Comment Re:Hmmm (Score 1) 259
Because if they're explaining to non-scientists, they might as well be explaining to babies. The foundational knowledge taught in schools simply isn't up to the standard needed.
Because if they're explaining to non-scientists, they might as well be explaining to babies. The foundational knowledge taught in schools simply isn't up to the standard needed.
If you can't make useful predictions within the parameters of your model, you can't test the ideas. Ergo, the shut up and calculate side does have a good argument.
Previously, in physics, there has been a three-way dance between theorists who develop the mathematical description, theorists who develop the mechanical description, and practical physicists who carry out observations both to test the theories and to apply them in practical terms. This dance kept everything moving.
This may or may not be the correct way to approach quantum mechanics. The rules are very different in that domain.
On the other hand, it's easy to spot the hostility between the groups and it's obvious that the anticipated new physics isn't getting found. New models are rare and are struggling. The dance hasn't completely stopped, but it is definitely in trouble.
But, of course, that might equally be down to the increased competition, the need to publish trivial results quickly rather than do anything profound, and the greatly reduced investment in blue sky science.
I'm going to suggest it's a mix of stuff. We need a lot more funding, a lot less aggro, and we either need to get the mechanical description partner back on their feet or we need to find an alternative to them if that sort of description just doesn't work in this arena.
But I think the science dance needs three sides. I think we're going to find that the calculate lobby can't advance a whole lot further on their own, and that they cannot produce a theory of everything without some idea of what an everything is.
If a manufacturer knows that a system has a specific defect that makes it dangerous to use in certain contexts, it is usually obliged by law to report those circumstances. The license agreement is not necessarily considered legally binding or protective where there is a case of wilful neglect. Deliberate actions are not treated the same as lack of awareness or even negligence. But even negligence may be treated unsympathetically by the courts, no matter what customers sign up to.
Given that this defect could have left exposed critical infrastructure, banks, and businesses whose work is in the national interest, one might even be able to argue a case that this gave succour to hostile powers.
The most probable outcome is nothing happening. Companies are risk-averse and Microsoft has expensive lawyers. But a class action suit for wilful endangerment isn't wholly impossible, and I could see the DOJ investigating whether laws were broken, but only after the election.
Hasn't it occurred to anyone that the The Foreign VPS Incentive Act will cause domestic VPS vendors to lose business?
Fiction:
12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell
Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual
The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.
There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.
So we need to look for alternative explanations.
The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)
Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.
The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.
The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.
The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.
When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.
Outside of the
/. crowd
Sometimes I wonder why this particular website bothers to cover issues related to that particular crowd. They're such an insignificant minority!
No 3rd either, so the king can even do that in time of peace!
Here's the lyrics to a fairly typical, average kinda tune:
We used to swim the same moonlight waters
Oceans away from the wakeful day
My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Scent of the sea before the waking of the world
Brings me to thee
Into the blue memory
My fall will be for you - My fall will be for you My love will be in you If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Into the blue memory
A siren from the deep came to me
Sang my name my longing
Still I write my songs about that dream of mine
Worth everything I may ever be
The Child will be born again
That siren carried him to me
First of them true loves
Singing on the shoulders of an angel
Without care for love ‘n loss
Bring me home or leave me be
My love in the dark heart of the night
I have lost the path before me
The one behind will lead me
Take me
Cure me
Kill me
Bring me home
Every way
Every day
Just another loop in the hangman’s noose
Take me, cure me, kill me, bring me home
Every way, every day
I keep on watching us sleep
Relive the old sin of Adam and Eve
Of you and me
Forgive the adoring beast
Redeem me into childhood
Show me myself without the shell
Like the advent of May
I’ll be there when you say
Time to never hold our love
-------
But there's next to no repetition in it.
In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.
Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.
And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.
Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.
The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.
The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.
Face scanning tech also depends on the data set being valid. The DOD has been compromised many times by airwall violations, security violations, improper screening, and extremely buggy software from Cisco and Microsoft.
All the enemy needs to do is write a rootkit that flips a couple of bits. The robot army now faces the other way and friends are identified as foe. I wouldn't put it past a group like the Lazarus hackers to be capable of such a stunt. We already know the enemy is capable of GPS jamming and GPS spoofing, because they've done so to hijack US drones, and that's another potential vulnerability.
US military robots are also known to have severe problems identifying that a person dressed as a tree is a person, not a tree. A skillful enemy could walk through US robot army lines without impediment, unless the US robots shoot indiscriminately. But if the US robots are genocidal, mutually assured destruction becomes a viable tactic. You can't be more than dead, after all.
And if the US includes a death switch, given that US defence contractors don't always wipe hard drives and the military don't psychologically screen very well (Manning was known to be seriously mentally unstable prior to deployment, for example), there's absolutely no guarantee the enemy won't simply learn it and spoof it.
I just don't see how the US think this could possibly work.
Only God can make random selections.
