I think what it means is that it makes you feel good.
There is that but there is also the fact that if it makes your oppressors even more oppressive then they are likely to irritate even more people. This will improve your support and give your arguments even more weight.
An important step has already been taken in that direction in Canada: Access Canada, the body which licenses Universities to use copyrighted material, has raised its fees by almost a factor of three and also added additional, more restrictive terms. The result is that all the major Canadian universities have opted not to renew the licence. I now foresee a huge backlash amongst faculty and students as access to material will now either become far more restricted or expensive. Give it enough years and enough students should have been affected that there will be some change.
So cats are more intelligent because dogs are more likely to fall for simple misdirection?
That's only a valid argument if the cat is aware of the misdirection and chooses to ignore it. Since most cats always ignore it this implies they are unaware that they are even being directed. A better test is to look at the wild relations of dogs and cats.
Wolves hunt in packs. They will attack wild herd of deer/elk/caribou/... and plan the attack well in advance by scaring the heard towards small, pre-arranged groups of wolves which take up the chase once the current pursuers tire. In this way the wolves gain the ability to outlast the greater stamina of the herd beasts with the entire pack moving in at the end to capture the prey. This shows clear intelligence: anticipation of future events, advance planning to overcome the obstacle of the prey's greater stamina and some form of rudimentary communication. Compare that to wild cats who, in general, tend to hunt alone and just use their stealth, strength and speed to sneak up and jump on prey. This requires great skill but not really intelligence. Of course this is because cats have the natural weapons and strength to be able to survive this way. Canines have taken a different evolutionary path evolving brains instead of brawn presumably in a similar fashion to our own distant ancestors.
False. A student who is interested in the subject will study it no matter what.
Your argument does not invalidate the OP's statement which was that poor teachers and tools would hinder the willingness of a student to study not stop them from studying altogether.
Whether or not those were the justifications the one undeniable good thing that came from dropping it was that the utter horror of a full scale nuclear war was made extremely clear to everyone including the politicians. While it is probably impossible to prove it seems to me that this was almost certainly a major factor in ensuring that the cold war stayed cold.
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks....It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks
No - it is more a function of how best to release the information to stop the organization. If you worked for the Taliban et al and were disgusted at their behaviour your best bet to stop that behaviour would be to secretly leak information to western governments who will then act to stop attacks. If you released it via Wikileaks your own organization would know that the information has been released and switch the attack to somewhere else and after an attack the information is public anyway.
Compare that to someone disgusted with the behaviour of a western government. The only people to whom these governments are somewhat accountable is their electorate. Hence, to stop the behaviour you are unhappy with the only choice you have is to leak the data publicly so that their electorate get to see it and demand an explanation and changes. So I would argue that the leaks might well be symmetric but that the terrorist leaks are more effective when kept secret and western government leaks more effective when made public.
This seems like an absurd view of science. None of the definitions [google.co.nz] i got from google...
Really? Wikipaedia for Scientist: "A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge." The originality here being to "acquire knowledge" i.e. something not known before (and no I did NOT just edit the entry to say that!;-).
Einstein had a physics degree and had done extensive extracurricular physics and maths studies in addition. So to think that Einstein never studied simply because he worked in a patent office would be very, very wrong.
Reading books and other learning material? Using simulations? Following and observing an expert? You usually only get to do things AFTER you have trained up to a certain level with the doing part being done under close supervision to demonstrate that you have learnt the skills needed to actually do whatever it is. You are confusing basic training to learn how to do certain tasks with those who have already learnt those basic skills _improving_ their skills by using them.
A whole program trying to deflect bullets with magnets. Aren't they made of lead?
Ever heard of Lenz's law? There is a very simple demo of it where you can make an aluminium ring jump off the pole of an electromagnet - this would work fine for lead as well. Not to mention paramagnetism and diamagnetism (not sure which applies to lead) - all materials containing atoms will interact with a sufficiently strong static magnetic field.
Being a scientist means doing original scientific research i.e. something that nobody has done before, otherwise it is called history. This means that you had better know what has been done before so that you can build upon and expand the existing knowledge. Currently the only way to learn this is via studying so, with currently technology, to be a scientist you do need to study.
Like it or not, but there is uneducated people doing research by the scientific method.
Using the scientific method does not mean that you are doing science. For example you could conduct a criminal investigation using the scientific method but that does not mean that what you are doing is science.
Your suggestion that "all corporations and individuals would be also bound to respect it" implies that people would be restricted in their religious choices.
How? All it would do is stop corporations from preventing their employees following whatever religion they desired since to restrict their choices would violate their right to freedom of religion. People would still be free to say what they like about any religion since that does not in any way restrict the freedom of people to choose - although it might persuade them to make different choices.
In a broad sense, this conflicts with the 1st amendment.
Conflicts between rights always occurs which is why we have courts. You might as well say that the law against murder restricts religious freedom because it prevents human sacrifices. In this case society clearly values the right to life over the right to freedom of religion. As I mentioned above criticizing a religion does not restrict its practice so there is no broad conflict although there might be specific cases of conflict which are easily resolved e.g. churches, synagogues etc. should be allowed to only hire followers of their own faith.
That was exactly my point. It is far better to grant a right than it is to just stop a government taking them away because the right stops ANYONE from taking it away, not just the government.
No but I wish it were possible to annihilate all the inaccuracies in the story! Alpha has NOTHING to do with the LHC other than happening to be in the same lab. These guys need to get the anti-protons down to almost zero velocity so starting with the highest energy machine on the planet would be stupid.
In fact Alpha uses the Anti-proton Decelerator which uses the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) which is one of the low energy machines at CERN accelerating protons to only 25 GeV - which is so low in energy that the protons have to be accelerated by another machine, the SPS, before they can even be injected into the LHC for final acceleration!
You don't (easily) but fortunately an atom is not a single particle but a system of two charged particles and so you can use atomic traps which rely on EM fields as well as absorption and emission of EM radiation.
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
Of course if the bartender had been a particle physicist and looked him up and down then he would have said: "Hey you're no neutron, you are a quark short. That'll be full charge for you, you pion!"
Could it at all be possible that during the big bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created.
No. It is one of the Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. While your suggestion of "random" separation is technically possible the odds against it happening are so vanishingly small that it would be more reasonable to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by spontaneous suffocation caused by no oxygen molecules entering any dinosaur's lungs just by "random chance".
Even if you ignore the odds of it happening then there would still have to be a border between the matter and anti-matter that would be devoid of mass and we don't see a band stretching throughout the universe like this nor do we see it in the cosmic microwave background. So not only is your theory overwhelmingly improbable it is inconsistent with data.
Freedom of religion is not exactly in the US constitution - all it says is that the US congress cannot pass a law establishing or restricting the "free exercise" of religion which is not the same as granting a right of freedom of religion. In the US case there is nothing in the constitution to prevent any private corporation refusing to hire anyone who is (or is not) of religion X - although I understand that you do have laws for that.
If it were that you were granted the right of "freedom of religion" then extra laws would not be required: all corporations and individuals would be also bound to respect it. The difference might be subtle but in the current climate of increasing corporate power it may turn out to be a very important one.
Yeah, the only folks who should pass judgement on medical treatment are plumbers. And the guy down at the 7-11, you know the one, he clearly knows a lot about prescription medication!
You misread my post - I did not say that doctors should not police themselves but that they should not be solely responsible for policing themselves without any oversight (as is currently the case for lawyers). Having no self-policing is just as bad as having only self-policing: as is the case with most things you need a balance.
I would be happy to do that too - but only so long as the panel of doctors was answerable to some higher, non-medical authority. Policing your own profession works fine up to a point but professions have their own view of the world and need to at least be reminded to keep in touch with the rest of society from time-to-time. Making them answerable to nobody but themselves is a recipe for disaster in the long term...at least if the legal profession is any sort of example.
That is not unique to the British. Apparently you've never heard of the Boston tea party, the American revolution...
Actually, if you think about it, you are agreeing with the OP. The Boston Tea Party and American Revolution involved British citizens rebelling against the British government which is pretty much what is happening here. It was only after you were successful that you became non-British.
But chalking decisions like this up to "professional courtesy" or a broken legal system is overhasty.
That might be the case but it is hard to have confidence in a system where the lawyers police themselves. Would you be happy going to a doctor if you knew that, no matter how badly he might mess up a treatment, you would only be successful in suing him if a panel of other doctors agreed he had mistreated you? If it is fine for lawyers to police themselves then how about all the other professions as well?
Not being able to test a hypothesis one way or the other does not make it wrong, it just makes it uninteresting to a scientist. You only have to look at string theory to see that there are such things in science as well. In both cases we might be capable of testing such hypotheses in the future, although I think we'll be experimentally testing string theory well before life-after-death!
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I think what it means is that it makes you feel good.
There is that but there is also the fact that if it makes your oppressors even more oppressive then they are likely to irritate even more people. This will improve your support and give your arguments even more weight.
An important step has already been taken in that direction in Canada: Access Canada, the body which licenses Universities to use copyrighted material, has raised its fees by almost a factor of three and also added additional, more restrictive terms. The result is that all the major Canadian universities have opted not to renew the licence. I now foresee a huge backlash amongst faculty and students as access to material will now either become far more restricted or expensive. Give it enough years and enough students should have been affected that there will be some change.
So cats are more intelligent because dogs are more likely to fall for simple misdirection?
That's only a valid argument if the cat is aware of the misdirection and chooses to ignore it. Since most cats always ignore it this implies they are unaware that they are even being directed. A better test is to look at the wild relations of dogs and cats.
Wolves hunt in packs. They will attack wild herd of deer/elk/caribou/... and plan the attack well in advance by scaring the heard towards small, pre-arranged groups of wolves which take up the chase once the current pursuers tire. In this way the wolves gain the ability to outlast the greater stamina of the herd beasts with the entire pack moving in at the end to capture the prey. This shows clear intelligence: anticipation of future events, advance planning to overcome the obstacle of the prey's greater stamina and some form of rudimentary communication. Compare that to wild cats who, in general, tend to hunt alone and just use their stealth, strength and speed to sneak up and jump on prey. This requires great skill but not really intelligence. Of course this is because cats have the natural weapons and strength to be able to survive this way. Canines have taken a different evolutionary path evolving brains instead of brawn presumably in a similar fashion to our own distant ancestors.
False. A student who is interested in the subject will study it no matter what.
Your argument does not invalidate the OP's statement which was that poor teachers and tools would hinder the willingness of a student to study not stop them from studying altogether.
It was done for only three purposes....
Whether or not those were the justifications the one undeniable good thing that came from dropping it was that the utter horror of a full scale nuclear war was made extremely clear to everyone including the politicians. While it is probably impossible to prove it seems to me that this was almost certainly a major factor in ensuring that the cold war stayed cold.
Perhaps part of the problem making such a determination is the asymmetric nature of their leaks....It's more a function of the people involved in the leaks
No - it is more a function of how best to release the information to stop the organization. If you worked for the Taliban et al and were disgusted at their behaviour your best bet to stop that behaviour would be to secretly leak information to western governments who will then act to stop attacks. If you released it via Wikileaks your own organization would know that the information has been released and switch the attack to somewhere else and after an attack the information is public anyway.
Compare that to someone disgusted with the behaviour of a western government. The only people to whom these governments are somewhat accountable is their electorate. Hence, to stop the behaviour you are unhappy with the only choice you have is to leak the data publicly so that their electorate get to see it and demand an explanation and changes. So I would argue that the leaks might well be symmetric but that the terrorist leaks are more effective when kept secret and western government leaks more effective when made public.
This seems like an absurd view of science. None of the definitions [google.co.nz] i got from google...
Really? Wikipaedia for Scientist: "A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge." The originality here being to "acquire knowledge" i.e. something not known before (and no I did NOT just edit the entry to say that! ;-).
How about Einstein?
Einstein had a physics degree and had done extensive extracurricular physics and maths studies in addition. So to think that Einstein never studied simply because he worked in a patent office would be very, very wrong.
How else can you train than by doing it?
Reading books and other learning material? Using simulations? Following and observing an expert? You usually only get to do things AFTER you have trained up to a certain level with the doing part being done under close supervision to demonstrate that you have learnt the skills needed to actually do whatever it is. You are confusing basic training to learn how to do certain tasks with those who have already learnt those basic skills _improving_ their skills by using them.
physics students at university would not be 'doing science' because what they are learning has already been done before.
Exactly correct - they are learning science, not doing science, with the exception of the usual final year research project.
You train to do science by repeating classical experiments.
True, but training to do something is not the same as actually doing it.
A whole program trying to deflect bullets with magnets. Aren't they made of lead?
Ever heard of Lenz's law? There is a very simple demo of it where you can make an aluminium ring jump off the pole of an electromagnet - this would work fine for lead as well. Not to mention paramagnetism and diamagnetism (not sure which applies to lead) - all materials containing atoms will interact with a sufficiently strong static magnetic field.
Who said you got to STUDY to be a scientist?
Being a scientist means doing original scientific research i.e. something that nobody has done before, otherwise it is called history. This means that you had better know what has been done before so that you can build upon and expand the existing knowledge. Currently the only way to learn this is via studying so, with currently technology, to be a scientist you do need to study.
Like it or not, but there is uneducated people doing research by the scientific method.
Using the scientific method does not mean that you are doing science. For example you could conduct a criminal investigation using the scientific method but that does not mean that what you are doing is science.
RTFS "reasonably young".
I guess that rules out 'the doctor' from Doctor Who then unless it is only the age of the actors which counts?
Your suggestion that "all corporations and individuals would be also bound to respect it" implies that people would be restricted in their religious choices.
How? All it would do is stop corporations from preventing their employees following whatever religion they desired since to restrict their choices would violate their right to freedom of religion. People would still be free to say what they like about any religion since that does not in any way restrict the freedom of people to choose - although it might persuade them to make different choices.
In a broad sense, this conflicts with the 1st amendment.
Conflicts between rights always occurs which is why we have courts. You might as well say that the law against murder restricts religious freedom because it prevents human sacrifices. In this case society clearly values the right to life over the right to freedom of religion. As I mentioned above criticizing a religion does not restrict its practice so there is no broad conflict although there might be specific cases of conflict which are easily resolved e.g. churches, synagogues etc. should be allowed to only hire followers of their own faith.
That was exactly my point. It is far better to grant a right than it is to just stop a government taking them away because the right stops ANYONE from taking it away, not just the government.
No but I wish it were possible to annihilate all the inaccuracies in the story! Alpha has NOTHING to do with the LHC other than happening to be in the same lab. These guys need to get the anti-protons down to almost zero velocity so starting with the highest energy machine on the planet would be stupid.
In fact Alpha uses the Anti-proton Decelerator which uses the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) which is one of the low energy machines at CERN accelerating protons to only 25 GeV - which is so low in energy that the protons have to be accelerated by another machine, the SPS, before they can even be injected into the LHC for final acceleration!
How do you trap a neutral antiparticle?
You don't (easily) but fortunately an atom is not a single particle but a system of two charged particles and so you can use atomic traps which rely on EM fields as well as absorption and emission of EM radiation.
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
Of course if the bartender had been a particle physicist and looked him up and down then he would have said: "Hey you're no neutron, you are a quark short. That'll be full charge for you, you pion!"
Could it at all be possible that during the big bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created.
No. It is one of the Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. While your suggestion of "random" separation is technically possible the odds against it happening are so vanishingly small that it would be more reasonable to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by spontaneous suffocation caused by no oxygen molecules entering any dinosaur's lungs just by "random chance".
Even if you ignore the odds of it happening then there would still have to be a border between the matter and anti-matter that would be devoid of mass and we don't see a band stretching throughout the universe like this nor do we see it in the cosmic microwave background. So not only is your theory overwhelmingly improbable it is inconsistent with data.
Freedom of religion is not exactly in the US constitution - all it says is that the US congress cannot pass a law establishing or restricting the "free exercise" of religion which is not the same as granting a right of freedom of religion. In the US case there is nothing in the constitution to prevent any private corporation refusing to hire anyone who is (or is not) of religion X - although I understand that you do have laws for that.
If it were that you were granted the right of "freedom of religion" then extra laws would not be required: all corporations and individuals would be also bound to respect it. The difference might be subtle but in the current climate of increasing corporate power it may turn out to be a very important one.
Yeah, the only folks who should pass judgement on medical treatment are plumbers. And the guy down at the 7-11, you know the one, he clearly knows a lot about prescription medication!
You misread my post - I did not say that doctors should not police themselves but that they should not be solely responsible for policing themselves without any oversight (as is currently the case for lawyers). Having no self-policing is just as bad as having only self-policing: as is the case with most things you need a balance.
I would be happy to do that too - but only so long as the panel of doctors was answerable to some higher, non-medical authority. Policing your own profession works fine up to a point but professions have their own view of the world and need to at least be reminded to keep in touch with the rest of society from time-to-time. Making them answerable to nobody but themselves is a recipe for disaster in the long term...at least if the legal profession is any sort of example.
That is not unique to the British. Apparently you've never heard of the Boston tea party, the American revolution...
Actually, if you think about it, you are agreeing with the OP. The Boston Tea Party and American Revolution involved British citizens rebelling against the British government which is pretty much what is happening here. It was only after you were successful that you became non-British.
But chalking decisions like this up to "professional courtesy" or a broken legal system is overhasty.
That might be the case but it is hard to have confidence in a system where the lawyers police themselves. Would you be happy going to a doctor if you knew that, no matter how badly he might mess up a treatment, you would only be successful in suing him if a panel of other doctors agreed he had mistreated you? If it is fine for lawyers to police themselves then how about all the other professions as well?
Not being able to test a hypothesis one way or the other does not make it wrong, it just makes it uninteresting to a scientist. You only have to look at string theory to see that there are such things in science as well. In both cases we might be capable of testing such hypotheses in the future, although I think we'll be experimentally testing string theory well before life-after-death!