It would be trivially easy for a politician's staff to setup a shell company to receive the contributions, owned by a holding company similarly setup for this purpose - distanced from the politician sufficiently to avoid any of these laws.
So what, the computer you bought in 2001 when XP came out is probably worthless to all but a few people now and that is a physical product.
Your XP disc is useful to someone, just not you. How is it different to a book, which is written once and copied many times, and which is generally obsolete to you once you've read it?
I would and have gladly paid loads to go on training courses for various subjects, but they are non-physical and obsolete pretty quickly.
Why should something that is not a physical product, or that becomes obsolete after time, be wrong? Don't see much morse code or many steam engines around now.
I agree with you about the re-sale of purchased goods, why should a product such as an operating system not be treated like any other commodity?
Sorry for my ignorance. I assume from the context of the discussion that there is currently no tax of any kind on a stock transactions in the USA?
In the UK there is a tax on transactions, called stamp duty, charged at 0.5% of the value of the transaction, rounded up to the nearest £5 (i.e. buy or sell £500 of stock, pay £5 tax. Buy or sell £5000 of stock pay £25 - I assume it get charged twice per transaction, once for the buyer, once for the seller, but couldn't comment on such details).
The UK doesn't really have a problem with HFT, in so far as I can tell from our fantastic news media (the country that brought you the News of the World after all).
And if the updates, be they full version updates or point releases, break the add ins with the consistency that Mozilla updates do then there is a problem.
You seems to be saying that I can:
A) Be secure but risk my useful add ins breaking, or...
I was going to start with a hello to you, but have just noticed that you posted AC so I can't. Hello anyway.
First off, black holes don't "attract light" (well, it does, but that's not what makes it black). Black holes are black because the energy inside (light rays) do not have enough energy to escape the gravity well of the hole. The light is BENT BACK by the extreme gravity.
So the presence of the singularity causes the light to bend back towards it. In what way is the singularity not attracting the light? It is doing so indirectly by causing the local space-time to warp so much so that the light changes trajectory.
Secondly, a "Light Beam" is basically a single photon (atom sized) oscillating through space (as a wave, with a point particle surfing it). So, Light has a tiny bit of electromagnetism that becomes a "beam" as it travels (at the speed of... wait for it... light). The gravitational influence of this point quanta is... well,.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 (estimate) i.e.... negligible.
Well, given that photons are bosons and so can stack (aka a LASER) a 'beam' of light is not necessarily a single photon, but could be many. Plus the wave that represents the quantum mechanical w/p duality aspect (the Schrodinger wave) is a probability wave, not an EM wave.
Also, the energy of the photon is e = hf. Given that the usual quantisation factor for most Uncertainty Principle stuff is h (which I think is something like 1 time 10 to the minus 43) then the energy of a photon is at least f away from being negligible.
Thirdly, gravity propagation is, like all, electromagnetic phenomenon an At the Speed Light phenomenon.
It is c (3 times 10 to the 8). The "Speed of Light" implies a subjective assessment of how fast light moves in the medium one is currently occupying. Although, I have never read about what happens about gravity propagating in a non-vacuum, I assume it would still be c but who knows?
Current theories show that gravity is the 'closed' loop variety of string theory (as opposed to matter like electrons that are open strings attached to the M-Brane (space field). closed loops can cross over to other Branes which explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic). Most of "gravity" as a force is simply not felt due to this ability to transfer out of our Brane.
When string theory makes any testable falsifiable prediction it will be allowed to 'show' things. At the moment it at best suggests. So far it relies too much on our assumption that our (meta)physical interpretations of a highly specialised form of maths represents an ontologically valid reality (especially when the Copenhagen QM interpretation pretty much did away with such ontologically relevant schemes and just went for modelling the data instead)
Isn't relativistic mass just a function of rest mass, probably using some Lorentzian style root 1 minus c squared over v squared type thing?
Is rest mass is zero then relativistic mass would be zero too?
(If photons had mass due to special relativistic effects then that mass must be infinite, as photons move at c, and special relativistic equations are all based on the ratio of velocity to c)
Surely photonic space-time curvature comes from their energy, not their mass? (e = hf from Max Plank, so photons have a hugely tiny amount of energy each, and ST distorts in response to matter and energy)
Xyrus, I agree with you entirely on both points. Sensible and well reasoned answers.
Makes me think I was posting in response to my own assumptions about you, whereas you are clearly informed and thoughtful and just happen to disagree with me.
A question: a balanced budget proposal would presumably mandate against a budget surplus as well as a deficit? Also, would a balance budget proposal also involve debt reduction or are these treated as separate issues (i.e. would a balanced budget amendment imply a certain time period of budget surplus to pay off the debt before the budget is balanced)? (I'm a UK citizen so I'm not up with the full debate in the US).
I live in England, and in my years I've lived in various constituencies with MPs (representatives) from each of the 3 main parties.
I must admit that whenever I have written to any of them I have always got back a detailed specific reply addressing my points, even in the cases where the MP didn't agree with me (even Keith Vaz, who I am no fan of, wrote a detailed response to a letter of mine - or at least someone in his office took the time to).
I even got a question I wrote to my local (Brighton Pavilion, then Labour) MP about the Digital Economy Bill (basically the UK equivalent of the DMCA) escalated to a government minister for a reply, which again addressed my specific points sufficiently to suggest that someone in their office had taken the time to reply to me specifically.
I can't recall from memory, how many constituents are there per congressman? UK has around 60 - 80k per MP. We've both got roughly the same number of lower chamber representatives (around 600 - 700 each give or take, UK has just removed a few seats) so given the hugely greater US population there must be way more voters per representative in the US.
Out of interest the UK has recently (several months ago) had a referendum on changing our electoral system to a Proportional Representation system (in this case, AV - Alternative Vote) rather than a First Past the Post system as currently used in UK and US elections. Is this something that ever gets aired in US debates?
(The vote failed, hugely)
I ask because often accuses itself as being one of the worst two party lockin systems, and PR benefits third parties hugely.
I must dash your dreams of one day riding a rocket of pure energy to the stars!
Were your rocket made of fuel 1kg in mass it would contain 9 x 10^18 joules (I think its joules in this context, someone correct me if not) of energy. e = mc2 is just a conversion factor between mass and energy, it shows how much energy is contain a given amount of mass, or equivalently how much mass a given amount of energy can create.
To accelerate something to c requires infinite energy.
You could in principal accelerate something to one picometer per second lower than c, but that would probably still require more energy than is contained in the whole universe.
Actually, as far as I am aware there is nothing in special (or for that matter general) relativity that says that nothing CAN move faster than C. It just says that:
a) It is logically unpleasant for anything to do so, because it allows for outright macroscopic causality violation (which would be in principle exploitable by technology up to an including paradox level activity)
b) e = mc2 means that the faster matter is moving the more it weighs (it has more kinetic energy). The closer you get to the speed of light the more an object weighs and so the more force is required to accelerate it further, what with f = ma. At m = c the force required to get any more acceleration is basically infinite.
Neither of these present a mechanism that says that something cannot move faster than C, they just state that:
1) Doing so would/could create paradoxes
and
2) You can't accelerate object faster than c, (but could you create an object already moving faster than c that requires no further acceleration)
Slashdot Mirror
"SOPA is about sites like......"
In the UK, counter-terrorism legislation introduced after the London tube bombings has been used by local councils to spy on householders recycling behaviour or usage of school catchment areas ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7922427/Councils-warned-over-unlawful-spying-using-anti-terror-legislation.html ).
Just cos it is introduced for one purpose does not mean it wont be used for another.
"That's Slashdot's moderated democracy."
Then adjust your viewing threshold. Its your choice to view them all if you want, no-one's stopping you.
Why would it be too late to do anything?
I get the same. I'm in Britain (i.e. non USA IP address) and the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act works fine, others get the blackout page.
I happens for me in England. http://en.wikipedia.org/ flashes up briefly and then jumps to a SOPA page.
When I try http://fr.wikipedia.org/ I get the French main page (again, from an English IP address).
To be fair, that isn't really a physics issue, it's more biology.
It would be trivially easy for a politician's staff to setup a shell company to receive the contributions, owned by a holding company similarly setup for this purpose - distanced from the politician sufficiently to avoid any of these laws.
So what, the computer you bought in 2001 when XP came out is probably worthless to all but a few people now and that is a physical product.
Your XP disc is useful to someone, just not you. How is it different to a book, which is written once and copied many times, and which is generally obsolete to you once you've read it?
I would and have gladly paid loads to go on training courses for various subjects, but they are non-physical and obsolete pretty quickly.
Why should something that is not a physical product, or that becomes obsolete after time, be wrong? Don't see much morse code or many steam engines around now.
I agree with you about the re-sale of purchased goods, why should a product such as an operating system not be treated like any other commodity?
Sorry for my ignorance. I assume from the context of the discussion that there is currently no tax of any kind on a stock transactions in the USA?
In the UK there is a tax on transactions, called stamp duty, charged at 0.5% of the value of the transaction, rounded up to the nearest £5 (i.e. buy or sell £500 of stock, pay £5 tax. Buy or sell £5000 of stock pay £25 - I assume it get charged twice per transaction, once for the buyer, once for the seller, but couldn't comment on such details).
The UK doesn't really have a problem with HFT, in so far as I can tell from our fantastic news media (the country that brought you the News of the World after all).
And if the updates, be they full version updates or point releases, break the add ins with the consistency that Mozilla updates do then there is a problem.
You seems to be saying that I can:
A) Be secure but risk my useful add ins breaking, or...
B) Keep the add ins but be insecure
Someone who makes, sells or advertises web browsers?
It has got even worse since v5 (which I think was about 8 days ago, since we're now on 7.1)
Now things I do in Thunderbird can cause both Thunderird and Firefox to lock and/or crash.
I hate to ruin the poignancy of your thought, but there would have been 2 leap years in the decade passed. (3652)
Remember, remember, the 5th of November, etc.
And that would be?
In what way was fraud the cause of the current recession?
And how long to actually boot into Workbench?
Booting into AmigaOS from the ROM is more or less the Amiga equiv of the BIOS loading up.
Warcraft was, I always though, more of a prophecy of what was to come...
In what way does a mobile phone, or a TV, operate from a desktop?
I was going to start with a hello to you, but have just noticed that you posted AC so I can't. Hello anyway.
First off, black holes don't "attract light" (well, it does, but that's not what makes it black).
Black holes are black because the energy inside (light rays) do not have enough energy to escape the gravity well of the hole.
The light is BENT BACK by the extreme gravity.
So the presence of the singularity causes the light to bend back towards it. In what way is the singularity not attracting the light? It is doing so indirectly by causing the local space-time to warp so much so that the light changes trajectory.
Secondly, a "Light Beam" is basically a single photon (atom sized) oscillating through space (as a wave, with a point particle surfing it). So, Light has a tiny bit of electromagnetism that becomes a "beam" as it travels (at the speed of... wait for it... light). The gravitational influence of this point quanta is ... well, .00000000000000000000000000000000000001 (estimate) i.e. ... negligible.
Well, given that photons are bosons and so can stack (aka a LASER) a 'beam' of light is not necessarily a single photon, but could be many. Plus the wave that represents the quantum mechanical w/p duality aspect (the Schrodinger wave) is a probability wave, not an EM wave.
Also, the energy of the photon is e = hf. Given that the usual quantisation factor for most Uncertainty Principle stuff is h (which I think is something like 1 time 10 to the minus 43) then the energy of a photon is at least f away from being negligible.
Thirdly, gravity propagation is, like all, electromagnetic phenomenon an At the Speed Light phenomenon.
It is c (3 times 10 to the 8). The "Speed of Light" implies a subjective assessment of how fast light moves in the medium one is currently occupying. Although, I have never read about what happens about gravity propagating in a non-vacuum, I assume it would still be c but who knows?
Current theories show that gravity is the 'closed' loop variety of string theory (as opposed to matter like electrons that are open strings attached to the M-Brane (space field). closed loops can cross over to other Branes which explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic). Most of "gravity" as a force is simply not felt due to this ability to transfer out of our Brane.
When string theory makes any testable falsifiable prediction it will be allowed to 'show' things. At the moment it at best suggests. So far it relies too much on our assumption that our (meta)physical interpretations of a highly specialised form of maths represents an ontologically valid reality (especially when the Copenhagen QM interpretation pretty much did away with such ontologically relevant schemes and just went for modelling the data instead)
Isn't relativistic mass just a function of rest mass, probably using some Lorentzian style root 1 minus c squared over v squared type thing?
Is rest mass is zero then relativistic mass would be zero too?
(If photons had mass due to special relativistic effects then that mass must be infinite, as photons move at c, and special relativistic equations are all based on the ratio of velocity to c)
Surely photonic space-time curvature comes from their energy, not their mass? (e = hf from Max Plank, so photons have a hugely tiny amount of energy each, and ST distorts in response to matter and energy)
Xyrus, I agree with you entirely on both points. Sensible and well reasoned answers.
Makes me think I was posting in response to my own assumptions about you, whereas you are clearly informed and thoughtful and just happen to disagree with me.
A question: a balanced budget proposal would presumably mandate against a budget surplus as well as a deficit? Also, would a balance budget proposal also involve debt reduction or are these treated as separate issues (i.e. would a balanced budget amendment imply a certain time period of budget surplus to pay off the debt before the budget is balanced)? (I'm a UK citizen so I'm not up with the full debate in the US).
I live in England, and in my years I've lived in various constituencies with MPs (representatives) from each of the 3 main parties.
I must admit that whenever I have written to any of them I have always got back a detailed specific reply addressing my points, even in the cases where the MP didn't agree with me (even Keith Vaz, who I am no fan of, wrote a detailed response to a letter of mine - or at least someone in his office took the time to).
I even got a question I wrote to my local (Brighton Pavilion, then Labour) MP about the Digital Economy Bill (basically the UK equivalent of the DMCA) escalated to a government minister for a reply, which again addressed my specific points sufficiently to suggest that someone in their office had taken the time to reply to me specifically.
I can't recall from memory, how many constituents are there per congressman? UK has around 60 - 80k per MP. We've both got roughly the same number of lower chamber representatives (around 600 - 700 each give or take, UK has just removed a few seats) so given the hugely greater US population there must be way more voters per representative in the US.
Out of interest the UK has recently (several months ago) had a referendum on changing our electoral system to a Proportional Representation system (in this case, AV - Alternative Vote) rather than a First Past the Post system as currently used in UK and US elections. Is this something that ever gets aired in US debates?
(The vote failed, hugely)
I ask because often accuses itself as being one of the worst two party lockin systems, and PR benefits third parties hugely.
Two points:
1) Why is a balance budget a good thing?
2) There are consequences to raising taxes, above and beyond pissing people off.
I must dash your dreams of one day riding a rocket of pure energy to the stars!
Were your rocket made of fuel 1kg in mass it would contain 9 x 10^18 joules (I think its joules in this context, someone correct me if not) of energy. e = mc2 is just a conversion factor between mass and energy, it shows how much energy is contain a given amount of mass, or equivalently how much mass a given amount of energy can create.
To accelerate something to c requires infinite energy.
You could in principal accelerate something to one picometer per second lower than c, but that would probably still require more energy than is contained in the whole universe.
Actually, as far as I am aware there is nothing in special (or for that matter general) relativity that says that nothing CAN move faster than C. It just says that:
a) It is logically unpleasant for anything to do so, because it allows for outright macroscopic causality violation (which would be in principle exploitable by technology up to an including paradox level activity)
b) e = mc2 means that the faster matter is moving the more it weighs (it has more kinetic energy). The closer you get to the speed of light the more an object weighs and so the more force is required to accelerate it further, what with f = ma. At m = c the force required to get any more acceleration is basically infinite.
Neither of these present a mechanism that says that something cannot move faster than C, they just state that:
1) Doing so would/could create paradoxes
and
2) You can't accelerate object faster than c, (but could you create an object already moving faster than c that requires no further acceleration)