Alright then. It seems that I stand corrected, at least in part. However, it is still true that the *AA is not reporting music/movie downloaders to the FBI, but rather filing lawsuits against them. Why is this? I can think of several possibilities.
1. They are unaware of the Copyright Felony Act of 1992. Unlikely in the extreme. I would estimate that it is more likely that they wrote this act than that they are unaware of it.
2. They are driven not by a respect for the rule of law, but by a desire for more money. Lawsuits have the potential to net the *AA (and their lawyers) quite a bit of quick cash, whereas criminal investigations do not. Now, of course, if the *AA's own claims are true, then any means of preventing the copying of media would net them enormous amounts of slow cash, and criminal investigations would do that without the need for them to pay the lawyers. So, if (2) is true, then it follows that they do not believe their own claims about lost revenue, and therefore, in their own eyes, their lawsuits have no basis. This is bad. When someone files a suit they believe has no basis, it indicates that either they think the system is wrong or that they are filing on a matter of principle. The *AA's principles are highly suspect in my mind, so we'll go with the former.
3. They think that their claims of revenue loss are correct, but that criminal investigations will not stop that loss, whereas lawsuits will. If this is true, then it would seem to indicate that they think that the downloaders are doing nothing criminal (or that there is insufficient evidence to convict in a criminal court) but that lawsuits will scare enough people to make them stop. This is also bad. Scare tactics are not a good thing for society, I think.
So, whichever is the case, I think that what the *AA is doing is a bad thing. Even (1) seems problematic, as a group employing as many lawyers as they do ought to know pretty much all the relevant laws by now.
Yes, I know that this is rather peripheral to the point you made. I used your point as a departure point for my own musings.
Personally, I oppose DRM in every possible fashion and in every concievable use.
Ok, here's a hypothetical situation for you. Purely hypothetical, as I can't imagine that such a thing could ever come up, but my inability to imagine it in no way constitutes a proof that it could not or will not, so the situation and the problems it presents are still meaningful.
Suppose that the use of some DRM today could prevent the use of a much much larger amount of DRM in the future. Further suppose that there is not any other way to prevent the use of that large amount of future DRM which is not ruled out by other concerns (for instance, destroying the planet in order to prevent DRM rather defeats the purpose). Now, do you oppose the use of the small amount of DRM today? If you do, it would seem that your opposition implies support of the large amount of DRM in the future.
Oh, and btw, before anyone else replies to me, please make sure that you are replying to what I actually said. I made statements about the legal status of copyright infringement, not about its moral status. So don't assume you know anything about my opinion of its moral status, because you don't.
You can agree or disagree with the concept or the severity of the crime, but at least have the balls to call it what it is.
I'm afraid not. Copyright infringement is not a crime. If it were a crime, then cases in courts involving copyright infringement would be in criminal courts. They are not. They are in civil courts. HUGE difference. MASSIVE difference. Worlds apart. It is not theft (legally). Theft is a crime. Copyright infringment is a civil offense. Get it straight. According to the cited definition of Steal, copyright infringement might be considered stealing. But take careful note: that cited definition nowhere says it is a crime.
You can take your own opinion about the moral implications of the act of copyright infringement, but at least have the brains to call it what it is.
Oh a policy! I feel so much better now! Haha and to think I was ever worried.
On a less sarcastic note, the USA at the end of WWII thought pretty hard and carefully about things, and came to the eventual conclusion that ending the war quickly by dropping little boy and fat man would actually result in fewer deaths and less problems in the future for both nations. So you would rather that we had just kept island hopping, probably for another couple of years, killed hundreds of thousands more Japanese and American soldiers, and sent both nations into much greater economic distress (war debts) than they would already be in anyway? I for one would rather have used the bombs.
Well considering how rarely I watch tv in the first place (never)... A total lack of commercials might just be enough incentive to get me to watch. So, is my business worth that much to the tv networks? Probably not. But anyway, to answer your question, yes, the same argument can be made in that case.
For people who are not going to build their own box no matter what, it makes sense for Dell to ask how much they'd pay to get rid of the crap. For people who are not going to buy a Dell with crap on it, it makes sense to ask Dell if they would remove the crap and lower the cost just to get those people's business.
For people who watch tv regularly anyway, it makes sense to ask whether they'd pay to remove the commercials. For people who don't watch tv (really because the shows are crap more than because of the commercials, but whatever. For the sake of argument, we'll say its the commercials), it makes sense to ask the networks if they would remove the commercials just to get my business.
Well, fair enough. To put myself at further risk of being overly pedantic, you might have just said that gravity propagates at no more than the speed of light. Then I probably wouldn't have nitpicked at all. I'm glad that you know what you're talking about, but I really am overly picky when it comes to physics, and I hate to think of other people getting the wrong idea from something like that. Sorry.
Because gravity also propagates at the speed of light.
We don't know this. Sure, it is predicted to be the case by GR (I think. High energy physicists don't have to know much about GR, and I don't.), but we have not measured the speed of gravity in any sort of reasonable experiment. Clifford Will, at Washington University in St. Louis, says that we need to detect gravity waves before we have any sort of reasonable measurement of gravity's propagation velocity.
From the bottom of the linked page:
The real way to measure the speed of gravity is to detect and study gravitational waves. By comparing the arrival of a gravitational-wave signal with that of an electromagnetic signal from an astrophysical source, one could compare the speed of gravity to that of light to parts in 10^(17).
Of course, I don't know Dr. Will personally. I merely turned up his page via Google, but WashU is certainly a respectable physics school, and I am inclined to trust what their faculty say about matters which are in their particular area of expertise and out of mine.
Sure, science couldn't and still can't absolutely rule out the stationary earth (or mobile earth) formulations of a universe model, but you're neglecting one crucial point: uncertainty. We can take a look at our data, and estimate the uncertainty that should attach to our conclusions. When the data are such that if one model were true, there would only be a (say).0012 probability that we would obtain these data by doing the experiments we have done, then we can much much much more safely claim that that model is false, particularly when we have another model which, if true, would produce these data (say).98 of the time.
In short, the situation with the scientific method is really much better than you've described it. The scientific method not only tells us things, it tells us just how sure (or unsure) we are of them. In fact, you are exactly wrong about one thing: It was not possible to rigorously follow the scientific method in the Middle Ages and conclude that the earth is at the center of the universe. It was possible to rigorously follow the scientific method and not conclude that the earth is not at the center of the universe. The data which had been obtained was highly likely to have been obtained provided either model were true, and thus the scientific method did not distinguish between the two. Now of course, given some a priori notion of "simple", the rigorous formulation of Occam's Razor from Bayesian statistics could most likely choose one of the two models, but that is strictly outside of the scientific method, as it depends upon a prior notion, rather than exclusively upon the data.
So, both Gallileo (or Copernicus) and the Church would be wrong in declaring that either model is correct, as the data did not overwhelmingly support either model over the other.
At least with some designs I have seen, it would be a fairly simple operation to replace the plastic extruder head with a milling tool head. Also, there has been some work done on incorporating conductors into the plastic to form a machine which can build circuits. Semiconductors, not so much. But connection circuits, even low-tolerance capacitors and inductors could be made.
Perhaps if you consider the bases of the assertions of the "religious nutjobs", you might find that at least some (more than you think) are not hypocrites, and are in fact (nearly) perfectly self consistent (Show me a person who is perfectly self consistent in their beliefs, and I'll show you a person who believes nothing). If one believes that souls exist (and tell me how that is hypocritical), and one believes that human beings have souls before they are even conceived (this is biblical, and once again, how is this hypocritical?), and one believes that animals other than humans do not have souls (hypocritical? I think not), then it is perfectly rational and not at all inconsistent to eat beef and lamb and eggs, but oppose abortion etc. Not that the opposition to abortion etc. is necessitated by the above beliefs (one could consider that a greater evil is being prevented by stem cell research or by some abortions), but the two are certainly not inconsistent.
Also, if one considers (for whatever reason) that a war at one time, complete with all the thousands of deaths involved in it, can prevent many thousands more deaths, then that war would then be justified by a belief in the sanctity of human life, provided of course that no other way to prevent deaths without causing as many or more can be found. Again, this is not hypocritical, nor is it inconsistent with itself or any of the beliefs suggested above.
Of course religion looks nutty if you only look at it through your own glasses. Praying and believing in God is absolutely ludicrous if you *know* that God does not exist. And that doesn't even start on everything else, which by extension, pretty much has to be nuttier. So, next time you are in a "discussion" with a "religious nutjob", before you call them inconsistent and hypocritical, take a look at what their first principles or first axioms are, and then see if you can find any inconsistencies among those axioms (and any subsidiary belief, like believing in souls, which does not follow strictly logically from the first axioms you've already come up with must also be considered an axiom). If you find inconsistencies, then and only then can you consider them a hypocrite without yourself being unsane.
Oh, and by the way, if you really want to make sure you are not yourself a hypocrite, you'd better apply the same consistency check to yourself and your own beliefs. Or better yet, have someone do it for you, since it is awfully difficult to figure out yourself what it is that you actually believe.
I think you said it yourself right there. It is a wiki. Wikis are very much web 2.0. Wikipedia is web 2.0 whereas brittanica online is web 1.0. This comes straight from Tim O'Reilly (and I think he might well be considered the authoritative source here, since it is his buzzword after all), in the page I linked previously.
You might try Tim O'Reilly's explanation, since he coined the bloody term in the first place.
Oh, and of course you heard of and used web 2.0 sites before anyone called them web 2.0. Think about it. Tim O'Reilly didn't sit around and think, hmm, let's come up with something we could call web 2.0. What would it be? And then went and made a bunch of people start implementing his ideas. It is descriptive, and the term to describe something (as happens pretty much always with history) came after that which is described. There had to be a web 2.0 before anyone could recognize it as something different from what came before and name it.
How moronic do they make Greens these days? Yea that pond scum will absorb a lot of CO2... and release it right back when you burn it for fuel. So it is carbon neutral unless you plan to compact the algae into bricks and bury it.
No. Algal biodiesel is carbon neutral if you burn it, because burning it emits the same amount of carbon as was removed from the atmosphere by growing the algae. Algol biodisel would be carbon negative if you buried it, because that would be taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
Yes.... Isn't it funny, that's exactly what he said, except that he didn't explicitly say that it is negative if you bury it.
Although I'm not sure about this "Algol biodisel" thing... Couldn't we at least use C biodisel, or even C biodiesel? Better yet, let's jump up even another couple of decades and use python biodiesel. Sorry, couldn't resist the bad joke.
Well, since I got modded as "flamebait" for my previous post, I'll try again with a little bit less sarcasm. Physics was most certainly considered a major branch of science by the 30s and 40s. It was considered a major branch of science long before chemistry and biology, in fact. Physics dates back all the way to Archimedes, Aristotle, Lucretius, and friends. Chemistry and biology did not so much as exist in the classical period. During that time, what we call science pretty much included physics and nothing else. For a slightly more contemporary example, in the 1800s, thermodynamics was king, and gave us things like the steam engine. The steam engine, of course, made possible the industrial revolution, which changed the world.
I know this is a peripheral point to the entirety of your post, but as a physicist, I heartily object to this disregard for my field's history. Otherwise, a good and interesting post.
She first asked double the money of the total medical bill. Mcdonalds declines and offers something more reasonable, she then sues for punitive damages.
Not quite double, but close, yes. However, you think McDonald's offer of US$800 to cover her US$11,000 is more reasonable!? Usually, when one is "offering to settle" it is because one has already filed suit. So your "she then sues for punitive damages" is likely off the mark.
This was before physics was considered a major branch of science
Right, that old Isaac Newton chap, he was really just a minor player. Oh, and Mr. Faraday too. And Thomas Edison didn't make the incandescent lightbulb as a practical application of physics. Also, I'm very glad that Archimedes now knows that his screw for lifting water was a result from only a minor branch of science. And I almost forgot! Gallileo! He died for a minor branch of science. All this time, I've been thinking all these people were actually important! Silly me. </sarcasm>
It really was science with no practical applications then.
Oh right, I forgot. That silly old thing we called a "steam engine" wasn't a practical application. After all, no practical result from physics could have so thoroughly changed the world...
Thermodynamics is very much a part of physics, and it very definitely had practical applications long before then 1930s.
Perhaps you had better read my post before asserting that the GP made a "good reply" with all facts checked and no wrong answers propagating urban legends. After all,
You would think in the post-Wikipedia world a person would at least try to check their facts before they make an ass of themselves.
Well, in response to both you and the poster who disagreed with your etymology of "blimp", I went out looking for more information, since nobody bothered to cite any sources. The Discouraging Word ran a bit on the etymology of "blimp" a while back, which can be found about halfway down the linked page (sorry, there's no anchor there), under the heading "Shortt, Cunningham, and the bothersome matter of blimp". This posting pulls together a number of sources: the New Yorker, the Oxford English Dictionary, "www.blimpinfo.com" (which seems to be where the other poster got his paragraph verbatim), "www.bartleby.com" (The American Heritage dictionary), "www.m-w.com" (Merriam-Webster), "www.wordorigins.com", and "http://www.worldwar1.com/sfzepp.htm" (a personal website).
The conclusion drawn by The Discouraging Word is that the etymology is very unclear, but that more sources tend to weigh in on the otomatopoeic origin side than anywhere else. It is worth mentioning that the OED, perhaps the most authoritative source cited, favors the B-limp origin, by itself citing a 1939 issue of the periodical War Illustrated.
The post ends with "Hmm. Such a complicated circle we can weave with on-line sources alone. We can't imagine what we might find were we to venture into a library...".
There is one more proposal for the origins of the word, put forth by none other than the celebrated philologist and author J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien suggests that "blimp" comes from a compounding of the words "blister" and "lump". However, nobody seems to give this theory much credence.
I am perfectly well aware of the meaning of "shill!". However, I was merely pointing out that it I have usually only seen it used in cases where the argument was flawed to begin with. As I said, it is not the appropriate response, but it is most typically not used simply because the shill-caller disagrees with the shill-accused.
Theories of fundamental physics in which space and time are treated as continuous work very well, and are nice and simple. Theories in which space and/or time are treated as discrete become very much more complicated, and we don't appear to need them. Special relativity treats space and time as continuous, and the example I gave, as well as the discussion that prompted that example, involved special relativity, and not anything else. Thus, the assumption that space and time are continuous is not ill-founded in this case. If we do not make that assumption, then we can't talk about special relativity.
Furthermore, continuity of space and/or time, or the lack thereof, in no way implies that in between any 2 masses of any size there exists another mass. That would be a ridiculous thing, and I don't think that any theory could take that as either axiom or theorem and still manage to describe our universe with any degree of success.
Finally, the point-like property of fundamental particles (BTW, I am a high energy, or particle, physicist) in no way implies discreteness of either time or space. In fact, as has been said in another reply to you, our current most successful theories of fundamental physics (eg Quantum ElectroDynamics, or QED), which describe particles as points, deal with a continuous spacetime, not a discrete spacetime.
So, at present, it does in fact look as though space and time are continuous, and in the context of the discussion, it would not make sense to assume otherwise.
The only situation in which the photons can never catch up, is if they pass the event horizon of a black hole;)
If you and I start 5 feet apart, and we begin with zero relative velocity, but then we start to accelerate away from each other, no matter what our rates of acceleration, provided it is >0, then given enough time, we each create an "accelerational black hole".
First, think of good old Zeno's paradox (well, one of them), where you have Achilles chasing a tortoise. The tortoise has a head start. When the starting gun sounds, Achilles crosses the short distance to the tortoise's starting position quite quickly, but when he arrives he finds that the tortoise has moved on. So he crosses this short distance even more quickly, only to find that the tortoise has moved a tiny bit further. And so on ad infinitum. Zeno concluded that Achilles could not catch the tortoise, but since we can easily observe that any person can catch the tortoise, Zeno called this a paradox.
Now, Zeno's paradoxes really aren't worth that much, it turns out. However, now let's put a jet pack on the tortoise. This jet pack is constrained to never let the tortoise move as fast as Achilles can run (don't ask how), but it will perpetually bring the tortoise closer and closer to Achilles' speed. Now, Achilles runs to the tortoise's starting position, and finds the tortoise has moved on a short way. So, he then looks at the tortoise's new position, and runs to that position. The tortoise now has a new position, so Achilles runs to there. In the original scenario with constant speeds, the time it took Achilles to reach each new position was smaller, in fact greatly smaller. The times form a geometric series, which converges nicely. However, with this supercharged tortoise, Achilles finds that the times to catch up do not form a convergent series. That is, the total time for Achilles to catch the tortoise diverges, or is infinite.
Now let Achilles be a photon, and let the tortoise be a spaceship. The spaceship has an unlimited amount of fuel, and can keep up a constant acceleration for as long as the pilot likes. So, the pilot looks out his back window, and sees nothing. The photons behind him (well, the ones that started far enough away that is) can never catch him. It looks like there is a black hole following him. In fact, what with the equivalence of acceleration and gravity, from the astronaut's frame of reference, there IS a black hole following him! Of course, if he gives up trying to escape it, and just lets himself fall back into it, then he stops accelerating, the photons can catch up, and the black hole disappears.
So, the GP was wrong. But the parent isn't completely right either, unless his "unless they pass the event horizon of a black hole" was intended to include accelerational black holes like this.
My example was taken (in essence, not in text) from Nigel Calder's Einstein's Universe, an excellent book if you're bored.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright then. It seems that I stand corrected, at least in part. However, it is still true that the *AA is not reporting music/movie downloaders to the FBI, but rather filing lawsuits against them. Why is this? I can think of several possibilities.
1. They are unaware of the Copyright Felony Act of 1992. Unlikely in the extreme. I would estimate that it is more likely that they wrote this act than that they are unaware of it.
2. They are driven not by a respect for the rule of law, but by a desire for more money. Lawsuits have the potential to net the *AA (and their lawyers) quite a bit of quick cash, whereas criminal investigations do not. Now, of course, if the *AA's own claims are true, then any means of preventing the copying of media would net them enormous amounts of slow cash, and criminal investigations would do that without the need for them to pay the lawyers. So, if (2) is true, then it follows that they do not believe their own claims about lost revenue, and therefore, in their own eyes, their lawsuits have no basis. This is bad. When someone files a suit they believe has no basis, it indicates that either they think the system is wrong or that they are filing on a matter of principle. The *AA's principles are highly suspect in my mind, so we'll go with the former.
3. They think that their claims of revenue loss are correct, but that criminal investigations will not stop that loss, whereas lawsuits will. If this is true, then it would seem to indicate that they think that the downloaders are doing nothing criminal (or that there is insufficient evidence to convict in a criminal court) but that lawsuits will scare enough people to make them stop. This is also bad. Scare tactics are not a good thing for society, I think.
So, whichever is the case, I think that what the *AA is doing is a bad thing. Even (1) seems problematic, as a group employing as many lawyers as they do ought to know pretty much all the relevant laws by now.
Yes, I know that this is rather peripheral to the point you made. I used your point as a departure point for my own musings.
Suppose that the use of some DRM today could prevent the use of a much much larger amount of DRM in the future. Further suppose that there is not any other way to prevent the use of that large amount of future DRM which is not ruled out by other concerns (for instance, destroying the planet in order to prevent DRM rather defeats the purpose). Now, do you oppose the use of the small amount of DRM today? If you do, it would seem that your opposition implies support of the large amount of DRM in the future.
Oh, and btw, before anyone else replies to me, please make sure that you are replying to what I actually said. I made statements about the legal status of copyright infringement, not about its moral status. So don't assume you know anything about my opinion of its moral status, because you don't.
You can take your own opinion about the moral implications of the act of copyright infringement, but at least have the brains to call it what it is.
Oh a policy! I feel so much better now! Haha and to think I was ever worried.
On a less sarcastic note, the USA at the end of WWII thought pretty hard and carefully about things, and came to the eventual conclusion that ending the war quickly by dropping little boy and fat man would actually result in fewer deaths and less problems in the future for both nations. So you would rather that we had just kept island hopping, probably for another couple of years, killed hundreds of thousands more Japanese and American soldiers, and sent both nations into much greater economic distress (war debts) than they would already be in anyway? I for one would rather have used the bombs.
Well considering how rarely I watch tv in the first place (never)... A total lack of commercials might just be enough incentive to get me to watch. So, is my business worth that much to the tv networks? Probably not. But anyway, to answer your question, yes, the same argument can be made in that case.
For people who are not going to build their own box no matter what, it makes sense for Dell to ask how much they'd pay to get rid of the crap. For people who are not going to buy a Dell with crap on it, it makes sense to ask Dell if they would remove the crap and lower the cost just to get those people's business.
For people who watch tv regularly anyway, it makes sense to ask whether they'd pay to remove the commercials. For people who don't watch tv (really because the shows are crap more than because of the commercials, but whatever. For the sake of argument, we'll say its the commercials), it makes sense to ask the networks if they would remove the commercials just to get my business.
Well, fair enough. To put myself at further risk of being overly pedantic, you might have just said that gravity propagates at no more than the speed of light. Then I probably wouldn't have nitpicked at all. I'm glad that you know what you're talking about, but I really am overly picky when it comes to physics, and I hate to think of other people getting the wrong idea from something like that. Sorry.
From the bottom of the linked page:
Of course, I don't know Dr. Will personally. I merely turned up his page via Google, but WashU is certainly a respectable physics school, and I am inclined to trust what their faculty say about matters which are in their particular area of expertise and out of mine.
Sure, science couldn't and still can't absolutely rule out the stationary earth (or mobile earth) formulations of a universe model, but you're neglecting one crucial point: uncertainty. We can take a look at our data, and estimate the uncertainty that should attach to our conclusions. When the data are such that if one model were true, there would only be a (say) .0012 probability that we would obtain these data by doing the experiments we have done, then we can much much much more safely claim that that model is false, particularly when we have another model which, if true, would produce these data (say) .98 of the time.
In short, the situation with the scientific method is really much better than you've described it. The scientific method not only tells us things, it tells us just how sure (or unsure) we are of them. In fact, you are exactly wrong about one thing: It was not possible to rigorously follow the scientific method in the Middle Ages and conclude that the earth is at the center of the universe. It was possible to rigorously follow the scientific method and not conclude that the earth is not at the center of the universe. The data which had been obtained was highly likely to have been obtained provided either model were true, and thus the scientific method did not distinguish between the two. Now of course, given some a priori notion of "simple", the rigorous formulation of Occam's Razor from Bayesian statistics could most likely choose one of the two models, but that is strictly outside of the scientific method, as it depends upon a prior notion, rather than exclusively upon the data.
So, both Gallileo (or Copernicus) and the Church would be wrong in declaring that either model is correct, as the data did not overwhelmingly support either model over the other.
The RepRap folks have already started using their machines to print parts for their machines. Their aim is a Von Neumann universal constructor.
At least with some designs I have seen, it would be a fairly simple operation to replace the plastic extruder head with a milling tool head. Also, there has been some work done on incorporating conductors into the plastic to form a machine which can build circuits. Semiconductors, not so much. But connection circuits, even low-tolerance capacitors and inductors could be made.
Perhaps if you consider the bases of the assertions of the "religious nutjobs", you might find that at least some (more than you think) are not hypocrites, and are in fact (nearly) perfectly self consistent (Show me a person who is perfectly self consistent in their beliefs, and I'll show you a person who believes nothing). If one believes that souls exist (and tell me how that is hypocritical), and one believes that human beings have souls before they are even conceived (this is biblical, and once again, how is this hypocritical?), and one believes that animals other than humans do not have souls (hypocritical? I think not), then it is perfectly rational and not at all inconsistent to eat beef and lamb and eggs, but oppose abortion etc. Not that the opposition to abortion etc. is necessitated by the above beliefs (one could consider that a greater evil is being prevented by stem cell research or by some abortions), but the two are certainly not inconsistent.
Also, if one considers (for whatever reason) that a war at one time, complete with all the thousands of deaths involved in it, can prevent many thousands more deaths, then that war would then be justified by a belief in the sanctity of human life, provided of course that no other way to prevent deaths without causing as many or more can be found. Again, this is not hypocritical, nor is it inconsistent with itself or any of the beliefs suggested above.
Of course religion looks nutty if you only look at it through your own glasses. Praying and believing in God is absolutely ludicrous if you *know* that God does not exist. And that doesn't even start on everything else, which by extension, pretty much has to be nuttier. So, next time you are in a "discussion" with a "religious nutjob", before you call them inconsistent and hypocritical, take a look at what their first principles or first axioms are, and then see if you can find any inconsistencies among those axioms (and any subsidiary belief, like believing in souls, which does not follow strictly logically from the first axioms you've already come up with must also be considered an axiom). If you find inconsistencies, then and only then can you consider them a hypocrite without yourself being unsane.
Oh, and by the way, if you really want to make sure you are not yourself a hypocrite, you'd better apply the same consistency check to yourself and your own beliefs. Or better yet, have someone do it for you, since it is awfully difficult to figure out yourself what it is that you actually believe.
http://calendar.google.com/
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://del.icio.us/
http://docs.google.com/
You might try Tim O'Reilly's explanation, since he coined the bloody term in the first place.
Oh, and of course you heard of and used web 2.0 sites before anyone called them web 2.0. Think about it. Tim O'Reilly didn't sit around and think, hmm, let's come up with something we could call web 2.0. What would it be? And then went and made a bunch of people start implementing his ideas. It is descriptive, and the term to describe something (as happens pretty much always with history) came after that which is described. There had to be a web 2.0 before anyone could recognize it as something different from what came before and name it.
Although I'm not sure about this "Algol biodisel" thing... Couldn't we at least use C biodisel, or even C biodiesel? Better yet, let's jump up even another couple of decades and use python biodiesel. Sorry, couldn't resist the bad joke.
Thank you, Mr. Hobbes. And now for our other speaker! Mr. Rousseau?
Well, since I got modded as "flamebait" for my previous post, I'll try again with a little bit less sarcasm. Physics was most certainly considered a major branch of science by the 30s and 40s. It was considered a major branch of science long before chemistry and biology, in fact. Physics dates back all the way to Archimedes, Aristotle, Lucretius, and friends. Chemistry and biology did not so much as exist in the classical period. During that time, what we call science pretty much included physics and nothing else. For a slightly more contemporary example, in the 1800s, thermodynamics was king, and gave us things like the steam engine. The steam engine, of course, made possible the industrial revolution, which changed the world.
I know this is a peripheral point to the entirety of your post, but as a physicist, I heartily object to this disregard for my field's history. Otherwise, a good and interesting post.
Thermodynamics is very much a part of physics, and it very definitely had practical applications long before then 1930s.
Well, in response to both you and the poster who disagreed with your etymology of "blimp", I went out looking for more information, since nobody bothered to cite any sources. The Discouraging Word ran a bit on the etymology of "blimp" a while back, which can be found about halfway down the linked page (sorry, there's no anchor there), under the heading "Shortt, Cunningham, and the bothersome matter of blimp". This posting pulls together a number of sources: the New Yorker, the Oxford English Dictionary, "www.blimpinfo.com" (which seems to be where the other poster got his paragraph verbatim), "www.bartleby.com" (The American Heritage dictionary), "www.m-w.com" (Merriam-Webster), "www.wordorigins.com", and "http://www.worldwar1.com/sfzepp.htm" (a personal website).
The conclusion drawn by The Discouraging Word is that the etymology is very unclear, but that more sources tend to weigh in on the otomatopoeic origin side than anywhere else. It is worth mentioning that the OED, perhaps the most authoritative source cited, favors the B-limp origin, by itself citing a 1939 issue of the periodical War Illustrated.
The post ends with "Hmm. Such a complicated circle we can weave with on-line sources alone. We can't imagine what we might find were we to venture into a library...".
There is one more proposal for the origins of the word, put forth by none other than the celebrated philologist and author J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien suggests that "blimp" comes from a compounding of the words "blister" and "lump". However, nobody seems to give this theory much credence.
I am perfectly well aware of the meaning of "shill!". However, I was merely pointing out that it I have usually only seen it used in cases where the argument was flawed to begin with. As I said, it is not the appropriate response, but it is most typically not used simply because the shill-caller disagrees with the shill-accused.
Theories of fundamental physics in which space and time are treated as continuous work very well, and are nice and simple. Theories in which space and/or time are treated as discrete become very much more complicated, and we don't appear to need them. Special relativity treats space and time as continuous, and the example I gave, as well as the discussion that prompted that example, involved special relativity, and not anything else. Thus, the assumption that space and time are continuous is not ill-founded in this case. If we do not make that assumption, then we can't talk about special relativity.
Furthermore, continuity of space and/or time, or the lack thereof, in no way implies that in between any 2 masses of any size there exists another mass. That would be a ridiculous thing, and I don't think that any theory could take that as either axiom or theorem and still manage to describe our universe with any degree of success.
Finally, the point-like property of fundamental particles (BTW, I am a high energy, or particle, physicist) in no way implies discreteness of either time or space. In fact, as has been said in another reply to you, our current most successful theories of fundamental physics (eg Quantum ElectroDynamics, or QED), which describe particles as points, deal with a continuous spacetime, not a discrete spacetime.
So, at present, it does in fact look as though space and time are continuous, and in the context of the discussion, it would not make sense to assume otherwise.
First, think of good old Zeno's paradox (well, one of them), where you have Achilles chasing a tortoise. The tortoise has a head start. When the starting gun sounds, Achilles crosses the short distance to the tortoise's starting position quite quickly, but when he arrives he finds that the tortoise has moved on. So he crosses this short distance even more quickly, only to find that the tortoise has moved a tiny bit further. And so on ad infinitum. Zeno concluded that Achilles could not catch the tortoise, but since we can easily observe that any person can catch the tortoise, Zeno called this a paradox.
Now, Zeno's paradoxes really aren't worth that much, it turns out. However, now let's put a jet pack on the tortoise. This jet pack is constrained to never let the tortoise move as fast as Achilles can run (don't ask how), but it will perpetually bring the tortoise closer and closer to Achilles' speed. Now, Achilles runs to the tortoise's starting position, and finds the tortoise has moved on a short way. So, he then looks at the tortoise's new position, and runs to that position. The tortoise now has a new position, so Achilles runs to there. In the original scenario with constant speeds, the time it took Achilles to reach each new position was smaller, in fact greatly smaller. The times form a geometric series, which converges nicely. However, with this supercharged tortoise, Achilles finds that the times to catch up do not form a convergent series. That is, the total time for Achilles to catch the tortoise diverges, or is infinite.
Now let Achilles be a photon, and let the tortoise be a spaceship. The spaceship has an unlimited amount of fuel, and can keep up a constant acceleration for as long as the pilot likes. So, the pilot looks out his back window, and sees nothing. The photons behind him (well, the ones that started far enough away that is) can never catch him. It looks like there is a black hole following him. In fact, what with the equivalence of acceleration and gravity, from the astronaut's frame of reference, there IS a black hole following him! Of course, if he gives up trying to escape it, and just lets himself fall back into it, then he stops accelerating, the photons can catch up, and the black hole disappears.
So, the GP was wrong. But the parent isn't completely right either, unless his "unless they pass the event horizon of a black hole" was intended to include accelerational black holes like this.
My example was taken (in essence, not in text) from Nigel Calder's Einstein's Universe, an excellent book if you're bored.