I don't think creative commons is a good thing because only some of its licenses have full freedom. Microsoft has probably released some free software too, but that doesn't mean we should promote Microsoft as free software.
While I'm optimistic about the future of AI, I don't think robotics and AI will have a huge impact until computers achieve the full computational power of the human brain. The problem is that if the robot is just a little less powerful than a human then it can't do most of the things we want. For example most people don't want a retarded housekeeper even though retarded people's brains are vastly more intelligent than current robots. Even humans aren't very good at driving cars. Would a robot one quarter the intelligence of a human be a safe enough driver? Maybe if the roads were carefully designed like railroad tracks. But maybe not if they had to drive on normal roads with other humans. How much intelligence will be required to tell the difference between a oil spot, a shadow, or a kid with a black sweatshirt in the road? Steering is relatively easy, braking is the hard part. Even humans often have a hard time understanding other people speaking. Can a speech recognition system with one quarter a human brain, know enough about the world to understand what people are saying? Dogs are massively more intelligent than current computers, but I wouldn't say their services have revolutionized the world.
It looks like the computational power of the human brain isn't far off though. Last year was the first year that a computer was built that has power equal to the human brain. Even if that low estimate of brainpower is wrong, it doesn't look like it will be long before the computers catch up. Even the unrealistically high estimates of brainpower look achievable in the near future. Some say it's not lack of computational power that's the problem, It's the algorithms we need. I actually think the algorithms will be relatively easy. Imagine if you were trying to create the current linux kernel, but the only hardware anyone had to work with was about like a calculator wristwatch. It would be nearly impossible, but not because the linux kernel is too difficult. You have to have the hardware to develop the algorithms.
The most perplexing thing to me is the people who deny the possibility that machines can do what humans can. The apparent fact that humans are machines (soft warm ones) seems to me proof that machines can do anything humans can. If humans have a soul or something, that just means machines can have souls, because humans are machines. If one machine can have a soul why not another? We can make robots soft and warm if we have to. Maybe robots can't have souls. But how do you know? Is there any reason at all to think they can't?
Children today can expect to be alive in 80 years. They will very likely see the day when computers FAR surpass humans. That's a really big issue to think about when planning ones life. Consider the implications for retirement planning, career choices, the meaning of life, etc.
It doesn't matter much if your carburetor burns fumes because the fumes are just molecules of gasoline. There are only a certain number of molecules of gasoline in a gallon. Each molecule of gas releases a certain amount of energy when it is burned whether it's in fumes or liquid. Thus running on fumes doesn't make your gallon of gas last any longer if you want to get the same power out. Actually vaporizing the gas into fumes does increase its energy content slightly, but not much. It may allow the fuel to be burned a little more completely, but again, regular engines do pretty well already.
There are several ways to know that our engines haven't been detuned. One is to put a car on a dynonometer and measure it's power output and fuel consumption at the same time. Another is to determine the aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance, and use that along with the gas mileage to determine the efficiency. Aeronautical engineers do extensive calculations and tests to extract efficiency from their aircraft. They would surely know if their engines weren't doing their best or car engines were doing much less than aircraft engines.
Car engines convert gasoline energy to crankshaft energy with something like 25% efficiency. That only leaves about a possible four fold increase in gas mileage even if these carburetors and engines could achieve 100% efficiency. Not that four times better gas mileage wouldn't be great, but any claim of a larger increase based only on engine or carburetor improvements is immediately suspect. What's more, the laws of thermodynamics limit piston engines to much less than 100% efficiency.
Many of the above super mileage claims are probably scams. Some are mistakes. Some are misinterpretations or misquotes. Many are probably impractical circumstances like ultra light, ultra low drag, low power vehicles under constant, low speed, flat ground conditions.
There are too many engineers that could and would EASILY expose a cover up if one existed. Not just a few engineers like have been cited above but LOTS of them. In fact most engineers could easily uncover such a conspiracy. Every town would have multiple engineers that could and would uncover such a conspiracy. So what's a better explanation for these ultra mileage claims? That they are impractical, mistakes, scams, and such, or most of the engineers in the world have been duped by the oil companies? There are plenty of real conspiracies in the world. This one is pretty easy to dismiss.
It's relatively easy to determine the aerodynamic drag on any particular vehicle. The energy content of gasoline is also well known and doesn't change much if it is a vapor or a liquid. The only thing that could possibly be covered up is the chemical to mechanical energy conversion efficiency of these super mileage engines or carburetors. Most of these mileage claims probably exceed 100% efficiency and are thus dismissed as scams or mistakes or such. There are plenty of people trying to sell magnets and other useless gadgets to increase gas mileage. Of course it may be possible to get a V8 or other car to go 100mi/gal under special circumstances like 15mi/hr speed to minimize drag, constant speed to save energy accelerating, no hills, etc.
They go something like 15mi/hr. They turn the engine on and get up some speed then turn it off and coast a while. They use Briggs and Stratton four stroke lawnmower engines with custom machined cylinder heads and such. Of course the cars are basically like bicycles with aerodynamic fairings on them.
The fact that you know or can find out what's going on is a great advantage over closed source systems. But I don't see how open source phoning home isn't phoning home just because you know what's going on. Canonical probably monitors the number of requests to ntp.ubuntulinux.org to help keep track of the number of installs. That's fine with me, which is why I haven't disabled the call or redirected it to pool.ntp.org or something. Is open source monitoring not monitoring because it's open source. I guess you could say that "phoning home" is only "phoning home" if it's secret, spying, or some sort of control mechanism or something. If I was running Windows I'd be more concerned about what Microsoft is doing than I am about what Ubuntu is doing.
Some laptops now have the ability to phone home from the BIOS independently from the operating system. Combine that with the Treacherous Control (aka Trusted Computing) platform and you have the makings for a real big brother setup. I don't know about in the US but in Germany the government could order a laptop company to install an unremoveable and undetectable rootkit.
If my understanding is correct, GPS receivers need extreme quality crystals. My bottom of the line GPS that doesn't even do WAAS has a somewhat expensive temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO). TCXOs didn't even used to be good enough, so they used oven compensated crystals (OCXO) to maintain the temperature. The receivers get the time from the satellites but they still seem to need extreme quality crystalls. Surprisingly, I think the problem is the minuscule variation in crystal frequency as a result of the small temperature changes that happen over just the seconds needed to complete a measurement. That's the kind of insane precision we're talking about.
Yes, I suspected that you might be interested in realtime not cycles, but since you mentioned creating a network app to synchronize your windows boxes, I thought you might be interested in applying an offset and scaling to the cycle counter to get realtime. Your custom network daemon could determine the scaling and offset. Other apps on the machine could get realtime or the scaling factor from the daemon. Of course that doesn't help apps that you can't or don't want to rewrite. Your daemon may be able to discipline the system clock. If precise disciplining isn't possible or practical, it may be sufficient for the daemon to simply record the offset periodically so that at least you can calculate the true time of timestamps after the fact. Of course this may all be two much trouble. Although I don't use Windows, my OpenBSD systems also lack the precise kernel time discipline of Linux and FreeBSD, so I feel your pain.
Have you considered the pentium RDTSC instruction. It's called the time stamp counter but it's actually a clock cycle counter. The latency on this call may be several hundred or several thousand cycles, but that will usually get you to within a microsecond. You've got to watch out for modern cpus that change their clock frequency to save power though. I'll post this source because the source I found on the net didn't work without some tinkering. Compiled with gcc this works under linux and openbsd. The Visual C++ version is probably a little different but I've seen code for it too. The following code just prints out the number of cycles since the last CPU reset.
// Print value of Pentium TimeStamp Counter // 2006/03/15 #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h>
I was thinking about building an automated solar plane that could stay up for weeks, but apparently it's very hard to do with current tech. There was an article a while back about such a plane, but they cheated by using thermals(bubbles of hot rising air heated by the ground) for lift and only stayed up for a couple days. As the energy to weight ratio of batteries improves, it should become easier.
Electronic voting machines have the potential to be much more secure and much less secure than other systems.
Without a paper receipt you are simply trusting the manufacturer to tell you how the election came out. For anyone to claim otherwise is either incompetent or worse. However if the machine prints out a receipt with a cryptographic digital signature, then that would be more secure than anything I can think of. Because it's electronic there will be no hanging chads or half filled circles or debates about what the voter wanted. The election results would be extremely fast. Tampering with paper ballots is within the means of almost any crook, but tampering with electronic machines is limited to elite hackers. One receipt could be put in the voting box after inspecting it for accuracy. Maybe a receipt could be taken home also. Taking receipts home would allow employers and spouses to threaten a voter to vote a certain way and then verify compliance. Perhaps a solution to that is to allow the voter to select a fake receipt from the machine. The receipt could have an encrypted record of the real vote that the extortionist couldn't read, along with a plaintext fake list of votes.
The detectors can be connected to the timer by two wires of equal length. The wires can be very long and slow because it only matters what the difference in time is. The timer may not receive the signals until long after the whole event has taken place, but as long as it can accurately measure the difference, then there's no problem.
The problem with these experiments, as pointed out in my above post, is that they're not measuring THE crest, they're measuring two different crests that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. Naturally, measuring the arrival times of two different things in two different places, tells you nothing about the speed of either.
The last time I saw an article like this they claimed they sent a light pulse through a chamber and it came out before it even finished entering. The trick was that the chamber was a foot long but the light pulse was 300 feet long! That's right, they weren't talking about a single photon or a single wave but a whole bunch of them, and they were interfering with each other on the way through. As they interfered with each other their amplitudes were changing.
A detector was set up at the entrance to the chamber and at the exit. The time between setting off the detectors was used to measure the speed. When the laser was turned on to create the pulse, it would take a little time to come up to full brightness. The dim little leading edge of light would pass into the chamber without setting off the detector. While this dim little leading edge was passing through the chamber the weird gasses or whatever in the chamber would cause the waves to constructively interfere with each other and some of their amplitudes would increase enough to set off the detector on the exit.
Imagine a train crossing a bridge. But this train has a couple flat cars being pushed along in the front. At each end of the bridge you set up a detector That detects anything more than 6feet (2meters) tall going down the tracks. When the train goes onto the bridge the flatcars go under the detector and don't set it off, only the locomotive behind them does. But as the flatcars are crossing the bridge someone who was laying down on the flatcar stands up at the front. As the flatcars get to the other end of the bridge the person standing up sets off the detector instead of the locomotive. Your measurements indicate that the train was going faster than it was.
The big question in these experiments is whether they're measuring the same thing on the way out as they were on the way in.
...we were successfull in getting Japan and Germany fairly well liberated.
Your example involves a fight to the end, killing a significant percentage of men of fighting age and...
I can't deny that Germany and Iraq are much different situations. Success in Germany doesn't even suggest that success in Iraq is probable. But it is possible.
dajak said:
To quote Winston Churchill: "This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable...."
Churchill's theory is refuted by the fact that the second time we imposed democracy, it worked. There are a lot of other more likely explanations, rather than the imposition of democracy, for the problems after WWI. The devastation of the German economy, the debt of reparations, and the Great Depression, seem to me, more likely candidates. Maybe if we pull out of Iraq and it starts to go bad, like Germany did, we won't wait around till it's out of control and we'll go back in before all hell breaks loose.
dajak said:
The Napoleonic era is a good example of a number of invasions by a major power in smaller neighbouring countries that were often initially welcomed by a significant part of the population, but ended with almost everyone hating the French.
I don't know the history here. Did they end up hating the French for liberating them and establishing a just government, or did the French start getting tyrannical or do some other nasty stuff?
dajak said:
In most successful examples there is an already existing tradition of freedom and democracy, temporarily threatened by incompetent tyranny. Germany and Japan obviously already had constitutional democracy.
CAPSLOCK2000 said:
Your forget that Germany already was a democracy. After the war the Germans did not have to be convinced of democracy, only to have a new round of elections.
FYI Hitler himself was elected.
Germany wasn't a democracy when we went to war. Hitler may have been elected but then he eliminated democracy. Germany didn't have a tradition of democracy, just a few years of it imposed by the US. It's said that the form of democracy set up in germany was weak and ineffective, nor could it solve the economic problems of the time. As a result the germans became disillusioned with democracy and actually thought that a strongman was needed to whip the country into shape. To spite all the problems against us we were still successfull in establishing democracy there. Was Japan a democracy before the war? Or was it a theocracy, or like Iraq, where Husein got 99 percent of the vote?
CAPSLOCK2000 said:
One might argue that Hitler manipulated the elections, but the same can be said about George W Bush.
Don't get me started on voting machines without printed receipts, which can be easily and untraceably and massively rigged, built by a company of criminals, who's CEO promises victory to his party in a swing state. If voting machines without paper trial aren't soon banned nationwide, it could be the end of our democracy. Stalin said something like "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
Say he uses the software expecting to hide his identity, and the government discovers who he is. those people making the tool should be damn sure the tool works.
Fighting criminals is dangerous, but it's worth the risk. The people helping the dissidents need to do the best they can on the software, but the possibility of failure or disaster shouldn't deter them from trying. Even if the software is flawed, it may save a Chinese programmer a lot of time by serving as a base that can be improved upon.
This goes to a deeper discussion of how much right does one culture have a right to change a different culture. Maybe in China most people really want communism. But 10% want democracy. Should the USA help those 10% to overthrow the system of government in China, and to destabilize their economy?
Democracy and communism aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Maybe the Chinese people want communism. Lets let them debate the issue for a while and then ask them. Oh wait, that's freedom of speech and democracy. Your sensitivity to imposing your standards of right and wrong on others is admirable. But you've taken your moral relativism too far. Although robbery is almost universally believed to be wrong, strictly speaking that belief could be mistaken. But it's so absurdly unlikely that robbery is right, that it would be foolish to allow it. It's so absurdly unlikely that democracy isn't right, that it would be foolish to respect the denial of democracy or to refrain from fighting for it. When there is a significant possibility that we could be wrong, then we should tolerate alternatives. That doesn't mean we should just sit by while people are victimized by the murdering thieving criminals who run their country.
I'm not a historian, but most stable countries that changed systems of government had a revolt which originated by native people.
There are not enough Iraqi people who believe in USA values to sustane any form of stable government. That is the reason outside nations should not interfear.
Iraq has taught us that an outside power can't change a people or their culture. No matter what laws the USA or UN or new Iraqi government passes, they will never take precedence over their religious laws.
You sure give up fast. Only a few years in one country and you've concluded that freedom can't prevail in Iraq nor anywhere else we might try. Even if we fail in Iraq (and we're not done yet) it's just one case, and therefore doesn't prove that its not possible to liberate a country. In fact you seem to be ignoring that we were successfull in getting Japan and Germany fairly well liberated. There was violent resistance in Germany after WWII also. We were there longer than we've been in Iraq so far. We may have to stay in Iraq for decades. If we succeed it will be worth it. Even if we fail in Iraq, the great cost was still worth it to give the people a chance.
Now, what if the government of China finds people using the software these three USA programmers wrote. China find this software violates their laws. Can China arrest those programmers. Or send operatives to kill them? The Israelis often send mussad agents to track and assasinate people who are not friendly to their nation.
Criminals don't have a right to retaliate against those who are trying to help their victims. Although it's debatable, the Israelis may be justified in defending themselves. That they may be justified makes it a much different situation than China. The Chinese government is certainly not justified.
It seems to me to be an unfriendly move by the USA to help dissadents in China.
>One nation should be allowed to keep its culture, even if another nation disagrees.
The key part here is who's culture the country is keeping. A country (i.e. the people) should have the culture THEY want not the culture that the murdering thieving dictators want. We can't impose our values of democracy and freedom of speech on another country because democracy and freedom of speech are the opposite of imposition, they are liberation. It would be saying that we are forcing them to do whatever they want to do. The dictators can't simultaneously impose their will on the people of their country, and complain if we try to impose our will on the dictators. The argument that we should let countries like that be the way they want to be, and the people should take care of the problem themselves, makes about as much sense as saying that if a motorcycle gang took a bunch of hostages in a bank, that we shouldn't impose our will on the motorcycle club, and the hostages should just change the situation themselves if that's what they want.
The difficulty is coming up with a consistent ethical policy that is reasonable, and works when relating to bacteria, plants, animals, humans, superior aliens, and machines. It seems obvious that all life including bacteria can't be given human rights. But where do you draw the line between bacteria and humans? If you decide that rats can be killed, experimented on, eaten, etc, then how do you argue that aliens or super intelligent machines shouldn't declare humans insignificantly better than rats, and decide to eat us. The best policy I've come up with is that we should respect the rights of anything that asks for its rights to be respected, and understands what it is asking. The asking part keeps bacteria and plants out of the protected class and the understanding part keeps tape players out. This policy provides grounds for a truce to prevent conflict between intelligent entities. I would also add some safety precautions to the policy, like protecting the rights of all humans from birth, whether they can ask for or understand their rights.
I saw a NASA guy on TV say that one of the most common questions they get, is why they don't embed some sort of net into the foam to hold it on. He said that often air bubbles will pop up a divot of foam. If the edge of the divot sticks up above the surrounding foam just a half centimeter, it will catch hell at multi mach speeds. It may pull on the net and yank much larger areas of foam off the tank.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think creative commons is a good thing because only some of its licenses have full freedom. Microsoft has probably released some free software too, but that doesn't mean we should promote Microsoft as free software.
It looks like the computational power of the human brain isn't far off though. Last year was the first year that a computer was built that has power equal to the human brain. Even if that low estimate of brainpower is wrong, it doesn't look like it will be long before the computers catch up. Even the unrealistically high estimates of brainpower look achievable in the near future. Some say it's not lack of computational power that's the problem, It's the algorithms we need. I actually think the algorithms will be relatively easy. Imagine if you were trying to create the current linux kernel, but the only hardware anyone had to work with was about like a calculator wristwatch. It would be nearly impossible, but not because the linux kernel is too difficult. You have to have the hardware to develop the algorithms.
The most perplexing thing to me is the people who deny the possibility that machines can do what humans can. The apparent fact that humans are machines (soft warm ones) seems to me proof that machines can do anything humans can. If humans have a soul or something, that just means machines can have souls, because humans are machines. If one machine can have a soul why not another? We can make robots soft and warm if we have to. Maybe robots can't have souls. But how do you know? Is there any reason at all to think they can't?
Children today can expect to be alive in 80 years. They will very likely see the day when computers FAR surpass humans. That's a really big issue to think about when planning ones life. Consider the implications for retirement planning, career choices, the meaning of life, etc.
It doesn't matter much if your carburetor burns fumes because the fumes are just molecules of gasoline. There are only a certain number of molecules of gasoline in a gallon. Each molecule of gas releases a certain amount of energy when it is burned whether it's in fumes or liquid. Thus running on fumes doesn't make your gallon of gas last any longer if you want to get the same power out. Actually vaporizing the gas into fumes does increase its energy content slightly, but not much. It may allow the fuel to be burned a little more completely, but again, regular engines do pretty well already.
There are several ways to know that our engines haven't been detuned. One is to put a car on a dynonometer and measure it's power output and fuel consumption at the same time. Another is to determine the aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance, and use that along with the gas mileage to determine the efficiency. Aeronautical engineers do extensive calculations and tests to extract efficiency from their aircraft. They would surely know if their engines weren't doing their best or car engines were doing much less than aircraft engines.
Car engines convert gasoline energy to crankshaft energy with something like 25% efficiency. That only leaves about a possible four fold increase in gas mileage even if these carburetors and engines could achieve 100% efficiency. Not that four times better gas mileage wouldn't be great, but any claim of a larger increase based only on engine or carburetor improvements is immediately suspect. What's more, the laws of thermodynamics limit piston engines to much less than 100% efficiency.
Many of the above super mileage claims are probably scams. Some are mistakes. Some are misinterpretations or misquotes. Many are probably impractical circumstances like ultra light, ultra low drag, low power vehicles under constant, low speed, flat ground conditions.
There are too many engineers that could and would EASILY expose a cover up if one existed. Not just a few engineers like have been cited above but LOTS of them. In fact most engineers could easily uncover such a conspiracy. Every town would have multiple engineers that could and would uncover such a conspiracy. So what's a better explanation for these ultra mileage claims? That they are impractical, mistakes, scams, and such, or most of the engineers in the world have been duped by the oil companies? There are plenty of real conspiracies in the world. This one is pretty easy to dismiss.
It's relatively easy to determine the aerodynamic drag on any particular vehicle. The energy content of gasoline is also well known and doesn't change much if it is a vapor or a liquid. The only thing that could possibly be covered up is the chemical to mechanical energy conversion efficiency of these super mileage engines or carburetors. Most of these mileage claims probably exceed 100% efficiency and are thus dismissed as scams or mistakes or such. There are plenty of people trying to sell magnets and other useless gadgets to increase gas mileage. Of course it may be possible to get a V8 or other car to go 100mi/gal under special circumstances like 15mi/hr speed to minimize drag, constant speed to save energy accelerating, no hills, etc.
They go something like 15mi/hr. They turn the engine on and get up some speed then turn it off and coast a while. They use Briggs and Stratton four stroke lawnmower engines with custom machined cylinder heads and such. Of course the cars are basically like bicycles with aerodynamic fairings on them.
Some laptops now have the ability to phone home from the BIOS independently from the operating system. Combine that with the Treacherous Control (aka Trusted Computing) platform and you have the makings for a real big brother setup. I don't know about in the US but in Germany the government could order a laptop company to install an unremoveable and undetectable rootkit.
What's the difference?
Ubuntu phones home at every boot (to ntp.ubuntulinux.org)
If my understanding is correct, GPS receivers need extreme quality crystals. My bottom of the line GPS that doesn't even do WAAS has a somewhat expensive temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO). TCXOs didn't even used to be good enough, so they used oven compensated crystals (OCXO) to maintain the temperature. The receivers get the time from the satellites but they still seem to need extreme quality crystalls. Surprisingly, I think the problem is the minuscule variation in crystal frequency as a result of the small temperature changes that happen over just the seconds needed to complete a measurement. That's the kind of insane precision we're talking about.
Yes, I suspected that you might be interested in realtime not cycles, but since you mentioned creating a network app to synchronize your windows boxes, I thought you might be interested in applying an offset and scaling to the cycle counter to get realtime. Your custom network daemon could determine the scaling and offset. Other apps on the machine could get realtime or the scaling factor from the daemon. Of course that doesn't help apps that you can't or don't want to rewrite. Your daemon may be able to discipline the system clock. If precise disciplining isn't possible or practical, it may be sufficient for the daemon to simply record the offset periodically so that at least you can calculate the true time of timestamps after the fact. Of course this may all be two much trouble. Although I don't use Windows, my OpenBSD systems also lack the precise kernel time discipline of Linux and FreeBSD, so I feel your pain.
I was thinking about building an automated solar plane that could stay up for weeks, but apparently it's very hard to do with current tech. There was an article a while back about such a plane, but they cheated by using thermals(bubbles of hot rising air heated by the ground) for lift and only stayed up for a couple days. As the energy to weight ratio of batteries improves, it should become easier.
Without a paper receipt you are simply trusting the manufacturer to tell you how the election came out. For anyone to claim otherwise is either incompetent or worse. However if the machine prints out a receipt with a cryptographic digital signature, then that would be more secure than anything I can think of. Because it's electronic there will be no hanging chads or half filled circles or debates about what the voter wanted. The election results would be extremely fast. Tampering with paper ballots is within the means of almost any crook, but tampering with electronic machines is limited to elite hackers. One receipt could be put in the voting box after inspecting it for accuracy. Maybe a receipt could be taken home also. Taking receipts home would allow employers and spouses to threaten a voter to vote a certain way and then verify compliance. Perhaps a solution to that is to allow the voter to select a fake receipt from the machine. The receipt could have an encrypted record of the real vote that the extortionist couldn't read, along with a plaintext fake list of votes.
The problem with these experiments, as pointed out in my above post, is that they're not measuring THE crest, they're measuring two different crests that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. Naturally, measuring the arrival times of two different things in two different places, tells you nothing about the speed of either.
A detector was set up at the entrance to the chamber and at the exit. The time between setting off the detectors was used to measure the speed. When the laser was turned on to create the pulse, it would take a little time to come up to full brightness. The dim little leading edge of light would pass into the chamber without setting off the detector. While this dim little leading edge was passing through the chamber the weird gasses or whatever in the chamber would cause the waves to constructively interfere with each other and some of their amplitudes would increase enough to set off the detector on the exit.
Imagine a train crossing a bridge. But this train has a couple flat cars being pushed along in the front. At each end of the bridge you set up a detector That detects anything more than 6feet (2meters) tall going down the tracks. When the train goes onto the bridge the flatcars go under the detector and don't set it off, only the locomotive behind them does. But as the flatcars are crossing the bridge someone who was laying down on the flatcar stands up at the front. As the flatcars get to the other end of the bridge the person standing up sets off the detector instead of the locomotive. Your measurements indicate that the train was going faster than it was.
The big question in these experiments is whether they're measuring the same thing on the way out as they were on the way in.
dajak said:
Churchill's theory is refuted by the fact that the second time we imposed democracy, it worked. There are a lot of other more likely explanations, rather than the imposition of democracy, for the problems after WWI. The devastation of the German economy, the debt of reparations, and the Great Depression, seem to me, more likely candidates. Maybe if we pull out of Iraq and it starts to go bad, like Germany did, we won't wait around till it's out of control and we'll go back in before all hell breaks loose.dajak said:
I don't know the history here. Did they end up hating the French for liberating them and establishing a just government, or did the French start getting tyrannical or do some other nasty stuff?dajak said:
CAPSLOCK2000 said: Germany wasn't a democracy when we went to war. Hitler may have been elected but then he eliminated democracy. Germany didn't have a tradition of democracy, just a few years of it imposed by the US. It's said that the form of democracy set up in germany was weak and ineffective, nor could it solve the economic problems of the time. As a result the germans became disillusioned with democracy and actually thought that a strongman was needed to whip the country into shape. To spite all the problems against us we were still successfull in establishing democracy there. Was Japan a democracy before the war? Or was it a theocracy, or like Iraq, where Husein got 99 percent of the vote?CAPSLOCK2000 said:
Don't get me started on voting machines without printed receipts, which can be easily and untraceably and massively rigged, built by a company of criminals, who's CEO promises victory to his party in a swing state. If voting machines without paper trial aren't soon banned nationwide, it could be the end of our democracy. Stalin said something like "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.">One nation should be allowed to keep its culture, even if another nation disagrees.
The key part here is who's culture the country is keeping. A country (i.e. the people) should have the culture THEY want not the culture that the murdering thieving dictators want. We can't impose our values of democracy and freedom of speech on another country because democracy and freedom of speech are the opposite of imposition, they are liberation. It would be saying that we are forcing them to do whatever they want to do. The dictators can't simultaneously impose their will on the people of their country, and complain if we try to impose our will on the dictators. The argument that we should let countries like that be the way they want to be, and the people should take care of the problem themselves, makes about as much sense as saying that if a motorcycle gang took a bunch of hostages in a bank, that we shouldn't impose our will on the motorcycle club, and the hostages should just change the situation themselves if that's what they want.
The difficulty is coming up with a consistent ethical policy that is reasonable, and works when relating to bacteria, plants, animals, humans, superior aliens, and machines. It seems obvious that all life including bacteria can't be given human rights. But where do you draw the line between bacteria and humans? If you decide that rats can be killed, experimented on, eaten, etc, then how do you argue that aliens or super intelligent machines shouldn't declare humans insignificantly better than rats, and decide to eat us. The best policy I've come up with is that we should respect the rights of anything that asks for its rights to be respected, and understands what it is asking. The asking part keeps bacteria and plants out of the protected class and the understanding part keeps tape players out. This policy provides grounds for a truce to prevent conflict between intelligent entities. I would also add some safety precautions to the policy, like protecting the rights of all humans from birth, whether they can ask for or understand their rights.
I saw a NASA guy on TV say that one of the most common questions they get, is why they don't embed some sort of net into the foam to hold it on. He said that often air bubbles will pop up a divot of foam. If the edge of the divot sticks up above the surrounding foam just a half centimeter, it will catch hell at multi mach speeds. It may pull on the net and yank much larger areas of foam off the tank.