Perhaps not the best example. The Palestinian "politicians" are terrorists. I dunno about that. I don't think Mahmoud Abbas or Hanan Ashrawi are terrorists. The problem is that they don't have any control over people that are.
Ok, but for me to believe the theory it would need to explain something that was otherwise inexplicable. This study talks about explaining fluctuations in the CMBR (at least I think, the BBC sucks at explaining science).
For me to start believing it, it would have to survive a barrage of experimental tests like the theory of relativity did.
If some theory like God, the idea that we're living in a simulation or the existence of a multiverse doesn't have an effect on reality, then I don't believe in it.
But since this one tries to explain the CMBR, it's still ok with me.
You really can't limit term of copyright to the author's lifetime. People work for companies that fund their work in exchange for a regular salary. This would bind the value of the work to the age and health of the employee, leading to all sorts of economic pressure to not fund the work of older people. Also evil publishers will keep JK Rowling alive but incapacitated for centuries using stem cells like the Emperor in Warhammer 40K.
That's fine, but then you have to explain the multiverse in terms that are appealing (and by appealing I assume you mean some way that will not require any power, intelligence or authority greater than your own..). Well no power that wasn't described by equations and in someway hardwired into reality. Certainly no intelligence. If the theory was complete it would explain the Big Bang.
I don't have a problem with the Universe having been created, I think it's just as plausible that something created this Universe - though I don't know how whatever created it managed to come into existence, or always was in existence. Well our local bit of spacetime came into existence in the Big Bang. I just want an explanation for how that happened.
It's like the water cycle. Once you read that you know people understand this stuff properly. If people told you that it rained because God wanted it to or that there is a singularity at the bottom of the drain where the laws of physics broke down, that would just be a verbose way for them to tell you they didn't have a clue.
I want a theory that explains why the Big Bang happened. It would be some sort of cosmological matter cycle that explains what happens inside black holes and where the matter in the Big Bang came from.
Whether science will progress this far in my lifetime is a bit doubtful of course.
It would be nice to think that there is another plane that we will still exist on when we die, but then again I seriously doubt that.
It's an interesting idea but I don't believe that we're living in a simulator where the laws of physics are different anymore than I believe that God who was somehow outside the Universe created it. Mostly because there is no evidence that either are true, but for the deeper reason than it would open a whole new question of who or what made God or the simulator.
Fred Hoyle proposed Steady State theory because you don't have a "moment of creation" that you need to explain. It didn't work, but if our universe was created out of another then the big bang wasn't a moment of creation. It seems like if this research produces a theory which is consistent with observations and where the multiverse has always existed it would be very elegant.
And I believe that a correct theory of everything would be elegant.
Yeah but your balloon is embedded in a larger universe. You could define time in balloon terms but you could also come up with a definition of time which works before the balloon was inflated.
Similarly if our Universe is embedded a wider multiverse you could define time in such a way that you can have time before the big bang. But it's the fact that the universe is embedded in something else which is interesting to most people.
To me it seems appealing that the multiverse is in some steady state even if the universe isn't because that avoids the Big Bang being some sort of unique, magic Act of Creation.
I always rationalised the Tardis in Doctor Who as some sort of pocket of universe that sprouts wormholes to different points in spacetime. Bigger on the inside than out would be no problem since the inside is a different spacetime connected to the Tardis's destination via a thin neck that is hidden by some sort of hologram. Come to think of it, since the outside of the Tardis is some sort of hologram hiding a wormhole entrance that explains how the Tardis can change shape to disguise itself. An if someone attacks outside of the Tardis you just turn of the hologram and break the thin neck to that part of spacetime and reconnect a bit later to make the thing appear indestructable.
And a civilisation like the Time Lords that's had spacetravel for thousands or millions of years and knows how to harness the power of blackholes would be plausibly be capable of this sort of thing. I certainly wouldn't expect them to be flying around in the sort of spaceships we'd design based on our current knowledge of technology.
So I'm not surprised either;-)
Actually the odd thing about Doctor Who is that there is no evidence that the people that wrote it knew anything about physics, so the Tardis isn't supposed to be a pocket universe, but I can quite see explaining all the Tardis's odd properties using this model.
I'm serious here. Why should they require ID? What problem will it solve? If your answer to the last question is "it will stop terrorists", please explain exactly how it would do so. Because in the past very disorganised terrorists have tried and almost succeeded in killing planes full of people. If you require ID which they need to fake, maybe they'll screw up and get caught. But even if they get past that checks there are much more profound things you can do with datamining that would catch them. E.g. most of these people have gone to Afghanistan for training. A trip to a terrorist training camp could be detected by immigration and tracked back to social security numbers which would be on ID. And it's not hard to make unforgeable IDs with some sort of digital signature on them. Plus you can tighten up the penalties for forging IDs.
Incidentally why do you think they ask for passports when people enter the country?
Come to think of it I'd ask for passports or something equally secure for domestic flights. ID is not secure enough. In the UK getting a fake ID is trivial and not particularly illegal. Most people have owned a fake ID or two in their time. But a fake passport is a serious criminal offense and only very criminal types get them. The actual document is quite hard to forge and forgeries are easy to detect.
Incidentally someone else was saying that terrorist are essentially just criminals. I sort of agree actually, except that a terrorist crime kills much more people on average than a regular crime. But secure IDs and datamining would be useful to catch other sorts of criminals too. I don't think that's a bad thing and you could do it in a way that protects people's privacy - the datamining would work with anonymised data - maybe keyed to a one way hash of passport IDs - and some sort of warrant would be required to de anonymise it.
Maybe I should start a DBA's against terrorism group;-)
That's the problem. Now and then young men cross the Israeli border and kill a whole lot of Israelis. They make no demands. If they make any statements, they are not televised. The governments of the world call them terrorists. I disagree. They're just murderers. They hate the Israelis and want to kill them, and they're not afraid to die trying. I think the 9/11 hijackers had much the same motives, they just chose a more creative way to do it. The "message" that America received was all their own creation. I dunno. These people are trying to impose a new sort of illiberal society in Europe and in Israel. That is political. If you can defeat them militarily they will stop, just like the Red Army and similar groups stopped. Come to think of it, the Red Army were more like spree killers than militarised terrorists too. And I think it's good for liberal societies to have a bit of competition from outside to stop them getting flabby.
If I were to march into a crowded lobby tomorrow morning and spontaneously open fire on random civilians, I'd be a terrorist. You believe that don't you?
This is why the US is fucked up. I don't think spree killers are terrorists since they don't have any identifiable political aims. But the difference between Islamist terrorists and apolitical spree killers is much less than between say the IRA and spree killers.
The guys that attacked Glasgow airport didn't do much more preparation than typical spree killers. They didn't make any political demands, have any identifiable target or expect to survive the attack. They were medical doctors too, so you'd expect them to a bit smarter than this.
Someone said "maybe we've entered an era where people on fire drive cars also on fire into crowded buidings and we all just accept that as normal".
The IRA had a military command structure and essentially professional soldiers who expected to survive. The IRA also negotiated with the UK government and could order its soldiers to stop fighting. And they would obey. Islamists have no centralised command structure or negotiating position as far as I can tell. In any case, if your enemies don't have a command structure it's pointless to negotiate with them. You can see a hint of this with Israel and the Palestinians. You can talk all you want, make concessions all you like. But since the Palestinian politicians aren't in control of the terrorists it doesn't matter, because the terrorists won't stop attacking you regardless of how much you give the politicians.
With Islamist terrorists it seems like a decentralised defense system composed of John Smeaton types is the best way to respond.
Oh, give me a break. This isn't that hard to understand; even you can handle it: They won't let you fly if you say "I don't want to show ID". They will let you fly if you say, "I forgot my ID". That won't stop a single bad guy ever. True, they should require ID.
Have already bought all of the fake IDs that they need to do their jobs because they are well-trained and financed. Nothing done here would capture the caliber of terrorists capable of actually pulling off another 9-11. All of the original 9-11 terrorists had their IDs in order. Actually that's not true. Some of the 9-11 terrorists were refused entry to the US because they messed up the paper work.
The detainee stated he traveled to Orlando, Florida, on 4 August 2001. The detainee was unable to answer questions at airport customs and did not have a return ticket. After being denied entry into the United States, the detainee returned to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The detainee applied for a second United States visa and after it was denied, he traveled to Afghanistan.
We're part of the Anglosphere? Cool! Always wanted to see a sphere made out of angles. Clearly, Frenchie, you are unaware of the work of Buckminster Fuller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK-USA_Security_Agreement
The UK-USA Security Agreement is an agreement or treaty that established an alliance of Anglosphere countries for the purpose of sharing intelligence. The alliance includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.
The community is derived from an intelligence sharing agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States signed immediately following the Second World War to capitalize on intelligence relationships built up during that conflict. This formalized the intelligence sharing agreement in the Atlantic charter, signed in 1941, following the cessation of the conflict.
According to Google, Greek writing developed long before Plato.
Plato did, however, think most people were stupid. Hence the requirement for a philosopher king to rule them. That's the wonderful thing about GGP's comment. It's utter bullshit but it's plausible and it mentions Plato. Instant +1 Insightful. So much for the wisdom of the crowds and for the wisdom of the Internet.
Odd fact about Plato. When I was in Germany someone told me he has a WWII German Army edition of Plato. So Plato was ok with the Nazis!
Of course that's not to say that writing didn't come with its attendant benefits, too...
Exactly. Every new technology has trade-offs. I think we stick with and adopt technology that works, meaning that we consider the trade-offs worth it. That is not to say that we don't loose something valuable when an older form is replaced. Today, I hear from my distant family several times a day through email, twitter, and text messages. I feel really connected to them. I almost never get letters any more and don't really miss them. When I do get them, I love to read them. There is something about putting down your thoughts by putting pen to paper that gives it poignancy. Recently, my son was in bootcamp and could only receive snail-mail. I found that is was hard sitting down to write a letter at first, but I came away from it feeling strangely rewarded.
I think books are also going to go away (from the mainstream) in a similar way. I am a bibliophile. I love to read books, but even more, I love to hold a book in my hands, feel it's heft and smell it's pages. I have almost a hundred, leather-bound classics in my office library and there is nothing like sitting down to read one. But, to be honest, most of the "reading" these days is in the form of audiobooks on my iPhone. I'm too busy to have the time to just sit and read. However, I'm consuming more books than ever now that I can do two things at once. I listened to Fahrenheit 451 yesterday while mowing and raking my (2+ acre) lawn. My wife also reads out loud to me while I'm cooking and doing dishes (we're reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow).
The danger I see is that we are more likely to get the "Cliff's NOtes" version of information off the internet. I can go online and find out enough about the story-line and plot of Fahrenheit 451 to carry on an intelligent dinner conversation, or recognize when it's being referenced in another book, but I'll never get the same depth of understanding, or come away with my own interpretation, unless I take the time to read the whole thing, unabridged, start-to-finish. Also, there are some books that are impossible to make into an audio book (think Flowers for Algernon). The only way to get the full impact is to see the words written on the page.
So, yes, I think something is lost in the trade-off. However, I think the the balance of benefit tips toward technology and the internet. I'd never have taken the time to run downstairs and look up how to spell Algernon from the book spine. A quick google search told me I had it right. I'm not going to page through my copy of Fahrenheit 451 to find a poignant passage to quote to my wife, I'll look it up on-line an read it to her from there. The internet makes information so accessible that we are more likely to take the time to look something up, rather than going my memory.
Also, I find myself stumbling on information I'd never have thought to look up while searching for other things. I can't count the number of times I've looked something up on Wikipedia and followed link after link down a rabbit-hole that lead me far from the initial article in what I call "stream-of-consciousness" surfing. This would never happen for me in a meatspace encyclopedia.
Technology also gives me things like spell check. This is very important for me. English is not my first language and I've never gotten the hang of spelling in it. Having the ability to type a word like it sounds and then pick the right spelling from a list is priceless (and save y'all from having to struggle through my attempts).
So, no, I don't think google is making us stupid, but I do mourn the things that will be lost. I'm sentimental about my old books and I'm afraid they will become relics and collector's items. But I'm not ready to live in the past (yet) and feel the benefits of the WWWeb and technology outweigh that which is lost.
When the jails are run by corporations they need to maximize profit. This is one way to do it. How many percent of the US population is in prison again? Not nearly enough by the look of it.
You'll be wasting a lot less time and brain cycles than the Dan Dare fantastist fruitloops elsewhere in these comments. Ahh, Mr Mekon I presume. We meet again.
Why do want to go to the moon? Because the Chinese are going?
Let's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha. I dunno, not allowing totalitarian strategic competitors to have the 'high ground' seems like a good enough justification to me. It's not even that expensive and maybe people will work out some better reason when they there. Plus if you don't do it the money would get spent on something worthless anyway.
Imagine if people had done cost/benefit analysis of the trip to the New World from Europe. Actually the biggest benefit of the New World was that North America was a safe place for democratic ideas to be perfected. If that hadn't happened then democracy would likely have been snuffed out globally when some totalitarian power took over Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
GP said there were no terrorists. I was just pointing out that there clearly are.
Ok, but for me to believe the theory it would need to explain something that was otherwise inexplicable. This study talks about explaining fluctuations in the CMBR (at least I think, the BBC sucks at explaining science).
For me to start believing it, it would have to survive a barrage of experimental tests like the theory of relativity did.
If some theory like God, the idea that we're living in a simulation or the existence of a multiverse doesn't have an effect on reality, then I don't believe in it.
But since this one tries to explain the CMBR, it's still ok with me.
It's like the water cycle. Once you read that you know people understand this stuff properly. If people told you that it rained because God wanted it to or that there is a singularity at the bottom of the drain where the laws of physics broke down, that would just be a verbose way for them to tell you they didn't have a clue.
I want a theory that explains why the Big Bang happened. It would be some sort of cosmological matter cycle that explains what happens inside black holes and where the matter in the Big Bang came from.
Whether science will progress this far in my lifetime is a bit doubtful of course. It would be nice to think that there is another plane that we will still exist on when we die, but then again I seriously doubt that.
It's an interesting idea but I don't believe that we're living in a simulator where the laws of physics are different anymore than I believe that God who was somehow outside the Universe created it. Mostly because there is no evidence that either are true, but for the deeper reason than it would open a whole new question of who or what made God or the simulator.
Fred Hoyle proposed Steady State theory because you don't have a "moment of creation" that you need to explain. It didn't work, but if our universe was created out of another then the big bang wasn't a moment of creation. It seems like if this research produces a theory which is consistent with observations and where the multiverse has always existed it would be very elegant.
And I believe that a correct theory of everything would be elegant.
Excel's scripting language is Turing Complete, so you could implement any game you wanted.
Yeah but your balloon is embedded in a larger universe. You could define time in balloon terms but you could also come up with a definition of time which works before the balloon was inflated.
Similarly if our Universe is embedded a wider multiverse you could define time in such a way that you can have time before the big bang. But it's the fact that the universe is embedded in something else which is interesting to most people.
To me it seems appealing that the multiverse is in some steady state even if the universe isn't because that avoids the Big Bang being some sort of unique, magic Act of Creation.
The consensus in science amongst string theorists is that string theory is correct.
I always rationalised the Tardis in Doctor Who as some sort of pocket of universe that sprouts wormholes to different points in spacetime. Bigger on the inside than out would be no problem since the inside is a different spacetime connected to the Tardis's destination via a thin neck that is hidden by some sort of hologram. Come to think of it, since the outside of the Tardis is some sort of hologram hiding a wormhole entrance that explains how the Tardis can change shape to disguise itself. An if someone attacks outside of the Tardis you just turn of the hologram and break the thin neck to that part of spacetime and reconnect a bit later to make the thing appear indestructable.
;-)
And a civilisation like the Time Lords that's had spacetravel for thousands or millions of years and knows how to harness the power of blackholes would be plausibly be capable of this sort of thing. I certainly wouldn't expect them to be flying around in the sort of spaceships we'd design based on our current knowledge of technology.
So I'm not surprised either
Actually the odd thing about Doctor Who is that there is no evidence that the people that wrote it knew anything about physics, so the Tardis isn't supposed to be a pocket universe, but I can quite see explaining all the Tardis's odd properties using this model.
I'm serious here. Why should they require ID? What problem will it solve? If your answer to the last question is "it will stop terrorists", please explain exactly how it would do so. Because in the past very disorganised terrorists have tried and almost succeeded in killing planes full of people. If you require ID which they need to fake, maybe they'll screw up and get caught. But even if they get past that checks there are much more profound things you can do with datamining that would catch them. E.g. most of these people have gone to Afghanistan for training. A trip to a terrorist training camp could be detected by immigration and tracked back to social security numbers which would be on ID. And it's not hard to make unforgeable IDs with some sort of digital signature on them. Plus you can tighten up the penalties for forging IDs.
Incidentally why do you think they ask for passports when people enter the country?
Come to think of it I'd ask for passports or something equally secure for domestic flights. ID is not secure enough. In the UK getting a fake ID is trivial and not particularly illegal. Most people have owned a fake ID or two in their time. But a fake passport is a serious criminal offense and only very criminal types get them. The actual document is quite hard to forge and forgeries are easy to detect.
Incidentally someone else was saying that terrorist are essentially just criminals. I sort of agree actually, except that a terrorist crime kills much more people on average than a regular crime. But secure IDs and datamining would be useful to catch other sorts of criminals too. I don't think that's a bad thing and you could do it in a way that protects people's privacy - the datamining would work with anonymised data - maybe keyed to a one way hash of passport IDs - and some sort of warrant would be required to de anonymise it.
Maybe I should start a DBA's against terrorism group
This is why the US is fucked up. I don't think spree killers are terrorists since they don't have any identifiable political aims. But the difference between Islamist terrorists and apolitical spree killers is much less than between say the IRA and spree killers.
The guys that attacked Glasgow airport didn't do much more preparation than typical spree killers. They didn't make any political demands, have any identifiable target or expect to survive the attack. They were medical doctors too, so you'd expect them to a bit smarter than this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_International_Airport_attack
Someone said "maybe we've entered an era where people on fire drive cars also on fire into crowded buidings and we all just accept that as normal".
The IRA had a military command structure and essentially professional soldiers who expected to survive. The IRA also negotiated with the UK government and could order its soldiers to stop fighting. And they would obey. Islamists have no centralised command structure or negotiating position as far as I can tell. In any case, if your enemies don't have a command structure it's pointless to negotiate with them. You can see a hint of this with Israel and the Palestinians. You can talk all you want, make concessions all you like. But since the Palestinian politicians aren't in control of the terrorists it doesn't matter, because the terrorists won't stop attacking you regardless of how much you give the politicians.
With Islamist terrorists it seems like a decentralised defense system composed of John Smeaton types is the best way to respond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smeaton_(baggage_handler) "If you see the law going down then you have to step up to the plate. I mean, at the end of the day, when the law falls, we fall."
They won't let you fly if you say "I don't want to show ID". They will let you fly if you say, "I forgot my ID". That won't stop a single bad guy ever. True, they should require ID.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_al-Kahtani
"Neighbours" must have really annoyed MI5 and the CIA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK-USA_Security_Agreement The UK-USA Security Agreement is an agreement or treaty that established an alliance of Anglosphere countries for the purpose of sharing intelligence. The alliance includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.
The community is derived from an intelligence sharing agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States signed immediately following the Second World War to capitalize on intelligence relationships built up during that conflict. This formalized the intelligence sharing agreement in the Atlantic charter, signed in 1941, following the cessation of the conflict.
Plato did, however, think most people were stupid. Hence the requirement for a philosopher king to rule them. That's the wonderful thing about GGP's comment. It's utter bullshit but it's plausible and it mentions Plato. Instant +1 Insightful. So much for the wisdom of the crowds and for the wisdom of the Internet.
Odd fact about Plato. When I was in Germany someone told me he has a WWII German Army edition of Plato. So Plato was ok with the Nazis!
Exactly. Every new technology has trade-offs. I think we stick with and adopt technology that works, meaning that we consider the trade-offs worth it. That is not to say that we don't loose something valuable when an older form is replaced. Today, I hear from my distant family several times a day through email, twitter, and text messages. I feel really connected to them. I almost never get letters any more and don't really miss them. When I do get them, I love to read them. There is something about putting down your thoughts by putting pen to paper that gives it poignancy. Recently, my son was in bootcamp and could only receive snail-mail. I found that is was hard sitting down to write a letter at first, but I came away from it feeling strangely rewarded.
I think books are also going to go away (from the mainstream) in a similar way. I am a bibliophile. I love to read books, but even more, I love to hold a book in my hands, feel it's heft and smell it's pages. I have almost a hundred, leather-bound classics in my office library and there is nothing like sitting down to read one. But, to be honest, most of the "reading" these days is in the form of audiobooks on my iPhone. I'm too busy to have the time to just sit and read. However, I'm consuming more books than ever now that I can do two things at once. I listened to Fahrenheit 451 yesterday while mowing and raking my (2+ acre) lawn. My wife also reads out loud to me while I'm cooking and doing dishes (we're reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow).
The danger I see is that we are more likely to get the "Cliff's NOtes" version of information off the internet. I can go online and find out enough about the story-line and plot of Fahrenheit 451 to carry on an intelligent dinner conversation, or recognize when it's being referenced in another book, but I'll never get the same depth of understanding, or come away with my own interpretation, unless I take the time to read the whole thing, unabridged, start-to-finish. Also, there are some books that are impossible to make into an audio book (think Flowers for Algernon). The only way to get the full impact is to see the words written on the page.
So, yes, I think something is lost in the trade-off. However, I think the the balance of benefit tips toward technology and the internet. I'd never have taken the time to run downstairs and look up how to spell Algernon from the book spine. A quick google search told me I had it right. I'm not going to page through my copy of Fahrenheit 451 to find a poignant passage to quote to my wife, I'll look it up on-line an read it to her from there. The internet makes information so accessible that we are more likely to take the time to look something up, rather than going my memory.
Also, I find myself stumbling on information I'd never have thought to look up while searching for other things. I can't count the number of times I've looked something up on Wikipedia and followed link after link down a rabbit-hole that lead me far from the initial article in what I call "stream-of-consciousness" surfing. This would never happen for me in a meatspace encyclopedia.
Technology also gives me things like spell check. This is very important for me. English is not my first language and I've never gotten the hang of spelling in it. Having the ability to type a word like it sounds and then pick the right spelling from a list is priceless (and save y'all from having to struggle through my attempts).
So, no, I don't think google is making us stupid, but I do mourn the things that will be lost. I'm sentimental about my old books and I'm afraid they will become relics and collector's items. But I'm not ready to live in the past (yet) and feel the benefits of the WWWeb and technology outweigh that which is lost.
Now get off my lawn!
tl;drLet's see... why did we want to go last time? Oh, because the Russians were going. Aha. I dunno, not allowing totalitarian strategic competitors to have the 'high ground' seems like a good enough justification to me. It's not even that expensive and maybe people will work out some better reason when they there. Plus if you don't do it the money would get spent on something worthless anyway.
Imagine if people had done cost/benefit analysis of the trip to the New World from Europe. Actually the biggest benefit of the New World was that North America was a safe place for democratic ideas to be perfected. If that hadn't happened then democracy would likely have been snuffed out globally when some totalitarian power took over Europe.