Wow. That's the solution. Let's just redefine "normal".
"Well sure, Bob, the black lesions all over your body would normally suggest you have some horrible disease, but seeing as this is the new normal, I don't think we need to worry about diagnosis and treatment. Have a great day, but make sure to pay my secretary on the way out... in cash."
All that matters is short term success. Fuck the future, fuck the brown people, fuck everything but the next six minutes.
We're dealing with a generation of navel-gazing halfwits whose entire life can be described in 140 characters. And of course, because any aspect of US monitoring of climate is going to be defunded, for the next five to ten years the virginal unwashed basement dwellers and all the angry Rust Belters can continue to pretend that a lack of solid action on CO2 emissions isn't going to cause any problems whatsoever.
Well, at least the Kochs will keep making money, and after all, that's all that really counts.
This seems largely to rest on the "many worlds" interpretation of QM, which is not something a lot of physicists are going to be stand behind. It's not "evidence" per se, but rather an interpretation of QM theory.
This is where parsimony, or "Occam's Razor" if you will, comes into play. There are probably any number of essentially solipsistic or Omphalistic explanations that would, for the most minimalist definition of "fit", line up with the evidence that we have in hand. But looking for the simplest explanation, which invariably isn't some variant of "Extra-universal super beings did it", which ultimately explains nothing, even if it were true, they go back to the methodological naturalism that actually attempts to find an answer.
The problem comes when a theory such as this is "abused" as it were to justify a whole bunch of metaphysical claptrap. It's like every New Age fruitcake using the word "quantum" in sentences to make the word salads and bullshit they spew somehow sound "sciency". The fact is that demonstrating the Universe is a simulation is very far out of reach at this stage, and really, as the article makes pretty clear, there's little point to direct inquiry since the problems that need to be solved to make it a viable claim are problems that need to be solved anyways. Unlike String Theory, which has produced some good tools and new conceptual innovations, I don't see any great new tools being produced by simulation theory. It will become evident at whatever point we solve a lot of the big open questions in physics whether the simulation claim makes any sense or not.
In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse. Yes, there may be some extrapolations of the underlying math that might point in such a direction, but at the moment, it's simply a cool-sounding idea with absolutely no experimental evidence at all. Of course, I feel the same way about string theory, though one thing string theory has produced is some pretty useful mathematical tools, so even when a theory is wrong or indemonstrable, it can still be of some use.
I have Onedrive ads popping up on one of my computers every time a File save dialog opens. Microsoft is the same evil, dirty player it ever was. It just doesn't have penetration on the biggest growth platform, so it's position is more vulnerable.
Your web experience must be thrilling, kind of like surfing the web in 1995. Christ, just use gopher to get the full glory of the 1990s Internet experience.
That's probably true. It's so bereft of features that it probably does take a lot less clock cycles. But then again, if that's the only argument, then Links is probably the hands down best winner, or maybe "telnet wherever.com 80"!
Microsoft's proclamations about the wonders of its products are beginning to resemble those satirical Monty Python faux-ads about Crelm Toothpaste.
No, that is the issue. In Common Law, as with Constitutional Law, that which is not forbidden is permitted. Twitter has a right to moderate content just as a newspaper or a store billboard does. Don't like it, don't use their service. The idea that any service should be forced to publish racist or extremist material is beyond absurd, and violates every notion of property rights and personal liberty. No one owes a pack of racists and violent lunatics some sort of platform.
But as we have already established, it is permitted where private individuals or organizations are concerned. The Government cannot restrain freedom of speech, save within very narrow and limited contexts (the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" or libel laws, for instance). But I as an individual am under no obligation to permit someone to stick a racist sign on my lawn, as my property rights override the racist's freedom of speech, and by the same token, Twitter is under no obligation to allow such content on its own property; the screen real-estate it makes available to the world.
This is what irritates me. People keep conflating private organizations' right to censor content they publish (a right that has existed for centuries now) with the sharp constitutional limits on government interference with free expression. The First Amendment does not block a newspaper from refusing to publish a racist letter to the editor, nor does it block Twitter from kicking off extremists. You can feel those sorts of decisions are wrong, and as a member of a free society you're solution is simply to go elsewhere.
It's not that much of a cultural thing, as newspapers have always exercised the right to edit letters for content, or in some cases to outright refuse to publish them. As to the claims of equal tolerance of hate speech, that's a legitimate point, though I find that claims that white people are as frequently the objects of out and out hate speech tend to be pretty hyperbolic.
It is, how? We're talking here about a private company whose fortunes are materially effected when potential buyers or advertisers walk away because they can't or won't control the extremist content that's appearing on their forum? Are you saying private web portals should have no power to constrain the kind of material that gets posted on their websites? Liberty isn't just for the extremists, you know.
Generally when censorship is brought up here, it's an attempt to conflate First Amendment protections with a private organization's lawful right to moderate content. Yes, in technical terms it is censorship, but since some people seem to believe that the First Amendment protection of speech somehow should be imposed on private companies' Internet-facing content, I think it's useful to draw a distinct line between content moderation and censorship.
I've never quite understood this argument how censorship actually makes extremists stronger. In a modest way I can see some legitimacy in saying be an "underground" movement will have a certain romantic appeal, but it's still pretty damned limiting. When White Supremacists had their shady BBSs and later websites, those were places that one had to actually seek out. But Twitter, Facebook and Google have given these groups a kind of free mass distribution they could only have previously dreamed of, and I think these services blocking them will not be doing the extremist types any favors. Quite the opposite, it's going to push them back under their online rocks again, where yes, maybe they regain a sort of mystique, but not what they really crave, which is mass media attention.
And it's coming. Advertisers and potential buyers are making it clear that extremist content on these major services is harmful to their own brands. So, whether you believe Google, Twitter and Facebook should just allow this kind of content on their systems because of simplistic notions about freedom of speech is irrelevant, they won't do it because it will cost them money. If the extremists want to broadcast their message, they're going to have to do it on their own, and without the assistance of the major online portals.
A business deciding they're not going to allow certain kinds of messages on their public bulletin board is no more censorship than me ordering my racist uncle to stop talking trash or get out of my house. In both cases, a private interest is making space available but making rules about what and cannot appear. Seeing as violent extremists have no lack of other places on the Internet to spread their message, this does constrain them. What it does do, however, is force them back on to their own echo chambers, which sucks for them, because that's where they were previously stuck for decades. Back in ye olden days, about the only way you could see any White Supremacist literature was by ordering one of their xeroxed periodicals in the mail, or on occasion, when one of them got sufficiently motivated to stick some shitty little xeroxed flyer on the windshield.
These groups have a right to their platform, but no one else has any obligation to provide them a pre-existing one. It's been this way for a very long time. Even newspapers won't publish nastier extremist rhetoric.
Apparently not, as several companies yanked their ads. At the end of the day, Google is an advertising business, so if those who pay for the advertising say "Don't put my ads up on hate videos", then that's what Google will do.
Ah yes, and Nixon was the victim of a similar kind of felony, but I don't exactly hear anyone crying a lot of tears because Deep Throat leaked Watergate info to Bob Woodward.
Let's remember how history remembers Deep Throat and Nixon, and which one came out the hero and which one came out the villain.
I do find it amusing that those that champion the likes of Snowden or the likes of Assange, suddenly find it evil that someone has tipped off the press that Trump's people were playing footsie with the Russians. Yes indeed, the real crime here must be the leaker, and not the information that was leaked.
Not even the Senate Republicans were going to save Nixon's ass in the end, and though the Democrats controlled the Senate, it still needs 2/3s majority to remove a sitting President. Ponder that. Wearing the same team jersey as the folks in Congress isn't an unlimited and infinite "get of out jail" free card, and sooner or later, if your actions become detrimental to the party and the country as a whole, and you commit dastardly enough offences, they'll throw you under the bus. If there turn out to be links between Trump's people and the Russians during the campaign, you're going to the phrase that brought Nixon down: "What did he know, and when did he know it."
In this case, it appears he got it from Breitbart, who sourced it from Mike Levin, whose career these days appears to be to peddle conspiracy theories to deluded right wingers. When Trump's people tried to blame Fox News, even Fox News couldn't stomach being held responsible for what is clearly a complete load of bullshit, and immediately aired a statement disclaiming that they had had any confirmation of wiretapping. In other words, even the Republicans' surest mouthpiece won't stand by this claim.
Of course, now, in a last-ditch effort to try to make a complete moron who gets his information from TV and websites look somehow half sensible, they're taking Comey's refusal to confirm or deny what he said to the Obama Administration as some sort of confession that the White House was being tapped, despite the fact that Comey openly and strongly denied that any such activity was ongoing.
Trump will never back down from this. It took him six years to finally admit that Obama was a natural-born US citizen, so we're talking about a guy whose ego and stupidity simply won't let him abandon idiotic claims.
You read it because the Kremlin made the claim, but there's no evidence that the Clinton camp had any kind of secret talks with the Russians. You're just buying into Russian-fed fake news.
Donald Trump, at best, has been naive and stupid, and at worst, a traitor. Buying into pleasant sounding Kremlin-fed faerie tales that Clinton somehow was negotiating with the Russians just shows how willing you are to accept anything that preserves your faith in Trump.
So there was vigorous debate and Hawking was wrong! Wow, that must mean Hawking is totally useless.
As to Hawking radiation, the point wasn't that he was right (he's not actually wholly wrong either), but rather that it was one of the first major attempts to unify QM and GR, to look for a way in which classic and quantum mechanics both can product phenomena. But some other areas in which he has worked are:
Among the myriad other scientific investigations pursued by Hawking over the years are the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, "large N" cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, the topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti-de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time and the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, the Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, holography, time symmetry and wormholes.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That's the solution. Let's just redefine "normal".
"Well sure, Bob, the black lesions all over your body would normally suggest you have some horrible disease, but seeing as this is the new normal, I don't think we need to worry about diagnosis and treatment. Have a great day, but make sure to pay my secretary on the way out... in cash."
All that matters is short term success. Fuck the future, fuck the brown people, fuck everything but the next six minutes.
We're dealing with a generation of navel-gazing halfwits whose entire life can be described in 140 characters. And of course, because any aspect of US monitoring of climate is going to be defunded, for the next five to ten years the virginal unwashed basement dwellers and all the angry Rust Belters can continue to pretend that a lack of solid action on CO2 emissions isn't going to cause any problems whatsoever.
Well, at least the Kochs will keep making money, and after all, that's all that really counts.
This seems largely to rest on the "many worlds" interpretation of QM, which is not something a lot of physicists are going to be stand behind. It's not "evidence" per se, but rather an interpretation of QM theory.
This is where parsimony, or "Occam's Razor" if you will, comes into play. There are probably any number of essentially solipsistic or Omphalistic explanations that would, for the most minimalist definition of "fit", line up with the evidence that we have in hand. But looking for the simplest explanation, which invariably isn't some variant of "Extra-universal super beings did it", which ultimately explains nothing, even if it were true, they go back to the methodological naturalism that actually attempts to find an answer.
The problem comes when a theory such as this is "abused" as it were to justify a whole bunch of metaphysical claptrap. It's like every New Age fruitcake using the word "quantum" in sentences to make the word salads and bullshit they spew somehow sound "sciency". The fact is that demonstrating the Universe is a simulation is very far out of reach at this stage, and really, as the article makes pretty clear, there's little point to direct inquiry since the problems that need to be solved to make it a viable claim are problems that need to be solved anyways. Unlike String Theory, which has produced some good tools and new conceptual innovations, I don't see any great new tools being produced by simulation theory. It will become evident at whatever point we solve a lot of the big open questions in physics whether the simulation claim makes any sense or not.
In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse. Yes, there may be some extrapolations of the underlying math that might point in such a direction, but at the moment, it's simply a cool-sounding idea with absolutely no experimental evidence at all. Of course, I feel the same way about string theory, though one thing string theory has produced is some pretty useful mathematical tools, so even when a theory is wrong or indemonstrable, it can still be of some use.
The real solution is to limit the number of IP lawyers. It's a growth industry that encourages this kind of distortion.
Oh yes, and outlaw sociopaths from becoming lawyers, or even working as a paralegal, or as a janitor in a lawyer's office.
I have Onedrive ads popping up on one of my computers every time a File save dialog opens. Microsoft is the same evil, dirty player it ever was. It just doesn't have penetration on the biggest growth platform, so it's position is more vulnerable.
Your web experience must be thrilling, kind of like surfing the web in 1995. Christ, just use gopher to get the full glory of the 1990s Internet experience.
That's probably true. It's so bereft of features that it probably does take a lot less clock cycles. But then again, if that's the only argument, then Links is probably the hands down best winner, or maybe "telnet wherever.com 80"!
Microsoft's proclamations about the wonders of its products are beginning to resemble those satirical Monty Python faux-ads about Crelm Toothpaste.
No, that is the issue. In Common Law, as with Constitutional Law, that which is not forbidden is permitted. Twitter has a right to moderate content just as a newspaper or a store billboard does. Don't like it, don't use their service. The idea that any service should be forced to publish racist or extremist material is beyond absurd, and violates every notion of property rights and personal liberty. No one owes a pack of racists and violent lunatics some sort of platform.
I tend to disagree with the cake baking decision, though on that score, the Civil Rights Acts also set something of a precedent.
But as we have already established, it is permitted where private individuals or organizations are concerned. The Government cannot restrain freedom of speech, save within very narrow and limited contexts (the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" or libel laws, for instance). But I as an individual am under no obligation to permit someone to stick a racist sign on my lawn, as my property rights override the racist's freedom of speech, and by the same token, Twitter is under no obligation to allow such content on its own property; the screen real-estate it makes available to the world.
This is what irritates me. People keep conflating private organizations' right to censor content they publish (a right that has existed for centuries now) with the sharp constitutional limits on government interference with free expression. The First Amendment does not block a newspaper from refusing to publish a racist letter to the editor, nor does it block Twitter from kicking off extremists. You can feel those sorts of decisions are wrong, and as a member of a free society you're solution is simply to go elsewhere.
It's not that much of a cultural thing, as newspapers have always exercised the right to edit letters for content, or in some cases to outright refuse to publish them. As to the claims of equal tolerance of hate speech, that's a legitimate point, though I find that claims that white people are as frequently the objects of out and out hate speech tend to be pretty hyperbolic.
It is, how? We're talking here about a private company whose fortunes are materially effected when potential buyers or advertisers walk away because they can't or won't control the extremist content that's appearing on their forum? Are you saying private web portals should have no power to constrain the kind of material that gets posted on their websites? Liberty isn't just for the extremists, you know.
Generally when censorship is brought up here, it's an attempt to conflate First Amendment protections with a private organization's lawful right to moderate content. Yes, in technical terms it is censorship, but since some people seem to believe that the First Amendment protection of speech somehow should be imposed on private companies' Internet-facing content, I think it's useful to draw a distinct line between content moderation and censorship.
I've never quite understood this argument how censorship actually makes extremists stronger. In a modest way I can see some legitimacy in saying be an "underground" movement will have a certain romantic appeal, but it's still pretty damned limiting. When White Supremacists had their shady BBSs and later websites, those were places that one had to actually seek out. But Twitter, Facebook and Google have given these groups a kind of free mass distribution they could only have previously dreamed of, and I think these services blocking them will not be doing the extremist types any favors. Quite the opposite, it's going to push them back under their online rocks again, where yes, maybe they regain a sort of mystique, but not what they really crave, which is mass media attention.
And it's coming. Advertisers and potential buyers are making it clear that extremist content on these major services is harmful to their own brands. So, whether you believe Google, Twitter and Facebook should just allow this kind of content on their systems because of simplistic notions about freedom of speech is irrelevant, they won't do it because it will cost them money. If the extremists want to broadcast their message, they're going to have to do it on their own, and without the assistance of the major online portals.
A business deciding they're not going to allow certain kinds of messages on their public bulletin board is no more censorship than me ordering my racist uncle to stop talking trash or get out of my house. In both cases, a private interest is making space available but making rules about what and cannot appear. Seeing as violent extremists have no lack of other places on the Internet to spread their message, this does constrain them. What it does do, however, is force them back on to their own echo chambers, which sucks for them, because that's where they were previously stuck for decades. Back in ye olden days, about the only way you could see any White Supremacist literature was by ordering one of their xeroxed periodicals in the mail, or on occasion, when one of them got sufficiently motivated to stick some shitty little xeroxed flyer on the windshield.
These groups have a right to their platform, but no one else has any obligation to provide them a pre-existing one. It's been this way for a very long time. Even newspapers won't publish nastier extremist rhetoric.
It's not about ending violent extremism, it's about not associating your product with it.
Apparently not, as several companies yanked their ads. At the end of the day, Google is an advertising business, so if those who pay for the advertising say "Don't put my ads up on hate videos", then that's what Google will do.
Ah yes, and Nixon was the victim of a similar kind of felony, but I don't exactly hear anyone crying a lot of tears because Deep Throat leaked Watergate info to Bob Woodward.
Let's remember how history remembers Deep Throat and Nixon, and which one came out the hero and which one came out the villain.
I do find it amusing that those that champion the likes of Snowden or the likes of Assange, suddenly find it evil that someone has tipped off the press that Trump's people were playing footsie with the Russians. Yes indeed, the real crime here must be the leaker, and not the information that was leaked.
Not even the Senate Republicans were going to save Nixon's ass in the end, and though the Democrats controlled the Senate, it still needs 2/3s majority to remove a sitting President. Ponder that. Wearing the same team jersey as the folks in Congress isn't an unlimited and infinite "get of out jail" free card, and sooner or later, if your actions become detrimental to the party and the country as a whole, and you commit dastardly enough offences, they'll throw you under the bus. If there turn out to be links between Trump's people and the Russians during the campaign, you're going to the phrase that brought Nixon down: "What did he know, and when did he know it."
In this case, it appears he got it from Breitbart, who sourced it from Mike Levin, whose career these days appears to be to peddle conspiracy theories to deluded right wingers. When Trump's people tried to blame Fox News, even Fox News couldn't stomach being held responsible for what is clearly a complete load of bullshit, and immediately aired a statement disclaiming that they had had any confirmation of wiretapping. In other words, even the Republicans' surest mouthpiece won't stand by this claim.
Of course, now, in a last-ditch effort to try to make a complete moron who gets his information from TV and websites look somehow half sensible, they're taking Comey's refusal to confirm or deny what he said to the Obama Administration as some sort of confession that the White House was being tapped, despite the fact that Comey openly and strongly denied that any such activity was ongoing.
Trump will never back down from this. It took him six years to finally admit that Obama was a natural-born US citizen, so we're talking about a guy whose ego and stupidity simply won't let him abandon idiotic claims.
Nobody gives a fuck about Clinton anymore. She lost, it's now about whether Trump's people were linked to the Russians.
You read it because the Kremlin made the claim, but there's no evidence that the Clinton camp had any kind of secret talks with the Russians. You're just buying into Russian-fed fake news.
Donald Trump, at best, has been naive and stupid, and at worst, a traitor. Buying into pleasant sounding Kremlin-fed faerie tales that Clinton somehow was negotiating with the Russians just shows how willing you are to accept anything that preserves your faith in Trump.
So there was vigorous debate and Hawking was wrong! Wow, that must mean Hawking is totally useless.
As to Hawking radiation, the point wasn't that he was right (he's not actually wholly wrong either), but rather that it was one of the first major attempts to unify QM and GR, to look for a way in which classic and quantum mechanics both can product phenomena. But some other areas in which he has worked are:
From http://www.physicsoftheunivers...