The problem here isn't that the police used electronic forensics in a criminal investigation; the problem is that the "crime" in question shouldn't have been illegal in the first place.
I, and probably you, have no problems with the police using such techniques to investigate real crimes, like robbery, theft, arson, etc. There's nothing wrong with this investigation technique -- the problem is that we are persecuting people for being in a public space after dark, which is absolutely ridiculous.
There are enough people gathered in a tight wad at airport security lines these days to present a far tastier target for terrorist attack than the planes themselves. Imagine a wheelie-suitcase full of explosive (with whatever precautions would be necessary to evade the bomb-sniffing dogs outside the airport -- I'm sure with an appropriate program of multiple layers of airtight seals and thorough chemical washing this could be done) and shrapnel set off in the middle of a security line; you'd probably kill at least a hundred people and close down the airport for a long time, causing millions of dollars in economic damage. Set it off close to the front and you stand a good chance of ruining a lot of expensive x-ray equipment in addition.
Why go after the hard target when there are much easier fish to catch?
Actually, when I was in China two years ago, they were a lot friendlier than the TSA in a lot of respects. Not saying that the Chinese are a paragon of civil liberties, of course (they're horrible), but when it comes to airport security, they are less onerous than the USA.
What if I can afford to buy an airplane outright, and then charge people to fly in it?
I can't have whatever security measures I want if I do this -- this is just an airline, and the TSA won't let me do this without groping the people that pay me to fly in my plane.
*if* they were replacing their nuke plants with other sources of clean energy. If you knock down one source of clean energy and replace it with another one, this really affects nobody other than the folks paying the bill.
But they're not -- they're replacing them in part with coal/gas plants, according to TFA. This ought to be regarded by non-paranoid people as a step backward.
The standard definition of "probably" in the particle physics community is a five-sigma signal, which means that the odds of it happening by chance are 1.4 * 10^-14.
The Swiss (and the Oregonians) seem to have decided that with sufficient safeguards in place, the possibility of doctors (or anybody else) coercing patients into dying outweighs the harm caused by forcing the terminally ill to suffer when they would prefer to die.
There is no need to theorize -- we have data from these two places, at least.
This is true 99% of the time. Most people who want to kill themselves are mentally ill, and in almost all cases the desire to kill yourself is a pretty big indicator of mental illness, and in that case the humane thing to do is to stop them from doing so and instead try to treat their illness.
However, if someone can show that they are *not* mentally ill (or at least not incompetent to make that decision) and want to kill themselves, the situation is quite different.
Just look at the positions held by the people in those situations themselves. Advocacy organizations for the mentally ill, like NAMI in the USA, with the support of mental illness patients and their caregivers, support involuntary institutionalization to prevent suicide. Many of these same people also support the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, and recognize that equating the situation of a terminal cancer patient or an Alzheimer's patient with a patient suffering from major depression is silly.
Why is it immoral to kill? It's immoral to kill because this is the ultimate form of coercion -- of depriving someone else of freedom.
Killing yourself (or, by extension, killing someone who has a genuine wish to die that is not the product of an altered mental state) is not immoral in this way.
Consider a late-stage cancer patient who is unable to get out of bed. Is it legal or not for a doctor to, upon request and upon determination that the person is competent, present that person with a large dose of barbituates and say "Take this if you want to die"?
I believe this should be legal. So do many other people, including Sir Pratchett. It's a damn shame that his life may end this way at such a young age, but to him it may be better than the alternative.
Germany's at least committing to trying to do this in a nonpolluting (i.e. non-fossil-fuel) way, and they actually have the infrastructure and engineering acumen to pull it off (maybe).
Where's Italy going to get their power? Russian gas? Somebody's coal? Magic space faeries?
Fukushima notwithstanding, nuclear power is reasonably safe (a hell of a lot better than coal), very environment-friendly, and economical (compared to things like large-scale solar). The only reasonable alternative I can think of is to build a big turbine in the middle of Rome and harness all of the hot air that comes out of the Vatican.
The biggest problem with software patents isn't the software part -- it's the patent part.
We need to seriously examine our idea of what is patentworthy and what fails the "obviousness" test. Lots of things are patented which really, really should not be patented. For instance, I have a digital SLR made by Olympus. Olympus uses a unique sensor size (a little smaller than Canon and Nikon), has decided their standard distance from that sensor to the back of the lens mount, and has built a bunch of lenses tailored to this. There is nothing magic about these values -- they're just engineering choices Olympus made. Yet these numbers -- the sensor size and the sensor-lens distance -- are patented. This is absurd. There's no invention here, just some choices that a bunch of engineers made. Canon and Nikon made different choices.
Likewise, people patent obvious solutions to problems, or solutions that have no particular inventive merit to them. This is just bog-standard engineering. Why is "multitouch" patentable? It's an obvious way to interact with a touchscreen, just like holding down two keys rather than just one at a time is an obvious way to interact with a keyboard.
Clean out all the bullshit patents, patents on things that shouldn't be patentable, and then we can talk about software patents. The great harm caused by software patents isn't really related to their software-ness; it comes from their stupidity. Slashdot just likes to talk about moronic software patents since we're software people, but moronic hardware patents are just as bad a deal.
Perhaps this guy was filming because he thought there was a reasonable likelihood that he would be witnessing excessive use of force by the police, and his video would potentially be necessary evidence?
There is a big difference between "callous and selfish" and "worthy of assault and destruction of property". If we as a society believe that things like this should not be posted on the internet, then pass a law saying so, and enforce this law against the uploader if it is uploaded.
It's also illegal to punch people in the face and break their property. I imagine the difference is that your average cop wouldn't know how to make a cellphone jammer.
Other way around: if an electron did have an electric dipole moment, then that wouldn't necessarily mean that it is not spherical. But if it has no electric dipole moment, then that is strongly suggestive that it is spherical; otherwise you'd need the intrinsic dipole moment (analogous to spin) to exactly cancel the dipole moment due to the non-spherical shape.
"Divisible" is a funny term. If you mean that in quantum field theory there is a vertex between an electron line and a Higgs, sure. But this doesn't mean that you can split an electron into a Higgs and "something else", any more than it means you can split an electron into an electron and a bunch of photons.
What it *does* mean is that every electron disturbs both the photon field and the Higgs field around it, and that by necessity some of the properties of what we call "electron" are actually related to the disturbances in these fields; in other words, you can't perfectly separate out the properties of the electron and the properties of the fields that it couples to. This is not a huge deal for electrons, since they only couple weakly to other quantum fields; the coupling constant is 1/137 (at low energy) with the photon field, and small to the Higgs field (if such a thing exists). It's a far bigger deal for quarks, where the coupling to the gluon field is large at low energy; you can't describe the properties of a quark in any meaningful way without considering how that quark affects the gluon field around it.
Forgive me if this explanation includes some stuff you already know -- I have no idea what your background is.
***
Are you familiar with Taylor (or Maclaurin) series? The idea is that any (well-behaved) function can be written as a polynomial of the form A + Bx + Cx^2 + Dx^3 + Ex^4 +... ad infinitum, and that when x is close to zero, this expansion is dominated by the first few terms. If you want to see if a given function is a constant, one way to do it is to show that the coefficients B, C, D, etc., are all zero. Unless you have a particular reason to suspect that you're at an inflection point, showing that B=0 strongly suggests that C, D, E, etc., are zero too for many physical systems.
It turns out that you can expand the shape of an object or the distribution of a field in something that resembles a Taylor series. The expansion terms are things called the "spherical harmonics"; you're probably most familiar with them as the shapes of the various hydrogen orbitals (s, p, d, f, etc.). It turns out that any shape (at least, any shape with a unique radius for a given latitude and longitude) can be written as a combination of these spherical harmonics. The process of calculating the coefficients corresponding to the different shapes is called a "multipole expansion" -- it's like a Taylor expansion for shapes. For something that is very nearly a sphere, this is dominated by the first few terms.
The first one of these spherical harmonics -- corresponding in a sense to the coefficient A above -- is just a perfect sphere. Its coefficient is called the "monopole moment". The second one (actually, there are three of them, corresponding to x, y, and z axes) are called "dipole moments", and they represent the leading-order deviations away from perfect sphericity. This dipole moment is what this experiment measured; they figure that if the electronic dipole moment is very nearly zero then all the higher-order moments are zero too.
The Heisenberg principle is just a consequence of a property of Fourier transforms that says that any signal localized in frequency space will not be localized in the original space. There is no magic there at all.
Where the magic comes in is the relationship between momentum and position, and energy and time, operators in QM. The position dependence of a momentum eigenstate is sinusoidal, so you use Fourier transforms to convert from the momentum eigenbasis to the position one. Thus, any state well-localized in the momentum basis will not be well-localized in the position one, and vice versa. This isn't because of any voodoo "uncertainty" that's unique to QM; it's a direct consequence of the fundamental way QM works and the way Fourier transforms work.
It's at least sort of reasonable, though. An object with no dipole moment, no quadrupole moment, no octupole moment, etc., *is* spherical; the dipole moment is just the second term in a multipole expansion of the shape, the first one that describes perturbations away from sphericity.
They measured the dipole moment as nearly zero; it's reasonable to assume that if the dipole moment is zero then the higher moments are nearly zero, too.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here isn't that the police used electronic forensics in a criminal investigation; the problem is that the "crime" in question shouldn't have been illegal in the first place.
I, and probably you, have no problems with the police using such techniques to investigate real crimes, like robbery, theft, arson, etc. There's nothing wrong with this investigation technique -- the problem is that we are persecuting people for being in a public space after dark, which is absolutely ridiculous.
There are enough people gathered in a tight wad at airport security lines these days to present a far tastier target for terrorist attack than the planes themselves. Imagine a wheelie-suitcase full of explosive (with whatever precautions would be necessary to evade the bomb-sniffing dogs outside the airport -- I'm sure with an appropriate program of multiple layers of airtight seals and thorough chemical washing this could be done) and shrapnel set off in the middle of a security line; you'd probably kill at least a hundred people and close down the airport for a long time, causing millions of dollars in economic damage. Set it off close to the front and you stand a good chance of ruining a lot of expensive x-ray equipment in addition.
Why go after the hard target when there are much easier fish to catch?
Actually, when I was in China two years ago, they were a lot friendlier than the TSA in a lot of respects. Not saying that the Chinese are a paragon of civil liberties, of course (they're horrible), but when it comes to airport security, they are less onerous than the USA.
What if I can afford to buy an airplane outright, and then charge people to fly in it?
I can't have whatever security measures I want if I do this -- this is just an airline, and the TSA won't let me do this without groping the people that pay me to fly in my plane.
Per TFA, the Falcon Heavy has half the payload capacity (to the Moon) of a Saturn V.
So it's a lot better than what we have now, but not as good as what we had 45 years ago. Got it.
How does the cost of one of these things compare with a Saturn V (were one to be built today), I wonder?
I did read TFA, where it pretty clearly states that renewables aren't going to take the whole load.
*if* they were replacing their nuke plants with other sources of clean energy. If you knock down one source of clean energy and replace it with another one, this really affects nobody other than the folks paying the bill.
But they're not -- they're replacing them in part with coal/gas plants, according to TFA. This ought to be regarded by non-paranoid people as a step backward.
Yes. This is how statistics works.
The standard definition of "probably" in the particle physics community is a five-sigma signal, which means that the odds of it happening by chance are 1.4 * 10^-14.
The Swiss (and the Oregonians) seem to have decided that with sufficient safeguards in place, the possibility of doctors (or anybody else) coercing patients into dying outweighs the harm caused by forcing the terminally ill to suffer when they would prefer to die.
There is no need to theorize -- we have data from these two places, at least.
This is true 99% of the time. Most people who want to kill themselves are mentally ill, and in almost all cases the desire to kill yourself is a pretty big indicator of mental illness, and in that case the humane thing to do is to stop them from doing so and instead try to treat their illness.
However, if someone can show that they are *not* mentally ill (or at least not incompetent to make that decision) and want to kill themselves, the situation is quite different.
Just look at the positions held by the people in those situations themselves. Advocacy organizations for the mentally ill, like NAMI in the USA, with the support of mental illness patients and their caregivers, support involuntary institutionalization to prevent suicide. Many of these same people also support the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, and recognize that equating the situation of a terminal cancer patient or an Alzheimer's patient with a patient suffering from major depression is silly.
Why is it immoral to kill? It's immoral to kill because this is the ultimate form of coercion -- of depriving someone else of freedom.
Killing yourself (or, by extension, killing someone who has a genuine wish to die that is not the product of an altered mental state) is not immoral in this way.
Consider a late-stage cancer patient who is unable to get out of bed. Is it legal or not for a doctor to, upon request and upon determination that the person is competent, present that person with a large dose of barbituates and say "Take this if you want to die"?
I believe this should be legal. So do many other people, including Sir Pratchett. It's a damn shame that his life may end this way at such a young age, but to him it may be better than the alternative.
Germany's at least committing to trying to do this in a nonpolluting (i.e. non-fossil-fuel) way, and they actually have the infrastructure and engineering acumen to pull it off (maybe).
Where's Italy going to get their power? Russian gas? Somebody's coal? Magic space faeries?
Fukushima notwithstanding, nuclear power is reasonably safe (a hell of a lot better than coal), very environment-friendly, and economical (compared to things like large-scale solar). The only reasonable alternative I can think of is to build a big turbine in the middle of Rome and harness all of the hot air that comes out of the Vatican.
The biggest problem with software patents isn't the software part -- it's the patent part.
We need to seriously examine our idea of what is patentworthy and what fails the "obviousness" test. Lots of things are patented which really, really should not be patented. For instance, I have a digital SLR made by Olympus. Olympus uses a unique sensor size (a little smaller than Canon and Nikon), has decided their standard distance from that sensor to the back of the lens mount, and has built a bunch of lenses tailored to this. There is nothing magic about these values -- they're just engineering choices Olympus made. Yet these numbers -- the sensor size and the sensor-lens distance -- are patented. This is absurd. There's no invention here, just some choices that a bunch of engineers made. Canon and Nikon made different choices.
Likewise, people patent obvious solutions to problems, or solutions that have no particular inventive merit to them. This is just bog-standard engineering. Why is "multitouch" patentable? It's an obvious way to interact with a touchscreen, just like holding down two keys rather than just one at a time is an obvious way to interact with a keyboard.
Clean out all the bullshit patents, patents on things that shouldn't be patentable, and then we can talk about software patents. The great harm caused by software patents isn't really related to their software-ness; it comes from their stupidity. Slashdot just likes to talk about moronic software patents since we're software people, but moronic hardware patents are just as bad a deal.
Perhaps this guy was filming because he thought there was a reasonable likelihood that he would be witnessing excessive use of force by the police, and his video would potentially be necessary evidence?
I wish I had mod points for you. Well said, sir.
If the police respected people's rights then this sort of thing wouldn't make life harder for them.
There is a big difference between "callous and selfish" and "worthy of assault and destruction of property". If we as a society believe that things like this should not be posted on the internet, then pass a law saying so, and enforce this law against the uploader if it is uploaded.
It's also illegal to punch people in the face and break their property. I imagine the difference is that your average cop wouldn't know how to make a cellphone jammer.
Yep; the electric dipole moment of the electron.
Other way around: if an electron did have an electric dipole moment, then that wouldn't necessarily mean that it is not spherical. But if it has no electric dipole moment, then that is strongly suggestive that it is spherical; otherwise you'd need the intrinsic dipole moment (analogous to spin) to exactly cancel the dipole moment due to the non-spherical shape.
"Divisible" is a funny term. If you mean that in quantum field theory there is a vertex between an electron line and a Higgs, sure. But this doesn't mean that you can split an electron into a Higgs and "something else", any more than it means you can split an electron into an electron and a bunch of photons.
What it *does* mean is that every electron disturbs both the photon field and the Higgs field around it, and that by necessity some of the properties of what we call "electron" are actually related to the disturbances in these fields; in other words, you can't perfectly separate out the properties of the electron and the properties of the fields that it couples to. This is not a huge deal for electrons, since they only couple weakly to other quantum fields; the coupling constant is 1/137 (at low energy) with the photon field, and small to the Higgs field (if such a thing exists). It's a far bigger deal for quarks, where the coupling to the gluon field is large at low energy; you can't describe the properties of a quark in any meaningful way without considering how that quark affects the gluon field around it.
Forgive me if this explanation includes some stuff you already know -- I have no idea what your background is.
***
Are you familiar with Taylor (or Maclaurin) series? The idea is that any (well-behaved) function can be written as a polynomial of the form A + Bx + Cx^2 + Dx^3 + Ex^4 + ... ad infinitum, and that when x is close to zero, this expansion is dominated by the first few terms. If you want to see if a given function is a constant, one way to do it is to show that the coefficients B, C, D, etc., are all zero. Unless you have a particular reason to suspect that you're at an inflection point, showing that B=0 strongly suggests that C, D, E, etc., are zero too for many physical systems.
It turns out that you can expand the shape of an object or the distribution of a field in something that resembles a Taylor series. The expansion terms are things called the "spherical harmonics"; you're probably most familiar with them as the shapes of the various hydrogen orbitals (s, p, d, f, etc.). It turns out that any shape (at least, any shape with a unique radius for a given latitude and longitude) can be written as a combination of these spherical harmonics. The process of calculating the coefficients corresponding to the different shapes is called a "multipole expansion" -- it's like a Taylor expansion for shapes. For something that is very nearly a sphere, this is dominated by the first few terms.
The first one of these spherical harmonics -- corresponding in a sense to the coefficient A above -- is just a perfect sphere. Its coefficient is called the "monopole moment". The second one (actually, there are three of them, corresponding to x, y, and z axes) are called "dipole moments", and they represent the leading-order deviations away from perfect sphericity. This dipole moment is what this experiment measured; they figure that if the electronic dipole moment is very nearly zero then all the higher-order moments are zero too.
The Heisenberg principle is just a consequence of a property of Fourier transforms that says that any signal localized in frequency space will not be localized in the original space. There is no magic there at all.
Where the magic comes in is the relationship between momentum and position, and energy and time, operators in QM. The position dependence of a momentum eigenstate is sinusoidal, so you use Fourier transforms to convert from the momentum eigenbasis to the position one. Thus, any state well-localized in the momentum basis will not be well-localized in the position one, and vice versa. This isn't because of any voodoo "uncertainty" that's unique to QM; it's a direct consequence of the fundamental way QM works and the way Fourier transforms work.
It's at least sort of reasonable, though. An object with no dipole moment, no quadrupole moment, no octupole moment, etc., *is* spherical; the dipole moment is just the second term in a multipole expansion of the shape, the first one that describes perturbations away from sphericity.
They measured the dipole moment as nearly zero; it's reasonable to assume that if the dipole moment is zero then the higher moments are nearly zero, too.