How did we develop a legal system so retarded that an argument that requires you to doublethink a single person into mature victimizer and immature victim doesn't get laughed out of court
I know the answer to this! I had the same double take teaching an intro physics lab in the US as a postdoc. I remember discussing with some 18 year old students a similar legal contradiction. Some students had been charged with possession of alcohol because they were under 21 and yet the whole point of the law is that an 18 year old is not mature enough to know how to behave with alcohol...so how can they be legally responsible if they get their hands on some?
The response was: "So what? We do it all the time and rarely get caught...and even when we do the penalty isn't much. Plus nobody would ever listen to us, we would never get the law changed.". So there is your reason: people have no respect for the law because rarely has an impact on them even when caught plus it is so much work with so little chance of success in making a change that nobody wants to even try. I really hope the US can fix this but, given the extreme rigidity of the political system there I don't see it happening in a smooth and easy way.
It's a pity computers can't teach reading comprehension. You wrongly generalized the fact that because an object O is useful for subject S, then it's useful for all subjects. I provided what's called a counterexample.
Yes it is a shame. In the middle of a discussion about use of computers in education you gave an example that baseball bats are not useful for teaching spanish but useful for teaching baseball the obvious implication being that computers are limited to only certain subjects. Hence my counter point: computers are general tools and useful for Spanish as well as just about every other subject BUT in moderation.
When I listen to people like you, I always wonder how people learned anything before computers existed.
They learnt the same way they do now: reading information they look up, talking to others etc. The benefit of computers is that they amplify your ability to do this, not replace it. In the same way that reading and learning took off after the invention of the printing press the same thing is happening now with computers. However with any new technology there are the over-enthusiastic as well as the nay-sayers. I'm sure some people in the time of Gutenberg when around complaining that printed books would get in the way of learning because we'd all forget how to write!
...I still think it's important to understand the underlying math and why it works instead of just wantonly applying it.
I used to think that way but now I'm not so sure. As long as students understand what the maths means in terms of the physics then why do they need to know how to solve it? In fact this is how many real world problems are solved: you use numerical techniques to get a solution because nobody knows how to solve the problem analytically! I'm not sure that a detailed knowledge of many different methods to solve differential equations is really required any more (at least for physicists) just so long as the physical meaning of the equations are understood.
In many way this is similar to chemistry where they use electron energy states to explain reactions. They know that these energy states come from QM solutions for the bound electrons but (in general) they don't know how to write down the equations and solve them to get those states i.e. they understand the results but not the detailed physics and maths behind it (although I'm sure that they could look it up and understand it if they felt they needed to).
No problem with my comprehension...those people LEARNED about computers on paper before using them...yes, they used computers later...
So why did they use the computers later if they had already learnt all they needed to know to successfully use them? I agree that you can do some of the learning without the computers but you cannot possibly say that you know how to use a computer if you have never actually done so i.e. the learning process REQUIRES access to a computer at some point it cannot be entirely paper-based.
I think the problem is not so much insufficient regulation so much as ineffectual regulation. If the consequence of violating the regulations is a 'tut, tut' and (possibly) confiscating their pocket change is it any wonder that they flout the rules?
No, the way to fix this is to seize all profits made as a result of the violation, and then add a fine on top of that.
The 'fine' should be loss of the license. They appear to have broken the license deliberately to make more money so they should have to repay the money and then lose the license for having proven themselves untrustworthy to have it. This would certainly be disruptive to customers but if governments behaved this way you'd soon see companies taking their responsibilities a lot more seriously and there there would be less need for such forceful action.
The article if for a Waldorf School, which is, I believe either K-6 or K-8 - how much C++ programming are kids in 5th grade doing?
Well my 5th grade daughter built and programmed a LEGO Mindstorms plotter over the summer with the help of a book but she then reprogrammed it herself to draw different pictures and even my 1st grade son managed to write some simple programs. Both have also written python programs to draw simple pictures too.
So I don't know how much programming they are teaching but I would argue that, especially if the school goes to 8th grade, the kids are certainly very capable of learning it. However that misses the point: we use computers throughout society. Hence it is important that they learn to use them even if they are not programming them - not to the exclusion of all else and certainly not all the time - but computers do have a place in education.
People don't really learn anything using those tools except how to use those tools, though.
This is not necessarily a bad thing: suppose you want to teach physics, particularly Quantum Mechanics, where difficult calculus problems frequently occur. Instead of having students spend a term or two taking courses in advanced calculus you can teach them how to use SAGE/Maple/Mathematica etc. in a few hours which removes the maths hurdle between them and the physics.
As others have pointed out, the fundamental principles of logic can be taught with paper.
Why use paper when you could teach it just by word of mouth? Why pollute your student's minds with inventions such as pens and paper? Computers are tools which students need to learn how to use because they WILL be using them throughout their lives - just as they will be using pen and paper.
Bats, balls and mitts are good for playing baseball. Does that mean they should be an integral part of Spanish?
Are you really suggesting that computers are as irrelevant to teaching Spanish as a baseball bat is? How about writing essays, recording and forwarding to the teacher for pronunciation help, looking up information about spanish culture, planning a trip to visit Spain, talking to someone in Spain in Spanish etc. Computers are a tool much like pen and paper: by themselves they do not magically improve learning but can be used in very effective ways and so are as relevant as pen and paper in today's society.
If you can't think of how to do this, then you don't have much imagination. Most of the better programmers and users I know are ones that learned before computers were so common, and learned a lot "on paper" before getting to actually practice on the real computer.
I don't think it's my imagination so much as your comprehension of english that is the problem: in your example the students still use computers! You can certainly start introductory teaching without the computer but eventually you are going to need to let your students loose with one if you want to successfully teach them to use it.
It's been going onto 30 years now and there hasn't been a SINGLE study showing computers help
I'd like to see how you successfully teach pupils to use and program computers without using any. I agree that there is a lot of ill-conceived use of technology in education at the moment - using a computer does not magically make things better. However to completely ban them from a school is an equal and opposite over-reaction. We all have to learn to deal with computers because on a day-to-day basis we all use them so it is just a irresponsible to exclude computers from a school education as it is to attempt to cram them into every possible subject.
Money comes secondary here, because without control, the whole market model is not sustainable.
If they believed that they could make more money by giving up control (as opposed to keeping control) they would do it in a heart beat. Hence the primary motivation is money. The control is just a means to that end.
I dont know about the 700 million years part but I do know that all reactor fuel is made from U-235 and is very toxic and radioactive.
It is only highly radioactive AFTER it has been inside the reactor for a while. The radioactivity comes from the fission products which are neutron rich nuclei and so decay via beta decay. These are not produced in any significant quantity outside the reactor core because the U-235 neutron capture cross-section is ~1,000 times smaller for fast neutrons and so there is no noticeable chain reaction from a spontaneous fission event. Before the fuel is in the reactor it only poses a toxic hazard.
If you want proof have a look at this picture. It is someone wearing latex gloves and holding a uranium fuel pellet in front of a container of hundreds of fuel pellets. While this is safe for fresh pellets you would not do this after these pellets have been in the reactor core. Indeed when spent fuel rods (containing the pellets) are removed from a reactor they are stored at the bottom of a pool for a period so some of the radioactive fission products to decay because the fuel is so active.
Copyright is about control today, more than ever before.
Not really - it is entirely about making as much money as possible, by any means possible. This is greatly enhanced if you have more control and can prevent consumers moving content from one platform to the next or from sharing with friends. However that is the only reason that there is interest in control.
Frankly the current copyright situation strikes me as very similar to the Cornish smugglers in the 18th century. The british government charged enormous duties on imported luxury goods in order to make money. The result was you could make immense profits by illegally importing goods from France without paying duties. The problem became more-or-less endemic with most of the population effectively benefitting from smuggling - directly or indirectly. Even local magistrates were said to have helped finance some of the operations! Despite increasingly draconian enforcement the smuggling continued until the import tariffs were eventually reduced to the point where smuggling became financially untenable.
I predict the same will happen with copyright. Eventually the owners will start to sell the works at sensible prices without DRM and the issue of copyright will become far less significant. Lets just hope that it does not take the 100 or so years that it took for smuggling!
Once something is in the public domain, there doesn't need to be some sort of "profit incentive".
...and yet there still is! Look at all the classic works of literature which are no longer under copyright but which still make money. If a lost work of Shakespeare or Dickens were found do you really think nobody would publish them because there would be no copyright and so they would not make any money?
I hope that was a sarcastic post. U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years which is the only reason that there is any left around in nature. As such it is barely radioactive. The only time you have to worry about it is if there is so much that it is near a critical mass (=52kg sphere) or if you are likely to eat it since it is highly toxic.
There was no semiconductor market until Intel invented the semiconductor.
There were no semi-conductors until we understood Quantum Mechanics. How many private companies would be far sighted enough to invest in fundamental research given that the pay-off is 50-100 years away and there is no legal means (thank goodness!) to patent/copyright the fundamental science to ensure a pay out even then?
The cost of all of those things are extraordinary when you're talking about being on the moon or in space.
True...but only for the moment. The cost/kg of launching to orbit has been steadily decreasing as technology improves as has the technology to mine etc. The same 1800's pioneers in Arizona would have been far, far more productive had they had access to 21st century technology since mining machines would be more powerful, shipping supplies to them cheaper etc.
If you look at history although Columbus (re)discovered North America in 1492 it was over 100 years before the first colony. There is a significant technological gap between what is needed to get you to a place to explore for a short period vs. to support life there. So should we really be that surprised that it is taking a while since first visiting the moon until we get a permanent base there? Sure the challenges are huge but were the challenge's the first North American colonists faced any less challenging given their vastly inferior technology compared to today's? Afterall it was so challenging that many of them died!
...misspelling "photon" meant the guy didn't know what he was talking about.
I did because it shows that he has not written a scientific paper with the word 'photon' in it NOT just because be mis-spelled it.
So we have the possibility of a competent foreign language speaker who just hasn't mastered English.
...and physics. Someone who does not know how to spell photon correctly is exceedingly unlikely to have written (m)any physics papers. This is not some esoteric bit of vocabulary: in physics it is an incredibly common word. So this is likely his first, or close to his first, paper on physics and frankly the author makes such glaringly wrong assumptions about GPS that, even without the spelling problems, it is clear he is well out of his depth.
Most western countries will reach peak population within 50 years...
So what? This has happened before.Over the centuries we've survived plaques (Black Death) and famine (little ice age) which has limited our population until we have found technological means to overcome it. So what's the problem if our population maxes out for a while again? At least until we find technological solutions to the space problem and get into the solar system where our growth can resume. While his point that we should not fix our eyes on the horizon for fear of crashing is true it is also true that the best drivers keep an eye out for things well in the distance as well. We have not got to where we are today by just gazing at our navels!
In terms of his comparison of space ships to luxury yachts a better comparison would be to compare them to aircraft. You will not survive for long outside an aircraft due to lack of oxygen and temperature and, what is worse, if that if the engines fail you die very quickly indeed whereas with a space craft, unless taking off or landing, you will probably have some time to deal with the problem. His examples of survival at sea are also restricted to tropical waters. Look at examples in, say, the north Atlantic and your survival time is probably not much different to space - only it will be hypothermia, not vacuum, which kills you. Of course space voyages will be a lot longer than a plane journey which is why we compare them to ships rather than aircraft, but in real life space craft have far, far more in common with planes than ships. Yet despite these difficulties air travel is common place today although 100 years ago this would have been unthinkable with the technology they had.
While it is true that space travel takes energy we are sitting on a huge amount of energy which we may, one day, be able to harness: mass. Fusion power still eludes us but, if we can ever make it work, will release over O(100,000) times more energy per H atom than chemical reactions. Understanding fundamental physics processes which we know occurred in the Big Bang (CP violation and/or baryon number violation) may allow us to push this even further and extract most of the mass-energy around us. Of course this is highly speculative: currently we have no idea whether this would be possible and, even if the physics allows it, the technological challenges will probably make fusion look like child's play!
Clearly with today's technology even the solar system is a daunting place to think about exploring...but the same could be said of early explorers on Earth using such simple technology that today we marvel that they managed to do what they did. However it is often said that short term predictions are overly optimistic and long term predictions are overly pessimistic - primarily because we cannot easily foresee new, unexpected breakthrough technologies. So my advice to the original author would be to have a bit more faith in what we may be capable of a 50-100 years time: we should certainly keep a close eye on the car in front but don't forget to look up once in a while!
The Olympics is where I find the exclusivity most annoying. When I lived in the US it really annoyed me that the BBC olympic coverage was blocked and the same is the case now that I live in Canada (although it is less noticeable since the summer olympics has fewer Canadian athletes so they have more international coverage and the winter olympics has very few British athletes so I'm not missing much!).
Obviously local TV coverage will focus on the local nation's athletes - that's what 90+% of people will want so it makes perfect sense. So why not allow other nations to make their coverage accessible worldwide so those living in other countries can keep up with their home nations? While this ruling will no doubt help it would be even nicer if the Olympic organizers could possibly stop running after all the money they can grab and start remembering a few of their ideals like bringing the world together, not dividing it up.
There is no "the" 4th dimension. A dimension is a degree of freedom. Time can be described as "a" dimension.
Yes there is - it is 'time' as defined by the local observer. Time has unique properties not shared by the 3 spacial dimensions which means that it is uniquely defined for each frame of reference unlike the x, y, z axes which can be arbitrarily rotated. Hence we can call time THE 4th dimension because each of us can locally, uniquely define its direction even though globally there is no unique direction.
In which case, English being the lingua franca of science (as unfair as that may be to non-native English speakers), he clearly has not written many scientific papers before.
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How did we develop a legal system so retarded that an argument that requires you to doublethink a single person into mature victimizer and immature victim doesn't get laughed out of court
I know the answer to this! I had the same double take teaching an intro physics lab in the US as a postdoc. I remember discussing with some 18 year old students a similar legal contradiction. Some students had been charged with possession of alcohol because they were under 21 and yet the whole point of the law is that an 18 year old is not mature enough to know how to behave with alcohol...so how can they be legally responsible if they get their hands on some?
The response was: "So what? We do it all the time and rarely get caught...and even when we do the penalty isn't much. Plus nobody would ever listen to us, we would never get the law changed.". So there is your reason: people have no respect for the law because rarely has an impact on them even when caught plus it is so much work with so little chance of success in making a change that nobody wants to even try. I really hope the US can fix this but, given the extreme rigidity of the political system there I don't see it happening in a smooth and easy way.
It's a pity computers can't teach reading comprehension. You wrongly generalized the fact that because an object O is useful for subject S, then it's useful for all subjects. I provided what's called a counterexample.
Yes it is a shame. In the middle of a discussion about use of computers in education you gave an example that baseball bats are not useful for teaching spanish but useful for teaching baseball the obvious implication being that computers are limited to only certain subjects. Hence my counter point: computers are general tools and useful for Spanish as well as just about every other subject BUT in moderation.
When I listen to people like you, I always wonder how people learned anything before computers existed.
They learnt the same way they do now: reading information they look up, talking to others etc. The benefit of computers is that they amplify your ability to do this, not replace it. In the same way that reading and learning took off after the invention of the printing press the same thing is happening now with computers. However with any new technology there are the over-enthusiastic as well as the nay-sayers. I'm sure some people in the time of Gutenberg when around complaining that printed books would get in the way of learning because we'd all forget how to write!
...I still think it's important to understand the underlying math and why it works instead of just wantonly applying it.
I used to think that way but now I'm not so sure. As long as students understand what the maths means in terms of the physics then why do they need to know how to solve it? In fact this is how many real world problems are solved: you use numerical techniques to get a solution because nobody knows how to solve the problem analytically! I'm not sure that a detailed knowledge of many different methods to solve differential equations is really required any more (at least for physicists) just so long as the physical meaning of the equations are understood.
In many way this is similar to chemistry where they use electron energy states to explain reactions. They know that these energy states come from QM solutions for the bound electrons but (in general) they don't know how to write down the equations and solve them to get those states i.e. they understand the results but not the detailed physics and maths behind it (although I'm sure that they could look it up and understand it if they felt they needed to).
No problem with my comprehension...those people LEARNED about computers on paper before using them...yes, they used computers later...
So why did they use the computers later if they had already learnt all they needed to know to successfully use them? I agree that you can do some of the learning without the computers but you cannot possibly say that you know how to use a computer if you have never actually done so i.e. the learning process REQUIRES access to a computer at some point it cannot be entirely paper-based.
if you don't have sufficient regulation...
I think the problem is not so much insufficient regulation so much as ineffectual regulation. If the consequence of violating the regulations is a 'tut, tut' and (possibly) confiscating their pocket change is it any wonder that they flout the rules?
No, the way to fix this is to seize all profits made as a result of the violation, and then add a fine on top of that.
The 'fine' should be loss of the license. They appear to have broken the license deliberately to make more money so they should have to repay the money and then lose the license for having proven themselves untrustworthy to have it. This would certainly be disruptive to customers but if governments behaved this way you'd soon see companies taking their responsibilities a lot more seriously and there there would be less need for such forceful action.
The article if for a Waldorf School, which is, I believe either K-6 or K-8 - how much C++ programming are kids in 5th grade doing?
Well my 5th grade daughter built and programmed a LEGO Mindstorms plotter over the summer with the help of a book but she then reprogrammed it herself to draw different pictures and even my 1st grade son managed to write some simple programs. Both have also written python programs to draw simple pictures too.
So I don't know how much programming they are teaching but I would argue that, especially if the school goes to 8th grade, the kids are certainly very capable of learning it. However that misses the point: we use computers throughout society. Hence it is important that they learn to use them even if they are not programming them - not to the exclusion of all else and certainly not all the time - but computers do have a place in education.
People don't really learn anything using those tools except how to use those tools, though.
This is not necessarily a bad thing: suppose you want to teach physics, particularly Quantum Mechanics, where difficult calculus problems frequently occur. Instead of having students spend a term or two taking courses in advanced calculus you can teach them how to use SAGE/Maple/Mathematica etc. in a few hours which removes the maths hurdle between them and the physics.
As others have pointed out, the fundamental principles of logic can be taught with paper.
Why use paper when you could teach it just by word of mouth? Why pollute your student's minds with inventions such as pens and paper? Computers are tools which students need to learn how to use because they WILL be using them throughout their lives - just as they will be using pen and paper.
Bats, balls and mitts are good for playing baseball. Does that mean they should be an integral part of Spanish?
Are you really suggesting that computers are as irrelevant to teaching Spanish as a baseball bat is? How about writing essays, recording and forwarding to the teacher for pronunciation help, looking up information about spanish culture, planning a trip to visit Spain, talking to someone in Spain in Spanish etc. Computers are a tool much like pen and paper: by themselves they do not magically improve learning but can be used in very effective ways and so are as relevant as pen and paper in today's society.
If you can't think of how to do this, then you don't have much imagination. Most of the better programmers and users I know are ones that learned before computers were so common, and learned a lot "on paper" before getting to actually practice on the real computer.
I don't think it's my imagination so much as your comprehension of english that is the problem: in your example the students still use computers! You can certainly start introductory teaching without the computer but eventually you are going to need to let your students loose with one if you want to successfully teach them to use it.
It's been going onto 30 years now and there hasn't been a SINGLE study showing computers help
I'd like to see how you successfully teach pupils to use and program computers without using any. I agree that there is a lot of ill-conceived use of technology in education at the moment - using a computer does not magically make things better. However to completely ban them from a school is an equal and opposite over-reaction. We all have to learn to deal with computers because on a day-to-day basis we all use them so it is just a irresponsible to exclude computers from a school education as it is to attempt to cram them into every possible subject.
Money comes secondary here, because without control, the whole market model is not sustainable.
If they believed that they could make more money by giving up control (as opposed to keeping control) they would do it in a heart beat. Hence the primary motivation is money. The control is just a means to that end.
I dont know about the 700 million years part but I do know that all reactor fuel is made from U-235 and is very toxic and radioactive.
It is only highly radioactive AFTER it has been inside the reactor for a while. The radioactivity comes from the fission products which are neutron rich nuclei and so decay via beta decay. These are not produced in any significant quantity outside the reactor core because the U-235 neutron capture cross-section is ~1,000 times smaller for fast neutrons and so there is no noticeable chain reaction from a spontaneous fission event. Before the fuel is in the reactor it only poses a toxic hazard.
If you want proof have a look at this picture. It is someone wearing latex gloves and holding a uranium fuel pellet in front of a container of hundreds of fuel pellets. While this is safe for fresh pellets you would not do this after these pellets have been in the reactor core. Indeed when spent fuel rods (containing the pellets) are removed from a reactor they are stored at the bottom of a pool for a period so some of the radioactive fission products to decay because the fuel is so active.
Copyright is about control today, more than ever before.
Not really - it is entirely about making as much money as possible, by any means possible. This is greatly enhanced if you have more control and can prevent consumers moving content from one platform to the next or from sharing with friends. However that is the only reason that there is interest in control.
Frankly the current copyright situation strikes me as very similar to the Cornish smugglers in the 18th century. The british government charged enormous duties on imported luxury goods in order to make money. The result was you could make immense profits by illegally importing goods from France without paying duties. The problem became more-or-less endemic with most of the population effectively benefitting from smuggling - directly or indirectly. Even local magistrates were said to have helped finance some of the operations! Despite increasingly draconian enforcement the smuggling continued until the import tariffs were eventually reduced to the point where smuggling became financially untenable.
I predict the same will happen with copyright. Eventually the owners will start to sell the works at sensible prices without DRM and the issue of copyright will become far less significant. Lets just hope that it does not take the 100 or so years that it took for smuggling!
Once something is in the public domain, there doesn't need to be some sort of "profit incentive".
I hope that was a sarcastic post. U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years which is the only reason that there is any left around in nature. As such it is barely radioactive. The only time you have to worry about it is if there is so much that it is near a critical mass (=52kg sphere) or if you are likely to eat it since it is highly toxic.
I doubt whether Growl is or isn't FOSS matters to the vast majority of Mac developers - or Mac end users, for that matter.
True, but I think that suddenly having to pay $1.99 will matter - at least to enough people that growl will no longer be used by other apps.
There was no semiconductor market until Intel invented the semiconductor.
There were no semi-conductors until we understood Quantum Mechanics. How many private companies would be far sighted enough to invest in fundamental research given that the pay-off is 50-100 years away and there is no legal means (thank goodness!) to patent/copyright the fundamental science to ensure a pay out even then?
Why only show law enforcement goofs, sometimes the bad guys do some pretty stupid stuff also.
You typically expect the bad guys to do stupid things - usually what they are getting arrested for! Less so with the police.
The cost of all of those things are extraordinary when you're talking about being on the moon or in space.
True ...but only for the moment. The cost/kg of launching to orbit has been steadily decreasing as technology improves as has the technology to mine etc. The same 1800's pioneers in Arizona would have been far, far more productive had they had access to 21st century technology since mining machines would be more powerful, shipping supplies to them cheaper etc.
If you look at history although Columbus (re)discovered North America in 1492 it was over 100 years before the first colony. There is a significant technological gap between what is needed to get you to a place to explore for a short period vs. to support life there. So should we really be that surprised that it is taking a while since first visiting the moon until we get a permanent base there? Sure the challenges are huge but were the challenge's the first North American colonists faced any less challenging given their vastly inferior technology compared to today's? Afterall it was so challenging that many of them died!
...misspelling "photon" meant the guy didn't know what he was talking about.
I did because it shows that he has not written a scientific paper with the word 'photon' in it NOT just because be mis-spelled it.
So we have the possibility of a competent foreign language speaker who just hasn't mastered English.
Most western countries will reach peak population within 50 years...
So what? This has happened before.Over the centuries we've survived plaques (Black Death) and famine (little ice age) which has limited our population until we have found technological means to overcome it. So what's the problem if our population maxes out for a while again? At least until we find technological solutions to the space problem and get into the solar system where our growth can resume. While his point that we should not fix our eyes on the horizon for fear of crashing is true it is also true that the best drivers keep an eye out for things well in the distance as well. We have not got to where we are today by just gazing at our navels!
In terms of his comparison of space ships to luxury yachts a better comparison would be to compare them to aircraft. You will not survive for long outside an aircraft due to lack of oxygen and temperature and, what is worse, if that if the engines fail you die very quickly indeed whereas with a space craft, unless taking off or landing, you will probably have some time to deal with the problem. His examples of survival at sea are also restricted to tropical waters. Look at examples in, say, the north Atlantic and your survival time is probably not much different to space - only it will be hypothermia, not vacuum, which kills you. Of course space voyages will be a lot longer than a plane journey which is why we compare them to ships rather than aircraft, but in real life space craft have far, far more in common with planes than ships. Yet despite these difficulties air travel is common place today although 100 years ago this would have been unthinkable with the technology they had.
While it is true that space travel takes energy we are sitting on a huge amount of energy which we may, one day, be able to harness: mass. Fusion power still eludes us but, if we can ever make it work, will release over O(100,000) times more energy per H atom than chemical reactions. Understanding fundamental physics processes which we know occurred in the Big Bang (CP violation and/or baryon number violation) may allow us to push this even further and extract most of the mass-energy around us. Of course this is highly speculative: currently we have no idea whether this would be possible and, even if the physics allows it, the technological challenges will probably make fusion look like child's play!
Clearly with today's technology even the solar system is a daunting place to think about exploring...but the same could be said of early explorers on Earth using such simple technology that today we marvel that they managed to do what they did. However it is often said that short term predictions are overly optimistic and long term predictions are overly pessimistic - primarily because we cannot easily foresee new, unexpected breakthrough technologies. So my advice to the original author would be to have a bit more faith in what we may be capable of a 50-100 years time: we should certainly keep a close eye on the car in front but don't forget to look up once in a while!
The Olympics is where I find the exclusivity most annoying. When I lived in the US it really annoyed me that the BBC olympic coverage was blocked and the same is the case now that I live in Canada (although it is less noticeable since the summer olympics has fewer Canadian athletes so they have more international coverage and the winter olympics has very few British athletes so I'm not missing much!).
Obviously local TV coverage will focus on the local nation's athletes - that's what 90+% of people will want so it makes perfect sense. So why not allow other nations to make their coverage accessible worldwide so those living in other countries can keep up with their home nations? While this ruling will no doubt help it would be even nicer if the Olympic organizers could possibly stop running after all the money they can grab and start remembering a few of their ideals like bringing the world together, not dividing it up.
There is no "the" 4th dimension. A dimension is a degree of freedom. Time can be described as "a" dimension.
Yes there is - it is 'time' as defined by the local observer. Time has unique properties not shared by the 3 spacial dimensions which means that it is uniquely defined for each frame of reference unlike the x, y, z axes which can be arbitrarily rotated. Hence we can call time THE 4th dimension because each of us can locally, uniquely define its direction even though globally there is no unique direction.
In which case, English being the lingua franca of science (as unfair as that may be to non-native English speakers), he clearly has not written many scientific papers before.