Wasn't this years Nobel Price in Medicine given just for this particular theory?
My point was: how did this years Physics Nobel Prize winner's theory benefit the whole mankind?
I guess we then agree that that the MRI technology is a benefite the whole of mankind. If you had looked a bit closer you would have noticed that this years Nobel Prize in Physics was for work done in the 1950's. These theories was then studied by the people who got the Nobel prize in Medicine in the 1960's and they did their breakthrough development in the 1970's. Without these fundamental theories in physics to guide them the people who developed the MRI could not have done the work!
You are artifically trying to seperate theory from practice. They go hand-in-hand and the MRI machine is a product of both the fundamental physics behind it and the people who realize the technological significance of the theories.
Beside, the physics of Abrikosov, Ginzburg, and Leggett is of fundamental importance to understand many more phenomena like superconductivity and superfluidity which has the potential to benefite mankind for centuries to come when the technological implications are developed by other scientist in the spirit seen by the like of Lauterbur and Mansfield.
MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.
Come on. How would one even use a MRI machine without any theory? One need to have an theoretical understanding of how the different tissues influence the magnetic field they are in, a theory to seperate the noise from the relevant signals, and then a mathematical (theoretical) algorithm to make a 3D image out of these signals based on the original physical theory of the interaction between the field and the matter.
Yes, because you did not think that these fancy images is actually what comes out of these machines when one turns them on? Theory is what creates those images from the experimental data.
One could as always have a long debate if the best theories comes from experimental physicists with an intuition about what happens in their equipment or from theoretical physicists with a deep understanding of fundamental theories. But as always the truth is that the world is not black and white; theories inspire new experiments whose new results give rise to new theories. And few theoretical or experimental physicist can afford to either neglect experimental or theoretical work that is done in the field they work.
I can understand that some find the more abstract theoretical physics frustrating since they can not follow the arguments. But if one takes the time to listen, one will find that they always refer back to experiments done, or more importantly, new experiments that can be done to check what they are saying is correct.
On a side note, MRI is based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) which is a property of atoms not discovered before quantum mechanics came along. The very abstract and mathematically complex theories scribled on black boards in the 30's is therefore the first guides to the experimentalists that a MRI machine could be build in the first place.
Third... BIG F*CKIN DEAL...so your cousin cant get his visa issued for a few days. Like I said, this is not a critical system, and they just send everyone back home, and new visas are able to be issued in a few days.
Yeah, becaues it doesn't matter if al-quaeda gets control over the VISA system; they will only issue visa's to some losers with box-cutters, no biggie there.
So cry all you want for Ogg but don't be surprised when we all ignore you and stick with what works.(Not a flame)
No crying here. But I won't buy one before it supports ogg. My whole music collection is ogg and I am not going to start to rip to mp3. So, maybe it will be a good business move for Apple to make the ipod support ogg, or maybe there is not so many people like me who only consider ogg when ripping music. The fact is that Apple will sell one to me at least if they would take the effort to support ogg. Luckily there seems to be other ogg players on the marked these days, so I guess I should look at those instead.
Sometimes, I don't see why folks complain that MS used some government source code in a product. If they want it to become a standard, then everyone needs to be able to freely integrate it into their systems, including commercial interests.
The problem is that MS has a history of hijacking standards, even standards that are owned by other companies (java being the best example). The government should be careful when investing in research and when creating standards, since the government would want the tax dollars invested to benefit the citizens in general (and the government departments specifically).
With an aggressive monopoly like MS existing at the moment in the IT field makes this point even more important. For instance if the government would fund development of an open file standard for documents and MS Word embraces and extends this standard by making it possible to read these files but adds incompatible, cryptic extension, the government would be forced to tell MS to open its extensions to its competitors or accept that the government is locked into using MS Word since 95% of its departments have already invested in Word. Note that the GPL would not make it necessary to protect the standard by a new court case, since GPL would force MS to open any extensions from the start. Similarly, if the government funds research into a new killer app, and MS takes the BSD code and makes their own app out of it (with presumably a cryptic file format) and makes this app only run on MS Windows and communicate with other MS Windows machines, the government again has to buy this app from MS to run the app they developed with tax money.
In fact, it is. You can bury the weapons 50ft. underground in the middle of the desert, but the guy with the mustache probably wants things like food and air.
And how are you going to hide from the spy satelites when you bury these large quantities of weapons in the desert?
For it to be a lie you would have to assume that Bush preternaturally knew that the CIA would realize in several months time that there was no Uranium... impossible.
The only thing one should ask of the president is to make a clear statement on the reasons for starting a war and not overstate any facts when dealing with something where Americans are asked to sacrifice their lifes. It is clear that Bush overstates the facts when he uses in the state of the union address information that CIA already has pointed out they do not believe in!
About the BBC story, you realize that Tony Blair is starting to look like he will out of office soon? The Blair government are denying everything that comes out about how they exaggerated the intelligence, and it seems to be their only defence even in the cases where it is clear to everyone that they have mislead the public.
Your appeal to emotion is totally irrelevant. For one thing, the CIA "passed" the information to Bush. If the CIA says something is true, then you pretty much have to believe them.
Well, the CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in a speech the President gave in October. So why did it appear again in January, despite what the CIA had already told the administration?
Let me just present this to you: where was the large anti-war movement in Kosovo. That's a big question.
Well there was no strong anti-war movement before Kosovo. Maybe democracy works after all?
The UN was against it,
No, Russia was against it, understandable so since they are a long term ally and culturally linked to the Serbian people. Note that the Russian government did not support Milosovitch but would get in trouble at home if they would allow a war against this neighbouring country. Anyway, with a Russian veto there could be no UN resolution.
Europe wasn't against it,
well, a genocide was happening in Europe at the time, the worst one since WWII.
and the left-wing of the American politics wasn't against it.
Those hypocrites, how dare they! War to stop genocide, and they call themselves liberal.
The right-wing of American politics was against it.
You mean the same who now states that we had to invaded Iraq to save the country from a genocide and a ruthless dictator, since there were no WMD after all?
Now, fast forward to the Iraq conflict. Now this time around, things are exactly opposite. The left-wing is freaking out. The right-wing is all for it. Why? Politics. That's all.
Thats all!? What about principles (sovereignty, international law, justice)? What about truth (genocide, WMD, threat to stability, links with terrorists)? What about getting allies and solving problems by working together with the world community instead of stating "either you are with us or against us". (I always wonder if Cheney knew that this statement comes from Stalin when he made it.)
We all like to point out the faults of the media, but maybe Toronto should think a bit about their own behaviour in this. Toronto citizens got very upset to be put on the WHO travel warning list in April, and Canadian politicians put immense pressure on WHO to be taken of the list because "it hurts tourism". A week later Toronto is of the list to "everyones relief", but then SARS breaks out again since it was not actually contained in the first incident! This is quite shocking when dealing with a disease we definitely don't want to spread around the world (imagine the horror of SARS in poor parts of Africa...). Canada is a country with a health care system that can contain SARS properly, if it keeps its eyes on the ball.
Maybe you should care more about actually doing your job in containing the disease than worrying about public relationships and news coverage? If you had contained the virus in the first outbreak, the bad PR would have been much less than the image of Toronto these days among travellers. More infohere from the bad, bad media about Toronto and SARS.
Intel, Pentium and Celeron are U.S. registered trademarks of Intel Corp. Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
... and Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds and Mandrake Linux is a trademark of Mandrakesoft. Or does not these trademark matter much to HP?
Well, maybe the US should pay their UN dues first. I don't see any mention in this article of the US paying for this wifi initiative, only some mention that some US companies could benefit by selling the equipment.
Oh yeah, I forgot how well the Sahara would be wonderful farmland if we didn't put the farmers out of work, how we started the whole Somali famine, caused all of the natural disasters in the world, etc. Nice troll.
What about the 1 million metric tons of food that we just... give away for free?
The parent post has some interesting points, you should listen to them.
First, the link you give says it all: "The agreement to donate surplus U.S. commodities..." (my emphasis). That surplus comes from overproduction that is encouraged with your tax money and protected from competition with trade barriers which increases food prises in general (i.e., an extra tax on the consumer).
Here is a link to an article in the Economist which gives an example of how trade subsidies combined with trade barriers hurt third world farmers:
Coffee producers, for example, are currently suffering from a big slump in prices, thanks to rapid increases in production in Vietnam and elsewhere. If more coffee farmers had the option to switch to other foods and crops that are currently protected in the rich world, or to move upmarket by processing more of their crop, the slump could be dealt with.
It is interesting that you mention the problem with the huge (and growing) desert of Sahara. It is an interesting ethical dilemma that the western world could easily make farm land out of parts of Sahara by investing a fraction of the money they use on military spending. We have the technological capability for the first time in history to make sure no human being need to go hungry to bed, the only thing lacking is the political will and determination to do it.
Actually, the US lost the case on steel tarrifs brought against them by EU et al in the WTO. So, no, not at all, the steel tarrifs are not fair and not consistent with fair trade. Even more so, it is a way to put extra taxes on the US population, on steel itself of course but more important anything made out of steel (like cars). GW Bush, the tax president (well, except if you are filthy rich that is). By the way, the EU now has the right to impose hugh tarrifs on the US if the US does not abandon their illigal tarrifs (so a nice trade war can be coming if Bush does not back down).
Neo Nazi's are forbidden to speak freely about their beliefs.
Neo-Nazis in Germany can go to the European Human Rigths court in Strasbourg and make a case against the German goverment if they feel that their free speech rights are violated. This is exactly equivalent to some organization taking a complain to the supreem court against a law that they feel is in violation of the First Amendment. If the German goverment loses their case, they will have to change their law on this issue. I don't think such a case has been brought against the German goverment (it might have, I just don't know about it) but such a court case would be quite difficult since you also have to discuss the rights of the jews that are misrepresented and also the German history's link with Nazism. And of course the muddy issue of what constitute a true "belief", what is really "propaganda", and who has the power to "write history".
If you feel strongly for those poor neo-nazis you can even file a case yourself to the ECHR.
Just last week and Italian food-reviewer decried McDonald's food as ashitty food - and guess what, the Italian McDonald's compay is suing him for $25 million (USD) for his statments: more info
Eh, McDonalds is an American company. What does their suing (not the European way of doing things I might add) have to do with free speech in Europe?
Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys.
EU is build on the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the national states in the EU have to make sure that their national laws don't conflict with the Human Rights, and EU citizens can take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if they feel that their Human Right is violated by an European country (for instance, free speech). This document is of course also the foundation of the UN and has its philosophical basis in the philosophers of the enlightenment (the most important of them being French philosophers) which lead to the French revolution and the American Constitution. Paragraph 19 of the Human Rights Charter states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
So, it is very wrong to state that EU lacks a "First Amendment".
If they can launch a shotgun hundreds of times, then why can't the US launch some lasers?
howdy,
Well, you see Wyatt, a shotgun might have been a high tech weapon in your days, but a modern laser is a much more a wild weapon than anything out of the old west. It is even more than a 100 times more effective than a shotgun, hard to belive! Anyway, you could have really cleaned out Tombstone with one of those laser thingis.
A bit more tax cuts for the rich should do it. American tax payers doesn't mind to pay for rebuilding Iraq anyway. I am sure the French economy is totally dependent on Iraq contracts...
I understand that you were making a lame joke, but KDE is much stronger than Gnome in Germany, especially with SuSE and a lot of the KDE developers (a majority?) being German.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess we then agree that that the MRI technology is a benefite the whole of mankind. If you had looked a bit closer you would have noticed that this years Nobel Prize in Physics was for work done in the 1950's. These theories was then studied by the people who got the Nobel prize in Medicine in the 1960's and they did their breakthrough development in the 1970's. Without these fundamental theories in physics to guide them the people who developed the MRI could not have done the work!
You are artifically trying to seperate theory from practice. They go hand-in-hand and the MRI machine is a product of both the fundamental physics behind it and the people who realize the technological significance of the theories.
Beside, the physics of Abrikosov, Ginzburg, and Leggett is of fundamental importance to understand many more phenomena like superconductivity and superfluidity which has the potential to benefite mankind for centuries to come when the technological implications are developed by other scientist in the spirit seen by the like of Lauterbur and Mansfield.
Come on. How would one even use a MRI machine without any theory? One need to have an theoretical understanding of how the different tissues influence the magnetic field they are in, a theory to seperate the noise from the relevant signals, and then a mathematical (theoretical) algorithm to make a 3D image out of these signals based on the original physical theory of the interaction between the field and the matter. Yes, because you did not think that these fancy images is actually what comes out of these machines when one turns them on? Theory is what creates those images from the experimental data.
One could as always have a long debate if the best theories comes from experimental physicists with an intuition about what happens in their equipment or from theoretical physicists with a deep understanding of fundamental theories. But as always the truth is that the world is not black and white; theories inspire new experiments whose new results give rise to new theories. And few theoretical or experimental physicist can afford to either neglect experimental or theoretical work that is done in the field they work.
I can understand that some find the more abstract theoretical physics frustrating since they can not follow the arguments. But if one takes the time to listen, one will find that they always refer back to experiments done, or more importantly, new experiments that can be done to check what they are saying is correct.
On a side note, MRI is based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) which is a property of atoms not discovered before quantum mechanics came along. The very abstract and mathematically complex theories scribled on black boards in the 30's is therefore the first guides to the experimentalists that a MRI machine could be build in the first place.
Yeah, becaues it doesn't matter if al-quaeda gets control over the VISA system; they will only issue visa's to some losers with box-cutters, no biggie there.
No crying here. But I won't buy one before it supports ogg. My whole music collection is ogg and I am not going to start to rip to mp3. So, maybe it will be a good business move for Apple to make the ipod support ogg, or maybe there is not so many people like me who only consider ogg when ripping music. The fact is that Apple will sell one to me at least if they would take the effort to support ogg. Luckily there seems to be other ogg players on the marked these days, so I guess I should look at those instead.
The problem is that MS has a history of hijacking standards, even standards that are owned by other companies (java being the best example). The government should be careful when investing in research and when creating standards, since the government would want the tax dollars invested to benefit the citizens in general (and the government departments specifically).
With an aggressive monopoly like MS existing at the moment in the IT field makes this point even more important. For instance if the government would fund development of an open file standard for documents and MS Word embraces and extends this standard by making it possible to read these files but adds incompatible, cryptic extension, the government would be forced to tell MS to open its extensions to its competitors or accept that the government is locked into using MS Word since 95% of its departments have already invested in Word. Note that the GPL would not make it necessary to protect the standard by a new court case, since GPL would force MS to open any extensions from the start. Similarly, if the government funds research into a new killer app, and MS takes the BSD code and makes their own app out of it (with presumably a cryptic file format) and makes this app only run on MS Windows and communicate with other MS Windows machines, the government again has to buy this app from MS to run the app they developed with tax money.
Which leaves me wondering what Microsoft show when they have corporate demos?
And how are you going to hide from the spy satelites when you bury these large quantities of weapons in the desert?
The only thing one should ask of the president is to make a clear statement on the reasons for starting a war and not overstate any facts when dealing with something where Americans are asked to sacrifice their lifes. It is clear that Bush overstates the facts when he uses in the state of the union address information that CIA already has pointed out they do not believe in!
About the BBC story, you realize that Tony Blair is starting to look like he will out of office soon? The Blair government are denying everything that comes out about how they exaggerated the intelligence, and it seems to be their only defence even in the cases where it is clear to everyone that they have mislead the public.
Well, the CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in a speech the President gave in October. So why did it appear again in January, despite what the CIA had already told the administration?
I really prefer a president lying about a blowjob he has got, then muddeling the issue of Iraq and the war on terror. But then I have the moral of a liberal...
yeah, because it is much easier to hide 500 tonnes of anthrax and VX gas, than a guy with a moustache.
Well there was no strong anti-war movement before Kosovo. Maybe democracy works after all?
The UN was against it,
No, Russia was against it, understandable so since they are a long term ally and culturally linked to the Serbian people. Note that the Russian government did not support Milosovitch but would get in trouble at home if they would allow a war against this neighbouring country. Anyway, with a Russian veto there could be no UN resolution.
Europe wasn't against it,
well, a genocide was happening in Europe at the time, the worst one since WWII.
and the left-wing of the American politics wasn't against it.
Those hypocrites, how dare they! War to stop genocide, and they call themselves liberal.
The right-wing of American politics was against it.
You mean the same who now states that we had to invaded Iraq to save the country from a genocide and a ruthless dictator, since there were no WMD after all?
Now, fast forward to the Iraq conflict. Now this time around, things are exactly opposite. The left-wing is freaking out. The right-wing is all for it. Why? Politics. That's all.
Thats all!? What about principles (sovereignty, international law, justice)? What about truth (genocide, WMD, threat to stability, links with terrorists)? What about getting allies and solving problems by working together with the world community instead of stating "either you are with us or against us". (I always wonder if Cheney knew that this statement comes from Stalin when he made it.)
Maybe you should care more about actually doing your job in containing the disease than worrying about public relationships and news coverage? If you had contained the virus in the first outbreak, the bad PR would have been much less than the image of Toronto these days among travellers. More info here from the bad, bad media about Toronto and SARS.
Well, maybe the US should pay their UN dues first. I don't see any mention in this article of the US paying for this wifi initiative, only some mention that some US companies could benefit by selling the equipment.
First, the link you give says it all: "The agreement to donate surplus U.S. commodities..." (my emphasis). That surplus comes from overproduction that is encouraged with your tax money and protected from competition with trade barriers which increases food prises in general (i.e., an extra tax on the consumer).
Here is a link to an article in the Economist which gives an example of how trade subsidies combined with trade barriers hurt third world farmers:
It is interesting that you mention the problem with the huge (and growing) desert of Sahara. It is an interesting ethical dilemma that the western world could easily make farm land out of parts of Sahara by investing a fraction of the money they use on military spending. We have the technological capability for the first time in history to make sure no human being need to go hungry to bed, the only thing lacking is the political will and determination to do it.
Actually, the US lost the case on steel tarrifs brought against them by EU et al in the WTO. So, no, not at all, the steel tarrifs are not fair and not consistent with fair trade. Even more so, it is a way to put extra taxes on the US population, on steel itself of course but more important anything made out of steel (like cars). GW Bush, the tax president (well, except if you are filthy rich that is). By the way, the EU now has the right to impose hugh tarrifs on the US if the US does not abandon their illigal tarrifs (so a nice trade war can be coming if Bush does not back down).
Neo-Nazis in Germany can go to the European Human Rigths court in Strasbourg and make a case against the German goverment if they feel that their free speech rights are violated. This is exactly equivalent to some organization taking a complain to the supreem court against a law that they feel is in violation of the First Amendment. If the German goverment loses their case, they will have to change their law on this issue. I don't think such a case has been brought against the German goverment (it might have, I just don't know about it) but such a court case would be quite difficult since you also have to discuss the rights of the jews that are misrepresented and also the German history's link with Nazism. And of course the muddy issue of what constitute a true "belief", what is really "propaganda", and who has the power to "write history".
If you feel strongly for those poor neo-nazis you can even file a case yourself to the ECHR.
Eh, McDonalds is an American company. What does their suing (not the European way of doing things I might add) have to do with free speech in Europe?
EU is build on the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the national states in the EU have to make sure that their national laws don't conflict with the Human Rights, and EU citizens can take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if they feel that their Human Right is violated by an European country (for instance, free speech). This document is of course also the foundation of the UN and has its philosophical basis in the philosophers of the enlightenment (the most important of them being French philosophers) which lead to the French revolution and the American Constitution. Paragraph 19 of the Human Rights Charter states:
So, it is very wrong to state that EU lacks a "First Amendment".
The other claims are equally absurd.
I can only imagine what they will call the currency when Africa get a free trade sone...
Well, you see Wyatt, a shotgun might have been a high tech weapon in your days, but a modern laser is a much more a wild weapon than anything out of the old west. It is even more than a 100 times more effective than a shotgun, hard to belive! Anyway, you could have really cleaned out Tombstone with one of those laser thingis.
A bit more tax cuts for the rich should do it. American tax payers doesn't mind to pay for rebuilding Iraq anyway. I am sure the French economy is totally dependent on Iraq contracts...
I understand that you were making a lame joke, but KDE is much stronger than Gnome in Germany, especially with SuSE and a lot of the KDE developers (a majority?) being German.
I prefer "Australian kissing'; it is just like "French kissing" only down under.... ;)