No. The personalized homework system that I envision would be deployed online, and grading/feedback would be automated. I've already deployed something similar to a population of >10,000 and it worked quite successfully.
A few words from the point of view of a prof who has taught 800+ person freshman courses where these online discussion groups naturally develop (at one point, even hosted one the course website). Of course students will discuss homework, and generally it's to be encouraged. If students are all given near-identical assignments, then of course there will copying- this isn't to be encouraged since it's a poor learning strategy for the students. The question is how to discourage it? Verbal exhortation only goes so far. The best solution, imo, is to stop the cellulose-based practice of giving every student an identical set of problems- instead give them identical learning goals and pick practice problems from a huge sea of questions, based on individual performance. Academic dishonesty proceedings could be considered a valid means of discouraging rote copying- the problem is that many instructors at universities, (which are generally decentralized in that sense that each course is administered independently), have let the issue go unaddressed for a long time and allowed a culture of efficient en masse online copying to become established- if students don't see a behavior being punished, the natural assumption is that it's legitimate. Online discussions wherein students help one another understand the subject matter are great- unfortunately human nature being what it is, an online forum in a class with identical/uniform homework assignments naturally evolves into an answer mill, even more so than was the case with pre-internet study practices (although of course the same behavior occurred in the days of cellulose as well, just less efficiently and less overtly, so there was still a general sense that it was illicit).
Depends on the journal- the mainline Americal Physical Society journals (Physical Review A,B,C,D,E,Letters) accepted LaTeX (made their own macros- RevTex) for years before accepting Word.
> No 3G. A killer in Europe for something at that level. I'm assuming this won't be a problem by the time of launch though, because I simply cannot imagine anyone trying to launch a 2.5G smart phone here these days.
Yes, it's very likely to have 3G by the time of the launch in Europe, in your version v1.x.
> No video calling. Minor league problem for me and directly related to no 3G.
See above- also, video calling is kind of wiggy nowadays, and Apple seems to prefer to omit a feature rather than include it partially-assed.
> "First proper browser on a phone" says Jobs in the keynote. Err...no, no at all. My phone is happily running Opera, as are plenty of others.
Other phones having browsers isn't a deficiency of the iPhone, but it does go to differentiation and the definition of the word "proper". Perhaps just say "best phone browser interface" (if you believe that) instead of "first proper phone browser interface"?
> No user-replaceable battery. No spare batteries? Are they serious? Not a problem with an iPod, you just lose your music for a while. Annoying but liveable. For a phone however, that's a much bigger hassle.
Like for the iPod, one can anticipate third-party external battery packs that plug into the dock connector. These aren't so popular with the iPod, it seems, but as you say they are more compelling as regards a phone. Also, perhaps the internal battery is software managed to null out the iPod function when the battery is low, to maintain the phone function.
> No third-party software. Err...no. Won't fly for me.
Apple wants to control the interface, especially at launch- see partial-ass comment above: they'd rather have fewer options, each of which works well, than more options, some of which, from 3rd parties, might be wiggy. That said, the Google Maps function in the phone is a sort of third-party app (from a third party, but integrated)- I imagine that we'll see more things like this as launch gets closer.
> Can't use your "iTunes music" as a ring tone. Now admittedly the source I read for this didn't make it clear if they really meant iTMS-purchased music or just any old MP3 but either way that's pretty poor.
Interesting- first I've heard of this- What's the source on this information?
> No GPS (that I'm aware of). I'm spending that amount of money, I'd like a GPS-enabled phone please.
Yup.
> No radio. For the love of god, what is it that Apple have against radios? Even the built-in Radio function of iTunes is utterly useless. I don't want to carry around an add-on for that, it should be built into the phone like damned near every other phone.
My guess is that Apple considers regular ota radio to be a dead, partially-assed technology- I wouldn't be surprised to see some form of next-generation digital radio appearing in iPod/iPhone at a time when Apple considers it ready.
> Fixed capacity - I can't move my own flash cards in and out of the phone.
This is very Apple. I put this in the same class as the user-replaceable battery issue- the more user-accessible slots and panels one adds to a product, the more difficult it becomes to design it into a small tight elegant package (each little door takes up space, and constrains the possible internal layouts of components). Beauty is also an issue. Certain demographics want to be able to upgrade their phones (and a subset of those actually do upgrade their phones); other users (most?) are happy with what they get. Apple is addressing this in an Apple sort of way- two memory options at purchase- if you want more, buy the 8GB model.
> No video at all - not just lack of video calling but also it's unclear if that camera will actually shoot video for storing on the internal memory and transferring off later.
As you say, this is unclear- not a definite lack. And perhaps Apple defines cellphone video as partially assed.
That's an interesting question- the thinnest possible nanotube knife, a single single-walled nanotube, is about 1 nanometer wide. I could imagine that a living cell membrane would self-heal as a nanotube knife passes through it, since the cell membrane is a dynamic fluctuating entity. Bigger problems would be created with the knife hit a large, covalently bound molecule, or a macromolecular assembly held together by strong non-bonded interactions (muscle fiber, microtubule, bone, extracellular matrix of various kinds). I'd think that many of those things wouldn't self-heal very well, but it's not totally obvious to me that the damage pathway would be wide enough that slowly passing a nanotube knife through say, an arm would make it fall off, or prevent it from healing back together over time. If I had to bet, I'd say yes, it would either fall off or end up attached so tenuously that it dies and falls off later, but who knows... (one problem is that a single nanotube is most likely not strong enough to slice through an entire arm)
It means quite a bit. Strontium titanate was the first superconducting semiconductor, predicted to be so by Marvin Cohen (my theses advisor:-) and later confirmed by experiment. The general idea is that a semiconductor with multiple valleys in the conduction band into which to place dopant electrons can rapidly develop low-energy electronic states under doping, and these are the states that couple to lattice vibrations and so generate superconductivity. If you don't have a problem with the term "doped semiconductor," (which is a material that actually conducts- how do you think those electrons get through transistors on computer chips:-), then you should be ok with "superconducting semiconductor".
Microstructured optical fibers are made by stacking a set of glass capilaries in the desired arrangement (with holes) and then pulling in a fiber puller to neck it down and stretch it into the holey fiber.
I'd assume that any fiber device prone to failure would be placed in an easily-accessible region of the fiber, so it would be a splice job, not a pull job.
It's also interesting to compare an electronic success (emusic) with an electronic failure (ebooks), rather than comparing the paper success (books) with the electronic failure (ebooks).
Emusic is better than music: you gain random access, facile organization & ultraportability, all of which are very valuable for music. And you can easily rip your existing CD collection into a more fungible digital form to jump-start your digital music library.
If people read books by randomly grabbing one off the shelf and reading 5 pages, then putting it back; if people could rip their existing book collection conveniently to electronic form; if the typical person owned as many books as they do songs and enjoyed creating mix-books for their friends or for certain moods; If people enjoyed shuffling randomly from book to book every 5 pages... then ebooks would be a sensation.
We don't read books like we listen to music.
DevonThink does much of this (but not all)
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 1
DevonThink http://www.devon-technologies.com/ for OSX can display multiple file types (rtf, pdf, images, movies), and has very powerful classification functions (that's its main purpose). But it doesn't handle presentation formats, as far as I know.
Three women are discussing how their husbands make love. The first says,
"My husband is a footbal player. He is really powerful and energetic in
bed, and this is a real turn on for me." The second says, "My husband is
a musician, and when we make love it's as if he were playing me. He al-
ways knows exactly what I want and gives it to me without my asking."
The third says, "Well, my husband is a sales representative for IBM.
When we make love all he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me
how good it's going to be when I finally get it."
Why not take this a step farther and create a distinct section of iTunes music Store where people can post music for sale? There may be issues with posting of offensive material, but overall it would be cool.
Well, then the place to look would probably be "Branford W. Parkinson, Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications (Progress in Astronautics & Aeronautics S.)". If you have access to a good library, please take a look and tell me what you find. If not, let me know and I'll take a look myself. As to your 4 examples, (1) I consider very unproven (there are so many other possible explanations and any small effect that can't be consistently reproduced is cause for concern), (2) same as (1), (3) I haven't yet seen the data, (4) black holes dynamics near the event horizon are pretty well understood and there certainly are no experimental results at variance with GR there, while spiral arm formation to my knowledge shows no evidence that gravity beyond Newtonian (not even needing GR, I suspect, just N-body Newtonian with very large N+stellar evolution and some gas physics maybe) is necessary for their formation (spiral density waves of some sort- the exact formation mechanism isn't yet fullly understood I'm guessing, but that doesn't mean that new fundamental physics is required).
Show me the data and don't be shy- if I can't fully assess it, I'll walk down the hall and chat with the lead theorist on LIGO or one of our GR numerical relativists:-).
OK, fine, but where is your reference to the literature on this effect? Where did you learn of it? The GPS corrections should all be documented. If there is a Fresnel effect that leads to intermittent positive/negative results, then the very fine-grained coverage of the GPS constellation over many years should have already been able to tease out the details of when it is observed and when not, and those details should be in the correction terms (otherwise it wouldn't be a correction!). Are they? What is the specific mathematical form of the term you refer to, and what is it about this form that leads you to claim that it relates to new physics?
Where is the evidence you cite that there is an effect on GPS clocks? I searched the article on arXiv.org for GPS, global, positioning, clock, time, atomic and didn't find anything. GPS clocks see a total solar eclipse (from the earth's shadow) every orbit and depends on timing down to nanoseconds, so if GPS sees something, it should have been reproduced thousands of times for every orbit of every satellite...
It would be much cheaper to spend 1000x less for improved experiments on the earth- the effect as indicated isn't all that small, if one wanted to design a truly first-rate experiment.
I have a serious concern, though, about these reports- the effect is seen in both regular pendula (whose period depends on g and the length of the pendulum) and in torsion pendula (which are masses and springs, whose period is pretty much independent of local gravity). That would seem to imply that the effect is a change in time itself, which should be blindingly obvious to atomic clocks. But isn't seen there.
I think you're confusing the radiation used to make the chip and the radiation emitted by the chip in use. 20nm is the feature size- roughly the same as (or a bit smaller than) the wavelength of the light used to *make* the chip, not the wavelength of the electromagnetic emissions from the chip in use. Even at an incredibly fast 1 THz clock, the device emits in the very deep IR, not soft Xray. Only at 1000 THz clock would we reach the visible spectrum, and there are lots of things that go wrong well before that.
In physics, names and nomenclature are shorthand for a more precise mathematical description. The usual description of subatomic particles is in terms of quantum field theory, and in QFT one has operators, mathematical constructs that create or destroy one excitation of a quantum field. A field is just a quantity that has a value everywhere in space, like an electric field or magnetic field. In this case, an 'electron field'. Since the number of excitations (or amplitude of the field) comes in discrete integers, there is no way to make half of an electron. The resulting objects are countable, and we refer to those entities as particles. This is unlike the excitation of a classical (non-quantum) wave on a classical string, where the amplitude of the excitation is continuous, not discrete. A guitar string can sound loud or soft or anywhere in between. The amplitude of an electron field has discrete integral values. The particle referred to here is a probably composite object- a bound state of several more fundamental field excitations with a finite lifetime before decay. Once one gets to these small lengthscales, one can't really take much intuition from everyday experience. Instead, one first understands the mathematical description of the experimental phenomena, and then develops intuition about the structure of the mathematics, attaching everyday words to those new mathematical concepts because the everyday meanings of those words have mnemonic value in recalling the appropriate mathematics.
Titanium is expensive because it is very difficult to extract from the oxide form. The oxide form itself is very cheap. It is the main ingredient in house paint.
In fact, the brand new relativistic heavy ion collider is working quite happily. You're thinking of the controversy over some very small leaks of radioactive materials a few years back- the lab didn't handle the public relations very well on that (gave an impression of not being fully open) so it made a stink, but the health consequences for the surrounding community were pretty much negligible.
There is one (small) potential way out of the cosmic ray argument: give up lorentz invariance. The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) defines a preferred reference frame, at least on the largest scales. Now all of the cosmic rays that impinge on the earth, if one wants to change reference frames and turn them into head-on symmetric collisions, as in a particle accelerator, end up with very large boosts relative to the cosmic microwave background, whereas the earth/accelerator reference frame is by comparison essentially at rest relative to the CMBR. So there is at least some measure of physical distinction between the two processes: ultrahigh energy cosmic rays and human-built colliders. However, one would be hard-pressed to connect that formal distinction to an actual mechanism to modify the dynamics of the Hawking radiation...
A fundamental problem of Spam is that the sender of an email cannot be identified and verified with 100% accuracy, so it is difficulty to filter 100% effectively. However, there is one and only one part of an incoming message that must of necessity be accurate- the To: address. So use the To: address to identify the sender! Publish your public address: "foo@bar.com". Any email to foo generates a reply "Thanks for the note. Mr. Foo loves you so much that he's generated a special personal email address just for you to use: 'foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com'. Please use this address in the future- sorry but you'll need to resend the message just sent to this new address. Don't ever give out this secial address to any else, because if Mr. Foo begins to receive spam on this To: address, he will automatically filter all future messages to foo_RANDOMSTRING straight to the trash." Every sender gets a unique RANDOMSTRING, so you can filter on the To: address. It's similar to throw-away email addresses, but coupled to a public address that triggers auto-generation of new RANDOMSTRING addresses. The sender has the inconvenience of adding foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com to their address book. Also, spammers can read the auto-reply and then add foo_RANDOMSTRING to their spam list, but this could be made difficult by putting it in a distorted gif image. The email client would also need to be configured to set Reply-To: correctly on folowups. One nice thing is that for user-requested bot-generated emails, one can simply give them a new RANDOMSTRING-based email address right off in the registration form or whatever. The ever-expanding number of foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com addresses adds to the overall load on the servers, but is that handle-able (nasty things could happen if your inbox got Dos'd)? In such a world, people would get used to pinging new people with just a short message to obtain their personalized RANDOMSTRING address. Kind of a weird system but maybe it's interesting to think about?
(A) Neither could any conceivable DRM scheme- would that in itself make them all illegal? Simply because something can be circumvented does not make it illegal. (B) A much lesser issue than wholesale copying. And this will be proved exactly how? A microphone in every home? (C) Maybe, maybe not. I don't think it's fair to assume. The very fact that it might be perfectly legal right now is interesting. I think a lot of people in the back of their minds feel guilty about file swapping and wouldn't fight too hard if it was taken away. But take away something that feel legit and the political cost is higher.
An idea I've been musing about for a little while- instead of distributing copies of files to each other the usual way, what of a communal lending library? The idea would be that each person provides a small selection of legitimately purchased material (music, probably mostly) to others to borrow over the internet. While it is being borrowed by one person, it cannot be borrowed by another, just like lending out a CD to a friend, which I assume is fair use. The efficiency is that the average person owns N CD's but can enjoy only 1 of them at a time. But with the lending library, other people can be enjoying any selection from the other N-1. Ideally, each person would have to purchase only one CD to make it all work: since the average person listens to music only a fraction p of the time, this would a 1/p-fold oversupply, probably sufficient to ensure that everyone can find what they want when they want it.
It would require some mechanisms to enforce the lending aspect of the policy (one could even allow local caching for bandwidth efficiency). Although IANAL, it sounds legal to me, and still obtains an enormous efficiency from digital distribution. Does that seem reasonable?
Slashdot Mirror
No. The personalized homework system that I envision would be deployed online, and grading/feedback would be automated. I've already deployed something similar to a population of >10,000 and it worked quite successfully.
A few words from the point of view of a prof who has taught 800+ person freshman courses where these online discussion groups naturally develop (at one point, even hosted one the course website). Of course students will discuss homework, and generally it's to be encouraged. If students are all given near-identical assignments, then of course there will copying- this isn't to be encouraged since it's a poor learning strategy for the students. The question is how to discourage it? Verbal exhortation only goes so far. The best solution, imo, is to stop the cellulose-based practice of giving every student an identical set of problems- instead give them identical learning goals and pick practice problems from a huge sea of questions, based on individual performance. Academic dishonesty proceedings could be considered a valid means of discouraging rote copying- the problem is that many instructors at universities, (which are generally decentralized in that sense that each course is administered independently), have let the issue go unaddressed for a long time and allowed a culture of efficient en masse online copying to become established- if students don't see a behavior being punished, the natural assumption is that it's legitimate. Online discussions wherein students help one another understand the subject matter are great- unfortunately human nature being what it is, an online forum in a class with identical/uniform homework assignments naturally evolves into an answer mill, even more so than was the case with pre-internet study practices (although of course the same behavior occurred in the days of cellulose as well, just less efficiently and less overtly, so there was still a general sense that it was illicit).
Depends on the journal- the mainline Americal Physical Society journals (Physical Review A,B,C,D,E,Letters) accepted LaTeX (made their own macros- RevTex) for years before accepting Word.
> No 3G. A killer in Europe for something at that level. I'm assuming this won't be a problem by the time of launch though, because I simply cannot imagine anyone trying to launch a 2.5G smart phone here these days.
Yes, it's very likely to have 3G by the time of the launch in Europe, in your version v1.x.
> No video calling. Minor league problem for me and directly related to no 3G.
See above- also, video calling is kind of wiggy nowadays, and Apple seems to prefer to omit a feature rather than include it partially-assed.
> "First proper browser on a phone" says Jobs in the keynote. Err...no, no at all. My phone is happily running Opera, as are plenty of others.
Other phones having browsers isn't a deficiency of the iPhone, but it does go to differentiation and the definition of the word "proper". Perhaps just say "best phone browser interface" (if you believe that) instead of "first proper phone browser interface"?
> No user-replaceable battery. No spare batteries? Are they serious? Not a problem with an iPod, you just lose your music for a while. Annoying but liveable. For a phone however, that's a much bigger hassle.
Like for the iPod, one can anticipate third-party external battery packs that plug into the dock connector. These aren't so popular with the iPod, it seems, but as you say they are more compelling as regards a phone. Also, perhaps the internal battery is software managed to null out the iPod function when the battery is low, to maintain the phone function.
> No third-party software. Err...no. Won't fly for me.
Apple wants to control the interface, especially at launch- see partial-ass comment above: they'd rather have fewer options, each of which works well, than more options, some of which, from 3rd parties, might be wiggy. That said, the Google Maps function in the phone is a sort of third-party app (from a third party, but integrated)- I imagine that we'll see more things like this as launch gets closer.
> Can't use your "iTunes music" as a ring tone. Now admittedly the source I read for this didn't make it clear if they really meant iTMS-purchased music or just any old MP3 but either way that's pretty poor.
Interesting- first I've heard of this- What's the source on this information?
> No GPS (that I'm aware of). I'm spending that amount of money, I'd like a GPS-enabled phone please.
Yup.
> No radio. For the love of god, what is it that Apple have against radios? Even the built-in Radio function of iTunes is utterly useless. I don't want to carry around an add-on for that, it should be built into the phone like damned near every other phone.
My guess is that Apple considers regular ota radio to be a dead, partially-assed technology- I wouldn't be surprised to see some form of next-generation digital radio appearing in iPod/iPhone at a time when Apple considers it ready.
> Fixed capacity - I can't move my own flash cards in and out of the phone.
This is very Apple. I put this in the same class as the user-replaceable battery issue- the more user-accessible slots and panels one adds to a product, the more difficult it becomes to design it into a small tight elegant package (each little door takes up space, and constrains the possible internal layouts of components). Beauty is also an issue. Certain demographics want to be able to upgrade their phones (and a subset of those actually do upgrade their phones); other users (most?) are happy with what they get. Apple is addressing this in an Apple sort of way- two memory options at purchase- if you want more, buy the 8GB model.
> No video at all - not just lack of video calling but also it's unclear if that camera will actually shoot video for storing on the internal memory and transferring off later.
As you say, this is unclear- not a definite lack. And perhaps Apple defines cellphone video as partially assed.
That's an interesting question- the thinnest possible nanotube knife, a single single-walled nanotube, is about 1 nanometer wide. I could imagine that a living cell membrane would self-heal as a nanotube knife passes through it, since the cell membrane is a dynamic fluctuating entity. Bigger problems would be created with the knife hit a large, covalently bound molecule, or a macromolecular assembly held together by strong non-bonded interactions (muscle fiber, microtubule, bone, extracellular matrix of various kinds). I'd think that many of those things wouldn't self-heal very well, but it's not totally obvious to me that the damage pathway would be wide enough that slowly passing a nanotube knife through say, an arm would make it fall off, or prevent it from healing back together over time. If I had to bet, I'd say yes, it would either fall off or end up attached so tenuously that it dies and falls off later, but who knows... (one problem is that a single nanotube is most likely not strong enough to slice through an entire arm)
It means quite a bit. Strontium titanate was the first superconducting semiconductor, predicted to be so by Marvin Cohen (my theses advisor :-) and later confirmed by experiment. The general idea is that a semiconductor with multiple valleys in the conduction band into which to place dopant electrons can rapidly develop low-energy electronic states under doping, and these are the states that couple to lattice vibrations and so generate superconductivity. If you don't have a problem with the term "doped semiconductor," (which is a material that actually conducts- how do you think those electrons get through transistors on computer chips :-), then you should be ok with "superconducting semiconductor".
Microstructured optical fibers are made by stacking a set of glass capilaries in the desired arrangement (with holes) and then pulling in a fiber puller to neck it down and stretch it into the holey fiber.
I'd assume that any fiber device prone to failure would be placed in an easily-accessible region of the fiber, so it would be a splice job, not a pull job.
It's also interesting to compare an electronic success (emusic) with an electronic failure (ebooks), rather than comparing the paper success (books) with the electronic failure (ebooks).
Emusic is better than music: you gain random access, facile organization & ultraportability, all of which are very valuable for music. And you can easily rip your existing CD collection into a more fungible digital form to jump-start your digital music library.
If people read books by randomly grabbing one off the shelf and reading 5 pages, then putting it back; if people could rip their existing book collection conveniently to electronic form; if the typical person owned as many books as they do songs and enjoyed creating mix-books for their friends or for certain moods; If people enjoyed shuffling randomly from book to book every 5 pages... then ebooks would be a sensation.
We don't read books like we listen to music.
DevonThink http://www.devon-technologies.com/ for OSX can display multiple file types (rtf, pdf, images, movies), and has very powerful classification functions (that's its main purpose). But it doesn't handle presentation formats, as far as I know.
Three women are discussing how their husbands make love. The first says, "My husband is a footbal player. He is really powerful and energetic in bed, and this is a real turn on for me." The second says, "My husband is a musician, and when we make love it's as if he were playing me. He al- ways knows exactly what I want and gives it to me without my asking." The third says, "Well, my husband is a sales representative for IBM. When we make love all he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it's going to be when I finally get it."
(http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0213.htm)
Why not take this a step farther and create a distinct section of iTunes music Store where people can post music for sale? There may be issues with posting of offensive material, but overall it would be cool.
Well, then the place to look would probably be "Branford W. Parkinson, Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications (Progress in Astronautics & Aeronautics S.)". If you have access to a good library, please take a look and tell me what you find. If not, let me know and I'll take a look myself. As to your 4 examples, (1) I consider very unproven (there are so many other possible explanations and any small effect that can't be consistently reproduced is cause for concern), (2) same as (1), (3) I haven't yet seen the data, (4) black holes dynamics near the event horizon are pretty well understood and there certainly are no experimental results at variance with GR there, while spiral arm formation to my knowledge shows no evidence that gravity beyond Newtonian (not even needing GR, I suspect, just N-body Newtonian with very large N+stellar evolution and some gas physics maybe) is necessary for their formation (spiral density waves of some sort- the exact formation mechanism isn't yet fullly understood I'm guessing, but that doesn't mean that new fundamental physics is required).
:-).
Show me the data and don't be shy- if I can't fully assess it, I'll walk down the hall and chat with the lead theorist on LIGO or one of our GR numerical relativists
OK, fine, but where is your reference to the literature on this effect? Where did you learn of it? The GPS corrections should all be documented. If there is a Fresnel effect that leads to intermittent positive/negative results, then the very fine-grained coverage of the GPS constellation over many years should have already been able to tease out the details of when it is observed and when not, and those details should be in the correction terms (otherwise it wouldn't be a correction!). Are they? What is the specific mathematical form of the term you refer to, and what is it about this form that leads you to claim that it relates to new physics?
Where is the evidence you cite that there is an effect on GPS clocks? I searched the article on arXiv.org for GPS, global, positioning, clock, time, atomic and didn't find anything. GPS clocks see a total solar eclipse (from the earth's shadow) every orbit and depends on timing down to nanoseconds, so if GPS sees something, it should have been reproduced thousands of times for every orbit of every satellite...
It would be much cheaper to spend 1000x less for improved experiments on the earth- the effect as indicated isn't all that small, if one wanted to design a truly first-rate experiment.
I have a serious concern, though, about these reports- the effect is seen in both regular pendula (whose period depends on g and the length of the pendulum) and in torsion pendula (which are masses and springs, whose period is pretty much independent of local gravity). That would seem to imply that the effect is a change in time itself, which should be blindingly obvious to atomic clocks. But isn't seen there.
I think you're confusing the radiation used to make the chip and the radiation emitted by the chip in use. 20nm is the feature size- roughly the same as (or a bit smaller than) the wavelength of the light used to *make* the chip, not the wavelength of the electromagnetic emissions from the chip in use. Even at an incredibly fast 1 THz clock, the device emits in the very deep IR, not soft Xray. Only at 1000 THz clock would we reach the visible spectrum, and there are lots of things that go wrong well before that.
In physics, names and nomenclature are shorthand for a more precise mathematical description. The usual description of subatomic particles is in terms of quantum field theory, and in QFT one has operators, mathematical constructs that create or destroy one excitation of a quantum field. A field is just a quantity that has a value everywhere in space, like an electric field or magnetic field. In this case, an 'electron field'. Since the number of excitations (or amplitude of the field) comes in discrete integers, there is no way to make half of an electron. The resulting objects are countable, and we refer to those entities as particles. This is unlike the excitation of a classical (non-quantum) wave on a classical string, where the amplitude of the excitation is continuous, not discrete. A guitar string can sound loud or soft or anywhere in between. The amplitude of an electron field has discrete integral values. The particle referred to here is a probably composite object- a bound state of several more fundamental field excitations with a finite lifetime before decay. Once one gets to these small lengthscales, one can't really take much intuition from everyday experience. Instead, one first understands the mathematical description of the experimental phenomena, and then develops intuition about the structure of the mathematics, attaching everyday words to those new mathematical concepts because the everyday meanings of those words have mnemonic value in recalling the appropriate mathematics.
Titanium is expensive because it is very difficult to extract from the oxide form. The oxide form itself is very cheap. It is the main ingredient in house paint.
Excellent. My house can cheerfully recommend to me a larger penis every time I arrive home after work.
In fact, the brand new relativistic heavy ion collider is working quite happily. You're thinking of the controversy over some very small leaks of radioactive materials a few years back- the lab didn't handle the public relations very well on that (gave an impression of not being fully open) so it made a stink, but the health consequences for the surrounding community were pretty much negligible.
There is one (small) potential way out of the cosmic ray argument: give up lorentz invariance. The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) defines a preferred reference frame, at least on the largest scales. Now all of the cosmic rays that impinge on the earth, if one wants to change reference frames and turn them into head-on symmetric collisions, as in a particle accelerator, end up with very large boosts relative to the cosmic microwave background, whereas the earth/accelerator reference frame is by comparison essentially at rest relative to the CMBR. So there is at least some measure of physical distinction between the two processes: ultrahigh energy cosmic rays and human-built colliders. However, one would be hard-pressed to connect that formal distinction to an actual mechanism to modify the dynamics of the Hawking radiation...
A fundamental problem of Spam is that the sender of an email cannot be identified and verified with 100% accuracy, so it is difficulty to filter 100% effectively. However, there is one and only one part of an incoming message that must of necessity be accurate- the To: address. So use the To: address to identify the sender! Publish your public address: "foo@bar.com". Any email to foo generates a reply "Thanks for the note. Mr. Foo loves you so much that he's generated a special personal email address just for you to use: 'foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com'. Please use this address in the future- sorry but you'll need to resend the message just sent to this new address. Don't ever give out this secial address to any else, because if Mr. Foo begins to receive spam on this To: address, he will automatically filter all future messages to foo_RANDOMSTRING straight to the trash." Every sender gets a unique RANDOMSTRING, so you can filter on the To: address. It's similar to throw-away email addresses, but coupled to a public address that triggers auto-generation of new RANDOMSTRING addresses. The sender has the inconvenience of adding foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com to their address book. Also, spammers can read the auto-reply and then add foo_RANDOMSTRING to their spam list, but this could be made difficult by putting it in a distorted gif image. The email client would also need to be configured to set Reply-To: correctly on folowups. One nice thing is that for user-requested bot-generated emails, one can simply give them a new RANDOMSTRING-based email address right off in the registration form or whatever. The ever-expanding number of foo_RANDOMSTRING@bar.com addresses adds to the overall load on the servers, but is that handle-able (nasty things could happen if your inbox got Dos'd)? In such a world, people would get used to pinging new people with just a short message to obtain their personalized RANDOMSTRING address. Kind of a weird system but maybe it's interesting to think about?
(A) Neither could any conceivable DRM scheme- would that in itself make them all illegal? Simply because something can be circumvented does not make it illegal.
(B) A much lesser issue than wholesale copying. And this will be proved exactly how? A microphone in every home?
(C) Maybe, maybe not. I don't think it's fair to assume. The very fact that it might be perfectly legal right now is interesting. I think a lot of people in the back of their minds feel guilty about file swapping and wouldn't fight too hard if it was taken away. But take away something that feel legit and the political cost is higher.
An idea I've been musing about for a little while- instead of distributing copies of files to each other the usual way, what of a communal lending library? The idea would be that each person provides a small selection of legitimately purchased material (music, probably mostly) to others to borrow over the internet. While it is being borrowed by one person, it cannot be borrowed by another, just like lending out a CD to a friend, which I assume is fair use. The efficiency is that the average person owns N CD's but can enjoy only 1 of them at a time. But with the lending library, other people can be enjoying any selection from the other N-1. Ideally, each person would have to purchase only one CD to make it all work: since the average person listens to music only a fraction p of the time, this would a 1/p-fold oversupply, probably sufficient to ensure that everyone can find what they want when they want it.
It would require some mechanisms to enforce the lending aspect of the policy (one could even allow local caching for bandwidth efficiency). Although IANAL, it sounds legal to me, and still obtains an enormous efficiency from digital distribution. Does that seem reasonable?