No law that says you must be allowed?
This is the UK not the US so there is no such thing as federal law. We do have laws which say you must be allowed to do X. For example the
so called 'right to roam' law.
Well, if you've ever been in school, you know that the demands it makes on a person are much greater than a full-time job.
If you think school is hard wait until you get to University! The trick is to prioritize things - and sleep is something which you DO need to prioritize. A good 8 hours of sleep before an exam will have a far greater impact on your grade than trying to stay up half the night and cramming...at least in my experience both as a student and a prof.
But, I think the summary doesn't make it sufficiently clear that this is just government IT departments, not all information technology in Canada. Private citizens and businesses can still do as they wish.
It is not just governments. Universities and other institutions have obligations under Canadian privacy laws. If they store data in the US, for example by using GMail accounts or online question services from text book companies, the US government can gain access to private data on Canadian students and the University will then be liable for a breach of privacy under Canadian law.
This has meant that at least some Canadian Universities are looking at implementing policies which forbid the storing of data in the US. The result undoubtedly will have some economic impact on the US since now either US companies will have to invest in Canadian based servers or be automatically disqualified from bidding on IT contracts (although I also understand that the US government can force US companies to reveal data even if it is not stored in the US so it may rule out any US company). This is not just hypothetical either - to my knowledge it has already affected contract decisions.
These drugs would be immensely beneficial to the human race. And what sane person wouldn't want to be smarter?
If the decision were that simple there would not be a problem. The question you should be asking is "What person would want to be smarter given the risk of unknown side effects from long term use?". These things are messing with your brain chemistry so side effects could be subtle: suppose they suppress happiness (not cause depression mind you)? Would you want to take them then?
If there are long term effects, say like early dementia, is it fair for the rest of us to pay for the required health care? There is a big difference between taking drugs to restore normal functionality and enhancing performance of a perfectly healthy human being.
I get roughly 5-6 hours of sleep a night and have had no issues at all. I did notice the "You know you're tired, but you don't think/act like you're tired" thing and yeah it's really odd.
Instead of drugs have you considered getting an extra 1-2 hours of sleep per night? This is cheaper than taking drugs, does not make you feel odd, and 10 years from now will not be shown to cause cancer/depression/heart disease/... If you are feeling tired during the day the message your body is trying to send you is 'sleep more' not 'take drugs'.
Rather than that why not a sign reading "cu*t". If the police stop you you could explain that you always find Scientologists somewhat curt but didn't want to hurt their feelings by spelling it out. After all it is not your fault if there are at least two other appropriate letters.
Both are bad and evil, but truth should always be accessible, no matter what.
Yes but are these terrorist organizations putting truthful videos on YouTube or just their own propaganda and lies? While governments do this too watching two opposing sets of half-truths and lies does not help you get any nearer the truth. You tend to pick what you want to believe based on your own preconceptions. To be useful for society you need uncensored, credible reporting i.e. a report which you feel you have to believe even if you don't want to. This is something which modern media seem to be unable to understand.
Since they were including companies as well as just software I hereby nominate ZDNet for most annoying website. Why can't they stick the 11 short paragraphs making up the article on ONE PAGE!
H.323 fails the multipoint test - there is an old project OpenMCU which used to provide some sort of multipoint linkup for H.323 but it never seemed to get beyond an early alpha stage.
EVO is horrible. It's JAVA+vic/rat. Quality is terrible, it is really slow to connect each time and you can't always connect. It is supposed to be the VC tool of choice for the LHC experiments. However it is so bad that almost every meeting I attend uses the CERN telephone conferencing in preference or the ESNET H.323 MCU which the Tevatron experiment (D0 and CDF) use.
If I headed this university, I'd make my students take quizzes on math, chemistry, physics and whatever else the university teaches,...
What's more they seem to apply this to all online users including faculty. Apart from the limitations on research (particularly if P2P is adapted for Grid computing-based file transfers) this displays a complete lack of trust in their faculty. With an administration like that I imagine attracting and retaining good faculty will be incredibly hard/impossible (why go there when you can go somewhere they trust you to act responsibly?) so the result will likely have a negative impact on student education.
Technically gluons also feel the strong nuclear force
There is no 'technically' about it: they do feel the strong force. However, as far as we know, you cannot create a bound state of just gluons - a so-called glue-ball - although it is possible that it may exist with a very short lifetime. If it had a long live time then, like the photon, being colour-neutral it would not feel the strong force and so would cause a long range strong nuclear force!
This is actually a rather important as it explains why Quarks are never found in isolation.
Actually you can observe single quarks - I've even done it! Top quarks decay so incredibly quickly (10^-24 s) that they decay as an isolated quark. This is because hadronization takes time and the top quark does not hang around that long. So a more correct statement is to say that at low energies quarks are never found in isolation. At high energies quarks exhibit what we call asymptotic freedom (the opposite of the low energy confinement which is what you described).
That's why I said "about the size", not "exactly the size". ...but you missed my first point: the real constituent particles are the quarks and gluons which as far as we know have no size.
...how one goes about doing anything not allowed by nature?
Sorry - I agree I did not make myself clear. What I meant was "in ways that already occur in nature" i.e. they are only creating things that we already know the universe already produces by itself.
I don't love the trendy label "nanotechnology" either, but the units produced are individually on the scale of nanometres.
Then why don't we call chemistry nanotechnology? If I produce hydrogen by dropping metal into an acid is that nanotech because the size of my end unit is that size? The difference is that nanotech involves technology on the nano scale i.e. tiny physical systems that human ingenuity has built. The design of isotopes involves zero human ingenuity Carbon-12 is Carbon-12 - I can't decide I'd like to have Carbon-12 with a toroidal nucleus vs. the usual roughly spherical shape.
although I want to stand by the assertion of continousness
I'm curious - is this based on intuition or is there evidence to suggest that space-time really is continuous at the Planck scale? Or a prediction of string theory? Certainly I'll agree that it appears continuous as far as we have probed.
...but unless (until?) you can show a free quark that is unambiguously not the product (rather than the trigger) of a false vacuum decay hadronization
How about top quark decays? This decays (or should decay) as a free quark because its lifetime is considerably less than the hadronization scale. We'd need to show spin correlations to prove that the quark decayed before hadronizing though so we are not quite there yet. This may be possible at the Tevatron but will definitely be possible at the LHC.
The term femtotechnology to describe technology built from subatomic particles
This is not an example femtotechnology any more than chemistry is is an example of nanotechnology. All they are doing is sticking protons and neutrons together in ways allowed by nature. This is not "designing" an isotope since there are only a few thousand combinations allowed. That's not to say it isn't useful technology but, if you look at the size of mchines required, the scale of the tech is anything but femto.
And unlike the atom as a whole, the nucleus is very compact, about the size of its constituent particles.
Not quite. First the real constituent particles of the nucleus are quarks which, as far as we are aware, are fundamental particles and so, like the electron, have no measurable size. As you increase the energy you will just see a quark confined to a smaller and smaller volume.
Secondly, if you regard the nucleus as made up of protons and neutrons, the radius is still not the same as that of a proton. The liquid drop model of the nucleus shows how you can roughly treat the nucleus as a drop of liquid with a constant density and so the radius of the nucleus is proportional to the cube root of the number of protons and neutrons (the mass).
In short, he's just "building" electrons and positrons.
You cannot build structures with electrons and positrons which are this small. The reason being that the binding energy for EM processes (the strongest force which an e+/- feels) is far too weak to confine the particles to a region as small as 1 fm. For example positronium has a binding energy of 6.8eV, roughly half that of a hydrogen atom and hence it will be slighly larger.
The misconception comes about because the electron is not a particle but a wave. You can trap the wave in a potential but it is still a wave. The smaller the space you want to confine it to the shorter the wavelength required and as the wavelength decreases the energy increases (deBroglie wavelength lambda=Planck's constant/momentum [lambda=h/p]). This means that energies O(10^6) times larger than EM binding energies to confine an electron to such a small area.
The only force we know of that is strong enough to do this is the strong nuclear force which is only felt by quarks. Hence, given our current knowledge, the only thing you could build such a tiny structure out of is quarks...which is why the nucleus is made of these!
There is nothing quite like having 5 or 6 books open to various pages while I code, flicking my eyes to various books or turning pages to keep track.
True, but supposing e-ink eBook readers were cheap enough that you could have 5 or 6 of them scattered over your desk? You could even have them open on different pages of the same book. I think that part of the problem with eBook readers is that they are new enough to be a lot more expensive than a book plus all the DRM stuff means they are all mutually incompatible. A ubiquitous standard plus cheaper hardware will make a huge difference.
I'm not sure M$ ever did really listen to their customers
Sorry but MS are very good at listening to customers. Its just that they only listen to their business customers and nobody else. This worked extremely well for them with Windows and Office and in theory should have worked with the Zune too. Unfortunately they do not seem to have realized that in this case their business customers, the RIAA, are employing kamikazee tactics. They are more interested in ensuring that nobody can ever listen to content in a manner they have not personally approved than they are about making a successful, profitable product.
Common mistake: voltage here is the potential drop over the resistance, which in this case is the wire. Since power is V times I, and this is typically what needs to remain constant for the device, reducing V by a factor of 10 means that you must increase I by a factor of 10. This will also increase the potential drop along the cable by a factor of ten and so you have 10 x 10 = 100 factor increase in the heat. A better formula to use is P=I^2 R in this case.
Or do you think Americans have double size wires in the streets/homes compared to Europeans?
No, you have lower power limits on your appliances. For example in the UK it is easy to buy a 3kW kettle or electric fan heater since the current drawn is ~13A which is the mas for a UK plug. In Canada and the US you can't get much over 1.5kW (at least when I looked) and even then the flex gets warm to the touch unlike in Europe. I first noticed this with electric lawn mowers. In the UK these things are great over here in Canada I made the mistake of getting one not realizing that the power was roughly half of the European models - as a result it is useless at cutting a lawn.
Looked at another way it will force US companies to stop doing business in countries which have laws restricting online content since they cannot comply with both local and US law at the same time.
It is also somewhat morally dubious since sometimes local "censorship" laws are well intentioned like not being allowed to deny the holocaust in Germany. Whether or not you agree with it (and personally I don't) is it any business of the US if a democratic country (i.e. not China!) decides on some level of censorship?
Err...not necessarily a good idea. If you lower the voltage your current requirements increase for the same power load. This increases the heating in the cables and thus increases the chance of an electrical fire.
I'm sure that you can do it safely but you will need far thicker cables than a 240V system and be careful that you have good connections. Plus you will loose 10-20 times more in power transmission than before.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the UK not the US so there is no such thing as federal law. We do have laws which say you must be allowed to do X. For example the so called 'right to roam' law.
If you think school is hard wait until you get to University! The trick is to prioritize things - and sleep is something which you DO need to prioritize. A good 8 hours of sleep before an exam will have a far greater impact on your grade than trying to stay up half the night and cramming...at least in my experience both as a student and a prof.
It is not just governments. Universities and other institutions have obligations under Canadian privacy laws. If they store data in the US, for example by using GMail accounts or online question services from text book companies, the US government can gain access to private data on Canadian students and the University will then be liable for a breach of privacy under Canadian law.
This has meant that at least some Canadian Universities are looking at implementing policies which forbid the storing of data in the US. The result undoubtedly will have some economic impact on the US since now either US companies will have to invest in Canadian based servers or be automatically disqualified from bidding on IT contracts (although I also understand that the US government can force US companies to reveal data even if it is not stored in the US so it may rule out any US company). This is not just hypothetical either - to my knowledge it has already affected contract decisions.
If the decision were that simple there would not be a problem. The question you should be asking is "What person would want to be smarter given the risk of unknown side effects from long term use?". These things are messing with your brain chemistry so side effects could be subtle: suppose they suppress happiness (not cause depression mind you)? Would you want to take them then?
If there are long term effects, say like early dementia, is it fair for the rest of us to pay for the required health care? There is a big difference between taking drugs to restore normal functionality and enhancing performance of a perfectly healthy human being.
Instead of drugs have you considered getting an extra 1-2 hours of sleep per night? This is cheaper than taking drugs, does not make you feel odd, and 10 years from now will not be shown to cause cancer/depression/heart disease/... If you are feeling tired during the day the message your body is trying to send you is 'sleep more' not 'take drugs'.
Rather than that why not a sign reading "cu*t". If the police stop you you could explain that you always find Scientologists somewhat curt but didn't want to hurt their feelings by spelling it out. After all it is not your fault if there are at least two other appropriate letters.
Yes but are these terrorist organizations putting truthful videos on YouTube or just their own propaganda and lies? While governments do this too watching two opposing sets of half-truths and lies does not help you get any nearer the truth. You tend to pick what you want to believe based on your own preconceptions. To be useful for society you need uncensored, credible reporting i.e. a report which you feel you have to believe even if you don't want to. This is something which modern media seem to be unable to understand.
Since they were including companies as well as just software I hereby nominate ZDNet for most annoying website. Why can't they stick the 11 short paragraphs making up the article on ONE PAGE!
H.323 fails the multipoint test - there is an old project OpenMCU which used to provide some sort of multipoint linkup for H.323 but it never seemed to get beyond an early alpha stage.
EVO is horrible. It's JAVA+vic/rat. Quality is terrible, it is really slow to connect each time and you can't always connect. It is supposed to be the VC tool of choice for the LHC experiments. However it is so bad that almost every meeting I attend uses the CERN telephone conferencing in preference or the ESNET H.323 MCU which the Tevatron experiment (D0 and CDF) use.
What's more they seem to apply this to all online users including faculty. Apart from the limitations on research (particularly if P2P is adapted for Grid computing-based file transfers) this displays a complete lack of trust in their faculty. With an administration like that I imagine attracting and retaining good faculty will be incredibly hard/impossible (why go there when you can go somewhere they trust you to act responsibly?) so the result will likely have a negative impact on student education.
There is no 'technically' about it: they do feel the strong force. However, as far as we know, you cannot create a bound state of just gluons - a so-called glue-ball - although it is possible that it may exist with a very short lifetime. If it had a long live time then, like the photon, being colour-neutral it would not feel the strong force and so would cause a long range strong nuclear force!
This is actually a rather important as it explains why Quarks are never found in isolation.
Actually you can observe single quarks - I've even done it! Top quarks decay so incredibly quickly (10^-24 s) that they decay as an isolated quark. This is because hadronization takes time and the top quark does not hang around that long. So a more correct statement is to say that at low energies quarks are never found in isolation. At high energies quarks exhibit what we call asymptotic freedom (the opposite of the low energy confinement which is what you described).
...how one goes about doing anything not allowed by nature?Sorry - I agree I did not make myself clear. What I meant was "in ways that already occur in nature" i.e. they are only creating things that we already know the universe already produces by itself.
I don't love the trendy label "nanotechnology" either, but the units produced are individually on the scale of nanometres.
Then why don't we call chemistry nanotechnology? If I produce hydrogen by dropping metal into an acid is that nanotech because the size of my end unit is that size? The difference is that nanotech involves technology on the nano scale i.e. tiny physical systems that human ingenuity has built. The design of isotopes involves zero human ingenuity Carbon-12 is Carbon-12 - I can't decide I'd like to have Carbon-12 with a toroidal nucleus vs. the usual roughly spherical shape.
I'm curious - is this based on intuition or is there evidence to suggest that space-time really is continuous at the Planck scale? Or a prediction of string theory? Certainly I'll agree that it appears continuous as far as we have probed.
...but unless (until?) you can show a free quark that is unambiguously not the product (rather than the trigger) of a false vacuum decay hadronizationHow about top quark decays? This decays (or should decay) as a free quark because its lifetime is considerably less than the hadronization scale. We'd need to show spin correlations to prove that the quark decayed before hadronizing though so we are not quite there yet. This may be possible at the Tevatron but will definitely be possible at the LHC.
This is not an example femtotechnology any more than chemistry is is an example of nanotechnology. All they are doing is sticking protons and neutrons together in ways allowed by nature. This is not "designing" an isotope since there are only a few thousand combinations allowed. That's not to say it isn't useful technology but, if you look at the size of mchines required, the scale of the tech is anything but femto.
Not quite. First the real constituent particles of the nucleus are quarks which, as far as we are aware, are fundamental particles and so, like the electron, have no measurable size. As you increase the energy you will just see a quark confined to a smaller and smaller volume.
Secondly, if you regard the nucleus as made up of protons and neutrons, the radius is still not the same as that of a proton. The liquid drop model of the nucleus shows how you can roughly treat the nucleus as a drop of liquid with a constant density and so the radius of the nucleus is proportional to the cube root of the number of protons and neutrons (the mass).
You cannot build structures with electrons and positrons which are this small. The reason being that the binding energy for EM processes (the strongest force which an e+/- feels) is far too weak to confine the particles to a region as small as 1 fm. For example positronium has a binding energy of 6.8eV, roughly half that of a hydrogen atom and hence it will be slighly larger.
The misconception comes about because the electron is not a particle but a wave. You can trap the wave in a potential but it is still a wave. The smaller the space you want to confine it to the shorter the wavelength required and as the wavelength decreases the energy increases (deBroglie wavelength lambda=Planck's constant/momentum [lambda=h/p]). This means that energies O(10^6) times larger than EM binding energies to confine an electron to such a small area.
The only force we know of that is strong enough to do this is the strong nuclear force which is only felt by quarks. Hence, given our current knowledge, the only thing you could build such a tiny structure out of is quarks...which is why the nucleus is made of these!
I think you are confusing your free beer with your free speech.
True, but supposing e-ink eBook readers were cheap enough that you could have 5 or 6 of them scattered over your desk? You could even have them open on different pages of the same book. I think that part of the problem with eBook readers is that they are new enough to be a lot more expensive than a book plus all the DRM stuff means they are all mutually incompatible. A ubiquitous standard plus cheaper hardware will make a huge difference.
Sorry but MS are very good at listening to customers. Its just that they only listen to their business customers and nobody else. This worked extremely well for them with Windows and Office and in theory should have worked with the Zune too. Unfortunately they do not seem to have realized that in this case their business customers, the RIAA, are employing kamikazee tactics. They are more interested in ensuring that nobody can ever listen to content in a manner they have not personally approved than they are about making a successful, profitable product.
Heat = Wattage which is Voltage * Current
Common mistake: voltage here is the potential drop over the resistance, which in this case is the wire. Since power is V times I, and this is typically what needs to remain constant for the device, reducing V by a factor of 10 means that you must increase I by a factor of 10. This will also increase the potential drop along the cable by a factor of ten and so you have 10 x 10 = 100 factor increase in the heat. A better formula to use is P=I^2 R in this case.
Or do you think Americans have double size wires in the streets/homes compared to Europeans?
No, you have lower power limits on your appliances. For example in the UK it is easy to buy a 3kW kettle or electric fan heater since the current drawn is ~13A which is the mas for a UK plug. In Canada and the US you can't get much over 1.5kW (at least when I looked) and even then the flex gets warm to the touch unlike in Europe. I first noticed this with electric lawn mowers. In the UK these things are great over here in Canada I made the mistake of getting one not realizing that the power was roughly half of the European models - as a result it is useless at cutting a lawn.
Looked at another way it will force US companies to stop doing business in countries which have laws restricting online content since they cannot comply with both local and US law at the same time.
It is also somewhat morally dubious since sometimes local "censorship" laws are well intentioned like not being allowed to deny the holocaust in Germany. Whether or not you agree with it (and personally I don't) is it any business of the US if a democratic country (i.e. not China!) decides on some level of censorship?
Sorry that should be 100-400 times more power lost in transmission - it goes as current squared.
Err...not necessarily a good idea. If you lower the voltage your current requirements increase for the same power load. This increases the heating in the cables and thus increases the chance of an electrical fire.
I'm sure that you can do it safely but you will need far thicker cables than a 240V system and be careful that you have good connections. Plus you will loose 10-20 times more in power transmission than before.