We often visualize the effect of mass on spacetime by using a trampoline and a bowling ball. The outer edges are flat and the closer you get to the bowling ball the more spacetime is warped downward.
On the outer edges, the effect is almost nonexistent and the trampoline's surface is nearly flat. What this suggests is that spacetime without mass is flat and that mass warps spacetime in a downward direction. So no mass = flat, mass = curved downward. So the effect is in the range of [0, black hole].
Obviously this is an very loose analogy but bear with me.
What if spacetime acts more like a waterbed? Not only does mass warp spacetime "downward" but something (in our analogy the displaced water) pushes the rest of spacetime upward.
To use a signal processing analogy, a filter will (nearly?) always affect the passband to some degree, with very high Q filters creating a knee where amplitude is increased significantly before the filter rolls off. That seems counterintuitive (at least to me) but it's nonetheless true.
Using another analogy, curved spacetime creates regions of "downhill-ness". What if the space between masses get a little bit of uphill curve as well? That could explain e.g., the Pioneer anomaly and possibly at much larger scales the effect in the article.
General relativity, which describes the effect of mass on space-time, is a very elegant theory with beautiful maths. The trampoline and ball have incidental similarity, but they're for illustration only.
There's nothing that makes the waterbed theory necessarily wrong, but you'd have to posit some new maths different and more complicated than we have with GR.
Yeah, I understand that the trampoline analogy is inadequate but I believe that we don't consider empty regions of space to have any type of "opposite" curvature or to exhibit negative gravity. I believe curvature is thought to be [0, black hole], not [-black hole, black hole].
Happy to be corrected on that, IANAP.
The disparity between what GR predicts and what we observe has led to the cosmological constant / dark energy / dark matter. Of course, those aren't really things in themselves, they're just a measure of that disparity, a fudge factor.
I'm suggesting that the disparity could be explained by spacetime "responding" to regions of curvature by mass with an opposite curvature.
Unfortunately I'm not qualified to do anything with that idea. I just wanted to throw it out there. It's something that's been bothering me for a long time.
Didn't plenty of new ideas start with analogies? I can think of Feynman and Einstein who described imagining or noticing things in real life which gave rise new ideas in physics.
You would have to explain to some extent what the analogy is, and what it means for the real world, before we could begin to discuss whether it is in any way correct, let alone useful.
Probably just a semantic difference in what they mean by "start." In this instance, the waterbed analogy would suggest some sort of negative mass-energy and a mass-energy conservation law.
Just to be clear- are you implying that people cannot be inspired by natural events and think of an analogy elsewhere in physics? Or are you saying that an analogy cannot be the firmament of a new theory?
I would agree with the latter, but it sounds like you're stating the former, which is categorically incorrect
(0 to black hole) makes more sense because in this analogy it represents somthing like a length of a vector (which details are lost in the process of constructing analogy). So -42 doesn't make much sense because it's exactly the same as 42 in opposite direction.
Question: why don't you try and learn the foundations of the current theories (it's incredible how many man-centuries of high quality intellectual work you can find condensed into a book) before launching into inventing new theories out of nothing?
Newton thanked the giants whose shoulders he was standing on. You are pretending you are a giant on your own. Do you sincerely believe it?
Right but he was also hit on head by an apple according to the myth. So there place for analogies like that. Also I thought your comment seemed a bit too disparaging. GP had an idea they wanted to share. There is probably a nicer way of saying it won't work than "why don't you go to the library and learn the maths before speaking up..."
> There is probably a nicer way of saying it won't work ...
The question is not why it doesn't work. The real issue is why someone who worked for years in order to become expert on a certain field should spend some of his time to consider a theory coming out of absolutely nothing. There may be a nicer way to say this; please help me find it ;-)
There isn't one because it doesn't need to be said.
It's also not true: the theory came out of questioning what would happen if you replaced one set of equations in the model with another, and whether that might make a more interesting (or accurate) model. It's simply expressed in informal language, but the formal (and completely sensible translation) is straightforward to anyone with the necessary background.
As for why experts would care, anywhere from dinner conversation (as is likely to be the case for myself; not a physics expert, but my company is, and Im curious of the answer) to it strikes a cord related to their work by giving them a new analogy, allowing them to bring more expertise to bear on the project.
For my professional work, some of the biggest influences have been questions by amateurs (and the subsequent trying to address them).
If it were actually such a useless idea, you'd have spent less time just refuting it than with your unnecessarily negative posts. Instead, you were negative for no clear reason (though, several uncharitable reasons might be inferred).
Please refrain from making such negative posts here. They make the community worse.
The base question, as I understood it, was if regions of curvature caused by mass cause regions of opposite curvature between them (rather than no curvature).
Mass effectively creates positive curvature in a region, so the question is if that "tugs" and create regions of negative curvature to keep the "total" curvature 0, in some sense. (There's actually several models here, depending on how you want to distribute the negative curvature.)
This isn't totally absurd on the face of it, for any reason I can think of, and brings up an interesting curvature conservation law.
The next question is if this model (curvature conservation) explains things we see, is contradicted by facts, etc. In parallel (though usually after) mechanisms by which the tugging would happen are proposed.
Because it's fun to pinpoint what exactly is wrong with some superficially plausible idea.
I can uderstand that it gets very old very fast for some people but there are physicists who like educating laymen by putting themselves in their shoes and pinpointing exact spot where they believe something that actually is not true.
Do I believe in myself? Yes. I'm a genius (by I.Q. score) and work hard every day. That's why I own a software company and have a beautiful family, money, a passport full of stamps, etc.
Do I think I just solved one of the biggest mysteries physics? No. I think you'd have to be a moron to have read it that way as I went out of my way to say I wasn't qualified, that it was just an idea, etc. If I were a physicist and working on the idea in earnest I wouldn't have presented it here.
I don't want to make this too much of a personal attack because it's less about you and more about HN (and the internet) in general:
People like you really (actually, as in for real) make me sad. I'm 100% confident that you're not bold enough to call me an idiot in person but you're happy to do it via a textarea on a web page. That's cowardice. That's a lack of character.
Why are you like this? Because you're a loser. You don't have the courage to carve out a real life for yourself so you attack anyone you can -- especially people who seem to have the qualities you lack. That's what losers do.
Let's turn this around:
You're obviously lacking something. I'm 40 and successful and violently independent but I have had some help along the way -- people who were willing to give me advice, insight into the life of a successful person. If I can help you by way of advice or mentoring to turn your life in a positive direction, reach out to me m@lattejed.com. I'm 100% serious.
Having said that, this will be my last contribution to Hacker News. This used to be a great place for intellectual discussion. Not so anymore. Leaving has nothing to do with someone not liking my waterbed analogy -- I've been thinking about leaving for a long time. I waste too much time here and get nothing in return.
I think you're taking this too personally. The burden of proof is on you, the person suggesting a new idea to support it somehow. You're asking other people to do the work involved which is not fair to them.
The analogy to trampolines and bowling balls is leading you astray. There's no "pushing down", or even a downward direction to push in in general relativity.
Not a physicist, but I've been quietly hoping something like this was the case for years and would usurp Dark Matter as the reason for rotational anomaly at the outer galactic edges.
It makes sense that space-time is both attractive or repulsive based on the presence or absence matter. Throw in an overlapping inverse square law at the galactic boundary and perhaps this solves the anomaly by way of a steep gravity wall where attractive and repulsive forces meet.
Again, not a physicists either, but I agree, it seems to make sense spatially.
I think it's generally agreed upon that the Space Shuttle program was needlessly wasteful and more PR- than science-driven. A heavy space plane has zero advantages over a capsule for most work done in LEO. It's good to see this renewed focus on more practical designs.
(If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)
Having said that, the name Starliner writes a check that a manned capsule won't ever be able to cash. This is the first time I've heard of Boeing's Starliner and it got me really, really excited until I pulled up a picture of it. They really should have picked a less grandiose name.
Shuttle flew a decent number of missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, conducting secret experiments and deploying spy satellites. Most of the missions are still classified, but many folks have said the military needs drove the design of the Shuttle program. There are pretty obvious advantages to a spaceplane if your goals include capture of enemy satellites. http://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html
It turns out a lot of science space research is heavily driven by military space presence. For example, Hubble has a 2.4m mirror because there was already a factory making that size for dozens of spy satellite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
And ever heard of "The Dish" at Stanford? It's a 150-foot radio telescope the US Air Force funded during the Cold War to ostensibly "study the chemical composition of the atmosphere." Total BS. The Air Force built it to intercept signals from Soviet radar systems after they bounced off the moon.
(Thankfully Stanford got to keep it and it's been used for hundreds of projects since then.)
Regarding Hubble, the intelligence community knew of significant design flaws in Hubble based on their experience with similar hardware, and did not communicate the problems to the Hubble team, for security reasons. This was much more about solar array flex and the Southern Magnetic Anomaly (high radiation zone that is often transited by Hubble, and which tends to crash the processors running the scope); the mirror flaw wasn't known by the TLAs.
The book _The Hubble Wars_, which describes most of this, made me pretty angry that an important scientific instrument was nearly crippled by the "national security" mindset.
Retrieval of objects in space and bringing them back to Earth is about the only mission where the Space Shuttle was superior to capsule designs. This was also used in a handful of science missions for studying long-term exposure of various materials.
But the vast majority of the Shuttle's 130 flights would have been better served by an Apollo or Gemini derived design.
From what I've read, Shuttle also did quite a bit of satellite repair (like fixing Hubble). And the orbiter's cargo bay certainly was useful to transport many parts of the ISS.
The Department of Defense still actively uses a spaceplane-ish vehicle. It's just a much smaller unmanned one called the X-37b. Many folks speculate it's used to repair and refuel spy satellites, and potentially even rendezvous with and and hack enemy satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Generally I totally agree though-- capsule design makes way more sense for anything leaving or reentering atmosphere. The upcoming Orion are clearly in that directly.
> From what I've read, Shuttle also did quite a bit of satellite repair (like fixing Hubble)
It did, but a capsule can do the job just fine too – for JWST, it is (or was) planned to do repairs using the Orion capsule and a mission module docked to it.
> And the orbiter's cargo bay certainly was useful to transport many parts of the ISS.
Kinda, yes. But an unmanned rocket could have done the same job, and likely cheaper than the Shuttle.
Most of the civilian Shuttle missions could have been easily served by other, much cheaper craft – but who knows what happened during the classified ones, it might actually have been cheaper to the taxpayer at large (if not NASA) to have one craft to serve both roles.
> The Department of Defense still actively uses a spaceplane-ish vehicle. It's just a much smaller unmanned one called the X-37b. Many folks speculate it's used to repair and refuel spy satellites, and potentially even rendezvous with and and hack enemy satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
We don't really know, but given how little fuel capacity it has and how long it stays in orbit, it's more likely that the DoD's stated purpose of long-endurance testing of new spy hardware is true.
I'm pretty sure we're not going to send any capsule to repair the JWSP. It's going to be at L2 which is 1 million miles away from Earth, or about 3x furthest than mankind has ever traveled. It would take weeks to get there.
If the rumor is that it's being used to refuel satellites, there are two considerations:
1. Can it get to many satellites? Yes, it has good delta V, though I think you're mixing the X-37's delta V with its boosters and the delta V of the Shuttle orbiter without its SRBs and external tank.
2. Can it carry fuel for those satellites? No, not much. The X-37 has a maximum total takeoff weight of 5000 kg, while the Shuttle can get 27000 kg to LEO. Unfortunately, only one X-37 will fit in the payload bay of the Shuttle, so we can't actually lift five X-37s in the Shuttle.
Many large satellites weigh more than the X-37's total mass. The biggest individual consumer, the ISS, requires about 7000 kg of fuel annually to stay in orbit. A KC-135 in-air refueling tanker is much faster than an oceangoing supertanker, but you wouldn't use the former to empty an oil rig!
The ISS needs that much fuel to boost it's altitude due to drag in LEO. But the refueling of satellites by the X-37 is hypothesized to be at much higher altitudes where there is very little drag.
These satellites don't need altitude boosts-- they use propellant for orbital changes (e.g. to "re-task" a spy satellite to a new region). But instead of chemical rockets they often use xenon gas ion engines.
The key thing with ion drives is their "specific impulse." High-thrust chemical rockets are needed to get out of the atmosphere and perform fast burns, but ion engines are often >10x more efficient once already in orbit. And because there isn't a chemical reaction, there is less corrosion and they can last for years.
Refueling xenon for the ion drives of spy satellites would double or triple their mission lifespan. They don't need much -- maybe just a couple hundred kg. And this could literally save billions of dollars since these satellites are so expensive to build.
Where have you gotten that from? The only numbers I can find for observed Δv changes are some 100m/s for USA-212, which is a third of the OMS' rated 300m/s with a full cargo bay.
For one thing, the X-37 Wikipedia page states that a design goal was 3.1 KM/s Delta-V. That's about as official a number as I'm finding online (blah blah Wikipedia source), but there are quite a few people who track these things in the sky. Each orbital inclination or altitude change requires a minimum delta V to execute, and we can observe the results of these maneuvers here on Earth. Online arguments about the X-37 delta-V are inconclusive, we'll leave it at that!
The shuttle was also great for anything that required an EVA, and could handle multiple EVAs on a single mission. It could also stay in orbit with a large crew for extended periods.
Those old boats had capabilities that I don't think we'll see for another two generations of manned spacecraft.
> The shuttle was also great for anything that required an EVA, and could handle multiple EVAs on a single mission.
Gemini, Vokshod, Apollo and Soyuz all demonstrated that ability as well. Apollo especially with multiple lunar EVAs per mission.
The Shuttle's biggest advantage over all those was being roomier, making EVA preparations less of a hassle, but all space craft currently in development are addressing that shortcoming.
> It could also stay in orbit with a large crew for extended periods.
Meh. Yes, it could… but should it? In that role, the Shuttle was still inferior to a real space station, while being as expensive. If it wasn't for political reasons (Shuttle was approved, but it was hard to fund anything else), NASA likely would have preferred using a space station for it (and largely did, once it could access Mir/ISS).
ISS isn't going away for a while yet, the industry is working on smaller private space stations that could be rented out for this purposes, and NASA is contemplating building smaller stations in deep space when/if necessary. We didn't actually lose any capability.
Important to note that the Shuttle did not require cabin depressurization to EVA, it had an airlock. None of those other vehicles could keep the cabin pressurized during an EVA (I'm not sure about Soyuz, for that matter).
Keep in mind it was NOT an all or nothing proposition for using the Shuttle. We launched satellites while the shuttle was running using Titan, Atlas, and Delta rockets. I would imagine if it was more cost efficient to use those rockets, they would have done so.
There's a difference between the shuttle being used for certain missions and the shuttle being necessary for those missions.
(and then going up a level, whether those missions were necessary to establish those capabilities or if different missions would have been used in the absence of the shuttle)
> (If that's incorrect and you're qualified to correct me please do.)
You're not wrong but there are some nuances. The original design for the shuttle was very different from what was ultimately built because when the Shuttle program funding was in jeopardy the Air Force was brought in and they forced the design to change to meet their needs. The shuttle got bigger and added the external fuel tank, almost entirely crippling the shuttle's reusability.
By far the most negative impact on the shuttle was the massive reduction in space flights from the he original proposal due to budget cuts and Congressional politicking. The average cost per flight was something on the order of $1.8 billion but most of that was fixed overhead and a lot of that overhead was the consequence of the Air Force redesign. If the shuttle were funded independently as originally planned, it would have cost a lot less to fly and with enough flights it would have been significantly more cost effective. Whether NASA could make it as cheap as rockets is unclear but it's not impossible that they could have brought it within a factor of two.
However, it's also unclear to me whether we could have pulled off something like the Hubble telescope repair with a rocket and pods.
One thing that the Space Shuttle had going for it was that it could be used as a Canadarm[1] platform. Bringing the arm back home in one piece was handy, and the orbiter's huge mass probably made it easier to reason about the physics involved.
It's important to note the space shuttle was a poor design in large part because it added a lot of cargo on a man rated system. 1 failure to achieve orbit in 135 missions is an outstanding record, but very wasteful when sending cargo. A capsule seems better in large part because it does not.
Further, if the shuttle was only sending people to orbit it's design could be both reusable and vastly simpler because of vastly lower rentry temperatures and more redundancy.
Considering that the Buran program was much less active and only had a single launch, the ROI on that wastage seems like it would have been rather low.
> I prefer to teach 3D graphics without matrices because it's really not anything more complicated than a compact notation.
From a programming perspective it's much less verbose. Also the 1:1 mapping of "spaces" (camera space, world space) makes it very clean to manage transformations between them.
> and isn't easily separable because it steals the "w=1" constant for depth remap and also adjusts the "w" afterwards
I'm sure you already know this but x,y,z,w == x/w,y/w,z/w. It's easy enough to move between a 3D rep and a 4D rep of the same coordinates.
Using 4D coordinates may be somewhat awkward as they're not necessary for representations of points in 3D space but it is a very elegant solution for lighting where it is necessary to represent infinity.
[Edit]
Sorry, the point I was making is that I was also bummed to not see matrices in the article. They are a little bit to wrap you head around but they've a very elegant solution to a lot of stuff in 3D.
"[T]he obvious solution is to compel Apple to let people shop for applications wherever they want, which would open the market and help lower prices"
Is that a joke?
I'd love to be able to sell iOS software directly to users. Even if there were no viable channels outside of the App Store having the choice would make me rest a lot easier.
But to state that "Apple's monopoly" has driven the price of software up is to be laughably out of touch with reality. Maybe this has to be argued from the point of view of the consumer and they thought "monopoly driving prices down" wouldn't be a very good case?
Prices could be lowered by a store that takes a smaller commission, while passing the same amount of money onto the developer. That would lower prices for consumers without hurting developers. Or there could be commission tiers that mean that the more successful the app the greater percentage the developer gets.
Wouldn't the developer still price to market in this case? It would be ideal that the decrease in commissions would be proportionate in developers' price points, but more than likely you're still paying .99-1.99 on average for the app. The developer is just making more in this case, not necessarily benefiting the consumer any more.
The separate stores should compete, as they are doing now. If one becomes more appealing, users and developers can switch. I think of the logic behind your argument as saying that Walgreens should be forced to let CVS use a portion of its stores to sell in (for free), even though there's a CVS across the street....there's nothing stopping anyone from going to shop across the street as it currently stands, just as there is no outside force stopping anyone from switching to an android to be able to download play store apps. These 2 year contracts are an impediment, but these are signed at the consumer's discretion.
Except that going across the street to CVS to get the exact same product at a better price is very different to switching from iPhone to Android. Apart from just the big outlay for new hardware, you have to figure out how to migrate from (e.g.) iCloud, what happens with your chats in iMessage with all your friends, the different way that Android actually works. Don't underestimate the degree to which small differences confuse non-techy users. Even just upgrading from one iPhone to another, or installing an iOS update, can be confusing.
No-ones going to do that to get slightly cheaper apps (if they are actually cheaper, which I doubt, because I don't believe that the Google App Store is actually competing with the Apple App Store).
I'm starting an application... plan on having a website, ios and android version. If my cost is $2/month/user, and I want to make even $1 a user, then I have to charge more for the Apple/Android store versions, because they charge 30%.
Beyond this, if I charge more for the Apple app than the website or google versions, then Apple may choose to ban my app. This means, my website app may be more expensive (higher margins, sure) because of Apple.
With Android, I can always bypass the Play Store (like Amazon does).
"But to state that 'Apple's monopoly' has driven the price of software up is to be laughably out of touch with reality."
I reckon the rationale here is twofold:
* The currently-mandatory 30% fee would now be optional, as would be the flat developer fee (if it still exists; I haven't really looked into it in a long time)
* The availability of additional stores means the availability of different apps that might not be available on Apple's store, thus increasing competition and driving down prices through more typical supply/demand curves.
I think this will make iPorn a reality on iOS outside the browser... though seriously, I'd love to see an app store for only reviewed/paid apps with no spyware/adware guarantees. Facebook/LinkedIn wouldn't be available on it because of their spyware activities. That would mean actually higher-quality apps.
I don't know what is so funny about this. Their monopoly allows them to tax 30% of every sale. I am an app developer and I absolutely charge more to my end users because of that 30% - after all I have to pay for servers and employees and that number would absolutely be lower if not for the 30% tax.
It's laughable because the market for iOS apps has driven the price as low as it can go already. You cannot go lower. The average price for an app is FREE, and for the paid ones it's usually one or occasionally two dollars.
Sounds like whoever wrote it doesn't know too much about the App Store as a consumer or developer.
The truth is that as right now, ~78% of apps in the App Store are free to download/play. The remaining ~22% that are paid stack around the $0.99 price point, which is the lowest possible price tier for a paid app.
I don't see how this "monopoly" is raising prices...
Opening the store in a way like the one being described would result in malware and low quality apps. It'd add clutter and an incredible amount of noise (aka. Competition) hurting developers and consumer.
It's a lose lose situation IMO.
If you need proof just look at Android. Lots of stores, low quality apps, and a very fragmented way for developers to monetize.
Yes, because Apple Store is known for having such high quality apps[1] all around. There's definitely room for a mobile store than actually reviews every app, with a person running said app. Bans on spyware/adware, and only apps for purchase. An initial review could be as little as $50 to the developer, and update reviews paid out of the top of sales. Charging well below 30%.
What part of Thailand is that? I get around ~50M/s on my phone. I haven't checked my home cable in a while but I stream HD video (Netflix / YouTube) to several computers / TVs at once w/o issue.
> The new preconnect API is used heavily to ensure HTTP requests are as fast as possible when they are made. With this, a page can be rendered before the user explicitly states they’d like to navigate to it; the page might already be available by the time the user actually selects it, leading to instant loading.
I get the impression AMP boils down to that. Google wants to present publisher content in "mobile app" form and has decided to push most of the cost onto publishers. I really wish they would have taken a different approach. They could have just slapped a stamp of approval on sites with good mobile layout and sub 1s load times. Let publishers make their own technology decisions about how to get there.
Also the Google News horizontal scrolling / AMP page scrolling / back button is a clusterfuck. More often than not I have to reload Google News from the address bar as an intermediate step in navigation. If you're going to wreck the web for better user experience then at least deliver better user experience.
I'm near phitsanulok now but had the same experience over the country. It might be because I'm using a tmobile sim through their partnership with local providers as I have seen the locals with much better speed in the city centers. The second you get out of the city and drop down to 3g or whatever the one below that is called, the locals have the same Web experience I have had
The stamp of approval for sub n seconds as a benchmark does sound like a better approach but at this point google is acting like a parent whose told their children to clean their room, or the parent is going to clean the room by tossing everything out. I get the impression that Google only cares about the results when it comes to making the Web faster, and doesn't care about anyone else's costs at this point
I'm working on a project where I'm doing boolean ops on 3D meshes that need a lot of tests.
I do a mixture of traditional unit tests w/asserts along with visual feedback. I have a rig set up that will dump final (or intermediate) results of operations to the screen with several tests being presented at the same time.
If I'm actively developing something and am going to be spending a lot of time in the debugger I can solo a test. Having the additional visual feedback makes everything go a lot faster.
For higher level stuff having a number of tests on screen at once gives visual feedback about regressions, which again speeds things up a lot.
This combined approach is the most useful I've found so far.
Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.
Yes it meant to be a better replacement for classic forums that are generally noisy and hard to deal with. Haash works more like Stackoverflow when it comes to questions and stays very simple with tutorials crowdsourcing too.
For using it as a customer support, generally DO encourages you to publish your question on the community instead of going with private chat and support tickets as when the question and answer go public everyone else can benefit from it and most importantly find it in milliseconds when searching on Google.
another reason is that your need for creating docs out of repetitive support queries massively drops as the Q&A is your docs.
I couldn't agree more. Food is one of the most accessible luxuries. The most expensive meals, with fine wine, cost less than most business class tickets (to wherever). On the other hand, a soft cooked egg on a piece of toasted bread after a workout can be just as delicious and costs pennies, available to all.
Next they're going to tell us they've found a way to eliminate that pesky sexual reproduction that's been plaguing us...
I agree so much! Many chefs, when asked what they love most the answer is simple. It's almost always some form of an egg. Great food doesn't have to be expensive or with win or be complex. In fact, very often the best things are simple and fast.
We live in an era where these things are readily available and they're really easy to make and to be delicious thanks to an abundance of spices and endless styles of fats.
I enjoy so much an egg fried in a small amount of butter until the edges are crispy on a piece of rye toast. A slice of tomato with a dash of ground pepper on top. Total cost: 50 cents tops? Total time: 4 minutes? Dishes: A non-stick pan that takes 10 seconds to clean?
It has never been more accessible or easy to not only cook but discover how to cook thanks to global shipping and the Internet than today. And we are left with a slurry of questionable nutrients as the future? OK fine - but I refuse.
But what if they introduce the way to make our sexual reproduction activity not causing pregancy?
What if they made something you wear over your penis, or a pill that the woman take, so that sexual reproduction activity doesn't comes with all its consequence?
I mean I think you're right. You can have it all and we do today. An amazing supply line of ingredients from around the world and endless great recipes and education on technique on the Internet. We can have our cake and eat, both in the kitchen and the bedroom. Rejoice!
What's more bothersome: If you withdraw access (after they've already scanned your contacts) they'll disable the app. That's why I deleted the app and won't use it again.
If a privacy-focused app makes you nervous about privacy they've already lost the war, haven't they?
I'm not the poster who you replied to, but - Just because someone explains their reasoning, doesn't mean you have to agree with them :)
I don't particularly want to send Signal a list of contacts - I'd rather not leak that information about my social graph. I understand how they want to use that information for discovery, so they can know who already uses the app.. But for my needs, this isn't necessary. I'd prefer to manually ask my friends for their username on the service.
If there were additional options, I might choose to use their service.
As it is, it doesn't fit my needs, and that's OK.
I'm sure there's plenty of other people who appreciate it.
For those who do not understand the economic incentives associated with social graphs, have a chat with Facebook, LinkedIn and Palantir. Or read about the reasons why mobile platforms were forced to implement access control policy for contacts, after apps began bulk-uploading valuable social graph data.
They (OWS) were recently subpoena'd for someone's data and all they could provide where rough timestamps when that user registered and when they last contacted the servers. Unless you think they're lying in response to a subpoena (which would be very serious from a legal perspective), then they really don't store that data.
Of course it would be nice if we didn't have to trust them that this won't change in the future (whether through a court order or their decision doesn't really matter).
We often visualize the effect of mass on spacetime by using a trampoline and a bowling ball. The outer edges are flat and the closer you get to the bowling ball the more spacetime is warped downward.
On the outer edges, the effect is almost nonexistent and the trampoline's surface is nearly flat. What this suggests is that spacetime without mass is flat and that mass warps spacetime in a downward direction. So no mass = flat, mass = curved downward. So the effect is in the range of [0, black hole].
Obviously this is an very loose analogy but bear with me.
What if spacetime acts more like a waterbed? Not only does mass warp spacetime "downward" but something (in our analogy the displaced water) pushes the rest of spacetime upward.
To use a signal processing analogy, a filter will (nearly?) always affect the passband to some degree, with very high Q filters creating a knee where amplitude is increased significantly before the filter rolls off. That seems counterintuitive (at least to me) but it's nonetheless true.
Using another analogy, curved spacetime creates regions of "downhill-ness". What if the space between masses get a little bit of uphill curve as well? That could explain e.g., the Pioneer anomaly and possibly at much larger scales the effect in the article.