care to speculate on their methods, since I don't work in that field, and don't have the time to search out the relevant papers. There are other methods of estimating dates, you know.
No... no it is not carbon dating, which can only get us a few tens of thousands of years back. In stuff from 400 mya, all the radiocarbon has long since decayed.
Singling out individual experiments, and clinging to their anomalous results in the face of immense amounts of more precise data with more statistics is the mark of a fool, not a scientist. You have consistently come down on the side of a few experiments, and utterly ignored all others.
Well, Halton Arp still seems to have a fine career, at the Max Planck Institute. He is still publishing papers expounding upon his theories, although as a skeptical experimentalist, you ought to be pushing for him to abandon his theories, since they don't agree with observational evidence that has arisen since he first developed them.
Dayton Miller died in 1941, so I would hardly consider his case relevant to a discussion of the state of modern physics. However, the interpretation of his (fine, AFAICT) experimental results as a statistical anomaly is hardly character assassination or ridicule. In fact, statistical anomalies are expected, and it would itself be an anomaly if we didn't find any.
Yes, these men did fine work, good science. However, later experiment and observation provided more data (of course) and with this data, we can calculate increasingly small likelihoods for their theories, in comparison to increasingly large likelihoods for competing theories. This is also good science.
It is good that you refrain from recommending theories, since AFAICT at a quick glance, Mills' theories are inconsistent and do not even predict these hydrino states! Furthermore, Mills' book is well-known to be full of plagiarism. This is very poor conduct for a scientist indeed! Anyone who tries to pass off the scientific work of others as their own absolutely deserves character assassination! So until other scientists start investigating his theories (this is not my field, so I will not likely be one of them), I think that I will dismiss them summarily. Perhaps that is unscientific (and perhaps not), but extremely stiff penalties for academic misconduct are an absolute necessity if academia is to continue to be capable of producing good scientific results.
Furthermore, the results of the experiments you cite must also be called into some question, given that a) one of them was done by Mills, and b) the other one spends a great deal of time propounding Mills' theory. Both of these strongly suggest experimenter bias, which can easily lead to the experimenter effect and skew results. Furthermore, the paper on the arXiv spends a significant amount of time talking about the role of experimental physics, as if the reader needed reminding or convincing. This also sends up a lot of red flags in my mind. Talk to me again when there are experiments along these lines done by people without a vested interest in a particular theory (such as, perhaps, yourself?).
By the way, did you read the crackpot index I linked to previously? You earned quite a few more points in this last post...
You might try going to the arXiv, and doing a search on the names of the authors. Most likely, if there is a popular press article about their work, they've also got a preprint up, if not an actual journal article yet.
I'm familiar with modern physics, and I'm also familiar with modern physicists (particularly since I am one). Nobody thinks that the current situation is really a good one, but it gets predictions made and verified, and nobody has yet come up with anything unequivocally better. Certainly nobody regards current theories as "sacred". Sorry to burst your anti-establishment bubble, but it just ain't so. So unless you've got something better (in which case I would very much like to see it. That would be quite exciting, if it really is better and works.), I'd ask you to shut your trap. Fish or cut bait. Whining about string theory and the standard model doesn't really help anyone do anything, except for make you sound like a crackpot. Especially when your complaints about string theory (in another comment) reveal that you don't quite fully understand the situation there. I don't much care for string theory myself, but your arguments against it just don't hold much water.
BTW, you mentioned a PhD. What is it in? What research did you do (for the PhD), and what research are you doing now? Your nick suggests that you are perhaps a biologist, which would make me wonder what relationship you think a PhD in biology has to your ability to discern, evaluate, and comment on the state of modern physics.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Jack Thompson, you're making your position seem ridiculous, and thereby not helping the cause at all.
I would nuance this a bit and say that Prohibition is a bad thing, but I have no idea about Prohibition unions.
Closer to 200 atoms wide. Take a glance at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html and notice the arrangement of the crystal (face-centered cubic) and the cube size. Going along one face, we pass two atoms before reaching the other side (one corner and one face center), so we have two atoms per 0.5 nm. Now chips are being mass produced on a 45 nm scale. This is about 100 times the silicon crystal cube size, with two atoms linearly per cube.
It seems as though, unless it is done somewhat carefully, this could place too much of a burden on copyright holders. Suppose I want to freely copy some popular song. I register ten thousand intents to do so with the copyright office. (or ten thousand people register one such intent) If the copyright holder fails to respond to even one such request, they lose some of the rights they previously had to control the use of their work.
That said, I expect that it is not too difficult to close this spamming loophole.
That's what's caused the oil shortage to begin with!
Ok, how about this: If you own a segment of wire, fiber, etc. which is on US soil and is used to carry IP traffic, then you may either not inspect or interfere with the packets (best effort), or you may be liable for any illegal activity which involves that segment.
This is, I understand, how common carrier status works. AFAICT, the telecoms are trying to have their cake and eat it too, by inspecting and interfering but maintaining immunity.
Only if the Theory of Everything turns out to be nonlocal. Any deterministic theory which is consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics (and thus also with experiment) must be a hidden variable theory, and only nonlocal hidden variable theories can agree with experiment. See the EPR paradox and Bohm's pilot-wave (an example of a nonlocal hidden variable theory).
Furthermore, IIRC (although I can't find the reference), nonlocal hidden variables place a pretty sharp limit on the amount of computation that the universe can do, and thus may be excluded quite soon (by a quantum computer that can factor numbers greater than ~10000).
Are you claiming that my entire thesis is untrue, or merely that I gave a poor example? It is not clear.
If the former, I'm afraid you'll have to provide more evidence than a single countercase to a single example.
If the latter, I'm still not sure I am convinced. I can't hear the audio at that NPR story on this machine, so I am only going on the story's summary, which is very sparing with details. However, from what I can glean from reviews of the cafe, it seems to be a walk up and buy food, then sit down and eat it type of place. This sort of restaurant clearly does not have you incurring a debt, since you pay for the food before you receive it. Thus, the legal tender thing doesn't apply anyway. Please correct me if I am wrong about the style of restaurant. I'm always glad to revise my mental model of our laws in favor of accuracy.
There is a subtlety here that you may have missed. Cash is legal tender for all debts. So, if you have already incurred a debt, then your creditor must accept cash as payment. However, most transactions do not involve you incurring a debt. For instance, when you pay to get on the bus, you have not yet incurred a debt, whereas if you eat a meal in a restaurant, then by the time you get the check, you do owe a debt. So, the bus driver may refuse cash; the restaurateur may not.
Interestingly, according to wikipedia, the "legal tender" phrase was added because the government couldn't pay its debts with gold or silver, and nobody wanted paper money instead. The phrase was added to compel them to accept the paper money.
Just be glad they aren't NUCLEAR oil refineries!
Apples and oranges. We were talking about a scenario in which marketing did not exist. To wit: "If marketing did not exist . . ."
The products you reference failed because their competitors had better marketing, which clearly would not be the case in a world where marketing did not exist.
Furthermore, you (anecdotally) support exactly my point! "Marketing causes people to purchase inferior products more often than not."
Furthermore, remove the fancy packaging, the screaming flashing ads, the brand name, etc, and you can reduce the price of a product significantly while maintaining your profit margin (provided, of course, that you have a good product). So when you consider the combination of jacked up prices and time spent by the average person trying to avoid advertisement (spam filtering, ad blocking, changing channels on the tv, going through the newspaper and throwing out the crap, etc, etc, etc), marketing has an absolutely tremendous cost to society, and almost no value to society to compensate!
Do you really expect to activate any non-negligible amount of material? CDF II has been in place for 7 years, and it still has no measurable residual radiation in the cavern when the beam is off.
Interesting tidbit: The radius of a (Schwarzchild) black hole is proportional to its mass, and so the volume of the black hole is proportional to the mass cubed. Since density is mass over volume, the density of a black hole is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. In short, black holes get less dense as they grow!
Well, at least now John Fogerty will have an answer to his question.
Posting on /. does not preclude any of the things you suggest, so I'm not really sure what you're griping about.
Most people confuse the difficulty of measurement with the uncertainty principle. The difficulty of measurement has to do with the fact that you can't measure something without affecting it. The uncertainty principle is actually a direct consequence of the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics. You cannot, even in principle, even as a thought experiment, construct a quantum mechanical state which violates the uncertainty principle (or any of the uncertainty principles). This is a mathematical certainty; it follows using pure logic from the postulates of quantum mechanics.
The difficulty of measurement is merely a mechanism by which the uncertainty principle is "enforced". If the postulates of quantum mechanics are correct (ie, if they are physical "law"), then the various uncertainty principles are correct (physical "law").
You might read the relevant wikipedia section for more clarification. Also, get yourself a copy of David J. Griffiths An Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, and be prepared to work through a decent bit of math. It will improve your understanding of quantum mechanics greatly.
The GP congratulates a certain set of people for finding a solution which is better than suicide bombing. You think "He is talking about Arabs.". Perhaps it is you who have the stereotyping problem, not the GP. You are putting words in his mouth.
They are almost certainly not. But no, I would not care to speculate on their methods, since I don't work in that field, and don't have the time to search out the relevant papers. There are other methods of estimating dates, you know.
No... no it is not carbon dating, which can only get us a few tens of thousands of years back. In stuff from 400 mya, all the radiocarbon has long since decayed.
Singling out individual experiments, and clinging to their anomalous results in the face of immense amounts of more precise data with more statistics is the mark of a fool, not a scientist. You have consistently come down on the side of a few experiments, and utterly ignored all others.
Well, Halton Arp still seems to have a fine career, at the Max Planck Institute. He is still publishing papers expounding upon his theories, although as a skeptical experimentalist, you ought to be pushing for him to abandon his theories, since they don't agree with observational evidence that has arisen since he first developed them.
Dayton Miller died in 1941, so I would hardly consider his case relevant to a discussion of the state of modern physics. However, the interpretation of his (fine, AFAICT) experimental results as a statistical anomaly is hardly character assassination or ridicule. In fact, statistical anomalies are expected, and it would itself be an anomaly if we didn't find any.
Yes, these men did fine work, good science. However, later experiment and observation provided more data (of course) and with this data, we can calculate increasingly small likelihoods for their theories, in comparison to increasingly large likelihoods for competing theories. This is also good science.
It is good that you refrain from recommending theories, since AFAICT at a quick glance, Mills' theories are inconsistent and do not even predict these hydrino states! Furthermore, Mills' book is well-known to be full of plagiarism. This is very poor conduct for a scientist indeed! Anyone who tries to pass off the scientific work of others as their own absolutely deserves character assassination! So until other scientists start investigating his theories (this is not my field, so I will not likely be one of them), I think that I will dismiss them summarily. Perhaps that is unscientific (and perhaps not), but extremely stiff penalties for academic misconduct are an absolute necessity if academia is to continue to be capable of producing good scientific results.
Furthermore, the results of the experiments you cite must also be called into some question, given that a) one of them was done by Mills, and b) the other one spends a great deal of time propounding Mills' theory. Both of these strongly suggest experimenter bias, which can easily lead to the experimenter effect and skew results. Furthermore, the paper on the arXiv spends a significant amount of time talking about the role of experimental physics, as if the reader needed reminding or convincing. This also sends up a lot of red flags in my mind. Talk to me again when there are experiments along these lines done by people without a vested interest in a particular theory (such as, perhaps, yourself?).
By the way, did you read the crackpot index I linked to previously? You earned quite a few more points in this last post...
You might try going to the arXiv, and doing a search on the names of the authors. Most likely, if there is a popular press article about their work, they've also got a preprint up, if not an actual journal article yet.
I'm familiar with modern physics, and I'm also familiar with modern physicists (particularly since I am one). Nobody thinks that the current situation is really a good one, but it gets predictions made and verified, and nobody has yet come up with anything unequivocally better. Certainly nobody regards current theories as "sacred". Sorry to burst your anti-establishment bubble, but it just ain't so. So unless you've got something better (in which case I would very much like to see it. That would be quite exciting, if it really is better and works.), I'd ask you to shut your trap. Fish or cut bait. Whining about string theory and the standard model doesn't really help anyone do anything, except for make you sound like a crackpot. Especially when your complaints about string theory (in another comment) reveal that you don't quite fully understand the situation there. I don't much care for string theory myself, but your arguments against it just don't hold much water.
BTW, you mentioned a PhD. What is it in? What research did you do (for the PhD), and what research are you doing now? Your nick suggests that you are perhaps a biologist, which would make me wonder what relationship you think a PhD in biology has to your ability to discern, evaluate, and comment on the state of modern physics.