Where is the UK legal structure that specifies which statutes and Acts are part of the "Constitution", and which are not? And what is the hierarchy to resolve conflicts?
A constitution is not just the body of laws that govern a country. It is the final authority of law and other governance. Where is the UK rule that says "this is the final authority, from which all authority is exclusively derived", uncontested by any other rule?
Which cops will probably take as a privacy break, after the outro "logout" their partner records, before the recorded intro "back on the clock".
If someone who looks like the off-duty cop shakes down a shop owner during the timestamped window, the off-duty cop can demonstrate they were across town pissing with simple lab tests, and that they couldn't have made it from there to the scene of the crime and back within the window.
Cops will love this. Honest cops, anyway. And their partners who don't have to fill out actual paper forms to record their partner took a piss break, but rather just note the privacy break ("Jon goes to the men's room at the donut shop") in a 2-second voiceover as they fast-forward through an uneventful day.
Actually, all public officials, and maybe every public employee, should wear the cameras while on duty. The cops show the biggest cost:benefit advantage. And people are used to seeing cop videos, so there's a demand for more. Once the cops' use has gotten some kinks out of the system, they all should be entered into it.
Maybe. Or that society had xenophobia combined with global reach. Or there was a distinct population of "sea people", who either mingled in such small percentages around the world, with no central locus, that their genes can't be detected yet by our stats. The "Malagasy" people seem to have left their marks from North of Malaysia, across India, to Spain and Britain and Libya.
The fact is that the artifacts almost certainly require a global civilization to explain their consistency. Their indication of very ancient conditions (the sky 13.5Kya) is even more mysterious. But there they are, despite our inability to explain them thoroughly. That shows that we're limited by our preconceptions in ways that the past human developments were not.
Well, those are good questions. They are questions that we have to answer in light of the existence of the artifacts we have. At the very least we have to accept that a global civilization can leave some artifacts, but not the ones we'd expect. And then start thinking about our own.
OK, Anonymous lizard Coward, you can't even tell when I'm using your own "herpetologist" invocation to make a point about your lack of intellect. "WTF" isn't a natural right, except for dummies, when reacting to something perfectly sensible, like my post.
I'm not worried about you. But it's more fun to poke you back than it is to wrestle alligators. So you prefer people who claim not to like me. So that justifies your personal attacks when you're the one who can't understand an intelligible post of mine? Stick to snakes. They're more reliable, preferring your heat while ignoring your lack of sense and manners.
I can't find any other posts that make my points. Certainly not posted before I posted (or started posting) mine. These "Redundant" mods are BS. At the very least the mod'er should have to include a link to at least one post to which the mod'ed post is redundant.
We should give kids who graduate highschool on time a $1000 bonus, cash, no strings attached. They can spend it on college, a car, gas, CDs, or crack (as long as they don't get caught), whatever. Maybe kids who graduate only a year late can get $500.
It costs over $30K:y to jail people. Plus the damage they did to go to jail. Plus the lost productivity from them both while commiting crimes and in jail. Plus their reduced productivity with jail on their career record. Plus the lost productivity policing, judging and jailing them. All deducted from their value producing even $30K:y at a job, without consuming justice system resources. By the time you account for the two parallel lives, we're probably saving at least $50K:y, maybe $100K:y, for every kid who gets a legit job instead of a criminal career, for probably at least 2-5 years per person. So every $1000 kid kept straight saves probably $300K - paying for 299 kids who got their bonus who would have stayed straight anyway. Those kids get to reinvest the money in something productive (except the tiny percentage who will spend it on crack).
We graduate about 3M kids from HS every year in the US. Even if the stats in this article we're discussing weren't a 31% dropout rate just in "the nation's 100 largest public school districts", but nationwide, that means a maximum of under 4.5M kids getting a maximum of $1K each, which would cost $4.5B a year. The extra $9K a year more than dropouts that HS grads earn would pay back the $1K right away; if the dropout rate were lowered only 5 points, they'd still pay back the program in 7 years. And that's before counting the societal savings in working instead of going to jail.
Let's invest $1000 in each grad. Or waste many times more on criminals.
If the cops are required to log their entire shifts in video to an auditable repository every day, then this tech will serve the public well. Let them take 15 minute privacy breaks every couple of hours, as long as their partner stays on duty, logging their outro/intro from the break.
Cops could file most reports by voiceover annotations of what they videoed. Most of their court and other official testimony could be submitted as sworn video/narration. That would save hours of time doing what they do worst, paperwork, and keeping them engaged in the scene. Offering "eyewitness evidence" with an interpreter. Returning the "word" of the cop to the more reliable status cops want it to be. Offering juries firsthand experience of how cops might have made an honest mistake. And creating a library of suspects useable by the entire justice system, once accepted as evidence on probable cause.
And keeping cops honest. Which protects the good ones, which accounts for 99% of the hours cops work. This system would also capture, or deter, the other 1% that does so much harm. While increasing productivity on the street and on the case, cutting costs and corroborating credibility.
We have to keep in mind that technology will continue to make the distinctions between public and private more operational. So we should exploit our systems for improving the public behavior we expect. While also protecting the privacy we expect, which allows the public to function. So these records should be private, stored for limited durations unless court ordered, and never shared except within explicitly court ordered transactions.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy. But after they'd played around with this tech and these rights for a while, we in the US will have even more reason to add a Privacy Amendment to our Constitution to protect ourselves. Combined with improved police protection, we can be more secure. Or, without protections on both sides of the public/private boundry, we'll all be made criminals.
25Ky is enough time to move from ice age to stone age. Without surface metals, oil, and the rest of the materials our current society used to build our current civilization, we'd take another path. Like the paths taken by Pacific Islanders and inhabitants of the Kalahari, also lacking those materials. And others, or some new path.
Spreading ourselves out in the universe is neither prerequisite not absolute measurement of our success as a species in creating societies. I'm all for it, but I know I'm a creature of this particular society.
Anonymous wilderness Coward, you're bewildered because you're a nerd, not a geek. Herpetologists are reptile nerds, with a brain. You're just a snake. Spitting Anonymous Coward venom. I drink venom for breakfast. I inherit your Earth as you go extinct. Anonymous looter Coward.
People don't know the letter of the law intuitively. Just as we learn the letter of the law, we can learn the way it's applied and enforced. And we can apply the law more to judges themselves.
A judges' job is to interpret the law. It's part of our entire people-based government. Democracy is messy, but its the least bad government we've yet created.
There probably should be more checks and balances on judges, like more formal reviews more often, by Congressional committees including legal orgs, private citizens, and probably even juries. Judicial respectability often hides incompetence and political agendas. But we need to extend our system in its natural way to enhance the accountability of judges. Because we're never going to make the law speak for itself.
Microsoft asked that we cooperate on patents as well, and so a patent cooperation agreement was included as a part of the deal. In this agreement, Novell and Microsoft each promise not to sue the other's customers for patent infringement. The intended effect of this agreement was to give our joint customers peace of mind that they have the full support of the other company for their IT activities.
Statements of "intent" in an open letter to a "community" (AKA a "Press Release" or "PR") have no legally binding weight. "Intent" cannot be proven, or more importantly, disproven. And that's human intent - corporate "intent" doesn't even exist in theory, except as a fallacious figure of speech.
Novell has a significant patent portfolio, and in reflection of this fact, the agreement we signed shows the overwhelming balance of payments being from Microsoft to Novell.
Since our announcement, some parties have spoken about this patent agreement in a damaging way, and with a perspective that we do not share. We strongly challenge those statements here.
If the agreement doesn't explicitly state the itemized valuation of the patents vs other business engaged under the agreement, then that claimed "reflection" has absolutely no legally binding reality. Maybe Microsoft just paid way too little for a great deal on Novell patents, and quite a lot more for Novell's cooperation with the overall strategy based on the agreement. Which would let Microsoft spare Novell (and its customers) when MS sues Linux developers, distributors and users for violating patents itemized in the agreement, which covers only MS and Novell. Driving most Linux business to Novell, but at a risk that Novell will alienate customers and generate countersuits, perhaps from large companies, including competitors like IBM, with its own army of lawyers and arsenal of actionable patents. If I were Novell, I'd demand a big payoff from MS to ensure my risk costs were covered. Even if a successful strategy would hand me nearly the entire Linux market. Because I'd next have to face the costs of being the sole remaining Linux competitor to Microsoft, which would have its own Linux to "embrace and extend".
We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents.
Our stance on software patents is unchanged by the agreement with Microsoft. We want to remind the community of Novell's commitment to, and prior actions in support of, furthering the interests of Linux and open source, and creating an environment of free and open innovation. We have a strong patent portfolio and we have leveraged that portfolio for the benefit of the open source community. Specifically, we have taken the following actions:
* We have stated our commitment to use our own software patents to protect open source technologies. more +
* We have spoken out against EU legislation that would liberalize the standards for granting software patents. more +
* We offer indemnification to our Linux customers accused of intellectual property infringement. more +
These statements mean nothing legally binding. They're PR. Maybe they're true. Maybe Novell's current execs expect to get money from Microsoft just because MS will now operate under a license without violating Novell's patents. And don't expect to cooperate with any of Microsoft's usual "embrace, extend, exterminate" strategies. But those plans can change. Those execs chan change, or change their minds, especially if MS pulls out other pressure. And maybe they're jus
The judge's decision is what happens when someone who understands the tech decides how the law governs the people and our actions, despite the limited understanding by the legislators of the tech they specify when writing the law to govern the people.
Even if the judge learned from the arguing lawyers to understand the essential similarities (and relevant differences) between email and IM, that's still the essence of how the American legal system works (or is supposed to).
That's why we call the judge "Justice So-and-so". Because the legal system is just the tech. We really have a justice system, of people who decide how laws were and are to be followed by other people.
That is a fascinating explanation of the engineering made possible by the physics of spintronics. I used NMR spectrographs in undergrad organic chem lab 20 years ago - there should be plenty of them, especially after they all got rebranded as "MRI" tech to avoid the marketing poison of calling themselves "nuclear":).
I wonder whether photons are more manageable, because they're organized along a line separated from each other, and don't directly interact (except transiently interfering at a single momentary locus), though all traveling at c. Or whether the sizes and energies are too small for current cheap equipment to manipulate.
What I'm looking for is a way to "charge" spins, of any particle, in large amounts of particles. Perhaps by randomly setting spins to either state, then separating them into populations of mostly one state (higher energy state) in the large majority of that filtered population. Then later "discharging" them, setting their state back to the lower energy state, collecting the discharged energy. The re/flipping (and separation) processes would have to be low energy consumption, at least not many times larger than the energy recoverable in the dis/charge cycle. Photons are even more interesting, if they're not much more difficult/inefficient, because the charged photons are already traveling fast for delivery to remote discharge.
Is this at all achievable (or immediately foreseeable) with current engineering? Convertible to chip scales that can process milli/deci/centiamperes of charged electrons, or some comparable spin-energy bearing amount of photons per second.
Well, maybe if we kept up this thread, someone could edit it into _Spintronics for Dummies_;).
So I think you're saying that a calibrated device could require energy transduced first into a magnetic field of strength to flip the spin of an electron, operating just long enough to probably flip the spin. A much lower strength than the nuclear formula you cited - do you have the formula for the energy to flip an electron's spin?
The electron spin, much more decoupled from the kinetics that transfer thermal energy (random kinetic energy in particles) among nuceli, can remain persistent after being flipped. To flip them back requires the same device. If the device acts on many electrons, not requiring any specific electron's state to be read to flip between the lower/higher energy states, does the energy for flipping have to be much larger than the energy difference? Is there a way to flip the spins "deterministically" of a large electron population to one selected state of the two (ie. almost certainly flip a large majority of the spins), then later to the other state (again, probabilistically)? Maybe by flipping them randomly, but in a roughly (probabilistically) expected quantity of each, then somehow separating them into two populations mostly in on or another state.
If the magnetic field is a permanent magnet, then the prior spin state will resist the magnet flipping it with a small force equal to the force generated by the energy input to the magnet by an augmenting electrical field (or rotation, etc). Or maybe an apparatus like the phosphorus doped device in the story we're discussing (tangentially;). Could one of these techniques back up a device that could take "wild" electrons by the ampere (or deci, or centi, or even milli), and output coulombs of "charged" electrons in the higher spin (and maybe about the same amount of "discharged" spin electrons separated into a separate circuit)? Could a complementary device accept the charged spin electrons, discharge them, collect the energy from their spins into another medium (like an opposing magnetic field against the device's magfield, driving a current)?
And would all these devices be more efficient in large quantity, and maybe easier to make, if we were dis/charging low-mass photons rather than heavier electrons?
How about those artifacts of a global civilization still standing in Egypt, Chichen Itza, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, and certainly elsewhere? They all predate our historical beginnings of agriculture, by several thousand years at least. And they all mark the sky in the state it was in about 13.5Kya, about the end of the last ice age. But though we knew about the buildings, we couldn't read what they'd recorded, as a medium, until maybe a decade ago. There's probably more recorded in them. And probably other recordings from the same global culture we haven't yet recognized.
And then there's other media. Like the Pacific "stick" charts I mentioned. There's little ancient artifacts remaining in those island cultures, as they're organized to perpetuate transient constructions from the local flora/fauna with which they've coevolved. If European disease had killed them all, in a few thousand years we probably would have lost even the few European records observing their woven records. Especially if we transferred all our own records to electromagnetic. Our successors might find some evidence that we had machines, but not evidence of the transient prior tech we'd recorded before it disappeared.
There are footprints of plenty of ancient societies. Our own bias in considering whether they're "civilizations", with the persistent artifacts of the actual cities that define "civilization", shows our blind spots. We could very easily just not recognize some very foreign media, like the possiblities I just spouted off the top of my head. Or they could have been as interested in making degradable media as are we in making persistent media.
A global civilization didn't have to be "like ours" to exist, even to be global - though that's not even the smaller scope of what I suggested. But it does have to be mostly like ours for us to recognize it. However, we don't have to recognize one for it to have existed. When we've got a broader view of how important artifacts can disappear, we'll have a better chance of finding their traces. Facing our own disappearing media will make us more sophisticated in that regard. And, in turn, help us learn from the disappeared media of the past.
The Catholic Inquisition(s) continued for hundreds of years, until 1834. By which time many European states had been free of Catholic rule for centuries. Some even officially Protestant.
So if you'll drop your dogmatic view of the Protestant/Catholic relationship during "the" Inquisition as simply domestic oppression of non-Catholics, you'll have a chance to learn something about the actual dynamic. Which could help us in learning about today's dynamic.
Don't replace the Catholic catechism with a new master of a dogmatic "education" that stops you from thinking for yourself, and makes you lash out at others who are doing it while you watch.
We're on one line of extended development, ignoring/neglecting other directions of development from each new development we produce. Even that pattern of development is just our style, not necessarily the way humans develop.
So while we have reached the Moon, we are standing on the shoulders of giants who reached quite a bit more that we have not.
For example, recently in Slashdot we read about lost nanotech steel techniques once used in making "Damascus" steel. We have retained the results of the tech revolutions in woven textiles, but how many specific techniques were lost that we reinvented once we industrialized the process, and now nanize the process? Consider the geometry not preserved by Arabs and a few others from the Classical Greek research.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Inca and some other peoples developed most of the vegetables most familiar to us. Potatoes (in every variety), peanuts, tomatoes, "peppers", most corn... these products of Inca breeding were produced by a science we understand so little that at best we call it a "religion". How much science did they produce now lost? The Incas didn't take our path through the wheel and the arch, but covered their empire in much more extensive roads than did the Romans theirs, over mountains higher than the Alps. Instead they bred the llama and developed the quipu for trained runners.
The notion of linear progress as a predetermined track along which we travel, progressively increasing our knowledge and sophistication, is a recent idea. It's basically the British teleology developed as a theory of history from the start of the Enlightenment, about 1750. Which is about when Britain gained control over so many previously superior civilizations in Africa, the Americas, Asia. They invented this narrow view of history largely to deny the power of the civilizations they had (mostly temporarily) conquered, to convince everyone (including the conquered) that the British were the natural "new" #1. We believe it, and we fail to see the old #1s who produced so much of what we use to be #1 now. And thereby fail to appreciate so much of what we lost by destroying the custodians of previous inventions and their way of inventing.
Our space tech is the linear descendant of about 3-6000 years of space research and development, mostly by Mediterraneans and Mideasterners, lately by Euramericans and Russians. But we don't know about much of the space tech (observations/predictions, mostly) lost with the Mayans and other earlier Americans, or even the Egyptians closer to our roots. Or the apparently global civilization that built observatories/markers in Egypt, Stonehenge, Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat, marking the sky as it was about 13.5Kya. And that's to say nothing of the sciences on tracks not our direct ancestors, like the genetic engineering in breeding foods, work animals (including ecosystems) and textiles. Then there's the various psychologies we call "religions" in all the peoples of the world we've missed or destroyed.
There was about 6000 years from the end of the Ice Age to the dawn of history, about the same period. During which the genetically same people could have had as much, or comparable development. If their investigations were into work that could spurt the way our science has, but at different periods, and with different setback patterns like the Roman collapse, the Aryan invasions of India, etc, they could have reached comparable sophistication in their pursuits as we have in ours, in the same duration with the same world and human genes.
And they didn't seem to need to abandon the planet. They generally made the world more secure in which to live, until eventually facing our ancestors. We have a lot to learn from them.
I wonder if many Protestant Europeans tried to help the Catholics in Catholic countries who spoke out publicly about the Catholic Church's Inquisition.
The media was much more direct and local (mostly word of mouth, except the church sermons and monarch's decrees), the population smaller, the expectations of free expression and even justice much lower.
But people were still people. I wonder how much more support people in places like Egypt get from freer people outside, proportionately, than in similar situations elsewhere in the past.
If there are records of parallel situations in different times/places, I'd like to know how they turned out.
OK, how about the Iraqi battery urn we only recently found? How about the
I'm talking about the possibility raised by our own predicament that previous societies have lost records to even more transient media. Like the Inca quipu. How about the rest of the "Linear-B" corpus? Or the rest of the recordings people might have left before the previous ice age?
How can you be so sure that "writing" of some kind wasn't used before, say, Sumer, when there are 50Ky old cave paintings?
If all you've got to deny the possibility is some strawman about aliens building pyramids with crystals, when we're talking about how humans could have produced records which could have disappeared, as we now see our own possibly doing, and as much of even the surviving types in the past certainly have, then I'll just take it that the possibility is just as strong as before you popped up your Anonymous Coward response.
By "hump" I meant the amount of energy required to push the spin from one to another state - I understand that "quantum" mechanics don't change in continuous functions.
So I suppose the Zeeman effect is that energy consumed by keeping the magnetic field at strength while the spin is changed. Does your book (or other source) indicate whether the spin flips back when the magfield is removed? Does it emit the energy difference? Or does an external stimulus have to force the flip back?
Is there an online discussion of the actual mechanics of these quantum changes? Not necessarily the quantized amounts in the grad-level math in which I'm mostly illiterate. Something accessible to a 1980s college physics minor like me, but not all stoned like _The Tao of Physics_.
What I really wonder is whether a chip like the one mentioned in the story that we're discussing could be used to store a significant amount of energy in the spins of amperes of electrons. Which could be released for use later by another chip. Which would consume less energy in the total spintronic dis/charge cycle than could be stored. And whether this works any better with electrons, and how frequency relates to the manageability of these phenomena.
And if not a chip, then in a larger machine, though I suspect better efficiencies are to be had at the microscale. Or maybe at the nanoscale, though these electrons are on the 10E15 femtoscale, just a couple notches lower.
The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?"
I ask: has this ever happened before?
Not necessarily in electronic bits and bytes. Not the "Alexandria Library" that was mostly duplicated in other libraries or private collections. Maybe like the Inca quipu, mats of knotted strings that recorded all their empire's operational records, other than the ceremonial records in statues and murals. But some quipu survive, despite Spaniards destroying most of them in the mid-1500s. Enough that we can at least recognize that they did have records of lots of transactions.
No, something more transient, as transient as our bits, read/written by something more transient than our metal/plastic/glass machines. Maybe songs or other performed stories, like tribal Australians. Maybe woven in more degradable material, like uncured plant matter. Maybe both, like the Pacific star navigation lore taught in temporary woven stics, but carried in the mind. Maybe patterns in some other loseable medium, like animal pelt patterns no longer readable now that the code has been lost, or interbred back into "blankness".
If it can happen to us, it could have happened before. Our civilization rose from meager beginnings only about 12K years ago, after the last Ice Age that lasted about 12Ky. There was another one before that, with people accumulating knowledge between. And probably a half-dozen or so others since we became as genetically developed as we are today, between 7Mya and 200Kya. We don't even have many records from the first half of the last 12Ky. Could we be reinventing the wheel, literally, every 25 thousand years?
That's a pretty simple device. Does the magnetic field need to be very strong, and the duration of operation very long (eg. slow photons through small field in short space not OK) to flip the states?
Does it take more energy to flip one way or another? Is either flip direction endothermic (to the electron, not net to the device with its power consumption)?
I'd investigate a microscopic device etched in silicon for flipping throughput, but it looks like these devices are MRIs, which are still very large and power hungry. Is that the detector making it big? If I didn't need imaging, but just a flipper and detector, could I make a chip with fairly high current, like a deciampere or more?
Slashdot Mirror
Where is the UK legal structure that specifies which statutes and Acts are part of the "Constitution", and which are not? And what is the hierarchy to resolve conflicts?
A constitution is not just the body of laws that govern a country. It is the final authority of law and other governance. Where is the UK rule that says "this is the final authority, from which all authority is exclusively derived", uncontested by any other rule?
Public urination: crime.
Which cops will probably take as a privacy break, after the outro "logout" their partner records, before the recorded intro "back on the clock".
If someone who looks like the off-duty cop shakes down a shop owner during the timestamped window, the off-duty cop can demonstrate they were across town pissing with simple lab tests, and that they couldn't have made it from there to the scene of the crime and back within the window.
Cops will love this. Honest cops, anyway. And their partners who don't have to fill out actual paper forms to record their partner took a piss break, but rather just note the privacy break ("Jon goes to the men's room at the donut shop") in a 2-second voiceover as they fast-forward through an uneventful day.
Actually, all public officials, and maybe every public employee, should wear the cameras while on duty. The cops show the biggest cost:benefit advantage. And people are used to seeing cop videos, so there's a demand for more. Once the cops' use has gotten some kinks out of the system, they all should be entered into it.
Maybe. Or that society had xenophobia combined with global reach. Or there was a distinct population of "sea people", who either mingled in such small percentages around the world, with no central locus, that their genes can't be detected yet by our stats. The "Malagasy" people seem to have left their marks from North of Malaysia, across India, to Spain and Britain and Libya.
The fact is that the artifacts almost certainly require a global civilization to explain their consistency. Their indication of very ancient conditions (the sky 13.5Kya) is even more mysterious. But there they are, despite our inability to explain them thoroughly. That shows that we're limited by our preconceptions in ways that the past human developments were not.
Well, those are good questions. They are questions that we have to answer in light of the existence of the artifacts we have. At the very least we have to accept that a global civilization can leave some artifacts, but not the ones we'd expect. And then start thinking about our own.
OK, Anonymous lizard Coward, you can't even tell when I'm using your own "herpetologist" invocation to make a point about your lack of intellect. "WTF" isn't a natural right, except for dummies, when reacting to something perfectly sensible, like my post.
I'm not worried about you. But it's more fun to poke you back than it is to wrestle alligators. So you prefer people who claim not to like me. So that justifies your personal attacks when you're the one who can't understand an intelligible post of mine? Stick to snakes. They're more reliable, preferring your heat while ignoring your lack of sense and manners.
Moderation -1
100% Redundant
I can't find any other posts that make my points. Certainly not posted before I posted (or started posting) mine. These "Redundant" mods are BS. At the very least the mod'er should have to include a link to at least one post to which the mod'ed post is redundant.
We should give kids who graduate highschool on time a $1000 bonus, cash, no strings attached. They can spend it on college, a car, gas, CDs, or crack (as long as they don't get caught), whatever. Maybe kids who graduate only a year late can get $500.
It costs over $30K:y to jail people. Plus the damage they did to go to jail. Plus the lost productivity from them both while commiting crimes and in jail. Plus their reduced productivity with jail on their career record. Plus the lost productivity policing, judging and jailing them. All deducted from their value producing even $30K:y at a job, without consuming justice system resources. By the time you account for the two parallel lives, we're probably saving at least $50K:y, maybe $100K:y, for every kid who gets a legit job instead of a criminal career, for probably at least 2-5 years per person. So every $1000 kid kept straight saves probably $300K - paying for 299 kids who got their bonus who would have stayed straight anyway. Those kids get to reinvest the money in something productive (except the tiny percentage who will spend it on crack).
We graduate about 3M kids from HS every year in the US. Even if the stats in this article we're discussing weren't a 31% dropout rate just in "the nation's 100 largest public school districts", but nationwide, that means a maximum of under 4.5M kids getting a maximum of $1K each, which would cost $4.5B a year. The extra $9K a year more than dropouts that HS grads earn would pay back the $1K right away; if the dropout rate were lowered only 5 points, they'd still pay back the program in 7 years. And that's before counting the societal savings in working instead of going to jail.
Let's invest $1000 in each grad. Or waste many times more on criminals.
If the cops are required to log their entire shifts in video to an auditable repository every day, then this tech will serve the public well. Let them take 15 minute privacy breaks every couple of hours, as long as their partner stays on duty, logging their outro/intro from the break.
Cops could file most reports by voiceover annotations of what they videoed. Most of their court and other official testimony could be submitted as sworn video/narration. That would save hours of time doing what they do worst, paperwork, and keeping them engaged in the scene. Offering "eyewitness evidence" with an interpreter. Returning the "word" of the cop to the more reliable status cops want it to be. Offering juries firsthand experience of how cops might have made an honest mistake. And creating a library of suspects useable by the entire justice system, once accepted as evidence on probable cause.
And keeping cops honest. Which protects the good ones, which accounts for 99% of the hours cops work. This system would also capture, or deter, the other 1% that does so much harm. While increasing productivity on the street and on the case, cutting costs and corroborating credibility.
We have to keep in mind that technology will continue to make the distinctions between public and private more operational. So we should exploit our systems for improving the public behavior we expect. While also protecting the privacy we expect, which allows the public to function. So these records should be private, stored for limited durations unless court ordered, and never shared except within explicitly court ordered transactions.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy. But after they'd played around with this tech and these rights for a while, we in the US will have even more reason to add a Privacy Amendment to our Constitution to protect ourselves. Combined with improved police protection, we can be more secure. Or, without protections on both sides of the public/private boundry, we'll all be made criminals.
25Ky is enough time to move from ice age to stone age. Without surface metals, oil, and the rest of the materials our current society used to build our current civilization, we'd take another path. Like the paths taken by Pacific Islanders and inhabitants of the Kalahari, also lacking those materials. And others, or some new path.
Spreading ourselves out in the universe is neither prerequisite not absolute measurement of our success as a species in creating societies. I'm all for it, but I know I'm a creature of this particular society.
Anonymous wilderness Coward, you're bewildered because you're a nerd, not a geek. Herpetologists are reptile nerds, with a brain. You're just a snake. Spitting Anonymous Coward venom. I drink venom for breakfast. I inherit your Earth as you go extinct. Anonymous looter Coward.
People don't know the letter of the law intuitively. Just as we learn the letter of the law, we can learn the way it's applied and enforced. And we can apply the law more to judges themselves.
A judges' job is to interpret the law. It's part of our entire people-based government. Democracy is messy, but its the least bad government we've yet created.
There probably should be more checks and balances on judges, like more formal reviews more often, by Congressional committees including legal orgs, private citizens, and probably even juries. Judicial respectability often hides incompetence and political agendas. But we need to extend our system in its natural way to enhance the accountability of judges. Because we're never going to make the law speak for itself.
Statements of "intent" in an open letter to a "community" (AKA a "Press Release" or "PR") have no legally binding weight. "Intent" cannot be proven, or more importantly, disproven. And that's human intent - corporate "intent" doesn't even exist in theory, except as a fallacious figure of speech.
If the agreement doesn't explicitly state the itemized valuation of the patents vs other business engaged under the agreement, then that claimed "reflection" has absolutely no legally binding reality. Maybe Microsoft just paid way too little for a great deal on Novell patents, and quite a lot more for Novell's cooperation with the overall strategy based on the agreement. Which would let Microsoft spare Novell (and its customers) when MS sues Linux developers, distributors and users for violating patents itemized in the agreement, which covers only MS and Novell. Driving most Linux business to Novell, but at a risk that Novell will alienate customers and generate countersuits, perhaps from large companies, including competitors like IBM, with its own army of lawyers and arsenal of actionable patents. If I were Novell, I'd demand a big payoff from MS to ensure my risk costs were covered. Even if a successful strategy would hand me nearly the entire Linux market. Because I'd next have to face the costs of being the sole remaining Linux competitor to Microsoft, which would have its own Linux to "embrace and extend".
These statements mean nothing legally binding. They're PR. Maybe they're true. Maybe Novell's current execs expect to get money from Microsoft just because MS will now operate under a license without violating Novell's patents. And don't expect to cooperate with any of Microsoft's usual "embrace, extend, exterminate" strategies. But those plans can change. Those execs chan change, or change their minds, especially if MS pulls out other pressure. And maybe they're jus
Laws govern people, not technology.
The judge's decision is what happens when someone who understands the tech decides how the law governs the people and our actions, despite the limited understanding by the legislators of the tech they specify when writing the law to govern the people.
Even if the judge learned from the arguing lawyers to understand the essential similarities (and relevant differences) between email and IM, that's still the essence of how the American legal system works (or is supposed to).
That's why we call the judge "Justice So-and-so". Because the legal system is just the tech. We really have a justice system, of people who decide how laws were and are to be followed by other people.
That is a fascinating explanation of the engineering made possible by the physics of spintronics. I used NMR spectrographs in undergrad organic chem lab 20 years ago - there should be plenty of them, especially after they all got rebranded as "MRI" tech to avoid the marketing poison of calling themselves "nuclear" :).
I wonder whether photons are more manageable, because they're organized along a line separated from each other, and don't directly interact (except transiently interfering at a single momentary locus), though all traveling at c. Or whether the sizes and energies are too small for current cheap equipment to manipulate.
What I'm looking for is a way to "charge" spins, of any particle, in large amounts of particles. Perhaps by randomly setting spins to either state, then separating them into populations of mostly one state (higher energy state) in the large majority of that filtered population. Then later "discharging" them, setting their state back to the lower energy state, collecting the discharged energy. The re/flipping (and separation) processes would have to be low energy consumption, at least not many times larger than the energy recoverable in the dis/charge cycle. Photons are even more interesting, if they're not much more difficult/inefficient, because the charged photons are already traveling fast for delivery to remote discharge.
Is this at all achievable (or immediately foreseeable) with current engineering? Convertible to chip scales that can process milli/deci/centiamperes of charged electrons, or some comparable spin-energy bearing amount of photons per second.
Well, maybe if we kept up this thread, someone could edit it into _Spintronics for Dummies_ ;).
;). Could one of these techniques back up a device that could take "wild" electrons by the ampere (or deci, or centi, or even milli), and output coulombs of "charged" electrons in the higher spin (and maybe about the same amount of "discharged" spin electrons separated into a separate circuit)? Could a complementary device accept the charged spin electrons, discharge them, collect the energy from their spins into another medium (like an opposing magnetic field against the device's magfield, driving a current)?
So I think you're saying that a calibrated device could require energy transduced first into a magnetic field of strength to flip the spin of an electron, operating just long enough to probably flip the spin. A much lower strength than the nuclear formula you cited - do you have the formula for the energy to flip an electron's spin?
The electron spin, much more decoupled from the kinetics that transfer thermal energy (random kinetic energy in particles) among nuceli, can remain persistent after being flipped. To flip them back requires the same device. If the device acts on many electrons, not requiring any specific electron's state to be read to flip between the lower/higher energy states, does the energy for flipping have to be much larger than the energy difference? Is there a way to flip the spins "deterministically" of a large electron population to one selected state of the two (ie. almost certainly flip a large majority of the spins), then later to the other state (again, probabilistically)? Maybe by flipping them randomly, but in a roughly (probabilistically) expected quantity of each, then somehow separating them into two populations mostly in on or another state.
If the magnetic field is a permanent magnet, then the prior spin state will resist the magnet flipping it with a small force equal to the force generated by the energy input to the magnet by an augmenting electrical field (or rotation, etc). Or maybe an apparatus like the phosphorus doped device in the story we're discussing (tangentially
And would all these devices be more efficient in large quantity, and maybe easier to make, if we were dis/charging low-mass photons rather than heavier electrons?
How about those artifacts of a global civilization still standing in Egypt, Chichen Itza, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, and certainly elsewhere? They all predate our historical beginnings of agriculture, by several thousand years at least. And they all mark the sky in the state it was in about 13.5Kya, about the end of the last ice age. But though we knew about the buildings, we couldn't read what they'd recorded, as a medium, until maybe a decade ago. There's probably more recorded in them. And probably other recordings from the same global culture we haven't yet recognized.
And then there's other media. Like the Pacific "stick" charts I mentioned. There's little ancient artifacts remaining in those island cultures, as they're organized to perpetuate transient constructions from the local flora/fauna with which they've coevolved. If European disease had killed them all, in a few thousand years we probably would have lost even the few European records observing their woven records. Especially if we transferred all our own records to electromagnetic. Our successors might find some evidence that we had machines, but not evidence of the transient prior tech we'd recorded before it disappeared.
There are footprints of plenty of ancient societies. Our own bias in considering whether they're "civilizations", with the persistent artifacts of the actual cities that define "civilization", shows our blind spots. We could very easily just not recognize some very foreign media, like the possiblities I just spouted off the top of my head. Or they could have been as interested in making degradable media as are we in making persistent media.
A global civilization didn't have to be "like ours" to exist, even to be global - though that's not even the smaller scope of what I suggested. But it does have to be mostly like ours for us to recognize it. However, we don't have to recognize one for it to have existed. When we've got a broader view of how important artifacts can disappear, we'll have a better chance of finding their traces. Facing our own disappearing media will make us more sophisticated in that regard. And, in turn, help us learn from the disappeared media of the past.
Last Inquisition ended in 1834.
The Catholic Inquisition(s) continued for hundreds of years, until 1834. By which time many European states had been free of Catholic rule for centuries. Some even officially Protestant.
So if you'll drop your dogmatic view of the Protestant/Catholic relationship during "the" Inquisition as simply domestic oppression of non-Catholics, you'll have a chance to learn something about the actual dynamic. Which could help us in learning about today's dynamic.
Don't replace the Catholic catechism with a new master of a dogmatic "education" that stops you from thinking for yourself, and makes you lash out at others who are doing it while you watch.
We're on one line of extended development, ignoring/neglecting other directions of development from each new development we produce. Even that pattern of development is just our style, not necessarily the way humans develop.
So while we have reached the Moon, we are standing on the shoulders of giants who reached quite a bit more that we have not.
For example, recently in Slashdot we read about lost nanotech steel techniques once used in making "Damascus" steel. We have retained the results of the tech revolutions in woven textiles, but how many specific techniques were lost that we reinvented once we industrialized the process, and now nanize the process? Consider the geometry not preserved by Arabs and a few others from the Classical Greek research.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Inca and some other peoples developed most of the vegetables most familiar to us. Potatoes (in every variety), peanuts, tomatoes, "peppers", most corn... these products of Inca breeding were produced by a science we understand so little that at best we call it a "religion". How much science did they produce now lost? The Incas didn't take our path through the wheel and the arch, but covered their empire in much more extensive roads than did the Romans theirs, over mountains higher than the Alps. Instead they bred the llama and developed the quipu for trained runners.
The notion of linear progress as a predetermined track along which we travel, progressively increasing our knowledge and sophistication, is a recent idea. It's basically the British teleology developed as a theory of history from the start of the Enlightenment, about 1750. Which is about when Britain gained control over so many previously superior civilizations in Africa, the Americas, Asia. They invented this narrow view of history largely to deny the power of the civilizations they had (mostly temporarily) conquered, to convince everyone (including the conquered) that the British were the natural "new" #1. We believe it, and we fail to see the old #1s who produced so much of what we use to be #1 now. And thereby fail to appreciate so much of what we lost by destroying the custodians of previous inventions and their way of inventing.
Our space tech is the linear descendant of about 3-6000 years of space research and development, mostly by Mediterraneans and Mideasterners, lately by Euramericans and Russians. But we don't know about much of the space tech (observations/predictions, mostly) lost with the Mayans and other earlier Americans, or even the Egyptians closer to our roots. Or the apparently global civilization that built observatories/markers in Egypt, Stonehenge, Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat, marking the sky as it was about 13.5Kya. And that's to say nothing of the sciences on tracks not our direct ancestors, like the genetic engineering in breeding foods, work animals (including ecosystems) and textiles. Then there's the various psychologies we call "religions" in all the peoples of the world we've missed or destroyed.
There was about 6000 years from the end of the Ice Age to the dawn of history, about the same period. During which the genetically same people could have had as much, or comparable development. If their investigations were into work that could spurt the way our science has, but at different periods, and with different setback patterns like the Roman collapse, the Aryan invasions of India, etc, they could have reached comparable sophistication in their pursuits as we have in ours, in the same duration with the same world and human genes.
And they didn't seem to need to abandon the planet. They generally made the world more secure in which to live, until eventually facing our ancestors. We have a lot to learn from them.
I wonder if many Protestant Europeans tried to help the Catholics in Catholic countries who spoke out publicly about the Catholic Church's Inquisition.
The media was much more direct and local (mostly word of mouth, except the church sermons and monarch's decrees), the population smaller, the expectations of free expression and even justice much lower.
But people were still people. I wonder how much more support people in places like Egypt get from freer people outside, proportionately, than in similar situations elsewhere in the past.
If there are records of parallel situations in different times/places, I'd like to know how they turned out.
OK, how about the Iraqi battery urn we only recently found? How about the
I'm talking about the possibility raised by our own predicament that previous societies have lost records to even more transient media. Like the Inca quipu. How about the rest of the "Linear-B" corpus? Or the rest of the recordings people might have left before the previous ice age?
How can you be so sure that "writing" of some kind wasn't used before, say, Sumer, when there are 50Ky old cave paintings?
If all you've got to deny the possibility is some strawman about aliens building pyramids with crystals, when we're talking about how humans could have produced records which could have disappeared, as we now see our own possibly doing, and as much of even the surviving types in the past certainly have, then I'll just take it that the possibility is just as strong as before you popped up your Anonymous Coward response.
Thanks for the very specific answer.
By "hump" I meant the amount of energy required to push the spin from one to another state - I understand that "quantum" mechanics don't change in continuous functions.
So I suppose the Zeeman effect is that energy consumed by keeping the magnetic field at strength while the spin is changed. Does your book (or other source) indicate whether the spin flips back when the magfield is removed? Does it emit the energy difference? Or does an external stimulus have to force the flip back?
Is there an online discussion of the actual mechanics of these quantum changes? Not necessarily the quantized amounts in the grad-level math in which I'm mostly illiterate. Something accessible to a 1980s college physics minor like me, but not all stoned like _The Tao of Physics_.
What I really wonder is whether a chip like the one mentioned in the story that we're discussing could be used to store a significant amount of energy in the spins of amperes of electrons. Which could be released for use later by another chip. Which would consume less energy in the total spintronic dis/charge cycle than could be stored. And whether this works any better with electrons, and how frequency relates to the manageability of these phenomena.
And if not a chip, then in a larger machine, though I suspect better efficiencies are to be had at the microscale. Or maybe at the nanoscale, though these electrons are on the 10E15 femtoscale, just a couple notches lower.
I ask: has this ever happened before?
Not necessarily in electronic bits and bytes. Not the "Alexandria Library" that was mostly duplicated in other libraries or private collections. Maybe like the Inca quipu, mats of knotted strings that recorded all their empire's operational records, other than the ceremonial records in statues and murals. But some quipu survive, despite Spaniards destroying most of them in the mid-1500s. Enough that we can at least recognize that they did have records of lots of transactions.
No, something more transient, as transient as our bits, read/written by something more transient than our metal/plastic/glass machines. Maybe songs or other performed stories, like tribal Australians. Maybe woven in more degradable material, like uncured plant matter. Maybe both, like the Pacific star navigation lore taught in temporary woven stics, but carried in the mind. Maybe patterns in some other loseable medium, like animal pelt patterns no longer readable now that the code has been lost, or interbred back into "blankness".
If it can happen to us, it could have happened before. Our civilization rose from meager beginnings only about 12K years ago, after the last Ice Age that lasted about 12Ky. There was another one before that, with people accumulating knowledge between. And probably a half-dozen or so others since we became as genetically developed as we are today, between 7Mya and 200Kya. We don't even have many records from the first half of the last 12Ky. Could we be reinventing the wheel, literally, every 25 thousand years?
That's a pretty simple device. Does the magnetic field need to be very strong, and the duration of operation very long (eg. slow photons through small field in short space not OK) to flip the states?
Does it take more energy to flip one way or another? Is either flip direction endothermic (to the electron, not net to the device with its power consumption)?
I'd investigate a microscopic device etched in silicon for flipping throughput, but it looks like these devices are MRIs, which are still very large and power hungry. Is that the detector making it big? If I didn't need imaging, but just a flipper and detector, could I make a chip with fairly high current, like a deciampere or more?