As well as the more familiar position / momentum uncertainty principle, there is a similar and related energy / time uncertainty that follows the same logic.
delta E multiplied by delta t must be greater than or equal to hbar.
Th greater the precision with which you define the energy of a system you are observing the less precisely you can define the time of the event being measured.
I have a mobile phone and a tablet with EE (a major UK mobile network provider). Both receive upwards of 3 spam calls a day, every day. Almost none of them are using the local area code spoof, they are all from unique and fairly random seeming numbers with area codes all over the country.
In particular, for the tablet I cannot have given the phone number to any third parties, since I do not know and have never known what the tablet's phone number is. I can only assume that EE have sold or given the phone number to spammers.
The affected people are those who bought tickets between August 21st and September 5th. That you haven't received an email reflects that fact that you bought your tickets around three weeks before the affected time period.
I too bought BA tickets at the beginning of August, and I likewise have not received any communication from BA about this issue. This does ot surprise me.
In this particular case, it is because most people don't say "would have" when speaking, the say "would've". It would sound a bit odd and pompous to say "would have" and pronounce each word in a clear and distinct way.
The sound of "would've" when spoken sounds indistinguishable from "would of" and so some people just make the connection in their minds and can't break it.
Presumably, according to the general consensus that all big companies run on selfishness and greed, if there were the demand (in the aggregate stastical sense) for greater bandwidth then it would be in their interests to supply it. If people were really willing to pay for greater bandwidth and the investment required was such that the ROI was reasonable, then a selfish greedy company would absolutely do it to maximise their profits.
That no company (or at least very few companies) does this suggest that either the demand isn't there[1] or the investment required is too big to expect a reasonable or speedy return[2].
[1] Demand being measured in terms of money willing to be spent, rather than just people moaning on internet forums but not actually being willing to change their behaviour.
[2] I know nothing about the USA market, but I imagine the lack of population density in much of the country has a lot to do with this.
I don't think this is a particularly fair example, to be honest. It is perfectly fair that this cop simply used some obvious heuristics in determining the half-pound measure.
I have a good idea in my head that half a kilogram (500g) is about a pound. I know it isn't exact, but for basic low level comparisons it works more or less OK. If the cop had a similar rough measure in his head then seeing a measurement of around 200 - 250g on the scale would ring in his mind as about half a pound, give or take. He didn't do any arithmetic, or need to do long multiplication, he just had a rough measure of a pound is about half a kg in his head. He might have been out by 10 or 15%, but he was close enough to be making a fair point.
But the line of questioning given in this example does not in any way allow him to express this perfectly reasonable point, instead focusing on the rather unnecessarily arithmetic details about precise pounds to gram conversions, rather than focusing on the method by which he came to his conclusion.
I agree with Voyager 529 above that he would have been better off writing down the exact gram measure on the evidence form, but he may well have worried that many people wouldn't have a similar idea of what 224g actually was and so it was more effective to write the imperial measure down.
I don't have any reason to defend a fictitious cop, but this seems like an example of the old "one should never attribute to malice that which can adequately be attributed to incompetence".
Not necessarily no, but it can lead to a situation whereby the people who vote for a given party get different policies from that party than they thought they had voted for.
Back to the UK example - the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) formed a coalition government in to 2010 because there was no overall parliamentary majority. The Lib Dems had campaigned on a platform of no increase in tuition fees for university students. In order to get other policies of theirs into action in the coalition government they had to scrap this tuition fees promise, and so the coalition government raised tuition fees.
There was a huge sense of betrayal, and the Lib Dem's reputation was destroyed and huge number of their voters deserted them in the 2015 election (the leader lost his seat two years later in the 2017 election).
This sort oft thing can be common place in PR voting systems. It isn't to say that we shouldn't consider PR however, just that there are pros and cons to both PR and FPTP systems.
The Fed (or the BOE or the ECB or any other central bank) does not control fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is tax and spend policy, controlled by the government.
The central bank controls monetary policy - the expansion and/or contraction of the money supply and the availability of credit.
We both know that a nuclear at on Russian cities by the USA means a nuclear response by Russia against American cities that would lead to the destruction of most of the populated areas of both nations.
Do you really think the US is going to do that in response to a conventional attack against a foreign country?
The Russians know this, and they wouldn't be stupid about it - they'd take small territories at a time, never large enough to justify a full scale response.
Aha, yes, a good point. I hadn't considered any contractual or compliance issues, as the business I work for is far to small for it to be a real issue. I can definitely see how an OS that makes no guarantees or commitments and offer no lines of responsibility may be a big issue for some businesses.
Out of interest, why do you prefer not to use Debian for serious matters?
I ask as someone with not much experience using Linux - I run Mint on my laptop, and have a couple of Debian boxes running simple things like SpamAssassin and MySQL and Dovecot. I've found Debian to be perfectly acceptable to use and setup without a GUI, but it sounds like you have some deeper experience than me.
The 'liability' part of limited liability does not refer to criminal liability.
If a shareholder or company officer commit a criminal act then they can be prosecuted whether the company is a limited liability organisation or not.
Limited liability refers to the fact that the owners of the company (the shareholders) are not liable for the debts of the company - if you own a limited company then the bank and other creditors cannot take your house and car if the company goes bust and can't pay its debts.
In my opinion, in this particular issue with Wells Fargo, it doesn't seem to have been made clear what crime the senior management have committed that would warrant prosecution. It seems clear that they have made some poor business decisions in setting targets that have incentivised others to commit crimes (the middle management and trader who setup these false accounts, who should be prosecuted), but it isn't clear that the senior management have done anything illegal.
But a computer as we understand it (von Neuman architechture, Turing complete, etc.) is generalisable - it can run any piece of properly written software. I can running Windows, or Photoshop, or DOS, or Prince of Persia, or anything I want. It runs a general set of logical operations, and does these regardless of the content of these operations (1).
A brain is a specific implementation, and it can only run one particular mind. My brains has neurons that have been shaped by my learning experiences. Your brain does not look like my brain, and as a result your mind is not my mind.
You couldn't run your mind on my brain.
You could run your operating system on my computer.
The hardware / software analogy still works, but the computer / software analogy doesn't work - the hardware and the software can't be so easily separated if we are talking about the mind.
(1) In fact, John Searle's Chinese Room argument makes it clear that a computer (as we understand it) could never run any piece of software that could understand the semantics of a proposition - at best it can understand the symbolic content but it can't ever understand what any of it 'means'.
"[...]agnosticism and atheism and for that matter liberal Protestantism, which naturally leads to the former , are not capable of creating the necessary philosophical and mental framework that supports the existence of a populous and culture that embraces values of personal integrity and policies based on hard data and logic"
You have asserted this, but have not provided any valid argument as to why it is the case.
You have claimed that a non-thiestic philosophy is not compatible with a society valuing personal integrity or analytical skills. Why is this? Can you provide examples?
(by examples, I refer to ones where the non-theism is the cause, not the correlate, the behaviour in question)
As an interested Brit, who has never spent any time in the USA, how do you categorise your status as lower-middle or upper-middle class?
I guess in the context of this conversation we are talking income levels (which in itself is different from how us class-loving Brits do it), but what sort of income levels are the categories based on, in your opinion? (I guess it might differ from state to state?)
I'm British, and I sometimes genuinely do not know how to spell certain words. I am certain that I know how to spell them correctly either for American or British English, but I am not sure which I am using.
The 'our' thing (honour, colour, etc.) or the 'ise' thing (authorise, specialise) is obvious, but the defence / licence thing I am never sure about.
You might say that I was taught badly at school, but I have no problem with spelling in general, it isn't as if I do not know how to correctly spell words - I simply have been exposed to American writing so much that it has influenced me at a subconscious level.
On a point of order - I'm not sure what you're saying about Oxford spelling for 'authorize'? There is no Brit alive who would say that spelling it authorize rather than authorise is correct.
That being said I agree that the US spelling makes more sense. It is closer to the pronunciation for both Brits and Americans.
Most American changes are like that, quite sensible and logical really. For example, the word 'gotton' does not exist in British English, but it ought to:
I forgot / I forget / I have forgotten (US and UK)
I got / I get / I have gotten (US) I got / I get / I have got (UK)
It is a good way to mark the past participle that British does not have.
And then the Anglo-Saxons arrived. And sort of conquered the Briton-Roman inhabitants.
And then the Danes / Vikings invaded and conquered most of the north-eastern half of the country.
While all this was happening, the Scotii had come over from Ireland and invaded Scotland. None of the above dislodged them.
The Welsh stayed in Wales for the whole time.
While the Anglo-Saxon-Briton-Roman English were fending off the Danes the French invaded and conquered.
Some other stuff probably happened in between while people weren't looking.
---
So, lots of the English languages comes from French because for around 2 or 3 hundred years the French were the ruling class of English. When you think about it the French words in the language are usually the more elevated and prestigious - you might simply 'start' something, or to sound more grand you might 'commence' it; you could just 'look' at something, or show off by 'regarding' it.
The Danes occupied parts of England for around 100 years, and they came over as temporary invaders and occupiers. They learned English only enough to rule and trade, they did not typically learn the language in full. At the time English was Old-English, which had German style complicated grammar on verbs and nouns. The Danes could not be bothered with this, and just learned a sort of basic stripped down version. This propagated in the general population, and is why English has so much less complicated grammar than other European languages.
A few hundred years later the English conquered the Welsh, and made it part of greater England. This is where the English language oddity with the word 'do' comes from. English speakers would say 'do you know the time?' whereas almost all other European languages would say 'know you the time?'. (Parlez vous Francais? => Speak you French?)
What is the word 'do' adding to that sentence? Welsh is pretty much the only other language that does this extra auxiliary verb thing.
Our western European and American alphabets are based on that create by Charlemagne. He based this on the Latin alphabet, but it is heavily modified to be easier to write in a general day to day nature. The ancient Latin alphabet was not easy to write in.
I'm as British as the next person (so long as that next person was also born in Leicester and now lives in Sussex) and I read your anecdote and genuinely couldn't tell if "get off of the bus" is wrong or right for 'my' language.
If you told me you did your research and found out that it is the British usage and that American's would never form a sentence that way I would have no problem believing you.
Then that system which allows such basic, script free administration is a particularly efficient and well designed system. The one that requires years and years of experience and training to do the same basic job is clearly not so well designed and is obscure and arcane.
I'm not sure I believe these statements are true of either Windows or Linux, but the argument that a system is poor because it can be easily understood and operated is not a particularly good argument.
I don't understand why you need to restart your Windows server every week.
I restart mine once a month, when the patch Tuesday/Wednesday happens. Very occasionally an additional security patch is release by MS that might require a restart if some severe security issue has been discovered.
There is pretty much no standard server type software on Windows that is going to require a restart to update or patch.
It seems like you must be running a fairly non standard setup on your single Windows server, or possibly more likely you are talking about a 15 year old installation?
I don't know that I'm using the Console = BAD argument, as much as I'm using the "you can't be a real computer and a console at the same time argument".
In Britain at least most people saw the Amiga as a games machine, and when the Sega consoles took over (which they did in Britain, the SNES was never as huge here) the Amiga couldn't complete with them and the Mac and PC at the same time.
David Plesance could (sorry for the spelling) did what he could with his "to be this good will take Sega ages" campaign, as he could see that the Amiga would do best competing in the console market rather than the serious computer market, but by then it was too late - the Amiga had no momentum and Sega had loads.
This is a good point, and something that held the Amiga back in serious office-type work:
1) The lack of vector based fonts
2) The lack of a standardised vector based printing system.
The fonts system in Workbench (at least in the 1, 2 and 3 generations that existed while the Amiga lived) was bitmap based, and so nothing scaled properly.
The printing system generally involved generating a bitmap of each page and sending that to the printer, which was hopeless for anything serious, and hopeless in terms on memory use on both computer and printer (at a time when memory was measured in a few mb at most - how much memory would a high-resolution full-colour bitmap take, compared to some simple Postscript data?)
Slashdot Mirror
As well as the more familiar position / momentum uncertainty principle, there is a similar and related energy / time uncertainty that follows the same logic.
delta E multiplied by delta t must be greater than or equal to hbar.
Th greater the precision with which you define the energy of a system you are observing the less precisely you can define the time of the event being measured.
http://galileo.phys.virginia.e...
The problem very much is happening in the UK.
I have a mobile phone and a tablet with EE (a major UK mobile network provider). Both receive upwards of 3 spam calls a day, every day. Almost none of them are using the local area code spoof, they are all from unique and fairly random seeming numbers with area codes all over the country.
In particular, for the tablet I cannot have given the phone number to any third parties, since I do not know and have never known what the tablet's phone number is. I can only assume that EE have sold or given the phone number to spammers.
The affected people are those who bought tickets between August 21st and September 5th. That you haven't received an email reflects that fact that you bought your tickets around three weeks before the affected time period.
I too bought BA tickets at the beginning of August, and I likewise have not received any communication from BA about this issue. This does ot surprise me.
In this particular case, it is because most people don't say "would have" when speaking, the say "would've". It would sound a bit odd and pompous to say "would have" and pronounce each word in a clear and distinct way.
The sound of "would've" when spoken sounds indistinguishable from "would of" and so some people just make the connection in their minds and can't break it.
Presumably, according to the general consensus that all big companies run on selfishness and greed, if there were the demand (in the aggregate stastical sense) for greater bandwidth then it would be in their interests to supply it. If people were really willing to pay for greater bandwidth and the investment required was such that the ROI was reasonable, then a selfish greedy company would absolutely do it to maximise their profits.
That no company (or at least very few companies) does this suggest that either the demand isn't there[1] or the investment required is too big to expect a reasonable or speedy return[2].
[1] Demand being measured in terms of money willing to be spent, rather than just people moaning on internet forums but not actually being willing to change their behaviour.
[2] I know nothing about the USA market, but I imagine the lack of population density in much of the country has a lot to do with this.
I don't think this is a particularly fair example, to be honest. It is perfectly fair that this cop simply used some obvious heuristics in determining the half-pound measure.
I have a good idea in my head that half a kilogram (500g) is about a pound. I know it isn't exact, but for basic low level comparisons it works more or less OK. If the cop had a similar rough measure in his head then seeing a measurement of around 200 - 250g on the scale would ring in his mind as about half a pound, give or take. He didn't do any arithmetic, or need to do long multiplication, he just had a rough measure of a pound is about half a kg in his head. He might have been out by 10 or 15%, but he was close enough to be making a fair point.
But the line of questioning given in this example does not in any way allow him to express this perfectly reasonable point, instead focusing on the rather unnecessarily arithmetic details about precise pounds to gram conversions, rather than focusing on the method by which he came to his conclusion.
I agree with Voyager 529 above that he would have been better off writing down the exact gram measure on the evidence form, but he may well have worried that many people wouldn't have a similar idea of what 224g actually was and so it was more effective to write the imperial measure down.
I don't have any reason to defend a fictitious cop, but this seems like an example of the old "one should never attribute to malice that which can adequately be attributed to incompetence".
Not necessarily no, but it can lead to a situation whereby the people who vote for a given party get different policies from that party than they thought they had voted for.
Back to the UK example - the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) formed a coalition government in to 2010 because there was no overall parliamentary majority. The Lib Dems had campaigned on a platform of no increase in tuition fees for university students. In order to get other policies of theirs into action in the coalition government they had to scrap this tuition fees promise, and so the coalition government raised tuition fees.
There was a huge sense of betrayal, and the Lib Dem's reputation was destroyed and huge number of their voters deserted them in the 2015 election (the leader lost his seat two years later in the 2017 election).
This sort oft thing can be common place in PR voting systems. It isn't to say that we shouldn't consider PR however, just that there are pros and cons to both PR and FPTP systems.
The Fed (or the BOE or the ECB or any other central bank) does not control fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is tax and spend policy, controlled by the government.
The central bank controls monetary policy - the expansion and/or contraction of the money supply and the availability of credit.
We both know that a nuclear at on Russian cities by the USA means a nuclear response by Russia against American cities that would lead to the destruction of most of the populated areas of both nations.
Do you really think the US is going to do that in response to a conventional attack against a foreign country?
The Russians know this, and they wouldn't be stupid about it - they'd take small territories at a time, never large enough to justify a full scale response.
Aha, yes, a good point. I hadn't considered any contractual or compliance issues, as the business I work for is far to small for it to be a real issue. I can definitely see how an OS that makes no guarantees or commitments and offer no lines of responsibility may be a big issue for some businesses.
Thanks for answering my question.
Out of interest, why do you prefer not to use Debian for serious matters?
I ask as someone with not much experience using Linux - I run Mint on my laptop, and have a couple of Debian boxes running simple things like SpamAssassin and MySQL and Dovecot. I've found Debian to be perfectly acceptable to use and setup without a GUI, but it sounds like you have some deeper experience than me.
The 'liability' part of limited liability does not refer to criminal liability.
If a shareholder or company officer commit a criminal act then they can be prosecuted whether the company is a limited liability organisation or not.
Limited liability refers to the fact that the owners of the company (the shareholders) are not liable for the debts of the company - if you own a limited company then the bank and other creditors cannot take your house and car if the company goes bust and can't pay its debts.
In my opinion, in this particular issue with Wells Fargo, it doesn't seem to have been made clear what crime the senior management have committed that would warrant prosecution. It seems clear that they have made some poor business decisions in setting targets that have incentivised others to commit crimes (the middle management and trader who setup these false accounts, who should be prosecuted), but it isn't clear that the senior management have done anything illegal.
But a computer as we understand it (von Neuman architechture, Turing complete, etc.) is generalisable - it can run any piece of properly written software. I can running Windows, or Photoshop, or DOS, or Prince of Persia, or anything I want. It runs a general set of logical operations, and does these regardless of the content of these operations (1).
A brain is a specific implementation, and it can only run one particular mind. My brains has neurons that have been shaped by my learning experiences. Your brain does not look like my brain, and as a result your mind is not my mind.
You couldn't run your mind on my brain.
You could run your operating system on my computer.
The hardware / software analogy still works, but the computer / software analogy doesn't work - the hardware and the software can't be so easily separated if we are talking about the mind.
(1) In fact, John Searle's Chinese Room argument makes it clear that a computer (as we understand it) could never run any piece of software that could understand the semantics of a proposition - at best it can understand the symbolic content but it can't ever understand what any of it 'means'.
"[...]agnosticism and atheism and for that matter liberal Protestantism, which naturally leads to the former , are not capable of creating the necessary philosophical and mental framework that supports the existence of a populous and culture that embraces values of personal integrity and policies based on hard data and logic"
You have asserted this, but have not provided any valid argument as to why it is the case.
You have claimed that a non-thiestic philosophy is not compatible with a society valuing personal integrity or analytical skills. Why is this? Can you provide examples?
(by examples, I refer to ones where the non-theism is the cause, not the correlate, the behaviour in question)
As an interested Brit, who has never spent any time in the USA, how do you categorise your status as lower-middle or upper-middle class?
I guess in the context of this conversation we are talking income levels (which in itself is different from how us class-loving Brits do it), but what sort of income levels are the categories based on, in your opinion? (I guess it might differ from state to state?)
I'm British, and I sometimes genuinely do not know how to spell certain words. I am certain that I know how to spell them correctly either for American or British English, but I am not sure which I am using.
The 'our' thing (honour, colour, etc.) or the 'ise' thing (authorise, specialise) is obvious, but the defence / licence thing I am never sure about.
You might say that I was taught badly at school, but I have no problem with spelling in general, it isn't as if I do not know how to correctly spell words - I simply have been exposed to American writing so much that it has influenced me at a subconscious level.
On a point of order - I'm not sure what you're saying about Oxford spelling for 'authorize'? There is no Brit alive who would say that spelling it authorize rather than authorise is correct.
That being said I agree that the US spelling makes more sense. It is closer to the pronunciation for both Brits and Americans.
Most American changes are like that, quite sensible and logical really. For example, the word 'gotton' does not exist in British English, but it ought to:
I forgot / I forget / I have forgotten (US and UK)
I got / I get / I have gotten (US)
I got / I get / I have got (UK)
It is a good way to mark the past participle that British does not have.
The Britons were conquered by the Romans.
And then the Romans left, but not entirely.
And then the Anglo-Saxons arrived. And sort of conquered the Briton-Roman inhabitants.
And then the Danes / Vikings invaded and conquered most of the north-eastern half of the country.
While all this was happening, the Scotii had come over from Ireland and invaded Scotland. None of the above dislodged them.
The Welsh stayed in Wales for the whole time.
While the Anglo-Saxon-Briton-Roman English were fending off the Danes the French invaded and conquered.
Some other stuff probably happened in between while people weren't looking.
---
So, lots of the English languages comes from French because for around 2 or 3 hundred years the French were the ruling class of English. When you think about it the French words in the language are usually the more elevated and prestigious - you might simply 'start' something, or to sound more grand you might 'commence' it; you could just 'look' at something, or show off by 'regarding' it.
The Danes occupied parts of England for around 100 years, and they came over as temporary invaders and occupiers. They learned English only enough to rule and trade, they did not typically learn the language in full. At the time English was Old-English, which had German style complicated grammar on verbs and nouns. The Danes could not be bothered with this, and just learned a sort of basic stripped down version. This propagated in the general population, and is why English has so much less complicated grammar than other European languages.
A few hundred years later the English conquered the Welsh, and made it part of greater England. This is where the English language oddity with the word 'do' comes from. English speakers would say 'do you know the time?' whereas almost all other European languages would say 'know you the time?'. (Parlez vous Francais? => Speak you French?)
What is the word 'do' adding to that sentence? Welsh is pretty much the only other language that does this extra auxiliary verb thing.
Carolingian Minuscule.
Our western European and American alphabets are based on that create by Charlemagne. He based this on the Latin alphabet, but it is heavily modified to be easier to write in a general day to day nature. The ancient Latin alphabet was not easy to write in.
I'm as British as the next person (so long as that next person was also born in Leicester and now lives in Sussex) and I read your anecdote and genuinely couldn't tell if "get off of the bus" is wrong or right for 'my' language.
If you told me you did your research and found out that it is the British usage and that American's would never form a sentence that way I would have no problem believing you.
I'm in the UK, and when I click on the link in the summary I get bounced to the CIA.gov homepage.
As opposed to the free GNL/Linux and GPL productivity suites they could otherwise have used?
If both are equally free then the universities must still have thought that Windows/MS Office was the better choice.
Then that system which allows such basic, script free administration is a particularly efficient and well designed system. The one that requires years and years of experience and training to do the same basic job is clearly not so well designed and is obscure and arcane.
I'm not sure I believe these statements are true of either Windows or Linux, but the argument that a system is poor because it can be easily understood and operated is not a particularly good argument.
I don't understand why you need to restart your Windows server every week.
I restart mine once a month, when the patch Tuesday/Wednesday happens. Very occasionally an additional security patch is release by MS that might require a restart if some severe security issue has been discovered.
There is pretty much no standard server type software on Windows that is going to require a restart to update or patch.
It seems like you must be running a fairly non standard setup on your single Windows server, or possibly more likely you are talking about a 15 year old installation?
I don't know that I'm using the Console = BAD argument, as much as I'm using the "you can't be a real computer and a console at the same time argument".
In Britain at least most people saw the Amiga as a games machine, and when the Sega consoles took over (which they did in Britain, the SNES was never as huge here) the Amiga couldn't complete with them and the Mac and PC at the same time.
David Plesance could (sorry for the spelling) did what he could with his "to be this good will take Sega ages" campaign, as he could see that the Amiga would do best competing in the console market rather than the serious computer market, but by then it was too late - the Amiga had no momentum and Sega had loads.
This is a good point, and something that held the Amiga back in serious office-type work:
1) The lack of vector based fonts
2) The lack of a standardised vector based printing system.
The fonts system in Workbench (at least in the 1, 2 and 3 generations that existed while the Amiga lived) was bitmap based, and so nothing scaled properly.
The printing system generally involved generating a bitmap of each page and sending that to the printer, which was hopeless for anything serious, and hopeless in terms on memory use on both computer and printer (at a time when memory was measured in a few mb at most - how much memory would a high-resolution full-colour bitmap take, compared to some simple Postscript data?)