Well, establishing full-blown fascism in the west is not easy today. What they have done with the snooper's carter is an important step on that way. So kudos for effort. Of course, I hoper these evil fuckers get reincarnated as cockroaches for the next hundred million times or so.
Scientists have no time for this. They have to do science, which already takes most/all of their time. Getting public exposure and then making statements that the public understands is not something they usually have the time or personality for. Hence in a self-governing country that respects science, either there are other working mechanisms (e.g. smart, educated citizens that actually understand they need to listen to actual scientists about the validity of scientific results and not to politicians), or that country is doomed. You cannot reasonably expect scientists to duplicate what politicians spend their whole waking time on in addition to their other work.
That is not the problem. The problem is the mass of morons that think they have what it takes to judge the quality of a scientific result, when that actually takes at least a PhD in a not too remote field. Of course these people are then easy to manipulate because they are clueless about how extremely clueless they are. Dunning-Kruger far-left side is where you find everybody of these idiots. Science is _not_ easy. Judging the quality of scientific research takes advanced knowledge. All a non-expert can do is find out how many actual scientists in the respective field think a result is valid or not. And, for example regarding climate change, there is no debate at all in the respective scientific circles whether it is happening and whether it is man-made. All that debate is by people that would not pass climatology 101.
I am pretty sure that he does not understand what exactly he is doing here and that all his rich friends are horrified. For all, except the US, this is good news.
They do not care about the customer, the only thing they care about is the bottom line. Of you do not have a way to publicly embarrass them after they screwed you over, they will just keep doing it to you. If you can, stay away from their "services" altogether.
You know, in a bidding police-state it is far more important to get convictions than to convict the person that actually did it. "Tools" like this (and as an engineer and scientist, I am offended by the very idea that has been implemented here) are a welcome way to make it appear that everything is in order.
You cannot have been very good at the basics of your job, because otherwise you would know that stiffer penalties have zero prevention values for most crimes. You would also know that most criminals do not expect to get caught. If they would expect to get caught, far more lenient penalties would already be sufficient to stop all crime permanently, because if you get caught, crime universally does not pay (well, unless it is a large enough crime, like what the banksters do, or the like).
And that is exactly what they are asking for in this matter: They want to be able to decrypt all "lawfully seized" devices. The problem is that if they are able to do that, then they are wayyyy of mission and are in the process of establishing a police-state. The purpose of the police is not and has never been to solve all crime. In a free society, its only purpose is to keep crime at a level that society still functions reasonably well. Only if they provably cannot do that anymore (and there is no indication that that is the case here) is an increase of their power justified.
What is really at work here is the desire of authoritarians (and these people are drawn to jobs like this) want to remove the feeling of being safe when people store their thoughts and ideas in their phones. They want the chilling-effects historically caused by "god sees everything" transferred to technology. This makes these people a huge threat to free society, much more than the crime they pretend to be fighting ever could.
I am aware that this has been going on in history. The thing is that most of Science has moved beyond that. What angers me is that they want to take Science back to the dark ages where the characteristics of the person of the scientist were deemed more important then the quality of the work performed.
The variations alone are a dead giveaway that they have some very large error source in there. Very likely this error source is the only thing they are measuring.
You seem to have forgotten a) how expensive getting payloads in high orbit is and b) that you need to pump a very large amount of energy into this thing. On Earth, that energy comes from a wall outlet. In space, not so much.
Indeed. Now, there has been the occasional discovery of some things that seemed to violate fundamental principles, but they either turned out not to be useful (for example, no FTL communication is possible with quantum entanglement) or turned out to be something else, usually a measurement error.
And that is the kicker: It would have to overturn an exceptional amount of well-established physics and this effect must be tied to very special circumstances, because otherwise it would have been observed before. This makes for an exceptionally low probability of an actual effect and a very high probability of a subtle measurement error.
Hell, with the tiny thrust they observe, it could even be an effect of the current flowing into the grounding, maybe combined with a skin-effect or some resonance effect in the copper itself. Copper is not a perfect conductor and they are putting a lot of energy in there for a very tiny effect. It could also be an effect caused by a hairline fracture somewhere in the device. With this large difference between energy input and effect output, there are literally thousands of potential error sources and most are outside of the precision levels experimental physicists usually work with and are experienced with. There is no sane reason at this time to believe this is anything but an error and a competent experimental team would keep looking for that error instead of speculation about applications in space travel.
This is the problem with the paper, apart from the sloppy uncertainties, there is no investigation as to the cause of the thrust. They focus only on measuring it. By far the most likely outcome of this is that it will turn out to be particle emission of some sort which our existing physics can explain. If they want to convince anyone of anything else they need to focus on investigating possible causes and focus less on just measuring the thrust.
Very much so. Just measuring the thrust gives you zero indications whether you measure a real effect or an error. But this tactics of just measuring the effect without trying to explain it is an exceptionally well established characteristic of junk-science and scientific fraud. This tactics to get investor money for something that does not actually work is over a century old. And in many cases, it was not actually fraud, just very bad scientists with very big egos thinking the rules of proper scientific experimentations and explanations do not apply to them. The same is exceptionally likely to be at work here. That is also the reason why no respectable scientific journal will touch their stuff: Their approach is fundamentally flawed.
We recently had an example on how to do this right: The case where some physicists measures FTL particle transmission. What they did was to publish everything, and explain that they did not actually believe this was indeed FTL and asking for help to find the source of the error. That way they remained committed to a proper scientific approach. In the end, this turned out to be a faulty connector, but it was very hard to find that flaw and needed help from a lot of smart people.
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Well, establishing full-blown fascism in the west is not easy today. What they have done with the snooper's carter is an important step on that way. So kudos for effort. Of course, I hoper these evil fuckers get reincarnated as cockroaches for the next hundred million times or so.
Scientists have no time for this. They have to do science, which already takes most/all of their time. Getting public exposure and then making statements that the public understands is not something they usually have the time or personality for. Hence in a self-governing country that respects science, either there are other working mechanisms (e.g. smart, educated citizens that actually understand they need to listen to actual scientists about the validity of scientific results and not to politicians), or that country is doomed. You cannot reasonably expect scientists to duplicate what politicians spend their whole waking time on in addition to their other work.
No argument about the kids, but I think you have an overly positive opinion about their parents and grandparents.
And that is exactly the problem: People that do not know their limits. "Incompetent and unaware of it" captures this extremely well.
That is not the problem. The problem is the mass of morons that think they have what it takes to judge the quality of a scientific result, when that actually takes at least a PhD in a not too remote field. Of course these people are then easy to manipulate because they are clueless about how extremely clueless they are. Dunning-Kruger far-left side is where you find everybody of these idiots. Science is _not_ easy. Judging the quality of scientific research takes advanced knowledge. All a non-expert can do is find out how many actual scientists in the respective field think a result is valid or not. And, for example regarding climate change, there is no debate at all in the respective scientific circles whether it is happening and whether it is man-made. All that debate is by people that would not pass climatology 101.
... regardless of age. Age does not make people any smarter, just a bit more adept as hiding their lack of insight.
I am pretty sure that he does not understand what exactly he is doing here and that all his rich friends are horrified. For all, except the US, this is good news.
Yes, very much so. In other news, addiction can be bad for your career development.
For many people, it will mean exercising their writing skills with a sometimes pretty harsh audience. I would say that is a worthwhile exercise.
They do not care about the customer, the only thing they care about is the bottom line. Of you do not have a way to publicly embarrass them after they screwed you over, they will just keep doing it to you. If you can, stay away from their "services" altogether.
You know, in a bidding police-state it is far more important to get convictions than to convict the person that actually did it. "Tools" like this (and as an engineer and scientist, I am offended by the very idea that has been implemented here) are a welcome way to make it appear that everything is in order.
You cannot have been very good at the basics of your job, because otherwise you would know that stiffer penalties have zero prevention values for most crimes. You would also know that most criminals do not expect to get caught. If they would expect to get caught, far more lenient penalties would already be sufficient to stop all crime permanently, because if you get caught, crime universally does not pay (well, unless it is a large enough crime, like what the banksters do, or the like).
And that is exactly what they are asking for in this matter: They want to be able to decrypt all "lawfully seized" devices. The problem is that if they are able to do that, then they are wayyyy of mission and are in the process of establishing a police-state. The purpose of the police is not and has never been to solve all crime. In a free society, its only purpose is to keep crime at a level that society still functions reasonably well. Only if they provably cannot do that anymore (and there is no indication that that is the case here) is an increase of their power justified.
What is really at work here is the desire of authoritarians (and these people are drawn to jobs like this) want to remove the feeling of being safe when people store their thoughts and ideas in their phones. They want the chilling-effects historically caused by "god sees everything" transferred to technology. This makes these people a huge threat to free society, much more than the crime they pretend to be fighting ever could.
Now that would be an interesting experiment.
I am aware that this has been going on in history. The thing is that most of Science has moved beyond that. What angers me is that they want to take Science back to the dark ages where the characteristics of the person of the scientist were deemed more important then the quality of the work performed.
The variations alone are a dead giveaway that they have some very large error source in there. Very likely this error source is the only thing they are measuring.
Well, at least it keeps the idiots busy while actual scientists do actual science.
You seem to have forgotten a) how expensive getting payloads in high orbit is and b) that you need to pump a very large amount of energy into this thing. On Earth, that energy comes from a wall outlet. In space, not so much.
Indeed. Now, there has been the occasional discovery of some things that seemed to violate fundamental principles, but they either turned out not to be useful (for example, no FTL communication is possible with quantum entanglement) or turned out to be something else, usually a measurement error.
No and no. Which is why the smarter minds with actual scientific understanding (admittedly a minority here) are not convinced it does work at all.
The dumbing down is in full progress...
Not as stupid as all the "believers" here. May also have some actual understanding of physics.
And that is the kicker: It would have to overturn an exceptional amount of well-established physics and this effect must be tied to very special circumstances, because otherwise it would have been observed before. This makes for an exceptionally low probability of an actual effect and a very high probability of a subtle measurement error.
Hell, with the tiny thrust they observe, it could even be an effect of the current flowing into the grounding, maybe combined with a skin-effect or some resonance effect in the copper itself. Copper is not a perfect conductor and they are putting a lot of energy in there for a very tiny effect. It could also be an effect caused by a hairline fracture somewhere in the device. With this large difference between energy input and effect output, there are literally thousands of potential error sources and most are outside of the precision levels experimental physicists usually work with and are experienced with. There is no sane reason at this time to believe this is anything but an error and a competent experimental team would keep looking for that error instead of speculation about applications in space travel.
NASA Eagleworks is not NASA.
This is the problem with the paper, apart from the sloppy uncertainties, there is no investigation as to the cause of the thrust. They focus only on measuring it. By far the most likely outcome of this is that it will turn out to be particle emission of some sort which our existing physics can explain. If they want to convince anyone of anything else they need to focus on investigating possible causes and focus less on just measuring the thrust.
Very much so. Just measuring the thrust gives you zero indications whether you measure a real effect or an error. But this tactics of just measuring the effect without trying to explain it is an exceptionally well established characteristic of junk-science and scientific fraud. This tactics to get investor money for something that does not actually work is over a century old. And in many cases, it was not actually fraud, just very bad scientists with very big egos thinking the rules of proper scientific experimentations and explanations do not apply to them. The same is exceptionally likely to be at work here. That is also the reason why no respectable scientific journal will touch their stuff: Their approach is fundamentally flawed.
We recently had an example on how to do this right: The case where some physicists measures FTL particle transmission. What they did was to publish everything, and explain that they did not actually believe this was indeed FTL and asking for help to find the source of the error. That way they remained committed to a proper scientific approach. In the end, this turned out to be a faulty connector, but it was very hard to find that flaw and needed help from a lot of smart people.