You are correct that no one should expect shutting down one operation to forever keep spam low. Point taken. And for the forseeable future, fighting spam will require constant vigilance against new attack vectors.
Still, it's inexcusable, and pretty shameful, that McColo was able to traffic all that spam as long as they did despite the obvious warning signs. Ditto law enforcement's apathy.
We can't eliminate spam (for now anyway), but we can keep it at bay, and it's reasonable to expect spam to require much more sophistication than it currently does.
I guess a trained AI would be better at fakeing being your IM-buddy because some people IM like a text message where they say things with as few characters as possable.
Actually, yes, that's true, when you keep in mind that:
1) Shortening your message to make it faster to text is a form of data compression. 2) Under an optimal data compression scheme, all strings of a given length are equally likely. In that case, there would be no way to know that "kdpwnb" is "Not something a human would say."
I think you're using a stronger restriction than the GP posited. He said (a) "If you can't explain it to a layman, you don't understand it", while you're responding to (b) "If you can't explain it to a layman in a short amount of time, you don't understand it."
I think you're right that (b) is false, but I still hold that (a) is true and a useful guide, as long as it's understood that:
1) You are unconstrained on time. 2) They're at least 100 IQ. 3) It's a two way interaction where they can stop you at any time they're not following.
So yes, I do think you should be able to trace an explanation of the third isomorphism theorem back through to basic group theory, and then back to basic math and division if you have to.
Interesting point. I was once actually in a situation of over-general code. My project lead asked me to spend about two days reading some other co-worker's code[1] and finding out how to "cut out enough fat" (lines not essential to his current task and input set) and explain the rest to him so that he could understand how it worked. The reasoning being, he wasn't comfortable using it unless he understood it all himself and his "time to understand" was maybe exponential in the length of the code.
But here's the thing: as I was reading through it, my reaction was more like, "Wow! This programmer did a really good job in making sure to gracefully handle everything possible that could go wrong". It was the kind of code I aspired to write myself.
It gets stranger: the project lead had already gone back to the programmer with the same request, and the programmer adamantly refused to make the changes, and for reasons that took a very long time to explain. (And I probably made a lot of points in defense of the code that the programmer did.) Worse, the code (as you warned about) took a long time to write. Apparently, the project lead didn't check up on him.
So, even given my reservations about reducing the code's generality, I went ahead and shrunk it down. Hopefully the lead kept the original for later...
[1] The code, if you're curious, implemented an algorithm that shifted around locations of masses to create a set of masses with equivalent centers of mass but met different position constraints.
Actually, it's even worse than that. A company is not even a "physical person" or physical-anything like the patent applicant wants to argue. A company is simply a legally-recognized *relationship* between physical things and people, not a physical object itself, which are what patents are intended to cover configurations of.
Incidentally, this is the source of another confusion. While the stuff you own might be physical, the legal rights you have in that stuff are not physical; just like a company, they are defined by the relationship they signify between people. When people say they want some object, what they really want is some combination of a) capability of accessing the object, and b) the legal right to access it (i.e. no one stops them). So physical property rights are just as non-material as intellectual property rights, meaning neither one is more "imaginary" or "tangible" than the other. Not that IP is justified or anything, blah blah blah.
My question is not misguided, just your understanding of it. Your post that I originally replied to singled out computers as being unable to do it, implying that there's something else could answer it (humans?). Now, it seems that you weren't saying that at all.
Our lot is not much different than a computation machines',
Well, that's all you had to say to answer my question, but sure, go ahead and show off your knowledge and call me misguided.
Right, and the point seemed to be that, "A human could provide a non-constructive proof, but a computer couldn't." And what I'm saying is, "why not?" Why can't "whatever it is that a human is going through when they present to you a non-constructive proof" be emulated on a computer? If it can't, you have to reject the Church-Turing Thesis, and say specifically how it is that humans marshal physical phenomena in a way that computers cannot.
How does this setup possibly count as a "computer"? It's not. It's just a physical process whose input/output, under one interpretation, is isomorphic to that of a computation its user wants to know the result of... oh, I see. Never mind!
Well, thanks, BadAnalogyGuy, for demonstrating exactly what's wrong with mainstream macroeconomic thought these days.
In case anyone didn't understand all that, he's referring to the infamous "GDP equation" that "gross domestic product", a poor attempt at capturing the total value of goods and services produced in an economy each year, is equal to:
Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government purchases (G) + net imports (X - M)
I don't know what he's using to mean Y, but I think he's referring to the rewrite of the equation that puts it as:
C + I + X - M - Y = GDP - (G + B)
where Y is net private savings and B is net government borrowing. That's how they derive the misleading identity that "net private savings equals government borrowing".
I used to see GDP as "imperfect, but a good appoximation of economic health, once you understand its limitations". Now I see mainstream macroeconomics taking its imperfections and amplifying them to the point of bad policy. They're so concerned about getting government-recorded spending to show up that they completely ignore whether that spending is actually producing anything of value. If people wisely move, in some area, to a more efficient "bartering of services", such as a babysitting co-op, that shows up as a sharp drop in consumption and thus GDP, yet has made everyone involved much better off. Add up imperfections like these, and you get a bunch of economics advocating the zombification of the economy by propping up obsolete businesses and business models, forever delaying meaningful recovery.
People come in with back pain. My job is to rule out the dangerous causes, and once that's done give them some analgesia and tell them to weight a few weeks for it to improve. Any serious pathology will reveal itself over time if there are no red flags during the initial history and physical. Patients hate that. They want the xray. So they go to their chiropractor who orders a bunch of xrays (placebo 'tests' are very therapeutic to patients actually). "Well, your xray looks fine!"
Actually, I don't hate that. What I hate is when I get chronic, severe back pain at age 16 and I got to doctors for 11 years who try the same thing every time while rolling their eyes and insisting that no, this time it will work, you must just be imagining it, and you should just get over it anyway, because it doesn't show up on our tests so you're faking and fuck off.
And if you want drugs for it, you're an evil terrorist addict.
"Evidence-based medicine" would start with, "Wow, we really don't know what's going on with you, here's a research hospital you can go to." Heck, even without the research hospital would be a tremendous improvement.
Want to convince me that standard medicine is scientific? Get results! That's it! That's all you have to do!
Sure, and "Don't you know that no productive trade ever happened before property rights?"
Let's stop throwing these strawmen around. Yes, lots of works, intellectual or physical, are produced without regard for the property rights that would exist in them. It's just that when such rights are non-existent, the corresponding production is nowhere near what it could be, and people are poorer in terms of that resource.
No, I'm not defending copyright as it stands today, and I would agree if the GP was referring to corporate interests' *abuse* of copyright, but some people have an unfortunate tendency to leap from "Hey, I just wrote a crappy poem and released it to the public domain" straight to, "Cancer would be cured tomorrow if IP were abolished.":-P
Yeah, but unless you REALLY know what you're doing, you risk locking yourself out of your computer and/or losing access to files.
For my part, I switched recently, and despite buying new hardware (I had to upgrade anyway), it's been an easy, smooth transition. The used computer I bought had Vista on it, and I installed Ubuntu 8.10 over it. I was surprised at how easy it was to install the OS and change settings. For wi-fi, all I had to do was plug in a USB adapter I had up and running on my previous computer and entire the password.
They've come a long way since three years ago when I... didn't get it to work out. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move over my previous computer's hard drives or critical files like email.
No, it's the Many Worlds theory. Hidden variables would say that if I just had more knowledge I could learn which of the coins will show up, that the outcome is in principle predictable (rather than knowable only up to its frequency), which is not posited by my analogy.
If you'd *ever* been involved with the press covering something technical, you'd know that the press would be more accurate if they just made up their stories whole-cloth. The whole "sending the j-school major to interview the rocket scientists" thing actually *lowers* the accuracy of the result below straight fiction.
This is the primary reason that the newspaper industry is dying. The don't add any value. The lie that there is some sort of "editorial fact checking" is exposed every days by blogs that actually have a clue, and really I can get plenty *opinions* for free on the internet. I think "the news" in general, even though cable news neworks scale better, is going to feel the pressure next.
Wow, good point, I had forgotten (briefly!) how badly j-school people botch anything remotely technical. I stand corrected.
Still, the *function* of having a technically informed person ask serious, helpful questions of e.g. NASA does add value, and it requires a well-educated person and a credible organization to do this kind of thing. Even if present media organizations, up to and including the NYT, currently suck at this, it needs to be done, and it's unclear how a hobbyist blogger working for free could do it.
Just get the news from the people already there? So, should we get news about NASA just by taking the word of insiders at NASA?
Also, even if you can get locals to send the news, you still need translators, which are expensive, though I guess you could work around that with wiki-translation or multilingual standardization of reporting...
Your scenario is an accurate analogy for the hidden variables hypothesis...
Er, I think it would be more accurate to say that the terms used in my analogy carry a lot of connotative baggage due to an association with an analogy used by proponents of hidden variables. The example itself does not argue for hidden variables, and I don't support that idea; I'm familiar with why it has to be rejected. I should have realized it could be misinterpreted due to previous famous analogies using similar terms.
The purpose was just to show what entanglement can an cannot allow. If I were to extend it to the quantum realm, it would be: I split the universe into 2n universes and give Alice the tail in half of them and the head in the other half. Alice and Bob don't know which of the universes I put them in, since they're otherwise indistinguishable. By looking at their half-coin, they learn which universe they ended up in, and therefore, which the other person has. Still doesn't mean they're instantaneously transmitting information or influence (or do I repeat myself).
The coins-in-envelope model is the same idea as the "hidden variable" theory, no? As I understand it, observations don't support the idea that the photons (or whatever) have a "heads" or "tails" hidden away somewhere that they synchronized when they were together- the probabilities are wrong.
No, the hidden variable theory is independent of explanation I gave. I didn't intend for the analogy to carry over so far to claim that "learning more information can increase your knowledge beyond probability assignment of the outcomes", which is what the hidden variable theory says. My point was just that entanglement of the particles means that -- until the entanglement is broken -- learning one tells you about the other, if only in a probabilistic sense. It is *not* a continual interaction that jumps the gap between the particles instantly.
(And there is no such thing as a particle really, just a factorisable component of the amplitude distribution, blah blah blah...)
Bingo. It's saddening how quantum mechanics is made out to be so much more mysterious and spooky than it really is.
A non-quantum version of entanglement is this: I cut a coin through its side, so I have two pieces, one with the head, and one with the tail side. I put each one and in a separate envelope, and give one envelope to Alice, and the other two Bob.
I separate them by a jillion miles.
Now Alice opens her envelope and sees tails. So she knows Bob must have heads. Wow! So awesome and spooky and mysterious and wonderful! Not! They're not sending information to each other or influencing each other. Alice only has access to the information she *brought* with her when they separated.
And after she sees the half-coin, if she polishes the tail image off and inscribes another image... no more entanglement! That is, by looking at her half-coin, you no longer are capable of learning what Bob had.
Ditto on the quantum level. When the particles are entangled, it simply means that learning one tells you something about the other... but influence spread is still limited to the speed of light.
***
Now, with that in mind, can anyone clarify what exactly is meant by this paper? What do human eyes add, and what insight is gained by proposing or performing this experiment?
Very good points on your part. Keep up the good work in bringing sense to ultra-left enviros, and I'll do my part in bringing sense to the ultra-right capitalists. One day, the world will start acting rationally.;-)
Well, glad to finally get some thanks for the effort I put into criticizing my fellow right-wingers:-) I notice you also asked for sanity from the mods on my initial post after I got smacked down to zero (1 with karma bonus), and I appreciate that as well.
I've been involved in an internecine dispute among libertarians about the environment, and I've become quite jaded at how quickly they turn off their thinking caps when it comes the environment. They immediately go from "The tragedy of the commons justifies solid, inviolable property rights" to "hey, let's leave the atmosphere in a perpetual tragedy of the commons and then cross our fingers REALLY hard and rationalize why someone's totally gonna solve the problem for us!" I've been kicked off a libertarian mailing list largely because I suggested that, "Gee, if our use of fossil fuels permanently displaces Bangaledeshis from their land, doesn't that at least obligate us to divert SOME of the economic benefit from such fuels to compensation for them?"
Sadly, most ultra right wing capitalists don't take the position I do on the environment (just to be clear, I meant in my post that if you looked at a random sampling of my views, that's how you would classify me), preferring instead, if anything, denial of the existence of a problem, or protracted tort resolution for alleged harms with absurd standards for liability.
As for those on the left, my complaint isn't so much that they bring up environmental problems, but that they all too often use them as flimsy pretenses to control people they don't like. Just because the earth has limited carbon absorption capacity, doesn't immediately justify banning SUVs and instituting an array of asinine, inefficient regulations and subsidies (like those for batteries mentioned), and I'd be a lot less worried if they pursued only economically-informed approaches. The market simply needs to price in these problems, and *then* brilliant people can compete to help us most painlessly adapt to the new constraints. If battery research is pointless even with the fossil fuel "externality premium", great! But we won't know that until prices adjust. That was the point I was making with my initial post.
Anyway thanks again for the support. I'd link my blog and online internecine flamefests, but I want to keep this account disconnected from my meatspace identity...
Yeah, it sure would suck if one responded to a post by reading stuff into it that just isn't there... ("I disagree completely. If a plan is intended to protect the environment, we shouldn't care that it's ill-conceived and perhaps even counter-productive?")
Look, if Pieter actually recognized *why* the types of programs in TFA are proposed, and objected on the grounds that there are more efficient ways to achieve the same ends... he would have said so, and identified exactly which pro-environment programs do not count as white elephants. If he didn't recognize any legitimate need the programs attempt to address, he would have characterized them as exactly equal to any request from any lobbyist... which is exactly what he did.
My response was richly deserved, and if he believes that environmental externalities need to be internalized as an alternative to patchwork efficiency regulations and subsidies, he sure did a good job of imitating someone who just doesn't "get it".
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct that no one should expect shutting down one operation to forever keep spam low. Point taken. And for the forseeable future, fighting spam will require constant vigilance against new attack vectors.
Still, it's inexcusable, and pretty shameful, that McColo was able to traffic all that spam as long as they did despite the obvious warning signs. Ditto law enforcement's apathy.
We can't eliminate spam (for now anyway), but we can keep it at bay, and it's reasonable to expect spam to require much more sophistication than it currently does.
I guess a trained AI would be better at fakeing being your IM-buddy because some people IM like a text message where they say things with as few characters as possable.
Actually, yes, that's true, when you keep in mind that:
1) Shortening your message to make it faster to text is a form of data compression.
2) Under an optimal data compression scheme, all strings of a given length are equally likely. In that case, there would be no way to know that "kdpwnb" is "Not something a human would say."
Wake me up when we actually know what causes sentience and how it works.
So, in other words, wake you up when we understand "waking up"? ;-)
Debacle, debut ... reminds me of an unrelated headline from a few years after the first fusion fiasco:
"Debacle turns debut into deja vu."
Will probably apply here just as well...
I think you're using a stronger restriction than the GP posited. He said (a) "If you can't explain it to a layman, you don't understand it", while you're responding to (b) "If you can't explain it to a layman in a short amount of time, you don't understand it."
I think you're right that (b) is false, but I still hold that (a) is true and a useful guide, as long as it's understood that:
1) You are unconstrained on time.
2) They're at least 100 IQ.
3) It's a two way interaction where they can stop you at any time they're not following.
So yes, I do think you should be able to trace an explanation of the third isomorphism theorem back through to basic group theory, and then back to basic math and division if you have to.
Interesting point. I was once actually in a situation of over-general code. My project lead asked me to spend about two days reading some other co-worker's code[1] and finding out how to "cut out enough fat" (lines not essential to his current task and input set) and explain the rest to him so that he could understand how it worked. The reasoning being, he wasn't comfortable using it unless he understood it all himself and his "time to understand" was maybe exponential in the length of the code.
But here's the thing: as I was reading through it, my reaction was more like, "Wow! This programmer did a really good job in making sure to gracefully handle everything possible that could go wrong". It was the kind of code I aspired to write myself.
It gets stranger: the project lead had already gone back to the programmer with the same request, and the programmer adamantly refused to make the changes, and for reasons that took a very long time to explain. (And I probably made a lot of points in defense of the code that the programmer did.) Worse, the code (as you warned about) took a long time to write. Apparently, the project lead didn't check up on him.
So, even given my reservations about reducing the code's generality, I went ahead and shrunk it down. Hopefully the lead kept the original for later ...
[1] The code, if you're curious, implemented an algorithm that shifted around locations of masses to create a set of masses with equivalent centers of mass but met different position constraints.
Actually, it's even worse than that. A company is not even a "physical person" or physical-anything like the patent applicant wants to argue. A company is simply a legally-recognized *relationship* between physical things and people, not a physical object itself, which are what patents are intended to cover configurations of.
Incidentally, this is the source of another confusion. While the stuff you own might be physical, the legal rights you have in that stuff are not physical; just like a company, they are defined by the relationship they signify between people. When people say they want some object, what they really want is some combination of a) capability of accessing the object, and b) the legal right to access it (i.e. no one stops them). So physical property rights are just as non-material as intellectual property rights, meaning neither one is more "imaginary" or "tangible" than the other. Not that IP is justified or anything, blah blah blah.
My question is not misguided, just your understanding of it. Your post that I originally replied to singled out computers as being unable to do it, implying that there's something else could answer it (humans?). Now, it seems that you weren't saying that at all.
Our lot is not much different than a computation machines',
Well, that's all you had to say to answer my question, but sure, go ahead and show off your knowledge and call me misguided.
Right, and the point seemed to be that, "A human could provide a non-constructive proof, but a computer couldn't." And what I'm saying is, "why not?" Why can't "whatever it is that a human is going through when they present to you a non-constructive proof" be emulated on a computer? If it can't, you have to reject the Church-Turing Thesis, and say specifically how it is that humans marshal physical phenomena in a way that computers cannot.
Then why can a human answer the question? And what about the human can't be captured by a computer?
How does this setup possibly count as a "computer"? It's not. It's just a physical process whose input/output, under one interpretation, is isomorphic to that of a computation its user wants to know the result of ... oh, I see. Never mind!
Well, if it makes you feel any better, Microsoft's going to release theirs (at least the second version) as "Reading Light", without the "my".
In other news, Open Source is communist because they're taking away the feeling of ownership...
Well, thanks, BadAnalogyGuy, for demonstrating exactly what's wrong with mainstream macroeconomic thought these days.
In case anyone didn't understand all that, he's referring to the infamous "GDP equation" that "gross domestic product", a poor attempt at capturing the total value of goods and services produced in an economy each year, is equal to:
Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government purchases (G) + net imports (X - M)
I don't know what he's using to mean Y, but I think he's referring to the rewrite of the equation that puts it as:
C + I + X - M - Y = GDP - (G + B)
where Y is net private savings and B is net government borrowing. That's how they derive the misleading identity that "net private savings equals government borrowing".
I used to see GDP as "imperfect, but a good appoximation of economic health, once you understand its limitations". Now I see mainstream macroeconomics taking its imperfections and amplifying them to the point of bad policy. They're so concerned about getting government-recorded spending to show up that they completely ignore whether that spending is actually producing anything of value. If people wisely move, in some area, to a more efficient "bartering of services", such as a babysitting co-op, that shows up as a sharp drop in consumption and thus GDP, yet has made everyone involved much better off. Add up imperfections like these, and you get a bunch of economics advocating the zombification of the economy by propping up obsolete businesses and business models, forever delaying meaningful recovery.
People come in with back pain. My job is to rule out the dangerous causes, and once that's done give them some analgesia and tell them to weight a few weeks for it to improve. Any serious pathology will reveal itself over time if there are no red flags during the initial history and physical. Patients hate that. They want the xray. So they go to their chiropractor who orders a bunch of xrays (placebo 'tests' are very therapeutic to patients actually). "Well, your xray looks fine!"
Actually, I don't hate that. What I hate is when I get chronic, severe back pain at age 16 and I got to doctors for 11 years who try the same thing every time while rolling their eyes and insisting that no, this time it will work, you must just be imagining it, and you should just get over it anyway, because it doesn't show up on our tests so you're faking and fuck off.
And if you want drugs for it, you're an evil terrorist addict.
"Evidence-based medicine" would start with, "Wow, we really don't know what's going on with you, here's a research hospital you can go to." Heck, even without the research hospital would be a tremendous improvement.
Want to convince me that standard medicine is scientific? Get results! That's it! That's all you have to do!
Sure, and "Don't you know that no productive trade ever happened before property rights?"
Let's stop throwing these strawmen around. Yes, lots of works, intellectual or physical, are produced without regard for the property rights that would exist in them. It's just that when such rights are non-existent, the corresponding production is nowhere near what it could be, and people are poorer in terms of that resource.
No, I'm not defending copyright as it stands today, and I would agree if the GP was referring to corporate interests' *abuse* of copyright, but some people have an unfortunate tendency to leap from "Hey, I just wrote a crappy poem and released it to the public domain" straight to, "Cancer would be cured tomorrow if IP were abolished." :-P
Yeah, but unless you REALLY know what you're doing, you risk locking yourself out of your computer and/or losing access to files.
For my part, I switched recently, and despite buying new hardware (I had to upgrade anyway), it's been an easy, smooth transition. The used computer I bought had Vista on it, and I installed Ubuntu 8.10 over it. I was surprised at how easy it was to install the OS and change settings. For wi-fi, all I had to do was plug in a USB adapter I had up and running on my previous computer and entire the password.
They've come a long way since three years ago when I ... didn't get it to work out. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move over my previous computer's hard drives or critical files like email.
No, it's the Many Worlds theory. Hidden variables would say that if I just had more knowledge I could learn which of the coins will show up, that the outcome is in principle predictable (rather than knowable only up to its frequency), which is not posited by my analogy.
If you'd *ever* been involved with the press covering something technical, you'd know that the press would be more accurate if they just made up their stories whole-cloth. The whole "sending the j-school major to interview the rocket scientists" thing actually *lowers* the accuracy of the result below straight fiction.
This is the primary reason that the newspaper industry is dying. The don't add any value. The lie that there is some sort of "editorial fact checking" is exposed every days by blogs that actually have a clue, and really I can get plenty *opinions* for free on the internet. I think "the news" in general, even though cable news neworks scale better, is going to feel the pressure next.
Wow, good point, I had forgotten (briefly!) how badly j-school people botch anything remotely technical. I stand corrected.
Still, the *function* of having a technically informed person ask serious, helpful questions of e.g. NASA does add value, and it requires a well-educated person and a credible organization to do this kind of thing. Even if present media organizations, up to and including the NYT, currently suck at this, it needs to be done, and it's unclear how a hobbyist blogger working for free could do it.
Just get the news from the people already there? So, should we get news about NASA just by taking the word of insiders at NASA?
Also, even if you can get locals to send the news, you still need translators, which are expensive, though I guess you could work around that with wiki-translation or multilingual standardization of reporting...
Your scenario is an accurate analogy for the hidden variables hypothesis ...
Er, I think it would be more accurate to say that the terms used in my analogy carry a lot of connotative baggage due to an association with an analogy used by proponents of hidden variables. The example itself does not argue for hidden variables, and I don't support that idea; I'm familiar with why it has to be rejected. I should have realized it could be misinterpreted due to previous famous analogies using similar terms.
The purpose was just to show what entanglement can an cannot allow. If I were to extend it to the quantum realm, it would be: I split the universe into 2n universes and give Alice the tail in half of them and the head in the other half. Alice and Bob don't know which of the universes I put them in, since they're otherwise indistinguishable. By looking at their half-coin, they learn which universe they ended up in, and therefore, which the other person has. Still doesn't mean they're instantaneously transmitting information or influence (or do I repeat myself).
The coins-in-envelope model is the same idea as the "hidden variable" theory, no? As I understand it, observations don't support the idea that the photons (or whatever) have a "heads" or "tails" hidden away somewhere that they synchronized when they were together- the probabilities are wrong.
No, the hidden variable theory is independent of explanation I gave. I didn't intend for the analogy to carry over so far to claim that "learning more information can increase your knowledge beyond probability assignment of the outcomes", which is what the hidden variable theory says. My point was just that entanglement of the particles means that -- until the entanglement is broken -- learning one tells you about the other, if only in a probabilistic sense. It is *not* a continual interaction that jumps the gap between the particles instantly.
(And there is no such thing as a particle really, just a factorisable component of the amplitude distribution, blah blah blah...)
Bingo. It's saddening how quantum mechanics is made out to be so much more mysterious and spooky than it really is.
A non-quantum version of entanglement is this: I cut a coin through its side, so I have two pieces, one with the head, and one with the tail side. I put each one and in a separate envelope, and give one envelope to Alice, and the other two Bob.
I separate them by a jillion miles.
Now Alice opens her envelope and sees tails. So she knows Bob must have heads. Wow! So awesome and spooky and mysterious and wonderful! Not! They're not sending information to each other or influencing each other. Alice only has access to the information she *brought* with her when they separated.
And after she sees the half-coin, if she polishes the tail image off and inscribes another image ... no more entanglement! That is, by looking at her half-coin, you no longer are capable of learning what Bob had.
Ditto on the quantum level. When the particles are entangled, it simply means that learning one tells you something about the other ... but influence spread is still limited to the speed of light.
***
Now, with that in mind, can anyone clarify what exactly is meant by this paper? What do human eyes add, and what insight is gained by proposing or performing this experiment?
Very good points on your part. Keep up the good work in bringing sense to ultra-left enviros, and I'll do my part in bringing sense to the ultra-right capitalists. One day, the world will start acting rationally. ;-)
Hey, I can hope...
Well, glad to finally get some thanks for the effort I put into criticizing my fellow right-wingers :-) I notice you also asked for sanity from the mods on my initial post after I got smacked down to zero (1 with karma bonus), and I appreciate that as well.
I've been involved in an internecine dispute among libertarians about the environment, and I've become quite jaded at how quickly they turn off their thinking caps when it comes the environment. They immediately go from "The tragedy of the commons justifies solid, inviolable property rights" to "hey, let's leave the atmosphere in a perpetual tragedy of the commons and then cross our fingers REALLY hard and rationalize why someone's totally gonna solve the problem for us!" I've been kicked off a libertarian mailing list largely because I suggested that, "Gee, if our use of fossil fuels permanently displaces Bangaledeshis from their land, doesn't that at least obligate us to divert SOME of the economic benefit from such fuels to compensation for them?"
Sadly, most ultra right wing capitalists don't take the position I do on the environment (just to be clear, I meant in my post that if you looked at a random sampling of my views, that's how you would classify me), preferring instead, if anything, denial of the existence of a problem, or protracted tort resolution for alleged harms with absurd standards for liability.
As for those on the left, my complaint isn't so much that they bring up environmental problems, but that they all too often use them as flimsy pretenses to control people they don't like. Just because the earth has limited carbon absorption capacity, doesn't immediately justify banning SUVs and instituting an array of asinine, inefficient regulations and subsidies (like those for batteries mentioned), and I'd be a lot less worried if they pursued only economically-informed approaches. The market simply needs to price in these problems, and *then* brilliant people can compete to help us most painlessly adapt to the new constraints. If battery research is pointless even with the fossil fuel "externality premium", great! But we won't know that until prices adjust. That was the point I was making with my initial post.
Anyway thanks again for the support. I'd link my blog and online internecine flamefests, but I want to keep this account disconnected from my meatspace identity...
Yeah, it sure would suck if one responded to a post by reading stuff into it that just isn't there ... ("I disagree completely. If a plan is intended to protect the environment, we shouldn't care that it's ill-conceived and perhaps even counter-productive?")
Look, if Pieter actually recognized *why* the types of programs in TFA are proposed, and objected on the grounds that there are more efficient ways to achieve the same ends ... he would have said so, and identified exactly which pro-environment programs do not count as white elephants. If he didn't recognize any legitimate need the programs attempt to address, he would have characterized them as exactly equal to any request from any lobbyist ... which is exactly what he did.
My response was richly deserved, and if he believes that environmental externalities need to be internalized as an alternative to patchwork efficiency regulations and subsidies, he sure did a good job of imitating someone who just doesn't "get it".