I'd have thought so. But the home page of the actual facility says "A European facility opening new avenues to reveal the secrets of matter on ultra-short timescales" so I'm guessing the Discovery article isn't very accurate.
I wonder if the FCC wouldn't have better luck by regulating advertising claims. I'm neither a lawyer nor American so I'm not sure what legal rights/responsibilities they have, but would they (or some other friendly government entity) be able to write a standardized definition of the phrase "broadband internet access" and insist that ISPs not mislead consumers by offering them something they aren't really getting?
Most of the important requirements of net neutrality are, after all, just restatements of what internet access is supposed to be.
It might also be useful if they could provide a working definition for "minimum available bandwidth", i.e., the minimum bandwidth the user can expect to actually receive when the network is at its most busy, and require ISPs to provide this information (as well, of course, as any applicable data caps and/or "fair use" policies) to potential customers in plain terms.
(It probably isn't economically practicable for ISPs to economically provide a specified minimum bandwidth at all times, but something like a 99th-percentile system might work well. One of the other practical problems with creating a workable definition is that bandwidth to any particular remote host might be limited at the other end, and it may be difficult to unambiguously define where "this end" stops and "the other end" begins; hopefully, though, the experts could come up with something.)
If you're talking about going back to the primary source (the cables themselves) then no, don't bother. I'm going to have to chicken out on this one, so please consider your point made.
If you don't mind discussing a tangentially related issue instead: it surprises me there aren't more better-known websites deconstructing the cables. I mean, almost any position you can take (reasonable or not) has websites proponents can point to: birthers, 9/11 sceptics, creationists, evolutionists, whatever. So why no cablegate.org? (Actually that domain does exist but points to Wikileaks itself.)
The only theory I have is that folks have been scared off by the legal threats made by the US government, but I don't find that very convincing. Any ideas?
It seems to me that you want me to do your homework! You're the one asserting that the cables reveal wrongdoing; prove it. (My default position is based on the surmise that if any of the cables had actually provided any actionable information the newspapers would have made a bit of a fuss about them. Instead we got articles about how rude the US ambassador was about our last government's foreign policy.) If I went around doing detailed research on every conspiracy theory I read on the internet I'd never get any work done!
As for the specific items you mention:
Spying is business as usual. OK, it may technically be illegal, so I suppose you've won that point, but face it - it isn't a *real* crime, unless it involves assassination or similar serious wrongdoing.
I don't recall hearing anything about any "cables about Israel" so if you can't provide an actual reference, please at least provide some sort of context.
The detention centers are old news. If some of the cables exposed additional, actionable, details, then, once again, please provide at least some context if not an actual reference.
I haven't heard that any of the Anonymous releases have exposed anyone's criminal or even immoral activity. Mostly they've been releasing credit card numbers, haven't they?
Even when it comes to Wikileaks, the last time I asked someone to actually point to a released diplomatic cable that revealed wrongdoing by the US government he came up blank. So, can you do better? I'd also accept another Wikileak release, it doesn't have to be the cables. (It does need to reveal wrongdoing by the person or people who the leak was taken from; for example, I'm not interested in diplomatic cables saying that the diplomat thinks person X is committing crimes but can't prove it.)
As a factual correction, the part of the legislation that allows for (alleged) infringers to have their internet connection cut off is not yet active. It won't kick in until such time as the government deems it necessary.
From TFA: "imagine that two people, each tossing a coin on their own and keeping a record of the results, compared this data after a few coin tosses and found that they always had identical outcomes, even though each result, heads or tails, would still occur randomly from one toss to the next". That's badly wrong. (Although I'm sure the researcher understands quantum mechanics, it was probably the PR guy who got it wrong!)
Entanglement really isn't all that mysterious; it just seems strange if you haven't gotten your head around non-commuting observables. Entangled particles are the quantum analogue of classical correlations - so it isn't as if two people are tossing separate coins, which of course aren't correlated.
Instead, imagine choosing a playing card at random from a shuffled deck and (without looking) cutting it in half and putting the two halves in separate envelopes. Keep one envelope and send the other to a friend living near Alpha Centauri. Open the envelopes at the same (pre-arranged) time. Gee whiz, you both simultaneously see two halves of the same card. Magic! (Well, maybe not.)
That's the classical playing card. A quantum playing card is weird: you can't see whether the card is black or red and whether it is odd or even at the same time. If you find out whether the card is black or red the number on the card changes at random; if you find out whether it is odd or even the suit of the card changes at random. Just to really make things awkward, you can choose to make a measurement that one third looks at the card's colour and two thirds looks at whether the card is odd or even (yes, I know that doesn't even make sense but that's the way it works). Then... if you cut a whole bunch of cards in half, do different measurements each time, and take care of a few loopholes, you find that the statistics you get prove that until you looked at each card (or half of it) it didn't actually have a specific colour or a specific number, just a wavefunction describing the probabilities. This is called Bell's Inequality.
My advice: if you don't need to understand it, don't bother trying. The important point is that it's the quantum cards (non-commuting observables) that are weird, not the fact that you can cut them in half (entanglement).
(Incidentally, if the card has been cut into two, and you look at the colour of each half, the numbers on the two halves change independently of one another. The entangled cards aren't mystically bound together forever. Only the initial measurement is the same.)
[...] I mean, photons don't act like mass-full particles in a non-vacuum [...]
No, I suppose not. I probably hadn't thought about it hard enough - there's an effective Hamiltonian which is different from the real one, but I guess it just looks like a change in the distance scale, not like a mass term. A change in the refractive index can act like a gravitational field (my thesis was about figuring out how much Hawking radiation you should see in materials with a rapidly changing refractive index) but I presume moving through a gravitational field doesn't cause generation mixing, otherwise we'd expect to see it in the neutrinos from the sun.
Which brings up another question: do you know whether the measured rate of neutrino mixing gives us a lower bound for the neutrino mass? Or is it a strictly binary zero/nonzero thing?
If you've done or seen the math that says the interaction probability doesn't matter [...]
Afraid not. But my gut tells me it shouldn't. Consider a hypothetical very thin pane of glass, so that the typical photon only interacts once; or, better still, consider the ideal model of a mirror. Each photon only interacts once when bouncing off a perfect mirror, but because the single interaction is with all the atoms simultaneously (i.e., a superposition) it still bounces off at the expected angle.
If you somehow measured which atom the photon bounced from / interacted with, that would cause the photon to depart at a random angle, but so long as you aren't doing that measurement the number of interactions shouldn't matter. This is rather like the two-slit experiment - in fact if you think about it, in the two slit experiment the photons you measure haven't interacted with the matter at all, but are still exhibiting wave behaviour.:-)
Photons only travel at less than the speed of light in a non-vacuum because of interactions; between interactions (between atoms, which is a vacuum) they still travel at the speed of light.
I strongly suspect that the effect is the same. The interactions aren't actually discrete because both the atoms and the photon are subject to quantum mechanics. Also remember that the atoms are fairly closely packed. (In the case of neutrinos, though, I guess the only interaction is with the quarks, which *aren't* closely packed, so that may be another problem with my suggestion!)
The photon-through-glass thing requires many, many interactions so the average is what we see when we treat the light as if they were rays bent by glass-air interfaces.
I don't think that's true - the critical fact is that the interaction might have been with any of the atoms. Even a single photon will behave the same way, and I don't think the interaction rate makes any difference as such, although I admit I'm not certain of this. Can I mention that my PhD was in quantum optics at this point?:-)
This particular experiment, whose neutrinos are both lower in energy and quantity than solar neutrinos, saw 88 interactions they could attribute to their emitter in a year. 6 of these were of the electron neutrino type.
Ah. Yeah, that ratio is rather too high to by reasonably explained away by matter interactions. Oh, well, the idea of massless fermions never appealed to me much anyway.
Even so, I hope one day we'll see a similar experiment carried out across a vacuum - Moon to Earth, maybe. That would eliminate any lingering doubts.:-)
I thought of the same objection as the OP, although I would have expressed it differently: the basis for the experiment is that massless neutrinos can't change type because they travel at the speed of light hence experience no proper time. But actually they only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. Granted the proper time between emission and detection would still be awfully awfully small, but do we know for sure how quickly oscillation occurs (in proper time)?
I'd have thought using your brain meant realizing that what you're proposing means a neutrino interacting twice -- the first muon neutrino interacting with some matter, and the electron neutrino hypothetically emitted by that interaction itself interacting with the detector. Even setting aside the issue that the second neutrino would have to be emitted in the same direction, that means the probability of this occurring is the probability of a single interaction squared. It means your idea is highly dependent on the probability of neutrino-atom interactions.
I'm not sure that there's any problem with the neutrino needing to be emitted in the same direction; wouldn't wave mechanics take care of this, just like a photon traveling through glass? The odds of a photon interacting with a single atom and coming out in the same direction are minimal, but when you've got a whole bunch of atoms it just works out.
Obviously, as you point out, the plausibility of this objection depends on the rate of neutrino-atom interactions. So the question becomes: what is the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter over a 300km hop, and how does it compare to the fraction of changed neutrinos measured? You've said yourself they sent out an awful lot of neutrinos.
From either perspective, the important question is: have the theoreticians actually considered this idea? If they have, it is safe to assume that they have been able to eliminate it, or they wouldn't be making the claims they are. But it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to automatically assume that they have indeed considered every possibility, particularly the dumb sounding ones. (It's surprising how often dumb-sounding possibilities don't look so dumb once you've actually done the maths.)
I'm sure all the necessary numbers are available, so we could do the math ourselves if we had the expertise and the time. But wouldn't it make more sense to ask the question first? Someone, after all, might know the answer already.:-)
Lo and behold, the US of A is exposed by wikileaks.
[Citation needed.]:-)
Most of the stuff from WikiLeaks that the media have been making a noise about is little more than gossip. There could easily be a few important items hidden in the dross, but if so, could you please point them out for me, because I'm having trouble finding them in amidst the rubbish.
Specifically: what criminal actions by members of the US government/armed forces/etc. have been revealed by Wikileaks? Two or three examples will be fine, I don't need a laundry list.
This quote reflects a really depressing world view and a lack of perspective. For the most part, those in authority in the US are doing a fine job.
Looking from the outside (mostly through the Goggles of Slashdot) I'd suggest there appears to be at least one significant institutional problem with the justice system in the US: it seems that a significant number of prosecutors and their superiors (DAs?) seem to see it as their job to convict as many people as possible, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong or not. Put another way, they seem to be deliberately ignoring the distinction between something being illegal and something being wrong. Laws often have unintended consequences. The British system (which we in NZ have inherited) expects the representatives of the Crown to refrain from prosecuting those who have technically violated the law without ill intent. In the US this doesn't always seem to happen, and often neither the judge nor the jury seem willing to refuse to cooperate.
It's not the best example (because at least some people do think he was in the wrong) but consider the case of Terry Childs. According to a jury member, the jury concluded that he hadn't done anything wrong, but felt that they had to convict anyway because the law was poorly written and could technically be interpreted to cover his actions.
I'd be interested to hear your views on this. As I said, all I know is what I read in the local newspapers plus on Slashdot and similar sites, so my perspective - while largely impartial - is far from ideal.
In fact, Maori are well-treated by the Government in modern-day New Zealand. If you have a specific objection about New Zealand's race relations, please make it; vague allegations are hardly helpful.
Given any useful definition of "real" then yes, consciousness is real, because it has observable effects. (For example, people arguing about whether or not consciousness is real.) You don't really need physics and science to answer that question.
Most other debate in this area boils down to arguing about what words like "real", "consciousness", and "free will" should actually mean (if anything) so speculating about possible quantum effects on the operation of the brain doesn't seem a particularly helpful way to resolve matters.
The problem is that many of these investors did not have much choice, they were simply working for Nortel and their pension was in company stock.
Does anybody else think this is a very bad idea? Investments should always be diverse, and if you are going to invest everything in one company the company you work for seems a particularly bad choice.
What were the trustees thinking? (There were trustees, I hope? The US isn't daft enough to let companies manage their employee's pension schemes themselves?)
I think the important questions are whether or not the US (or any other foreign entity, but as I understand it SWIFT only concerns the US) has requested your information, what reason was given, what information was provided, and when this happened. Obviously once the data is in the US you can't be certain where it's going to end up (Wikileaks, for example!) but at least if the reason doesn't stack up you could start asking pointed questions.
In most cases the answer would be "no, we haven't given any of your information to the US" and you could relax. (Assuming you're the sort of person who worries about these things in the first place.)
I'd also have thought that anyone worried about the US spying on them wouldn't want anyone to tell the US about it, because it might wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone want to bet that the US now has a full dossier on Mr. Alvaro?:-)
It is my understanding that, to be legally actionable, conspiracy requires at least one overt act. Planning how best to do something isn't necessarily criminal in and of itself.
That doesn't mean that those allegations don't deserve investigation. There may have been an overt act, or perhaps some other law was broken.
The linked article mentions alleged wrongdoing by HBGary only very briefly - just one paragraph near the end. It also isn't immediately clear whether or not any of the actions this paragraph alleges would actually be illegal under US law. (For reference, the paragraph in question starts "When asked to investigate pro-union websites".)
The main focus of the article is on the sort of technology HBGary was developing. (Personally, I'm particularly intrigued by the use of direct access ports in attack technology, because this is a vulnerability I've been complaining about for years. Nobody I discussed it with would admit it was a security risk worth caring about.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have thought so. But the home page of the actual facility says "A European facility opening new avenues to reveal the secrets of matter on ultra-short timescales" so I'm guessing the Discovery article isn't very accurate.
*All* particles are mathematical abstractions.
Only if the "virtual BIOS" is signed. Chicken and egg, I'm afraid.
I wonder if the FCC wouldn't have better luck by regulating advertising claims. I'm neither a lawyer nor American so I'm not sure what legal rights/responsibilities they have, but would they (or some other friendly government entity) be able to write a standardized definition of the phrase "broadband internet access" and insist that ISPs not mislead consumers by offering them something they aren't really getting?
Most of the important requirements of net neutrality are, after all, just restatements of what internet access is supposed to be.
It might also be useful if they could provide a working definition for "minimum available bandwidth", i.e., the minimum bandwidth the user can expect to actually receive when the network is at its most busy, and require ISPs to provide this information (as well, of course, as any applicable data caps and/or "fair use" policies) to potential customers in plain terms.
(It probably isn't economically practicable for ISPs to economically provide a specified minimum bandwidth at all times, but something like a 99th-percentile system might work well. One of the other practical problems with creating a workable definition is that bandwidth to any particular remote host might be limited at the other end, and it may be difficult to unambiguously define where "this end" stops and "the other end" begins; hopefully, though, the experts could come up with something.)
Where does it say that? The article is discussing systems that don't require human approval for a kill.
If you're talking about going back to the primary source (the cables themselves) then no, don't bother. I'm going to have to chicken out on this one, so please consider your point made.
If you don't mind discussing a tangentially related issue instead: it surprises me there aren't more better-known websites deconstructing the cables. I mean, almost any position you can take (reasonable or not) has websites proponents can point to: birthers, 9/11 sceptics, creationists, evolutionists, whatever. So why no cablegate.org? (Actually that domain does exist but points to Wikileaks itself.)
The only theory I have is that folks have been scared off by the legal threats made by the US government, but I don't find that very convincing. Any ideas?
It seems to me that you want me to do your homework! You're the one asserting that the cables reveal wrongdoing; prove it. (My default position is based on the surmise that if any of the cables had actually provided any actionable information the newspapers would have made a bit of a fuss about them. Instead we got articles about how rude the US ambassador was about our last government's foreign policy.) If I went around doing detailed research on every conspiracy theory I read on the internet I'd never get any work done!
As for the specific items you mention:
Spying is business as usual. OK, it may technically be illegal, so I suppose you've won that point, but face it - it isn't a *real* crime, unless it involves assassination or similar serious wrongdoing.
I don't recall hearing anything about any "cables about Israel" so if you can't provide an actual reference, please at least provide some sort of context.
The detention centers are old news. If some of the cables exposed additional, actionable, details, then, once again, please provide at least some context if not an actual reference.
I haven't heard that any of the Anonymous releases have exposed anyone's criminal or even immoral activity. Mostly they've been releasing credit card numbers, haven't they?
Even when it comes to Wikileaks, the last time I asked someone to actually point to a released diplomatic cable that revealed wrongdoing by the US government he came up blank. So, can you do better? I'd also accept another Wikileak release, it doesn't have to be the cables. (It does need to reveal wrongdoing by the person or people who the leak was taken from; for example, I'm not interested in diplomatic cables saying that the diplomat thinks person X is committing crimes but can't prove it.)
Sounds reasonable, provided that this doesn't mean that a lone hacker is automatically treated as a member of a criminal organization.
What are the real-world analogies? Are there existing RICO list crimes that are often committed by individuals rather than organized criminals?
As a factual correction, the part of the legislation that allows for (alleged) infringers to have their internet connection cut off is not yet active. It won't kick in until such time as the government deems it necessary.
"Computers don't lie."
Actually they do, when instructed to do so. It's easy to frame someone. See http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
I can imagine it now ...
From TFA: "imagine that two people, each tossing a coin on their own and keeping a record of the results, compared this data after a few coin tosses and found that they always had identical outcomes, even though each result, heads or tails, would still occur randomly from one toss to the next". That's badly wrong. (Although I'm sure the researcher understands quantum mechanics, it was probably the PR guy who got it wrong!)
Entanglement really isn't all that mysterious; it just seems strange if you haven't gotten your head around non-commuting observables. Entangled particles are the quantum analogue of classical correlations - so it isn't as if two people are tossing separate coins, which of course aren't correlated.
Instead, imagine choosing a playing card at random from a shuffled deck and (without looking) cutting it in half and putting the two halves in separate envelopes. Keep one envelope and send the other to a friend living near Alpha Centauri. Open the envelopes at the same (pre-arranged) time. Gee whiz, you both simultaneously see two halves of the same card. Magic! (Well, maybe not.)
That's the classical playing card. A quantum playing card is weird: you can't see whether the card is black or red and whether it is odd or even at the same time. If you find out whether the card is black or red the number on the card changes at random; if you find out whether it is odd or even the suit of the card changes at random. Just to really make things awkward, you can choose to make a measurement that one third looks at the card's colour and two thirds looks at whether the card is odd or even (yes, I know that doesn't even make sense but that's the way it works). Then ... if you cut a whole bunch of cards in half, do different measurements each time, and take care of a few loopholes, you find that the statistics you get prove that until you looked at each card (or half of it) it didn't actually have a specific colour or a specific number, just a wavefunction describing the probabilities. This is called Bell's Inequality.
My advice: if you don't need to understand it, don't bother trying. The important point is that it's the quantum cards (non-commuting observables) that are weird, not the fact that you can cut them in half (entanglement).
(Incidentally, if the card has been cut into two, and you look at the colour of each half, the numbers on the two halves change independently of one another. The entangled cards aren't mystically bound together forever. Only the initial measurement is the same.)
[...] I mean, photons don't act like mass-full particles in a non-vacuum [...]
No, I suppose not. I probably hadn't thought about it hard enough - there's an effective Hamiltonian which is different from the real one, but I guess it just looks like a change in the distance scale, not like a mass term. A change in the refractive index can act like a gravitational field (my thesis was about figuring out how much Hawking radiation you should see in materials with a rapidly changing refractive index) but I presume moving through a gravitational field doesn't cause generation mixing, otherwise we'd expect to see it in the neutrinos from the sun.
Which brings up another question: do you know whether the measured rate of neutrino mixing gives us a lower bound for the neutrino mass? Or is it a strictly binary zero/nonzero thing?
If you've done or seen the math that says the interaction probability doesn't matter [...]
Afraid not. But my gut tells me it shouldn't. Consider a hypothetical very thin pane of glass, so that the typical photon only interacts once; or, better still, consider the ideal model of a mirror. Each photon only interacts once when bouncing off a perfect mirror, but because the single interaction is with all the atoms simultaneously (i.e., a superposition) it still bounces off at the expected angle.
If you somehow measured which atom the photon bounced from / interacted with, that would cause the photon to depart at a random angle, but so long as you aren't doing that measurement the number of interactions shouldn't matter. This is rather like the two-slit experiment - in fact if you think about it, in the two slit experiment the photons you measure haven't interacted with the matter at all, but are still exhibiting wave behaviour. :-)
Photons only travel at less than the speed of light in a non-vacuum because of interactions; between interactions (between atoms, which is a vacuum) they still travel at the speed of light.
I strongly suspect that the effect is the same. The interactions aren't actually discrete because both the atoms and the photon are subject to quantum mechanics. Also remember that the atoms are fairly closely packed. (In the case of neutrinos, though, I guess the only interaction is with the quarks, which *aren't* closely packed, so that may be another problem with my suggestion!)
The photon-through-glass thing requires many, many interactions so the average is what we see when we treat the light as if they were rays bent by glass-air interfaces.
I don't think that's true - the critical fact is that the interaction might have been with any of the atoms. Even a single photon will behave the same way, and I don't think the interaction rate makes any difference as such, although I admit I'm not certain of this. Can I mention that my PhD was in quantum optics at this point? :-)
This particular experiment, whose neutrinos are both lower in energy and quantity than solar neutrinos, saw 88 interactions they could attribute to their emitter in a year. 6 of these were of the electron neutrino type.
Ah. Yeah, that ratio is rather too high to by reasonably explained away by matter interactions. Oh, well, the idea of massless fermions never appealed to me much anyway.
Even so, I hope one day we'll see a similar experiment carried out across a vacuum - Moon to Earth, maybe. That would eliminate any lingering doubts. :-)
I thought of the same objection as the OP, although I would have expressed it differently: the basis for the experiment is that massless neutrinos can't change type because they travel at the speed of light hence experience no proper time. But actually they only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. Granted the proper time between emission and detection would still be awfully awfully small, but do we know for sure how quickly oscillation occurs (in proper time)?
I'd have thought using your brain meant realizing that what you're proposing means a neutrino interacting twice -- the first muon neutrino interacting with some matter, and the electron neutrino hypothetically emitted by that interaction itself interacting with the detector. Even setting aside the issue that the second neutrino would have to be emitted in the same direction, that means the probability of this occurring is the probability of a single interaction squared. It means your idea is highly dependent on the probability of neutrino-atom interactions.
I'm not sure that there's any problem with the neutrino needing to be emitted in the same direction; wouldn't wave mechanics take care of this, just like a photon traveling through glass? The odds of a photon interacting with a single atom and coming out in the same direction are minimal, but when you've got a whole bunch of atoms it just works out.
Obviously, as you point out, the plausibility of this objection depends on the rate of neutrino-atom interactions. So the question becomes: what is the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter over a 300km hop, and how does it compare to the fraction of changed neutrinos measured? You've said yourself they sent out an awful lot of neutrinos.
From either perspective, the important question is: have the theoreticians actually considered this idea? If they have, it is safe to assume that they have been able to eliminate it, or they wouldn't be making the claims they are. But it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to automatically assume that they have indeed considered every possibility, particularly the dumb sounding ones. (It's surprising how often dumb-sounding possibilities don't look so dumb once you've actually done the maths.)
I'm sure all the necessary numbers are available, so we could do the math ourselves if we had the expertise and the time. But wouldn't it make more sense to ask the question first? Someone, after all, might know the answer already. :-)
Lo and behold, the US of A is exposed by wikileaks.
[Citation needed.] :-)
Most of the stuff from WikiLeaks that the media have been making a noise about is little more than gossip. There could easily be a few important items hidden in the dross, but if so, could you please point them out for me, because I'm having trouble finding them in amidst the rubbish.
Specifically: what criminal actions by members of the US government/armed forces/etc. have been revealed by Wikileaks? Two or three examples will be fine, I don't need a laundry list.
This quote reflects a really depressing world view and a lack of perspective. For the most part, those in authority in the US are doing a fine job.
Looking from the outside (mostly through the Goggles of Slashdot) I'd suggest there appears to be at least one significant institutional problem with the justice system in the US: it seems that a significant number of prosecutors and their superiors (DAs?) seem to see it as their job to convict as many people as possible, regardless of whether they've actually done anything wrong or not. Put another way, they seem to be deliberately ignoring the distinction between something being illegal and something being wrong. Laws often have unintended consequences. The British system (which we in NZ have inherited) expects the representatives of the Crown to refrain from prosecuting those who have technically violated the law without ill intent. In the US this doesn't always seem to happen, and often neither the judge nor the jury seem willing to refuse to cooperate.
It's not the best example (because at least some people do think he was in the wrong) but consider the case of Terry Childs. According to a jury member, the jury concluded that he hadn't done anything wrong, but felt that they had to convict anyway because the law was poorly written and could technically be interpreted to cover his actions.
I'd be interested to hear your views on this. As I said, all I know is what I read in the local newspapers plus on Slashdot and similar sites, so my perspective - while largely impartial - is far from ideal.
In fact, Maori are well-treated by the Government in modern-day New Zealand. If you have a specific objection about New Zealand's race relations, please make it; vague allegations are hardly helpful.
Given any useful definition of "real" then yes, consciousness is real, because it has observable effects. (For example, people arguing about whether or not consciousness is real.) You don't really need physics and science to answer that question.
Most other debate in this area boils down to arguing about what words like "real", "consciousness", and "free will" should actually mean (if anything) so speculating about possible quantum effects on the operation of the brain doesn't seem a particularly helpful way to resolve matters.
The problem is that many of these investors did not have much choice, they were simply working for Nortel and their pension was in company stock.
Does anybody else think this is a very bad idea? Investments should always be diverse, and if you are going to invest everything in one company the company you work for seems a particularly bad choice.
What were the trustees thinking? (There were trustees, I hope? The US isn't daft enough to let companies manage their employee's pension schemes themselves?)
I think the important questions are whether or not the US (or any other foreign entity, but as I understand it SWIFT only concerns the US) has requested your information, what reason was given, what information was provided, and when this happened. Obviously once the data is in the US you can't be certain where it's going to end up (Wikileaks, for example!) but at least if the reason doesn't stack up you could start asking pointed questions.
In most cases the answer would be "no, we haven't given any of your information to the US" and you could relax. (Assuming you're the sort of person who worries about these things in the first place.)
I'd also have thought that anyone worried about the US spying on them wouldn't want anyone to tell the US about it, because it might wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone want to bet that the US now has a full dossier on Mr. Alvaro? :-)
I don't understand why the BFDI needs to ask the US for this data. If Europol are vetting the US requests, shouldn't they be keeping track?
It is my understanding that, to be legally actionable, conspiracy requires at least one overt act. Planning how best to do something isn't necessarily criminal in and of itself.
That doesn't mean that those allegations don't deserve investigation. There may have been an overt act, or perhaps some other law was broken.
The linked article mentions alleged wrongdoing by HBGary only very briefly - just one paragraph near the end. It also isn't immediately clear whether or not any of the actions this paragraph alleges would actually be illegal under US law. (For reference, the paragraph in question starts "When asked to investigate pro-union websites".)
The main focus of the article is on the sort of technology HBGary was developing. (Personally, I'm particularly intrigued by the use of direct access ports in attack technology, because this is a vulnerability I've been complaining about for years. Nobody I discussed it with would admit it was a security risk worth caring about.)