I think it goes both ways actually. Both the consumer and the producer have a vested interest in ensuring that the consumer is buying what he thinks he is buying. The protection of trademarks works toward that goal. It means only the Coca-cola company can sell a product bestowed with the treasured Coke label (unless they give someone else express permission). And it means that the consumer who buys his beloved Coke can be confident he is purchasing it from the Coca-cola company whose product he has come to trust. (Replace "Coca-cola" and "Coke" with your favorite soda company and soda name, respectively, for full effect.)
To spell it out.... This protection benefits the producer, in that other companies aren legally prevented from stealing away their customers under false pretenses (as opposed to stealing them away by offering better product). But it also benefits the consumer, in that they can't be fooled into thinking they're buying a particular product they desire, but in reality be sold a competing product they have no interest in (even though it may, in reality, be the better product).
Have to admit I haven't attempted to enter or leave the country lately. But I do know, for example, it is easier to enter and the leave the U.S. than it is to enter or leave Russia. Russia is one of the few nations that require an exit visa, separate from an entry visa. Here in America we are only too happy to deport you. (Unless you try to blow something up while you're here.)
Even Orwell couldn't DREAM of all the goodies the US Government has in store for you! ...
Don't worry about ...
Don't worry about ...
Don't worry about ...
I didn't say I wasn't worried about these things. I did say I have faith that the people are coming to a point where we will finally draw the line. I talk about that in another post in this thread: here
And that includes 90-year-old grandmothers living in apartment blocks with pet parakeets or canaries.
Not quite. Though that no-NAIS site tries to imply such, to scare us all into action, it doesn't go quite so far as to state that, since it would obviously be a lie. It only says "other pet owners", after a list of pet animals that are more commonly "farm animals" than pets.
The truth is, if it can't be considered livestock, it won't fall under the NAIS. Livestock are "farm animals". Not parakeets. Not canaries. Not cats or dogs. Not guppies. Basically nothing you'd currently find (legally) in a New York apartment.
It does sound totalitarian, to require such livestock identification. But I can't just dismiss it out of hand, because there is a need to protect the food supply. For heaven's sake it's not just the U.S. that has been worried about mad cow disease. Japan, for example, stopped buying our beef because of it. It's not just as simple as "don't feed beef to your cows", because, hey, here's a surprise: not everyone obeys the law, and not everyone treats their animals well. We need to be prepared for the possibility that some shady guy is trying to beat the system by breaking such laws, creating a health risk for everyone.
This may not be the right way to do it, but there needs to be a protection of some sort. The plan is worthy of criticism, but the goals behind it seem worthwhile to me.
While I do commend your unexpectedly good grip on history
Thank you!
It's not entirely impossible that such a gradual change might be the extension of what we're currently experiencing
Granted. It's certainly possible, and it's certainly a danger we must be watchful for. However, I don't believe it will come to that. My evidence for this is the growing outrage and protest among the citizenry, and the political opposition among elected officials finally really digging in. I have hope that voters will continue to wake up and realize that things have changed since the "Republican Revolution" of 1994. The shoe is now on the other foot. The administration and majority in congress have mostly lost touch with the people. That needs to be remedied, fast. And I think that will begin to happen within the next couple years. The general feeling even among many of my conservative friends is one of a growing uneasiness and dissatisfaction with domestic policy, if not with the Iraq war.
It's not unimportant. The issue isn't simply obedience to authority. It's also about the limits of that obedience. But more importantly, my posts have been about the establishment of an authority, despite the knowledge of its tyrannical nature. The people may obey the authority. But depending on the state of the society, the likelihood of that authority even coming to power will vary drastically. This is the heart of what I've been saying.
Did the psychologists test to the very limits of human suffering? Did they test subjects raised in vastly different social/economic/political environments? Did they test for different sources of authority? Did they test groups of subjects making decisions together? Did they test for the wording of the commands (i.e. "increase the pain level" versus "turn the dial up")? There are far more variables in real world scenarios than just whether the orders were obeyed or not. Your comment seems to imply I was playing a racial/ethnic card, but I was doing no such thing. I was talking about environmental factors. I'm sorry, but this is a case where the lab environment is just too dramatically different from reality to say that it explains everything so simply.
The experiments may have proved that by and large all humans have a capacity for cruelty. But what it didn't rule out was that people can be, and may need to be, primed for that cruelty. I've read about the studies where people believe they are administering electric shocks, and the supposed subjects of the shock are actors, portraying various states of pain. The results of these experiments showed, for example, that the person holding the trigger could be convinced to gradually increase the pain applied, but would balk at jumping right to a high setting. This represents a psychological priming happening.
For Nazi Germany, the stage was set, society was primed, by the time the soldiers got their inhumane orders. The government was already a corrupt tyranny. The power and authority of the government was accepted. The military orders weren't the first evidence of this. They wouldn't have been obeyed if they hadn't come from an established authority. It should have been stopped long before that, before the corrupt authority was established. My argument is that it wasn't stopped because the entire society was desperate for stability of all sorts, and so they didn't care about the nature of their leader, as long as he slowed their decent into chaos and poverty.
My argument is that this desperation would generally be a necessary step in the transfer of government from stable democratic republic to tyranny. It is too complete and utter a transformation. Germany didn't go through this. They went from unstable monarchy, to unstable republic, to slightly more stable dictatorship. The desire for the increase in stability overwhelmed any opposition to tyranny.
Just to be clear, my comment was not in defense of the idea that the oath is actually worth anything. As far as I'm concerned, "let your yea be yea and your nay be nay". If someone can't be trusted to keep your word on important matters of government and humanity, without an oath, then I don't want them in office or holding a gun. I was just saying that it takes a lot more to corrupt thousands of "regular people" than to corrupt one politician.
Anyway, you do make a good point. However, Weimar Germany was a very different place from 20th-century America. The U.S. has had a fairly successful democratic republic for nigh on 230 years now. Whereas Hitler took power after the dramatic failure of Germany's first, short-lived attempt at democracy. Plus, this attempt was made during a period of much civil conflict and general political chaos. People were by that point willing to cling to any available form of stability.
Again, central to my argument was the fact that the U.S. would have to decay from successful, stable democratic republic, to tyranny. I seriously doubt that such a change could happen directly in today's world. If it were to happen, I think there would need to be an extended period of desparation before the public, including the soldiers, would compromise freedoms for the tenuous stability of a tyrannical government. We made it through a civil war after just, what, 80 years of Democracy? I think that after nearly 3 times that the tenets, virtues, and benefits of freedom and self-government are well-established enough not to leave our collective memory very quickly.
Ah, true, true. I was thinking of analog, not digital. I suppose there's little possibility that a "high quality" cable is going to make much difference to a digital signal, except in how far it will go. So unless you're trying to run your digital signal a long distance (in which case, digital image decay should not be slow and graceful, but sudden and dramatic) cheap cable should do it, eh?
"military personnel have all taken an oath to defend the US Constitution"
So did the President.
Yes, but the President is only one man. It is much easier for one man to become corrupt than a few hundred thousand. Not impossible of course, but much less likely. Especially considering the freedom of the society we have now, and have had in the past. For those freedoms to degenerate and eventually be lost leaving a tyrannical government where there was once a democratic republic, and for a few hundred thousand military personnel to support the tryanny, would probably require a recruitment program that actively searched for corruptible, or stupid, people interested only in power and wealth. Good luck keeping that one a secret.
As frightening as the ideas in Orwell's "1984" are, I don't think the scenario is realistic. There are too many people who are too aware of and attached to their freedoms to let things slide quite that far. I'd bet even the most gun-shy Democrat would be willing to pick up a gun if it came to that, regardless of whether they thought it should be legal in times of peace and stability. Under a tyranny, all bets are off. A tyranny doesn't the citizenry, even if they are trustworthy, so why bother trying to follow their laws?
I'm not too worried about the U.S. government decaying into tyranny. I am worried, however, that the U.S. could lose our global position and end up back where we were in the late 1800's... That is, hardly a force to be reckoned with, either militarily or economically.
You've obviously never bought video equipment from Best Buy before. The way they push that stuff you'd think it could cure poverty and bring about world peace all at the same time, if only enough people would buy it....
The truth of the matter is, Best Buy hauls serious cash based on the brand image of Monster cables. (If they're anything like the computer department, where I worked, the profit margins on cabling are absolutely exorbitant.) At the stores near me, the cables are divided into two sections: Monster and non-Monster. I don't know how big of a real visual/audio difference there is between the two. If there is one, I don't care enough to notice. It's surely not as big as the difference between composite and component.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some animated banner GIFs from AdSense around lately. Maybe even light Flash. I used to not block Google ads with Adblock, because they were so unobtrusive. But if animated GIFs or even light Flash ads become commonplace, that will change in a heartbeat.
I'm just a peon, by anyone's standards, but I would feel dispirited if someone were promoted past me because they couldn't function at the lower level.
You shouldn't feel like the only way you can be promoted is into a management position. If that's the environment where you work, then there is a flaw or fault in their positional infrastructure. I would view promotion into a managment as a demotion. To me the higher salary offsets a more onerous task. I have no desire to go into that type of management, and I don't (right now, anyway) have the skills that would be necessary for it. That shouldn't leave me stuck at a dead end though....
This is why many companies have two separate career tracks which can originate out of the developer or engineer position. My previous employer had just such a plan in place. As a level-I software engineer, if I had stayed and advanced there, I would have been given two options. Moving beyond level-III, I could go into a management track or stay on the engineer track. The engineer track (which included project management, a technical position) had more levels within the department than the manager track (which included team management, a resource management position). In fact the top-level engineering position in the IT department was almost guaranteed to make a salary greater than the top-level management position. In order to make more as a manager, you had to be at least the head of the whole IT department.
Obviously, this type of infrastructure isn't necessarily feasible for smaller companies. Ours was a company of nearly 500 people (nearly half in sales), with 80 or so in IT.
Anyway, to restate, you should be able to be promoted for technical skill, without being expected to take up a management position. A promotion into a management ladder is a recognition of different types of skills (resource management and interpersonal, for example), not a recognition of lesser or greater technical skills. It isn't one-way: I've known a lot excellent engineers who were promoted to management on that merit, but were terrible managers in practice. There should be a separate recognition of technical skill and experience, and an official designation, authority boost, and salary boost to go with it.
From a paranoid and panicy point of view this article can be seen as an announcement that all open source software is insecure and that kind of (incorrect) idea is dangerous in the hands of a decision maker.
I was actually just coming back to amend my comment by noting this possibility. I admit that my original comment was written in a spirit of optimism. I don't know what came over me... I suppose I was feeling under the weather;).
Back to my normal, cynical self... Given the propensity of popular media to "simplify" news from the tech sector, I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline like this, sometime soon:
"Infamous U.S. Hacker Prefers to Attack Open Source"
Not exactly the type of attention the FOSS movement is looking for, eh?
The gamer inside you might make you believe that 'loyalty to gamers' or 'independence' might convince Nintendo to remain it's own entity, but this is simply naieve. Nintendo wants to beat Sony. It wants to beat Microsoft. It wants to get back to where it was 10 years ago. To do that, it needs to match their investment capabilities. To do that, it just might need companies like Cisco.
If Nintendo cared that much about beating MS and Sony, they wouldn't be aiming their next console at picking up people who have traditionally been non-gamers. They're straddling a market gap that I very much doubt MS or Sony cares two bits about, simply because it's just not profitable for companies their size and with so much investment already sunk into the "hardcore" market.
MS and Sony are pushing their machines as "home entertainment systems", implying an inclusion of not just gaming, but video, audio, etc. Whereas Nintendo is perfectly satisfied to remain a "game machine".
"Where it was 10 years ago" is someplace Nintendo can never be again. They've accepted that, and are going a new direction.
They aren't competing in the same class. While their (Nintendo vs. the other two) markets overlap, I really doubt MS or Sony are all that concerned about Nintendo pushing one or both of them out, and they don't have much reason to be. With the Revolution aimed at a different price-point, and only a portion of their customers, Nintendo is not a threat to the other two, nor are the other two a threat to Nintendo.
MS's primary concern is Sony, and vice versa as well. And that is because they are competing in pretty much the same marketspace. Nintendo is a different product at a different price, aimed at a partially overlapping but substantially different customer base. I really doubt they are that worried about each other.
This is my opinion because I haven't yet heard anyone ask "are you going to get the XBox 360, or the Revolution", or "are you going to get the PS3, or the Revolution". There are two different questions I keep hearing: "Are you going to get the XBox 360, or the PS3", and "Are you going to get the Revolution". This shows better than anything, IMHO, that the marketspaces are fundamentally different, despite coincidental overlap. With the Nintendo, it's yes or no, not either-or. Their success doesn't seem to rely on the failure of the others at all.
It would be a total waste of money for either MS or Sony to start after Nintendo's intended market right now, when they are still fighting each other over "1st place". Maybe in a few years, if a clear victor has emerged between MS and Sony, Nintendo will have some reason to worry about the market for the Revolution. But I'd bet big money that Nintendo, as a target, will have already moved by then.
When someone high-profile says something that lots of low-profile people are already saying, it is news because people who don't typically hear that thing said now have the opportunity to hear it.
Your friendly-neihborhood Linux admin can say this stuff all he wants with his other admin buddies, or here on Slashdot. But that doesn't necessarily get heard by even one decision-maker. This will be heard by lots of them, if they are even lightly following online tech-news.
How high-profile is Kevin Mitnick? I have a plethora of friends who haven't even heard of Linux, and barely know what an "OS" is. But they have heard of Kevin Mitnick, and know what he is famous for. Not that they need to know about this particular quote. It's just an illustration of his visibility.
Add in the weight of passengers and then the elevator will go down and your formula applies.
I understand all that about tension forces on either side of the pulley netting out and resulting in zero net downward force on the connected masses. My point was that, regardless of how much effective weight there was, it should not affect the acceleration.
I did have it wrong though. I forgot that non-zero net force that results from putting people in (adding mass on one side) has to act over the mass of the people, and the elevator, and the counterweight. Which means that acceleration will be lower than normal. The gravitational force on the people is all that's available to make motion, but it has to pull more than just the people. So acceleration will be less.
If both those go, the cars still don't accelerate very much, because there's a counterweigth so only the imbalance of passengers would cause acceleration.
This doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure gravity accelerates any amount of mass at an equal rate: 9.8m/s^2. Shouldn't matter whether it's 50kg or 1500kg.
I'm afraid you aren't going to find any physicists out there arguing that GR doesn't claim that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equal. It has nothing to do with what any experiment proves. The theory is the theory.
You misunderstood me. I'm not looking for arguments about whether GR includes this postulate. I'm looking for arguments about where this postulate isn true in reality. Which, ideally, would be something we can test by experiment. If it were not true, obviously that would mean GR has a flaw.
I think maybe instead of "healthy", what he meant was "clean", which IIRC is largely related to the purity of the waveforms, which can be quite separate from problems of power loss.
The idea is that performing these little mental activities, and trying to do so quickly, will help stave off the many neurological and psychological conditions that can arise in old age due simply to a lack of appropriate mental stimulation.
People in their 20s and 30s really probably don't need it. The inactivity that spurs these disorders usually tends to set in after retirement.
First let me make clear I'm talking about "most" people. As in, the average person on the street. There are plenty of people out there who are exceptions, in both directions. But as far as the average person (at least in the U.S.) goes....
Understanding scientific concepts is one thing. But learning to think scientifically, to approach new information with both skepticism and objectivity, in appropriate amounts, is something that most people are not prepared to do. Not unless they are trained up that way from youth. Otherwise you are asking them to change something that's already ingrained in their world-view. And while not impossible, that's a hard thing to do for the sake of something that's not "essential" to their daily life. Most people aren't going to be able to do it. This is, I think, our biggest hurdle. It's the only reason that the battle between evolution and creationism is being fought in the scientific venues instead of the philosophical ones. And that's actually what I meant by "not capable". They are convinced they've got it right already, and nothing you can say will change that.
If you want people to learn that stuff--how to think scientifically--you have to get them while they're kids.
But that's not going to change the people who just don't care about it. People care about what they care about. Unless you can turn science into something they care about (like the "great space race" to beat the "commies"), which is tough to do while remaining honest, they're not going to change or make sacrifices.
I think I'm coming off even more cynical than I mean to. I think that a certain portion of the population is going to be a "lost cause". They are too busy just getting by to try to care about something that's not going to put food in the pantry, shoes on the kids' feet, and tires on the car today. And there's another segment that's frankly just too old. They're sure they've already got it "figured out" and you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
So, again, I say we let the old dogs be, and get to work on the pups. But don't expect them all to come out perfect.
Sweeping generalizations, maybe. But it's the best explanation I can think of for all the things I've seen people do.
Whether mass changes with velocity depends on how you're defining "mass". The modern definition of mass is the invariant mass (= the rest mass, for massive bodies). The older "relativistic mass" is now equated with "energy", or rather energy/c^2.
If you want to discuss inertial responses to forces, mass becomes a tensor (matrix), which decomposes into longitudinal and transverse masses--it's no longer described by a number.
If you want to describe the source of gravity, that's a tensor (matrix) too: the stress-energy tensor that you mention, of which relativistic mass(-energy) is one component.
Kinetic energy contributes to the relativistic mass-energy and therefore the stress-energy tensor; this issue is discussed in a pedagogical paper [arxiv.org].
Much appreciated, Mr. Anonymous. Now that I know there is some info out there on this, I will certain look into it. Hopefully I can find arguments for both sides and get a sense for whose arguments are stronger. I have to admit, I did not know that GR as formulated does treat inertial mass (measured by collisions) and gravitational mas (measured by gravity) as identical. That's probably a gross oversight on my part but I am, after all, just an "armchair physicist".
I'm not sure which conclusion I'd like to see validated right now. The absence of experimental evidence (or at least discussion of it) had in the past led me to the position I stated in my earlier post. Obviously I'm still somewhat attached to it. But what I've read recently about theories on the "origin" of mass has opened my mind more to Dr. Carlip's argument. Especially if there is experimental evidence to support him.
In the presence of an event horizon, though, occasionally one member of a virtual pair will fall into the black hole while its partner escapes to infinity. The particle that reaches infinity will have to have a positive energy, but the total energy is conserved; therefore the black hole has to lose mass. (If you like you can think of the particle that falls in as having a negative mass.) We see the escaping particles as Hawking radiation.
There's something that always bothered me about this idea....
Whenever one of these spontaneous particle pairs pops out of the vacuum, there is always one matter particle and one antimatter particle. Shouldn't there be an equal probability that either one could fall into the black hole (unless it's a charged black hole, of course)? If equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles are going in, then shouldn't they balance each other out and result in a net effect of zero?
And speaking of charged black holes.... If the black hole has a predominant positive charge, then it seems to me that it would be predisposed to pulling in negatively charged particles as opposed to positively charged ones. So, when an electron-positron pair pops up, the electron is more likely to be "eaten", and contribute to mass, rather than negate it. Does the lower probability of proton-antiproton pairs popping up, combined with the larger mass of anti-protons exactly balance out the contributions of the electrons? If not, then either either the positive or negative black hole will have steady growth, instead of evaporation.
And what about anti-matter black holes? Granted, anti-matter is so rare that it's extremely unlikely to arise in nature. But if one did arise, then by absorption of positive matter, would we not have the exact opposite dilemmas that we have with regular black holes? E.g. if a "regular matter" black hole evaporates naturally, then anti-matter black holes should naturally grow, and vice-versa.
Man, I only had just the one quandry to start with, but once I got thinking, all this stuff popped up!
When an object is moving relative to you, you will measure its mass to be greater than if it were standing still.
But how is the mass being measured? The primary ways of measuring mass deal with measuring changes in momentum. And momentum is a function of both mass and velocity (kinetic energy). So how can we say for certain how much of that momentum is coming from mass and how much from kinetic energy? We need a corroborating measurement to say for sure. One that is not dependent on velocity. If no such method of measurement exists (i.e., if gravitational effects do indeed depend on kinetic energy), then we can safely say that mass does indeed increase with velocity, because all mass effects are affected by changes in velocity.
You seem to indicate that this is, in fact, the case:
This includes its intertia and gravitational attraction
But I am unaware of any experiments that have been carried out to verify this. If there have been, I would happily be pointed to them so I can correct my understanding. As far as I know, GR does not predict this. I was under the impression that the stress-energy tensor is compartmentalized in a way that kinetic energy does not directly affect measured gravitational effects.
From now on, every conversation in the U.S. that regards science in any way must stoop to a lowest common denominator argument, and all statements that are backed by empirical evidence must have the caveat, "but, only if science is right," in front of them.
<cynicism>
Everything else in the U.S. has warnings on it to "protect" idiots from their own stupidity. Why should science not be subject to the same societal "obligations"?
But slightly more seriously, I think this wouldn't be such a big issue if we weren't so obsessed with getting everyone interested in and aware of science, when the simple truth is most people either just don't care or aren't capable of understanding. The "you too can understand Science" movement has convinced everyone that they have the ability to judge the merit of complex research.
If we want more people to understand science, they need to go to school. Reading pop sci books and magazines, watching pop sci TV specials, etc. is not making the general public smarter. It's making them more overconfident in their limited comprehension.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it goes both ways actually. Both the consumer and the producer have a vested interest in ensuring that the consumer is buying what he thinks he is buying. The protection of trademarks works toward that goal. It means only the Coca-cola company can sell a product bestowed with the treasured Coke label (unless they give someone else express permission). And it means that the consumer who buys his beloved Coke can be confident he is purchasing it from the Coca-cola company whose product he has come to trust. (Replace "Coca-cola" and "Coke" with your favorite soda company and soda name, respectively, for full effect.)
To spell it out.... This protection benefits the producer, in that other companies aren legally prevented from stealing away their customers under false pretenses (as opposed to stealing them away by offering better product). But it also benefits the consumer, in that they can't be fooled into thinking they're buying a particular product they desire, but in reality be sold a competing product they have no interest in (even though it may, in reality, be the better product).
Even Orwell couldn't DREAM of all the goodies the US Government has in store for you!
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Don't worry about
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I didn't say I wasn't worried about these things. I did say I have faith that the people are coming to a point where we will finally draw the line. I talk about that in another post in this thread: here
Not quite. Though that no-NAIS site tries to imply such, to scare us all into action, it doesn't go quite so far as to state that, since it would obviously be a lie. It only says "other pet owners", after a list of pet animals that are more commonly "farm animals" than pets.
The truth is, if it can't be considered livestock, it won't fall under the NAIS. Livestock are "farm animals". Not parakeets. Not canaries. Not cats or dogs. Not guppies. Basically nothing you'd currently find (legally) in a New York apartment.
It does sound totalitarian, to require such livestock identification. But I can't just dismiss it out of hand, because there is a need to protect the food supply. For heaven's sake it's not just the U.S. that has been worried about mad cow disease. Japan, for example, stopped buying our beef because of it. It's not just as simple as "don't feed beef to your cows", because, hey, here's a surprise: not everyone obeys the law, and not everyone treats their animals well. We need to be prepared for the possibility that some shady guy is trying to beat the system by breaking such laws, creating a health risk for everyone.
This may not be the right way to do it, but there needs to be a protection of some sort. The plan is worthy of criticism, but the goals behind it seem worthwhile to me.
Thank you!
It's not entirely impossible that such a gradual change might be the extension of what we're currently experiencing
Granted. It's certainly possible, and it's certainly a danger we must be watchful for. However, I don't believe it will come to that. My evidence for this is the growing outrage and protest among the citizenry, and the political opposition among elected officials finally really digging in. I have hope that voters will continue to wake up and realize that things have changed since the "Republican Revolution" of 1994. The shoe is now on the other foot. The administration and majority in congress have mostly lost touch with the people. That needs to be remedied, fast. And I think that will begin to happen within the next couple years. The general feeling even among many of my conservative friends is one of a growing uneasiness and dissatisfaction with domestic policy, if not with the Iraq war.
Did the psychologists test to the very limits of human suffering? Did they test subjects raised in vastly different social/economic/political environments? Did they test for different sources of authority? Did they test groups of subjects making decisions together? Did they test for the wording of the commands (i.e. "increase the pain level" versus "turn the dial up")? There are far more variables in real world scenarios than just whether the orders were obeyed or not. Your comment seems to imply I was playing a racial/ethnic card, but I was doing no such thing. I was talking about environmental factors. I'm sorry, but this is a case where the lab environment is just too dramatically different from reality to say that it explains everything so simply.
The experiments may have proved that by and large all humans have a capacity for cruelty. But what it didn't rule out was that people can be, and may need to be, primed for that cruelty. I've read about the studies where people believe they are administering electric shocks, and the supposed subjects of the shock are actors, portraying various states of pain. The results of these experiments showed, for example, that the person holding the trigger could be convinced to gradually increase the pain applied, but would balk at jumping right to a high setting. This represents a psychological priming happening.
For Nazi Germany, the stage was set, society was primed, by the time the soldiers got their inhumane orders. The government was already a corrupt tyranny. The power and authority of the government was accepted. The military orders weren't the first evidence of this. They wouldn't have been obeyed if they hadn't come from an established authority. It should have been stopped long before that, before the corrupt authority was established. My argument is that it wasn't stopped because the entire society was desperate for stability of all sorts, and so they didn't care about the nature of their leader, as long as he slowed their decent into chaos and poverty.
My argument is that this desperation would generally be a necessary step in the transfer of government from stable democratic republic to tyranny. It is too complete and utter a transformation. Germany didn't go through this. They went from unstable monarchy, to unstable republic, to slightly more stable dictatorship. The desire for the increase in stability overwhelmed any opposition to tyranny.
Anyway, you do make a good point. However, Weimar Germany was a very different place from 20th-century America. The U.S. has had a fairly successful democratic republic for nigh on 230 years now. Whereas Hitler took power after the dramatic failure of Germany's first, short-lived attempt at democracy. Plus, this attempt was made during a period of much civil conflict and general political chaos. People were by that point willing to cling to any available form of stability.
Again, central to my argument was the fact that the U.S. would have to decay from successful, stable democratic republic, to tyranny. I seriously doubt that such a change could happen directly in today's world. If it were to happen, I think there would need to be an extended period of desparation before the public, including the soldiers, would compromise freedoms for the tenuous stability of a tyrannical government. We made it through a civil war after just, what, 80 years of Democracy? I think that after nearly 3 times that the tenets, virtues, and benefits of freedom and self-government are well-established enough not to leave our collective memory very quickly.
Ah, true, true. I was thinking of analog, not digital. I suppose there's little possibility that a "high quality" cable is going to make much difference to a digital signal, except in how far it will go. So unless you're trying to run your digital signal a long distance (in which case, digital image decay should not be slow and graceful, but sudden and dramatic) cheap cable should do it, eh?
"military personnel have all taken an oath to defend the US Constitution"
So did the President.
Yes, but the President is only one man. It is much easier for one man to become corrupt than a few hundred thousand. Not impossible of course, but much less likely. Especially considering the freedom of the society we have now, and have had in the past. For those freedoms to degenerate and eventually be lost leaving a tyrannical government where there was once a democratic republic, and for a few hundred thousand military personnel to support the tryanny, would probably require a recruitment program that actively searched for corruptible, or stupid, people interested only in power and wealth. Good luck keeping that one a secret.
As frightening as the ideas in Orwell's "1984" are, I don't think the scenario is realistic. There are too many people who are too aware of and attached to their freedoms to let things slide quite that far. I'd bet even the most gun-shy Democrat would be willing to pick up a gun if it came to that, regardless of whether they thought it should be legal in times of peace and stability. Under a tyranny, all bets are off. A tyranny doesn't the citizenry, even if they are trustworthy, so why bother trying to follow their laws?
I'm not too worried about the U.S. government decaying into tyranny. I am worried, however, that the U.S. could lose our global position and end up back where we were in the late 1800's... That is, hardly a force to be reckoned with, either militarily or economically.
You've obviously never bought video equipment from Best Buy before. The way they push that stuff you'd think it could cure poverty and bring about world peace all at the same time, if only enough people would buy it....
The truth of the matter is, Best Buy hauls serious cash based on the brand image of Monster cables. (If they're anything like the computer department, where I worked, the profit margins on cabling are absolutely exorbitant.) At the stores near me, the cables are divided into two sections: Monster and non-Monster. I don't know how big of a real visual/audio difference there is between the two. If there is one, I don't care enough to notice. It's surely not as big as the difference between composite and component.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some animated banner GIFs from AdSense around lately. Maybe even light Flash. I used to not block Google ads with Adblock, because they were so unobtrusive. But if animated GIFs or even light Flash ads become commonplace, that will change in a heartbeat.
I'm just a peon, by anyone's standards, but I would feel dispirited if someone were promoted past me because they couldn't function at the lower level.
You shouldn't feel like the only way you can be promoted is into a management position. If that's the environment where you work, then there is a flaw or fault in their positional infrastructure. I would view promotion into a managment as a demotion. To me the higher salary offsets a more onerous task. I have no desire to go into that type of management, and I don't (right now, anyway) have the skills that would be necessary for it. That shouldn't leave me stuck at a dead end though....
This is why many companies have two separate career tracks which can originate out of the developer or engineer position. My previous employer had just such a plan in place. As a level-I software engineer, if I had stayed and advanced there, I would have been given two options. Moving beyond level-III, I could go into a management track or stay on the engineer track. The engineer track (which included project management, a technical position) had more levels within the department than the manager track (which included team management, a resource management position). In fact the top-level engineering position in the IT department was almost guaranteed to make a salary greater than the top-level management position. In order to make more as a manager, you had to be at least the head of the whole IT department.
Obviously, this type of infrastructure isn't necessarily feasible for smaller companies. Ours was a company of nearly 500 people (nearly half in sales), with 80 or so in IT.
Anyway, to restate, you should be able to be promoted for technical skill, without being expected to take up a management position. A promotion into a management ladder is a recognition of different types of skills (resource management and interpersonal, for example), not a recognition of lesser or greater technical skills. It isn't one-way: I've known a lot excellent engineers who were promoted to management on that merit, but were terrible managers in practice. There should be a separate recognition of technical skill and experience, and an official designation, authority boost, and salary boost to go with it.
I was actually just coming back to amend my comment by noting this possibility. I admit that my original comment was written in a spirit of optimism. I don't know what came over me... I suppose I was feeling under the weather ;).
Back to my normal, cynical self... Given the propensity of popular media to "simplify" news from the tech sector, I wouldn't be surprised to see a headline like this, sometime soon:
"Infamous U.S. Hacker Prefers to Attack Open Source"
Not exactly the type of attention the FOSS movement is looking for, eh?
The gamer inside you might make you believe that 'loyalty to gamers' or 'independence' might convince Nintendo to remain it's own entity, but this is simply naieve. Nintendo wants to beat Sony. It wants to beat Microsoft. It wants to get back to where it was 10 years ago. To do that, it needs to match their investment capabilities. To do that, it just might need companies like Cisco.
If Nintendo cared that much about beating MS and Sony, they wouldn't be aiming their next console at picking up people who have traditionally been non-gamers. They're straddling a market gap that I very much doubt MS or Sony cares two bits about, simply because it's just not profitable for companies their size and with so much investment already sunk into the "hardcore" market.
MS and Sony are pushing their machines as "home entertainment systems", implying an inclusion of not just gaming, but video, audio, etc. Whereas Nintendo is perfectly satisfied to remain a "game machine".
"Where it was 10 years ago" is someplace Nintendo can never be again. They've accepted that, and are going a new direction.
They aren't competing in the same class. While their (Nintendo vs. the other two) markets overlap, I really doubt MS or Sony are all that concerned about Nintendo pushing one or both of them out, and they don't have much reason to be. With the Revolution aimed at a different price-point, and only a portion of their customers, Nintendo is not a threat to the other two, nor are the other two a threat to Nintendo.
MS's primary concern is Sony, and vice versa as well. And that is because they are competing in pretty much the same marketspace. Nintendo is a different product at a different price, aimed at a partially overlapping but substantially different customer base. I really doubt they are that worried about each other.
This is my opinion because I haven't yet heard anyone ask "are you going to get the XBox 360, or the Revolution", or "are you going to get the PS3, or the Revolution". There are two different questions I keep hearing: "Are you going to get the XBox 360, or the PS3", and "Are you going to get the Revolution". This shows better than anything, IMHO, that the marketspaces are fundamentally different, despite coincidental overlap. With the Nintendo, it's yes or no, not either-or. Their success doesn't seem to rely on the failure of the others at all.
It would be a total waste of money for either MS or Sony to start after Nintendo's intended market right now, when they are still fighting each other over "1st place". Maybe in a few years, if a clear victor has emerged between MS and Sony, Nintendo will have some reason to worry about the market for the Revolution. But I'd bet big money that Nintendo, as a target, will have already moved by then.
New-and-exciting != news.
When someone high-profile says something that lots of low-profile people are already saying, it is news because people who don't typically hear that thing said now have the opportunity to hear it.
Your friendly-neihborhood Linux admin can say this stuff all he wants with his other admin buddies, or here on Slashdot. But that doesn't necessarily get heard by even one decision-maker. This will be heard by lots of them, if they are even lightly following online tech-news.
How high-profile is Kevin Mitnick? I have a plethora of friends who haven't even heard of Linux, and barely know what an "OS" is. But they have heard of Kevin Mitnick, and know what he is famous for. Not that they need to know about this particular quote. It's just an illustration of his visibility.
Add in the weight of passengers and then the elevator will go down and your formula applies. I understand all that about tension forces on either side of the pulley netting out and resulting in zero net downward force on the connected masses. My point was that, regardless of how much effective weight there was, it should not affect the acceleration. I did have it wrong though. I forgot that non-zero net force that results from putting people in (adding mass on one side) has to act over the mass of the people, and the elevator, and the counterweight. Which means that acceleration will be lower than normal. The gravitational force on the people is all that's available to make motion, but it has to pull more than just the people. So acceleration will be less.
From the top of the page:
Last Updated: Thursday, 17 March, 2005, 11:30 GMT
This doesn't sound right to me. I'm pretty sure gravity accelerates any amount of mass at an equal rate: 9.8m/s^2. Shouldn't matter whether it's 50kg or 1500kg.
I'm afraid you aren't going to find any physicists out there arguing that GR doesn't claim that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equal. It has nothing to do with what any experiment proves. The theory is the theory. You misunderstood me. I'm not looking for arguments about whether GR includes this postulate. I'm looking for arguments about where this postulate isn true in reality. Which, ideally, would be something we can test by experiment. If it were not true, obviously that would mean GR has a flaw.
Healthy != glitchy
I think maybe instead of "healthy", what he meant was "clean", which IIRC is largely related to the purity of the waveforms, which can be quite separate from problems of power loss.
Not for kids. For old people.
The idea is that performing these little mental activities, and trying to do so quickly, will help stave off the many neurological and psychological conditions that can arise in old age due simply to a lack of appropriate mental stimulation.
People in their 20s and 30s really probably don't need it. The inactivity that spurs these disorders usually tends to set in after retirement.
http://www.tdctrade.com/imn/05112204/toys081.htm
If you want people to learn that stuff--how to think scientifically--you have to get them while they're kids.
But that's not going to change the people who just don't care about it. People care about what they care about. Unless you can turn science into something they care about (like the "great space race" to beat the "commies"), which is tough to do while remaining honest, they're not going to change or make sacrifices.
I think I'm coming off even more cynical than I mean to. I think that a certain portion of the population is going to be a "lost cause". They are too busy just getting by to try to care about something that's not going to put food in the pantry, shoes on the kids' feet, and tires on the car today. And there's another segment that's frankly just too old. They're sure they've already got it "figured out" and you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
So, again, I say we let the old dogs be, and get to work on the pups. But don't expect them all to come out perfect.
Sweeping generalizations, maybe. But it's the best explanation I can think of for all the things I've seen people do.
If you want to discuss inertial responses to forces, mass becomes a tensor (matrix), which decomposes into longitudinal and transverse masses--it's no longer described by a number.
If you want to describe the source of gravity, that's a tensor (matrix) too: the stress-energy tensor that you mention, of which relativistic mass(-energy) is one component.
Kinetic energy contributes to the relativistic mass-energy and therefore the stress-energy tensor; this issue is discussed in a pedagogical paper [arxiv.org].
Much appreciated, Mr. Anonymous. Now that I know there is some info out there on this, I will certain look into it. Hopefully I can find arguments for both sides and get a sense for whose arguments are stronger. I have to admit, I did not know that GR as formulated does treat inertial mass (measured by collisions) and gravitational mas (measured by gravity) as identical. That's probably a gross oversight on my part but I am, after all, just an "armchair physicist".
I'm not sure which conclusion I'd like to see validated right now. The absence of experimental evidence (or at least discussion of it) had in the past led me to the position I stated in my earlier post. Obviously I'm still somewhat attached to it. But what I've read recently about theories on the "origin" of mass has opened my mind more to Dr. Carlip's argument. Especially if there is experimental evidence to support him.
Thanks again!
There's something that always bothered me about this idea....
Whenever one of these spontaneous particle pairs pops out of the vacuum, there is always one matter particle and one antimatter particle. Shouldn't there be an equal probability that either one could fall into the black hole (unless it's a charged black hole, of course)? If equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles are going in, then shouldn't they balance each other out and result in a net effect of zero?
And speaking of charged black holes.... If the black hole has a predominant positive charge, then it seems to me that it would be predisposed to pulling in negatively charged particles as opposed to positively charged ones. So, when an electron-positron pair pops up, the electron is more likely to be "eaten", and contribute to mass, rather than negate it. Does the lower probability of proton-antiproton pairs popping up, combined with the larger mass of anti-protons exactly balance out the contributions of the electrons? If not, then either either the positive or negative black hole will have steady growth, instead of evaporation.
And what about anti-matter black holes? Granted, anti-matter is so rare that it's extremely unlikely to arise in nature. But if one did arise, then by absorption of positive matter, would we not have the exact opposite dilemmas that we have with regular black holes? E.g. if a "regular matter" black hole evaporates naturally, then anti-matter black holes should naturally grow, and vice-versa. Man, I only had just the one quandry to start with, but once I got thinking, all this stuff popped up!
When an object is moving relative to you, you will measure its mass to be greater than if it were standing still.
But how is the mass being measured? The primary ways of measuring mass deal with measuring changes in momentum. And momentum is a function of both mass and velocity (kinetic energy). So how can we say for certain how much of that momentum is coming from mass and how much from kinetic energy? We need a corroborating measurement to say for sure. One that is not dependent on velocity. If no such method of measurement exists (i.e., if gravitational effects do indeed depend on kinetic energy), then we can safely say that mass does indeed increase with velocity, because all mass effects are affected by changes in velocity.
You seem to indicate that this is, in fact, the case:
This includes its intertia and gravitational attraction
But I am unaware of any experiments that have been carried out to verify this. If there have been, I would happily be pointed to them so I can correct my understanding. As far as I know, GR does not predict this. I was under the impression that the stress-energy tensor is compartmentalized in a way that kinetic energy does not directly affect measured gravitational effects.
<cynicism>
Everything else in the U.S. has warnings on it to "protect" idiots from their own stupidity. Why should science not be subject to the same societal "obligations"?
But slightly more seriously, I think this wouldn't be such a big issue if we weren't so obsessed with getting everyone interested in and aware of science, when the simple truth is most people either just don't care or aren't capable of understanding. The "you too can understand Science" movement has convinced everyone that they have the ability to judge the merit of complex research.
If we want more people to understand science, they need to go to school. Reading pop sci books and magazines, watching pop sci TV specials, etc. is not making the general public smarter. It's making them more overconfident in their limited comprehension.
</cynicism>