That all depends on what you consider 'room temperature'. To me, that doesn't mean actual room temperature, it means a temperature that can be achieved with small, economical cooling systems. I could see all the way down to -50 degrees C being practical for in home use. Considering the record for superconductivity is around -135 C, we're really not all that far away. In fact, seen as liquid nitrogen is relatively cheap to produce, if transistors existed above that temperature it would be possible to begin large scale experimentation now.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that we don't have a working theory for how the newer higher temperature superconductors work. It's within the realms of imagination that when we finally come up with an explaination, research will proceed much more rapidly. The highest temperature superconductors known today were found essentially by trial and error.
I thought it had been nearly proven that peer review for highly specialized complez subjects was pretty much worthless, since most reviewers will not understand the subject matter and also won't be willing to admit that they don't understand it. Didn't some students at MIT create a giberish generating program that was able to produce papers that pass peer review?
The basic problem is, for truly ground breaking research, there often isn't a ready supply of peers to do the review. There are plenty of subjects in science where litterally a dozen or less people in the world qualified to do the review. And in all likelyhood, 4 of them collaborated on the research in question and another 6 were consulted at some point during the research.
Would someone who knows please explain how the EU Court has jurisdiction over national laws?
What power the EU Court has over the UK is the power that the UK gave it when it signed up for the EU in the first place. Basically, the court has jurisdictions in cases that involve EU law or the EU treaties.
the UK (and other countries in the EU, for that matter) ceded its soverignity to the EU to such an extent that the EU acts as a Supreme Court?
In some ways yes and in some ways no. The EU court has jurisdiction over many basic human rights issues especially where they apply to the EU charter. Of course, there are many points of law that have nothing to do with human rights or EU law, so those topics are still covered by each nations highest court. That being said, if a country fails to follow a judgement, there really isn't much the court can do except for fining the country. And if the country doesn't pay, there is even less they can do. It is unlikely that the EU would risk a major international incident over a member's failure to pay a court imposed fine.
Is the EU as a whole like the Federal government is to the US states or Canadian provinces? I really do not know myself and am asking for a serious answer.
It is really more like the Articles of the Confederation (The United State's 'first draft' government). While it has many of the functions of a sovereign nation, the EU is much more loosely united that the States in the US or Provinces in Canada. Remember that the EU began it's life as the European Economic Community, and managing the economy of the Union is still it's primary purpose.
Well, according to the summary the scanner is looking for protiens that are produced by cancerous cells, not the cells themselves. And even if it were the case that it could only detect the cancer cells in the blood, it would still have it's uses. If it could be made cheap enough, it could become a standard test, everytime you visit the doctor. It would still allow us to catch cancer cases earlier than they would have been otherwise even if we couldn't rely on it to detect 100% of all cancer cases.
For emergency equipment, wouldn't it be easier and more effective to just put a damn hand crank on the thing? If kids in third world countries can power a laptop with a handcrank I think I can power a phone long enough to call 911.
The real question on regulation is if it does more good than harm. The easiest way for me to think about it is as a controls system.
It can be underdamped (no regulation), meaning that the industry will go to extreme highs and lows as companies go for short term profits and take advantage of monopolistic opportunities only to be bitten in the ass by those same policies later. Any slight impact on the industry will send companies fortunes flying high or crashing low. There is also little need to innovate since once you have secured your position you can simply remain there until a competitor begins to make inroads on your market.
It can also be overdamped (too much regulation), meaning that the government is so involved that it is slowing innovation and holding companies to the same playing field even if one has a much better product than the others. Industries will be slow to recover from negative effects and slow to take advantage of new opportunities as they wait for the regulation to catch up with changing technologies.
Of course, it is technically possible for a system to be perfectly damped, where regulation would protect the industry from wild swings while still allowing innovation to flourish. Of course, this is the knife edge that is nearly impossible to walk, especially tech industries that are constantly changing.
In the US, it would seem to me that we are underdamped, telcos are taking short term profits rather than improving infrustructure. If the government could reduce the cost of entry into the market or legislate a maximum cost / bandwidth it would improve the infrustructure immensely.
instruction book that we wrote to describe physics?
There's the thing that you don't understand. We didn't create mathematics to describe physics, yet mathematics always seems to do the job, and ussually much more simply than you would expect.
How many of us sat through algebra in middle school thinking "I'll never use this". Then sat through calculous in high school thinking "Nobody would ever use this". Then took our first calc based physics course in high school and thought, "No way, this is actually how the universe works?".
As far as we can determine, mathematics is the universal language of the universe, it certainly isn't something that we created. The fact that we are near to describing the infinately complex universe with a handful of equations would seem to indicate that mathematics is a part of the very stucture of the universe.
Are these kinds of investigations really inherently bad in and of themselves or is it just the way the RIAA has handled the court procedings after the fact?
Personally, I think that if you can sanely, rationaly, and beyond a reasonable doubt prove that someone has violated the copyright, you have the right to make them stop and seek some amount of damages. The problem with the RIAA is that they almost never prove beyond any kind of doubt, they violate laws in their investigations, and they seek damages many times what the actual damages are.
Seriously, thousands of people make their living producing the games that I love to play. I see no problem in them charging me to play them and no problem in them punishing people who try get out of paying. You can argue that they are too expensive, or that there are no good demos available, and even that priracy doesn't really affect sales. But that doesn't really change the facts. Yes, people will take what they can without paying but companies should have the right to deter them from doing so.
What about automated 'not' killing machines. Imagine an army of a thousand robots that roll up on the enemy and subdue them using nonleathal weapons and tactics. Given that they are cheap enough, and easily replaced it is technically possible. They could be built to be virtually indestructible, ignore all resistance and simply bind and detain anyone that attacks them.
As for you idea of war by proxy, who's going to enforce the arbitrary rules that you set up for the conflict? Unless you make the punishment for 'cheating' much greater than the effects of losing the war, there will always be those who violate the rules. As for limiting the number of bots on the field or boiling the conflict down to chess, you would be ignoring all the other inputs to war that greatly effect the outcome. Winning a war is often not about strategy, it is about resources, technology, and willingness to sacrifice.
Am I the only when that thought memristors would remain the the 5-10 year category for the next couple of decades? Granted, this is just a proof of concept chip but it is moving along very rapidly compared to most 'game changing' advances.
20 years of theory and work just to make the first memristor, less than a year to use the new memristor in a device that actually improves over the standard technology. So when will we see commercially available devices? Next year some time at this rate?
Have you heard anything about Somolia in the past, oh I don't know 20 years? There is no government in control of the people, not in the sense you seem to imply. There's also no organized economy or workers rights. Most likely, these pirates are average people with starving family back home, doing anything they can to put food on the table.
Like a lot of problems around the world, the only way you are going to 'fix' the problem is to raise the standard of living so that the risks of brazenly illegal behavior outweigh the benifits. Sending aid is, of course, a very tricky situation. For many people, it feels like rewarding people who have broken the law. Not to mention there will always be the select few who have become attached to the power they have gained.
What's the big deal about drinking recycled urine? I guess I just don't get it; pure water is pure water, regardless of what was in it in the past (unless, I sopose, you believe in homeopathic medicine). Statistically, I bet most of the water you drink has gone through a fellow human being at some point or another, what's the big deal?
More likely it means that the Verizon rep was trying to be exceedingly clear about what was and wasn't accessed, and in the process mucked up the waters somewhat.
As for your other questions, I do not believe that they store records of what was said unless they are ordered to by the government. The hardware and software necissary to do so would be expensive and would provide no business advantage to them, unless you think they go around blackmailing people or something. I'm not saying they haven't been so ordered, only that it would be a net loss for them to do it otherwise.
Do everything you can to be suspicious without violating any laws. Download dozens of distrobutions of Linux, send massive files to your friends anything to get yourself noticed. Then, when they cut off your access, complain and complain and keep complaining until they either give in or give up.
Seriously, these test cases exist for a reason, show the ISP how much business it will cost them, show the government how many false positives they will get. It can't hurt and (if they aren't a buch of corrupt fools) it could help.
That's a good questions and one that isn't as easy to answer as you'd think it is. In many places, prison is punishment to deter future crime. No one wants to go to prison and therefore no one should commit crimes that will send them there.
In other places, prison is more about rehabilitation. It assumes prisoners have done something wrong for a reason and attempts to address that reason through education, anger managment, anti-drug programs etc. It also removes them from society, but it is more to force them into their rehabilitation and to protect society than it is punishment.
It's interesting that two wildly disparate theories of criminal justice both produce the same basic concept of prisons. Personally, I believe that neither system is better or worse than the other, there are examples of both succeeding admirably. The problem in the US is that we don't implement either one. Unstead we try to combine the two, and end up sending contradictory messages.
The point is that the law should have to catch up. You know that whole no 'ex post facto' rule in the constitution? When anything you don't like can be called illigal by purposefully misinterpreting the written law, you have thrown a very important part of our constitution out the window.
Yeah, the woman did a horrible thing. And yeah, you could argue that there should be a law against it. But the point is that there isn't one. And if there's no law, than the justice system should have no power to punish you. If you really want to punish her, too bad. Change the law so that the next person can be dealt with legally and according to the rules laid out in the constitution.
I could be totally wrong, but I was under the impression that all the 'missing mass' of subatomic particle was believed to be generated by the Higgs Boson/Field.
So not having to mine and refine a few extra tons of alluminium doesn't help the environment? Reducing fuel burned by 20% doesn't reduce greenhouse gases and particulates? I'm confused by your definition of green technology, unless you mean 'technology that's only purpose is to be more environmentally friendly'. If that is what you mean, then by your definition there isn't a single major corporation that has significantly invested in green technology.
The current financial market has pretty much guaranteed that they can do nothing "green."
On the contrary, there are many 'green' innovations that are actually cost saving innovations. Look at the Boeing 787 (if it ever gets off the ground) it uses much less alluminum and has 20% higher fuel efficiency. Modern innovation is both green and economical.
we can look at the red light shift of things moving away all around us and their velocity. Doing this, we can trace their vectors backwards to an intersection point--the point of the event theorized to be the Big Bang. The true center of the universe.
No you can't actually, because all the the vectors show everything moving away from us at the same velocity. The way it was explained to me way back when: Imagine a loaf of bread with raisins spaced equally throughout. As the bread rises, the raisins get farther apart from one another. From the point of view of any raisin, all the other raisins are moving away from it at the same speed. The same thing happens in the big bang, the universe vastely increased in size.
It's important to remember that the Big Bang "wasn't an explosion in space, it was an explosion of space". You can't trace the origin back to a specific point because when the big bang happened that single point was the entire universe.
Should be relatively cheap and reliable hardware. While the surface is the definition of a hellish landscape, the cloud tops of Venus are the only place in the solar system (other than Earth of course) with temperatures and pressures that humans could survive in. Not only is that interesting from a human habitation standpoint, but the mild conditions should also improve the lifespan of the balloon probe itself. Sure, you can't dig in the dirt like the Mars rovers can, but you will see a heck of a lot more of the planet from the air than on the ground.
First, there's no proof that tissue created from stem cells is more prone to cancer, at least none that I have ever heard of. Second, you need to realize the very real, and very serious emotional issues that women go through when they are forced into having breast removed. Conciously or sub-conciously, breasts are an important aspect to a woman's feminity and self-esteem, losing one or both can be highly damaging for some women.
If nothing else, imagine if you got your wang cut off in an accident and the doctors told you they could replace it good as new but you'd have a slightly higher chance of getting cancer later in life. Would you really need to think about it?
I just read the lost teaspoons article and I have to admit it was actually kind of interesting and funny. If they had been able to draw any real conclusions it's almost IgNobel worthy. My favorite part came at the end, when they surveyed the people they had been researching. Of the people that responded to the survey, "Thirty six (38%) were male, 57 were female (61%), and one was undecided."
Slashdot Mirror
That all depends on what you consider 'room temperature'. To me, that doesn't mean actual room temperature, it means a temperature that can be achieved with small, economical cooling systems. I could see all the way down to -50 degrees C being practical for in home use. Considering the record for superconductivity is around -135 C, we're really not all that far away. In fact, seen as liquid nitrogen is relatively cheap to produce, if transistors existed above that temperature it would be possible to begin large scale experimentation now.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that we don't have a working theory for how the newer higher temperature superconductors work. It's within the realms of imagination that when we finally come up with an explaination, research will proceed much more rapidly. The highest temperature superconductors known today were found essentially by trial and error.
I thought it had been nearly proven that peer review for highly specialized complez subjects was pretty much worthless, since most reviewers will not understand the subject matter and also won't be willing to admit that they don't understand it. Didn't some students at MIT create a giberish generating program that was able to produce papers that pass peer review?
The basic problem is, for truly ground breaking research, there often isn't a ready supply of peers to do the review. There are plenty of subjects in science where litterally a dozen or less people in the world qualified to do the review. And in all likelyhood, 4 of them collaborated on the research in question and another 6 were consulted at some point during the research.
Would someone who knows please explain how the EU Court has jurisdiction over national laws?
What power the EU Court has over the UK is the power that the UK gave it when it signed up for the EU in the first place. Basically, the court has jurisdictions in cases that involve EU law or the EU treaties.
the UK (and other countries in the EU, for that matter) ceded its soverignity to the EU to such an extent that the EU acts as a Supreme Court?
In some ways yes and in some ways no. The EU court has jurisdiction over many basic human rights issues especially where they apply to the EU charter. Of course, there are many points of law that have nothing to do with human rights or EU law, so those topics are still covered by each nations highest court. That being said, if a country fails to follow a judgement, there really isn't much the court can do except for fining the country. And if the country doesn't pay, there is even less they can do. It is unlikely that the EU would risk a major international incident over a member's failure to pay a court imposed fine.
Is the EU as a whole like the Federal government is to the US states or Canadian provinces? I really do not know myself and am asking for a serious answer.
It is really more like the Articles of the Confederation (The United State's 'first draft' government). While it has many of the functions of a sovereign nation, the EU is much more loosely united that the States in the US or Provinces in Canada. Remember that the EU began it's life as the European Economic Community, and managing the economy of the Union is still it's primary purpose.
Well, according to the summary the scanner is looking for protiens that are produced by cancerous cells, not the cells themselves. And even if it were the case that it could only detect the cancer cells in the blood, it would still have it's uses. If it could be made cheap enough, it could become a standard test, everytime you visit the doctor. It would still allow us to catch cancer cases earlier than they would have been otherwise even if we couldn't rely on it to detect 100% of all cancer cases.
For emergency equipment, wouldn't it be easier and more effective to just put a damn hand crank on the thing? If kids in third world countries can power a laptop with a handcrank I think I can power a phone long enough to call 911.
The real question on regulation is if it does more good than harm. The easiest way for me to think about it is as a controls system.
It can be underdamped (no regulation), meaning that the industry will go to extreme highs and lows as companies go for short term profits and take advantage of monopolistic opportunities only to be bitten in the ass by those same policies later. Any slight impact on the industry will send companies fortunes flying high or crashing low. There is also little need to innovate since once you have secured your position you can simply remain there until a competitor begins to make inroads on your market.
It can also be overdamped (too much regulation), meaning that the government is so involved that it is slowing innovation and holding companies to the same playing field even if one has a much better product than the others. Industries will be slow to recover from negative effects and slow to take advantage of new opportunities as they wait for the regulation to catch up with changing technologies.
Of course, it is technically possible for a system to be perfectly damped, where regulation would protect the industry from wild swings while still allowing innovation to flourish. Of course, this is the knife edge that is nearly impossible to walk, especially tech industries that are constantly changing.
In the US, it would seem to me that we are underdamped, telcos are taking short term profits rather than improving infrustructure. If the government could reduce the cost of entry into the market or legislate a maximum cost / bandwidth it would improve the infrustructure immensely.
instruction book that we wrote to describe physics?
There's the thing that you don't understand. We didn't create mathematics to describe physics, yet mathematics always seems to do the job, and ussually much more simply than you would expect.
How many of us sat through algebra in middle school thinking "I'll never use this". Then sat through calculous in high school thinking "Nobody would ever use this". Then took our first calc based physics course in high school and thought, "No way, this is actually how the universe works?".
As far as we can determine, mathematics is the universal language of the universe, it certainly isn't something that we created. The fact that we are near to describing the infinately complex universe with a handful of equations would seem to indicate that mathematics is a part of the very stucture of the universe.
Are these kinds of investigations really inherently bad in and of themselves or is it just the way the RIAA has handled the court procedings after the fact?
Personally, I think that if you can sanely, rationaly, and beyond a reasonable doubt prove that someone has violated the copyright, you have the right to make them stop and seek some amount of damages. The problem with the RIAA is that they almost never prove beyond any kind of doubt, they violate laws in their investigations, and they seek damages many times what the actual damages are.
Seriously, thousands of people make their living producing the games that I love to play. I see no problem in them charging me to play them and no problem in them punishing people who try get out of paying. You can argue that they are too expensive, or that there are no good demos available, and even that priracy doesn't really affect sales. But that doesn't really change the facts. Yes, people will take what they can without paying but companies should have the right to deter them from doing so.
What about automated 'not' killing machines. Imagine an army of a thousand robots that roll up on the enemy and subdue them using nonleathal weapons and tactics. Given that they are cheap enough, and easily replaced it is technically possible. They could be built to be virtually indestructible, ignore all resistance and simply bind and detain anyone that attacks them.
As for you idea of war by proxy, who's going to enforce the arbitrary rules that you set up for the conflict? Unless you make the punishment for 'cheating' much greater than the effects of losing the war, there will always be those who violate the rules. As for limiting the number of bots on the field or boiling the conflict down to chess, you would be ignoring all the other inputs to war that greatly effect the outcome. Winning a war is often not about strategy, it is about resources, technology, and willingness to sacrifice.
Am I the only when that thought memristors would remain the the 5-10 year category for the next couple of decades? Granted, this is just a proof of concept chip but it is moving along very rapidly compared to most 'game changing' advances.
20 years of theory and work just to make the first memristor, less than a year to use the new memristor in a device that actually improves over the standard technology. So when will we see commercially available devices? Next year some time at this rate?
Have you heard anything about Somolia in the past, oh I don't know 20 years? There is no government in control of the people, not in the sense you seem to imply. There's also no organized economy or workers rights. Most likely, these pirates are average people with starving family back home, doing anything they can to put food on the table.
Like a lot of problems around the world, the only way you are going to 'fix' the problem is to raise the standard of living so that the risks of brazenly illegal behavior outweigh the benifits. Sending aid is, of course, a very tricky situation. For many people, it feels like rewarding people who have broken the law. Not to mention there will always be the select few who have become attached to the power they have gained.
What's the big deal about drinking recycled urine? I guess I just don't get it; pure water is pure water, regardless of what was in it in the past (unless, I sopose, you believe in homeopathic medicine). Statistically, I bet most of the water you drink has gone through a fellow human being at some point or another, what's the big deal?
More likely it means that the Verizon rep was trying to be exceedingly clear about what was and wasn't accessed, and in the process mucked up the waters somewhat.
As for your other questions, I do not believe that they store records of what was said unless they are ordered to by the government. The hardware and software necissary to do so would be expensive and would provide no business advantage to them, unless you think they go around blackmailing people or something. I'm not saying they haven't been so ordered, only that it would be a net loss for them to do it otherwise.
Do everything you can to be suspicious without violating any laws. Download dozens of distrobutions of Linux, send massive files to your friends anything to get yourself noticed. Then, when they cut off your access, complain and complain and keep complaining until they either give in or give up.
Seriously, these test cases exist for a reason, show the ISP how much business it will cost them, show the government how many false positives they will get. It can't hurt and (if they aren't a buch of corrupt fools) it could help.
That's a good questions and one that isn't as easy to answer as you'd think it is. In many places, prison is punishment to deter future crime. No one wants to go to prison and therefore no one should commit crimes that will send them there.
In other places, prison is more about rehabilitation. It assumes prisoners have done something wrong for a reason and attempts to address that reason through education, anger managment, anti-drug programs etc. It also removes them from society, but it is more to force them into their rehabilitation and to protect society than it is punishment.
It's interesting that two wildly disparate theories of criminal justice both produce the same basic concept of prisons. Personally, I believe that neither system is better or worse than the other, there are examples of both succeeding admirably. The problem in the US is that we don't implement either one. Unstead we try to combine the two, and end up sending contradictory messages.
"The Evitable Conflict" in I Robot.
Yeah, Asimov did about 60 years ago.
The point is that the law should have to catch up. You know that whole no 'ex post facto' rule in the constitution? When anything you don't like can be called illigal by purposefully misinterpreting the written law, you have thrown a very important part of our constitution out the window.
Yeah, the woman did a horrible thing. And yeah, you could argue that there should be a law against it. But the point is that there isn't one. And if there's no law, than the justice system should have no power to punish you. If you really want to punish her, too bad. Change the law so that the next person can be dealt with legally and according to the rules laid out in the constitution.
I could be totally wrong, but I was under the impression that all the 'missing mass' of subatomic particle was believed to be generated by the Higgs Boson/Field.
So not having to mine and refine a few extra tons of alluminium doesn't help the environment? Reducing fuel burned by 20% doesn't reduce greenhouse gases and particulates? I'm confused by your definition of green technology, unless you mean 'technology that's only purpose is to be more environmentally friendly'. If that is what you mean, then by your definition there isn't a single major corporation that has significantly invested in green technology.
The current financial market has pretty much guaranteed that they can do nothing "green."
On the contrary, there are many 'green' innovations that are actually cost saving innovations. Look at the Boeing 787 (if it ever gets off the ground) it uses much less alluminum and has 20% higher fuel efficiency. Modern innovation is both green and economical.
we can look at the red light shift of things moving away all around us and their velocity. Doing this, we can trace their vectors backwards to an intersection point--the point of the event theorized to be the Big Bang. The true center of the universe.
No you can't actually, because all the the vectors show everything moving away from us at the same velocity. The way it was explained to me way back when: Imagine a loaf of bread with raisins spaced equally throughout. As the bread rises, the raisins get farther apart from one another. From the point of view of any raisin, all the other raisins are moving away from it at the same speed. The same thing happens in the big bang, the universe vastely increased in size.
It's important to remember that the Big Bang "wasn't an explosion in space, it was an explosion of space". You can't trace the origin back to a specific point because when the big bang happened that single point was the entire universe.
Should be relatively cheap and reliable hardware. While the surface is the definition of a hellish landscape, the cloud tops of Venus are the only place in the solar system (other than Earth of course) with temperatures and pressures that humans could survive in. Not only is that interesting from a human habitation standpoint, but the mild conditions should also improve the lifespan of the balloon probe itself. Sure, you can't dig in the dirt like the Mars rovers can, but you will see a heck of a lot more of the planet from the air than on the ground.
First, there's no proof that tissue created from stem cells is more prone to cancer, at least none that I have ever heard of. Second, you need to realize the very real, and very serious emotional issues that women go through when they are forced into having breast removed. Conciously or sub-conciously, breasts are an important aspect to a woman's feminity and self-esteem, losing one or both can be highly damaging for some women.
If nothing else, imagine if you got your wang cut off in an accident and the doctors told you they could replace it good as new but you'd have a slightly higher chance of getting cancer later in life. Would you really need to think about it?
I just read the lost teaspoons article and I have to admit it was actually kind of interesting and funny. If they had been able to draw any real conclusions it's almost IgNobel worthy. My favorite part came at the end, when they surveyed the people they had been researching. Of the people that responded to the survey, "Thirty six (38%) were male, 57 were female (61%), and one was undecided."