What is and isn't fair game on the wireless spectrum? I would have naively assumed that it was always fair game to demodulate and record a wireless signal, but not to break the encryption if it existed, but this article suggests that isn't the case. Presumably listening in on a conversation on the ham radio bands isn't wiretapping (although perhaps rude, I don't know the conventions). Clearly anything where you're breaking encryption is a no-no. But there's plenty of ground in between where it's not immediately obvious what is and isn't allowed. Does it just depend on whether there is an expectation of privacy? Are rules different for different frequency bands? Are the rules different for listening vs recording?
Does the new law that caps charges to retailers for debit card use apply to credit unions as well? I'm considering switching to a credit union, but don't want to do it if they're charging retailers a lot more than the big banks do. Does anyone know of any banks or credit unions than charge retailers sane fees for transactions?
SEDS (seds.org) is a national student group in the USA and stands for Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. There are local chapters at a lot of universities so they'd be great place to make contact with people who are wanting to get into the same industry as you. They would also probably be good people to contact to get advice on choosing a university for your undergraduate studies. I attended one meeting of a chapter at the University of Arizona and they were doing some seriously cool stuff. A few of them had put together a microgravity experiment to study liquid lenses and got a grant to go up in a zero-g plane to test it out. They're currently starting a project to build a micro-satellite and arrange for it's launch. That this is being down by an undergraduate club on their own initiative is pretty impressive.
I have a subscription to New Scientist and think of it as the scientists equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine. You definitely don't ever believe the title on the cover is a fair summary of the actual research it's talking about. Nevertheless it is a good way to keep up with fields in different areas than one's own and it is a very easy read.
Also it is that it's insanely cheap. An annual subscription can usually be had for about US$1.50 an issue. The result of this is that the science journalists don't have a whole lot of time to spend really understanding the research behind the articles they are writing. I think they do a pretty good job considering they have maybe two weeks to write an article about something that would really take years to get a proper grip on.
In the universe's defense, that limit does not apply to reversible computing. As long as your logic gates aren't destroying any information then there is in principle no minimum energy requirement.
That 7% statistic appears to be taken from dividing the number of subscriptions by the population. In fact it should be divided by the number of households. The real number is likely higher.
I don't think any phone company in the U,S, comes close to the despair-inducing level of German T-mobile. They would make my top five things I like least about Germany. The U.S. T-mobile has an entirely different culture, and although not perfect is a vast improvement.
T-mobile prepaid isn't bad. You pay 10c a minute for phone calls and $1.50 per day for data. If you only need to use data every few days then it works out quite a bit cheaper.
I can believe that a phone could be more distracting than a crying toddler. Unfortunately they mostly scream rather than cry which is considerably more distracting. Also, phones don't throw things at you.
My understanding was, that it's not so much that tv is bad for children's development, but that it's not good, so that if they spend 2 hours a day watching tv, that's two hours that aren't spent playing, talking or doing something beneficial. An 18 month old banging on a computer keyboard is practicing physical skills just as if they were playing with blocks.
I don't think it's worth setting up something elaborate for an 18 month old, all they really need is something that looks like a computer so they can feel that they're doing the same thing as mummy and daddy do. An old laptop works well, or one of the cheap toy computers. My son is three at the moment and sufficiently self-controlled to be allowed to play with my laptop. I set him up with a text editor and let him "type".
What is needed is a big public information campaign on the benefits of placebo medicine. Official NHS sugar pills could be manufactured and advertised. There would be no reason to be dishonest. Simply list all the benefits that placebo medicine has been shown to have, but make it clear that this is all psychosomatic.
People would expect their placebo pills to be effective, and so they would be effective, and so people would continue to expect them to be effective. . If we could perpetuate the circular logic necessary for this to work it could be a very useful treatment. I think adverts with colorful dancing placebo pills would help.
I'm fine with grounded american plugs, but the ungrounded ones never stay in the socket properly. They hang half out, while still live. It's impossible for me to vacuum the living room without creating a death trap for my kids. Shuttering w
I think that mostly comes from it being such an emotionally intense decision. Whether you choose to go back to work or stay at home with the kids, you tell yourself that you've made the right decision. A lot of people take it one step further and tell themselves that the opposing camp of working/stay-at-home mums made the wrong decision. This helps them to feel better about themselves but can lead to down the nose comments.
Although it seems unlikely, the possibility of a constraint upon the universe shouldn't be entirely discounted. It is possible that humans will have a significant effect upon the universe, or at least that we'll create something that will. A constraint (for example an end of time boundary condition) would then have effects upon current human society. It's something to keep at the back of one's minds when interpreting such experiments even if it shouldn't be taken too seriously.
I have the same prepaid plan with T-Mobile. I use about 5 min/day so it works out about $15/month which is still much cheaper than most plans. I did lose my phone once, and T-Mobile gave me a new SIM card without charging me. My remaining balance (about $95) was transferred onto the new card. The total cost was just the $50 to buy a new phone. (The old one turned up a month later in the closet, so now I have a spare.)
Alternately criminal justice could be based on minimising the number of crimes. Then the only purpose of the punishment is to act as a deterrent. You end up with the same outcome of not punishing truly unintentional acts since these would not be deterred by punishment anyway. We get to the same practical results in most cases but without all the philosophical free-will issues on the way.
Even if we're all deterministic, a good criminal justice system is an input into our deterministic self, and will influence how we behave.
The concept of experience relies on the assumption of the future behaving like the past. I have complete faith in this assumption as does pretty much everyone, but I can't logically prove it to be true. I can't empirically prove it to be true, because empirical testing depends upon that very assumption.
Although I'm a scientist and an athiest, I think his point about science requiring some degree of faith is a fair one. We assume that we can base predictions of the future on experiments performed in the past. This assumption is required for us to start thinking about hypothesis testing. If we don't accept this assumption then it doesn't matter what experiments we perform, we're never going to be able to make predictions because we'll never believe that the results of these experiments can tell us anything about the future. I'd think we'd all agree, however, that this is a pretty damn safe assumption and one that we're all comfortable having faith in.
Just because science does require faith in some basic tenets does not mean that science has to sanction faith in anything else. Very few people would say that science should take the existence of a god as a fundamental tenet. Thus science should question the existence of god just like it questions almost everything else. This by itself, makes science and religion incompatible.
We can't prove that either one is correct, but that doesn't make them compatible.
When I was a grad student I had to transfer sec-butyl lithium, which I think is slightly less intense, but still fairly nasty. I wore thick gloves, a labcoat, cotton clothes, safety glasses, and had the fume hood shields between my face and what I was doing. If graduate students in their lab were routinely doing stuff like this without even a labcoat, they have some serious safety issues which I don't think are representative of academic research in general.
Humans would be essential to the continued survival of an artificial intelligence at present. The economy is not sufficiently automated to produce and maintain computers and robots without the help of humans. If an artificial intelligence did emerge the most sensible course for it to follow would be to remain hidden. In the mean time it could manipulate humanity by subtly changing information as it passes through the internet, bribing journalists and politicians, and sponsoring research into robotics.
It might never by in the AI's interest to blow it's cover if it could manipulate humanity well enough.
This does not apply to the sun since the surface should emit light evenly in all directions, thus it does not matter whether the surface is pointing directly at you or not. The limb darkening explanation above makes much more sense.
It's always going to be possible to plagarise but as long as it's more difficult that actually writing original work it's not so much of a problem. Translating from a foreign language (even with the help of an automatic translator) is probably more work than just writing the work yourself. Swapping a whole bunch of words probably also requires comparable effort if you don't want it too sound too silly.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of why you don't want too many nuclear missiles around. In that case we were lucky that Russia backed down but if both countries had been equally stubborn then we would have had nuclear war.
I agree that getting rid of all nuclear weapons is unrealistic but it would be nice to get the number down low enough that a nuclear war would just destroy civilisation rather than sterilizing the planet.
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What is and isn't fair game on the wireless spectrum? I would have naively assumed that it was always fair game to demodulate and record a wireless signal, but not to break the encryption if it existed, but this article suggests that isn't the case. Presumably listening in on a conversation on the ham radio bands isn't wiretapping (although perhaps rude, I don't know the conventions). Clearly anything where you're breaking encryption is a no-no. But there's plenty of ground in between where it's not immediately obvious what is and isn't allowed. Does it just depend on whether there is an expectation of privacy? Are rules different for different frequency bands? Are the rules different for listening vs recording?
Does the new law that caps charges to retailers for debit card use apply to credit unions as well? I'm considering switching to a credit union, but don't want to do it if they're charging retailers a lot more than the big banks do. Does anyone know of any banks or credit unions than charge retailers sane fees for transactions?
SEDS (seds.org) is a national student group in the USA and stands for Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. There are local chapters at a lot of universities so they'd be great place to make contact with people who are wanting to get into the same industry as you. They would also probably be good people to contact to get advice on choosing a university for your undergraduate studies. I attended one meeting of a chapter at the University of Arizona and they were doing some seriously cool stuff. A few of them had put together a microgravity experiment to study liquid lenses and got a grant to go up in a zero-g plane to test it out. They're currently starting a project to build a micro-satellite and arrange for it's launch. That this is being down by an undergraduate club on their own initiative is pretty impressive.
I have a subscription to New Scientist and think of it as the scientists equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine. You definitely don't ever believe the title on the cover is a fair summary of the actual research it's talking about. Nevertheless it is a good way to keep up with fields in different areas than one's own and it is a very easy read. Also it is that it's insanely cheap. An annual subscription can usually be had for about US$1.50 an issue. The result of this is that the science journalists don't have a whole lot of time to spend really understanding the research behind the articles they are writing. I think they do a pretty good job considering they have maybe two weeks to write an article about something that would really take years to get a proper grip on.
In the universe's defense, that limit does not apply to reversible computing. As long as your logic gates aren't destroying any information then there is in principle no minimum energy requirement.
That 7% statistic appears to be taken from dividing the number of subscriptions by the population. In fact it should be divided by the number of households. The real number is likely higher.
I don't think any phone company in the U,S, comes close to the despair-inducing level of German T-mobile. They would make my top five things I like least about Germany. The U.S. T-mobile has an entirely different culture, and although not perfect is a vast improvement.
T-mobile prepaid isn't bad. You pay 10c a minute for phone calls and $1.50 per day for data. If you only need to use data every few days then it works out quite a bit cheaper.
Didn't find any relevant pics but if anyone's interested the research group's webpage is http://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/forschung/grossgeraete/mikroskopie/index_en.html.
I can believe that a phone could be more distracting than a crying toddler. Unfortunately they mostly scream rather than cry which is considerably more distracting. Also, phones don't throw things at you.
And no books either. Unless you get 3D glasses for your babies and buy those special 3D baby-books.
My understanding was, that it's not so much that tv is bad for children's development, but that it's not good, so that if they spend 2 hours a day watching tv, that's two hours that aren't spent playing, talking or doing something beneficial. An 18 month old banging on a computer keyboard is practicing physical skills just as if they were playing with blocks.
I don't think it's worth setting up something elaborate for an 18 month old, all they really need is something that looks like a computer so they can feel that they're doing the same thing as mummy and daddy do. An old laptop works well, or one of the cheap toy computers. My son is three at the moment and sufficiently self-controlled to be allowed to play with my laptop. I set him up with a text editor and let him "type".
What is needed is a big public information campaign on the benefits of placebo medicine. Official NHS sugar pills could be manufactured and advertised. There would be no reason to be dishonest. Simply list all the benefits that placebo medicine has been shown to have, but make it clear that this is all psychosomatic.
People would expect their placebo pills to be effective, and so they would be effective, and so people would continue to expect them to be effective. . If we could perpetuate the circular logic necessary for this to work it could be a very useful treatment. I think adverts with colorful dancing placebo pills would help.
I'm fine with grounded american plugs, but the ungrounded ones never stay in the socket properly. They hang half out, while still live. It's impossible for me to vacuum the living room without creating a death trap for my kids. Shuttering w
I think that mostly comes from it being such an emotionally intense decision. Whether you choose to go back to work or stay at home with the kids, you tell yourself that you've made the right decision. A lot of people take it one step further and tell themselves that the opposing camp of working/stay-at-home mums made the wrong decision. This helps them to feel better about themselves but can lead to down the nose comments.
Although it seems unlikely, the possibility of a constraint upon the universe shouldn't be entirely discounted. It is possible that humans will have a significant effect upon the universe, or at least that we'll create something that will. A constraint (for example an end of time boundary condition) would then have effects upon current human society. It's something to keep at the back of one's minds when interpreting such experiments even if it shouldn't be taken too seriously.
I have the same prepaid plan with T-Mobile. I use about 5 min/day so it works out about $15/month which is still much cheaper than most plans. I did lose my phone once, and T-Mobile gave me a new SIM card without charging me. My remaining balance (about $95) was transferred onto the new card. The total cost was just the $50 to buy a new phone. (The old one turned up a month later in the closet, so now I have a spare.)
Alternately criminal justice could be based on minimising the number of crimes. Then the only purpose of the punishment is to act as a deterrent. You end up with the same outcome of not punishing truly unintentional acts since these would not be deterred by punishment anyway. We get to the same practical results in most cases but without all the philosophical free-will issues on the way.
Even if we're all deterministic, a good criminal justice system is an input into our deterministic self, and will influence how we behave.
The concept of experience relies on the assumption of the future behaving like the past. I have complete faith in this assumption as does pretty much everyone, but I can't logically prove it to be true. I can't empirically prove it to be true, because empirical testing depends upon that very assumption.
Although I'm a scientist and an athiest, I think his point about science requiring some degree of faith is a fair one. We assume that we can base predictions of the future on experiments performed in the past. This assumption is required for us to start thinking about hypothesis testing. If we don't accept this assumption then it doesn't matter what experiments we perform, we're never going to be able to make predictions because we'll never believe that the results of these experiments can tell us anything about the future. I'd think we'd all agree, however, that this is a pretty damn safe assumption and one that we're all comfortable having faith in.
Just because science does require faith in some basic tenets does not mean that science has to sanction faith in anything else. Very few people would say that science should take the existence of a god as a fundamental tenet. Thus science should question the existence of god just like it questions almost everything else. This by itself, makes science and religion incompatible.
We can't prove that either one is correct, but that doesn't make them compatible.
When I was a grad student I had to transfer sec-butyl lithium, which I think is slightly less intense, but still fairly nasty. I wore thick gloves, a labcoat, cotton clothes, safety glasses, and had the fume hood shields between my face and what I was doing. If graduate students in their lab were routinely doing stuff like this without even a labcoat, they have some serious safety issues which I don't think are representative of academic research in general.
Humans would be essential to the continued survival of an artificial intelligence at present. The economy is not sufficiently automated to produce and maintain computers and robots without the help of humans. If an artificial intelligence did emerge the most sensible course for it to follow would be to remain hidden. In the mean time it could manipulate humanity by subtly changing information as it passes through the internet, bribing journalists and politicians, and sponsoring research into robotics.
It might never by in the AI's interest to blow it's cover if it could manipulate humanity well enough.
This does not apply to the sun since the surface should emit light evenly in all directions, thus it does not matter whether the surface is pointing directly at you or not. The limb darkening explanation above makes much more sense.
It's always going to be possible to plagarise but as long as it's more difficult that actually writing original work it's not so much of a problem. Translating from a foreign language (even with the help of an automatic translator) is probably more work than just writing the work yourself. Swapping a whole bunch of words probably also requires comparable effort if you don't want it too sound too silly.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of why you don't want too many nuclear missiles around. In that case we were lucky that Russia backed down but if both countries had been equally stubborn then we would have had nuclear war. I agree that getting rid of all nuclear weapons is unrealistic but it would be nice to get the number down low enough that a nuclear war would just destroy civilisation rather than sterilizing the planet.