Not really. I'm not defending Google here, but you seem to be talking about an essay not an algorithm. If you have algorithms that are similar enough, they do not even need to be "structured the same way" to produce the same output(errors included). Anybody who has been to an ACM contest will tell you this.
As such this story is useless. The internet needs no more speculation as it is, it's hard enough arguing what is wrong or right when concrete evidence is available. Our flamewars should be founded on solid ground.
Yes, but infra-red sensors (which are one kind of night vision devices) typical use a tight range of wavelengths and thus could possibly be fooled or at least made inefficient. I do not know the extent of usage by the military in combat, but they tend to be useful in situations where you want to know if somebody is inside a room..etc before entering, because IR can penetrate thin barriers (doors..etc). As for air/space surveilance of ground activity, IR is far more important than light amplification in detecting enemy forces/missile silos from above. This is because equipment gives off heat even if it is dark/concealed.
I have not RTFA and do not know what "one wavelength" means.
If you visited their website using IE then yes (and insert a lot of jeering here for using IE) be very concerned. Firefox is immune because it's the IE rendering engine that is exploited.
That said, your file explorer on windows also uses the said engine, so any files you download are a threat as soon as you browse to their location. If you have put these files somewhere you know of, try using the windows shell to move them into a directory you don't like to go to very often. Then wait until spyware/anti-virus removers get updated and you are "safe".
95% of the conflicts between human beings - supposedly civilised ones - would not exist if not for the overly inflated ego of the participants. There is no issue here. Either the usage of the code was wrong or right according to strict licensing definitions. Since it appears everybody agreed to the fact it was wrong, the next step is clear. Why the fuss, and the emotions, and the name calling? Mistakes happen.. just fix them and move on.
What other nation of Muslims has in its Constitution that Islam must be kept out of the government? They owe that constitution to the man.
First, you seem to be under the impression that Muslims in general have accepted this seperation-of-state-and-faith as much as the Christians in Europe. The hard fact is that in every event that even REMOTELY resembles free elections, religious groups truimph (read Egypt, Palestine). The Muslim culture evolves around faith in many aspects, and as someone who has lived in the ME for a while I tell you it is not easy to pretend the politics is devoid of religion. Funnily enough, Egyptian constitutions have recently been amended to try and deny this, among other things. The regime there is one of the most oppressive and corrupt in the region, and the amendments are not being done out of love for "secular freedom".
As for Attaturk, he was a very serious secularist. Turks are taugh to rever him, and Turks are some of the most hot-blooded patriots you'll ever meet, but the rest of the Muslim world despises him from what I've seen. What you see as good for these people is not what they see as good for themselves. G.W has learned that pretty well now.
I agree, the sysadmin's response seems very reasonable, and it is quite hard to conceive of any other form of action given that a warrant was already being sought, and the threat to the university systems was immediate.
The articles give a pretty vague picture of what happened though, because they say the passowrds to the.200 IP were the same as the ones to the 117 one, which Savoy had obtained earlier. My question is: why did Savoy wait and take a defensive stance if he had already cracked the machine before?.
Also, would you care to give us some insider geek-info on the counter hacks? It is always amusing to see this sort of thing, with a supposed "hacker" having ssh wide open with easily an guessable pass. Or was this more involved? Just curious.
It is not as simple as you think, even though every single one of your examples happens to be universally valid and not related to what I am about to say:
Using materialism/utilitarianism to judge what "backwards" means in terms of moral code is nonsense. We in the West have become habituated to certain phenomenae that were simply unthinkable to us before, and which, after years of religion losing its meaning, are perfectly acceptable to us now. I have Eastern-European friends who have lived in the middle east for a while as I have, and some of them are still not able to settle back home. They just can't come to grips with the gothic, sex - centered culture certain places have developed. Fathers watch T.V downstairs while their daughters get nailed by 14 year old boyfriends in the room directly above. People engage in sexual acts in public. Women are advertised/sold in glass windows, subsidized by government...
I am of the opinion that most of morality is relative/nurture-based, although some dogmatic moral systems (notably monotheist ones) have extremely high correlations with evolved psychological response. Take the marriage thing, for instance: it's not by accident that relationships between "settled" couples are heavily encouraged in so many cultures whereas wild sex is frowned upon to the degree of criminalization - it makes sense that the couples who are formally "together" can provide and care for their offspring better than participants in a one-night-stand, who might jeapordize the well being of the larger familial group as a whole. Just because we have developed a tolerance for this activity does not mean the people who despise it are "ass-backward", from *whatever* point of view you're coming from. In other words, we have become habituated to things that are instinctive as well as required by religious doctrine, all in the name of "fun", and our advanced "humanism" has done the opposite by creating issues that were never before problematic (PETA lives off this).
Anyway I again stress that this has nothing to do with the blatant hypocrisy that you talked about. I agree with you. The indifference to child prostitution..etc has nothing to do with nature (which we should understand) and nurture (which we should at least respect).
The guys at PETA are probably having a RAGING party right now, complete with chimpanzee outfits. Human rights for cows too! And seals! Baby seals!
Human rights for chimps, eh. How about human responsibilities? It would be rather naive to elevate chimps to our level then look the other way when, say, they tear apart smaller monkeys for food as they routinely do. We should be humane to animals, yes, and there is an overlap between that "humaneness" and the rights we ascribe to humans, but that does not mean they are the same thing. Not many chimpanzees get tortured compared to human beings, or subjected to mass rape, or blown up in markets, or have the living daylights bombed out of them while they sleep in their habitats. It's looks like some people have their priorities slightly screwed up.
Besides, we still haven't answered the question of whether PETA people should have human rights. The consensus is on the negative from what I'm told.
'..the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' This may very well work for the French, but I don't know of anyone else who would give in to a computer and follow orders.
Seriously. Even if you ARE modded down, it doesn't make you some kind of martyr. Hmm? I always admired posts that get modded down while speaking for some noble cause. They go straight to heaven in my opinion. Or they get reincarnated as a... oh wait.
Those millions with you in the subway are not there because of their unquestionable love for nature and the preservation of widlife. They probably even have SUVs parked at home with "global warming rules!!" bumper stickers on them. It's just this little thing called parking, and this other small issue of commuting for hours over a distance normally achievable in 15min. Have you ever been to say, Georgetown , D.C? I digress.
I personally like to keep a car for pleasurable driving in decent distances, while the transportation issue to and from work is generally resolved with public transportation. But then I live near D.C, so that is an option. And I have no problem with being in an economic car as long as the car isn't painful to look at, and is made with quality in mind. Some people however like to be in a 300 HP beast, for the same reason that six-horse carriages were a grand thing before. It's the human ego, and yes, it is terrible.
Yes, my mental parser BSODed on that as well. I even tried to put in a period after "Tuesday", but it is still rubbish. Ya know, it wouldn't harm the editors if they just READ the summary, casually even, and post it if they manage to NOT die in agony. By God it is not too much to ask!
Funnily enough, the April Fools stories were eerily free of error. I wonder if they were trying to say something.
Hate to break it to you pal, but April 1 was a Sunday this year. Maybe in Australia , where I deduce you live, they suckered you guys on the calendar dates? That would be something, I say.
The best thing about this very profesionally done April fools joke is that it's almost believable. Can advertising as described make for a viable business model? Why not? In any case kudos to the G people for a job well done: the photos of people smiling as they receive their packages had me spilling tea over my keyboard, almost.
1. This is the reverse of the infinite/inifitismal - the infinite is defined but undetermined, not the other way round. You can define an infinite set, but you will never be able to "determine" all it's elements. It is rather dangerous playing with infinity also, because it can be argued that the lack of determinism is axiomatic i.e the definition is the lack of determination. Scary stuff, and not really relevant.
2. Yeah, I thought about the circular definition issue for a while. The problem is that if you disregard the intertial notions (i.e mass as related to the kinematic response of a "stationary" body to applied "force", in the precise direction of the application force) then what do you have left? What is mass? It is incorrect, in my perhaps uninformed opinion, to say mass cannot be defined, because we consistently measure mass (i.e assign values to massive objects) and it makes no sense to measure what we do not comprehend. This is not a matter of anthromorphism, but simple science. We need to know what mass means.
If mass can only be determined, then how do you determine it?
Investors should take a break on April 1st, and it's Sunday anyway. All effects to the stock of a company, if any, should be short lived as "sly" investors would rush back upon realisation of the joke hoping to benefit from the dip in price. Result is that the price would shoot back up, maybe even landing a coupla feet further than it was in the first place. Clowns.
I disagree. Momentum can be defined irrespective of mass. Momentum is simply the generalized velocity derivative of the Lagrangian, or the generator group of the group of all possible motions (remember that photons have momentum but no mass) Ah, and therein the confusion lies. This is a great chat by the way, the issue has been debated formally in journals before. I agree perfectly with what you've said in both posts, it's just that classicaly the concepts of momentum and mass have been tied together, and that is why people use terms like "relativistic mass" to account for the variation in the time component of the four vector, which is very different from the "actual" or "rest" mass. Books still have F = d(mv)/dt, even though the m here is very different from mass in classical concepts. Which brings us to the other issue of:
Resistance to an accelerating force"??? What does that even mean? Alright, you got me there:) Again, classical issues. It used to be that the percieved acceleration of a body in response to "force" was proportional to the invariant property of "mass". Whereas today we define (real, rest, invariant)mass only through energy equivalence, the "percieved resistance" to motion is still used with the aforementioned and equally confusing "percieved mass". As you pointed out, neither is necessary, we don't need all this nonsense with new formalisms!
About Einstein's quote, he wasn't wrong methinks. He just stated it a little roughly, adding the "percieved" or relativistic stuff to the intrinsic, and we must remember this was written long before the current formulation of momentum..etc was made. He is quoted elsewhere shying away from the description of (relativistic mass" (i.e M = m/(1-beta) ) by one of the guys who responded to my OP. Also, concerning QM Einstein was not alone in his skepticism. In fact, only Bohr digested the stuff with a good stomach. Everybody else, including Hiesenberg (who caused the whole commotion in the first place) did not believe the "uncertainty" in a realistic sense when he got older. Everybody was trying to find ways to understand this probablistic reality that was proposed, and until today nobody has managed a satisfactory philosophical interpretation. Read Max Born's Nobel prize lecture. That guy had an amazingly mature understanding of things, and the more I study (I am not a Prof yet either) the more I see what he was trying to portray.
actually, it's better stated as E^2=p^2c^2+m^2c^4 where m is the so called "rest mass" Yes, now may I ask what the "p" in that equation represents? It is (Lorentz factored)momentum, which incorporates the concept of relativism in mass. The word relativistic mass is not merely a simplification of the equation by substitution - it is a real effect of energy content on the inertial mass of the body (it's resistance to an accelerating force). When bodies gain energy (through motion or otherwise) they also gain "mass" by a factor of L/c^2, and the same for energy loss. Hence when bodies are travelling with a certain velocity relative to a frame, they are more difficult to accelerate in that particular direction than the same bodies at rest in the frame, because "p" in your equation above is GREATER than m*v for the same body of mass m at rest. And when they reach speed c, they become impossible to accelerate.
You are correct in that there is in fact a difference between mass m that is intrinsic to the structure of the body, and the percieved mass M which differs due to changes in space-time itself.
Finally, to quote Einstein: "Under this theory mass is not an unalterable magnitude, but a magnitude dependent on (and, indeed, identical with) the amount of energy."
You are trying to dictate a utopia/paradise as being the only situation where the monotheist God would be plausible, and in doing so have ignored pretty much the entirety of monotheist theology concerning purpose. There are far more convincing arguments on the atheist side. This one - the question of why the human universe isn't perfect - will be dismissed by the monotheists via the concept that it is not meant to be. An everlasting afterlife provides overwhelming justice for the issues that trouble you so much.
And it is the afterlife, in fact, that poses the real problem.
Read the notes you linked to carefully (they are some of the best on the web). Mass/inertia is no longer invariant when a body is moving with respect to a frame. This is why the term "relativistic" mass is used. Invariant mass is the so called "rest" mass which results from the mass being stationary with respect to a frame of reference, and this is the typical, implicit nomenclature for non-relativist applications. Because we need to consider the relative mass in moving systems, F=ma (which is just m*dv/dt)must be written as F=dp/dt, where the change in mass is accounted for with respect to velocity.
Indeed, but Newton did not realise that mass varied with the energy content of a body, and therefore his version of the equation could simply be written as F = m dv/dt. The m is factored out because it is constant. When we consider what is called relativistic mass (which depends on a velocity relative to a particular system), it becomes necessary to include the m inside the differential. Newton would have never thought of that, because mass was an absolute and invariant concept to him. Like anything dealing with time, the equations needed to be re-written to take into account the relativity of "time".
Speed of Light Breaks it Already, Doesn't It? Yes, many of us have pointed this out, but apparently the man is proposing that relativistic form of the equation be revisited, which is a whole-nuther story. We're just nitpicking to be frank with you;)
If he finds this it will be interesting not because of NSL concerns but because it would be an observation of the finite propagation speed of gravity. I haven't done enough gravity to touch on advanced things like G waves, so I don't follow you. What I do know, as I posted somewhere below, is that cornerstone relationships like E=mc2 would very much go to hell, and quantum electrodynamics would have to be written from scratch. Relativity still holds as a mathematical/logical principle, but some fundamental axioms from which relativistic effects derive current relations will need to be modified, which is terrifying. I think he is wrong, but I wish him luck.
an interesting question to ask would be: even if the said forces "cancel out" in a particular coordinate plane somewhere on earth, forces acting in directions other than those considered(e.g gravitational curvature) would interfere with his oh-so-delicate measurements, no? Indeed, it would seem a NASA investigation during a space-mission would be even better, but I think it would be hard to convince NASA to get it's astronauts to do a 10-min off-course acceleration with a shuttle in some pointless direction, all for the love of science. Oh well.
Newton's law underwent some serious revisiting in 1905 when a chap called Einstein realised that masses are not constant/absolute but in fact relative, and this is why the modern relativistic notation differs quite a bit from the original F=ma. Now if this new guy is not joking (Russian timezones, April 1st, bit early..etc) then not only is our understanding of momentum going to be radically different, but in fact E=mc2 might have to be revisited as well (must read part 10 of this historical paper by Einstein to understand). That happens to be a very ground breaking idea if it were true, and would change lots of things we supposedly know about fundamental physics.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. I'm not defending Google here, but you seem to be talking about an essay not an algorithm. If you have algorithms that are similar enough, they do not even need to be "structured the same way" to produce the same output(errors included). Anybody who has been to an ACM contest will tell you this.
As such this story is useless. The internet needs no more speculation as it is, it's hard enough arguing what is wrong or right when concrete evidence is available. Our flamewars should be founded on solid ground.
Yes, but infra-red sensors (which are one kind of night vision devices) typical use a tight range of wavelengths and thus could possibly be fooled or at least made inefficient. I do not know the extent of usage by the military in combat, but they tend to be useful in situations where you want to know if somebody is inside a room..etc before entering, because IR can penetrate thin barriers (doors..etc). As for air/space surveilance of ground activity, IR is far more important than light amplification in detecting enemy forces/missile silos from above. This is because equipment gives off heat even if it is dark/concealed.
I have not RTFA and do not know what "one wavelength" means.
If you visited their website using IE then yes (and insert a lot of jeering here for using IE) be very concerned. Firefox is immune because it's the IE rendering engine that is exploited.
That said, your file explorer on windows also uses the said engine, so any files you download are a threat as soon as you browse to their location. If you have put these files somewhere you know of, try using the windows shell to move them into a directory you don't like to go to very often. Then wait until spyware/anti-virus removers get updated and you are "safe".
95% of the conflicts between human beings - supposedly civilised ones - would not exist if not for the overly inflated ego of the participants. There is no issue here. Either the usage of the code was wrong or right according to strict licensing definitions. Since it appears everybody agreed to the fact it was wrong, the next step is clear. Why the fuss, and the emotions, and the name calling? Mistakes happen.. just fix them and move on.
Also, please see icon to the right of your summary for clarification.
What other nation of Muslims has in its Constitution that Islam must be kept out of the government? They owe that constitution to the man.
First, you seem to be under the impression that Muslims in general have accepted this seperation-of-state-and-faith as much as the Christians in Europe. The hard fact is that in every event that even REMOTELY resembles free elections, religious groups truimph (read Egypt, Palestine). The Muslim culture evolves around faith in many aspects, and as someone who has lived in the ME for a while I tell you it is not easy to pretend the politics is devoid of religion. Funnily enough, Egyptian constitutions have recently been amended to try and deny this, among other things. The regime there is one of the most oppressive and corrupt in the region, and the amendments are not being done out of love for "secular freedom".
As for Attaturk, he was a very serious secularist. Turks are taugh to rever him, and Turks are some of the most hot-blooded patriots you'll ever meet, but the rest of the Muslim world despises him from what I've seen. What you see as good for these people is not what they see as good for themselves. G.W has learned that pretty well now.
I agree, the sysadmin's response seems very reasonable, and it is quite hard to conceive of any other form of action given that a warrant was already being sought, and the threat to the university systems was immediate.
.200 IP were the same as the ones to the 117 one, which Savoy had obtained earlier. My question is: why did Savoy wait and take a defensive stance if he had already cracked the machine before?.
The articles give a pretty vague picture of what happened though, because they say the passowrds to the
Also, would you care to give us some insider geek-info on the counter hacks? It is always amusing to see this sort of thing, with a supposed "hacker" having ssh wide open with easily an guessable pass. Or was this more involved? Just curious.
It is not as simple as you think, even though every single one of your examples happens to be universally valid and not related to what I am about to say:
Using materialism/utilitarianism to judge what "backwards" means in terms of moral code is nonsense. We in the West have become habituated to certain phenomenae that were simply unthinkable to us before, and which, after years of religion losing its meaning, are perfectly acceptable to us now. I have Eastern-European friends who have lived in the middle east for a while as I have, and some of them are still not able to settle back home. They just can't come to grips with the gothic, sex - centered culture certain places have developed. Fathers watch T.V downstairs while their daughters get nailed by 14 year old boyfriends in the room directly above. People engage in sexual acts in public. Women are advertised/sold in glass windows, subsidized by government...
I am of the opinion that most of morality is relative/nurture-based, although some dogmatic moral systems (notably monotheist ones) have extremely high correlations with evolved psychological response. Take the marriage thing, for instance: it's not by accident that relationships between "settled" couples are heavily encouraged in so many cultures whereas wild sex is frowned upon to the degree of criminalization - it makes sense that the couples who are formally "together" can provide and care for their offspring better than participants in a one-night-stand, who might jeapordize the well being of the larger familial group as a whole. Just because we have developed a tolerance for this activity does not mean the people who despise it are "ass-backward", from *whatever* point of view you're coming from. In other words, we have become habituated to things that are instinctive as well as required by religious doctrine, all in the name of "fun", and our advanced "humanism" has done the opposite by creating issues that were never before problematic (PETA lives off this).
Anyway I again stress that this has nothing to do with the blatant hypocrisy that you talked about. I agree with you. The indifference to child prostitution..etc has nothing to do with nature (which we should understand) and nurture (which we should at least respect).
The guys at PETA are probably having a RAGING party right now, complete with chimpanzee outfits. Human rights for cows too! And seals! Baby seals!
Human rights for chimps, eh. How about human responsibilities? It would be rather naive to elevate chimps to our level then look the other way when, say, they tear apart smaller monkeys for food as they routinely do. We should be humane to animals, yes, and there is an overlap between that "humaneness" and the rights we ascribe to humans, but that does not mean they are the same thing. Not many chimpanzees get tortured compared to human beings, or subjected to mass rape, or blown up in markets, or have the living daylights bombed out of them while they sleep in their habitats. It's looks like some people have their priorities slightly screwed up.
Besides, we still haven't answered the question of whether PETA people should have human rights. The consensus is on the negative from what I'm told.
Sorry, leaving now.. no need to throw things.
Those millions with you in the subway are not there because of their unquestionable love for nature and the preservation of widlife. They probably even have SUVs parked at home with "global warming rules!!" bumper stickers on them. It's just this little thing called parking, and this other small issue of commuting for hours over a distance normally achievable in 15min. Have you ever been to say, Georgetown , D.C? I digress.
I personally like to keep a car for pleasurable driving in decent distances, while the transportation issue to and from work is generally resolved with public transportation. But then I live near D.C, so that is an option. And I have no problem with being in an economic car as long as the car isn't painful to look at, and is made with quality in mind. Some people however like to be in a 300 HP beast, for the same reason that six-horse carriages were a grand thing before. It's the human ego, and yes, it is terrible.
Yes, my mental parser BSODed on that as well. I even tried to put in a period after "Tuesday", but it is still rubbish. Ya know, it wouldn't harm the editors if they just READ the summary, casually even, and post it if they manage to NOT die in agony. By God it is not too much to ask!
Funnily enough, the April Fools stories were eerily free of error. I wonder if they were trying to say something.
Hate to break it to you pal, but April 1 was a Sunday this year. Maybe in Australia , where I deduce you live, they suckered you guys on the calendar dates? That would be something, I say.
The best thing about this very profesionally done April fools joke is that it's almost believable. Can advertising as described make for a viable business model? Why not? In any case kudos to the G people for a job well done: the photos of people smiling as they receive their packages had me spilling tea over my keyboard, almost.
1. This is the reverse of the infinite/inifitismal - the infinite is defined but undetermined, not the other way round. You can define an infinite set, but you will never be able to "determine" all it's elements. It is rather dangerous playing with infinity also, because it can be argued that the lack of determinism is axiomatic i.e the definition is the lack of determination. Scary stuff, and not really relevant.
2. Yeah, I thought about the circular definition issue for a while. The problem is that if you disregard the intertial notions (i.e mass as related to the kinematic response of a "stationary" body to applied "force", in the precise direction of the application force) then what do you have left? What is mass? It is incorrect, in my perhaps uninformed opinion, to say mass cannot be defined, because we consistently measure mass (i.e assign values to massive objects) and it makes no sense to measure what we do not comprehend. This is not a matter of anthromorphism, but simple science. We need to know what mass means.
If mass can only be determined, then how do you determine it?
Investors should take a break on April 1st, and it's Sunday anyway. All effects to the stock of a company, if any, should be short lived as "sly" investors would rush back upon realisation of the joke hoping to benefit from the dip in price. Result is that the price would shoot back up, maybe even landing a coupla feet further than it was in the first place. Clowns.
About Einstein's quote, he wasn't wrong methinks. He just stated it a little roughly, adding the "percieved" or relativistic stuff to the intrinsic, and we must remember this was written long before the current formulation of momentum..etc was made. He is quoted elsewhere shying away from the description of (relativistic mass" (i.e M = m/(1-beta) ) by one of the guys who responded to my OP. Also, concerning QM Einstein was not alone in his skepticism. In fact, only Bohr digested the stuff with a good stomach. Everybody else, including Hiesenberg (who caused the whole commotion in the first place) did not believe the "uncertainty" in a realistic sense when he got older. Everybody was trying to find ways to understand this probablistic reality that was proposed, and until today nobody has managed a satisfactory philosophical interpretation. Read Max Born's Nobel prize lecture. That guy had an amazingly mature understanding of things, and the more I study (I am not a Prof yet either) the more I see what he was trying to portray.
You are correct in that there is in fact a difference between mass m that is intrinsic to the structure of the body, and the percieved mass M which differs due to changes in space-time itself.
Finally, to quote Einstein:
"Under this theory mass is not an unalterable magnitude, but a magnitude dependent on (and, indeed, identical with) the amount of energy."
You are trying to dictate a utopia/paradise as being the only situation where the monotheist God would be plausible, and in doing so have ignored pretty much the entirety of monotheist theology concerning purpose. There are far more convincing arguments on the atheist side. This one - the question of why the human universe isn't perfect - will be dismissed by the monotheists via the concept that it is not meant to be. An everlasting afterlife provides overwhelming justice for the issues that trouble you so much.
And it is the afterlife, in fact, that poses the real problem.
Read the notes you linked to carefully (they are some of the best on the web). Mass/inertia is no longer invariant when a body is moving with respect to a frame. This is why the term "relativistic" mass is used. Invariant mass is the so called "rest" mass which results from the mass being stationary with respect to a frame of reference, and this is the typical, implicit nomenclature for non-relativist applications. Because we need to consider the relative mass in moving systems, F=ma (which is just m*dv/dt)must be written as F=dp/dt, where the change in mass is accounted for with respect to velocity.
Indeed, but Newton did not realise that mass varied with the energy content of a body, and therefore his version of the equation could simply be written as F = m dv/dt. The m is factored out because it is constant. When we consider what is called relativistic mass (which depends on a velocity relative to a particular system), it becomes necessary to include the m inside the differential. Newton would have never thought of that, because mass was an absolute and invariant concept to him. Like anything dealing with time, the equations needed to be re-written to take into account the relativity of "time".
an interesting question to ask would be: even if the said forces "cancel out" in a particular coordinate plane somewhere on earth, forces acting in directions other than those considered(e.g gravitational curvature) would interfere with his oh-so-delicate measurements, no? Indeed, it would seem a NASA investigation during a space-mission would be even better, but I think it would be hard to convince NASA to get it's astronauts to do a 10-min off-course acceleration with a shuttle in some pointless direction, all for the love of science. Oh well.
Newton's law underwent some serious revisiting in 1905 when a chap called Einstein realised that masses are not constant/absolute but in fact relative, and this is why the modern relativistic notation differs quite a bit from the original F=ma. Now if this new guy is not joking (Russian timezones, April 1st, bit early..etc) then not only is our understanding of momentum going to be radically different, but in fact E=mc2 might have to be revisited as well (must read part 10 of this historical paper by Einstein to understand). That happens to be a very ground breaking idea if it were true, and would change lots of things we supposedly know about fundamental physics.