I might prefer to risk my life, why should I have to pay for (and be forced to use) seatbelts?
Simple - as a tax payer I do not want to pay for your hospital care, treatment, disability benefit etc. So, provided you have no dependents, if you make the law such that people without seat belts must pay for their own healthcare, receive no disability benefits etc. then by all means go out and kill yourself. However if you want support from society you should expect that society will require reasonable steps to lessen the risks.
....and if you are in the US the same applies to allowing private insurance to exclude coverage for injuries from such accidents because why should others pay higher premiums to support your needless risk taking?
I don't think self-driving cars will really take off until manufacturers are protected from lawsuits
Correction, self-driving cars will really take off when manufacturers do not need protection from lawsuits. If they need to be protected from lawsuits then their system is not good enough.
I wonder what the penalty would be for hacking your OWN car that you own in France..to disable or spoof said breathalizer?
Why bother - as far as I can tell from the factual details (hidden amongst the highly biased propaganda and dubious science in the article) the law will only require people to carry a breathalyser. There is no mention that you will be required to use it or that it is hooked up to the car's ignition. It is just there in case you want to check whether you are over the limit. While the article waxes on and on about how people will have to buy new ones every time they go for a drink or buy two so they can test a friend etc. as far as I can tell the only effect will be that french cars will have a new object shoved into their first aid kits.
60 ns is not hard for two clocks a few metres apart. Put those clocks 700km apart AND underground where you cannot directly received GPS and things get a lot harder! For a start you need to know exactly how far apart the clocks are because a discrepancy of 30cm means a 1ns difference in propagation delay for a signal.
Actually doing one experiment was exactly what happened - only Opera saw any FTL neutrinos, no other experiment corroborated this. In addition Opera received considerable criticism for NOT being sceptical enough and by no means was their paper written in any sort of cautionary tone. If it had it would have claimed an unexplained timing discrepancy not FTL neutrinos which is what it DID claim.
In their defence it is an extremely hard experiment to do so mistakes are inevitable and I would not blame them for that. However, knowing this, they should take the blame for publishing far too early for such amazing claims. That being said I would rather have one daft result like this every 5-10 years than to restrict experiment's abilities to publish as they see fit and risk missing an important result.
Even at the speed of light at long distances there can be an appreciable time lag of a few seconds. This would be enough to miss an erratically manoeuvring drone (and it would be a drone since humans cannot handle large accelerations and need air which is easily lost through holes). There is also the issue of laser diffraction which make long distance lasers unlikely.
The advantage with a missile is that it can have onboard intelligence and so correct for target motion as it gets nearer. So missiles will be an effective long range weapon, but almost certainly nuclear, not antimatter. The biggest issue with this is actually storage rather than production - we can make far more than we can store...although we cannot make much, about enough to warm a cup of tea at CERN.
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others.
In general I would agree with that statement. The key is what is the cost of doing X vs. the benefit derived to others. For example forcing people to pay taxes which are then used to provide medical treatment for everyone, regardless of income is good. The penalty is less money but the benefit derived is people getting to live.
However with forced vaccination the penalty is a very low, but non-zero risk of death or serious harm vs. a higher risk of dearth or risk of harm for someone who themselves refused the vaccination. If we accept this as ethical then the next question is how big a risk is it acceptable to force someone to take with their life? ! in a billion, 1 in a million, 1 in 10? Who gets to decide?
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death. In fact it is ethically similar to forced, live organ donation. You would never force someone to donate a kidney to save another - forcing vaccinations is exactly the same - the only real difference is that the risk of death is less to the person being forced.
Getting back on topic....what about considering academia - assuming your town has a university nearby. The money you will make is not as good as industry - so expect some level of pay cut but the chances of losing your job are a lot less than industry, most of the time at least. However you will get to work with us crazy academics and get exposed to a huge variety of different problems and issues.
As an added bonus, should you find that you do not like it, most universities have very good training programs so you should get the chance to gain some different skills and leave.
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
I disagree. Overuse of antibiotics is bad for everyone, including the patient who is taking the antibiotics because later in life they will likely need effective antibiotics. Vaccinating a section of the population who does not need to be vaccinated because the complications of the disease do not apply to them offers no benefit to them.
As far as I can tell egg in vaccines applies primarily only to the flu vaccine and, even then, there are alternatives. However even then I would still argue that it is unethical for a doctor to advise a patient undergo a medical procedure with a non-zero risk for the sole benefit of others. By all means ask them to volunteer - there are plenty of example of living organ donation, bone marrow etc - but advising them that they should undergo a medical procedure which does not benefit the patient is unethical.
Reread the post - I'm referring to the specific case where one person is immune to the nasty effects of the disease e.g. rubella causing birth defects and so suffers no benefit from the vaccination themselves. In the case where the patient themselves would benefit from the immunity then the reason for doing it is that they, themselves, benefit from the immunity.
Because willfully endangering other people to eliminate a tiny, tiny risk of discomfort to yourself
If the only risk of taking a vaccination was a small discomfort you might have a point. However vaccinations are not risk free - the risk of significant complications is incredibly low but NOT zero. So again I ask why is it reasonable to ask someone to take on this small, but non-zero risk for no benefit to themselves in order to protect someone refuses to take the same tiny risk themselves despite the fact that it would actually benefit them?
If anyone refuses a vaccine, they not only put themselves at risk, but others that they may come in contact with.
Sorry but that is a very bad reason to get vaccinated. We are all responsible for our own health. Assuming I'm immune to the complications of a non-serious disease (e.g. rubella causes birth defects if you are pregnant which does not apply to men) why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
We might have some crazy right-wing politicians in Alberta compared to the rest of Canada but, as a European who moved to Alberta from the US, they are not a patch on the crazy, right wing US politicians. For example they all support (admittedly in some cases grudgingly) free health care at a level that puts them somewhere slightly to the left of the US democrats.
Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either.
Ok, I suppose technically it is basic physics and biology. Given basic physics there is no way to make the trip short enough that anyone setting off will live long enough to get to Alpha Centauri. Until you solve that there is no economic problem because, even with infinite money, nobody can make it there.
For the solar system I agree that there is an economic hurdle to overcome but, as launches keep getting cheaper, it is just a matter of time before we find something valuable enough to be worth the cost to recover. Once we get there and build infrastructure off the Earth things will tend to get cheaper because something constructed on the moon has a far smaller energy cost to launch.
This is much the same thing which happened during the colonization of North America - initially everything was imported from Europe and then gradually local manufacturing took over because it saved the (then expensive) transport costs from Europe.
The MPAA currently can only compete on one of these points -- cost.
Actually the MPAA can effectively compete on all the other points EXCEPT cost...they can do everything you list, better than any pirate, except give it away for free. The fact that they are ignoring all the other points and trying to compete on cost is why they are having such a hard time. If they released content commercial free, at the same time as (or even in advance) of broadcast in multiple DRM-free formats for a low cost the chances are that they would attract customers willing to pay for the simple convenience vs. searching dodgy websites for content of unknown quality which is only available after broadcast.
Since the speed of sound in air is ~330m/s which is ~750 mph the enemy will not hear it until after it hits at which point it is not the sound which they will be concerned about.
What's wrong with the solar system to get ourselves experienced with space? Interstellar travel is out until we solve the issues you mention but the solar system is most definitely within reach - the limitations there are technology not basic physics. I think most people would think that mining Helium-3 on the surface of the moon, watching a sulphur volcano erupt on Io or sailing the methane oceans on Titan would count as exciting.
Having clear, nationally-comparable test scores is much more meritocratic than....
This is only true if there is a clear correlation between how good a doctor is and their score on the test. However I would argue that this is not the case because part of being a doctor involves interacting with patients and a doctor with an appalling bedside manner and no interest in the patient is not a good doctor no matter how high their exam score might be. While I'm not a doctor myself this is an opinion I have heard voiced by several GPs and agrees well with my own experience in selecting grad students - above a certain competence level exam scores are not a good indicator of success.
So by all means use the exam to select candidates who know enough but for the rest you need to use reference letters and interviews. Afterall if they cannot perform well in an interview how are they going to successfully interact with patients?
...those with the best scores have the best opportunities. This means they can't have vastly varying tests or the results would vary creating an unfair advantage.
There is a very simple solution to this: make the test pass or fail. If medicine is similar to research then, once you get over a certain level of competency it is motivation and interest that is most important not whether you scored 80% or 90% on an exam.
Even if you want to keep public scores you can build up a large question bank of previously asked questions for which you know the difficulty and then randomly choose a few of these questions to put in an exam, along with new questions. This lets you normalize the difficulty level and each exam's new questions get added to the question bank making it harder for anyone to learn all the questions.
If you don't do reductionist science, it is hard (but possible) to receive funding
This is not really true - look at condensed matter physicists - they study the bulk properties of matter and this probably the largest area of physics. Even in particle physics we have ion collisions which study the bulk properties of the early universe and are leading to insights such as a new Quark-Gluon-Plasma state.
I found it very telling that the article was entirely about medicine which is not science but a combination of science and art. Medicine's primary goal is to heal people NOT to understand how the human body works. While this is certainly a very worthy goal the understanding is just a means to that end and so intuition is used ("art") to study the mechanisms (using science) which doctors believe they need to understand in order to cure a patient. If you guess wrong that is not science's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
I might prefer to risk my life, why should I have to pay for (and be forced to use) seatbelts?
Simple - as a tax payer I do not want to pay for your hospital care, treatment, disability benefit etc. So, provided you have no dependents, if you make the law such that people without seat belts must pay for their own healthcare, receive no disability benefits etc. then by all means go out and kill yourself. However if you want support from society you should expect that society will require reasonable steps to lessen the risks.
....and if you are in the US the same applies to allowing private insurance to exclude coverage for injuries from such accidents because why should others pay higher premiums to support your needless risk taking?
I don't think self-driving cars will really take off until manufacturers are protected from lawsuits
Correction, self-driving cars will really take off when manufacturers do not need protection from lawsuits. If they need to be protected from lawsuits then their system is not good enough.
I wonder what the penalty would be for hacking your OWN car that you own in France..to disable or spoof said breathalizer?
Why bother - as far as I can tell from the factual details (hidden amongst the highly biased propaganda and dubious science in the article) the law will only require people to carry a breathalyser. There is no mention that you will be required to use it or that it is hooked up to the car's ignition. It is just there in case you want to check whether you are over the limit. While the article waxes on and on about how people will have to buy new ones every time they go for a drink or buy two so they can test a friend etc. as far as I can tell the only effect will be that french cars will have a new object shoved into their first aid kits.
60 ns is not hard for two clocks a few metres apart. Put those clocks 700km apart AND underground where you cannot directly received GPS and things get a lot harder! For a start you need to know exactly how far apart the clocks are because a discrepancy of 30cm means a 1ns difference in propagation delay for a signal.
CERN did not claim this but the Opera experiment did. They even calculated the neutrino speed in their paper.
Actually doing one experiment was exactly what happened - only Opera saw any FTL neutrinos, no other experiment corroborated this. In addition Opera received considerable criticism for NOT being sceptical enough and by no means was their paper written in any sort of cautionary tone. If it had it would have claimed an unexplained timing discrepancy not FTL neutrinos which is what it DID claim.
In their defence it is an extremely hard experiment to do so mistakes are inevitable and I would not blame them for that. However, knowing this, they should take the blame for publishing far too early for such amazing claims. That being said I would rather have one daft result like this every 5-10 years than to restrict experiment's abilities to publish as they see fit and risk missing an important result.
Well, technically then you do not need a passport because you have a right to leave and return.
Even at the speed of light at long distances there can be an appreciable time lag of a few seconds. This would be enough to miss an erratically manoeuvring drone (and it would be a drone since humans cannot handle large accelerations and need air which is easily lost through holes). There is also the issue of laser diffraction which make long distance lasers unlikely.
The advantage with a missile is that it can have onboard intelligence and so correct for target motion as it gets nearer. So missiles will be an effective long range weapon, but almost certainly nuclear, not antimatter. The biggest issue with this is actually storage rather than production - we can make far more than we can store...although we cannot make much, about enough to warm a cup of tea at CERN.
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others.
In general I would agree with that statement. The key is what is the cost of doing X vs. the benefit derived to others. For example forcing people to pay taxes which are then used to provide medical treatment for everyone, regardless of income is good. The penalty is less money but the benefit derived is people getting to live.
However with forced vaccination the penalty is a very low, but non-zero risk of death or serious harm vs. a higher risk of dearth or risk of harm for someone who themselves refused the vaccination. If we accept this as ethical then the next question is how big a risk is it acceptable to force someone to take with their life? ! in a billion, 1 in a million, 1 in 10? Who gets to decide?
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death. In fact it is ethically similar to forced, live organ donation. You would never force someone to donate a kidney to save another - forcing vaccinations is exactly the same - the only real difference is that the risk of death is less to the person being forced.
Do you think the device would regularly query some system online...
No - I expect it encodes the time and IP address directly. From that you can figure out the location later, no need for the printer to do it.
The "location" isn't really identified since these devices have no way of knowing their location
They often have an IP address and that can usually be traced to an approximate location.
Getting back on topic....what about considering academia - assuming your town has a university nearby. The money you will make is not as good as industry - so expect some level of pay cut but the chances of losing your job are a lot less than industry, most of the time at least. However you will get to work with us crazy academics and get exposed to a huge variety of different problems and issues.
As an added bonus, should you find that you do not like it, most universities have very good training programs so you should get the chance to gain some different skills and leave.
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
I disagree. Overuse of antibiotics is bad for everyone, including the patient who is taking the antibiotics because later in life they will likely need effective antibiotics. Vaccinating a section of the population who does not need to be vaccinated because the complications of the disease do not apply to them offers no benefit to them.
As far as I can tell egg in vaccines applies primarily only to the flu vaccine and, even then, there are alternatives. However even then I would still argue that it is unethical for a doctor to advise a patient undergo a medical procedure with a non-zero risk for the sole benefit of others. By all means ask them to volunteer - there are plenty of example of living organ donation, bone marrow etc - but advising them that they should undergo a medical procedure which does not benefit the patient is unethical.
Reread the post - I'm referring to the specific case where one person is immune to the nasty effects of the disease e.g. rubella causing birth defects and so suffers no benefit from the vaccination themselves. In the case where the patient themselves would benefit from the immunity then the reason for doing it is that they, themselves, benefit from the immunity.
Because willfully endangering other people to eliminate a tiny, tiny risk of discomfort to yourself
If the only risk of taking a vaccination was a small discomfort you might have a point. However vaccinations are not risk free - the risk of significant complications is incredibly low but NOT zero. So again I ask why is it reasonable to ask someone to take on this small, but non-zero risk for no benefit to themselves in order to protect someone refuses to take the same tiny risk themselves despite the fact that it would actually benefit them?
If anyone refuses a vaccine, they not only put themselves at risk, but others that they may come in contact with.
Sorry but that is a very bad reason to get vaccinated. We are all responsible for our own health. Assuming I'm immune to the complications of a non-serious disease (e.g. rubella causes birth defects if you are pregnant which does not apply to men) why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
Trust me, it's based in reality.
We might have some crazy right-wing politicians in Alberta compared to the rest of Canada but, as a European who moved to Alberta from the US, they are not a patch on the crazy, right wing US politicians. For example they all support (admittedly in some cases grudgingly) free health care at a level that puts them somewhere slightly to the left of the US democrats.
I agree and since the people they are supposed to be governing clearly need protection....
Isn't it the same thing, though? Of course, basic physics doesn't technically get into the way of getting to Alpha Centauri either.
Ok, I suppose technically it is basic physics and biology. Given basic physics there is no way to make the trip short enough that anyone setting off will live long enough to get to Alpha Centauri. Until you solve that there is no economic problem because, even with infinite money, nobody can make it there.
For the solar system I agree that there is an economic hurdle to overcome but, as launches keep getting cheaper, it is just a matter of time before we find something valuable enough to be worth the cost to recover. Once we get there and build infrastructure off the Earth things will tend to get cheaper because something constructed on the moon has a far smaller energy cost to launch.
This is much the same thing which happened during the colonization of North America - initially everything was imported from Europe and then gradually local manufacturing took over because it saved the (then expensive) transport costs from Europe.
The MPAA currently can only compete on one of these points -- cost.
Actually the MPAA can effectively compete on all the other points EXCEPT cost...they can do everything you list, better than any pirate, except give it away for free. The fact that they are ignoring all the other points and trying to compete on cost is why they are having such a hard time. If they released content commercial free, at the same time as (or even in advance) of broadcast in multiple DRM-free formats for a low cost the chances are that they would attract customers willing to pay for the simple convenience vs. searching dodgy websites for content of unknown quality which is only available after broadcast.
The enemy would be terrified by the noise
Since the speed of sound in air is ~330m/s which is ~750 mph the enemy will not hear it until after it hits at which point it is not the sound which they will be concerned about.
What's wrong with the solar system to get ourselves experienced with space? Interstellar travel is out until we solve the issues you mention but the solar system is most definitely within reach - the limitations there are technology not basic physics. I think most people would think that mining Helium-3 on the surface of the moon, watching a sulphur volcano erupt on Io or sailing the methane oceans on Titan would count as exciting.
Having clear, nationally-comparable test scores is much more meritocratic than....
This is only true if there is a clear correlation between how good a doctor is and their score on the test. However I would argue that this is not the case because part of being a doctor involves interacting with patients and a doctor with an appalling bedside manner and no interest in the patient is not a good doctor no matter how high their exam score might be. While I'm not a doctor myself this is an opinion I have heard voiced by several GPs and agrees well with my own experience in selecting grad students - above a certain competence level exam scores are not a good indicator of success.
So by all means use the exam to select candidates who know enough but for the rest you need to use reference letters and interviews. Afterall if they cannot perform well in an interview how are they going to successfully interact with patients?
...those with the best scores have the best opportunities. This means they can't have vastly varying tests or the results would vary creating an unfair advantage.
There is a very simple solution to this: make the test pass or fail. If medicine is similar to research then, once you get over a certain level of competency it is motivation and interest that is most important not whether you scored 80% or 90% on an exam.
Even if you want to keep public scores you can build up a large question bank of previously asked questions for which you know the difficulty and then randomly choose a few of these questions to put in an exam, along with new questions. This lets you normalize the difficulty level and each exam's new questions get added to the question bank making it harder for anyone to learn all the questions.
If you don't do reductionist science, it is hard (but possible) to receive funding
This is not really true - look at condensed matter physicists - they study the bulk properties of matter and this probably the largest area of physics. Even in particle physics we have ion collisions which study the bulk properties of the early universe and are leading to insights such as a new Quark-Gluon-Plasma state.
I found it very telling that the article was entirely about medicine which is not science but a combination of science and art. Medicine's primary goal is to heal people NOT to understand how the human body works. While this is certainly a very worthy goal the understanding is just a means to that end and so intuition is used ("art") to study the mechanisms (using science) which doctors believe they need to understand in order to cure a patient. If you guess wrong that is not science's fault.