he only sustainable way to have freedom is to allow businesses to do what they will and let consumers do what they will.
As a free individual I have a right to hold the individual owners of a corporation responsible for any actions taken by the legal fiction they control.
The Nanny State interferes with this right by protecting corporate owners via limitation of liability and other special treatment under the law.
The "free market" you are defending is not free: it is populated by special groups (corporate owners) who have the huge power of the Nanny State protecting them. A truly free market would have no corporations in it. A market with corporations in it needs to be regulated. There is no third option.
completely unregulated market will be owned by the big players on that market, and not be free at all.
Which big players would those be? Because without the gross interference in the "truly free market" known as "The Companies Act" or some variation thereof, there would be no "big players" because there would be no corporations.
The reification of a corporation as a legal entity and the sheltering of the owners behind the skirts of the Nanny State in the form of liability limitation is a huge interference with "free markets".
For some reason defenders of the "free market" always seem to be in favour of that particular type of interference, and against any further interference that would aid in protecting everyone from rampaging corporations.
Anyone who is intellectually consistent is either for corporations AND corporate regulation; or against corporations AND against other forms of government interference in free trade between individuals. To be for corporations and against regulation is simply contradictory.
Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands.
It's been obvious for decades now that "nature vs nurture" is a stupid way to decompose the various influences on human behaviour, but journalists and idiots (but I repeat myself) will continue to ask the "burning" question "nature vs nurture?" for at least a couple of decades more.
Even so,/. in 2025 will probably carry stories with headlines:
"Nature or Nurture: Which explains the failure of Linux on the desktop?"
"Engineers look to unexpected places for variable geometry low-speed wing design: birds!"
"Company goes green for totally unexpected reason: to save money!"
"Women have babies, therefore they should not be drafted" is false, and sexist, and stupid. It is stupid because it isn't an argument, yet you clearly intended it to be one.
You have still not made any argument as to why the draft should ever be differentially applied with regard to sex. Personally, I'm against the draft as such, but I would be even more opposed to a draft that targeted only men rather than everyone equally.
There, fixed that for you. And countered your argument.
Nope. We DO practice "social monogamy", which is the pretense of one woman mating with one man for the nominal purpose of making babies and raising children.
We do not practice sexual monogamy, but so what? Social monogamy is what matters to the argument: women who have kids are mostly socially mated, and there are data to suggest that a decrease in available males will decrease the overall reproduction rate (and economic well-being) of their female peers.
There's actually a very simple reason why women cannot register for the draft that's not sexist at all: population.
This makes no sense on many levels. Women's population is the same as men's... or did you mean something else?
You certainly couldn't mean anything to do with population growth being limited by women's reproductive capacity, as modern nations are so far below that limit you could easily kill half the female population and still have no problem maintaining population growth at current levels.
The number of women available for breeding isn't even close to the limiting factor. Just encourage each surviving woman to have twice as many kids and you're good to go, and the average fecundity would still be far below the human historical norm.
Athough in fact I've heard self-proclaimed "feminists" argue that American women born in the 50's were at a disadvantage (compared to whom, one wonders) as 60,000 men were killed in Vietnam, taking them out of the marriage pool. In a society that practices social monogamy taking men out of the gene pool is just as bad as taking women out.
So your single word "argument" is incoherent and any attempt to make it coherent is obviously wrong.
But do please keep on with your sexist and stupid beliefs, whatever they are!
Yeah, the summary is basically, "Ignorant people shocked by well-known fact they didn't know, especially because it somehow vaguely relates to some ridiculous mythology created by ignorant people thousands of years ago!"
Parthenogenesis is fairly common. There are species that are both parthenogenic and sexually reproducing. Depending on environmental stresses one kind or the other will dominate. Sex, with its higher degree of intergenerational variability, was selected for originally and has been conserved because sexually reproducing creatures have a better chance of having offspring survive in times of rapid change, as well as the more fundamental driver which is co-evolving parasites.
The article makes no sense. It calls antibodies "war machines". Antibodies just bind proteins
But you see, "war" is such a successful human activity, solving all kinds of problems that couldn't be solved any other way far more easily and at less human cost than any other method, that it is now used as a metaphor for any enterprise that people expect to be easily successful.
Thus, the "War on Poverty"--which eliminated poverty--and the "War on Drugs"--which eliminated recreational drug use--and the "War on Terror"--which eliminated terrorism.
As you can see, "war" is such a great metaphor for wildly successful enterprises that everyone wants to use it!
Regardless of what our ulterior motives may be, we are helping people over there and doing the right thing.
I have no doubt you're sincere in this belief, and could not disagree with you more. You--your country--is doing the wrong thing, and you are one of the victims.
The place to compare Iraqi violence to is Iraq before your country invaded it, not some other place at some other time. The violence during rioting in Chicago a few years back was less than that in Somalia yesterday. That doesn't mean it was ok.
Iraq wasn't a problem until the American government created it: it was an ally against Islamist terrorism. Afghanistan was a problem and will continue to be one for generations. The invasion--which I supported--was a mistake, an attempt to solve in a short time by military means a problem that can only be solved in a long time by non-military means.
The United States was founded by isolationists skeptical of international adventurism. One day perhaps you'll return to those moral roots. Until they you will continue to kill innoncent people along with people you designate as bad guys, and wonder why you are hated and feared rather than loved and respected.
At the time, it seemed like a reasonable option...
This is the problem, not any MS issue.
I recall glancing at some magazine for "Web developers" back in the early 2000's and it had completely idiot advice about getting objects back from the DOM and testing them to see if they supported specific methods, and basing the browser identification on that (rather than the spoofable user agent header) using invalid inferences like "only browser X supports method Y".
This is trivially wrong, but apparently it was promoted by "Web developers" as a best practice at the time, instead of the "built to break" practice it obviously was. No one with any real software development training or experience would ever do something so stupid as to deploy code that depended on a momentary snapshot of current capabilities to make inferences about the environment the code was running in, but in those days the attitude was "everyone can be a developer!"
My computer has been controlled by my brain for years.
Yeah, the summary hits new highs (or lows, depending on how you're scoring) on self-contradictory gibberish: "is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only the mind. The study, published in Nature, found that when research subjects had their brains connected to a computer" by some complicated collection of hardware...
So apparently "only the mind" means "the brain plus some incredibly complicated hardware that we aren't going to count because, well, uh, BECAUSE!"
Yeah, this is pretty much the Chebacca defense: say something completely incoherent and totally unrelated to the issue, which is that voting systems should avoid any preferencing of candidates, and call it an "explanation" and hope that incredibly stupid people will repeat your claim by rote, as has happened with this story.
Electronic voting systems have the ability to be less biased than paper voting systems by, for example, randomizing the candidates list for each voter, to reduce any name-ordering bias.
Too bad the purpose of electronic voting has never been to do anything other than make it easier to corrupt the electoral process.
I voted in a local election last night that used paper ballots and electronic vote counting. This seems to me to be the optimal division of labour between material and electronic systems: robust, easily recountable, and generating fast returns (the first polls were reporting less than an hour after they closed, the election was called less than two hours after.)
Electrons in a graphene sheet behave like massless particles
Minor nit: it ain't electrons that behave this way, but quasi-particles resulting from the interaction of free electrons with the substrate. The equations of motion describe the quasi-particle dynamics, not the bare electron dynamics.
In graphene, electrons behave like massless particles traveling near the speed of light.
No, electrons do not.
"Charge carriers", which in the case of graphene are quasi-particles that result from the interaction of electrons with the more-or-less 2D medium, do.
The difference is tremendously important, althought admitedly your explaination is about a million times better than the gibberish in the headline and summary.
This is interesting and legitmate physics: charge-carrying quasi-particles in 2D graphene behave as massless particles in a 2+1D spacetime (according to the paper, at least.) If you role the sheet up the dynamics of the quasi-particles becomes that of massive particles in a 1+1D spacetime. This allows experimental realization of systems described by relativistic dynamics (the Dirac Equation) under much simpler circumstances than one might generally expect.
This is similar to the research on "solid state monopoles" which behave like Dirac monopoles over large distance scales. They allow the study of a wide range of phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible (and in the case of Dirac monopoles, entirely theoretical!)
No mass in the ordinary sense of the term is created in the situation the paper describes. If you weighted the system with a sufficiently sensitive balance you would not find that the apparatus weighted more when the graphene sheet was rolled up.
The holographic universe theory is a return to beautiful simplicity.. the concepts are simple enough to understand and that math is really not all that hard either.
But apparently too difficult for the author of the article to understand. Otherwise they wouldn't write gibberish like this: In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth.
And would instead write something like: In the holographic universe all of the dynamics in three dimensions can be fully accounted for by the boundary condition on a two-dimensional surface. The third dimension is a result of a perfectly real, actual, objective, existing process. It is not in any sense "unreal" or "an illusion", since it obviously exists and it is by studying it that we have come to the conclusion that the real, objective, existing three dimensional universe might arise from a two-dimensional boundary plus some really cool physics!"
The use of gibberish language, in which perfectly ordinary, real, objective physical phenomena like the third spatial dimension are describe as "an illusion" and "not real" won't help anyone understand the holographic universe theory, which is extremely beautiful, elegant and might even be true.
The use of such gibberish language will only create barriers to understanding in the minds of lay-people, and only people who have no clue what reality is would ever use such language unless they cared more about confusing people than enlightening them.
As a physicist, let me say... If this was research that offered immediate benefits to the country (like a new medicine), then I could understand it.
As a physicist, you should know better.
Once upon a time I was a neutrino physicist, both at one of the large labs (SNO) and on a small reactor neutrino experiment. A table-top detector I designed actually detected reactor neutrinos.
Since that distant day I've worked mostly as a software designer and medical physicist. I've run my own business, and I'm an adjunct professor in the Department of Pathology at the local university helping the biologists and MDs deal with the large numerical datasets that genomic technology is producing. For my next career I'm trying to decide between robotics and poetics, and will probably do some of both.
I can do that diversity of things because of the kind of education I got as a physicist. In the course of the past fifteen years I've intereacted heavily with biologists, pathologists, cardiac surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software developers, and because of the foundations my education rests on I have been able to learn to communicate with all of them quite effectively, and contribute to a number of projects that are likely to make the world a better place.
Projects like this Indian neutrio detector are factories for the production of people like me, and personally I'm arrogant enough to think that India could use a few more people like me. I've worked with physicists from all of the world--the US, Canada, Poland, and Israel, the UK, Sri Lanka, Australia, China...--and the Indians I've known have been as good as any. Projects like this will help keep them in India, where when they leave academia--which is the most common outcome for PhDs in any discipline--their skills and education will be more likely to be applied to local problems.
It is utterly myopic to attack a project like this as not addressing India's problems. It is ONLY projects like this that will solve them, by creating the only thing that will ever solve them: highly trained, intelligent, mathematically an technologically literate, curious, empirically-oriented human beings.
Just think of it as a marker that contains a guaranteed unique identifier. backed up by a system that records which company is associated with that uniique identifier, and records to prove that they were the only company who has access to that identifier.
Many people have already pointed this out here, but since apparently it is too hard for you to understand I'll point it out again: no system of identification is more secure than its weakest link. In the case of SmartWater and other similar systems, the weakest link is the end user. Unless you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that no one in the shop in question has had any access to the source bottle, and you can further prove that no one who has been sprayed has ever transfered any of the material to anyone else, ever, you have a very poor identification system.
The number of people in this discussion who are telling us it is possible to amplify minute traces of this stuff for forensic purposes as if that was a good thing--rather than an open door to false conviction due to accidental transfer of minute traces of this stuff--is depressing.
This is just another insane scheme by ignorant people who think that "zero" is a tolerance, and it will fail for the same reasons. Every American $100 bill purportedly has non-zero traces of cocaine on it. In a few years of widespread use every person will have a few dozen DNA traces on them, including many from places they have never been due to accidental transfer.
But unless you took precautions, now PeekYou can tie your screen name to your IP.
Of course, if you're really clever, you'd put a screen name that isn't your own into the system, which is what I did. Ideally, someone else will put mine in, just to really confuse things. It turns out that for the/. usernames I tried you get pretty much the entire population of the US back.
It does indeed look like a scam to collect people's real names and link them to screen names and/or IPs.
I don't get why people say this. The rural crime rate is significantly higher than the urban crime rate. This is not controversial.
Live in the country if you hate the environment and love crime. Even a small city (I live in a town of 100k and walk to work) is far safer and more environmentally-friendly than rural or village living.
Nope. This sort of thing is perfectly legitimate, but we all know the vast majority of it isn't aimed at actual criminals, but merely people who happen to have been brought to the attention of the Organs of the State (as the Soviets used to call them.)
It's still perfectly legitimate police work, but like all police work it necessarily casts a wider net than criminals, which is why the presumption of innocence is such an important habit of mind.
The problem with that, though, is that people have trouble accepting that there was nothing wrong with what they did -- a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong.
Nope, the problem is that the people who discuss this question are lousy teachers. They set it up deliberately to create a block in other people's minds that makes it unnecessarily difficult for them to understand what is being claimed and why it is true.
If instead they said, "It is possible to represent numbers in different ways. We all know this, and it's completely uninteresting, but I'm going to bore you with it anyway. You know you can represent 1/3 as 0.3333... right? No big deal. Now curiously that also means you can represent 1/1 = (3*1/3) as 3*0.3333... or 0.99999... It's just a different representation of exactly the same value. You can of course also represent 1 as 5*1/5 1/2+1/2 and all kinds of other awkward and unintersting ways, too."
I'm not sure why people insist on presenting this result in the most counter-intuitive way possible and then wasting vast amounts of time trying to undo the damage they've inflicted with their incompetent introduction of the problem. My guess is that they are simply not very smart, as anyone who isn't fairly dumb would see that there is an obvious pedagogical problem at play here, and correct their presentation accordingly, rather than blindly and stupidly repeating the rote "0.9999... = 1" introduction to the remarkably dull fact that you can represent the same value in different ways.
Of course, in an insanely strictly typed language with infinite precision 0.999... would not quite be the same as 1, as the former is a real and the latter is an integer, so despite having the same value their different types would mean they could not be used identically in all circumstances.
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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Not to mention that while peace would be better for Israelis and Palestinians, it is not necessarily better for sub-groups of those populations, such as the international arms dealers.
There, now we've all demonized our particular nemesis.
And remember: pointing out that one party is at fault necessarily means that you 100% in support of absolutely everything all the other parties have ever done or might plan on the doing! That's what keeps the debate pointless and stupid, and if we didn't want pointless and stupid debate we wouldn't be on/., would we?
Re:Israel is an interesting exercise in Game Theor
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It's interesting that the Israelis are looking to biological scum for guidance in such matters.
Unfortunately, the biological scum in question has an important characteristic that humans do not. From the article: "Bacteria don't hide their intentions from their peers in the colony, he explains — they don't lie or prevaricate, but communicate their intentions by sending chemical messages among themselves."
That is what enables colonial decision making of the kind bacteria employ. This is not a moral judgment on humans in general, or on the Israelis or the Palestinians, but a matter of empirical fact: lying is what we do. It is a critical component of the mate-competition that made us human in the first place.
Expecting humans to "just say no" to lying is as anti-empirical as expecting bacteria to start sending false biochemical signals. Neither one is going to happen for perfectly ordinary biological reasons.
Nor is this to say that we are doomed to millenia of perpetual and (obviously) pointless warfare. Just that we need to be clear about what kind of beings we are when looking for solutions to our problems.
If it were timeliness, all of the kids would be using socializing through MySpace...
I'm not clear on why you think "timeliness" has anything to do with "first". There are two way to be untimely: early, and late. First movers are generally early, and therefore untimely.
Luck has far more to do with business success than anything else, although other things are important. People who were successful in their first business are significantly less successful in their second business: this speaks to both the role of luck in their first success and the attributes of the individual that have changed in the course of becoming a success.
I am a (moderately) successful business owner, and have seen many times that while hard work is a neccessary ingredient for success, one of its most significant roles is as an enabler of luck: if you work hard and manage your business well, you will be likely to stay in business for long enough that good luck will happen to you. Likewise, you will be more able to weather the all-too-common episodes of bad luck.
A business cannot succeed on luck alone, but nor can it become wildly successful without a very generous helping of luck. This is why business success is so unpredictable and elusive. If hard work, innovation, genius and so on were all that was required, we would be able to predict successes and failures, which we notably cannot do.
Zuckerberg was successful because he was lucky, but he was lucky because he worked hard. However, many others have worked just as hard and not been lucky, and have not succeeded in the same way because of that.
Slashdot Mirror
he only sustainable way to have freedom is to allow businesses to do what they will and let consumers do what they will.
As a free individual I have a right to hold the individual owners of a corporation responsible for any actions taken by the legal fiction they control.
The Nanny State interferes with this right by protecting corporate owners via limitation of liability and other special treatment under the law.
The "free market" you are defending is not free: it is populated by special groups (corporate owners) who have the huge power of the Nanny State protecting them. A truly free market would have no corporations in it. A market with corporations in it needs to be regulated. There is no third option.
completely unregulated market will be owned by the big players on that market, and not be free at all.
Which big players would those be? Because without the gross interference in the "truly free market" known as "The Companies Act" or some variation thereof, there would be no "big players" because there would be no corporations.
The reification of a corporation as a legal entity and the sheltering of the owners behind the skirts of the Nanny State in the form of liability limitation is a huge interference with "free markets".
For some reason defenders of the "free market" always seem to be in favour of that particular type of interference, and against any further interference that would aid in protecting everyone from rampaging corporations.
Anyone who is intellectually consistent is either for corporations AND corporate regulation; or against corporations AND against other forms of government interference in free trade between individuals. To be for corporations and against regulation is simply contradictory.
Replace human for bee or for organism and I think the quote still stands.
It's been obvious for decades now that "nature vs nurture" is a stupid way to decompose the various influences on human behaviour, but journalists and idiots (but I repeat myself) will continue to ask the "burning" question "nature vs nurture?" for at least a couple of decades more.
Even so, /. in 2025 will probably carry stories with headlines:
"Nature or Nurture: Which explains the failure of Linux on the desktop?"
"Engineers look to unexpected places for variable geometry low-speed wing design: birds!"
"Company goes green for totally unexpected reason: to save money!"
Women have babies.
This is true, and it is not sexist.
"Women have babies, therefore they should not be drafted" is false, and sexist, and stupid. It is stupid because it isn't an argument, yet you clearly intended it to be one.
You have still not made any argument as to why the draft should ever be differentially applied with regard to sex. Personally, I'm against the draft as such, but I would be even more opposed to a draft that targeted only men rather than everyone equally.
There, fixed that for you. And countered your argument.
Nope. We DO practice "social monogamy", which is the pretense of one woman mating with one man for the nominal purpose of making babies and raising children.
We do not practice sexual monogamy, but so what? Social monogamy is what matters to the argument: women who have kids are mostly socially mated, and there are data to suggest that a decrease in available males will decrease the overall reproduction rate (and economic well-being) of their female peers.
There's actually a very simple reason why women cannot register for the draft that's not sexist at all: population.
This makes no sense on many levels. Women's population is the same as men's... or did you mean something else?
You certainly couldn't mean anything to do with population growth being limited by women's reproductive capacity, as modern nations are so far below that limit you could easily kill half the female population and still have no problem maintaining population growth at current levels.
The number of women available for breeding isn't even close to the limiting factor. Just encourage each surviving woman to have twice as many kids and you're good to go, and the average fecundity would still be far below the human historical norm.
Athough in fact I've heard self-proclaimed "feminists" argue that American women born in the 50's were at a disadvantage (compared to whom, one wonders) as 60,000 men were killed in Vietnam, taking them out of the marriage pool. In a society that practices social monogamy taking men out of the gene pool is just as bad as taking women out.
So your single word "argument" is incoherent and any attempt to make it coherent is obviously wrong.
But do please keep on with your sexist and stupid beliefs, whatever they are!
Unless you're not a Biologist.
Yeah, the summary is basically, "Ignorant people shocked by well-known fact they didn't know, especially because it somehow vaguely relates to some ridiculous mythology created by ignorant people thousands of years ago!"
Parthenogenesis is fairly common. There are species that are both parthenogenic and sexually reproducing. Depending on environmental stresses one kind or the other will dominate. Sex, with its higher degree of intergenerational variability, was selected for originally and has been conserved because sexually reproducing creatures have a better chance of having offspring survive in times of rapid change, as well as the more fundamental driver which is co-evolving parasites.
The article makes no sense. It calls antibodies "war machines". Antibodies just bind proteins
But you see, "war" is such a successful human activity, solving all kinds of problems that couldn't be solved any other way far more easily and at less human cost than any other method, that it is now used as a metaphor for any enterprise that people expect to be easily successful.
Thus, the "War on Poverty"--which eliminated poverty--and the "War on Drugs"--which eliminated recreational drug use--and the "War on Terror"--which eliminated terrorism.
As you can see, "war" is such a great metaphor for wildly successful enterprises that everyone wants to use it!
Regardless of what our ulterior motives may be, we are helping people over there and doing the right thing.
I have no doubt you're sincere in this belief, and could not disagree with you more. You--your country--is doing the wrong thing, and you are one of the victims.
The place to compare Iraqi violence to is Iraq before your country invaded it, not some other place at some other time. The violence during rioting in Chicago a few years back was less than that in Somalia yesterday. That doesn't mean it was ok.
Iraq wasn't a problem until the American government created it: it was an ally against Islamist terrorism. Afghanistan was a problem and will continue to be one for generations. The invasion--which I supported--was a mistake, an attempt to solve in a short time by military means a problem that can only be solved in a long time by non-military means.
The United States was founded by isolationists skeptical of international adventurism. One day perhaps you'll return to those moral roots. Until they you will continue to kill innoncent people along with people you designate as bad guys, and wonder why you are hated and feared rather than loved and respected.
replying to undo erroneous "redundant" mod. Stupid Monday morning fingers!
At the time, it seemed like a reasonable option...
This is the problem, not any MS issue.
I recall glancing at some magazine for "Web developers" back in the early 2000's and it had completely idiot advice about getting objects back from the DOM and testing them to see if they supported specific methods, and basing the browser identification on that (rather than the spoofable user agent header) using invalid inferences like "only browser X supports method Y".
This is trivially wrong, but apparently it was promoted by "Web developers" as a best practice at the time, instead of the "built to break" practice it obviously was. No one with any real software development training or experience would ever do something so stupid as to deploy code that depended on a momentary snapshot of current capabilities to make inferences about the environment the code was running in, but in those days the attitude was "everyone can be a developer!"
My computer has been controlled by my brain for years.
Yeah, the summary hits new highs (or lows, depending on how you're scoring) on self-contradictory gibberish: "is possible to manipulate complex visual images on a computer screen using only the mind. The study, published in Nature, found that when research subjects had their brains connected to a computer" by some complicated collection of hardware...
So apparently "only the mind" means "the brain plus some incredibly complicated hardware that we aren't going to count because, well, uh, BECAUSE!"
an explanation?
Yeah, this is pretty much the Chebacca defense: say something completely incoherent and totally unrelated to the issue, which is that voting systems should avoid any preferencing of candidates, and call it an "explanation" and hope that incredibly stupid people will repeat your claim by rote, as has happened with this story.
Electronic voting systems have the ability to be less biased than paper voting systems by, for example, randomizing the candidates list for each voter, to reduce any name-ordering bias.
Too bad the purpose of electronic voting has never been to do anything other than make it easier to corrupt the electoral process.
I voted in a local election last night that used paper ballots and electronic vote counting. This seems to me to be the optimal division of labour between material and electronic systems: robust, easily recountable, and generating fast returns (the first polls were reporting less than an hour after they closed, the election was called less than two hours after.)
Now on a totally unrelated note, go buy this book and be part of the future: http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Death-collection-stories-people/dp/0982167121
Electrons in a graphene sheet behave like massless particles
Minor nit: it ain't electrons that behave this way, but quasi-particles resulting from the interaction of free electrons with the substrate. The equations of motion describe the quasi-particle dynamics, not the bare electron dynamics.
But otherwise, yeah. What you said.
In graphene, electrons behave like massless particles traveling near the speed of light.
No, electrons do not.
"Charge carriers", which in the case of graphene are quasi-particles that result from the interaction of electrons with the more-or-less 2D medium, do.
The difference is tremendously important, althought admitedly your explaination is about a million times better than the gibberish in the headline and summary.
This is interesting and legitmate physics: charge-carrying quasi-particles in 2D graphene behave as massless particles in a 2+1D spacetime (according to the paper, at least.) If you role the sheet up the dynamics of the quasi-particles becomes that of massive particles in a 1+1D spacetime. This allows experimental realization of systems described by relativistic dynamics (the Dirac Equation) under much simpler circumstances than one might generally expect.
This is similar to the research on "solid state monopoles" which behave like Dirac monopoles over large distance scales. They allow the study of a wide range of phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible (and in the case of Dirac monopoles, entirely theoretical!)
No mass in the ordinary sense of the term is created in the situation the paper describes. If you weighted the system with a sufficiently sensitive balance you would not find that the apparatus weighted more when the graphene sheet was rolled up.
The holographic universe theory is a return to beautiful simplicity.. the concepts are simple enough to understand and that math is really not all that hard either.
But apparently too difficult for the author of the article to understand. Otherwise they wouldn't write gibberish like this: In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth.
And would instead write something like: In the holographic universe all of the dynamics in three dimensions can be fully accounted for by the boundary condition on a two-dimensional surface. The third dimension is a result of a perfectly real, actual, objective, existing process. It is not in any sense "unreal" or "an illusion", since it obviously exists and it is by studying it that we have come to the conclusion that the real, objective, existing three dimensional universe might arise from a two-dimensional boundary plus some really cool physics!"
The use of gibberish language, in which perfectly ordinary, real, objective physical phenomena like the third spatial dimension are describe as "an illusion" and "not real" won't help anyone understand the holographic universe theory, which is extremely beautiful, elegant and might even be true.
The use of such gibberish language will only create barriers to understanding in the minds of lay-people, and only people who have no clue what reality is would ever use such language unless they cared more about confusing people than enlightening them.
As a physicist, let me say... If this was research that offered immediate benefits to the country (like a new medicine), then I could understand it.
As a physicist, you should know better.
Once upon a time I was a neutrino physicist, both at one of the large labs (SNO) and on a small reactor neutrino experiment. A table-top detector I designed actually detected reactor neutrinos.
Since that distant day I've worked mostly as a software designer and medical physicist. I've run my own business, and I'm an adjunct professor in the Department of Pathology at the local university helping the biologists and MDs deal with the large numerical datasets that genomic technology is producing. For my next career I'm trying to decide between robotics and poetics, and will probably do some of both.
I can do that diversity of things because of the kind of education I got as a physicist. In the course of the past fifteen years I've intereacted heavily with biologists, pathologists, cardiac surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software developers, and because of the foundations my education rests on I have been able to learn to communicate with all of them quite effectively, and contribute to a number of projects that are likely to make the world a better place.
Projects like this Indian neutrio detector are factories for the production of people like me, and personally I'm arrogant enough to think that India could use a few more people like me. I've worked with physicists from all of the world--the US, Canada, Poland, and Israel, the UK, Sri Lanka, Australia, China...--and the Indians I've known have been as good as any. Projects like this will help keep them in India, where when they leave academia--which is the most common outcome for PhDs in any discipline--their skills and education will be more likely to be applied to local problems.
It is utterly myopic to attack a project like this as not addressing India's problems. It is ONLY projects like this that will solve them, by creating the only thing that will ever solve them: highly trained, intelligent, mathematically an technologically literate, curious, empirically-oriented human beings.
Just think of it as a marker that contains a guaranteed unique identifier. backed up by a system that records which company is associated with that uniique identifier, and records to prove that they were the only company who has access to that identifier.
Many people have already pointed this out here, but since apparently it is too hard for you to understand I'll point it out again: no system of identification is more secure than its weakest link. In the case of SmartWater and other similar systems, the weakest link is the end user. Unless you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that no one in the shop in question has had any access to the source bottle, and you can further prove that no one who has been sprayed has ever transfered any of the material to anyone else, ever, you have a very poor identification system.
The number of people in this discussion who are telling us it is possible to amplify minute traces of this stuff for forensic purposes as if that was a good thing--rather than an open door to false conviction due to accidental transfer of minute traces of this stuff--is depressing.
This is just another insane scheme by ignorant people who think that "zero" is a tolerance, and it will fail for the same reasons. Every American $100 bill purportedly has non-zero traces of cocaine on it. In a few years of widespread use every person will have a few dozen DNA traces on them, including many from places they have never been due to accidental transfer.
This isn't that hard to understand, surely?
But unless you took precautions, now PeekYou can tie your screen name to your IP.
Of course, if you're really clever, you'd put a screen name that isn't your own into the system, which is what I did. Ideally, someone else will put mine in, just to really confuse things. It turns out that for the /. usernames I tried you get pretty much the entire population of the US back.
It does indeed look like a scam to collect people's real names and link them to screen names and/or IPs.
lower crime
I don't get why people say this. The rural crime rate is significantly higher than the urban crime rate. This is not controversial.
Live in the country if you hate the environment and love crime. Even a small city (I live in a town of 100k and walk to work) is far safer and more environmentally-friendly than rural or village living.
against actual criminals
Nope. This sort of thing is perfectly legitimate, but we all know the vast majority of it isn't aimed at actual criminals, but merely people who happen to have been brought to the attention of the Organs of the State (as the Soviets used to call them.)
It's still perfectly legitimate police work, but like all police work it necessarily casts a wider net than criminals, which is why the presumption of innocence is such an important habit of mind.
The problem with that, though, is that people have trouble accepting that there was nothing wrong with what they did -- a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong.
Nope, the problem is that the people who discuss this question are lousy teachers. They set it up deliberately to create a block in other people's minds that makes it unnecessarily difficult for them to understand what is being claimed and why it is true.
If instead they said, "It is possible to represent numbers in different ways. We all know this, and it's completely uninteresting, but I'm going to bore you with it anyway. You know you can represent 1/3 as 0.3333... right? No big deal. Now curiously that also means you can represent 1/1 = (3*1/3) as 3*0.3333... or 0.99999... It's just a different representation of exactly the same value. You can of course also represent 1 as 5*1/5 1/2+1/2 and all kinds of other awkward and unintersting ways, too."
I'm not sure why people insist on presenting this result in the most counter-intuitive way possible and then wasting vast amounts of time trying to undo the damage they've inflicted with their incompetent introduction of the problem. My guess is that they are simply not very smart, as anyone who isn't fairly dumb would see that there is an obvious pedagogical problem at play here, and correct their presentation accordingly, rather than blindly and stupidly repeating the rote "0.9999... = 1" introduction to the remarkably dull fact that you can represent the same value in different ways.
Of course, in an insanely strictly typed language with infinite precision 0.999... would not quite be the same as 1, as the former is a real and the latter is an integer, so despite having the same value their different types would mean they could not be used identically in all circumstances.
Not to mention that while peace would be better for Israelis and Palestinians, it is not necessarily better for sub-groups of those populations, such as the international arms dealers.
There, now we've all demonized our particular nemesis.
And remember: pointing out that one party is at fault necessarily means that you 100% in support of absolutely everything all the other parties have ever done or might plan on the doing! That's what keeps the debate pointless and stupid, and if we didn't want pointless and stupid debate we wouldn't be on /., would we?
It's interesting that the Israelis are looking to biological scum for guidance in such matters.
Unfortunately, the biological scum in question has an important characteristic that humans do not. From the article: "Bacteria don't hide their intentions from their peers in the colony, he explains — they don't lie or prevaricate, but communicate their intentions by sending chemical messages among themselves."
That is what enables colonial decision making of the kind bacteria employ. This is not a moral judgment on humans in general, or on the Israelis or the Palestinians, but a matter of empirical fact: lying is what we do. It is a critical component of the mate-competition that made us human in the first place.
Expecting humans to "just say no" to lying is as anti-empirical as expecting bacteria to start sending false biochemical signals. Neither one is going to happen for perfectly ordinary biological reasons.
Nor is this to say that we are doomed to millenia of perpetual and (obviously) pointless warfare. Just that we need to be clear about what kind of beings we are when looking for solutions to our problems.
If it were timeliness, all of the kids would be using socializing through MySpace...
I'm not clear on why you think "timeliness" has anything to do with "first". There are two way to be untimely: early, and late. First movers are generally early, and therefore untimely.
Luck has far more to do with business success than anything else, although other things are important. People who were successful in their first business are significantly less successful in their second business: this speaks to both the role of luck in their first success and the attributes of the individual that have changed in the course of becoming a success.
I am a (moderately) successful business owner, and have seen many times that while hard work is a neccessary ingredient for success, one of its most significant roles is as an enabler of luck: if you work hard and manage your business well, you will be likely to stay in business for long enough that good luck will happen to you. Likewise, you will be more able to weather the all-too-common episodes of bad luck.
A business cannot succeed on luck alone, but nor can it become wildly successful without a very generous helping of luck. This is why business success is so unpredictable and elusive. If hard work, innovation, genius and so on were all that was required, we would be able to predict successes and failures, which we notably cannot do.
Zuckerberg was successful because he was lucky, but he was lucky because he worked hard. However, many others have worked just as hard and not been lucky, and have not succeeded in the same way because of that.