JaKiri

It APPEARS from your point of view to slow down or contract.

And does, from your point of view, and the point of view of any rest frame that has it non-stationary (which when acceleration is involved is all of them by definition.

If things really did contract then Einstein would have said that it actually occurs and not use the term appears.

He didn't use the term "appears", though (not least because he was writing in German). He was also far from the first to describe the Lorentz transformations.

Also, if space ships traveling near the speed of light actually would contract then you would notice your own ship contracting and not the other ship appearing to contract.

It appears to contract, and does. It's not some optical illusion, it's a mathematical consequence of the speed of light being constant for all observers.

It is all relative to your point of view, it does not actually happen.

The first statement does not exclude the possibility that it does "actually happen", which it does.

If it does not, there is no way to explain, for example, the huge discrepencies between the decay rates particles moving at different velocities with an otherwise predictable decay rate, like muons. As it is, muon decay agrees with SR - both from the point of view of the muon, and from the point of view of the lab (in non-mathematical analysis, the muon "gets further" than it should travelling in the lab either because it's time dilated (from the lab's point of view) or because the lab has spatially contracted (from the muon's point of view)).

Well, I am sorry for offending anyone, but I honestly believe that the path we tread down as a nation is fine the way it is now.

Even if you're enormously rabidly antiterrorism to the exclusion of civil liberties, then the patriot act is still terrible. It's taking things away from the populace for no gain.

Well, Energy is not photons, photons don't have a "mass equivilent", blah blah blah

I think Hillary Clinton voted for that one.

Hillary Clinton caring about public perception more than anything else? WELL I NEVER

That being said, it was a huge document that was hoisted on people and COME ON LETS VOTE NOW NOW NOW WHAT ARE YOU A COWARD?

Well I, for one, do not mind sacrificing a few liberties here and there in order to straighten up the mess that the law has become when it comes to preventing terrorism, at the very least.

It doesn't prevent terrorism, though. America was doing just fine (except when it chose to ignore things for political reasons) in any case.

Let me rephrase that: energy [math]E [/math] is photons [math](\hbar\nu)[/math], which have a mass equivalent [math] (=E/c^2)[/math]; mass is the condensed form of energy, and has, or acquires, a (rotating) vector, or degree of freedom, that energy alone (photons with a pun) doesn't have. Mass can acquire energy otherwise, due to its inertial properties (say in a gravitational field, what the hey), or by absorbing energy, apart from the energy it is equivalent to -but the inertia it has means it can't ever reach the same travel velocity as energy. Charge is another kind of potential (also connected to photons), that behaves like gravity, but is balanced (gravity has no opposite 'charge').

Just so we're on the same page, you do realise that this is gibberish, right?

It's very dependent upon the software side of things as well, as it's pretty obvious that a single threaded application (as most "home" software is at this point) is still going to be limited by single core performance and, although it might be a bit of a truism, that the only things that will stress the processor will be things that require a lot of number crunching, and only real time programs (rendering, usually) make that into a significant technical challenge.

Going by the way the home market any improvements will only be observable on most computers by the latest version of spider solitaire using full 3d spinnionvision rather than the boring 2d of yesteryear.

In purely practical terms, AMD need a big hit in either the graphics card or processor markets soon. Losing the amount of money they're losing cannot be sustainable.

Pssst. That's median. Grrr.

Pssst. If we assume intelligence follows a gaussian distribution*, the median is the same as the mean!

*Which it almost certainly doesn't, for the same reasons that height doesn't.

What you want is the MSDS (material safety data sheet). Google finds quite a few, of which http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s2666.htm is the first, searching for (chemical name) MSDS.

It's me, I'm the essence of masculinity.

Eeeee (by gum)

only when used with a Qualifier, "What makes" it fall to the ground.

It was just a bit of a play on words, rather than a serious question per se.

That is the popular meme today -- that clock speed is no longer relevent.

I'm not saying that clock speed is irrelevent, just that, by and large, in recent times improvements in single core performance have come by an improvement in architecture rather than simply upping the clock speed.

All other things being equal, an improvement in clock speed is definitely advantageous and were we seeing claims about how the new Core2's would be running at 4GHz plus I'm sure everyone would be very excited. However, it doesn't really mean anything because we can't assume that all other things are equal.

But in fact there's really no reason why computers can't also have faster clock speeds than they currently do. I suspect it has more to do with marketing and general engineering direction than actual physical properties of the chips, but one of the concerns I have is that it will become HARDER for them to increase clock speed in the future because of all the additional cores (with, presumably, different fail speeds).

The point about failure rates is a good one, especially given this would exaggerate the vast differences in yields between AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

WRT clock speeds, I would make the distinction between theoretical chips and actual chips - enormously high clock rates can and have been produced, but not on today's chips, even with absurd levels of cooling.

I can handle arguing with an elitist, but I prefer them to at least be honest about their self inflation.

Ad hominem is claiming that the argument is invalid due to the personal flaws of the proposer.

What I did is claim that you had personal flaws because your argument was invalid.

From what I've seen, our litigatory culture has little problem keeping companies focused on prevention.

There are a huge number of case studies, extending to this day, of companies balancing the cost of litigation against the cost of fixing a flawed product. The Ford Pinto is probably the best example of this.

If safety is everyone's concern, companies will go out of their way to kiss our ass and show off how safe they are, making marketing claims that bind them to law.

There are already things that bind them to law, they still break them.

(Not to mention Action news and investigative journalism will keep them in check.. )

Everyone can sleep safely knowing that Action News is on the case, assuming they manage to investigate the products before they're sold!

Why can't the government actively investigate these matters? Why does there have to be a special set of laws to get the government's help in ensuring the legitimacy of business?

So you want government to regulate industry... without regulations?

"laissez-faire capitalism" was not advocated by me and most certainly neither is socialism. Rather a much, much less regulated free market system. Right now, we have a heavily regulated market; a controlled market; a government-corporate monopoly.

A free market without government regulation, government created monopolies and the like is the very definition of liassez-faire capitalism.

I must point out that you didn't answer my question.

I know you're just being humorous there, but saying it again like that actually forces me to post this in public, because if I don't then some -- fool -- wil assume we're letting you off the hook. So for the record, if you call someone an idiot again you'll receive a flame infraction.

 

If you want to discuss it further, my inbox is open.

Rules? I wrote the rules!

(Well, not really)

"And the man thus threw up his hands in frustration, crying, 'Bingo!'" Fallacians 12:23

I don't have that in my bible, is it in the apocrypha?

Why is a "what" question?

Occam's Razor usually doesn't work for me in discussions with religious people since they insist that *their* God is necessary.

That's just misunderstanding how it works, though. It's like the futility of bringing up Special Relativity against that nuclear hoaxer from the other day.

The concept of the null hypothesis is generally got wrong by everyone (including me at points). It's not helped that it's misused more than it should be by people who should know better.

The lack of evidence doesn't mean evidence of lack. It just means a god that chooses not to be observed can't be measured properly by the scientific method. At best a skeptical "maybe" can be applied.

You're perfectly correct in saying that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but that's not the end of the story.

If you would prefer, how's the statement "the existance of god is neither required nor suggested by any predictive model we have yet been able to produce that fits with the evidence we have gathered, within the bounds of experimental error"? Me saying "science says god doesn't exist" (or whatever words I used) is just shorthand for that. Remember that Occam's Razor still applies.

(I must point out at this point that I'm a fairly hard-line empiricist, you'll probably get more agreement from one of those wishy-washy string theorists)

So, it doesn't make it ok, and yes they can be sued - so it sounds to me like it's already illegal and they can already be punished. So what then is the point of regulation? Could it be that our examples of past inadequacies were more about a lack of enforcement rather than a lack of legislation?

The problem here is that unless you regulate what can and can't be sold (especially as medicine), the people who sell dangerous things don't become tortfeasors until the harm is done. If people sold fish that could only be used to slap you, then you would presumeably prefer people not to be allowed to buy the fish in the first place rather than waiting for them to come up and slap you, and then getting some marginal compensation.

Of course, that's assuming that it's something as mild as a slap. If these fish killed you, you wouldn't really be getting anything back from the courts now, would you.

Oh, but more regulations are the answer..yes, yes...more laws...always more laws...

Yep, that's why I think we should try not to kill people. Because I want more laws.

Glad you got my point. It's not legal to lie about the product you're selling.

How do you know if they're lying or not, without clinical trials?

So either we have the guy suing (or his family, if the guy in question snuffed it) being forced to perform expensive clinical trials if he wants to be able to prove that the thing he took did not actually do what it said on the tin or we need some kind of government agency to do it. And it's not the first one of these options.

So this amazing solution of yours is to have an equivilent of the FDA only test "medicines" after they start being sold, and to let the bodies pile up in the streets till then! Hurray!

Market corrections occur when a product is found to be substandard. Without clinical trials, the only way to find out when a medical product is substandard is when you get a sufficiently large pile of bodies.

So, in summation: the changes you are supporting would either a) not change anything, except to have people die or b) give companies free reign over what they put out, and have people die.

Let's lay off the drama, you're not saving anyone's life in a chat forum...

I thought when people discussed politics it was on the topic of what things they'd like, at a basic level, to happen. The way they want society to be run. I want people to stay alive, you want people to die.

I can understand dismissing the importance of political discussion if my chosen path ended up with the previously mentioned pile of corpses, so fair enough I suppose.

And being emotionally invested to the point you utilize ad hom as a discussion tactic is childish and beneath the intellect of everyone else here.

That's not ad hominem, you idiot.

Priceless. So, you do understand Dr. Paul's pro-life point of view after all. That protecting life is part of protecting liberty.

Lets take a week old foetus out of its mother and see how well it gets on, shall we?

It's a moot point anyway, legally life is defined in the US to start at birth.

You can go ahead and add wholesale bias to your analysis here since you continue to equate consequence with intent with respect to Paul's positions.

Last I checked, being an extremist was not a good thing. He does not get a pass card for wanting to increase freedom because you ignore the ways that the things he proposes decrease freedom. You might as well say that shooting a gun wildly into a crowd of people is supporting their right to live because noone gets killed until the bullets actually hit them.

You might as well say that Dr. Paul is for racism by his advocating my personal right to allow or refuse anyone I want in my home - including if it's based on their race.

I could say he was a racist for saying that the Civil Rights act has done "nothing but harm", calling black youths "fleet-footed" and saying that only 5% of blacks had sensible political opinions and then defending these statements.

In any case, you're allowed to refuse anyone into your home you like, with the exception of people with court orders. Unlike your claim of an ad hominem, this actually is an example of a strawman fallacy.

Clearly you fear true freedom.

The freedom to discriminate against black people is the most important freedom of all.

Yes, socialist governments have their advantages and disadvantages, as do capitalist federations - and we here in the united states have chosen capitalism and it's consequences. It won't always outperform socialist governments, but it is the preferred compliment to a free republic.

Could you please clarify how this relates to the difference between laissez-faire capitalism and a socialist government on the topic of promoting or reducing the effect of monopolies?

It seems a just a little bit like a non sequitur, given that this was started by you complaining about the US government encouraging monopolies, which socialism does (according to you) and laissez-faire capitalism does not.

The very best science can say is that there remains a minuscule possibility that a higher power exists that we haven't yet seen evidence of.

That's what I said, though?

The lack of evidence for a god makes it empirically, and thus scientifically, true that there isn't a god, just as is the case for everything else (I wouldn't classify god as a null hypothesis by any definition).

It's not absolutely true, but science doesn't deal in absolute truths so I see no contradiction.

Not really. The theory of evolution can be tested in the laboratory with predictions, observations and scientific tests. There is no physical evidence to support the God theory...

If you gather evidence, you're hardly beleving it because someone tells you it's true, are you?

Looking back, it's a bit of a pathetic diagram all round. I should really have drawn the acceleration due to gravity on it.

I'm sorry if that seems really basic it is just I am starting physics next year at school and I would like to have at least a little knowlege...

General Relativity is a mathematical nightmare. Don't be worried if you don't understand it, and unless you're doing something postgrad that deals with it I doubt it'll be presumed.

In Einstein’s theory of special relativity it states that objects APPEAR to an observer to contract the closer they approach the speed of light, they do not actually contract. Clocks APPEAR to observers to slow down, they do not actually slow down.

No, they do actually slow down, or contract. From our point of view, which is just as valid as theirs.

That is why it is called relativity, things appear to change relative to other things. Nothing actually changes.

Ever heard of the Twin paradox?

Space is soft like a blanket? Where did you get this information?

It's a metaphor that approximates the way gravity works in terms that can be understood by the layman. The rubber sheet analogy is one that I've seen time and time again, at every level of study.

Easier to read, although I doubt that "most people who have a time display on their PC screen set it a standard clock with a face", as the default Windows one is digital.

It's not early -- Nehalem is only one year out. Historically we know a lot more at this stage of development. Intel has become distinctly cagier about its roadmap in recent years. And BTW, not one CPU on the roadmap has a clock speed over 3.2 ghz. That's actually DOWN from 3.8.

You appear to be a bit hung up on raw clockspeed, which is odd given that an E6320 (for example) is a lot faster at around 1.8GHz than my old 2GHz P4 from 2002.