StringJunky

The harsh rules of life from Man's early history haven't gone away, just transformed into new goals and priorities which we all compete for. The other problem, increasingly, there's becoming too many fish in the pond, so competition will only increase into the future.

As far as I'm concerned, misspelling is not a problem unless it obscures the intent and meaning. Although I double check I don't get too hung up if it's clear what I'm trying to say, when I find more errors after. I note that nearly everybody has a typo or misspell somewhere in longish posts.... as alluded earlier, we must be mindful of Skitt's Law.

Bit by bit, over the last few years, the more it makes sense. The hardest thing has been to realise that many fundaental things in the universe are not material. Actually, I think now, it's unrealistic to expect to equate macro objects with fundamental ones. The analogy I came up with, in the difficulty of researching these things, Is imagining an opaque box with hand holes and then having to describe the properties of an object that's inside by tactile means alone. You can describe as data, no more and no less, what the touch signals tell you. Everything else is storytelling what you make from it... that's your model.

Perhaps you'll be happier - along with many others, probably - when scientists have a working model, with a quantum description, where phenomena are mediated by virtual particles, like gravitons.

Gravitational waves are the modulation of time and distance. Forget about material properties. Is electric charge material or magnetism? You don't have any problem with photons being made of them do you. Why can't modulated gravity be 'made' of time and space, which comprise spacetime? When scientists measure it, those parameters are what's affected.

From the BBC site:

I'm heading in that direction. As much as I'm fed up with the difficulties, we can't turn the clock back and pretend we can be totally autonomous again.

Immigration control, sovereignty on domestic finances, law etc. These are some of the things that will be argued, as I'm sure you know.

The UK will be deciding, via referendum, whether to remain an integral part of the European community or to go it alone. What will be the pros and cons of either path? I've always had an 'island' mindset but, in the last few years, have come realise that the UK is probably one of the top four countries that carry the most international weight in the democratic world. I now don't think it would be responsible for us to withdraw back into our collectively island self. The world is, inexorably, becoming a global village and we would be in grave error to ignore this integration.

I think Einstein changed his mind twice about them existing after his theory predicted them.

It's speculation until you can measure it. Consider that, for 100 years gravitational waves didn't exist until they were actually measured. It's the only wave to separate fact from figments of our imagination.

AFAIU if one can't measure it it's not science. I think what something is ontologically for a scientist is the equations and formulae derived from what they measure.

Mass causes spacetime to curve, so if there is no mass, spacetime (which is a geometric description of space) would be described as flat.

There's another, not insignificant, pressure against preserving privacy that doesn't affect Apple so much, since it derives the majority of its revenue from device sales. With increasing use of end-to end encryption, it means that harvesting valuable personal data for marketing purposes become more and more inaccessible to commercial companies that rely on that utilising that data for revenue. What do SFN members think of this? If the mods think this is too much of a diversion I'll make a new thread? I wouldn't want to use that lock with a hangover. You might find this article on deducing password formation interesting.

What things 'are' is of no consequence in science. All that matters is that those things have measurable parameters. What they were looking for WRT gravitational waves is changes in distance-with-time between the two arms at each of the two LIGO observatories.

You aren't thinking of the extra distance the light signal travels through cables, time delays via switching and data processing etc as electrons. They travel at some fraction of the the speed of light. Add all those together and there's the reason for it being "slow".

I think Apple have probably got it as secure as possible by not having backdoors and limited passcode tries before lockout/data destruction. I've read that nuclear warheads are protected this way against unauthorised access. If that's the state-of-the-art then that's what is needed to protect government and civilian data. Any system that allows unlimited tries is fundamentally weak and will eventually be bypassed.

Interesting post, CharonY, never thought of it like that. I think you would agree, that, even though the end date of a person's life doesn't change, the earlier they know the more time they have to make the most of the the time they have left.

Yes, it's outrageous the difference in drugs on both sides of the pond. Hep C treatment Harvoni costs, on average in bulk, $1125/pill in the US against $641/pill in the UK; they are made in the US. They cost a couple of dollars each to make. Both sides are getting taken to the cleaners but the US population are getting screwed for more. For a new treatment like this, with many patients needing it, the UK NHS budgets, I think, about $35 000 for a year's treatment without too many qualms; $277/pill in this scenario at 90 days treatment length. For the UK the price is over twice the preferred price and four times if the NHS had to pay US prices.

There's no plausible science on which to speculate a mechanism for telepathy or TK and there's no verified scientific investigations of those phenomena to even start speculating a mechanism... both possible speculatory avenues are closed. There's nowhere to start meaningfully, unless, one just wants to make stuff up.

I think I read the the movement on the 'arms' was some fraction of the size of a proton.

Considering how far GCHQ UK and NSA US are up each others arseholes, one can take it for granted if the NSA gets what it wants the UK services will align themselves to that. Those two are more or less one, from where I'm standing. I hope Apple is looking for real scrap.

Kept getting a 404 on your link. This one works for me....googled it. Can't see where the difference is in the urls. http://www.macworld.com/article/3035747/security/proper-device-management-could-have-prevented-the-whole-fbi-apple-fight.html That puts a different angle on things. It looks like, to me, that the FBI thought they had the ideal test case with maximum impact that would enable them to pursue more intrusive powers for government agencies but they have, instead, made themselves look increasingly incompetent. The best thing they they can do is stop digging.

When you think about it, it's a no-brainer that it will hurt a company financially if they depend on privacy to help their bottom line. That doesn't mean that their customers don't matter, as a matter of principle. They are a device-driven company, so if their devices aren't secure they lose the vast majority of their revenue streams through loss of customer confidence. Also, Apple products are expensive, partly because they don't subsidise their prices by selling customer info to third parties for marketing purposes. Pragmatically, with that in mind, my support is firmly behind Apple.

What's that got to do with this topic? Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs.