Oh come on! The bit where the crematorium doors close, there is a whorp...whorp.. noise and then they open to show he had "dematerialized" would have been good.
...so to determine when Betelgeuse will "go boom", we need to figure out what element it is mostly fusioning at the moment.
This is hard to do. Although I'm a particle physicist, not an astronomer, I say some recent articles about a star "unexpectedly" exploding despite its hydrogen rich outer atmosphere. What you need to know is what elements are being burnt in the core which (apparently) are not necessarily the elements are present in the outer atmosphere of the star.
No, no, no, the first way to tell if a star has already gone supernova is by the change in graviton waves.
I know you are trying to be funny but if there are gravity waves (possibly transmitted by gravitons) they would still arrive at the speed of light much like the visible and other EM radiation with very little lead time, if any. These are predicted by General Relativity and as such cannot violate relativity's golden "no information faster than light" causality rule. Even if the current gravity wave detectors were sensitive enough to detect any gravity waves it would be an after the fact detection since it takes thme time to analyse the data and so they would undoubtedly use the visible artifact to search a region of data carefully.
Try to tell that to a nation (= any nation) full of clueless idiots that don't understand the meaning of consumer.
Ah but this will hit "the clueless idiots" where it hurts. If the other ISPs advertise that you can get BBC iPlayer with them but not with BT I imagine that there will be quite an effect.
This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like.
There is a simple solution to this: the BBC should just ignore them. If they decide to limit or block access to iPlayer then I'm sure their competition will make mincemeat of them given its popularity. All they need to do is advertise that they have iPlayer access and let the market decide - this is one time that leaving things to the market might actually work.
Exactly: clearly you should teach the appropriate computer language for the course. So Fortran should be taught...but in ancient history not science (of any discipline).
Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population â" mostly in Europe, Britain and the US
A majority of Slashdot story posters apparently don't realize that Britain is part of Europe. Saying "in Europe and Britain" makes as much sense as saying "in the US and California".
The battery situation (to the extent that you meant battery life, the only metric that matters for batteries) *improved* across the board.
Really? My unibody Mac BookPro has 2x50 WHr batteries that let me go for a whole 8 hours = one full day of meetings. The new ones have 73WHr fixed batteries which are claimed to last 7 hours (so probably ~6 hours). True I have to switch them by hand but at least I can run for 8 hours. So could you explain how this is an improvement?
Speaking as a European it is not an irresponsible headline because, if you read the whole summary it does present a balanced case: human ingenuity vs. computer speed and multi-tasking. For example there was a mid-air collision (over Brazil?) several years ago caused by a human air traffic controller overriding the automatic collision avoidance instructions so human ingenuity is not always helpful! The fact that you got upset by this suggests that you think human ingenuity is always the best choice and you are unhappy that Airbus chose not to rely on it - which is your prejudice not the author's.
However the snippet is wrong in that it is extremely surprising given the comparison between US and European cars where the situation is completely reversed. Drive a US car and the damn thing won't let you start the engine without a manual having to have BOTH the clutch depressed AND be in neutral which is plain stupid since either is sufficient and I usually just depressed the clutch to start the engine. Not to mention the number of times the stupid thing pings at you: put your keys in the ignition without turning on the engine *PING, PING, PING*, turn off the engine but down't take your keys out fast enough *PING, PING, PING*, put some luggage on the passenger seat *PING, PING, PING* (no seatbelt!), driver not yet irritated enough *PING, PING, PING*. Of course it also pings at you if you leave your lights on, which is useful, but by this time most people have reached under the dashboard and forcibly removed the device which goes *PING* in order to retain their sanity. This makes it about as useful as those stupid dialogue boxes that ask you "Are you sure you want to do that?".
So given this experience I am extremely surprised that it is the opposite way around with aeroplanes.
Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points.
Except for the benzene ring what you are describing is physics i.e. the physical properties of materials. It might be the physics of a 100 or so years ago but that does not make it chemistry. Besides there are plenty of other obvious constants in physics: charge of an electron, mass of an electron, proton, neutron etc. nuclear masses, atomic orbital energies, spectral lines etc. although perhaps in another 50-100 years these will have been recycled into chemistry as well?
Thank you very much for that incredibly informative comment. I'm (obviously!) not a lawyer and your reply shows how very well worded the European Convention on Human Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are. Since I'm actually British (but will hopefully be Canadian as well soon!) its also nice to see that influence. Thank you again for your comment.
Am I a sleeze for parking the other four domains and trying to sell them? (I think not).
That depends on whether you have told her. Your position is completely reasonable, in fact even generous, as long as she knows that because she has not paid you you are trying to recoup some money by selling some of the domains. Not telling her would be somewhat sleazy because she might believe that you are just being very kind to her and she may get upset if she suddenly loses the domains without warning. Plus letting her know may motivate her to actually pay you if she makes some money from her art at some point.
He is not over reacting but he is reacting wrongly. The problem here is that the local school are incompetent not that you need to track your kid. How hard is it to have lists of pupil's names associated with each bus and given to the bus driver to check off? In fact if they are really this incompetent do you really want to send your kid to that school? What is she going to learn? Since the school seems resigned to the problem take it up with the board of governors (or whomever is in charge of the school). If they will not fix the problem then publicise the issue to the other parents (chances are from your description though they are already aware of it) and then organize a few "fun" events like have everyone boycott the buses for one day and drive their kids to and from school (imagine the traffic headache that will cause as well as potentially give the bus drivers concerns of job security). Things like that should help address the root cause of the problem without having to resort to more Orwellian methods. The other advantage is that you'll also have improved things for everyone else at the same time.
Canada is an independent country (thank goodness if you've been looking at what the British MPs have been up to!) - but I am a citizen of Britain and a permanent resident of Canada hence I have two MPs, a Canadian and a British one, whom I can write to.
That's the point, isn't it? Hopefully citizens in those countries will wish that they weren't embargoed and put pressure on their government to change.
Sounds good to me. I think I'll start petitioning the UK and Canadian governments to change control of ICANN. This is a US corporation and I think it would be very bad if that started to refuse domain names to Canada because the US government doesn't think our copyright laws are draconian enough. Probably not the type of pressure you were hoping for is it? However when foreign corporations start meddling in local politics this is the sort of result you will get.
It's not a matter of xenophobia. For most people anyway. Illegal immigration is a very real social and economic problem.
And how does fingerprinting people who are eaving solve it? What happens if someone refuses to allow themselves to be scanned then? Will they be refused permission to leave? If so the US government is going to look like a real idiot since they will be refusing illegal immigrants permission to leave since I doubt many of them will want to submit to a fingerprint scan.
A far bigger problem is the directionality of the emissions. They send out highly directional beams. These will sweep out a hollow cone of some width. However if you move outside that cone you will not get a signal. This will mean that far more pulsars than just the four mentioned in the article will need to be mapped if you want to cover the galaxy.
However EU law overrides French law and in the charter of fundamental rights freedom of religion is one of them. Hence, if the French courts regarded Scientology as a religion they would be bound, by EU law , to allow it.
I'm not quite sure where the author got that idea. The US has always been based on the idea that the individual is paramount.
I think you answered your own question. He got that idea from the US and, as is unfortunately rather stereotypical, forgot that there are more countries than the US in "the west". In most of those countries there is far more of a balance between the individual and the state. In fact even in the US this seems to be rapidly becoming the case because power is held increasingly by corporations and while US laws seem to regard these as individuals of some description they are in fact communal groups with rigid heirarchies.
The summary imples that the US has given scientology religious status. The US does not recognise or give religions status. This is prohibited by the Constitution.
Not true. Your constitution prevents your government from passing laws which restrict the practicing of religion. Therefore the US courts must judge what constitutes a religion in order to determine whether a law is constitutional. There might not be an official list of recognized religions written in a book somewhere but, in practice, there must be one built up via legal precedent. Since the article only says "Scientology does not have the status of a religion there, as it does in the US" this is an accurate statement since Scientology cannot be shut down in the US because, as far as the courts are concerned, it is a religion and therefore protected from any law restricting its practice. In France the courts do not recognize it a religion so it has no protection.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on! The bit where the crematorium doors close, there is a whorp...whorp.. noise and then they open to show he had "dematerialized" would have been good.
Dammit - glad, not gald!
I'm just glad that users have the ID number after their name - otherwise Slashdot would be insulting me everytime I post.
...so to determine when Betelgeuse will "go boom", we need to figure out what element it is mostly fusioning at the moment.
This is hard to do. Although I'm a particle physicist, not an astronomer, I say some recent articles about a star "unexpectedly" exploding despite its hydrogen rich outer atmosphere. What you need to know is what elements are being burnt in the core which (apparently) are not necessarily the elements are present in the outer atmosphere of the star.
Nope, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
Assuming they exist at all...which has not yet been proven.
No, no, no, the first way to tell if a star has already gone supernova is by the change in graviton waves.
I know you are trying to be funny but if there are gravity waves (possibly transmitted by gravitons) they would still arrive at the speed of light much like the visible and other EM radiation with very little lead time, if any. These are predicted by General Relativity and as such cannot violate relativity's golden "no information faster than light" causality rule. Even if the current gravity wave detectors were sensitive enough to detect any gravity waves it would be an after the fact detection since it takes thme time to analyse the data and so they would undoubtedly use the visible artifact to search a region of data carefully.
Try to tell that to a nation (= any nation) full of clueless idiots that don't understand the meaning of consumer.
Ah but this will hit "the clueless idiots" where it hurts. If the other ISPs advertise that you can get BBC iPlayer with them but not with BT I imagine that there will be quite an effect.
This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like.
There is a simple solution to this: the BBC should just ignore them. If they decide to limit or block access to iPlayer then I'm sure their competition will make mincemeat of them given its popularity. All they need to do is advertise that they have iPlayer access and let the market decide - this is one time that leaving things to the market might actually work.
Exactly: clearly you should teach the appropriate computer language for the course. So Fortran should be taught...but in ancient history not science (of any discipline).
Light pollution has caused one-fifth of the world's population â" mostly in Europe, Britain and the US
A majority of Slashdot story posters apparently don't realize that Britain is part of Europe. Saying "in Europe and Britain" makes as much sense as saying "in the US and California".
The battery situation (to the extent that you meant battery life, the only metric that matters for batteries) *improved* across the board.
Really? My unibody Mac BookPro has 2x50 WHr batteries that let me go for a whole 8 hours = one full day of meetings. The new ones have 73WHr fixed batteries which are claimed to last 7 hours (so probably ~6 hours). True I have to switch them by hand but at least I can run for 8 hours. So could you explain how this is an improvement?
Speaking as a European it is not an irresponsible headline because, if you read the whole summary it does present a balanced case: human ingenuity vs. computer speed and multi-tasking. For example there was a mid-air collision (over Brazil?) several years ago caused by a human air traffic controller overriding the automatic collision avoidance instructions so human ingenuity is not always helpful! The fact that you got upset by this suggests that you think human ingenuity is always the best choice and you are unhappy that Airbus chose not to rely on it - which is your prejudice not the author's.
However the snippet is wrong in that it is extremely surprising given the comparison between US and European cars where the situation is completely reversed. Drive a US car and the damn thing won't let you start the engine without a manual having to have BOTH the clutch depressed AND be in neutral which is plain stupid since either is sufficient and I usually just depressed the clutch to start the engine. Not to mention the number of times the stupid thing pings at you: put your keys in the ignition without turning on the engine *PING, PING, PING*, turn off the engine but down't take your keys out fast enough *PING, PING, PING*, put some luggage on the passenger seat *PING, PING, PING* (no seatbelt!), driver not yet irritated enough *PING, PING, PING*. Of course it also pings at you if you leave your lights on, which is useful, but by this time most people have reached under the dashboard and forcibly removed the device which goes *PING* in order to retain their sanity. This makes it about as useful as those stupid dialogue boxes that ask you "Are you sure you want to do that?".
So given this experience I am extremely surprised that it is the opposite way around with aeroplanes.
Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points.
Except for the benzene ring what you are describing is physics i.e. the physical properties of materials. It might be the physics of a 100 or so years ago but that does not make it chemistry. Besides there are plenty of other obvious constants in physics: charge of an electron, mass of an electron, proton, neutron etc. nuclear masses, atomic orbital energies, spectral lines etc. although perhaps in another 50-100 years these will have been recycled into chemistry as well?
Thank you very much for that incredibly informative comment. I'm (obviously!) not a lawyer and your reply shows how very well worded the European Convention on Human Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are. Since I'm actually British (but will hopefully be Canadian as well soon!) its also nice to see that influence. Thank you again for your comment.
Am I a sleeze for parking the other four domains and trying to sell them? (I think not).
That depends on whether you have told her. Your position is completely reasonable, in fact even generous, as long as she knows that because she has not paid you you are trying to recoup some money by selling some of the domains. Not telling her would be somewhat sleazy because she might believe that you are just being very kind to her and she may get upset if she suddenly loses the domains without warning. Plus letting her know may motivate her to actually pay you if she makes some money from her art at some point.
You do know that there is a difference between persecution and prosecution right? One can sometimes lead to the other but they are not the same.
He is not over reacting but he is reacting wrongly. The problem here is that the local school are incompetent not that you need to track your kid. How hard is it to have lists of pupil's names associated with each bus and given to the bus driver to check off? In fact if they are really this incompetent do you really want to send your kid to that school? What is she going to learn? Since the school seems resigned to the problem take it up with the board of governors (or whomever is in charge of the school). If they will not fix the problem then publicise the issue to the other parents (chances are from your description though they are already aware of it) and then organize a few "fun" events like have everyone boycott the buses for one day and drive their kids to and from school (imagine the traffic headache that will cause as well as potentially give the bus drivers concerns of job security). Things like that should help address the root cause of the problem without having to resort to more Orwellian methods. The other advantage is that you'll also have improved things for everyone else at the same time.
Canada is an independent country (thank goodness if you've been looking at what the British MPs have been up to!) - but I am a citizen of Britain and a permanent resident of Canada hence I have two MPs, a Canadian and a British one, whom I can write to.
That's the point, isn't it? Hopefully citizens in those countries will wish that they weren't embargoed and put pressure on their government to change.
Sounds good to me. I think I'll start petitioning the UK and Canadian governments to change control of ICANN. This is a US corporation and I think it would be very bad if that started to refuse domain names to Canada because the US government doesn't think our copyright laws are draconian enough. Probably not the type of pressure you were hoping for is it? However when foreign corporations start meddling in local politics this is the sort of result you will get.
So what you are saying is that it will work until we actually have a practical need for a galactic positioning system?
It's not a matter of xenophobia. For most people anyway. Illegal immigration is a very real social and economic problem.
And how does fingerprinting people who are eaving solve it? What happens if someone refuses to allow themselves to be scanned then? Will they be refused permission to leave? If so the US government is going to look like a real idiot since they will be refusing illegal immigrants permission to leave since I doubt many of them will want to submit to a fingerprint scan.
A far bigger problem is the directionality of the emissions. They send out highly directional beams. These will sweep out a hollow cone of some width. However if you move outside that cone you will not get a signal. This will mean that far more pulsars than just the four mentioned in the article will need to be mapped if you want to cover the galaxy.
However EU law overrides French law and in the charter of fundamental rights freedom of religion is one of them. Hence, if the French courts regarded Scientology as a religion they would be bound, by EU law , to allow it.
I'm not quite sure where the author got that idea. The US has always been based on the idea that the individual is paramount.
I think you answered your own question. He got that idea from the US and, as is unfortunately rather stereotypical, forgot that there are more countries than the US in "the west". In most of those countries there is far more of a balance between the individual and the state. In fact even in the US this seems to be rapidly becoming the case because power is held increasingly by corporations and while US laws seem to regard these as individuals of some description they are in fact communal groups with rigid heirarchies.
The summary imples that the US has given scientology religious status. The US does not recognise or give religions status. This is prohibited by the Constitution.
Not true. Your constitution prevents your government from passing laws which restrict the practicing of religion. Therefore the US courts must judge what constitutes a religion in order to determine whether a law is constitutional. There might not be an official list of recognized religions written in a book somewhere but, in practice, there must be one built up via legal precedent. Since the article only says "Scientology does not have the status of a religion there, as it does in the US" this is an accurate statement since Scientology cannot be shut down in the US because, as far as the courts are concerned, it is a religion and therefore protected from any law restricting its practice. In France the courts do not recognize it a religion so it has no protection.