swansont

One can possibly look at recent actions to assess how it would be received. “Sandwich guy” was acquitted. Several malicious prosecution attempts have been no-billed. Ethics are one issue but juries might find it justifiable. If the new signage on the Kennedy center came down via some vigilante tactics, they might not be able to prosecute

Light passing through light does nothing (photons at very high energy can scatter off of each other, but it’s rare)

Oil sitting in the oil pan isn’t doing the job it’s meant to do - that’s just the reservoir. When it’s running, the oil is actually lubricating parts.

We’re not denying its presence, but we can opt not to use it in certain situations, like where it’s unreliable or unethical. I don’t see how that would comply with the rules. We want the thoughts of people. If we have questions or critiques we want the person whose idea it is to engage with us

Seems to me this has happened before. They put down a new layer with the blackout, which is how it works with physical documents but not digital ones. There was also some conjecture that some of it was done on purpose by agents who weren’t keen on participating in the coverup.

Disappointing to be kicked off because of something you’d expect the host to be protecting against. Thanks for getting us back online.

Sure, blame it on others, rather than considering the possibility that you aren’t being clear or that what you feel is subjective opinion and not some objective truth.

You should also see lots of moderator notes telling them it’s against the rules, if it was used to make content, and lots of such posts in the trash. Read the rules. 2.13, in particular

GPS time is UTC(USNO) and is used a lot of places, so while the mandate is for DoD, it leaks into a lot of places. There’s a memorandum of understanding that NIST and USNO time agree to some level (IIRC it’s under 100 ns but usually are within 10 ns or so) and they both steer to agree with the international standard, BIPM.

It never seems to, but it plays on the narrative that government is incompetent, and somehow private enterprise is incredibly efficient. One thing the escapades of DOGE in the US showed was that this is far from true, even though you can cherry-pick individual instances of problems. They imply that these are typical rather than being outliers. As Phi’s example showed, sometimes the “efficiency” is cutting preventative maintenance or similar necessary tasks, which initially shows up as savings but always ends up costing more. Services are cut, costs go up.

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/power-outage-boulder-atomic-clock-nist/ “As a result of that lapse, NIST UTC drifted by about 4 microseconds” Usually their error with respect to the BIPM is measured in nanoseconds. If GPS had this error, positioning uncertainty would be more than a kilometer. Before I retired, there was a meeting with NIST folks about them looking at USNO’s power backup systems, because they wanted to upgrade. Looks like that didn’t happen, but the problem is finding the money. Beancounters don’t always appreciate the importance, and everybody is making their case, so someone decides what the priorities are. This would be a very unsatisfying “We told you so.” The blame game might get ugly.

The fact that it would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics is independent of the actual mechanism. It’s not an issue of being dismissive when there’s no reason to accept the premise that it could work. But I recall there being discussion of the mechanism, which you insisted would work, and were dismissive of any objections.

Privatization is just a dodge to funnel money to people, usually friends of the advocates of the proposal. I’d be interested to find any examples where privatization has resulted in better service and lower (or even steady) costs. This is apparently the first domino NIST faced that cascaded to the failure of their timescale.

Wowsers. https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-service/c/o0dDDcr1a8I “In short, the atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage. One impact is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference. At time of writing the Boulder servers are still available due a standby power generator, but I will attempt to disable them to avoid disseminating incorrect time.” … “we now have strong evidence one of the crucial generators has failed. In the downstream path is the primary signal distribution chain, including to the Boulder Internet Time Service” (I’ve met Jeff Sherman, who indeed works at NIST)

I was thinking about that. I think there’s a distinction between “good/bad idea” rules that nature dictates and the rules that we impose on each other.

I was thinking similar thoughts. OTOH, mad respect to someone living naked and with no tools, yet able to build a computer and network connection without interacting with any people.

It will be moved to the trash, as such content is against the rules.

When you post someone else’s material we expect a link to it, at the very least. The overarching problem with these arguments is that they are meaningless. You can e.g. pick any angle range and make a similar calculation. They are equally likely, statistically speaking. You were born on a particular day. There’s only a 1/366 chance of that, but unless you’re predicting it ahead of time, so what? The “close to the ecliptic” observation says it came from the thick disk region of the galaxy, nothing more. The probability arguments are similar to ones that creationists make to “disprove” evolution and they all suffer from innumeracy. It’s pathetic that a credentialed scientist, who should have an understanding of statistics and probability, is doing it

You can only speak for yourself. You don’t appear to know what motivates other people, or what makes them “tick”

It says mass is a form of energy, but does not say that it can necessarily be converted to another form.

Moderator NoteAnything tainted by AI, even in this way, violates our rules.

I recall seeing that form of the argument as well; probably somewhere here (though with the way archiving limits things now I don’t know if a search would find it). It was likely offered up because someone rejected merely citing the 2nd law.

What about people who don’t want to be hermits? That’s the only way to be free of such rules.

It’s a version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics; you would be spontaneously heating an object with a cooler object. i.e. focusing sunlight will never get you above ~6000K

Just a link to a story is insufficient, and you need to enlighten us as to the context of the “16th anomalie” (sic)