Do me a favor and review the Michelson - Morley experiment and what it really proved or disproved. And remind me when they performed the experiment in the absence of a gravitational field. It disproved the idea of a luminiferous aether. Or to be more accurate: none of the many thousands of experiments performed since M-M, with increasingly accurate apperatus, either based on the same principle as M-M or on different principles (such as TroutonNoble) have produced results consistent with the presence of a luminiferous aether.
Now, Maxwell's equations are not Galilean invariant.
Previously, it was therefore assumed that this was because they only worked in one frame: the rest frame of the luminiferous aether. But there is no luminiferous aether.
So either Maxwell's equations are wrong, or they work in all inertial frames. If the latter, then the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. Einstein postulated this, and derived a new set of non-Galilean transformations from this assumption.
The correctness of Einsteins postulate, and its consequences, have since been checked experimentally many, many times (some examples).
Now, I presume that by "remind me when they performed the experiment in the absence of a gravitational field", you're referring to the "aether drag" hypothesis that the aether is dragged along with mass. I would note that, if it's dragged by mass, then there's no such thing as 'the rest frame of the luminiferous aether' for Maxwell's equations to hold in, which means either Maxwell was wrong or, again, the equations hold in all inertial frames. The latter means special relativity, and I doubt you're suggesting the former. So the inertial drag hypothesis doesn't exactly solve anything. But that's irrelevent, anyway, since it's been experimentally disproven. Hamer tried the experiment with the huge lead blocks which you're aware of. So did a few other people. No drag detected. In a fit of desperation, someone tried to explain that by suggesting that it only worked for very large masses or those masses with large magnetic fields. No dice: J O Lodge noted that no other planets had that effect. Finally, someone realised that if aether drag were true, there wouldn't be any stellar aberration; and the hypothesis died a well-deserving death.
Regarding relativity and self-contradictory: you're right, I apologise; on re-reading you were referring to quantum mechanics -- but since the entire rest of your post was criticisms of relativity, I think you'll forgive my confusion.
Regarding your parenthetical last comment, "appear to be" is a bit ambiguous: If A and B are, provably, mutually exclusive; then yes, proving A does indeed necessarily disprove B.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove with your comment on ring laser gyroscopes. If you're suggesting that they're somehow incompatible with special relativity, I'm afraid you're going to have to explain further.
Not necessarily now, though; it's 2:53 in the morning and I'm going to bed. Good night!
I like dwm, it's a rather tiny and simple window manager. It took me about five seconds to realise that you weren't talking about Vista's Desktop Window Manager, dwm.exe.
I hope you will forgive any aspirations regarding your sanity I may have entertained during those five seconds.
...Are you seriously suggesting that absolute number of files is a meaningful unit of comparison? Or even if we accept that it is (which I don't), you're obviously implying that more files is worse, which I would take issue with: for example, I'd take Unix-style thousands of single-purpose config files over a Windows-style monolithic registry any day.
I know what it is but... just what actually *IS* entanglement? What the heck is going on? If you can find the answer to that, there are a lot of theoretical Physicists who would want to talk to you. Quantum mechanics is the most sucessful **predictive** theory in history, but as for what the heck is actually going on -- if it is even meaningful to ask such a thing -- no-one knows for sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_qua ntum_mechanics has a discussion of some of the ideas.
Interesting, but wrong. When your cousin wrote the arithmetic engine, he used the standard IEEE floating point library. That was rewritten from scratch for Windows XP to use an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. Apparently, "this was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016". (source)
You're right! OS standard widgets and UI libraries are for fools! A program isn't a proper program unless it implements everything from radio buttons to window management tools completely from scratch in a way guaranteed to utterly confuse anyone who hasn't spent 87 hours learning the its precise eccentricities! "Consistency" and "learnability" are for people who want usable software, not cool software!
If I were to look, would I be likely to discover the involvement of a certain company known for pushing closed, incompatible data formats centered on it's closed operating system? Ah; I was wondering why they use Windows Media audio for their online radio player and online Listen Again services. Your hypotheses could go a long way to explaining that.
Or, at least, it could if the BBC did use Windows media. Which... they don't.
They use Real audio.
(Which is a whole other argument -- personally, I hate realplayer, and real alternative has some serious bugs, but anyway...)
I don't know who modded you "insightful", but Do me a favour: take a course in special relativity. The very first thing you learn will be the experiment that disproves your position.
In the mid to late 19th century, most Physicists thought as you did: they imagined that light travelled in a medium, just like any other; and called that medium the "luminiferous aether". Thus, light travelled at a speed of c relative to this aether. Thus, an inertial frame of reference could be measured relative to the aether, all in a nice, objective way.
Sadly, two chaps called Michelson and Morley came and performed an experiment that showed that there was no luminiferous aether and that light did not travel in a medium. Then Einstein postulated that, maybe, just maybe, the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. Then some clever people invented atomic clocks and verified relativity to lots and lots of significant figures, and lots of Physics teachers came along and did lots of experiments involving light bulbs and mirrors in hypothetical rockets moving at nice simple fractions of c and everyone was happy!
Until Quantum Mechanics came along, of course.
Errr....
Ahem.
Seriously though: take a course in special relativity rather than grandly proclaiming that Relativity Is Self-Contradictory from a position of complete ignorance.
Browser features is the major deciding factor for me. Firefox simply is capable of doing more than any other browser. If you'll forgive the descent into the colloquial: O RLY?
In my experience, by the time you've added enough extensions to Firefox to bring it up to the same level of functionality that Opera comes with by default (mouse guestures, page zooming, spatial navigation, adblocking, keyboard shortcut customizability, etc. etc.) it takes about 10 minutes to start and nearly as long to do anything with. Plus the multitude of standards that Opera can read and Firefox can't. Like SVG. And HTML5. And DOM3. Not to mention, email! And, of course, Usenet. Oh, And IRC. And not forgetting Bittorrent. Etc, etc, etc.
I'm sorry, but saying that Firefox is capable of doing more than Opera is just... wrong.
That said, Opera is absolutely hideous on non-Windows platforms. It does not feel 'native' at all. It may not use native widgets, but you can approximate the look and feel easily enough with a good skin (e.g. GNOME skin for Opera).
Technically, the 546 to 281 is Javascript speed; the net page loading decrease is still very good (574ms against 859ms for Digg.com, for example), but not a factor of two. (source: http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/#realworl d)
how this is any different than having two billiard balls, one is red and one is blue. Without looking at them, you put them both into boxes and ship them off to opposite sides of the globe. Now, one box is opened, and the ball is blue. So you know when the other box is opened, the ball they got will be red. If I may tweak your analogy: imagine two billiard balls, shipped off to opposite sides of the globe. you can measure either their color (red-blue) or their pattern (solid-stripe). If you measure the color of one, and it comes up blue; if the other ball's color if measured, it will come up red (and vice-versa). If you measure the pattern of one, and it comes up solid; then if the other one's pattern is measured, it will come up stripy (and vice-versa). But measuring one aspect destroys any correlation in the other: if you measure the color of one of them, and it comes up red; and the other guys measure the *pattern* of the other, and it comes up solid, and then you measure the pattern of the first, it will not necessarily be striped: it might be solid or striped, with 50-50 probability. The measuring of the color destroyed the pattern information in the first ball.
Opera uses standard z-ordering. It's returning you to the page of links because that's the page you were looking at last, so it's at the top of the pile; nothin to do with left or right. Not returning to the tab page is easy enough: just quickly cycle through all the new tabs once you've opened them, and the links page will be pushed further down the stack.
You can get (/write) two kinds of extensions on Opera:
- UserJS, which are Javascript files you can get to apply to all pages viewed (think Greasemonkey); and
- Opera Widgets (think OS X 10.4 or Vista, except for Opera).
Very few pages won't render at all; even some of Google's online office apps which claim they don't support Opera actually work fine if you fake the browser identifier. The only thing that's iffy are pages which use embedded Windows media files; the pause/play etc. controls of which don't work except if you're in full-screen mode for some reason. You don't get many of those around, though; most people just use flash these days.
I've said this a few times now, but I'll repeat it: You Can't Transmit Information Across A Quantum Entanglement. (Usual caveats: to the best if our knowledge at the present time).
That's interesting, but mostly irrelevent. You can't transmit information across an entanglement. Faster-than-light communication is, to the best of our knowledge at the present time, still as impossible as it ever was.
No. You can't transfer information across an entanglement. Faster than light communication is as impossible as it ever was; and causality has not yet been knowingly violated.
> a small machine that measures that's designed to react when it an electron comes "de-entangled"
That's your mistake. There's no possible way to detect that an electron has suddenly become "de-entangled".
The only thing the machine can measure is the electron's spin in either of two axis. Now, say you measure it in the left-right axis and its spin comes up as left. What do you know now? You do know that if the corresponding entangled particle has been measured in the left-right axis, it would have come up as right. But this does not tell you whether it has actually been measured. There is no way to tell whether the other party has measured their particle. No information has been transferred. You can't violate causality, even with quantum entanglement.
I very much doubt anyone has given a penniesworth of thought to the relative probabilities of people using LinuxSux/LinuxRocks etc. as usernames. A full list of trademarks would be many millions of items long, they're not going to go through them one by one and decide what might be detrimental, or work out which ones are owned by Microsoft; they've just blocked the whole list as a legal precaution.
A rather appropriate XKCD...
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 4, Funny
That's an nVidia driver config dialogue. I can't speak for the GP, but I have an ATi card; and when I tried to get dualscreen's working (about a year ago, with 6.06; I don't know whether anything's changed since then), it was xorg.conf all the way. Which was painful.
IIRC, there was an ATi specific set of instructions, and a generic Xinemara set. The ATi specific set just didn't work - the machine failed to load X and dumped me at a command line, no matter what variations I tried. After figuring out the basics of bash syntax (mostly by trial and error) and restoring the original xorg, I tried the Xinemara way. Whilst I eventually got this to work (after about 4 hours of trying various different variations in xorg), it was a kludge at best -- my right hand monitor is 1024x768 whilst my left one is 1152x864, but Xinemara apparently couldn't cope with that, and gave me a 'virtual' desktop spanning the two monitors 864 pixels high, which I could scroll the view of the right hand monitor up & down in. So a maximised window would either have its top or bottom cut off. Horrible solution, I don't know who thought that would be a good idea. I now just unplug my right hand monitor whenever I boot into Ubuntu.
Kernel updates are often feature updates and not security. That makes them optional. You've missed the point. Certainly, some, possible most, kernel updates are features only and not security. But some aren't. Occasionaly, there is a critical security updates. And it only takes one. What that one happens, you do need to reboot, and so does everyone else running Linux; and the bug in TFA would be triggered exactly the same as it was now. And so the situation if everyone was running Linux remains unchanged from what it is now: there are always going to be some situations where critical kernel security updates are released, and there is always going to be mass rebooting at that time, and any TFA-like bug for which that causes a problem will have a problem. "An OS that needs fewer reboots to fix [the] problem" would actually not fix the problem; it would merely delay the problem -- so maybe the Skype network would not have gone down until the next critical kernel security update, but it would still have eventually.
But. of course, as I said before, any network like Skype's is always going to have to handle mass network repropogation eventually; the fact that it couldn't was a bug in Skype's algorithm.
Again simply put many updates shouldn't require a reboot!
Windows wasn't designed correctly for high availability.
Forum users are not professional journalists, so criticizing them (or the forum generally) for not writing to professional standards or for not being "reliable sources" is nothing short of moronic. I beg your pardon? I agree with you that criticising the forum users or the forum for not being reliable sources would be, stupid. Fortunately, no-one has done so, least of all me; so I'm not sure why you're implying I have. My criticism was to the Slashdot editors for treating a forum as it was a reliable source, not to the forum users themselves. Another example: If someone is criticised for, say, discriminating against ethnic miorities; that is not the same thing as criticising the ethnic minorities themselves for being what they are...!
"If a poster repudiates users' personal experiences expressed on a forum on the basis that forum posts do not adhere to any kind of professional journalistic standard, then that poster is resorting to a technicality to avoid dealing with the actual subject matter..." Do me a favour and Google the phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data", will you?
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_speci al_relativity
Now, Maxwell's equations are not Galilean invariant.
Previously, it was therefore assumed that this was because they only worked in one frame: the rest frame of the luminiferous aether. But there is no luminiferous aether.
So either Maxwell's equations are wrong, or they work in all inertial frames. If the latter, then the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. Einstein postulated this, and derived a new set of non-Galilean transformations from this assumption.
The correctness of Einsteins postulate, and its consequences, have since been checked experimentally many, many times (some examples).
Now, I presume that by "remind me when they performed the experiment in the absence of a gravitational field", you're referring to the "aether drag" hypothesis that the aether is dragged along with mass. I would note that, if it's dragged by mass, then there's no such thing as 'the rest frame of the luminiferous aether' for Maxwell's equations to hold in, which means either Maxwell was wrong or, again, the equations hold in all inertial frames. The latter means special relativity, and I doubt you're suggesting the former. So the inertial drag hypothesis doesn't exactly solve anything. But that's irrelevent, anyway, since it's been experimentally disproven. Hamer tried the experiment with the huge lead blocks which you're aware of. So did a few other people. No drag detected. In a fit of desperation, someone tried to explain that by suggesting that it only worked for very large masses or those masses with large magnetic fields. No dice: J O Lodge noted that no other planets had that effect. Finally, someone realised that if aether drag were true, there wouldn't be any stellar aberration; and the hypothesis died a well-deserving death.
Regarding relativity and self-contradictory: you're right, I apologise; on re-reading you were referring to quantum mechanics -- but since the entire rest of your post was criticisms of relativity, I think you'll forgive my confusion.
Regarding your parenthetical last comment, "appear to be" is a bit ambiguous: If A and B are, provably, mutually exclusive; then yes, proving A does indeed necessarily disprove B.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove with your comment on ring laser gyroscopes. If you're suggesting that they're somehow incompatible with special relativity, I'm afraid you're going to have to explain further.
Not necessarily now, though; it's 2:53 in the morning and I'm going to bed. Good night!
I hope you will forgive any aspirations regarding your sanity I may have entertained during those five seconds.
...Are you seriously suggesting that absolute number of files is a meaningful unit of comparison? Or even if we accept that it is (which I don't), you're obviously implying that more files is worse, which I would take issue with: for example, I'd take Unix-style thousands of single-purpose config files over a Windows-style monolithic registry any day.
Interesting, but wrong. When your cousin wrote the arithmetic engine, he used the standard IEEE floating point library. That was rewritten from scratch for Windows XP to use an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. Apparently, "this was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016". (source)
You're right! OS standard widgets and UI libraries are for fools! A program isn't a proper program unless it implements everything from radio buttons to window management tools completely from scratch in a way guaranteed to utterly confuse anyone who hasn't spent 87 hours learning the its precise eccentricities! "Consistency" and "learnability" are for people who want usable software, not cool software!
Or, at least, it could if the BBC did use Windows media. Which... they don't.
They use Real audio.
(Which is a whole other argument -- personally, I hate realplayer, and real alternative has some serious bugs, but anyway...)
I don't know who modded you "insightful", but Do me a favour: take a course in special relativity. The very first thing you learn will be the experiment that disproves your position.
In the mid to late 19th century, most Physicists thought as you did: they imagined that light travelled in a medium, just like any other; and called that medium the "luminiferous aether". Thus, light travelled at a speed of c relative to this aether. Thus, an inertial frame of reference could be measured relative to the aether, all in a nice, objective way.
Sadly, two chaps called Michelson and Morley came and performed an experiment that showed that there was no luminiferous aether and that light did not travel in a medium. Then Einstein postulated that, maybe, just maybe, the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames. Then some clever people invented atomic clocks and verified relativity to lots and lots of significant figures, and lots of Physics teachers came along and did lots of experiments involving light bulbs and mirrors in hypothetical rockets moving at nice simple fractions of c and everyone was happy!
Until Quantum Mechanics came along, of course.
Errr....
Ahem.
Seriously though: take a course in special relativity rather than grandly proclaiming that Relativity Is Self-Contradictory from a position of complete ignorance.
In my experience, by the time you've added enough extensions to Firefox to bring it up to the same level of functionality that Opera comes with by default (mouse guestures, page zooming, spatial navigation, adblocking, keyboard shortcut customizability, etc. etc.) it takes about 10 minutes to start and nearly as long to do anything with. Plus the multitude of standards that Opera can read and Firefox can't. Like SVG. And HTML5. And DOM3. Not to mention, email! And, of course, Usenet. Oh, And IRC. And not forgetting Bittorrent. Etc, etc, etc.
I'm sorry, but saying that Firefox is capable of doing more than Opera is just... wrong.
Technically, the 546 to 281 is Javascript speed; the net page loading decrease is still very good (574ms against 859ms for Digg.com, for example), but not a factor of two. (source: http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/#realworl d)
Opera uses standard z-ordering. It's returning you to the page of links because that's the page you were looking at last, so it's at the top of the pile; nothin to do with left or right. Not returning to the tab page is easy enough: just quickly cycle through all the new tabs once you've opened them, and the links page will be pushed further down the stack.
You can get (/write) two kinds of extensions on Opera:
- UserJS, which are Javascript files you can get to apply to all pages viewed (think Greasemonkey); and
- Opera Widgets (think OS X 10.4 or Vista, except for Opera).
Very few pages won't render at all; even some of Google's online office apps which claim they don't support Opera actually work fine if you fake the browser identifier. The only thing that's iffy are pages which use embedded Windows media files; the pause/play etc. controls of which don't work except if you're in full-screen mode for some reason. You don't get many of those around, though; most people just use flash these days.
I've said this a few times now, but I'll repeat it: You Can't Transmit Information Across A Quantum Entanglement. (Usual caveats: to the best if our knowledge at the present time).
That's interesting, but mostly irrelevent. You can't transmit information across an entanglement. Faster-than-light communication is, to the best of our knowledge at the present time, still as impossible as it ever was.
No. You can't transfer information across an entanglement. Faster than light communication is as impossible as it ever was; and causality has not yet been knowingly violated.
> a small machine that measures that's designed to react when it an electron comes "de-entangled" That's your mistake. There's no possible way to detect that an electron has suddenly become "de-entangled".
The only thing the machine can measure is the electron's spin in either of two axis. Now, say you measure it in the left-right axis and its spin comes up as left. What do you know now? You do know that if the corresponding entangled particle has been measured in the left-right axis, it would have come up as right. But this does not tell you whether it has actually been measured. There is no way to tell whether the other party has measured their particle. No information has been transferred. You can't violate causality, even with quantum entanglement.
Not at all. It's a respected, very well typeset, slightly left-of-centre British broadsheet (technically Berliner).
I very much doubt anyone has given a penniesworth of thought to the relative probabilities of people using LinuxSux/LinuxRocks etc. as usernames. A full list of trademarks would be many millions of items long, they're not going to go through them one by one and decide what might be detrimental, or work out which ones are owned by Microsoft; they've just blocked the whole list as a legal precaution.
"Conspiracy Theories"
That's an nVidia driver config dialogue. I can't speak for the GP, but I have an ATi card; and when I tried to get dualscreen's working (about a year ago, with 6.06; I don't know whether anything's changed since then), it was xorg.conf all the way. Which was painful.
IIRC, there was an ATi specific set of instructions, and a generic Xinemara set. The ATi specific set just didn't work - the machine failed to load X and dumped me at a command line, no matter what variations I tried. After figuring out the basics of bash syntax (mostly by trial and error) and restoring the original xorg, I tried the Xinemara way. Whilst I eventually got this to work (after about 4 hours of trying various different variations in xorg), it was a kludge at best -- my right hand monitor is 1024x768 whilst my left one is 1152x864, but Xinemara apparently couldn't cope with that, and gave me a 'virtual' desktop spanning the two monitors 864 pixels high, which I could scroll the view of the right hand monitor up & down in. So a maximised window would either have its top or bottom cut off. Horrible solution, I don't know who thought that would be a good idea. I now just unplug my right hand monitor whenever I boot into Ubuntu.