That gives the Supreme court a tremendous amount of authority. But it does NOT give them sole arbitration over what is and what is not Constitutional.
Allow me to emphasize:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution
If you have a specific law, which one party involved in a case claims violates a part of the Constitution, then a decision regarding whether or not it DOES violate the Constitution is under the authority given to the Supreme Court in that clause. The authority to determine whether or not laws contradict, and to determine which laws have legal priority, is clearly given to the judiciary any time someone presents them with a case which requires such a decision.
Now - please show me in the Constitution itself (the supreme law of the US) where exactly it says the Supreme court has sole authority to interpret the Constitution?
Article III, Section 2. The Supreme Court is "the" authority for deciding fact in controversies over the interpretation of the constitution. Other branches or individuals can put forward and even act on their opinions, but the constitution gives the _authority_ to interpret the constitution to the Supreme Court (and to lower courts, which of course can be overruled by the higher court).
A nice explanation of this is in #78 of the Federalist Papers (which of course predates the final ratification of the constitution, and offers an explanation of original intent).
There's a common myth that evidence speaks for itself. It doesn't. It just sits there on the lab table, incapable of speaking. Evidence also neither supports nor refutes any theory, these also being things evidence is incapable of doing unless the evidence is itself sentient. You're anthropomorphizing the evidence when you claim it supports or refutes a theory.
*scratches head* So am I anthropomorphizing my table leg when I claim that it supports the table?
Evidence can, of its own accord, support or refute a theory if the evidence is directly related to a prediction made by that theory. Little expertise or interpretation is required in such a case. (Example: I predict that if I drop this rock it will fall. The evidence will then support the prediction, in the same manner as a table leg, with no interpretation required.)
The only way to stop this is to put a ban on this.
Gah, be careful what you wish for. We have enough well-intentioned laws that stick their legal noses where they don't belong, and end up legislating us into a corner. Sure, modern plastic packaging is annoying and in some cases potentially dangerous to open. But you don't want to create laws which might inadvertently restrict protective packaging for fragile items.
For one thing, there's always going to be a failure mode in which the paper record does not match the electronic record. That's impossible to do anything about -- you don't know, and can never know, which one is right.
The point is to make the paper record voter verified, and then you legally require the assumption that the count of the paper record is the official count. Then you can count the votes by computer, and have citizen groups choose (by themselves, not having officials choose for them) a certain percentage of the votes to count by hand and verify against the electronic tally. If this count matches, then there is no need for a recount. If this count is off, then a recount is required.
The reason for the dominance of the paper record is that the security and accuracy of paper ballots is a solvable problem because they can be visibly monitored, secured away, and physically guarded, while the security and accuracy of electronic ballots is impossible because the internal function of the hardware and software cannot be observed or guaranteed.
Further depression of the button would advance the counter under the view of the voter;
This would violate the confidentiality of votes. If you want to harass someone and observe their vote, you simply have to put someone in front of and behind them in line, and a comparison of the observed tallies tells you exactly how they voted.
Just a couple of weeks earlier, MS and Novell join up to make a business deal that is so bad, even those involved with the deal can't explain it from a legal or business standpoint
They could explain it, it's just that neither side wants to. If you add up the money exchanged, the net result was that MS paid Novell some $300 million, which means MS was buying something. MS thought it was worth $300 million to create the speculation of legal trouble with Linux (as you said), but they don't benefit if they make a big deal out of the fact that they had to pay for Novell's cooperation, so they pretended to be buying protection from Novell. Novell thought $300 million was a nice chunk of cash, but they look sleezy if they admit that they were that easily bought out and cooperating with a FUD attack, so they took the money and then put a backspin on the story.
I started using the same password but with my right hand shifted one letter down on the keyboard. 6 months later, shift the other hand down. 6 months later, shift the right hand outward. I intend to move around in this fashion until I can return both hands back to home position.
Does the vast majority of the global population really work in a sitting position, or is it just the vast majority that are participating in the "global economy"?
The vast majority of people who can read news articles at work do. I.e., the audience.
Re:If productivity per man-hour has increased ....
on
Has Productivity Peaked?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You have a laptop, internet access, a flat-screen TV, and a microwave (or at least you COULD have these things). So you've traded your shorter work week for more toys than your father had back then.
If you were willing to give up all these advanced toys which have now become ordinary, you might be able to get by just fine on the salary from a shorter workweek.
I consulted said article and the following thermodynamic/heat transfer texts at my disposal: Moran & Shapiro, Cengel, Turns, Bejan, and Burmeister. Beyond what certainly are many nebulous descriptions, I do not find fault with GP's statement even at the quantum level. Could you please explain?
The exact sentence I was referring to in the wiki article was "For microscopic systems with few particles, the variations in the parameters become larger than the parameters themselves, and the assumptions of thermodynamics become meaningless." The fundamental reason why this is true, is that the assumption of thermodynamics is that a system has a large number of microstates (precise configurations of which molecule is where) which are equally likely. Thermodynamic properties are then derived from a probabilistic argument which considers the macrostates (what properties the overall system has) which have the largest number of microstates. In a gas you can do this because there are a large number of configurations of the component molecules, and overwhelmingly, most of those are "the molecules are roughly evenly distributed, with the energy roughly distributed between the molecules". Therefore, this is the macrostate which occurs, and a temperature can be defined which is essentially based on the logarithm of the number of microstates in the dominant macrostate. With a single particle by itself, each macrostate essentially has one microstate, and there is no temperature.
You also selectively quoted the article, it was a study on mice which were exposed to a carcinogenic substance and irradiated with microwaves (sometimes after, sometimes before).
The study compared cancer rates in the presence of a carcinogen between a state of not being irradiated, and several conditions of being irradiated. I don't know about you, but I consider it biologically relevant if an environmental factor significantly changes susceptability to carcinogenic substances.
If RF is supposedly targeting lipid bilayers, then any sort of RF-related brain damage/cancer risk should be magnified dozens of times... Anybody ever heard anything about this?
lemaymd just posted this link a short time ago elsewhere in this thread. The article reports a significant magnification of skin cancer risk in the presence of a carcinogen after (or during) exposure to subthermal 2.45 GHz radiation.
1. Changing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier. 2. Changing the permeability of individual cell walls. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
Any interaction for which all of the molecules rotate in the same direction is not a thermal interaction
Why not - rotational energy *is* themal energy.
Allow me to reemphasize, any interaction for which all of the molecules rotate in the same direction is not a thermal interaction. This is because the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to ordered motion, but only apply when a system has entered the thermodynamic limit. The thermodynamic limit requires the motion in consideration to be randomized and disordered so that microstates are sampled equally.
(There are rotational degrees of freedom in a thermodynamic system, but this motion is randomized for each molecule, and thus one molecule's rotation does not correlate with its neighbors.)
you can't even use the language of "heat" to describe the interaction
I can use the language of heat to describe interactions from the level of individual particles to the level of supermassive black holes
You could try to use the language of heat to describe interactions of individual particles, but you would be wrong. Consult any thermodynamics textbook, or see the last paragraph of "First law" in this wiki article.
lipid bilayers are polar molecules which are aligned
Actually close to true - they are *roughly* aligned.
Their degree of alignment varies under different thermodynamic and environmental conditions, but yes, under virtually any realistic condition they will be reasonably aligned (as necessary to form a bilayer), and this will correlate their motion when responding to microwave radiation.
the effects of such rotations on the function of lipid bilayers is very poorly understood
At this level of heating it's quite well understood - there is zero effect.
If heat were the only consideration, then yes that would apparently be true. However, that is not the case.
If I was concerned about EM radiation at all, I'd be concerned about it at the DNA/RNA level, not at the cell boundary.
The two are not unrelated. There is a study out there showing that the 2.4 GHz band can alter the permeability of the blood-brain barrier sufficiently to allow carcinogenic substances into the brain which could not previously enter. If the cell boundary or other regional boundaries have their behavior altered, then the resulting consequences can potentially be quite complex, and can include damage to DNA.
I agree, but don't you think that Michael Bevington is overreacting just a little bit?
I felt a steadily widening range of unpleasant effects whenever I was in the classroom, he said. First came a thick headache, then pains throughout the body, sudden flushes, pressure behind the eyes, sudden skin pains and burning sensations, along with bouts of nausea. Over the weekend, away from the classroom, I felt completely normal.
Hey, if the man was getting sick, then he was getting sick. It's not an overreaction to want to get better, so if removing the network from his classroom made him not sick, then good for him. It wouldn't be very helpful to just tell him to suck it up.
It might be nice if someone in the area would contact him about setting up a controlled experiment where a router he is exposed to for a full day is turned on and off at random without his knowledge, and each day he records how he feels. If this were done for 10-20 days, the result would probably be pretty clear one way or the other.
Microwaves make things heat up. It's not magic voodoo radiation.
No, microwaves rotate polar molecules. Heating up food is simply a convenient byproduct of this. The effects of the heat are almost equivalent to the regular oven (although not precisely since it can heat from the inside rather than the outside-in), but the direct effects of the non-thermal (read as "correlated") rotations of lipids are NOT the same as a conventional oven, as nothing like this happens in the presence of a conventional oven.
Whole-brain heating is not the only biological mechanism of interaction with radiation. The bulk of relevant research in this area for the last few years seems to be focused on sub-thermal interactions.
Microwave radiation passing through a sample of polar molecules which are aligned can produce directionally correlated rotation in the entire collection. Any interaction for which all of the molecules rotate in the same direction is not a thermal interaction, as the thermodynamic limit does not apply to coordinated movements. Therefore you can't even use the language of "heat" to describe the interaction at this scale. It just so happens that lipid bilayers are polar molecules which are aligned, and unfortunately, the precise biological consequences of the effects of such rotations on the function of lipid bilayers is very poorly understood.
It seems quite naive for the people in this forum to be dismissing the concerns of those parents as uneducated and unscientific. There are serious unanswered scientific questions about the interactions and effects this will have, and you can't just wish or scoff them away. "The company that built it said it was safe" doesn't really qualify as scientific understanding, and "everything is dangerous" is an unscientific and fallacious argument.
If you were to rig up your microwave to operate with the door open, then sit a few meters away from the front of it and run it for 7 or 8 hours (the length of a school day), you'd probably feel like complete crap. If you were close enough you'd probably die, but farther away you would probably feel various levels of discomfort, ranging from migraines down to the minimal level which would probably be a deep fatigue due to interactions between the microwave radiation and the blood-brain barrier.
(You probably should NOT attempt this.)
So yes, there are other technologies which operate right around 2.4 GHz, but wireless networks are one of the only technologies which operate at that precise wavelength (which interacts strongly with water and lipids), with those power levels, without shielding, and with long durations of exposure.
Patents do not have to be meaningful, or even have a remote chance of standing up in court.
The problem is that patents, once granted, have to go to court to be contested. This is needlessly expensive. The patent office should have a simple appeal process by which citizens (or other companies) can submit prior art for a patent which has been granted, at which time the patent office should review the validity of a granted patent, and revoke the patent if the prior art is deemed valid by the examiner. This would take care of a significant quantity of invalid patents without excessive court battles and corresponding expense.
In this case any number of people could simply submit homework assignments or pages from standard textbooks done before this patent was even submitted, and it would be revoked. This is evidence that SHOULD have been submitted as the background of the invention, but from reading it, clearly was not, and should therefore be reconsidered after the fact. People have been using multiple sequence lists since practically the dawn of time, and ordinary programmers could easily point this out to the patent office if there were a mechanism for them to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to emphasize:
If you have a specific law, which one party involved in a case claims violates a part of the Constitution, then a decision regarding whether or not it DOES violate the Constitution is under the authority given to the Supreme Court in that clause. The authority to determine whether or not laws contradict, and to determine which laws have legal priority, is clearly given to the judiciary any time someone presents them with a case which requires such a decision.
Article III, Section 2. The Supreme Court is "the" authority for deciding fact in controversies over the interpretation of the constitution. Other branches or individuals can put forward and even act on their opinions, but the constitution gives the _authority_ to interpret the constitution to the Supreme Court (and to lower courts, which of course can be overruled by the higher court).
A nice explanation of this is in #78 of the Federalist Papers (which of course predates the final ratification of the constitution, and offers an explanation of original intent).
*scratches head* So am I anthropomorphizing my table leg when I claim that it supports the table?
Evidence can, of its own accord, support or refute a theory if the evidence is directly related to a prediction made by that theory. Little expertise or interpretation is required in such a case. (Example: I predict that if I drop this rock it will fall. The evidence will then support the prediction, in the same manner as a table leg, with no interpretation required.)
Do you have any idea how much that would go for on ebay?
Gah, be careful what you wish for. We have enough well-intentioned laws that stick their legal noses where they don't belong, and end up legislating us into a corner. Sure, modern plastic packaging is annoying and in some cases potentially dangerous to open. But you don't want to create laws which might inadvertently restrict protective packaging for fragile items.
The point is to make the paper record voter verified, and then you legally require the assumption that the count of the paper record is the official count. Then you can count the votes by computer, and have citizen groups choose (by themselves, not having officials choose for them) a certain percentage of the votes to count by hand and verify against the electronic tally. If this count matches, then there is no need for a recount. If this count is off, then a recount is required.
The reason for the dominance of the paper record is that the security and accuracy of paper ballots is a solvable problem because they can be visibly monitored, secured away, and physically guarded, while the security and accuracy of electronic ballots is impossible because the internal function of the hardware and software cannot be observed or guaranteed.
This would violate the confidentiality of votes. If you want to harass someone and observe their vote, you simply have to put someone in front of and behind them in line, and a comparison of the observed tallies tells you exactly how they voted.
They could explain it, it's just that neither side wants to. If you add up the money exchanged, the net result was that MS paid Novell some $300 million, which means MS was buying something. MS thought it was worth $300 million to create the speculation of legal trouble with Linux (as you said), but they don't benefit if they make a big deal out of the fact that they had to pay for Novell's cooperation, so they pretended to be buying protection from Novell. Novell thought $300 million was a nice chunk of cash, but they look sleezy if they admit that they were that easily bought out and cooperating with a FUD attack, so they took the money and then put a backspin on the story.
Brilliant! My first password will be "asdfjkl;".
The vast majority of people who can read news articles at work do. I.e., the audience.
You have a laptop, internet access, a flat-screen TV, and a microwave (or at least you COULD have these things). So you've traded your shorter work week for more toys than your father had back then.
If you were willing to give up all these advanced toys which have now become ordinary, you might be able to get by just fine on the salary from a shorter workweek.
Learn how to play chess. :)
The exact sentence I was referring to in the wiki article was "For microscopic systems with few particles, the variations in the parameters become larger than the parameters themselves, and the assumptions of thermodynamics become meaningless." The fundamental reason why this is true, is that the assumption of thermodynamics is that a system has a large number of microstates (precise configurations of which molecule is where) which are equally likely. Thermodynamic properties are then derived from a probabilistic argument which considers the macrostates (what properties the overall system has) which have the largest number of microstates. In a gas you can do this because there are a large number of configurations of the component molecules, and overwhelmingly, most of those are "the molecules are roughly evenly distributed, with the energy roughly distributed between the molecules". Therefore, this is the macrostate which occurs, and a temperature can be defined which is essentially based on the logarithm of the number of microstates in the dominant macrostate. With a single particle by itself, each macrostate essentially has one microstate, and there is no temperature.
The study compared cancer rates in the presence of a carcinogen between a state of not being irradiated, and several conditions of being irradiated. I don't know about you, but I consider it biologically relevant if an environmental factor significantly changes susceptability to carcinogenic substances.
Don't complain, celebrate. Declare a national "Yell-at-a-Camera Day" and get everyone you know to participate.
lemaymd just posted this link a short time ago elsewhere in this thread. The article reports a significant magnification of skin cancer risk in the presence of a carcinogen after (or during) exposure to subthermal 2.45 GHz radiation.
1. Changing the permeability of the blood-brain barrier.
2. Changing the permeability of individual cell walls.
(This is not an exhaustive list.)
Allow me to reemphasize, any interaction for which all of the molecules rotate in the same direction is not a thermal interaction. This is because the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to ordered motion, but only apply when a system has entered the thermodynamic limit. The thermodynamic limit requires the motion in consideration to be randomized and disordered so that microstates are sampled equally.
(There are rotational degrees of freedom in a thermodynamic system, but this motion is randomized for each molecule, and thus one molecule's rotation does not correlate with its neighbors.)
You could try to use the language of heat to describe interactions of individual particles, but you would be wrong. Consult any thermodynamics textbook, or see the last paragraph of "First law" in this wiki article.
Their degree of alignment varies under different thermodynamic and environmental conditions, but yes, under virtually any realistic condition they will be reasonably aligned (as necessary to form a bilayer), and this will correlate their motion when responding to microwave radiation.
If heat were the only consideration, then yes that would apparently be true. However, that is not the case.
The two are not unrelated. There is a study out there showing that the 2.4 GHz band can alter the permeability of the blood-brain barrier sufficiently to allow carcinogenic substances into the brain which could not previously enter. If the cell boundary or other regional boundaries have their behavior altered, then the resulting consequences can potentially be quite complex, and can include damage to DNA.
Hey, if the man was getting sick, then he was getting sick. It's not an overreaction to want to get better, so if removing the network from his classroom made him not sick, then good for him. It wouldn't be very helpful to just tell him to suck it up.
It might be nice if someone in the area would contact him about setting up a controlled experiment where a router he is exposed to for a full day is turned on and off at random without his knowledge, and each day he records how he feels. If this were done for 10-20 days, the result would probably be pretty clear one way or the other.
Perhaps grasping at straws?
No, microwaves rotate polar molecules. Heating up food is simply a convenient byproduct of this. The effects of the heat are almost equivalent to the regular oven (although not precisely since it can heat from the inside rather than the outside-in), but the direct effects of the non-thermal (read as "correlated") rotations of lipids are NOT the same as a conventional oven, as nothing like this happens in the presence of a conventional oven.
Whole-brain heating is not the only biological mechanism of interaction with radiation. The bulk of relevant research in this area for the last few years seems to be focused on sub-thermal interactions.
Microwave radiation passing through a sample of polar molecules which are aligned can produce directionally correlated rotation in the entire collection. Any interaction for which all of the molecules rotate in the same direction is not a thermal interaction, as the thermodynamic limit does not apply to coordinated movements. Therefore you can't even use the language of "heat" to describe the interaction at this scale. It just so happens that lipid bilayers are polar molecules which are aligned, and unfortunately, the precise biological consequences of the effects of such rotations on the function of lipid bilayers is very poorly understood.
It seems quite naive for the people in this forum to be dismissing the concerns of those parents as uneducated and unscientific. There are serious unanswered scientific questions about the interactions and effects this will have, and you can't just wish or scoff them away. "The company that built it said it was safe" doesn't really qualify as scientific understanding, and "everything is dangerous" is an unscientific and fallacious argument.
If you were to rig up your microwave to operate with the door open, then sit a few meters away from the front of it and run it for 7 or 8 hours (the length of a school day), you'd probably feel like complete crap. If you were close enough you'd probably die, but farther away you would probably feel various levels of discomfort, ranging from migraines down to the minimal level which would probably be a deep fatigue due to interactions between the microwave radiation and the blood-brain barrier.
(You probably should NOT attempt this.)
So yes, there are other technologies which operate right around 2.4 GHz, but wireless networks are one of the only technologies which operate at that precise wavelength (which interacts strongly with water and lipids), with those power levels, without shielding, and with long durations of exposure.
You don't think maybe they would have tried that before reporting the results?
The problem is that patents, once granted, have to go to court to be contested. This is needlessly expensive. The patent office should have a simple appeal process by which citizens (or other companies) can submit prior art for a patent which has been granted, at which time the patent office should review the validity of a granted patent, and revoke the patent if the prior art is deemed valid by the examiner. This would take care of a significant quantity of invalid patents without excessive court battles and corresponding expense.
In this case any number of people could simply submit homework assignments or pages from standard textbooks done before this patent was even submitted, and it would be revoked. This is evidence that SHOULD have been submitted as the background of the invention, but from reading it, clearly was not, and should therefore be reconsidered after the fact. People have been using multiple sequence lists since practically the dawn of time, and ordinary programmers could easily point this out to the patent office if there were a mechanism for them to do so.
Uh, link please?