The real invasion of this system is that the raw data will be used not only to trigger a GPS speed limit. No, it will inevitably be used to halt cars driven speeders, then suspects of other crimes, then any "person of interest" to the police, or their political bosses. The stored records will be used to track people wherever they drive. The entire population will be tracked everywhere we go, and people's sense of privacy will go extinct.
Last time I checked, GPS devices don't send a signal to the GPS satellites (or really anywhere) but rather calculate their position based on the relative timings of signals from the GPS satellites. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS.
Thus, the devices (unless they included transmitters, which would be fairly easy to detect and/or disable) would not provide The Man any information about your whereabouts, activities, or anything else you might like to keep private. There would be no "stored records", and no "invasion of privacy".
Furthermore, a governor does not halt a car, but merely limits its speed. Also, the table of speed limits is entirely contained within the device (as I understand it), meaning that the government is not suddenly in control of your car's speed at all times. They are in control of it in some sense at the time they manufacture the device, but that's it.
GPS governors are less of an invasion of privacy than cameras in public places. Take off the tinfoil hat.
C- for relativity for sure! It doesn't get even close to relativistic speeds! And it certainly doesn't have enough mass for general relativity!
disclaimer: yes, I know that this comment was not technically correct. There are always plenty of reference frames in which it is moving at relavistic speeds, and general relativity deals with all gravity, not just high mass. its a joke. deal with it.
The third link there, "circular topology", brings up an error message that says "www.tubgirl.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again."
I'm thinking Ansley cables. That's what we use here at work to bring a signal from the central drift chamber's TDCs (Time to Digital Converters) up to the tracking electronics. Yes, we're using them for digital, but they were designed for analog (we used them because when the upgrade was done in the late-90s, we had a bunch left over from the old detector, and so that was cheapest.)
yes... that was mostly a joke, but I know that Ansley cables do have very good analog signal transmission properties. One thing that helps though, is if you make sure to bundle several cables together. The outer two or three cables in a bundle should be unused. This helps because the insulator in the cables acts as a dielectric, and if you have cables solo, or on the edge of a bundle, the signal quality tends to degrade faster.
I think that the structure of the cables is 48 twisted pairs in a ribbon arrangement, with some kind of PVC as the insulator.
Obviously, you can approximate any irrational number as p/q, and your approximation gets better as q gets larger. So, if x is the number that you're trying to approximate, then take the absolute value of x - p/q. Then, find the smallest number u (the infimum) for which abs(x - p/q) is less than 1 / (q^u). This value u is the irrationality measure of x. For u=1, x is rational, (mathworld isn't quite clear about u between 1 and 2...) for u greater than 2, x is transcendental.
For pi, u ~= 8.0161. So pi is quite irrational.
We learned about this when studying for the Putnam my freshman year.
My company has its own distribution of Linux. Aging? oh heavens yes. Fermilinux is based on Redhat 7.3.
I wish we could upgrade to a more modern one (ie based on glibc6 rather than libc5) if only for the sake of being able to customize my own work environment. As it is, if I want to add something that is not already on my office machine (I don't have root, obviously) I have to compile it, hope that the old libs don't break it, hack at it if they do, and install it to my home directory. Quite annoying.
But, I'm very much on the low end of the totem pole (I'm an undergrad, with grad students, phd's, technicians, etc. all over my head. Plus I'm only working here for the summer.) so it is not likely I'll have any say in an upgrade.
I think that security is the main reason to stick with the old stuff. They've got the hell patched out of everything, and then it's all been gone over with a magnifying glass and dentist's tools... Which presumably makes it secure. I'm skeptical, but then I'm always skeptical of security. I'm no security pro though, so my opinion doesn't wind up counting much.
kinda reminds me of the McCarthy trials, where if you had been to a meeting of the communist club in junior high, then decided that you didn't like it and never went back, you were still up for suspicion of being a communist. And of course all the black-listing etc. that went along with that.
Of course, I'm far too young to remember that era, so if I've said something incorrect, please correct me.
Well, simply removing mass would not alter the moon's orbit, for the same reason that a hammer and a feather fall at the same speed in a vacuum. But, we would decrease tides significantly. Also, the mass has to go somewhere, ie it has to have some momentum, and depending on how we give it that momentum, conservation of momentum might mean that we had also given the moon an equal amount (although opposite in direction) amount of momentum, which could change its orbit.
I'm going to assume that you mean an earth mounted, or independent space-faring-object mounted laser or microwave system... If it were mounted on the sail's payload, you would gain nothing. Conservation of Momentum.
There are some things that would be more difficult to express without the two negatives make a positive rule.
As a simple example: "I can't not fall.". This means, of course, that "I can't avoid falling." or "I must fall.", which is not quite the same thing as "I can fall.". In this case, there is an alternative to the double negative which conveys the same meaning, but there do exist cases (I think!) for which there is not an alternative. If you allow double negatives to simply mean the same thing as a single negative, you lose nuances of meaning that are currently possible.
I have rarely seen a grammar/spelling correction post that was in fact "couched in the tones of an insensitive clod..." here. And yet people flame away anyway. Perhaps I never see holier than thou grammar/spelling posts because they get modded into oblivion, but even on the occasions when I drop my threshold, I still don't see them...
IMHO the problem is that people don't respond well to correction. If you made a grammar or spelling mistake, and someone points it out, then either clarify (if the meaning was ambiguous), ignore it (if it was simply a typo), or learn a new rule of grammar (if it was a fine point of english mechanics which you didn't know of before). This is of course just a natural extension of the (sensible) idea that if you make any kind of mistake, and are corrected, then the best response is to quietly correct the mistake, or make note of it in order to avoid making it again. Or, if you really and honestly don't care, ignore it!
But then again, maybe my parents were just weird, bringing me up to be polite and civilized... I dunno.
Heh, I was at a lecture last fall by John Schwartz (invented string theory). Three of my profs that semester were sitting in the row in front of me (PDE, Classical Mechanics, and Quantum Mech I). After the lecture, I commented that the math was way over my head, and they all said, yeah, me too! The key thing (arithmetically) seemed to be the wedge product, which is the "multiplication" operation in an exterior algebra. Look it up on mathworld... I still don't understand it yet. One of my other math profs has a whole book on the exterior algebra.
Well, I suppose it might produce Hydrogen Peroxide, or more complicated molecules with only H and O, but those are likely endothermic. For that matter, is H2 + O2 -> H2O2 endothermic? anyone?
Fair enough. However, that is not the impression that I typically get. Perhaps I am just misinterpreting, but atheists (at least the particularly vocal ones) typically seem (to my perception) to claim the logical higher ground, and I do not think this is justified.
Also, I do think that the question of theism/atheism is significantly less clear cut than the petrol/pink elephant situation. It is a good analogy, but the determination of which is simpler is, no pun intended, not that simple. On the surface, I suppose it is "universe runs on universeness" vs. "universe runs on universeness + God"? Presented that way, it would seem quite obvious, but there are certainly other ways to state the matter. For example, one possibility for theism is "universeness runs on God, universe runs on universeness". (nobody seems to have trouble adding more layers, so long as each layer is simpler than the one before, to wit, atoms, then nucleus, then protons/neutrons, then quarks, then ?strings?) Or, breaking down "universeness" into physical laws and such, one might argue that it seems a lot more complicated than just God running it. (Not that I would take that position, actually, I think simpler physical laws tend to point to God, rather than the other way.) And of course, that is not comprehensive, nor does it include various rebuttals to those arguments, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.
Just in case you're curious, yes, I am a Christian, and also a scientist. (I just finished my undergrad junior year of physics, and I'm working at Fermilab for the summer.) Additionally, one of my beliefs which results from my more basic Christian beliefs is that what I am called by God to do is to oppose, by means of decent arguments, atheism, specifically in academic and scientific communities.
Alright. So does Occam's Razor constitute proof, pure, logical proof, of atheism? If not, then why should theism require proof when atheism doesn't?
I certainly admit that people have reasons why they are atheists. This does not puzzle me. What does puzzle me is that they demand proof, and not simply arguments for, theism. After all, I do not see atheists presenting proof, but only arguments for, atheism. And yes, I am well aware that not all atheists do this. But some do, as we have recently seen.
I do not think that assumptions are unreasonable. If I did, I would be a solipsist. But I do think that someone in an unprovable position should not ask someone who claims to also be in an unprovable (but incompatible) position for proof of that position.
I most certainly use Occam's razor, and I don't take issue with people using it to decide in favor of atheism. In the case of the car analogy: if someone were to claim that there were a pink elephant, I suppose I might demand evidence of this statement. However, I don't think that I would ask for a proof. Yes, asking "prove there isn't an elephant" is silly. My point is, so is asking "prove there is an elephant".
So, you're basing it on the statement "because something has worked in a number of known cases, it should be applied to others". A decent statement, and one that I can generally agree with, but can you prove that? Additionally, I really don't think that using Occam's Razor constitutes any sort of proof. Which is most certainly acceptable. However, it supports my claim that atheists do not have any more proof for their position than theists do for theirs. Which leads me to my puzzlement that atheists should ask for proof from theists, when, as I said, they do not require it of themselves.
Ok, then prove Occam's Razor. The decision to apply Occam's Razor is, once again, purely arbitrary. Where does Occam's Razor come from? I would be willing to bet a lot of money that on some level, it comes from (guess what?) an unprovable assumption. In which case it is, as I said, arbitrary.
The burden of proof (if proof is applicable) lies with whoever makes a claim. You're quite correct that it does not lie with agnostics, because agnostics don't claim anything (about the theism/atheism issue).
I claim that no proof can be made that no god exists. This is simple to prove: there are definitions of god which include the property that his/hers/its/their existence is unprovable.
By asking for proof from theists, atheists implicitly claim that proof is required. This claim can be proven, of course, from the idea that one should only believe in things which are proven. So I challenge that idea. Can anyone prove it? (lots of people seem to make this claim, so the burden of proof lies with them) If so, I challenge the fundamental assumptions involved in the proof. Can anyone prove those? You can never get away with making no unprovable assumptions. So, any and every choice of assumptions to make is arbitrary (from a pure logic standpoint). Since your choice of theism vs. atheism is dependent upon the assumptions that you make, that too is arbitrary.
One might thus decide that the only logical decision then is in fact agnosticism... but taken to its logical extreme, this leads you to... precisely nothing. No assumptions, no claims, no beliefs, no actions, no logic, nothing. Most people find this uncomfortable, and wind up making assumptions. However, I find it very odd that some people (who have decided to make unfounded assumptions) ask for proof from others without a) considering that if you really and truly look for proof, you wind up with pure and total nothing, and b) asking for proof from themselves.
It must have been a very strange philosophy class that you took that ignored all this. Perhaps you should sue the university and get your tuition refunded.
I pretty sure that I can't... which was the point of my post in the first place. If you can't prove any of the available alternatives, then whichever one you choose (yes, even atheism) is, in fact, a matter of faith.
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The real invasion of this system is that the raw data will be used not only to trigger a GPS speed limit. No, it will inevitably be used to halt cars driven speeders, then suspects of other crimes, then any "person of interest" to the police, or their political bosses. The stored records will be used to track people wherever they drive. The entire population will be tracked everywhere we go, and people's sense of privacy will go extinct.
Last time I checked, GPS devices don't send a signal to the GPS satellites (or really anywhere) but rather calculate their position based on the relative timings of signals from the GPS satellites. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS.
Thus, the devices (unless they included transmitters, which would be fairly easy to detect and/or disable) would not provide The Man any information about your whereabouts, activities, or anything else you might like to keep private. There would be no "stored records", and no "invasion of privacy".
Furthermore, a governor does not halt a car, but merely limits its speed. Also, the table of speed limits is entirely contained within the device (as I understand it), meaning that the government is not suddenly in control of your car's speed at all times. They are in control of it in some sense at the time they manufacture the device, but that's it.
GPS governors are less of an invasion of privacy than cameras in public places. Take off the tinfoil hat.
C- for relativity for sure! It doesn't get even close to relativistic speeds! And it certainly doesn't have enough mass for general relativity!
disclaimer: yes, I know that this comment was not technically correct. There are always plenty of reference frames in which it is moving at relavistic speeds, and general relativity deals with all gravity, not just high mass. its a joke. deal with it.
Oh dang, I was hoping this would solve the organ donor deficit problem.
Sounds like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates getting together:
New joint release from Apple and Microsoft: The iMS!
The third link there, "circular topology", brings up an error message that says "www.tubgirl.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again."
I'm thinking Ansley cables. That's what we use here at work to bring a signal from the central drift chamber's TDCs (Time to Digital Converters) up to the tracking electronics. Yes, we're using them for digital, but they were designed for analog (we used them because when the upgrade was done in the late-90s, we had a bunch left over from the old detector, and so that was cheapest.)
yes... that was mostly a joke, but I know that Ansley cables do have very good analog signal transmission properties. One thing that helps though, is if you make sure to bundle several cables together. The outer two or three cables in a bundle should be unused. This helps because the insulator in the cables acts as a dielectric, and if you have cables solo, or on the edge of a bundle, the signal quality tends to degrade faster.
I think that the structure of the cables is 48 twisted pairs in a ribbon arrangement, with some kind of PVC as the insulator.
pi is really irrational...
Obviously, you can approximate any irrational number as p/q, and your approximation gets better as q gets larger. So, if x is the number that you're trying to approximate, then take the absolute value of x - p/q. Then, find the smallest number u (the infimum) for which abs(x - p/q) is less than 1 / (q^u). This value u is the irrationality measure of x. For u=1, x is rational, (mathworld isn't quite clear about u between 1 and 2...) for u greater than 2, x is transcendental.
For pi, u ~= 8.0161. So pi is quite irrational.
We learned about this when studying for the Putnam my freshman year.
ESR: I can't read the minds of blunderers and cheaters, and would not want to immerse myself in their thinking if I could.
My company has its own distribution of Linux. Aging? oh heavens yes. Fermilinux is based on Redhat 7.3.
I wish we could upgrade to a more modern one (ie based on glibc6 rather than libc5) if only for the sake of being able to customize my own work environment. As it is, if I want to add something that is not already on my office machine (I don't have root, obviously) I have to compile it, hope that the old libs don't break it, hack at it if they do, and install it to my home directory. Quite annoying.
But, I'm very much on the low end of the totem pole (I'm an undergrad, with grad students, phd's, technicians, etc. all over my head. Plus I'm only working here for the summer.) so it is not likely I'll have any say in an upgrade.
I think that security is the main reason to stick with the old stuff. They've got the hell patched out of everything, and then it's all been gone over with a magnifying glass and dentist's tools... Which presumably makes it secure. I'm skeptical, but then I'm always skeptical of security. I'm no security pro though, so my opinion doesn't wind up counting much.
kinda reminds me of the McCarthy trials, where if you had been to a meeting of the communist club in junior high, then decided that you didn't like it and never went back, you were still up for suspicion of being a communist. And of course all the black-listing etc. that went along with that.
Of course, I'm far too young to remember that era, so if I've said something incorrect, please correct me.
Well, simply removing mass would not alter the moon's orbit, for the same reason that a hammer and a feather fall at the same speed in a vacuum. But, we would decrease tides significantly. Also, the mass has to go somewhere, ie it has to have some momentum, and depending on how we give it that momentum, conservation of momentum might mean that we had also given the moon an equal amount (although opposite in direction) amount of momentum, which could change its orbit.
I am disinclined to trust any report of "100%" security. Anywhere, by anyone.
I'm going to assume that you mean an earth mounted, or independent space-faring-object mounted laser or microwave system... If it were mounted on the sail's payload, you would gain nothing. Conservation of Momentum.
There are some things that would be more difficult to express without the two negatives make a positive rule.
As a simple example: "I can't not fall.". This means, of course, that "I can't avoid falling." or "I must fall.", which is not quite the same thing as "I can fall.". In this case, there is an alternative to the double negative which conveys the same meaning, but there do exist cases (I think!) for which there is not an alternative. If you allow double negatives to simply mean the same thing as a single negative, you lose nuances of meaning that are currently possible.
I have rarely seen a grammar/spelling correction post that was in fact "couched in the tones of an insensitive clod..." here. And yet people flame away anyway. Perhaps I never see holier than thou grammar/spelling posts because they get modded into oblivion, but even on the occasions when I drop my threshold, I still don't see them...
IMHO the problem is that people don't respond well to correction. If you made a grammar or spelling mistake, and someone points it out, then either clarify (if the meaning was ambiguous), ignore it (if it was simply a typo), or learn a new rule of grammar (if it was a fine point of english mechanics which you didn't know of before). This is of course just a natural extension of the (sensible) idea that if you make any kind of mistake, and are corrected, then the best response is to quietly correct the mistake, or make note of it in order to avoid making it again. Or, if you really and honestly don't care, ignore it!
But then again, maybe my parents were just weird, bringing me up to be polite and civilized... I dunno.
Heh, I was at a lecture last fall by John Schwartz (invented string theory). Three of my profs that semester were sitting in the row in front of me (PDE, Classical Mechanics, and Quantum Mech I). After the lecture, I commented that the math was way over my head, and they all said, yeah, me too! The key thing (arithmetically) seemed to be the wedge product, which is the "multiplication" operation in an exterior algebra. Look it up on mathworld... I still don't understand it yet. One of my other math profs has a whole book on the exterior algebra.
You mean, as in, Bill Gates has a linux based attack monkey with frickin' lazers on its head, and we're supposed to follow it?
Thank you, you just brightened my day. I feel reassured that I really am that much smarter than most people in the world...
Well, I suppose it might produce Hydrogen Peroxide, or more complicated molecules with only H and O, but those are likely endothermic. For that matter, is H2 + O2 -> H2O2 endothermic? anyone?
Fair enough. However, that is not the impression that I typically get. Perhaps I am just misinterpreting, but atheists (at least the particularly vocal ones) typically seem (to my perception) to claim the logical higher ground, and I do not think this is justified.
Also, I do think that the question of theism/atheism is significantly less clear cut than the petrol/pink elephant situation. It is a good analogy, but the determination of which is simpler is, no pun intended, not that simple. On the surface, I suppose it is "universe runs on universeness" vs. "universe runs on universeness + God"? Presented that way, it would seem quite obvious, but there are certainly other ways to state the matter. For example, one possibility for theism is "universeness runs on God, universe runs on universeness". (nobody seems to have trouble adding more layers, so long as each layer is simpler than the one before, to wit, atoms, then nucleus, then protons/neutrons, then quarks, then ?strings?) Or, breaking down "universeness" into physical laws and such, one might argue that it seems a lot more complicated than just God running it. (Not that I would take that position, actually, I think simpler physical laws tend to point to God, rather than the other way.) And of course, that is not comprehensive, nor does it include various rebuttals to those arguments, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.
Just in case you're curious, yes, I am a Christian, and also a scientist. (I just finished my undergrad junior year of physics, and I'm working at Fermilab for the summer.) Additionally, one of my beliefs which results from my more basic Christian beliefs is that what I am called by God to do is to oppose, by means of decent arguments, atheism, specifically in academic and scientific communities.
Alright. So does Occam's Razor constitute proof, pure, logical proof, of atheism? If not, then why should theism require proof when atheism doesn't?
I certainly admit that people have reasons why they are atheists. This does not puzzle me. What does puzzle me is that they demand proof, and not simply arguments for, theism. After all, I do not see atheists presenting proof, but only arguments for, atheism. And yes, I am well aware that not all atheists do this. But some do, as we have recently seen.
I do not think that assumptions are unreasonable. If I did, I would be a solipsist. But I do think that someone in an unprovable position should not ask someone who claims to also be in an unprovable (but incompatible) position for proof of that position.
I most certainly use Occam's razor, and I don't take issue with people using it to decide in favor of atheism. In the case of the car analogy: if someone were to claim that there were a pink elephant, I suppose I might demand evidence of this statement. However, I don't think that I would ask for a proof. Yes, asking "prove there isn't an elephant" is silly. My point is, so is asking "prove there is an elephant".
So, you're basing it on the statement "because something has worked in a number of known cases, it should be applied to others". A decent statement, and one that I can generally agree with, but can you prove that? Additionally, I really don't think that using Occam's Razor constitutes any sort of proof. Which is most certainly acceptable. However, it supports my claim that atheists do not have any more proof for their position than theists do for theirs. Which leads me to my puzzlement that atheists should ask for proof from theists, when, as I said, they do not require it of themselves.
Ok, then prove Occam's Razor. The decision to apply Occam's Razor is, once again, purely arbitrary. Where does Occam's Razor come from? I would be willing to bet a lot of money that on some level, it comes from (guess what?) an unprovable assumption. In which case it is, as I said, arbitrary.
The burden of proof (if proof is applicable) lies with whoever makes a claim. You're quite correct that it does not lie with agnostics, because agnostics don't claim anything (about the theism/atheism issue).
I claim that no proof can be made that no god exists. This is simple to prove: there are definitions of god which include the property that his/hers/its/their existence is unprovable.
By asking for proof from theists, atheists implicitly claim that proof is required. This claim can be proven, of course, from the idea that one should only believe in things which are proven. So I challenge that idea. Can anyone prove it? (lots of people seem to make this claim, so the burden of proof lies with them) If so, I challenge the fundamental assumptions involved in the proof. Can anyone prove those? You can never get away with making no unprovable assumptions. So, any and every choice of assumptions to make is arbitrary (from a pure logic standpoint). Since your choice of theism vs. atheism is dependent upon the assumptions that you make, that too is arbitrary.
One might thus decide that the only logical decision then is in fact agnosticism... but taken to its logical extreme, this leads you to... precisely nothing. No assumptions, no claims, no beliefs, no actions, no logic, nothing. Most people find this uncomfortable, and wind up making assumptions. However, I find it very odd that some people (who have decided to make unfounded assumptions) ask for proof from others without a) considering that if you really and truly look for proof, you wind up with pure and total nothing, and b) asking for proof from themselves.
It must have been a very strange philosophy class that you took that ignored all this. Perhaps you should sue the university and get your tuition refunded.
I pretty sure that I can't... which was the point of my post in the first place. If you can't prove any of the available alternatives, then whichever one you choose (yes, even atheism) is, in fact, a matter of faith.